Ron DeSantis, born September 14, 1978, in Jacksonville, faces scrutiny over alleged "drink parties" with underage girls in Rome, Georgia, and controversial claims regarding his Yale education. Former Guantanamo detainees Mansoor Adafi and Joe Hickman allege he observed force-feeding prisoners and witnessed mysterious deaths of ringleaders, claims supported by a canceled Vice documentary. Despite these allegations and his failed attempts to appeal to Midwestern voters, DeSantis maintains a public image while navigating accusations ranging from inappropriate behavior to potential complicity in detainee mistreatment. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Meatball Ron's Midwest Strategy00:15:12
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What's Meatball, my Ron's?
This is Behind the Bastards, a podcast about the worst people in all of history.
And this week, we are talking about Ronnie the Big D DeSantis.
Meatball Ron.
Ron DeSanctimonious.
Lockdown Ron, I think is the other thing that Trump calls.
Anyway, we all have horrified faces right now.
I know.
I know.
You all have beautiful faces.
And let me introduce those beautiful faces right now because no one else could be the guests on our Ronathan Sanctimonious D episodes, but Cody Johnston and Katie Stole.
That's right.
We are the faces here.
Hey for me.
Is that your wrong?
It was amazing.
I think it's Ted's who's doing wrong.
Yeah.
This is like a frozen animatronic if you were to see him do it.
Yeah.
It was unsettling.
It was when Cody becomes president and gets his animatronic Cody in the Hall of Presidents.
Oh, no, it's when I was when I became president, and that's the big reveal.
That's what I've been doing.
I actually am like this.
So, guys, y'all, yins, what would your nicknames be if Trump gave you a nickname?
Probably something like Dirty Cody or something.
Dirty Cody, it alludes to the unkempt nature of my persona disheveled.
Dusty Cody.
Dusty Cody.
Yeah, something like that.
I love Beardy.
Beardo Cody.
Yeah, Beardo.
Derry Cody.
Yeah, Beardo.
I don't know what mine would be.
Probably crazy with a K or something.
Crazy Katie.
Oh, crazy Katie.
Mine would just be that woman.
That woman.
That woman.
See, I think he would just alter his Ron DeSantis nickname for me and call me Meatball Rob.
Because Ron and I are both very Italian, tragically Italian.
That's not wrong.
Same, actually.
But I have never ever thought of you as a Rob.
I thought you were going to say you never thought of me as a meatball.
Wow, Katie.
Wow.
Wow.
No, no, no.
I mean, occasionally, sure.
Yeah.
We're honest with each other.
No.
Wow.
Just the Rob.
Oh, wait, though, seriously, has anybody called you Rob before?
Not and lived.
No.
Yeah.
So, okay.
So, Ron, get on it.
Something with machetes, maybe.
It is.
No, that's too cool sounding.
Very funny.
My favorite thing about Donald Trump, because, you know, he's a bad person.
Hate him.
Done tremendous damage both to my family and to the world.
But I have, you know, as a writer, as a longtime comedy writer, game recognized game.
And he is an incredible nickname giver.
Just one of like stunningly effective.
My favorite example of that is Meatball Ron because people may not be aware of this.
He hasn't publicly called Ron DeSantis Meatball Ron.
In fact, it was like back in February, a story broke that in private, Trump was calling him Meatball Ron as an insult.
This is back when he was publicly calling him like Lockdown Ron and DeSanctimonious, which are both much worse nicknames.
Oh, terrible.
And as soon as everyone heard he's calling him this in private, it instantly became like nationwide DeSantis' nickname.
You did it.
You did it.
And Trump was even like, from the privacy of your own home, you still did it.
Trump has even been like, no, I'd never call him that.
You know, it's inappropriate.
I'm not going to engage in the Italian description.
Oh, he's a, he's an amazing person.
Oh, it's so funny.
He's so good at the marketing and just like the, he knows how to do it because all he needs to do is like, I would never call him that.
I maybe, you know, maybe some people call him meatball Ron.
I wouldn't call him that.
Let me call him.
But you should.
I don't know.
It's a great nickname made up by a smart man, but no.
But I would know.
Tell me that I call him Meatball Ron.
So are y'all ready to learn the ballad of Meatball Ron?
Yeah.
Yeah.
I have a question for you before we begin.
Do you address his name?
His last name?
Oh, yeah.
Wait, his last name?
Yeah.
Because this is Cody's favorite thing about it.
Yeah, it's a little hobby horse.
Just a little factoid.
His name is pronounced DeSantis.
Yes.
But he pronounces it DeSantis.
Yeah.
Because when he was running for governor, he people called him DeSantis.
And he's like, I guess it's DeSantis now.
He just changed the way he pronounced his name under like vague social pressure, which I think is pretty amazing.
And that's and very consistent to the man we are going to be talking about.
Exactly.
I'm going to color it with.
Oh, yes.
Yes.
So Ronathan J. DeSantis was due to a filing mishap born under the legal name Ronald Deion DeSantis on September 14th, 1978 in Jacksonville, Florida.
Now, but you're all wondering about that middle name, right?
Dion?
That's an odd middle name for a meatball.
Well, Ronnie's father, also Ron DeSantis, was a huge fan of Deion DiMucci, the doo-op singer, whose most well-known hit was the 1961 song Run Around Sue.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I said it at my birthday party last night.
Yeah, that's why Governor Ron DeSantis' middle name is Dion.
That's so funny.
Oh, my God.
Yeah, right out the gate with some mind-blowing facto.
Ron DeSantis.
Yeah.
Deion DeSantis.
It's a good chance.
Almost.
Almost to DeSantis.
Run around Sue.
Yeah.
Almost the same name as Deion Sanders, who would have been a better governor of Florida.
Probably.
He might have been a terrible person.
Oh, we are all in on Sanders.
Okay, that's good.
That's good.
So I should note off the top here that when I say Ron was born in Florida, I am referring to the state in the southeastern portion of the United States, not the seminal genre-defining rap artist Flo Ryda, aka Tremar Dillard, who recently represented San Marino in the 2021 Eurovision Song Contest.
Listeners get confused whenever we mention the state, and I want to assure you that Meatball Ron was not birthed xenomorph-like from the belly of one of America's great cultural treasures.
Are you sure?
He's just, yeah, yeah.
I double-checked.
Okay.
I double-checked.
I even sent in an email request to the sheriff of Jacksonville, who responded, please stop messaging us about Flo Rida.
Seems like a pretty good confirmation.
And you trusted them.
Well, you know, I just, I legally, I can't further my suspicions until we get some sort of like a photo for the police of Ronald.
All right.
See, AI will not be of any use to me until we can generate a perfect cover of that scene from Alien, where it's Ron DeSantis bursting out of Flowrider's chest and Flowright is singing whatever song Flow Rider got famous for.
I know nothing else about Flowrida.
I'm pretty sure it was called Meatball Ron.
I think someone has to be able to do something like that.
Yeah.
We'll see.
Prove me right or wrong.
I figured which.
So before we discuss Ron DeSantis' childhood, we should talk briefly about his family background.
His mom and dad were the first generation of their family to move to Florida.
He is fairly recent, about as recent, I think about as recent as my family is, immigrants to good old-fashioned the United States.
Most of his relatives remained in western Pennsylvania and Northwest Ohio, which is why Ron now classic greaseball stuff.
Yeah, just Italians in Western PA in Ohio.
Damn, all right.
Oh, yeah.
No, it's what we do, baby.
Get up there, Feral.
Get to Akron.
Come on.
Yeah, yeah, Akron, the promised land.
That's what for generations Italians were like sitting around in Tuscany looking out at like the unfolding glory of nature and going, fuck, I wish this was Akron.
I want grayer skies.
So because of the fact that most of his family has stayed in this chunk of the Midwest, Ron claims in his memoir, which he published immediately prior to launching his presidential campaign, that despite growing up in Florida, he is culturally a Midwesterner.
Quote, I was geographically raised in Tampa Bay, but culturally, my upbringing reflected the working class communities in western Pennsylvania and Northeast Ohio, from weekly church attendance to the expectation that one would earn his keep.
This made me God-fearing, hardworking, and America-loving.
And there's a lot that's funny about that, particularly the fact that it's kind of insinuating that Floridians are like shiftless, godless degenerates, which is true.
That's exactly what he's saying.
And there's this element of like, I'm, I, I invaded the place and took over with like, it's like this weird like reverse, like Americanized, like great replacement thing of like, yeah, culturally I'm here and I'm bringing those values to Florida, but also he wants to make America Florida, right?
Yeah.
So what, so like, what is it?
Do you want to actually make America?
Like Ohio's version of Florida?
Like what is he saying?
Yeah, the Ohio version of Florida, which I don't know.
There's a Jimmy Buffett joke there, but it's not coming to me right now.
So Ron's decision to do this has been writing James Buffett.
That's the Midwestern Jimmy Buffett.
He's scared of the water.
He doesn't get anywhere.
I think it's a cuss.
I think it's actually pronounced James Buffet.
James Buffet.
So this has been made fun of by a lot of people.
It's worth noting that he only very recently started claiming to be culturally Midwestern in his initial congressional campaigns and first governor. gubernatorial campaign.
He described himself repeatedly as from Florida, from Tampa Bay.
So this is something he has picked up as an attempt to get votes in the Midwest.
Yeah.
The common man.
Yeah, the common idiot.
Like that's what that's how he's what he's saying about Midwesterners is like, they're so dumb.
I can pretend to be from there despite growing up as far away almost as you can.
Right.
It's funny because like he's like, he's insulting the Midwest by like, you're dumb enough.
You'll believe this.
But also he's insulting Floridians by being like, yeah, they're fucking stupid.
I'm not one of them.
And I'm not one of them.
I'm bringing my good shit over there.
And it has not seemed to work.
A recent article on Floridapolitics.com notes that he is at least 10 points behind Trump in Pennsylvania, and he recently dropped to third place in the Ohio primary polls behind Vivek Ramaswamy.
He is 55 points behind Donald Trump there.
Ooh, that's painful.
Hasn't exactly played out.
State which state?
That's Ohio.
Ohio.
Oh, okay.
The Midwest in him isn't doing so high.
How's he doing in Florida?
He's not beating Donald Trump last I checked.
Yeah, I didn't think so.
How could he be realistically?
Anyway, that's actually what we're talking about.
That's the whole point of this week's episodes.
So back to his family.
Ron gets his interest in politics from his grandfather, who was a major figure in the Republican Party of mid-century Ohio.
He was on deck in 1960 for a major political scandal where a number of voting machines failed during an election.
It led to something like 1,500 people's votes failing to be counted, effectively disenfranchising them, right?
This is like a very serious issue.
The Secretary of State, who was a fairly rare Republican in state government at that point in time, cleaned house and put Philip Rogers, Ron's grandpa, in as director.
By all accounts, he was very good at this job and he became a respected expert on election integrity.
The Republican Party in Ohio in those days was not a mighty force, but Philip gained widespread respect and traveled around the state, helping to ensure integrity in a number of smaller elections.
When the local steelworkers union needed to do a vote, they trusted him to manage it and ensure that it was done with integrity.
He was even contracted out to other states, including Louisiana, to help them set up modern voting machine systems.
Rogers is described by one colleague as, quote, someone who believed in the way the system worked.
He was political, but not a politician.
Instead, someone who believed enough in the system to work a pretty thankless and intricate job.
By all accounts, he was not especially ideological, and I've run into no complaints of him taking advantage of this job to further his own political ends.
Crucially, Roger was on the moderate wing of the Republican Party.
Little League Team Success00:15:08
One write-up from NBC News notes, there was a group of Goldwaterites who were a thorn in the side of the party at the time, says Benning, referring to acolytes of Barry Goldwater, the failed outfra-conservative presidential candidate in 1964.
Phil wasn't in with them.
This was one of his fellow Republicans in Ohio at the time.
So he's not an extremist, not a hard right guy.
Ron DeSantis, the dad of our Ron DeSantis, the son of this dude, moved the family away from its Midwest roots after he graduated in 1970 and got a job for Nielsen, the company that used to determine what TV shows got renewed.
Most of our Gen Z viewers will not know what the fuck we're talking about when we say mention Nielsen families, but once upon a time, people paid money to subscribe to something called cable because we hadn't yet invented lime wire.
TV should they're not going to remember lime wire either.
Yeah, what the fuck is that?
TV shows lived or died based on how many Nielsen viewers turned in tuned into them.
The basic idea was like a percentage of families in each state got like sent a box that they would hook up to their TV and it would record what they were watching.
And then Nielsen would do some whack ass math to determine how many people are actually watching the show.
And advertisers would use this data to decide where to buy ad space and what the value of ad space was, right?
And thus was American popular culture shaped for decades.
Old Ron, as he probably is not called, was a low-level cog in this system.
He's physically putting the boxes into people's houses.
R. Ron DeSantis' mom was a first-generation Polish immigrant and became a critical care nurse.
It's interesting to look at what some of the elder adults in Ron's youth did for a living.
His parents' siblings became a priest and a nun, respectively, which suggests a strong Catholic upbringing.
R. Ron doesn't talk about this as much as he speaks generally about God and going to church, but it's worth noting that from what is publicly available for us to see, his nun-aunt does not seem to be the kind of Catholic you might expect, given her nephew's path.
Here's NBC again.
Be open to diversity, Sister Regina said during a 2020 commencement address to graduates at Ursuline High School.
Do not be afraid of those who are different from you.
It's okay to change your thinking.
Change is the constant in our lives.
Oh, that's interesting.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So that's different from the other.
Yeah.
In one end of the meatball, out the other end of the meatball.
Yeah.
Yeah.
His priest-uncle, Father Rogers, has been known to recite Teddy Roosevelt's Man in the Arena speech from the pulpit, but doesn't have a reputation for bringing up politics in a more relevant modern sense.
He has a sizable fan pace among the Catholic subculture, including many people who have followed him from two different churches because of his raw charisma.
It's said he doesn't need a microphone to reach the back pews.
I bring this up because it's a notably distinct difference between R. Ron and his elder kin.
DeSantis is known for a lot of things, but in-person charisma is not one of them.
People who know the family will say that he takes after his mom, Karen, more, as she is something of an introvert and uncomfortable with the spotlight.
Even as he's become a national figure, she doesn't really show up in public, which, you know, is her right.
He should take her advice.
Yeah.
Her approach to it.
Avoid being known by people.
Yeah.
You know, a big weakness for Ron seems to be being perceived.
Being perceived.
Exactly.
If no one could see or be aware of him, he would be a lot more likable.
Man, I bet he was.
I bet he wanted to be like his uncle so bad.
It was the idea, right?
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
He just never had that excuse.
No, no, he's too much of a meatball.
Not a speech.
A dry meatball at that.
A dry meatball.
Absolutely.
The driest meatball.
As a kid, young Ron was bright and a good student.
Excellent student, actually.
His grades were so good that one teacher would describe him as having a Stepford report card.
He was also a very capable athlete.
And in his youth, Ron's first love was baseball.
He was known to other kids as D, which he still prefers to be called and claims to like more than his real name.
So, you know, that's the ad he should have gone with.
Florida got that D, you know?
Got that D.
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
Take this D. Put this D in you.
Ron.
If you weren't a coward, we would support you just based on that.
Don't even care about your politics.
It's a good D joke.
Can't go sign that.
I feel like if he weren't a coward, he'd be saying a lot worse stuff than he already is.
That is almost certainly true, Cody.
K money, C money.
Anyway, the earliest influential book that Ron read as a kid was The Science of Hitting by baseball legend Ted Williams.
One of Ted's pieces of advice in that tome is to be very careful about the swings that you choose to take.
Ron's father claims his son took this advice to heart, telling the New Yorker, I must have thrown half a million pitches to Ron.
I think he swung at about 500 of them.
What are you laughing about there, Cody?
He went after Disney like seven months ago.
I know, I know, he did not learn that fucking lesson.
That did not stick with you, man.
Well, if it is.
Actually, you know, I might argue, Cody, and this is one of the things I find interesting about Ron.
He did abide by that advice in his life and career up until like a year and a half ago.
Like he's even most of his political career extremely consistent.
It's really about a little less than two years ago that he decides to take some really wild swings that have just shattered him, which is interesting to me.
Like you almost get the feeling like this guy is like this disciplined coiled spring and managed to like keep himself in line.
And then just for whatever reason, 2022 decides it's time to go off the leash.
No, it was not.
No, it was not.
Yeah.
So I think the trumpification of his desires and I think the libs of TikTok talkification.
Like he's got some people surrounding him that are very online and radical in the bad sense of the word.
Battical, you could call him.
You could.
I feel like even that gives him too much cred.
But like the, yeah, this sort of like he's been sort of injected with a lot of awful shit that he's let sort of snip into him because he's a dry meatball.
So they're pumping him full of like the poison.
Yeah, meatball juice, which he needs.
Oh, exactly.
Okay, okay, okay.
I don't know.
I'm mixed up.
I don't know.
His hometown was Dunaden, which is famous both for its long-standing lawsuit with the Tolkien estate over its name and for baseball.
It was the spring training home of the Toronto Blue Jays.
So as a kid, Ron could easily go down the street and watch the pros play.
His upbringing was very parochial, and he notes that until he graduated high school, he had rarely traveled further than five miles away from his house for anything but baseball.
In his memoir, he writes, Baseball was the engine that expanded my horizons.
In those days, little leagues like Dunedin National had a regular season in which the individual teams, each sponsored by a local business, would compete against each other.
Now, I also played Little League Baseball.
Did you play Little League either, y'all?
I did.
I sure did.
Yeah.
I think it should be a federal felony to make children play baseball, but I'm not sure if you guys had a better experience, maybe.
Maybe slightly better.
Enjoyed it personally.
Okay.
Okay.
Wow.
There's diversity on the panel today.
It's good.
Sure.
Yeah.
Criminals.
A variety of opinions.
Well, meatball Ron loved it.
Couldn't get enough baseball.
And he was very good.
And so was his team.
He kind of like lands in with this group of boys who are all, they make like a pact when they're 11 or 12 together to get to the nationals, effectively.
And, you know, they do very well.
The first big year, they get to the district tournament.
They're eliminated by game three, but like it's further than they thought they were going to get.
Ron and his teammates are super dead.
Like four of them are going to wind up getting drafted into the majors.
Like they are like, it's kind of a dream team of little boys.
Baseball Ron.
Baseball Ron.
So after getting eliminated in game three of the district tournament, they train even harder to compete the next year with the hope of earning a spot in the prestigious Little League World Series in Williamsport.
News articles often include a photo of Ron's team from this period.
You see him holding an aluminum bat on his shoulder.
One local Tampa source described him as staring into the camera with a look so assured, it's almost unnerving on a 12-year-old.
You get similar hype in other write-ups, most of which describe him as an unusually serious kid.
I don't see it.
I haven't found that photo, but I found, I've got another one here.
And like, he just looks like a normal pre-teen boy.
Yeah, I want to see that, the unnerving one, because I feel like unnerving is a very another good word to describe him and his interactions with people.
Yes.
He's a very serious kid.
Yeah, I mean, he doesn't, in this photo, he looks, he's just laughing like the others.
Like, he just looks like a smiling kid.
He does look like a kid.
He's not putting on the face, right?
No, we've also all seen him laugh at this point, I think.
Yeah.
His nightmare laugh, like the crowing of a fucking funeral bird.
Oh, yeah.
He's smiling.
Looks like a boy.
He looks like a happy kid.
Yeah.
Yeah.
What happened, Ron?
What happened?
Well, that's what we're talking about today.
Whether or not he was an unusually serious kid, he was openly ambitious in a way that is not the norm for preteen boys.
From that Tampa Bay write-up, quote, I always knew he was going into politics, said Brady Williams, who is now the Ray's AAA manager in Durham and was then one of DeSantis' closest friends.
His goal was to be the president of the United States.
Was that far-fetched?
A lot of things we talked about that summer were far-fetched, and a lot of them happened.
So he is one of these.
And I do feel like I think we need a government agency specifically to go after little boys who talk relentlessly about becoming the president or data.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
They need to be tracked.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
At all costs.
Yeah.
Parents have to like register them like, yeah, my son's been talking about becoming the president or the first trillionaire.
You know, we got to tamp down on that.
We got to tamp down on that.
Yeah.
Deal with those ambitions.
Yeah.
Are kids fucked up?
Yeah.
This is this is a use that we could have for like Philly sports fans, right?
Where the government sends a bus of them out to each of these kids with just like eggs to just like start pelting them.
Oh, yeah, you gotta be the president.
Yeah.
The president, boy.
Actually, I think we may have solved a major societal problem here.
It creates jobs, too.
Yeah, it creates jobs for Philly sports guys, most of whom are unemployed.
Yeah.
There's nothing anybody could possibly find wrong with this.
I think we've got a, I think we've got a plan to solve the meatball Ron problem.
Yeah, we've got it now.
The next year, his little league team does much better.
He describes them as storming into the regional tournament and making mincemeat of the other southern teams.
One of his former teammates has discussed how manically they had to train that year, rarely going two days in a week without playing.
They eventually made it to the regional championships where they won the southern regional title and earned a spot in the national contest or in the World Series.
Quote, I was surprised at how big of a deal it was for our community.
We found ourselves on the local news and on the front page of the local newspapers, a long way from being a bunch of kids putting on a far-fetched motto beneath the brims of our hats.
Williamsport is the Shangri-Law for Little Leagues.
The games take place in an actual stadium that can hold more than 40,000 spectators, thanks to the terraced hills beyond the outfield fence.
The field was perfectly manicured.
When we first got a peek at the stadium, it was like entering Finway Park or Wrigley Field for the first time.
The teams all stayed in cabins on site and there was a dining hall for all meals.
And this is Meatball Ron's first brush with fame.
This is the first time he's like on TV.
He gets like a little card made of himself.
Yeah.
Sees himself how he can be, how he should be, how he has the right to be, how it's his destiny to be.
You do get that feeling.
Again, bring in Philly sports fans for the Little League World Series, you know?
Give them free batteries.
Just keep things stamped down.
Free batteries.
Oh, yeah.
Philly's guys love their fucking batteries.
So every biographical look at Ron will discuss his little league team's rise to the championships.
It does seem to have been a crucial moment for his self-conception, the time where he realized that his humble middle-class upbringing wouldn't lock him out of national aspirations.
In his memoir, he also uses it as an excuse to make a baffling political point about China.
So apparently, the big Little League competition includes a team from Taiwan.
It is the World Series.
And like, I don't know why.
They lost their big game at Williamsport.
And he describes the other team's pitcher as throwing like Nolan Ryan, which makes me think of the time Nolan Ryan cold cocked that dude on the field.
And I want to see Ron DeSantis take a haymaker from anyway, whatever.
After losing to the Taiwanese team, this is the thing I don't understand why he brings up.
So they eventually lose to this Taiwanese team.
And then after noting this disappointing loss, Ron gives us this gym.
I also think it may have informed some of my later political judgments.
For example, while my hostility towards the Chinese Communist Party and my support for Taiwan is reflected by my general political outlook, the respect I had for Taiwanese baseball no doubt made my pro-Taipei stance more natural.
After all, I remembered playing ping pong against these guys, and they were just normal kids having fun, not Maoists trying to further a cultural revolution.
Yeah, I'm sure all pre-teen Chinese kids are hardcore Maoists.
You're afraid of your own political opinions.
Yeah.
Like the idea, it's so, it's just like step out of yourself.
If they'd been Beijing kids, you would have had the same experience because you're all fucking kids.
You play the game.
They're not going to be just like reading from the fucking red book to you.
That's so absurd.
It just speaks to like the way like his mind.
Like, his mind works of like, yeah, I had an experience.
Well, I had one experience with people who were different from me.
Yeah.
And now that that informs my entire worldview, whether it be negative or positive.
It's just this weird, like, whatever.
Yeah.
Competitive World Mindset00:04:26
I hate meatballs now.
I don't like meatballs anymore.
So after graduating high school, Ron claims to have worked full-time at an electric company that had sponsored his little league team in order to pay for college.
So he's, they sponsor his team.
The guy who runs the electric business company thing is like, meatball Ron, if you ever want a gig once you're done with the baseballs, you got a gig here.
So he gets this job and he will not shut up about this job, right?
This is like the one blue collar moment of his life.
And he's hard.
He's got to milk that.
Absolutely.
As hard as he can.
And he will use this.
He's going to make as much political hay out of this motherfucking gig as it's possible to make.
But you know who else will milk a meatball, Cody?
You know who loves milking meatballs?
Can't get enough of that of that ball milk, as they call it.
Yeah.
Who's the ball milk milkers?
Well, if you want ball milk.
If you want ball milk, meatball.
Sincere question.
Uh-huh.
Yeah.
Well, you can ask meatball Ron that.
Her name is Casey.
So, you know, here's an ad.
There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
We always say, trust your girlfriends.
I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends.
Oh my god, this is the same man.
A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
I felt like I got hit by a truck.
I thought, how could this happen to me?
The cops didn't seem to care.
So they take matters into their own hands.
I said, oh, hell no.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He's going to get what he deserves.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm Lori Siegel, and on Mostly Human, I go beyond the headlines with the people building our future.
This week, an interview with one of the most influential figures in Silicon Valley, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
I think society is going to decide that creators of AI products bear a tremendous amount of responsibility to products we put out in the world.
From power to parenthood.
Kids, teenagers, I think they will need a lot of guardrails around AI.
This is such a powerful and such a new thing.
From addiction to acceleration.
The world we live in is a competitive world, and I don't think that's going to stop.
Even if you did a lot of redistribution, you know, we have a deep desire to excel and be competitive and gain status and be useful to others.
And it's a multiplayer game.
What does the man who has extraordinary influence over our lives have to say about the weight of that responsibility?
Find out on Mostly Human.
My highest order bit is to not destroy the world with AI.
Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Hey, I'm Nora Jones, and I love playing music with people so much that my podcast called Playing Along is back.
I sit down with musicians from all musical styles to play songs together in an intimate setting.
Every episode's a little different, but it all involves music and conversation with some of my favorite musicians.
Over the past two seasons, I've had special guests like Dave Grohl, Leve, Mavis Staples, Remy Wolf, Jeff Tweedy, really too many to name.
And this season, I've sat down with Alessia Cara, Sarah McLaughlin, John Legend, and more.
Check out my new episode with Josh Grobin.
You related to the Phantom at that point.
Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
That's so funny.
Share each day with me each night, each morning.
Say you love me.
You know I.
So come hang out with us in the studio and listen to Playing Along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Oh, yeah.
Oh, yeah.
I don't know why I came back that way.
It was a fun choice, I thought.
I do.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you both.
Electrician Footwear Complaints00:04:29
So Meatball Ron is very proud of his working class credentials as briefly an electrician.
Now, he never bothers to interrogate whether anything has changed to make it harder for a kid today to pay for Yale tuition with an entry-level gig at a power company.
What he does make time to do in his memoir is shit on those lazy millennials.
Thank goodness.
While it was common for Rising College freshmen to spend their summer enjoying themselves on the beach and sleeping in until noon, I was up at the crack of dawn to start work just after 6 a.m.
Five days per week as an electrician's assistant.
I made a mere six bucks an hour, but it felt great to receive a paycheck for a good day's work.
Okay.
Yeah.
She's describing a job.
Yeah, because you were a kid that didn't know better and you had a job.
And also, like, you, you are going to Yale and you are legitimately one of the few working class kids there.
But, like, I'm going to guarantee you, most college students at most colleges worked because they're not Yale's.
They don't have like millionaire parents with legacy.
Right.
Like, go to a different school and you'll, your experience will be like, oh, everybody's kind of doing this thing that I'm doing.
You chose to go to the school for rich assholes, which is what Yale is.
Everyone knows it.
It's the school for rich psychopaths.
And like, you're being like, well, nobody else here has a fucking job.
Yeah, of course.
What do you expect?
They're all in Yale.
Yeah.
It's a mix of George H.W. Bush's blood sons and fucking illegitimate children.
That's all of Yale except for you in this period, I assume.
One assumes.
Yeah, one assumes.
So Ron also uses his early work history to make the usual litany of conservative complaints against the regulatory state.
When I showed up to work that first day, I wore a tire that was typical of what an electrician would wear.
Jeans, a long-sleeved shirt, and an old pair of work boots.
Then I was promptly sent home.
Why?
Because it wasn't clear if the old worn-out boots were actually OSHA approved.
I didn't know what OSHA was, but I soon learned that the Occupational Health and Safety and Health Administration was a federal agency charged with promulgating workplace safety rules.
The net result for me was that I had to spend the lion's share of what would end up being my first week's paycheck buying a pair of boots that were clearly approved by OSHA.
I doubt this made me any safer, but it did make me a tad bit poorer.
Now, I have my doubts.
We'll talk about this, but I have my doubts as to whether or not this happened.
More accurately, I doubt if Ron DeSantis at the time had a serious issue with being required to wear approved safety footwear.
It is very silly that he chose to complain specifically about footwear, to make a point about unreasonable regulations, because electricians die all the fucking time if they don't wear proper footwear.
It's an extremely reasonable regulation written in blood.
Here's one quote from a 2015 article in Electrical Contractor magazine titled Feet on the Ground.
Bad things can happen with the wrong footwear.
These are two real life examples.
An electrician wearing cowboy boots loses his footing and slips, and he comes into contact with a live conductor, resulting in his electrocution.
In another example, a lineman wearing tennis shoes is electrocuted when his foot comes into contact with a fallen energized wire.
The incident occurred when the victim was attempting to restore power disrupted by a severe storm.
Both incidents could have been prevented had the victims been wearing proper protective footwear.
And he does describe his boots as worn out.
Worn out.
I was going to say, thank you.
Yeah.
Yes.
You said your boots sucked.
Like, this is a job that can't.
More points.
It's this element about regulations generally.
It's that Dave Rubin thing on Rogan.
I don't know if you've seen where he's like, yeah, all these regulations for building stuff.
Yeah, it's so you don't cut corners and like have houses collapse or like the wire.
Like there are reasons that these exist on not every single regulation in the world, but it's such a weird complaint.
Also, shouldn't your boss buy those?
Maybe that's the argument.
That is, see, that's what I was saying.
Like, this is not an issue with, this is not an issue with regulations.
This is an issue with the fact that independent contractors are like the legal classification is so fucked that your boss doesn't have to equip you with proper safety gear.
Like that's required that the bosses provide these that you should need.
Yes, you need them.
They're making you get them.
You shouldn't have to pay for them necessarily.
Post-Grad Drinking Rules00:15:34
There's your little complaints, Ron.
No, but you can't, that can't be the complaint because that doesn't go along with conservative dogma.
And that probably was the complaint at the time.
Like that's probably what bothered him at the time.
I can't believe I have to buy these.
Why do I have to buy this for myself?
Yeah.
I mean, I will say, I wish he'd been allowed to work as an electrician wearing let's just worn out.
Yeah, yeah.
Now, because he was such a good student with excellent grades and extracurricular performance, Ron earned admittance to Yale.
He was not a legacy admission.
His parents certainly did not have the money to bribe a spot for their son in the prestigious school.
It seems clear to me that Ron saw Yale as an opportunity for him to increase his social class and network with powerful rich people in the hopes of becoming one himself.
He was successful there, becoming captain of the baseball team and rushing for the famous Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity.
Now, he is going to, as we'll say, really try to downplay the degree to which he fit in at Yale, but going to this fraternity puts him in rarefied air because DKE is one of the oldest frats in the country.
Its alumni include George W. Bush, George H.W. Bush, Teddy Roosevelt, and Rutherford B. Hayes, who I know is your favorite president, Cody.
You're a big fan.
Rutherford is Stan, as we call them.
Hayesheads.
Yeah, Hayesheads.
Sure.
Jeez.
Yeah.
You got hay fever.
That's another good one.
That's another good term for Rutherford B. Hayes fans.
Yeah.
Although I will say Dan Quayle was also a member of DKE, so it's not that rarefied, right?
They'll let Quayle in.
Sure, sure, sure.
So it's the club that little boys growing up who want to be president go to.
It is exactly that club.
And like, it is the kind of thing.
Clearly, this was the thing he did because he thought at the time this is the way to become president, right?
You go to Yale, which is a very fancy school for presidents, and you go to fucking get into DKE, right?
Now, because Republican politics have since taken a major populist plunge, particularly in the last six, seven years, Ron has now been forced to disavow his alma mater.
Roughly half of the first 20% of his memoir is just him shitting on everyone but him at Yale to try to salvage his blue collar credentials.
He does this by trying to paint the school that both George's Bush went to as a breeding ground for communists.
Yes.
What?
Man, he's really trying to dance a tightrope right now.
All these different people he is.
Yeah.
This part's fun.
While Yale's popular motto made homage to God and country, the ethos of the university's academics was hostility to the Almighty and disparagement of America.
Before I got to Yale, I believe that almost all Americans were proud that our nation defeated the Soviet Union to win the Cold War.
But at Yale, I was told that the United States was to blame for the conflict in the first place, not the Stalin-era Soviets.
Well, the late 1990s was one of the most prosperous times in human history.
At Yale, we were led to believe that communism was superior, even though it was impossible to point to even one example of the superiority since real communism had never been tried.
I wondered if some of my professors and classmates rooted for Ivan Drago to defeat Rocky Balboa in Rocky IV.
Just what an amazing paragraph.
What a rich, rich passage.
Yeah.
He didn't get his book fact checked.
Wow.
I don't believe communists were saying that.
That's what I'm saying.
I don't believe that.
Anybody could push back on this.
They've never taught that.
Not now, not then.
It's so funny how, like, I simply don't believe it.
This like Red Scare stuff is so funny.
And like, I mean, it's alarming for sure, but like, just like how hard he's going in on this.
Like, oh, I just need to like say that communism is bad and also like distance myself from the clear path that I chose for myself.
I don't believe you, Ron, is my point.
I think.
Yeah, I don't believe Ron otherwise.
He's definitely a liar.
Oh, the commies at Yale.
What the fuck?
The fucking commies at Yale don't even like Rocky.
Don't even like seminal film Rocky IV.
Yeah.
Not even one of the good Rockies.
It's such a funny, like, he's such a Ted Cruz in so many ways, too, of just like that cultural touchstone.
I know it too.
I know.
The Rocky IV.
You were a culture, pop culture.
Ha ha.
Yeah.
He's such a fucking freak.
Fucking, a fucking meatball.
Anyway, DeSantis goes on to note that experiencing unbridled leftism on the fucking Yale campus is what pushed him right.
So he does say that.
He includes that line.
I was forced into conservatism by those Yale communists.
Oh my God.
The gender studies at Yale.
Like, give me a fucking fucking wild.
God.
Now, as you're probably not going to hear.
Sarah Lawrence or something.
As you're probably not going to be surprised to hear, not everyone who went to college with old Ronnie D had a positive opinion of him.
And I'm going to quote from an article.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Here's a fun quote from an article in the New Yorker.
Some recalled that DeSantis was so intensely focused that he wasn't much of a teammate.
Ron is the most selfish person I have ever interacted with, another teammate told me.
He has always loved embarrassing and humiliating people.
I'm speaking for others.
He was the biggest dick we knew.
But the same teammate praised DeSantis' intellect.
This is the frustrating part.
He's so fucking smart and so creative.
You couldn't even plagiarize off his work.
He takes some angle, and everyone knew there was only one person who could have done that.
So yeah, he's a smart asshole who likes to bully people.
Make him president, I tell you.
Yeah.
I mean, like, not that smart, though, because sometimes he's.
Well, this guy may not be very smart, right?
He's another Yale dude, and Yale has given us a lot of dipshits.
Well, there's an element too of just like, yeah, you got good grades, you like worked hard, but like, there's like.
That's different than it's related.
I don't know.
Yeah.
Yeah.
What is intelligence, right?
That gets us into a...
Anyway, whatever.
Let's, let's move on.
He's a dick and selfish.
After he graduated with honors, Ron became a history teacher and taught for a year at the prestigious Darlington School in Rome, Georgia.
It is here that he first runs into his first serious controversy.
Last year, a source with, quote, close knowledge of the matter provided information to The Hill about a photo that had started going viral.
This photo showed a young adult, Ronnie D, posing with teenage girls, some of whom were students of his, while holding a beer.
Now, this picture that first came to prominence when Trump started his campaign against meatball Ron, the former president shared this picture from another user's post with a text, that's not Ron, is it?
He would never do such a thing, question mark.
Now, the original.
He did indeed.
And this original post, like Trump was, the post he was sharing included a caption by another user that read, Ron DeSantis was having a drink party with his students when he was a high school teacher.
Yeah, such a weird way to frame it.
Having drinking party.
But also Trump.
But also Trump carpeted.
Yeah, Trump carpeting on it so that he's a photo with a woman.
Silly about this.
Wait, so who's used the phrase drink party?
Yeah.
The person who originally posted.
Okay, because that is a Twitter blue ass phrase.
That is a very Twitter blue phrase.
God, a drink party when you're having your drink parties with your leftists at Yale.
Yeah, that is a phrase written by someone who has forgotten the face of his mother in favor of an Elon Musk snapple fact.
Unreal.
And has never been invited to a drink party.
And never would be invited to a drink party.
I've never been invited to a drink party.
I also love just like, obviously, we don't need to get too much into the Trump of it all, but the idea of Trump sharing this photo.
Bro, there are stories of you walking in at Miss USA.
You were on Epstein's plane.
What are you doing?
But also, like, he's Teflon.
It doesn't matter.
Yeah.
It doesn't fucking matter.
God, man.
Fuck that guy.
The post that Trump was quoting went on to say, having drinks with underage girls and cuddling them look pretty gross and ephebophiliesque.
Oh, huh.
It's also, you get a lot from the post.
Very Twitter.
Because it's like, yeah, you got to make a, you got to like, it's the very libertarian thing to like really emphasize the difference between pedophilia and ephebophilia.
You got to make it borrow NFT profile.
Oh, my God.
Yeah, this guy owns a bored ape.
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
All his apes are gone, though.
All his apes.
He's got that slurp juice.
You know, he doesn't have slurp juice.
Meepo Ron.
That's right.
Can't even slurp.
Now, this created an uproar on conservative social media.
And The Hill, which is a liberal-leaning publication, talked to someone who had apparently...
Yeah, yeah, it's kind of libby.
Yeah.
More on the lib side.
I wouldn't call it a conservative.
It's certainly not like a left-wing rag or whatever, but it's like, no.
It's not conservative media.
Yeah, talk to someone who had apparently been at the party where Ron has his arms around these girls drinking a beer.
According to our whistleblower, very silly thing to call a whistleblower, by the way.
Fucking fucking ridiculous.
According to like the microfiche we found in the fucking old year book, like what?
Come on.
DeSantis had a reputation among students for being a young, hot teacher who girls loved.
And the girls in the photo are believed to have graduated in 2002, making them seniors at the time.
Hill reporter also added, the source who provided the photo says that it was taken prior to graduation, meaning the young girls would have still been DeSantis' responsibility at the time.
So that is gross.
That's gross.
I would posit even if they weren't his responsibility, he is grabbing drinks with the time you have graduated college and are working as a teacher shouldn't be drinking with high school girls.
Especially not at a drink party.
Not a drink party.
Not at a drink party.
It is also sad.
It's like we all knew guys.
Oh, it's very sad.
I mean, I suppose you could drink some water with some teenage girls in class, I suppose, but that's not the same thing at all.
Although, I would say if anyone ever described to me that they were drinking water with teenage girls at their school, I'd be like, well, why are you, why are we talking about this this way?
That's all.
That's peculiar.
Most people don't describe it that way.
Yeah.
So the New York Times followed up the Hill's reporting here, positively IDing DeSantis as the man in the photo and finding further sources that would back up in several interviews that, quote, several students recalled Mr. DeSantis has a frequent presence at parties with the seniors who lived in town.
So that is deeply off.
Frequent.
Frequent.
Yeah, he is crashing teen girl parties.
A regular face at the drink parties.
Yes.
I don't think their parents would like that.
Yeah.
And it's the Times' report reveals nothing damning in a legal matter, right?
There's no, no one is accusing him of like sexual harassment or assault or of like anything like that.
Those allegations just aren't present.
But there's not a good reason why as a teacher and an adult, you become a frequent presence at high school parties.
No.
Like there's not a non-creepy way for that to happen.
Yeah.
You're not there because you're just, you really get on with these teachers in part.
Like you're really lit up intellectually from the conversation at the drink party.
I don't think so.
The best case scenario is like you have no friends and no sense of judgment.
And yeah, feel like you get along better with people who have less life experience.
Right, because it's not even like this is like his hometown or something.
No.
Like, oh, I knew like, oh, I was a senior and this was a sophomore.
Yeah, and they were like, they were, yeah, freshmen or whatever.
Yeah.
It's like, no, a new town and you're like, hanging up high school.
Like, God.
No.
One of the sources that I'm going to continue to quote from that Times article.
Two former students, both women, remembered him attending at least two parties where alcohol was served.
But they said that the parties took place after graduation and that they were not bothered by his presence at the time, although they question it now.
It was his first job out of Phil.
He was cute.
We didn't really think too much about it.
Yeah.
You were kids.
You were at the high school.
You got no context.
Yeah, that's why it's the adults' responsibility to not be a weirdo.
Yeah.
Well, Mr. D shows up at a lot of parties.
He's always taking pictures.
They're like, Mr. D's not a normal teacher.
He's a cool teacher.
But then like five years later, they're like, oh, no.
No way.
Right.
Because it's also not even like high school, like in 2020, where like that is kind of like understood.
It's like, no, that's weird.
It's weird.
Yeah.
Lots changed in the last 20 years.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Good for that changing at least.
Yes.
And also hasn't changed anything.
It also hasn't changed.
So after this really creepy gap year, he enrolls in Harvard Law School.
Again, he's doing this because he is trying to maximize his chance of like being accepted as a member of like the upper crust conservative intelligence.
So then you can rule the club.
If you want to be a part of the Illuminati, you got to do the game.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You got to do the gig.
He claims now that he decided to go to Harvard because he was motivated by Tom Cruise's performance and a few good men.
And yeah, like Tom's character, he became a judge advocate general, joins the Navy and gets deployed to Iraq as a lawyer with a SEAL team.
Now, because the Navy SEALs have the reputation that they have among conservatives, Ron has attempted to be, he's basically like claimed like he will always say, I deployed with the SEALs, which is technically accurate, but he's clearly trying to like, like he's, he's a lawyer.
His job is when they go shoot people to be like, yep, you're allowed to shoot these people.
Like that, that's what he was doing.
He makes a big point about this now in all of his campaign events.
He told a voter in New Hampshire this July, I'm the only veteran running out of all these candidates.
Yeah.
I'll be the first president elected since 1988 who's actually served in a war.
Now, that is true, although he was not out, you know, getting shot at or doing anything.
He was looking at paperwork.
He was being a lawyer.
He was also not universally popular among his comrades at the time from the New Yorker.
Quote, a colleague who served with DeSantis remembered, Ron was a voracious worker and he worked at phenomenal speed.
He was a superb writer, especially for his age.
But even then, his ambition seemed consuming.
Ron's a user, the former colleague told me.
Veteran Presidential Campaign00:05:12
If you had utility to him, he would be nice to you.
If you didn't, he wouldn't give you the time of day.
Yeah.
You know, I got to say, this is a little controversial, but I hate people like that.
I really do.
Yeah.
Bold.
Bold stance.
Bold stance.
Plenty.
Bold stance.
No, of course he is.
And it's like, yeah.
This is also, it's interesting because, I mean, sure, we'll, we'll get into this, but it's that a lot of these elements are very heavily reflected in his governance.
Yes.
Absolutely.
Everything.
He's policies and how he approaches politics.
Yeah, it's not a good guy.
Not a bad bad meatball.
Yeah Bad meatball now, you know what is a good meatball Yeah, oh man bison you can make a fine bison meatball you guys what my uh my my wild game meat recipe that I that I that I really it's great if you've got like wild boar You know, anything that's like kind of get you know, if you've got like a bunch of ground up boar meat or whatever, anything.
Do you have anything for like impossible beef?
You could you could do this with impossible beef.
You could do this with like ground venison.
I would get, I would take a pound of ground venison, a pound of ground boar meat, and mix them together with a whole sleeve of saltine crackers that you just crumble up in there.
You crack one, maybe two eggs in, stir it all together, then you baste it with either barbecue sauce or ketchup and you bake that shit in the oven and you cook yourself a delicious meatloaf.
It's perfect.
Oh, me.
Delightful food.
Yeah.
Meatloaf.
Reality meatloaf.
It's like when do we roll the meatloaf into balls?
Oh, I see.
No, no, no.
Meatloaf.
No.
But meatloaf.
Because the loaf is the strongest shape in nature.
You could do a meatloaf ball, Katie.
You could chop up meatloaf.
I'm sorry, that just sounds like a nice thing for me.
That's why it's like a little bit of a bad thing.
It's like the crab shape, how like it sort of independently appears in all sort of all across nature.
The loaf appears all across nature.
So question, were we about to throw to ads?
Yes.
Okay.
Yeah.
That's what this whole thing is about?
Okay.
Here's an ad There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
We always say, trust your girlfriends.
I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of the girlfriends, oh my God, this is the same man.
A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
I felt like I got hit by a truck.
I thought, how could this happen to me?
The cops didn't seem to care.
So they take matters into their own hands.
I said, oh, hell no.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He's going to get what he deserves.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm Laurie Siegel, and on Mostly Human, I go beyond the headlines with the people building our future.
This week, an interview with one of the most influential figures in Silicon Valley, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
I think society is going to decide that creators of AI products bear a tremendous amount of responsibility to products we put out in the world.
From power to parenthood.
Kids, teenagers, I think they will need a lot of guardrails around AI.
This is such a powerful and such a new thing.
From addiction to acceleration.
The world we live in is a competitive world, and I don't think that's going to stop, even if you did a lot of redistribution.
You know, we have a deep desire to excel and be competitive and gain status and be useful to others.
And it's a multiplayer game.
What does the man who has extraordinary influence over our lives have to say about the weight of that responsibility?
Find out on Mostly Human.
My highest order bit is to not destroy the world with AI.
Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Hey, I'm Nora Jones, and I love playing music with people so much that my podcast called Playing Along is back.
I sit down with musicians from all musical styles to play songs together in an intimate setting.
Every episode's a little different, but it all involves music and conversation with some of my favorite musicians.
Over the past two seasons, I've had special guests like Dave Grohl, Leve, Mavis Staples, Remy Wolf, Jeff Tweedy, really too many to name.
And this season, I've sat down with Alessia Cara, Sarah McLaughlin, John Legend, and more.
Check out my new episode with Josh Grobin.
You related to the Phantom at that point.
Yeah, it was definitely the Phantom in that.
That's so funny.
Share with me each night, each morning.
Intimate Music Conversations00:15:22
Say you love me.
You know I.
So come hang out with us in the studio and listen to Playing Along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Ah, we're back.
And I wanted to delay this next part because it's horrible.
Because after being in Iraq, Ron gets stationed in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
Now, this is by far the most contentious part of his backstory, and so I will be very careful in my phrasing here.
In a 2006 interview with CBS, DeSantis told his interviewer that at one point, several prisoners launched a hunger strike while he was at Guantanamo.
He says that his commanding officer asked him, how do I combat this?
And Ron answered, hey, you can actually force feed.
Here's what you can do.
Here's kind of the rules for that.
Now, there's some questionable elements of this recollection because force feeding started at Guantanamo somewhat slightly before DeSantis actually got sent there.
So he's probably exaggerating in order to take credit for what is torture, right?
This is torture we're talking about.
I actually invented a fun new way to torture people.
Yes.
Hurting them was my idea.
Ultimately, the Pentagon authorized force feeding.
Detainees would be strapped to a chair.
A nurse would force a lubricated tube down their nose and then would pump in nutritional supplements.
Lawyers for detainees have argued that this was torture because force feeding is banned by a UN convention against torture.
Former inmates, now released, have accused DeSantis of having played a role in their torture.
Mansoor Adafi wrote an article for Al Jazeera and described meeting DeSantis, who initially told him that he was at Guantanamo to ensure that prisoners' rights were respected.
Quote, I remember him asking why we were all still on hunger strike.
We told him to look around.
Camp Delta was constructed from metal shipping containers, divided into cages with wire mesh.
In the summer, the cages were like ovens.
In the winter, they were cold and wet.
They were loud with huge fans and the echoes of all the men's voices.
There was the persistent harassment by guards, desecration of Qurans, non-existent medical care, systematic torture, and being cut off completely from the outside world.
We told DeSantis we were on hunger strike because we wanted to know why we were being imprisoned, because we wanted a fair judicial process to prove our innocence.
He took notes.
He promised to register our complaints.
Now, Ron may or may not have registered their complaints.
We don't know, but it had no impact on what happened next.
Days later, a Daify was brought back to the wreckyard, where nurses and Navy corpsmen, which is Navy medics essentially, were waiting with a restraint chair and several cases of insure.
Ron DeSantis and other JAG officers stood nearby, observing.
Quote, I was informed that the U.S. government was determined to break the hunger strike.
The doctor in charge, a colonel, told me that he did not care if I was innocent or protesting mistreatment.
He was there for one thing, to make me eat.
I refused and was immediately and violently strapped into the chair so tightly that I could not move.
A nurse forced a thick tube into my nose and down my throat.
My nose bled and the pain was so great that I thought my head would explode.
The nurse would not stop.
Instead, he began pouring insure into a feeder bag attached to the tube.
They poured can after can into the feeder bag until my stomach and throat were so full that insure poured back out of my mouth and nose.
I thought it was going to drown.
If you throw up, O'Corman said, We'll start from the beginning with a new case and fill you up again.
As I tried to break free, I noticed DeSantis' handsome face among the crowd at the other side of the chain link.
He was watching me struggle.
He was smiling and laughing with other officers as I screamed in pain.
It is very upsetting.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Cody, you got a good meatball joke?
Something about.
Oh, no, but I did think when you were describing this, it sounded like you said jag off.
I did too.
I did too.
That's good.
That's good.
I thought the eye together.
Glad we pulled out of this tail spin.
Also, I mean, there's been some references to him being handsome, and I don't agree with that.
They keep saying he's handsome.
Yeah.
I think he might be so subjective.
But I know, but multiple people, there's been multiple suggestions today, and I've had a problem.
I take issues.
It is really interesting that a Dafey specializes, like, specifies that.
That he's like getting torched and handsome face.
Damn, that guy's kind of good looking, though.
Anyway, peculiar.
The things that occur to you when you're in an intense situation.
So a Dafey was one of several former inmates who claimed to have recognized DeSantis.
He was featured along with several whistleblowers in an unreleased Vice documentary.
The whistleblowers include a former U.S. Naval Sergeant, Joe Hickman.
So Joe was on guard duty during a night when three prisoners, the ringleaders of the hunger strike, died somewhat mysteriously.
Our government claims that these guys all were part had a suicide pact together, right?
That they committed suicide.
Hickman does not agree with this.
Again, he was on guard duty that night and he believes the men were assassinated to restore order and put an end to the strike, which was very bad PR for the U.S. government.
From a write-up by The Daily Beast, quote, Hickman, who later contributed as a whistleblower for the Justice Department's investigation into the deaths, recalled DeSantis as popular and extremely handsome.
So there we go again.
Navy girls would go crazy.
I feel like you added that in just to fuck me.
No, no, I'm not.
I swear to God, I have not.
I've not added a like, it's just a thing that comes up with like all everyone from these girls at the school he taught at to this sergeant to the dude he was torture helping to torture.
All I'll mention this.
I don't get it, but it's like an undeniable thing.
You have to acknowledge it.
We have to ignore it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I agree.
I do agree for the record.
I don't understand this and it makes me question my own sanity.
It's like, it's like fucking being best friends with Jimmy Stewart in that movie where he sees the giant rabbit and you're just like, is there really a rabbit?
Like, he's so consistent about this.
What am I missing?
Yeah.
Fucking Harvey's somewhere around here.
Yeah.
Great movie, by the way, Harvey.
Fucking absolute classic.
Yeah, classic.
So yeah, I'm going to continue that quote.
Maybe Navy girls would go crazy over him, Hickman said.
Although he added that he doesn't believe DeSantis, who became a jag straight out of Harvard Law, I'd argue he's been a jag forever, would have been in the room that night.
They weren't going to give somebody like that that kind of responsibility, Hickman said in the transcript.
So that Vice documentary was canceled at the last minute for very shady but unclear reasons.
It seems likely that it was killed to avoid angering a potential future president out of cowardice at the highest levels of a failing media company.
But I just really have nothing more to say because it's unclear still at this point.
In the spring of 2006, Ron met his future wife, Casey, at a driving range at the University of North Florida.
Again, not Flowrida.
He and his wife did not meet on Flowrida.
Again, we get the subreddit fills with confusion every time we mention this.
So I just want to make sure we're really keeping it straight.
It is from this period that we get our only context on Ron's flirtation techniques, which I know everyone's very excited to learn about.
How does the handsome man flirt?
I'm going to read you how you're going to regret asking that.
Yeah.
This is how he opens with his future wife.
Hello.
Somebody left these balls behind.
Would you like to have them?
Meatballs?
No.
Golf balls.
It's a driving range, right?
It's a driving range.
You want my balls?
Yeah.
Very, very funny.
Wow.
This works on Casey, and their first date is that evening at Beef O'Brady's, which is apparently a restaurant.
Meatballs.
What do you want?
I'd want some balls and beef.
Some people say I'm very handsome.
Some people, this guy I tortured says I'm very handsome.
This guy I tortured and teenage girls.
He's got a poster in his like, like I imagine his apartment is completely empty aside from a pillow and a blanket on the floor and a poster he made that says like people who think I am attractive.
Guys I tortured at Guantanamo, teenagers.
Hot drinking.
That one sorry.
You question mark.
Oh, great.
So Jill Casey Black, usually called Casey, had grown up in Troy, Ohio, one of two daughters of an optometrist and a speech pathologist.
She had also been an active student athlete and had done very well in school.
She went to the University of Charleston and graduated with a degree in economics and French.
She competed as an equestrian and had started a promising career as a reporter and on-screen talent for the local Jacksonville station WJTX.
The one story I found of her as a TV reporter is that there was a story about an alligator that had gotten into a suburban neighborhood, which she described as a story with real teeth.
If you're curious as to the level of rigor she brought to journalism as a profession.
You know what they call getting a degree in economics and French?
What's that?
Monet.
Okay.
Studying Monet?
No?
Studying Monet.
You're proud of yourself, aren't you?
Yeah.
Studying Monet.
Yeah.
No, no, we get it.
No, Because it's like, okay, wait, wait, wait.
We get it.
No.
Yeah.
Good one.
Thank you.
Good one, buddy.
Yeah.
So they get hitched in 2009 at Disney World.
Oh, now, how about that?
That is funny because of the war he's going to have with Disney later that he also counts to it.
By all accounts, it's not a very Disney Disney wedding.
There's not like Mickey or any characters hanging around.
They go to Epcot after, which is like the least Disney thing to do at Disney World.
I think it's more of a rich Florida people thing than a Disney super fan thing, right?
Like Disney World's just like.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
You got to get the photos.
Yeah.
And it's not.
Yeah.
Oh, I got the prince is here and the other prince.
Oh, and the prince is over there.
Yeah, exactly.
So, yeah, the two are a famously power couple in Florida politics, where Ron is tight-lipped and reserved and introverted.
Casey is an extrovert.
She's going to do, when he runs for office, she does a lot of on-the-ground campaigning, even like knocking on doors for him.
She does a lot of introducing him at events and stuff.
Like, she is the talker of the two of them.
Because she's more likable.
Here's my weird husband.
By far.
Isn't he handsome?
Yeah.
Look at me.
Just look at him.
Don't listen to his words.
Yeah.
I'll talk.
I'm attractive and charismatic.
Please ignore my husband's words.
Yeah.
I studied Monet in college.
Yeah.
Way to go, Cody.
So these ambitions, and she is, you know, the two are by all accounts deeply in love and partners in Ron's political ambitions.
And those ambitions would become evident for the first time in 2012 when Ron noticed that the newly drawn sixth district in Florida had, again, not Flo Rida, Florida, had an open campaign for Congress.
It was a Tweener district in between Jacksonville and Orlando and had no incumbent.
Because of the demographics of the district, it would be a guaranteed win for any Republican who could win the nomination.
With Casey at his side, Meatball Ron decided he was going to be that Republican.
And we will talk about that and his rise to power in part two.
I feel like there's also something to say about the phrase tweener district.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's uncomfortable to me.
Yeah.
Tweens.
Yeah.
Yeah.
His wife is age-appropriate, though.
So.
Yeah, good for that.
That is good.
Good for them.
Yep.
He is married to an adult.
That's positive.
Shows growth.
I like to end things on a positive note.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Modern politics.
Yeah.
Well, thanks for having us here for this.
Yeah.
How you feeling, guys?
All right.
I feel excited to see Meatball Ron up on stage just, you know, just being himself.
Just being himself.
Yeah.
Just be, and just, you just be yourselves, you know?
If you are a relentlessly dedicated psychopath who wants to become the president purely for reasons of self-gratification, don't let anything stop you, you know?
No.
Relentlessly craft a life towards that goal and proceed on a rocket ship-like course towards it until fucking Biff Tannin calls you Meatball Ron and utterly annihilates all of your dreams in a single shot.
I mean, it's honestly back to the earth.
Yeah.
It's like the Death Star shooting a taxicab.
Just absolutely wiped out.
A handsome taxicab.
Yeah, a handsome taxicab.
Anyway, you guys got some plugs?
Sure.
We got shows.
Oh, yeah, we got shows.
Yeah, check us out.
We got a YouTube show called Some More News.
It's also a podcast.
And we have a companion podcast called Even More News.
Hell yeah, you do.
Hell yeah, we do.
I've got, oh, we've got a Patreon for that as well.
Patreon.com slash some more news.
I've got a band called The Hot Shapes that has an album out now.
Check it out on Bandcamp and SoundCloud, thehotshapes.bandcamp.com.
Yeah.
We have to work because it's out where we split up the plugs.
I got it all.
Well, you said, you said, Cody, go.
So I did, but then I was like, well, Katie's not going to want to plug my band.
No, you're right.
We'll figure that out in the future.
Yeah, I agree with what he said, but also I do want to plug his band.
Go ahead.
Listen to his band.
Check it out.
All right.
See you next episode, probably.
Yeah.
See you next episode.
You can find us at CoolerZone Media.
If you want to get this without ads, you can subscribe.
And I'm going to also put in a free plug for a YouTube channel that I like.
Just Google Bobby Fingers YouTube.
Watch the Steven Seagal video first.
You'll be pleasantly surprised.
All right.
Called it.
No, no, no.
This is just like my favorite thing that exists.
This artist, I don't know why he doesn't have Cody.
You need to watch these videos.
Bobby Fingers.
Okay.
I don't know.
I don't know.
I'm not familiar with this, but the thumbnails are things.
Watch Steven Seagal Videos00:02:08
Yes, I have no way to describe this to you.
There's three videos so far.
Watch the one about Steven Seagal.
That's all I'll tell you, listeners.
I have no affiliation with this guy.
I just love him.
All right.
Looking forward to that.
We're supporting artists.
Bye.
Behind the Bastards is a production of CoolZone Media.
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