Have we really fallen this far in Florida?
The profanity-filled, anti-Semitic, sexist death threat against Florida Sen. Tina Polsky, captured in a recording on her office phone, is sickening in its unbridled fury. It calls her every name you can imagine and then some, ending with this: “F--- off and die.”
The unidentified woman — who blocked her call identification — as cowards do — even stoops to dismissing Polsky’s breast-cancer diagnosis, saying, “I don’t give a f--- about your cancer. People have cancer every f------ day, all right? I don’t care about your f------ cancer.”
This unhinged, vomitous spew was the result of a completely reasonable request by Polsky, a Democrat from Boca Raton. She simply asked the Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo to leave her office because he wouldn’t wear a face covering. She’s undergoing cancer treatment and Ladapo — who has been unwilling to say whether he’s gotten the COVID vaccine — had come to her office for a meeting. She had been seen with other people without masks but said she knew that they were vaccinated.
That was nearly two weeks ago. Since then, Polsky has received a half-dozen malicious messages — but this was a standout in the race to the bottom of civil discourse in Florida, with Gov. Ron DeSantis at the helm and Donald Trump hovering. Instead of being outraged that an elected official was being attacked so viciously, DeSantis said on Fox News that Polsky’s complaint was “manufactured,” and that she was just trying to get air time.
When asked about the threat by the Miami Herald, DeSantis spokesperson Christina Pushaw noted that death threats are a crime in Florida. She referred the reporter to the governor’s Oct. 28 statements when he said there’s “no room for threats for anything” and noted, wonderingly, that this is “a crazy political time” — as though he had no part in that. He said that he wouldn’t “countenance” the threats against Polsky and that they were wrong.
It took Senate President Wilton Simpson, a Trilby Republican, to say the things the governor should have been saying: “We can disagree on all kinds of things, including policies regarding masks, but there is absolutely no place for anti-Semitic slurs, or mean-spirited and cruel statements about someone’s health diagnosis.”
He’s right. At least someone in Tallahassee still knows what decency sounds like.
