Florida

Nothing could be more predictable than media coverage of the catastrophic building collapse in Surfside, Florida. Cable news will feature it because the story is both shocking and eye-catching. Their obvious problem is that the cable channels have hours of air-time to fill and precious little real information, beyond dreadful pictures and interviews with bereaved friends and family and others who escaped the tragedy. To save hours of watching this low-information disaster footage, the best thing is to read the story on your favorite website and watch very little TV. That is true of every breaking-news news story where real information is scarce at first.

The term ‘Florida man’ usually comes loaded with negative connotations, but not if you’re talking about Ron DeSantis. The first-term Republican governor’s approval ratings have reached 64 percent; a recent poll had him at 55 percent, still high for an unabashed conservative in a swing state. Enterprising apparel companies are already selling ‘DeSantis 2024’ gear — and a Trafalgar poll of likely contenders (excluding Trump) shows DeSantis leading the pack with 35 percent support among Republican voters. The Florida governor also bested Trump in a straw poll conducted during June's Western Conservative Summit in Denver. DeSantis’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic has earned him adoration from the right.

In a tragic traffic accident at the Wilton Manors Stonewall Pride march near Fort Lauderdale, a driver lost control of his vehicle and careered into members who were marching. One person was killed and another was hospitalized. This was of course not how social media saw it, as rumors of a terrorist attack rocketed around Twitter, aided in no small part by irresponsible comments from Fort Lauderdale mayor Dean Trantalis. The mayor claimed on camera that the incident was a ‘terrorist attack against the LGBT community’. He then seemed to hint that the intended target was Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz: ‘Hardly an accident. It was deliberate, it was premeditated and it was targeted against a specific person.

Oh joy! A fake scientist under indictment for hacking wants to oust alleged snow-sniffer and congressman Matt Gaetz, who is under investigation for soliciting sex from an underage girl. Could matters get any more Florida than this? In an Instagram post worthy of any up-and-coming representative, Rebekah Jones declared her intention to challenge Gaetz for Florida's first congressional district. 'I had hoped that someone in the Republican party would step up and primary him, and I've yet to see that happen,' Jones, who is a resident of Maryland, said in her Instagram post. 'And so, if it takes me going home to Florida to run against Matt Gaetz, then I will do it. If it means getting one child sex trafficker out of office, you're damn right I'll do it.

Florida governor Ron DeSantis signed two more pieces of major legislation on Monday, this time targeting Chinese Communist party influence in the United States. HB 1523 criminalizes 'trafficking in trade secrets', while HB 7017 aims to prevent foreign influence in America's higher education system. The latter implements strict vetting of foreign researchers to avoid espionage and requires state agencies to disclose certain donations from 'countries of concern', which consist of China, Cuba, Russia, North Korea, Iran, Syria, and Venezuela. 'There is no single entity that exercises a more pervasive, nefarious influence across a wide range of American industries and institutions than the Communist party of China,' DeSantis said during a signing event in Miami, Florida.

Miami  Florida governor Ron DeSantis signed legislation on Monday to penalize Big Tech for de-platforming private citizens and political candidates. The bill, which was passed last month by the Florida legislature, would allow Floridians who are banned from platforms to sue for damages and imposes hefty fines — up to $250,000 each day — on tech companies that boot political candidates. DeSantis signed the bill during an event at Florida International University that featured remarks from local citizens, political activists and elected officials, most of whom were of Latin American descent. Cubans and Venezuelans warned that Big Tech's crackdown on free speech was reminiscent of their home countries' slide into socialism and thanked DeSantis for pushing back on online censorship.

Say what you want about the media in 2021, they never let a dream die. For over a year now, the activists who play journalists on TV have been hell-bent on destroying Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida. The press is trying, with all their might, to turn him into the second most evil man in America. The latest hit job, by 60 Minutes’s Sharyn Alfonsi, was particularly egregious because of CBS’s incredibly sloppy execution. At a press conference, Alfonsi asked DeSantis about a scandal she was desperately trying to gin up. Her spiel was this — Publix received exclusive rights to the vaccination distribution from the DeSantis administration because the grocery chain had contributed $100,000 to the governor’s PAC.

The ethical case against domestic use of ‘vaccine passports’ was made with some passion in Britain before Boris Johnson’s change of heart. Matt Hancock repeatedly assured people that Britain is 'not a papers-carrying country'. Vaccine Minister Nadhim Zahawi said vaccine passports would be 'discriminatory'. Michael Gove promised that there were 'no plans' to introduce them. In a Westminster Hall debate, MPs from all parties lined up to say that out of principle, the minority who chose not to take the vaccine should suffer no penalty. We have not been told the reason for the u-turn. In theory, the government is taking soundings.

From the moment Matt Gaetz blitzed into Washington in 2016 as a 34-year-old Trump ally, it was clear that the representative from Florida liked to live dangerously. He invited Holocaust doubter and general crazy person Charles Johnson to the State of the Union. He hired canceled Trump speechwriter Darren Beattie, then, because that wasn’t risky enough, he potentially fudged House ethics rules to pay him. As a Florida state representative, Gaetz allegedly concocted a scoring system for sexual conquests in Tallahassee: lobbyists were one point, aides two, legislators three, married legislators six. (Gaetz denies any knowledge of the game.) In fall 2019, Gaetz white-knighted for Democrat Katie Hill after her bisexual menage à trois forced her out of Congress.

Donald Trump was over an hour late for his first speech since leaving the White House at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Orlando, Florida. The former president finally emerged at 4:47 p.m., kissing the American flag as the PA system blasted Lee Greenwood’s ‘God Bless the USA’. He waited, applauding the crowd for the duration of the song before beginning his prepared remarks at 4:50 p.m. ‘Hello CPAC — do you miss me yet?’ he asked the crowd. Trump quickly laid to rest some of the stories that have swirled since his departure from office. ’We’re not starting new parties,’ Trump said. ‘We have the Republican party…that was fake news.’ He then launched into the issue everyone expected him to tackle: immigration.

At its narrowest point, the Florida Straits is only 93 miles wide. You could swim it, if you were exceptionally motivated and athletic. I remember the first time I landed at Miami airport. I was struck by the amount of Spanish being spoken, and the signs advertising Cuban coffee. I immediately understood the dynamic that led to southern Florida jokingly being dubbed ‘Northern Cuba’.As one of the earliest states to announce its results, Florida crushed Biden supporters’ hopes for a landslide early in the night. Trump’s victory has been attributed to the Cuban vote. Comedian Jaboukie Young-White tweeted ‘the kkkubans came out in full force’ after Trump’s victory in Florida was announced.

What the hell are we all going to talk about when he’s gone? That’s the barely disguised fear of wonks and analysts, journos and spinners, cultural critics and columnists, podcasters and Don Lemon. What will we all do when Trump loses by a landslide next month? Calm down, lower the volume? Take a Thai beach vacation? Write about something other than Donald J. Trump? This has been a golden era for pundits and commentators. You’re never five seconds away from a Trump take. (Sometimes I write four before breakfast then a dozen after lunch — if each take was a downed martini I’d have severe alcohol poisoning by dinner.) All by himself, Trump is what Tom Cruise, in Top Gun, called ‘a target rich environment’.

Swing state season, that three- to four-month stretch of peak American crazy, is upon us. The big three states — New York, California and Texas — are often considered representative of the American experience, due to their larger-than life branding and enduring economic heft. But, small outlier communities aside, the big three are politically homogeneous and ultimately predictable in their beliefs and voting patterns. That makes them utterly boring and, dare I say, un-American in sensibility come election time. America is a bipolar land of infinite complexity and chaos.

One of the largest obstacles standing in the way of Donald Trump’s re-election is his weakness in every big city in America. Some cities produce such large vote advantages for the Democrats that a Republican simply can’t make up those votes across the rest of the state. That disadvantage is a write off in New York City, Los Angeles and Chicago because Trump is guaranteed to lose the deep blue states those cities are in. It will matter, however, in nine battleground states that will decide who wins the 2020 election. Specifically, in Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, the vote totals in the big cities and counties could make it nearly impossible to win those states in the suburban and rural areas.