DeSantis Office Responds To Report About 2019 Decision
Something strange is happening at The Daily Beast—strange, even by their standards. A recent piece targeting Florida Governor Ron DeSantis is so wildly off-mark, it’s left even casual observers wondering, who thought this was a good idea?
Here’s the setup: in a curious attempt to paint DeSantis as anti-veteran, The Daily Beast published an article highlighting that under his tenure, five military veterans have been executed in Florida. It tries to cast this as a betrayal, leaning hard into the contradiction between DeSantis’s military service and his tough-on-crime approach. The article, apparently written by an intern, singles out Bobby Joe Long—among others—as one of the veterans DeSantis supposedly “let” be executed.
Ron DeSantis is under fire for turning against his fellow service members and letting executioners slaughter five veterans this year alone.https://t.co/aIalUPYhyM
— The Daily Beast (@thedailybeast) August 13, 2025
Now, a critical detail that didn’t make it into the piece? Bobby Joe Long was a convicted serial killer. He raped and murdered at least 10 women in the Tampa Bay area in 1984. He confessed to the crimes. He was convicted in open court. The case wasn’t murky, wasn’t political, and wasn’t some fringe legal controversy. He was a brutal predator, and justice caught up with him.
But you wouldn’t know that if you only read The Daily Beast article. It’s a baffling omission, one that essentially turns a heinous murderer into a sympathetic figure, solely for the purpose of slamming DeSantis.
Cue the internet’s instant response. X (formerly Twitter) lit up with a blistering Community Note that fact-checked the article into oblivion. It calmly laid out the crimes Bobby Joe Long committed—and instantly dismantled the false framing of the piece.
The cherry on top? DeSantis’s communications director, Alex Lanfranconi, issued a reply that was as sharp as it was simple:
“A simple trick to avoid execution in Florida is to not murder people.”
This kind of response doesn’t just land—it obliterates the central thesis of the article. And let’s be honest: there was no thesis. The piece reads like a rhetorical banana peel, flung in desperation, hoping to trip up a political rival with absolutely no regard for reality, context, or the very real pain caused by monsters like Bobby Joe Long.
What’s more troubling is what this signals about the state of journalism at outlets like The Daily Beast. If the goal is simply to generate anti-DeSantis content at all costs—even if it means whitewashing the legacy of a serial killer—then we’ve moved beyond partisan bias into something else entirely: moral incoherence.
So yes, The Daily Beast ran an article that omitted a serial killer’s crimes to score points. Yes, it was written by an intern. And yes, the internet—armed with facts—responded accordingly. But the real story here is the desperation of legacy media that’s forgotten its responsibility to inform and, instead, opts for outrage with zero restraint.