Ron DeSantis, Florida’s Republican hard-right governor, will be termed out of office in barely 10 months’ time. Civil rights groups watching a slew of new restrictive laws passing through the state’s legislature say his bequest will be a “police state”, where government officials dictate what residents can do, say or believe.
They point in particular to two House bills they say restrict free speech, and which have already found favor with Florida’s veto-proof Republican majority:
HB1471 would give a handful of state officials unprecedented power to designate as a “terrorist group” any organization whose aims and policies they do not like, including non-profits operating for religious, charitable and social justice purposes.
HB945 creates a “counterintelligence and counterterrorism” unit within the Florida department of law enforcement that critics say will be used to spy on groups or individuals whose “actions, views, or opinions” are deemed “a threat or are inimical to the interests of this state”.
But there are others: an education bill that blocks state funds from any campus where students “advocate for diversity, equity, and inclusion, or promote or engage in political or social activism”, such as the gun control walkouts that followed the 2018 mass shooting at Parkland’s Marjory Stoneman Douglas high school.
Another House bill that passed smoothly through committee scrutiny seeks to limit anonymous complaints against law enforcement, which will lead to “fewer investigations and more coverups”.
And a “foreign influence” bill looks to outlaw certain groups that, among other criteria, are identified as engaging in “political activity” in the state.
Opponents see that proposal as an attempt to crystalize DeSantis’s December executive order that designated the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), a leading Muslim civil rights group in the US, as a “foreign terrorist organization”.
In response, several of Florida’s prominent civil rights and voter advocacy groups have aligned to challenge DeSantis’s final-year agenda, and denounced the bills at a joint press conference this week.
“This is how a police state is built,” said Amina Spahic, spokesperson for Florida For All.
“Regimes don’t begin with mass execution. They begin by pressuring ordinary people into silence. We normalize surveillance, fear and punishment for dissent. Step by step, those in power have tested how far they can go.”
The Florida chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has been a long-time critic, and courtroom opponent, of many of DeSantis’s extremist policies since he took office in January 2019, including repeated attacks on the transgender community, immigrants, voting rights and free speech.
Its executive director, Bacardi Jackson, told the Guardian that she saw DeSantis attempting to round out his final term with a flurry of red-meat actions for the Republican base, perhaps intending to pursue another crack at the Republican presidential nomination after his 2024 flop.
“His legacy overall, and certainly this legislative session, is a reflection of the climate he has built in this state and it’s a climate of rolling back individual rights and freedoms, but also of concentrating power in the hands of a few in the state while also eviscerating local authority and rule,” she said.
“The bills that are here right now are deeply disturbing and concerning. Some of them feel a bit more dangerous, such as the domestic terrorist organization bill, which is taking us back to the Johns committee time in Florida, where we went on boogeyman hunts to basically go after people and organizations that the state didn’t like.”
Jackson, and others, say it is no coincidence that Florida Republicans have developed an obsession with “domestic terrorism” at the same time the Trump administration uses the phrase to smear opponents of its violent anti-immigration operations in Minnesota and elsewhere, including Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti, two US citizen protestors shot and killed by federal agents.
“We are still seeing that inclination rise again in Florida, and domestic terrorism is the one that really raised alarms for me,” she said.
“Because once you can go after the infrastructure of people power, the organizations that help to organize and galvanize and support communities in their constitutional rights to assemble and to protest their government, then you’re really moving into complete authoritarian control.”
To Equality Florida, the state’s largest LGBTQ+ advocacy group, the terrorism bill is “manufactured crisis” that distracts from last week’s revelation that James Uthmeier, Florida’s unelected attorney general and DeSantis’s former chief of staff, was accepting $100,000 a year of public money for a two hour-a-week teaching role at the University of Florida.
“This political theater does real harm,” said Jon Harris Maurer, the group’s public policy director.
“The legislation creates a dangerous new weapon that can be turned against any organization that falls out of favor with those in power, and once the governor and cabinet designate any organization a domestic terrorist organization the consequences, which include felony penalties, are swift and severe.
“Here’s the chilling part, there’s no clear definition of what triggers that designation. Could it be a rally on the Capitol steps? An op-ed calling for someone’s removal from office? Could it include something as simple as disagreeing with the surgeon general’s views on abolishing vaccine policies in schools?
“We’ve already seen how this administration weaponizes power against dissent. Our attorney general has opened baseless investigations into anything from a wine bar operated by a political opponent to a statewide ballot initiative that he opposes.”
DeSantis’s office did not respond to the Guardian’s request for comment.
Danny Alvarez, a state Republican congressman of Miami, who sponsored the surveillance bill creating the state’s first counterterrorism unit, told the Florida Trident that he was “very, very aware” of questions over first amendment protections, and was planning an amendment to address what the outlet said were “dangers the bill posed to free speech and risks of political persecution”.
“But just understand, this is going after terrorists, nation state bad actors, not political speech,” said Alvarez, who earlier this month demanded that a Florida high school principal who allowed students to join an immigration protest be stripped of her credentials.
His assurance was rejected by Pamela Burch Fort, a representative of the Florida conference of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).
“The totality of actions that we’re seeing here today in Florida, the anti-protest bill passed a few years ago, the Halo Act, the counter-intelligence bill, and these domestic terrorism bills, harken back to the days of J Edgar Hoover and the Johns Commission,” she said.
“It creates suspicion of legitimate activity and definitely imposes a chill and an air of intimidation.”
