It’s been a while since we checked in on the Media Research Center’s DeSantis Defense Brigade, determined to act like Ron DeSantis was personally paying them to defend him against any and all criticism — with a focus on … pudding. Curtis Houck complained in a March 16 post:
The Daily Beast offered a reminder Thursday of how there’s no bottom to their juvenile but slimy reporting as reporters Jake Lahut and former conservative-turned-real-life-Randall Zachary Petrizzo offered an audition for the grocery store tabloids in “The GOP Campaign Trail Is Already Getting DeSantis-Proofed.” The big scoop? Governor Ron DeSantis (R-FL) isn’t a social butterfly and allegedly ate a cup of pudding with his fingers.
The big find came near the end of the 1300-plus-word hit piece, insisting “[t]he chatter over DeSantis’ public engagement has also surfaced past unflattering stories about his social skills—particularly, his propensity to devour food during meetings.”
They then cited “a former DeSantis staffer” (who’s likely rather disgruntled) that claimed DeSantis “would sit in meetings and eat in front of people” as if he were a “starving animal who has never eaten before… getting shit everywhere.”
[…]The rest of the piece reads like it belongs in the warped dreams of someone like Joy Reid or Tommy Vietor or Bulwark fan fiction, built on anonymous sources insisting they’re important to DeSantis’s 2024 chances.
Houck — who is acting in a very juvenile and slimy manner in comparing Petrizzo to a character from the cartoon “Recess” — is very bitter about writers who, unlike him, escape the right-wing bubble and thus feels he must personally insult them; CNN’s Oliver Darcy is another target. Still, Houck insisted that the sources with “grievances” were the problem, not himself or DeSantis, accusing one source of “channeling their inner Mean Girl” even though Mean Girl tactics (which we call Heathering) are a common MRC strategy.
Houck took Pudding-gate into a second day by continuing to whine about it being covered:
The liberal media have been pulling out all the stops with pointless mud-slinging against Governor Ron DeSantis (R-FL). On Thursday, the ever-juvenile Daily Beast penned what they thought would be a direct hit against DeSantis’s hypothetical 2024 chances by alleging he’s socially awkward and one time used three fingers to get a lick of pudding.
Also on Thursday, New York Magazine huffed at this horror as and joked it could impale his campaign. And at Puck News, Tara Palmeri claimed “some” are “wondering if DeSantis…is on Ozempic, the diabetes-turned-weight-loss drug” because of said media-driven reputation around his love of food.
New York Magazine Intelligencer section editor Margaret Hartmann had the duty of beclowning herself in “Ron DeSantis Eating Pudding With His Fingers Will End His 2024 Bid.”
Quipping that “[p]oliticians should really consider only taking in sustenance alone in a darkened room, just to be safe,” Hartmann boasted DeSantis was “hit with a food-related accusation so weird it may end his 2024 presidential bid before it officially starts.”
It was Alex Christy’s turn to complain that Pudding-gate was being talked about in a March 18 post:
MSNBC’s Joy Reid has discovered another scandal plaguing Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis on Friday’s edition of The ReidOut. Not only does DeSantis eat pudding with his fingers, he is also short. Meanwhile, the Lincoln Project’s Rick Wilson stuck to the classic DeSantis fake scandals as he falsely accused DeSantis of trying to ban books about Rosa Parks and Hank Aaron.
After Wilson claimed that DeSantis lacks the charisma to win a presidential election, Reid turned to Democratic strategist Don Calloway to talk about the pudding scandal, “put up three fingers and be like ‘save me some pudding ‘cause I got three fingers right all ready to grub’ That’s so gross, though. That’s just nasty.”
For good measure, Christy defended DeSantis over charges that his attacks on education in Florida led to a book about Hank Aaron being banned:
Nobody’s banning books about Hank Aaron. As for Parks, what Wilson is referring to is a New York Times report about a textbook that was submitted for review. What Wilson didn’t say was the publisher did this because of what they thought was needed in Florida, not what was actually required. Additionally, the Times itself said “It’s unclear which of the new versions was officially submitted for review” and the book was rejected for unrelated, bureaucratic reasons.
Christy returned to DeSantis pudding defense in a May 19 post:
MSNBC’s All In host Chris Hayes lamented on Thursday that when people think of authoritarians, they tend to think of people like Stalin or Mussoulini [sic] and not “Mr. Pudding Fingers” because for Hayes, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s education, abortion, Disney, and drag show policies are all hallmarks of “authoritarianism.” However, the worst bit of so-called authoritarianism to come out DeSantis’s Florida is that parents will no longer be able to give their kids “gender-affirming care.”
Christy didn’t belabor the pudding point further.