In 2024, Floridians voted, by a margin of 55.9% to 44.1%, to legalize recreational marijuana. Unfortunately, the threshold for passage of “Amendment 3” was 60% and the measure failed.

So far so bad … but it gets worse.

Nearly two years later we’ve learned that state government officials misappropriated millions of dollars in taxpayer money; funneled it through a charity founded by governor Ron DeSantis’s wife and into Republican PACs operated by the man who later became the state’s attorney general, with the approval of the then sitting attorney general, now a US Senator; and poured it into a campaign to defeat the measure.

We know this because someone leaked a grand jury report on the matter to CBS News Miami.

“Based on the impending ballot initiative, the expedited nature of the movement of these funds  … and the quick disbursement of the funds to their final destination,” the report reads, “we conclude that these funds were misappropriated as part of a sophisticated scheme to fund political activities.”

Unfortunately, the grand jury couldn’t figure out exactly who to charge  with which elements of the criminal conspiracy and didn’t issue indictments: “Nobody will take responsibility for deciding the $10 million of taxpayer money would go to Hope Florida … or had any memory of who made it.”

De Santis’s response to the matter: “The only crime that was apparent was whoever leaked the grand jury report.”

Now-AG James Uthmeier, who seems to have been the central figure running the $10 million embezzlement operation, calls the affair “a politically motivated hoax” which “shows that the Democrats had to collude with the press to break the law.”

It’s not their fault they embezzled taxpayer money to rig an election, see? It’s everybody else’s fault for finding out!

If that grand jury had minded its own business, if that whistleblower had kept the report under wraps, if the media hadn’t told the public about it, IF IT WEREN’T FOR THOSE MEDDLING KIDS … the word that comes immediately to mind is “Clintonesque.”

What’s next?

Hopefully we’ll get a new, more vigorous investigation that finds out who did and knew what, when they did and knew it, and charges those responsible. I hate to leave anything to the federal government, but Florida’s state government is too tightly under the control of the perpetrators for it to get done any other way.

We should also get another vote on the recreational marijuana measure, this time an un-rigged one.

Thomas L. Knapp (X: @thomaslknapp | Bluesky: @knappster.bsky.social | Mastodon: @knappster) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

“California,” Milo Yiannopoulos wrote last year on X, “needs ICE checkpoints at supermarket entrances, gas stations, strip malls, intersections and government buildings, with on the spot deportation for anyone who can’t prove they are in the US legally.”

On August 27, ICE agents abducted Yiannopoulos at Louis Armstrong International Airport in New Orleans, briefly detained him at one of the gang’s concentration camps in Alexandria, Louisiana, and deported him the next day to his native country, the United Kingdom. It seems he had overstayed his visa, and after failing to appear for a hearing, had become subject to a “final order of removal.”

Oops.

You can see, I hope, temptation to  schadenfreude from those of us who support truth, justice, and the American way  (i.e. “open borders” as called for in the Declaration of Independence and mandated by the US Constitution).

Do we really need a mouthy Brit jetting over here at will, spouting stupid, evil, and abhorrent opinions at high volume, then overstaying the “welcome” he insists everyone else must continually bow and scrape for both initially and on a recurring basis, on pain of abduction and deportation?

In my opinion, yes, that’s exactly what we need.

I don’t have to like Milo Yiannopoulos, or agree with his odious ideas, in order to understand that where he travels to or chooses to live is neither my business nor the US government’s.

In fact,  the case against deporting Yiannopoulos is strengthened, not weakened, by his 24/7 public stupidity.

It’s pretty easy for anti-immigration advocates to make the case for deporting, say, a (non-ICE) gang member who has committed violent crimes in the US or seems likely to based on having committed such crimes elsewhere.

It’s not quite as easy to make the case for deporting immigrant workers to “protect American jobs.” That requires preying on abject economic ignorance to convince Americans that immigration makes them less, rather than more, prosperous. But it’s obviously doable, at least for a little while, until a head of lettuce costs ten bucks.

Yiannopoulos, however, traffics mainly in speech.

Speech is not a violent crime. In fact, it’s not a crime at all.

Speech moves easily across borders. If Yiannopoulos wants to say something, we can listen whether he says it in London or in Los Angeles.

And the ability to speak isn’t a resource of fixed quantity. When Yiannopoulos speaks, he isn’t reducing the ability of anyone else to speak. He can speak all he wants … and the rest of us can too. As we should.

Even “bad” speech has value. As Louis Brandeis put it, “if there be time to expose through discussion the falsehoods and fallacies, to avert the evil by the processes of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence.”

The rants of a Milo Yiannopoulos embody ideas — bad ideas — that, unfortunately, many other people also hold. The cure for bad ideas isn’t to deport a particular mouthpiece, it’s to entertain those ideas and expose them as bankrupt with better ideas.

Back in the UK, Yiannopoulos will continue doing the  same things he was doing in the US, just as successfully … and spending his money, probably mostly earned from US sources, there instead of here.

No schadenfreude from me. He’s owed an apology and his freedom to travel.

Thomas L. Knapp (X: @thomaslknapp | Bluesky: @knappster.bsky.social | Mastodon: @knappster) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

The US Army, Fox Business reports, plans to build nuclear “microreactors” at five of its bases — Fort Bragg, Fort Campbell, Fort Hood, Fort Benning, and Fort Drum — over the next two years, with at least 15 more to follow later.

Why? To, the report says, “strengthen the military’s energy security and reduce its reliance on potentially vulnerable power grids.”

The idea certainly makes sense for a military base, but it makes sense for everyone, everywhere else, too.

The biggest security  and reliability worry with electricity isn’t that an enemy missile or bomb will take out a power plant. It’s that an attack or accident somewhere along the 650,000 miles of high-voltage transmission lines and 6.3 million miles of distribution lines criss-crossing the US will stop that power from getting delivered.

A drunk driver hits a pole. A defective or damaged transformer explodes. A computer suddenly stops juggling chainsaws to correctly operate some part the increasingly complex and interconnected “grid” system. And the lights go out, somewhere. Maybe just on your block, maybe in a million households.

Most of the proposed to solutions to these problems seem to be about making the “grid” more “robust,” more interconnected, more complex, and more centralized. That’s a move in the wrong direction.

The “grid” is a sprawling Rube Goldberg machine that evolved over the course of the 20th century based on the now false notion that large numbers of consumers must get their electricity from large, central power plants.

The problem with that is that when something breaks in one place, people in other places suffer. In 2003, a “cascading grid failure,” caused by sagging power lines short-circuiting on tree branches in Ohio, blacked out eight US states and the Canadian province of Ontario.

Technology advances, and it doesn’t have to be “grid” technology. These days, many consumers who lost power in 2003 could, reasonably affordably, get their electricity from their own rooftop solar panels or backyard wind turbines. And for those who don’t, smaller community-level systems make more sense than a central computer pushing watts down many miles of vulnerable line, through multiple switching  steps from far-flung plants.

The 20-megawatt nuclear reactors the army’s buying could each, in civilian context, power as many as 20,000 homes — about twice as many as found in the median US county. Combined with wind and solar — at both household and utility scale — there’s no reason why populations can’t become far more self-reliant and secure so a power problem in Akron doesn’t black out Ann Arbor.

If that sounds obvious, it is. So obvious that even the US Army has figured it out (as an old Marine, I naturally believe they’re not terribly bright). The rest of us should get with the decentralization/localization program.

Thomas L. Knapp (X: @thomaslknapp | Bluesky: @knappster.bsky.social | Mastodon: @knappster) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY