The anti-LGBTQ video that produced a backlash against Gov. Ron DeSantis’ campaign for President for its homophobic content was a self-inflicted wound — produced by someone in the campaign — the New York Times reported. Sunday.
The video, widely seen as a product of the “bizarre” depths of the internet culture, attacked Donald Trump as being too friendly to LGBTQ people and highlighted DeSantis’ record championing “the harshest, most draconian laws that literally threaten trans existence” as a good thing.
It was first credited to “Proud Elephant,” identified on social media as a “media and news company” and retweeted by the DeSantis campaign’s rapid response Twitter account, DeSantis War Room, on June 30. It went up on the last day of Pride month, which memorializes the beginning of the LGBTQ rights movement, and has been viewed 26 million times. But the initial “Proud Elephant” credit was just to give the campaign plausible deniability, according to Times reporting under the bylines of Shane Goldmacher and Maggie Haberman.
“A DeSantis campaign aide had originally produced the video internally, passing it off to an outside supporter to post it first and making it appear as if it was generated independently, according to a person with knowledge of the incident,” says the article, which is largely about the DeSantis’ campaign reboot.
Republicans and Democrats both widely condemned the meme-filled video that flashed the words “this governor does not care,” after a smattering of commentator clips expressing astonishment at DeSantis’ daring in taking on the LGBTQ community.
Outlets from coast to coast were agog at the 73-second video that started with clips of Trump’s pro-LGBTQ comments. It pivoted to a mashup of, pulsing music, images of oiled-up bodybuilders interspersed with clips of DeSantis smiling broadly and various movie clips, including Christian Bale as Patrick Bateman, an elite Wall Street mover and shaker who was also a serial killer, rapist, and cannibal in American Psycho.
“Is this the weirdest ad in American political history?” reads the headline in The New Republic, calling it a sign of DeSantis’ lean into homophobia. Mentioned in the video, former Olympic decathlete and transgender woman, Caitlyn Jenner, called the video a “new low,” according to CBS News. The Log Cabin Republicans, which bills itself as the largest organization of LGBTQ conservatives, called the video “divisive and desperate,” in a news release.
Originally, DeSantis called the video “fair game,” since DeSantis’ rival Trump was a “pioneer” in injecting trans acceptance into the cultural mainstream by allowing transgender women to compete in his beauty pageants.
But then, it turns out, DeSantis — or somebody — did care. The original tweet the DeSantis War Room retweeted was deleted nine days after its posting. But the internet forgets nothing. Now the video lives under Twitter accounts such as “crazy ass moments in American politics.”
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