Ron DeSantis allows infamous child predator to hang with kids in Florida

While "investigating" drag shows

Welcome to a quick Sunday edition of Progress Report.

Happy New Year! I hope you had a fun final evening of 2022; we watched the year slip into the past from a balcony on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, where the fog seemed to lift as the seconds ticked down to midnight. Everything still exists as it did yesterday, and the course of events isn’t altered by the mere turning of a calendar, but there’s still an optimism that comes with starting at the beginning again.

Sometimes, there are stories that need to be told because nobody else is willing to do so. Tonight, I’ve got a story that the media should be running with, but seem to find too inconvenient to their future coverage plans and opportunities for access.

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Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has staked his political career on “protecting children” from supposed sexual predators — unless, it appears, they are ideologically simpatico. Otherwise, the Republican presidential hopeful would undoubtedly take swift action as a pedophile-apologist and self-confessed creep walks the streets of Orlando.

As a result, deposed Brazilian ex-president Jair Bolsonaro is free to greet and hug children as he wanders around Central Florida in his quest to avoid criminal prosecution back home.

Bolsonaro, who landed in Florida on Saturday and will be staying at the home of a former MMA fighter for at least a month, has a record pockmarked with sexual impropriety and public misconduct. In October, he lit his re-election campaign on fire when he told a radio host that he’d stopped to greet underage prostitutes and was titillated into following them into their brothel just 18 months earlier.

“I stopped the bike in a corner, took off my helmet, and looked at some little girls, three, four, beautiful 14 or 15 years old. dressed up in a community on a Saturday… I pintou um clima. ‘Can I come into your house?’ I went in. There were about 15 or 20 girls, getting ready. All Venezuelans,” Bolsonaro explained.

It was the phrase “pintou um clima” which caused immediate alarm. It is a dialect expression literally translated as “painted a climate”, or “had a climax”, which in Brazil is used to describe sexual, chemistry, tension and flirtation, and is considered by most to be completely inappropriate to recount interactions with a 14 year old child.

Amid the scandal, he received support from Gabriel Monteiro, a former city council member in Rio who was forced out of office just months prior after being charged with rape and producing child pornography.

In 2020, Bolsonaro was accused of violating the country’s Child and Adolescent Statute after asking a 10-year-old girl sexual questions on his weekly live stream.

He has also repeatedly praised the brutal Paraguayan dictator Alfredo Stroessner, who sat atop a massive pedophile ring within his government. Up to 1000 young girls were said to have been seized and raped under the auspices of the Stroessner inner circle, which perhaps explains Bolsonaro’s indifference, as the Brazilian has only levied accusations of pedophilia and grooming at the LGBTQ+ community.

Direto da América @DiretoDaAmerica

#BRAZIL :: Bolsonaro walks on the streets of a condo where Brazilian immigrants live in Orlando, Florida this Saturday morning.

Last Wednesday, the DeSantis administration made national headlines when it explicitly threatened a venue in Orlando that was due to host to a Christmas-themed drag show. In a sharply worded statement, the administration reminded the proprietors of the The Plaza Live that “exposing children to sexually explicit activity is a crime in Florida,” and warned that any reports of children attending the show would result in a so-called investigation that could lead to the revocation of its liquor licenses.

A day earlier, the administration launched an “investigation” against the Broward Center for the Performing Arts, which had just played host to another drag queen Christmas show. In July, DeSantis himself filed a complaint against a restaurant in Miami over a drag brunch that had children in attendance without incident or complaint.

“Florida stands with parents to protect children,” DeSantis said at the time. “Exposing children to inappropriate sexualized content is wrong and the state will hold accountable those establishments that transgress this clear boundary.”

DeSantis spent all of 2022 launching homophobic accusations and stirring violent right-wing protests at school boards, drag bars, and every other place where the LGBTQ+ community once felt safe. In calling gay men “groomers” and weaponizing transphobic tropes, DeSantis has used the safety of children as an excuse to drive queer people from schools and public life.

Yet DeSantis’s concern for children has never seemed to extend to allies and friend like Rep. Matt Gaetz, who was accused of trafficking teenage sex partners, and former tax collector Joel Greenberg, who was sentenced to 11 years in prison this fall for a litany of crimes, including trafficking teens. DeSantis was also close allies with a major GOP donor who committed suicide in December while reportedly under investigation for sexual misconduct.

His office has been largely mum on the revelation that Florida’s state foster care system was at the very least complicit in a child sex trafficking circle that led to the deaths of multiple teenagers.

The governor has yet to give comment on Bolsonaro’s presence in Florida, largely because nobody has asked him about it yet. Until that happens, he is exceedingly unlikely to offer an opinion about the unrepentant human rights criminal and teen ogler wandering around his state. As a homophobic demagogue whose intentional fumbling of Covid led to tens of thousands of deaths, DeSantis must feel a certain kinship with him.

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