2024 GOP Primary: Ron DeSantis Humiliation Station

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > 2024 GOP Primary: Ron DeSantis Humiliation Station

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

Scott is all the more perplexing because he has a really solid power structure in South Carolina, having built a machine that combines transactional paleoconservative business interests and the backing of the state megachurches, particularly Seacoast, which has major outlets and financial holdings in every major city in the state. Scott has tempered his position by taking a moderate (for Republican red state standards) position on police reform, which isn't going to help him at the national level. He's not a very charismatic speaker, but he's good at conventional politics, which has made his entry all the stranger- he's horribly bobbled abortion policy questions, despite their being an obvious sticking point for him.

One possibility is that Scott is being encouraged by the least chuddy, most money-focused elements of the evangelical christianity industry.

edit: since it's relevant to this candidate, here's a slightly revised post about the business model of Seacoast and its scale of influence that I made a few years back:

quote:

The below is the result of some googling I did in 2018 when someone asked me to try to identify who was backing confederate apologist groups in SC.

Seacoast is a megachurch located in South Carolina. It's popular across all income levels and races, but principally caters to the comfortably wealthy and white. It forms a major locus of public, political and social thought among Charleston voters, particularly politically influential exurbs. Republican Senator Tim Scott is a prominent member of the church. It is fundamentalist and very conservative, but they don't burn crosses - they inspire brand loyalty. (This whole vein of research was a dead end, btw- there was no sign that the church was associated with the revanchist group I was looking at).

Here's a picture of their original "campus". It seats about 1,300, but they're expanding it to seat 2,400 soon- and they have a a dozen other campuses of the same and larger sizes around every major city in the state, as well as a massive telechurch program.

For scale, that footprint is about 2000 feet long, according to google maps. There's a main street to the immediate north, and a weird side entrance in the west, going...somewhere, from the parking area. What is that? Well...

All of the yellow areas are areas I know are currently owned or under negotiation for purchase by Seacoast.

That street leading out of their parking lot? It goes directly to a shopping center, with an immediately joining apartment complex behind it to the South. The shopping center is owned by Seacoast, managed through an entity called "American Asset Corporation". The apartment complex (which has only exits going past the church and shopping center) is also owned by Seacoast.

On the north side of the main road, there is a more disjointed area of commercial offices, law firms, and fast food joints. A Chik-fil-a just moved in (of course). Seacoast owns all of that property too, aside from some small detached dwellings owned by African American families. These families have lived in the area since before Seacoast existed, and are now hoping to sell their properties to the church for enough to greatly improve their situation. Seacoast is beginning to close the properties in this northern section; they are consolidating them into a new shopping center.

You may have noticed a yellow line going out of the map to the northwest. What is that? Well...

That triangle in yellow is a residential development connected to all the neighboring properties by a narrow road, called "Seacoast Parkway". You might be wondering why it's called that. Seacoast used to own it, and were going to build a 6,000 capacity megachurch there, along with their own planned community with residential and commercial development. The local government blocked it (the whole thing has one narrow road in or out, which, well, it's an area that sees frequent, massive flooding- you do the math). Seacoast sold the real estate to another developer instead, who still built a neighborhood there. (there's another property at the northwest corner there I'm excluding for the moment).

You may have noticed the massive industrial looking-thing in the Southwest. Well...no, that's the port of Charleston. I don't think Seacoast owns that. But...

I believe Seacoast currently or previously has had controlling interests in all of the areas in blue. This includes most commercial properties serving the port. It also includes the residential properties, where I believe the church used to own the property, and now maintain control through an agreement with the developer that controls the HOA. This includes the residential areas in the northwest corner, which are, still, cut off from the rest of the area by floodplains and is connected by a single, two lane road that goes under the highway, in a flood zone, then loops through the rest of the office and commercial properties to connect to an escape route. It may also include the private schools and community center that are attached to the central north neighborhood, which is wealthy and has a heavy Seacoast attendee population.

I don't have public news coverage of these forms of control or purchase like I do the things in yellow, but it would explain the rate and form of land development in the area...over the course of at least 30 years, as part of a planned development and investment approach that would have occurred at the same time that Seacoast was formed. Seacoast has another, similar campus set up near the other major port in the Charleston area. This is probably not a coincidence. Seacoast attendees wake up in houses built on property sold to them by Seacoast, in neighborhoods indirectly controlled by a Seacoast property, go to Seacoast services in cars sold to them by other Seacoast members, and afterwards they eat at a Chik-fil-a that leases a footprint from Seacoast and shop in retail stores that are also leasing from a Seacoast holding. This is the sort of business plan that the genuinely sophisticated megachurches develop before they even incorporate their first holding company.

All of this is to say that retail should always be understood partially in terms of real estate ownership, because that scale of institutional investment and control will gladly set up retail as a part of a much, much longer-term scheme. Seacoast and its owners are enthusiastic amateurs compared to actual, dedicated real estate developers.

Less consolidation has occurred than I expected in the years since I wrote that post, probably due to covid. Nonetheless, commercial development has continued and Seacoast now has a separate office complex there to run its network. With all this said, Seacoast is a politically powerful entity in South Carolina. It gives Scott no real leverage nationally.

Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 04:04 on Jun 7, 2023

# ¿ Jun 7, 2023 03:39

Adbot: ADBOT LOVES YOU

# ¿ May 10, 2024 04:25

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

DarklyDreaming posted:

Hopeless candidates run all the time to raise their profile on a national level, especially under the GOP where spectacle is everything. It's a good way to get appointed Secretary of Something or Other by the winner

Scott isn't someone who's ever pursued that, and he decided that his current term would be his last one back in 2019. He's got no specific background or positioning for any particular cabinet position, either- and he's unlikely to get anything under Trump, who he's very publicly clashed with.

# ¿ Jun 7, 2023 04:28

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

Another fun fact about Scott: he's never married or publicly dated and is thus as a part of his expressed Christian beliefs, avowedly celibate. Somehow (probably because he pisses off far fewer people in SC politics) I've never heard the sort of rumormongering around him that constantly swarms around Lindsey Graham, the other SC senator. I have to imagine that if Scott starts showing any promise, his personal life's going to go under a microscope in that regard.

# ¿ Jun 7, 2023 07:05

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

Tim Scott�s girlfriend (originally titled "Why do we care whether Republican candidate Tim Scott has a girlfriend?")

quote:

In June, as Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.) began to get a little momentum in the presidential primary, a person working on behalf of one of Scott�s Republican opponents messaged me, asking to chat.

�Have you seen the video,� he asked over the phone, conspiratorially, �where he says he has a girlfriend?�

The video in question was from a May event organized by the news website Axios, where the interviewer asked the South Carolina senator about the possibility of becoming the first bachelor president since the 19th century. �I probably have more time, more energy and more latitude to do the job,� he replies. And then the senator adds � quickly, as an aside: �My girlfriend wants to see me when I come home.�

An oppo campaign appears to be trying to spread media attention on the fact that Tim Scott is famously a bachelor, celibate and, until relatively recently, a virgin. This is in the added context of a much more intense and similar rumor mill around fellow SC Senator Lindsey Graham, who "everyone knows" is gay. Scott doesn't have the same sort of reputation and attributes his status to his taking his christianity and morality seriously. The oppo campaign is likely trying to generate a similar scandalous/dishonest aura around Scott.

Here's some relevant parts of a writeup I did on Scott from the 2020 election:

Discendo Vox posted:

Tim Scott is one of the two US Senators from SC. He's African-American, and generally regarded as in a safe seat. He is a member of Seacoast, which is a megachurch in Charleston with satellites around SC and NC. Seacoast's coverage is much broader than it seems, because it pioneered livestreaming events from its churches. It's a massive media and commercial force in SC, in no small part because it's the default church to belong to if you're a wealthy out-of-towner. Seacoast's patronage network is one of Scott's powerbases- it gives him a positive image, and it gives him ties to the massive real estate industry that roils the Charleston area, in which the church is itself a player. Seacoast attendees go to services, then eat at nearby restaurants owned by Seacoast, and drive back to gated communities built by Seacoast, in cars sold at auto dealerships whose land is also rented from Seacoast - all without knowing that this is part of a business plan the church has to maximize profits (this isn't unique to seacoast, I just looked into how they were doing it several years ago- many megachurches do this, it's a refinement of more open church business strategies).

Seacoast is mixed race and softpedals its chuddiness enough to maintain a very very broad consumerbase [i.e. it's not all white]. Scott has never been as married to Trump as other Senators, especially on race issues where it hurts his ability to use the church to launder his conservatism. And he criticized Trump a fair amount over how he's handled the Floyd sequence of events, to the point of being one of the main GOP figures quoted doing so.

Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 23:52 on Sep 12, 2023

# ¿ Sep 12, 2023 23:43

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

The X-man cometh posted:

There are no women in the SC GOP who are willing to pretend to be Scott's girlfriend?

This is unlikely because unlike Graham, Scott is well-liked and popular within the state party and it�s backers.

# ¿ Sep 23, 2023 19:46

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

The above discussion is tied to the underlying shittiness of pharma; getting a drug to market requires (legitimate, necessary) massive regulatory and scientific expense, and individual drug patents create a massive boom-or-bust reward structure. It's like a lottery where the jackpot is in the rage of 50 billion, but each ticket is 10 million- and that's if your company's doing everything by the book. If you can find a way to make a ticket cheaper, or get someone else to pay, or get more payments from a winning ticket...

This creates especially strong incentives for a) deregulatory pressure, b) slimy financial practices to deflect risk and speculate on "winners", and c) evading regulations. These all feed into each other, especially the intersection of a) and b), which keep producing new forms of slimy efforts to undermine drug approvals, building upon previous successful deregulatory efforts.

I dream of the day that we recover from and reverse the court decisions that blocked FDA from regulating prescription practices and normalized offlabeling. I have no idea how we get there; we've created a knowledge deficit to the tune of trillions.

Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 08:11 on Oct 1, 2023

# ¿ Oct 1, 2023 08:09

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

Interesting...note the small printed string near the address box in most of them? That's apparently their internal documentation of individual campaign messages. I think all of those ones are from a single entity.

Nikki Haley Lemonade Stand: SFA_NH3_1
Nikki Haley Phone Quiz: SFA_NH3_2
AFP Action "time to choose a new leader": 0054_F11
AFP Action "willing to let go of Trump": 0055_F12

Looking back, the MAGA Action mailer also has a differently formatted combo of message indicators.

Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 00:36 on Nov 3, 2023

# ¿ Nov 3, 2023 00:30

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

We need the previous 53 AFP Action mailers so we can unlock the bonus gallery.

# ¿ Nov 3, 2023 00:37

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

It unfortunately does seem to track that tall people are more likely to win elections, ceterus paribus, to a sufficient degree that it's a troubling reflection of how shallow the basis is for some voter's decisions. A sufficiently shallow and insecure pol will fixate on this.

# ¿ Nov 3, 2023 06:17

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

VorpalBunny posted:

So has Trump gone even further down the fash-hole than before? The media is reporting it like he's literally parroting Hitler, and his plans for a second/forever term are more alarming than ever. Did the recent polls just go to his head? He had been off the campaign trail for a while, and sort-of keeping his mouth shut, but these recent rallys have reminded everyone of the rhetoric and I feel like people are alarmed he's still aiming for authoritarianism.

The forever term plans are a broader state transformation project being worked up by other conservative groups to basically undermine and rapidly replace entities in all three branches and put them under conservative control. It's terrifying in some respects, but it's also reported oddly because it's principally just bundling things conservative groups have been pursuing for decades.

# ¿ Nov 14, 2023 08:37

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

Has anyone identified who asked the question of Haley? It's a fantastic shivving.

# ¿ Dec 28, 2023 16:25

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

Timmy Age 6 posted:

WaPo talked to the guy but he didn't want to identify himself.

The guy knew just what he was doing and this makes me even more curious who he was and if he was working for someone.

# ¿ Dec 28, 2023 17:52

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

This sort of thing is why I think it might not have been a dem operative. If it were, why target Haley?

# ¿ Dec 28, 2023 21:52

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

edit: whoops, wrong thread! my bad.

Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 05:24 on Jan 16, 2024

# ¿ Jan 16, 2024 05:16

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

Ethics_Gradient posted:

Actually, no, the numbers are just distorted by alcoholics pulling the average way up:

Something like half of Americans are either teatotalers or effectively abstinent (only have a glass of wine or champagne at a wedding/holiday dinner).

While reducing your alcohol consumption can only be beneficial for your health and longevity (those "glass of red wine a day" studies have been debunked), I think you are overstating the risks of alcohol consumption. IIRC think chances of getting certain kinds of cancer might rise like 1-3 percentage points or something?

Here's the NCI factsheet. For some rarer types of cancer it's about a 30% increase from even light drinking.

Here's more information about another set of debunked research (an effort by alcoholic beverage companies to subvert the scientific process) that promoted drinking. If you see claims about benefits of "moderate" alcohol consumption, they're likely coming from this discredited research. Infuriatingly, a lot of the coverage generated from that garbage is still floating around, even from groups like the AHA.

# ¿ Jan 28, 2024 23:58

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

To briefly convey a controversial and very broad and complex set of areas of research, the thing that makes addiction what it is, and the thing that makes it so terrible, isn't the direct sensation or the tolerance or withdrawal- it's the alteration of the mind, all the different parts of the cognitive landscape, of the addict to justify and rationalize further access and consumption, to the point of harm. The miraculous reconciling, sense-making machine between one's ears gets all its resources redirected as if the substance (or, under some arguments, the behavior or reward) is at least as important as any other necessity.

# ¿ Jan 31, 2024 05:50

Adbot: ADBOT LOVES YOU

# ¿ May 10, 2024 04:25

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

GoutPatrol posted:

My friend have you heard about all the weight loss drugs over the past year that will also supposed to reduce addictive behavior

capitalism is the problem and will sell you the cure

I do not know what you are referring to. Are you talking about Ozempic? There's been like one study and some anecdotes. This is not a meaningful slam on capitalism.

# ¿ Feb 4, 2024 01:15

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > 2024 GOP Primary: Ron DeSantis Humiliation Station