The photo of U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) dining happily with her beau outdoors in South
Beach just before the New Year confirmed what Floridians already knew: Florida had emerged as an international symbol of sanity and liberty. “Welcome to Florida, AOC!” Team DeSantis tweeted. “We hope you’re enjoying a taste of freedom here in the Sunshine State thanks to @RonDeSantisFL’s leadership.”
In his State of the State address on Tuesday, Gov. DeSantis reiterated the theme. “Together,” he said, “we have made Florida the freest state in these United States. While so many around the country have consigned the people’s rights to the graveyard, Florida has stood as freedom’s vanguard.”
The Florida gubernatorial election of 2018 may well prove to have more impact on the history of the nation than the 2020 presidential election.
There was nothing inevitable about Florida’s emergence as a vanguard of freedom. A photo out of South Beach in the COVID-panicked month of March 2020 reminded Floridians of the bullet they had dodged just a year earlier. There, in a Miami Beach hotel room, lay popular Florida Democrat Andrew Gillum — on the VP short list for every White presidential candidate — naked and incoherent among a sea of meth bags. Gillum’s “date,” a White male stripper in even worse shape, lay nearby. The charming “family man” had a lot of ’splainin’ to do.
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