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It was 10 years in the past that “Florida Man” emerged as a buzzy Twitter account documenting outlandish headlines from the Sunshine State, however the meme will be traced again to the 1500s, throughout the days of Spanish explorer Juan Ponce de León’s supposed quest for the fountain of youth in Florida.
Within the Washington Submit final yr, Julio Capó Jr. and Tyler Gillespie tracked the origins of the meme via centuries of colonial and state historical past, and concluded, “The web turned Florida Man right into a Southern Gothic determine of indulgence, decadence and questionable selections.”
With the 2024 presidential marketing campaign about to ramp up, Republicans are dealing with the prospect of getting two Florida males as frontrunners. One is the previous president, Donald Trump, who regardless of two impeachments and a sea of authorized troubles, nonetheless retains a powerful maintain on the occasion’s base from his Mar-a-Lago property in Palm Seaside and vowed at Saturday’s Conservative Political Motion Convention to be the agent of “retribution” on behalf of aggrieved voters.
The opposite is the state’s culture-warring governor, Ron DeSantis, the so-far undeclared candidate who grew up on Florida’s Gulf Coast. He’s speaking up his new e-book and successful the assist of many rich donors as early polls present he’s the strongest Republican challenger to Trump.
Trump has road-tested a wide range of derogatory nicknames for DeSantis, whereas the governor has solely pushed again obliquely. But inside their occasion, Trump and DeSantis are aligned — and on the reverse finish of the ideological spectrum from one more Florida man, former Gov. Jeb Bush, who was the early chief of the Republican subject for 2016.
“On this atmosphere, old-guard company Republicanism is less than the duty at hand,” DeSantis declares in his e-book, sounding a notice that Trump might properly agree with. The governor, contemporary from his battle with Disney, implied that he’s finest suited to oppose “massive, publicly traded companies lining up behind leftist causes.”
At CPAC, Trump stated, the GOP is “by no means going again to the occasion of Paul Ryan, Karl Rove and Jeb Bush.”
How did DeSantis rise to probably problem Trump? Justin Sayfie, a former adviser to Jeb Bush and accomplice at a lobbying agency, attributes “his speedy nationwide ascent” to “the early pandemic in 2020 when he grew to become a hero to thousands and thousands for filling a vacuum of management at a time of world disaster and uncertainty.”
“Susceptible older adults in Florida witnessed how he prioritized their well being and security by prohibiting transfers of sufferers contaminated with the coronavirus from hospitals into long-term care amenities, in contrast to in New York,” Sayfie wrote. “Mother and father of Florida schoolchildren witnessed how he targeted on preserving faculties open, so college students wouldn’t fall behind of their studying. Small-business house owners witnessed how he battled to get and preserve companies open, in order that they and their workers might proceed to feed their households throughout the pandemic.”
And the flood of vacationers to Florida took notice. Furthermore, DeSantis has a knack for selecting points that unite Republicans and divide Democrats, Sayfie noticed.
Studying the governor’s new e-book, Jay Parini famous that “in every single place … one senses his rage in opposition to political correctness. He rails, on almost each web page, about ‘the woke agenda’ that he sees permeating nearly each degree of life in America…”
“The title of this e-book should absolutely be ironic: ‘The Braveness to Be Free.’ DeSantis is all concerning the restriction of freedoms wherever attainable. He needs to cancel librarians who enable children to learn sure Black or LGBTQ writers and to fireplace tenured professors within the state college system who educate ‘woke’ concepts. He needs to limit the rights of girls looking for abortions and people of LGBTQ folks looking for to stay their lives. He hopes to punish companies, such because the Walt Disney Firm, for criticizing his insurance policies.”
In Parini’s view, DeSantis is “a cold man, with a coronary heart of ice and — like so many politicians on each the precise and left nowadays — stuffed with resentments, grudges and the urge to destroy anybody who doesn’t agree with him. … I shudder to assume what he would possibly do if handed the presidential bully pulpit.”
The primary primaries received’t begin till early subsequent yr, so there’s nonetheless loads of time for GOP contenders from states aside from Florida to jostle for the nomination.
For extra on politics:
SE Cupp: CPAC allowed Trump’s ‘cartoonish shows of buffoonery’
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Paul Begala: The transfer that’s certain to elect Trump in 2024
John Avlon: Republicans shouldn’t underestimate Tim Scott
For so long as folks have existed, they’ve questioned concerning the huge questions — why we’re right here, what comes subsequent and whether or not there may be life elsewhere within the universe. “The necessary factor is to not cease questioning,” stated Albert Einstein. Within the day-to-day swirl of life, adults might set these queries apart, however they continue to be entrance of thoughts for a lot of youngsters.
This weekend, CNN Opinion launched the primary in a sequence of movies that includes questions from children and solutions from a few of the world’s foremost specialists. In a collaboration with the Templeton Basis, CNN’s Kirsi Goldynia and Mackenzie Happe produced a video by which Anthea, a 9-year-old Brooklyn scholar, requested theoretical physicist Brian Greene, “What existed earlier than the universe?” We hope you’ll watch Greene’s reply — and tell us what you assume.
“Pupil mortgage debt is crushing, and it has exploded in the previous few a long time,” noticed Jill Filipovic. Lots of the greater than 43 million People who collectively owe $1.75 trillion {dollars} cheered when President Joe Biden introduced a plan to forgive as a lot as $20,000 per borrower.
However six Republican-led states and two debt holders have filed lawsuits difficult the coverage, claiming it’s “past the scope of Biden’s energy; he’s utilizing Covid as a pretext, they are saying, for a legislation that needs to be accepted by Congress,” Filipovic famous. Supreme Court docket justices heard arguments within the case Tuesday.
“The Republican speaking level,” she added “is that Biden’s plan is an enormous taxpayer giveaway, and that he cunningly used Covid as an excuse to push via a coverage Congress would have by no means accepted. So it’s value asking Republican politicians: Why received’t Congress act to alleviate scholar mortgage debt — even when it means making the uber-wealthy and huge companies pay extra in taxes — and enhance the financial and private futures of so many younger folks?”
The US Division of Power lent new credibility to the idea that the virus that causes Covid-19 by chance leaked from a lab in Wuhan, China, saying final week that it has “low confidence” in that evaluation. Then FBI Director Christopher Wray stated his company thinks the pandemic “most probably” resulted from a “potential lab incident in Wuhan.”
Peter Bergen famous that “we might by no means actually know the way the Covid-19 virus originated as a result of the Chinese language authorities didn’t enable worldwide inspectors into Wuhan for weeks after a brand new mysterious, deadly virus first emerged there in December 2019.”
Covid has killed 6.8 million folks, together with 1.1 million People. “And but the USA hasn’t had any systematic examination by the federal government of how this occurred,” Bergen wrote. A “Covid-19 fee have to be fashioned to research how the virus emerged, which responses to the virus labored or didn’t work because it unfold throughout the USA and the teachings realized for a way finest to arrange for the subsequent pandemic.”
The discharge of Fox Chairman Rupert Murdoch’s deposition in a authorized submitting as a part of a lawsuit filed by Dominion Voting Programs has ignited a brand new debate over the position of Fox Information.
“Murdoch acknowledged that some Fox Information hosts — Sean Hannity, Jeanine Pirro, Maria Bartiromo and former host Lou Dobbs — endorsed lies that the 2020 presidential election was stolen; and that he gave Jared Kushner confidential details about President Joe Biden’s advertisements and debate technique in 2020,” David Zurawik famous.
“Murdoch’s deposition clearly reveals the hypocrisy, dishonesty and lack of something resembling journalistic ethics on the prime and in entrance of the digicam at Fox Information.”
Zurawik thought-about how it will have an effect on the community’s future, writing, “For one factor, Fox was by no means a information community to start with. Whereas a information community is a platform constructed on the premise that considered one of its first obligations is offering residents with vetted info that they’ll use to be free and self-governing, Fox was based in 1996 as a political platform and run by Roger Ailes, a political operative.”
Now, Zurawik argued, “It’s turn out to be a lot deeper culturally. Fox Information is a world view, a way of life, a manner of seeing the world, a 24/7 heat tub of false nostalgia and aggrievement primarily for older adults — a few of whom are possible feeling left behind or threatened by the adjustments in American life.”
4 years in the past, Lori Lightfoot received almost 74% of the vote for Chicago’s mayor. On Tuesday, she did not advance to the runoff, having gained the assist of simply 17% of voters, David Axelrod identified.
“Crime — a perennial situation that has bedeviled mayors for many years — is much and away the highest concern of Chicago voters. And whereas she might declare some progress up to now yr over 2021, Lightfoot was extensively thought-about a failure on the important situation of public security,” Axelrod wrote. However there have been different points. “Lightfoot’s fall is a extra sophisticated story that goes to a clenched-fist, go-it-alone model of management that made consensus exhausting to construct and drove many who ought to have been her allies away.”
How’s your Sunday going? In keeping with TikTok creator Marisa Jo Mayes, many individuals spend the day placing collectively “insanely lengthy to-do lists” and feeling “paralyzing” stress to get issues prepared for the beginning of the work week.
“Because of this,” Holly Thomas wrote, “we hit Mondays primed for stress and unable to focus or have interaction correctly with work. This sense of chaotic unease ripples throughout the week, costing us extra when it comes to productiveness and vitality than any quantity of effort can compensate for. Naked minimal Monday devotees as an alternative make the aware resolution to coast on the primary day of the working week, thus conserving their vitality. ‘It was like some magic spell came to visit me,’ Mayes explains. ‘I felt higher. I wasn’t overwhelmed, and I truly received extra achieved than I anticipated.’”
As a millennial, Thomas feels for Mayes and different GenZers greedy for options to overwork. “The primary a number of years of my working life handed in a haze of fluorescent workplace gentle and breakfasts consumed any time between 4 and 10 am consisting fully of caffeine drugs, Pepsi Max and low. I made much less cash every month than I’d be charged in lease a decade later and carried out my enterprise and relationships in a everlasting state of adrenalized exhaustion. …”
“Not like millennials, who had been not less than motivated by the hope that it might all be value it ultimately, there’s no such gentle on the horizon for Gen Z.”
Newspapers throughout the nation introduced they might cease operating “Dilbert” after the sketch’s creator Scott Adams ranted about Black People as a “hate group” and advised White folks to “get the hell away” from them.
Adams complained he was being cancelled, however, as Dean Obeidallah wrote, “this isn’t ‘cancel tradition,’ however ‘consequence tradition’ the place persons are rightly held accountable for his or her phrases and actions…”
“Adams is only a prime instance of the period we stay in, a time when some folks will say racist or bigoted remarks after which play the sufferer card, alleging that they’ve been victimized by ‘cancel tradition’ in hopes of silencing their critics.”
“Within the minds of individuals like him, freedom of expression means being free to spew all of the hate-filled rubbish they need and in response, requiring the remainder of us to chunk our tongues. However that’s not how free speech works. Individuals will and may push again in opposition to bigotry.”
Profitable the NCAA particular person all-around title in gymnastics left Onnie Willis Rogers “elated” twenty years in the past. “Nevertheless it was a selected sort of pleasure, tinged with the frustration usually felt by the Black athlete who excels in a sport the place they’re considered one of solely a only a few.”
“Even throughout my 4 years at UCLA, an city faculty with a large Black inhabitants, I used to be the one Black feminine gymnast on my crew,” she wrote. “However I’ve observed one thing totally different about gymnasts at present, and maybe you’ve, as properly. There are extra Black and brown athletes within the sport than ever earlier than. And they’re turning out to be a drive to be reckoned with…”
“This yr, Fisk College is the primary HBCU to have an NCAA gymnastics crew — a whole crew of Black and brown ladies doing gymnastics. It’s radical. It’s transformative. And as Black Historical past Month attracts to a detailed, it’s a reminder of what’s attainable.”
For extra:
Julian Zelizer: Uncovering the forgotten historical past of slavery within the North
Peniel E. Joseph: This enduring crime continues to hang-out America’s efforts for racial justice
The actor Thomas Sadoski not too long ago returned from a visit to war-torn Yemen, together with his work for the humanitarian group Battle Little one. He wrote that malnutrition impacts as many at 95% of kids in some areas.
“The ensuing stunted bodily growth had me satisfied that I used to be in a kindergarten classroom when in actual fact I used to be assembly with eight and nine-year-olds. And people youngsters had been, as a colleague unnervingly put it, ‘the fortunate ones.’ Over 2 million Yemeni youngsters are usually not at school, with far too lots of them populating the huge baby soldiery one should every day maneuver.”
“In all places is the ache of terminal hunger — the nightmarish results of which embrace the shortcoming to control physique temperature, to provide tears when weeping after which a last decline into ghastly, emaciated, torpid loss of life. All of which I noticed, and which Yemenis endure every day: youngsters’s lives snuffed out by globally sanctioned neglect.”
In opposition to this backdrop, Sadoski wrote, “To face callously by and watch indignity lumped upon depravity heaped upon agony is completely inhuman. Nonetheless, the wheels are steadily in movement for that end result, as world assist for Yemen is in staggering decline.”
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Candace Rondeaux: The upper Wagner’s infamous boss rises, the more durable he might fall
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AND…
Jeff Yang is nearer to Bodily zero than 100, however he’s nonetheless hooked on “Bodily 100,” the Netflix actuality present from South Korea.
“Regardless of claiming to be a search to search out the last word bodily specimen,” he famous, the present was “was extra of an acknowledgment that no such single superb exists; that various kinds of our bodies excel at various kinds of achievement, and that every one sorts of builds deserve respect.”
“Losers cheered on survivors; winners reached their arms out to assist up the fallen; and the symbolic act of making an attempt your hardest delivered the one actual victory that issues — victory over worry and self-doubt.”
“As one other fan-favorite contestant, 47-year-old MMA fighter Choo Sung-hoon, stated after dropping within the semifinal spherical, ‘I needed to show that individuals of their 40s and 50s world wide, like me, can beat younger folks in the event that they work exhausting. I’m sorry I misplaced. However previous males all around the world! We are able to nonetheless do it!’”