For a change, good news on the culture wars front arrives in Florida by way of successful activism, a less sycophantic Legislature — and a significant court settlement reached in a constitutional challenge to the state’s “Don’t Say Gay law.”
Students and teachers will be able to discuss LGBTQ+ issues in the classroom — as long as it’s not in the lesson plans. New, detailed guidelines from the state Department of Education about whatcan and can’t be said regarding sexual orientation and gender identity are supposed to be coming soon to school districts.
One can only hope these spelled-out rules focus on helping kids understand — and respect — all kinds of families that aren’t going away just because religious zealots desire it. And that they leave out the political hysterics of past years.
In other words, the rules need to be useful.
In addition to the court settlement, there were positive developments in the Legislature: Harmful censorship and rights bills infringing on free speech and a free press, and to ban abortion in the state, were left to die on the floor or in committees.
To save face and ego, the discriminatory “Don’t say gay” law’s chief instigator, Gov. Ron DeSantis, claimed the settlement as a victory over “activists and extremists.” As if we’re all blind to the fact that the activists at work spinning rage-provoking misinformation were, among right-wingers, the Moms for Liberty he heralded, a group now losing ground here and all over the country.
As for the state’s chief extremist, it’s DeSantis himself.
It bears repeating: Gender identity and sexual orientation was never part of the curriculum in kindergarten through third grade in Florida. As the legal challenge made clear, the overblown outrage created by falsehoods and exaggerations about “pornographic” books available to children was circulated by Republicans to set the stage to pass legislation.
They used the first ban on elementary school-aged kids as the conduit to extend anti-gay laws to prohibit the free speech of mature high school students. The courts saw that for what it was: an attempt to send back to the closet an entire community by silencing it.
Didn’t ‘stay the course’
Voters are tired of dogmatic hogwash hijacking educational institutions.
From the offensively watered-down teaching of Black history to the redefinition of subjects areas like civics — only patriotism allowed — plus, the more recent attempt to wipe out sociology the way diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs were, all these initiatives have brought negative, world-wide attention to Florida.
To add insult to the injury, the free-speech restrictions in public education are happening at a time when a voucher system allows parents to afford whatever private education they choose for their children. But it’s never enough. Republicans want to impose conservative ideology on the rest of us.
Some eager-beaver legislators heard him. But key players like Senate President Kathleen Passidomo of Naples and House Speaker Paul Renner of Palm Harbor didn’t follow his mandates this time like bobble-heads.
Perhaps they took their cues from Iowa caucus results: DeSantis pitched his “Make America Florida” — and got a no, thanks.
Critics of Governor DeSantis’s “Don’t Say Gay” law reached a settlement with the State of Florida about the limits of the law, striking out its most hateful provisions. A spokesman for DeSantis declared “victory,” but he was trying to salvage the governor’s reputation. The reality is that the settlement is a sharp rebuke to DeSantis and his puppet legislature. Unless there are two lawyers with the same name, the litigants were represented by the same lawyer who represented E. Jean Carroll.
The purpose of the law was to make LGBT people disappear by pretending they don’t exist. DeSantis lost.
If you can open the article, it contains the language of the settlement.
TALLAHASSEE — Students and teachers can discuss sexual orientation and gender identity in classrooms under a proposed settlement reached Monday between the state and lawyers for LGBTQ advocates who sued over what they call the “Don’t Say Gay” law.
Activists say the deal clarifies vague language about what the law allows, while lawyers for Gov. Ron DeSantis says it keeps the Parental Rights in Education Act on the books.
The settlement agreement says the state “restricts only classroom instruction on particular subjects — “sexual orientation” and “gender identity.” It doesn’t prohibit references to LGBTQ people, doesn’t discriminate against them or prohibit anti-bullying policies based on sexual orientation or gender identity, either.
“This settlement … re-establishes the fundamental principle, that I hope all Americans agree with, which is every kid in this country is entitled to an education at a public school where they feel safe, their dignity is respected and where their families and parents are welcomed,” Roberta Kaplan, the lead attorney for the plaintiffs, told the Associated Press. “This shouldn’t be a controversial thing.”
It also protects the legitimacy of gay student groups, safeguards against hate and bullying and allows LGBTQ students and teachers to display pictures of their partners and families. It also says library books are not subject to the law.
Filed with the U.S. 11th Circuit Court of Appeals, it requires the Florida Board of Education to send the agreement to all 67 school districts and make clear “the settlement reflects the considered position of the State of Florida on the scope and meaning of this law.”
The governor’s office, without offering any evidence, said the ruling was “a major win against the activists who sought to stop Florida’s efforts to keep radical gender and sexual ideology out of the classrooms of public-school children in kindergarten through third grade” because it kept the law intact.
“We fought hard to ensure this law couldn’t be maligned in court, as it was in the public arena by the media and large corporate actors,” said Florida General Counsel Ryan Newman. “We are victorious, and Florida’s classrooms will remain a safe place under the Parental Rights in Education Act.”
Despite arguing that the bill didn’t prevent people from talking about sexual orientation or gender identity in school, or even having materials that mentioned those topics, the law led to widespread confusion. Schools across the state banned gay-themed books, Gay Pride events, dances and LGBTQ support groups, even to the point of taking down rainbow stickers and other LGBTQ messages.
Central Florida school districts were among those that removed library books for fear they violated the law. The Seminole County school district, for example, last year decided “Jacob’s New Dress,” a storybook about a boy who wants to wear a dress to school, could not be available in primary grade libraries.
The Lake County school district removed three books from school libraries last school year, including “And Tango Makes Three,” a picture book based on a true story of two male penguins in Central Park Zoo who raised a chick together. That was “done in compliance with Florida state law, specifically 2022 House Bill 1557,” a district attorney wrote.
Lake schools reversed its decision on “And Tango Makes Three” after attorneys for the state, in another lawsuit, wrote that the law applied only to “formal” classroom instruction and not to library books. But that opinion, embedded in a memorandum filed in federal court in late 2022, was not necessarily widely known.
The deal came after two years of court hearings. U.S. District Judge Allen Winsor in Tallahassee twice threw it out on grounds the plaintiffs had no standing.
The plaintiffs appealed Winsor’s decision and agreed to a settlement because the appeals process would have taken years.
Under the deal, the law also doesn’t prohibit “incidental references in literature to a gay or transgender person or to a same-sex couple. Such references, without more, are not ‘instruction on’ those topics.”
References to gay or transgendered individuals are not instruction “on sexual orientation or gender identity any more than a math problem asking students to add bushels of apples is ‘instruction on’ apple farming,” the agreement said.
Typical classroom discussion and schoolwork don’t count as instruction, the settlement said, “even if a student chooses to address sexual orientation or gender identity.”
The statute allows teachers to “respond if students discuss their identities or family life … “provide grades and feedback” if a student chooses “LGBTQ identity” as an essay topic, and answer “questions about their families.”
It also doesn’t require the removal of safe space stickers or safe spaces for LGBTQ students.
It doesn’t prohibit Gay-Straight Alliances, book fairs that include LGBTQ+ focused books, gay-themed musicals or plays, or other extracurricular activities including dances, wearing gay-themed clothing, and non-conforming garb.
To say that opposite-sex attraction was the norm or that “heterosexuality is superior or that gender identity is immutable based on biological traits,” would be equally prohibited under the statute, the agreement states.
Staff writer Leslie Postal and the Associated Press contributed to this report.
At DeSantis’s urging, the Florida legislature passed a law known as “Stop Woke.” The law restricts teaching about race and gender in the state’s classrooms and bans “diversity, equity, and inclusion” programs in the workplace. Several employers sued to block the law, calling it a restriction on free speech. The employers won in the federal District Court, and the state appealed the decision. Today the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals overturned the Stop Woke Act as applied to employers. It remains in effect for schools.
TALLAHASSEE — A federal appeals court Monday rejected restrictions that Gov. Ron DeSantis and Republican lawmakers placed on race-related issues in workplace training, part of a 2022 law that DeSantis dubbed the “Stop WOKE Act.”
A three-judge panel of the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said the restrictions violated First Amendment rights.
“This is not the first era in which Americans have held widely divergent views on important areas of morality, ethics, law and public policy,” the 22-page opinion said. “And it is not the first time that these disagreements have seemed so important, and their airing so dangerous, that something had to be done. But now, as before, the First Amendment keeps the government from putting its thumb on the scale.”
The panel upheld a preliminary injunction issued in 2022 by Chief U.S. District Judge Mark Walker of Tallahassee against the restrictions. The law was challenged by Primo Tampa, LLC, a Ben & Jerry’s ice-cream franchisee; Honeyfund.com, Inc., a Clearwater-based technology company that provides wedding registries; and Chevara Orrin and her company, Collective Concepts, LLC.
Orrin and her company provide consulting and training to employers about issues such as diversity, equity and inclusion.
Walker also separately issued a preliminary injunction against part of the law that would restrict the teaching of race-related concepts in universities. The state has appealed that decision.
The workplace-training part of the law listed eight race-related concepts and said that a required training program or other activity that “espouses, promotes, advances, inculcates, or compels such individual (an employee) to believe any of the following concepts constitutes discrimination based on race, color, sex, or national origin.”
As an example, the law targeted compelling employees to believe that an “individual, by virtue of his or her race, color, sex, or national origin, bears personal responsibility for and must feel guilt, anguish, or other forms of psychological distress because of actions, in which the individual played no part, committed in the past by other members of the same race, color, sex, or national origin.”
The state disputed that the law violated speech rights, saying that it regulated “conduct.” It said businesses could still address the targeted concepts in workplace training but couldn’t force employees to take part.
But the appeals court flatly rejected such arguments Monday. It described the law as the “latest attempt to control speech by recharacterizing it as conduct. Florida may be exactly right about the nature of the ideas it targets. Or it may not. Either way, the merits of these views will be decided in the clanging marketplace of ideas rather than a codebook or a courtroom.”
Certain counties in Florida are experiencing an outbreak of measles, a highly contagious and sometimes lethal that was supposedly under control due to widespread vaccination.
Florida’s top doctor, Dr. Joseph Ladapo, has thus far failed to instruct students in the affected schools to get vaccinated because he and Governor DeSantis took a strong stand against getting vaccinated for COVID.
Is there one mainstream piece of public health advice — no matter how long-standing — that Florida’s top doctor won’t buck?
Joseph Ladapo, Gov. Ron DeSantis’ anti-vaxx surgeon general, has spread misinformation about COVID-19 and has advised against coronavirus vaccines, citing debunked claims.
Perhaps Ladapo saw, in the novelty and divisiveness of the pandemic, an opportunity to become the go-to, Ivy League-educated doctor for vaccine deniers. Now, he’s turned his focus to a long-known virus — up until now, largely non-controversial, but highly contagious and dangerous for children: measles.
Following an outbreak at Manatee Bay Elementary in Weston, where six measles cases have been confirmed, Ladapo sent a letter to parents that pediatricians, immunologists and infectious disease experts have criticized. The letter acknowledged what has been common practice to contain measles outbreaks — that unvaccinated children or those without immunity should remain home during the incubation period of the virus, or up to 21 days.
Ladapo, then, however, wrote that, “due to the high immunity rate in the community,” the Department of Health “is deferring to parents or guardians to make decisions about school attendance.”
This should have been Ladapo’s opportunity to tell parents, “Get your children vaccinated — now!”
The MMR vaccine, approved by the federal government more than 50 years ago, offers 98% protection against measles after two full doses. That’s a widely known statistic that not even Ladapo can deny — he acknowledges it in his letter but stops short of recommending the vaccines.
Instead, Florida’s top doctor is telling parents it’s OK to send kids to school sans immunization, even though they could contract a potentially lethal virus or spread it to others who are also not immunized. Worse, the Broward County school outbreak could spread to other communities…
The vaccine skepticism that gained force during the pandemic, thanks in part to public figures like DeSantis and Ladapo, is a threat to not only public-health efforts to keep COVID at bay but other diseases we thought belonged in a bygone era.
Many states (most?) require children to get vaccinated against a long list of diseases before they can start school. Apparently, Florida is not one of them. The state lets parents decide. Public health, be dammed!
Since I started following the cruel and unusual policies of Florida’s Governor Ron DeSantis, I have seen him repeatedly attack public schools, divert public money to private and religious schools, and remove whatever offends him from the curriculum (such as accurate histories of Black people).
I have also discovered some fearless bloggers who are not afraid of DeSantis. Billy Townsend and Jason Garcia. They take on political corruption without flinching.
Jason Garcia, an investigative reporter, wrote recently about how conservative billionaires have shaped DeSantis’s political agenda. The part I don’t understand is why someone of vast personal wealth would want to take food stamps away from impoverished children or make the lives of homeless people even more miserable. What kinds of sadists are they?
And last week, the Republican governor came out in support of a plan to round up homeless people across Florida and — potentially — put them into secured camps.
Each move was, at least on the surface, a disparate executive decision. But they share something in common: They are all ideas promoted by conservative billionaires and the right-wing think tanks they fund.
Taken together, the moves offer a window into how super-rich mega donors shape action across DeSantis’ state government.
Let’s start with the food stamps.
Though it didn’t get much attention at the time, the Florida Department of Children and Families late last year changed the rules for the state’s food-stamps program, which is formally known as the “Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.”
Funded by the federal government but administered by the states, food stamps currently help more than 3 million impoverished Floridians buy groceries and keep food on the table for themselves and their families.
But the state of Florida makes it much harder for some people to qualify for food stamps, by imposing what are commonly called “work requirements” — mandatory employment and training programs that someone must participate in each week in order to obtain and continue receiving aid.
Florida had previously imposed work requirements on adults without children between the ages of 18 and 52. But late last year, the state expanded work requirements to adults without children up to age 59 — sweeping up somewhere around 100,000 more very low-income Floridians, according to materials provided to the governor’s office and obtained in a public-records request.
Anti-poverty activists and advocates for working families have long argued that work requirements don’t actually work. Rather than helping people find sustainable employment in which they can work themselves out of poverty, mandatory work requirements merely create barriers that block some people from receiving any aid at all and push others into erratic, poor-paying and poverty-entrapping jobs — all while enriching a few private contractors that administer the programs.
And the FGA isn’t just promoting work requirements generally. Records show it pitched this exact idea to DeSantis’ staff.
It happened in December 2022, when, emails show, the FGA met with senior staffers in the Governor’s Office and provided a series of policy proposals. One of the ideas they pitched? Forcing Floridians as old as 59 years old to participate in mandatory work requirements before they can get food stamps.
The recommendation was contained in a memo provided to the Governor’s Office tiled, “Taking Florida’s Food Stamp Work Requirements to the Next Level.”
One reason the FGA may have the ear of the DeSantis administration: Tax records show that its largest funder in recent years has been Richard “Dick” Uihlein, a Midwestern billionaire who is one of the biggest conservative donors in American politics.
More specifically, Uihlein is one of DeSantis’ top funders: Records show he has given DeSantis roughly $3 million in recent years — including $1.5 million to the Super PAC that supported DeSantis’ failed presidential campaign.
It’s important to note that the FGA wants DeSantis to go even further: The organization has also urged the Governor’s Office to extend food stamp work requirements to adults with children as young as six years old.
Kicking kids off health insurance
Food stamps aren’t the only safety net program that has come into DeSantis’ crosshairs recently.
Earlier this month, the state of Florida surprised anti-poverty advocates by suing the federal government over new rules related to Florida KidCare — a program that provides health insurance for low-income children whose families do not qualify for Medicaid.
KidCare is funded jointly by the federal government and the state. And Florida has long required families participating the program to pay monthly premiums in order to get coverage for their kids.
But new federal rules require the state to provide at least one year of continuous health insurance coverage for any child who enrolls in the program — even if the child’s family misses a monthly premium payment.
The DeSantis administration has sued to overturn that rule. The suit argues that federal officials have overstepped their authority, and that forcing Florida to continue providing health insurance to kids whose parents have missed a payment would undermine the integrity of the KidCare program.
An excerpt from Florida’s lawsuit against the federal government regarding eligibility rules for children’s health insurance.
The report was produced by a two-year-old organization called the Paragon Health Institute. Tax records show it is largely funded by the nonprofit network of billionaire industrialist Charles Koch, another of the nation’s biggest conservative political donors.
All of Paragon’s first-year funding came from one of Koch’s “Stand Together Trust.” Most of its second-year funding came from the Koch group, too.
Paragon is also intertwined with the FGA. The institute’s president — and the lead author of the report Florida cited in its lawsuit — is Brian Blase. Blase is also a visiting fellow with the FGA, according to the group’s website.
Blase said he wasn’t consulted by anyone from the state about the litigation and that he didn’t know anything about the lawsuit before it was filed.
Asked if the Governor’s Office conferred with anyone from the Paragon Health Institute or the FGA before launching its suit, DeSantis spokesperson Jeremy Redfern responded, “Not to my knowledge.”
But this is a relationship that DeSantis likely wants to repair as tries to rehabilitate his political reputation and prepare for a second presidential run. Politico Florida reported last week that DeSantis allies expect him to run again in 2028 — and to restart his political fundraising operation later this year.
In what appears to be a transparent effort to protect Confederate monuments, the Florida legislature is considering a bill that would prevent localities from removing monuments that have been in place for at least 25 years.
A proposal that would prevent the removal of historic state monuments, like Confederate statues, has been making its way through the Florida House and Senate.
Senate Bill 1122 would punish local governments that try to take down historic monuments located on public property and would give someone the right to sue if one is removed. A similar bill, House Bill 395, is moving through Tallahassee as well.
On Tuesday, the Senate Community Affairs Committee voted favorably on SB 1122, but not without contention.
Many of those who spoke in opposition of the legislation at Tuesday’s meeting viewed the bill as a tactic to prevent the removal of Confederate monuments and also opposed the fact that the bill would take power away from local governments. Those who spoke in favor of the bill said they viewed it as a way to protect history — one commentator specifically said he was in favor of the bill as he saw it as a way to protect “white society.”
Count on the Florida legislature to protect the monuments to white history.
Many educators have worried about the pernicious agenda of “Moms for Liberty,” which arrived on the scene in 2021 with a sizable war chest.
What is that agenda? Defaming public schools and their teachers. Accusing them of being “woke “ and indoctrinating students to accept left wing ideas about race and gender. Banning books they don’t like. Talking about “parental rights,” but only for straight white parents who share their values.
M4L got started in Florida, as do many wacky and bigoted rightwing campaigns, but it has been shamed recently by the sex scandal involving one of its co-founders, Brigitte Ziegler. The two other co-founders dropped her name from their website, but the stain persists.
CNN reports that this rightwing group is encountering stiff opposition from parents who don’t share their agenda and who don’t approve of book banning.
The story begins:
Viera, FloridaCNN —
In Florida, where the right-wing Moms for Liberty group was born in response to Covid-19 school closures and mask mandates, the first Brevard County School Board meeting of the new year considered whether two bestselling novels – “The Kite Runner” and “Slaughterhouse-Five” – should be banned from schools.
A lone Moms for Liberty supporter sat by herself at the January 23 meeting, where opponents of the book ban outnumbered her.
Nearly 20 speakers voiced opposition to removing the novels from school libraries. One compared the book-banning effort to Nazi Germany. Another accused Moms for Liberty of waging war on teachers. No one spoke in favor of the ban. About three hours into the meeting, the board voted quickly to keep the two books on the shelves of high schools.
“Why are we banning books?” asked Mindy McKenzie, a mom and nurse who is a member of Stop Moms for Liberty, which was formed to counter what it calls a far-right extremist group “pushing for book banning and destroying public education.”
“Why are we letting Moms for Liberty infiltrate our school system?”
The Orlando Sentinel editorialized about the DeSantis administration’s effort to kill a voter referendum that would put reproductive rights into the state constitution. Last year, Governor DeSantis signed a highly restrictive ban on abortion—that it was prohibited after six weeks of pregnancy, when few if any women realize they are pregnant.
Next week, Attorney General Ashley Moody will come before the state Supreme Court and argue that Floridians can’t be trusted to understand a ballot initiative that would protect abortion rights in Florida — and because of that, they should be stripped of the right to demand them.
Moody is asking the state’s high court to crush an abortion rights initiative that’s already supported by nearly 1 million Floridians (and counting). If it makes the ballot, it’s likely to pass: Most polls show that voters support abortion rights, regardless of party. Without this amendment, the Legislature has already shown it will do everything in its power to destroy those rights.
Voters in six states, including solidly conservative Kentucky and Kansas, have already voted to project abortion rights. At least a dozen other states could vote on abortion this year.
That’s why Florida voters deserve to have their say — and why Florida’s anti-reproductive-rights leaders are so desperate to make sure they don’t.
Here’s what voters will see on the ballot:
No law shall prohibit, penalize, delay, or restrict abortion before viability or when necessary to protect the patient’s health, as determined by the patient’s healthcare provider. This amendment does not change the Legislature’s constitutional authority to require notification to a parent or guardian before a minor has an abortion.
The DeSantis administration insists that voters won’t understand this amendment so should not be allowed to vote on it.
One million Floridians have already signed a petition to put it on the ballot.
The DeSantis administration is afraid that voters will understand it and pass it.
Will the conservative state Supreme Court of Florida allow the people to decide?
Florida blogger Billy Townsend was delighted to see Ron DeSantis get booted from the Republican primaries after the Iowa caucuses. DeSantis had large ambitions, thinking that the nation wanted his harsh rightwing policies. But he made the mistake of thinking he could run to the right of Trump. There’s no space there.
Billy hopes that voters saw through the hype about “the Florida Blueprint” and DeSantis’s promise to “Make America Florida.”
Before the primaries, in March 2023, he predicted that DeSantis would flounder, and he was right:
We don’t know who will command Florida’s invasion yet — tiny Emperor Ron DeSantis (with his pseudo VP Jeb Bush) or Florida-ism’s Pope Donald Trump. But it makes no difference. Whoever wins their gross song of ice and fire will then lead Florida’s army of the dead right toward Colorado and Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.
Florida’s political and cultural invasion of the country should be laughable. The Florida “blueprint”has made us a hollowed out shell of a state — pleasantly livable for people with capital (like me) because a few big private interests team up to “govern” our warm spaces enjoyably for customers who can pay. And a few cities, like mine (Lakeland), which is blessed with a money-belching socialist power utility, create a nice and warm urban experience.
If America fully grasps that Florida Blueprint by 2024, I feel quite certain that we will repulse this absurd invasion-by-mafia. The referendum on Florida should not be a close run affair.
But our worst American billionaires and mouthiest showboating sheriffs like hollowed out states; and they far prefer mafias to unions or citizens mobilized politically around public good.
Florida is their model state for decadent capital cut free from any public oversight, public good, or sense of shared citizenship. And they will try to impose that Florida on everybody else by pretending that Florida is not Florida. Anti-civic capital is often dumb. But it’s heavily armed; and it has great sway — although not total away — over what the public is told.
Crushing Florida’s invasion — explicitly rejecting the failed “Florida Blueprint” at the national level — is crucial to any effort to reform Florida at home. The Florida Blueprint must culminate, in the military sense, as an expansive political force. That’s the sine qua non of Florida’s future…
The MAGA Pope thrashed the Tiny Emperor
Well, MAGA Pope Trump’s GOP smashed the tiny emperor’s irrationally cocky army of Pushaws and private jet jockeys as easily as Trump gropes unwilling women. (Sorry Trumpers, he is who he is. I can’t make your citizenship choices for you. But you will own them. Expect no moral mercy or understanding from me this time around.)
Trump’s formally adjudicated sexual abuse and Capitol Lynch Mob leadership aside, his defenestration of DeSantis is a useful first step. It’s good for Florida and America.
Even better, when America as a whole saw the “Florida Blueprint” personified by Gov. High Heels, America as a whole rejected Gov. Pudding Fingers thoroughly and humiliatingly, with the national contempt growing almost by the moment. Watching DeSantis in the polls has been like watching the Enron stock price circa October 2001 (go Google it, youngs).
Yes, in large part, that’s because he’s personally very weird and off-putting and cruel in the way that people who torture cats are weird and off-putting and cruel.
But it was also because Florida, as a model for America, got a thorough thrashing — including by Trump himself. Of all people, Florida Man Bonesaw Jesus himself attacked the Florida Model of “governing” a week or two after I published my piece.
The GOP primary campaign ended that day, with the Trump campaign’s unanswered dismantling of Florida as an expansive idea. A loooooonnnnnng, slow humiliation ensued, tempered only by extensive luxury travel.
In some ways Trump is now running as the ultimate Florida man — full of gross indulgence and utterly devoid of any concern for the state where he lives. Only a Florida Man would have the chutzpah to run against Florida from Florida when the party he owns has been in power here for a generation…
Anyway, ya’ll will generally share my mirth for now in laughing at DeSanctimonious. We can do that together. Trump gives you permission.
But then you’re all gonna try to convince yourselves it’s fine to line up behind a more senile version of the Zieglers writ large — the Capitol Lynch Mob leader with a terrible economic record, a jury-adjudicated sexual abuser, a criminal openly running on “retribution” and “dictatorship on Day 1,” who you all know would rape your wife and daughter and force them to have an abortion after getting rid of Roe v. Wade.
A federal judge in Florida ruled against Disney in its battle with Governor DeSantis. The Disney Corporation sued Florida Governor DeSantis for violating its right to free speech. Disney spoke out against the governor’s “Don’t Say Gay” law. DeSantis urged the legislature to dissolve Disney’s governing board and replace it with a board appointed by DeSantis.
Disney sued, claiming it was punished for exercising free speech. Disney says it will appeal.
Now that DeSantis is out of the presidential race, America’s businesses will breathe a sigh of relief. Only in Florida will businesses be punished for disagreeing with the governor.
The federal judge in the case—Alan Winsor– was appointed by Donald Trump.
Diane Ravitch's blog 