Day: August 1, 2024

Florida Is Mad Scientist DeSantis’ Project 2025 Laboratory

Pensito Editors
Gov. Ron DeSantis in his Tallahassee laboratory. (Pensito Illustration)

Over the past several years, Gov. Ron DeSantis and the stacked GOP Florida Legislature have been conducting an experiment with Floridians as their lab rats. The hypotheses and methodologies are straight out of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 playbook.

The Tallahassee Democrat (an ironic name for a newspaper in the capital of a rapidly reddening state) has a pretty good explanation on the topic here:

Project 2025 proposes a dramatic overhaul of the federal government, replacing thousands of civil employees with political hires, expanding the power of the president, abolishing the Department of Education, enacting a flurry of tax cuts, banning pornography and halting sales of the abortion pill.

For Floridians, the document’s themes and policies may sound familiar. After all, Gov. Ron DeSantis advanced many of the same ideas, pushed along by hard-right think tanks in his first six years as governor.

“You guys in Florida are living in the future,” said Nick Beauchamp, a political scientist at Northeastern University. He has written on Project 2025 and its proposals, powered by Heritage and a host of other conservative, billionaire-funded think tanks.

See also WNMF’s piece, “Florida Is the Laboratory for Project 2025.”

Harris’ Measured Response to Trump’s Manic Racism

Buck Banks

“The American people deserve better. The American people deserve a leader who tells the truth, a leader who does not respond with hostility and anger when confronted with the facts. We deserve a leader who understands that our differences do not divide us — they are an essential source of our strength.”

— Vice President Kamal Harris speaking at a convention of Sigma Gamma Rho, one of the nation’s most prominent Black sororities, in response to Donald Trump’s Antagonistic, unrepentant display of racism at the National Association of Black Journalists Convention.