Florida Is Turning the Tide — My Byline Supplement Report
My latest report in Byline Supplement reveals a template for how to fight back against authoritarians and win — it begins with not obeying in advance
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“Out of crisis and loss, beautiful things can blossom.”
Thank you to each and every one of you who has made it possible for me to travel and meet extraordinary people in real life. Your subscriptions and donations have given me the wings to travel to Florida and Sonoma, California, and to book upcoming trips to bring you the news of the brave and brilliant people who are fighting for the integrity of their communities.
I am so proud of my latest report in Byline Supplement, Not Obeying in Advance: How Equality Florida is Turning the Tide, which reveals how activists mobilized thousands to fight against anti-LGBTQ legislation.
My Q&A with Equality Florida co-founder Stratton Pollitzer explains how it can be duplicated everywhere, but it begins with not underestimating your own power.
I asked the editors if they would remove the paywall for this report, which shows how people defeated or neutralized 21 out of 22 bills, and how they — by simply showing up and outnumbering the extremist in Moms for Liberty etc. five to one — managed to reinstall protections for 75 percent of Florida’s student population. In addition, their willingness to show up each day during the 60 days of session in Tallahassee and look lawmakers in the eyes and tell their stories — walking past a gauntlet of Proud Boys — reveals a bravery and steeliness that can eradicate despair. Action is a balm.
They are beating DeSantis at his own game, and it’s glorious.
They only reason I know that is because I was able to be boots on the ground, and witness with my own eyes the efforts of the community members who are not allowing their children to be bullied and shamed.
Below is an excerpt from the report, and I ask you to do three things — share the article far and wide with your pro-democracy networks; please support Byline Supplement with a subscription if you can, and please support my work with a paid subscription:
I also ask you not to obey in advance. That is lesson No. 1 from Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny. More on that soon.
Excerpt here:
Not Obeying In Advance: How Equality Florida Is Turning the Tide
Heidi Siegmund Cuda traveled to St. Petersburg, Florida, to report on how a seasoned group of activists mobilized thousands of people in the state to push back against the worst anti-LGBTQ legislation, and how they are winning. In her Q&A with Stratton Pollitzer, Equality Florida co-founder and deputy director, he explains how their strategy can be duplicated throughout the US
“In those moments when it feels so scary, like it’s all falling apart, you have to remember that you cannot erase consciousness.”
—Stratton Polltizer, Equality Florida
Glitter was everywhere. From the sequined gown adorning the “world’s tallest drag queen” Daphne — the evening’s hostess — to the sparkle of sequined bow ties and vintage art deco jewelry worn on lapels.
The annual gala on 18 May of Equality Florida in St. Petersburg was an evening of pure joy.
The 700 people in the room represented the thousands of Floridians who helped defeat or neutralize 21 of 22 bills in the most recent Congressional session.
They not only defeated the worst of the anti-gay agenda pushed by the failed presidential candidate, Governor Ron DeSantis, they managed to get 11 school districts representing 75% of the student population in Florida to return to their original protocols for protecting the rights of LGBTQ students. And in more news: in previous years in Florida, extremist candidates ran uncontested by the dozens. This year, that number is zero.
“In those moments when it feels so scary, like it’s all falling apart, you have to remember that you cannot erase consciousness,” Stratton Polltizer, Equality Florida’s co-founder and deputy director told Byline Supplement.
In the room where the gala took place, you could feel the collective exhale of all that they had accomplished by simply remembering that people do have power.
Equality Florida is the largest civil rights organization in the state, dedicated to securing full equality for Florida’s LGBTQ community. And the bottom line, the organization isn’t new to this. It has been pushing back against bad bills since 1997, the year it was founded.
What follows is my Q & A with Stratton Pollitzer, Equality Florida’s Co-Founder and Deputy Director, on how they are beating Ron DeSantis at his own game, and how what they’re doing in Florida can inspire other states to not lose hope.
Heidi Siegmund Cuda: The headlines coming out of Florida are so grim, but my visit to your state tells a completely different story. Can you start there?
Stratton Pollitzer: What is happening now in Florida, this is not the way it was supposed to be. This was not the story that Florida was writing. If you go back in time just four or five years, Florida was positioned as the breakthrough red [Republican] state in the country where broad bipartisan coalitions come together, working to pass LGBTQ legislation.
So before Ron DeSantis took office — after blue [Democrat] states in the country had passed a wide range of pro-LGBTQ laws — we had 20 Republican co-sponsors of our statewide non-discrimination protections. It was the most co-sponsored piece of legislation in Florida that year. The momentum was building.
Similarly, the work we had done in our schools in Florida — Safe and Healthy Schools Program — is easily the largest scale, LGBTQ school-based program in the United States.
In a period of just five years, we had trained in person with our staff, over 40,000 principals and school district leaders all across Florida. There was a better than 50-50 chance that there was somebody in your school who we had trained. That was the story we were writing, and that was the direction we were moving in.
And that's one of the reasons this has been such a painful period. It hurts so bad, because we've come so far.
But we are a state absolutely held hostage by a gerrymandered legislature, and a Republican supermajority that's just wildly out of step with everyday people here. And then we got Ron DeSantis. He made the cynical approach to running for President with a campaign that was basically a think-tank-manufactured list of issues that he believed if he repeated robotically, he could ride to the Republican nomination.
He tripled down on what he believed was the ‘perfect’ formula — the ‘Free’ State of Florida, an anti-woke agenda, a culture warrior — their twisted version of parental rights, which is basically taking rights away from most parents in service to an extreme fringe.
It was a cynical attempt to appeal to a Republican primary base. And then in the last election cycle in 2022, when he was re-elected Governor, there was a deep collapse of Democratic turnout in Florida.
HSC: So they made the fatal mistake of obeying in advance.
SP: And the Democrats were wildly outspent. But even so, DeSantis didn’t get any more votes than in the previous election, but he read his win as an endorsement of his manufactured culture war strategy.
And so our job in that moment in 2022, heading into 2023, was to reshape the narrative and mobilize people.
That was when DeSantis really unleashed the first 20-plus anti-LGBTQ laws in Florida. That's the year that the ‘Don't Say Gay’ bill was first introduced.
What we said in that moment was we are going to own this narrative. We have to show the country that Ron DeSantis is actually anti-parental rights, that this is censorship, authoritarianism, and about control.
We had to show that he is willing to demonize and harm the most vulnerable people in our state in order to profit his political ambitions.
And I must say, I think we did a phenomenal job of labeling him to the country.
I don’t think anybody’s heard of the ‘The Parental Rights and Education Act’ — that's what they call the bill. But everybody’s heard of the ‘Don’t Say Gay’ bill. Those were our words for what they were actually doing.
HSC: DeSantis is now synonymous with this mean-spirited, anti-gay, anti-immigrant stance. No one likes book bans, everyone loves teachers, everyone cares about children. He is now associated with all of this mean and cruel anti-gay culture war junk.
SP: People have come to understand that. And late in his campaign for President, he stopped using the word ‘woke’, he began trying to move away from these things. And when he came back to Florida right after he suspended his campaign, he tried to scrape all of this off of his résumé and started saying that he never believed in book bans. And that it was a misapplication of the law, that people have misunderstood his words, and all of these things, because he came to realize how all it did was tarnish his reputation.
Our job is to make sure that all of that was permanent, not just for him, but for how he represents a whole style of conservative politicians. You know, like Governor Abbott in Texas, who are all working this playbook, and we have to prove that it was a losing strategy.
HSC: Being in Florida over the weekend, you could feel how out of step his policies are. How did you go about getting people out of fear and into action?
SP: I would say — step one, we reframed the narrative. We knew we had to be super disciplined about how we showed what was driving their agenda and how we talked about it.
We understood all of these bills, including the attacks on the telling of history in our schools and the attacks on diversity, equality, and inclusion in our schools, the book bans, and all of it is part of the same cloth — a cynical strategy saying he’s claiming to be fighting for families, when really what he's doing is attacking. He’s attacking all of us in an inclusive and broad society.
And so right when he announced the ‘Don’t Say Gay’ bill, we raised money to cut television commercials — something we had never done before. We put them on air in Tallahassee. The first one is called My Heroes. We helped raise the profile of what he was doing here nationally, and by July of 2023, it was the most well known piece of legislation in the United States.
So that was step one, you have to really name what they're doing and what is motivating them and be very disciplined. Never let them run from their résumé.
HSC: What you are describing is a broader point in how to win in a propaganda war. Because I think so often, people are caught on the back foot because they don't even know how to frame the pushback. So to be able to call it what it is, and to never deviate from it is really important.
SP: That’s right. So then we said, ‘Alright, as these laws are coming, we have to make these commitments: we will stop and kill every bill that we can, and we will use everything we have’.
And it was going to take a new playbook because the old style of how we used to work won’t accomplish our goals.
We determined we had to mitigate and lessen the impact of these bills and amend anything that we can't stop outright to make a less harmful impact.
And then we said, anything that does pass, we will try to have it softened up in committee and through testimony, to prepare for legal challenges.
And so in the first year, they passed something like six bills, but we managed to kill 15 of them.
A bunch of really bad ones passed but even the ones that passed, we were able to get crucial carve-outs. One example is the bill that banned transgender people access to the restroom that aligns with their gender identity. Originally it was going to ban access to any bathroom, public or private, and we were able to restrict it to government buildings only. And similarly, they tried to ban gender affirming care — health insurance for gender affirming care. And we were able to restrict that to government-issued health insurance. So the Government or government entities could not provide gender affirming care, but private insurance still could.
HSC: What I could also feel in my trip to Florida is that Ron DeSantis, who fascism scholar Ruth Ben-Ghiat calls a ‘true fascist’, has paradoxically unleashed so much love with his cruel policies and that love has manifested into meaningful action.
SP: One thing you have to remember in moments where we're going backwards, there was a period of about eight or 10 months where our state was just in an all out state of panic, there was no silver bullet. We knew it was gonna take time and be difficult.
But in those moments when it feels so scary, like it’s all falling apart, you have to remember that you cannot erase consciousness.
They tried erasing us from public life, but guess what? We spent decades in Florida building strong partnerships. And in our school districts, students don't have an issue with LGBTQ students at all. They are a highly visible part of the school community. There are so many teachers and district leaders and school board members who are on our side.
So DeSantis is unable to erase what people already know. And because he can’t erase consciousness, it’s in that scary moment where we remembered how to fight back — 3,200 parents, students, volunteers, began showing up to 500 school board meetings this year. That's a real number.
And because they made their presence known, it gave our allies in those districts the courage to stand up and fight. There was a moment where they were trying very hard to scare school board members into believing that Ron DeSantis would just remove them from office if there was any hint that they weren't enforcing his law, and he did remove three school board members in Broward County in September of 2023 — one of the most progressive school districts in the state.
And that was the year that a lot of districts stopped celebrating LGBTQ history month and you know, people got really scared. But when we started showing up and we had our unified message, the manufactured extremist group, Moms for Liberty, backed down, or stopped showing up altogether. We were outnumbering them five to one.
We learned to just keep fighting. You're not gonna win every one of these battles, you're gonna lose a whole lot of them, but you have to keep fighting until you start to get a win.
(He tells a beautiful story about the transformation of Orlando after the Pulse nightclub massacre).
HSC: Out of crisis and loss, beautiful things can blossom.
Please read every word of the report here:
I wept during the interview, and I wept while I was writing it.
These are human stories. Thank you for entrusting me with them.
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