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.

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

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.

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?

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

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.

At home in Florida

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Seems Merriam-Webster might harbor smut and subversion.

‘Institutional neutrality’

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

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

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

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

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

Antisemitism, however, unleashes a firestorm.

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

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

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

In a neat triangulation of white nationalism, antisemitic paranoia, and (somewhat understandable) disdain for the whole U.S. government, one of Damsky’s X posts castigates Donald 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.’”

‘Warrior culture’

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

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

‘Illegitimate revolution’

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

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

Census projections show the U.S. will be a majority 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.

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

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.

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 — 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.”

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

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.

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

Florida’s elected representatives are fighting like weasels in a sack.

The Senate versus the House; the House versus the governor; the governor versus everybody.

They’re so furious they can’t even see straight.

The governor has one job: Look after the best interests of the people of Florida, who are crying out for affordable insurance, housing, decent public schools, clean water — small stuff like that.

But he prefers to spend his time yelling about “woke” education and exhorting cops to pick up anyone who looks “illegal,” even if they’re U.S. citizens.

The Legislature has one job: Pass a budget during their two-month session.

They haven’t managed to do it yet. They went home on Frida but they didn’t get around to the budget. They say they’ll reconvene in a week.

The Senate wants to cut sales tax on clothes costing under 75 bucks, reduce the business rent tax from 2% to 1%, and give a one-time credit for vehicle registration fees.

The House wants to slash sales tax on everything and spend $4.4 billion less than the Senate.

The two chambers are supposed to be negotiating a compromise, but Speaker Daniel Perez says senators aren’t playing nice, dismissing their proposals “unacceptable” and “patronizing.”

Senate President Ben Albritton politely insists he won’t pass massive tax cuts “at the expense of the long-term financial stability of our state.”

Such tax cuts would pretty much insure county and municipal governments — police, firefighters, parks, roads, libraries — would take an enormous hit.

The governor says cutting sales tax will only help those dang tourists — AKA Florida’s No. One industry, especially the dastardly Canadians. (Who’s going to tell him they’re vacationing elsewhere these days?)

He wants to go even bigger (and dumber), abolishing property taxes or at least upping the homestead exemption.

If you rent or you depend on local services, you’re out of luck.

Dissing DeSantis

At the moment, both chambers are either openly flouting or ostentatiously ignoring directives from the governor’s office.

The Senate has refused to confirm a slew of his nominees, including University of West Florida trustees and heads of the Department of Children and Families and the Agency for Healthcare Administration.

In an attempt to stop the washed-up-politician-to-higher-ed-sinecure pipeline, the House has passed a bill to bring university presidential searches back into the sunshine, letting taxpayers know who’s under consideration.

DeSantis is outraged: “They want the universities to be able to pursue a leftist indoctrination agenda,” he says, a statement that suggests he has never met members of the Florida House.

The governor seems trapped in a perpetual temper tantrum, calling Daniel Perez “terrible,” “rotten,” “treacherous,” and “a tool of the Left.”

This “tool of the left” is the same Daniel Perez who’s such a good little MAGA he got the House to pass a bill called “Tackling and Reforming Unlawful Migration Policy” — also known as the TRUMP Act.

DeSantis had called a special session in January, demanding legislators adopt his bill, giving him near-monarchical power over private businesses and law enforcement, all in the name of fighting the sinister foreigners infiltrating the state to pick tomatoes and put up drywall.

Instead, the Legislature gaveled out, then gaveled in their own special session, thumbing their noses at the governor to whom they once bowed down before.

This is what happens when you 1. Run against Trump; and 2. Become politically irrelevant.

Mutual snark

Perez and DeSantis have been snarking at each other for months, but now their reactionary-Republican-on-reactionary-Republican war has gotten hotter than Tallahassee in August.

Not only has the House defied the governor, its healthcare budget committee has been digging into Hope Florida, a charity founded by Casey DeSantis.

Ms. DeS is generally assumed to be running for governor in 2026.

Hope Florida claimed to be about keeping needy people off that nasty ol’ gubmint assistance, funneling them to church programs and other private aid groups.

“Hope Florida is not a program,” says Casey DeSantis. “Hope Florida is an idea, Hope Florida is a philosophy.”

Problem is, as Rep. Alex Andrade, R-Pensacola says, Hope Florida also looks a lot like “conspiracy to commit money laundering and wire fraud.”

Oh, dear.

Here’s what happened: Centene Corp., a Fortune 500 company and Florida’s biggest Medicaid contractor, overcharged for prescription drugs.

It could happen to anyone! Just ask Sen. Rick Scott.

Centene settled with the state for $67 million.

The DeSantis administration told the Legislature about $57 million of that. But $10 million that should have been divided between the state and the feds somehow got donated to the Hope Florida Foundation.

Hope Florida promptly funneled that $10 million to two political committees, one called “Save Our Society From Drugs” (they mean fun drugs, not Advil) and the other “Secure Florida’s Future.”

SFF is controlled by the Florida Chamber of Commerce, which uses it to make dark money campaign contributions.

Nothing shady there, right?

You call this ‘clean’?

It gets better (or worse if you give a damn about ethics and the rule of law): Within a few weeks these two dodgy outfits directed $8.5 million of their windfall to another one, “Keep Florida Clean” (not making this up), the purpose of which was to defeat Amendment 3.

That was the amendment seeking to legalize marijuana. It narrowly lost in the 2024 elections.

Guess who controlled the Keep Florida Clean PAC?

James Uthmeier, attorney general of the State of Florida and DeSantis’ former chief of staff and presidential campaign manager.

A lot of that money paid for ads against Amendment 3, an action that was probably illegal.

Rep. Andrade accuses Uthmeier of “money laundering and wire fraud.”

Uthmeier dismisses Andrade as a tool of “Big Marijuana.”

He says he wasn’t involved in the Hope donation thing.

Or, not very involved, or even aware of what it was, though he swam in the tightest inner circle of DeSantisWorld, up to his eyeballs in some of the governor’s stupidest ideas, including building a golf course in the fragile habitat of Jonathan Dickinson State Park.

The evidence suggests he was very involved.

Meanwhile, DeSantis is in full hissy-fit mode, accusing legislators of working with Democrats and the “liberal media” to trash his wife’s pet charity and derail her political ambitions.

In one of his weird rants he says, “Some people feel threatened by the First Lady, accusing the Legislature and the press of “doing narrative.”

He goes on: “You know, if you’re looking at 2026 and you’ve got some horse, you don’t want her anywhere near that. You’re very worried because she runs circles around their people.”

‘Mistakes were made’

Rep. Andrade slaps back: “I don’t care if she files to run for governor,” adding, “Given how much credit she gets for the Hope Florida Foundation and the Hope Florida program, I’m just kind of shocked at how incompetent she’s been in managing all of it.”

Casey DeSantis had been polling pretty well against declared candidate Byron Donalds, recipient of the presidential endorsement, a congressman who calls Donald Trump “Daddy.”

The Hope debacle could change that.

Hope Florida’s president Joshua Hay allowed as how “mistakes were made” and resigned, as did one of Hope’s attorneys.

Frustrated that people from the Chamber of Commerce and the various dark money committees involved in Hope refused to talk, Andrade has dropped the inquiry — for now.

The House could return to it later.

The Legislature may have backed off investigating Hope, but the “liberal media,” lawyers, political consultants, campaign managers, and maybe even some judges will not.

More like this will come to light; more evidence of what Andrade calls the DeSantis “culture of neglect, incompetence and entitlement” will emerge, just as the 2026 gubernatorial campaign kicks off.

The Fall of the House of DeSantis is going to be quite the spectacle.

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

It’s always been like this: Al Capone wintered in Miami Beach; Richard Nixon escaped to his Key Biscayne compound so he could hang out with his mob-affiliated pal Bebe Rebozo; Charles Ponzi made a name for himself for selling Florida swampland — impossible to build on— to unsuspecting Yankees.

More recently, another shady real-estate type, found liable for sexually assaulting journalist E. Jean Carroll and accused of sexual abuse (and worse) by dozens more women, bought a Palm Beach estate and now claims Florida as his home.

So, it’s hardly surprising “influencers” Andrew and Tristan Tate, British-American brothers facing charges of human trafficking and rape in Romania, flew to Florida the minute their travel restrictions were lifted last month — possibly because Trump’s special envoy pressured the Romanian government.

The Tates have fans in TrumpWorld, including lawyer Alina Habba (on the losing side of the E. Jean Carroll case) and Donald Trump Jr., who called their detention “absolute insanity.”

Elon Musk, too: He says Andrew Tate, a former kickboxer who believes women exist only to serve men, should be U.K. prime minister.

But in a rare moment of good sense, Gov. Ron DeSantis bucked TrumpWorld and told those stars of the manosphere they’re “not welcome” in Florida.

Moreover, the state attorney general is investigating certain accusations, including claims they lured a Florida woman to Romania and tried to coerce her into sex work.

Andrew Tate responded by taunting DeSantis on X: “Your wife will never win governor unless you arrest me, @GovRonDeSantis,” calling the governor a “communist” and declaring, “When Americans who are unfairly imprisoned abroad return home you betray them. You better nail me now.”

At least none of our institutions of higher learning have invited the Tates to speak on campus.

Yet.

Socratic dialog

You might keep an eye on New College, though.

Our once-renowned honors school has not exactly covered itself in glory over the past few years, what with dumping top-tier faculty, tanking in the rankings, admitting low-scoring jocks, mismanaging funds, and grossly over-paying its under-achieving president, but inviting British “comedian” Russell Brand to appear its “Socratic Stage Series” adds insult to injury.

Brand was supposed to be “in conversation” with NCF president Richard Corcoran on April 12.

New College announced the Brand appearance in February. On April 4, the British Crown Prosecution Service charged him with one count of rape, one count of indecent assault, one count of oral rape, and two counts of sexual assault.

In a press release, New College defended bringing in Brand, wrapping itself in the flag of free speech: “After thoughtful consideration, we have decided to move forward with Russell Brand’s scheduled appearance,” citing the institution’s responsibility “to ensure a space where ideas — especially those that invite dialogue such as the topic of cancel culture and free speech, can be explored with respect, critical thought, and intellectual integrity.”

Not quite 48 hours later, New College thought better of it, announcing this “important and possibly never more relevant” conversation would be rescheduled at a later date.

NCF blamed problems with the venue (problems which apparently didn’t exist a few days ago) and those pesky journalists: “the current media climate is a distraction from the deeper purpose of the event to explore free speech.”

Brand has a court date in London on May 2.

Magic amulet

Now, you might be wondering exactly what qualifies Brand to be a guest lecturer for a public college in Florida.

He’s best known as host of a “Big Brother” spinoff called “Big Brother’s Big Mouth,” as the star of several films, including “Forgetting Sarah Marshall,” often-fired radio host, and general provocateur.

He used to be a progressive (of sorts), praising Barack Obama, meeting with the Dalai Lama, and saying rude things about George W. Bush, but has lately become a conspiracy theorist who, in 2024, took to selling a $250 “magic amulet” which supposedly keeps you safe from “all sorts of evil energies.”

Right.

There’s this thing we do in higher ed called “research.” You’d think a few minutes perusal of Russell Brand’s baby talk-titled memoir, “My Booky Wook” with gleeful accounts of spitting in a woman’s face and furiously smashing a sex worker’s phone because it kept ringing while they were in flagrante (a service “for which,” says Brand, “I’d paid a lot of money”) might suggest perhaps he’s not someone likely to enrich the culture.

None of this proves Brand is a rapist, but it’s pretty clear he’s a misogynist jerk.

Brand insists that while he was once epically promiscuous, all his liaisons were “consensual,” even the ones with teenagers.

Besides, he says, he has now been washed clean by the Holy Spirit, baptized last year in the River Thames by adventure reality TV star Bear Grylls.

Criminal investigation

Well, the Lord may have forgiven him, but the justice system doesn’t work like that: In addition to charges in the U.K., Brand faces a U.S. civil suit and possible criminal investigation into allegations that he exposed himself and assaulted a woman on the set of the film “Arthur.”

The question remains: Why is New College spending taxpayer money on this guy?

Other “Socratic” speakers are (mostly) defensible: Steven Donziger, who famously sued Chevron over oil operations in Ecuador which wreaked monstrous environmental damage. (The oil company accused him of misconduct in the case; he spent three years in home detention for refusing to turn over his phone and trial records; Amnesty International fruitlessly urged former President Joe Biden to issue a pardon.)

Also scheduled for appearances at New College are Judith Butler, the distinguished gender theorist, and Stanley Fish, lawyer and literary scholar, disliked by both the right and the left.

There is also, as you’d expect, a bunch of conservatives ranging from the intellectually respectable — Mollie Hemingway, editor of “The Federalist” — to the anti-vax doctor Scott Atlas.

But casting Russell Brand as some free speech hero is flat out stupid.

Milton intervention

It’s not the first time NCF has embarrassed itself. In 2024 the college invited white supremacist “eugenicon” Steve Sailer, who says Black men are in thrall to a “primal African cult of fertility,” to “debate” Black historian Dr. Marvin Dunn.

As if you can argue “both sides” on racism. There are not two sides — unless you think the KKK makes a lot of good points.

When Hurricane Milton forced the cancellation of what promised to be a particularly unlovely spectacle, you could almost believe in the wrath of God.

Despite MAGA hissy fit-pitching and anti-DEI squawking over “censorship” and “indoctrination” on campus, conservative ideas are not suppressed or censored.

FSU recently hosted economist and Reagan acolyte Glenn Loury; the University of Florida’s Hamilton Center has showcased Republican pollsters and American Enterprise Institute luminaries.

This is as it should be.

But there’s a difference between a university fostering honest discussion of academic freedom, ideology, and prejudice, and promoting a man who could soon be convicted of sexual assault.

Scrubbing the record

Florida’s Republican junta has convinced itself higher education turns innocent students into tree-hugging transgender Marxists who read nothing but books on critical race theory.

Terrified they’ll be penalized financially and every other way, colleges and universities have busied themselves scrubbing websites of incendiary words such as “women,” “Black,” “institutional” and “trauma.”

FSU has deleted and “archived” its posts on high-achieving students before 2023, claiming, in fluent bureaucratic nonsense-speak, they did it to get rid of “outdated information to enhance user experience and ensuring our webpages load quickly and efficiently on all devices.”

In case you’re not buying that one, they’re also calling it “routine maintenance.”

A cynical person might think this is really about obscuring official praise of students who might be queer or working in currently disfavored fields of study.

A cynical person might also wonder if state government wants to use higher education to return us to an imagined past when white Christian men were in charge of everything and everything was absolutely great, especially for white Christian men.

One of the governor’s picks for the Board of Trustees at University of West Florida, an institution he calls “a left-wing college,” wanted to take us back to the 1950s.

Scott Yenor, an academic nonentity at Boise State in Idaho, thinks only “non-Jewish white men” should be in leadership positions.

He says “independent women” are “medicated, meddlesome and quarrelsome” and proclaims, “If we want a great nation, we should be preparing young women to become mothers,” not have successful careers, certainly not in the manly fields of science, medicine, and the law.

Even some of Florida’s loudest and proudest reactionaries objected to Yenor’s weird ideas about women and obvious antisemitism.

Sen. Randy Fine, the state’s only Jewish Republican legislator (until he was elected to Congress on April 1) raised the alarm.

Back to Idaho

Indeed, Yenor is so out there that several hundred citizens, including students, alumni, former trustees, and donors, held a town hall in Pensacola — deep red Pensacola — urging the Florida Senate to reject his nomination.

Former Republican legislators, business leaders, donors, local officials, and members of the Jewish community expressed dismay. UWF President Emerita Judy Bense urged people to tell the governor “this is wrong.”

The amazing thing is, they won. Yenor, who had not yet been confirmed by the Senate, withdrew from consideration.

Sen. Don Gaetz, father of the egregious Matt, celebrated Yenor’s decision: “Gentlemen don’t go where no one wants them.”

Unacquainted with what gentlemen do, the governor is throwing a tantrum, blaming Fine, whom he describes as “repellent,” snarling, “Let’s just consider the source. I mean, that same senator called me antisemitic,” and accusing others of distorting Yenor’s record, “trying to dredge up statements” he calls “flimsy.”

Booting Yenor back to Idaho is a small victory for UWF and the basic decency we should expect from Florida’s state institutions.

“Rescheduling” Brand is, too, although New College is probably beyond redemption: Opening the campus to white supremacists and accused rapists does not demonstrate a commitment to vigorous examination of social norms and political pieties, or a bold assertion of free speech.

It’s evidence of decay.

NCF is now an educational ruin, lovely buildings perched on the shores of the Gulf of Mexico, intellectually and morally empty.

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

The sitting governor is limping around like a disabled waterfowl with a bad beer hangover, inspiring a high level of schadenfreude in the Florida Legislature.

He’s on the way to obsolescence and everyone knows it.

So — even though the next gubernatorial election doesn’t take place until November 2026 — it’s past time to look to the future: Who will rule the citrus-cankered, gun-crazy, storm-battered Sunshine State?

One of the leading candidates is Byron Donalds, a congressman from southwest Florida and an epic Trump rump-kisser.

Donalds calls Trump “Daddy.”

Trump calls Donalds a “TOTAL WINNER” and says he backs the obsequious congressman for governor.

Donalds’ understanding of America’s past is, to put it kindly, bizarre. During a 2024 event to drum up minority support for “Daddy,” he expressed nostalgia for the good old days of Jim Crow.

Back then, he says, “the Black family was together” and Black people voted conservative.

This is, of course, nonsense: Back then, Black people pretty much didn’t vote at all.

If they got past the poll tax and the “literacy tests” required to register (and most didn’t), and tried to cast a ballot, they could be lynched.

Rep. Donalds might want to familiarize himself with the Ocoee Massacre.

In 1920, a farmer named Mose Norman tried to exercise his rights as an American citizen and vote. A white mob rampaged through the town, killing at least 50 people.

Instead of recognizing that the United States still struggles with racism and misogyny, Donalds prefers to indulge in fake history and retrograde gender stereotyping, informing us: “Men have been created by God to be conquerors, to be hunters,” adding, “A Black man in today’s America is looking around and saying, ‘How can I go hunt for my people and hunt for my family?’”

What’s he talking about? Hunting for a good education? A good job? A rabbit?

Paranoia

With Trump’s endorsement, Donalds leads the Republican pack of potential candidates for governor, at least according to one recent poll, which has him at 31% support, followed (distantly) by former Lt. Gov. Jeannette Nuñez, Ag Commissioner Wilton Simpson, and the ethics-challenged mayor of Miami.

But, despite pronouncements that with Trump in the mix the race is a done deal, there are other, er, interesting candidates who cannot be dismissed so easily.

With the chaos President Musk is unleashing on the nation, Trump may not be quite so powerful in a year’s time — especially if he messes with your granny’s Medicare.

Casey DeSantis tops the polls conducted by the University of North Florida and Florida Atlantic University/Mainstreet Survey.

Ron DeSantis insists Florida’s First Lady isn’t running for anything: She’s a wife and mother, a dedicated supporter of America’s cosmetics industry.

He rather formally refers to her as “First Lady,” though “co-governor” might be more accurate.

When the two of them toured areas ravaged by Hurricane Ian in 2022, they dressed exactly alike: jeans, white shirts, Florida Department of Emergency Management vests, white rubber boots.

When it comes to his career, she’s the decider, the strategizer, the enforcer.

Casey is seen as more likeable than Ron but, like him, she’s paranoid.

In 2024, when Ron DeSantis was running for president, she tried to “humanize” him, reminding him to smile and be “likeable.”

Alas, it didn’t work, as evidenced by his dismal showing in the primaries.

Susie Wiles, Florida’s most feared campaign pro, worked for DeSantis until Casey decided she was somehow trading on her association with the governor and ran her off.

Wiles, who makes no secret of her profound dislike of the DeSantii, steered Trump’s campaign and is now White House chief of staff.

Oops.

Less popular than palmetto bugs

But ruthlessness, control freakery, and a streak of authoritarianism a mile wide are hardly disqualifying in Florida.

Ron DeSantis and his equally socially awkward predecessor proved that.

While Byron Donalds and Casey are clearly the frontrunners, there are plenty of other undelicious characters eyeing the Mansion.

Matt Gaetz, for starters — the rich, eminently punchable, Botox boy who has all the charm of a drunken iguana.

That would be the same Matt Gaetz who was forced to withdraw his name from consideration as Trump’s pick to be attorney general, the very Matt Gaetz who, in the words of the congressional investigation into his conduct, has been credibly accused of “prostitution, statutory rape, illicit drug use, impermissible gifts, special favors or privileges, and obstruction of Congress.”

The guy’s been investigated for sex trafficking by the Department of Justice (back when we still had one), paid a 17-year-old to have sex with him, and “entertained” fellow House members with nude photos of women he claimed to have slept with.

He has no ideas, but he’s rich in insults.

He insults Republicans, Democrats, senators, congressmen and -women, reproductive rights supporters, environmentalists, feminists, gay people, and Black people.

As a member of the Florida House, he ridiculed two Black senators, implying they were stupid.

Gaetz may have to overcome a few obstacles. For starters, his statewide approval rating is 18%. He’s less popular than palmetto bugs, blue green algae, and Kanye West.

Still, money works wonders in politics and a Gaetz campaign would have plenty of cash — even if he had to get it from his daddy.

Trumpier than thou

Florida Commissioner of Agriculture Wilton Simpson, another possible candidate, has less name recognition than Matt Gaetz, but then, he hasn’t been credibly accused of statutory rape.

Wilton Simpson via Florida Department of Agriculture

Simpson’s recently distinguished himself by sniping at Ron DeSantis over who’s the Trumpiest on immigration: “I’m not the one who opposed and ran against President Trump.”

Back when Simpson was president of the Senate, DeSantis vetoed a $600 million cancer facility planned for Pasco County (part of Simpson’s district) as well as $300 million for conservation lands.

Out of spite.

Jeannette Nuñez, you say? She’s making bank at her new sinecure: president of FAU, so why would she leave?

Plus, her polling is negligible, and she’s dull to boot.

But this is Florida: You never know.

For about five minutes in 2023, Francis Suarez, mayor of Miami, was a candidate for president of the United States. It did not go well.

Lately, he’s been calling a run for governor “interesting.”

What’s also interesting is that he’s been the subject of several state and federal probes (the state ones have now been dismissed by Florida’s joke of an Ethics Commission) involving his lucrative side hustles, including his getting paid $10,000 a month by a developer who was asking the city to grant him a special building permit.

Dare to dream

But why limit ourselves to those so-called credible — if possibly indictable — folks whose allegedly relevant experience or, at least, ability to get in front of TV cameras, makes them fit to run for Florida’s highest office?

Blue Sky thinking, people!

Don Trump Jr.?

He’s young, he’s well-connected, he’s armed, he lives in a $10 million house in Jupiter (the town in Palm Beach County, not the planet) and he has Thoughts About Government.

Like, that J.D. Vance is AWESOME.

Don Jr. gives himself credit for getting our Nazi-curious V.P. his current gig, expending what he described as “10,000 percent” of his political capital on begging his daddy.

He championed Robert F. Kennedy Jr., too.

So, when your kid gets the measles, you know who to thank.

Then there’s Jeff Bezos.

He’s a Floridian! And owns no fewer than three immodest dwellings on Indian Creek Island, one of them 23,000 square feet.

His neighbors include Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner, Tom Brady, and rising seas caused by the anthropogenic climate change none of them believe in.

Jeff B would be a great choice: He could just buy the state (except for the parts his fellow billionaires own), and we could all work at Amazon warehouses and branches of Whole Foods.

Economic problems solved.

Out there

And now that he’s out of prison, what about former Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio?

Actually, he can’t call himself a “Proud Boy” any more: Earlier this month, a federal judge awarded the violent nationalists’ name and trademarks to the Metropolitan African Methodist Episcopal Church in Washington D.C. — the church Tarrio’s outfit vandalized in 2020.

Or Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, one of Florida’s most impressive intellects.

Luna, author of a proposal to put Trump’s face on Mt. Rushmore, is investigating the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963.

She’s ordered members of the Warren Commission to appear before her, which, no doubt they’d be delighted to do, except they’re all dead.

Imagine: If APL were governor, she could launch investigations into Mickey’s mousehood — is he an actual rodent or an undocumented Mexican? — as well as demand Miami P.D.’s Sonny Crockett testify under oath on whether Detective Rico Tubbs was a DEI hire.

Seriously, y’all: With this rich cornucopia of political geniuses, how can Florida go wrong?

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

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!”

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.”

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

Men are back, baby!

Not just any old men, either: mega MAGA manly men with testosterone mixed with crypto cash oozing out of every orifice.

After years of chicks lording it over us (one of them even calling herself “Vice President” of the United States), ridiculing our gun fetishes, and dissing our deep-felt need to shoot stuff, this is exactly what the country needs.

And in case there’s any confusion, this nation now declares there are two genders and two genders only: men and girls.

Former Left Coast types like billionaire Mark Zuckerburg now say American corporate culture must embrace aggression and revel in “masculine energy.”

As you recall, Zuck used to be one of those weedy Gamma males (he couldn’t make Beta-status), ignored by hot girls and ridiculed by Alphas at Harvard.

Well, no más. He bulked up during the pandemic, rocking bigtime masculine energy — indeed, so much masculine energy, fellow nerdster Elon Musk challenged him to a cage fight at the Roman Colosseum.

Unfortunately, this awesome bout never materialized. Musk says Zuck “declined;” Zuck hinted at scheduling problems.

In any case, they’re buds again, or at least cordial fellow oligarchs.

As for Musk, his Big-D energy rules. He’s cock-a-hoop (as it were) that his little friend Donald Trump is back in the White House while the “handsome” and “nice” Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau is out, and in Germany, AfD, Musk’s fave white supremacists, are singing,“We’re marching to a faster pace — look out, here comes the master race!”

As President Musk says, “Masculinity is making a comeback. Great men are rising.”

Rising like rockets headed to Mars!

The butching-up of New College

Here in the Great State of Florida which, if you look at a map, looks appropriately phallic, manliness flourishes like tumescent mushrooms after a hard rain.

Our super-manly governor is muscling in on Florida’s so-called “institutions of higher education,” which have for too long been dominated by female students and professors teaching Virginia Woolf instead of Ernest Hemingway and refusing to acknowledge this country was built by white Christian tough guys like Andrew Jackson, Gen. George Armstrong Custer, and John Wayne.

Females have been running amok over the last hundred-odd years, wearing trousers, voicing their opinions, asserting their bodily autonomy, even voting.

Worst of all, they insist on going to college.

Ron DeSantis has already tamed the once girl-and-gay friendly New College of Florida, appointing trustees like Christopher Rufo, who warns too many women cause “all sorts of cultural problems,” turning universities into “social justice ghettos.”

The solution to this abhorrent feminization? Affirmative action for long discriminated-against white guys.

It was easy: New College simply lowered academic standards and admitted a bunch of baseball players.

Now the governor has turned his attention to the University of West Florida, appointing a new board member, a right-thinking fellow from Boise State U., where men are men and the football field is a strong, masculine blue.

Feminism, says Prof. Scott Yenor, ruins everything, causing women to be “medicated, meddlesome and quarrelsome.”

Scott Yenor assures us we should not want females pursuing degrees in manly subjects like science or becoming attorneys: “every effort must be made not to recruit women into engineering, but rather to recruit and demand more of men who become engineers. Ditto for med school and the law.”

Maybe those Taliban dudes have a point.

Over-educated, under-loved

We can’t have “independent women” running around becoming professionals. Yenor warns, “If we want a great nation, we should be preparing young women to become mothers.”

The girls at UWF will love how this simplifies matters for them.

They have one job, and that job is babies.

Ron DeSantis says he was “not familiar” with Prof. Yenor’s remarks, but the gov is such a modest fellow: He also refused to take credit for that genius plan to build resorts, motels, pickleball courts, parking lots, golf courses, clubhouses, and other super-fun things in our state parks which, face it, are pretty boring, what with them being nothing but “nature.”

The only “nature” manly men should concern themselves with is impregnating anything with a functioning uterus.

Take President Musk: He’s got 12 children and says he wants many, many more.

He even generously offered some of his magisterial boy-juice to “give” a kid to that unsuccessful, unhappy spinster Taylor Swift.`

Florida’s own Matt Gaetz, unjustly hounded out of Congress merely for enjoying the company of young ladies whom he compensated for their time, concurs.

“Over-educated, under-loved” women asserting their independence and protesting in favor of reproductive rights, need a good, strong husband to free them from a life of “lonely microwave dinners” with their cat.

If the ladies stay home making dinner for their husbands, changing diapers, and cleaning up baby vomit, they won’t have time to fool with a career.

Nothing gay about it

Naturally, women have to be acceptable to men — a manly man won’t take any old female. She needs a beach babe body and a compliant attitude.

Good looks are essential in MAGAmerica. OK, maybe not for Zuck, Bezos, and President Musk: Money trumps ugly.

Matt Gaetz, who’s rich, but not as rich as those oligarchs, knows he needs to maintain his boyish beauty. Word on the street is he’s availed himself of that miracle of modern science, Botox.

There’s nothing unmanly about braving a few needles to plump up the skin and get what’s known in the cosmetic dermatology trade as that irresistible “Spock Eye.”

This is NOT GAY.

And, since the gentlemen go to all that trouble to be attractive, shouldn’t the feminists work a little harder?

As Gaetz points out, if you’re one of those “5′ 2″, 350 pound” chicks who “looks like a thumb,” you’ll never find a guy and you’ll never have to worry about getting pregnant and so why don’t you shut up about abortion?

He says this with love, you see; he understands women, especially young women — very young women.

Embracing the patriarchy

The patriarchy gets a bad rap these days, but here in Florida we embrace it and then go make it a sandwich.

U.S. Rep. Byron Donalds, eyeballing the 2026 Florida governor’s race, knows who his daddy is, and that daddy is Donald Trump.

Interviewed by Fox “News” the day before the Inauguration, Donalds waxed rhapsodic: “When Americans see deportations or repatriations happen, they’re gonna be like, ‘Thank you,’” adding “Daddy’s back!”

I’m sure President Musk’s friend Donald Trump loves it when one of his boys calls him “Daddy.”

So cute!

Of course, everybody’s calling him Daddy now: Lauren Boebert, Kid Rock, and Tucker Carlson, who imagined Daddy spanking “bad little girl” Kamala Harris.

There’s even an awesome new song called “Daddy’s Home” by the blindingly white rapper Tom MacDonald and special musical guest Roseanne Barr in which they holler: “We won, you mad, it’s done, too bad, boo-hoo, so sad, now your daddy’s home.”

America is full-on masculine again: guns, boots, trucks, well-done 48 oz. steaks, bad beer, misogyny, rage, violence, imperialism.

If you sass him, well, Daddy’s got a big belt and he’s not afraid to use it.

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

Florida’s simply not large enough: As part of a growing empire, we need a bigger place.

People keep coming here, especially Canadians, clogging up the aisles in Publix, ostentatiously ordering Molson beer in bars, bragging about how they don’t have to worry about going bankrupt paying for health care.

Canada owes us big time, so it’s only fair they cede their territory to us. We’ll call it “Florida North” (not “North Florida” which, as everybody knows, is weird).

Why not? Canada doesn’t do anything but sit up there being polite.

Politeness is a security risk.

Also, the Canadians have oil, which should clearly belong to us.

As the Dear Leader asserted the other day in his completely rational press conference, if the 51st-staters don’t play nice, we’ll bring them to their frostbitten knees with “economic force” and turn their so-called “provinces” into good Christian Florida counties with lousy hospitals and empty libraries.

“Governor” Trudeau (what a loser) says there’s “not a snowball’s chance in hell” we’ll get Canada.

Yeah, well, in MAGAmerica, hell is full of snowballs: We call them big, beautiful tariffs.

If the tariffs don’t work, there’s always the 101st Airborne.

While we’re at it, we might as well invade Greenland.

Maybe we’ll give Denmark, a small loser country which claims Greenland is an autonomous territory of its kingdom, a bit of money for the place.

A place in Nuuk

This would be awesome for Florida, too.

Floridians used to dream of having a house in North Carolina to escape the Sunshine State’s eight months of summer, but when the U.S. gets its mitts on that big old hunk of ice in the North Atlantic, Floridians can get a place in Nuuk.

Cheap!

Besides, as a blond lady on “The Five” (obviously a distinguished historian) reminded us, back in 1867 President Harry Truman offered the Danes, a people known only for pastries, $100 million for it.

They should have taken the deal.

Now the Danes (many of whom are large dogs) are being rude and nasty, and if there’s anything the Dear Leader hates its rudeness and nastiness.

The so-called “King of Denmark” changed his coat-of arms, which used to have a tiny polar bear — the symbol of Greenland with a bunch of lions and crowns.

Now the polar bear is really big, like the king is saying “Greenland isn’t for sale.”

Au contraire, mein amigo: Everything is for sale.

Ask Elon Musk: He bought the presidency of the United States for a mere $250 million.

Don Jr. took a “day trip” to Greenland on Jan. 7, merely, you know, as a snow-loving tourist, called his father from a restaurant, and put him on speakerphone.

Anybody sitting there, innocently enjoying their seal-meat Suasaat, could hear Don Sr. hollering, “You see the people and the ships sailing around and they’re not the right ships. They’re not the ships you want to know about.”

Anyway, Greenland: The place should be grateful we want to give them the benefits of our civilization:

“Real Housewives.”

Unaffordable homeowners’ insurance.

High fructose corn syrup.

Guns.

‘Liquid invasion’

Besides, Greenland totally owes Florida for the flood damage it continues to inflict upon us.

As the never-satirical Florida columnist Frank Cerabino points out, Greenland persists in sending “giant chunks of your ice floe into the Atlantic, knowing fully that they will eventually wage a liquid invasion against the low-lying coastline of Florida.”

An act, he says, of war.

Nations have been carpet-bombed for less.

If Greenlanders keep saying “no,” the Dear Leader warns he might resort to military force.

He doesn’t like the word “no.”

It’s perfectly clear this God-favored nation needs both Canada and Greenland for “economic security,” “national security,” and to make America great — or at least way bigger — again.

As deep thinker and Manifest Destiny Dude Jesse Watters remarked on Fox, “The fact that they don’t want us to take them over makes me want to invade. I want to quench my imperialist thirst.”

If the British, the Spanish, the French, the Chinese, the Portuguese, the Dutch, the Belgians, the Moguls, and every-damn-body else gets to colonize, we do, too.

We’re not stopping at Canada and Greenland, either: the Panama Canal is also on the list.

So what if there’s some “treaty”? We’re imperial America. Treaties mean nothing.

Ask the Indians. They thought they had treaties, too.

Jimmy Carter gave that canal away and look what happened to him?

Sure, he got the Nobel Peace Prize, but the guy never made any money.

Loser.

While we’re at it, there’ll be a little rebranding.

The Gulf of “Mexico” is now the Gulf of America. We’ll make Mexico pay for the new maps.

And how do you like the sound of “Trump International Canal”

Beautiful.

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

The United States government has always been a rowdy, often nasty, bunch: fist fights, knives pulled, guns cocked.

In 1838, two House members fought a lethal duel, and, in 1856, pro-slavery Sen. Preston Brooks took out his cane and thrashed abolitionist Sen. Charles Sumner.

On Jan. 6, 2023, a North Carolina congressman had to stop an Alabama congressman from punching Florida’s own Rep. Matt Gaetz.

Many in Washington and beyond would like to punch Matt Gaetz, but in this particular instance he’d just tanked the 14th vote on making Kevin McCarthy speaker of the House, offending Rep. Mike Rogers, a McCarthy supporter.

McCarthy would go on to win the 15th vote.

Ten months later, McCarthy’d been ousted and boy, was he mad!

So mad he shoved Tennessee U.S. Rep. Tim Burchett — “a clean shot to the kidneys!” howled Burchett — sparking a near brawl in a Capitol corridor.

This is what happens when Mean Girls — who don’t have to actually be girls — run your government.

Take Matt Gaetz (again). The failed attorney general nominee, Lolita-fancier, and blue ribbon jerk, set the House’s Mean Girl standard, referring to an incoming Republican senator as “Mitt Romney without the good hair” and long-time Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell as “McFailure,” bringing a Holocaust denier to a State of the Union address, passing around nude photos of his exes, and calling women who favor reproductive rights fat and ugly.

Gaetz is out of the House now, but the score-settling, tantrum-throwing state Randy Fine, only recently elected to the Florida Senate, has generously decided to run for Congress, so the nation will not feel the loss of his epic nastiness so keenly.

Fine’s resumé includes calling a Brevard County school board member a “whore” and threatening Special Olympics funding because he didn’t get invited to a party.

This past October, the judge presiding over an election filing dispute found him in contempt and ordered him to take an anger management course.

Gaetz must be proud.

Such an expert hissy fit-pitcher will fit right in with the likes of Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia. These two nearly launched into a slap fight over who got to try and impeach President Biden first.

Greene said Boebert “copied her articles” and called her “a little b----.”

Hands-down winner

For her part, Boebert, famous for groping her date and singing loudly at a 2023 performance of “Beetlejuice” (she was “escorted out” of the theater), called fellow representative Ilhan Omar “black-hearted” and probably a terrorist because she is Muslim.

Impressively vile as Greene and Boebert are, the hands-down winner of the Meanest Mean Girl in Congress is Nancy Mace, R-South Carolina.

Mace used to be seen as a moderate Republican, a Donald Trump critic who demanded he be “held accountable” for lying and instigating the Jan. 6 insurrection.

But she has now executed a perfect volte-face, becoming one of his most passionate groupies, practically vibrating with spite.

This past November, Delaware elected Congress’ first trans woman, something Mace seems to take as a personal insult.

Rep. Sarah McBride, a Democrat, doesn’t make a big deal out of her gender status; Mace does, apparently convinced the minute McBride dares to enter a stall in the Capitol ladies’, Western Civilization will crumble into dust.

She trash-talks her fellow member relentlessly, too: “Sarah McBride doesn’t get a say. I mean, this is a biological man.”

Mace has videoed herself ripping down blue and pink trans flags, snarling like an enraged hyena, and insisted Mike Johnson, whose lordly powers as speaker include regulating toilets in the House of Representatives, forbade trans women to use women’s bathrooms.

Now she’s demanding Congress ban trans people from bathrooms in all federal properties.

Does Mace think persecuting people who are four times more likely than straight folks to be assaulted, raped, or killed helps America achieve a more perfect union?

Or is she being horrible for the sheer hell of it?

Cruelty

MAGA Mean Girls take pleasure in tormenting people, especially those weaker than themselves, and causing gratuitous pain. As Atlantic Monthly essayist Adam Serwer wrote in 2018, “The cruelty is the point.”

And nobody enjoys cruelty more than Donald Trump, Mean Girl of the Century.

He kicked off his first campaign by ridiculing a disabled New York Times reporter, mocking women as “pigs,” and insulting veterans. Once in office, he delighted in images of caged migrant children, promoted police brutality, celebrated violence, and humiliated everyone around him.

Now he’s obsessed with punishing every person who has ever said anything negative about him, contradicted him, or failed to conspicuously celebrate his greatness: scientists, lawyers, teachers, doctors, journalists, judges, environmentalists, professors.

He wants to fire more than half the federal workforce.

(Hope you don’t think that tax return or that Social Security check will arrive on time — or ever — anymore).

He threatens our allies, dissing NATO, and, just the other day, trolled Canada, musing on making it the 51st state and referring to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau as “governor.”

Canada is the United States’ largest trading partner.

He wants to jail reporters who displease him and destroy news organizations trying to hold him to account.

The United States Senate just blocked a bill that would have protected press freedom.

Trump told them to.

He wants President Joe Biden investigated for supposedly stealing the 2020 election; he wants former chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley, President Barack Obama, and the whole Jan. 6 committee tried for “treason.”

This is what you voted for, America: ignorant bullies, junior despots, petty mediocrities who take pleasure in others’ suffering.

Nothing they do will improve your life, make you safer or freer or bring down the price of eggs.

They’re Mean Girls — Mean Girls don’t do public service.

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

LONDON—However hard they try — and try they do — the British cannot beat Americans for dysfunctional, embarrassing, weird, indeed criminal, politics.

They haven’t witnessed anything like a former “adult film” star conjuring a picture of the 45th president in his underwear, telling her right before they had sex that she reminded him of his daughter, an encounter she describes as “brief.”

Maybe if Prince Andrew had been forced to listen to one of convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein’s teenagers discuss her, um, “date” with His Royal Highness in a public courtroom, it might come close to this cringe-making awkwardness.

But the prince settled out of court, so no points there.

Still, while Conservative Prime Minister Rishi Sunak can’t begin to compete with Donald Trump’s epic vulgarity, and members of Parliament insist on speaking in sentences complete with nouns and verbs — unlike many in Congress (looking at you, Marjorie Taylor “peachtree dish” Greene) who could use some English lessons — that doesn’t mean they aren’t giving it their all.

The sitting Tory government knows it’s likely to lose the next election bigly, so for some reason best known to themselves (or attributable to the subsidized booze in the House of Commons bar) they’ve decided to copy every stupid, crazy, hateful hairball of an idea puked up by our own Republicans.

You’re welcome, Britain.

Diversity initiatives in government? No mas.

No more networks for Muslim staff in the Civil Service. No more support of LGBTQ employees.

And no more attaching official IDs to “rainbow lanyards” or other displays of supposedly “woke” tendencies.

Studies show that most Britons support diversity and inclusion in the workplace, but who cares what the voters want?

Define a woman?

The sick and spiteful policies of Florida’s own mini-Mussolini have inspired the Conservatives to embrace a bunch of lousy schemes, such as a new education rule forbidding schools to teach about where babies come from, contraception, consent, etc. to any kid under 9 — which apparently doesn’t happen anyway — and bans discussion of gender identity.

Don’t say “gay,” don’t say “sex,” and certainly don’t say “trans.”

Rishi Sunak, who likes to say “a man is a man and a woman is a woman,” wants it made clear to the Youth of the U.K. that being trans is bad.

He’s fond of accusing Labour leader Keir Starmer of being “unable to define a woman” (a favorite talking point among U.S. Republicans) and recently added to his image as a jerk of the first order by making a transphobic “joke” in the House of Commons.

He made said “joke” on the day the mother of Brianna Ghey, a 16 year-old trans girl murdered by two teenagers, was sitting in the Commons gallery.

Sunak refused to apologize.

Ronald Dion DeSantis would be proud.

Protests

USF campus police using tear gas on protestors on the USF campus in Tampa on April 30, 2024 (photo credit: Tampa Bay SDS)

Top Gov would not, however, be proud of how the British government is handling pro-Palestinian protests at universities.

Not once have the police been summoned to break up the encampments which have sprung up on the silky lawns of Oxford and in the hallowed halls of the London School of Economics.

The Tories would much prefer the approach of Columbia’s president, Minouche Shafik, who didn’t seem to mind how the cops treated her students and has categorically refused to divest from Israel.

Fun fact: Not only is the dual U.S.-U.K. citizen Shafik a distinguished economist, she was awarded a life peerage by Prime Minister Boris Johnson, he of the hair and the endless scandals.

Baroness Shafik sits in the House of Lords — when she’s not screwing up a major educational institution, that is.

In contrast to Columbia and other seats of learning across the country, many British universities are actually discussing divestment with student demonstrators.

Trinity, the richest college at the very rich Cambridge University, has agreed to give up its stock in arms companies that supply the Israeli military.

Gaza protests across the U.K. have been almost entirely peaceful, but that’s not stopping Rishi Sunak from scaremongering, summoning university heads and demanding they take “personal responsibility” for the safety of students, especially Jewish students, some of whom feel understandably uncomfortable about their classmates’ vehement opposition to Israeli policy.

Antisemitism

It’s undeniable there’s a fair amount of anti-semitism in the U.K. , some on the left, some on the right. “Free Palestine” has been spray-painted on buildings in London neighborhoods known to have a substantial Jewish population and Jewish kids verbally harassed.

Some Jewish students say the academic environment is hostile, making them feel vulnerable; others, such as Jews for Justice for Palestinians, have joined the protests.

A group of rabbis, lawyers, and other prominent British Jews have called for a ceasefire.

It’s not that Sunak really likes Israel; it’s more that he really dislikes universities, even though he has degrees from two of them (Oxford and Stanford).

Universities teach young people to question authority, especially the Conservative Party, and often encourage students to pursue what he has called “useless” degrees, the kind that don’t lead to high-paying jobs providing a good “return on investment” to society.

Sunak means degrees in subjects such as the arts and the humanities.

(He himself studied philosophy at Oxford).

Kind of reminds you of Top Gov (Yale and Harvard), doesn’t it?

Brown folks

Then there’s immigration: Ron DeSantis, Donald Trump, and the rest of their whole sick crew despise immigrants — unless they’re rich, conservative and, ideally, from Norway or some other white country.

Brown folks are not welcome.

Dislike of foreigners is also a core value of British Conservatives; they don’t like brown people, either.

They are, however, pretty ecumenical in their xenophobia: Brexit was fueled by pissed-off Britons wanting to throw those dang Poles, Italians, Germans, Filipinos, and other not-English types out of this green and pleasant land.

Never mind the fruit rotting on the vines for lack of farm laborers and the dire shortage of nurses and other health care workers.

I have to admit that on immigration policy, the Sunak government may have Florida and Texas beat.

You will recall Top Gov sent planes to collect asylum seekers from Texas and flew them off to Massachusetts to keep them out of Florida (makes zero sense, I know).

The Tories are more ambitious: They mean to catch the boatloads of desperate refugees when they arrive from France and dispatch them to Rwanda to be “processed.”

Yes, Rwanda, which the Tory government has declared “a safe country,” despite strong rulings to the contrary by the British High Court, and despite what the U.S. State Department calls “significant human rights issues,” i.e. targeting journalists, violence against LGBTQ people, and extra-judicial killings.

The British government has, to date, paid the Rwandan government £370 million pounds.

So far, they’ve flown exactly one guy there.

Slow start

Sunak allows that, sure, it’s a slow start, but it’s not his fault, it’s those human rights groups, high court judges, and flaming liberals in the House of Lords.

He boasts the government is poised to export pesky asylum seekers any day now: Commercial charters have been booked and planes are waiting on runways ready to take off.

Problem is, of the 5,700 refuges deemed “eligible” for removal, more than half of them have disappeared, blending into the general British population, probably working and contributing to the economy.

While the Sunak government has yet to go so far as to claim asylum seekers are rapists and murderers “poisoning the blood” of the nation, their xenophobic rants are nonetheless reminiscent of Trump’s.

Priti Patel, a former Tory cabinet minister, warned that immigration would destroy the U.K. from within.

MP Suella Braverman utters dire warnings about the cross-Channel “invasion.”

Braverman embraces the Great Replacement conspiracy theory, railing against threats to “the West” and dilution of “English culture” from too damn much diversity.

Racist snark

For months, Rishi Sunak seemed to like her racist snark, but then she went too far, accusing the London police of “playing favorites” and being too nice to pro-Palestinian demonstrators.

That was too much for a law-and-order suck-up like Sunak and he fired her.

Unrepentant, she is now the darling of fascist-adjacent groups such as Britain First.

(That name sounds kind of familiar … .)

More fun facts: Sunak, Patel, and Braverman are all the children of immigrants. Their parents came to Britain from Uganda, Mauritius, and Tanzania, children of immigrants from India themselves.

Apparently British Conservatives are so eaten up with prejudice and paranoia they wouldn’t recognize irony if it slapped them upside the head.

Barring some almighty intervention, Labour is going to beat them like a rented mule, and while the party of Keir Starmer isn’t going to bring about the New Jerusalem, they’re unlikely to spend their time in government tormenting the weak and the vulnerable.

They might even do some good.

Meanwhile, the Tories might want to stop taking their cues from Ron DeSantis and his master, the Beast of Mar-a-Lago.

As Rick Wilson, the smartest (ex) Republican in the U.S., reminds us, everything Trump touches dies.

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

Republicans cast themselves as the party of piety, traditional gender roles, and family values.

This is at odds with reality.

Donald Trump raped New York writer E. Jean Carroll in a department store dressing room. Dozens of other women have accused him of sexual harassment.

A former staffer on Herschel Walker’s failed U.S. Senate campaign is suing Matt Schlapp, head of the influential right wing group CPAC, for sexual battery. Former House Speaker Dennis Hastert went to jail for abusing teenaged boys.

To name but a few.

Certainly, Democrats are not without sin: Anthony Weiner and Rep. John Conyers, for example, though Dems are more likely to resign when confronted with their appalling behavior.

Which brings us to Florida GOP chairman Christian Ziegler, who — as the entire planet now knows — has been accused of rape.

He claims the sex was consensual. Sarasota police are inclined to disagree.

He admits to having an affair with the woman he allegedly attacked.

His wife Bridget, a co-founder of Moms for Liberty and member of the Sarasota School Board who has vowed to bring “religious values” to education, also admits to having an affair with her. The three of them had sex. Together.

Family values!

Sen. Rick Scott, the state’s legislative leadership, the Cabinet, and other former friends and enablers say Ziegler should step down.

Gov. Ron DeSantis, who used to praise Bridget Ziegler to the skies, declaring he wished he could put a Bridget Ziegler on every school board “in every county in Florida,” now wants the Zieglers deep-sixed.

Dark motive

Ronbo’s presidential campaign is disintegrating before the eyes of the nation, so he’s trying to change the subject, vowing to dedicate $1 million to — somehow — fighting the cosmic injustice of Florida State not being included in the College Football Playoffs.

Of course, Ziegler refuses to resign.

In an email to fellow Rs which manages to be both self-aggrandizing and self-pitying, he says “anyone” can file a rape accusation and suggests there’s some dark “motive” at work: “We have a country to save and I am not going to let false allegations of a crime put that mission on the bench as I wait for this process to wrap up.”

According to the sworn police affidavit, Ziegler took a little break from saving the country and refused to take no for an answer.

The woman who says he attacked her had agreed to an “encounter” with both him and his wife but, when Bridget backed out, she canceled, admitting it was Bridget she was really “into.”

Ziegler showed up at her place uninvited, she says, bent her over a piece of furniture, and raped her.

He also recorded the whole thing.

What a model of a Christian gentleman.

Ziegler continues to insist he’s being targeted; he’s the real victim; and he’ll be exonerated.

The Florida Center for Government Accountability, the nonprofit that broke the story (full disclosure: I sit on FLCGA’s board but wasn’t involved in the center’s stories), now reports the police have recovered Ziegler’s auto-porn tape.

Without going into the (truly ghastly) details of the encounter, the tape suggests the case will be anything but open and shut.

So, let’s assume for a moment that Christian Ziegler does not get charged with rape.

Concubine?

Let’s look at the Zieglers in terms their MAGA conservative friends might understand.

Christian’s an unapologetic adulterer, an unrepentant offender against the Commandments (Numbers 7 and 10, specifically).

I guess he could argue the Old Testament does suggest it’s all right for certain righteous fellows to have multiple sex partners: Jacob and his four wives, Solomon and his 300 concubines.

Nice work if you can get it. But I don’t recall Jesus ever putting his stamp of approval on ménages à trois.

Like her husband, Bridget’s also an adulterer, cheating on her undelicious spouse with another woman.

The same woman, as it happens.

Nobody should condemn Bridget for having sex with a same-gender partner; it’s just that she and her sister Harpies for Hate have made a career of vicious homophobia.

Hypocrisy is never pretty, no matter how blond and tan.

Bridget’s long been an anti-woke warrior princess, a big backer of Ron DeSantis’ “Don’t Say Gay” law. When a fellow school board member — a gay man — was accused at a public meeting of being a “lawbreaker and LGBTQ groomer” by a woman with reported ties to Bridget’s Harpies for Hate, she sat there, let him be abused, and did nothing.

Although several school board members are calling for her resignation, as of this writing, Bridget is still on the Sarasota School Board as well as DeSantis’ absurd Disney oversight board.

She’s just who you want pushing for wholesome, child-friendly entertainment — but only if you like the idea of Mickey, Minnie, and Snow White in a three-way.

I mean, how is she going to explain mommy and daddy’s exotic proclivities to her own kids? Unless the Zieglers move to Kabul or lock their offspring in the cellar for the foreseeable future, their young daughters are going to have some questions.

Staggering arrogance

Hell, we all have questions, such as how dare these trashy people presume to set themselves up as moral arbiters?

It’s not just their sleaziness, it’s their staggering arrogance.

One of the Moms for Libertines chapters famously quoted Adolf Hitler in their newsletter. In a “media training session” run by Christian Ziegler at their national conference, his advice was “Never apologize. Ever.”

He added, “I think apologizing makes you weak.”

To be fair, he did sort of apologize to his alleged victim. The police helped her record their conversations in the days after she says he raped her.

He told her he was “sorry.” Then he tried to change the subject to his need for a haircut.

In a subsequent call, the woman tried to get him to acknowledge that he’d sexually assaulted her.

His response? “Those are big words, please don’t. No, I didn’t.” Then he said, lamely, “I never wanted you to feel that way.”

Christian Ziegler is also still chair of the Florida GOP, though probably not for long.

Through rivers of crocodile tears, vice chair and ambitious little toad Evan Power contacted his fellow Republicans, saying: “It is with a heavy heart I write this email to you.”

He’s calling a special meeting to discuss “the situation with the Chairman.”

In the Republican Party, the wages of hypocrisy is usually promotion. But in this case, exile to political Siberia is more likely.

No matter what happens, let’s remember there’s a victimized woman at the heart of this sordid business.

It would be funny if it weren’t so criminal.

Florida Phoenix is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Florida Phoenix maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Diane Rado for questions: info@floridaphoenix.com. Follow Florida Phoenix on Facebook and Twitter.

Ronbo is pissed off. Madder than a wet hen. Angry as a sack full of rattlers. Irate as a guy with sand in his Speedo.

After everything he has done for Florida — nay, the nation! — and this is how Florida (indeed, the NATION!) repays him.

Iowa poll numbers? In the crapper.

The Koch Bros? Endorsed Nikki Haley.

Sen. Rick Scott? Endorsed Trump.

Ronbo’s trapped in a desperation tantrum so unhinged he keeps threatening to bomb the Bahamas.

He has decided to show how tough he is, going on the offensive not against Moscow but against a peaceable nation of pink buildings, blue seas, and Black people, wooing voters in Iowa and New Hampshire by hollering, “Like, if the Bahamas were firing rockets into Fort Lauderdale, like, we would not accept that for, like, one minute. I mean, we would just level it.”

The government of the Bahamas has requested urgent clarification.

Here’s the question: How many wheels will fall off the Ronbo bus before it lands permanently and irreparably in the ditch?

Ronbo’s problems go way beyond his reputed penchant for eating pudding with his hands.

Rep. Randy Fine, once DeSantis’ most loyal pet poodle, has turned on his master. Along with a pack of other traitors in the Florida Legislature, he’s defected, switched his endorsement to Trump.

Fine says it’s because the governor was too slow in condemning the Nazis who persisted in waving DeSantis signs all over Florida.

(Fine should have known better: The governor can hardly go around dissing his base, right?)

Backing down

Now Ronbo’s backers are becoming hysterical. That guy who was CEO of the DeSantis super PAC Never Back Down?

He backed down. Bailed. Resigned over issues “well beyond a difference of strategic opinion.”

A couple of weeks earlier, NBD’s top dudes had met to figure out how DeSantis could counter the menace that is Nikki Haley. Two of them nearly got into a fistfight.

Top consultant Jeff Roe took exception to Scott Wagner, a buddy of DeSantis’ from their (totally non-elitist) Yale days, saying “You have a stick up your a—, Scott.”

“Why don’t you come over here and get it?” said Wagner, who reportedly had to be restrained by two other NBD board members.

Adding to the general air of doom and disarray, Ronbo’s big donors wonder what happened to all that campaign cash. DeSantis and PACs supporting him vacuumed up fat checks early on, but a lot of that cash seems to have been blown on private jet travel.

Obviously, Ronbo, his Jackie-wannabe First Lady, and the campaign prop offspring can’t fly commercial.

One donor expressed alarm that “these guys have spent all this money for no return.” He added, “You don’t just keep throwing money at Radio Shack.”

What’s a poor graduate of Yale and Harvard to do? The serious cash is drying up; the media are dismissing him; the elites are ridiculing him; Nikki Haley (like, a GIRL!) is attacking him.

Worst of all, Donald Trump is trolling him. Hard.

Think of it: Ronbo and Plastic Jackie did that adorable Build-the-Wall campaign ad with their adorable kid in 2018 — a huge compliment to then-President Trump — and he repays them with insults, taunting, and sneering.

Trump is also tormenting them by being 30 points ahead in Iowa and 40 points ahead in New Hampshire.

So unfair.

‘Wounded bird’

On Nov. 5, Trump told the Republican Party’s hilariously named “Freedom Summit” that his rivals should drop out of the race. DeSantis in particular: “We hit him hard and now he’s like a wounded bird falling from the sky.”

Before the DeSantis duck splats on the pavement, making an unseemly mess, he’s tried one last, desperate move: debating a guy who isn’t running for president.

Last Thursday on Fox “News,” Ronbo went at California Gov. Gavin Newsom in what moderator Sean Hannity cast with characteristic understatement as both a “mixed martial arts” bout and a “war.”

Fun fact about Newsom: He used to be married to Kimberly Guilfoyle, Donald Trump Jr.’s shouty squeeze.

Fun fact about DeSantis: He has a habit of wiping his nose then depositing his snot on potential voters’ sleeves.

But here’s how it went — at least the parts you could make out amidst the hollering, insults, and interruptions.

DeSantis said California screwed up COVID; Newsom said Florida screwed up COVID. Newsom said DeSantis wants to stop women having control over their bodies, signing a bill that bans abortions at six weeks, before they even know they’re pregnant.

DeSantis said that’s because he’s into life in all its forms and iterations unless maybe it’s gay.

(That’s what he meant, anyway).

Newsom brought up Ronbo’s zeal for banning books; Ronbo whipped out texts he said were pornographic. Newsom rolled his eyes; Ronbo crowed that everyone in California is moving to Florida, including Newsom’s in-laws.

Given that the parents of Newsom’s wife are rich Republicans, it’s not exactly shocking they bought a second home (for a mere $3.3 million) in Naples.

Poop map

Then, in a coup de théâtre, DeSantis whipped out a map of San Francisco dappled in various shades of brown. It supposedly tracks incidents of public defecation in the city he described as “previously great.”

“Feces is now a fact of life,” said Ronbo.

Newsom deployed a relaxed Kennedyesque smile to convey his contempt for DeSantis, poop, porn, and all.

DeSantis had clearly been advised to arrange his resting-jerk face into a more pleasant configuration, even to “smile.”

Ron DeSantis’ “smile” is about as genuine as George Santos’ resumé.

More fun facts: Newsom is at least four inches taller than DeSantis.

While the AP called the debate a “hard to explain” spectacle, it isn’t really hard to explain at all: Newsom was raising his national profile for a likely White House run in 2028; DeSantis, his presidential campaign collapsing around him like a gingerbread house in the rain, is desperate.

As former GOP strategist Stuart Stevens twxxted: “@RonDeSantis will go down as the chump who not only lost every debate in his race, but lost to a guy who isn’t even in the race. That’s talent.”

It gets worse: The Washington Post reports that DeSantis campaign staffers smell disaster. A source told the newspaper: “People increasingly think it’s over. It’s a dumpster fire.”

Ménage à trois

The Florida Republican Party is doing a little self-immolating of its own. DeSantis pal Christian Ziegler, state party chairman and pious promoter of “family values,” is under criminal investigation for rape.

A woman says he assaulted her and claims that he, she, and his wife had a hot little ménage à trois going down there in Sarasota.

She also alleges he videotaped their, er, encounters.

Bridget Ziegler is a school board member and one of the founders of Moms for Liberty. She demands that “religious values” return to our schools and wants books on racism, LGBTQ issues, and anything that depicts sex be removed from libraries lest it corrupt our youth.

As DeSantis watches his White House dreams turn to ash, he’s feebly calling for Ziegler to resign.

It won’t matter. He won’t matter.

The bigtalking “Top Gov” in the ill-fitting flight suit has been forced to come down to earth; the swaggering Walmart Napoleon who bought the early hype around his “inevitability,” is now heading for his Waterloo.

Florida Phoenix is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Florida Phoenix maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Diane Rado for questions: info@floridaphoenix.com. Follow Florida Phoenix on Facebook and Twitter.

If Matt Gaetz were a character in “Animal House,” he’d be Douglas Niedermeyer, the fascist frat bro who ends up being killed in Vietnam by his own troops.

Everybody hates Matt Gaetz.

They hate him as much as they hate Ted Cruz and y’all, that’s a heaping helping of hate.

As Sen. Lindsey Graham once remarked, “If you killed Ted Cruz on the floor of the Senate, and the trial was in the Senate, nobody would convict you.”

You could probably murder Matt Gaetz in the House chamber and receive a standing ovation.

U.S. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., speaks to reporters at the U.S. Capitol on Sept. 20, 2023. (Ariana Figueroa/States Newsroom)

Even former speaker Newt Gingrich can’t stand the sneering, squirrel-cheeked member (emphasis on “member”) from northwest Florida who engineered the fall of Speaker Kevin McCarthy and says Gaetz should be expelled from the House.

Newt Gingrich is an expert on jerk behavior: He once called Democrats the “enemies of normal Americans” and piously condemned Bill Clinton for his sexual sins — just before news broke of his own extra-marital affairs.

Not that you should feel even a micro-twinge of sympathy for Kevin McCarthy, a weak little man who would have agreed to trade his soul for the office — if only he had a soul.

McCarthy’s silly impeachment “investigation,” the misshapen carrot he offered Gaetz and his band of middle school nihilists so that maybe they would not shut down the government and evict him from the big fancy chair up front, was never going to appease the deranged right wing of his reactionary caucus.

Never a strategy

Gaetz and the seven other dolts who’ve vandalized the U.S. government simply wanted to make a mess, because, like, it’s awesome to bust up the furniture and pee on the carpet.

There was never a strategy for where to go after they detonated the stink bomb. Gaetz’s only plan was to raise campaign cash off his mega-MAGA move and continue to taunt, insult, and verbally moon Republicans who used to think they were his friends.

Rep. Chip Roy of Texas, who did not vote to fire McCarthy, lashed out at Gaetz for dissing him. “You want to come at me and call me a RINO? You can kiss my ass!

Scores of other Republicans don’t bother to conceal their fervent hope the House Ethics Committee will find that Gaetz is guilty of at least some of the infractions he’s been accused of, including misappropriating campaign money, using drugs, bribery, and displaying videos of nude women he claims to have had sex with so they can boot him out.

But Gaetz, like his much-indicted role model, figures all attention is good attention. The more Trump is accused of criminal behavior, the more popular with Republican goose-steppers he becomes.

Like George Wallace

Matt Gaetz is betting that being a complete schmuck will work for him, too — at least in Florida.

After all, the good white folks in his ultra-Trumpy, church-choked, anti-vaxxer district have kept voting for him. Most love him.

One guy likened him to George Wallace, but that was, believe it or not, meant as a compliment.

I’m sure Gaetz prefers to think of himself as a conservative version of JFK, complete with an assertively toothy smile.

Let’s say the House does its job for once and expels Matt Gaetz: Will he feel shame? Embarrassment? The tiniest twinge of remorse?

PLEASE.

When he’s on the stump, campaigning for governor of Florida in 2026, he’ll boast about how the Deep State, the Lesbian lobby, and radical Wokeists conspired against him.

To be fair, Gaetz says he’s not running, but his relationship with the truth has always been somewhat elastic.

Morally vacant, misogynistic, and racist: Judging by Florida’s last two governors, I’d say his resumé would be popular with people who had no trouble electing the guy whose company defrauded Medicare or the guy who thinks public school librarians and teachers “groom” children for some ill-defined future debauchery.

Most objectionable

Gaetz has been working on being the most objectionable person in any room since 2010, when he was elected to the Florida Legislature.

He was forced to apologize for suggesting legendary civil rights activist Rep. Arthenia Joyner was uneducated and voted against a Florida revenge porn bill, telling a former state legislator that he figured photos of his exes were his to use as he liked.

Once he got to Congress in 2017, he voted against renewing the Violence Against Women Act as well as a federal sex trafficking bill.

As if that wasn’t enough to establish his MAGA bona fides, he invited a Holocaust denier to a State of the Union address (later claiming “I didn’t know much about him”) and asked Donald Trump for a blanket pardon to protect him from the “bloodlust” of his opponents.

If he does decide to run for governor once Ron DeSantis finally leaves office, his main opponent could be, well, Casey DeSantis.

This isn’t as far-fetched as it sounds: In 1966, when Alabama Gov. Wallace found himself term-limited out, his wife Lurleen ran and won, buying him time to change the state constitution to allow him to serve multiple terms.

Thanks to Matt Gaetz

Meanwhile, back in Washington, government has more or less ground to a halt — thanks to Matt Gaetz — until the House chooses a new speaker.

Could it be Steve Scalise of Louisiana, who once described himself as “David Duke without the baggage”?

Gym Jordan, the bellicose former Ohio State University wrestling coach, who keeps denying he knew anything about the rampant sexual abuse of OSU wrestlers?

Perhaps a Florida Man: U.S. Rep. Byron Donalds distinguished himself attempting to defend Donald Trump’s storing classified documents in a Mar-a-Lago bathroom, insisting, “there are 33 bathrooms at Mar-a-Lago, so don’t act like it’s just in some random bathroom that the guests can go into. That’s not true.”

For a little while, Donald Trump, the ultimate Florida Man, seemed to be in the running.

The reliably deranged Marjorie Taylor Greene said he was the only candidate she would back for speaker.

Alas, it is not to be: Trump has now endorsed Gym Jordan.

The United States used to be called “the world’s greatest democracy.” Thanks to Matt Gaetz, Florida’s own bouffant-sporting, sneering little rich boy and his co-conspirators, we don’t even have a functioning government.

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