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You’re boiling, little froggies

Gov. Wokety-woke DeWoke: Selling America by the pound

Death by a thousand cuts is too euphemistic a phrase to describe what Gov. Wokety-woke DeWoke and his Florida GOP accomplices are doing there:

Florida Sen. Jason Brodeur (R-Lake Mary) wants bloggers who write about Gov. Ron DeSantis, Attorney General Ashley Moody, and other members of the Florida executive cabinet or legislature to register with the state or face fines.

Brodeur’s proposal, Senate Bill 1316: Information Dissemination, would require any blogger writing about government officials to register with the Florida Office of Legislative Services or the Commission on Ethics.Florida bill targets union due collections for public school teachers

In the bill, Brodeur wrote that those who write “an article, a story, or a series of stories,” about “the Governor, the Lieutenant Governor, a Cabinet officer, or any member of the Legislature,” and receives or will receive payment for doing so, must register with state offices within five days after the publication of an article that mentions an elected state official.

If another blog post is added to a blog, the blogger would then be required to submit monthly reports on the 10th of each month with the appropriate state office. They would not have to submit a report on months when no content is published.

Thus, the GOP declares the First Amendment violable in Florida. But no way will Florida ask people to register guns, mind you, because of the Second Amendment.

Brodeur (whose bill has no co-sponsors) knows this bill is blatantly unconstitutional. He’s not that stupid. But as with the Florida governor’s actions, Brodeur is yanking on the Overton Window to the right while yanking our chains. Each new outrage will be followed by something slightly less outrageous, therefore seen as not as bad and drawing less outrage.

The same day, another of Brodeur’s Florida state senate colleagues filed a bill to outlaw the Democratic Party in the state. Not in so many words, mind you:

The Ultimate Cancel Act,” filed Tuesday by state Sen. Blaise Ingoglia, would require the state’s Division of Elections to “immediately cancel” the filings of any political party whose platform had “previously advocated for, or been in support of, slavery or involuntary servitude.”

The bill, called SB 1248, would require Florida officials to notify all registered voters who belong to any canceled parties that their parties no longer exist. It would also change their voter registrations to “no party affiliation” and “provide procedures” for those voters to update their affiliations to “an active political party.”

The bill would allow any canceled political parties to re-register with the Florida State Department — but only under the condition that the party change its name to something “substantially different from the name of any other party previously registered” with the agency.

There’s no way dropping these two bills the same day was not coordinated.

But wait! There’s more:

Acting on a proposal from Gov. Ron DeSantis, Florida lawmakers filed legislation Wednesday to allow the death penalty for adults who sexually batter children younger than 12.

Never mind that such an act would violate “prior U.S. Supreme Court precedent saying that capital punishment can only be applied in the case of murder.” Florida is pushing the envelope on the acceptable.

The bills would put Florida at odds with “prior U.S. Supreme Court precedent saying that capital punishment can only be applied in the case of murder,” a 1977 precedent reinforced in 2008.

The proposed legislation also matches another bill that proposes lowering the threshold for the death penalty from a unanimous jury recommendation to an 8-4 vote. Sen. Blaise Ingoglia, R-Spring Hill, and Rep. Berny Jacques, R-Seminole, filed legislation to change the jury requirement.

Lowering the jury threshold is another move backed by DeSantis,who has expressed outrage about a jury’s vote in favor of a life sentence instead of a death sentence for the Parkland school shooter. Three of 12 jurors voted for a life sentence instead of death.

Going to an 8-4 threshold would give Florida the lowest death penalty threshold in the nation. Only Alabama currently has a nonunanimous jury requirement, requiring at least a 10-2 vote for the death penalty.

Listen. Key features of creeping whatever-ism are the creeps and the creeping:

1. Find the line.
2. Step over it.
3. Dare someone to push you back.
4. No pushback? New line.
5. Repeat.

This is the conservative M.O. to which I’ve drawn repeated attention:

Do it on enough fronts at once, and opponents won’t have the resources to push back on all of them. It’s how you erode freedom in freedom’s name. While waving a flag. Clutching your pocket Constitution. Brandishing a gun. And singing Lee Greenwood.

It’s frog boiling without the frogs.

Dante Atkins tweets in response, “It’s funny to me how deeply anti-communist Florida keeps on doing things that are the hallmarks of state socialist regimes, like trying to ban all competing political parties and force media to register with the state.”

Don’t snicker. What’s happening in Florida may appear facially ridiculous. But Gov. Wokety-woke DeWoke and his fascist-leaning friends are assaulting normalcy on so many fronts at once to see what they can get away with. Flood the zone with shit, as Donald Trump adviser Steve Bannon famously suggested:

That’s the Bannon business model: Flood the zone. Stink up the joint. As Jonathan Rauch once said, citing Bannon’s infamous quote, “This is not about persuasion: This is about disorientation.”

Will the townspeople notice? Or will they keep their heads down and say nothing like German villagers?

“[E]very day … these people, in their neat Germanic way, would get out their feather dusters and go outside. And, never thinking about what it meant, they would sweep off the layer of ash that would settle on their windowsills overnight. Then they would return to their neat, clean lives and pretend not to notice what was happening next door.”

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