While Bill Barr rants about ‘anarchist’ cities, Florida is quietly bringing in fascist-style laws against protesters

On Monday, flanked by maskless Polk County Sheriffs, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis announced his grand new strategy to quell dissent and just maybe boost his disastrous standing in the Sunshine State polling averages: the Combating Violence, Disorder and Looting and Law Enforcement Protection Act. Since this is Florida, it’s equal parts stupid and dangerous.

The act calls for felony charges for protesters who block roadways; felony charges for protests of seven or more people which result in property damages; hell, charges for donating to protests that result in property damage. People convicted under these new statutes will lose their eligibility for state benefits, and won’t be eligible for bail until their first court appearance. Under the “No Defund the Police Permitted’ subsection, we learn that municipalities that reduce funding to police will lose access to state grants and aid. The act even attaches RICO liability to people involved in organizing protests that result in property damages.

But as far as addressing the most prevalent source of actual violence at protests — drivers running over people exercising their First Amendment rights — not only does the act fail to create penalties for vehicular assaults, it actually calls for immunity for people who drive over protestors.

“Gov. DeSantis’ proposal is undemocratic and hostile to Americans’ shared values. This effort has one goal: silence, criminalize, and penalize Floridians who want to see justice for Black lives lost to racialized violence and brutality at the hands of law enforcement,” said ACLU Florida’s Executive Director Micah Kubic in a press release.

“Undemocratic and hostile to Americans’ shared values” could be the GOP’s platform this year, if they’d bothered to write a new one instead of just copying and pasting from 2016 and agreeing that whatever Trump tweets at 5am is tantamount to royal writ.

Criminalizing dissent is all the rage with the GOP these days. In August, GOP Governor Bill Lee of Tennessee signed a law that would strip protestors of voting rights. Last week, the Department of Justice issued a memo confirming the need to consider "a variety of federal charges" against protesters, including "seditious conspiracy.”

And on the same day that DeSantis rolled out his Florida-style fascism, Bill Barr announced three metropolitan areas — Portland, Seattle, and New York City — had been designated “anarchist jurisdictions,” supposedly for permitting anarchy, violence, and destruction.

The Florida governor’s unconstitutional move can only be understood fully in the context of the main problem the Republicans face, namely that they’re on the wrong side of history and their policies are unpopular with the majority of Americans. The law-and-order push coming from Trump is a blatant attempt to fearmonger into a second term despite pervasive incompetence; DeSantis, like always, is just cribbing from his spray-tanned hero’s playbook.

Distraction is all they have, really. These grifty GOP goons have all but given up on trying to govern. That’s an oversight which can sometimes escape detection in better times, but challenges like a novel pandemic don’t respond well to the Republican strategy of blaming poor people and immigrants for everything. Plus tax cuts. Always tax cuts.

Florida’s Covid response ranks among the worst in the nation. The state’s unemployment system is broken, purposefully designed to fail by the prior incompetent Republican governor, Rick Scott. People are dying and they’re out of work and DeSantis has decided to try and posture as a tough guy instead of doing anything useful.

If DeSantis were truly interested in addressing violence, he could start with the impunity of the police, whose continued failure to be held accountable is the reason we are all out there to begin with. If he were truly interested in tackling disorder, he could start with the disorder of ongoing systemic racism within law enforcement, a tragic failure that cuts short far too many lives. (And if he were truly interested in addressing looting, he could call up Rick Scott and ask about Scott’s role in the largest Medicare fraud in US history — after which he ended up getting away, er, Scott-free.)

The statewide response is the national response; GOP governance as a fractal, incompetence at any magnification. Covid numbers look bad? Just hide the numbers. No need to address systemic racism, only to punish those to call attention to it.

As someone who recently stood in a street expressly for the purpose of calling for racial justice and to defund the police, my interest in DeSantis’ assault on dissent is more than a little academic. This announcement sent shockwaves through the spaces where organizers plan the next move to take on injustice. For a second or two, people were stunned. Then, most of us were pissed off.

But here’s the thing. We’re not going to shut up.

You can’t stop people from protesting racial injustice unless you… address racial injustice. These streets are indeed our streets, and we’ll continue to occupy and obstruct said roadways until such a time as the ugly stain of prejudicial violence is fully extirpated from the body politic. Here’s the thing, Ron, you can’t scare people away from the fight. And since DeSantis is so fond of copying everything Trump does, he should have seen what happened every time his idol tried to fight righteous indignation with brute force.

When Trump sent in his federalized goons to Portland to teargas vets and moms and students and civil rights activists and even the Mayor, it didn’t stop the protests. It accelerated them. People saw that the state would stop at nothing, including snatching people off the street into unmarked vans, to prevent the constitutionally protected expression of dissent. They responded accordingly.

So the way I look at it, DeSantis has two options. He can change absolutely everything about the way he operates and address police brutality and admit that something needs to be done about systemic racism and police violence.

Or he can continue with this blatantly unconstitutional and sure to be wildly unpopular attempt to criminalize protest.

DeSantis has never been accused of being a fast learner.