Ron DeSantis pushes back against calls to condemn neo-Nazi protests
Florida governor says people are trying to ‘smear me as if I had something to do with that’
www.theguardian.com
DeSantis’s comments came a day after his press secretary, Christina Pushaw, drew widespread criticism over a tweet that she posted, then deleted, on Sunday. She
wrote: “Do we even know they’re Nazis? Or is this a stunt like the ‘white nationalists’ who crashed the Youngkin rally in Charlottesville and turned out to be Dem staffers? I trust Florida law enforcement to investigate and am awaiting their conclusions.”
The “stunt” Pushaw referred to was an incident last October in which the Lincoln Project, an anti-Trump Republican political action committee, sent a group of people pretending to be white supremacists to an event for the Republican gubernatorial candidate Glenn Youngkin in Charlottesville, Virginia.
In response to Pushaw’s comments, the Anti Defamation League
wrote that it was “alarmed that @ChristinaPushaw would first give cover to antisemites rather than immediately and forcefully condemning their revolting, hate-filled rally and assault”.