Rising in the Sunshine State   

Having campaigned on a promise to bring the pandemic under control, Joe Biden was forced to watch the rapidly spreading Delta variant wreck the “summer of freedom” that he’d promised. But the administration’s response — advocating masking for schoolchildren, as well as vaccine mandates — met a rising tide of conservative opposition.

In a Republican Party fiercely opposed to those policies, one voice in particular made itself heard: the trenchant tones of Florida governor Ron DeSantis.

“We can either have a free society, or we can have a biomedical security state,” declared the first-term governor.

The Biden administration knew a foil when it saw one, and so it decided to hit back at the man whose laissez-faire pandemic policies in the nation’s third-most-populous state had garnered him the moniker “DeathSantis” on the left.