DeSantis Defends Bizarre Homophobic Ad Featuring ‘Oiled-Up, Shirtless Bodybuilders’
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) defended himself this week after sharing a widely condemned and mocked campaign ad that began by bragging about his continued reign of terror against the LGBTQ+ community in Florida and ended with the 2024 presidential candidate splicing images of himself in between oiled-up, shirtless bodybuilders.
DeSantis received criticism from both sides of the political aisle over the weekend after his campaign released a video on Friday attacking Trump for his prior statements in support of the LGBTQ community during his 2016 campaign.
The ad then touted DeSantis’ anti-LGBTQ policies while splicing together images of DeSantis alongside “manly” images that bizarrely include oiled-up bodybuilders, Brad Pitt in “Troy” (twice), Leonardo DiCaprio in “Wolf of Wall Street” and Christian Bale as psychopathic serial killer Patrick Bateman in “American Psycho.” DeSantis defended the video publicly for the first time this week, telling conservative political commenter Tomi Lahren: “Identifying Donald Trump as really being a pioneer in injecting gender ideology into the mainstream, where he was having men compete against women in his beauty pageants — I think that’s totally fair game, because he’s now campaigning saying the opposite.” Christina Pushaw, the DeSantis campaign’s Rapid Response director, also defended the video on Twitter after former Trump official Richard Grenell called it “undeniably homophobic.” “Opposing the federal recognition of ‘Pride Month’ isn’t ‘homophobic.’ We wouldn’t support a month to celebrate straight people for sexual orientation, either… It’s unnecessary, divisive, pandering,” Pushaw wrote. “In a country as vast and diverse as the USA, identity politics is poison.” The New
