Florida shows us the way back to the Light.

Florida Is Back To Normal And Corporate Media Are Calling It A Hellscape
If your perception of the world is based on what corporate media tells you, you might think Florida is overrun by wild spring break revelers who are running around killing people by flaunting COVID precautions.

“How spring break in South Beach spun out of control,” the Washington Post blared. The Associated Press reported “deaths” and “violence,” while “police have arrested hundreds of partiers involved in violence and property destruction” in South Beach.

Business Insider lumped “street fights, arrests, and maskless crowds” together in its description of the debauchery. On March 20, the city of Miami Beach established a state of emergency, complete with an 8 p.m. weekend curfew.

The narrative that “Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ ‘open-for-business’ policy is backfiring in Miami Beach,” as Slate suggested, is as lazy as it is inaccurate. I’m sure there are some ne’er-do-wellers in Miami, as in any other place on earth. But the corporate media is so busy trying to dunk on DeSantis’s successful and freedom-centric COVID-19 response, they won’t tell you what’s really going on in the Sunshine State.

I’ve spent the past week in Florida, and visited beach towns on both the Atlantic and Gulf coasts. I’ve seen cheerful street musicians, sailboats unloading in marinas, kids on playgrounds, and moms pushing strollers in seersucker dresses. I’ve seen a few groups of what look like spring breakers too, walking down sunny sidewalks or sitting at beachfront bars enjoying fresh fried seafood.

Teenagers rollerblade down the boardwalk, while fishermen cast off the edge of the pier. People sit and dangle their bare feet over the water, practicing the old southern ritual of passing the time. A maskless street musician plays the accordion, while his dog retrieves dollar bills from the hands of delighted passersby.

Kayaks pass under the pier and jet skis speed around the bay. On the boardwalk, an older gentleman being pushed in a wheelchair is out for a stroll. “We’re open!” signs grace a few storefronts.

At the Saturday morning market, crowds buzz around tents buying farm produce, fresh-baked bread and fresh-squeezed orange juice, jewelry, art, and empanadas. Jenn Sperato mans the booth from the Habana Cafe, a local restaurant in Gulfport.

“Five dollars, honey,” she says as she hands out hot Cuban sandwiches and plantains. She asks another customer, clearly a regular, about her baby.

MMMMMM, Cuban sammitches!!!

Uhh, sorry about that digression, gang, I just couldn’t help myself. Anyways.

“Business keeps picking up,” she tells me. “You get tourists, but you’ll also have locals that will be here every week.”

Down on the beach, kids play in the sand and teenagers climb on rocks that jut out into the water. A few groups are taking family pictures. Behind them, a parasail glides by. An older lady walking her dog passes me on the sidewalk and grins, saying, “It’s so nice not to see masks!”

Normality is alive and well in Florida, as much as corporate media don’t want to admit it. Families with young kids are enjoying the open restaurants, beaches, and storefronts alongside retired couples and teenagers. I sense an attitude of friendliness, and camaraderie with strangers rather than fear of them. And there seems to be an extra abundant number of American flags.

For Fake News Media, what’s to like about any of that? They aren’t journalists anymore, nor do they aspire to be. They’re Gatekeepers and Influencers, the Deep State’s Propaganda Korps shock troops. Their job is decidedly NOT to honestly and fairly report on the day’s events but to steer them—to ensure the Sheeple remain compliant; the State remains all-powerful and pervasive; and the recently restored status quo ante-Trump of Amerika v2.0 remains undisturbed. Florida has become problematic for the Holy Narrative, a threat which must not go unchallenged.

In DeSantis’s Florida, America That Was is fighting back, even beginning to turn the tide. Can it be much of a surprise that her enemies would launch a fierce counterassault, hoping the rest of us will stay in our cages?

Update! A bigger problem than Trump was?

You would think it was summer 2024 and presidential polls were showing Democrats ten points behind the way they and the media (“Democrats with bylines” as Glenn Reynolds put it) are coming after Ron DeSantis, hurling any ridiculous accusation they can find at the proverbial wall, hoping one will stick.

The other day it was “Sixty Minutes”—Dan Rather’s old stomping grounds before he was caught in some big time fibbing, speaking of presidential elections—trying to smear the Florida governor, asserting he had favored Publix in lucrative COVID vaccine distribution because the supermarket chain gave him a campaign donation. (As is the corporate custom, Publix did the same with virtually every other politician, including, apparently, Bernie Sanders.)

About five minutes serious research would have unearthed the absurdity of this charge—since debunked by several Florida Democrats—but with the anti-DeSantis zeitgeist at the ultra-establishment “Sixty Minutes” five months wouldn’t have been enough, even with the myriad producers and assistants working at CBS.

The need to “get” DeSantis overwhelmed all, including, as has been noted everywhere except for most of the mainstream media, cherry-picking the governor’s remarks to turn them inside out.

So the Democrats are seeing a problem down the road, a problem with the potential of growing even bigger than Donald Trump, if such a thing were possible, a Republican presidential candidate who is considerably smarter than they are and, thus far, keeps his cool and is willing to punch back at their excesses.

Besides that, he might be more appealing to the “soccer moms” than Trump.

Better to wipe him out now.

Perhaps. Of course, the proposition that DeSantis might be a credible threat depends on the fatally-flawed premise that “elections” still mean a thing, which they don’t, so why bother “wiping him out” at all? Then again, though, the proposition that the Democrat-Socialists might not feel any particular need to wipe out DeSantis rests on an equally flawed premise: that they wouldn’t destroy anyone they wanted to destroy—threat or no threat, need or no need, with reason or without. Perverse villainy; force of habit; pure spite; an innate compulsion to crush all dissent; some unknown factor—any one of these would be sufficient motivation to drive the Demonrats to it.

The politics of personal destruction is simply what these people do; the odds against an attempt to preemptively take DeSantis out of play don’t make for comfortable betting.