Florida, Trade in Your Freedoms at the State Line

 

In the latest shredding of the United States Constitution, Florida Republicans are proposing a bill that is designed to intimidate anyone who has anything bad to say about our governor. If you write anything about the Fuhrer of Florida, aka Governor Ron DeSantis, you would be required to register with the Florida Office of Legislative Services or the Commission on Ethics. If you write more than one post, you would be required to file monthly reports detailing where, when, and by whom the post was published, plus the amount of compensation received.

Sieg Heil

The bill would also cover the Governor’s Cabinet officers and members of the Florida legislature. The bill did exempt newspaper websites, perhaps as an afterthought, assuming any thought went into this bill in the first place. This legislation was proposed by State Sen. Jason Brodeur and includes fines for failure to file the appropriate forms and reports that also disclose the sources of any revenue. The fines are $25 per day not to exceed $2,500 per violation. The bill would also make it easier for the subject of the blog post to sue for defamation by lowering the bar of proof to only having to show negligence rather than intended malice.

Since Tucker Carlson of Fox “News” fame maintains a home on Gasparilla Island in Florida and maintains a website that is not owned by his “news” employer, he too would be covered by such a law. The lower bar for defamation would be a bonanza for the court system. It would be hard to imagine how a change in Florida's defamation law could be structured to only protect the governor and not some liberal target of the Tucker Carlson megaphone.

While I would normally doubt that any such clear violation of the First Amendment would ever see the light of day, our Florida Fuhrer seems very comfortable trampling on the rights of anyone who gets in his way. Much like his mentor, Adolph, he has seen fit to stack the courts with his conservative friends, ban books he doesn’t like, attack the state’s largest employer Disney, revise Black history to make slavery and discrimination more palatable, attack the gay community from all sides, completely revamp the education system in his image, break the law when it suits him, and he has even retroactively changed a law he violated after he had been taken to court.

Books Banned in Florida Schools

The proposed legislation would intimidate anyone with a view that might upset the governor. It would attack their source of revenue as the disclosure of any supportive revenue would subject that business or individual to the full wrath of a governor who is known to use the power of his office to settle grudges.

From this vantage point, it is hard to know if he is channeling Adolph from the beyond or is taking lessons from Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán. The governor’s press secretary (Christina Pushaw) admitted that the Florida “Don’t Say Gay” law was patterned after the one in Hungary which was described as an “anti-grooming” bill to stop gay people from preying on children.

It's Ron's Turn at the Mike

Our pugilistic culture warrior extraordinaire uses perceived cultural threats as an excuse for aggressive, sometimes illegal, uses of state power against his declared enemy, the “liberal woke mob.” He wants to be president of the United States. Stranger things have happened. I seem to remember another demagogue with a spray tan and a blonde combover with a reputation for lies and deceit who threaded the needle to get the GOP nomination and become president.