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      ‘It’s a scary time’: Florida Democrat vows to keep fighting six-week abortion ban

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      Last week, Lauren Book, the top Democrat in the Florida senate – was placed in handcuffs, arrested and charged with trespassing, after refusing to leave an abortion rights demonstration near the state capitol building in Tallahassee.Hours before, Republican lawmakers in the state senate advanced the legislation, which would dramatically restrict the state’s current ban on abortion from 15 weeks of pregnancy to six weeks – before many women even realize they’re pregnant. Critics say the narrow window would amount to a “near-total” ban on abortions in the state.The bill would have far-reaching implications across the south. After the supreme court’s decision to eliminate a woman’s constitutional right to an abortion, Florida became a haven for women seeking reproductive care from states where access was prohibited or severely restricted, including Louisiana and Alabama.“It’s a scary time,” Book told the Guardian ahead of the vote. “Women are being put in very, very dangerous situations to get the healthcare they need and deserve.”Republican dominance in the state legislature means the bill’s fate is “all but sealed”, she acknowledged. The Republican-controlled house is expected to give the bill final approval as soon as this week. It will then be sent to Governor Ron DeSantis, a Republican who is widely expected to run for president and who has signaled his support.But Book, who has led the opposition to this bill in the state senate, vowed to keep fighting – as a political leader and, she said, as a mother furious that her twins – a boy and a girl – no longer have the same rights to bodily autonomy.“In the course of just two generations, we’ve seen our rights won and lost,” she said in a floor speech last week. “It is up to us to get them back. No one is going to save us but ourselves.”Book became senate minority leader in 2021, having served in the chamber since 2017. The following year, DeSantis signed into law a ban on abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy, without exceptions for rape or incest.A sharp backlash to last summer’s supreme court decision overturning Roe v Wade fueled a string of ballot-box successes for abortion rights and powered Democrats to victory in states across the country in the 2022 midterm elections. But not in Florida.In November, DeSantis won re-election by nearly 20 points in a state that was once a presidential battleground, while Republicans claimed a supermajority in both chambers of the state legislature.Emboldened, Republican lawmakers have advanced a dizzying array of legislative proposals that have thrilled conservatives, alarmed liberals and offered a policy platform from which the governor could launch a presidential bid.As minority leader, Book believes it is her role to rally the opposition – and help Democrats claw back power in 2024. “We are going to do the work to get the numbers out in ’24,” she said, “because the alternative is not acceptable. It’s dangerous and it is killing women.”In addition to the abortion bill, the state’s Republican lawmakers are pressing forward with legislation that would impose new controls on trans youth, limit drag performances, ease media defamation suits, expand the state’s controversial “Don’t Say Gay” law, ban diversity and equity programs at public universities and colleges, place new restrictions on public-sector unions, and allow a divided jury to impose a death sentence. Already this session, DeSantis signed a law expanding Florida’s school voucher system, and another allowing Floridians to carry a concealed weapon without a permit.But while DeSantis’s conservative crusade may excite his base, Book said she expects it will backfire on him.“We’re not doing the things that matter to Floridians. We’re not doing the things that make life here better,” she said, arguing that the legislature should be focused on tackling the rising cost of property insurance. “Instead, we’re attacking small groups of people, we’re taking away women’s rights, all under the banner of freedom and allowing this guy to run for president.”The governor’s office did not respond to a request for comment.With the abortion bill barrelling toward the governor’s desk, Book said she and her Democratic colleagues are using every legislative tool at their disposal to draw attention to the “dangerous consequences” of the legislation.They offered numerous amendments, including one that would allow women seeking abortions to cite religious exemption. Another put forward by Book would have renamed the so-called “Heartbeat Protection Act” to the “Electrical activity that can be manipulated to sound like a heartbeat through ultrasound protection at the expense of pregnant people’s health and well being act.” All were rejected.When the bill came before the senate health policy committee for debate, Democrats extended the session so medical providers and opponents would have more than the allotted “30 seconds” to testify, Book said. In speeches, she shared the stories of women, including a constituent, who faced life-threatening complications after the loss of desired pregnancies because their states new abortion restrictions prevented doctors from administering miscarriage care.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAnd last week, senate Democrats engaged in an emotional floor debate ahead of the senate vote on the six-week ban. From the public gallery overlooking the chamber, protesters repeatedly disrupted the proceedings, shouting down lawmakers who spoke supportively of the legislation. Several were removed before the senate president ordered the gallery cleared.The displays of opposition have had little effect.State senator Erin Grall, a Republican sponsor of the bill, said during the debate that “bodily autonomy should not give a person the permission to kill an innocent human being”. Republicans have sought to emphasize that the measure allows for exceptions in cases of rape, incest or human trafficking until 15 weeks of pregnancy – additions DeSantis has called “sensible”.Critics counter that the exceptions are narrow, noting that the proposal will require victims to “provide a copy of a restraining order, police report, medical record, or other court order” before they can receive an abortion.Book, a sexual assault survivor, says the paperwork requirement will keep women from seeking care. “Show your documents to prove that you were raped?” Book said. “You don’t even need to do that now to carry a gun.”The bill’s proponents also tout provisions that would expand funding for anti-abortion pregnancy centers and provide families car seats, cribs and diapers. Book called the initiatives “insulting”.“You’re going to give them car seats or a crib? What about healthcare? What about child care? Those are things that people need,” Book said. “They’re not pro life. They’re pro-birth.”Book sees a backlash brewing in Florida, though it won’t come in time to stop Republicans from passing the ban.According to a recent survey by the Public Religion Research Institute, nearly two-thirds of Floridians believe abortion should be legal in most or all cases. Another poll published last month found that roughly three in four Florida voters, including 61% of Republican respondents, say they oppose a six-week abortion ban with no exceptions for rape or incest. (Notably, the measure that passed the Florida senate does allow for exceptions, which was not asked as part of the polling question.)Activists on both sides of the abortion debate are, meanwhile, waiting on a decision by the Florida supreme court, which is weighing a challenge to the state’s current 15-week ban. The six-week proposal would only go into effect if the 15-week ban is upheld.Book said she would like to see the matter settled by Florida voters in the form of a ballot initiative, like it was in Michigan and other states. In the meantime, she is urging women in Florida and around the country “not to take matters into your own hands”.Protesters have once again gathered in Tallahassee, as the Republican-controlled house charges ahead with a debate on the measure scheduled for Thursday. Among them will be Nikki Fried, chair of the Florida Democratic party, who was arrested alongside Book last week. For Book, the women’s resistance is proof that however bleak it may appear now, the fight for abortion rights in Florida is only just beginning.“​I’m heartened by the women who are now occupying Tallahassee and not going quietly into the night,” she said. “I think that is emblematic that this is not over.” More

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      Trans people, students and teachers are besieged by DeSantis’s crusade. But he’s not done yet

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      No public school teacher or college professor in Florida has been more outspoken in his criticism of Governor Ron DeSantis than Don Falls. In the spring of 2022, the 62-year-old social studies high school teacher became the lead plaintiff in a lawsuit against the governor to block enforcement of the recently approved Stop Woke (Wrongs Against Our Kids and Employees) Act.The DeSantis-backed legislation banned the supposed teaching of critical race theory – a scholarly examination of how social conceptions of race influence laws, political movements and history – in the Sunshine state’s public schools and universities. When Falls heard that a Jacksonville law firm was drafting litigation to stop the new law from taking effect, the grandfather of five decided to raise his head above the proverbial parapet.“One thing I’ve taught my students is that there are certain fundamental values associated with a democracy, and if they’re going to work, you’ve got to stand up for them,” recalled Falls, who has taught for 38 years. “I couldn’t have taught that to my students and then, when the ball was in my court, pass it on to somebody else.”In his first year as Florida’s chief executive, DeSantis raised public school teachers’ salaries and paid tribute to the mostly gay, lesbian and transgender victims of one of the country’s most deadly mass shootings in recent times. But as he built his national profile, attracting attention for his controversial views on masks and vaccines during the Covid-19 pandemic, he took a sharp swing to the right and stepped up his courtship of the party’s Trump-loving base.Now, with rumors he is close to launching his presidential bid, DeSantis is highlighting his crusade to “reform” public education in Florida and restrict the rights and freedoms of the state’s transgender population as centerpieces of a nationwide agenda for what he calls “America’s revival”.Last year, DeSantis and his Republican allies went further and rammed house bill 1467 through the state legislature, requiring all reading material used in public schools to be reviewed by a “trained media specialist” to ensure that the material be “free of pornography” and “appropriate for the age level and group”. Critics say it empowers conservative groups to ban books whose contents they disagree with, even if they are age appropriate.Falls continued to resist. Confronted with a choice of either removing the estimated 250 to 300 books in his classroom or submitting them to the vetting process, he and other colleagues at the school opted to conceal their covers by enveloping them in plain brown paper, thereby shielding themselves from possible criminal prosecution or civil liability.He posted a wryly written sign inside his classroom that read: “closed by order of the governor”.Book bans, pronoun bansOn 23 February hundreds of college students walked out of their classrooms at six public universities to protest against DeSantis’s decision to abolish diversity, education and inclusion (DEI) programs and policies that had been mandated in 2020 in all of Florida’s dozen institutions of higher education by other political appointees, including the former governor Rick Scott.Demonstrations were also held in early March to denounce HB 999, legislation that would eliminate college majors and minors in “critical race theory, gender studies or intersectionality”, render a professor’s tenure subject to review at any time, and require colleges to offer general education courses that “promote the philosophical underpinnings of Western civilization and include studies of this nation’s historical documents”. It would also formally outlaw spending on DEI programs, which seek to promote the participation and fair treatment of people from all walks of life.“We’re seeing more and more students who, emboldened by some faculty members, shout people down and shut down viewpoints they don’t agree with,” the chief sponsor of the legislation, state representative Alex Andrade, told the Guardian. “People are forgetting that public universities are a component of a state government’s executive branch, and when we’re trying to encourage and enforce discrimination in the name of diversity and equity, we’re getting it wrong.”The sweeping scope of that legislation, coupled with three other education bills that would, among other things, forbid school staff and students from using “pronouns that do not correspond with a person’s sex”, has left educators in Florida feeling incensed and dumbfounded.“There aren’t actually any majors in critical race theory or intersectionality,” noted Andrew Gothard, an English instructor at Florida Atlantic University and president of United Faculty of Florida, the union that represents more than 25,000 faculty members in the Sunshine state’s dozen public universities and 16 state and community colleges. “The goal is to eliminate all thought that diverges from the governor’s political platform, and it’s absolutely terrifying.“Any time you’re telling people they can only teach history in a way that praises the motherland, you’re straying into Hitler Youth territory.”Multiple requests from the Guardian for an interview with Governor DeSantis went unanswered. But in a recent statement, DeSantis defended HB 999 because it seeks to push back “against the tactics of liberal elites who suppress free thought in the name of identity politics and indoctrination”.DeSantis called a press conference on 8 March to debunk what he termed “the ‘book ban’ hoax” in relation to the Stop Woke Act, asserting that books containing pornographic content and other kinds of violent or age-inappropriate content had been discovered in libraries and classrooms in 23 school districts statewide. These included Maia Kobabe’s widely acclaimed Gender Queer: A Memoir, one of 10 books that received an Alex Award from the American Library Association in 2020 for having “special appeal for young adults ages 12 through 18”.“Our mantra in Florida has been education, not indoctrination,” DeSantis wrote in his recent memoir, The Courage to Be Free: Florida’s Blueprint for America’s Revival. He hailed Florida as one of the first states to enact a parents’ bill of rights, which in his telling guarantees mothers and fathers “the right to inspect the materials being used in their kids’ schools”.Yet DeSantis also omits any reference to the state’s grossly underpaid public school teachers, who rank 48th nationwide in average salaries according to the National Education Association.‘Slate of hate’Another target of the 44-year-old governor is the state’s LGBTQ+ community and, in particular, the transgender population. A new bill, house bill 1421, titled “Gender Clinical Interventions”, would prohibit transgender individuals from amending their own birth certificates and eliminate transition-related care such as hormone therapy and puberty blockers for minors.The chief sponsor of the bill, state representative Randy Fine, tweeted in March that the legislation would outlaw the “butchering of children” and free Florida taxpayers from having to subsidize “the sexual mutilation of adults”. In reality gender-confirming surgical procedures are seen as lifesaving, and are mostly offered to teenagers who are at least 15 years of age or older. Even among this group such operations are “exceedingly rare”, according to the National Center for Transgender Equality.Not to be outdone, state senator Clay Yarborough introduced senate bill 254 that would allow the state to take temporary custody of children who may be receiving gender-affirming care now or in the future. (Yarborough declined the Guardian’s request for an interview.)The barrage of bills focusing on transgender people is part of a broader onslaught by far-right thinktanks and consultants on democracy, abortion rights and racial progress, according to Nadine Smith, a co-founder and executive director of Equality Florida, an LGBTQ+ community rights organization.“It’s not surprising to see this slate of hate introduced,” said Smith. “This rightwing shift has everything to do with usurping Trump on the right in the forthcoming Republican presidential primary elections. DeSantis is not driven by convictions or a core set of values, he is driven only by ambition and his desperation to become president.”The civil rights advocate remembers a different Ron DeSantis four years ago. Elected governor for the first time in 2018 by a razor-thin margin of about 32,000 votes, the former congressman and co-founder of the rightwing House Freedom Caucus gravitated towards the center-right during his early time in office.DeSantis issued a proclamation on the third anniversary of the 2016 mass shooting in an Orlando gay nightclub that paid tribute to the 49 people who died but failed to mention the targeting of the LGBTQ+ community as a possible motive of the killer.The governor came under fire for that omission and reissued the proclamation with amended wording. He even met with a survivor of the shooting and other members of the city’s LGBTQ+ community as a sign of solidarity.“The DeSantis we are seeing now doesn’t sound like the DeSantis who ran for governor the first time,” said Smith. “He went from being someone who went to the Pulse nightclub and responded to the criticism to someone who routinely calls LGBTQ+ people groomers and incites violence towards us.”The number of anti-LGBTQ+ demonstrations in Florida has soared in recent months. The Armed Conflict Location and Event Data (ACLED) project documented 17 such episodes during 2022, up sharply from the six that the organization chronicled in 2021 and the five that were recorded in 2020. Some degenerated into riots. Nationwide, Florida ranked third in these incidents, surpassed only by California and Texas.Members of the state’s transgender population say they are feeling the intensifying heat.Morganti (not his real name) moved to the Gulf coast city of Bradenton from Louisiana in 2016. The 35-year-old New College of Florida student still identified as a woman at the time, and struck up a relationship with a local woman. “She and I could hold hands walking through a shopping mall, and when I first came down here it wasn’t a big deal,” said the third-year marine biology major.But the bearded trans man has noticed a palpable change in the political climate during the intervening six years. No violent confrontation has occurred to date, but he has dealt with comments about his voice and body.The hostile takeover of New College by six of DeSantis’s rightwing allies on its board of trustees earlier this year has not helped matters, and Morganti says he will move abroad to obtain his master’s degree once he has finished his undergraduate studies in January 2025.“If Ron DeSantis doesn’t make it to the White House, he will still be our governor – and that means Florida isn’t going to be a safe place to live in,” he said.If the 2022 and 2023 sessions of the Florida legislature are anything to go by, DeSantis is betting that legislation targeting the state’s transgender population and consolidating Tallahassee’s control over the curricula of the state’s public schools and universities will also strike a chord among voters in the Sunshine state and beyond.Whether or not DeSantis does mount a presidential bid in 2024 remains to be seen, as would the eventual success of such a campaign.In the meantime, university professors, schoolteachers and members of Florida’s LGBTQ+ community will continue to feel besieged for the foreseeable future. Some educators predict the departure of many colleagues in the coming months and years.“We have a governor and a legislature who are going rogue to harm the state,” said the union president, Andrew Gothard. “These laws are going to cause a major exodus of faculty and students from Florida’s system of higher education.” More

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      in Elections

      Trump Says He’ll Still Run For President If Criminally Convicted

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      He made the remarks in an interview with Tucker Carlson, his first time on the program since the release of private text messages showed the Fox News anchor’s repugnance for the former president.Former President Donald J. Trump said Tuesday that he would continue campaigning for the White House even if convicted of a crime.In his first national media interview since pleading not guilty last week to 34 felony charges related to a hush-money scandal during his 2016 White House bid, Mr. Trump complimented the strongmen leaders of several other countries; attacked “sick, radical” Democrats; and indicated that not even a prison sentence would keep him from running for president.“I’d never drop out, it’s not my thing,” Mr. Trump said when asked on Fox News about a potential conviction.In addition to his criminal charges in New York, the former president is facing several other criminal investigations: One is related to his attempts to overturn election results in Georgia, another is into his efforts to hold on to power in Washington after losing re-election and a third is into his handling of classified documents at his home in South Florida.The hourlong interview was also his first with the Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson since private text messages, revealed as part of a $1.6 billion defamation against the cable channel by Dominion Voting Systems, showed Mr. Carlson’s repugnance for the former president.While Mr. Carlson referred to Mr. Trump as “a demonic force, a destroyer,” in one text message in early 2021 and added “I hate him” in another, on Tuesday he traveled to Mr. Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in South Florida for what Mr. Carlson described on his show as “a rare venture outside the studio for us.” The interview consumed his program.“For a man caricatured as an extremist,” Mr. Carlson said about Mr. Trump at the start of the show, “we think you’ll find what he has to say moderate, sensible and wise.”During the interview, most of which was spent on foreign policy, Mr. Trump said that Democratic leaders were a bigger threat to the nation than foreign dictators.Mr. Trump referred to President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia as “very smart,” said that Saudi Arabia’s leaders were “great people” and called President Xi Jinping of China a “brilliant man.” He also said that “the biggest problem” for the United States wasn’t foreign actors but “these sick, radical people from within” the country.The former president said that he was able to handle Russia and China from the White House, and described an interaction with Mr. Putin in which he told the Russian leader that he couldn’t invade Ukraine. Mr. Trump didn’t mention that he had been impeached for opening a pressure campaign on Ukraine, including an internal push to withhold military aid, to investigate his political rivals.Speaking about his arraignment exactly one week earlier, Mr. Trump said he felt supported by members of the courthouse staff.“It’s a tough, tough place and they were crying,” he said. “They were actually crying. They said, ‘I’m sorry.’” More

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      in US Politics

      How Ron DeSantis waged a targeted assault on Black voters: ‘I fear for what’s to come’

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      Al Lawson felt the weight of his victory the night he was elected to Congress in 2016.He was born in Midway, a small town that’s part of a stretch of land in northern Florida dotted with tobacco fields once home to plantations. A former basketball star, he was once reprimanded for drinking out of a whites-only water fountain. In some of his early campaigns for the state legislature, he ran into the Ku Klux Klan.There was jubilation when he was elected.“Everywhere I would go, it was like a celebration,” Lawson said one morning last month in his office in downtown Tallahassee. “People saying: ‘Boy, I wish my daddy, my granddaddy – I really wish they could see this.’”In Congress, Lawson was a low-key member known for delivering federal money for things like new storm shelters to help his northern Florida communities. He was easily re-elected to the House in 2018 and 2020. But when he ran for re-election in 2022, he lost to a white Republican by nearly 20 points.Lawson’s loss was nearly entirely attributable to Governor Ron DeSantis. The governor went out of his way to redraw the boundaries of Lawson’s district to ensure that a Republican could win it. It was a brazen scheme to weaken the political power of Black voters and a striking example of how DeSantis has waged one of the most aggressive – and successful – efforts to curtail voting rights in Florida.In addition to reducing Black representation in Congress, the governor has tightened election rules, created a first-of-its-kind state agency, funded by more than $1m to prosecute election fraud and gutted one of the biggest expansions of modern-era voting rights.“Governor DeSantis has really targeted Black folks in his efforts to strip, restrict and suppress our vote in the state of Florida. That has been his number one mission,” said Jasmine Burney-Clark, the founder of Equal Ground, a nonprofit that works to register voters.As DeSantis prepares to launch a run for president, his war on voting rights is a dangerous omen for what he could do in the White House. Several states have already passed similar voting restrictions and implemented their own units dedicated to prosecuting election fraud, which is extremely rare. DeSantis’ office did not respond to a request for comment on this story.“At the end of the day, this is all about his blind political ambition,” said Angie Nixon, a Democratic state lawmaker who led a sit-in on the floor of the state legislature in protest of DeSantis’s attack on voting rights. “I fear for what’s to come.”A new Republican voting mapLawson’s election was a big deal in Gadsden county, the only majority-Black county in Florida. Near the stately old courthouse in Quincy, the county seat, Brenda Holt, a county commissioner, can quickly point out the tree that was used to lynch Black people.“We needed a Black congressman. We needed one simply because he would come to all these little places and help us with things. He understood about raising hogs and he understood about being out there in the tobacco fields,” said Holt, who has also served as the chair of the county Democratic party. “When he walked in the room, you didn’t have to say nothing. We didn’t have to explain ourselves so much to him. Because he lived it.”Lawson’s election was no accident. In 2015, the Florida supreme court ordered the state to draw a district that stretched across northern Florida, from Tallahassee to Jacksonville. Such a district was legally required, the court said, to preserve the ability of Black voters in that part of the state to elect the candidate of their choosing.When it came time to redraw Florida’s congressional districts last year, the Republican-controlled legislature offered up a plan that kept Lawson’s district intact for at least another decade.Then DeSantis stepped in.On Martin Luther King weekend last year, the governor submitted his own proposal for Florida’s 28 congressional districts. His plan chopped Lawson’s district into four different ones, all of which favored Republicans. DeSantis took issue specifically with the idea that the state was required to draw an irregularly shaped district to benefit Black voters. Such an approach, he said, was unconstitutional.The legislature did not back down. It passed a map that kept Lawson’s district in place. But it also passed a backup map which broke up the majority of Lawson’s district, but kept Jacksonville contained in one congressional district. It was a compromise.DeSantis rejected that plan too, saying it was dead on arrival.Eventually, the legislature caved and invited DeSantis to draw a congressional map.“I served in the legislature for 17 years and never in the history of the legislative body have we turned over the redistricting to the governor. Never heard of that – never,” said Tony Hill, a former Lawson staffer who unsuccessfully ran for Congress last year.Lawson was blindsided. Some top Republicans in the state, he said, including Senator Rick Scott and Ted Yoho, privately told him they were surprised by what DeSantis was doing.DeSantis, who had already been working with top Republican mapmakers, proposed a plan that sliced up Lawson’s district and heavily favored Republicans in 20 of Florida’s 28 congressional seats, a bump up from the 16 GOP seats that the legislature proposed. DeSantis’s map also cut the number of districts in which Black voters had a chance to elect a candidate of their choice from four to two.The legislature passed his map. Last November, white Republicans won all four seats in northern Florida.“This is a lynching,” Holt said. “You’re treating us like a dog. They treat dogs better than us. We’re pissed off.”It’s now harder for Jacksonville residents to access federal resources to address issues like housing affordability, food deserts and crime. Several residents said they have not yet seen any town halls or events from Aaron Bean, the new GOP congressman who represents the area. A Bean spokesperson did not say whether he had held any events in Jacksonville. “Congressman Bean has been enthusiastic about seeing all corners of this newly drawn congressional district. From town halls to chamber of commerce events, from groups of thousands to groups of one, he has made it his mission to engage with as many residents of north-east Florida as possible,” she said.Ben Frazier, an activist who leads a nonprofit called the Northside Coalition of Jacksonville, emphasized the need for federal assistance as he drove around the city’s 33209 zip code – one of the most dangerous in the city – pointing out boarded-up businesses and houses.“It is unfortunate that [DeSantis] has chosen to operate like that because he’s not only a danger to Black people and people of color,” he said. “He’s a danger to democracy.”“It’s people of color that all of this redistricting is concerned about,” said Lee Harris, the senior pastor at Mt Olive Primitive Baptist church in Jacksonville. “If you notice, as long as they think they have control and the majority, they will push whatever law is beneficial to them.”DeSantis’s attack on Black representation appears to have aims far outside Lawson’s district.The governor has waged a legal battle over a 2010 constitutional amendment, overwhelmingly approved by Florida voters, making it illegal to draw districts that reduce political access for racial minorities. Getting rid of Lawson’s district would seem to violate that provision.“It was a performing, crossover district where Black voters had long successfully elected their candidate of choice. And in dismantling it, it raises all kinds of indicia of discriminatory intent,” said Michael Li, a redistricting expert at the Brennan Center for Justice.If DeSantis succeeds in dismantling districts like Lawson’s, it could ultimately provide legal cover for other states to do the same, Li said. In the federal courts, DeSantis’s approach joins a long line of conservative cases that have been pushing to raise the bar for when race can be considered in redistricting.“It’s basically trying to divorce any consideration of race or racial impacts in a redistricting map from the actual drawing and construction of a redistricting map,” said Chris Shenton, an attorney at the Southern Coalition for Social Justice who is challenging the Florida maps.“That’s a distinction that only makes sense on paper and only makes sense if what you’re trying to do is prevent the Voting Rights Act from working.”‘Fear’ and confusionBeyond redistricting, one of the key elements of DeSantis’s crackdown on voting has been his use of a law enforcement unit to pursue charges of voter fraud.One morning last August, Ronald Lee Miller, a Miami man in his late 50s, heard a knock on his door and answered, still in his underwear. When he opened the door, he saw that police had surrounded his home, some with their guns drawn and pointed at him. They put him in handcuffs and told him he was under arrest.A few hours later, DeSantis appeared at a press conference in a Fort Lauderdale courtroom, flanked by uniformed law enforcement officers, and announced Miller was among 19 people with prior criminal convictions being arrested for voter fraud and would “pay the price”. They were charged with multiple counts of third-degree felonies, each punishable by up to five years in prison. The arrests were the first made under the office of election crimes and security, a new $1.2m office DeSantis had created a few months earlier.Many saw it as a thinly veiled effort to keep Black people from voting (14 of those arrested were Black). And records showed that many of those charged believed they were eligible to vote. Even though they all had prior convictions that resulted in a lifetime voting ban in Florida, none of them had been warned they couldn’t vote. All of them, including Miller, had received voter registration cards before casting a ballot.Ahead of the arrests, DeSantis and Florida Republicans had also made the rules for voting with a felony conviction in Florida extremely confusing.In 2018, Florida voters overwhelmingly approved one of the largest expansions of the right to vote in the modern era. They approved a constitutional amendment that allowed people with most felony convictions to vote. Those convicted of murder and sex-related offenses – as the 19 people in the arrests had been – were excluded.DeSantis and the GOP legislature followed up by passing a law that required people with felony convictions to pay off outstanding fines and fees before casting a ballot. But Florida has no central mechanism for people to check how much they owe and state officials quickly became backlogged.“They want to put fear, the same type of spirit, fear into people so that you won’t vote,” said Rosemary McCoy, a Jacksonville activist who had her voting rights restored in 2019.Miller and his lawyer, Robert Farrar, eventually got his case dismissed on procedural grounds, successfully arguing that the statewide prosecutor didn’t have the authority to bring the case.But DeSantis did not let it go. In February, the legislature passed a law that expanded the power of the statewide prosecutor, bolstering their authority to go after cases like Miller’s. DeSantis has also requested increasing the office of election crimes and security’s budget to $3.15m and nearly doubling the number of personnel.Now the governor and the legislature could cause more confusion. An election bill unveiled last week would make it so that all voters receive a warning that they may not be eligible to vote when they receive their official voter registration card.“This has all become nothing more than political theater. It’s a waste of time, waste of money, waste of judicial assets,” Farrar said.The office of election crimes and security also targets groups that register voters.In Florida, Black and Hispanic voters are five times more likely than white voters in Florida to register through a third-party group. But in its first year, the office of election crimes and security levied $41,600 in fines against these voter registration groups. Those fines came after DeSantis and the legislature passed sweeping new voting restrictions and raised the maximum fine that could be levied from $1,000 to $50,000.Burney-Clark said her nonprofit Equal Ground registered 10,000 voters in the lead-up to the 2020 election. But since then, it has scaled back and only registered a handful of voters – the group can’t afford the risk of high fines.‘We’re going to silence you’Cecile Scoon, president of the Florida chapter of the League of Women Voters, sees a clear through-line in all of DeSantis’s efforts to attack voting rights.“It’s all connected to ‘we don’t care what you vote,’” she said. “‘We don’t care what you say. We know better and we’re going to silence you.’“We are not in the land of the free any more in the state of Florida.” More

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      in US Politics

      ‘Bigoted vitriol’: Florida Republican urged to resign over offensive trans remarks

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      A Republican Florida state lawmaker has made a partial apology for calling transgender people “demons”, “imps” and “mutants” during a hearing on a contentious bathroom bill.Webster Barnaby, a self-described “proud Christian conservative”, said his “indignation was stirred” by members of the transgender community who spoke out on Monday against the bill banning them from bathrooms not aligned to their gender at birth.The controversy comes just days after conservatives elsewhere in the state forced the removal of an illustrated novel about Anne Frank from a high school library, claiming it contained inappropriate sexual material that “minimized” the Holocaust.By Tuesday, Barnaby’s Twitter account appeared to have been removed from the platform after his outburst the previous day at a Florida state house commerce committee hearing in Tallahassee.“The Lord rebuke you, Satan, and all of your demons and all of your imps who come parade before us,” he told the speakers at the hearing. “That’s right, I called you demons and imps who come and parade before us and pretend you are part of this world.“We have people that live among us today on planet Earth that are happy to display themselves as if they were mutants from another planet. This is the planet Earth where God created men male and women female.”The British-born Barnaby, 63, made a tempered apology from the floor soon after the House bill passed. “I referred to trans people as demons – I would like to apologize to the trans community for referring to you as demons,” he said.But his expressed regret cut no ice with LGBTQ+ activists, who have been protesting against a slew of anti-trans proposals placed before the Republican-dominated Florida legislature this year, championed by the state’s hard-right governor, Ron DeSantis.The bills include banning pronouns, drag shows and pride flags; criminalizing certain medical care for trans youth; and expanding the “don’t say gay” law that outlaws discussion of sexual preference and gender identity to all Florida’s classrooms.“When Republican Webster Barnaby called trans people ‘demons’, ‘imps’, and ‘mutants it wasn’t a mistake or gaffe,” Democratic former state representative Carlos Guillermo Smith wrote in a tweet. “It was the hatred and bigotry that’s really motivating Florida’s 20+ anti-LGBTQ proposals finally being spoken into words. Now it’s exposed.”The advocacy group Equality Florida called on Webster to resign and on the Florida house speaker, Paul Renner, to condemn “this bigoted vitriol from his own caucus”.The Guardian has contacted Barnaby for comment.School officials in Florida’s Indian River county, meanwhile, are defending a principal’s decision to remove the book Anne Frank’s Diary: The Graphic Adaptation from his school library last month at the behest of the conservative parents’ rights group Moms for Liberty.Florida has become a stronghold of the conservative book banning movement in recent months, with a new law threatening educators with felony charges for exposing students to material deemed “inappropriate”.According to Moms for Liberty, the illustrated novel, based on Frank’s wartime memoir, contains sexual content that “minimizes the Holocaust” that involved the murders of 6 million Jews in Europe during the second world war.In one scene, it shows the teenager in a park looking at nude statues of females and later proposing to a friend that they show each other their breasts.“Even her [own] version featured the editing out of the entries about sex,” said Jennifer Pippin, the chairperson of the group’s Indian River chapter.“The publisher of the book calls it a ‘biography’, meaning it writes its own interpretive spin. It quotes the work, but it’s not the diary in full. It chooses to offer a different view on the subject.”A spokesperson for the school district of Indian River county, Cristen Maddux, said the principal of Vero Beach high school, Shawn O’Keefe, followed protocol by removing the challenged book, a decision that can be reviewed by a district committee.“The feedback that the Holocaust is being removed from the curriculum and students aren’t knowledgable about what happened, that is not the case at all. It’s just a challenged book and the principal removed it,” she said.The Associated Press contributed reporting More

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      ‘People will die’: why is Ron DeSantis loosening gun laws that most Floridians support?

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      Governor Ron DeSantis went to the Florida capitol earlier this month to sign a bill behind closed doors with a handful of his allies. The bill, one of many hard-right proposals that Florida Republicans hope to pass during this legislative session, has stoked fear and outrage among gun safety advocates: permitless carry.With Republicans’ sweeping control of the state legislature and governorship, the bill – which would allow Floridians to carry guns without a permit or training – easily passed both chambers before being signed into law by DeSantis. The Florida house approved the bill late last month in a vote of 76 to 32, and the senate then passed the proposal in a vote of 27 to 13.The Republicans’ latest push reflects a broader rightward lurch in Florida’s politics since DeSantis took office in 2019, even though Trump carried the battleground state by just three points in 2020. Polls show that a majority of Floridians oppose the policy, and previous surveys have indicated that Florida voters overwhelmingly support other gun safety measures like universal background checks and mandatory waiting periods.Gun safety groups have provided evidence suggesting the permitless carry law will contribute to an increase in violence. They accuse the governor of prioritizing presidential ambitions over his constituents’ safety in a state that has witnessed two of America’s deadliest mass shootings.“It all has to do with talking points and setting him up to run for higher office,” said Congressman Maxwell Frost, a Democrat of Florida. “And as a result, people will die.”No ‘permission slip’ requiredRepublican legislators across the country have embraced permitless carry, or “constitutional carry” to its supporters, in recent years. The policy has won praise from rightwing activists who view any firearm-related regulation as a violation of their second amendment right to bear arms. Florida law previously stipulated that those who wish to carry a concealed gun must complete safety training and undergo a more detailed background check, but Republicans moved to do away with those requirements.“I believe that this comes down to one pretty clear thing that shall not be infringed,” the Republican state senator Jay Collins said at a committee hearing last month. “We don’t need to have the government get in the way of law-abiding citizens’ rights.”Twenty-five states have already enacted laws allowing residents to carry concealed firearms without a permit, and Florida will become the 26th in July, when the policy goes into effect.“A constitutional right should not require a permission slip from the government,” DeSantis said in his State of the State address last month. “It is time we joined 25 other states to enact constitutional carry in the state of Florida.”The proposal had been endorsed by the Florida Sheriffs Association, which represents the 67 elected sheriffs across the state.“Violent career criminals are not applying for a state permit to carry a gun,” Al Nienhuis, the association’s president and sheriff of Hernando county, said at a January press conference. “Removing the permitting process will assist our law-abiding citizens with the protections they need to defend themselves and their families from those criminals who intend to do them harm.”Florida crime statistics appear to challenge that argument. The 2021 Annual Uniform Crime Report showed Florida’s crime rate had reached a 50-year low, a fact that DeSantis himself touted in his state of the state address.Research suggests that removing the permitting requirement to carry concealed guns may instead contribute to a rise in violent crime. One study released in 2019 found that states saw an increase of 13% to 15% in violent crime rates in the years after they loosened regulations on carrying concealed firearms.Those concerns have fueled a divide among Florida’s law enforcement officers. Although the Florida Sheriffs Association supported the bill, a number of officers said they fear the policy will only further endanger them and their colleagues.“It’s not going to make our communities safer,” Sheriff John Mina of Orange county said on The Problem With Jon Stewart. “It’s going to make them more dangerous.”At the March committee hearing on the permitless carry bill, dozens of Florida residents echoed those fears. Isabella Burgos, a volunteer with the gun safety group Students Demand Action and a first-year student at Florida State University, gave emotional testimony about how she regularly fears for her life as she walks around campus. Burgos spoke just weeks after a gunman attacked Michigan State University, killing three students.“I’m at war with the terrors of the chance I may die young,” Burgos said through tears. “This epidemic will turn to utter war with this bill in place. So I urge you all to oppose this deadly bill that would be destructive to our minds and destructive to society – vote no. My life, my children’s lives and your children’s lives depend on it.”A ‘uniquely heinous proposal’In February, Florida marked five years since the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas high school in Parkland, which claimed the lives of 14 students and three educators. The attack came less than two years after a gunman killed 49 people at Pulse, an LGBTQ+ nightclub, in Orlando.For gun safety advocates, Republicans’ introduction of a permitless carry bill on the heels of the Parkland anniversary feels cruel. Debbie Mucarsel-Powell, a former Democratic congresswoman from Florida and now senior adviser to the gun safety group Giffords, described Republicans’ actions as “shameful”.“We are one of the largest states in the country, where we have seen two of the worst mass shootings,” Mucarsel-Powell said. “And we have to continue to do the work to make sure that we protect the lives of Floridians.”As Mucarsel-Powell noted, Florida legislators came together in the aftermath of the Parkland shooting to craft a bipartisan gun safety bill. The legislation, which raised the age requirement for buying a long gun from 18 to 21 and established a “red flag” law allowing law enforcement to seize firearms from those deemed to be dangerous, was signed by the then governor, Rick Scott, a Republican.“Everybody can say that partisanship has increased and the partisan divide is getting bigger, and I think that’s really evident in Florida,” said Cate Allen, a survivor of the Parkland shooting and leader of Students Demand Action. “Our representatives, our congressmen are pursuing political ambitions and personal gain over what their constituents actually want.”Surveys indicate that Florida residents broadly oppose permitless carry. One recent poll conducted by the University of North Florida’s Public Opinion Research Lab showed 77% of Florida voters, including 62% of Republicans, do not support the proposal.“I’m not going to say that the bills that [DeSantis] pushed in the past were good, but I think this one in particular is uniquely heinous,” said Alyssa Ackbar, a Tallahassee-based organizer for the gun safety group March for Our Lives. “The notion of getting rid of the permitting for concealed carry is honestly devastating.”To DeSantis’s critics such as Frost, the governor’s robust support for permitless carry is a particularly alarming example of how his political aspirations have endangered Floridians.“This is just one in a laundry list of legislation that will result in deaths, that will result in harm, that will result in trauma,” Frost said. “But it’s all part of a greater plan here because he’s more interested in running for president than he is in running the state of Florida.”‘Bullying people into submission’Although the permitless carry bill has now passed, gun safety advocates say they are still committed to holding Republican legislators accountable for supporting the widely unpopular bill.“I think it’s important to let lawmakers know that we’re watching them,” said Shannon Watts, founder of the gun safety group Moms Demand Action. “If they do the right thing, we’ll have their back, and if they do the wrong thing, we’ll have their job.”Advocates put a significant share of the blame for the bill on the shoulders of DeSantis, accusing Republican legislators of allowing their allegiance to the governor to take priority over the wishes of their constituents.“We’re seeing a rise of extremism and radicalism from DeSantis and the legislators that are completely loyal to him,” Mucarsel-Powell said. “They will not do anything that he doesn’t support.”Ackbar said she had heard from legislators that some of their colleagues only expressed support for the permitless carry bill because they want to stay in DeSantis’s good graces.“DeSantis has a way of bullying people into submission, into doing what he wants, and I truly believe that this bill is part of that as well,” Ackbar said.Gun safety advocates fear DeSantis will only escalate his demands to relax Florida’s gun regulations as he prepares to launch a presidential campaign, given that he has previously received criticism from hardline gun rights activists. The governor faced accusations of hypocrisy from gun safety advocates and gun rights activists alike in February, after the Washington Post reported on emails showing that DeSantis’s campaign team quietly sought to ban concealed weapons from his own election night party in Tampa last November.Watts mocked DeSantis’s stance as “guns everywhere for thee but not for me”, adding: “The governor knows that it is dangerous for people to have easy access to guns and then show up at his events. And yet, he wants those same people in our schools and in public places. It is the height of hypocrisy.”Gun rights activists have similarly criticized DeSantis for holding events where firearms are prohibited. A gun rights protester was arrested in October for trespassing at an Alachua county Republican party event where DeSantis was speaking, although those charges were later dropped. The protester held a sign reading: “I will not be disarmed by DeSantis.”Even the permitless carry proposal has sparked frustration among gun rights activists, who say the legislation does not go far enough. Those activists instead want a law similar to the one used in Texas, which allows residents to openly carry a gun in public without a permit instead of limiting the policy to concealed weapons. DeSantis’s failure to enact an open permitless carry law reflects “political impotence”, as one gun rights supporter put it at the committee hearing last month.Given those complaints from rightwing activists, gun safety advocates worry that DeSantis will eventually push for an open permitless carry policy in his quest to woo Republican primary voters. The human toll of such a political strategy, they say, could be devastating.“All of his political moves and all of the bullying that he does to have people vote his way, it costs lives,” Ackbar said. “They’re not just talking points. They’re not just political notions. They are real, and there are young people in communities in this state that are constantly harmed by the ways that he pushes these bills.” More

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      Fewer pronouns, more guns: Ron DeSantis’s plan to turn the US into Florida

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      The title of Governor Ron DeSantis’s book, which he is zealously promoting across the nation, is less important than the subtitle. The Courage to Be Free is a forgettable title shared by a volume by actor and gun rights activist Charlton Heston. But the subtitle, Florida’s Blueprint for America’s Revival, unlocks DeSantis’s national ambitions.While former US president Donald Trump labours under the frayed slogan of “Make America great again”, DeSantis is building a case to “Make America Florida” – a phrase that appears on caps, flags and other merchandise.The governor argues that he has made glorious summer in the Sunshine state. If and when he announces a run for US president in 2024, he will claim that he can repeat the formula in state after state across the US. Florida, his theory goes, is an incubator of conservative ideas that work.He dangles a carrot to Republicans who, weary of Trump’s losing streak, are seeking a saviour. DeSantis writes that when he was elected in 2018, there were nearly 300,000 more registered Democrats than Republicans in Florida; by October 2022, there were more than 300,000 more registered Republicans than Democrats.“What Florida has done is establish a blueprint for governance that has produced tangible results while serving as a rebuke to the entrenched elites who have driven our nation into the ground,” DeSantis writes in The Courage to Be Free.But the governor’s critics question whether his fixation on culture wars (“Florida is where woke goes to die!”) is quite as popular as it seems. They also contend that, with numerous climatic, economic and social problems, Florida is not quite the paradise that DeSantis likes to portray.“What it is is a blueprint for is people who want to abuse their power in order to target people who disagree with them politically,” said Maxwell Frost, the youngest member of Congress, who represents a Florida district. “That’s what we’ve seen from someone like Governor DeSantis.“What we’re exporting out of Florida is fascism. For him to sit there and say, ‘Oh, yeah, my bill on banning trans kids from talking about who they are is now equated to a top education system,’ it’s just a bunch of bullshit, to be honest. Most Floridians hopefully will see through that.”DeSantis, 44, as governor of the third most populous state has imposed limits on how race and sexuality can be taught in schools, forcing some teachers to remove books from their libraries. He has also banned transgender girls from school sports, redrawn the state’s political maps to favour Republicans, attacked Disney and other businesses that disagree with his ideology, and cracked down on Black Lives Matter protests.Then there was the coronavirus pandemic. The governor mostly followed guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention during the early months, closing Florida’s beaches, bars and schools. But he pivoted in early 2021, reopening schools before other states and banning face mask and vaccine mandates in businesses and government. When the media questioned his approach, he hit back pugnaciously to the delight of a base that revels in “owning the libs”.DeSantis claimed vindication last year when he smashed fundraising records and won re-election by nearly 20 percentage points in what used to be a swing state, albeit against a weak candidate from a disorganised Democratic party. Republicans saw hope that DeSantis has cracked the code for a party that has lost the popular vote in six of the last seven presidential elections.The party now enjoys a supermajority in the Florida state legislature and is pushing issues such as telling teachers which pronouns they can use for students, making guns more available and easier to carry, keeping immigrants who are in the country illegally out of the state and criminalising some drag shows.Republicans argue that DeSantis’s agenda explains why Florida ranks number one in the nation for net in-migration. About 319,000 people moved there last year, according to an analysis of census data by the National Association of Realtors, while California lost the most residents, with 343,000 departing.Christian Ziegler, chairman of the Florida Republican party, said: “You’re seeing people leave other states that have completely opposite ideology and political positions and policy positions. California, New York – everyone’s leaving those states and everyone’s flocking to our state. That validates the claim that Florida is a working model. If it was a cellphone, it would probably be the Apple iPhone. Everyone wants it, everyone’s buying it and everyone’s gravitating towards it.”Part of the attraction, Ziegler claims, is DeSantis’s “pro-freedom” approach to the pandemic, which allowed businesses and tourism to bounce back more quickly than elsewhere, and his support for what Republicans frame as “parents’ rights”.“I can’t tell you how many parents have moved here from other states because they want their kids in school not shut down, not to have masks forced on them, not to have a vaccine forced on them,” he said.Critics of DeSantis present a very different version, noting that Florida has long been a magnet because of its sunny weather and lack of state income tax. The pandemic, and the rise of remote working, made it especially attractive to people fleeing expensive big cities such as New York. (The trend may be temporary: latest census data shows that Manhattan’s population grew last year.)Speaking from Sarasota, Ziegler also defended DeSantis’s controversial policies on the teaching of US racial history. “From my standpoint, I can tell you we learned about the injustices of slavery. We learned about the heroic efforts of Harriet Tubman or Dr Martin Luther King Jr,” he said. “That is far different than the critical race theory, where they’re trying to point out that everyone in society is oppressed or an oppressor or that just the colour of your skin is going to make you biased and hateful.”This is a misrepresentation of critical race theory, which examines the ways in which racism was embedded into American law and other modern institutions, maintaining the dominance of white people. It is not typically taught in public schools.Progressives dispute the assertion that DeSantis’s focus on hot-button culture war issues is working.“He’s selling a blueprint for hate and bigotry,” said Brandon Wolf, press secretary of the LGBTQ+ rights organisation Equality Florida and a survivor of the Pulse nightclub shooting in 2016. “Ron DeSantis is being honest about one thing and that is that he is trying to sell the snake oil of his authoritarian tactics in Florida to the rest of the country.”Wolf pointed out that, beneath the veneer of prosperity that the governor projects, there are plenty of shadows in the state. A haven for retirees, Florida has the worst long-term care for elderly people among all 50 states, according to the American Association of Retired Persons. It is among 10 states that have refused to expand Medicaid, a public health insurance programme for people with low income, under the Affordable Care Act. It ranks 16th worst for healthcare among the 50 states, says the Commonwealth Fund, a grant-making foundation that supports independent healthcare research.Meanwhile the cost of living is spiralling. Norada Real Estate Investments found that Florida home values have risen by 80% over the past five years. The cost of home insurance is rising fast as the market struggles to deal with stronger hurricanes and more intense rainstorms due to the climate crisis.“Leaning into the culture war issues was successful for him and the challenge that I pose to that is ask any everyday Floridian: what are the top five things keeping them up at night? I guarantee you, they’re not going to say someone in a wig reading Red Fish Blue Fish at the library,” Wolf said.“The question of has Florida been wildly successful is best posed to people who are kept up at night by the cost of housing, the potential for dangerous storms,” he added. “You just ask them if Florida feels like the most successful and freest state in the nation.”Education is another such example. While DeSantis has created political theatre around pandemic measures and racial and sexual identity, the state faces a severe shortage of teachers in its long-underfunded public schools. Florida ranked 49th in the country for average teacher pay in 2020, according to the National Education Association.Tim Canova, a law professor at Nova Southeastern University in Fort Lauderdale and a former congressional candidate, said: “Teachers are underpaid, understaffed, the curriculums are dictated centrally on down, whether it’s Common Core federal standards or from the state in Tallahassee.“It’s a miserable job for teachers. They don’t have much autonomy. They’ve got big class sizes. They don’t get paid much. They’ve got to constantly fill out reports about their teaching. It’s a problem that’s way beyond Florida but the schools in Florida have been weak for a long time.”Research by Data for Progress, a progressive polling firm and advocacy group, also raises questions about the viability of DeSantis’s hard-right policies beyond Florida’s borders, with independent voters across the country largely siding with Democrats on culture war issues.A survey of 1,252 likely voters nationally from 17 to 20 March found that 41% support and 50% oppose mandating K-12 libraries to immediately remove and review books flagged as inappropriate; 37% support and 47% oppose eliminating college diversity, equity and inclusion programmes; 39% support and 46% oppose banning college majors and minors in critical race theory.Danielle Deiseroth, interim executive director of Data for Progress, said: “Most Americans might agree that they like Florida’s weather. They certainly don’t like policies being put forward by Governor DeSantis and Florida lawmakers, especially on some of these culture war issues that have been dominating, especially on rightwing news media.”“In terms of DeSantis positioning himself for a potential presidential run in ’24, which seems all but certain at this point, these extreme policies are going to alienate a lot of voters right off the bat,” she said. “Women in particular were one of the groups most opposed to many of these policies.”Last year’s midterm election results appear to support this view as far-right Republicans underperformed among female voters, in part because of their extreme positions on issues such as abortion after the supreme court’s decision to overturn Roe v Wade. DeSantis is expected to sign a six-week abortion ban, even though polls show that a majority of Floridians oppose it.DeSantis critic Rick Wilson, a fifth-generation Floridian and Republican strategist, has been involved in more than 30 political campaigns in the state, and co-founded the Lincoln Project, an anti-Trump group. Based in the state capital, Tallahassee, Wilson is sceptical of the notion that Florida could be the laboratory of ideas for a Republican revival.Recalling Texas governor Rick Perry’s failed presidential campaign, he said: “Perry came out and said, ‘I did all these conservative things, I’m the champion, I could make Washington work like Texas.’ That was his biggest line and it fell flatter than a pancake. That was also Jeb Bush’s argument: ‘I was Florida’s most conservative governor, I accomplished all these amazing conservative reforms.’”Far from a blueprint for America, Wilson describes Florida as “the Petri dish of bad ideas”. He added: “There is a slowly emerging theme among some conservatives I’ve been talking to of ‘I wish he’d do more about tax cuts and less about book banning, and talk more about smaller government and less about using government to punish people.’“In Maga world, that authoritarian stuff sells pretty well. But again, you can’t out-Trump Trump.”That authoritarian streak alarms activists who say DeSantis and his allies have pushed voter suppression bills to marginalise people of colour. His Florida model, they argue, would pose a fundamental threat to civil rights if exported elsewhere.Jasmine Burney-Clark, founder of Equal Ground, a Black-led civic engagement organisation, said: “It is not a state where people of colour, particularly Black people who have been on the other end as targets of his attacks, are feeling like this is a model for success, freedom or liberation.“If you are invested in a world that is seeded in white supremacy, hate and racist policies, then it is absolutely the perfect blueprint for the rest of the nation.” More

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      Florida teacher fired for asking students to pen obituaries for active shooter drill

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      A Florida teacher who was fired from his school after asking his students to write their own obituaries in advance of an on-campus active shooter drill says he has no regrets about the assignment that cost him his job.“It wasn’t to scare them or make them feel like they were going to die, but just to help them understand what’s important in their lives and how they want to move forward with their lives and how they want to pursue things in their journey,” the dismissed psychology teacher, Jeffrey Keene, told NBC News.Keene’s dismissal once again has cast a spotlight on the persistently bizarre decisions within the public education system of Florida, which has banned discussions of gender and sexual identity in classrooms but whose Republican extremist governor, Ron DeSantis, staunchly supports keeping the guns which help fuel school shootings across the country as accessible as possible.According to NBC, Keene learned that his 11th- and 12th-grade students at Dr Phillips high school in the Orlando area would be rehearsing how to respond to a shooting attack at their campus during their first period on 4 April. That prompted him to ask his students to write their own biographical obituaries as classwork, reasoning that the assignment would cause them to reflect on their lives as they prepared to undergo the active shooter drill.“This isn’t a way to upset you or anything like that,” Keene recalled telling his class of 35 students. He added: “If you can’t talk real to them, then what’s happening in this environment?”Just one week earlier, an intruder shot and killed three nine-year-old students as well as three staffers at Covenant elementary school in Nashville, Tennessee. Police shot and killed the intruder. The attack was one of more than 100 shootings at kindergarten through 12th-grade schools or during school-related activities in the US this year as of Saturday, according to the K-12 School Shooting Database resource.The murders at Covenant also occurred during what as of Saturday was one of more than 140 mass shootings in the US this year, according to the Gun Violence Archive, which defines a mass shooting as one in which at least four victims are wounded or killed.It later became apparent that someone was upset by Keene’s assignment. By second period that day, Keene said some of his students revealed to him that they had been interviewed by school officials about the obituaries. And in the middle of seventh period, he was told that he’d been fired from his job, which he had started in January.The public school district which oversees Dr Phillips high has largely declined to discuss the case. A spokesperson for the district only told NBC in a statement that an employee responsible for “an inappropriate assignment about school violence” had been fired.Keene said to NBC that he was too new of a hire to qualify for membership to the local teachers’ union, so he had no administrative method available to seek reinstatement to his job. The school district’s statement also noted that Keene was still completing his post-hiring probation, implying that his dismissal could be implemented more swiftly than for a teacher who had finished the trial period.Keene hopes to find another job in teaching and believes his assignment was appropriate, according to NBC.“I don’t think I did anything incorrectly,” Keene told the network. “I honestly didn’t think a 16-, 17-, 18-year-old would be offended or upset by talking about something we’re already talking about.”The steady presence of mass shootings and violence at schools in US news headlines has moved many to call for more meaningful gun control, but Congress has been unable to pass anything substantial, even as schools acknowledge their vulnerability by making students practice what to do if heavily armed intruders barge onto their campuses and try to shoot them to death.A bill passed by Congress and signed into law by Joe Biden last year expanded background checks for the youngest gun buyers and funded some mental health and violence intervention programs. But the president is among many who say much stronger measures are needed, including an assault weapons ban that Congress has been unable to pass.Three days after the Nashville school murders and five days before Keene lost his job, Florida’s Republican-controlled legislature voted to allow gun owners to carry around their firearms without a state permit.They did so at the behest of DeSantis, who has also successfully advocated for a legislative ban against classroom discussions of systemic racism, saying the concept joined learning about sexual and gender identity as one of the biggest threats to Florida’s schoolchildren.Florida’s 22 million or so residents make it the country’s third-most populous state. More