Lost in all the completely justified commotion regarding Andrew Gillum's upset win in the Florida gubernatorial primary was the fact that the Republicans nominated a candidate who gives the establishment of that party an even more profound case of the vapors. Adam Putnam, the 44-year-old state agricultural commissioner, spent $30 million on his primary campaign. He had been grooming himself for this job for years. He had the endorsements of many of the most prominent Republican officeholders.

And then he lost, badly, to Congressman Ron DeSantis, a profound Trump loyalist on whose behalf the president* came to Florida to throw one of his now-weekly wankfests. Turns out, there was a reason why DeSantis gave Florida Republicans the shakes. He is more than a bit of a white rider. From The Washington Post.

DeSantis, elected to represent north-central Florida in 2012, appeared at the David Horowitz Freedom Center conferences in Palm Beach, Fla., and Charleston, S.C., in 2013, 2015, 2016 and 2017, said Michael Finch, president of the organization. At the group’s annual Restoration Weekend conferences, hundreds of people gather to hear right-wing provocateurs such as Stephen K. Bannon, Milo Yiannopoulos and Sebastian Gorka sound off on multiculturalism, radical Islam, free speech on college campuses and other issues.

Joe Raedle Getty Images

Fellow speakers included a former Google engineer who was fired after arguing that “biological causes” in part explain why there are relatively few women working in tech and leadership; a critic of multiculturalism who has written that “Europe is committing suicide” by welcoming large numbers of refugees and immigrants; and a British media personality who urged the audience to keep the United States from becoming like the United Kingdom, where “discrimination against whites is institutionalized and systemic.”

If this reminds you of a classic op-ed from The Onion, you're not wrong.

On Aug. 31, the Tallahassee Democrat reported that an unknown number of Florida voters received anti-Gillum robo-calls paid for by a neo-Nazi group in Idaho called the Road to Power. The automated calls were narrated by someone speaking in an exaggerated minstrel dialect who was pretending to be Gillum, with junglelike sounds in the background. Efforts to reach the group for comment were unsuccessful, and the DeSantis campaign denounced the calls as “appalling and disgusting.”

By the way, if you're one of those sad people who can't understand how this president* ever happened in the Republican Party, you should take a look at some of the past speakers/attendees at these White Camellia hoedowns.

Guest speakers at its conferences over the past five years have included Republican members of Congress, former governors Rick Perry of Texas and Mike Huckabee of Arkansas, young conservative activists James O’Keefe and Ben Shapiro, and right-wing European politicians Nigel Farage and Geert Wilders.

A sufficient number of people in this country want to be governed by outright white supremacists to force the rest of us to live under them. Chew on that for a while.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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