Ron DeSantis

Ron “Don’t Say Gay” DeSantis appears to be gunning for a new moniker: “Ron DeScandal.”

The Florida governor, who continues to ignore or worsen a myriad of crises in the wake of his presidential flop, is getting sued by one of his state’s former top law enforcement officials. Shane Desguin, a former chief of staff for the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, says he was fired for blowing the whistle on illegal orders.

ABC News has more:

“[Desguin] alleges his retirement in November was actually a “wrongful termination” and was the result of him blowing the whistle on a host of issues, including violations of state public records laws, illegal orders to arrest demonstrators without probable cause and directives to obtain photos and personal information of migrants flown to the Sunshine State without legal justification.

In particular, Desguin’s suit points to an order received from DeSantis through a senior official about obtaining “photographs, biometric data, and any other pertinent information” from migrants upon their arrival at a Florida airport. Desguin says he told the governor’s office the FDLE couldn’t legally conduct name checks, take photographs or collect data without a criminal predicate or reasonable suspicion.

In another episode, Desguin says he protested DeSantis’ decision to transport migrants out of Florida. In the cruelest of political stunts, the gay-hating governor flew migrants from Texas to Martha’s Vineyard without their knowledge last year.

He sent staffers to the Lone Star State, and instructed them to determine which of the newcomers were potentially trying to settle in Florida. The identified migrants were approached and told they would be settling in cities like New York or Washington D.C., only to land in the Vineyard, a wealthy liberal enclave off the coast of Cape Cod.

But like many of DeSantis’ callous acts, his potentially illegal orders blew up in his face. A court ruled recently that some of the migrants are eligible for government-issued protection from deportation, because they’re victims of a possible crime.

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The ultimate panderer, Desguin alleges DeSantis, through an aid, ordered him to make arrests at a neo-Nazi rally in Orlando in September 2023. He was told the arrests would benefit DeSantis politically.

When Desguin refused, citing the First Amendment, he says he was told law enforcement could always “find a way.”

“I don’t think you understand. If you look hard enough, you can find a way. The Governor [DeSantis] wants someone arrested today. He [Defendant DeSantis] will stand by you in any arrest,” the aid allegedly said. (The lawsuit says arrests were ultimately made.)

Courts have clawed back many of DeSantis’ signature anti-LGBTQ+ policies in recent months, including “Don’t Say Gay” and his notorious school book bans.

DeSantis’ “Stop WOKE Act,” which limits discussion of race, gender and other topics in state university classrooms, is also being litigated in court. A federal judge in Tallahassee blocked a key provision, calling the law “positively dystopian.”

In an apparent effort to prove his point, state lawyers recently told a federal appeals court that Florida lawmakers could exert power over professors’ political speech in classrooms. “In the classroom, the professor’s speech is the government’s speech, and the government can restrict professors on a content-wide basis and restrict them from offering viewpoints that are contrary,” said an attorney, per The Tallahassee Democrat.

Not content with only trying to stifle speech, DeSantis is attempting to starve the arts. He vetoed every. single. line of funding for the arts in the state’s annual budget ($32 million in total).

Art organizations across Florida say suddenly losing state grants is devastating. “It’s a huge disappointment and a quandary,” Michael Tomor, the executive director of the Tampa Museum of Art, told The Tampa Bay Times. “We are all unclear as to why this happened.”

With DeSantis, the common thread is often vengeance. He appears destined, if not determined, to spend the last half of his term defending his administration’s cruelty in court.

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