July 29, 2025 • 33 mins
In this episode of One Thing Trump Did, we talk about Florida's political past and present, and how the state's political machine is affecting politics in Washington, DC. Jeremy is joined by journalist Robert Fieseler, author American Scare: Florida's Hidden Cold War on Black and Queer Lives and Matthew Peddie, host of WUSF's weekly public affairs program Florida Matters. #Florida #politics #Trump #Rubio #DeSantis #Bondi #redscare #Black #queer
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Speaker 1 (00:15):
Welcome to One Thing Trump did, available exclusively on the
Middle Podcast feed. I'm Jeremy Hobson, and each week on
this show we picked just one thing coming out of
the Trump White House to focus on it in a
nonpartisan way. And today our one thing is Florida and
its political machine, which you could say is now at
least partly in control of the entire country, Which is
(00:36):
how we came up with the title of this episode.
Are we all Floridians now? So what do I mean
by that? Well, look at the Trump administration. Trump himself
is now officially a Florida resident and has conducted a
lot of business at his private club mar A Lago
and Palm Beach. The Secretary of State, Marko Rubio is
from Florida, so is the Attorney General Pam Bondi, the
White House Chief of Staff Susie Wilds, and more than
(00:59):
a dozen of they're high ranking officials in the administration.
Florida is also the fastest growing state in America, and
it is now the third most populous with more than
twenty three million people. That is ten times the state's
population back in nineteen fifty. And I bring that up
because one of our guests, says, the political machine that
(01:20):
existed in nineteen fifties Florida can be seen in our
national politics right now. Joining me now is Robert Fiesler,
who is the author of American Scare, Florida's Hidden Cold
War on Black and Queer lives, and Matthew Petty is
with us as well, host of the weekly public affairs
show Florida Matters at WUSF in Tampa At a longtime
(01:42):
political journalist in the state of Florida. Welcome to both
of you.
Speaker 2 (01:46):
Thank you, happy to be here.
Speaker 1 (01:47):
All right. So, before we go back in time and
to some very fascinating history that you detail in your book, Robert, Matthew,
I want to ask you, as you look at the
Trump administration as a longtime Florida based political journalist, what
do you see that has its roots in Florida politics?
Speaker 2 (02:04):
I mean, pick one. It's interesting that the title of
the series is you know, one thing Trump did, because
it's really hard to say, you know, Florida is just
one thing. It's many things, and many of those things
are now have some kind of influence on national politics,
if not national culture. But I mean immigration would be
one to look at you saw a lot of what
(02:25):
Governor Rondi Santis when he was running for governor, and
even before that, he was rolling out policies that were
we now see it being enacted on a national stage,
not by him, of course, but by President Trump. But
there's some real similarities there. Another thing to mention too
would be education, and Robert has been sort of reporting
(02:46):
on that as well. But there's some really consistent threads
running through education from K through twelve up into higher
education that we have seen roll out across the state
of Florida in recent years, and now you are seeing
echo that at the national level as well.
Speaker 1 (03:02):
Like what what in the education world?
Speaker 2 (03:04):
Well, if you look at this notion of parental rights
in education, a lot of this actually kind of goes
back to the early days of the pandemic. You remember,
you had the Mom's for Liberty movement, this idea of
really pushing back against COVID era restrictions. A lot of
it comes back to what was happening in public schools
in Florida, so masking restrictions, keeping kids out of the
(03:24):
classroom and not not wanting to bring kids back into
the classroom and things like that, and you had essentially
a revolt of a lot of parents sort of standing
up and saying, look, we don't think this is right.
We want to have our kids back in school. We
don't believe in these MASK regulations or other things like,
for example, of vaccine mandates. So that sort of does
go back to obviously a pretty big public health issue
(03:47):
around how to respond to and deal with COVID nineteen.
But that sort of spiraled out into education. Mom's liberty
took on a life of its own as a podent
political force, and that sort of spread out as well,
and you see some of those things kind of getting
picked up in other states as well.
Speaker 1 (04:02):
I was actually in Florida for many months lived there
at the beginning of the pandemic, and the people that
I was neighbors with were very happy that their kids
were able to be in school in Florida and were
early on the train of saying Ron DeSantis is going
to be the president of the United States because of
how he handled COVID. The Florida parents, I think we're
(04:23):
quite happy with how different that was than the rest
of the United States. Of course, hindsight of twenty twenty,
but let's talk about what was happening in the nineteen
fifties Robert. The political power center of Florida at that time,
you write, was in the northern part of the state,
which is kind of like the Deep South of the
United States, and a man named Charles Johns was a
(04:44):
key player. Who was he and what did he want? Sure?
Speaker 3 (04:47):
Charlie Johns was a strident segregationist Dixiecrat state senator who
was basically the most powerful politician in the state of
Florida in the nineteen fifties, nineteen sixties, nineteen forties era,
as the head of a contingent of Dixiecrat old school
Florida politicians called the pork Choppers, who had all taken
(05:08):
a blood oath to not redistrict the state so that
basically all of the small population in the north of
Florida could run the entire legislature and usually elect the governor,
and also so that they wouldn't integrate racially in any
public services public schools, etc. Charlie Johns, in addition to
being the head pork Chopper, was the chairman of the
(05:29):
Florida Legislative Investigation Committee, which was Florida's Macarthy era inquisition committee,
better known as the Johns Committee, and they went after
black integration as teachers and as well as closeted queer
teachers and the school system, as well as the public universities.
And basically they had all the power in the world
(05:49):
during the Red Scare to use the hot button word communists,
to call anyone they didn't like communists, subversives and enemies
of the people. Charlie Johns was a man that sort
of pioneered a certain style of Tallahassee politics and planted
the toxic seeds in our culture such that they cyclically
(06:10):
about once a decade in Florida in anti queer and
anti black movements and sentiments sort of white power movements
and nativist movements that we see tend to be an
incubator for our culture war. In other words, a lot
of desantsis notions in terms of fear of academic freedom,
fear of the outsider, the use of state power to
(06:32):
suffocate the individual. That was all stuff that was pioneered
by a guy named Charlie Johns, a senator who got
away with it in the nineteen fifties.
Speaker 1 (06:40):
Matthew is Charlie john somebody that you have heard about
read about over the years in Florida.
Speaker 2 (06:45):
It's a name I'm familiar with, I've met. I obviously
don't have the deep kind of research that Robert's done,
but one of my colleagues, Carry Sheridan, spoke to Robert
and we had that conversation on WSAF. So you have
fascinating conversation, really interesting book, and I think I think
you know, just listening to Robert talking now about those
kind of parallels, I mean, it's not just this particular
(07:06):
era in history that he's talking about. You do see
some other parallels. So even the notion of tossing around
the word communism, which Jeremy as you know, having spent
some time in Florida, I mean, that is a really
kind of charged word, especially in certain parts of Florida
where you have folks, for example, have fled the communist
regime in Cuba or Venezuela, and so labeling somebody a
(07:27):
communist even today carries a lot of power.
Speaker 1 (07:29):
But Charlie Johns was not able to really find any
communists in Florida. That's one of the reasons why he
started going after black people and gay people.
Speaker 3 (07:37):
Well, I mean, Charlie Johns was applying the term communist
as unscientifically as he could, and he was determined to
use it within the construct of hysteria politics to rile
up his white segregationist base so that he could attack
anyone he wanted to preserve the apartheid system that helped him,
his friends, and the small number of North Florida oders
(08:00):
that elected him. So basically their argument was, and it
sounds it may sound ridiculous now, but that the Soviets
basically wanted peace between the races so that the proletariat
was strong enough to rise up against the upper classes.
And that's why they needed to go after the NAACP
and stop racial integration in the state post Brown v.
Board of Education and decision, which was a federal decision
(08:23):
in nineteen fifty four that should have applied to Florida,
but the Charlie Johns and the Johns Committee decide they didn't.
They also decided that the Communists wanted the breakdown of
the American family, so they were going to use basically
homosexuality and the possibility which we've all known as verifiably false,
of homosexual recruitment to basically infect American males such that
(08:47):
the American family collapsed from within. So the Cold War
was a real thing fought in the shadows between American
spies and Soviet spies. But any sort of public inquest
in terms of open hearings where John's Committee individuals were
recipoenaing and badgering and attempting to publicly embarrass NAACP leaders,
(09:08):
or even private interrogations of closeted queer people that they
would basically entrap in cruising zones and university towns throughout Florida.
Any of that was just basically provocation for them to
target whoever they wanted. They were an investigation committee, always
looking for something new to investigate, and they knew communism
(09:28):
was just the term everyone was going to go along with.
Speaker 1 (09:31):
Speaking of journalists, it was actually quite difficult for you
to get from the State of Florida the records that
you would need to write this book and to talk
about this history. You found another way around it. But
tell us just a little bit about the difficulty of
finding out the truth from the State of Florida.
Speaker 3 (09:49):
Right, So, the State of Florida has mutilated this history utterly.
When the Johns Committee closed down in nineteen sixty five,
sealed the records as part of his retreat from the
legis when the pork trappers lost control and basically they
were turning the lights down on their offices, he used
arcane rules from the end of reconstruction to supposedly keep
them out of a public review for in perpetuity. Then
(10:12):
he died, and right after he died, the state of
Florida passed the state constitutional Amendment that would allow legislative
papers up for public review, and the legislature then freaked out.
They panicked. They thought that if any of these basically
tens of thousands of documents ever came to public light,
they wouldn't just damage the reputations of historically corrupt officeholders,
(10:34):
they would damage the public trust and faith in offices themselves.
So basically they decided they were going to eliminate the
names of all of the victims, anyone that Charlie Johns
and his John's Committee hurt historically, and so when they
released the documents, they were basically historically useless. I went
to Tallahassee right basically at the first day after in
(10:56):
the COVID lockdown that the archive was open and the
papers became a I was probably the only gig. I
ever excited to go to the city of Tallahassee, and
I get there and the documents are utterly mutilated. I
mean to the point where it would have taken me
fifteen years to reconstruct and repiece together based off of
the incredible censorship that they performed. So I did some
(11:17):
digging and I found that in Tallahassee was the first
John's Committee scholar who was now working as a paralegal,
woman named Bonnie Stark, who'd been involved actually and testified
in favor of open records during the documents release in
the nineteen nineties. It turns out she'd won some admirers
in the state Senate staff, and they had, informally but
(11:38):
in a very practical way, really given her the secret
second set of the records that were imperfectly redacted. They
didn't put the same effort into it. So when I
reached out to Bonnie Stark, she told me, I've got
these thirty boxes. I've been lugging them around for years,
and I want to give them to you. That's what
you criminologists would call an orgy of evidence, and what
historians would call a major document find.
Speaker 1 (12:00):
So, Matthew, as you listen to that, and as I
listen to that, I just wonder about what it is
like to be a journalist in the state of Florida
right now, and how those tactics might be seen on
the national level, where it is getting more difficult to
get people to say things on the record and just
(12:21):
get the information that you need.
Speaker 2 (12:24):
Yeah, I mean, it is kind of mind blowing just
to listen to this sort of historical digging in the
detective work that Robert's gone through to write his books.
So kudos for that. I mean, the thing is, it
is getting difficult to kind of find information, and you know,
public records releases can be challenging, but there are ways
(12:45):
to get information out there. There are people who would
you want to talk about what's happened with her, or
something that happened, you know, more than fifty years ago,
or something that's happened in the last couple of months.
So there are still ways around it. There's still journalists
who are out there doing things and trying to find
the truth and put that out there so people can
listen to it or read it or watch it and
(13:05):
make up their own minds. So, I mean, Florida, as
you know, Jeremy is a really fascinating place to be
a journalist. And now as we find this kind of
confluence of political power sort of consolidating in Florida, a
lot of what we are seeing on the national stage
is stuff that we've sort of lived through in the
last few years here in Florida. So people may be
wondering what's happening with regards to say, immigration laws. A
(13:28):
lot of those things have been sort of field tested,
as it were in Florida, so we kind of have
some inkling of how things may proceed from here.
Speaker 1 (13:35):
Well, and it does seem like in Florida the governor
is a very powerful person compared to babe governors in
other states.
Speaker 2 (13:42):
Yeah, indeed, I mean one good example of that. So
right now they have something called Florida Doze, right, it's
essentially a DOGE, of course, stands for the Department of
Government Efficiency. It's the state's version of the task force
that was hitded by Elon Musk at the federal level
to try and out what they're calling fraud, waste and
(14:02):
abuse and what in Florida what Florida does is doing.
They've just started an announcing audits of local cities and
municipalities and counties in the last week they're looking at
what they say is wasteful sprending, and so on the
one hand, you have this notion of Florida being you know,
the quote unquote free state of Florida, but it is
(14:23):
a very top heavy state in terms of consolidation of
power in Tallahassee. So you have you know, theoretically mayors
of cities and mayors of counties who are able to,
you know, wield the power that's sort of visiting them
by the voters of their county or city to spend
taxpayer money and the ways they see fit. And on
(14:43):
the other hand, you have the state of Florida, through
this task force, coming and looking and saying, no, look,
this is this is not the way you should be
spending your money. We've actually heard from voters they want
you to spend money differently, and they're kind of imposing
their will on That's just one example of how you
have this kind of top down hierarchy in Florida, and
it's become a lot more so in the last few years.
Speaker 1 (15:04):
And Robert you write that we are living in a
second red Scare now and that these tactics of the
past are back in Ron DeSantis is Florida.
Speaker 3 (15:14):
It's basically neo red Scare, the first real red Scare
hysteria of the twenty first century. What it's about is
arch conservatives of any party with ttalitarian instincts that use
scapegoat groups and piping up fear to enforce a new hegemony.
And it's usually political and cultural. They want to own
society in additioning to owning like the political sphere. So
(15:37):
DeSantis's notions of like the so called don't say Gay bill,
the so called stop wokak, the idea that we can't
teach ap African American history because it's going to make
young kids hate America. We can't give them the real history.
We've got to give them a sort of American pageant
that's going to get them patriotic. Those were all notions
that were perfected by Charlie Johns. Basically they Charlie Johns
(16:01):
pioneered the notion of the teaching of this sort of
propaganda class to all Floridians called Americanism versus Communism. And ironically,
some of the educators that were tapped to put together
that curriculum were individuals who had been initially targeted by
the Johns Committee and under under homosexual suspicions, so they
were basically under Charlie Johns's thumbs. Then you see every
(16:24):
decade basically a sort of new movement bubble up with
john z and ideas and using Tallahaxi political style. In
the nineteen seventies, the Anita Bryant Save Our Children movement,
which was an anti homosexual movement that meant to basically
cut down against ordinances that were designed in Miami's Dade
(16:44):
County to protect homosexuals. In the eighties you had these
things called the Bush Trask Amendment, which was basically taking
public money away from institutions and colleges that had gay groups.
And then in the nineties you had the rise of
Jeb Bush and the revival of this very proud revival
of the Anita Bryant era anti gayand option initiative, which
(17:05):
leads us all the way into desanticism and their obsession
with trans folk immigrant folk. There's some real gusto behind
the Alligator Alcatraz, but none of DeSantis' ideas, none of
Jeb Bush's ideas none, and believe it or not, none
of Anita Bryant's ideas were original, they were perfected by
the first guy that got away with it. The greatest
(17:26):
trick you ever pulled was trying to tell people he
had no legacy because Charlie John's basically died without the
gears of justice affecting him. He showcased how you could
use the rules of the most old school form of
tallahassee politics, spoils, personal enrichment, electoral jerrymandering, doubling down, finding
constitutional roopholes, revenge, no grudge left unturned, that those principles
(17:50):
could be used to build a political power structure for
yourself and in the state of Florida, effectively crown yourself king.
Speaker 1 (17:58):
Well a lot there. Stand by because there's more to
discuss as we look at what's happening in America now
and how it's connected to what's happened in the past.
One Thing Trump Did with w USF's Matthew Petty and
author Robert Fiesler will be right back. Welcome back to
(18:30):
One Thing Trump did exclusively on the Middle Podcast Feed.
I'm Jeremy Hobson. This episode, we're talking about Florida's political
past and president and whether or not in a way,
we're all Floridians. Now. I'm joined by author Robert Fiesler
and wusf's Matthew Petty. Matthew, you heard all of that
there a moment ago from Robert. Do you see the
remnants of the Johns Committee in Florida politics today? When
(18:53):
you think about the Stop Woke Act? When you think
about that, don't say gay bill and other things, Alligator Alcatraz.
Speaker 2 (19:00):
It's interesting to think about this. I mean, a couple
of years ago, when we were looking at some of
the policies that were being championed by Governor Rondi. Santis.
The thinking was that here is somebody who has obviously
has higher political ambitions, and I don't think that's changed.
But of course we saw that his aspirations to be
the Republican nominee for a president didn't go too far,
(19:22):
but he was for a time running for president, and
we saw a lot him really sort of doubling down
on some of these fairly it's hard to find one
word to describe them, but policies around immigration that were
quite hard line. So he saw a lot of those
policies being rolled out, a lot of the things that
we're talking about around education too. They sort of bubbled
up in the years leading up to his run for president.
(19:44):
I mean that has continued since then, of course, but
it seemed like those have sort of been structured to
sort of position him as somebody who's going to be
running for higher office. One thing I'll say though, too,
I mean, thinking about Robert and his book and some
of the sort of pushback that actually occurred in the
nineteen fifties to some of these rules, you are seeing
some of that too. So for example, the Stop Work Act,
and of course it's also known as the Individual Freedom Act.
(20:07):
Stop Work stands for wrong to our kids and employees.
It's intended to restrict the discussion of or teaching ideas
related to race and six. That has actually had some
pushback in federal courts. So federal judge, for example, permanently
blocked part of the Act, saying it violates free speech
rights under the First and fourteenth Amendments to the US Constitution.
So there has been some pushback to some of these things,
(20:28):
and I think that also kind of mirrors what we
were seeing in the nineteen fifties. And as Roberts have
described in his.
Speaker 1 (20:34):
Book, yeah, absolutely, and probably the south of Florida has
a lot more power today than it did back in
the nineteen fifties. You can if you win Miami Dade County.
It's much more important now than it was back then.
You know, I'm from Illinois, which has its own storied
political machine. Many former governors have gone to jail. As
(20:54):
you know. Robert and a lot of Illinois power players
were in the Obama administration, Ram and Manual Bill daily
Ittsi are the people who are in the administration now,
Susie Wilds, Marco Rubio, Pambondi, Matthew are they products of
Florida's political machine?
Speaker 2 (21:09):
Absolutely? I mean, Susie Wows is a really interesting kind
of major player, sort of somebody who has maybe not
been so much in the forefront of folks imaginations, but
people who've been paying attention to Florida politics know that
she helped, you know, in the first kind of iteration
of the Trump presidency. She was helping Governor Randy Sanders
(21:30):
for a time and then they had a falling out,
But she really did help govern De de Sanderson his bid
for governor the first time around. So somebody who has
a lot of political connections and has really kind of
stuck with President Trump and helped him in his return
to power for his second term. So she is somebody
who has had a lot of connections with Florida politics
(21:50):
and is now of course kind of you're seeing that
play out on the federal level. Turn and then Pam Bondi,
of course, a fairly high profile politician from Florida who
is now of you know, iterating what was what was
happening in Florida on the national stage at Marco Rubio.
Interesting case there because you will remember back in the
twenty sixteen campaign and twenty fifteen leading up to that,
(22:12):
very outspoken as were a lot of the Republican candidates
saying that Donald Trump was not somebody they should be
put in the backing. But he's come around completely and
now is really, you know, stridently enforcing the Trump a
gender on the international stage.
Speaker 1 (22:28):
What about Rhin Desantus? Has he come around? It seems
like they're getting along Trump and DeSantis.
Speaker 2 (22:34):
That's a good question. It's it's hard to know. Of course,
the campaign for governor, that Ron campaign for president, I
should say that Rondi Sanders wage was pretty bruising, So
you saw a falling out between de Sanders and Trump,
they seem to have mended fences a little bit. And
again it comes back to immigration, right you saw De
Sanders enthusiastically saying we are going to support to the
(22:57):
utmost the Trump agenda when it comes to immigration. Alligator
Alcatrauzer so called Alligator Alcatrauz as Robert just mentioned, I
mean that is that controversial detention facility that was built
hastily on the air strip and on the edge of
the Everglades. So the notion of kind of creating these
detention facilities and sort of using them to move migrants
(23:20):
to before presumably deporting them, and then of course the
making sure that sheriff's officers and police departments are fully
behind supporting the immigrations and customs of forcement if it
to arrest more folks who are here without paperwork and
ship them out of the country. So around the issue
of immigration, for sure, you're seeing a lot more cohesion
between Governor DeSantis and President Trump.
Speaker 1 (23:42):
Do you see DeSantis running again for president in twenty
twenty eight.
Speaker 2 (23:48):
It's a good question. I don't know if twenty twenty
eight would be the year, but I do think that
DeSantis is somebody who has not given up on his
higher political aspirations. I mean, the interesting thing too, is
that there's been a lot to talk about whether his wife,
Casey DeSantis, could be a contenda for governor of Florida
as well. So that's a hard question to answer right now, Jeremy.
(24:09):
But I think I wouldn't discount Gallnedy Santas sitting his
sights on the presidency at some point.
Speaker 1 (24:17):
Robert, let me go back, just for a moment, to
your reporting and the John's Committee, because this wasn't just
about politics, as you've said, this actually ruined some people's lives.
You were able to talk to victims of the Johns Committee.
Just tell us about somebody who was a victim and
how it affected their life.
Speaker 3 (24:38):
Sure, so I spoke at length to There are only
several last living survivors of the Johns Committee purchase from
the sixties, and I spoke to a man named Arc Coppolston,
who's a ninety three year old gay man who lives
in Palm Springs, California, who, during his sophomore year at
the University of Florida in nineteen fifty eight, was targeted
(24:59):
by the john Committee. They decided to abduct him. At
a very vulnerable moment, police officers in State of Florida
highway uniforms pulled him out of a final exam to
embarrass him in front of his classmates and instigate panic.
They took him to a random hotel on the edge
of Gainesville, and they proceeded to interrogate him in the
presence of a state lawyer, state interrogators and investigators, and
(25:21):
a state senator, which made it an official public proceeding
because the Johns Committee, using arcane rules, had declared they
only needed a quorum of one senator one representative made
it a state hearing, so basically he was grilled in
that moment about his up to then hidden sexual life,
which was art Copolsen was a gay man who was
(25:41):
just beginning to understand himself and beginning to have his
first boyfriends. And they tried to get him to confess
about who he was, to confess his homosexuality, and to
say every person he knew who also participated in the
gay underworld of nineteen fifty eight Gainesville. And the problem
at that point was he knew several professors who were gay,
(26:02):
one of whom was mentored one of whom was an
engineering professor who was his boyfriend and who was married.
And he was basically denied food and water, denied access
to a lawyer, this is all primoranda rides, denied access
to a bathroom, humiliated as a young basically as a
young person. And he remarkably Art Coppleston withstood this interrogation,
(26:23):
although he was under oath, falsely denied that he was homosexual,
and then also though there was a lot of pressure
to name any name to get him out of that chair,
he did not name any names. It caused his mind
to shatter. At one point, John's committee interrogators presented a
telephone number for his parents, who were recovering alcoholics, who
did not know he was gay. He was their only son,
(26:44):
and they said, what do you think would happen if
we called this another number and told your mother what
a disgusting son she had. And Art Coppleston at that
point it caused such a fracturing because he knew that
if they found out that their only son was gay,
that would push them right back in the bottle and
he would blame himself. So although Arc Coppolsten basically survived
that interrogation, was stalked for the next three years by
(27:08):
state agents, someone who would stand outside his dorm room
door and listen in to his last ten feet of
private space while he was just sitting there doing his homework,
and then at the first chance he got, basically the
day after graduation commencement, he packed up his car and
fled the state of Florida and never came back. But
he carried the trauma of that with him mentally. He
(27:28):
also carried it bodily. It affected his future relationships and
his capacity to receive and accept love as a gay
person because there was a lot of internalized homophobia. But
Art Coppolsten has found the strength later in life to
tell his story. He wants the story of what he
suffered and the story of basically the burden that he's
carried because of what the State of Florida did to
(27:50):
him to violate his civil rights. I asked him why
he was talking to me so much. He told me
he wants all of this to be a knife in
the legacy of Charlie John's. He wants people to know
the consequences of what happens when someone gets all the
power of the state through some strange amount of loopholes
and through an era and a paradigm that allows such
things to occur and what happens to individuals for the
(28:11):
rest of their lives. Art Copelsen is only one of hundreds,
if not thousands of people that were affected by the
Florida Johns Committee this.
Speaker 1 (28:18):
Way, Wow, it's fascinating history and people should check out
your book to read more about it. I do want
to just finally say I don't want to hate on
Florida at all in this segment. I loved living in Florida.
It's an incredibly diverse, dynamic place. It's changing all the time.
(28:39):
It's beautiful, it's affordable for a lot of people. There
are a lot of amazing things about Florida, and obviously
it's a very popular place for people to move to.
Speaker 3 (28:47):
It's a success story. There were other southern cabals and
states that did not succeed the way that Florida did.
That's why the legacy of the Johns Committee has bloomed,
only because the state of Florida has been so successful
full side by side it. Pre World War Two, it
was a rural, agricultural backwater. There was no hop in
Miami with its awesome vibe. There there was no Suncoast Tampa,
(29:10):
Saint Pete thing. Orlando was not a significant notion and
basically there it wasn't the cultural hub that now between
nine hundred and one thousand people want to move to
every day.
Speaker 1 (29:22):
Yeah, it's amazing. So let me just finally ask each
of you, what should those of us who don't live
in Florida know about what is coming out of Florida
and is going to affect all of us? And I
guess I'll start with you, Robert, just because you've been
thinking about this for a long time.
Speaker 3 (29:41):
Know the legacy of Tallahassee politics and understand that if
you do not understand the rules of Tallahassee politics, you
will be victim to them because you will be subject
to them no matter what. The two major power centers
of this country right now politically are Washington, d C.
Where it's a bunch of Floridians running the show, and
Tallahassee Florida, which is basically dotted line parroting and experimenting
(30:05):
with a lot of ideas. So you need to learn
and understand what the origins of these Tallahassee political strategies
are and where they come from. They come from this
guy named Charlie Johns. They came from this specific red
Scare era. And also there were people that stood up
to Charlie Johns in state and federal courts and brought
him down. So it's possible to resist if you exist
(30:28):
in a system where you understand basically what the guidelines
of Tallahassee politics are going to be, Know who your
opposition is, know who your rights are, and look to
history for the exemplars who defeated the prior red scares.
Speaker 1 (30:43):
Matthew, what about you? What should we know as non
Floridians about what's happening in our country right now and
its roots in Florida.
Speaker 2 (30:51):
It's a great question, is how to really put my
finger on one thing. Just to take a slightly different tag,
I would say, have a think about kind of nuts
and bolts, things like homeowners insurance. And this is a
little bit of a warning in some ways. My colleague
Jessica Missarius has done some fantastic reporting on the kind
of confluence of the hurricane season and the homeowner's insurance crisis,
(31:12):
and some of the experts she spoke to as saying
that look what's happening in Florida with the spiraling costs
of homeowner's insurance and the fact you have big companies
essentially kind of washing the hands of the state and
saying it's too expensive for us to be in business here.
That is something that you might start to see, if
not you are already seeing in other states. So you know, Florida.
(31:32):
Of course, people love it for its warm weather and
the sunshine, but there are some things about the kind
of insurance market structure here that are not great, and
I mean that it can be kind of a perilous
place to live, and that's something to kind of keep
your eye on as you think about other parts of
the country that are also facing natural disasters.
Speaker 1 (31:54):
Yeah, when we sold our house in Florida, like a
month before we closed, they canceled our insurance for exactly
that reason. I think it's very difficult right now to
get it in especially coastal parts of Florida.
Speaker 2 (32:07):
Yeah, it is. And it's a political problem too that
hasn't been solved. I mean, the state legislature has taken
several goes at it over the last few years and
hasn't seemed to quite sort of get it right. And
it still remains a challenge for homeowners, especially those folks
living on the coast.
Speaker 1 (32:21):
That is Matthew Petty, who is the host of wusf's
weekly public affairs show Florida Matters. And we've also been
speaking with Robert Fiesler, the author of the new book
Americans Scare, Florida's Hidden Cold War on black and queer lives.
Thanks to both of you so much for joining me today.
Speaker 2 (32:36):
Thanks Jeremy, thank you, and thanks.
Speaker 1 (32:38):
You for listening to One Thing Trump Did. It was
produced by Harrison Patino. Our next middle episode will be
in your podcast feed later this week. We'll be asking
if crime is an issue where you live, and if
it is, what do you want to be done about it?
And if you like this podcast, please rate it wherever
you get your podcasts and write a review. Our theme
music was composed by Noah Haidu. I'm Jeremy Hobson. Talk
to you soon. S
Welcome to One Thing Trump did, available exclusively on the
Middle Podcast feed. I'm Jeremy Hobson, and each week on
this show we picked just one thing coming out of
the Trump White House to focus on it in a
nonpartisan way. And today our one thing is Florida and
its political machine, which you could say is now at
least partly in control of the entire country, Which is
(00:36):
how we came up with the title of this episode.
Are we all Floridians now? So what do I mean
by that? Well, look at the Trump administration. Trump himself
is now officially a Florida resident and has conducted a
lot of business at his private club mar A Lago
and Palm Beach. The Secretary of State, Marko Rubio is
from Florida, so is the Attorney General Pam Bondi, the
White House Chief of Staff Susie Wilds, and more than
(00:59):
a dozen of they're high ranking officials in the administration.
Florida is also the fastest growing state in America, and
it is now the third most populous with more than
twenty three million people. That is ten times the state's
population back in nineteen fifty. And I bring that up
because one of our guests, says, the political machine that
(01:20):
existed in nineteen fifties Florida can be seen in our
national politics right now. Joining me now is Robert Fiesler,
who is the author of American Scare, Florida's Hidden Cold
War on Black and Queer lives, and Matthew Petty is
with us as well, host of the weekly public affairs
show Florida Matters at WUSF in Tampa At a longtime
(01:42):
political journalist in the state of Florida. Welcome to both
of you.
Speaker 2 (01:46):
Thank you, happy to be here.
Speaker 1 (01:47):
All right. So, before we go back in time and
to some very fascinating history that you detail in your book, Robert, Matthew,
I want to ask you, as you look at the
Trump administration as a longtime Florida based political journalist, what
do you see that has its roots in Florida politics?
Speaker 2 (02:04):
I mean, pick one. It's interesting that the title of
the series is you know, one thing Trump did, because
it's really hard to say, you know, Florida is just
one thing. It's many things, and many of those things
are now have some kind of influence on national politics,
if not national culture. But I mean immigration would be
one to look at you saw a lot of what
(02:25):
Governor Rondi Santis when he was running for governor, and
even before that, he was rolling out policies that were
we now see it being enacted on a national stage,
not by him, of course, but by President Trump. But
there's some real similarities there. Another thing to mention too
would be education, and Robert has been sort of reporting
(02:46):
on that as well. But there's some really consistent threads
running through education from K through twelve up into higher
education that we have seen roll out across the state
of Florida in recent years, and now you are seeing
echo that at the national level as well.
Speaker 1 (03:02):
Like what what in the education world?
Speaker 2 (03:04):
Well, if you look at this notion of parental rights
in education, a lot of this actually kind of goes
back to the early days of the pandemic. You remember,
you had the Mom's for Liberty movement, this idea of
really pushing back against COVID era restrictions. A lot of
it comes back to what was happening in public schools
in Florida, so masking restrictions, keeping kids out of the
(03:24):
classroom and not not wanting to bring kids back into
the classroom and things like that, and you had essentially
a revolt of a lot of parents sort of standing
up and saying, look, we don't think this is right.
We want to have our kids back in school. We
don't believe in these MASK regulations or other things like,
for example, of vaccine mandates. So that sort of does
go back to obviously a pretty big public health issue
(03:47):
around how to respond to and deal with COVID nineteen.
But that sort of spiraled out into education. Mom's liberty
took on a life of its own as a podent
political force, and that sort of spread out as well,
and you see some of those things kind of getting
picked up in other states as well.
Speaker 1 (04:02):
I was actually in Florida for many months lived there
at the beginning of the pandemic, and the people that
I was neighbors with were very happy that their kids
were able to be in school in Florida and were
early on the train of saying Ron DeSantis is going
to be the president of the United States because of
how he handled COVID. The Florida parents, I think we're
(04:23):
quite happy with how different that was than the rest
of the United States. Of course, hindsight of twenty twenty,
but let's talk about what was happening in the nineteen
fifties Robert. The political power center of Florida at that time,
you write, was in the northern part of the state,
which is kind of like the Deep South of the
United States, and a man named Charles Johns was a
(04:44):
key player. Who was he and what did he want? Sure?
Speaker 3 (04:47):
Charlie Johns was a strident segregationist Dixiecrat state senator who
was basically the most powerful politician in the state of
Florida in the nineteen fifties, nineteen sixties, nineteen forties era,
as the head of a contingent of Dixiecrat old school
Florida politicians called the pork Choppers, who had all taken
(05:08):
a blood oath to not redistrict the state so that
basically all of the small population in the north of
Florida could run the entire legislature and usually elect the governor,
and also so that they wouldn't integrate racially in any
public services public schools, etc. Charlie Johns, in addition to
being the head pork Chopper, was the chairman of the
(05:29):
Florida Legislative Investigation Committee, which was Florida's Macarthy era inquisition committee,
better known as the Johns Committee, and they went after
black integration as teachers and as well as closeted queer
teachers and the school system, as well as the public universities.
And basically they had all the power in the world
(05:49):
during the Red Scare to use the hot button word communists,
to call anyone they didn't like communists, subversives and enemies
of the people. Charlie Johns was a man that sort
of pioneered a certain style of Tallahassee politics and planted
the toxic seeds in our culture such that they cyclically
(06:10):
about once a decade in Florida in anti queer and
anti black movements and sentiments sort of white power movements
and nativist movements that we see tend to be an
incubator for our culture war. In other words, a lot
of desantsis notions in terms of fear of academic freedom,
fear of the outsider, the use of state power to
(06:32):
suffocate the individual. That was all stuff that was pioneered
by a guy named Charlie Johns, a senator who got
away with it in the nineteen fifties.
Speaker 1 (06:40):
Matthew is Charlie john somebody that you have heard about
read about over the years in Florida.
Speaker 2 (06:45):
It's a name I'm familiar with, I've met. I obviously
don't have the deep kind of research that Robert's done,
but one of my colleagues, Carry Sheridan, spoke to Robert
and we had that conversation on WSAF. So you have
fascinating conversation, really interesting book, and I think I think
you know, just listening to Robert talking now about those
kind of parallels, I mean, it's not just this particular
(07:06):
era in history that he's talking about. You do see
some other parallels. So even the notion of tossing around
the word communism, which Jeremy as you know, having spent
some time in Florida, I mean, that is a really
kind of charged word, especially in certain parts of Florida
where you have folks, for example, have fled the communist
regime in Cuba or Venezuela, and so labeling somebody a
(07:27):
communist even today carries a lot of power.
Speaker 1 (07:29):
But Charlie Johns was not able to really find any
communists in Florida. That's one of the reasons why he
started going after black people and gay people.
Speaker 3 (07:37):
Well, I mean, Charlie Johns was applying the term communist
as unscientifically as he could, and he was determined to
use it within the construct of hysteria politics to rile
up his white segregationist base so that he could attack
anyone he wanted to preserve the apartheid system that helped him,
his friends, and the small number of North Florida oders
(08:00):
that elected him. So basically their argument was, and it
sounds it may sound ridiculous now, but that the Soviets
basically wanted peace between the races so that the proletariat
was strong enough to rise up against the upper classes.
And that's why they needed to go after the NAACP
and stop racial integration in the state post Brown v.
Board of Education and decision, which was a federal decision
(08:23):
in nineteen fifty four that should have applied to Florida,
but the Charlie Johns and the Johns Committee decide they didn't.
They also decided that the Communists wanted the breakdown of
the American family, so they were going to use basically
homosexuality and the possibility which we've all known as verifiably false,
of homosexual recruitment to basically infect American males such that
(08:47):
the American family collapsed from within. So the Cold War
was a real thing fought in the shadows between American
spies and Soviet spies. But any sort of public inquest
in terms of open hearings where John's Committee individuals were
recipoenaing and badgering and attempting to publicly embarrass NAACP leaders,
(09:08):
or even private interrogations of closeted queer people that they
would basically entrap in cruising zones and university towns throughout Florida.
Any of that was just basically provocation for them to
target whoever they wanted. They were an investigation committee, always
looking for something new to investigate, and they knew communism
(09:28):
was just the term everyone was going to go along with.
Speaker 1 (09:31):
Speaking of journalists, it was actually quite difficult for you
to get from the State of Florida the records that
you would need to write this book and to talk
about this history. You found another way around it. But
tell us just a little bit about the difficulty of
finding out the truth from the State of Florida.
Speaker 3 (09:49):
Right, So, the State of Florida has mutilated this history utterly.
When the Johns Committee closed down in nineteen sixty five,
sealed the records as part of his retreat from the
legis when the pork trappers lost control and basically they
were turning the lights down on their offices, he used
arcane rules from the end of reconstruction to supposedly keep
them out of a public review for in perpetuity. Then
(10:12):
he died, and right after he died, the state of
Florida passed the state constitutional Amendment that would allow legislative
papers up for public review, and the legislature then freaked out.
They panicked. They thought that if any of these basically
tens of thousands of documents ever came to public light,
they wouldn't just damage the reputations of historically corrupt officeholders,
(10:34):
they would damage the public trust and faith in offices themselves.
So basically they decided they were going to eliminate the
names of all of the victims, anyone that Charlie Johns
and his John's Committee hurt historically, and so when they
released the documents, they were basically historically useless. I went
to Tallahassee right basically at the first day after in
(10:56):
the COVID lockdown that the archive was open and the
papers became a I was probably the only gig. I
ever excited to go to the city of Tallahassee, and
I get there and the documents are utterly mutilated. I
mean to the point where it would have taken me
fifteen years to reconstruct and repiece together based off of
the incredible censorship that they performed. So I did some
(11:17):
digging and I found that in Tallahassee was the first
John's Committee scholar who was now working as a paralegal,
woman named Bonnie Stark, who'd been involved actually and testified
in favor of open records during the documents release in
the nineteen nineties. It turns out she'd won some admirers
in the state Senate staff, and they had, informally but
(11:38):
in a very practical way, really given her the secret
second set of the records that were imperfectly redacted. They
didn't put the same effort into it. So when I
reached out to Bonnie Stark, she told me, I've got
these thirty boxes. I've been lugging them around for years,
and I want to give them to you. That's what
you criminologists would call an orgy of evidence, and what
historians would call a major document find.
Speaker 1 (12:00):
So, Matthew, as you listen to that, and as I
listen to that, I just wonder about what it is
like to be a journalist in the state of Florida
right now, and how those tactics might be seen on
the national level, where it is getting more difficult to
get people to say things on the record and just
(12:21):
get the information that you need.
Speaker 2 (12:24):
Yeah, I mean, it is kind of mind blowing just
to listen to this sort of historical digging in the
detective work that Robert's gone through to write his books.
So kudos for that. I mean, the thing is, it
is getting difficult to kind of find information, and you know,
public records releases can be challenging, but there are ways
(12:45):
to get information out there. There are people who would
you want to talk about what's happened with her, or
something that happened, you know, more than fifty years ago,
or something that's happened in the last couple of months.
So there are still ways around it. There's still journalists
who are out there doing things and trying to find
the truth and put that out there so people can
listen to it or read it or watch it and
(13:05):
make up their own minds. So, I mean, Florida, as
you know, Jeremy is a really fascinating place to be
a journalist. And now as we find this kind of
confluence of political power sort of consolidating in Florida, a
lot of what we are seeing on the national stage
is stuff that we've sort of lived through in the
last few years here in Florida. So people may be
wondering what's happening with regards to say, immigration laws. A
(13:28):
lot of those things have been sort of field tested,
as it were in Florida, so we kind of have
some inkling of how things may proceed from here.
Speaker 1 (13:35):
Well, and it does seem like in Florida the governor
is a very powerful person compared to babe governors in
other states.
Speaker 2 (13:42):
Yeah, indeed, I mean one good example of that. So
right now they have something called Florida Doze, right, it's
essentially a DOGE, of course, stands for the Department of
Government Efficiency. It's the state's version of the task force
that was hitded by Elon Musk at the federal level
to try and out what they're calling fraud, waste and
(14:02):
abuse and what in Florida what Florida does is doing.
They've just started an announcing audits of local cities and
municipalities and counties in the last week they're looking at
what they say is wasteful sprending, and so on the
one hand, you have this notion of Florida being you know,
the quote unquote free state of Florida, but it is
(14:23):
a very top heavy state in terms of consolidation of
power in Tallahassee. So you have you know, theoretically mayors
of cities and mayors of counties who are able to,
you know, wield the power that's sort of visiting them
by the voters of their county or city to spend
taxpayer money and the ways they see fit. And on
(14:43):
the other hand, you have the state of Florida, through
this task force, coming and looking and saying, no, look,
this is this is not the way you should be
spending your money. We've actually heard from voters they want
you to spend money differently, and they're kind of imposing
their will on That's just one example of how you
have this kind of top down hierarchy in Florida, and
it's become a lot more so in the last few years.
Speaker 1 (15:04):
And Robert you write that we are living in a
second red Scare now and that these tactics of the
past are back in Ron DeSantis is Florida.
Speaker 3 (15:14):
It's basically neo red Scare, the first real red Scare
hysteria of the twenty first century. What it's about is
arch conservatives of any party with ttalitarian instincts that use
scapegoat groups and piping up fear to enforce a new hegemony.
And it's usually political and cultural. They want to own
society in additioning to owning like the political sphere. So
(15:37):
DeSantis's notions of like the so called don't say Gay bill,
the so called stop wokak, the idea that we can't
teach ap African American history because it's going to make
young kids hate America. We can't give them the real history.
We've got to give them a sort of American pageant
that's going to get them patriotic. Those were all notions
that were perfected by Charlie Johns. Basically they Charlie Johns
(16:01):
pioneered the notion of the teaching of this sort of
propaganda class to all Floridians called Americanism versus Communism. And ironically,
some of the educators that were tapped to put together
that curriculum were individuals who had been initially targeted by
the Johns Committee and under under homosexual suspicions, so they
were basically under Charlie Johns's thumbs. Then you see every
(16:24):
decade basically a sort of new movement bubble up with
john z and ideas and using Tallahaxi political style. In
the nineteen seventies, the Anita Bryant Save Our Children movement,
which was an anti homosexual movement that meant to basically
cut down against ordinances that were designed in Miami's Dade
(16:44):
County to protect homosexuals. In the eighties you had these
things called the Bush Trask Amendment, which was basically taking
public money away from institutions and colleges that had gay groups.
And then in the nineties you had the rise of
Jeb Bush and the revival of this very proud revival
of the Anita Bryant era anti gayand option initiative, which
(17:05):
leads us all the way into desanticism and their obsession
with trans folk immigrant folk. There's some real gusto behind
the Alligator Alcatraz, but none of DeSantis' ideas, none of
Jeb Bush's ideas none, and believe it or not, none
of Anita Bryant's ideas were original, they were perfected by
the first guy that got away with it. The greatest
(17:26):
trick you ever pulled was trying to tell people he
had no legacy because Charlie John's basically died without the
gears of justice affecting him. He showcased how you could
use the rules of the most old school form of
tallahassee politics, spoils, personal enrichment, electoral jerrymandering, doubling down, finding
constitutional roopholes, revenge, no grudge left unturned, that those principles
(17:50):
could be used to build a political power structure for
yourself and in the state of Florida, effectively crown yourself king.
Speaker 1 (17:58):
Well a lot there. Stand by because there's more to
discuss as we look at what's happening in America now
and how it's connected to what's happened in the past.
One Thing Trump Did with w USF's Matthew Petty and
author Robert Fiesler will be right back. Welcome back to
(18:30):
One Thing Trump did exclusively on the Middle Podcast Feed.
I'm Jeremy Hobson. This episode, we're talking about Florida's political
past and president and whether or not in a way,
we're all Floridians. Now. I'm joined by author Robert Fiesler
and wusf's Matthew Petty. Matthew, you heard all of that
there a moment ago from Robert. Do you see the
remnants of the Johns Committee in Florida politics today? When
(18:53):
you think about the Stop Woke Act? When you think
about that, don't say gay bill and other things, Alligator Alcatraz.
Speaker 2 (19:00):
It's interesting to think about this. I mean, a couple
of years ago, when we were looking at some of
the policies that were being championed by Governor Rondi. Santis.
The thinking was that here is somebody who has obviously
has higher political ambitions, and I don't think that's changed.
But of course we saw that his aspirations to be
the Republican nominee for a president didn't go too far,
(19:22):
but he was for a time running for president, and
we saw a lot him really sort of doubling down
on some of these fairly it's hard to find one
word to describe them, but policies around immigration that were
quite hard line. So he saw a lot of those
policies being rolled out, a lot of the things that
we're talking about around education too. They sort of bubbled
up in the years leading up to his run for president.
(19:44):
I mean that has continued since then, of course, but
it seemed like those have sort of been structured to
sort of position him as somebody who's going to be
running for higher office. One thing I'll say though, too,
I mean, thinking about Robert and his book and some
of the sort of pushback that actually occurred in the
nineteen fifties to some of these rules, you are seeing
some of that too. So for example, the Stop Work Act,
and of course it's also known as the Individual Freedom Act.
(20:07):
Stop Work stands for wrong to our kids and employees.
It's intended to restrict the discussion of or teaching ideas
related to race and six. That has actually had some
pushback in federal courts. So federal judge, for example, permanently
blocked part of the Act, saying it violates free speech
rights under the First and fourteenth Amendments to the US Constitution.
So there has been some pushback to some of these things,
(20:28):
and I think that also kind of mirrors what we
were seeing in the nineteen fifties. And as Roberts have
described in his.
Speaker 1 (20:34):
Book, yeah, absolutely, and probably the south of Florida has
a lot more power today than it did back in
the nineteen fifties. You can if you win Miami Dade County.
It's much more important now than it was back then.
You know, I'm from Illinois, which has its own storied
political machine. Many former governors have gone to jail. As
(20:54):
you know. Robert and a lot of Illinois power players
were in the Obama administration, Ram and Manual Bill daily
Ittsi are the people who are in the administration now,
Susie Wilds, Marco Rubio, Pambondi, Matthew are they products of
Florida's political machine?
Speaker 2 (21:09):
Absolutely? I mean, Susie Wows is a really interesting kind
of major player, sort of somebody who has maybe not
been so much in the forefront of folks imaginations, but
people who've been paying attention to Florida politics know that
she helped, you know, in the first kind of iteration
of the Trump presidency. She was helping Governor Randy Sanders
(21:30):
for a time and then they had a falling out,
But she really did help govern De de Sanderson his bid
for governor the first time around. So somebody who has
a lot of political connections and has really kind of
stuck with President Trump and helped him in his return
to power for his second term. So she is somebody
who has had a lot of connections with Florida politics
(21:50):
and is now of course kind of you're seeing that
play out on the federal level. Turn and then Pam Bondi,
of course, a fairly high profile politician from Florida who
is now of you know, iterating what was what was
happening in Florida on the national stage at Marco Rubio.
Interesting case there because you will remember back in the
twenty sixteen campaign and twenty fifteen leading up to that,
(22:12):
very outspoken as were a lot of the Republican candidates
saying that Donald Trump was not somebody they should be
put in the backing. But he's come around completely and
now is really, you know, stridently enforcing the Trump a
gender on the international stage.
Speaker 1 (22:28):
What about Rhin Desantus? Has he come around? It seems
like they're getting along Trump and DeSantis.
Speaker 2 (22:34):
That's a good question. It's it's hard to know. Of course,
the campaign for governor, that Ron campaign for president, I
should say that Rondi Sanders wage was pretty bruising, So
you saw a falling out between de Sanders and Trump,
they seem to have mended fences a little bit. And
again it comes back to immigration, right you saw De
Sanders enthusiastically saying we are going to support to the
(22:57):
utmost the Trump agenda when it comes to immigration. Alligator
Alcatrauzer so called Alligator Alcatrauz as Robert just mentioned, I
mean that is that controversial detention facility that was built
hastily on the air strip and on the edge of
the Everglades. So the notion of kind of creating these
detention facilities and sort of using them to move migrants
(23:20):
to before presumably deporting them, and then of course the
making sure that sheriff's officers and police departments are fully
behind supporting the immigrations and customs of forcement if it
to arrest more folks who are here without paperwork and
ship them out of the country. So around the issue
of immigration, for sure, you're seeing a lot more cohesion
between Governor DeSantis and President Trump.
Speaker 1 (23:42):
Do you see DeSantis running again for president in twenty
twenty eight.
Speaker 2 (23:48):
It's a good question. I don't know if twenty twenty
eight would be the year, but I do think that
DeSantis is somebody who has not given up on his
higher political aspirations. I mean, the interesting thing too, is
that there's been a lot to talk about whether his wife,
Casey DeSantis, could be a contenda for governor of Florida
as well. So that's a hard question to answer right now, Jeremy.
(24:09):
But I think I wouldn't discount Gallnedy Santas sitting his
sights on the presidency at some point.
Speaker 1 (24:17):
Robert, let me go back, just for a moment, to
your reporting and the John's Committee, because this wasn't just
about politics, as you've said, this actually ruined some people's lives.
You were able to talk to victims of the Johns Committee.
Just tell us about somebody who was a victim and
how it affected their life.
Speaker 3 (24:38):
Sure, so I spoke at length to There are only
several last living survivors of the Johns Committee purchase from
the sixties, and I spoke to a man named Arc Coppolston,
who's a ninety three year old gay man who lives
in Palm Springs, California, who, during his sophomore year at
the University of Florida in nineteen fifty eight, was targeted
(24:59):
by the john Committee. They decided to abduct him. At
a very vulnerable moment, police officers in State of Florida
highway uniforms pulled him out of a final exam to
embarrass him in front of his classmates and instigate panic.
They took him to a random hotel on the edge
of Gainesville, and they proceeded to interrogate him in the
presence of a state lawyer, state interrogators and investigators, and
(25:21):
a state senator, which made it an official public proceeding
because the Johns Committee, using arcane rules, had declared they
only needed a quorum of one senator one representative made
it a state hearing, so basically he was grilled in
that moment about his up to then hidden sexual life,
which was art Copolsen was a gay man who was
(25:41):
just beginning to understand himself and beginning to have his
first boyfriends. And they tried to get him to confess
about who he was, to confess his homosexuality, and to
say every person he knew who also participated in the
gay underworld of nineteen fifty eight Gainesville. And the problem
at that point was he knew several professors who were gay,
(26:02):
one of whom was mentored one of whom was an
engineering professor who was his boyfriend and who was married.
And he was basically denied food and water, denied access
to a lawyer, this is all primoranda rides, denied access
to a bathroom, humiliated as a young basically as a
young person. And he remarkably Art Coppleston withstood this interrogation,
(26:23):
although he was under oath, falsely denied that he was homosexual,
and then also though there was a lot of pressure
to name any name to get him out of that chair,
he did not name any names. It caused his mind
to shatter. At one point, John's committee interrogators presented a
telephone number for his parents, who were recovering alcoholics, who
did not know he was gay. He was their only son,
(26:44):
and they said, what do you think would happen if
we called this another number and told your mother what
a disgusting son she had. And Art Coppleston at that
point it caused such a fracturing because he knew that
if they found out that their only son was gay,
that would push them right back in the bottle and
he would blame himself. So although Arc Coppolsten basically survived
that interrogation, was stalked for the next three years by
(27:08):
state agents, someone who would stand outside his dorm room
door and listen in to his last ten feet of
private space while he was just sitting there doing his homework,
and then at the first chance he got, basically the
day after graduation commencement, he packed up his car and
fled the state of Florida and never came back. But
he carried the trauma of that with him mentally. He
(27:28):
also carried it bodily. It affected his future relationships and
his capacity to receive and accept love as a gay
person because there was a lot of internalized homophobia. But
Art Coppolsten has found the strength later in life to
tell his story. He wants the story of what he
suffered and the story of basically the burden that he's
carried because of what the State of Florida did to
(27:50):
him to violate his civil rights. I asked him why
he was talking to me so much. He told me
he wants all of this to be a knife in
the legacy of Charlie John's. He wants people to know
the consequences of what happens when someone gets all the
power of the state through some strange amount of loopholes
and through an era and a paradigm that allows such
things to occur and what happens to individuals for the
(28:11):
rest of their lives. Art Copelsen is only one of hundreds,
if not thousands of people that were affected by the
Florida Johns Committee this.
Speaker 1 (28:18):
Way, Wow, it's fascinating history and people should check out
your book to read more about it. I do want
to just finally say I don't want to hate on
Florida at all in this segment. I loved living in Florida.
It's an incredibly diverse, dynamic place. It's changing all the time.
(28:39):
It's beautiful, it's affordable for a lot of people. There
are a lot of amazing things about Florida, and obviously
it's a very popular place for people to move to.
Speaker 3 (28:47):
It's a success story. There were other southern cabals and
states that did not succeed the way that Florida did.
That's why the legacy of the Johns Committee has bloomed,
only because the state of Florida has been so successful
full side by side it. Pre World War Two, it
was a rural, agricultural backwater. There was no hop in
Miami with its awesome vibe. There there was no Suncoast Tampa,
(29:10):
Saint Pete thing. Orlando was not a significant notion and
basically there it wasn't the cultural hub that now between
nine hundred and one thousand people want to move to
every day.
Speaker 1 (29:22):
Yeah, it's amazing. So let me just finally ask each
of you, what should those of us who don't live
in Florida know about what is coming out of Florida
and is going to affect all of us? And I
guess I'll start with you, Robert, just because you've been
thinking about this for a long time.
Speaker 3 (29:41):
Know the legacy of Tallahassee politics and understand that if
you do not understand the rules of Tallahassee politics, you
will be victim to them because you will be subject
to them no matter what. The two major power centers
of this country right now politically are Washington, d C.
Where it's a bunch of Floridians running the show, and
Tallahassee Florida, which is basically dotted line parroting and experimenting
(30:05):
with a lot of ideas. So you need to learn
and understand what the origins of these Tallahassee political strategies
are and where they come from. They come from this
guy named Charlie Johns. They came from this specific red
Scare era. And also there were people that stood up
to Charlie Johns in state and federal courts and brought
him down. So it's possible to resist if you exist
(30:28):
in a system where you understand basically what the guidelines
of Tallahassee politics are going to be, Know who your
opposition is, know who your rights are, and look to
history for the exemplars who defeated the prior red scares.
Speaker 1 (30:43):
Matthew, what about you? What should we know as non
Floridians about what's happening in our country right now and
its roots in Florida.
Speaker 2 (30:51):
It's a great question, is how to really put my
finger on one thing. Just to take a slightly different tag,
I would say, have a think about kind of nuts
and bolts, things like homeowners insurance. And this is a
little bit of a warning in some ways. My colleague
Jessica Missarius has done some fantastic reporting on the kind
of confluence of the hurricane season and the homeowner's insurance crisis,
(31:12):
and some of the experts she spoke to as saying
that look what's happening in Florida with the spiraling costs
of homeowner's insurance and the fact you have big companies
essentially kind of washing the hands of the state and
saying it's too expensive for us to be in business here.
That is something that you might start to see, if
not you are already seeing in other states. So you know, Florida.
(31:32):
Of course, people love it for its warm weather and
the sunshine, but there are some things about the kind
of insurance market structure here that are not great, and
I mean that it can be kind of a perilous
place to live, and that's something to kind of keep
your eye on as you think about other parts of
the country that are also facing natural disasters.
Speaker 1 (31:54):
Yeah, when we sold our house in Florida, like a
month before we closed, they canceled our insurance for exactly
that reason. I think it's very difficult right now to
get it in especially coastal parts of Florida.
Speaker 2 (32:07):
Yeah, it is. And it's a political problem too that
hasn't been solved. I mean, the state legislature has taken
several goes at it over the last few years and
hasn't seemed to quite sort of get it right. And
it still remains a challenge for homeowners, especially those folks
living on the coast.
Speaker 1 (32:21):
That is Matthew Petty, who is the host of wusf's
weekly public affairs show Florida Matters. And we've also been
speaking with Robert Fiesler, the author of the new book
Americans Scare, Florida's Hidden Cold War on black and queer lives.
Thanks to both of you so much for joining me today.
Speaker 2 (32:36):
Thanks Jeremy, thank you, and thanks.
Speaker 1 (32:38):
You for listening to One Thing Trump Did. It was
produced by Harrison Patino. Our next middle episode will be
in your podcast feed later this week. We'll be asking
if crime is an issue where you live, and if
it is, what do you want to be done about it?
And if you like this podcast, please rate it wherever
you get your podcasts and write a review. Our theme
music was composed by Noah Haidu. I'm Jeremy Hobson. Talk
to you soon. S
Host
Jeremy Hobson
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