Infamous DeSantis conspiracy theorist announces run for Florida governor

Fried made the announcement via a Twitter video. In addition to an English version she made alternates with Spanish and Haitian subtitles.

It’s unclear why Nikki Fried didn’t fully commit to speaking Spanish and Haitian in these versions. “Those in power will do whatever harm it takes to stay there,” Fried says in English.

This statement alludes to the controversial background of Fried’s political career.

As the Daily Caller points out, Nikki Fried comes with an airport’s worth of baggage and history.

For starters, Fried is close friends with the former dashboard manager at Florida’s Department of Health, Rebekah Jones. She’s notorious for alleging Florida Governor Ron DeSantis manipulated the state’s COVID-19 data.

It was last month that Charles C.W. Cooke published a scathing rebuke of Rebekah Jones in the National Review. He outlines that the employee records for Rebekah Jones show that she was repeatedly a poor employee at the Department of Health, and management just put up with her until her very public finale.

The poor behavior in May 2020 that led the FDOH to gently try and remove her from her role operating Florida’s COVID-19 dashboard, backfired. On May 7th of last year she crashed it for everyone. The only other technical manager capable of fixing what Jones was doing also got locked out of his account by Ms. Rebekah Jones.

As explained by National Review: "In her role as the manager of the dashboard, Jones did not have the ability to edit the raw data. Only a handful of people in Florida are permitted to touch that information, and Jones was not among them."

Yet for some reason Florida’s Agricultural Commissioner Nikki Fried was repeatedly willing to indulge the baseless claims Rebekah Jones put out.

Rebekah Jones recently gave a public endorsement for Fried.

Elsewhere, Nikki Fried entertained the accusation that Florida Governor Ron DeSantis was giving his donors in an elderly gated community first dibs on COVID-19 vaccines. No proof ever came of this even though Fried said she was meeting with the FBI to get to the bottom of it.

As of now it’s still unresolved. DeSantis made a public statement clarifying that vaccine distribution for Florida was purely age-based and not financial whatsoever.

Most egregious of all was how Nikki Fried publicly hitched her wagon to a now-infamous 60 Minutes piece about Governor DeSantis.

The show’s reporting claimed Florida chose the Publix grocery-store chain to be the official vaccine distribution partner for the state because the company donated to DeSantis’ re-election campaign.

Daily Caller lists off various public officials in Florida who pushed back on the 60 Minutes story and said the claims were untrue. They show didn’t prove their case.

The report on it put out by CNN actually agrees, saying “beyond spotlighting the public finance records, "60 Minutes" never offered any substantive evidence to support the significant assertion and link the donation with the partnership.”