A usefully absurd mirror of Florida's tiny dictatorship
A usefully absurd mirror of Florida's tiny dictatorship
The spectacle of Rick Nolte’s DeSantis-powered impunity reflects a stupid, petty, and weak dictatorship. It has overpowered Brian Haas and Grady Judd; but it runs from self-respect and dignity.
I’ve had a small influx of readers I perceive as non-local recently. For their benefit, I want to note that I write, quite often, about issues specific to my community of Lakeland and Polk County, on Florida’s I-4 Corridor.
But my articles almost always connect to issues you’re probably experiencing in your own communities — or that we’re all experiencing together in this era. I hope you’ll stick around. I think this piece illustrates the value of considering macro forces at the local, ground level.
All dictatorships are stupid, inefficient, petty, cowardly, and corrupt. That’s because everything revolves around the dictator’s fragile feelings and selfish interests. Everything.
You can’t tell a dictator the truth. And you certainly can’t embarrass him if you want to stay in his good graces and advance yourself — or stay out of the reach of his power to harm you.
Today, in Florida, we live in the dumbest and weakest of dictatorships. But it’s still a dictatorship, which I don’t think most people have fully grasped.
That’s why the three crank GOP Polk School Board candidates from the CCDF1 can document their own crimes with complete impunity. As a collective, the CCDF crank slate itself has cited in writing at least five clear criminal violations of Florida election law. All I’ve done is quote them. (To be fair, Jill Sessions has only been implicated in a crime by Terry Clark; she did not document it herself.)
That’s on top of hiring a church-cheating convicted criminal with 6 shady PPP loans to run at least two of their three campaigns.
Many good folks I know dread Florida becoming the dictatorship that we already are. But the impunity of the CCDF criminal slate — stretching back to June, really —demonstrates how we crossed that line as a state and society in the last 18 months or so.
We slipped easily from gerrymandered, badly-governed, one-party GOP state to personal dictatorship when Republican elected “officials” and unelected “leaders” completely and willingly surrendered any individual human agency to cowardly personal will of Ron DeSantis and his small army of base cranks. There is no Florida Republican Party anymore. There’s just DeSantis; and the GOP legislative and judicial branch has completely surrendered the apparatus of state to him, personally.
Case in point: even under Trump and Rick Scott, in 2018, I think State Attorney Brian Haas and Sheriff Grady Judd would have actually done something, in public, months ago about the open lawlessness of the GOP cranks in this Polk County School Board election cycle.
But abject DeSantis-ism in 2022 paralyzed and emasculated them. That’s what dictatorships do. They capture, then destroy, independent law enforcement and legal systems and officers.
What Grady used to be is gone
Grady Judd used to be — sort of — the dictator of Polk County. But he’s not anymore. He’s surrendered that power to become just another uniformed agent of DeSantis. And a weak one at that. He’s not funny or fearsome or unique anymore. He’s just another tiresome political apparatchik with a badge and guns. He has surrendered meaningful influence.
Grady’s weird degradation dance with Saga Stevin blew up in both their faces last year. He just threw a petulant toddler fit because he couldn’t force the School Board to impose an anti-parent, anti-learning “opt-in” policy on “controversial” books. And he almost cost non-crank Republican School Board candidate Justin Sharpless his race in August just by endorsing him in an R+13 primary turnout — against Sara Jones, a progressive black woman.
But DeSantis would have removed Sara Jones if she won anyway. DeSantis may well remove the rest of the board over the opt-in/opt-out book-banning silliness. I absolutely would have been removed as an elected board member by now.
So in a DeSantis dictatorship, Grady is moot. Unnecessary, even for the cranks.
(Grady’s only real School Board endorsement success was Democrat Kay Fields, a black woman, who recently read a PRIDE proclamation with great sincerity and bucked him on books. LOL. I’d love to know the full backstory of that endorsement.)
Anyway, the sheriff should really just retire to his moon pies and let somebody more serious try to clean up his 70 percent murder rate spike. He claims to think Jill Sessions’ church-cheating, convicted criminal, 6-PPP loan collecting campaign manager is a better citizen than Toni Morrison.
Whatever.
Grady will never get voted out of office. But emotionally, it’s all downhill from here. He can keep imposing his power and his guns with DeSantis’ permission; but he’s well past his peak of adulation. Broad-based, small-d democratic worship and celebrity have always mattered far more to him than good law enforcement. He’ll settle for fear; but love is what he craves. You can withhold it and wound him.
Ron DeSantis endorsed Rick Nolte — hitched his tiny dictator prestige to him ahead of his own election to stay tiny dictator.
Thus, like Haas, Grady knows that treating Rick Nolte and the CCDFers like former State Attorney Jerry Hill treated former judge candidate Christie Thornhill will embarrass and diminish and potentially hurt DeSantis, the boss. And like all subjects of tiny dictators, Brian Haas and Grady Judd know that DeSantis’ feelings and/or personal interests are the sine qua non of their own positions now. Full stop.
That’s what happens when you surrender without a fight to a petty and quite cowardly dictator. You live in humiliated complicity with corrupt mediocrity. You also become small and boring. Nobody really cares about a flunkie.
Dignity — and influence — in the time of dictatorship
Rick Nolte is nothing — a bumbling, gross, self-declared campaign criminal. If there is a less capable elected official in Florida, please point this person out to me so I can mock that person too.
His elevation and protection by dictator power is a clear indicator of decline in state-level and county-level leadership. Again, dictatorships are always evidence of leadership decline. The public performance of Brian Haas, relative to previous State Attorney Jerry Hill, on election crime is evidence of dictatorship decline.
I’m proud to say Lakeland — where I have the most influence — is bucking that trend of decline. On the ground, as a city, politically and socially, we are resisting the trickle down of the DeSantis dictatorship. (Winter Haven and northeast Polk seem to be as well; but I know Lakeland better.) We Lakelanders broke our own local “Harrell First” city dictatorship without even winning an election against it. Its remnants — particularly the non-Harrell parts — are actually being quite constructive and helpful today. Even Lakeland Leads has made a good, pro-public education hire. We’re a reasonably collaborative, forward-looking city mostly at peace with itself right now. It’s a good place to live; and we fight for it.
Together, the productive, inclusive parts of our city crushed the CCDF’s beloved, lib-hating Saga Stevin 67-33 in last year’s mayor’s race.
Make no mistake: in Lakeland, we’re still subject to the DeSantis dictatorship, just like Brian Haas and Grady Judd. But we’re not complicit in it like they are. (Well, ok, maybe Jennifer Canady is.)
I’m proud of that general lack of complicity. I think I’ve contributed to it. And it’s a platform to build from for the future. As a community, we’re not nearly so inclined to bend the knee as our emotionally compliant county brethren.
A useful absurdity for keeping a dictatorship weak and vulnerable
Yes, it seems shocking that Rick Nolte and the CCDF, like Saga Stevin and other cranks, have the power to render Grady Judd and Brian Haas mute; but dictatorships always create shocking absurdities.
Nolte beautifully illustrates that fact.
He represents the sheer, naked absurdity of how thoroughly Ron DeSantis dominates Grady Judd and Brian Haas and their instruments of official power in Polk County. Nolte is a DeSantis-made man. That’s all that matters. Personal impunity is the currency of dictatorships — and mafias. DeSantis, through Nolte, rubs that in Grady and Brian’s faces every day that he’s School Board-member elect with self-reported crimes sitting in the open on his campaign finance documents.
I could lament and/or stress over the fact that the GOP’s slavish loyalty to the DeSantis dictatorship has elevated a person as ridiculous as “T.I.T.S.” Nolte to some theoretical official power over your kids and your property/sales tax money — not to mention a free pass from the law.
But I see no reason to lament or stress.
I find Nolte quite useful today — and very useful moving ahead if he ever takes office — in mocking this hollow dictatorship.
DeSantis has now made personal dictatorship a Florida civic custom. The custom will outlive him as a Florida politician if he wins re-election as our state’s tiny dictator. (He will not willingly acknowledge a loss, I assure you.) Every GOP flunkie who bent the knee will want the personal dictator mantle after DeSantis abandons Florida in the hope of repeating the process as president.
So, reversing this new custom is a long-term, generational fight. We have a big hole to dig out of to re-establish anything resembling popular self-respecting, self-government in this state. Ridicule is one of our most powerful weapons against a stupid, weak dictatorship. It was a potent weapon in killing the “Harrell First” dictatorship in Lakeland — PPP and Kate Wallace, anyone. LOL.
And the DeSantis dictatorship is still quite weak.
You’ll know it’s powerful when it confiscates my assets, uses the instruments of state power to trump something up on me (or someone I love), or simply drags me out of my house, with a gun to my head and a sack over it — just for existing and trash-talking it.
Grady and Brian aren’t there, yet. Neither is DeSantis. He doesn’t have the guts or reach for that kind of order yet. See his abject cowardice on abortion, the DoE/Jefferson scandal, and the 2020 Polk “teacher strike.”
But DeSantis does have that kind of order in him, morally, as a person, if he ever feels enough impunity. No conscience would stop him. Grady and Brian would probably obey that order, as would the Canady/Stargel courts.
The official jump from “Nolte is bulletproof” to “put a bullet in Billy” is, I suspect, not quite as far as I would like it to be.
Through studying history, human nature, and my ancestors, I happen to think that talking about it openly — and daring them all to do it — is the best way to prevent such an order. But I could be wrong.
Nolte as your mirror
I want to talk directly for a second to the GOP cranks and the people who know they’re cranks, but who enabled them and then surrendered to them. (Those of you who didn’t have my sincere respect; and you know who you are.)
I’m an NPA. But more importantly, I’m a responsible, law-abiding, self-respecting grown man. The best part of that — the best part of being me, not you, in public life — is that I don’t have to pretend, like you do, that Jill Sessions, Rick Nolte and Ron DeSantis are anything other than what they are.
I don’t have to pretend anything is other than it is — at least until ya’ll come to me with violence over my refusal to pretend. We’ll see if that ever happens. (It might.)
I’m also happy that I do not suffer from your need to feel a sense of community from the fake grievance, abject compliance, tribal impunity, and petty cruelty to the vulnerable that today defines the character of Team GOP for some reason. I don’t feel any sense of belonging or sexual charge from chanting “Lock her up” about anybody — even those who deserve it.
Your need and/or tolerance for all of that is why it was so easy for DeSantis to confiscate all your dignity in public life and impose Rick Noltes and Ed Shoemakers and CCDFers on you, dear GOP friends, as a grotesque joke and display of power. Rick Scott must be kicking himself because he could have done it, too.
I know that I can’t argue you out of your susceptibility to this.
There is no limit to the corruption you will swallow to feel a sense of lib-hating community. You will swindle yourselves into oblivion for it and whine when people notice. So, believe me, I understand my limitations as a persuasive writer and communicator.
For now, I far prefer to just laugh at your weakness and your need for my approval — and then demonstrate that I can render Judd and Haas as silent as Nolte has without publicly declaring that I committed crimes or sucking up to the tiny dictator DeSantis.
But if you ever get tired of getting fleeced by hate grifters, I’m eager to talk about a different, far more dignified way.
It’s true that those of us who are uninclined to bend the knee in Polk County now have to live with Rick Nolte as a school board-member elect. But he has no real personal power or capability; and he’s got to live with us, too.
So do you — until you kill us. LOL.
I’m not trying to convince Brian Haas or Grady Judd or you of anything. I’m just trying to hold up a mirror; and Rick Nolte makes a fabulous, glimmering mirror — for them and you. The willingness to hold up that mirror, which you all know is accurate, is power and influence in a dictatorship, too.
Who’s having more fun in your tiny dictatorship?
That’s why I’m having considerably more fun than Grady Judd or Brian Haas — or you — in talking about Rick Nolte. And, I suspect, I’m having considerably more fun than Nolte himself, his looming government salary check for what will be a do-nothing job not withstanding.
That’s the difference between having dignity and influence — and not having it — within in a weak dictatorship.
Indeed, at this point, Hillsborough State Attorney Andrew Warren, who DeSantis removed from office just for existing while Grady Judd trash-talked him in person has much more dignity and influence in the DeSantis dictatorship than does his Warren’s former colleague Brian Haas. Warren has personal courage and agency that Haas has not demonstrated.
When and if the pleasant and likable Haas — or even Judd — demonstrates any of the same agency as cantankerous Jerry Hill, much less Andrew Warren, I will be the first to celebrate his blow against the DeSantis dictatorship criminal cranks and their weak, pathetic enablers.
The so-called County Citizens Defending Freedom (CCDF) is Polk County’s version of Moms for Liberty and those other stupid, pro-dictatorship groups.
Here to read about school libraries. Thanks for the update.