Earlier this week, we noted that Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has, through his record of accomplishments, made his case for the Republican presidential nomination even before he officially announces next week. The governor is generating a lot of interest among Republicans, which means the Leftmedia will be gearing up to tear him down. Time magazine entered the fray with a hand-wringing piece to go with its cartoon villain portrayal of the heir to the Bad Orange Man.

Literally, Time’s cover is a cartoon drawing of DeSantis scowling into the camera while peeling an orange. The message couldn’t be more obvious.

Indeed, Molly Ball’s article goes to great lengths to tie DeSantis to Donald Trump, which is ironic given how much Trump has attacked and distanced himself from DeSantis since launching his own reelection bid. For Time magazine’s audience, however, the message is clear: Be very afraid.

Time makes sure readers know that “critics see DeSantis as a would-be authoritarian,” and Ball backhands his voters by saying, “The people of Florida seem to like the steady hand — even if it’s an iron fist.” She also quotes a Democrat calling the governor a “bully,” and she finds as many people as possible to talk about the governor being mean or heavy-handed. Hint: DeSantis is just like Trump.

Democrats are the true authoritarians, of course, which Time comes close to admitting. After describing how the governor worked to build a broader coalition after his narrow election, the article moves on to COVID. “It was the pandemic, critics and supporters agree, that changed DeSantis.” He “grew frustrated” by the confusion coming out of Washington and the misinformation of the medical establishment. He hated the sheer cruelty of forcing people to die without family members being allowed by their side.

So DeSantis chose to become the face of freedom — of rebellion against the tyrannical “science” being foisted on us.

And he was right. Florida excelled economically after initially shutting down, and it didn’t suffer from disproportionate deaths as critics predicted it would. The Free State of Florida stood as a shining city on a hill when compared to disasters like New York.

Nevertheless, the clear message from Time is that DeSantis is a villain, and its “What Ron DeSantis means for America” cover title is meant to provoke fear.

The contrast couldn’t be more stark with how Wired’s Virginia Heffernan handled her interview with one of Joe Biden’s diversity hires, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg.

The transportation secretary cares about transportation, the subheader assures us, “But infrastructure occupies just a sliver of his voluminous mind.”

Oh good grief.

The first sentence isn’t any better, telling readers that Buttigieg is so darn smart his “curious mind” has to hold “much of its functionality in reserve.” Heffernan’s second paragraph gushes that she only “slowly became aware that his cabinet job requires only a modest portion of his cognitive powers,” though Buttigieg happily condescended to make his “cathedral mind” somehow “intelligible to me.”

Pete Buttigieg is also gay, don’t you know, and if he wasn’t, we’d think he and Heffernan had something going on.

Another paragraph is enlightening:

Buttigieg, whose father was a renowned Marxist scholar, was himself a devotee of Senator Bernie Sanders as a young man. He now recognizes that the persistence of far-right ideology, with its masculinist and antidemocratic preoccupations, is part of the reason that neoliberalism has come undone. Not everyone, it seems, even wants a rising standard of living if it means they have to accept the greater enfranchisement of undesirables, including, of course, women, poor people, Black people, and the usual demons in the sights of the world’s Ted Cruzes and Tucker Carlsons.

Marxism is great, in other words, especially when contrasted to the racist “far-right” ideology of Republicans.

Meanwhile, the words “train” and “East Palestine” strangely never came up.

If you’d like to continue laughing at this slobbering hagiographic nonsense, Andrew Stiles of The Washington Free Beacon hilariously summarizes “The 10 Most Nauseating Lines” from this profile of “the transportation secretary best known for finishing fifth in the 2020 Democratic primary,” complete with amusing quote memes.

Likewise, National Review’s Charles C.W. Cooke expertly satirizes the story.

For our purposes, we just want to highlight once again the sheer partisanship of the mainstream media. Wired is hardly mainstream, and you might not have even heard of it before today, but Time was once the flagship magazine of what was supposed to be an objective press. That it functions as little more than a Democrat henchman conducting opposition research is a shame and a disservice to the American people.