Why Are We Like This?

Thanks to supermajorities in the state legislature, Gov. Ron DeSantis has full, unfettered control of Florida's legislative agenda -- and he's using it. Last week, DeSantis' friendly coterie of lawmakers sent him a slate of bills aimed at burnishing his national credentials for an eventual run at the Presidency.

Alongside Jason Garcia (@Jason_Garcia) from Seeking Rents, we explore DeSantis and the legislature's joint efforts to punish asylum seekers, Florida taxpayers, formerly incarcerated voters, and

We also talked with Thomas about his finger-lickin' chicken of a weekend at the expense of wife-beater Joe Carollo.

It's been a few months since we talked about the confounding case of Eric Silagy and Florida Power & Light, and while deductive reasoning could lead some folks to the conclusion that the nation's largest public utility engaged in election tampering at the behest of its CEO, we generously extend the benefit of the doubt.

We're joined on this episode by Mario Ariza (@marioarizabaez) whose recent reporting alongside the Floodlight News team presaged the announcement that Silagy will step down from his post in April. We talked about that and more on this super-sized episode.

Follow Floodlight News FloodlightNews.org.

In Manatee County, teachers have their marching orders. Educators and administrators are clearing books from not just school libraries but class libraries. We talked with Judd Legum (@JuddLegum) from Popular Information about his reporting on the pressure teachers are feeling from our censorious government and education department, and the reaction they have gotten for raising red flags.

You can read more of Judd's reporting and subscribe to Popular Information at popular.info.

Our humble podcast achieves the rare Eskamani Trifecta as we welcome back Ida Eskamani to help us preview what promises to be Florida's most unhinged legislative session in living memory, with GOP supermajorities in both houses and a governor focused on earning national conservative bona fides. We discuss the threats to groups like renters, LGBTQ Floridians, Black communities, and undocumented immigrants and their families.

Super fun stuff, but we wrap up on a high note with our Oscar picks.

We’re back for a new season and year, and the Gods have smiled on us with a series of increasingly ridiculous Florida-adjacent stories. We touched on former-Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro’s Florida winter that landed him in a hospital while his supporters in Brasilia stormed the capital. We also caught up on kitchen table issues — literally — talking about the GOP’s new fixation on gas stoves. Also, eggs, wtf. 

Our main story is a local one about how members of the Miami-Dade Democratic Party’s are attempting to coup chairman Robert Dempster over what amounts to little more than trivial bookkeeping errors, and the real history of inter-party animosity in a county that appears to be lurching hard to the right as a hub for global fascism. 

The United States is the largest art market in the world, and with its unique combination of rich people and light oversight, Florida is a natural nexus for art-related fraud. This week, Tess Davis, Executive Director of the Antiquities Coalition, guides us through this new and foreign world of art, antiquities, and the fraudsters who bring their chaotic energy to Art Basel Miami each year. 

Come for the interview about daring art heists, stay for a rousing game of Baseled in Miami!

You can learn more about the Antiquities Coalition at theantiquitiescoalition.org and across all the social networks. 

(Also, while Picasso’s Visage aux Mans has not been recovered according to the Internet, it does appear to be for sale on Sotheby’s website!)

Billy Corben, director of hit documentaries like Cocaine Cowboys, The U, and most recently HULU’s God Forbid: The Sex Scandal That Brought Down A Dynasty, joins us to talk about Miami’s undisputed status as the capital of crypto scams and million-dollar ape jpegs. 

Come for the crypto convo where we dissect Art Basel’s role in supporting the wheezing, dying collection of scams that we consider the “crypto industry” and stay for a rousing game of Guess The Grifter, the new quiz show that was made just for Miami. 

You can follow Billy on Twitter @BillyCorben and you can stream God Forbid now on HULU and Disney+.

A bit of a palette cleanser from politics and midterm elections this week. It’s Thanksgiving week, and we’ve pulled a story from the annals of Florida’s violent recent past that centers on one family’s tragic holiday, a salacious story that may have retreated from public memory but one that we hope to use as a backdoor to talk about the state of mental healthcare in Florida.

But first, we kick off the week with three big stories from Florida that will make you, too, ask the question, "Why Are We Like This?"

Follow Thomas Kennedy @Tomaskenn. Follow David Quiñones @david_quinones. Follow Gerald Doherty @TostoneSopran.

Music in this episode is by David Rosen.

(Ok, you'll probably notice that we recorded this shortly after the midterm elections, as various races that are now settled were still up in the air. But we turned out to be right so stick a sock in it.)

With the midterm elections a week in the rearview and a bit of perspective, we talked with Kartik Krishnaiyer (@kkfla) of the Florida Squeeze (@Flasqueeze) about the disastrous failures of the Florida Democratic Party to mount anything resembling a fight in the recent cycle and what that portends for the future. We got into the shambolic Party leadership, weak candidates, corrupt consultant class, and other variables that diminished Democrat outcomes in Florida. Can it be reversed? What would that look like? Listen to find out!

Following yet another crushing defeat for Florida Democrats, we caught up with Danny Rivero (@TooMuchMe), a Miami journalist at NPR affiliate WLRN to figure out exactly why our politics are like this.

One issue that Democrats ceded ground on was immigration, where conservative narratives dominated, centering around crime, demonization, and midnight flights to Martha’s Vineyard. Danny talked with us about the contemporary landscape of immigration as a political football, and about his limited podcast series Detention By Design, exploring the dark history of the US’s use of prisons to detain tens of thousands of immigrants today.