Cuomosexuality was a media cult that stemmed from its need to smear President Trump and elevate its own partisan faction by putting forward a model for handling the pandemic. Since the media is based out of New York and Cuomo was eager to be the model, it was done.

DeSantis is the flip side of the equation precisely because Florida had actually done a fairly decent job of managing the pandemic. And even now that the media no longer needs Cuomo and has turned on him, it still needs to destroy DeSantis. Especially since he’s a potential presidential candidate. The discredited smears and attacks aimed by the media at DeSantis are the flip side of the Cuomo cult, but serve the same purpose.

And the better Florida looks, the harder the media smears. No matter how discredited the smears are (the entire ‘Florida Data Scientist’ nonsense is a master class in the sort of garbage that the national media will happily repeat while showing no interest in even the most basic fact checks, some of them coming from its own local outlets) they will continue.

The bigger picture is that reporting, even biased reporting, has given way to PR for one side and hit pieces aimed at the other. Journalism is a political messaging operation and the pandemic is just another setting for the larger political agenda. The media is lying about DeSantis for the same reason it lied about Cuomo. Likewise, it lied about Trump for the same reason it’s lying about Biden. The fawning over corrupt criminals is the flip side of hit pieces and smear campaigns against their opponents.