DeSantis's henchmen are pretty awful (and don't like me at all!)

And don't worry, we've got good news tonight, too

Welcome to a Friday evening edition of Progress Report.

It’s been a rough week, to say the least, but I’m actually feeling a bit heartened right now. My friend Jen Cousins, an education activist in Florida and a frequent Progress Report contributor, has been leading such a smart resistance to the GOP’s war on public education that she’s now getting praise from major media outlets:

Florida is more than a miserable preview of what kinds of repression might come if DeSantis becomes president. It is also a blueprint for how progressive Floridians can and have been fighting back—and not on DeSantis’s terms. Rather than getting trapped in defining what DeSantis means by “woke” or “indoctrination,” groups like Florida Freedom to Read Project are fighting proactively for “every student’s right to access information and ideas while at school.”

Jen has been crucial in breaking a number of stories for Progress Report about the education spiral happening in Florida right now, and I highly recommend checking out her work and donating to her grassroots organization.

Staring down evil can feel daunting and hopeless, and I’m as cynical as they come, but I continue to discover that if you’re truly dedicated to freedom and relentless in your pursuit of justice, people will take notice and there’s a real chance that you can make a difference.

OK, now let’s get to the rest of the newsletter. Tonight, I’ll touch on some more DeSantis insanity, and then we’ll take a look at some actual good news. That part is for premium subscribers only — you guys help make this newsletter possible — and hopefully it provides you with some hope going into the weekend.

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This newsletter has been covering Ron DeSantis’s reprehensible exploits since he was an obscure member of Congress that had genuflected and debased himself just enough to get Donald Trump’s stamp of approval.

Given the relentlessness of his cruelty, we’re spending more time and resources than ever on covering DeSantis and the white nationalist takeover of Florida — especially, as I’ve written over and over again lately, given how uninterested the mainstream media has been in covering the horrors of DeSantis’s totalitarian project up to this point. (We’ve seen a bit of improvement over the past few days, which I don’t think is a coincidence; two days after we raised the alarm about the cult leader that DeSantis put on the Disney board, CNN ran a story on it.)

That said, I want to avoid giving DeSantis all the credit for the growing dystopian vibe in Florida, because the reality is that there are plenty of other mediocre egomaniacs and disingenuous shitheads serving in Tallahassee right now.

Take, for instance, state Rep. Randy Fine, who today earned himself a place on the list of the very worst people in the state.

Fine the chairman of the House Health & Human Services Committee, which puts him in charge of the bill that will ban gender-affirming care for minors (and potentially adults). Early las week, Fine choreographed a rote hearing over the bill, which included testimony from the same few anti-trans activists that every Republican legislature has flown in to testify. Disgusting, boring stuff. Until the end.

In his final remarks, Fine likened gender-affirming care to the work of Josef Mengele, the sadistic Nazi doctor who conducted twisted experiments on Jewish prisoners at Auschwitz during the Holocaust. Really. Watch:

Jordan Zakarin @jordanzakarin

Here's Florida state Sen. Randy Fine comparing gender-affirming care to the work of Josef Mengele, the Nazi butcher who experimented on prisoners at Auschwitz. The comment came during a hearing on banning gender-affirming care for minors today. Fine chairs the committee.

Fine, choked up on his own bigoted bullshit, claimed that his being Jewish justified his comparison between sought-after, affirming care and the work of a man who injected chemicals into the eyes of children, beat people to death, and decapitated slaves for years in one of history’s most brutal camps.

There is no context in which gender-affirming care and Mengele are at all similar, and Fine’s citation of his own faith was meant to shield him from legitimate criticism for such an absurd and offensive statement. As a Jewish person who lost family to Hitler’s mass pogroms myself, it makes my blood boil when people use the Holocaust to justify the persecution and torture of another vulnerable community. And I told Fine exactly that.

Each sentence in Fine’s response was dumber and more offensive than the last, culminating with a final line that left me gobsmacked, livid, and depressed all at the same time. There is no justification for antisemitism, and for a Jewish person to publicly suggest that there are valid excuses for the hatred that has led to millennia of oppression and genocide against his own people is pathetic and tragic in equal measure.

Fine has very clearly been spending too much time with the white nationalists that comprise much of the Florida GOP apparatus, who have over time infected his brain with terminal self-loathing. I almost feel bad for the guy, because he’s hitched his career to a state Republican Party that has allied itself with neo-Nazis, but today he forfeited any trace of sympathy by introducing a bill that would make it virtually impossible for trans people to live in Florida.

House Bill 1421 would institute some of the most regressive restrictions on trans care in the nation. The bill calls for banning gender-affirming care for anyone under the age of 18, codifying the recommendation from DeSantis’s rigged medical board, and stripping the license of any doctor that does provide such care.

Further, the bill would also prevent health insurance companies from covering puberty blockers, hormone therapy, and gender-affirming surgery; as well as ban state funds, such as Medicaid, from covering such care for all Floridians, regardless of age.

So thorough is this bill that it would also prevent gender changes on birth certificates and allow patients that have received gender-affirming care to sue their doctors for up to 30 years after they’ve completed their treatment.

States all around the country have taken their cues from Florida’s legislation, and if there’s any aspect of this sorry situation that might be reminiscent of the Holocaust, it’s the wide-spread and systemic war on the existence of queer people.