Transcript
Rachel Maddow Presents: Déjà News
Episode 2: Florida’s First War on Woke
Long before Governor Ron DeSantis declared a new war on wokeness, Florida lawmakers in the 1950s and 60s tried going after the NAACP, suspected communists and gay people in Florida schools and universities. The lawmakers upended life for countless numbers of their fellow Floridians before being upended themselves by their own zeal for the cause. Now that DeSantis is bringing this playbook to a presidential campaign, Rachel Maddow and Isaac-Davy Aronson ask what we can learn from the last time Florida went down this path.
Rachel Maddow: It’s 1964, and the governor of Florida is giving a press conference. The big issue at this press conference is a new report that has just been released by the state of Florida. And although it’s been released by the state, the governor of the state is telling reporters at this press conference that he’s got nothing to do with it. It’s not his report. He didn’t do it. He definitely should not be blamed for it.
Farris Bryant, Florida Governor: First of all, it is a legislative matter and it is not something over which I have authority, even if I wanted to exercise it.
Secondly, I think in determining whether or not it was a proper thing to do, you must…
Maddow: Florida Governor Farris Bryant telling reporters that he has no authority over this matter. He had nothing to do with this thing.
But there’s a public clamor over this report. It’s really all anyone wants to talk about, to the point where the governor can’t quite deal with questions about it. He ends up at this press conference kind of backed into a corner, explaining to reporters that maybe this report won’t be quite so damaging. Maybe it won’t have too bad an impact because maybe people won’t be able to get their hands on it.
He says at this press conference that the report should not be distributed generally to the public.
Bryant: …distributed. Now, it’s widely distributed on newsstands and generally to the public, I think from what I’ve read about it that would probably not be proper. On the other hand…
Maddow: It would not be proper for the public-at-large to read it, at least not for too much of the public to read it.
The governor even tells reporters that day that he himself has not read it.
Bryant: I don’t know what circulation it is intended to be. I haven’t read the material. I’m confident though that the legislative committee is properly motivated and trying whether in error, or otherwise, to do a good job.
(MUSIC PLAYING)
Maddow: This might be almost 60 years ago now, but we all know this sound, right? We know the sound of a politician trying to get as far away from something as possible. I haven’t read it, I don’t know anything about it, it’s got nothing to do with me.
This report that tied up this governor in knots -- that he was backpedaling away from so fast -- it really was a big public scandal in Florida. It was a big enough deal that one Florida TV station actually booked a psychiatrist to try to talk people down, to try to calm the upset. They asked the psychiatrist specifically if maybe the pictures that were included in this report might be part of the problem with it.
Reporter: Do you think perhaps the pamphlet would have been more widely accepted had the pictures been left out?
Bernard Goodman: Yes, I feel that the pictures which, of course, constitute simply reproductions of pornographic material, I feel that these pictures haven’t added anything to the effectiveness of the report, haven’t shed any additional light on the subject matter of the report. And I feel that it was unwise to include these pictures. The proof of it is the effect that they’ve had.
Maddow: Did he say reproductions of pornographic material? Again, this was 1964, a report with plenty of pictures released by the state of Florida, released, in fact, by some of the most powerful politicians in that state’s legislature.
The governor, who was denying he knew anything about this report, denying he’d read it, dodging questions about it from reporters, he had been one of the most enthusiastic supporters of the committee that created the report. The committee that created that report had been a huge power center in Florida politics for years, for a decade. But now something had gone wrong. They had gone too far.
With the release of this report, some long-simmering, quiet worries about what these guys had been up to in the legislature had boiled over into real scandal, into widespread public disgust and anger. And the politicians who were associated with this thing, they were not only scrambling to explain themselves, they were scrambling now to salvage their careers. And it was all because they had set out to warn the people of Florida -- warn them about what they said was one of the greatest dangers facing that state. All they were trying to do, they said, was warn the people of Florida about the gays.
Richard Mitchell, Chairman, Legislative Investigations Committee: We felt that the best job that we could do for the legislature, and for the people of Florida, was to better acquaint parents, teachers, and other responsible citizens, such as law enforcement officers, of the nature and the scope of homosexuality in the state of Florida.
Maddow: That’s all they were trying to do. This was 1964 in Florida.
Today, Republican Governor Ron DeSantis is using Florida as his political demonstration project for the country, a demonstration of what he calls fighting “wokeness,” threatening teachers with firing, or even worse, for teaching civil rights history or for saying anything about homosexuality, banning gender-affirming care for trans people, treating families with trans kids like they’re criminals, actually criminalizing drag performances.
And that craze in Republican politics is, of course, not limited to Florida today. They’re trying this all over now, anywhere Republicans are in control of state government.
But Florida has taken the lead on this. And it turns out, Florida has been here before.
(MUSIC PLAYING)
I’m Rachel Maddow, and I’m here once again with Isaac-Davy Aronson. Hi, Isaac.
Isaac-Davy Aronson: Hi, Rachel.
Maddow: Isaac’s here this week with this story about Florida that is history, but it’s not ancient history. This all happened within living memory.
Aronson: It’s the story of a conservative Florida politician, facing what he saw as the threat of a changing state and country, using the power of the state to go after some of Florida’s most vulnerable people. It’s about the lives he upended in the process. And it’s about how that same politician enjoyed the ride. He enjoyed wielding that power. He enjoyed being the mightiest politician in the state for years, until suddenly he wasn’t.
Maddow: Now that Florida’s ambitious conservative Governor Ron DeSantis is seeking the presidency, as he campaigns on a promise to make America Florida, it might be helpful to understand how things went for the last Florida man who tried this political playbook in that state. And so, here we go. This is “Rachel Maddow Presents: Déjà News.”
(MUSIC PLAYING)
Florida Promotional Video: Florida, famous throughout the world for glorious sunshine and beautiful beaches.
Maddow: It’s the mid-1950s, and while glorious sunshine and beautiful beaches are great -- always great -- Florida itself is changing.
Florida Promotional Video: Each week, more than 1,000 families move into the sunshine state. Florida is the only major state to more than double its population in the last 15 years.
Maddow: Florida in the 1950s was the fastest-growing state in the whole country. In 1940, if you lined up all the states in the country in terms of population, Florida would have been 27th. By 1950, Florida had moved from 27th up to 20th. By 1960, Florida had moved from 20th up to 10th.
Florida was growing so fast, not because of some phenomenal birth rate in the state, but because Americans from other places were moving there in droves, and in particular to its cities, to Miami, Tampa, St. Petersburg, Orlando.
And this is where Isaac picks up the story. I’ll be back with you on the other side.
Aronson: For all the demographic and cultural change in the Sunshine State, politically, Florida still operated as it had for decades, like a small, agrarian, deep-south state. Florida had gone through the same political progression as the rest of the Deep South, losing the Civil War, followed by the reconstruction era that was supposed to allow black citizens a share of political power in the state. That was followed by a white power resurgence that in the late 1800s saw Florida rewrite its constitution to take away political rights from black people and other minorities. That constitution worked, as intended, for the next many decades.
In the 1950s, even as South Florida’s population ballooned and diversified and its cities boomed, the state was run by a group of conservative white legislators from Florida’s rural north. They called themselves -- you ready for this -- the Pork Chop Gang.
Randolph Hodges, Former Florida Senator: The Pork Chop, so-called Gang, was a group of conservative senators, primarily representing the rural areas who tried to operate in a very conservative manner --
Aronson: Former state senator Randolph Hodges, once a member in good standing of the Pork Chop Gang, speaking to Florida Public Television in the 1980s.
Hodges: We built a real firm foundation for the state to grow on. And I really don’t think we were quite that bad.
Aronson: You know, history has not been kind to you when you’re describing your legacy as, “I really don’t think we were quite that bad.”
Here’s a little bit more from that same report, starting with how the Pork Chop Gang got its name.
Reporter: Pork as in pork barrel political projects or bringing home the bacon. Those in power brought state money and state projects back to their districts. Jobs with the state went to their families and their friends. They met on the Aucilla River at lobbyist Raeburn Horne’s fish camp and played poker and drank whiskey. They lived and plotted together during sessions at the Cherokee Hotel, the Floridan, and later at the Duval. The Pork Choppers ran the show.
Aronson: They ran the show, but there were worries ahead for the Pork Choppers. In 1954, two things happened that made them worry that maybe the system that kept them in power for decades was under threat.
First, the Chief Pork Chopper, State Senate President Charley Johns, he lost the governor’s race that year in 1954. Again, Florida was run entirely by Democrats, but Charley Johns lost to a more progressive Democrat who was, among other things, a relative moderate on civil rights issues.
But of course, the thing that happened in 1954 that really made the Pork Choppers and every other white Southern conservative lose their minds was the Supreme Court handing down its decision in Brown v. Board of Education.
Charley Johns: I’ve just been informed by the press of the United States Supreme Court’s ruling, Washington on segregation.
Aronson: This is Charley Johns after getting the news that segregated schools had just been ruled unconstitutional.
Johns: My present inclination is to call an extraordinary session of the Florida legislature to cope with this ruling.
Aronson: If you know anything about this period in American history, you know it’s really impossible to overstate how insane conservative white Southerners went at the prospect of school desegregation. Their movement to stop desegregation was called “massive resistance.” It was all about state governments trying to basically nullify federal law and federal court decisions.
And in Florida, the Senate President Charley Johns, he decided to attack the specter of school desegregation in an additional way. He decided to use the state legislature he presided over to go after the people who were trying to make desegregation happen. He decided to create a special committee to go after civil rights activists, to go after the NAACP.
Johns: Senate Bill Number 347, an act to provide for the creation and appointment of a committee of the legislature to make investigations of the activities in this state…
Aronson: What Charley Johns created with that Senate bill was the Florida Legislative Investigation Committee. But everyone just called it the Johns Committee. And through this committee, Charley Johns was determined to show that school desegregation had to be stopped not only because segregation was great, but because desegregation was a giant communist plot against America.
The Johns Committee was set up to expose all the communists in Florida’s NAACP to show how the communists, through the NAACP, were infiltrating Florida, especially its colleges and universities.
Johns: It’s my understanding, and this is purely hearsay, that this organization is attempting to organize on the University of Florida campus, and the Un-American Activities Committee has said that there’s a number of known communists that belong to this organization.
Aronson: The U.S. House Un-American Activities Committee, along with Senator Joe McCarthy, had for years been whipping Americans up into a frenzy with anti-communist investigations. Johns seemed to see that as kind of a model for his committee. But his plan to unmask the NAACP as a hotbed of communists hit a snag. He made a big show of dragging Florida NAACP members before his committee, but he might not have been ready for what he got. Those witnesses ran rings around him.
Pansy Flaum: I protest against this committee. I think it’s illegal. I think it’s immoral, and I think it’s indecent.
Rev. Theodore Gibson: I was born and reared in Dade County. I am an American citizen. I believe in the heritage of America. I believe in the principles of the Constitution of the United States. I would not permit this committee or any other committee to intimidate me nor to deny me my lawful constitutional rights.
Aronson: These poised, defiant witnesses, they seemed to really flummox the Johns Committee and Charley Johns himself.
Johns: I want to say that the way the witnesses defied our legislative committee when we were down at Miami was simply ridiculous, and I feel this committee should go back down there and call those witnesses before us to testify. And if they refuse, we should put them in jail and let them stay there.
Aronson: The committee’s investigation was soon blocked by lawsuits brought by the NAACP’s formidable lead lawyer Thurgood Marshall. But the thing to know about the Johns Committee is that, even though Charley Johns had set it up to go after the NAACP, officially, it had a completely wide-open mandate to investigate anything that might pose any kind of threat to the citizens of Florida. And so, the committee started to shift its focus.
Here’s historian Stacy Braukman.
Stacy Braukman: There’s no smoking gun that says, this is why we’re doing this. The timing worked out so that while they were wrapping up with the NAACP, at the same time, they were getting information from people in Tampa, people in Gainesville, where they had uncovered like a big group of homosexual professors at the University of Florida. And so, Charley Johns, he sent his investigator to Gainesville.
Aronson: Historian Stacy Braukman wrote a great book about this whole scandal, a great book with an amazing title. It’s called “Communists and Perverts Under the Palms.”
Braukman: The chief investigator’s name was R.J. Strickland, and the first thing he did in Gainesville is he connected with the University of Florida police. They started at the Alachua County Courthouse. There was a men’s bathroom there that, for decades, had been used for gay encounters, and then spaces on campus, the library. They set up sting operations, you know, stakeouts.
Aronson: In addition to their sting operations, they also paid bounties, so citizen vigilantes could turn in suspected gay people for a cash reward.
John Hayes: The Tallahassee Police Department is using Florida State University students as informers against homosexuals. The students get $10 a head every time one is approached by a suspected sex offender. Police Chief Frank Stoutamire feels that the students want to work as informers. It’s all right with him. Since October, Tallahassee Police have arrested 10 suspected homosexuals. John Hayes, Channel 4 News, Tallahassee.
Aronson: When suspected homosexuals were brought in for questioning, they were in a really vulnerable position. Homosexuality was illegal in Florida, so the threat was not just public exposure and embarrassment and ostracism. The threat was being kicked out of school, being fired, being jailed. And with that incredible leverage over the people they were questioning, the Johns Committee investigators sought one thing from these interrogation sessions: names -- names of more people to haul in.
Braukman: They asked them to name names, which they did. They followed what I called a blueprint for asking questions. They wanted to know if the individual was passive or active in homosexual practices. They wanted to know if they had been taught, if they had learned this behavior. And then they asked very specific questions.
Aronson: Like very specific questions. Stacy Braukman excerpted some of the transcripts of these interrogations in her book, and they are extremely graphic questions about every single kind of sexual act the person has ever engaged in. The people who got dragged into these interrogations described the questioning as not just invasive and intimidating, but as physically grueling.
Ruth Jensen-Forbell: They took me into the basement of the administration building into a room, and I was there for at least 15 hours. I think it was probably closer to 17 because it was the next day. During that time, I was not offered the opportunity to go to the bathroom, to have anything to eat or to have anything to drink. All they wanted to know were the names of people. Did you have relationships with other women on the campus? What about, you know, these people? I said, no, no, no. Did you see anybody doing this or that? You know, and they would be pretty graphic in what they said.
Aronson: This is from a documentary called “The Committee,” produced by students at the University of Central Florida.
Chuck Woods: And they brought me into a room and said, we have information that you’re a homosexual. They showed me a letter from the president that they can help me with my problems, so to speak. And I was shocked by that as well that the university president would be involved in this witch hunt as well. Had I admitted to it, I would have been kicked out of the University of Florida.
Jensen-Forbell: So I was afraid of everything, who I talked to, what happened, so I ended up not going to classes, took incompletes, and didn’t go back.
Aronson: The Johns Committee investigation started with the targeting of universities, then moved on to the rest of the school system. Here’s historian Stacy Braukman again.
Braukman: They realized, well, a lot of Florida teachers went to Florida universities for college. And so, there’s going to be lots of homosexual public school teachers, and we’ve got to go find them. They traveled around the state. And from the panhandle down to Miami, they found a lot of names. People named a lot of names, because they were absolutely terrified.
Aronson: Exact numbers are understandably hard to come by. Researchers like Stacy Braukman have identified dozens of public school teachers and university professors who were fired on the grounds of homosexuality during the Johns Committee’s crusade. That doesn’t account for all those who resigned out of pressure or fear.
The Johns Committee kept up these inquisitions year after year. It seemed like this was just the way things were going to be in Florida. But, of course, things always seem like they’re never going to change right up until the moment they do.
The first hint that the Johns Committee might be wearing thin with the people of Florida came when they set up shop at the University of South Florida in Tampa in May 1962.
Braukman: There was a group of concerned parents of USF students whose kids had come home and said they’re teaching evolution. My professor thinks integration is good. My professor doesn’t believe in God. So they did two weeks of hearings where the committee was asking, like, do you really think that J.D. Salinger is this is quality literature? Like, do you really think we should be teaching that integration is good? Why don’t you teach Christian beliefs?
These hearings were covered in the press and people could see, like, oh, my gosh, we’ve got legislators actually asking professors and administrators, is this appropriate for you to be teaching this? We don’t think so. It was the first time they got pretty widespread criticism for being completely out of bounds.
Aronson: Going after the NAACP, going after gay people, that was one thing. But even the Johns Committee’s supporters didn’t like the optics of state legislators doing a line-by-line interrogation of professors’ lesson plans. And then, in 1964, came the Johns Committee’s big report to the public.
Mitchell: This booklet was published and is presented to authorized people with the hope that it will better inform them as to the scope of homosexuality and the nature of it in the state of Florida.
Aronson: In 1964, the Johns Committee releases this report, this pamphlet. It comes to be known as the Purple Pamphlet after the color of its cover, but its formal name is “Homosexuality and Citizenship in Florida.”
What is this pamphlet like? Well, here’s a passage from a, quote, veteran investigator of homosexual activities. Quote, “The homosexuals are organized. The homosexuals will win every battle that is fought unless we band together. If we don’t act soon, we will wake up some morning and find they are too big to fight. They may be already.”
The pamphlet also includes a handy glossary of homosexual terms and deviant acts in which Florida’s citizens are warned about such things as pygmalionism, which apparently is having a thing for statues. But yeah, it’s the pictures that cause all the fuss. Pictures that range from merely salacious to, frankly, distressing.
The title page of this thing is a full-page photo of two naked men kissing. There’s a photo of what purports to be a homosexual encounter in a public bathroom. There’s a photo of what appears to be a teenage boy tied up with rope. There are even multiple naked photos of a young child. This was supposed to be the culmination of the Johns Committee’s years of work, all its investigations and interrogations and all the expertise it had gathered on the threat -- the nature and the scope -- of homosexuality.
But their fellow lawmakers, all their conservative allies, took one look at this thing, and all they saw was a whole bunch of pornography, including child pornography, being published by the state legislature, with the great seal of the state of Florida stamped right on the back.
The state attorney in Dade County said the pamphlet itself was a threat to school kids in his county and threatened to prosecute members of the committee for publishing it. The Miami Herald called for the resignation of every member of the committee and an investigation of the possible violation of obscenity laws.
As for Charley Johns, well, he knew a sinking ship when he saw one. After the pamphlet came out, he resigned from his own committee. Within a couple of years, the committee was disbanded, and Charley Johns left the Senate entirely. His long career as the most powerful politician in the state was over.
Maddow: The Florida legislature was so scandalized by the whole Johns Committee Purple Pamphlet debacle, they sealed all the Johns Committee’s records until 2038. Now, as it happens, they ended up getting unsealed a few decades early. We have Florida voters to thank for that. Florida voters approved a constitutional amendment requiring the legislature’s records to be made public, even if the legislature didn’t want that.
So the records of the Johns Committee do exist. They’re not under seal, and that means researchers, like Stacy Braukman, have been able to go through them to bring this whole era to light. And it’s hard to look at Florida today and not see the Charley Johns era boomeranging back through that state again.
Here’s the question, though. If Florida conservatives have been at a place like this before, can what happened with them last time help us understand what’s happening today and what might happen next? That’s all ahead when Déjà News continues.
(MUSIC PLAYING)
Lester Holt, NBC News Anchor: In Florida, the governor today signed a contentious bill that restricts teaching about gender identity and sexuality in elementary schools.
(VIDEO PLAYING)
Sam Brock, NBC News Correspondent: The legislation, which has been referred to by opponents as the “Don’t Say Gay” bill, has sparked national outrage. Today, the governor and potential 2024 presidential candidate, once again, putting himself at the forefront of America’s culture wars. Supporters say the law lets parents determine when and how to introduce LGBTQ topics to their children.
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis: We will make sure that parents can send their kids to school to get an education, not an indoctrination.
Maddow: An education, not an indoctrination. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. Sixty years after the Johns Committee imploded as an embarrassment and a scandal in the 1960s, now today, another right-wing Florida government is rifling through lesson plans, outlawing the teaching of ideas they don’t like or history they wish wasn’t true. They’re banning books, making it illegal in Florida schools to even acknowledge that LGBTQ people exist.
Teachers and professors are canceling courses out of fear of losing their jobs, or even worse, some teachers are now at risk of prison if they allow a student to have access to a banned book.
Ron DeSantis says it’s all needed, it’s all necessary because of Marxism, cultural Marxism, threatening Florida’s students. Last year he signed a bill mandating that Florida school kids be taught the evils of communism. It really does all sound awfully familiar.
Johns: This organization is attempting to organize on the University of Florida campus. And the Un-American Activities Committee has said that there’s a number of known communists that belong to this organization.
Maddow: What can Florida’s previous bout with this kind of politics help us understand about what’s happening right now?
Isaac talked with some folks in Florida to find out.
Aronson: The agenda Ron DeSantis has pursued in Florida is often talked about in terms of his presidential ambitions, that he’s creating a record of scorched earth right-wing policies to sell to Republican primary voters across the country. But for the people who live in DeSantis’ Florida, what he’s doing is no abstraction. It’s not about slogans and campaign ads, it’s their lives.
Shevrin Jones, Florida State Senator: You have a lot of parents who are very fearful for their children, especially LGBTQ parents. They have expressed that they have to move or they’re going to move because they don’t feel like their child is safe here.
Aronson: State Senator Shevrin Jones represents North Miami-Dade County.
Jones: We have black parents where I represent the largest black district in the state. Many of them are asking, are we going to have to start teaching African-American studies ourselves? Are we going to have to task our churches in doing it? What is Governor DeSantis doing? Why is my history not important? We run the risk of an entire generation being raised in a state where they do not feel seen, heard or represented.
Aronson: As the first black openly gay member of the Florida legislature, Senator Jones has felt particularly in the crosshairs of this new culture war onslaught from the right.
Jones: For the first time in my 11 years being in the legislature, I went to the Pride Festival that they had on Miami Beach. I had to hire a security guard. So when you talk about fear, it’s because Governor DeSantis and the Republicans have made people who look like me or people who are me, they’ve made us live in a very hostile state.
Aronson: Senator Jones says the summer of 2020 and the Black Lives Matter protests against the murder of George Floyd by police officers, that those were a crucial catalyst for DeSantis’ crusade against so-called “wokeness.”
Jones: His radicalization was empowered by a base of people. Pew Research did a poll and they said that during the summer months of George Floyd, white America heard the words equality, like privilege, social justice, more in a lifetime that they have ever heard before. And that not only put America on display, they put America’s racism on display.
And so, what did politicians do? Politicians say, you know what, enough of that. This is wokeism. This is indoctrination.
Aronson: It’s hard not to see the parallels with Charley Johns and the Pork Chop Gang in the 1950s, watching the Supreme Court order them to desegregate their schools, watching their state’s population swell with young, diverse new residents who were voting in ways they didn’t like. Who’s doing all this indoctrinating of our young people? It’s the NAACP. It’s the communists. It’s the gays.
The Pork Chop Gang fell out of power in scandal in the 1960s, but some of the members of that gang lived long enough to see their views come back around, to see them come back into fashion. This is Florida historian Robert Buccellato.
Robert Buccellato: All of the Pork Choppers to the end of their life, even some of them that I spoke to who passed away just a few years ago, they were unapologetic. They think that they were in the right, that there was a place for their type of politics. All of them left the Democratic Party. They found new homes in the Republican Party. Those that were still alive recently that I knew of were very big MAGA supporters. And that brand of politics is alive and well.
Aronson: A lot of people these days feel like they’re having to fight battles they thought were already won. Are we really arguing about banning books again? But Senator Shevrin Jones says those battles were never really over because although, yes, those battles did also happen years ago, the forces that fought against progress back then never went away. He describes it almost like a latent virus, always waiting for reactivation.
Jones: We’re dealing with unfinished business right now. It’s unfinished business and I think we got too comfortable because we thought we were living in a post-racial society, but that was never true. There were individuals who were waiting in the background for the individual to be able to lead the charge, to give a hall pass, to not just show my hate, to not show just my racism, to not just show my anti-Semitism, but to show that this has always been our country.
Aronson: As for why now, why is this all bearing its head at this moment in history? It’s worth noting that just as in the days of the Pork Chop Gang, Florida is changing. This year, Florida once again became the fastest-growing state in the nation, for the first time since 1957. And the moment that Ron DeSantis was first elected in 2018, that was also a squeaker of an election. With a shift of just half a percentage point, Florida would have ended up not with Republican Ron DeSantis, but with DeSantis’ Democratic opponent, who would have been Florida’s first black governor.
Here again is State Senator Shevrin Jones.
Jones: There is a group of people who see the changing of America. They disagree with the changing of America. And people think it’s about policy, but it’s not. This is a power battle, because if I feel like my power is being tested or my power is being challenged, I’m going to fight for it at all costs. So that’s what we’re seeing. We’re seeing the slipping way of power.
Maddow: Isaac, I take the Senator’s point. But to a lot of people, I feel like Ron DeSantis doesn’t look like a guy whose power is slipping away right now. I mean, DeSantis won re-election in Florida last year by 20 points. And a lot of Democrats, a lot of people opposed to DeSantis-style culture war politics, seem to have resigned themselves to the idea that this is just how Florida is now. It’s just how it is and how it will be.
The state’s politics just went so far to the right, they fell off a cliff, and that’s how it’s going to stay from here on out. At least that’s, I think, how it looks to people from outside the state.
Aronson: Yeah. I actually put that to Senator Jones. I’m going to play you his reply.
Jones: Nope, nope, nope, nope, nope, nope.
Maddow: Well, that’s at least very clear on his point.
Aronson: Yeah. I mean, interestingly, both Senator Jones and the Florida historian that I spoke to, Robert Buccellato, they think DeSantis’ power is less solid than it seems. And they both get to that view from their reading of history.
Consider the situation in 1964, the year of the Purple Pamphlet debacle. Charley Johns had been running this high-profile political operation, attacking civil rights groups and gay people for almost a decade. Florida politics just seemed stuck, like it would never change, with segregationist governors and hard-right culture war politics. But in fact, Florida was just a few years away from what Buccellato refers to as the golden age of Florida governance, full of reformist leaders and even a brand-new good government constitution.
Buccellato: Johns and DeSantis both have levels of intolerance about them. They had inflated senses of mission to try and win over their bases. They both railed against a so-called agenda or mysterious undercurrent of supposed indoctrination that didn’t exist. But ultimately, the political landscape doesn’t really have a place for them. The actions of Charley Johns, because they are so unjust, because they are so cruel and mean-spirited in nature, it is always going to inflame the people that they’re trying to silence. I think ultimately, they are the masters of their own destruction.
Aronson: Senator Jones says he feels that moment coming soon. Let’s call it the “Purple Pamphlet moment,” when people just say enough.
Jones: Americans can only take a certain amount of extremism before it swings back. Because they are test, test, test, test until they’re like, wait, stop, this is too much. And I think we’re right at a breaking point to where Floridians, Americans want to get back to some type of normalcy.
Maddow: Isaac, I feel like we run up against this all the time in the news and in history, particularly in political history. It’s like you said before, things always seem like they’re never going to change right up until the moment that they do. Things seem inevitable until they’re not.
It’s a good reminder to never underestimate a political leader or a movement, but also not to overestimate them either. What’s working now, particularly when it’s working because it is shocking and extreme and transgressive, it doesn’t always keep working, and sometimes for those very same reasons.
Aronson: Yeah, absolutely. And also, who would have thought that people reassuring us that everything’s going to be okay, that things might return to some kind of normal, would be guys from Florida?
Maddow: I know. We’re going to have to readjust our conception of Florida man and what he stands for.
Aronson: Totally. Although I will say they were both wrestling alligators during their interviews.
Maddow: Yeah, I was wondering. I thought I could get a little splish splish splish splash in the back.
Aronson: But they remained so calm.
Maddow: Yeah.
Aronson: It’s so impressive.
Maddow: I would expect nothing less.
(MUSIC PLAYING)
Maddow: All right, that’s going to do it for this episode of Déjà News.
Isaac, what have you got for us next week?
Aronson: Well, it’s the story of Republicans launching a nationwide anti-voter fraud operation, which is, of course, actually aimed at keeping black and minority voters from polls. Their justification: they say the last presidential election was stolen. And I know it sounds all too familiar, but this story comes from nearly six decades ago.
Maddow: Well, that’s next time on “Rachel Maddow Presents: Déjà News.”
Aronson: Déjà News is a production of MSNBC and NBC News.
Maddow: It’s executive produced and written by me and Isaac.
Aronson: Our associate producer is Janmaris Perez.
Maddow: Archival tape wrangling by Holly Klopchin and Johanna Cerutti.
Aronson: Our audio producer is Tim Einenkel.
Maddow: Our technical director is Bryson Barnes.
Aronson: Our senior executive producers are Cory Gnazzo and Laura Conaway.
Maddow: Our web producer is Will Femia.
Aronson: Our booking producer is Valerie Champagne.
Maddow: Our thanks to State Senator Shevrin Jones and to Stacy Braukman. Her book really does get my vote for the best title ever. Once again, it is “Communists and Perverts under the Palms.”
Aronson: Thanks also to historian Robert Buccellato, whose many Florida history books and his podcast, “The Florida History Podcast,” are a great guide to the state’s politics.
Maddow: Also, thanks to Lisa Mills and the University of Central Florida for excerpts from their fantastic documentary, “The Committee.”
Aronson: You can find a link to that documentary and see the infamous Purple Pamphlet, the whole thing, at our website, msnbc.com/dejanews.
Buccellato: The Pork Chop Gang would meet over at this cabin in the woods and they would get, you know, boozed up and they would do these marathon card games. And the progressives couldn’t really get the conservation passed because none of them were very good card players. Most of them were not very big drinkers, and they wouldn’t get invited. But they had a editor from the Miami Herald who was a friend of theirs.
And he was a great card player and he was a big drinker. He could handle his bourbon. So he went there, and he cleaned all of these pork choppers out of every cent they had. He said, well, I’ll tell you what, you can keep your money, but you have to pass this conservation for the Everglades. So basically, that was how we have the Everglades today.
Aronson: So Florida, like, won the Everglades in a card game, basically.
Buccellato: Yeah, yeah, in a card game, essentially.
END