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ISLAMO SHARIA?

5 25 Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis signed law last week that makes it tougher for citizens to get constitutional amendments on the ballot.

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After a grand jury report found that Florida misappropriated $10 million in taxpayer money, the DeSantis administration is arguing that the anonymous leak of the report was the only crime committed. And that reporters asking about its contents may be breaking the law. “Let’s do a little exercise, here. Pull out your phone,” Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier told a reporter Thursday who asked for comment on the report, which had been sealed for months before CBS Miami reported on it Wednesday. Leaking a grand jury report is a first-degree misdemeanor.

Uthmeier, who refused to discuss the report beyond calling it a politically motivated hoax, told the reporter to look up a Florida statute banning criminal solicitation. “Are you trying to solicit a crime here in violation of the law?” Uthmeier asked, smiling. “I did not think so.” The report found that $10 million from a Medicaid settlement was funneled through the DeSantis-aligned charity, Hope Florida, to two nonprofits and ultimately sent to a political committee fighting Amendment 3, a proposal to legalize marijuana.

The report did not find enough evidence to bring criminal charges for anyone involved, which includes some of the highest echelons of Florida’s political system: a current U.S. senator, the attorney general, DeSantis’ chief of staff, and an appellate judge. Those officials moved into these elevated positions in the months following the Herald/Times’ reporting on the scandal engulfing the embattled charity. The DeSantis administration, meanwhile, has bitterly rebuked all accusations of wrongdoing, maintaining that the investigation has been politically motivated and a “debunked hoax.”

They’ve maintained that the $10 million gifted to Hope Florida by Medicaid contractor Centene as part of a $67 million legal settlement was a “bonus,” not Medicaid dollars — despite the grand jury report finding that all of the money belonged to taxpayers. Although Gov. Ron DeSantis, at an unrelated news event in Lake City, agreed with Uthmeier that leaking the report was the only crime committed in the Hope Florida saga, he took the most offense to the media tying the scandal to his wife, Casey DeSantis.

Florida’s first lady for years was the face of the organization, touting it as one of her key initiatives. Gov. DeSantis on Thursday demanded the press take down articles and images using her picture, accusing the press of “smearing ... good people.” “I think the people that were behind the smear, in the political arena, were disgraceful,” he said. “We’ve got cancer in the Legislature — some of these people are bad actors.”

The charity was created to connect needy families to churches and other community groups to help move them off of government assistance. Since the grand jury report was issued in January, Casey DeSantis has not promoted Hope Florida. This story was originally published August 27, 2026 at 2:24 PM.

Read more at: https://www.miamiherald.com/news/politics-government/state-politics/article317033347.html#storylink=cpy

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Kimberly Leonard and Gary Fineout

08/27/2026

JACKSONVILLE, Florida — Democrats are using a leaked grand jury report on Hope Florida as a fresh line of attack against Sunshine State GOP incumbents, seizing on findings that Gov. Ron DeSantis’ administration “misappropriated” $10 million in taxpayer funds from a health care settlement intended to help needy children.

The controversy — first uncovered by GOP state lawmakers — has given Democrats an opening to tie two prominent Republicans to a dispute over millions of dollars in taxpayer money that ultimately flowed into a DeSantis-backed political committee.

The long-running scandal involved a charity connected to an initiative spearheaded by Florida first lady Casey DeSantis, called the Hope Florida Foundation, and has entangled GOP Sen. Ashley Moody and Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier, both of whom were appointed to their current jobs by the governor and are up for elections in November.

On Wednesday, a grand jury report looking into the funds was leaked to CBS Miami. According to the report, jurors concluded that state officials shifted upwards of $10 million as part of a “sophisticated scheme to fund political activities” because the money eventually went to a political committee and the Republican Party of Florida to defeat an amendment that would have broadly legalized marijuana in the state. Some of the money also flowed into a political committee tied to Gov. DeSantis himself, according to the grand jury.

But the report — which was apparently issued in January but has been kept under seal since then — also concluded there wasn’t enough evidence to criminally charge anyone because “nobody will take responsibility” for routing the money to the foundation or “had any memory of who made it.” At the time money was shifted, Moody was state attorney general while Uthmeier was the governor’s chief of staff.

CBS Miami published its story on the grand jury report on Wednesday, the same day state Rep. Angie Nixon, the Democrat running against Moody, launched her campaign kickoff event in Jacksonville. Ahead of her kickoff, Nixon called on Moody to resign and described the funds transfer as “corrupt” and “disrespectful” in an interview with POLITICO. She drew attention to the report in her stump speech before a crowd of around 200 people who gathered for her campaign launch later that night.

“It just came out today,” Nixon said of the news report. “She stole $10 million for medically needy kids in order to defeat two citizen-led ballot initiatives that you all placed on the ballot that would have allowed you all to have healthier lives.”

Asked about this before the revelations in the grand jury report were published, Moody’s campaign pointed to how Florida’s Agency for Health Care Administration, which is responsible for setting health policy and planning, negotiated and settled the agreement with health insurer Centene after Centene overbilled Florida’s Medicaid program. The settlement ultimately led to the health insurer paying back the state $57 million, with another $10 million flowing into Hope Florida.

Moody’s Senate office spokesperson, Will O’Grady, said Thursday the leaked report “confirms what we have said all along,” regarding how AHCA negotiated the agreement “and the settlement funds were disbursed according to its terms.”

“Neither the Department of Legal Affairs nor the former attorney general had knowledge of how the settlement money would be spent,” he said. “Attempts to characterize this any other way are disingenuous.” Moody released a similar statement on X, blaming the news on the “political season” where “there may be a tendency to misrepresent the facts.”

But the grand jury report concluded Moody knew about the plans to divert the money to the foundation and “authorized” John Guard — then a top official in her office — to sign the settlement agreement. The report additionally stated Guard worried about the transfer and raised it with Moody, and as a result the settlement was rewritten so that AHCA was directing the funds instead of the attorney general. In her statement, Moody said “multiple agencies” signed the final agreement.

President Donald Trump nominated Guard for a federal judgeship last year but did not renominate him this year. Guard appeared before the grand jury, though Moody and Uthmeier didn’t. Asked about the leaked grand jury report on Thursday, DeSantis said during a press conference in Lake City, Florida, that “the only crime that was apparent” was its leak.

“There was no diversion of any Medicaid funds. It was a private settlement,” he said. The governor also argued that the “whole reason” the investigation came up was to “smear” his wife, though he didn’t raise the fact that the news had reached a fever pitch last year while Casey DeSantis was weighing a run for governor. The first lady is only mentioned in the grand jury report in the context of describing what Hope Florida is, not in regard to any transfer of funds.

Uthmeier was not only the governor’s chief of staff when the money was transferred but was also leading the political committee the governor was pushing to try to convince the public to vote against the pot ballot measure. Asked about the report Thursday, Uthmeier during a press conference in The Villages called it a “politically motivated witch hunt” and “hoax,” and maintained “nobody did anything wrong here.” He accused Democrats of collusion with the press to leak the report, though didn’t offer evidence of how CBS obtained the report, and pointed out how he wasn’t allowed under Florida law to comment on grand jury proceedings.

Democrat José Javier Rodríguez, who’s running against Uthmeier for Florida attorney general, called on his rival to “resign, come clean and turn himself in.” He pointed out that the report also said that Uthmeier was a key figure in the diversion of the funds and later was among those who’d been blocking the release of the report.

“This report pulls back the veil on the corruption Floridians have been seeing for years,” Javier Rodríguez said. “Enough is enough.”

David Jolly, the Democratic nominee for governor, pledged Thursday to “reopen” an investigation “into the laundering of Medicaid funds” if elected. Jolly, in a statement posted on X, noted that those involved — including Uthmeier and Moody — had been appointed to key posts by DeSantis, which he asserted was designed to “further insulate anyone from accountability and hide the truth from Floridians.” The campaign for Rep. Byron Donalds, the Republican nominee for governor, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Nixon said she wasn’t certain whether her campaign would be able to run ads on the matter — she has raised about $2.5 million since launching her campaign in January, an amount that falls far short of what would be needed to run a statewide ad. She added, however, that she would “hit [Moody] hard on it.”

“Kids are probably going to die because they didn’t get the resources that they needed,” she told POLITICO.

Annette Taddeo, the Democratic candidate for Florida chief financial officer, used the report to criticize current CFO Blaise Ingoglia, another DeSantis appointee, for “ignoring stealing in plain sight” and spending time criticizing local government instead of focusing on issues in state government.

Ingoglia was not in his position at the time the transfer occurred, but Katie Strickland, now a top aide for him, worked in the DeSantis administration at the time and was identified by other witnesses “as a participant in meetings and conversations.” The grand jury found her testimony “not credible” and called her testimony “least informative” because “she could hardly recall any details or information” about the settlement. Strickland did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Meanwhile, state Senate Democrats called on both Moody and Uthmeier to resign.

Democrats aren’t the only ones raising concerns. The initial investigation was started by GOP members of the state House before the grand jury took it up. The GOP state representative leading the investigation, Alex Andrade, had sent his records to the Second Judicial Circuit. GOP Sen. Rick Scott, a two-term former governor, had praised the state House’s work and said the money should be paid back. When asked about the latest report, Scott called it “deeply concerning.”

“Money designated to help poor kids was diverted to political ads,” he said. “Florida families deserve accountability, not more finger pointing in Tallahassee.”

Andrade declined to comment on the leaked report.

Former GOP Rep. Matt Gaetz, now a host on One America News Network, praised CBS Miami’s Jim DeFede over X for producing a “great scoop” and later drew attention to the fact that Uthmeier had been leading the political committee against the marijuana amendment.

When Uthmeier celebrated a $1.2 million settlement on X with consulting firm Deloitte over its diversity, equity and inclusion practices, Gaetz taunted with, “What PAC are you sending the settlement money to?”

Kimberly Leonard reported from Jacksonville, and Gary Fineout reported from Tallahassee.

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AN PHOENIX FLA 7 26

“‘It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.’”

That’s how federal judge Mark Walker began his 2022 injunction blocking enforcement of Ron DeSantis’ “Stop Woke Act” in Florida institutions of higher education.

In case you don’t recognize the quotation, it’s from George Orwell’s “1984:” You know, the novel where the Ministry of Truth rewrites history and forbids free enquiry.

Certain words are banned; wrong thinking is punished. Even hearing about disfavored ideas is considered an attack on decency and order.

As defendant in the case, the State of Florida argued (apparently with a straight face) university professors have the right to free speech, sure, but only if the state approves of that speech.

The law forbade teaching anything that explores racial or gender injustice.

You weren’t allowed to say, given how we still struggle to overcome discrimination against minorities, women, and the disabled, that maybe diversity, equity and inclusion programs helped a lot of people; you must embrace color-blindness in all things (because we all know race doesn’t matter in America!); yet, woe betide you if you ever made a white person feel “guilt, anguish, or other forms of psychological distress because of actions, in which the person played no part, committed in the past by other members of the same race, color, national origin, or sex.”

Like many of us teaching in the state university system, the judge was unimpressed.

DeSantis and the legal team from his Ministry of Truth appealed up the food chain to the 11th Circuit, and what do you know?

They lost again.

‘Breathtaking assertion of power’

The majority opinion, by a Trump appointee, is unsparing.

Judge Britt C. Grant wrote, “If the First Amendment offers any boundary of protection at all for public university classrooms, this statute crosses it.”

She called the Stop Woke law “a breathtaking assertion of power to ban unpopular ideas from public discourse.”

Naturally, the governor pitched a little hissy fit, taking to social media to say, “State universities are funded by taxpayers and directed by elected officials and their appointees. The state has both a right and a responsibility to ensure instruction at these universities is consistent with the underlying mission and to exclude indoctrination and ideological agendas.”

He called the decision “judicial overreach.”

Let’s talk about gubernatorial overreach. Or, to put it another way, what is this guy’s problem with education?

Is he really that frightened of ideas?

If he and his education appointees are so convinced their positions — slavery had an upside, gender is 100% biological, capitalism is divinely ordained, a woman’s highest destiny is to be a mother, vaccines are unnecessary, climate change isn’t real — are valid, surely they’d welcome testing them with historical records, expert reports, and empirical evidence.

Facts, even.

Reading books by and about, say, gay people, teaching the history of Stonewall, or examining central Supreme Court decisions such as Obergefell v. Hodges, do not mean straight people will somehow become gay, any more than studying Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar” will necessarily inspire you to assassinate any official you think has gotten too big for his britches.

Gender studies will not destroy heterosexuality; it’s simply a way to talk about the ways people understand who they are, how they present themselves, how other people see them.

Snowflakes

Universities are supposed to be where you encounter people who aren’t like you, unfamiliar, maybe upsetting, points of view, tricky topics, and ideas your parents don’t approve of.

Intellectual freedom means we should be able to discuss almost anything.

Yet the DeSantis administration act like snowflakes, hypersensitive, unwilling to contemplate anything outside their very white, very Christian, pathetically nationalist, bubble.

DeSantis is especially nervous America’s racial history, trying to outlaw “The 1619 Project,” a brilliant collection of writings about how the arrival of the first slaves on the Virginia shore has informed and shaped our country, shutting down or crippling African American Studies programs.

I guess white people are so used to considering themselves the “real” Americans who had all the good ideas, invented all the good stuff, and “built this country,” the reality that Africa is as central to our identity as Europe is scary.

The governor and his crew seem especially freaked out by the possibility students might encounter Critical Race Theory. Listening to them, you’d think CRT is to blame for everything from high gas prices to the common cold.

CRT is pretty simple: Race is socially constructed (not biological) and racism is not merely a product of individual bias (though that’s part of it) but embedded in our legal, educational, medical, and financial systems.

Say a white person and a Black person commit the same crime. It would make sense if they got the same sentence, right?

But in most cases the Black person will get a longer sentence.

‘The perfect villain’

The Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonpartisan health policy think tank, has repeatedly shown structural racism (conscious or not) in the medical profession means doctors and nurses misdiagnose Black, Latino, and members of other ethnic communities far more often than they do whites, and, unlike with white patients, tend to dismiss their pain.

Infant mortality among people of color is at least twice as high than it is for whites.

There’s nothing sinister or anti-American in acknowledging, as Justice Thurgood Marshall said, the original Constitution was “defective from the start,” given that it upheld slaveholders’ rights in their human property and protected the slave trade.

Slavery was at the heart of our republic since its beginning.

It still reverberates in our culture.

There’s nothing anti-white in pointing this out. The Founders installed in the Constitution ways to amend it, fix social problems, even change American society.

The country is an ongoing project: We’re still striving for that “more perfect union,” and acknowledging the blindingly obvious ways in which our deals don’t match up with our reality is not a heinous assault on patriotism.

CRT was developed by legal scholars, and has long been part of law school curricula. Nobody much noticed it until 2021, when a right-wing activist called Christopher Rufo kicked off a national moral panic.

You might remember Rufo from the 2024 presidential campaign, amplifying J.D. Vance’s lies about Haitians in Ohio eating cats and dogs.

Before that, Rufo had made a name for himself as a warrior against anything he saw as “woke,” especially in higher education.

DeSantis appointed Rufo to New College’s Board of Trustees (he’s since left) to help destroy what once was an admired, creative, and tolerant liberal arts school, labeling any teaching he didn’t like “Critical Race Theory.”

CRT, he said, is “the perfect villain.”

Army of lefties

Having tried to banish CRT along with sociology, the unpleasant parts of American history, the novels of Toni Morrison, and any science that might reveal things are more complicated than they’d like, DeSantis, the various mediocrities running Florida’s Department of Education, and fellow travelers such as Moms for Liberty, have convinced themselves universities are hotbeds of “Marxist indoctrination.”

Apparently, professors — especially in the Humanities and Social Sciences — are not merely “woke,” we’re a bunch of commies, determined to brainwash the Youth of Florida into hollering “Workers of the World Unite!” — assured they have nothing to lose but their chains.

Or something like that.

Alas, all my colleagues and I must be really lousy at indoctrination. I don’t know anybody who’s been successful in producing even one committed Marxist.

But DeSantis et al. are convinced higher education is a plot to produce an army of lefties.

Not that they can produce much evidence of this.

They’re more ideologically rigid than the most committed Trotskyite, and less logical than the American officer who, standing in the ruins of a Vietnamese provincial capital in 1968, told reporter Peter Arnett, “It became necessary to destroy the town to save it.”

Maybe the administration’s idea is to destroy higher ed in order to save it.

Hypotheticals

No doubt DeSantis took some comfort from the dissent in the 11th Circuit’s ruling.

Judge Barbara Lagoa, a former member of the Florida Supreme Court, (indeed, a DeSantis appointee and often mentioned as a potential U.S. Supreme Court justice), argues, what if “a professor who says that Hamas’s October 7th attack on Israel was ‘exhilarating’ and something to be celebrated and encouraged?”

She goes on to say, “Florida acts well within its authority to curb professorial endorsements of that kind within its own classrooms.”

First of all, if someone were stupid enough to say such a thing, that professor could be disciplined for creating a hostile educational environment.

But taking a hypothetical case of poor judgment and concluding somehow professorial speech must always be equivalent to the views of the state violates the First Amendment.

The First Amendment protects offensive speech — even hate speech.

In George Orwell’s essay “Freedom of the Press,” he writes, “If liberty means anything at all it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”

Or to quote again from the majority opinion, the university’s mission is to get students to “puzzle through ideas that are good and bad, easy and hard, ideally getting ever closer to the truth.”

Professors call this “teaching.”

AN 7 26

A new report has revealed that top Florida officials had a 77-year-old Army veteran investigated for mailing a postcard to the state's chief financial officer that said nothing but "You lack values."

According to Reason, “James O'Gara, a resident of Largo, Florida, was interviewed by detectives from the criminal division of the Florida Department of Financial Services (DFS) last September after he mailed the postcard to Chief Financial Officer Blaise Ingoglia's office. The police encounter led to accusations of First Amendment retaliation and government bullying by Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis' administration… An audio recording of detectives' interview with O'Gara shows that they didn't think there was anything wrong with his statement and quickly closed their investigation.”

But when word of the incident began to spread, so did O’Gara’s message. Soon, Ingoglia's office received dozens of postcards from across the country bearing the message: "You lack values."

The investigation was launched on September 15, 2025, when the then-director of the Criminal Investigations Division, Simon Blank, emailed the division's assistant director and lieutenant colonel, saying, “The attached was mailed to the CFO. Can you have someone look into the name and do a threat assessment?" Two weeks later, Lt. Col. James Evangelina wrote to Darrell Wilson, the former chief of the division's Bureau of Fire, Arson and Explosives Investigations, “I'd like a member of our team to arrange a meeting with the individual mentioned to discuss potential avenues for assistance. Additionally, if possible, please verify the sender's identity and evaluate any potential threat level associated with the information provided."

Two detectives visited O’Gara a few days later, telling him, “Look, you didn't do anything wrong. I understand that right now our country's in a very interesting position politically. Everything's polarized and whatnot."

"I have a right to voice my opinion, and I will do so all the more reciprocally because they sent you guys out," said O'Gara.

"I completely support the First Amendment, 100 percent,” the detective replied. “Just being how things are polarized right now politically, anything that's going on with anybody disagreeing with whatever, they're having us check things, stuff like that."

According to Reason, “O'Gara said he'd sent 200 similar postcards to other politicians but had never had any problems before. The detectives remained courteous throughout the interview, comparing Army service records with O'Gara and repeating several times during the conversation that they hadn't seen a threat in his postcard.”

"Yeah, like I said, they're making us check up on things," said one detective. "I looked at your postcard and was like, you didn't do anything wrong."

"I'm pissed that they sent you here," noted O'Gara. "I know it's not your fault. This is totally inappropriate, totally inappropriate."

The detectives left then interviewed two of his neighbors, asking about his behavior. In their report, they said they found “no credible threat,” noting O’Gara’s “displeasure” at being investigated, and concluding, “As a result, he will be sending further correspondence to express his 1st amendment right. He has no intention on escalating to actual threats and will continue to let the CFO know this is wrong."

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an fla phoenix 5 26

“Convenient mythologies require neither evidence nor logic.” —*Edward S. Herman, “Manufactured Consent: The Political Economy of Mass Media”

In a number of articles on its website, PEN America explains in striking detail the right-wing Trojan horse of “parental rights,” illuminating the threat caused by policymakers focused on this theater in the culture war.

PEN — which has gained a global reputation for standing “at the intersection of literature and human rights to protect free expression in the United States and worldwide” — argues that “parents’ rights” is not a source of freedom as claimed, but the crux of an ideological rigidity exercised by MAGA Republicans.

Replace the terms “books” and “literature” with “vaccinations” in the narratives, and the poisonous effects of “parents’ rights” and “medical freedom” on Florida’s public health system becomes clear.

Under the guise of “freedom,” the DeSantis administration including Surgeon General Joe Ladapo has established policies that have directly contributed to the measles outbreak that has spread across the state.

Yet, despite the proliferation of this disease, which has placed Florida fourth in the United States with 152 confirmed cases in 2025-26 and 145 confirmed cases so far this year, state officials have acted as if “there’s nothing to see here.”

Collier County is the center of an outbreak that began in January at Ave Maria University. The number of reported cases out of Collier has remained steady at 106, with most cases affecting those aged 15 to 24. According to the Florida Department of Health, Florida is up to 150 cases this year as of the week ending May 2. Officials note that there is “a continuing slowdown in infections after outbreaks earlier this year.”

Contagion

Measles is one of the most contagious communicable diseases on record. With the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine, measles is easy to control. The MMR vaccine is credited with saving the lives of millions of people globally over the past 50 years.

Traditional medical experts warn that unvaccinated children need to stay home after measles exposure to stop transmission of this highly contagious disease. If not, chances of a prolonged outbreak increase significantly. Among unvaccinated people, nine of 10 who’re exposed will get infected.

Gov. Ron DeSantis, Republican legislators, and some health officials might have avoided the outbreak had they treated it as a strictly health-related issue not a politically charged one. And if DeSantis and Ladapo weren’t so cavalier about tossing around inaccurate data, taking problems out of context, or selectively presenting information, Florida wouldn’t be in this situation.

Experts point to vaccine hesitancy and fear sown by MAGA Republicans as reasons why fewer parents are interested in vaccinating their children. According to Politico, vaccine hesitancy has “evolved into a central pillar of the MAGA movement’s health policy, often blending medical skepticism with a desire to dismantle public health regulations.”

Skepticism of COVID-19 vaccines, and a growing distrust of traditional childhood vaccines, are “closely tied to the “Make America Healthy Again” (MAHA) agenda led by figures such as Robert F. Kennedy Jr.,” Politico writes.

The publication cites a 2023 Morning Consult poll showing that “as the number of voters more doubtful of vaccines has risen — despite scientific evidence that they’re safe and effective — it has come almost exclusively from one political party. While opposition to more established vaccines is still far from a majority position among Republicans, significant numbers question their safety and say Americans shouldn’t be encouraged to get them.”

Hubris

Katelyn Jetelina and Kristen Panthagani capture perfectly the hubris surrounding Florida’s widening measles epidemic.

Jetelina, an epidemiologist, and Panthagani, an emergency physician at Yale University, have written that by ignoring common sense and medical advice, Florida’s health officials risk a mushrooming measles outbreak. Negligence by Lapado, DeSantis, and the MAHA crew has endangered citizens and inflamed the outbreak.

“This is happening in a state with a growing skepticism of vaccinations and an ongoing debate between individualism and the good of the larger population that came to a head during the COVID pandemic,” the authors write in a 2024 opinion piece in Scientific American.

“But containing measles, which can spread quickly, should not be up for debate. Yet this is what is happening in Florida, and it’s putting children’s health at risk.”

A 2025 study from the Cureus Journal of Science and Medicine, published in PubMed, examines how “declining vaccine uptake and growing vaccine hesitancy created pockets of susceptibility that enabled the outbreak.”

DeSantis and Lapado are vigorously pushing to make it easier for parents to opt their children out of mandatory school vaccines — a proposal the Florida House refused to pass in the 2026 regular session and the just-completed special session.

‘Parental rights’

“Since 2021, the Sunshine State has led the country in advancing the parental rights agenda. Contrary to its name, this agenda has used fuzzy, coded language to manufacture moral panic, and to deliver control over what students can read and learn in schools not into the hands of all parents but to a particular segment of citizens — some not even parents but community members,” PEN America officials and researchers said.

“The cumulative effect has been to privilege some parents’ ideological preferences above all others, tie the hands of educators, and limit students’ access to information through curricular prohibitions and book bans.”

The same dynamic applies to health care and vaccines.

In its report on “parental rights” legislation, PEN cautioned that despite the fact that encouraging greater parental involvement in schools can seem like common sense, “these bills have an ulterior motive driving them: to empower a vocal and censorship-minded minority with greater opportunity to scrutinize public education and intimidate educators with threats of punishment.”

In Florida, the DeSantis administration and Republicans in the Legislature have taken up the battle cry. Ladapo and DeSantis announced in a press conference their intention of eliminating childhood vaccine mandates. Medical experts note that all 50 states enforce childhood vaccine mandates, with all states allowing medical exemptions and more than half — including Florida — allowing religious exemptions

Lyndon Haviland of the CUNY School of Public Health and Health Policy blames the “perfect storm” of vaccine skepticism, failed leadership, and broken trust as the core reasons for the outbreak.

The eruption of measles in Texas, Florida, and elsewhere, she contends, aren’t isolated events.

Manufactured distrust

“Cases have also surfaced in Alaska, California, New Mexico, New York City, Georgia, Rhode Island, New Jersey and Pennsylvania. Concern that reports will continue to grow is rising,” she writes.

“It’s especially worrisome considering that the measles virus was completely eliminated in the U.S. as recently as the year 2000. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention attributed this achievement to a “highly effective vaccine program in the United States, as well as better measles control in the Americas region.”

So, how did we get here?

“The answer: distrust. Distrust in health experts, who years ago were revered as national authorities on serious medical issues. Distrust in public health agencies, the CDC, and the Food and Drug Administration specifically, once respected as credible information resources. Distrust in the strength and rigor of vaccine testing protocols, the pharmaceutical industry itself and the broader politicization of public health.”

Haviland and other health experts fear ‘America, which was once considered a world leader in public health, has lost decades of progress in preventing the spread of a deadly disease with a provably safe therapy that has successfully saved millions of American lives.”

The focus on vaccine hesitancy “underplays the significant backlash against vaccines and the flood of anti-vaccine misinformation to which many Americans have been subjected,” Haviland continues.

“The reality is that Americans are increasingly adopting a more dismissive mindset in the way they view vaccine efficacy. Skepticism, rather than hesitancy, is a more accurate term to describe America’s perception of vaccines — and it shows no sign of slowing down.”

A certain arrogance

There is a certain arrogance the MAGA multitude carry. They act as though they have a direct line to God and the divine right to determine what’s best for the rest of us. Hence, the series of seemingly endless toxic, selfish crusades that former youth pastor and author John Pavlovitz argues “amplify baseless anti-science propaganda.”

This poisonous mindset has a human cost. Almost 90,000 people in the Sunshine State have died because of COVID; others have succumbed to preventable diseases like the flu.

There’s no telling when this measles outbreak will end but many in health circles and elsewhere will not stop fighting to protect America’s people against this destructive public health crisis.

Kevin Griffis, the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy’s director for media relations and public affairs, in an April 22 opinion piece wrote, “Americans can handle hard truths. What they should not have to tolerate is selective concern dressed up as science. … Public health depends on trust. Trust depends on honesty.”

“When the nation’s top health official pretends otherwise — or claims ignorance when it is politically convenient, so as not to raise the ire of MAHA activists — it is not public health leadership. It is yet another example of politics and ideology trumping evidence.”

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an 3 26

Former federal prosecutor Joyce Vance is disputing a Wednesday claim by President Donald Trump's administration that it can sideline investigations by Bar Associations around the country.

According to Bloomberg Law, the Justice Department is working to "suspend stat bar ethics investigations" targeting DOJ lawyers. The DOJ has clashed with judges across the U.S. and judgment, behavior and legal violations have prompted complaints to state Bar Associations as a result.

According to the proposal, which was posted in the Federal Register on Wednesday, the DOJ wants to do its own internal review of the lawyers rather than the regulatory association. Critics see it as diminishing the power of the Bar Associations as a whole.

Commenting on the report on X, Vance called it "bunk."

"State bars license attorneys and consider misconduct allegations. Historically, state bars have deferred to DOJ‘s internal discipline process as a courtesy, but they are not obligated to, and the AG has zero authority to suspend state bar operations," Vance said about Attorney General Pam Bondi.

"DOJ can’t avoid investigation and incredible allegations of clear, ethical violations, like lying to or misleading judges and failing to follow court orders if state bars want to pursue them," Vance added. "The process is usually long and involves wrist slaps instead of jumping straight to disbarment, but egregious cases deserve serious discipline."

University of Michigan Law School Professor Barbara McQuade agreed.

"All DOJ lawyers are members of a state or DC bar, and subject to its ethics rules and penalties, up to disbarment. Subverting state bar authorities would give DOJ lawyers carte blanche to violate ethics rules," she said about the report.

Self-described "recovering lawyer" Jeff Jacobs commented, "You would think that, given the ethical implications of many of the actions by this DOJ and its state-licensed attorneys, the administration would go out of its way to avoid antagonizing state bar associations."

In January, the Texas Supreme Court ended the 42-year reliance on the American Bar Association for law school accreditation because the ABA has diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) requirements. Florida has now done the same. Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-Fla.) has proposed his own accreditor for Florida law schools instead.

If Bondi's proposal moves forward after a public comment period, “whenever a third party files a bar complaint alleging that a current or former Department attorney violated an ethics rule while engaging in that attorney’s duties for the Department, or whenever bar disciplinary authorities open an investigation into such allegations,” the attorney general “will have the right to review the complaint and the allegations in the first instance,” it states.

Bondi is calling ethics probes into attorneys at the DOJ part of an anti-Trump "weaponization" effort.

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noem trump

an 7 25

cosplay alligator alcatraz w desantis

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AN 11 25

Arizona Central reports high school teachers in Pima County are still reeling from online harassment and attacks after their Halloween costumes sparked outrage from Turning Point USA and Republican critics last week. But school officials say the educators wore the “bloody” shirts to advocate for math education, not to mock the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk.

“These shirts were part of a math-themed Halloween costume meant to represent solving tough math problems,” Vail School District Superintendent John Carruth said in a letter to the school community. “The shirts were never intended to target any person, event, or political issue.”

AZ Central reports the firestorm erupted on Oct. 31, after teachers in the Cienega High School math department were photographed wearing bloodied white T-shirts with the phrase “Problem Solved” in black text. The school district shared a photo of the Halloween costumes on Facebook, which exploded over the internet thanks to lingering tension around Kirk’s murder seven weeks ago.

Turning Point’s online megaphone opened the gates to a blast of criticism and denunciation on X and other social media platforms, according to AZ Central. But the costumes had been used in reference to solving math problems at earlier events in 2024, long before Kirk’s assassination.

“But to leaders at Turning Point USA, Kirk’s political organization, the costumes resembled the white T-shirt Kirk wore when he was shot in the neck at an event in September. That shirt had also been emblazoned with black text, which read ‘FREEDOM.’ It became a symbol for his mourners after he died,” AZ Central reports.

“@vailschools, shut your school down, it's nothing more than a den of vile verminous scum. Shut this place down,” posted one commenter on X the day after Halloween, seemingly without knowing the full context of the image. “At the very least defund it entirely.”

Top elected leaders in the Republican Party also chimed in, with Florida GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis accusing the teachers of “glorifying a murder just because they disagreed with the victim” in a post on X.

Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah), who is himself known for incendiary comments regarding accident and death when victims are Democrats, amplified a post identifying each teacher with their name, phone number and email address.

Arizona state Sen. Jake Hoffman (R-Queen Creek) called the teachers “BLOODTHIRSTY” and “psychopaths” before deleting his post demanding they be fired.

“The fact that this photo was taken so out of context and spread so quickly without doing some simple fact-checking has been really harmful,” said Superintendent Carruth.

But Turning Point spokesman Andrew Kolvet was unwilling to let go of his claim against the teachers despite the shirts also appearing last year.

“It's a very weird costume for teachers in general, but after what happened to Charlie, I'm absolutely floored they wore it again,” Kolvet said on X. “I do not believe for a second that all of them are innocent.”

Read the AZ Central report at this link.

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10 25 an

SARASOTA, Fla. — Florida plans to end nearly a half-century of required childhood immunizations against diseases that have killed and maimed millions of children. Many critics of the decision, including doctors, are afraid to speak up against it.

With the support of Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo on Sept. 3 announced his plan to end all school-age vaccination mandates in the state.

“Every last one of them is wrong and drips with disdain and slavery,” he told a cheering crowd of vaccination foes in Tallahassee. “Who am I, as a government or anyone else,” he said, “to tell you what you should put in your body?”

History shows that mandates increase the use of vaccines. Lower vaccination rates will mean increased rates of diseases like measles, hepatitis, meningitis, and pneumonia — and even the return of diphtheria and polio. Many of these diseases threaten not just the unvaccinated but also those they come in contact with, including babies and older people with weakened immunity.

But that scientific fact is being left unsaid in Florida. Health officials have largely been silent in the face of Ladapo’s campaign — and not because they agree with him. The University of Florida muzzled infectious disease experts, said emeritus professor Doug Barrett, formerly the university’s chief of pediatrics and senior vice president for health affairs.

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“They’re told not to speak to anyone without permission from supervisors,” he said. University spokespeople didn’t respond to requests for comment.

County-level Department of Health officials across the state got the same message, said John Sinnott, a retired professor at the University of South Florida who is friends with one of the county health leaders.

Sarasota County’s health department referred a reporter to state officials in Tallahassee, who responded with a statement that vaccines will “remain available” to families who want them. The state did not respond to other requests for comment or for an interview with Ladapo.

Many pediatricians are silent, too, at least in public.

“A lot of them don’t take a strong stance on whether kids need to be vaccinated,” said Neil Manimala, a urologist and the president-elect of the Hillsborough County Medical Association. “They don’t want to lose business. And there are enough anti-vax people who can lambaste you on Google, spreading stories about clinicians who ‘want to instill the poison jabs.’”

History of Modern Vaccine Mandates

Several states ended vaccination mandates early last century when smallpox was the only widely given vaccine, said historian Robert Johnston of the University of Illinois-Chicago. None has done so since other vaccines were added to the schedule. (Routine smallpox vaccination ended in 1972).

In the 1970s, persistent measles outbreaks provoked officials to strengthen child protection with enforced school mandates in every state. Today the partisan split on vaccine policy in the wake of the covid outbreak has changed the equation. This is nowhere more the case than in Florida, although legislators in Texas and Louisiana are also considering ending mandatory vaccination, and Idaho enables parents to get an exemption just by asking for it.

“This is really going to be a watershed moment for families who already were not sure they want to do vaccines and now are being told they don’t need them,” said Jennifer Takagishi, vice president of the Florida branch of the American Academy of Pediatrics.

It’s hard to know how fast vaccine-preventable diseases might return if Florida ends its mandates — or how the public will respond. Askedin an interview whether his office had modeled disease outcomes before his September announcement, Ladapo said “Absolutely not.” Parental freedom of choice isn’t a scientific matter, he said. “It’s an issue of right and wrong.”

Ladapo’s Department of Health did not respond a month later when asked whether it was making contingency plans for outbreaks. During a 2024 measles outbreak in Broward County, Ladapo sent parents a letter granting them permission to send unvaccinated children to school, defying the science-supported advice from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

In 1977, a measles epidemic that killed two children in Los Angeles County spurred a dramatic crackdown on vaccine-shunning across the country. But during an epidemic this year that killed two Texas children and 14 people in Mexico, Republican Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas signed a bill making it easier for parents to opt out of getting required shots.

“When are we going to have enough of a groundswell of people dying or becoming severely ill that leads people to push back and say, ‘No, no, we want the vaccines?’” Takagishi said. “I don’t know if we know the tipping point yet.”

“I don’t have the answer,” said Emory University emeritus professor Walter Orenstein, who worked on measles for many of his 26 years at the CDC and led the agency’s immunization program from 1988 to 2004. “Measles resurgences created the political will to support our overall immunization program. For some reason it hasn’t worked this time. It’s just sad.”

Youngsters in Florida are already among the least vaccinated in the nation, because of relatively lax enforcement, the post-covid backlash against shots, and the libertarian attitude of state officials. Statewide, only about 89% of kindergartners are fully vaccinated, with Sarasota County having the lowest rate, at about 80%. To be safe from the spread of measles, a community must be 95% immunized.

With Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. cutting vaccine research, filling the health agency with anti-vaccine activists and spreading doubt about vaccination’s safety and value, little stands in the way of decisions by Florida officials that are likely to cause rates to sink further.

Ladapo’s department is ending mandates for shots against hepatitis B, chickenpox, and the bacteria causing meningitis and pneumonia. Early next year, the Florida Legislature is expected to take up reversal of a 1977 law requiring kids at school and day care to be vaccinated against seven other diseases that can kill children: whooping cough, measles, polio, rubella, mumps, diphtheria, and tetanus.

After Measles, Which Disease Returns Next?

In the face of these attacks, scientists are attempting to predict which diseases are likely to make a resurgence and when.

A study published in April by Stanford epidemiologist Mathew Kiang and colleagues estimated that even at current vaccination levels, measles, declared eliminated from the United States in 2000, is likely to become a routine illness again. If measles vaccination rates drop by an additional 10%, there could be an average of about 450,000 cases yearly, with hundreds of deaths and cases of brain damage.

But the study may exaggerate the threat, said Shaun Truelove, an epidemic disease modeler at Johns Hopkins University who said he’s worried about losing public trust with alarmist predictions. Still, he said, an intensification of measles outbreaks seems certain. The country is already in the midst of its worst measles year in three decades, with more than 1,500 cases and current outbreaks in South Carolina and Minnesota.

“You don’t really need to model measles if vaccines stop,” Truelove said. “In the pockets where there are outbreaks, every kid who isn’t vaccinated will get infected.”

Measles is the “canary in the coal mine” for other vaccine-preventable diseases, said Sal Anzalone, a pediatrician with Healthcare Network in Naples, Florida. “When you start seeing measles, there’s more to come behind that.”

People who want vaccinations will still be able to get them if mandates are eliminated, Ladapo has said.

But the state’s message confuses parents, especially the poor and underserved, Anzalone said. It’s typically hard for them to get children to appointments unless they have to, he said, noting that 80% of his patients are insured through Medicaid. If policies put more of the payment burden on parents, fewer will vaccinate, he said.

And if vaccinations fall and infections increase, children won’t be the only people affected. Cancer patients and people in Florida’s numerous elderly communities would be at risk. Schools and businesses would be disrupted. Disease could disrupt the tourism industry, which brought 143 million people to the state last year. (The Florida Chamber of Commerce did not respond to requests for comment.)

“Infectious diseases don’t stop with the people who say they are willing to bear the risk,” said Meagan Fitzpatrick, a University of Maryland vaccinologist. Because of their unpredictable spread, she said, “with an infectious disease, vaccination is never an individual choice.”

Clinicians fear that an end to mandates could allow hepatitis B, a chronic liver disease, to return with force, since an estimated 2 million Americans carry the virus. They also foresee a return to the days when infants with high fever had to undergo a painful and risky lumbar puncture and blood draw to rule out meningitis, as well as a blood infection caused by the bacteria Haemophilus influenzae type B that routine vaccination has prevented since the 1990s.

Barbara Loe Fisher, who co-founded the modern movement against vaccine mandates in the early 1980s after her son suffered a reaction to the pertussis vaccine then in use (and since replaced with a safer shot), is skeptical that Floridians will abandon vaccination en masse, despite the end to mandates.

Fisher, president of the National Vaccine Information Center, moved from Virginia to southwestern Florida in 2020. She said she believes that vaccine injuries are undercounted and that children are vaccinated without informed consent. She acknowledged that mandates have increased coverage but said their removal will increase trust in public health and medicine.

“It is time to allow biological products like vaccines to be subject to the law of supply and demand,” she said, “just like any other product sold in the marketplace.”

Sinnott, for his part, anticipates measles will come roaring back, along with intensified whooping cough, influenza, and covid outbreaks.

“They think nothing will happen. Maybe they’re right,” said Sinnott, the retired professor. “It’s an experiment.”

Polio could return, and that is not an abstraction for Sinnott, 77.

He was 7 years old when he contracted the disease, spending six months in a wheelchair. In recent years he’s suffered from post-polio syndrome — difficulty swallowing, and tightness and pain in his limbs.

The first polio vaccine was licensed in 1955, the year he got sick. “I remember one time my mother telling me, ‘The line was too long,’” he said.

Sinnott forgives his parents, and parents today who waver on vaccination. He’s less tolerant of certain public health leaders. They should know better, he said.

*KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF—an independent source of health policy research, polling, and journalism. Learn more about KFF.

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AN 10 25

After the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Republican then-President George W. Bush made it clear that he didn't blame Islam in general for al-Qaeda's violence. Bush described Islam as a "great religion," drawing a clear distinction between non-violent Muslims and Islamist terrorism.

But fear-mongering over Islamist "Shariah law" is common on the far right. Former Rep. Michelle Bachman (R-Minnesota) was obsessed with "Shariah law" during Barack Obama's presidency, and according to MSNBC's Steve Benen, this obsession persists among MAGA Republicans in 2025.

In his October 14 column, Benen explains, "Younger readers might not be aware of this, but between 2011 and 2015, the threat of 'creeping Sharia law' became quite common in far-right circles, before eventually getting picked up by some Republicans eager to score points with the most rabid elements of the GOP base. Newt Gingrich, for example, included an anti-Sharia provisions in his 2012 presidential platform."

Benen continues, "The basic idea behind this paranoid nonsense was that Americans needed to fear the demise of the separation of church and state, which would give way to the imposition of Islamic rules on the public against Americans’ will. State-sanctioned Sharia law did not and does not exist — at least not in this country — and the idea that government officials would impose Sharia on the populace was obviously silly. But at the time, too many Republicans and their allies took all of this quite seriously, as part of a bizarre campaign to scare people and turn Muslim Americans into a threat in need of government action."

The "Rachel Maddow Show" producer cites Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Alabama), and Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas) as some of the MAGA Republicans who are trying to scare their voters by claiming, without evidence, that "Shariah law" is making inroads in the United States.

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"The fact that this anti-Sharia nonsense is apparently back suggests that the GOP's existing list of boogeymen isn't delivering the kind of results the party wants to see," Benen argues. "So at least some Republicans are turning back the clock, pointing anew to an old threat that still does not exist."

*Steve Benen's full MSNBC column is available at this link.*

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AN 10 25

After the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Republican then-President George W. Bush made it clear that he didn't blame Islam in general for al-Qaeda's violence. Bush described Islam as a "great religion," drawing a clear distinction between non-violent Muslims and Islamist terrorism.

But fear-mongering over Islamist "Shariah law" is common on the far right. Former Rep. Michelle Bachman (R-Minnesota) was obsessed with "Shariah law" during Barack Obama's presidency, and according to MSNBC's Steve Benen, this obsession persists among MAGA Republicans in 2025.

In his October 14 column, Benen explains, "Younger readers might not be aware of this, but between 2011 and 2015, the threat of 'creeping Sharia law' became quite common in far-right circles, before eventually getting picked up by some Republicans eager to score points with the most rabid elements of the GOP base. Newt Gingrich, for example, included an anti-Sharia provisions in his 2012 presidential platform."

Benen continues, "The basic idea behind this paranoid nonsense was that Americans needed to fear the demise of the separation of church and state, which would give way to the imposition of Islamic rules on the public against Americans’ will. State-sanctioned Sharia law did not and does not exist — at least not in this country — and the idea that government officials would impose Sharia on the populace was obviously silly. But at the time, too many Republicans and their allies took all of this quite seriously, as part of a bizarre campaign to scare people and turn Muslim Americans into a threat in need of government action."

The "Rachel Maddow Show" producer cites Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Alabama), and Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas) as some of the MAGA Republicans who are trying to scare their voters by claiming, without evidence, that "Shariah law" is making inroads in the United States.

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"The fact that this anti-Sharia nonsense is apparently back suggests that the GOP's existing list of boogeymen isn't delivering the kind of results the party wants to see," Benen argues. "So at least some Republicans are turning back the clock, pointing anew to an old threat that still does not exist."

*Steve Benen's full MSNBC column is available at this link.*

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AN 9 25

As the debate over vaccine mandates heats up in Florida, there’s a push in the Legislature and the administration of Gov. Ron DeSantis to broaden the use of ivermectin.

A Republican legislator from Spring Hill has filed legislation to allow the over-the-counter sale of ivermectin suitable for human use even though the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has not authorized or approved ivermectin for use in preventing or treating COVID-19 in humans or animals.

Ivermectin is an effective treatment for parasites in animals and for use by humans to treat parasites such as head lice and scabies, according to the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

The FDA has not approvedIvermectin for treatment or prevention of COVID-19, and so far recommends against taking it for COVID-19, instead suggesting people get vaccinated for protection.

Nevertheless, there was buzz during the pandemic about using it for treatment for COVID-19.

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HB 29 sponsor Rep. Jeff Holcomb, R-Spring Hill, did not immediately return Florida Phoenix’s request for comment. If approved, Florida would join the ranks of Tennessee, Arkansas, Louisiana, Idaho, and Texas in approving the medication for over the counter sales.

The governor, First Lady Casey DeSantis, state Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo, and Agency for Health Care Administration Secretary Shevaun Harris held a press conference at the University of South Florida Health College of Medicine to recognize World Cancer Research Day and to highlight $60 million in new cancer research grant opportunities.

There, the first lady said she expected some portion of the new grant funding to be used for cancer research on ivermectin.

“I know we should look at it. I know we should look at the benefits of it. We shouldn’t just speculate and guess,” DeSantis said.

Ladapo, seconded the idea.

“There’s been a lot of chatter about it, and this very simple drug that happens to be very safe, by the way, has unfortunately, you know it’s so much it’s been weighed down by all this politics, especially during the Biden administration.”

Ivermectin is not approved by the FDA for cancer treatment.

The FDA also warns large doses of ivermectin can be dangerous. “Even doses of ivermectin for approved human uses can interact with other medications, like blood-thinners. You can also overdose on ivermectin, which can cause nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, hypotension (low blood pressure), allergic reactions (itching and hives), dizziness, ataxia (problems with balance), seizures, coma, and even death.”

Ladapo and DeSantis defend no mandate push

Meanwhile, Ladapo and his boss DeSantis defended their push to eliminate vaccine mandates from Florida law, rules, and regulations.

“I hope that we continue to reject the normal and we pursue a path that feels righteous, that feels like we’re actually, you know, aiming toward the thing that we want to improve,” Ladapo said.

“That opportunity is there. Thankfully, we have leadership, uniquely in this state, to do it. And I hope it spreads like, like all those minor viruses that my critics are afraid of, or something.”

The minor viruses Ladapo referred to includes measles. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports 1,514 confirmed measles cases this year as of Sept. 23. Six of those confirmed cases were in Florida. There were 11 confirmed measles cases in Florida in 2024.

Measles and other disease outbreaks occur as the percentage of school-age children in Florida who are vaccinated against measles, mumps, and rubella dips. While the target rate for MMR vaccination is 95%, Florida’s 2024-2025 rate was 88.8%.

That’s a near 5% point change from the 2019-2020 year, aKFF analysis shows, and well below the targeted 95% needed for herd immunity.

Ladapo and DeSantis avoided directly answering whether their children have been vaccinated. Ladapo said reporters should be asking substantive questions and likened the questions about the children to “silly games.”

“I actually don’t care about sharing information about that. I really don’t care at all. But I won’t. And I won’t because I’m not going to participate in the silly games that so much of the media chooses to partake in instead of the substantive parts of the issues.”

In addition to defending his anti-vaccine mandate push, Ladapo appears on board with the Trump administration’s announcement that autism rates are up because pregnant women are taking acetaminophen, the active ingredient in Tylenol, during their pregnancies.

“They acknowledge that not all the studies show harm, but some of them do show relation. And it’s not a total explanation for autism by any means, but it does appear to be that it’s reasonable to conclude that it may be contributing to the prevalence of autism in children,” Ladapo said.

When asked whether he intended to issue any guidance he said: “We’re still looking at it. So, we may have some more guidance, but it would probably be very much in line with where the FDA is.”

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mma

How right-wing media sow distrust and confusion around vaccines and science

As Florida ends school vaccine requirements and Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s leadership comes under fire, the right has repackaged anti-science talking points as well-meaning skepticism

Written by Gideon Taaffe, Isabella Sherk, Jack Wheatley & Jack Winstanley

Published 09/18/25

Amid the rise of the so-called “Make America Healthy Again” movement, right-wing media figures have employed a variety of tactics that sow doubt and confusion around vaccine efficacy and science more broadly. These efforts to capitalize on existing distrust of public health institutions and pharmaceutical companies have gained renewed momentum following Florida’s elimination of vaccine requirements for schools and comments made by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. during a contentious Senate hearing.

MAHA acolytes have challenged well-studied topics by “just asking questions,” described vaccination requirements as impediments to freedom and parental choice, and exploited post-pandemic mistrust of public health infrastructure and pharmaceutical companies.

The MAHA movement is fueling mistrust in medicine amid a CDC leadership shake-up and Florida's elimination of vaccine requirements

//

09/09/25 10:09 AM EDT

08/11/25 9:56 AM EDT

07/09/25

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9 25

A dangerous group of whacko militants threatens to destroy Florida as we know it

D. Earl StephensSeptember 07, 2025 | 07:37AM ET

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Florida announced plans this week to become the first state to end all vaccine mandates, INCLUDING FOR SCHOOLCHILDREN.

Read that again.

I had intended to write about the Epstein files today, and the incredibly brave survivors of alleged child rape, who gathered on Capitol Hill to tell their stories. They were there because it is beginning to look like our president who ran on releasing those files, instead has a starring role in them, and will do everything possible to make sure they never see the light of day.

That would generally would be a banner story. In a sane, just world, it would have the potential to end Donald Trump's presidency, and ultimately land him jail for the rest of his miserable life.

But because you hang around places like this and pay attention, you don’t need me to tell you that we are not living in a sane, just world.

Just how insane and unjust is the world? Consider that the possibility of the president being accused of sexual abusing underage women was by far only the second-biggest story of the day ...

Truth is, this vaccine news might be one of the most significant stories of the century, because of its gruesome ramifications on the future of our rattling civilization.

Bluntly: If Florida goes through with this death plan, it could potentially result in one of the largest losses of human life ever.

Look, vaccines have been a life-changing discovery, and one of mankind’s greatest achievements. The advent of vaccines has saved hundreds of millions of lives the past 100 years or so.

That we are reversing our thinking on the use of vaccines in America is almost too absurd to contemplate. The profound stupidity and danger this presents really can't be overstated.

MILLIONS of lives are at risk if Florida out-Floridas itself and actually puts this deranged plan into action.

We need only look at COVID to see this.

Despite what you’ll hear from many ghoulish, anti-life Republicans, millions of lives were saved thanks to COVID vaccines. Maybe even more startling, an estimated 317,000 lives in the United States alone would have been saved during the COVID outbreak had everybody just done their civic duty and gotten vaccinated.

If Florida goes ahead with this insane plan, just as sure as I am typing this, all kinds of otherwise preventable diseases will begin reappearing all over the place — measles and polio just to name a couple. And while our children will be most vulnerable, because Republicans never saw a kid whose life wasn’t worth jeopardizing, Florida’s huge population of retirees will also be under direct threat.

We will ALL be under threat.

Today’s gruesome news comes in the backdrop of the insane vaccine guidance being shoveled out to the American public by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., our secretary of Health and Human Services, who listens to everybody but professionals in the medical and scientists communities, ignores a century’s worth of vaccines’ positive results, and has been a vocal vaccine skeptic.

Last month, after Kennedy proudly announced the rollback of nearly $500 million in vaccine funding, I typed this:

“Instead of answers and more science and discovery to make sure we are ready for the next mass-medical emergency, Trump instead has inflicted us with this gruesome stray from the Kennedy dynasty, who is quickly becoming a one-man pandemic.”

Last week, Susan Monarez, the Director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, was forced out by Captain Death less than one month into her job for refusing to go along with this maniac’s plans to end us.

Four other leading officials at the CDC resigned because they too had come under extreme pressure from the sickening Kennedy. One of those officials said Kennedy’s team asked him to “change studies that have been settled in the past” to fit Kennedy’s anti-vaccine views.

Yep, “change studies.” Just make stuff up. I mean, it’s only people’s lives we are talking about …

So who are the players down in the Sunset State, who are putting this latest death plan into action?

Let’s start with Dr. Joseph A. Ladapo, the Florida surgeon general, who made the announcement standing beside the state’s grotesque and Trump-slobbering Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis.

Ladapo is a COVID vaccine-denier. A quack. A nut. A complete moron.

And dangerous as hell.

He has associated withccalled “America’s Frontline Doctors,” which is led by Texas physician Stella Immanuel, who has put forth the theory out loud and often that sperm from alien or demon sexual visitations are responsible for much of what ails us.

With qualifications like that, there is a good chance Ladapo has the inside track to the 2028 Republican Presidential nomination …

In announcing what will henceforth be known as the “Florida Death Plan” Ladapo said this:

“Who am I to tell you what your child should put in their body?”

Who are YOU to tell us??? You are allegedly a doctor, sonny. Should we be going to an exterminator to get advice on medical issues?

Er … That actually might be advisable in Florida.

He added that the administration would be “working to end” all vaccine mandates, because “every last one of them is wrong and drips with disdain and slavery.”

I’m not making this up.

Not a single word about the lives vaccines have saved, just lies and conspiracy theories, because that is the Republican way in 2025.

And then, of course, there’s DeSantis himself. A dumb man’s idea of a smart person. The ultimate Florida Man. A guy, who says, “Watch this!” while playing with matches and gasoline, as is the case with this maniacal, evil vaccine plan.

While standing next to Ladapo with that beachball-sized smirk on his face, Trump’s willing punching bag announced that his wife, Casey DeSantis, will head the commission on the Florida Death Plan, because if we are going to kill hundreds of a thousands of children best we have a dreadfully unqualified ghoul doing it.

Her beaming husband, Ron, ended the press conference by bragging:

“We’ve already done a lot. I don’t think any state has come even close to what Florida has done.”

He’ll get no argument there.

D. Earl Stephens is the author of “Toxic Tales: A Caustic Collection of Donald J. Trump’s Very Important Letters” and finished up a 30-year career in journalism as the Managing Editor of Stars and Stripes. You can find all his work here.

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an 7 25

'Done everything they can to avoid hearing from' us: Veteran interrupts GOP celebration in Florida

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AN SN 7 25

Do you think concentration camps are cool?

Does your heart fill with mean-spirited joy at the thought of human beings stuffed into tents and FEMA trailers parked on a disused airstrip in the heart of the Everglades in the middle of a Florida summer?

Do you get off on the idea of alligators and snakes killing people and admire bully capitalism hawking camo beverage coolers, stickers, and T-shirts with grinning reptiles proclaiming, “Nowhere to Run; Nowhere to Hide”?

Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier certainly does: He’s raising campaign cash on his own little merch site.

Other paid-up members of the Cruelty is the Point cult do, too.

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Celebrating the erection of Florida’s own gulag, known as “Alligator Alcatraz,” the state Republican Party bosses trilled, “Don’t forget to pick up your swag to support our efforts to undo all of Joe Biden’s failures!”

We are ruled by sociopaths.

This prison, parked in the middle of Big Cypress National Preserve, has already received hundreds of detainees, packed into rough-and-ready structures that have not had to meet any building or environmental codes and may not be able to withstand a tropical storm.

Cult leaders can’t decide if the place is Devil’s Island or a charmingly rustic resort.

Showing Donald Trump around the place, Ron DeSantis pointed to the razor wire, iron bunk beds, and bright new Astroturf on the ground.

The first batch of detainees don’t seem especially grateful. Those who’ve managed to make a phone call to the outside world say the guards have served them maggot-laced food, refused them medical attention, kept bright lights on all night, and either crank up the air conditioning until the detainees freeze or cut it off and let them swelter.

One alleged foreign malefactor says guards confiscated his Bible.

Gators in ICE caps

Trump loves this. He fantasizes about terrified detainees chased by Burmese pythons and “cops that are in the form of alligators.”

The White House has put out a Trump meme with a gaggle of gators in ICE caps.

The Trump administration is proud of this latest monument to hatred and gets very upset if anyone criticizes it.

Stephen Miller, architect of Trump’s immigration policy, flew into a tantrum the other day when a reporter told him inhabitants of the human world were calling the South Florida stalag “dehumanizing.”

“American citizens are stripped of their rights and their liberties by the invasion of illegal aliens!” he replied. “What’s ‘dehumanizing’ is when Democrats let illegal alien rapistsinto the country to attack our children. That is ‘dehumanizing’!”

He failed to explain exactly how people fleeing murderous dictatorships in Venezuela, El Salvador, and Nicaragua take rights and liberties from citizens.

As for those hideous assaults alleged by Miller, American citizens commit far more crimesthan undocumented immigrants.

The administration knows this. Until a few weeks ago, a Department of Justice website contained information confirming it.

Attorney General Pam Bondi shut down the website for “review” in “accordance with recent Executive Orders and related guidance.”

Why let data get in the way of propaganda?

‘Not safe’

Miller, Trump, and DeSantis insist the people ICE rounds up are “the worst of the worst, the most heinous of the most heinous.”

Again, the data show this is not true. Only 8%of undocumented detainees have been convicted of violent crimes.

This country is still — nominally — a nation of laws, and everyone thrown into an ICE dungeon is entitled to due process.

Even our supine Supreme Court agrees.

But Florida’s tropical tent prison makes it nearly impossible for detainees to consult with attorneys, meaning they could be deported without fair hearings.

A group of lawmakers, including Rep. Anna Eskamani and Sen. Carlos Guillermo Smith, tried to visit the facility a couple of weeks ago. Inmates from the Orange County jail — which is in Eskamani’s and Smith’s districts — had been transferred there without being charged with anything.

Legislators pointed out Florida Statute 944.23 allows them to visit state facilities “at their pleasure.”

But DeSantis’ people insist the Everglades prison camp is not technically a state facility, not under the jurisdiction of the Department of Corrections.

Even though the state of Florida’s paying for it.

‘Emergency’ powers

Actually, the Trump administration admits it’s a state facility.

In a filing asking a federal judge to deny a request by Friends of the Everglades and the Center for Biodiversity to halt construction in Big Cypress, the administration argues the plaintiffs’ claim depends on showing a final federal “agency action,” which they can’t because the feds haven’t “implemented, authorized, directed or funded Florida’s temporary detention center.”

Indeed, they insist, “Florida is constructing and operating the facility using state funds on state lands.”

DeSantis, Uthmeier, and Pam Bondi need to get their stories straight.

By last Saturday, legal problems had been overcome and the gulag had miraculously become “safe.”

A group of legislators got a curated tour, during which what you saw depended on who you were—and whether you gave a damn about the human beings locked up in there.

Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Florida) took a thermometer with her, reporting an indoor temperature of at least 83 degrees.

Another Democratic lawmaker said some detainees were shackled to benches.

Republican state Sen. Blaise Ingoglia insisted it’s pretty nice: “I actually laid down in one of the beds and it was really comfortable.”

Sure. And everybody’s talked to a lawyer, there are no mosquitoes, and tropical storms? No problem!

Meanwhile back in reality, DeSantis’ vanity project has already flooded at least once.

Big Cypress is 96% wetlands. It’s wetlands’ job to flood.

When Ron DeSantis, claiming “emergency” powers, seized 39 square miles of Everglades land (nearly 25,000 acres) he claimed, “The environmental impact will be zero.”

DeSantis and the attorney general contend they’re merely taking over what Uthmeier calls “an old, virtually abandoned” airstrip.”

That airstrip is abandoned for a reason. It’s a relic of one of the most boneheaded ideas anyone in Florida ever had.

The Phoenix’s own Craig Pittmanrecently recounted how in 1968 a really stupid plan to build a huge airport in the Everglades galvanized support for preserving Florida’s River of Grass.

Fun fact: It was Florida’s then-Gov. Claude Kirk and his top aide Nathaniel Reed — who went on to help pass the Clean Water Act in 1972 and co-write the Endangered Species Act in 1973 — who led the fight to save Big Cypress.

Both were Republicans.

Vandals

Back then, some conservatives wanted to conserve, not destroy.

DeSantis and Uthmeier belong to a new generation of environmental vandals.

They want us to believe Big Cypress is wasted space with a few snakes, some bugs, a cadre of demonic alligators programmed to chase brown folks.

Inconsequential. Nothing to see there.

The ignorance is embarrassing.

To the Miccosukee and the Seminoles, the land is holy: “We live here. Our ancestors fought and died here. They are buried here,” said one tribal leader. “The Big Cypress is part of us, and we are a part of it.”

The land is not empty, or “abandoned.”

Manatees and dolphins give birth to their young in the estuaries on the eastern side. Mullet, trout, grouper, silver perch, spiny lobster, oysters, and clams thrive amongst the mangrove roots.

The mangrove branches harbor herons, pelicans, and egrets; there are red cockaded woodpeckers, fox squirrels, and Florida panthers in the pinelands, and some of the world’s rarest orchidsin the cypress swamps.

The land is a vital ecosystem for plants and animals and humans, too. Its water flows are essential to the aquifer on which South Floridians depend for their drinking water.

DeSantis likes to cast himself as the savior of the River of Grass and waxes petulant if you suggest his pet prison will damage the ecosystem: “I’m the governor who’s poured more money into Everglades restoration than anyone!”

And now he’s poured more money into Everglades destruction than anyone.

The camp will cost $450 milliona year to run.

Don’t be gaslit

Don’t let the man gaslight you: Claims they’re not desecrating Big Cypress are complete rubbish.

Friends of the Everglades has aerialphotographs showing the building of new roads and paving once-wild areas.

Runoff from asphalt pollutes. The huge trucks lumbering in and out of the site, carrying construction materials, also pollute.

You can’t house and feed hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people, without terrible damage to already fragile nature.

They’ll need pesticides to keep the Everglades’ vigorous mosquitoes at bay; they’ll need generators and microwaves and machinery to pump out the sewage.

The gulag is even sullying the night sky.

One of the lawsuitsfiled by conservation groups points out the huge prison lights make the place “look like Yankee Stadium, visible from 15-miles away.”

Big Cypress has been designated an International Dark Sky Place. You used to be able to see the Milky Way arching over the marshes and hammocks like a necklace of diamonds and pearls.

Trumpists probably don’t look up at the heavens. They don’t look down at the wonders of the earth.

So why would they care if one of Florida’s greatest treasures gets trashed?

Florida Phoenix is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Florida Phoenix maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Michael Moline for questions: info@floridaphoenix.com.

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Supreme Court hands 'huge' loss to Trump and DeSantis over illegal Florida law

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Miami New Times reports a member of Miami-Dade County's GOP Executive Committee joked about running over protesters with his car as people took to the streets forthe "No Kings" protests.

In a June 13 tweet, District 22 committeeman Chris Barcenas reposted a video of a man dancing in his car and singing to Shaboozey's "A Bar Song (Tipsy)" with the caption, "Driving home from work knowing DeSantis gave permission to the good people of Florida to go car bowling this weekend."

Barcenas added, "Turn on off-road mode."

READ MORE: 'Mourning and shame': Sociologist explains the Trump ritual that his supporters — and critics — fall for

The post was still available on X on Monday, preceding later posts trying to imply right-wing assassin, Vance Boelter, was a Democrat.

Miami New Times reports Barcenas is a former member of the Proud Boys who protested at the Capitol on January 6 but did not enter the building and was not charged with any crimes related to January 6. He later testified before the U.S. House Select Committee on the January 6 riot, detailing the Proud Boys' involvement in the insurrection and his involvement with the organization and another local right-wing group, Floridians First. Barcenas claims he is no longer involved with the Proud Boys.

Last week, at the onset of anti-Trump protests, Gov. Ron DeSantis reminded Floridians that they do not have to worry about hitting protesters with their cars if they are surrounded and feel threatened.

"We also have a policy that if you are driving on one of their streets and a mob comes and surrounds your vehicle and threatens you, you have the right to flee for your safety," DeSantis said during an appearance onthe Rubin Report podcast. "And so if you drive off and you hit one of these people, that's their fault for impinging on you."

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READ MORE:The Trump administration just accidentally made the case against the Big Beautiful Bill

Miami defense attorney Mark Eiglarsh told reporters he was concerned about DeSantis’ message.

“The right to use deadly force in Florida only occurs when you reasonably fear death or great bodily harm; you don’t get free rein to hit protesters just because they are around your vehicle," he said.

Read the full Miami New Times report at this link.

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If you’re wondering what happens when history is bowdlerized or suppressed, lies are enshrined, free enquiry stifled, empathy ridiculed, education crippled, and hatred valorized, take a look at Preston Damsky, racist, antisemite, and top law student at the University of Florida.

Damsky’s now notorious for receiving a “book award” as the best student in his “Originalism” seminar. Seems the professors were dazzled by his capstone essay arguing the Constitution’s “We the People” means white people.

Only white people.

Non-whites should have their voting rights protections removed. What he calls “criminal infiltrators at the border” should be shot on sight.

Amendments 13, 14, and 15, the ones abolishing slavery and enshrining citizenship, equal treatment under the law, and the right to vote are illegitimate.

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According to Damsky, “The United States was founded as a race-based nation-state for the preservation and betterment of White Americans(the People), as clearly laid out in the Preamble and revealed by our history, it is difficult to see how these amendments (or at least the way they have been interpreted in the post-World War II era) do not amount to unconstitutional, revolutionary usurpations by the constituted government power.”

There’s a touch of truth in this: The 18th Century iteration of our Constitution was indeed written by white men for white men.

But much as he’d love for American society to look like it did in 1788, when the Federalist Papers were published, times have changed. We fought a bitter war over slavery, marched against segregation, demanded rights for the disenfranchised, and eventually legislated our way — slowly and partially — to a more equitable nation.

The post-Civil War amendments are just as valid, just as much a part of the Constitution of the United States, as the earlier ones.

For now, at least: it’s unclear whether this will continue to be the case.

At home in Florida

Most Americans once celebrated our heterogeneity, our pluralism, and our tendency to expand freedoms. We valued knowledge and tried to foster understanding; we welcomed the new.

Not so much these days, not here in Florida. Trump and DeSantis have made ignorance great again.

This state now has statutes forbidding teaching the truth about slavery and Jim Crow, threatening educators who discuss gender, sexuality, systemic racism, and other disfavored topics.

Universities are scrubbing their websites of words that might upset the governor and his goons: “women,” “Black,” “colonialism,” and “diversity” — even if it’s “biodiversity” — anything seen as threatening to white, male Christian hegemony.

No wonder Preston Damsky, who was raised in the alarmingly multicultural world of Southern California, feels at home in here in Florida.

Florida is also alarmingly multicultural, of course, but our governor — while not an avowed white supremacist — is nonetheless an anti-immigrant, anti-civil rights, Viktor Orban-wannabe whose definition of “American” leaves out an awful lot of people.

DeSantis’ Florida is big on book bans, removing from schools books with LGBTQ characters, books about civil rights, books questioning American exceptionalism, books that tell painful truths about the world.

Toni Morrison’s “Bluest Eye,” Kurt Vonnegut’s “Slaughterhouse Five,” William Styron’s “Sophie’s Choice,” Khaled Hosseini’s “Kite Runner,” Margaret Atwood’s “Handmaid’s Tale,” Judy Blume’s “Forever,” and Anne Frank’s “Diary” have all been challenged or deep-sixed by parents and school boards who want to suppress stories that might deepen and complicate students’ knowledge of the country they live in or expand their understanding of ways to be human.

In Escambia County, they’ve yanked the dictionary off the shelf.

Seems Merriam-Webster might harbor smut and subversion.

‘Institutional neutrality’

But nobody’s censoring Preston Damsky’s weird, warped take on who counts as a real American, and nobody is punishing him for being a white supremacist.

When asked why Damsky’s paper was not only acceptable but worthy of an award, the interim dean of UF’s law school cited “institutional neutrality” and said professors must not practice “viewpoint discrimination.”

This is actually as it should be: Contrary to right-wing talking points accusing the academy of “canceling” the insufficiently “woke,” universities are places where you can express unpopular, even vile, racist, exceptionally stupid opinions.

But “institutional neutrality” doesn’t seem to apply to all exceptionally stupid opinions — as Preston Damsky has now discovered.

Virulent racism is OK: The Trump regime is not yanking funding from universities for anti-Black discrimination.

Antisemitism, however, unleashes a firestorm.

The Trump-DeSantis axis has ginned up such hysteria over perceived antisemitism (which the rational among us can see is often principled support for the Palestinian people and horror at the murderous Netanyahu government), that anyone who criticizes Israel is treated like Heinrich Himmler, architect of the “Final Solution.”

Mohsen Madawi, Rumeysa Ozturk, Mahmoud Khalil and other student protesters detained for exercising their First Amendment rights are not Nazis. Preston Damsky, on the other hand … well, he has said calling him a Nazi “would not be manifestly wrong.”

His social media posts call Jews “parasites” and declare they must be “abolished by any means necessary.”

In a neat triangulation of white nationalism, antisemitic paranoia, and (somewhat understandable) disdain for the whole U.S. government, one of Damsky’s X posts castigates Donald Trumpfor inviting rapper (and Florida native) Kodak Black to the White House.

This, Damsky said, serves to “normalize and glorify the mongrelized stupidity that is modern Jewish-produced ‘popular’ ‘culture.’”

‘Warrior culture’

You’d think the guy would notice Trump is not exactly devoid of his own antisemitism, accusing Jews of being money-grubbing and “disloyal” to America. In Iowa the other day, he invoked one of the oldest and nastiest Jewish stereotypes, calling bankers “shylocks.”

And surely Damsky would give the Trumpists credit for their own racist projects, restoring Confederate names to military facilities and starting the process to take Harriet Tubman’s nameoff a Navy ship.

Defense Secretary “Good Hair” Hegseth bleats about restoring a “warrior culture” to the military, obviously unaware that Harriet Tubman spied for the Union Army and led the 1863 Combahee Ferry Raid into Confederate territory.

Look it up, Pete. She was a warrior.

UF hasn’t expelled Damsky, but the university has made clear he’s not welcome on campus. If he trespasses, he could be charged with a second-degree misdemeanor.

It’s not the racism, it’s the antisemitism.

While Damsky shares many of the sentiments of Trump’s team of white nationalists, especially Stephen Miller, who wants to deport anybody with brown skin, Damsky despises Trump for being a tool of our old friend, the International Jewish Conspiracy.

Damsky’s X account is a crazy salad of the-enemy-of-my-enemy-is-my-friend pro-Iranian screeds, demands for a Palestinian state (has he noticed that Persians and Arabs are not, according to his definition, white?), attacks on conservatives deemed insufficiently pro-Caucasian, and ranting about “Black criminality.”

He’s a Florida man, all right — an antebellum Florida man.

‘Illegitimate revolution’

His law school papers echo Confederate Ordinances of Secession: “The negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition.”

At times he sounds like South Carolina’s Jim Crow Sen. Ben Tillman, who thundered in 1900 that Black people had no rights: “We of the South have never recognized the right of the negro to govern white men, and we never will.”

Census projections show the U.S. will be a majority minoritynation in about 2045. Appalled at the thought, Damsky calls this “an illegitimate revolution” and says white folks “cannot be expected to meekly swallow this demographic assault on their sovereignty.”

The 14th and 15th Amendments must be repealed; non-whites, who cannot be citizens, should be given 10 years to leave the country; political violence on behalf of white hegemony is not only acceptable, it’s desirable.

Preston Damsky is not a cause, he’s a symptom, yet another white man terrified of losing the power he assumes is his God-given right.

He and the white nationalist Trump regime are unable to accept that the indigenous peoples our European ancestors displaced, killed, or locked up on reservations; the Africans kidnapped and forced into slavery to enrich the likes of Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger Taney, author of the Dred Scottdecision (and apparently one of Damsky’s heroes); and the immigrants from all over the world who risked everything to get here, are what make America great.

These scared people should get out more — and read more, say, W.E.B. Du Bois’ “Black Reconstruction” or Maya Angelou’s “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings,” or Percival Everett’s “James” or Marie Arana’s “Latinoland.”

Education is the enemy of hatred.

Most of the time.

Nevertheless, those of us who teach must keep trying to blast the Preston Damskys out of their sad, cramped little worlds by showing them the many and wonderful ways to be an American.

Damsky’s probably enjoying all this attention. That’s fine. He will no doubt go on to become an intellectual star in the white supremacist world.

He may even get an invitation to dinner at Mar-a-Lago.

But he won’t get what he wants. America never was, and never will be, a “white man’s country.”

And thank God for that.

Florida Phoenix is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Florida Phoenix maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Michael Moline for questions: info@floridaphoenix.com.

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A few days ago, the University of Florida was all ready to welcome a brand-new president. They’d gotten rid of the useless (yet expensive) Ben Sasse and chosen a single finalist, a scientist called Santa Ono, former head of the University of Michigan.

The trustees liked him; Ron DeSantis liked him, especially since Ono, who was once all-in on diversity at UM, recently pulled a 180, loudly recanting his climate change-admitting, student protest-allowing progressive ways and parroting the governor’s War on Woke nonsense like a DeSantis Bot.

It wasn’t enough: The state university Board of Governors refused to give him the job.

Poor old weathervane Ono fell victim to a nasty social media campaignagainst him, led by such intellectual giants as Don Trump Jr., who squawked “WTF!” on the twixter; New College trustee Christopher “They’re eating the cats!” Rufo; Sen. Rick Scott; and the congenitally absurd Rep. Byron Donalds, who allowed as how while he didn’t know Ono, the man didn’t sound like he “comported with the values of the state of Florida.”

Au contraire, congressman. Given that Ono was prepared to abandon the principles of free speech, inclusion, and academic independence, I’d say he perfectly comports with the values of the state of Florida.

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Especially when it comes to higher education.

DeSantis and his UF allies may have lost the Ono battle (more on the politics involved later), but he’s committed to the larger war: Florida may soon be celebrated in the MAGA-sphere as the first state to lay waste to its universities.

New College purge

The full-scale assault started in 2023, when DeSantis wrecked New College and took to installing ideologically aligned hacks as presidents and appointing university boards so bent on destruction they’d shame a Visigoth.

Former politico Richard Corcoran was not educationally, temperamentally, or administratively qualified to be president of the state honors college, yet there he is, DeSantis’ boy, drawing a huge salary and inviting accused rapiststo speak on campus in Sarasota.

FIU and FAU got landed with dead-enders former Lt. Gov. Jeannette Nuñez and Republican state Rep.-turned private prison company vice president Adam Hasner.

Now the governor has turned his lizardy eye upon the universities of West Florida and Florida A&M with a view to undermining academic freedom, student opportunity, and scholarly rigor.

DeSantis, who loves to call Florida “free,” doesn’t want institutions of higher education to be free: He wants them cowed, cramped, and compliant.

In April, DeSantis claimed — with no evidence, mind — UWF was some kind of “indoctrination camp” run by “Marxist professors” and warned those crazy Pensacola lefties to “buckle up.” Big changes were coming.

To that end, he appointed a noisome bouquet of trustees, several proudly hostile to book-learning. Three of them were either rejected by the Florida Senate or else slunk off before they could be officially sent packing.

Adam Kissel, a fellow at the Heritage Foundation and one of the discarded candidates, seemed puzzled by the snub. In an interview with UWF’s newspaper “The Voyager,” he claimed he’d been brought down by a “disinformation narrative” partially based on his comments lamenting the GI Bill’s negative effect on American society.

That would be the GI Bill that has enabled millions of veterans to get a college degree and join the middle class.

‘Cancel culture’

Kissel also complained about the general milieu in blood red Escambia County, claiming, “Cancel culture is still alive in Pensacola.”

After these embarrassing rebuffs, you might think DeSantis might rethink his approach but, of course, you’d be wrong. His newest trustee pick, another Heritage Foundation luminary, pitched a hissy fit about UWF students putting on a Halloween drag show in 2019.

(Halloween — you know, when people dress up in all sorts of outlandish ways?)

Zack Smith, a Pensacola native and former assistant U.S. attorney in the Northern District of Florida, told UWF’s then-president Martha Saunders he had “concerns” (most of which seem to involve gay people asserting equal rights or Black people calling out systemic racism in America), including such outré actions as inviting one of the founders of Black Lives Matter to speak on campus (she’s an “avowed Marxist”!) as well as the UWF librarian suggesting Ibram X. Kendi’s “How to Be an Antiracist” as a good read for Black History Month.

God forbid students might encounter a critique of capitalism or an important and provocative exploration of race during Black History Month.

Pro tips for Project 2025 zealots:

  1. Capitalism is not beyond criticism. I refer Heritage True Believers to Mark 10:25 (the camel/rich man/eye-of-needle thing) and Matthew 6:24 (the God and Mammon thing) as well as analyses of our economic system, many written by those embedded in it.
  2. Marxism is a political philosophy. Like any other philosophy, it should be studied in universities. Merely hearing about it does not rot your very soul.
  3. Ibram X. Kendi is a distinguished scholar, a graduate of Florida A&M University who has gone on to win a National Book Award and a MacArthur Fellowship. Reading his work will not infect you with the Woke Mind Virus.

But — agree or disagree with what Kendi says — his book might make you think.

Imagine that: college students thinking.

Obeisance

Eye-wateringly stupid as Smith’s complaints were, they had the intended effect: Martha Saunders resigned, allowing DeSantis to put his education commissionerin as interim president.

The irredeemably unimpressive Manny Diaz Jr. has no higher ed experience, no terminal degree, and no business running what was, under presidents such as Judy Bense, a highly regarded archeologist, and Martha Saunders, an expert in communications theory, a university on its way up.

Unfortunately for UWF, odds are Diaz gets the permanent gig: That’s what happened at New College; that’s what happened at FIU.

DeSantis wants university presidents who realize they do not work for the institution, fostering knowledge, encouraging free inquiry, and serving education.

He insists they work for him. They must do his bidding, battling villains such as faculty unions, student journalists, Pride Month celebrations, critical race theory, gender studies, and African American studies.

Which brings us to FAMU.

DeSantis and his higher ed henchpersons have, in the past, tread pretty carefully with Florida’s only public HCBU.

Maybe it’s because FAMU is such a, well, let’s call it a “bargain.”

In 2024-25, FAMU’s enrollment was 9,980. New College’s was 850. FAMU’s appropriation was $50 million. New College got $52 million.

Even those of us who went to school in Florida can do that math.

Not that anyone should be surprised the state spends far more per student at predominantly white New College than at predominantly not-white FAMU.

Can’t be racism. Oh, no. Perish the thought.

Even though on Planet DeSantis, the very existence of a majority-minority student body is DEI gone wild.

At any rate, FAMU’s no longer flying under the governor’s radar. He just got to stick another of his favorites in the top job.

The good part: FAMU’s presidential search was unusually transparent, at least in comparison to the absurdly hermetic process at UF and other state institutions. The four finalists’ names were publicly announced and students, faculty, and community members were invited to meet them.

Three had solid-to-excellent qualifications. Contenders included the provost and vice president for academic affairs at the University of Maryland Eastern Shore, the senior vice president for administration and finance at the University of Central Florida, and FAMU’s own senior vice president and COO.

The not-so-good part: Candidate Number Four.

Marva Johnson appeared almost out of nowhere, rumored to be a late addition pushed by trustee Deveron Gibbons, a DeSantis appointee.

As you’d expect, she has no higher education experience, but she has far more important qualities: She’s a telecom company executive, a MAGA Republican, and a crony of Ron DeSantis’.

Disquiet at FAMU

FAMU has long been a leader in the fight for civil rights and remains the nation’s top public HCBU, alma mater of politicians like former Atlanta mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms and U.S. Rep. Al Green, musicians Common and Cannonball Adderley, satirist Roy Wood Jr., Wimbledon champion Althea Gibson, and art collector Bernard Kinsey.

Rattlers were horrified Johnson made the short list and held rallies protesting her candidacy. Movie producer, FAMU alum and big-time donor Will Packer said she might “do irreparable harm to the university’s relationship with its community and with its donor base.”

Naturally, she got the job.

And, like any self-respecting MAGA grifter, immediately demanded a salary of $750,000, nearly $300,000 a year higher than her predecessor.

Of course, she won’t make as much as the president of New College: He pulls in nearly a $1 million overseeing those 850 students.

Taxpayers might wonder why, when legislators and the governor keep whining about the need to cut budgets and save money, there seems to be no problem paying a gaggle of under-qualified nonentities huge amounts to be university presidents.

But universities in Florida and other MAGA-controlled states are no longer so much about education as they are about propaganda and power.

Republicans want to control curriculum, censoring anything that upsets white folks — topics such as slavery, genocide, colonialism, gender, women’s rights.

You’ve seen how Trump is going after Harvard and other universities, cutting off funding, trying to control hiring and admissions, denying foreign students visas.

Colleges in Utah, Ohio, Texas, Iowa, and (no surprise) Florida are being told to emphasize Western Civilization, the Constitution, and “Great Books.”

Ono’s crash and burn

MAGAs might not like it if universities really focused on, say, the Constitution. Students might realize that the current regime regularly violates it.

For Ron DeSantis, taming Florida’s universities feeds his desperate need for relevance. Spurned by the voters during his disastrous presidential bid, ridiculed by onetime patron Donald Trump, defied by the Legislature, DeSantis figures at least he can run — or ruin — education.

It’s not quite as smooth a conquest as anticipated.

The crash of Santa Ono’s UF candidacy was about the Right’s fear of DEI. But it was also about giving DeSantis a black eye.

The crash of Santa Ono’s UF candidacy was about the Right’s fear of DEI — they truly do want to Make America White (and Christian and male-dominated) Again — and hysteria over hiring someone who, despite his pathetic attempts to demonstrate that he’d drunk the Trumpy Kool-Aid, clearly knew better.

But it was also about giving DeSantis a black eye.

Signs indicate Casey DeSantis will run for governor when her husband terms out.

But she’s got all kinds of political problems, not least an investigation into her dodgy charity, Hope Florida.

Her husband is spewing spittle all over Tallahassee, accusing a “jackass” in the Legislature (the rest of us know him as Rep. Alex Andrade) of taking documents which “he dropped in a prosecutor’s office,” and hollering “that is not an organic investigation” and any accusation of money laundering is just a “smear.”

Then there’s her likely primary opponent, Rep. Byron Donalds. He’s been endorsed by Trump.

It’s no coincidence he led the MAGA campaign against Ono.

Higher education has always been political. Governors and legislators have never approved of professors (liberals, mostly) or students (snotty-nosed kids protesting) or faculty (probably Marxists).

But DeSantis has taken the politicization of universities to a whole new level of venality, pettiness, and dangerous repression.

The “Free State of Florida” isn’t.

As that famous novel(which could soon be on the banned books list) says: “Freedom is slavery” and “Ignorance is strength.”

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Florida Phoenix is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Florida Phoenix maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Michael Moline for questions: info@floridaphoenix.com.

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Dems demand investigation of DeSantis charity accused of diverting Medicaid funds

Mitch Perry, Florida Phoenix

'Slanderous false accusations': Casey DeSantis doubles down on defense of controversial program

Mitch Perry, Florida Phoenix

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Why are right-wingers so scared of ideas?

Are their minds so weak that mere exposure to certain books will infect them with what Elon Musk calls “the woke mind virus”?

They don’t want you inoculated against measles, but they’re doing their damnedest to inoculate Americans against knowledge.

Novels upset them; poetry upsets them; science upsets them; history upsets them; art upsets them; questioning of authority upsets them.

Universities really, really upset them — all that interrogating norms; all that challenging orthodoxy; all that critical inquiry.

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To that end, Donald Trump’s going to war with Harvard, Columbia, Johns Hopkins, even Penn, his alma mater.

Ron DeSantis beat him to it: The governor’s been trying for years to regulate speech, impose restrictions on what teachers can teach, and decree which books the state of Florida finds “acceptable.”

While he’s had some success in K-12, enabling Moms for Liberty and their ilk in their book-banning crusade and threatening educators with dire consequences if they mention the existence of gay and trans people, some judges, unsurprisingly partial to the First Amendment, have slapped him down.

DeSantis, nothing if not energetic in his rage, is now determined to shield our precious college students from Dangerous Thoughts.

Choose the administrators. Choose the presidents. Control the universities.

The University of Florida needs a new dean of Liberal Arts and Sciences — with 40 majors and more than 10,000 students, it’s the largest college at UF.

They got as far as interviewing four highly qualified candidates: two mathematicians — UF’s own Kevin P. Knudson and Maggy Tomova, dean of UCF’s College of Science; Ryan Schroeder, dean of Georgia Southern’s College of Behavioral and Social Sciences; and Robert Brinkmann, a professor of Geology and dean of Liberal Arts and Science at Northern Illinois University.

‘Radical DEI progressives’

But two weeks ago, the governor blew up the search. Demanded UF stop it.

Seems the finalists, admired scholars and seasoned leaders, are crypto-Marxist, Trump-hating eggheads bent on destroying America.

An anonymous social media account calling itself “Commies on Campus” ran shrieking to Bryan Griffin, DeSantis’ communications director, calling all four “ radical DEI progressives.”

The Commies posted slick, selectively edited videos of candidate interviews, slamming Brinkmann for stating the obvious: “We have people in charge of things in our country that don’t have any business being in charge of those things,” and Knudson for being proud that as head of UF’s Honors Program “we were able to increase the number of African American and Hispanic students in the program.”

As if that’s somehow shameful.

Kent Fuchs, UF’s invertebrate of an interim president, sent out a memo pretending “terminating the search” was the only thing to do, what with the university also in the middle of hiring a permanent president.

Fuchs has never said no to DeSantis.

He does as he’s told, facilitating the hiring of our data-challenged surgeon general at UF’s medical school and trying to stop professorsfrom testifying on voting rights.

Academic freedom doesn’t matter; the professors’ expertise might pose a “conflict of interest to the executive branch of the state of Florida.”

As if serving the interests of the executive branch should somehow be the mission of a university.

UF remains a distinguished institution, though slipping in national rankings of public universities. It was No. 5 a couple of years ago but is now No. 7.

Still pretty good, especially given DeSantis’ obsessive attacks on higher education in the state.

But allowing some trifling X account to dictate policy at Florida’s flagship university won’t exactly burnish UF’s reputation.

All-purpose insult

Whoever the “Commies on Campus” may be, they weren’t paying attention in political science class.

They call anything they don’t like “communist:” LGBTQ, feminism, secularism, programs for the poor, addressing the climate crisis, taxing the rich, giving anyone without one of those useful White Man Cards a fair shot in life.

“Communist” is MAGA’s all-purpose insult.

Read a book, kids: While real live commies like the ones in North Korea, Cuba, or China may think religion is the opiate of the masses and rich folks (except the leaders of these countries) shouldn’t exist, they’re not keen on stuff like feminism, they persecute gay people, and they sure as hell don’t favor DEI.

Ask the Uighurs.

Yet DeSantis, a man educated beyond his intelligence, takes what these nameless chuckleheads say at face value.

There are in fact a number of well-regarded Marxist scholars at American universities. Yale, the governor’s alma mater, has a reading group studying Marxism and Cultural Theory.

Nevertheless, DeSantis emerged from the Red Menace of New Haven untainted.

He’s also unimpeded by understanding what universities are supposed to do.

An academic’s job is to research everything from the Roman Republic to astrophysics to Norse sagas to gene structure to the ideology of slavery to economic and political systems, which requires reading across the spectrum from “Das Kapital” to “ The Road to Serfdom“ and presenting their data and knowledge to students.

We call this “education.”

It’s embarrassing how MAGAs deem Hungarian (or Putinist) authoritarianism OK, even admirable, while “communist” is the gravest of insults and socialism is a mortal sin.

Perhaps they’re unaware socialism is viewed favorably by around 36%of Americans.

That’s almost the same number who say they strongly support Donald Trump.

Ideas are not viruses

The point is, ideas are not viruses: Mere exposure to communist thought doesn’t turn you into a communist, any more than reading James Baldwin’s “Giovanni’s Room” makes you gay, any more than reading “The Wealth of Nations” ensures you’ll become a rabid capitalist.

But MAGAs don’t do high-level thinking: It makes their heads hurt. They simply react.

Loudly. Ignorantly. Irrationally.

Commies on Campus now has a new project: trying to influence who will become the new president of the University of Florida.

UF has announced a finalist.

One finalist. Chosen in secret.

He is Dr. Santa Ono, a Canadian American immunologist.

The Commies say he’s some kind of woke monster who, as president of the University of Michigan, created “THE LARGEST #DEI EMPIRE in the country.”

Their evidence? Christopher Rufo, the febrile New College trustee last heard claiming immigrants were eating cats and dogs, calls Ono “left-wing” and points to a 2023 commencement address in which he made the unimpeachable statement, “The climate crisis is the existential challenge of our time.”

Florida gubernatorial candidate and Trump acolyte U.S. Rep. Byron Donalds, never losing a chance to ingratiate himself with MAGA voters, demands UF “ go back to the drawing board.”

Donalds’ hair is on fire because Ono once said, “Racism is one of America’s original sins.”

Deep breath, people: 1. Both of Ono’s statements are perfectly true; and 2. Rufo, Donalds, and the Commies need to update their intel.

Ono has changed his tune. No longer a champion of diversity, he’s now singing from the DeSantis Hymnal, declaring himself in “total alignment” with the governor’s anti-woke crusade.

“I have the same views as this governor,” Ono said.

Bend the knee

During his three years at Michigan (the shortest tenure of any president in the university’s history), Ono initially won praise for prioritizing sustainability and anti-racist projects. Students say he was personable and accessible.

Then Trump happened, and, like too many university administrators, he bent the knee, shutting UM’s DEI office, cracking down on student protest, and creating, as one faculty member said, “ a surveillance state.”

Seems he deployed plainclothes officers police to trail and photograph people on UM’s campus.

No wonder DeSantis likes this guy.

Santa is a real scholar, a proper scientist, with academic and administrative qualifications that could have been a great fit at UF. He’s streets ahead of DeSantis’ last hand-picked president, the empty, in-over-his-head Ben Sasse, whose one discernable talent was spendingother people’s money.

In a Trump-free world, Ono might have become the leader who could protect the institution. He might have pushed back against the governor’s determination to reduce Florida’s universities to football factories with libraries curated by the likes of Christopher Rufo and courses insisting on the divine greatness of America.

Alas, Ono has made clear that’s not him, not anymore.

This is what you get when one incurious, anti-intellectual, and perpetually angry man chooses university presidents in secret.

This is what you get when there’s only one finalist.

Yes, the trustees officially make the job offer, but there’s no chance they’d hire someone DeSantis didn’t like.

This is the reality of higher ed in Florida today.

FIU has one finalist for president. No shock that it’s DeSantis’ former lieutenant governor and Interim President Jeannette Nuñez.

In its presidential search, FAU announced three finalists. Maybe this would be a real contest?

Two had Ph.Ds. and solid higher ed experience. One was a Republican political hack.

You can guess who got the gig.

A ‘plant’ at FAMU?

Florida A&M, still in the process of choosing a president, has four finalists.

Promising, right?

There were initially three on the shortlist, all with extensive university experience. Then a fourth candidate, a woman with ties to top Republicans, appeared.

She’s Marva Johnson, a communications company executive, appointed by then-Gov. Rick Scott to the Florida Board of Education and chosen by Ron DeSantis for the Florida Scholars Academy Board of Trustees.

Commies on Campus have not yet weighed in on this one.

FAMU alumni say she’d be a terrible choice, calling her “ a plant” and likening her to a Trojan Horse hostile to the university’s mission.

But what the alumni want, and what the university wants, probably won’t matter.

What DeSantis wants matters.

As everyone in the unfree state of Florida knows, all animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.

YOU MAKE OUR WORK POSSIBLE. SUPPORT

Florida Phoenix is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Florida Phoenix maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Michael Moline for questions: info@floridaphoenix.com.

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One of the few contenders combative enough to take on President Donald Trump in a Republican presidential primary, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, is falling hard and fast, critics say.

DeSantis’ re-election was one of the few bright spots for Republicans who had predicted a “red wave” election in 2022 but saw GOP candidates get rejected up and down the ticket— with almost every Trump-endorsed candidate losing to a Democrat. In a blue map of victories that year, however, Florida remained solidly red with DeSantis carrying the state by 20 points despite a strong showing from Democratic challenger and former governor Charlie Crist.

But that was then, and this is now, reports Axios, which posted a rundown on DeSantis’ surprising plummet within roughly two years.

READ MORE: 'Barely literate': Education secretary's 'deranged' letter gets major red ink corrections

"Be careful how you treat people on the way up because you may encounter the same people on the way down," said Curt Anderson, veteran consultant and top adviser to DeSantis' predecessor, Rick Scott, reports Axios. "... You see falls in politics, but not like this. It's stark. It's fast. It's a made-for-TV movie. Let's not forget: He was ahead of Trump in polling in 2022 and would've run against President Biden or Vice President [Harris] and won."

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But Axios reports DeSantis' stumble “began with his failedpresidential primarybid against Donald Trump last year,” and his “vindictive and pugilistic style of politics left him further isolated in the Florida Capitol” at a time when he really needs allies.

Mere months ago, Desantis’ wife Casey DeSantis was considering a bid to succeed her husband as governor, but her state-backed charity, Hope Florida, is now enmeshed in a scandal after the charity received $10 million in secret settlement money from a Medicaid provider days before the charity sent that same amount to two DeSantis’-favored political groups.

In Mississippi, a Republican governor’s name can be on text messages involving the misuse of welfare money without that governor being charged or investigated. But in Florida, House Republicans and independent observers are openly alleging DeSantis’ arrangement amounted to an illegal siphoning of Medicaid funds.

READ MORE;'Massive deception': Trump voters 'feel betrayed' after ICE detains son

Now with his lame-duck popularity crumbling amid party in-fighting, his wife possibly compromised by scandal and no presidential appointment obvious, DeSantis’ career in the Republican Party is unsure.

“Ron DeSantis went from Rupert Murdoch and every Republican billionaire telling him he could be president to sniping at hecklers at a fish shack in Destin," said former Republican Rep. Matt Gaetz. “It's quite a fall."

Read the full Axios report here.

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Florida Decides Healthcare, a political committee and nonprofit that is fighting for expanded Medicaid eligibility in the Sunshine State, on Sunday sued the Florida secretary of state and other state officials, challenging a law Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis signed last week that makes it tougher for citizens to get constitutional amendments on the ballot.

According to the lawsuit, which was filed in federal court, Florida Decides Healthcare (FDH) is working to qualify a ballot measure to appear on the 2026 general election ballot that, if voted through, would expand Medicaid coverage in Florida.

Provisions in H.B. 1205 include decreased time for organizers to submit signed petitions and increased monetary penalties for violations. The law also makes it a third-degree felony for anyone other than a registered petition circulator to collect or physically possess more than 25 signed petition forms beyond ones own and immediate family members.

"Because of H.B. 1205's punitive and onerous restrictions, set to go into effect in the middle of FDH's ongoing petition drive, the organization faces the real and imminent threat of being unable to continue its operations," according to the suit. "H.B. 1205 creates intolerable uncertainty, exposes FDH to ruinous civil and criminal penalties, and could ultimately force FDH to shut down its campaign entirely."

According to a statement from FDH, the lawsuit contends that the bill is a "direct assault" on the citizen-led constitutional amendment process in Florida, "a vital democratic tool that gives everyday Floridians the power to propose ballot initiatives."

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H.B. 1205 creates "vague" and "punitive" restrictions around the process that will have a chilling impact on political speech and dissuade civic engagement, according to the group.

The Elias Law Group, a prominent Democratic law firm, and the Southern Poverty Law Center, a racial justice and legal advocacy group, are lending legal support to FDH.

This targeting of the citizens amendment process comes less than one year after two ballot initiatives in Florida narrowly failed. Amendment 4 sought to ensure the right to an abortion up until fetal viability. The measure narrowly failed, falling short of the 60% majority needed to pass, meaning Florida will remain under a six-week abortion ban. Amendment 3 sought to legalize marijuana and also failed. Groups backing the initiatives raised tens of millions of dollars.

According to the Orlando Sentinel, the DeSantis administration used public money to run ads targeting the initiatives, and defended the ad campaigns as educational.

"Floridians have a constitutional right to change policy themselves. State legislators have now effectively silenced their constituents, all in order to maintain their chokehold on policymaking," said Kelly Hall, executive director of the Fairness Project, in a statement on Tuesday. The Fairness Project was among the groups that backed Amendment 4 last fall.

"It's the ultimate cowardly act—for politicians to enact minority rule when they know their policies don't align with the will of the majority," Hall added. "Sadly, this is nothing new for DeSantis, who used extraordinarily undemocratic means to block the will of the people during the 2024 election."

Mitch Emerson, campaign manager for Florida Decides Healthcare, similarly called the law "cowardly." Emerson is also a plaintiff in the suit.

"It's not reform—it's repression. We are filing this lawsuit because we refuse to let them silence the people of Florida," said Emerson in a statement on Monday. "We believe in democracy, and we believe that when politicians fail to act, the people have the right to step in. Floridians are ready to vote for Medicaid expansion—and we intend to make sure they get that chance."

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Florida Republicans aren't putting up with Ron DeSantis' temper tantrums anymore

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On February 13, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed into law a bill making it a first-degree misdemeanor to illegally enter the Sunshine State as an “unauthorized alien” and imposing additional penalties for reentry. But on April 4 in Miami, U.S. District Court Judge Kathleen Williams issued an order temporarily blocking the law.

Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier, on Wednesday, April 23, sent Florida law enforcement a letter saying that he won't stop them from enforcing the law — which has already led to arrests. However, Pinellas County, Florida Sheriff Bob Gualtieri, according to Florida Phoenix reporter Jackie Llanos, is saying he plans to abide by Williams' order and is telling his deputies not to arrest anyone under the law.

Gualtieri told the Phoenix, "I don't think it changes anything. We take our direction on something like that from the judge, not from anybody else."

READ MORE: 'Afraid' Trump 'will lose': Lawyers blast firms capitulating to Trump in scathing letter

In his April 23 letter, Uthmeier — a DeSantis ally — wrote, "I cannot prevent you from enforcing §§811.102 and 811.103, where there remains no judicial order that properly restrains you from doing so."

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Regardless, Gualtieri, according to Llanos, said he is abiding by Williams' order.

DeSantis, meanwhile, is openly critical of Williams, who he described as an "activist judge" during an April 7 press conference. And in an April 23 post on X, formerly Twitter, the far-right Florida governor wrote, "The mission continues. Immigration law must be enforced and FL is leading on working with the Trump administration to get it done."

The Florida ACLU, the Community Justice Project and Americans for Immigrant Justice are among the groups and organizations fighting the law in court.

Community Justice Project Director Alana Greer, criticized Uthmeier's April 23 letter, saying, in a written statement, "A federal judge entered not one, but two clear and direct orders stopping enforcement of this law. The Attorney General's letter makes us gravely concerned that Floridians will continue to be arrested under this unconstitutional statute. We will be back in court to ensure their rights are protected."

READ MORE:'Chilling': Trump official threatens staff with criminal sanctions for speaking with press

*Read the full Florida Phoenix article at this link.

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TALLAHASSSEE — If you’re one of the 900 new people who move to Florida every day, you may not know this crucial secret of Florida government. I’m a Florida native, so let me clue you in. Lean in close and I’ll whisper it in your ear. Are you ready?

The Florida Legislature contains more cuckoos than a Swiss clock factory.

Now that you’re aware of this fact, how are you holding up? How’s your blood pressure? Can you handle the truth?

You want some evidence? Just last year, a legislator claimed his new anti-bear bill was necessary because there were bears on crack invading people’s houses. This was, of course, a complete fantasy. Yet his colleagues didn’t question his sanity or call the paramedics. They just passed the bill. It’s the law now!

This year there’s one that’s even kookier. I am referring to the so-called “chemtrails” bill.

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In case you’re unfamiliar with that debunked conspiracy theory, the folks who believe in “chemtrails” are convinced the government (or maybe it’s the Illuminati) is dispatching planes to fly over us unsuspecting Americans and spray chemicals on us.

Why? The chemtrails can change the weather, say the diehards. Or maybe they can control people’s minds. Or maybe they’re just going to poison everybody they don’t like. Who knows? After all, it’s a secret, like the 1947 UFO crash landing in New Mexico.

Anyway, there’s a bill in the Legislature to track and attack chemtrails. Instead of being laughed out of the Capitol building, as it deserves, the bill was just passed by the full Senate, because that’s what our state’s elected leaders are like right now. I wish I could tell youthe “Looney Tunes” theme song played while they voted.

“The measure (SB 56), sponsored by Miami Republican Ileana Garcia, would prohibit the injection, release, or dispersion of any means of a chemical, chemical compound, substance, or apparatus into the atmosphere for the purpose of affecting the climate,” my colleague Mitch Perry reported in the Phoenix last week. “Any person or corporation who conducts such geoengineering or weather modification activity would be subject to a third-degree felony charge, with fines up to $100,000.”

The bill would require the Florida Department of Environmental Protection to set up a hotline so anyone concerned about streaks in the sky can call and report them. I’m sure the DEP will jump right on those reports, just the way the agency has jumped on reports of rampant water pollution that fuels toxic algae blooms, kills seagrass, and leaves manatees to starve.

I tried calling Sen. Garcia to ask her some questions about her bill. While I waited to talk to her, I was struck by a subversive thought:

What if the chemtrails bill becomes law and we folks who still live in the real world use it to flip the script? What if we employ its provisions to go after the people who really ARE changing the weather — with their greenhouse gas emissions?

A healthy skepticism

The most shocking thing about this chemtrails bill is not that it was filed — filed, I should add, by a senator who won her seat by just 32 votes, thanks to an illegal ghost candidate scheme backed by Florida Power & Light.

Nor is the most shocking thing that it passed one house of our Legislature by a vote of 28-9 and now is headed for the other.

No, what’s shocking is that it was endorsed by Senate President Ben Albritton and Gov. Ron DeSantis, two allegedly well-educated people. At this rate, they’ll next endorse a taxpayer-funded expedition to explore how we ended up living inside a Hollow Earth.

Actually, DeSantis’ endorsement isn’t that much of a surprise. He’s happy to appease the Tinfoil Hat Brigade if it gets him a mention on Fox News or its imitators.

Remember, DeSantis is the guy who appointed as his surgeon general the world’s biggest vaccine skeptic and now lets him run around the state trying to convince everyone to stop preventing children’s tooth decay. I sometimes wonder if he and RFK Jr. share a brain worm.

But Albritton’s comments threw me. He’s a longtime citrus man who’s familiar with the need for accurate weather forecasts. Yet he actually called this lunacy “a great piece of legislation” that would address “real concerns from our constituents.”

If some of those constituents also think their elected politicians are all lizard people, presumably he’d be fine with legislation requiring a reptilian DNA test before administering the oath of office.

“I have heard the conspiracy theories out there,” Albritton said about Garcia’s bill, “but the fact is we should not be shutting down legitimate concerns. Healthy skepticism is important. There’s a lot we don’t know in this field of science and people are rightfully concerned.”

Because I grew up in Florida, I have a healthy skepticism toward anything Florida politicians say. Albritton’s statement suggests that I’m right to be skeptical because there’s a lot that’s wrong with his comments.

We actually know quite a lot about the weather modification attempts. We know they don’t work and have mostly been discontinued.

Florida law currently requires anyone who wants to modify the weather to get a permit first. A Senate bill analysis of SB 56 points out, “There have been no applications for weather modification licenses in the past 10 years.”

Four years ago, eight Western states tried cloud seeding to produce rains to end a lengthy drought. However, Scientific American reported, “there is little evidence to show that the process is increasing precipitation.”

Yet “weather modification” is what our Legislature chooses to tackle instead of lowering property insurance rates, boosting educational test scores, or any one of a dozen more important issues. Maybe they’re under some bizarre mind control method that requires them to be ineffective at good governing.

Legitimate concerns

Albritton’s statement about people being “rightfully concerned” about chemtrails sounds like he’s endorsing the bogus claims that spread last year that the government steered two hurricanes to clobber specific communities ahead of the election.

Those rumors were, of course, lies spread by the unscrupulous to fool the gullible. They became so pervasive that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration had to put out a press release denying it.

“NOAA does not modify the weather, nor does it fund, participate in or oversee cloud seeding or any other weather modification activities,” it said.

Given how Elon Musk is rapidly dismantling the agency now, I doubt they can control the thermostat in their office buildings, much less the weather.

I wish Albritton were as supportive of the “legitimate concerns” many of us Floridians feel about climate change.

We’re on the front lines of it, with our rising sea levels, more intense hurricanes, higher storm surges, and increased temperatures even at night. It’s hurting everything from our seafood industry to our sea turtle nesting. Heck, it’s even hurting Albritton’s own industry, agriculture.

Hard-headed property insurance companies recognize the dangers and disruptions of climate change. Why can’t our state officials?

“If lawmakers want to protect Floridians by addressing substances affecting the temperature, weather, and climate, they should hold power companies and the oil and gas industry accountable,” said longtime Florida climate activist Susan Glickman of the CLEO Institute, a non-profit dedicated to climate education and advocacy. “The pollution they release is warming the climate in increasingly extreme and deadly ways.”

But last year the Legislature voted to delete most references to climate change from state law under the well-known scientific theory of “If We Don’t Talk About It, Surely It Will Go Away.” Given how we were all beaten up by intense hurricanes and big storm surges last year, I don’t think it went away.

Fortunately, I see a way to take this “chemtrails” bill and turn it into a “let’s fight climate change” bill. Let me explain.

Contrail confusion

I have a confession to make: Every time I read someone’s rants about chemtrails, I always crack up. That’s because I always pictureCary Grant fleeing the evil crop-duster in the movie “North by Northwest,” which is the silliest and most inefficient murder method ever attempted.

Was the pilot supposed to crash into Cary and kill himself too? Cut Cary’s head off with the propeller, which would make the plane stop flying? Or maybe force him to cough up a lung because of all the pesticide he was inhaling? None of these options seem practical.

Similarly, the whole chemtrails theory falls apart on practical questions. How often and how much do you need to spray those chemicals in the sky to affect everyone? There are 23 million people in Florida alone. That’s a lot of folks to spritz with your mind-control concoction.

Seems to me you’d need WAAAAAY more chemical spraying than what we’re seeing if you plan to coat every single one of us with the goop. You’d need to dump it out in quantities like the helicopter pilots dropping[pix]

Nope, what we’re seeing up in the sky are simple contrails — droplets of water vapor clinging to particles of soot that were emitted by an airplane’s engine.

So imagine my surprise when Rafe Pomerance of Rethink Energy Florida told me, “Water vapor is a greenhouse gas.”

“Say what now?” I replied, displaying my usual incisive intellect.

“You warm up the earth, and one of the effects is an increase of water vapor in the atmosphere,” he explained. Then the vapor traps heat in our atmosphere just like carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases do. The heat that created the vapor gets amplified by the vapor.

When I expressed that old healthy skepticism, he referred me to a scientist named Adam Boies of Stanford University. He’s an expert on contrails. He confirmed that chemtrails are bogus and also confirmed what Pomerance told me.

Some of the contrails disappear in minutes after the plane that created them leaves the area, Boies said. But some, say about 20%, linger longer. Those are the dangerous ones that can trap heat in the atmosphere.

Airplane engine manufacturers are worried about this so they are working on engine designs that will stop producing contrails, he said.

“The airlines are so concerned about this that they’re willing to try new fuels or rerouting flight patterns to try to avoid them,” Boies told me.

Thus, for once, the Legislature might do the right thing for the wrong reason — asking people to report something that actually is a cause of climate change. That’s why I think we should embrace this silly chemtrails bill and join DeSantis and Albritton in pushing it forward.

Then, once the bill passes, I say we all start contacting that DEP hotline to report, say, Florida Power & Light and its fellow utilities for burning fossil fuels to produce electricity. They’re building a lot of solar farms now, but they ought to replace their older plants too.

The same goes for all the municipal incinerators across the state, too, and the Big Sugar companies burning their fields and sending billows of thick smoke into the communities south of Lake Okeechobee. I say we report every one of these folks messing up our state.

“Hello, DEP,” we can say, “there’s a chemical plant in Pensacola that’s altering the weather with its nitrous oxide emissions. The clouds of pollutants are going up in the atmosphere and trapping heat here! You should do something about that, pronto.”

Or how about, “Hello, is this the DEP? I want to report someone for altering the weather. It’s the Florida DOT. They’re building a lot of roads for heavily polluting cars and trucks and doing nothing for mass transit. No electric vehicle charging stations, either. Can you get after them for that?”

By the way, I never did reach the bill’s sponsor, Sen. Garcia. It’s too bad. I was ready to congratulate her for doing more to combat climate change than either DeSantis or his predecessor, Rick Scott. Of course, to hear me speak, she’d first have to unwrap all that tinfoil from around her head.

YOU MAKE OUR WORK POSSIBLE. SUPPORT

Florida Phoenix is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Florida Phoenix maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Michael Moline for questions: info@floridaphoenix.com.

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Florida governors have long held sway over the selection of state university presidents, but Gov. Ron DeSantis has taken extra care to install political allies with limited higher education experience in these well-paid jobs, including his former Lt. Gov. Jeanette Nuñez.

Now, a bill filed for the 2025 regular session of the Florida Legislature would limit the governor’s authority, giving universities more autonomy in selecting their leaders. Sen. Alexis Calatayud of Miami and Rep. Michelle Salzman of Escambia County introduced the measure.

HB 1321 in the House and SB 1726 in the Senate would strip the State University System’s Board of Governors (BOG) and State Board of Education of their power to approve university and college presidents, leaving it up to the institutions’ trustees and search committees. The bill would prohibit Board of Governors members from sitting on search committees.

Since 2023, five of Florida’s 12 public universities have hired new presidents — the University of Florida, New College of Florida, Florida Gulf Coast University, Florida Polytechnic University, and Florida Atlantic University. Four — Florida International University, the University of Florida, the University of South Florida, and Florida A&M University — are in the process of finding new presidents.

UF hired former U.S. Sen. Ben Sasse as president in February 2023, but he stepped down in July 2024 and reports of profligate spending followed, requiring a fresh search.

FAU chose Adam Hasner as its president this month. The former state House majority leader faced pushback from College Democrats because of his partisan background, although he pledged during forums that he would stay away from politics as president.

Nuñez stepped away from the DeSantis administration to become interim president at her alma mater, FIU, this month, two years before her term in office was set to end.

Trustees from both institutions applauded their new presidents for their connections in Tallahassee and perceived political influence over appropriations.

Jose Oliva, a member of the Board of Governors, said moments before that panel approved Nuñez that when he was speaker of the Florida House and Nuñez was lieutenant governor, “it was very standard to see her during budget time in the speaker’s office advocating for FIU and making sure that FIU received not just the proper support from the Legislature, but also the proper recognition for its many successes.”

People who protested Hasner, Nuñez,Sasse, and former House speaker Richard Corcoran at New College largely focus on fears they would politicize the institutions. DeSantis has been plain that he wants to convert the formerly progressive New College into the Hillsdale of the South, referring to the conservative Christian college in Michigan.

DeSantis has hinted that similar transformations may be coming at the University of West Florida, which just underwent a big shake-up of its board of trustees, and elsewhere within the system.

The governor’s office and BOG have made no secret of their motives, making clear they want to “prune” “ ideological study stuff,” want no more “indoctrinating concepts,” are putting certain degrees under the microscope for their return on investment, now that colleges and universities must undergo “DOGE Florida” audits.

“I want to say that we are fully aligned with the Board of Governors’ vision and mission because ultimately we recognize that FIU’s success is also the BOG’s success,” Nuñez said Feb. 20 in front of governors about to vote for her confirmation.

The governor reached out to FIU to advocate for Nuñez. Earlier, DeSantis reportedly positioned now-state Sen. Randy Fine for FAU’s post (although that fell through), and his office guided Sasse to Gainesville, Politico reported.

The newly proposed legislation would reverse heightened secrecy that the Legislature and DeSantis imposed for presidential searches in 2022, reopening records about presidential searches under Florida’s public records laws.

Among the other requirements, Calatayud and Salzman’s bill would impose term limits on State Board of Education members (two four-year terms), college trustees (eight consecutive years), university trustees (10 consecutive years), and Board of Governors members (one seven-year term) and require them to disclose their financial records. Members of the Board of Governors would have to be residents of the state.

Calatayud declined to comment about the legislation, nor did Rep. Demi Busatta, chair of the House higher education appropriations commitee, respond to requests for comment.

The bill has support from the two Democrats on the Senate Higher Education Appropriations committee, Sens. Carlos Guillermo Smith and Tracie Davis.

“I’ve been concerned for many years that the governor has used his power to influence decisions on provosts and university presidents really to reward his most loyal soldiers, and it’s not getting us great leaders at our higher education institutions. In fact, it’s resulted in a lot of grift and a lot of corruption,” Smith told the Phoenix.

Davis called the Calatayud’s bill “refreshing,” saying DeSantis “has basically weaponized the appointments of presidents here in the state of Florida.”

“Being an educator myself, many of them don’t have the qualifications to be presidents of universities,” Davis told the Phoenix.

House Minority Leader Fentrice Driskell, too, supports a move toward independence for universities.

“That legislation, I think, is going to be in tension with the governor,” Driskell told reporters on the opening day for the legislative session last week. She added: “I really appreciate that to the extent that we can get away from the governor having such a heavy hand on these appointments, I think that would be better for the people of Florida, too.”

‘Long history’ of nontraditional candidates

Critics see DeSantis’ exertion of control as worrisome for the universities and academic freedom but BOG vice chair Alan Levine counsels calm. He is a former deputy chief of staff to former Gov. Jeb Bush.

“It really isn’t new. I know people want to hang this on Gov. DeSantis, I just don’t think that’s fair,” Levine told the Phoenix in an interview before Salzman and Calatayud filed their identical bills.

“Gov. DeSantis is not the first governor to be interested in who university presidents are,” Levine said, adding that he believes some of the best presidents in Florida were not academicians.

Hasner, selected unanimously over two career-academic finalists, and Nuñez have no experience in higher education administration, while Corcoran previously served as Florida education commissioner and Sasse was president of Midland University, a small, private institution in Nebraska.

When he served under Bush, Levine said, “a new president didn’t get hired unless we were aware of who it was and we were comfortable with who that person was.” The Board of Regents — now replaced by the Board of Governors — would keep the governor’s office informed about presidential searches he added.

“There’s a long history of people that are nontraditional candidates” who proved “exceptional presidents,” Levine said, listing former House Speaker John Thrasher (FSU 2014-2021); former House Speaker T.K. Wetherell (FSU 2003-2010); former Jacksonville Mayor John Delaney (UNF 2003-2018, Flagler College 2021-present); and former Lt. Gov. Frank Brogan (FAU 2003-2009).

He also listed attorney Marshall Criser, who served on the Board of Regents and as president of University of Florida for five years starting in 1984.

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How does Florida stack up with the rest of the nation?

Politics in higher education is happening “most in red states,” Judith Wilde, a presidential search researcher at George Mason University, told the Phoenix, listing as examples Virginia, Texas, and Georgia.

“It’s those sorts of southern red states where we see politics come in most. The most egregious by far is in Florida,” Wilde said. “DeSantis makes it clear what he wants, and his people make sure that’s what happens. There’s not much more to say about that.”

“It was exacerbated in a way by Sasse himself, when you look at the reasons that he was forced out of the position,” Wilde said. “When he took on the role, he said he would not bring politics into the position and yet he hired people who had been on his staff when he was a senator to do things. He hired some firms that he knew from his days in Washington. … So, he brought politics right back into it.”

UF responded to Sasse’s administrative practices by implementing new HR policies for the office of the president.

DeSantis himself claims the universities are heading in the “direction quite frankly that Florida voters have been very favorable towards in the last many elections.”

“We believe in the mission, but we also have a responsibility to make sure [presidents are] operating in ways that are consistent with the state’s best principles and best ideals,” DeSantis said during a news conference last month.

“So, when you have somebody that has already proven that they have a dedication to classical mission of the universities, that they have opposed efforts to use universities for ideological indoctrination, I just think it gives people a little more confidence that they’re going to do that as they go in.”

Wilde argued that presidents selected through nonpolitical processes can produce conservative leadership, but that relying on politicians may not always lead to the desired result.

“I think it’s sort of naive to say that having a politician, you know what they’re going to do and that they will remain conservative,” she said. “I don’t feel that that’s necessarily a rule, and if they really want somebody conservative, then they should be able to get that with a regular search. Most politicians don’t seem to really have a clue about what a university does, and so how can they really lead it?”

Fear of political payback could prevent search committees from advocating for candidates other than the one preferred by the governor, Wilde said.

“It’s going to take a lot of thinking and cogitating on the part of the members of the search committee to go against the governor, because they know that if they go against him and choose somebody else without having a really good reason, or being able to convince that this other person would be better, that they may lose their positions in whatever it is they do.” Wilde said.

More presidents than in the past across the country are stepping down before their terms end, one reason being the increased frequency of secret searches and another lack of support from the university community, she said.

“When the search is done in secret, it means that the people at the university don’t know who’s coming and, at the end, kind of like the Wizard of Oz — suddenly a curtain has pulled aside and with a roll of drums, here’s your new president,” Wilde said.

At UF, Sasse was the sole finalist named — notwithstanding a state law requiring a “shortlist” of finalists to be made public.

Wilde’s research into the 2015-16 academic year found that 92% of searches nationwide involved an outside search firm, the vast majority of which suggested secret searches. During 1975-76, only 2% of searches were done in secret; the rest were done locally and involved alumni, faculty, students, and local stakeholders.

According to a 2022 nationwide survey of college presidents by the American Council on Education, since 2006, presidents’s tenure has decreased by 2.6 years. Presidents surveyed had been in their position an average of 5.9 years.

“I’m not aware of any specific effort for this to happen, it’s just sort of a natural evolution,” Levine said.

What’s it take?

According to Artis Hampshire-Cowan, a search consultant hired by FAMU, university presidents must be “ business executives” to be successful — tenacious, with an understanding of the complexity of university finances and the scramble for resources.

About 80% of presidents will serve in that capacity at only one school in their career; 17% will serve in a second presidency, Wilde said.

“[Search firms] claim you need to have someone who’s been president, and yet there aren’t very many of those who choose to be president again,” she added.

Sen. Gayle Harrell, chair of the Senate Higher Education Appropriations Committee, said she believes political experience can help a president but isn’t everything.

“They have to be the complete package.” Political experience “may give you a leg up, but it’s only one aspect of all the credentials that you have to present,” Harrell told the Phoenix.

“There are insights gained from having legislative experience or administrative experience in Tallahassee that perhaps someone coming from out of state or from another university system might not understand,” Harrell said.

Financial

Hasner and Nuñez are set to make hundreds of thousands of dollars more than their predecessors did.

Hasner’s contract is for five years with an annual base pay of $875,000 and $150,000 bonus if he receives an exceptional or outstanding review. In addition, there’s a retirement supplement of $100,000 and $19,800 per year in an automobile allowance, as well as a $30,000 relocation reimbursement.

For the current year, outgoing interim President Stacy Volnick was set to earn a base salary of $551,250. She now serves as the VP for administrative affairs and COO earning a $450,000 base salary.

Nunez’s interim contract will give her annual base salary of $850,000 with a performance bonus of up to $127,500, a $12,500 annual automobile allowance, and paid insurance premiums.

In Jessell’s contract, signed in 2022, which was set to expire this November, he and the university agreed to a $650,000 base salary with a $175,000 annual bonus, $130,000 annual retirement supplement, $12,500 automobile allowance, and a $10,000 moving stipend.

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As Americans face the reality of President Donald Trump's second term and the mass firings, takeover of federal agencies by billionaire mogul Elon Musk, and looming trade war that have come with it, the direct democracy advocacy group Fairness Project warned of a "major attack" on voters' rights taking place at the state level across the country.

While many in the U.S. have been focused on the actions of the Trump administration, said the group in a Thursday statement, legislators in over 15 states have introduced more than 100 bills to stop citizen-led initiatives from being placed on ballots in upcoming elections—and to stop them from becoming law even if a majority of voters support the measures.

"We're sounding the alarm: Direct democracy is being threatened right under our noses," said Kelly Hall, executive director of the Fairness Project. "Ballot measures have been a lifeline to working people in red and purple states, allowing them to make change even when politicians fail to represent their interests. Legislators are trying to systematically take that power away."

The Fairness Project has supported dozens of successful ballot measure campaigns to expand healthcare access, raise minimum wages, and win paid time off policies for roughly 18 million people across the country.

The group was the biggest funder of abortion rights ballot measures in the last election cycle, working to ensure campaigners in Missouri and Arizona collected enough signatures to get questions about expanding abortion rights on ballots. Both ballot initiatives were approved by voters in November.

The Fairness Project was also involved in a 2023 campaign to stop a Republican-backed measure in Ohio that would have required a 60% supermajority to pass any future constitutional amendments.

In six of the states currently pushing attacks on ballot measures—Oklahoma, Arizona, Missouri, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Idaho—Republicans are making similar attempts to raise the threshold for passing ballot measures from a simple majority to 60%.

If they succeed in passing the proposals, said the Fairness Project, the GOP will be "effectively enacting minority rule."

Lawmakers are also advancing bills that would apply onerous signature requirements to the ballot measure process.

In Florida, Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis' proposed changes to ballot initiative laws include requiring individual voters to complete a petition in person at an election office or by mail in order to express support for a measure, instead of allowing sponsors to pay workers to collect signatures in public.

"They want to kill the process," Angelo Paparella, president of a group that has run several petition drives in the state, toldAxioslast month.

The Arkansas state Senate this month passed several bills regulating how citizen-led initiatives make it onto ballots, including one requiring canvassers to request a photo ID from signers; one requiring potential signers to read the ballot title of a petition or have it read aloud to them; and one requiring canvassers to file an affidavit certifying they complied with state law when collecting signatures.

"This is their playbook: When cowardly politicians know they can't win with voters on the issues, they try to change the rules of the game," Hall said Thursday.

Earlier this week, Mississippi voters once again lost out on the chance to place measures on statewide ballots, which was permitted in the state until the state Supreme Court struck down the ballot initiative process in 2021.

Lawmakers allowed a proposal to partially restore the process to die ahead of a legislative deadline.

"This means voters still have no direct way to propose new state laws, to change state laws, or to change the Constitution," reported Taylor Vance of Mississippi Today.

Hall said the Fairness Project will continue fighting attacks on representative direct democracy nationwide.

"Voters are paying attention to this widespread attack on their constitutional rights, and they're fighting back," said Hall. "Americans deserve leaders who respect our democracy."

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Members of the Florida Legislative Jewish Caucus vocalized opposition to the newly appointed University of West Florida Board of Trustees chair, citing what they consider his antisemitic social media posts as a disqualifying factor.

Gov. Ron DeSantis appointed Scott Yenor to the UWF Board of Trustees in January and then his fellow trustees elected him as their chair.

The bipartisan caucus is asking DeSantis to reconsider Yenor as a trustee, in part because of a recent thread of social media posts in which he commented on politicians’ sexual orientation, race, and “non-Jewish” status.

Watching @PeteHegseth‘s hearings yesterday I looked at the Dem Bench for national leadership or for reforming the party. Pretty slim pickin’s.

🧵🧵

— Scott Yenor (@scottyenor) January 15, 2025

Rep. Mike Gottlieb, chair of the caucus, told the Phoenix, “I mean, this is not the kind of guy that we need running an institution of higher learning and education here. He’s completely racist.”

In the thread, Yenor breaks down “the Dem Bench for national leadership or for reforming the party” by mentioning how many are heterosexual, lesbian, which states have two senators who are women, how many are “non-Jewish males over 65,” how many are Jewish, and concludes by writing that “only three of the 23 Democrat governors are straight white men under sixty-five.”

“Why are they non-Jews as opposed to being Christian?” Gottlieb said. “People are people, there is no need to label anybody.”

Yenor, a political science professor at Boise State University who has served as a fellow at conservative think tanks, has faced scrutiny for remarks advocating women stay out of higher education and against the LGBTQ community.

“There’s more to it than just what appears to be the anti-Jewish bias,” Gottlieb said. “… How does that make us any less qualified to be elected based on our religion, and that’s essentially what he said, and to me, that is marginalizing individuals based on their race, ethnicity, or religion, and I think that’s the definition of antisemitism.”

‘I’m not familiar with that’

DeSantis defended the appointment in January, saying he was not familiar with Yenor’s belief that women should put motherhood first, the Phoenix reported.

DeSantis defends UWF board nominee who criticizes women prioritizing their careers

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“I’m not familiar with that. I mean, obviously, I think if you look at the state of Florida, we probably have a higher percentage of women enrolled in our state universities than we do men, and that’s probably grown under my tenure,” DeSantis said during the Jacksonville press conference in which he talked about the results of his education policy. “But what I don’t do, what I don’t like, is cherry-picking somebody saying this and then trying to smear them.”

Although Yenor is on the board, the appointment is yet to be approved by the Florida Senate.

Gottlieb said the caucus “felt like the governor should know more about this person.”

The bipartisan bunch of lawmakers, in addition to Gottlieb, includes Reps. Hillary Cassel and Yvette Benarroch as vice chairs, and Sens. Lori Berman, Randy Fine, and Tina Polsky, and Reps. Peggy Gossett-Seidman, Rita Harris, Chip LaMarca, Mitch Rosenwald, Michelle Salzman, David Silvers, Kelly Skidmore, Allison Tant, and Debra Tendrich.

Former Sen. Lauren Book and former Rep. David Silvers were included in the call to the governor.

Rep. Mike Caruso, who was the lone House vote against the special session immigration package DeSantis also disapproved of, is a member of the caucus but did not sign the letter.

Fine noted the impending confirmation vote Monday in an X post in which he declared he was “very troubled” by the appointment.

“He must still be confirmed by the Florida Senate and I will be sharing my concerns with my colleagues. There is no place for antisemitism in our Universities, let alone in their leadership,” Fine wrote.

‘Divisive and prejudiced remarks’

WUWF reported that some members of the UWF community and trustees expressed a desire for leadership with deeper ties to the community. The Pensacola News Journal reported that one of 13 trusteeships at UWF has direct ties to the Pensacola area.

Gottlieb said Yenor reached out to members of the caucus Monday.

“He’s contacted members of our caucus and tried to sort of explain his rationale for that and it didn’t fly with them,” Gottlieb said.

“Look, is he saying anything in that tweet explicitly negative to Jews? Not necessarily explicitly. But, by implication … I think when you call somebody out for being Jewish or not Jewish, that is antisemitic in and of itself.”

A news release from the caucus said that “allowing individuals with a track record of divisive and prejudiced remarks to hold positions of influence within our institutions … erodes public trust” and undermines the mission of Florida’s universities.

“From where I sit, we have a responsibility as legislators and certainly, as chair of the caucus, when I see something to say something, and this was brought to my attention by members of my caucus who felt that this was yet again another troubling appointment by Gov. DeSantis that doesn’t appear to be properly vetted,” Gottlieb said.

During the January news conference, DeSantis alluded to the idea that changes would be coming to UWF. His attention to its board of trustees mirrors his overhaul of New College of Florida two years ago.

Gottlieb said that, aside from the Jewish caucus concerns, Yenor is another “minion” for DeSantis.

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Florida Phoenix is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Florida Phoenix maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Michael Moline for questions: info@floridaphoenix.com.

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'Isn't being honest': DeSantis' tactics may be unifying Florida Republicans against him

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After Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis won reelection by 19 percent in 2022, many of his cheerleaders were confident he would be the next president of the United States.

But DeSantis' 2024 presidential campaign was a disappointment, and he ended up dropping out of the race and giving GOP frontrunner Donald Trump a lukewarm endorsement.

According to Politico reporters Kimberly Leonard and Gary Fineout, the two-term Florida governor is now "facing his biggest hurdle since ending his 2024 presidential campaign in trying to work with fellow Republicans."

READ MORE: How Trump’s quick executive actions could redefine who counts in our democracy

"He wants legislators to pass measures on illegal immigration to support Trump's executive orders and mass deportation plans, and to enact sweeping changes that could make ballot initiatives more difficult to pass," Leonard and Fineout explain in an article published on January 27. "But he had to force lawmakers to travel into town as GOP legislative leaders said the work could wait until the regular policymaking period in March. And once lawmakers get to Florida's capital, it's still not clear they'll do what DeSantis wants — or instead opt to publicly push back against the governor."

"Infighting" between DeSantis and Republicans in the Florida State Legislature, according to the Politico reporters, show how much the governor's "political clout has waned since he exited the presidential race a year ago." And one GOP state lawmaker described the tensions as a "s--t show."

Democrat Jason Pizzo, minority leader in the Florida State Senate, told Politico, "Mommy and daddy are fighting. And they have to consume for more power, more relevance, more attention. We're all grown-ups, so there are some adults in the room. The Senate president and the speaker really probably need to get together on what they'll agree to do."

Meanwhile, a GOP member of the Florida House of Representatives, quoted anonymously, criticized DeSantis for his "political theater" and told Politico, "No one feels the need to cover for him politically. He's not the best politician. He’s a bull in every china shop."

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Florida Republican Governor Ron DeSantis has selected Attorney General Ashley Moody to succeed U.S. Senator Marco Rubio, should Rubio be confirmed as Secretary of State. Moody, 49, has served under Governor DeSantis for five years. If she chooses to remain in the Senate, she would need to run in a special election in 2026.

Both Lara Trump and Matt Gaetz had been rumored at one time to be interested in consideration. DeSantis’s wife, Casey DeSantis, had also been rumored as a possible replacement. Lara Trump announced she would not seek the appointment. Some political observers suggested DeSantis, who is term limited and cannot run for a third term in 2026, could appoint himself to the role, but he announced he would not.

As Florida’s Attorney General, Moody has taken an aggressive, right-wing stance on key cultural issues.

In 2023, Moody appeared to compare a popular LGBTQ children’s book about gay penguins to “Nazi propaganda.”

After citing “a newrulingin Russia that bans the LGBTQ movement,” MSNBC‘s Ja’han Jones wrote: “In Putinesque fashion, the Florida AG argued that because schools are able to ban Nazi propaganda under ‘value-based judgments,’ they should be allowed to make similar decisions about LGBTQ content.”

READ MORE: Trump Ran on Promise to Lower Grocery Prices — Few Americans Now Believe He Will

“In a legal brief filed over the summer,” Jones noted, Moody had “argued that schools’ homophobic book bans are constitutional because ‘public-school systems, including their libraries, convey the government’s message, and, when the government speaks, it may ‘regulate the content of … its own message.’ ‘”

Moody “once sued Donald Trump for alleged fraud,” The Washington Post’s Aaron Blake reports.

She is currently suing Starbucks, CBS News reported, over alleged “racial quotas” that an investigative agency denies are quotas.

“Moody in May filed a complaint with the Florida Commission on Human Relations alleging that Starbucks had policies that ‘appear on their face to be racial quotas.’ But after an investigation, the commission’s executive director in November issued a determination that there was ‘no reasonable cause’ to believe that the Seattle-based coffee company violated a state anti-discrimination law,” CBS reported.

Moody’s appointment was quickly met with strong criticism.

“Ashley Moody has a long record of opposing abortion rights and even sought to keep an abortion rights amendment off of Florida’s ballot. She went further and supported threatening TV stations who played ads advocating for abortion rights,” according to Nico Delgado, the spokesperson for the liberal Super PAC American Bridge 21st Century. “Moody also sought to get the Affordable Care Act declared unconstitutional, which would hurt over 4.6 million Floridians. Moody also abused her elected position and took a lead role in efforts to overturn the 2020 election and joined the lawsuit seeking to invalidate the results. Moody supported book bans and is in the pocket of Big Oil – while ignoring climate change.”

The Florida Democratic Party Chair Nikki Fried declared Moody has “ignored the growing property insurance crisis and let wealthy corporations rip off Floridians. Instead, she spent her time chasing political attention and currying favor with the far right. She worked for over a year to silence the voices of Floridians who wanted Amendment 4 on the ballot, weaponizing state law and the Florida Constitution to score the political points that got her this appointment.”

READ MORE: ‘Concerns From Mar-a-Lago’: Speaker Johnson Boots Pro-Ukraine Intel Chair in ‘Big Shakeup’

DeSantis used the opportunity of announcing Moody’s appointment to hold a press conference to say she will “work with President Trump to deliver on the mandate he earned,” is “willing to shut the border” and will “make sure any legal immigration to this country is putting Americans first,” as CBS News reported.

He also, according to the nonprofit and nonpartisan news outlet NOTUS, said Moody has pledged that, as a Senator, she will “defund” the United Nations “once and for all.”

Moody told DeSantis she is “ready to show up and fight for this nation and fight for President Trump to deliver the ‘America First’ agenda on Day One.”

NOTUS justice reporter Jose Pagliery, in a social media thread, called Moody a “close DeSantis ally who keeps filing lawsuits for the MAGA cause.”

He adds that Moody “fought mask mandates during COVID,” has “claimed that FEMA was discriminating against Trump supporters,” and “accused the Biden administration of ‘flat out refusing to secure the border.'”

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Ron DeSantis has a dilemma - Alternet.org

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Nearly a year after the Biden administration gave Florida the green light to become the first state to import lower-cost prescription drugs from Canada — a longtime goal of politicians across the political spectrum, including President-elect Donald Trump — the program has yet to begin.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis hailed the FDA’s approval of his plan in January, calling it a victory over the drug industry, which opposes importation on the grounds that it would lead to a surge in counterfeit medications.

A Florida health official familiar with the importation program told KFF Health News there was no planned date yet for the state to begin importing drugs. The official asked not to be identified because they weren’t authorized to speak publicly about the program.

Florida applied to create an importation program in November 2020, just months after the Trump administration gave states the option. DeSantis, a Republican, complained publicly for years about the pace of the federal approval process under the Biden administration and in 2022 filed suit against the FDA for what he called a “reckless delay.”

Trump touted his administration’s move to bring medicines over the border in a preelection interview published last month by AARP, the advocacy group for older Americans, which supports allowing Americans to buy drugs from Canada. He vowed to “continue my efforts to protect Americans from unaffordable drug prices” in a second term.

It’s not clear whether his second administration will or can do more to help Florida and other states set up programs, because it’s ultimately up to the states to act. Colorado is the only other state that has an importation plan pending with the FDA.

FDA spokesperson Cherie Duvall-Jones said she could not answer whether Florida had submitted documents the agency requires before the state can start importing medicines. She referred all questions to the state.

After this article was published — and 14 weeks after KFF Health News first contacted Florida officials for comment — Alecia Collins, deputy chief of staff for the Florida Agency for Health Care Administration, said the state is “awaiting feedback from the FDA on the last of the [pharmaceutical] labels so we can move forward with the next steps for launching the program.” The FDA did not immediately respond to a follow-up request for comment.DeSantis press secretary Jeremy Redfern said he had been “slammed” since the first week of November and could not answer questions.

Drug companies typically sell medications for far less in Canada than in the United States, as a result of Canadian government price controls. But because of safety and efficacy concerns, federal law prohibits consumers from buying drugs from outside U.S. borders except in rare cases.

Politicians ranging from conservatives such as DeSantis to liberals such as Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont have long pushed for importing lower-cost prescription drugs from Canada.

In 2000, Congress passed a law allowing states to import prescription drugs from north of the border, with the caveat that it could go forward only if the secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services affirmed it was safe. That didn’t happen until 2020, when Trump’s HHS secretary, Alex Azar, made such a declaration.

Since 2022, Azar has been chairman of the board at LifeScience Logistics, a Dallas-based company that Florida is paying millions of dollars to set up its drug importation program, including warehousing its medicines.

Azar on Nov. 13 refused to answer questions from KFF Health News about drug importation, saying he wasn’t authorized to speak on the matter.

Florida’s program would not directly assist consumers at the pharmacy. It’s instead aimed at lowering costs for the state Medicaid program and for the corrections and health departments.

Matthew Baxter, a senior director at Ontario-based Methapharm Specialty Pharmaceuticals, which has contracted with LifeScience to export drugs, would not say whether Methapharm has sent any medicines over the border.

The pharmaceutical industry and the Canadian government oppose U.S. drug importation. Drug companies say importation would increase the risk of counterfeit drugs appearing on U.S. pharmacy shelves, while the government in Ottawa has warned it won’t allow medicines to be exported if Canadians could experience shortages as a result.

Florida’s predicted savings would also be relatively minor. DeSantis estimated the program would save state agencies up to $180 million in its first year. Florida’s annual Medicaid budget tops $30 billion.

Florida identified 14 drugs, including for cancer and AIDS, that it would attempt to import from Canada for its state agencies.

Camm Epstein, a health policy analyst in Saratoga Springs, New York, said drug importation is a seemingly simple concept that resonates with the public, which is why DeSantis and others have turned to the idea as a response to rising drug prices. “It riles up the crowd,” he said. “Who doesn’t want to pay lower drug costs?”

But bringing drugs over the border is complicated because of the FDA’s many requirements, including finding companies to work with — a Canadian exporter and a U.S. importer — and following a process that ensures the drugs are authentic, Epstein said.

“This was, at best, a boondoggle,” he said.

Florida has spent tens of millions of dollars to stand up its drug importation program. The state has already paid LifeScience Logistics $50 million to set up a warehouse to store the medicines. DeSantis noted the costs in his 2022 lawsuit against the FDA.

“Plaintiffs have paid their retained importer and distributor over $24 million thus far — and increasing at the rate of $1.2 million every month — even though not a single prescription pill has been imported, relabeled, or distributed, solely because of the FDA’s idleness,” the state said in its suit.

Florida’s delay may be due to operational challenges, Epstein said. “Predictably, even if they turned on the spigot there would be no flow, because Canada was not going to permit for the supply,” he said.

Colorado and Florida are among at least nine states that have passed laws allowing for Canadian drug importation. Colorado’s 2022 application to the FDA is still pending. In December 2023, Colorado officials released a report noting the state was unable to find a drugmaker willing to sell it medicines from Canada.

*KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF—an independent source of health policy research, polling, and journalism. Learn more about KFF.

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Trump's children aren't wasting any time launching new money-making opportunities after their father was elected to a second term in the White House.

According to the Daily Beast, Lara Trump – the Republican National Committee co-chair who is married to the president-elect's son, Eric — is now launching a new clothing line. Her company, LT Brand by Lara Trump Collection, is labeled "a celebration of strength, resilience and patriotism." She wrote on Instagram that it would help "American workers and factories" and that her products will be "handcrafted in the USA because I believe in bringing jobs back home and making a difference where it matters most."

The Wall Street Journal recently reported that Trump's eldest son, Donald Jr., is now going into business with a former supporter of Florida Republican Governor Ron DeSantis to specifically fund companies eschewing ESG (environmental, social and governance) philosophy. His new business partner, Omeed Malik, is a former Bank of America executive who was fired in 2018 over allegations of making unwanted advances toward female employees and was in relationships with female subordinates.

READ MORE:**Inside Donald Trump Jr.'s plan for 'building the new Republican Party': report**

Their new firm, 1789, is now seeking $100 million in startup capital with a promise to exclusively fund American companies in "response to the weaponization of capital by foreign entities." Some of the more notable board members of the company include failed Arizona U.S. Senate Republican nominee Blake Masters and Jamie McCourt, who was the U.S. Ambassador to France during Trump's first term in office.

Virginia Canter, who is the chief ethics counsel for the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, told the Journal that the Trump children's businesses raise numerous questions about how their private sector work will benefit from their familial connections.

"If it is a regulated entity, will it be given less oversight? Will they be treated differently than other regulated industries?" She said.

According to the Journal, Trump Jr. and Malik first got acquainted while doing business with the company PublicSquare, which was expressly focused on marketing to conservatives who felt alienated by more mainstream brands. Trump Jr. said on a 2023 episode of his podcast that he wanted to help PublicSquare "really get that dual economy going until the other side is willing to not be political, to not hate your guts, to not hate your freedoms, your religion, your values, until they’re willing to not jam their woke bulls— down your throats."

READ MORE:['If he was on The Apprentice right now he'd be fired': Analyst explains why Trump Jr.'s deposition matters

However, PublicSquare has yet to show any definitive proof of success. Despite having a valuation of roughly $200 million in February of 2023, the Journal reports that it has since seen its value plunge by approximately 90%, trading from around $29.80 per share down to around $2 per share in late 2024. In the first three quarters of 2024, PublicSquare posted revenue of $16 million, but losses of nearly $37 million. And the company recently laid off more than a third of its workforce.

Trump Jr. is no stranger to launching failed businesses. He's coming off of a failed cryptocurrency venture called World Liberty Financial, whose signature "gold paper" currency has an image of the president-elect's face on the front. After being unable to tap into a mass market of buyers for its tokens that can't be resold, it reduced its sales targets by 90% after just launching in September.

Lara Trump and Donald Jr. aren't the only Trump relatives to try their hand in business. Trump's son-in-law, Jared Kushner (who is married to his eldest daughter, Ivanka) runs the firm Affinity Partners out of Miami, Florida. That company has attracted billions of dollars in investments from foreign governments including Saudi Arabia and Qatar, along with money from Taiwanese billionaire Terry Gou, who founded the manufacturing giant Foxconn.

Ivanka also had her own clothing line during Trump's first term. However, she eventually shuttered it, with the Beast reporting that the Trump heiress opted to instead focus on supporting her father's administration. The Journal noted that Ivanka's decision to shut down her business was also "tired of the extra restrictions and scrutiny."

READ MORE:**Kushner firm may be 'front to funnel foreign government money' to Trump family: Senate Dem**

Click here to read the Beast's article about Lara Trump, and click here to read the Journal's full report about Trump Jr. (subscription required)

omfg desantis would pick replacement

an 11 24

If Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) is confirmed as President-elect Donald Trump's next secretary of state, it could open the door for Trump's family to get an even deeper foothold in the federal government.

Any Senate vacancy in Florida has to be filled by Governor Ron DeSantis (R) until the next election, which wouldn't happen until 2028. And MAGA is now pushing for Trump's daughter-in-law, Lara, to be appointed senator in Rubio's place should his seat become vacant. The Daily Beast reported that Lara Trump herself is now actively offering herself as a replacement for Rubio.

"This is my home state now and has been for three years," the Republican National Committee co-chair told Fox News' Sean Hannity, adding that she would "love to serve the people of Florida." Sen. Katie Britt (R-Ala.) also endorsed the idea of Lara Trump's appointment. And CBS News' Scott MacFarlane posted to the social media platform Bluesky that Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) is also reportedly on board.

READ MORE:**GOP senator suggests Trump's daughter-in-law take Marco Rubio's Senate seat**

Ric Grenell, who was Trump's acting Director of National Intelligence in his first administration, was thought to be a front-runner to helm the State Department before the news of Rubio's appointment was made public. Tara Palmieri of Puck News tweeted that DeSantis was not in the loop, and learned about Florida's senior U.S. senator being nominated as the nation's potential next top diplomat while he was on vacation in Italy.

Trump tapping Rubio to head the State Department is particularly noteworthy given that they were bitter rivals in the 2016 Republican presidential primary. In a debate, Rubio took a jab at the size of Trump's hands, implying that the billionaire reality TV star was small elsewhere. This led Trump to say there was "no problem" with the size of any of his body parts.

Political strategist and columnist Cheri Jacobus, who is a former communications staffer for the RNC, offered one potential explanation for Rubio's appointment to one of the most high-ranking Cabinet positions — "to open the seat for his daughter-in-law."

"I think that may be the main reason Trump picked Rubio," Jacobus wrote on Bluesky.

READ MORE:**Lara Trump says Project 2025 has 'productive' ideas that would be 'great for this country'**

However, not all Republicans are as enthusiastic about the prospect of Lara Trump joining the Senate. Conservative columnist Scott Morefield called it a "bridge too far" in a post on X.

"Yes, Donald Trump should get his Cabinet picks, but the Senate pick is DeSantis’, not Trump’s," Morefield wrote. "And it would be a bad idea because it would make the seat vulnerable when election time rolls around."

Like Rubio, DeSantis is also a former Trump rival, having run a short-lived campaign for the Republican nomination in 2024. The two-term Florida governor went all-in on the Iowa Caucuses, only to come up short to Trump. He suspended his campaign shortly afterward and endorsed Trump.

Click here to read the Daily Beast's report in full (subscription required).

READ MORE:[All in the family? How Marco Rubio's Senate seat could go to a DeSantis or a Trump

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===

rww 10/18/2024

by

Kyle Mantyla

On October 12th one of the most remarkable political statements of any religious leader in this or any election season was broadcast live from an all-day rally of tens of thousands of people on the Washington Mall. The event, called A Million Women, was staged by some of the leading apos

Ziklag and the Courage Tour, the far-right groups that hosted the Republican vice-presidential nominee, are charities that can’t legally intervene in political campaigns.

Last week’s MAGA-inflected spectacle cast Kamala Harris as demonic, and Trump an avatar of biblical justice.

Bigoted Christian nationalist pastor Joel Webbon declared on an Oct. 16, 2024 livestream that the world rightfully belongs to Christians, such as himself, as they were promised “dominion” over it. Webbon also stated that Christians are “destined to colonize” not just the world, but also “the stars.”

In lawsuits filed across the country, attorneys who worked to overturn Trump’s 2020 defeat are alleging rampant voting fraud.

Elections are supposed to be decided at the ballot box. But this year, Donald Trump’s campaign appears to be trying to win on a different field of battle. With dozens of lawsuits already filed across the country, the Republicans are using state and federal courts as a key pillar of their strategy to retake the White House.

Last week, a lawyer who worked for the Florida Department of Health resigned, and a letter obtained Thursday by the Miami Herald indicates that he didn’t like the state agency’s decision to prosecute television stations for airing political ads.

===

mma 10 24 no twt

A federal court issued an order blocking Florida state officials and in particular Gov. Ron DeSantis' health secretary Joseph Ladapo, from threatening TV stations over ads in support of Amendment 4, the constitutional ballot referendum that seeks to repeal Florida's near-total abortion ban, reported constitutional attorney Adam Steinbaugh.

DeSantis' administration sent letters to TV stations threatening to prosecute their employees for airing the ad, citing an obscure "sanitary nuisance" law intended to apply to physical health hazards like improperly sealed septic tanks. Specifically, they argued that the law might falsely persuade women who are eligible for abortion under health exceptions from seeking care.

The court didn't buy the argument and called out the state for violating the First Amendment right to freedom of speech.

"While Defendant Ladapo refuses to even agree with this simple fact, Plaintiff's political advertisement is political speech — speech at the core of the First Amendment," said the ruling. "The government cannot excuse its indirect censorship of political speech simply by declaring the disfavored speech 'false.'"

The ruling cited the conclusion of the Supreme Court in the 1945 case *Thomas v. Collins*: "The very purpose of the First Amendment is to foreclose public authority from assuming a guardianship of the public mind through regulating the press, speech, and religion."

"To keep it simple for the State of Florida: it's the First Amendment, stupid," the ruling continued.

This comes after a tough day of oral argument, in which U.S. District Judge Mark Walker appeared visibly exasperated with Florida attorneys' arguments that the prosecution threats against TV stations were legitimate.

---

fashy?

an 9 24

Mother Jones' Ari Berman has described ballot measures as the "last line of defense" for "fundamental rights" in states where civil liberties are under attack from far-right MAGA Republicans, and that includes ballot measures for protecting abortion rights.

One such measure is Amendment 4 in Florida, where Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a six-week abortion ban into law.

According to Florida Phoenix reporter Barrington Salmon, DeSantis and his allies are resorting to "brazen" tactics to "game the system" and "combat the referendum" — including "using state agencies and law enforcement."

READ MORE:**Dems 'going on offense' against 'vulnerable' Republicans in FL and TX to save Senate majority**

"State police are showing up at Florida voters' homes to question them about signing the abortion petitions and the Florida Agency for Health Care Administration (AHCA) has launched a website targeting the initiative with politically charged language," Salmon reports in an article published on September 27. "Critics have castigated DeSantis for using these instruments to actively resist the ballot initiative and attempt to subvert the will of the people."

Salmon adds, "By his actions, he may be violating a statute prohibiting the state 'influencing' a person's vote, as the Phoenix has reported."

But Florida Democrats, according to Salmon, are "fighting back against" DeSantis' "assertions and his claims to have found evidence of fraud."

"For example, Florida Democratic Party Chair Nikki Fried and two private citizens filed criminal complaints against the (DeSantis) Administration," Salmon explains. "And a South Florida appellate attorney has asked the Florida Supreme Court to stop DeSantis, AHCA Secretary Jason Weida, and Moody from interfering in the voting on Amendment 4. The state's highest court has agreed to expedite that case."

READ MORE:[McConnell warns GOP 'it’s over' for Republicans if Harris wins and kills Senate filibuster

*Read Barrington Levy's full Florida Phoenix report at this link.

===

===

an 9 24

A survey of professors at Florida universities found that new state government limits on tenure and academic freedom, plus the state’s political climate, have prompted many of them to apply for jobs outside the Sunshine State.

Of approximately 350 faculty working almost exclusively in Florida public institutions, 135 — 39% — reported that since 2022 they have applied for a job in higher education in another state. Popular destinations include California, Colorado, Georgia, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, and New York.

The survey, headed by Georgia branch of the American Association of University Professors Conference President Matthew Boedy, asked professors across the South how political interference like tenure limits and political vetting of course materials have affected their career outlooks.

More than 2,900 professors answered across 12 states from Aug. 12-30. Responses to the Faculty in the South Survey came from Florida, Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Texas, and Virginia.

Professor profess

Topics driving Florida professors to apply elsewhere were largely listed as “tenure issues,” as well as academic freedom, DEI, and the overall political climate.

In a free-response section, professors anonymously provided examples of how changes in tenure, contracts, and academic freedom affect their work.

Florida professors consistently highlighted post-tenure review. Approved by the Board of Governors in 2023 at the Legislature’s direction, the practice puts tenured professors under review every five years to determine their “productivity.” If deemed unsatisfactory, a professor can be terminated.

A report compiled by POLITICO shows that 91% of the 861 public professors who underwent tenure review met or exceeded expectations laid out for them. Some earned bonuses. Professors who did not meet expectations, 64 of them, must show improvement during the next year or face termination. More severe, 10 faculty members statewide had “unsatisfactory” performance and were terminated.

Professors spoke out forcefully against the reviews before they took effect last year, and this year’s survey results reflect that sentiment hasn’t shifted.

“Though I am not in direct danger from [post-tenure review], I am now eying the door,” one professor wrote.

“I traded off a higher salary and choice of where I wanted to live, among other things, for academia and its promise that I would be allowed to use my expertise to the best of my ability for my students and the good of society. But this bargain doesn’t hold anymore. The governor and university leaders hold their own faculty in suspicion and contempt. They are actively working to destroy lifelong careers. Tenure is definitely gone, and academic freedom is on life support. It’s time to go.”

‘Anti-woke policies’

Another professor said Gov. Ron DeSantis brags about Florida’s top ranking in higher education by U.S. News & World Report but neglects other topics.

“Rather than working on real problems … the governor keeps looking for more unconstitutional ‘anti-woke’ policies he can implement. Morale among faculty at my institution is the lowest I have seen in more than two decades of working in higher education.”

The Wall Steet Journal released its annual rankings of public universities Monday and it showed Florida’s institutions tumbling in the rankings, including the University of Florida losing its #1 spot.

More than two-thirds of respondents to Boedy’s survey said the effect has been a reduction in applications to join their departments or institutions.

One professor said she recently left a “BIG FL state school in Orlando” because the school “did not defend academic freedom” and did not give a pay raise for the 2023-2024 school year.

“My institution also allowed for post-tenure review to go into effect. I am a new scholar (PhD earned within the last five years), and, frankly, there was no viable reason to stay at that institution,” she said.

“No raise? No tenure (post-tenure review effectively nullifies some of the more important tenure protections)? Not being allowed to teach things from a “non-Western” point of view? My administration cowing to politicians? For real, what incentive is there to stay in FL in higher ed?”

Touting tenure review

DeSantis claimed during the Republican National Convention that Florida universities are “bringing in huge amounts of talent.” Something “maybe even more important” that, he added, is that Florida was “the first state to eliminate DEI” and was implementing post-tenure review.

DeSantis said the rule “is now allowing us to kind of get academia focused on the classical mission of pursuing truth, preparing students to be citizens of this republic, high standards, not be some type of an indoctrination camp.”

He added: “Some of these professors that were unproductive and had their other agendas, they’ve gotten processed out. The media will be like, ‘These professors are fleeing Florida.’ Wait a minute — if Marxist professors are leaving Florida, that is not bad for Florida, that is good for Florida.”

The legislative changes implementing post-tenure review were led by two state senators who now serve as Florida Department of Education officials: public schools Commissioner Manny Diaz Jr. and university system Chancellor Ray Rodrigues.

During implementation of post-tenure review, DeSantis asserted that “unproductive” tenured professors are the “most significant deadweight costs” for Florida universities, the Phoenix previously reported.

More than 80% of professors said in the survey that they would not recommend a graduate student or out-of-state faculty seek employment in Florida.

“The governor of the state of Florida and his university oversight (BOG) have purposely misled the public about higher education,” one professor wrote.

“They are deceiving the public about what is taught, the implications of how ideas are communicated, and the outcomes of higher education. Their desire is for a college degree to simply be vocational education to prepare students to be ‘cogs in a machine’ rather than employees who understand social, political, and economic factors that have affected the ways employee rights have changed over the years.”

The state Legislature passed the Stop WOKE Act in 2022, which the state argues allows it to forbid college professors from criticizing the governor or teach concepts surrounding race, racism, and privilege.

Uploading a different syllabus

The effects of that law and related efforts by the state government have left professors bowdlerizing their courses.

“We literally upload a different syllabus to the public system than we distribute to our students in class just to avoid having to explain every single detail of it to some draconian maniac from the state legislature,” one professor submitted in the survey.

Another professor pointed out that the Math for Liberal Arts course name was changed to eliminate the word “liberal” to comply with state requirements.

“I no longer feel safe teaching works about Jewishness (I am Jewish) because my university is datamining our Canvas courses for mentions of words like Jew, Jewish, Palestine, Israel etc.,” one professor wrote, referring to an August order from Rodrigues to universities, asking them to review courses that may contain antisemitic material.

One professor said he is being censored from “telling legitimate truths,” and that “what we are seeing from our state government is deeply hegemonic and antithetical to the purpose of higher education.”

He said: “Even though I have been highly successful in a major state university in Florida, I am actively seeking faculty, administrative, and nonprofit jobs in other states. Florida has become toxic to anyone who believes in freedom of inquiry, freedom of speech, and the need to expose students to critical inquiry and a diversity of viewpoints.”

Another professor said she feels “hampered” in teaching contentious issues. “Respect for education to teach critical thinking skills is tanking,” she wrote.

“I can’t advocate safely for students and human rights. I worry my ‘Freedom of Speech’ isn’t so ‘free’ now,” another professor wrote.

During the post-tenure review policy approval process, professors warned that universities might struggle to recruit faculty if it were approved. Now, professors responding to the survey report, that prediction has come true and pools of candidates for many positions are mere fractions of what there were before the political focus on education intensified.

One professor said educators’ work is more relevant than the governor’s and that noise about Florida education seems to come more from outside the state.

“People outside the state seem to have more negative things to say about the state of higher education in Florida than those who actually work and live here,” he wrote.

“Judging a university by whether one likes the governor or not is both short sighted and politically biased in its own way. This is why we have elections and term limits in this country. The most relevant and important work happens in the classroom not the governor’s mansion.”

Across all states surveyed, a majority of respondents said they were deeply dissatisfied with the state of higher education, and 48.9% have noticed a decrease in the number of applicants for professor jobs.

Investigating impacts

Education policy in recent years drove Boedy, an associate professor at the University of North Georgia, to research the effect on those who teach.

“I wanted to do this survey of faculty in the South because I wanted lawmakers and policymakers and those who attack higher education to understand the impacts of those attacks,” Boedy said in an interview with the Phoenix.

“As you can see from the results of the 12 states, many faculty are feeling not just attacked but are feeling that they can’t do their jobs well and many are considering leaving their state. Those attacks from outside of higher education and within higher education have real impacts and I wanted the survey to show that.”

Boedy said the range in salary and experience in responses provides a “good picture of faculty across the 12 states.”

Florida Phoenix is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Florida Phoenix maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Michael Moline for questions: info@floridaphoenix.com. Follow Florida Phoenix on Facebook and X.

===

((( NOTE HOW FLORIDA HARMED BY CULTURE WAS WEDGE BS

3/24

wASHINGTON (AP) — A new Biden administration rule that sets tougher standards for deadly soot pollution faced a barrage of legal challenges Wednesday, as 25 Republican-led states and a host of business groups filed lawsuits seeking to block the rule in court.

Twenty-four states, led by attorneys general from Kentucky and West Virginia, filed a joint challenge stating that new Environmental Protection Agency rule would raise costs for manufacturers, utilities and families and could block new manufacturing plants and infrastructure such as roads and bridges. Texas filed a separate suit, as did business groups led by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and National Association of Manufacturers.

“The EPA’s new rule has more to do with advancing President (Joe) Biden’s radical green agenda than protecting Kentuckians’ health or the environment, said Kentucky Attorney General Russell Coleman, who is leading the joint lawsuit along with West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey.

The EPA rule “will drive jobs and investment out of Kentucky and overseas, leaving employers and hardworking families to pay the price,” Coleman said.

READ MORE

Watchdog: EPA’s lead pipe fix sent about $3 billion to states based on unverified data

Racial bias did not shape Mississippi’s water funding decisions for capital city, EPA says

US’s largest public utility ignores warnings in moving forward with new natural gas plant

The soot rule is one of several EPA dictates under attack from industry groups and Republican-led states. The Supreme Court heard arguments last month on a GOP challenge to the agency’s “good neighbor rule,” which restricts smokestack emissions from power plants and other industrial sources that burden downwind areas.

Three energy-producing states — Ohio, Indiana and West Virginia — challenged the rule, along with the steel industry and other groups, calling it costly and ineffective. The rule is on hold in a dozen states because of the court challenges.

In opposing the soot rule, Republicans and industry groups say the United States already has some of the strictest air quality standards in the world — tougher than the European Union or major polluters such as China and India.

Tightening U.S. standards “wouldn’t improve public health, but it would put as many as 30% of all U.S. counties out of compliance under federal law, leading to aggressive new permitting requirements that could effectively block new economic activity,’' Coleman said.

The EPA rule sets maximum levels of fine particle pollution — more commonly known as soot — at 9 micrograms per cubic meter of air, down from 12 micrograms established a decade ago under the Obama administration.

Environmental and public health groups hailed the rule as a major step to improve the health of Americans, including future generations. EPA scientists have estimated exposure at previous limits contributed to thousands of early deaths from heart disease and lung cancer, along with other health problems.

EPA Administrator Michael Regan said the new soot rule, finalized last month, would create $46 billion in net health benefits by 2032, including prevention of up to 800,000 asthma attacks and 4,500 premature deaths. The rule will especially benefit children, older adults and those with heart and lung conditions, Regan said, as well as people in low-income and minority communities adversely affected by decades of industrial pollution.

“We do not have to sacrifice people to have a prosperous and booming economy,″ Regan said.

Biden is seeking reelection, and some fellow Democrats have warned that a tough new soot standard could harm his chances in key industrial states such as Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin.

The EPA and White House officials brushed aside those concerns, saying the industry has developed technical improvements to meet previous soot standards and can adapt to meet the new ones. Soot pollution has declined by 42% since 2000, even as the U.S. gross domestic product has increased by 52%, Regan said.

The new rule does not impose pollution controls on specific industries. Instead, it lowers the annual standard for fine particulate matter for overall air quality. The EPA will use air sampling to identify counties and other areas that do not meet the new standard. States would then have 18 months to develop compliance plans for those areas. States that do not meet the new standard by 2032 could face penalties, although EPA said it expects that 99% of U.S. counties will be able to meet the revised annual standard by 2032.

Industry groups and Republican officials dispute that and say a lower soot limit could put hundreds of U.S. counties out of compliance.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce warned the White House in January that 43% of total particulate emissions come from wildfires, and called the pollution standard “the wrong tool to address this problem.’'

The EPA said it will work with states, counties and tribes to account for and respond to wildfires, an increasing source of soot pollution, especially in the West, where climate change has led to longer wildfire seasons, with more frequent and intense fires. The agency allows states and air agencies to request exemptions from air-quality standards due to “exceptional events,” including wildfires and prescribed fires.

Besides Kentucky, West Virginia and Texas, other states challenging the EPA rule include: Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Utah and Wyoming.

All three cases were filed before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia.

an 6 24

Florida Republican Governor Ron DeSantis earlier this week cut millions of dollars in arts and culture from the Sunshine State's budget over a beloved Tampa-based festival the governor believes is too "sexual," according to The Guardian.

Per the report, Desantis refused to elaborate during a Thursday press conference on what he meant by "they're doing all this stuff" at the 10-day "Tampa fringe" festival that promotes inclusivity.

Margaret Ledford, who serves as artistic director for City Theatre Miami — a group for middle school students that "lost a $47,000 grant" due to DeSantis' move — said the more than $32 million in funding cuts is "going to be a combination of everything, from tightening our programming and salaries, and going to our patrons, once again, for donations."

READ MORE:**GOP’s 'extremist agenda' could put Florida in play for Biden — and sink Trump: analysis**

"You can’t say gay, you can’t do anything he considers woke, and the word climate change has been taken out of state statutes," she said.

Ledford added, "We’re also trying to figure out how we reach the students of the community if we can’t talk about things they need to talk about in schools. If we bring in a play with a gay character, we can do that because we’re theater, but whose job are we putting in jeopardy if a student then asks a question of a teacher?"

Creative Pinellas' chief executive Margaret Murray, according to the news outlet, slammed the "unprecedented, wide-ranging veto of grants to almost 700 groups and organizations."

It's "incredibly disheartening," she said.

READ MORE:**'Negligent': Ron DeSantis slammed for vetoing bill to warn beachgoers of pollution**

"According to a recent report by the Florida Cultural Alliance, every $1 spent on the arts generates $9 in economic activity," Murray said. "Unfortunately, there is little recourse to reverse the state’s decision, but we do still have a voice. Please continue supporting the artists and arts organizations. Now is the time to buy that piece of artwork or purchase tickets to the play you recently heard about. Collectively, we can amplify our advocacy for the arts and make our voices heard."

*The Guardian's full report is available here.

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an 6 24

A law Florida Republican Governor Ron DeSantis signed after the 2020 election has caused a significant decrease in the amount of voters who can receive mail-in ballots ahead of the 2024 election, according to Politico.

Per Politico, "The plunge occurred after GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a wide-ranging election law in 2021 that required all standing vote-by-mail requests to be canceled after the 2022 elections. Both parties and election supervisors have tried over the last several months to build up awareness of the change, but it’s not clear if that message is sinking in with voters."

Although both GOP and Democratic voters are both experiencing the impact, the news outlet reports the the law "could prove devastating" especially for the latter, :who have embraced mail-in voting since 2020 as the Republican Party nationally has raced away from it."

READ MORE:Election denialism embraced by 'large proportion' of Trump’s followers: report

Florida Democratic Party chair Nikki Fred told Politico, "It’s definitely inconvenient and unfortunately we have to start all over again. It’s a waste of everyone’s resources to get access to voting."

The news outlet also notes:

Florida used to allow vote-by-mail requests to remain valid for two election cycles, but GOP legislators changed the law in the session following the 2020 elections. Starting in 2023, mail-in ballot requests expired at the end of December following a general election. The law signed by DeSantis was part of a wave of changes that Republicans made in the aftermath of the election where former President Donald Trump made false claims about widespread voter fraud.*

GOP consultant Ryan Tyson — who Politico reports is one of DeSantis' own advisers — has been negatively impacted by the change in the law.

Tyson wasn't able to vote in the Republican presidential primary.

READ MORE:Trump may have to go crawling to DeSantis for help if convicted: expert

"I was in another state the day of the primary," the DeSantis adviser said. "I was in Colorado when I tried to request one and was notified I missed the window."

Politico reports the state's "local election supervisors have tried to alert voters that their vote-by-mail requests had been canceled and that they need to make new requests, but so far have seen only limited success."

Although the change hurts the state's Democratic Party, Politico reports, "The Republican base’s aversion to mail-in voting has hurt the party across the country, both in the midterms and in critical off-year elections. Republicans elsewhere have haltingly started to encourage voters to embrace the method, even as Trump’s attacks continue."

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an 5 24

fla Republican Governor Ron DeSantis last year recruited thousands of public school teachers and paid them thousands of dollars out of taxpayer funds to attend training on teaching what he called “civics,” but a report states the program focused on “the tenets of Christian nationalism,” and included at least one quote from the Christian bible.

“Training materials produced by the Florida Department of Education direct middle and high school teachers to indoctrinate students in the tenets of Christian nationalism, a right-wing effort to merge Christian and American identities,” Popular Information founder Judd Legum revealed in his exclusive report Tuesday.

“A three-day training course on civic education, conducted throughout Florida in the summer of 2023, included a presentation on the ‘Influences of the Judeo-Christian Tradition’ on the founding of the United States,” Legum writes. “According to speaker notes accompanying one slide, teachers were told that ‘Christianity challenged the notion that religion should be subservient to the goals of the state,’ and the same hierarchy is reflected in America’s founding documents. That slide quotes the Bible to assert that ‘[c]ivil government must be respected, but the state is not God.’ Teachers were told the same principle is embedded in the Declaration of Independence.”

Legum included a screenshot from the training that bears the logos of the Florida Department of Education and DeSantis’ “Civics Literacy Excellence Initiative.”

READ MORE: Supreme Court ‘Puppetmaster’ Slammed Over Report He’s Flying Alito’s ‘Theocratic’ Flag Again

It reads in part: “‘Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s; and unto God the things that are God’s.’ Matthew 22:21.”

“The next slide in the deck,” Legum continues, “quotes an article by Peter Lillback, the president of Westminster Theological Seminary and the founder of The Providence Forum, an organization that promotes and defends Christian nationalism. The group’s executive director, Jerry Newcombe, writes a weekly column for World Net Daily— a far-right site known for publishing hundreds of stories falsely suggesting Obama was a Muslim born in Africa.”

That slide “argues that there would be no freedom, no republic, and no constitution without religion. The speaker notes accompanying the slide emphasize that ‘the separation of Church and State did not mean the separation of God and government,’ and all the founders were ‘steeped in the Judeo-Christian tradition.'”

In a March of 2023 press release, DeSantis’s office trumpeted: “Today, Governor Ron DeSantis highlighted Florida’s continued commitment to expanding civics education in Florida schools and announced that the first 4,500 teachers have completed the Civics Seal of Excellence endorsement course and will receive a $3,000 bonus.”

The statement claimed the course was “at capacity with 20,000 teachers making their commitment to civics education, and there are additional 14,000 teachers on the waiting list for this first of a kind civics teacher professional development program.”

READ MORE: Trump’s Bronx Rally Attendance Claim Fuels Mockery as Aerial Images Show a Different Story

It also pointed to a 2022 program, saying “Florida’s Civic Literacy Excellence Initiative also included a three-day Civics Excellence teacher training course in the summer of 2022 for teachers to increase their knowledge of civics in addition to the creation of supplemental materials for civics lessons including the Civics Reading List and the Portraits of Patriotism video series to further student interaction with civics.”

Some teachers called that 2022 program’s teachings “cherry-picked,” NBC News (video below) reported at the time. Others were “shocked to learn what they were expected to teach their students.”

“They told us what to think and what our opinions were,” one teacher told NBC News, calling it “very unsettling.”

One slide in that program NBC News reported claimed it is a “misconception” that “The Founders desired strict separation of church and state and the Founders only wanted to protect freedom of worship.”

In 2022 The Washington Post reported, “New civics training for Florida public school teachers comes with a dose of Christian dogma, some teachers say, and they worry that it also sanitizes history and promotes inaccuracies.”

Watch that NBC News video below or at this link.

===

an 5 24

DeSantis’ homeschooling push leaves FL teachers with 'empty seats and budget crunches'](https://www.alternet.org/desantis-school-choice-politico/)

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AHA NOTE ENABLED BY FOX bs GAS STOVES OFFSHORE WIND

an 5 24

florida Gov. Ron DeSantis on Wednesday signed a bill that erases most references to climate change in state law, deprioritizes it in policy decisions, and eases regulations for natural gas pipelines while banning offshore wind installations in state waters.}:

DeSantis signed the bill despite the fact that Florida is one of the most vulnerable regions in the world to the climate crisis—both from sea-level rise and extreme weather such as heatwaves and hurricanes. Indeed, on the day of the signing, Key West tied for its highest heat index on record at 115°C, heat that was made at least five times more likely because of the burning of fossil fuels.

"This purposeful act of cognitive dissonance is proof that the governor and state Legislature are not acting in the best interests of Floridians, but rather to protect profits for the fossil fuel industry," Yoca Arditi-Rocha, executive director of climate education nonprofit the Cleo Institute, toldThe Associated Press.

The bill's opponents told APthat it exes out nine references to climate currently on the books. It also takes steps to promote fossil gas—which already provides nearly three-quarters of Florida's electricity—and makes it harder to ban gas stoves and other appliances.

Further, AP reported:

The legislation also eliminates requirements that government agencies hold conferences and meetings in hotels certified by the state's environmental agency as "green lodging" and that government agencies make fuel efficiency the top priority in buying new vehicles. It also ends a requirement that Florida state agencies look at a list of "climate-friendly" products before making purchases.

The law, which goes into effect July 1, "is very much out of line with public opinion," Greg Knecht, director of the Nature Conservancy in Florida, toldThe Washington Post.A full 90% of Floridians believe climate change is occurring, 69% of them want the state government to act on it, a Florida Atlantic University survey found.

Florida is already seeing the impacts of the climate crisis from Wednesday's high heat and humidity in the Keys to last year's Hurricane Idalia. Moving forward, Florida was ranked 10th in a list of states or provinces with the most physical infrastructure at risk from climate impacts by 2050.

"This feels like Act 1 of a Greek tragedy," the Environmental Voter Project wrote on social media in response to the signing.

Knecht told the Postthat DeSantis and Florida's Republican-controlled Legislature were willing to address the effects of the climate crisis—the governor earmarked more than $28 million to study flooding vulnerability in each county last year—but would not acknowledge the cause of the problem or discuss solutions that involved reducing emissions.

"On one hand, we recognize that we're seeing flooding and we're seeing property damage and we're seeing hurricanes, and we're conveying to the public that we can build our way out of these problems," Knecht said. "And then on the other hand, we're turning around and saying, 'Yeah, but climate change isn't really real, and we don't need to do anything about it.'"

This may partly be because, as green advocates told Post, the climate crisis has become a culture war issue that DeSantis can use to attract media attention and right-wing voters, as he has done with high-profile attacks on abortion rights and LGBTQ+ rights.

Others blamed the influence of the fossil fuel industry.

"Fossil fuel companies don't like competing with clean energy," Democratic Florida Senate candidate Carlos Guillermo Smith wrote on social media. "So they donated to Ron DeSantis who signed a law that bans offshore wind, eliminates energy efficiency grant programs, and deletes any reference to 'climate change' from state statute."

"GOP = Profits over people always," Smith said.

Progress Florida wrote: "While Gov. Ron DeSantis does the dirty work of corporate polluters, Floridians are left to suffer as the state becomes more unaffordable and the natural treasures of the people who have farmed, hunted, and worshipped here for generations are destroyed

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