The full episode transcript for Rachel Maddow Presents: Deja News | Episode 2: Florida's first war on woke
Episode 2: Florida’s First War on Woke
But there’s a public clamor over this report. It’s really all anyone wants to talk about, to the point where the governor can’t quite deal with questions about it. He ends up at this press conference kind of backed into a corner, explaining to reporters that maybe this report won’t be quite so damaging. Maybe it won’t have too bad an impact because maybe people won’t be able to get their hands on it.Bryant: …distributed.
Reporter: Do you think perhaps the pamphlet would have been more widely accepted had the pictures been left out? With the release of this report, some long-simmering, quiet worries about what these guys had been up to in the legislature had boiled over into real scandal, into widespread public disgust and anger. And the politicians who were associated with this thing, they were not only scrambling to explain themselves, they were scrambling now to salvage their careers.
Maddow: Now that Florida’s ambitious conservative Governor Ron DeSantis is seeking the presidency, as he campaigns on a promise to make America Florida, it might be helpful to understand how things went for the last Florida man who tried this political playbook in that state. And so, here we go. This is “Rachel Maddow Presents: Déjà News.”
Maddow: Florida in the 1950s was the fastest-growing state in the whole country. In 1940, if you lined up all the states in the country in terms of population, Florida would have been 27th. By 1950, Florida had moved from 27th up to 20th. By 1960, Florida had moved from 20th up to 10th. Aronson: Former state senator Randolph Hodges, once a member in good standing of the Pork Chop Gang, speaking to Florida Public Television in the 1980s.
First, the Chief Pork Chopper, State Senate President Charley Johns, he lost the governor’s race that year in 1954. Again, Florida was run entirely by Democrats, but Charley Johns lost to a more progressive Democrat who was, among other things, a relative moderate on civil rights issues. Johns: My present inclination is to call an extraordinary session of the Florida legislature to cope with this ruling.
Aronson: What Charley Johns created with that Senate bill was the Florida Legislative Investigation Committee. But everyone just called it the Johns Committee. And through this committee, Charley Johns was determined to show that school desegregation had to be stopped not only because segregation was great, but because desegregation was a giant communist plot against America.
Pansy Flaum: I protest against this committee. I think it’s illegal. I think it’s immoral, and I think it’s indecent. Aronson: The committee’s investigation was soon blocked by lawsuits brought by the NAACP’s formidable lead lawyer Thurgood Marshall. But the thing to know about the Johns Committee is that, even though Charley Johns had set it up to go after the NAACP, officially, it had a completely wide-open mandate to investigate anything that might pose any kind of threat to the citizens of Florida. And so, the committee started to shift its focus.
John Hayes: The Tallahassee Police Department is using Florida State University students as informers against homosexuals. The students get $10 a head every time one is approached by a suspected sex offender. Police Chief Frank Stoutamire feels that the students want to work as informers. It’s all right with him. Since October, Tallahassee Police have arrested 10 suspected homosexuals. John Hayes, Channel 4 News, Tallahassee.
Ruth Jensen-Forbell: They took me into the basement of the administration building into a room, and I was there for at least 15 hours. I think it was probably closer to 17 because it was the next day. During that time, I was not offered the opportunity to go to the bathroom, to have anything to eat or to have anything to drink. All they wanted to know were the names of people. Did you have relationships with other women on the campus? What about, you know, these people? I said, no, no, no.
Aronson: The Johns Committee investigation started with the targeting of universities, then moved on to the rest of the school system. Here’s historian Stacy Braukman again. The first hint that the Johns Committee might be wearing thin with the people of Florida came when they set up shop at the University of South Florida in Tampa in May 1962.
Mitchell: This booklet was published and is presented to authorized people with the hope that it will better inform them as to the scope of homosexuality and the nature of it in the state of Florida. The title page of this thing is a full-page photo of two naked men kissing. There’s a photo of what purports to be a homosexual encounter in a public bathroom. There’s a photo of what appears to be a teenage boy tied up with rope. There are even multiple naked photos of a young child.
Maddow: The Florida legislature was so scandalized by the whole Johns Committee Purple Pamphlet debacle, they sealed all the Johns Committee’s records until 2038. Now, as it happens, they ended up getting unsealed a few decades early. We have Florida voters to thank for that. Florida voters approved a constitutional amendment requiring the legislature’s records to be made public, even if the legislature didn’t want that.
Sam Brock, NBC News Correspondent: The legislation, which has been referred to by opponents as the “Don’t Say Gay” bill, has sparked national outrage. Today, the governor and potential 2024 presidential candidate, once again, putting himself at the forefront of America’s culture wars. Supporters say the law lets parents determine when and how to introduce LGBTQ topics to their children.
Ron DeSantis says it’s all needed, it’s all necessary because of Marxism, cultural Marxism, threatening Florida’s students. Last year he signed a bill mandating that Florida school kids be taught the evils of communism. It really does all sound awfully familiar. Aronson: As the first black openly gay member of the Florida legislature, Senator Jones has felt particularly in the crosshairs of this new culture war onslaught from the right.
And so, what did politicians do? Politicians say, you know what, enough of that. This is wokeism. This is indoctrination. Aronson: A lot of people these days feel like they’re having to fight battles they thought were already won. Are we really arguing about banning books again? But Senator Shevrin Jones says those battles were never really over because although, yes, those battles did also happen years ago, the forces that fought against progress back then never went away. He describes it almost like a latent virus, always waiting for reactivation.
The state’s politics just went so far to the right, they fell off a cliff, and that’s how it’s going to stay from here on out. At least that’s, I think, how it looks to people from outside the state.Jones: Nope, nope, nope, nope, nope, nope.Aronson: Yeah. I mean, interestingly, both Senator Jones and the Florida historian that I spoke to, Robert Buccellato, they think DeSantis’ power is less solid than it seems. And they both get to that view from their reading of history.
Jones: Americans can only take a certain amount of extremism before it swings back. Because they are test, test, test, test until they’re like, wait, stop, this is too much. And I think we’re right at a breaking point to where Floridians, Americans want to get back to some type of normalcy. Maddow: I know. We’re going to have to readjust our conception of Florida man and what he stands for.Maddow: Yeah, I was wondering. I thought I could get a little splish splish splish splash in the back.Maddow: I would expect nothing less.Isaac, what have you got for us next week?
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