President Joe Biden and Democrat Charlie Crist have said that they don’t support calls from some activists to defund the police. And a law that both men supported provides funding for the IRS to potentially hire tens of thousands of new employees — most of whom would work in customer service, not tax auditing, bureau officials have said.
But an anti-Crist ad from the Republican Party of Florida makes two distorted claims: that Crist and Biden “teamed up” to “hire 87,000 new IRS agents to audit the middle class,” and that Crist “supported Biden’s agenda to defund the police.”
Biden and Crist have said that some financial resources for police could be redirected to social and mental health workers, but neither man has an agenda to completely defund law enforcement or drastically cut police budgets, as the ad could lead viewers to believe. Also, the IRS has said that any new auditors or “agents” that are hired will focus on scrutinizing the tax returns of individuals and businesses with very high incomes — not the “middle-class.”
The Republican Party of Florida released the ad on Aug. 24 and said it’s a “significant and sustained statewide tv and digital advertising campaign.” A Spanish-language version is scheduled to run in the Miami, Tampa and Orlando media markets, the party said.
Crist resigned his House seat on Aug. 31 and will focus on his gubernatorial race this fall against Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. (We also published a story about Crist ads attacking...
The author and behavioural scientist, Gad Saad, has just published a book on what he calls “suicidal empathy”. He says that “a society dies when it cares more about exhibiting infinite tolerance a...