Sen. Rick Scott Tells Communists And Socialists To Stay Out Of Florida

David Moye
·4 min read
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If Florida GOP Sen. Rick Scott is really considering running for president, he’s found a bizarre campaign pitch to potential voters: Telling them to stay out of his state.

Scott, who reportedly is considering a late entry into the race for the 2024 Republican nomination, attempted to throw out some performative red meat on Tuesday by “warning socialists and communists not to travel to Florida.”

“They are not welcome in the Sunshine State,” he condescendingly declared in a video posted on Twitter. “We’re the free state of Florida. We actually don’t believe in socialism. Some people in our state lived under it, and we know people lived under socialism — it’s not good. It’s not good for anybody.”

Scott’s exhortation, The Daily Beast noted, was a response to Florida travel advisories issued by the NAACP, the League of United Latin American Citizens, Equality Florida, Florida Immigrant Coalition, and the Human Rights Campaign. The advisories cite the culture-war crackdown led by GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis, another 2024 contender, on transgender people, migrants and education.

Not surprisingly, Scott’s video was ridiculed on social media, with people pointing out it probably won’t help tourism, or the many Florida residents who rely on socialist-style programs like Social Security or Medicare.

Other people wondered why Scott was more worried about communists and socialists moving to the state than the Nazis who are already there.

One person researched whether Scott was more popular than socialism and, well, it didn’t look good for the senator.

Another Twitter user noted that Scott may have had a more favorable impression of socialism when he was CEO of the for-profit hospital company Columbia/HCA and oversaw what a political commentator called “the largest Medicare fraud in the nation’s history.”

Scott also took a swing at the usual suspects in May, when he posted a social media message blasting “Socialists, Communists, and those that enable them.”

When he’s not talking down to out-of-staters, he’s had some remarkably unappealing ideas in Washington. He proposed “sunsetting” popular benefit programs like Medicare and Social Security, and raising taxes on poor Americans so they’d have some “skin in the game.”

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