This Republican ghoul should look both ways before crossing angry Floridians further

No doubt Gov. Ron DeSantis expects Floridians to be grateful for saving us from yet another woke attack on decency, probity, and speeding motorists.

I refer, of course, to colorful crosswalks.

Just as he has fought to expel books by Black and gay authors from our schools, the governor has ordered the Florida Department of Transportation (FDOT) to paint over the flowers, the sunbursts, the fish, the musical notes, and the rainbows — especially the rainbows.

We want guns in our streets, not rainbows.

Speaking of guns, one of the first crosswalks to be destroyed was the one outside the Pulse Memorial.

You may recall that in 2016 a gunman murdered 49 people at an LGBTQ+ nightclub in Orlando.

The rainbow crosswalk was intended to honor them.

DeSantis, however, views it as some sort of personal insult.

His political future looks distinctly unpromising AND his wife’s gubernatorial campaign lies in ruins after the Hope Florida scandal. Environmental activists won a temporary shutdown of his Everglades gulag, though an appeals court is allowing it to stay open for now.

I mean, nobody likes the guy, but, by God, he can still teach crosswalks a sharp lesson.

“We will not allow our state roads to be commandeered for political purposes,” he said.

Except the crosswalks were not “commandeered.” Like most painted crosswalks in Florida, the Pulse rainbow was supported by the city government and the citizens.

FDOT itself had approved it.

But in late August, FDOT turned up in the dead of night and ground it off the road.

But this kind of pointless vandalism is happening across the state.

At least a dozen schools in Tampa will see their “Crosswalks to Classrooms” school crossings destroyed, including one painted to look like a shelf of books.

Florida’s government is particularly scared of books.

‘Political ideologies’

Hearts commemorating a young girl who died of a heart condition in Port St. Lucie; checkerboards in Daytona near the raceway; “Back the Blue” in Hillsborough County; bike lanes in Orange County, painted by kids who won an FDOT art contest to design them — all either already gone or about to be.

Florida Transportation Secretary Jared Perdue vows to “keep our transportation facilities free and clear of political ideologies.”

As if violating free expression in cities and towns across the state is not the product of a “political ideology.”

DeSantis says painted crosswalks promote “social, political, or ideological messages” and must be obliterated.

That’s one of his excuses. He’s got more.

The governor claims he has no choice but to enforce a new law — a law he signed — allowing FDOT to withhold funds for road projects and “traffic control” if cities and counties don’t follow orders.

Thing is, FDOT always had the power to forbid street art. That’s why communities wanting to paint a crosswalk sought and received permission — from FDOT.

Now, you could argue that the wrong kind of paint could create a slippery surface.

Crosswalk painters know this and generally use acrylic or other paints that bond to the asphalt.

You could argue brightly colored crosswalks give people trying to cross the street a false sense of security, leading them to just hop out into the road without looking to see what maniac in an F-150 is barreling toward them.

Except the data do not support that contention.

You could argue drivers encountering images of sunflowers or fish or “Black Lives Matter” on the road will be so discombobulated trying to read and interpret the art, they’ll become reckless.

Remember, FDOT said yes to those cheery, often clever, crosswalks.

Distracted drivers?

The crosswalks only got dangerous this spring.

Now, as the law says, “Non-standard surface markings, signage and signals that do not contribute directly to traffic safety or control can lead to distraction or misunderstandings, jeopardizing both driver and pedestrian safety.”

The state’s assumption that drivers aren’t already distracted is demonstrably false, as every human who has ever operated a car in this state knows.

Whether they’re behind the wheel of a beat-up Kia or 4,000-pound Mercedes SUV, people frequently struggle to heed FDOT’s “standard surface markings and signage,” including the scarlet octagon that says “STOP.”

Nevertheless, research indicates they are unlikely to lose control of the vehicle contemplating a pink, blue, and green-stiped crosswalk.

What they might do is slow the hell down. A national study shows street art has contributed to a 50% reduction in crashes involving vehicles and pedestrians.

In Leon County, the Knight Creative Communities Institute worked with Florida State University and local government to determine whether brightly painted crosswalks might get people to drive the speed limit near schools.

Sure enough, brightly painted crosswalks did indeed cause Tallahassee drivers — not noted for their adherence to posted speed limits — to ease up on the accelerator.

Unless you just moved to Florida from Inner Mongolia, you know what’s actually going on here.

Bike lanes and walkways designed and painted by school kids, and crosswalks celebrating a city’s history or its natural beauty or demonstrating its commitment to inclusivity, somehow threaten DeSantis’ commitment to Beijing-style state control.

Children must not grow up in the Free State Florida feeling free to create or express themselves or engage in their community.

‘Conform’

Asked during a press conference what he’d tell Florida children now watching grown people destroying their art, DeSantis said, “We have a representative system of government. People elect their representatives. They’re able to enact the legislation with the governor’s signature and then when that happens, obviously, people will conform their conduct accordingly.”

Hear that, kids? “Conform” your conduct and chant the mandated Pledge of Allegiance every morning.

DeSantis means to bully the people of this state from Perdido Bay to the Dry Tortugas: Expressions of dissent, assertions, of common humanity, civic pride, beauty, and joy will not be tolerated.

The people of Pensacola have been told the large “Black Lives Matter” painting on A Street, the words spelled out with flags of nations that have contributed to Florida culture, is verboten.

God forbid Black people think their lives matter.

This is not a popular decision: The mayor says Pensacola will comply, but city resources are stretched pretty thin, so if the state really wants to rid the place of a “Black Lives Matter” painting, FDOT might have to handle it themselves.

As for LGBTQ+ folks and their aggressive use of the color wheel, state policy is to erase both the pigmentation and the people.

Remove “gay” books from the library, pull courses out of college catalogs, and scrub rainbows off the streets.

Remember the great essay “The Cruelty is the Point” by Adam Serwer?

The Atlantic published it in the early days of Donald Trump’s first term, but it’s just as relevant now: insulting, attacking, undermining, performative hatred — this how the regimes in both Washington and Tallahassee rule us.

Resistance

Authoritarians want to control every aspect of our culture, no matter how seemingly inconsequential.

No shot is too cheap, no attack too petty: FDOT has just ripped out road signs on Longboat Key.

The road signs identified Longboat Key’s main drag as “Gulf of Mexico Drive,” its name since 1957.

The regime wants it changed.

The entire world calls the body of water along Florida’s west coast the Gulf of Mexico.

However, I’m happy to report, not all Floridians acquiesce in this name-changing nonsense.

Some elderly residents of Tallahassee’s Westminster Oaks faced down a county road crew as it was scraping the paint off the yellow and green crosswalk by their retirement community.

Children at the nearby W.T. Moore Elementary School had painted it.

Around 30 seniors arrived on golf carts and walkers. An 85-year old lady lay down on the crosswalk and the road crew retreated.

But only temporarily.

Delray Beach and Key West are vigorously resisting DeSantis’ attempt to destroy their rainbow crosswalks, as is Fort Lauderdale, which is demanding an FDOT hearing.

Fort Lauderdale’s mayor declared, “We must stand our ground. We cannot allow us to be bullied into submission and to allow others to dictate what we should do in our own communities.”

In Orlando, the resistance grows louder and more determined.

After the state wrecked the Pulse rainbow crosswalk, hundreds of protesters re-colored the rainbow.

FDOT painted the new rainbow black.

Protesters colored it in again.

FDOT put up signs saying, “No Impeding Traffic,” and, “Defacing Roadway Prohibited,” and called in city cops and the Highway Patrol.

You’d think they’d be lurking in a Home Depot parking lot rounding up Brown people. At least four people have been arrested.

They were armed — with water-soluble chalk.

Babysitters

I’d be willing to bet these law enforcement officers signed up to fight crime, bust bad guys, and keep communities safe, not protect a 10-foot wide hunk of road.

One man, a survivor of the Pulse nightclub massacre, observed on social media: “More officers babysitting the crosswalk than there were security guards watching the front door of Pulse the night 49 people were murdered. By a lot.”

Our tax dollars at work.

I have news for Ron DeSantis and the dead-eyed myrmidons who carry out his narrow-minded whims: You can’t pray the gay away, nor can you paint over it.

You can’t quash children’s creativity.

You can’t surgically remove people of color from our history.

You can’t outlaw rainbows.

Just as FSU’s football team was putting the finishing flourishes on its win over the Alabama Crimson Tide, the sun came out. To the west, a glorious rainbow arced across the Tallahassee sky.

I’m waiting for DeSantis to declare the heavens “woke.”

Here's the sinister truth behind Florida's flourishing book bans

It’s Banned Books Week in Florida!

OK, the observance is in October, but it’s always Banned Books Week in Florida. Every day seems to bring another hissy fit from a state goon or “concerned” parent hell-bent on returning us to the glory days of censorship.

Hillsborough County School Superintendent Van Ayres has been attacked by parents and shouted at by state government for failing to remove materials chest-thumping Attorney General James Uthmeier claims are “pornographic“ from school libraries.

Ayres already had two books — Call Me By Your Name, a gay romance with some sex scenes, and Jack of Hearts (and Other Parts), which has no sex scenes — taken off the shelves.

That was not enough for Uthmeier and some of the school board’s more hysterical members. So, in an abundance of caution, Ayres had 600 more removed from schools for a “review,” estimated to cost $350,000.

It was not enough: During a June school board meeting, one member called many surviving books “nasty and disgusting,” and another, obviously in need of smelling salts, said, “I, as a 56-year-old woman, mother of five and a physician, can’t look at these pages.”

She wants heads to roll:

“Have you considered firing all your media specialists and starting from scratch with women and men who can read, or have a single shred of decency? These people that you trust to review these materials are abusing the children of your county. They’re child abusers.”

Here are some of those child-abusing materials: The Diary of Anne Frank, What Girls Are Made Of, The Bluest Eye, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Slaughterhouse Five, and The Handmaid’s Tale.

Women and men who can — and do — read will know the authors of those books include a Booker Prize winner, a National Book Award winner, winner of a Presidential Medal of Freedom, and a Nobel Prize laureate.

Obviously, a bunch of perverts and losers.

‘Overbroad and unconstitutional’

The good news is that some at that ambush of a meeting objected to the objections.

One parent said it was not the state’s responsibility to decide what books her kid should have access to, it was hers: “Don’t tell me that it’s inappropriate if I think it’s appropriate for my child to read.”

The chair of the school board also took exception to the abuse heaped on school librarians (annoyingly now called “media specialists”) who are, in fact, experts in “age-appropriate” materials.

The even better news is that a federal judge has struck down the worst parts of Gov. Ron DeSantis’ pet book-banning law as “overbroad and unconstitutional.”

A gaggle of big publishers including Simon and Schuster, Hachette, HarperCollins, Penguin Random House, plus a bunch of well-known authors and hacked-off parents, sued over the state’s vague decree that if a text “describes sexual conduct” it’s “pornographic.”

U.S. District Judge Carlos Mendoza, probably trying hard not to roll his eyes, pointed out the state can’t seem to define what they mean by “sexual conduct”: Consensual intercourse? A kiss? A rape? A seductive conversation? A hand sliding down (or up) to touch certain body parts which may or may not be named? Joyous marital congress?

The state’s arguments boiled down to:

  • If a parent or random Moms for Liberty busybody think something is obscene and therefore an assault on the Moral Fiber of Our Youth, it is, even if they can’t quite get specific about what that means. They know obscenity when they see it, by golly.
  • Books in public school libraries should promote “government speech,” i.e., the views espoused by the DeSantis regime.

Views such as, say, gays are not good; trans people are worse; sex outside of marriage is terrible; authority should not be questioned; climate change should not be studied.

Legal fees

According the state, “When the government speaks, it ‘can freely select the views that it wants to express, including choosing not to speak and speaking through the removal of speech that the government disapproves.”

According to DeSantis’ lawyers, school books are “not subject to the First Amendment.”

You thought free speech was protected in the Free State of Florida?

In 2023, PEN America file a lawsuit against the Escambia County School District for removing or restricting access to books some people found objectionable. Escambia keeps losing in court, but that hasn’t stopped them from continuing to spend taxpayer money: at least $440,000. So far. To make an obvious point, think about the field trips and school supplies that cash could have funded.

What’s all this book banning really about, anyway?

Authoritarianism for authoritarianism’s sake? That’s probably part of it. Bullies love to bully.

Does it spring from deeply held religious notions of “purity” which hold that any exposure to what some people see as “immoral” words or images will pollute the minds of innocent children?

Y’all might remember the embarrassing kerfluffle at a Tallahassee charter school over showing students one of the great achievements of Western art.

The teacher leading a unit on the Renaissance had the temerity to display a picture of Michelangelo’s statue of David. Some parents freaked out: You could see David’s junk!

As if half the planet does not sport similar junk.

Consider And Tango Makes Three, the famous true story of two male penguins raising a chick at New York’s Central Park Zoo. That book has been snatched off library shelves all over Florida because, well, maybe because it could encourage tolerance toward flightless birds?

Fear factor

The banners seem to think stories with a gay hero or a trans character will turn kids gay or trans.

These people do not assume stories with gun violence will turn kids into mass shooters. But books telling the truth about Native American genocide and slavery will make kids question the essential virtue of America. Biographies of Malcolm X or Martin Luther King or novels by Ralph Ellison or Alice Walker will make white kids feel guilty.

It’s true the Left has been known to criticize certain books — The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and To Kill a Mockingbird, for racist language, or Lolita for its depiction of pedophilia — but rarely demand they be deep-sixed altogether.

Still, nobody can take away the Right’s title as the undisputed heavyweight champs of the book banning world.

Here’s the real reason for MAGA animosity to books: Fear.

They are scared of an America where white is not the default ethnicity, Christianity is not the dominant religion, heterosexuality is only one kind of “normal,” and history is a complicated tangle of high ideals and low crimes. They cannot bear the thought their children will grow up in the 21st century when all they cherished as solid and eternal can be questioned, even discarded.

So, they fight for control.

Until March of this year, a website called BookLooks, founded by a member of Moms for Liberty, touted a ratings system for books it deemed unsuitable for decent eyeballs.

BookLooks has shut down, saying that “after much prayer and reflection it has become apparent that His work for us here is complete and that He has other callings for us.” However, the ratings system is still all over the Web, with “0″ (no sex, no swearing, no nudity, no booze or drugs), to “4″ denoting a text with “depictions of sexual organs in a state of arousal” plus oral sex of every kind.

Level 5, “Aberrant Content,” means stuff so filthy (“sadomasochistic abuse, assault, and ‘beastiality’” (sic) it’d burn the retinas of a saint.

‘Book of Books’

Take a look at the Moms’ Book of Books, a document that is at once alarming, absurd, and not a little prurient.

It quotes carefully curated and utterly out of context scenes of sex and sexual assault from Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye or Yaa Gyaasi’s Homegoing. (Newsflash: in a novel about slavery, you’re pretty much going to encounter sexual assault.)

They react with horror at novels about kids coming to terms with being gay, such as The Perks of Being a Wallflower. They declare books dangerous for supposedly promoting “alternative gender ideologies.”

The Book of Books also lavishly shares sex act image after sex act image from graphic novels including The Handmaid’s Tale and Maia Kobabe’s Gender Queer. That stuff is, admittedly, pretty raw, even hard to look at. However, you can’t help wondering why they couldn’t have done with just two or three explicit pictures — and whether the compilers were getting a naughty thrill out of the whole thing.

We expect the Moms and their ilk to freak out over sex of any flavor, but even more of their ire has been directed at references to race, which they label “controversial social commentary” or just “hate.” They don’t mean “hate” as in scenes of racist violence or oppression of people of color. They mean people of color daring to expose or criticize or otherwise express strong disapproval of racism.

‘Nasty white folks’

Adding to the many transgressions of The Bluest Eye, they point to this sentence: “Nasty white folks is about the nastiest things they is.”

In Angie Thomas’ The Hate U Give, the Moms clutch their pearls at: “A sixteen-year-old black boy is dead because a white cop killed him. What else could it be?”

Sherman Alexie’s The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian raises alarm for this: “Our white dentist believed that Indians only felt half as much pain as white people did, so he only gave us half the Novocain.”

This nonsense would be hilarious if it weren’t driving public education policy in Florida. Those who want to ban or suppress books are closing the barn door after the horse has bolted and is now in the next town, sitting in a bar drinking a Mai Tai. They’re also exposing themselves as the frightened creatures they are.

The bans will continue: Escambia County has removed another 400-plus books from its libraries without reviewing a single one. The lawsuits will continue. And the 21st century will continue, despite the state of Florida trying its best to drag us back to the 19th.

Ghislaine Maxwell just made a classic Florida move—and it stinks

Al Capone liked to relax in Miami Beach.

Ex-dictators, junta leaders, and death squad commanders from Cuba, Nicaragua, Peru, Honduras, Venezuela, and Panama have moved here when things got too hot at home.

Then there are the dodgy New York billionaires, including the felonious current occupant of the White House and his erstwhile pal, the late Jeffrey Epstein, who installed themselves in ocean-front mansions and became Florida Men.

Epstein’s girlfriend/posh pimp Ghislaine Maxwell made herself a Florida Woman, too, shopping for young girls in Palm Beach County.

Then she moved north, although not by choice: She was sentenced to 20 years for sex trafficking and imprisoned at FCI Tallahassee.

Now the feds have whisked her off to some tennis prison in Texas.

If you’re a halfway rational human being, you probably haven’t given much thought to her over the past six months, what with the attacks on science, the attempts to wreck higher education, the dismantling of environmental protections, and destruction of the rule of law.

Obsession

Our brothers and sisters in MAGA, however, just can’t get her out of their heads.

They’re fixated on her, Jeffrey Epstein, and these alleged files which may or may not still be sitting on the attorney general’s desk.

They’re convinced the files contain mighty secrets about nefarious cabals, Pizzagate, Lizard People, and sex island dirt on the Clintons.

Pam Bondi claimed on Fox “News” she would “review” the files then put Epstein’s stuff out there for everyone’s delectation.

Yet no files have been forthcoming, and boy, is MAGA mad.

Recently some “personal finance” website voted Tallahassee the ninth most boring city in America.

Unfair!

Until last Friday when Maxwell left us, everybody wanted to visit Tallahassee.

Florida’s capital was the focus of the political world, an object of slathering fascination especially among podcast hosts, news junkies, cable TV reporters, Never Trumpers, Ride-or-Die Trumpers, and people on psychotropic medication.

Call that boring? We hadn’t gotten this much attention since the Great Presidential Vote Count Screw-Up of 2000.

Trump acolyte Todd Blanche (his side-hustle is being Bondi’s deputy AG) recently descended upon the United States Courthouse in downtown Tallahassee to interview Maxwell in the presence of her Miami attorney David Markus.

Look over there!

Blanche and Markus admit they are good friends but swear there’s no conflict of interest, no sir, nothing to see here.

We don’t know what they said, but Ghislaine-o-mania isn’t going away.

Hoping to distract us, the regime keeps hollering “Squirrel!”

The FBI just released 230,000 files on the assassination of Martin Luther King.

National Security Tsarina Tulsi Gabbard has accused Barack Obama of treason, claiming he cooked up a coup against Trump in the 2016 election.

Speaker Mike Johnson was all for releasing the Epstein files until he wasn’t (maybe there was a phone call from the Oval Office?), so he adjourned the House early to avoid a vote on it.

Trump himself has been slinging delusions around like a chimp with a barrel of feces, claiming the Epstein files were created by James Comey or Joe Biden or maybe sinister Greenlandic elves.

When that didn’t seem to work, he started barking about changing the names of NFL teams in Cincinnati and Washington back to “Indians” and “Redskins.”

Then he tried to change the subject by flouncing off to Scotland (where three-quarters of the population heartily despise him) to (in order of importance) 1. Play golf; 2. Make a “trade deal” with the EU that will cleverly raise costs for Americans.

The Scots and the international press made sure nobody forgot how the president and Florida’s favorite pedophile used to be bosom buddies, dogging him with questions and snark.

There’s a grand sign at the entrance to his Aberdeenshire golf course proclaiming “Trump International Golf Links.” Underneath, somebody placed a smaller, quite official-looking sign which said, “Twinned with Epstein Island.”

Overboard

Neither heat domes nor killer floods nor ICE agents nor gloom of night will stay Americans from their fixation with Epstein and Maxwell.

And so — inevitably — back to Florida, always the humid center of bad behavior, back to Jeffrey Epstein’s Palm Beach palace of horrors, and back to Ghislaine Maxwell, surely the most uptown inmate in FCI history.

She was once an heiress, the youngest child of megabucks London newspaper baron Robert Maxwell. As a student at Oxford, she was described as a “shiny glamazon.”

But her father was not only physically and emotionally abusive, he was embezzling from his own company and defrauding its employees.

In 1991, they found Robert Maxwell face down in the sea.

He’d been sailing near the Canary Islands on his yacht “The Lady Ghislaine.” Nobody ever figured out whether he jumped or was pushed.

Next thing you know, Ghislaine is Jeffrey Epstein’s arm candy, hard at work procuring young girls for him.

Like Trump, Epstein was a New Yorker trying to be a big deal in Palm Beach. In 1990 he bought a 14,000 square foot mansion and partied at Mar-a-Lago.

Like Trump, noisome stories about sexual abuse swirled around him like a nasty cocktail of skunk spray and dog poop.

Enabling Epstein

You will not be surprised to learn that the state of Florida played a major role in enabling Epstein.

Having amassed vast evidence he’d raped and sexually assaulted at least a dozen under-age girls, Palm Beach County cops searched his Palm Beach mansion in 2005, only to find his six computer hard drives had disappeared.

Epstein finally got arrested, and though a federal grand jury returned a 60-count indictment, he was allowed to plead guilty only to “soliciting a prostitute.”

In 2008, he was put into the private wing of the Palm Beach County jail. He had his own television room. His personal driver arrived every morning to take him to his office.

Turns out the Palm Beach County state attorney, the FBI, prosecutors and the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Florida — a man named Alex Acosta, later appointed Secretary of Labor by Donald Trump — colluded to give Epstein the sweetest of sweet deals: a 20-month sentence.

He served about a year.

This is corrupt even by Florida standards.

When he got out in 2009, Epstein went back to living the lifestyle of the rich and infamous while the young women he assaulted and exploited were forgotten.

We might never have known all this were it not for the relentless and brilliant work of journalist Julie Brown, whose 2018 series in the Miami Herald gave voice to his victims: She tracked down more than five dozen of them.

‘Pyramid scheme’

Brown’s reporting detailed how he’d prey on homeless girls or especially vulnerable kids, paying them to bring in other girls.

This sex-trafficking “pyramid scheme,” as Brown calls it, was run by Ghislaine Maxwell.

Maxwell would visit South Florida gyms and spas, telling petite blonde high schoolers — apparently Epstein’s “type” — they could make big money giving massages to “this old guy.”

She encountered 17-year old Virginia Giuffre working at Mar-a-Lago’s spa and convinced her to “work” for Epstein.

Virginia Giuffre said Epstein passed her around to various men, including Prince Andrew and prominent lawyer Alan Dershowitz, instructing her to have sex with them. Prince Andrew denied the allegations but he wound up reaching a settlement with Giuffre. Dershowitz has also repeatedly denied allegations. Giuffre dropped her allegations against Dershowitz in 2022 and said she “may have made a mistake.”

Trump claims he had no idea what his good friend Jeffrey was up to back then, variously insisting he ditched Epstein for being “sleazy” (insert your own pot-and-kettle joke here) or they quarreled over Epstein’s “stealing” his pretty young Mar-a-Lago employees.

Brown’s attention to the shady nonprosecution deal in Palm Beach eventually led to his 2019 New York arrest on federal sex trafficking charges.

Epstein, of course, is now dead, most likely by suicide — though lots of MAGAs don’t believe that.

Virginia Giuffre is also dead, definitely by suicide.

Ghislaine Maxwell, however, is still here.

She wasn’t exactly living her best life in Tallahassee, spending her days giving yoga classes, teaching etiquette (even criminals want to be ladylike!) and, no doubt, explaining over and over that her name is not pronounced “Gizz-Lane.”

MAGA (and quite a few Democrats) want her to talk; she wants out of prison.

She may be about to get lucky.

Pardon

Thanks to Trumpists’ rich fantasy life, in which everything is a conspiracy of the Deep Swamp, she suddenly has some power.

She says she’ll testify in public as long as Congress agrees to a few little provisions as spelled out by her lawyer, chiefly immunity and a chance to see the committee’s questions in advance.

She also doesn’t want to appear before them until after the Supreme Court hears her appeal, in which she makes the thoroughly bizarre argument that the nonprosecution deal the Southern District of Florida cut with Epstein should apply to her, too.

Classic Florida move: The rules are different here.

Anyway, if they don’t comply, she’ll take the Fifth.

Trump keeps saying he’s “allowed” to pardon her, though he evades the question of whether he actually would.

That, no doubt, depends on what kind of dirt he thinks she has on him and whether that outweighs dirt she might have on his perceived enemies.

Here in Tallahassee, we’re feeling a little sore, a little mad at Texas for stealing our celebrity sex offender.

But once a Florida Woman, always a Florida Woman.

Texas will never take that away from us.

This torture proves Florida is way ahead of the crazy curve

If you wake up every morning worrying you’ve landed in hell, you pretty much have.

It’s hotter than Satan’s house cat.

Venture outside and it feels like you’re walking through a sauna wearing a suit made of polar bear fur while carrying a five-gallon pot of live coals.

Like so much in Florida, summer gets worse every year.

The heat is immoral; unconscionable; unendurable.

It should be illegal.

Surely Florida’s governor could figure out how to outlaw this heat.

He solved that pesky climate change business by simply erasing any mention of it in state statutes.

Maybe he could proclaim 100 degrees is really only 80, 80 is 50, and 50 is below freezing.

Kind of like what they call “vanity sizing:” A size 14 dress is now labeled a 10.

Or maybe we could use Celsius: 37 degrees sounds a lot better than 100.

See? You feel cooler already, don’t you?

Or not.

Those of us living in the reality-based culture know you cannot beat the Florida heat.

The best you can hope for is to reach some kind of accommodation with it, appease it the way the ancients would sacrifice a goat or a chicken to butter up a surly god given to smiting people for fun, or figure out ways to avoid the worst of it.

To Do List

I’m a native Floridian; I have suggestions:

  1. Find a swimming pool. Lie in the water. Do not get out unless you are joined by an alligator — which happens quite often — and then extricate yourself slowly. No sudden movements. (Gators do not follow homeowners’ association rules.)
  2. If reptiles run you out of the pool, try a bathtub. Yes, your skin will become quite wrinkly, but it’s better than heat rash.
  3. Go shopping. You’re risking heatstroke getting from the parking lot to the door, but once you get inside your favorite big box store, the air-conditioning will be delightfully frosty.

You can spend hours and hours in Walmart, looking at “school clothes” even if you don’t go to school. Florida’s Back to School sales tax holiday runs throughout August. Unfortunately, the guns and ammo sales tax holiday doesn’t begin until Sept. 8. But it’ll still be hot enough to scald a scorpion and still be hurricane season.

You can get yourself a bargain firearm suitable for firing into the storm!

  1. Bribe a grocery store or restaurant to let you sit in their walk-in freezer. Make sure you’ve got a cell signal in there: We don’t want any tragedies.
  2. Speaking of ice, here’s something you can do using your home freezer. Stick a pair of jeans and a t-shirt in there, wait three hours, then put them on.

They’ll be stiff for 20 minutes or so, but you’ll enjoy the personal air-conditioning.

  1. Leave. Go to Greenland.

Forget Canada (they’re certainly trying to forget us). Greenland will be the 51st state. The only reason it hasn’t happened already is that Donald Trump has been too busy blowing up the National Weather Service, NASA, and NOAA.

But you don’t want to wait till half of Florida flees our polluted aquifers, flooded suburbs, hurricane-ravaged condos and malarial sinks.

Get ahead of the crowd and scope out Nuuk’s best spots for Musk Ox steak and Eric the Red beer.

You’ll never run out of ice in Greenland.

Not for five or six years, at least.

Rising tide

This dang Chinese hoax is warming up everything from the Antarctic to the Indian Ocean to the Pacific to the north Atlantic.

Greenland’s ice sheet is melting, faster and faster every year. So are the glaciers and the icebergs.

How do I know this? Because some of NASA’s global climate change research websites are still up (see link above), but who knows for how long.

Now where do you think that all that water from the ice sheets will go?

If you answered “everywhere,” you’re correct.

If you said, “Especially Florida,” you get bonus points.

One of the annoying little quirks of vast quantities of melting ice is rising sea levels.

We live in the southernmost state, the most watery state, the one that floods if you stare at it hard.

A lot of us live just a few feet above sea level.

Since 1970, the sea level has risen seven inches, which might not sound too bad, except even a Category 1 hurricane — Debby in 2024, say — can produce a storm surge of 2-5 feet.

With a whopper like Helene, it’s more like 15 feet.

You see the problem.

Seas aren’t only rising, they’re getting hotter. Hotter seas breed bigger storms.

Over the past few weeks, the temperature of the Gulf of Mexico (no, I’m not calling it by that fake Trump name) has ranged from 80 to 92 degrees.

The warmer the water, the faster it evaporates, the faster it evaporates, the heavier the rainfall.

Add to that temperatures in the high 90s and you get a heat-plus-humidity situation which almost certainly violates the Geneva Conventions on torture.

Compared to the poor souls along the Guadalupe River in Texas, we’ve been lucky.

Our luck is unlikely to hold. Every part of Florida is susceptible to flash floods.

Deflection, denial

This is, of course, a global problem.

China is now the worst greenhouse gas offender, but the U.S. is right behind and, given how the regime hates being Number Two, I’m sure we will soon regain the title of Biggest Threat to Human Life on Earth.

New research by the nonprofit Climate and Community Institute shows the 17% increase in the Pentagon’s budget translates into an enormous increase in carbon emissions: 178 tons in 2026.

That’s half of what the entire United Kingdom emits.

We’re not stopping there, either. Trump is enabling extractive industries to pillage the land from sea to shining sea, making swingeing cuts to wind and solar energy programs, and ordering an ancient, costly, and dirty Michigan coal plant to stay open.

What, you ask, is Florida doing about this?

(Can you hear me laughing bitterly?)

To be fair, the governor did sign a ban on drilling along the Apalachicola River.

But when it comes to the climate crisis, he deflects and denies.

In addition to trying to deep-six the whole issue by refusing to name it and calling attempts to address the causes of the precipitous rise in temperatures “left-wing stuff,” he wants you to believe monster storms have always happened in Florida and always will.

It’s just “tropical weather.”

And despite what Marjorie Taylor Greene, Georgia U.S. representative and weekend scientist, says, weather is not controlled by the government.

But just to be sure, she says she’ll sponsor legislation prohibiting “the injection, release or dispersion of chemicals or substances into the atmosphere for the express purpose of altering weather, temperature, climate or sunlight intensity.”

Ahead of the curve

Florida, always ahead of the crazy curve, has already passed such a bill, and the governor has signed it.

He cites dark fears of “chemtrails” deployed by shadowy green activists trying to fight climate change by “injecting different things in the atmosphere, blocking the sun and doing all this stuff.”

He added, “We’re the Sunshine State. We want to have the nice sunshine.”

First of all, “chemtrails” are not a thing. Those white lines swooshing behind aircraft are condensation trails, i.e. little bitty ice crystals formed when the exhaust from the plane hits the cold high-altitude air.

Second, while there’s some preliminary research on using geoengineering to reflect sunshine back into space, we don’t know how this might affect rainfall or food production and many scientists don’t think it’s feasible or desirable.

Moreover, why spend billions fooling with the sun when we could develop sustainable power, stop burning fossil fuels, encourage clean energy, and hold polluters accountable for destroying the environment.

Despite most Floridians figuring they can ride this thing out in their air-conditioned caves, the reckoning will soon come.

The hotter it gets, the more air-conditioning we’ll use; the more we crank up the AC, the hotter it gets.

No matter what nonsense the MAGA brain trust comes up with, data are still data.

Storms are stronger. The seas are invading. The heat is becoming increasingly deadly: Florida leads the nation in heat-related illnesses.

Science doesn’t care what Marjorie Taylor Greene, Donald Trump, or Ron DeSantis believe.

As I said, you can’t beat the heat. But the heat can — and will — beat you.

This money-making hellhole proves we're ruled by sociopaths

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.

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 rapists into 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 crimes than 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 Pittman recently 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 orchids in 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 million a year to run.

New construction at the Dade-Collier Dade-Collier Training and Transition Airport, where the new state immigrant detention center is located, on July 5, 2025. (Photo courtesy of Friends of the Everglades/Ralph Awrood)

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 aerial photographs 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 lawsuits filed 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?

This exceptionally stupid award says everything about the mess Florida's in

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.

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.

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.

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 Trump for 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.’”

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 name off 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.

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 minority nation 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 Scott decision (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.

Rats to a burger joint dumpster: Why does Florida have such awful politicians?

Younger readers may be unaware there was a time when politicians followed the rules, almost as if they cared about good government.

Certainly there were liars, fraudsters, and zealots, your Sen. Joe McCarthys, your Sen. Styles Bridges, and, of course, the great-granddaddy of corruption and sleaze, Richard Nixon. But most lawmakers actually seemed to believe in, you know, the law.

Seems almost quaint.

Take a look, if you can stomach it, at Florida’s sitting attorney general, one James Uthmeier Esq.

A federal judge has held him in contempt for violating a court order halting SB 4C — last session’s bill allowing the state to arrest anyone who might kinda sorta look “illegal.”

Brown folks rounded up by handcuff-happy cops included at least one American citizen.

Uthmeier took to X, proclaiming, “If being held in contempt is what it costs to defend the rule of law and stand firmly behind President Trump’s agenda on illegal immigration, so be it.”

Older readers will detect an echo of former Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris, who did her damnedest to stall ballot recounts in the great Gore-Bush imbroglio of 2000, and who would grandly quote the Biblical Queen Esther, “If I perish, I perish.”

The AG appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit, half of whom were appointed by Trump. They told him (in judicial language) to get lost.

Scofflaw history

Uthmeier’s lucky U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams didn’t fine him or throw his arrogant backside in jail.

Still, it’s early days: Hope Florida, the nonprofit founded by the state’s ambitious First Lady, is under investigation by North Florida State’s Attorney Jack Campbell. Uthmeier is up to his eyeballs in this one.

State Rep. Alex Andrade (R-Pensacola) has accused Uthmeier of criminal fraud and money laundering.

Seems Hope Florida got a $10 million “donation” of taxpayer money, of which a good chunk went to a PAC controlled by Uthmeier.

You can’t use that money for political purposes; nevertheless, that’s just what Uthmeier’s PAC did, spending it on ads to defeat last year’s recreational marijuana amendment.

DeSantis hadn’t yet elevated Uthmeier, then his chief of staff, to the AG job, but still: The guy was an officer of the court, a member of the Florida Bar.

You’d think he’d get it.

Then again, Florida under DeSantis is not known for adherence to the rule of law.

Remember in 2022 when the governor tricked a bunch of Venezuelan asylum seekers onto a plane and flew them to Martha’s Vineyard? Legally dubious? Ethically ugly? Yes and yes.

De Santis is also the guy who suspended one state attorney for saying he wouldn’t pursue abortion cases and another because, he claimed, she wouldn’t enforce state law.

“State attorneys have a duty to prosecute crimes as defined in Florida law,” he said. “Not to pick and choose which laws to enforce based on his personal agenda,” adding that those outlaw prosecutors were “basically saying that they didn’t want to enforce statutes that the Legislature had done.”

Yet when James Uthmeier said he wouldn’t enforce a statute passed by the Legislature, namely, Florida’s 2018 law forbidding anyone under 21 to buy a long gun, the governor shrugged.

He said that law is unconstitutional anyway and that Uthmeier’s stance was a “good-faith position.”

What’s the difference? The two state attorneys he suspended are Democrats.

Besides, as Floridians all know, the sacred right to pack heat matters more than actual human beings like the two people killed by a white supremacist Trumper on the FSU campus in April.

Unfortunately for us, DeSantis and his enablers aren’t particularly troubled by a bit of violence, as long as it’s perpetrated by the right people.

While he initially criticized the Jan. 6 riot, calling it “unacceptable,” he soon fell in line with MAGA-speak, denying there was an “insurrection” of any kind and defending Trump’s role in what was clearly an attempted coup.

So what if a few Capitol police got roughed up? They were on the wrong side.

In Florida, we like cops to be on the right side, making sure Marxists, environmentalists, feminists, BLM radicals, LGBTQ-types, and other outside agitators get what’s coming to them.

And, according to the governor, citizens can play cop, too.

In advance of the No Kings protests on June 14, DeSantis decreed that any patriotic, God-fearing, Trump-voting motorist who felt threatened or even just mildly inconvenienced by those freaks marching in one of the 70-odd demonstrations across Florida had his permission to give ’em a little automotive nudge.

“If you drive off and you hit one of these people, that’s their fault for impinging on you,” he said. “You don’t have to sit there and just be a sitting duck and let the mob grab you out of your car and drag you through the streets.”

DeSantis clearly cut con law class the day they discussed freedom of assembly.

Something in the water?

You begin to wonder if there’s something about Florida that encourages a complete disregard not just of decent behavior but of the rule of law.

Maybe it’s some kind of mosquito-borne illness? Maybe the toxic algae choking our waters emits a foul miasma that clouds the brain’s moral center?

Maybe it’s a fish problem, you know, rotting from the head down?

In any case, scofflaws flock to Florida like rats to a burger joint dumpster.

We’ve a long history of criminality: Al Capone hung out in Miami Beach, and Charles Ponzi sold worthless swampland to rubes dreaming of a life in “paradise.”

It’s no surprise the current occupant of the White House, a casino-bankrupting grifter with 34 felony convictions, chose Palm Beach County as his home.

For a brief period in history — way back there, from the 1960s to the 1990s — Florida was known as a good-government state, with leaders such as Reuben Askew, Bob Graham, and Lawton Chiles, who promoted education, conservation, and transparency.

Again, quaint.

In the past couple of decades, however, we’ve elected such prize porkers as a governor whose company perpetrated a huge Medicare and Medicaid fraud and an attorney general who saw nothing untoward in taking a $25,000 campaign contribution from Donald Trump then dropping an investigation into his shady “university.”

Rick Scott is now a U.S. senator; Pam Bondi is now the attorney general of the United States.

Bondi’s busy demonstrating how much she learned in Florida, doing her damnedest to destroy the separation of powers enumerated in the Constitution.

She’s suing every single federal judge in the state of Maryland for having the brass-faced gall to issue orders insisting on due process for people the Trump regime wants to deport.

Doing their job, in other words.

Lawyers or lawless?

Meanwhile, back down here in the sunniest state with the shadiest government, DeSantis and Uthmeier are back with a brand new bad idea: “Alligator Alcatraz,” a huge ICE detention camp in the Everglades.

The state seized the land from Miami-Dade County to park a 5,000-bed facility bang in the middle of the state’s greatest environmental treasure.

Who cares if it’s legal? It sure ain’t moral.

Despite the state’s claims that the place won’t hurt the surrounding wetland ecosystem (apparently 5,000 people in housing pods won’t create any run-off and all the trucks and buses transporting people and supplies will not make a mark upon the land), it’s an assault on a vulnerable and irreplaceable place.

Remember that the next time you hear DeSantis’ bleating how he wants to “save” the Everglades.

DeSantis, Bondi, and Uthmeier may call themselves lawyers, but they are lawless.

This eye-wateringly stupid fight is DeSantis' last gasp effort to be relevant

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 campaign against 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.

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.

Santa Ono takes questions from University of Florida trustees before they unanimously approved him as the school’s president-elect on May 27, 2025. He was rejected by the state Board of Governors on June 3, 2025. (Photo courtesy UF)

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 rapists to 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 commissioner in 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.”

This makes MAGA terrified — and your kids are going to suffer

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.

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 professors from 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 spending other 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.

Nobody wants your feeble prayers

Thoughts and prayers.

On Thursday, April 17, a 20-year-old boy, a student, walked around FSU’s sunny campus, firing a handgun. Two dead; six injured.

The response from our elected leaders? The usual: “Thoughts and prayers.”

The governor of the State of Florida said he was “praying,” adding, “We are all Seminoles today.”

First Lady Casey DeSantis: “Praying.”

Sen. Rick Scott: Also “praying.”

The president of the United States called the attack “terrible, a shame,” then blew off any suggestion of gun control reform, saying he’s a “big advocate of the Second Amendment.”

Maybe he missed the praying memo.

I teach at FSU; and that Thursday afternoon, I was locked down in my office.

It was frightening, yes; it was also horribly familiar. This is America: Sandy Hook, Virginia Tech, Columbine, Uvalde, Nashville, Parkland.

The Tallahassee Democrat reported that several survivors of the 2018 Marjorie Stoneman Douglas shooting were on campus that day.

Robbie Alhadeff’s sister Alyssa died at MSD: “Something has to change,” he said.

Graduate student Stephanie Horowitz saw people running and knew instantly what was happening.

Jason Leavy was a freshman at MSD when Nikolas Cruz murdered 17 people. He knew, too, and started barricading his classroom door.

“It’s the least surprising thing in the world, honestly,” he said.

Every one of those kids has been through multiple active shooter drills. Many faculty have, too.

We are supposed to shove desks against our doors, turn off the lights, “harden” our schools and churches and college campuses and act as though we’re grateful when politicians express their insincere and frankly insulting “sympathy.”

Nobody wants their feeble prayers and, as for their thoughts, if the violence-loving reactionaries in charge of this state were actually capable of thoughts they’d realize things do not have to be this way.

Priorities

From the state Capitol to the U.S. Capitol, politicians shrug: Guns matter more than people; children, high school students, college students — they don’t give the big money to political campaigns.

The Second Amendment trumps all the others.

We’re supposed to accept there’s nothing anyone can do: This is just the way things are.

As The Onion’s evergreen mass shooting headline goes, “‘No Way to Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens.”

But the kids ain’t all right; the kids are scared — and furious.

Florida State University students marched to the Capitol on April 23, 2025, less than a week after a gunman opened fire on their campus, calling for legislation on guns and school safety. (Photo by Jay Waagmeester/Florida Phoenix)

Last Tuesday, a group of FSU students braved the morally noxious fumes of the Capitol to demand sensible gun control, red flag laws, firearm storage legislation — commonsense stuff like that.

Madalyn Probst, president of the FSU College Democrats, said, “The fact that they are able to sit in this place and prioritize weapons over my life, my friends’ lives, and the lives of my community around me is deplorable.”

Problem is, the grown folks in charge don’t care.

“The fact that they are able to sit in this place and prioritize weapons over my life, my friends’ lives, and the lives of my community around me is deplorable.”

– Madalyn Probst, FSU College Democrats

The Florida House has approved a bill allowing 18-year-olds to buy guns, repealing a law they passed after the murders at Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School.

We don’t let them drink, but hell, they can get themselves a nice Taurus 9mm semi-automatic handgun — just like the one used to kill three and wound five at Michigan State University in 2023.

Here at FSU, you can still see the mountains of flowers and teddy bears where the wounded and dead fell. Yet the governor — who has the emotional intelligence of a poison dart frog —continues to push what he calls “Second Amendment Summer.”

If you’re buying a gun or ammo between Memorial Day and the Fourth of July, you don’t have to pay sales tax.

Because we want more people packing heat.

‘Protecting’ children

The FSU atrocity was Florida’s sixth mass shooting and the 27th school shooting in the nation.

This year. So far.

The grown folks in charge are obsessed with “protecting” children from fluoride and potentially life-saving vaccines.

No letting them near books like “And Tango Makes Three,” lest they want to become gay.

No letting them discover trans people and queer people are real and deserving of dignity.

They can’t stand the thought of high schoolers reading Toni Morrison’s “Beloved” or “The 1619 Project,” lest they learn about the horrors of slavery.

They are terrified college students might study sociology, delve into political theories suggesting organizational models for the state that don’t insist our version of rapacious capitalism is the best, or encounter books that challenge religious or cultural orthodoxies.

As for sex, they don’t even want to think about it — unless, of course, the teenaged daughter gets pregnant or the teenaged son gets an STD.

They insist on shielding kids from a slew of normal human realities, but not gun violence.

It’s OK for young people to grow up knowing how to barricade themselves inside a classroom or learn strategies for evading a mass shooter but not appreciate poetry or play a musical instrument or master a foreign language.

It’s OK for them to live scared of that loner kid or that angry-looking guy or some person they can’t see, someone who wants to spill as much blood as possible.

The freedom to get a gun any time for any reason is more important.

So, we have Sandy Hook, Virginia Tech, Columbine, Uvalde, Nashville, Parkland, and now FSU.

United Against Hate

One of my students reminded me there was supposed to be a “United Against Hate” symposium in honor of Maura Binkley on April 17.

Maura Binkley was the student shot and killed at a yoga studio in 2018 along with another woman.

The symposium was to promote campus safety, but it had to be canceled.

The FSU building where it should have taken place was a crime scene.

Maura Binkley was murdered by a guy who hated women.

The young man who allegedly walked around campus shooting his classmates hates people of color — he’s a Trump supporter and a white supremacist.

He told a fellow student Black people were ruining his neighborhood.

The United States government manufactures hatred against anyone who’s not a white Christian, embracing violence against its citizens.

Nowhere is safe.

An unhappy Florida electorate finds few politicians willing to listen

Floridians are big mad.

Not all 20-odd million of us, of course: We tend to be politically soporific, occasionally becoming passionate over potholes or maybe a too-short grouper fishing season, but preferring to keep reality at arm’s length.

Still, something is changing. People are angry, auto-calling their representatives, making signs, demonstrating and showing up at town halls.

MAGAs will tell you these are nothing but a bunch of disgruntled Democrats, but I’ll bet cash money a good number of those veterans protesting silently outside Tallahassee City Hall last week usually vote Republican.

And I’ll bet a decent number, frightened and frustrated over President Musk’s scorched-earth attacks on the Department of Education, NOAA, USAID, etc. (it’s a terrifyingly long list), didn’t vote at all in 2024.

I overheard a couple of them talking about it during a recent town hall in Tallahassee. They both said they didn’t like either candidate: Harris was too pro-Israel, Trump was good at business (highly debatable) but a terrible person, and until now they never really thought it mattered who got elected.

Now they know.

The town hall was organized by the Democratic Party of Leon County, hoping to get our congressman to come and talk to us, his constituents.

Rep. Neal Dunn was invited. He never even responded. He certainly didn’t show up.

Republicans don’t show up, not any more.

They don’t like getting booed. They don’t like facing outraged citizens.

A few tried holding town halls. Did not go well. But hey, at least they actually held town halls. Nobody’s seen hide nor hair of Florida Republicans.

Maybe they’re huddled together in an undisclosed location.

I doubt anyone expected to see either of our senators: Ashley Moody remains a MAGA acolyte, while Rick Scott held a telephone town hall once, but that was back during the pandemic.

Invisibility

Lawmaker invisibility hasn’t stopped constituents from arranging meetings and imploring these politicians — who allegedly work for them — to come and listen.

Tampa Bay voters put on a town hall in Clearwater on March 15 in Rep. Anna Paulina Luna’s district.

She was, unsurprisingly, absent. Undeterred, a large crowd addressed a cut-out of her.

Some told the cardboard Luna they feared DOGE would wreck Social Security.

One lady, whose husband was fired from the U.S. Geological Survey in DOGE’s senseless purges, said, “I’ve called and I have emailed and heard nothing from you.”

Maybe Luna’s too busy lobbying to carve Trump’s face on Mt. Rushmore.

Luna doesn’t support Ukraine, and pitched a little hissy fit when Democrats waved the blue and yellow flag in the House, snapping, “Put those damn flags away!”

But by God, she’s determined to get to the bottom of the great JFK assassination cover-up, demanding the doctors who treated JFK in Dallas and members of the Warren Commission who investigated it appear before Congress.

Unfortunately for her and for the CIA/Cuba/KGB/Space Aliens conspiracy theorists, all those people are quite dead.

No-show

Neal Dunn, last week’s no-show, is a urologist from Panama City and is, like Luna, one of the state’s least impressive members of Congress.

He’s done absolutely nothing of note, unless you count his proposed resolution to “Protect American Businesses from Onerous Refrigeration Regulations.”

You’d think he might have bothered to attend a room of 500+ voters, eager to hear from him.

It wouldn’t have been much of an inconvenience, either: According to his website, he was in Tallahassee that morning, hosting an event for young people who might want to attend one of the service academies.

That event ended at 11 a.m.; the town hall started at 11 a.m.; the distance from City Hall to the American Legion Hall is 1.8 miles.

It would have taken him a solid five or six minutes to drive there.

Concerns

The standing-room-only audience created a list of what they’d like to talk about: the unelected Musk, DOGE’s trashing of government services, Ukraine, health care, reproductive rights, our endangered planet, our endangered entitlement programs, and our endangered democracy.

A panel of worthies, including a county commissioner, a city commissioner, legendary activist Karen Woodall, and former Democratic congressman Alan Boyd, tried to address people’s issues.

It wasn’t smooth sailing.

Many were thoroughly annoyed with the good souls on the panel as well as the minority party in Washington.

Democrats are good at lamenting, hand-wringing, and doom-predicting — all reasonable responses to the atrocities visited upon the country by President Musk and his henchpersons.

They just don’t seem to have much in the way of answers.

One guy stood up and yelled, “What’s the solution? I think we know the problem!”

Attack on universities

Sentient Americans understand the United States is being dismantled, hurled into a Dumpster, and set on fire.

Rep. Dunn’s district contains six institutions of higher education. All receive federal funds.

If DOGE gets its way and slashes the budgets of the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health, what will become of research at FSU, FAMU, and other colleges and universities?

FSU alone could lose $65 million.

That would be a direct hit on the College of Medicine, all the science departments, and the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory — the largest and most important magnet lab in the world.

It conducts experiments in (among other things) superconductivity, critical to efficient and sustainable energy sources.

If that money goes away, it won’t just be scientific research that suffers: There will be a knock-on effect, harming the whole university.

The best professors will leave; the best students won’t enroll; lots of people will be laid off.

What will happen to the hundreds of federal jobs at Tyndall Air Force Base at the western end of Rep. Dunn’s territory? How about the USDA Farm Service office in Madison at the eastern end?

Florida is home to 100,000 federal employees, most of them represented by Republicans.

How about DOGE’s decimating NOAA and the National Weather Service? Florida’s entire Democratic congressional delegation warned that this was a Very Bad Idea.

No Republicans signed onto their letter.

Remember Michael?

Maybe Dunn thinks Florida doesn’t need hurricane forecasters; maybe he’s forgotten what Hurricane Michael did to his district in 2018.

Without NWS it would have been even worse.

What would Dunn — or any of Florida’s senators and representatives— say to the 400 statewide who’ve lost their jobs with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service? Or the untold numbers who’ll soon be sacked by the Veterans Administration?

Dunn is a veteran himself, but he’s pretty offhand about their concerns. It’s only 20 “in the region” (whatever than means — VA jobs, maybe?

“This is not a massacre,” he said.

Maybe not to him, but the veterans protesting outside his recent event at Gulf Coast State College weren’t impressed: “There’s nowhere in the Constitution that what is going on with DOGE and Elon Musk is appropriate,” one told WJHG TV.

That’s putting it mildly.

But the Constitution doesn’t seem to matter to DOGE, President Musk, Trump, or the Republican-controlled Congress.

Maybe it will mean something to the Supreme Court.

What do you say, Rep. Dunn?

Can Democrats get their act together before the country — and Florida — fall apart?

Older readers may remember the cartoon book, “101 Uses for a Dead Cat,” in which deceased felines were repurposed as tent pegs, toilet paper holders, boat anchors, and other objects.

I came across my battered copy the other day and — for some reason — thought of the Florida Democratic party.

The national Democratic Party, too, though it’s not quite as dead, and so plans to turn individual Dems into table lamps are premature.

Table lamps are actually useful.

Reubin Askew via State Library and Archives of Florida Bob Graham via U.S. Senate The late Gov. Lawton Chiles via State Library and Archives of Florida

Harsh, sure. But as the arsonists President Musk and his little buddy Donald Trump burn the nation down to the ground, the Democrats can’t even put together a bucket brigade.

Younger readers might not be aware that Florida was once solidly Democratic.

The party had held power since Florida became a state in 1845. Maybe they figured they always would.

For more than a century, Democrats were the party of slavery, states’ rights, and Jim Crow, but, gradually and imperfectly, became the party of civil rights, voting rights, and workers’ rights, switching places with Republicans, who once had a strong streak of social progressivism.

Then the R’s were seduced by Nixon’s Southern Strategy and became the party of pro-segregation white people.

For 30 years, Florida elected New South governors such as Reubin Askew, Bob Graham, and Lawton Chiles, leaders who believed in education, open government, protecting the environment — crazy stuff like that.

Taken for granted

But Democrats kind of forgot to do the political outreach part, taking their voters for granted, failing to build a bench of young leaders.

Sure, Bill Clinton won Florida in 1996; Al Gore damn near won in 2000 (if the court had ordered a count of the over-votes, he would have become president), and Barack Obama won in 2008 and 2016.

State politics, however, were a different animal.

Jeb Bush (assumed to be “the smart one” in the family) put together a coalition of hungry Republicans and conservative Democrats, winning the gubernatorial race in 1998. That same year, Florida Democrats made one of their most boneheaded moves.

Former state Rep. Willie Logan in 1991. (Don Dughi Collection via State Library and Archives of Florida)

Legislative Democrats chose Rep. Willie Logan of Miami-Dade as their “speaker designate.” He had a good chance of becoming the first Black Speaker of the Florida House.

Then, for reasons they could never quite articulate, his own party ousted Logan during a public meeting.

When they named a white woman instead, the Black Caucus walked out, furious.

White Democrats mumbled stuff about Logan being a little “too liberal” and a little too laid-back.

Or it might have been that Logan was a little too Black.

He claimed they worried Republicans would “put my picture on fliers and pass them around saying, ‘If you vote for a Democrat, this is going to be the next speaker of the House.’”

I guess those Democrats forgot that African Americans were — and are — the heart of the party.

That was the beginning of the hard times.

Republicans surge

Other factors, including gerrymandering and the hordes of tax-hating, socially conservative Midwestern white folks moving to the state, contributed to the Democrats becoming a minority, but this high-profile insult of a young leader did not inspire confidence or help foster party unity.

Republican majorities in the Legislature have only grown since then, and Democrats have been unable to field convincing candidate for statewide office.

This is how we got landed with the super-rich, super-sleazy Rick Scott, whose company defrauded Medicare, and the petulant Ron DeSantis, energetically destroying Florida in the name of a phantom he calls “DEI.”

There was that brief, giddy moment last fall when it seemed just possible the state was inching toward purple.

The reproductive rights amendment looked like it could pass; Debbie Mucarsel-Powell mounted a good senatorial campaign against the appalling Scott; it even seemed just possible the Democrats would deny the Republicans a supermajority in the Legislature.

Of course, they failed.

Now that Trump is back in the Oval Office, smashing up the national china and turning the White House lawn into a car lot, Dems across the country have misplaced their mojo.

‘We shall overcome’

This lawless administration attacks free speech, wrecks our democratic institutions, tanks the economy — and the opposition responds by wearing Barbie pink to Trump’s address to Congress.

I like pink, and I get that it’s the pussy hat march color, but come on, y’all: How about something a little more effective?

A little louder?

Even respect-the-office when-they-go-low-we-go-high types ought to applaud Texas Rep. Al Green for heckling Trump as he stood telling lies before the nation.

Ten Democrats demonstrated a measure of intestinal fortitude when the House formally censured Green, stepping up to the well with him and singing “We Shall Overcome.”

To borrow a phrase from Donald Trump, it made “good TV.”

Maxwell Frost via U.S. House

Some more good TV: Florida’s own Rep. Maxwell Alejandro Frost calling Trump “the grifter-in-chief,” drawing the incoherent ire of House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer of Kentucky, who threatened to have him thrown out of the building.

Comer, known for accusing the Biden family (with zero evidence) of lying, cheating and stealing, piously invoked the “decorum” of the House.

House members are known for their passionate commitment to decorum.

Wisconsin Rep. Derrick Van Orden hollered at President Biden during his State of the Union Speech, calling him a liar, yet neither he nor the small army of Republicans who made a hobby of yelling at Barack Obama got censured.

Rep. Lauren Boebert, who was famously asked to leave a theatrical performance of “Beetlejuice” for illicit vaping, loud singing and, er, over-enthusiastic groping of her date, referred to Rep. Al Green’s walking stick as a “pimp cane.”

No word of protest from the Rs.

Marjorie Taylor Greene, that paragon of charm, grace, and the kind of elegant manners even the Princess of Wales would envy, called her colleague Rep. Boebert a “little bitch” and displayed sexually explicit photos of Hunter Biden.

The point is, to compete with the Republicans’ 24/7 freak show, Democrats not only need to concoct some policies on which to campaign (shouldn’t be that hard, since Americans are getting fed up with President Musk’s Reign of Error) but find some effective leaders and hone — if not their insult skills — their wit and showmanship.

Showwomanship, too. (Go ahead: call the DEI Police on me).

Prospects

We already know who ain’t getting the job done.

That would be Chuck Schumer (bless his heart) and Hakeem Jeffries. Esteemed gents, sure. Firing up America? Nah.

How about a Florida Man to counter that orange immigrant Florida Man?

If Dems had any sense, they’d trot out Maxwell Frost every chance they get.

He’s cute and he’s fearless.

Rep. Jared Moskowitz of Florida’s 23rd District might be useful, too — he trolls the idiot likes of Marjorie Taylor Greene like a boss.

Greene likes to claim the gubmint controls hurricanes and Ukraine is teeming with Nazis.

U.S. Rep. Jared Moskowitz via U.S. House Anna Eskamani via Florida House

Moskowitz calls her “head of the Mensa caucus” and suggests Vladimir Putin appoint her his “special envoy” to Congress.

The problem with Moskowitz is that he’s got this impulse to “work with Republicans,” which might have made sense in, say, 1996, but these days means letting Republicans trample decency.

He (and several other Dems) voted to censure Al Green.

Moreover, he defends the war criminal prime minister of Israel.

Meanwhile back in the (not) Free State of Florida, Anna Eskamani shines like a diamond in a bucket of dead mullet.

She’s bright, she’s brave, and she won a swing seat in 2018.

She’s also bailing out of the Legislature to run for mayor of Orlando.

Maybe that will set her up for a future run for statewide office; maybe in a few years, the MAGAs will fed up with the Trumpocracy.

As for the national Dems, they might want to follow the lead of Sen. Bernie Sanders, who’s traveling the country on a Fighting Oligarchy tour, drawing thousands at town hall meetings.

Republicans tried the town hall thing but wilted in the face of public rage.

Still, I’m not sure simply turning a bright light on Republicans’ dictatorial tendencies, stupidity, and general jerkiness will be enough.

Six-dollar avocados

The Democrats kind of need some concrete, well-expressed, easily digested policies people (even people as dumb as MTG) understand will help, not hurt, them.

The problem is, by the time the Dems get it together, the government will have likely have been destroyed: no VA, no civil rights, no environmental protection, no accessible heath care, no science, no hurricane forecasters, no academic freedom.

On the upside, Trump is tanking the economy as fast as he can.

People do get a bit upset if they have no money.

Six-dollar avocados and $20 eggs will focus voters’ minds, even here in the Free State of Florida.

They might — just might — vote for a Democrat.

But don’t hold your breath.

Florida’s public universities are falling victim to DeSantis’ war on progress

Jeanette Nuñez has been installed as “acting president” of Florida International University.

The smart money says she’ll soon be permanent.

Her qualifications? Let’s see: She graduated from FIU 30 years ago, served in the Legislature, and was Ron DeSantis’ lieutenant governor.

That’s pretty much it.

Oh, and her about-face on in-state tuition for DACA recipients, whose only crime was being brought to the U.S. as children.

In 2014, she helped push the bill granting Dreamers the same tuition rate as other Florida resident students.

Now this daughter of Cuban exiles has turned on these Floridian kids.

As Sen. Jason Pizzo, D-Sunny Isles, put it, Nuñez chose to “do a 180 for political expediency, drop a $120-thousand position and exchange it for a million-dollar position, at the university with the most number of in-state tuition waivers for undocumented kids.”

FIU once prided itself on educating Dreamers, declaring, “DACA and undocumented students have a home at FIU.”

The faculty don’t want her; the students are protesting; Panther Now, the FIU newspaper, calls her a “political nepo baby.”

But DeSantis wants her, so the FIU Board of Trustees snaps to attention and barks, “Yes, sir!”

DeSantis, the lame duck and failed presidential candidate, may have lost much of his hold on the Legislature but, given that he appoints state university trustees, our institutions must still suffer his anti-intellectualism, his spite, and his obsession with “woke.”

Like FIU, Florida Atlantic has also been landed with a new president, an unimpressive ex-legislator who once proudly declared himself “the most partisan Republican in Tallahassee.”

Adam Hasner beat out FSU’s dean of the College of Business and the University of Maine’s provost: two genuinely qualified candidates.

The governor prefers political hacks.

Outraged students, faculty

Hasner’s executive experience consists of being vice president for public policy at Geo Group, a Boca Raton-based private prison corporation.

Geo Group has been accused of forcing inmates into virtual slavery, witholding food if they didn’t work for the prison.

FAU’s faculty have decried his appointment, and outraged FAU students have pointed out a university is not the same as a prison.

Not yet, anyway.

The University of West Florida is in the middle of a hostile takeover by ultra-conservative trustees, several of whom are affiliated with the Heritage Foundation, authors of the misogynistic, homophobic, white supremacist Project 2025.

These nominees are not an impressive bunch: The only one who actually lives in the area is an NRA instructor and graduate of Pensacola Christian College, an entity unaccredited by any reputable academic assessment organization.

Another teaches at Boise State in whiter-than-Wonder-Bread Idaho, where he is given to bizarre pronouncements on the evils of college-educated women who, turned uppity by all that book-learning, fail to fulfill their God-mandated role as stay-at-home mamas.

Scott Yenor says women who defy decency by insisting on a career should always make much less money than men.

His plans for UWF include abolishing its anthropology department and its distinguished archeology program.

He thinks no one needs to study human cultures except to learn that Western Civilization is the only real civilization and “patriarchy” is the natural order of things.

Yenor may not actually be a shoo-in: He needs Senate confirmation, and his X-posts suggesting only “non-Jewish white men” should hold power have riled the combustible Sen. Randy Fine, enraged by what he sees as Yenor’s blatant antisemitism.

Incompetent, arrogant, fiscally irresponsible

The bipartisan legislative Jewish Caucus isn’t real happy, either.

We’ll see who wins this contest: DeSantis (who says he didn’t know Yenor said that stuff!) or horrified Floridians from the Perdido River to the House and Senate chambers.

Seriously, y’all: Anybody who’s too extreme for Randy Fine, proud member of the Attila the Hun Fan Club, shouldn’t be within 50 miles of any Florida institution of higher education.

Maybe if somebody tells Yenor that, despite DeSantis’s best efforts, Florida is full of non-Aryans, he’ll stay out west.

Prolifigacy

Again, the professors and the students — the people who teach at UWF and learn at UWF, the people for whom the university exists — want Yenor deep-sixed.

Of course, nominating an ignorant yahoo is on-brand for DeSantis.

Installing incompetent, arrogant, and fiscally irresponsible presidents at colleges and universities is, too.

Ben Sasse, the disgraced former president of UF, stands out as one of DeSantis’ stupidest moves.

The Florida auditor general found that Sasse, a former U.S. senator from Nebraska, spent money like a drunken sailor.

He hired D.C. cronies at way above market rates and didn’t require them to live in Gainesville; he blew $300,000 chartering UF’s Athletic Association’s private jets to do God knows what; he threw absurdly expensive parties — one with a $38,000 sushi bar at a cost of about $900 per guest.

Whose bright idea was it to hire Sasse?

That would be Ron DeSantis and UF board chair, developer Mori Hosseini — at the time, one of the governor’s university enforcers.

These two also imposed our anti-vaxxer surgeon general upon UF’s medical school, where he does next to nothing yet draws a fat salary in addition to his job at the Department of Health.

‘Transformational leader’

When Sasse was announced as UF’s new leader, state politicos hailed him as a “transformational leader,” though a more accurate description would be “useless and not very smart.”

Sasse is given to spouting dim-witted, ill-phrased educational theories he clearly imagines are cutting-edge when they’re simply nonsense. Stuff like: “Our monolithic system lacks incentives to empower social entrepreneurs to spark intellectual curiosity” and “a thriving system will cultivate a student’s self-awareness about different learning styles and help them develop a style that works for them.”

Those of us in the academy would first take a red pencil to this pitiful excuse for English and explain that “cultivating” different “learning styles” and “sparking intellectual curiosity” is what we call “teaching.”

Appointing university presidents used to take place out in the open, where taxpayers could see the process. But now the process is so secret, only the names of finalists become public.

After a mere 17 months on the job, Sasse “resigned” (translation: was pushed out by the irascible Hosseini, who decided he didn’t like the way Sasse and DeSantis seemed to be in cahoots), but shed no tears for him: He’ll continue to receive $1 million a year plus full benefits until 2028.

This kind of profligate, time and energy-wasting, embarrassing nonsense is what you get when politicians who don’t understand education choose politicians who don’t know what they’re doing in an opaque process hidden from the citizens who foot the bills.

Nevertheless, the big money showered on Sasse and his gold-plated lieutenants looks like a bargain compared to what’s been going on at New College, once Florida’s highly regarded honors college, now a taxpayer-funded Heritage Foundation training camp.

Jock college

DeSantis’ hand-picked trustees installed Richard Corcoran, a man singularly lacking in intellect, training, and relevant experience, as president, paying him more than twice the salary of his eminently qualified predecessor.

The big bucks don’t stop there: Though the value of a New College degree has tanked, it spends way, way more money per capita than any public university in the state.

One of New College’s trustees figures it costs the place around 90 grand per student.

The state average is $10,000 per student.

Richard Corcoran insists it’s really only $68,000 each.

They’ve now agreed it’s somewhere between $88,000 and $91,000.

So that’s all right.

Nevertheless, trustee Eric Silagy has questions: New College is “spending a lot more money to educate a very small number of students that already cost exponentially more of state taxpayer dollars to educate. And I personally have real concerns with that.”

He’s also concerned about the $1.5 million spent on athletics, especially since “that’s a violation of the Board of Governors rule.”

Corcoran, another DeSantis-sponsored grifter, doesn’t care. He’s fired faculty, ditched programs, and admitted kids with low test scores to play baseball.

He wants to run a jock college.

By the way, if Silagy’s name sounds familiar, it’s because he used to be CEO of Florida Power & Light Co., one of the state’s most despised corporations.

He resigned in 2023 when he and FPL were accused of campaign finance violations, trying to disguise advertisements as legitimate news stories, spying on reporters, and all sorts of other sleazy stuff.

In Florida, guys like him never slink off in disgrace: They land on an important board of trustees.

But the really bizarre thing is that Silagy talks more sense than New College’s president.

Florida’s public colleges and universities are struggling.

MAGA’s rage when professors teach our sometimes-shameful history, their discomfort with scientific realities from the climate crisis to vaccine efficacy, and their attempts to block students from encountering ideas that challenge American exceptionalism, means some institutions fear telling the truth.

An uneducated populace is a compliant populace: Ron DeSantis is trying to destroy higher education in this state, reducing universities to Christian Nationalist support systems for sports teams.

College is no longer about intellectual excellence: It’s about the governor’s war against the 21st Century.

'Toddler mad': DeSantis is going Looney Tunes over GOP diss

Ron DeSantis is spittle-spouting, white boot-stamping, holding-his breath-till-he’s-blue, screaming-till-he’s-sick mad.

He’s toddler mad, Elmer Fudd mad: like, vewy, vewy angwy.

The Florida Legislature has defied him; dissed him; insulted him.

They showed up for the special session he demanded, gaveled in, gaveled out, and declared their own special session.

Then they trashed his hateful immigration bill and passed their own, infinitesimally less hateful, immigration bill.

The slap-fight is on, y’all.

DeSantis called the Legislature’s bill “toothless,” “grotesque,” and “weak, weak, weak.”

The Legislature, belatedly remembering they’re a co-equal branch of government, channeled their inner Bugs Bunny, and proclaimed, “Of course, you realize this means war!”

Daniel Perez via Florida House

House Speaker Daniel Perez and Senate President Ben Albritton called DeSantis’ rant a “blatant lie and accused him of bullying.

Plus, he wouldn’t return their phone calls.

The governor’s bill would have made it a state crime for the undocumented to cross the sacred border of Florida, even though some will have legally sought asylum and most are not, by any stretch of the imagination, criminals.

The bill would have forced Western Union, MoneyGram, and the like to police the citizenship of anyone trying to send money abroad.

If some hapless cop failed to be sufficiently “tough” on alleged “illegals,” DeSantis would have that cop arrested.

See, DeSantis is the hero of his bill, the sheriff valiantly saving White America from the Invading Horde — including the guy mowing your lawn.

So what if that guy ends up stateless, separated from his family, or back in a country where he’s likely to be killed?

It’s not like he’s an American.

Trumpier than thou

DeSantis insists he’s the one to double and triple down on the Gestapo-adjacent policies hourly spewing out of the Oval Office: He’s the Trumpiest! He wakes up every morning feeling the Trumpiest!

But the Florida Legislature, knowing the Naranja Suprema de Mar-a-Lago responds best to shameless flattery, called Daddy to ask what he wanted in the bill and named it the “Tackling and Reforming Unlawful Migration Policy Act:” TRUMP.

Sycophancy is not the same as cleverness.

But never fear: It’s not like the Legislature has suddenly discovered empathy. Their bill is almost as inhumane as DeSantis’.

It strips out the remittance part and the cop-arresting part, but takes away in-state tuition for Dreamers–you don’t want to educate young people who, through no fault of their own, were brought to the US as small children.

Let them mow lawns and pick tomatoes and put up dry wall!

Oh, wait: We’re getting rid of the people who do those jobs.

Sen. Randy Fine claims it will “save” the state $45 million.

It will not. The state does not pay these students’ tuition. They pay it, just like every other Florida student.

Fine doesn’t care: His specialty is performative hatred and blue-ribbon Trump toadying, qualities which are about to get him elected to the U.S. Congress from the 6th District.

On April Fools’ Day, no less.

Egg Farmer

The main difference between the bills is that the lawmakers’ doesn’t make the governor Emperor of Immigration, as he desires.

Instead, it puts in charge one Wilton Earl Simpson, Commissioner of Agriculture.

This is a calculated slap upside the gubernatorial head.

Snarling like an enraged mole rat, DeSantis posted on the Elon Musk Cartoon Channel (aka X), “Wilton Simpson has voted to give drivers licenses and in-state tuition to illegals. He even refused to oppose allowing illegals to practice law in Florida. Do we want the fox guarding the henhouse?”

Wilton Simpson is a chicken farmer.

Simpson spat back: “I’m not the one who opposed and ran against President Trump.”

Simpson added, “DeSantis’ routine attacks on farmers don’t sit well here in Florida — and apparently not with folks across the country either.”

Mee-freaking-ow.

Torch songs

Democratic lawmakers allowed themselves a rare moment of schadenfreude mixed with music.

During a meeting in the Capitol, House Minority Leader Fentrice Driskell played Goyte’s “Somebody That I Used to Know,” calling it a great break-up song.

It goes: “Now and then I think of all the times you screwed me over/But had me believing it was always something that I’d done.”

Florida Republicans are not famous for brain power, but it looks like they realize Ron DeSantis is increasingly impotent — irrelevant, even.

Donald Trump doesn’t like him.

Come 2026, he’s out of a job.

Lawmakers don’t need to suck up to him any more.

Maybe he’ll run for U.S. Senate against former Florida A.G. Ashley Moody, the woman he appointed to fill the seat of now Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

Maybe he’ll run for president in 2028, although the nation took a good look at him in 2024, and the nation said, “Oh, HELL no!”

Whatever his future, these days DeSantis is becoming shrill, declaring he’ll veto the Legislature’s bill, flying around the state (at taxpayer expense, naturally), telling Floridians to get up in their lawmakers’ faces and demand complete capitulation: “You have your marching orders.”

Any politician who dares disobey him will face a primary opponent more to the governor’s liking, bankrolled by DeSantis’ Florida Freedom Fund.

And more! He just hasn’t decided yet what other terrifying vengeance he will wreak.

DeSantis is Yosemite Sam without the rustic charm — same absurd fantasies about ridding himself of pesky varmints impeding his bid to get back into Donald Trump’s good graces, same inability to figure out how: “Don’t rush me, I’m-a-thinkin’! And my head hurts.”

J.D. Vance eclipses DeSantis — but he might want to watch his back

Ron DeSantis must be madder than a wet hen, sick as a parrot, fit to be tied.

His political future just got knee-capped by Donald “My Ear Took a Bullet for America” Trump when the convicted felon and Putin fan girl chose J.D. Vance as his running mate.

It’s not that Ronbo wanted the VP slot: He doesn’t do second-in-command. But he had visions of a 2028 run for the White House dancing inside his head.

If only Diaper Don had picked a sad also-ran like the once kinda sorta moderate-turned-toady Marco Rubio, the epically boring governor of North Dakota (what’s that dude’s name again?), or the embarrassment that is Tim Scott, Ronbo figured that, with his charisma and charm, he could whip any of those guys next time.

But Trump went and screwed him, elevating a brat senator who’s younger and smarter and arguably more extreme.

Ronbo’s consolation prize was a last-minute speaking slot at the convention with Nikki Haley and Vivek Ramaswamy, Trump’s other discarded concubines.

As for the future, maybe Ronbo can land an afternoon slot on Fox.

If Trump wins and somehow doesn’t declare himself president-for-life, Vance will be the nominee in 2028. Ditto if Trump loses and the country survives the violence.

Vance could end up as president before then, possibly without lifting a finger — except maybe to pass Trump the Pretzel Bacon Pub Cheeseburgers that finally tip him over into massive stroke territory.

Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and their autocracy-loving billionaire buds will see to that: Those two, along with Don Jr. (whose own cousin calls him “stupid”), pushed hard for Vance to be on the ticket.

Risibly ignorant

Vance is their kind of guy: not merely a jerk of the first order, but a democracy skeptic.

Ukraine? He says he can’t figure out why people think Putin is a threat and “ really doesn’t care.”

Damn, y’all: Ukraine is white and mostly Christian: Wonder how he feels about, say, South Korea or Kenya?

Assuming he has any knowledge of those countries. He’s already proved himself risibly ignorant when he referred to Britain as “ the first Islamist country” with nuclear weapons.

You may know Vance from his 2016 memoir “Hillbilly Elegy” in which he congratulates himself for surviving Appalachian deprivation and his mother’s drug addiction to become a venture capital bro.

He trashes the poor people he grew up with, dismissing them as a bunch of lazy losers who failed, unlike him, to get into Yale Law School.

You may also know Vance from the insults he once heaped on the short-fingered vulgarian: “reprehensible,” “an idiot,” “a total fraud,” “a moral disaster,” “cultural heroin,” and “one of USA’s most hated, villainous, douchey celebs.”

Sounds about right, doesn’t it? But in 2021, Vance was running for U.S. Senate and needed Trump’s endorsement, so he slunk down to Mar-a-Largo, prostrated himself on the floor between the boxes of classified documents, and begged forgiveness from the man he once referred to as “America’s Hitler.”

That’s just the kind of moral fiber we want to see in the vice president of the United States.

‘Class war’

But Vance is not only a wholly owned Trumper, he’s in thrall to “Project 2025,” embracing the racism, the cruelty, the science-denial, the arrogance, the authoritarianism, and especially the misogyny.

My God, the misogyny: Vance is anti-choice (of course) and wants to ban abortion with no exceptions for rape or incest, calling a pregnancy resulting from a crime “inconvenient” while piously declaring “two wrongs don’t make a right.”

He blames the “sexual revolution” for liberating all these dang women from their God-ordained roles as incubators. He’s against no-fault divorce, once suggesting women stay in violent marriages for the sake of the family.

He disapproves of working women and has said universal day care is “ class war against normal people.”

His wife, Usha Vance, a high-powered corporate litigator, has just quit her job, but you wonder who looked after their three kids while she was out making big money.

No doubt Vance would argue that his family is different. Special, even though Usha Vance, daughter of Indian immigrants, may be in for a rough campaign ride.

White supremacists are throwing little tantrums because Trump’s running mate is married to a Hindu. On his podcast, Baby Nazi Nick Fuentes huffed, “Do we really expect that the guy who has an Indian wife and named their kid Vivek is going to support white identity?”

But a little hatred directed at his wife and kids won’t stop the ambitious Vance. He knows how to weaponize spite and stupidity.

Make America Hungary

For example, did you know the Democrats who run the country are “ childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable too”?

This will come as a shock to the Bidens, Kamala Harris and Douglas Emhoff, Sen. and Ms. Charles Schumer, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigeig and husband Chasten, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and his wife Evan Ryan, Attorney General Merrick Garland and his wife Lynn, who all together have 12 children and many, many dogs.

I didn’t trawl through the entire cabinet, but even a cursory glance reveals a distinct lack of childlessness and a sad scarcity of cats: Interior Secretary Deb Haaland has one kid and four pups, for God’s sake.

But why let reality get in the way of childish insults?

J.D. Vance certainly won’t. He’s on a mission to make America not so much great again (again) but to make America Hungary.

He’s a Viktor Orbán wannabe, and if he gets anywhere nearer the Oval Office than the VIP tour, we will soon find ourselves living in a cross between Budapest and Gilead, a land of so-called “Christian conservative governance” where LGBTQ people have few rights, women have no rights over their own bodies, and none of us are free to read and think what we like.

Orbán and Vance are agreed: Education and the arts should be instruments of state propaganda.

Of course, our own Ronbo concurs, as he demonstrated when he vetoed funding for museums, music, and theater with “sex stuff” (present only in his impoverished imagination) and destroyed the once-distinguished New College of Florida.

If he doesn’t get a Fox gig, maybe Ronbo will become Minister of Information in a Vance regime.

On the other hand, ole J.D. might want to slow down and consider whether being Trump’s vice-president is really worth the butt-kissing, boot-licking, and general humiliation.

He might consider the danger.

He might want to remember what happened with Trump’s last VP.

On Jan. 6, MAGA insurrections erected a gallows at the Capitol, determined to hang Mike Pence.

Trump had no intention of stopping them. In fact, he thought it was a fine idea.

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