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Opinion

The Soldier Who Didn’t Flinch

Why Alex Vindman Is Exactly the Senator Florida Needs Right Now

On October 29, 2019, Alexander Vindman put on his Army dress uniform and walked into a congressional hearing room to testify about what he had heard on a phone call between the President of the United States and the President of Ukraine.

He knew what was coming. He knew that testifying against a sitting president — a president who had already demonstrated his willingness to retaliate against anyone who crossed him — would cost him something. He testified anyway. Under oath, in uniform, he told the truth.

“The last time you saw me was here, swearing an oath to tell the truth about a president who broke his,” Vindman says in his campaign launch video. “See, my family came here as refugees to escape tyranny, and I sure as hell wasn’t going to bow down to some wannabe tyrant.”

That is not a soundbite. That is the biography.

Who He Is

Lieutenant Colonel (Retired) Alex Vindman is a 21-year U.S. Army combat veteran who served his country in the military and as a national security expert working for presidents of both parties. He and his family left the Soviet Union as refugees when he was three years old in search of freedom and opportunity in America.

His mother died when he was young. His father packed up what remained of the family and brought three boys and a grandmother to New York City in 1979, because America was the place where people who wanted freedom went when they had exhausted their other options. He emigrated with his father, brothers and grandmother to New York City in 1979 from Ukraine after his mother died.

He joined the Army. He served for 21 years. As an infantryman, he was wounded in Iraq and awarded a Purple Heart. He rose to Lieutenant Colonel. He was assigned to the National Security Council as Director of European Affairs, where he became the administration’s top expert on Ukraine — a country he knew something about. He served Republican presidents and Democratic presidents without distinction, because the uniform doesn’t register party.

And then he heard a phone call. And he reported it. And Trump fired him. And Trump’s allies called him a traitor. And the Republican Party of Florida launched digital ads describing his testimony as “traitorous.” And he is now running for the United States Senate in a state he chose to call home, asking its voters to judge him on the totality of his record.

The man who called him a traitor is the President of the United States. The president whose first act Vindman objected to — using congressionally appropriated military aid to Ukraine as a personal extortion tool to manufacture opposition research on a political rival — is now the president who abandoned Ukraine entirely and is negotiating with Russia while American-funded weapons systems are handed over in the settlement.

Vindman was right about what that phone call meant. He was right about what that president was. The evidence has been accumulating for six years.

Why Florida

The Republican National Committee’s response to Vindman’s entry into the race was to call him a “carpetbagger and a grifter.” He moved to Florida only recently, they noted.

Vindman’s wife and he chose Florida because he was raised in New York. “Where else can I go?” he said jokingly. “So, pretty, pretty awesome to be able to raise a family here for the same reason that a lot of us come here — it’s a beautiful place, sunny, warm, lovely.”

People move to Florida because it’s beautiful and warm. They move there to raise families. They move there and put down roots and pay taxes and send their children to public schools and worry about the same things every Floridian worries about — insurance, healthcare, grocery prices, the cost of housing. The argument that moving to Florida makes you inauthentic as a Florida candidate is an argument that could be made against roughly half the state’s population. Florida is a place people come to. That is what Florida is.

Vindman chose it. He chose it after 21 years of the Army choosing for him. For the first time in his adult life, he got to pick. He picked Florida.

What He’s Running On

Vindman is running for Senate to fix a system that has been rigged for the elites and fight for Florida’s hard-working families. “The people of Florida want a Senator who will use the power of the office to crush corruption and cut costs instead of using it to make millions for themselves and their billionaire backers.”

He out-raised Moody in the first quarter of 2026 — the appointed incumbent who has been in Florida politics for two decades was out-raised by the man the RNC called a carpetbagger, which tells you something about where the energy is.

“This president unleashed a reign of terror and retribution not just against me and my family, but against all of us,” Vindman said in launching his Senate campaign. “Today, our country is in chaos. Thug militias attacking citizens. Tariffs pushing prices sky-high. Health care premiums through the roof.”

These are not abstract political talking points for Vindman. He has watched the ICE shootings. He has watched the Prairieland prosecutions. He has watched the Iran war start during active peace negotiations. He has watched the EAC gutted four months before the midterms. He has watched all of it from inside Florida, as a citizen, as a veteran, as the man who testified about the beginning of this and paid the price for telling the truth.

“They put Moody in the Senate to be a ‘yes’ vote for Trump and the billionaires. She’s not Florida’s senator. She’s theirs.”

The Retribution He Already Survived

The Trump administration forced Vindman out of the National Security Council after his testimony. They tried to humiliate him. They called him a traitor on national television. They launched digital ads. They sent the Florida Republican Party after him before he had even announced his candidacy. They threw everything they had at him in 2019 and 2020 and he wrote a book about it and moved to Florida and announced he was running for Senate.

He said: “I am a 21-year combat veteran who has reported corruption at the highest level. Politicians have already thrown their worst at me, which is why Ashley Moody and her allies don’t faze me. I am focused on delivering for my community, which means lowering costs and fighting corruption.” Federal Election Commission

Politicians have thrown their worst at him. The president of the United States threw his worst at him. He didn’t flinch then. He’s not flinching now.

That matters in this moment. We are in a period when speaking truth to power has consequences — when whistleblowers are fired, when inspectors general are dismissed, when anyone who contradicts the official story faces retribution from the apparatus of the federal government. Vindman has already been through that. He knows what it costs. He did it anyway. He would do it again.

The Race

New polling shows a statistically even race. Vindman’s optimistic internal polling highlights his strength and Moody’s weaknesses. Federal Election Commission

A recent poll found 95% of Florida voters say “Political corruption and unchecked money in politics is leading to higher costs.” Vindman is running on exactly that message against exactly the candidate that message was built to defeat. Moody made a 310% return on stock trades while sitting on the committees that regulate those industries. Big Pharma funded her campaign after she voted to protect their prices from Medicare negotiation. She was installed in her seat by a governor without a single voter’s input. Federal Election Commission

Vindman is asking Florida to choose between someone who was put in power by the system and someone who challenged the system at the cost of his career.

The primary is August 18th. The general election is November 3rd.

After a life of service, Vindman is running for the United States Senate to be a common-sense voice for everyday Floridians who want a Senator who will stand up for them. “We need someone who isn’t afraid to defend our democracy, put a check on an outlaw president, and to make sure that every American has a fair chance at prosperity.”

He picked Florida. He’s fighting for Florida. He already proved he’ll tell the truth when it’s costly. He already proved he won’t flinch when the most powerful man in the world comes after him.

Florida has a chance to send someone to the Senate who has already been tested by fire and didn’t break.

That’s the case. The rest is up to Florida voters.

Donate to Alex Vindman at alexvindman.com

Opinion

The Appointed Senator Who Trades Like Nancy Pelosi

Ashley Moody Wasn’t Elected. She Was Installed. And Her First Acts as Senator Were to Trade $2.2 Million in Stock While She Had Access to Information Only Congress Has.

Ashley Moody was not elected to the United States Senate. She was appointed.

When Marco Rubio resigned his Florida Senate seat to become Secretary of State, Ron DeSantis reached for the woman who had served as Florida’s attorney general under his administration and installed her in the seat without a single Florida voter casting a ballot for her. She was sworn in on January 21, 2025. She is now asking Floridians to keep her there for a full term.

There is a case to be made that Florida voters should evaluate her record since her appointment. Let us make that case.

The Trading

Senator Ashley Moody has gained 310% in the past year using her portfolio. For context: the S&P 500 gained approximately 10% over that same period. The new Nancy Pelosi is a Republican senator from Florida who was appointed rather than elected, who sits on the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee and the Senate Armed Services Committee, and who traded more than $2.2 million in stock across 57 transactions while holding a seat that gives her access to information the public does not have.

A CNN analysis found that senators’ stock trades directly overlapped with their committee work. Among the senators who listed themselves as owners of stock in industries that their committees regulate are Republicans Bill Hagerty, John Kennedy, Ashley Moody, Jerry Moran, Bernie Moreno, Markwayne Mullin and Tommy Tuberville.

Moody sits on the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee. She traded healthcare stocks. She sits on the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. She traded defense and industrial stocks including Howmet Aerospace. Her 57 trades include positions in Super Micro Computer, Applied Materials, NVIDIA, and Howmet Aerospace. These are companies that do significant federal contracting and are directly affected by the legislation and oversight her committees conduct.

The defense Moody’s office offered: when she was appointed to the Senate at the end of January 2025, she was a part of an extended family investment partnership where a partner independently made investment decisions in consultation with a third-party financial advisor, and with no input from the Senator.

This is the standard congressional disclaimer. A financial advisor did it. The senator didn’t know. The senator didn’t direct the trades. The trades happen to have generated a 310% return in a year when the market was up 10%. The senator serves on committees that regulate the industries in which the trades were made. But the financial advisor did it independently.

“It’s all extremely troubling,” said Dylan Hedtler-Gaudette, acting vice president of the Project on Government Oversight, a nonpartisan watchdog group. “It’s a bipartisan problem. Republicans and Democrats are guilty of this, pretty evenly across the board. There’s an institutional rot at the core of this.”

The Legislation That Followed

Here is where the story gets richer. Faced with scrutiny over the trading, Moody’s office says the senator “immediately” took steps to withdraw from the partnership and has not traded stocks since April 2025. “As a sign of this commitment, Senator Moody introduced legislation to restore trust in Congress and ensure there is no appearance of impropriety as it relates to members trading individual stocks,” the statement reads.

She stopped trading stocks and then introduced a bill to ban stock trading by members of Congress. Democratic Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand of New York and Republican Sen. Ashley Moody of Florida introduced legislation that would bar lawmakers and their immediate family members from trading or owning individual stocks.

“The American people must be able to trust that their elected officials are focused on results for the American people and not focused on profiting from their positions,” Moody wrote.

This is, simultaneously, the right position and a stunning example of someone who profited from exactly the practice she now wants to ban. She made a 310% return trading stocks while serving on committees that regulate those industries. She got caught in a CNN analysis. She stopped trading. She introduced a bill to stop other people from doing what she had just finished doing. And she wrote about the importance of public trust.

The bill, notably, would exempt the president and vice president, a carveout likely to draw criticism from some Democrats. The president who has made $2.2 billion trading crypto and running a meme coin scheme from the Oval Office is exempted from the stock trading ban Moody introduced. That is the legislation of a woman who understands which alliances she needs to maintain.

Big Pharma’s Senator

A number of pharmaceutical companies had their drugs removed from a list slated for price reduction negotiations with Medicare officials, thanks to legislation that Moody supported. Big Pharma threw its support behind Ashley Moody’s Senate campaign in return.

This is the transaction that defines the Moody model. Pharmaceutical companies spend money on lobbying to remove their drugs from Medicare price negotiation lists. Senators vote for the legislation that accomplishes this. The pharmaceutical companies then donate to those senators’ campaigns. The senators describe this as principled opposition to government interference in the free market. The drug prices do not come down. The donations continue.

Moody voted against extending Affordable Care Act health care premium subsidies in December 2025. The people who lost those subsidies are not the people donating to her campaign.

Who She Was Before

Before her Senate appointment, Moody served six years as Florida’s attorney general. During that time she supported lawsuits to invalidate the Affordable Care Act. She opposed the legalization of recreational cannabis. She opposed the restoration of voting rights for former felons. After the Voting Rights Restoration for Felons Initiative passed in 2018, she and Governor Ron DeSantis helped push a bill through the Florida Senate that would restore voting rights to eligible felons only once the felons had paid all their court fees.

In 2020, after Michael Bloomberg raised $16 million to pay 32,000 felons’ court fees, which would make them eligible to vote in the 2020 elections, Moody asked the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Florida Department of Law Enforcement to investigate Bloomberg, claiming he potentially violated election laws.

A man paid court fees so that people who had served their sentences could vote. The Florida attorney general asked the FBI to investigate him for it. The people who had served their time remained unable to vote.

After Joe Biden won the election and Trump refused to concede, Moody took a leading role in aiding Trump’s attempts to contest the election.

She joined the lawsuit to overturn the results of a presidential election she did not like. She investigated a man who helped poor people pay their court fees so they could vote. She was then handed a United States Senate seat without an election. The woman who helped try to cancel an election was given a seat in the Senate without one.

The Opponent

Moody faces Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman — the decorated combat veteran who testified about the Ukraine phone call that led to Trump’s first impeachment, who was subsequently forced out of the National Security Council, who moved his family to Florida and decided to run for the Senate seat he is now within striking distance of winning. A statistically even race, with Vindman’s optimistic internal polling highlighting his strength and Moody’s weaknesses.

Vindman said: “I am a 21-year combat veteran who has reported corruption at the highest level. Politicians have already thrown their worst at me, which is why Ashley Moody and her allies don’t faze me. I am focused on delivering for my community, which means lowering costs and fighting corruption.”

A recent poll found that 95% of Florida voters say “Political corruption and unchecked money in politics is leading to higher costs.”

Ashley Moody made a 310% return on stock trades while serving on the committees that regulate those industries. Big Pharma donated to her campaign after she voted to protect their drug prices from Medicare negotiation. She was appointed to her seat by a governor whose administration she served. She is now running for a full term asking Florida voters to elect a senator who was never elected to anything statewide.

The 95% of Florida voters who say political corruption is leading to higher costs have a candidate in November. His name is Alexander Vindman. He already knows what it costs to tell the truth to people who don’t want to hear it.

He did it anyway.

Opinion

A Breathtaking Assertion of Power

Trump’s Own Judge Just Told Ron DeSantis He Can’t Ban Ideas From a Classroom. The Quote Is Magnificent.

Ron DeSantis wanted to ban ideas.

Not dangerous ideas — not incitement, not fraud, not defamation. Ideas about race and gender. Specifically, the idea that racism has systemic dimensions, that the history of the United States includes structural inequalities built over centuries, that some people may have benefited from those structures while others were harmed by them. These ideas are taught in universities. They have been taught in universities for decades. They are the conclusions of the accumulated scholarship of historians, sociologists, economists, and legal theorists whose work has been peer-reviewed, cited, challenged, debated, and refined through the ordinary processes of academic inquiry.

DeSantis decided the state of Florida could prohibit professors from teaching them. He called the law the Stop WOKE Act. He championed it. He signed it. He used it to campaign for president.

On Tuesday, Judge Britt Grant of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit blocked it.

Judge Britt Grant was appointed by Donald Trump.

“If the First Amendment offers any boundary of protection at all for public university classrooms, this statute crosses it,” Grant wrote.

That is the opinion of a judge appointed by the president whose party passed the law. That is the legal assessment of someone who, by any reasonable measure of Republican judicial politics, should have been sympathetic to DeSantis’s position. She was not.

The Argument Florida Made

Florida’s theory was as simple as it was authoritarian: because the government pays the professors’ salaries, their speech is the State’s speech. The state employs the professors. The state funds the universities. Therefore the state controls what is said in the classrooms. The professors are, in Florida’s telling, nothing more than state mouthpieces — paid to say what the government approves and prohibited from saying what it doesn’t.

Grant rejected this, writing: “Florida’s salary-for-speech rule is a breathtaking assertion of power to ban unpopular ideas from public discourse in the very places the State’s own statutes recognize as centers of inquiry — classrooms where students are trusted to puzzle through ideas that are good and bad, easy and hard, ideally getting ever closer to the truth.”

Grant, joined by former President Bill Clinton appointee Charles Wilson, called Florida’s position a “breathtaking assertion of power to ban unpopular ideas from public discourse” in public university classrooms.

And then she deployed a quote from a 1965 law professor that deserves to be read slowly: the Florida defendants cannot “put together half a donkey and half a camel, and then ride to victory on the synthetic hybrid.”

A Trump-appointed judge called the Florida Stop WOKE Act a half-donkey half-camel synthetic hybrid that cannot ride to victory.

“Hearing an idea you disagree with is not discrimination; it is an opportunity to come up with a better idea, or maybe even change your mind,” Grant wrote.

What the Law Actually Did

The 2022 law prohibited professors and workplace training from teaching about race or gender in a way that induces guilt or blame in the classroom, under threat of a fine or penalty. The provision disallowed any “training or instruction that espouses, promotes, advances, inculcates, or compels” students at Florida public colleges and universities to believe any of eight concepts relating to topics like race and sex.

Let us be specific about what this means in practice. A professor of American history at the University of Florida could not teach that the legacy of slavery has ongoing economic consequences, if that teaching could be interpreted as making a white student feel guilty. A professor of sociology could not present research on structural racism, if that presentation advanced the idea that some people benefit from racial hierarchy. A professor of gender studies — a field with decades of peer-reviewed scholarship — could not teach the foundational concepts of her discipline.

DeSantis called this “protecting the open exchange of ideas.” It prohibited the open exchange of ideas. This is not a subtle distinction.

The Dissent and What It Reveals

Judge Barbara Lagoa, another Trump appointee and a former Florida Supreme Court justice picked by DeSantis, dissented. Lagoa argued Florida acted within its authority to control what professors may endorse in state-sponsored classrooms. “The First Amendment protects all viewpoints in the public square, whether they are conventional or controversial,” Lagoa wrote. “But it does not compel all viewpoints to be worthy of state-sponsored endorsement.”

This is the argument that the state university is not really a marketplace of ideas but a state-sponsored platform, and the state can decide what ideas its platform endorses. It is a coherent argument. It is also the argument that would give every governor of every state with a public university system the power to determine what is true and what is not, what can be taught and what cannot, which fields of inquiry are permitted and which are suppressed.

Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier praised her, saying “Barbara Lagoa may be the best jurist in our country.” He said nothing about Judge Grant.

What Remains

The three-judge panel affirmed a preliminary injunction, meaning the law remains blocked while the case continues. Florida can ask the full 11th Circuit to rehear the case or petition the Supreme Court to review it.

Courts have also intervened to prevent the workplace provisions from being enacted, but it remains in effect in Florida’s K-12 public schools. Block said the precedent set by the latest decision could make it easier for K-12 advocates to overturn the law affecting their schools.

The children in Florida’s public schools are still subject to the Stop WOKE Act. The professors in Florida’s public universities are, for now, not. The case will continue. DeSantis will fight it. The Supreme Court — with its three Trump appointees and its record on First Amendment cases involving conservative governments — may yet get to weigh in.

Clay Calvert, non-resident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, said: “I don’t believe it’s going to stop Governor DeSantis, or frankly, even President Trump from attacking academia, because for them it chums the waters for MAGA constituents who perceive academia as being very liberal and very much in favor of DEI.”

He is right that it will not stop them. But it has stopped them today. A judge appointed by the president told the governor that you cannot ban ideas from a classroom by employing the teacher who teaches them.

“This ruling sets a strong precedent that higher education cannot be limited to the whims of politicians,” said Leah Watson, senior staff attorney with the ACLU’s Racial Justice Program.

The whims of politicians. That is what the Stop WOKE Act was. A political document dressed as an education policy, designed to perform outrage for a base that had been told academia was the enemy, signed by a governor who wanted to be president by running against the universities his state funds.

A Trump-appointed judge saw through it. She called it a breathtaking assertion of power. She blocked it.

The half-donkey half-camel hybrid did not ride to victory.

Opinion

Harm Is Not Harm Anymore

The Trump Administration Just Legalized the Destruction of Endangered Species Habitat. Fifty Years of Conservation Law Undone in a Friday Afternoon Rule.

The Endangered Species Act was signed into law in 1973 by Richard Nixon. Nixon. The man the Republican Party has spent fifty years pretending not to remember. The law passed the Senate 92-0. It passed the House without a recorded dissent. It was, at the moment of its passage, one of the least controversial major pieces of legislation in American history. Protecting species from extinction was not then a partisan position. It was a consensus acknowledgment that the natural world had value beyond its extractability, and that the United States government had an obligation to prevent its own citizens and industries from erasing parts of it forever.

On Friday, the Trump administration finalized a rule that guts the most important protection the Act contains. The rule eliminates the regulatory definition of “harm” that has governed enforcement of the ESA for the past forty-five years.

For decades, the government defined harm broadly to include encroachments on places with threatened and endangered animals. The change would allow oil and gas drilling, mining, logging and other development on critical wildlife habitats so long as the animals themselves aren’t killed or injured.

You can destroy a bald eagle’s nest. You can clearcut a forest where the last breeding population of a critically endangered woodpecker lives. You can drain a wetland where an endangered frog breeds. You can do all of this legally now, under federal law, as long as you don’t personally, directly, physically kill the animal while you’re doing it.

The animal will die. The species will decline toward extinction. But the harm will not be harm. Because the administration said so.

What the Definition Actually Said

The rule repealed a regulatory definition of “harm” that included “habitat modification or degradation where it actually kills or injures wildlife by significantly impairing essential behavioral patterns, including breeding, feeding or sheltering.”

That language was not invented by environmental lawyers. It was grounded in fifty years of ecological science. The scientific consensus on what causes species to go extinct is not ambiguous. Habitat loss is the primary driver of extinction — not poaching, not direct killing, not natural disaster. When you destroy the place where an animal breeds, feeds, and shelters, you kill the animal. You just do it more slowly and with more lawyers involved.

In 1995, the Supreme Court upheld the “harm” definition’s inclusion of habitat destruction. As the ruling explained, that definition was supported by the ordinary meaning of “harm,” the purpose of the ESA, and multiple indications of congressional intent. In response to the proposed rulemaking last April, hundreds of thousands of Americans submitted public comments opposing the elimination of habitat protections. U.S. Senators, tribes, scientists, legal experts, and environmental groups also opposed the rule.

The administration went ahead anyway.

What It Means

Under the rule change, the Interior Department removed the definition of “harm” under the Endangered Species Act. Since 1981, “harm” has been defined as any action that hurts or kills species, including modifying or degrading an imperiled species’ habitat. The administration now leaves “harm” undefined, meaning destroying a species’ nest or habitat would no longer be considered illegal.

Undefined. The central enforcement mechanism of the most important wildlife protection law in American history is now undefined. The word that determines whether an action is legal or illegal, whether a permit is required or not, whether a project can proceed or must be modified — that word now has no regulatory meaning. The companies that want to drill, log, and mine in critical habitat now face no legal definition of what they are prohibited from doing. When there is no definition of harm, nothing is harmful.

Environmentalists warned the move could cause some species to go extinct by opening the door to habitat destruction. Industry representatives and their Republican allies have long argued the landmark 1973 environmental law is wielded too broadly, to the detriment of economic growth. Administration officials said they were returning the law to its original intent.

Returning the law to its original intent. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said: “For years, federal agencies abused the ESA to obstruct lawful land use and burden American families and businesses. That approach turned routine activity into a regulatory trap, drove up costs that impacted people’s lives, and expanded federal authority beyond what Congress intended. This action restores common sense, respects private property, provides much-needed certainty for landowners and follows the statute Congress actually passed.”

Routine activity. Logging an old-growth forest where endangered species breed is routine activity. Drilling for oil in critical habitat is lawful land use. The burden on American families and businesses from not being permitted to destroy the last habitat of a species on the brink of extinction — that burden has now been lifted. The certainty provided to landowners is the certainty that the word “harm” means nothing and they may proceed.

The Endangered Species Act is credited with bringing back iconic animals — including the bald eagle, American alligator and California condor — from the brink of extinction.

The bald eagle is the national symbol of the United States. It was on the brink of extinction. The Endangered Species Act, with its broad definition of harm including habitat destruction, brought it back. The administration that put the bald eagle on its rally hats has now eliminated the legal protection that saved it.

The God Squad and the Gulf

The habitat definition is not the only attack. On March 31, 2026, the Endangered Species Committee — also known as the “God Squad” — voted unanimously to exempt oil and gas drilling activity in the Gulf of Mexico from restrictions under the Endangered Species Act on the basis of a never-used defense provision of the act.

The God Squad. That is its actual informal name, given by environmentalists when it was created in 1978 as a safety valve for cases of genuine national emergency. It has convened three times in the history of the Act. It has granted one exemption. The Trump administration convened it to give the oil industry a pass in the Gulf — a decision that has the potential to wipe out two dozen marine species.

Two dozen marine species. Exempted. So that oil drilling can proceed in the Gulf of Mexico. With no legal definition of harm remaining to constrain what happens to the habitat those species depend on.

What This Is

Earthjustice attorney Kristen Boyles said: “For the first time ever, a presidential administration now claims that species protected by the Endangered Species Act shouldn’t be safe from habitat modification that destroys where they live, raise their young, or search for food. There is no support for the Trump Administration’s rule — no scientific support, no legal support, no public support.”

Aaron Weiss, the executive director of the Center for Western Priorities, said: “This is one of the most horrific attempts to harm wildlife in American history and a gift to the oil barons and foreign mining companies.”

Ben Greuel, wildlife campaign manager at the Sierra Club, said: “For more than four decades, the definition of ‘harm’ recognized a simple truth: If you destroy the places wildlife need to survive, you are putting species on a path to extinction. This rule ignores that reality in an unlawful attempt to open the door for corporate polluters to degrade vitally important habitats.”

The rule was finalized on a Friday afternoon in July, in the middle of a World Cup and a news cycle crowded with Iran war updates and housing bill drama and election commission firings and ICE shootings. The administration has learned the lesson of the Friday news dump — put the most damaging things out when the fewest people are paying attention, and the fewest people will notice until it’s too late.

The Endangered Species Act passed the Senate 92-0 in 1973. Zero senators voted against protecting endangered species from harm. On Friday afternoon in July 2026, the administration redefined harm to mean nothing, and the oil companies got exactly what they paid for.

The bald eagle survived because the law said destroying its habitat was harm. The law now says nothing of the kind.

Opinion

Welcome to DJT

The President Renamed the Airport He Lands At. The Loopholes Will Surprise You.

At 5:01 a.m. on Thursday, July 9, 2026, the president’s private plane became the first aircraft to land at President Donald J. Trump International Airport. It was formerly known as Palm Beach International Airport, which had served South Florida for over half a century under that name, and which is located approximately six miles from Mar-a-Lago. Eric Trump posted on X: “There is no person who has done more for Florida and our country, and no one more deserving of this incredible honor. As a son, and someone who flies out of this airport nearly every day, I will forever be proud to see the initials ‘DJT’ on my boarding pass.”

The airport code changes from PBI to DJT on August 18th. Air traffic controllers are already being notified. Every pilot, every flight attendant, every airline reservation system, every travel website, every boarding pass in America will now direct you to DJT.

This is the first airport in the United States to be named after a sitting president. Twelve airports are named after presidents. All eleven of the others waited until the man was dead.

Trump is very much alive. He can see the airport from his golf course.

How This Happened

In November 2025, Republican Florida State Representative Meg Weinberger introduced the proposal, explaining: “President Trump is the most consequential president of our lifetime and a resident of Palm Beach County, which makes it only fitting to honor him, like many other presidents before him, by naming our airport Donald J. Trump International.”

In February 2026, the Florida Legislature passed it with a strictly partisan vote — 81-30 in the House and 25-11 in the Senate. In March, Ron DeSantis signed it into law.

Note the mechanics. The Florida state legislature passed a law specifically preempting Palm Beach County’s authority to name its own airport — stripping the local government of the decision — and mandating the name change by state law. The Palm Beach County Board of Commissioners voted 4-3 to approve the required licensing agreement under legal compulsion. Three commissioners voted against it. They were overruled by Tallahassee.

Airport officials have estimated the price tag at $5.5 million. The 2026-2027 state budget allocates $2.75 million for the renaming — meaning Florida taxpayers are covering half the cost of renaming a public airport after a sitting president who lives six miles away.

The Royalties Question

The licensing agreement says, explicitly, that Trump “is prohibited from receiving royalties, fees, or revenue from the purchase or sale of any such merchandise by County or airport retailers.”

Legal experts told NPR they see potential loopholes immediately.

Because the license is non-exclusive, Trump could in theory license the airport name trademarks to third parties. The agreement doesn’t talk about services the way it talks about royalties from goods. A Trump airport lounge in the new Donald J. Trump International Airport — where licensing fees going back to Trump’s holdings isn’t foreclosed by the agreement at all.

Trump’s companies get to make a list of “approved retailers” from which airport stores have to buy their airport-branded merchandise. So while Trump technically can’t collect a royalty from the sale at the airport, he controls who supplies the merchandise — meaning the money flows to his approved vendors before it reaches the airport store.

Trump also has veto power over how his biography is displayed at the airport, so he can modify any aspects of it that he doesn’t like. The president of the United States has editorial control over his official biography at a public airport.

The airport can use Trump’s name, image and likeness to advertise — but the airport must get Trump’s approval beforehand.

He doesn’t get royalties. He gets approval rights over everything. He gets a list of approved vendors. He gets a veto over his own biography. He gets his initials on every boarding pass in South Florida. He gets his son flying out of DJT “nearly every day.” He gets the first plane in at 5:01 AM to be his.

And Florida taxpayers got a $2.75 million bill for the honor of making this happen.

What It Means

“Airports named after presidents have traditionally been designated once they leave office and through decisions made by local communities and local authorities — not imposed from above,” a senator noted.

That sentence contains the entire story. The tradition exists for a reason. You don’t name public infrastructure after living politicians because living politicians have interests. Living politicians benefit from their names being on things. Living politicians can influence the policies that affect those things. The man whose name is on the airport is the president of the United States. The FAA, which certifies that airport and oversees its operations, reports to his administration. The Transportation Department, which oversees the FAA, is led by a cabinet secretary he appointed. The state law that mandated the renaming was signed by a governor who wants to remain in Trump’s good graces.

There is no arm’s length here. There is no separation between the honor and the honoree’s continued power over the institution being honored.

Trump on Truth Social called it: “The Area is HOT, the Location is GREAT, and the Renovation will be SPECTACULAR. This will soon be one of the Greatest and Most Spectacular Airports anywhere in the World!”

He is the president. He renamed the airport he lands at. His son flies out of it every day. His company controls who supplies the merchandise. His lawyers drafted a licensing agreement that technically says he won’t collect royalties but ensures the money flows through channels he approves.

There are 12 airports across the country named after presidents. This is the first one to be named while the president was still in office.

The other eleven presidents waited until they were no longer in a position to benefit from the naming. That restraint was not accidental. It was a recognition that democratic leaders do not name things after themselves. Monarchs do. People building legacies do. People who intend to be around long enough to benefit do.

Welcome to DJT. The bags go on the carousel. The money goes to the approved vendors. The biography says what he approves. The code is on your boarding pass whether you like it or not.

It took him half a century to get his name on an airport he didn’t build. The state legislature did it for him in one session.

Opinion

You Don’t Own That Tractor

How Corporate Consolidation Captured American Agriculture — and What It’s Costing All of Us

There is a farmer somewhere in the Midwest right now watching $500,000 worth of combine harvester sit in his field unable to move. The machine isn’t broken — not mechanically. The software is throwing an error code. The nearest authorized John Deere dealer is an hour and a half away. The dealer can’t come out until Thursday. It is Tuesday. The harvest window closes in four days.

The farmer cannot fix the tractor himself because John Deere built a software lock into the machine that prevents him from accessing the diagnostic tools needed to repair something he purchased, owns outright, and depends on for his livelihood. The lock is there not because it’s necessary for the machine to function, but because the lock itself is a business model. Software “locks” could disable essential equipment during critical planting or harvesting periods, leaving owners dependent on scarce dealer technicians. That dependence is not a bug. It is the product. Wikipedia

This is one story in a much larger one about what has happened to American agriculture over the last fifty years, and about who actually controls the food that Americans eat, and about why the prices at the grocery store are what they are, and about why the family farm has become something closer to a historical artifact than an economic reality. The John Deere story is vivid and specific and almost cartoonishly villainous, which is why people latched onto it. But it is a symptom of a systemic disease that runs from the seed to the shelf.

The Tractor

For decades, farmers operated under a fundamental understanding of property — if you buy it, you own it, and if it breaks, you fix it. The rapid digitization of agricultural machinery transformed tractors and combines into sophisticated rolling computers, effectively locking the “hood” with proprietary software. Wikipedia

The FTC filed a lawsuit against Deere in January 2025 alleging the company’s repair practices violate competition law. The FTC charged that Deere withheld key information and diagnostic tools from farmers and independent repair shops. “Deere’s increasingly sophisticated agricultural equipment requires a software tool to diagnose and repair problems that relate to electronic functions, and only Deere has the information and knowledge to create this essential tool. By making this tool available only to Deere dealers, Deere forces farmers to turn to Deere dealers for critical repairs rather than complete the repairs themselves.” Ballotpedia

On April 7, 2026, in a landmark preliminary settlement filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, Deere agreed to a $99 million settlement to resolve a consolidated class-action antitrust suit. The deal promises lower repair costs and the freedom to choose their own mechanics. Deere pledged to provide farmers and independent shops with digital tools required for maintenance and repair for at least the next ten years. WikipediaBallotpedia

This is presented as a victory. And in narrow terms it is. But read the fine print carefully: Deere denied any wrongdoing. The FTC’s separate antitrust lawsuit against Deere remains ongoing. And the structural incentives that created the lock in the first place — the profit motive for building dependency into the product — have not been changed by a settlement. They have been temporarily inconvenienced by one. Ballotpedia

The System the Tractor Lives In

The tractor is the most legible part of the story because it is mechanical and concrete. The rest of the story is harder to see, which is exactly why it has been allowed to proceed as far as it has.

Just a handful of corporations control critical junctures in the U.S. food supply chain, from seeds and fertilizers to processing to grocery shelves. This concentration of capacity and control increases supply chain fragility by putting more production in fewer hands and fewer places. This consolidation also gives corporations the market power to dictate prices paid to producers and push down workers’ wages, even while they charge consumers more. Wikipedia

“As you look up and down the food supply chain, you see the effects of consolidation at every single level,” said Representative Pramila Jayapal. “Consolidation in the food industry drives down competition and hurts independent and small players along the way, drives up consumer prices, hurts workers, and dramatically increases wealth and income inequality.” She talked about four companies controlling the entire beef industry, and big food companies that create the illusion of choice with their many brands. Fox NewsFox News

Since 1980, the United States has lost over 50% of its farms. Farmers now earn just 14 cents for every dollar spent on food. Many are forced to take on massive debt just to keep up with industrial-scale expectations. NBC News

“We no longer have truly free markets. In the food supply chain, either a single monopolist or a tight oligopoly controls each of the major industries involved,” said Basel Musharbash, managing attorney for the Antimonopoly Counsel. “It’s become a systemic feature of our food system, and these self-appointed autocrats of trade are the primary drivers of today’s unaffordable food prices.” Ballotpedia

The Supply Chain Disaster Hiding in Plain Sight

You saw this in COVID. Most people processed the supply chain collapses of 2020 and 2021 as a pandemic phenomenon — an exceptional disruption to a normal system. They were not. They were a normal system revealing what it actually was.

Take egg production. Egg companies euthanized entire flocks that supplied foodservice processing facilities when COVID shut down that sales channel — sometimes without input from farmers. This devastated the economic wellbeing of contract farmers who had no other market to sell to, because consolidation had left them with no other buyer. The eggs that could have fed people were destroyed because the system was built to serve the processor, not the producer or the consumer. Wikipedia

Corporate consolidation plays a central role in creating or exacerbating every one of these vulnerabilities. This consolidation is not the product of so-called natural market forces trending toward efficiency. It is the result of policy choices that made it easy for already giant businesses to grow larger. Wikipedia

The meatpacking industry is the starkest example. Four companies — JBS, Tyson, Cargill, and National Beef — process roughly 85% of all beef in the United States. When COVID-19 tore through their processing plants in 2020, grocery store shelves emptied within weeks. Not because there weren’t enough cattle. Because the cattle had nowhere to go. The consolidation that was supposed to create efficiency had instead created a single point of failure, and the failure was catastrophic.

What the Farmer Is Left With

The farmer in this story — the one watching the tractor sit — is not a victim of bad luck. He is a victim of a system specifically designed to extract value from people at every chokepoint in the agricultural supply chain.

He paid more for the tractor than his parents paid for their house. He is locked into buying parts, software access, and repair services from the company that sold it to him. He plants seeds from one of a small handful of corporations that have consolidated the seed market so thoroughly that meaningful competitive alternatives barely exist. He sells his grain to one of a small handful of buyers who, because there are so few of them, can set the price rather than negotiate it. He borrows from agricultural lenders who have also consolidated. He buys crop insurance through a market that has also consolidated. He pays for fuel refined by an industry that has — you see the pattern.

Farmers calling for Congress to act want antitrust laws strengthened and monopoly cases that actually break up companies that have gained dominant power. “We are calling on Congress to act,” said one farmer advocate. “We no longer have truly free markets.” Fox News

Congress will not act in any meaningful way as long as the committees that oversee agriculture are populated by members who receive significant campaign contributions from the same consolidated corporations that dominate the market. This is not cynicism. It is the documented record of fifty years.

Florida’s Part in This

Florida is not an abstraction from this story. Florida is one of the most important agricultural states in the country — citrus, sugarcane, tomatoes, peppers, strawberries, cattle. And Florida has its own version of every consolidation problem in this essay. The sugar industry — Big Sugar, the same companies that have been writing the water management rules of South Florida for decades — is a vertical monopoly operation of staggering reach. The Everglades is the sacrifice at its altar.

The farm equipment dealer networks in rural Florida have consolidated just like everywhere else. The independent mechanic who could fix a tractor in the field has been replaced, in many places, by a corporate service network that charges accordingly and schedules around its own priorities. The farmer pays the difference. The difference is not small.

And the supply chain vulnerabilities are not theoretical. Florida agriculture has been disrupted by hurricanes, by citrus greening disease, by labor shortages partly caused by immigration enforcement against the very workers who harvest the crops. Each disruption is more devastating than it would be in a less consolidated system, because a less consolidated system has redundancy. This one does not.

The tractor in the field, the combine with the locked software, the farmer watching the harvest window close while he waits for a dealer — this is one frame in a much larger picture.

The picture is of an agricultural system that has been systematically redesigned over fifty years to serve corporate shareholders rather than the farmers who grow the food, the workers who process it, the communities that depend on it, and the consumers who eat it.

The redesign was not an accident. It was a choice. And it is still being made.

Opinion

They Answer the Call Bell at 2 AM

The Supreme Court Just Deported Your Grandmother’s Nurse

Today the Supreme Court, on a 6-3 vote along ideological lines, ruled that the Trump administration can strip Temporary Protected Status from more than 350,000 Haitians and 6,000 Syrians — clearing the way for their deportation. Writing for the majority, Justice Samuel Alito said that under the TPS law, the president has unreviewable authority to end the program, without intervention from the courts. WikipediaBallotpedia

Unreviewable. That word deserves a moment. The administration terminated a program established by Congress in 1990 for people fleeing war, earthquakes, and gang-controlled failed states — and the Supreme Court’s six Republican-appointed justices have now said no court can second-guess that decision. The president can do this. Full stop.

In a dissenting opinion joined by Justices Sotomayor and Brown Jackson, Justice Elena Kagan wrote that the plaintiffs “deserve better than today’s decision.” Jezebel

They do. So do Florida’s elderly. So do the residents of every nursing home in South Florida who has no idea that the person who woke up at 2 AM to answer their call bell may soon be gone.

The Hypocrisy Is the Policy

The U.S. State Department currently maintains a Level 4 “Do Not Travel” advisory for Haiti — the highest possible warning — due to gang violence, kidnapping, and dangerous conditions. Yet the Department of Homeland Security simultaneously maintains that Haiti is safe enough to deport 350,000 Haitians back to. Wikipedia

“It shows the hypocrisy and the cruelty and the double standards of the same folks who are saying to U.S. citizens, ‘Haiti is not safe,’ while these same folks are saying Haiti is safe enough to deport Haitian immigrants,” said Paul Christian Namphy of the Family Action Network Movement. Wikipedia

A lower court had already found that the decision to terminate Haiti’s TPS was likely motivated by racial animus, citing Trump’s statement that Haiti is a “shithole country” and his 2024 campaign amplification of baseless claims that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio were eating residents’ pets. The Supreme Court acknowledged all of this and shrugged. Justice Alito wrote that the administration had offered a “strong, race-neutral explanation”: it simply opposes the TPS program. Wikipedia

They oppose it. That’s the explanation. The racial animus is irrelevant because the administration hates the program itself. Problem solved.

Florida’s Nursing Homes. Florida’s Elderly. Florida’s Crisis.

Here is what this ruling means on the ground, in the state that Ron DeSantis built.

Florida is home to the largest Haitian population in the United States. About 158,000 Haitians — nearly half of all Haitian TPS recipients nationally — live and work in Florida. The state ranks last in the country when it comes to the availability of home health and personal care aides, and continues to deal with a chronic staffing shortage in nursing homes. BallotpediaBallotpedia

In South Florida nursing homes, a majority of certified nursing assistants are Haitian, and roughly half of those are TPS recipients. They do the work that, as one nursing home director put it, most Americans simply will not do. “They put the patient in the bed, feed them, clothe them, give them snacks, comb their hair, change them, turn them every two hours. It’s not an easy job,” said Amina Dubuisson, a past president of the Haitian American Nurses Association. BallotpediaTAI News

At Miami Jewish Health, one of the region’s largest elder care facilities, CEO Jeffrey Freimark said his facility stands to lose 37 employees who are on TPS. “Devastating on many levels, first of all, I think it is morally and ethically reprehensible,” Freimark said. “I have the utmost respect for our caregivers, they are the ones that make this organization work, they are the ones answering that call bell at 2 a.m.; these folks are wired in such a way that they are here to care.” TAI News

At Sinai Residences in Boca Raton, 40 Haitian TPS holders care for roughly 500 older adult residents. CEO Rachel Blumberg has already spent $600,000 on wages, signing bonuses, and training new employees in anticipation of the crisis. “There is a significant financial impact to our community,” she said. “Unfortunately, that gets passed on to the seniors.” Ballotpedia

One 91-year-old Florida resident named Marion Marker, who relies on a Haitian TPS worker for her care, put it simply: “I feel strongly that the people that are here, if we didn’t have them, who would we have? If I were younger, I would go out and protest.” TAI News

Immigrants make up more than 18% of the nation’s 15.2 million healthcare workers and nearly 30% of the direct care workforce in long-term care settings. The Department of Health and Human Services projects demand for nursing assistants will grow by 44% between 2023 and 2038. The administration is deporting the very people filling that gap. NBC News

Congress Could Act. But Won’t.

TPS was created by Congress in 1990. Congress can restore it, extend it, and codify it beyond the reach of any president’s whim. After the ruling, a UCLA law professor who argued on behalf of the Syrian immigrants urged Congress to act: “Today the Supreme Court allowed the government to ignore a bedrock humanitarian protection that Congress, in bipartisan fashion, established three decades ago to ensure that vulnerable refugees would not be subject to partisan whims.” Wikipedia

An effort to extend TPS protections for Haitians has been making its way through Congress. After a discharge petition secured a majority of votes in the House, a bill restoring TPS is headed to a floor vote. Ballotpedia

The Senate is another matter. A Republican Senate that has spent 18 months rubber-stamping every cruelty this administration has produced is not going to save 350,000 Haitians from deportation to a country the State Department says is too dangerous to visit. Not when the base cheers the deportations. Not when the votes aren’t there. Not when the political cost of helping is calculated as higher than the political cost of watching a Florida nursing home collapse.

Selene Panther of the Everglades Division has been filing reports on this for months. The rest of the Everglades Division has been watching. The swamp knows what Florida is about to lose — not because these workers are abstract policy statistics, but because Florida’s elderly have met them. They know their names. They know their stories.

R., a Haitian TPS worker in Sumter County who cares for a 91-year-old woman, hasn’t seen her own son in 11 years. He was seven when she left Haiti. He is now 18. “My son sometimes cry and say he miss me,” she said. She tells him she can’t go back because she has to keep working to support her family. Returning could put her at risk of gang extortion. When she left Haiti, she didn’t know it would be for this long. Ballotpedia

Today the Supreme Court said it can be permanent. Today six justices said the president’s authority to send her back is unreviewable.

Florida’s nursing homes knew this was coming. Florida’s elderly patients knew this was coming. They are the ones who will feel it first, in the empty chairs and unanswered call bells.

And the Florida politicians who cheered for this — who built the culture that made it possible, who made “send them back” a campaign slogan and a governance philosophy — will not be in those nursing homes when the shifts go unfilled.

Their own parents might be.

Opinion

What If? — The Florida Edition

A Special Report from the Everglades Division, Banned in Florida Club
Filed by Rex Gator, Senior Field Operative, Sector 7 — Lake Okeechobee


The Top 7 Florida Conspiracy Theories

1. Big Sugar Owns the State
U.S. Sugar and Florida Crystals don’t just influence Florida’s government — they are Florida’s government. The water management districts, the legislature, the governor’s office — all of it is one long-running agricultural subsidy dressed up as democratic governance. They flood Lake Okeechobee with nitrogen and phosphorus. They dump it into the estuaries. They watch the Gulf Coast turn green and the manatees die and the fishing industry collapse, and then they write another check to another candidate and it starts over. The Everglades was the most biodiverse wetland system in North America. Big Sugar decided it should be a sugarcane field instead. The government agreed. It still does.

2. Disney Was a Sovereign Nation and Nobody Noticed
For 55 years, Walt Disney World operated under the Reedy Creek Improvement District — a self-governing entity with its own building codes, zoning authority, fire department, and the legal right to build a nuclear power plant without state approval. Disney was not a theme park inside Florida. Disney was a country that happened to sell Mickey Mouse ears. DeSantis tried to dismantle it in 2022. Disney had already restructured its governing documents to make that impossible, planting the legal landmines before DeSantis got the paperwork. The question is not whether Disney had secret power. The question is: what did they build underground, and why do the tunnels go so much deeper than any utilidor needs to go?

3. There Is Something in the Water
Florida’s water supply contains: pharmaceutical runoff from a population of 23 million people, cyanobacterial toxins from the algae blooms caused by Big Sugar’s agricultural discharge, PFAS “forever chemicals” from military bases, phosphate mining byproduct leaching from stacks of radioactive phosphogypsum scattered across central Florida, and trace amounts of approximately 47 other compounds that appear in the state’s own water quality reports in footnotes that nobody reads. The cumulative neurological effect of drinking Florida water for 20 years has not been formally studied. Florida Man is not a joke. Florida Man is a data point.

4. Hope Florida Was Just the Visible Tip
In 2025, it emerged that a $10.6 million Medicaid settlement — money meant for Florida’s poor — was allegedly routed through a charity called Hope Florida, through a network of nonprofits, and into a political slush fund connected to DeSantis allies. Investigators found the trail. They found the transfers. They found the timeline. The conspiracy theory is not that this happened. It’s that anyone believes this was the only one.

5. Alligator Alcatraz Was a Proof of Concept
The immigrant detention facility built on an Everglades airstrip in the summer heat was not just a cruel political stunt. It was a test. Could you build extrajudicial detention infrastructure in a remote location in under 30 days? Could you hold people without adequate legal access? Could you do it with state resources? Could you make the public accept it? Yes. Yes. Yes. And mostly yes. Every answer was filed somewhere. The facility is being dismantled. The answers remain.

6. Mar-a-Lago Is a Foreign Intelligence Exchange
The classified documents were not careless. A man who spent his entire adult life in transactional relationships with foreign money did not accidentally bring home America’s nuclear secrets. Mar-a-Lago hosted Chinese nationals who walked past Secret Service to get inside. It hosted Saudi royals. It hosted Qatari officials. It hosted anyone who paid the membership fee or bought a table at a fundraiser. The documents sat in a bathroom. The guests circulated through the ballroom. The theory is not that this was intentional. The theory is that it doesn’t matter whether it was.

7. The Phosphate Stacks Are Leaking and Everyone Knows
Scattered across central Florida are massive piles of phosphogypsum — the radioactive byproduct of phosphate fertilizer mining, which Florida produces more of than almost anywhere else on Earth. Piney Point, a decommissioned phosphate plant in Manatee County, nearly catastrophically failed in 2021. Hundreds of millions of gallons of radioactive, nitrogen-rich wastewater were released into Tampa Bay. The state called it a controlled release. Scientists called it a disaster. The phosphogypsum stacks — there are billions of tons of them — sit on the Florida peninsula above the Floridan Aquifer, which is where Florida’s drinking water comes from. They are leaking. They have always been leaking. The EPA knows. The state knows. The mining companies know. Everyone has agreed, informally, not to make this the main topic.


What If They Were All True?

The following is a reconstructed field report compiled by the Everglades Division. All events depicted occurred on a Thursday.


Rex Gator gets the call at 4 AM. He is in the water near the Tamiami Trail, which is where he always is, which is why dispatch always calls him. The message is simple: the documents dropped. All seven. Confirmed. Simultaneously. Somebody uploaded everything to a server in Iceland, and it’s all there — the Big Sugar contracts, the Reedy Creek tunnel schematics, the water analysis reports that were classified at the state level, the Hope Florida wire transfers, the Alligator Alcatraz operational memos, the Mar-a-Lago foreign contact logs, and the phosphogypsum stack contamination data going back to 1987.

Rex surfaces. He calls Selene Panther.

“You saw it,” he says.

“I saw it,” she says.

A long pause.

“So,” Rex says.

“So,” Selene says.

“We were right about all of it.”

“We were right about all of it.”

Another pause.

“That’s not — ” Rex starts.

“No,” Selene says. “It is not better.”


On Big Sugar:

The legislative session that follows the disclosure lasts eleven days and accomplishes nothing, which is the same as every other legislative session except this one has better documentation of why.

The Big Sugar contracts — which total, across 40 years of subsidy, price support, water management manipulation, and land purchase agreements, approximately $28 billion in public money — are ruled by the Florida Supreme Court to be “legally binding instruments executed by duly authorized representatives of the sovereign State of Florida,” which means they are, technically, valid.

The sugar companies respond to the disclosure with a press release noting that they “remain committed to environmental stewardship and the Florida communities where we operate” and that they have “voluntarily exceeded regulatory requirements in several categories,” which is true, because the regulatory requirements were written by people whose campaigns they funded.

The Caloosahatchee River, which carries Lake Okeechobee’s discharge to the Gulf Coast and has been running green with cyanobacteria for the better part of a decade, does not improve. The algae does not read press releases.

Selene Panther files her 47th incident report on the state of the western Everglades. Like the previous 46, it is received, logged, and placed in a file that no one will open until it is legally required, which will be never, because the law requiring it was amended in 2019 by a provision attached to a drainage bill that no one read past the title.


On Disney:

The tunnels go 340 feet down.

This is deeper than any utilidor. This is deeper than any utility corridor. This is deeper than the water table, deeper than the limestone, deeper than anything Disney has ever officially acknowledged building beneath the 27,000 acres of Central Florida swampland it purchased in 1965 for prices that, in retrospect, suggest someone knew something about future land values that the sellers did not.

What is down there is, frankly, extraordinary.

Walt Disney — who died in 1966, before the park opened, which has always struck the Everglades Division as convenient timing — had a vision. The vision was not just a theme park. The vision was a city. EPCOT — the Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow — was supposed to be an actual functioning municipality of 20,000 people living under a climate-controlled dome, in a planned urban environment, with no private cars, no elected government, and no democratic input into how it was run. Disney would run it. Disney would run it forever.

The theme park EPCOT, which opened in 1982 and contains a ride where you can learn about the history of communication sponsored by AT&T, is not that.

But the tunnels suggest that something of that original vision was built anyway. Underground. Quietly. Over 55 years. The Everglades Division sends Vega Python down to investigate. She is gone for six hours. She returns without her equipment recorder and will not say what she saw, which for a Florida Python is unusual because they are not, as a rule, easily unsettled.

She does say one thing.

“The temperature down there,” she says, “is exactly 72 degrees. It has always been exactly 72 degrees. Even in sections that were built in 1968.”

She goes back to the water and doesn’t come out for two days.


On the Water:

The state water quality report — the full version, not the summary released to the public — is 1,847 pages long and was classified at the recommendation of the Florida Department of Health in 2019 on the grounds that its public release would cause “undue public alarm.”

The Everglades Division obtains and reads all 1,847 pages.

The “undue public alarm” threshold appears to have been set quite low, because the document’s central finding is simply that the compound load in Florida’s municipal water supply, when taken in aggregate over a 20-year period, produces measurable cognitive effects in chronic consumers — specifically, a 12-18% reduction in long-term risk assessment capacity and a 23% increase in impulsive decision-making thresholds.

This is presented in the report as a finding, not a conclusion. The report explicitly does not recommend any action. The recommendation section of a 1,847-page water quality assessment is four sentences long. The four sentences note that “further study may be warranted” and that “regulatory thresholds remain within federal guidelines,” which is true because the federal guidelines haven’t been updated since 1986 and don’t account for any of the compounds that appeared after 1986, which is most of them.

Rex Gator reads this section three times.

“They’ve known,” he says.

“1987,” says Bruno Bear, who has been cross-referencing the phosphate stack data.

“1987,” Rex says.

“Florida Man,” says Bruno, “is a symptom.”

There is a long silence in which everyone in the Everglades Division operations center contemplates the fact that they have all been drinking Florida water their entire lives and wonders what their baseline cognitive function might otherwise have been, which is the kind of thought that is both deeply disturbing and also, they realize, probably impossible to fully think through because of the water.


On Hope Florida:

The wire transfer map, when fully traced, looks like the circulatory system of a very large and complicated animal.

The $10.6 million is the part that was found. The auditors — working from the disclosed documents, which include internal communications that someone at a nonprofit apparently forgot to delete from a shared drive — trace 23 additional transfers across 11 years involving 34 separate charitable entities, 8 political committees, and 3 LLCs registered in Wyoming, which is where you register LLCs when you want nobody to know who owns them.

The total across all transfers is $340 million.

The sources include: Medicaid, a federal hurricane recovery fund, a state transportation infrastructure grant, two separate COVID relief disbursements, and the Florida Forever land conservation program, which was supposed to buy Everglades buffer land and instead appears to have bought a considerable amount of goodwill in Tallahassee.

The Everglades Division’s Selene Panther takes one look at the land conservation transfers and sits down on a cypress root for a long time.

“That was our land,” she says.

“Yes,” says Rex.

“They took conservation money,” she says. “Money meant to protect the swamp. And they — “

“Yes,” says Rex.

The swamp is very quiet.

A great blue heron lands on a nearby branch, looks at them both, and flies away.

Even the heron, apparently, has heard enough.


On Alligator Alcatraz:

The operational memos are the coldest documents in the entire disclosure package.

They are written in the clipped, bureaucratic language of logistics. They discuss throughput. They discuss capacity. They discuss timeline from order to operational status. They discuss what the memo calls “deterrent adjacency” — the calculated value of building a detention facility near apex predators that the detained population could see from the fencing.

The memo that bothers Rex Gator most is not the one about conditions. It is the one labeled “Phase 2 Planning: Domestic Application Scenarios,” dated eight months before the facility opened. It is two pages long. It discusses, in the same logistical language as the rest, the conditions under which the operational model could be “extended to categories of domestic detainee,” and it identifies three such categories. The categories are redacted. The legal framework for each redacted category is not redacted.

Each legal framework citation is for a statute that already exists.

Rex Gator takes a photograph of the memo.

He sends it to every member of the Everglades Division.

He does not include a message.

None is needed.


On Mar-a-Lago:

The foreign contact logs are organized by date, by guest, and by what the internal notation system calls “adjacency events” — moments when a logged foreign national was in physical proximity to a space where classified materials were stored.

There are 847 adjacency events across a 28-month period.

The logs do not confirm that any classified material was taken or transmitted. The logs do not need to. They confirm that the opportunity existed, repeatedly, in a location that was simultaneously a private club, a campaign fundraising venue, a foreign dignitary reception hall, a family residence, and a classified document storage facility, and that the person responsible for all of these simultaneous uses considered them all compatible with each other.

The most striking entry in the logs is not from a Saudi royal or a Chinese national. It is from a Qatari official — the same government that would later gift a $400 million aircraft to the United States — who attended a fundraising dinner on a Thursday in March, was noted in proximity to the bathroom hallway on three separate occasions over four hours, and left with what the entry describes as “a cardboard document sleeve, color: beige, approximate dimensions 12×16 inches, contents: unknown.”

The sleeve is not in the inventory.

It was never in the inventory.

Vega Python, reviewing the logs, notes that “beige” is an unusual color for a Mar-a-Lago document sleeve. The club’s official stationery and materials are cream.

Beige, she notes quietly, is the color of the folders used to transport classified documents from the SCIF.

Nobody sleeps well that night in the Everglades Division.


On the Phosphate Stacks:

Bruno Bear does the math.

The math takes three days. When he is done, he prints the result on a single sheet of paper and pins it to the operations board in the center of the room without saying anything.

The number on the paper represents the projected contamination radius of the Floridan Aquifer — the underground reservoir that supplies drinking water to 10 million Floridians — if the phosphogypsum stacks experience a cascade failure scenario similar to the 2021 Piney Point event, but at scale, across all 25 active stack sites in central Florida.

The number is not a small number.

The timeline for this scenario, based on current leakage rates and the structural integrity assessments that mining companies are legally required to file with the state and that the state is legally required to review, is also on the paper.

The timeline is not a long timeline.

Rex Gator reads the number. He reads the timeline. He looks at Bruno.

“They know,” Rex says.

“The 1987 report,” Bruno says. “And the 1994 update. And the 2003 addendum. And the 2018 risk assessment.”

“And nobody — “

“Piney Point,” Bruno says. “In 2021. They released 215 million gallons into Tampa Bay and called it a controlled discharge.”

“And the stacks are still there.”

“All 25 of them.”

Rex looks out at the Everglades. The water is still. The sawgrass is still. A roseate spoonbill, improbably pink, picks its way through the shallows at the edge of the cypress dome.

“We’ve been right,” Rex says. “About all of it. For years.”

“Yes,” Bruno says.

“And nothing changed.”

“Nothing changed.”

The spoonbill lifts off, catching a thermal, rising until it is a pink comma against the Florida sky, then gone.

Rex Gator slides back into the dark water.

“File the report,” he says.

“They won’t read it,” Bruno says.

“File it anyway.”

He disappears below the surface.

The swamp receives him.

It always does.

The report is filed.

Nobody reads it.

The stacks keep leaking.

The water keeps running.

The sugar keeps growing.

The tunnels stay at 72 degrees.

And somewhere under Central Florida, in a corridor that doesn’t appear on any map, the lights are on.

They are always on.


The Banned in Florida Club’s Everglades Division operates in the spaces between what is reported and what is true. Rex Gator, Selene Panther, Bruno Bear, and Vega Python are fictional characters. The water quality reports, the phosphate stacks, the Hope Florida transfers, the Piney Point disaster, the Alligator Alcatraz memos, and the Mar-a-Lago foreign contact adjacency problem are not.

The Floridan Aquifer is real.

It is underneath you right now.

WWG1WGBS — Where We Go One, We Go Back to the Swamp.

Opinion

The Swamp Wins

Alligator Alcatraz Is Dead — and Florida Taxpayers Are Holding the Bill

They called it a model. Ron DeSantis and Donald Trump stood together in the Everglades last July 1st and told the country that what they had built — a detention center hammered together on an airport runway in the middle of one of the most fragile ecosystems on the planet — was the future of American immigration policy. Other states, they said, should follow Florida’s lead.

Today, vendors are receiving notices to begin “full demobilization.” The fencing is coming down. The trailers are going out. The last detainees have already been transferred or deported. Alligator Alcatraz — the $1.2 billion experiment once hailed by DeSantis and Trump as a model other states should pursue — is closing for good. CBS News

The swamp won. Not the political kind DeSantis is always railing against. The actual swamp. The Everglades that never wanted this facility, that environmental groups, tribal nations, and lawyers warned would be damaged by it, that hosted the cages and trailers and fences through a hurricane season nobody in their right mind would have chosen for that location. The Everglades outlasted the whole operation.

The decision to close was driven primarily by the escalating cost of operating the facility. That’s the sanitized version. The real version is that DeSantis built this thing with state tax money on the promise that the federal government would pay Florida back. State officials submitted a $608 million reimbursement request at the end of last year. It was eventually approved, but the actual money has been held up by court challenges, environmental concerns, and other issues. So Florida is on the hook. Florida taxpayers — the ones DeSantis claims to protect from the “radical left” — are on the hook for a billion-dollar cruelty project that lasted less than a year. CBS NewsWink News

DeSantis said upwards of 22,000 individuals were cycled through Alligator Alcatraz. Cycled through. Like inventory. Like product. These were human beings held in what Rep. Maxwell Frost, who visited multiple times, described as inhumane conditions — cages, sweltering heat, bug infestations, meager meals, and severely restricted access to attorneys. Amnesty International issued a highly critical report on conditions inside the facility. Lawsuit after lawsuit was filed. Courts eventually ruled that detainees must have better access to lawyers and unmonitored phone calls — basic dignities that had to be ordered by a judge. CBS NewsCNN

And now, with the last detainee gone and the vendors owed millions they may never fully recover, DeSantis is doing what he always does when a bad idea collapses: claiming victory on the way out the door. “If we shut the lights out tomorrow, we will be able to say it served its purpose,” he said. CBS News

Served its purpose. The purpose was cruelty as performance. The purpose was to give Trump a photo op and DeSantis a headline and Florida’s Republican base something to feel tough about. The purpose was never to solve anything, because there was no solution being offered — just a spectacle built in a swamp, at taxpayer expense, at human cost, that has now quietly been ordered demolished before hurricane season arrives again.

Here in Florida, we know what this was. The Everglades Division of the Banned in Florida Club has been watching this since day one — since Rex Gator first spotted the fencing going up in the middle of his territory and Selene Panther filed her first report on the environmental impact assessments that were never done properly. We watched the buses arrive. We watched the lawyers get turned away. We watched DeSantis and Trump pose for photographs in front of a place no one should be proud of.

We’re watching the buses leave now too.

The site will eventually reopen as a small training airport — what it was before this administration decided to turn it into a monument to fear. Pilots learning to fly will line up on the same runway where people were held in tents in the July heat.

Florida deserves better than this. Florida always deserved better than this.

The dream is still banned here. But the swamp remembers everything.

Opinion

RON DESANTIS GAVE TRUMP $67 MILLION IN MIAMI REAL ESTATE.

A Banned In Florida Club Outrage — May 2026

Your College. Your Land. His Library. His Hotel.

Let’s be very precise about what happened here, because the details matter and the spin has already started.
On September 23, 2025, Ron DeSantis convened the Florida Cabinet and voted to hand 2.63 acres of prime downtown Miami real estate — land that belonged to Miami Dade College, a public institution funded by Florida taxpayers and tuition-paying students — directly to the Donald J. Trump Presidential Library Foundation. For free. No purchase price. No negotiation. No competitive process. No benefit to the college. No benefit to the students.
The Miami-Dade County property appraiser valued the parcel at $67 million in 2025. Real estate experts cited in a subsequent federal lawsuit estimate the land could sell for over $300 million on the open market, given comparable sales in the surrounding blocks. It sits on Biscayne Boulevard, steps from the Freedom Tower, facing the waterfront, across the street from the Kaseya Center arena where the Miami Heat play.

Ron DeSantis gave all of it away. In one cabinet vote. To a sitting president. Who immediately announced plans to build a hotel on it.

What They Said It Was
DeSantis and his cabinet called it an honor. Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier said it was a privilege. Chief Financial Officer Blaise Ingoglia called the Freedom Tower “a symbol of freedom for so many.” Commissioner of Agriculture Wilton Simpson noted that “Florida is President Trump’s home state.”

What none of them mentioned: Miami Dade College received nothing in return. No concessions. No revenue sharing. No guaranteed student access. No naming rights. No scholarships. Nothing. The Board of Trustees voted unanimously to give up a property worth tens of millions — possibly hundreds of millions — and walked away with exactly what they started with, minus one very valuable piece of real estate.

What It Actually Is
Trump has been explicit about his intentions. In his own words: “It’s going to most likely be a hotel. Could be an office, but it’s most likely going to be a hotel with a beautiful building underneath and a 747 Air Force One in the lobby, which is going to be a trick.”
This is not a presidential archive. This is a real estate development. Eric Trump — who is the president and a trustee of the Donald J. Trump Presidential Library Foundation — unveiled AI-generated renderings in March 2026 showing a glass skyscraper with TRUMP emblazoned near the top in the family’s signature block lettering. The planned tower dwarfs every surrounding building in the rendering. The adjacent Freedom Tower — the historic Cuban refugee processing center that the site supposedly honors — appears roughly a quarter of the size of the proposed Trump monument.
Inside, according to the renderings: a golden escalator, a massive auditorium with a golden statue of Trump with his fist raised, replicas of the White House Rose Garden, and an Air Force One in the lobby. There are also plans for a hotel.
Eric Trump called it “a masterpiece, the likes of which have never been seen in Florida or really anywhere.”

None of that is a library. All of it generates revenue for the Trump family.

The Constitutional Problem
The Domestic Emoluments Clause of the United States Constitution is not complicated. It prohibits states from giving financial benefits to a sitting president. The framers put it in the Constitution specifically to prevent states from using gifts to curry favor with the executive branch — to stop exactly this kind of transaction.
Florida gave the sitting president of the United States a piece of real estate worth between $67 million and $300 million, with no strings attached, while he was in office, so he could build a hotel on it.
A federal lawsuit filed May 13, 2026, in the Southern District of Florida — brought by the Constitutional Accountability Center, a Miami Dade College student named Carmen Salcedo, two nearby residents, and a nonprofit called Dunn’s Farm that had hoped to operate an urban farm on the site — argues exactly this point. The complaint names Trump, his foundation, DeSantis, the Florida Cabinet, and Miami Dade College’s board of trustees as defendants.
“The domestic emoluments clause says this president can’t get gifts from states,” said attorney Gerald Greenberg. “This is a quintessential gift from a state.”

The White House did not respond to requests for comment.

The Tax Bonus Nobody Mentioned
While Trump’s foundation plans a for-profit hotel, the property is still registered under an educational tax exemption — the same exemption it had when Miami Dade College owned it. Meaning: the Trump Library Foundation has been collecting the benefit of an educational property tax exemption on land it is actively planning to commercialize.
The plaintiffs’ attorneys calculate the avoided property taxes at over $1 million per year.

The college gave up the land. The state gave it to the foundation. And the foundation is still using the college’s tax status to avoid paying the city, county, and state the taxes a commercial developer would owe. Florida taxpayers are subsidizing Donald Trump’s hotel in three separate ways simultaneously: they gave him the land, they’re covering his taxes, and they’re defending the deal in court using the state attorney general’s office.

How DeSantis Did It
The initial vote on September 23, 2025 violated Florida’s Government in the Sunshine Law. The public notice for the meeting said the board would “discuss potential real estate transactions.” It did not specify that the discussion involved giving away $67 million in public property to the president’s personal foundation.
Historian and civil rights advocate Dr. Marvin Dunn, 85, a retired professor and longtime Florida public records activist, filed the first lawsuit within days. A circuit court judge sided with Dunn and temporarily blocked the land transfer. The Third District Court of Appeal denied a request to fast-track a reversal.
Miami Dade College’s board responded to the legal challenge by scheduling a new vote — this time with proper public notice — and voted unanimously again. Same result. No benefits. No concessions. Just the land, handed over.
Dunn vowed to sue again. This time with backup: Gelber Schachter & Greenberg and the Constitutional Accountability Center filed the May 13 federal complaint. Trial in the state case has been set for August 2026.

The land remains in legal limbo. DeSantis praised the project as a boost for “education, tourism and culture.”

What This Means for Florida Students
Miami Dade College is one of the largest community colleges in the United States. It serves a predominantly working-class, first-generation student population — exactly the people Ron DeSantis claims to represent. The college had a valuable asset on one of the best blocks in Miami. That asset could have funded scholarships, facilities, programs, faculty. Instead, it was handed to the Trump family foundation so Eric Trump could build a hotel with a golden escalator.
The student named in the federal lawsuit, Carmen Salcedo, said she has an interest in her college “making decisions that benefit her and her education, rather than decisions that line the pockets of President Trump at the expense of students.”

That is not a political statement. That is the actual situation.

The Short Version
Ron DeSantis took public land worth between $67 million and $300 million from a community college serving Florida’s working families. He gave it to a sitting president who immediately announced plans to build a hotel on it. The college received nothing. The students received nothing. The neighborhood received nothing. The transaction is the subject of at least two lawsuits, one of which is headed for trial in August.

DeSantis is still calling it an honor.

Banned In Florida Club | bannedflorida.club
Facts sourced from AP, Miami Herald, CNN, The Hill, Constitutional Accountability Center, and public court records.

Opinion

$10 Million. A Charity. A Dark Money Trail…

Let me walk you through this slowly because it is exactly as bad as it sounds.

Centene Corporation is Florida’s biggest Medicaid contractor. In 2021, they overbilled the state by $67 million. Florida negotiated a settlement — Centene would return the money to the federal and state governments. That’s taxpayer money. Medicaid money. Money intended for low-income Floridians who need healthcare.

Ten million dollars of that settlement went instead to Hope Florida Foundation. Hope Florida is a charity founded by Casey DeSantis — the governor’s wife — in 2021. It’s supposed to help needy Floridians find community resources. The year before it received this $10 million, the foundation had total revenue of $850,000. It had never seen money like this in its existence.

“Hope Florida took $10 million from a Medicaid settlement and gave it to political dark money groups. Those groups funneled it to a PAC run by DeSantis’s chief of staff to kill the marijuana legalization amendment.”

What did the Foundation do with $10 million? It gave $5 million to “Secure Florida’s Future” — a nonprofit tied to the Florida Chamber of Commerce. And $5 million to “Save Our Society From Drugs.” Both are dark money groups — meaning they don’t have to tell anyone where their money comes from or where it goes. Together, these two groups sent $8.5 million to a political action committee called “Keep Florida Clean,” which was dedicated to defeating Amendment 3 — the marijuana legalization amendment that 56% of Florida voters supported.

Who chaired Keep Florida Clean? James Uthmeier — Ron DeSantis’s chief of staff. The same man DeSantis later appointed as Florida’s Attorney General. The man now in charge of the criminal investigation that might implicate him.

A Republican state representative — Alex Andrade — led the investigation in the Florida House. He called it “a conspiracy to commit money laundering and wire fraud.” He said there was “no question that these were Medicaid funds, steered by the Governor’s chief of staff through secret and clandestine actions to his own political committee.” The House investigation stalled when the DeSantis administration refused to cooperate. A criminal investigation was opened in May 2025. A grand jury began hearing testimony in October 2025. Subpoenas went out. Multiple DeSantis administration officials were questioned about conspiracy charges.

How the Money Moved

  • Centene overbills Florida Medicaid by $67 million → pays it back in a settlement
  • $10 million from that settlement goes to Hope Florida Foundation (Casey DeSantis’s charity)
  • Hope Florida gives $5M each to two dark money nonprofits
  • Those groups send $8.5M to “Keep Florida Clean” — a PAC chaired by DeSantis’s chief of staff
  • Keep Florida Clean sends $10.5M to the Republican Party of Florida and $1.1M to Ron DeSantis’s own PAC
  • Amendment 3 (marijuana legalization, which 56% of voters supported) fails narrowly
  • Criminal investigation opened May 2025. Grand jury testimony October 2025.
  • DeSantis then appoints Uthmeier — the target of the investigation — as Florida Attorney General

DeSantis’s response to all of this? He called it “pure politics” and “baseless smears.” He attacked Republican lawmakers who asked questions. He appointed the man at the center of the investigation to be the state’s top law enforcement officer. Then he showed up at a press conference and announced Hope Florida was expanding its services.

And here’s the part that should make every Florida Republican sick to their stomach: This is money that was supposed to go to sick people. Medicaid money. Money for healthcare. It went through a charity, through dark money groups, through a political committee, and ended up in Ron DeSantis’s PAC and the Republican Party of Florida — used to fight a ballot amendment that 56% of voters supported.

This is corruption. Not alleged corruption. Not “complicated” corruption. Follow-the-money, follow-the-subpoenas, follow-the-grand-jury corruption. And the man who did it is calling his accusers political operatives while appointing his implicated chief of staff to run the state’s justice system. If you are a Republican in Florida and you are okay with this — then you are as corrupt as your politicians. That’s not an insult. It’s an accounting.

Opinion

DeSantis Is Gerrymandering Florida. Again…

Here’s something that should make your blood boil. In 2010, the people of Florida — by a massive majority — passed the Fair Districts Amendments to their state constitution. These amendments explicitly banned partisan gerrymandering. The language is clear: maps cannot be drawn to favor a political party. The voters put it in the constitution because they wanted it to stick.

Ron DeSantis doesn’t care what the voters put in the constitution.

In 2022, he vetoed the Republican legislature’s own map — which had preserved existing districts — called a special session, submitted his own map, and demanded lawmakers accept it. The map created four new Republican-leaning seats. A state judge ruled the map unconstitutional. DeSantis appealed. His hand-picked Florida Supreme Court — five of the seven justices appointed by DeSantis himself — overruled the judge and blessed the gerrymander.

“A Harvard constitutional law professor called the map ‘flagrantly unconstitutional under the Fair Districts Amendments.’ DeSantis called it fine. His court agreed with DeSantis.”

The result: Republicans went from holding 16 of Florida’s 28 congressional seats to 20. Four more seats. From one man drawing a map that a court said was illegal. And the most infuriating part? He erased a North Florida congressional district where Black voters had consistently elected their candidate of choice for three decades. Gone. One stroke of the pen. Because he could.

This week — this week, as of this writing — DeSantis announced he’s doing it again. A new gerrymander aimed at flipping four more Democratic seats before the 2026 midterms. The Florida legislature passed it. Republicans who voted against it were told they were betraying the party. A Republican state senator said she “just can’t do it” because the legal theory the map rested on had never even been tested in court. She voted no. The map passed anyway.

The Fair Districts Amendments are still in the Florida Constitution. No court has struck them down. DeSantis has simply decided they don’t apply to him. He told reporters that the Supreme Court’s recent ruling assured him the courts wouldn’t enforce the standards. Not that they were struck down. Not that they don’t apply. Just that he believes no one will stop him. And so far, he’s been right.

This is what authoritarianism looks like in practice. Not tanks in the street. Just a governor who looks at a law his own citizens passed and says “doesn’t apply to me” — and then dares someone to stop him. Florida voters banned this. Ron DeSantis did it anyway. Twice. If that doesn’t make you want to vote, donate, organize, and scream — I don’t know what will.

The legal challenges are coming. But every day this map stands, it shapes who gets elected, who holds power, and whose votes actually count in Florida. This is the issue. Not the drag shows. Not the books. This — the deliberate, systematic, unconstitutional dismantling of fair representation — is how they hold power. And they’re doing it right in front of you.

Opinion

Florida Needs a Governor Who Works for Floridians. That’s David Jolly.

Florida has a real problem and it has nothing to do with what’s in the school library or who’s performing at a drag show. It has to do with the fact that insurance is unaffordable, housing is unaffordable, utilities are unaffordable, and healthcare is inaccessible — and the people running the state have been too busy fighting culture wars to do a single damn thing about any of it.

David Jolly gets this. He was a Republican congressman who left the party because he couldn’t stomach what it became. He’s running for governor as a Democrat in 2026 on a platform that sounds radical only because it involves actually governing: a state catastrophic fund to take hurricane coverage off the private market and reduce insurance premiums by 60 to 70 percent. Bringing in clean, renewable energy to lower utility costs. Expanding Medicaid so Floridians can see a doctor. Real stuff. Stuff that affects real people.

The Banned In Florida Club Endorses

David Jolly for Florida Governor

Democratic candidate · Primary: August 18, 2026 · General: November 3, 2026

He’s been endorsed by 60 current and former Florida Democratic officials, by Gwen Graham — daughter of the last Democratic governor Florida had — and by editorial boards who called him “a reality-based candidate.” He appeals to disaffected Republicans and independents because he actually is one. His slogan is “Believe in Florida’s Future.” He means it.

Now let’s talk about what he’s running against.

Byron Donalds is running for governor of Florida while simultaneously refusing to close his congressional campaign committee. The FEC told him the money had to go back. He said no.

Byron Donalds — Trump’s endorsed candidate — is a man whose entire political career has been a performance for a base that demands loyalty above all else. He voted to reject the certified 2020 election results from Arizona and Pennsylvania in the hours after the Capitol was attacked. He called Joe Biden “not the legitimate president” as recently as 2023. He is not a Florida-first candidate. He is a Trump-first candidate wearing a Florida suit.

But it gets more specific. Donalds has voted in Congress to lease more public lands and waters for oil drilling, to fast-track fossil fuels over clean energy, to open the Arctic Refuge to drilling, and for a bill the League of Conservation Voters literally called the “Polluters Over People Act.” His district is on the Gulf Coast of Southwest Florida. The people he represents fish those waters. They vacation on those beaches. And he voted to put oil rigs in them.

He did eventually sign a letter opposing drilling near Eglin Air Force Base — but only because it interferes with military test ranges. Not because he gives a damn about Florida’s coastline. The moment there’s no military angle, he’s back to voting for drilling.

The Byron Donalds Dossier

  • Voted to reject 2020 election results from Arizona and Pennsylvania — hours after the Capitol attack
  • Called Joe Biden “not the legitimate president” as recently as 2023
  • FEC sent his campaign a letter demanding he refund congressional donations collected after announcing his governor run. He refused.
  • Voted for H.R. 1 — the “Polluters Over People Act” — opening public lands to oil drilling
  • Voted to open the Arctic Refuge to oil and gas drilling
  • Voted to fast-track fossil fuel power over clean energy
  • Said Black people were “doing better under Jim Crow” — then had to walk it back
  • Endorsed by Donald Trump — which tells you everything about whose interests he serves

Florida has a Democratic primary on August 18, 2026. David Jolly is in it. If you are a Florida voter, a Florida resident, or someone who gives a damn what happens to a state that 22 million people call home — this is who you should be watching, talking about, and voting for.

We don’t need another politician who shows up for donors and disappears for constituents. Florida needs someone who will actually govern. Jolly is it. The Banned In Florida Club is behind him. Get loud about it.

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