What actually occurred was the opposite of Pushaw’s prediction.
When the news of the stunt broke, volunteers at Martha’s Vineyard rushed out with pizza, salad, and soup. “People were just showing up (at the church) with food, rice, and beans,” Carla Cooper, head of the Democratic Council of Martha’s Vineyard, said. “When something happens to our island, we come together to help. We are going to take care of these people.”
You would think this response would have humiliated DeSantis, whose imagination had no room for the possibility that anybody could act so humanely.
Instead, conservative media simply responded as if rich liberals had acted in the way Desantis anticipated. The Federalist gleefully reported that liberals were “melting down” as if they were angry at having to accommodate immigrants, rather than at DeSantis’s abuse of immigrants. It became a “fact” in the conservative media that Martha’s Vineyard was responding to the immigrants with terror: