Sometimes incompetence?

Two common arguments against conspiracy “theories”:

1. More than three people can’t keep a secret. This one is sheer nonsense. Massive numbers of people can keep a secret if they feel like it’s worth doing. Secrecy is the default in human affairs. Transparency is rare and usually fake.

2. What looks like conspiracy is always incompetence. This one is not provably wrong. Some mysterious failures turn out to be caused by infiltration and sabotage, especially in corporate circles. Some are just dumb, or at least impossible to prove otherwise.

I’m wondering about DeSantis’s failure. He has managed to lose every possible source of support.

The Trump cult wants him to fail. This is obvious and natural. He’s a threat to Trump, so Trump mobilizes all his gangster resources to squash him.

The leftist media should have wanted to boost DeSantis as the best competitor to Trump, but DeSantis lost their support by solely pushing anti-Woke. Now they’re squashing him along with the Trump media.

Serious opponents of the “virus” tyranny should want to favor DeSantis as the strongest and most effective opponent of the tyranny. He lost us by totally ignoring his best points and switching to the Woke crap.

Analogy in terms of ordinary non-political jobs: Let’s say Ron is known as the best plumber in town. He applies for a plumbing job. Instead of listing his successful plumbing contracts, he says that he’s the best caterer in town and doesn’t care about plumbing. Employers who want a good plumber are not going to hire him, and employers who want a good caterer will know that he has never served an edible meal or organized a successful event.

If DeSantis was a young inexperienced politician, the sabotage theory would make sense. Saboteurs know how to weaponize wrong information and bad advisors. But he’s an expert politician who knows the game. He must be throwing his own fight for reasons we can’t see.

Even the cynical fact that campaigns are solely designed to raise money doesn’t work. He’s not raising nearly as much money as he should, and he doesn’t have any discernible online fanbase. He didn’t get my contribution, which would have been the max permissible amount if he had shown any competence. He has apparently lost Ken Griffin, his patron in the tech world.