Republished with permission from Florida Phoenix, by Diane Roberts

How about this for a new state slogan? “Florida: Where Brain Cells Go to Die.” Or “The Confederacy’s Best Beaches!” Maybe “Florida: Come for the Sunshine, Stay for the Measles.”

We are spoiled for choice.

About the measles: There’s an outbreak—nine cases in Broward County and one in Polk County, so far. And given how our anti-vax demon sperm quack of a surgeon general says sick kids don’t need to quarantine, and kids who haven’t had the measles-mumps-rubella jab can carry on coming to school, it could spread.

The measles virus is one of the world’s most contagious and can lead to pneumonia, hearing loss, and, in a few cases, brain damage or death.

The U.S. once had measles beat: The MMR vaccine is so effective (97%) that, by 2000, the disease was effectively eliminated.

Not anymore. Too many dunderheads are buying what dangerous anti-vaxxers like Ron DeSantis and his pet quack Joseph Ladapo are selling.

Ladapo is so science-challenged he thinks COVID-19 vaccines break into your DNA like a burglar busting down your door and throwing your stuff around.

As for your DNA getting messed up by a vaccine, a member of the FDA’s vaccine advisory council sighs: “You have better chance of becoming Spider-Man.”

Remember, Ladapo has tenure in the medical school at the state’s flagship institution of higher education.

Or what used to be the state’s flagship institution.

Purge at UF

The University of Florida, now a wholly owned subsidiary of DeSantis and his education-hating hoodlums, has just shut down its Diversity Equity and Inclusion office and terminated all the staff.

Other institutions are meekly following suit: The University of South Florida did not replace its DEI director when the position became vacant; the University of North Florida has shut down the offices supporting minority faiths and LGBTQ students.

The racists are thrilled to bits. Sen. Rick Scott, R-Gehenna, saying that UF’s invertebrate president Ben Sasse does “all the right things.”

Christopher Rufo, always the Drama Queen, twixxted, “The conservative counter-revolution has begun.”

Gator Nation, on the other hand, is not so thrilled.

UF’s newly-elected student government officers released a statement declaring themselves “unwaveringly in support of diversity, equity, and inclusion.”

Emmitt Smith, the great Gator running back and NFL all-time rushing record holder, registered his disgust, accusing the university and the state of failing to show “courage and leadership” and warning minority students—especially student athletes—to speak up.

Otherwise, they’ll be “complicit” in systemic racism.

The university says it’s just following orders: DEI programs are now illegal here in DeSantistan.

The university also says the $5 million they used to spend on helping under-represented students will be re-allocated to “faculty recruitment.”

Good luck with that, y’all: With attacks on tenure and academic freedom, censoring established areas of scholarship including sociology and gender studies, and imposition of “centers” pushing highly selective versions of America history to inculcate “patriotism” on campus, is it any wonder Florida universities are losing faculty and struggling to attract good replacements?

The authoritarian right ruling this state is convinced that if white Christian men were in charge, everything would be just peachy.

‘A-Longin’ for the Old Plantation’

DeSantis and his legislative lackeys are, in the words of Florida’s official state song (third verse), “still a-longin’ for the old plantation.”

Back then the overseer didn’t have to give workers water breaks or five minutes in the shade when it’s 100 degrees and 98 percent humidity.

And none of those frills like a living wage.

The Florida Legislature has voted to preempt local regulations, making sure wokey cities (Miami, Gainesville, etc.) can’t require businesses to treat their employees like human beings.

Everyone knows heatstroke builds character.

Still, suppressing human rights and destroying the Constitution haven’t been entirely smooth sailing of late: the Stop-Hurting-White-Folks’-Feelings movement has run into some legal trouble.

While the prohibition on state money for DEI stands, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit has slapped down DeSantis’s Stop Woke statute, ruling that universities can teach what they like, how they like, and that private employers may indeed train workers to recognize and address the sexism, racism, ableism, transphobia, and homophobia spreading through this state like STDs during Spring Break.

This hasn’t stopped the Legislature from plumbing new depths of pettiness. It has passed a bill to forbid teacher training in our history of racial brutality which, they claim, “indoctrinates” future educators in “identity politics and woke ideology.”

Rep. Alex Andrade of Pensacola hit the floor in support, allowing as how slavery was a Bad Thing, but those woke ed courses don’t take into account that “some slaves were paid for their work and were able to actually get a portion of payment that slave owners received for their labor.”

OK, calm down, son. Yes, a small number of enslaved people got a little money for skilled jobs such as blacksmithing, baking, sewing, even engineering.

You know what they used the money for? Mostly to buy freedom for themselves or their families.

Andrade, who clearly wants to be Matt Gaetz when he grows up, is one of those young show ponies who lives to compete in Florida’s reactionary Gymkhana.

He was the “brains” (if that’s the right word) behind the bill that would expand defamation laws and clamp down on free speech.

Journalists would be especially vulnerable: If they use an anonymous source, the law would automatically class the source as “presumptively false.”

Thing is, without anonymous sources, we’d have never known about Watergate, the Pentagon Papers, CIA Black Sites, or Moms for Liberty founder Bridget Ziegler’s epic three-way hypocrisy.

Not chilling enough for you? Journalists’ motives for publishing a story with an unnamed tipster would be deemed presumptively malicious.

Happily—for those of us with a fondness for free speech, at least—the bill died upon adjournment of the Legislature.

But like a zombie desperate for a brains-fix, it will probably lurch back onto the calendar next year.

Meanwhile, your Florida Legislature’s way of dealing with issues like the lack of affordable housing, runaway insurance rates, bad nursing home care, homelessness, and the climate crisis is to ignore them, push them out of sight, or censor any mention of them.

Don’t say “gay” and it goes away; don’t say “global warming” and it doesn’t exist; don’t point to racism and it’s not a problem.

Just shut your eyes and whistle “Dixie:” everything in Florida is fine, just fine.