Joe Gruters, if you lay down with dogs, you’ll get up with blackfaced fleas

Joe Gruters

Only he knows why, but Sen. Joe Gruters will be slumming it with Rep. Anthony Sabatini at an anti-vaccine rally later this month.

While Sabatini probably doesn’t have anything to do on a Wednesday afternoon in the middle of a committee week, Gruters does.

The Sarasota Senator chairs the Florida GOP and unlike Representative Blackface he chairs a committee in the Legislature, too.

But instead of doing something worthwhile, Gruters will be a guest speaker at an event that sounds like a rejected Party Down episode: The Florida Freedom Rally.

Hosted by the equally inane-sounding Conscious Coalition and Moms For Freedom, the event promises to be a cesspool of angry, misinformed and conspiratorial whackjobs who are hellbent on rejecting the COVID-19 vaccine.

Gruters’ presence isn’t harmless. If we’ve learned anything over the past week, or past four years, his presence is validation.

The people who gather at the state Capitol to hear him speak will walk away even more resolute in their beliefs than when they arrived, all because an influential Senator will have told them they might be onto something when he should have cringed.

And they don’t just believe that vaccines are a scam.

These same people believe masks have a mortality rate. They believe in the “plandemic.” They believe Joe Biden wants to microchip them. They believe the election was stolen.

Simply put, this is the crowd who thinks Sabatini is a good attorney. Ergo, it’s the crowd all respectable elected officials should keep at arm’s length.