805: The Florida Experiment

Ira Glass

Justina Tedesco knows exactly when she got the idea to leave suburban New Jersey and move to a different state. It was still at the height of COVID. Her second-grader was doing remote learning. The vaccine had barely been introduced, and most people couldn't get it.

She was working from home, and her son's class took a snack break.

Ira Glass

When we looked up the clip, DeSantis didn't exactly tell people to move to Florida. But you can see how Justina took it that way.

Ira Glass

The big thing she wanted, in-person learning for her son. For Dennis and Alenda Michael, in a small town in Washington State, it was a story on NBC News around the same time that did the job. The story was about a grocery store in Naples, Florida.

Ira Glass

In fact, the reporter in the story reads comments from people who saw video of this store online.

Ira Glass

I was curious about all this because in the speeches that Ron DeSantis is giving as he runs for president, he talks a lot about how Florida is the fastest-growing state, which it is. And he talks about how people are moving to Florida because of him and all he's done there, which, who knows?

It's true that among the transplants, there are twice as many Republicans as Democrats. But I wondered, what is really happening? Was DeSantis actually the reason that people uprooted their lives and crossed the country, like they wanted to be part of his Florida experiment?

So in the last week, I've talked to a half dozen people who told me, yes, they did exactly that. Though they all said it wasn't just politics. It was also the fact that there's no state income tax in Florida, and housing prices, for nearly all of them, that's way cheaper than where they moved from.

They love the sunny, summery lifestyle. But they all said politics clinched it, in particular, COVID politics, the way Governor Ron DeSantis broke ranks early and loudly from other states in opening schools and ditching mask mandates. And that's when migration to the state picked up. As one woman, Kim, who moved from Payson, Utah, put it--

Ira Glass

Justina wanted to get her second-grader on board with the idea of moving. So before they put their house on the market, she sat down with him on the living room couch, and they each put a piece of paper on the coffee table, and each wrote out the pros and cons of going to Florida.

Ira Glass

She has a big Italian family living around them in New Jersey.

Ira Glass

[LAUGHS]

Ira Glass

But the most important thing, he didn't write that he would miss his classmates or his school, which told Justina his remote learning experience was so bad, he wasn't bonding with those kids, and they really got to get out of New Jersey and into in-person school.

While COVID policies were the thing that really convinced the people I talked to into moving, almost all of them liked the other stuff that Ron DeSantis has so prominently brought to Florida, his anti-woke policies, restricting what's said in schools about sexuality and race and systemic racism, his ban on gender-affirming care for trans kids, and on transgender girls doing sports with other girls, his ban on abortion after six weeks. Justina weighs up the trade-offs this way.

Ira Glass

For today on our program, Ron DeSantis is running around the country telling Americans we can all have what these new Floridians are loving in their new homes if we vote for him for president. Maybe you've seen the bumper sticker, "Make America Florida."

So what would that be like? How's it working out for people? Today, we go inside the Florida experiment he's created there. From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Stay with us.

Ira Glass

Act one, Prescription for Freedom. So Ron DeSantis' governorship, and also the presence of Donald Trump in the state, have created a kind of hothouse of a political experiment on the right in Florida, with all kinds of wealthy influential right-wingers migrating to the state, specifically to Sarasota County, northwest of Mar-a-Lago over on the Gulf Coast.

Perfect example, Mike Flynn is one of the newest arrivals. He moved to Englewood in Sarasota County. You might remember Mike Flynn. President Trump appointed him as national security advisor, and he lasted only 23 days in that job. He got kicked out after getting in trouble for lying to the FBI about talking to the Russian ambassador.

In Florida, he started a whole new life, waging a kind of information war and a political war on the far right. And Sarasota is the right place for a guy like that to live out his dreams. Steve Bannon, the co-founder of Moms for Liberty, the headquarters of Rumble, of Truth Social-- I could go on-- Charlie Kirk, Patrick Byrne, Doug Logan, they all have ties to Sarasota County. Tucker Carlson is just down the coast.

For whatever reason, Sarasota County, which in the past was a wealthy, white area for old-fashioned pro-business Republican types, has now become a place where these MAGA right wing rich guys have set about building their ideal version of society. And at Flynn's side, there's this one guy in particular who's been bounding from one project to the next, creating this little parallel universe down there that we're going to talk about in this next story because this guy's a pioneer in this movement that you're going to be hearing a lot about in this next election. Maybe you've already heard of it, medical freedom.

In Ron DeSantis' case for being president, "Make America Florida," medical freedom is a big item. One of our producers, Zoe Chace, was very interested to understand its appeal and growing popularity, and spent some time down in Sarasota County.

Zoe Chace

The guy I'm here to talk about is named Vic Mellor. He has a bunch of money, likes to spend it on politics. Just a few months ago, he paid $3 million for a building in Sarasota County, 959 East Venice Avenue.

Zoe Chace

He's teaming up with Mike Flynn and some others to use it for this hybrid office down here. One side of it is a production house for the launch of Flynn's upcoming podcast.

Zoe Chace

Vic is a big guy. He ducks through doors. He's tall. He's wide. He dresses like he just walked off a construction site, which he did. He runs a precast concrete business. He makes the huge blocks of hollowed-out concrete that make up buildings.

He dreams big, which brings me to the other half of 959 East Venice, the part I really want to tell you about. The place where Vic and his movement are inventing something new. Specifically, the other half of this building is going to be a medical clinic, We The People Health and Wellness Center. "We the People," drawn in Founding Fathers cursive on the big glass doors. A clinic that caters to people who did not get the COVID vaccine, who do not trust the medical establishment, and want a place to go where they can be treated by people who think like they do.

Zoe Chace

Vic shows me the exam rooms, the carved-out area for pediatrics, the adult examination area, the soft-gray IV-drip room where you can sit quietly and get liquid vitamins pumped into your arms. The whole building is 10,000 square feet. This is roughly half. It opens in September, two to three nurses, maybe a primary care doctor, one pediatrician, for sure, at least to start.

I wanted to take a look at this building of Vic's because it captures so much to me about this moment in American politics, this half ivermectin clinic, half Mike Flynn flagship podcast studio, it's symbolic of a new momentum on the right, where people took certain lessons from the pandemic-- mandates are bad. Vaccines are suspect. The scientific community is out to get you. The government telling you what to do in health care is dangerous-- and they're building a movement from those principles.

959 East Venice is like an early fort on that frontier, a beachhead for this political movement that's coming into the mainstream called "medical freedom." Also, I'm not going to say this is uniquely Florida, but it's pretty Florida-shaped what happened here. So let me get into Vic's story and the experience of some of these other people in Sarasota to explain how this building came to be.

Vic is a new political convert, and he's newly flush. Vic is not one of the new arrivals in Sarasota County. He's in his early 50s now. He's been here 30 years. He started with nothing and built a successful concrete business. He was a big Fox News watcher with a recent history of bringing new things into the world that he thinks should exist. Like before he built this clinic, a few years ago, feeling antsy and agitated about the state of the world with some money to burn, he decided to buy some land a few miles away from his place in Venice.

Zoe Chace

After he built The Hollow, Vic met Mike Flynn, which changed his life. And these days, they talk or see each other every day. Vic helps Flynn get all his projects off the ground and helps fund some of them.

I would call Mike Flynn a father figure in Vic's life. He doesn't disagree with that. He grew up without a dad in Woonsocket, Rhode Island. When General Flynn showed up in Sarasota-- that's how Vic always refers to him, as General-- it organized Vic's ambient angst about Trump witch hunts in the media and his jones about the Second Amendment into something much closer to Flynn's worldview, which amounts to a comprehensive One World Order conspiracy aimed at him and other Trump loyalists.

Flynn didn't have to push Vic very far. Vic was at January 6. He didn't go into the Capitol building, he says, but he's totally unrepentant about it. He's still convinced the election was stolen from Trump.

OK, so the creation of this clinic at 959 East Venice, it all begins back in 2020, during the pandemic. Vic chafed against the lockdowns and the masks. And lucky for him, he lives in Florida, where the governor, Ron DeSantis, issued an executive order pretty early on in the summer of 2021 that told school districts to stop forcing kids to wear masks in school.

The school board in Sarasota didn't want to follow the governor's order. They wanted to keep kids in masks. Vic's got two young children in that school district.

Zoe Chace

At this big meeting, Vic meets a very essential partner in this whole endeavor, the other person this story's about, one of the newly politicized moms of Sarasota County. Small but mighty Tanya Parus, petite blonde, pink nail polish, with a bustling just-left-the-PTA-meeting energy. She's got a 5- and a 7-year-old in school.

Zoe Chace

So Vic and a bunch of parents, Tanya among them, decided to organize a big mask waiver signing out at The Hollow, where doctors would give them notes so their kids wouldn't have to wear masks in school. Tanya is a former EMT. She was in a trailer they installed out there taking vitals before they met with the doctors.

Zoe Chace

To be clear, the thing they're all fighting against, wearing masks in school, the science shows masks are effective at slowing the spread of COVID if you wear them. This mask waiver event at The Hollow was a turning point. Once Vic saw how many of them there were, he realized, we could be doing a lot more here. This is a full-fledged political movement that I can throw myself into.

Tanya, meanwhile, became this connector between these apostate doctors and patients who didn't want to go to regular hospitals. In late 2021 and into the next year, if you wanted a doctor who would see you without a mask or wouldn't push the vaccine, she could give you names.

Zoe Chace

Getting ivermectin became a huge focus of this emerging parallel medical system. A surprising amount of the emotion driving this movement has to do with ivermectin. You probably remember ivermectin, the horse drug. People started taking huge doses to cure themselves of COVID at one point. But the science says ivermectin doesn't work for COVID. It's an amazing drug for other things like parasites, not COVID.

No matter, though. Doctors on YouTube were promoting things like ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine as miracle cures, quick, cheap, easy solves for COVID. You may remember that YouTube and Twitter and Facebook removed videos because it wasn't true, and it got put on that shortlist of designated official misinformation that the tech companies would actually do something about.

But when those ivermectin-loving doctors got shut down, they only got more famous within the medical freedom movement, and set up shop on alternative media platforms like Rumble and Telegram. They created a whole alternate ecosystem of podcasts and podcast networks.

Zoe Chace

The basic conspiracy theory articulated on a lot of these shows is this-- COVID was a man-made created virus masterminded by Bill Gates and the World Health Organization in order to control the world's population. Vaccines were pushed in order to kill us. Lockdowns were used in order to control us. Moderna, Pfizer, they're in on it. They want to kill off ivermectin because it's a cheap alternative to what they're selling.

The conspiracy has a name. It's called The Great Reset. And that's what Flynn will be covering on his show down the hall from the clinic, among other things.

Zoe Chace

When I ask Vic and Tanya straight-up if they believe in the Great Reset, they were both like, I'm not going to cop to that exact thing, like all the stuff you said. Specifically, like, maybe it wasn't Bill Gates. But, yes, there was a power grab, and there was money to be made.

Zoe Chace

It makes sense to me that Tanya was the person who threw herself into this project of building this alternative medical system, and now running the We The People Clinic at 959 East Venice. She's definitely a take-matters-into-your-own-hands type. And she feels like doctors haven't listened to her in the past when she needed them.

Zoe Chace

Nine miscarriages in, Tanya seemed to find a doctor who figured out something that might help. And then she had two kids right in a row, the kids who years later would go on to flick masks onto the bathroom floor during COVID.

Zoe Chace

What we're chronicling here, remember, is the establishment of a headquarters of this new MAGA-fied medical freedom movement at 959 East Venice Avenue, half podcast studio, half medical clinic. And the next big moment in the story of the creation of this building happens at arguably the opposite of this place, the main hospital in the area, Sarasota Memorial Hospital.

Not long after the mask mandate event at The Hollow, Vic started up a political organizing company to support what he calls "freedom candidates," America-first candidates, essentially, Trumpists. He called it The Hollow 2A and threw a lot of money into it. They supported a slate of school board candidates who swept into office. They also backed another group of candidates for a local hospital.

Sarasota Memorial Hospital is governed by a publicly elected board, and they supported four candidates who were aligned with this medical freedom movement. These candidates were basically anti-everything the hospital was doing, anti the CDC protocols they used, anti the vaccines they administered, upset that the hospital didn't offer ivermectin and other alternative medicines to patients who wanted it to treat COVID.

They kind of wanted to tear the whole place down, and they called for a big investigation into everything that had transpired during COVID. Three of their preferred candidates won, not enough to control the board, enough to make some noise. The public hospital has public meetings every month, and you can imagine how those have been going.

Zoe Chace

In February of this year, 2023, the board was delivering the results of a three-year review of the hospital's performance during the COVID pandemic. The report was glowing. The hospital's COVID-19 death rate was about 25% lower than state and national averages. Hospital stays were shorter too, which is a pretty great verdict for a place full of elderly people.

Vic and The Hollow crew didn't believe those results at all. They started pushing for a completely independent investigation of the hospital's COVID practices. Kind of like those forensic audits that people who thought the election was stolen wanted after 2020. Demands to comb through every ballot, every gear of the voting machines.

But this, of course, was way more personal because there was all this grief and pain mixed in with the suspicion.

Zoe Chace

"My son was 39 years of age when he went into the hospital," this one woman is saying up at the mic.

Zoe Chace

"It's like the doctors are making decisions for all of us."

Zoe Chace

"They said his organs are failing. He's 39. What do you mean his organs are failing? We asked for ivermectin. I had my lawyer on the phone. They refused. All the nurses and doctors," she goes on, "I know how hard you work. But the CDC protocol, it's killing people."

Dr. Manny Gordillo ran the COVID response at the hospital. He was at that hearing, but didn't speak. Ivermectin came up in so much of the testimony that I wanted to talk to him about that. It was a stand-in for so many things, but it was also just a drug, a relatively harmless drug. Why not just give them the ivermectin?

Zoe Chace

That's what drives him nuts, when people who have been lied to refuse remdesivir, which can work, and want ivermectin, which does not.

Zoe Chace

This is the unbridgeable divide between the medical professionals and the medical freedom people in this case. To the activists, it's bad medicine to not give ivermectin. To the professionals, it's bad medicine to give it. There's not a middle ground to be had.

Dr. Gordillo is an infectious disease specialist, and he's had many of these confrontations-- conversations-- with family members demanding alternative COVID treatments over the past few years. It was rough running the hospital's COVID response. He'd coped with death threats against his family, protests outside the ICU. He'd work 100 hours a week. It was hard on his marriage.

His wife was like, these patients hate you, and you're still going to work for them? What kind of a person are you? I thought what happened at the meeting might make him mad.

Zoe Chace

Dr. Gordillo is from Peru, from a place he says the choices were becoming a fisherman or a priest. He tried something else, of course, but he still fishes. That's one of the things he loves about living in Sarasota. Something that surprised me, Dr. Gordillo did take a serious look at ivermectin. There were early studies showing it killed COVID in a test tube. Problem was, the doses it took were much too high to give to a human being.

He says, when people know they're going to die, people always ask for alternative treatments to all kinds of things, for HIV, cancer. He's seen it a lot over 30 years. And his attitude is, if the treatment won't hurt you, sure, go get it elsewhere. If an alternative clinic gives out ivermectin, he's like, whatever, they're just not going to do it at his hospital.

Zoe Chace

I let Tanya and Vic know Gordillo had taken a serious look at ivermectin.

Zoe Chace

His answer probably shouldn't surprise anyone who's been living in America lately. You have studies? I have studies too. You have doctors? I have doctors that say the opposite.

Zoe Chace

The two sides on this are so divided and both so embattled that the one thing they have in common is how misunderstood each side feels by the other. At that board meeting at Sarasota Memorial Hospital, it was true for Dr. Gordillo. It was true for Tanya.

Zoe Chace

Tanya was like, OK, it's not going to work at Sarasota Memorial.

Zoe Chace

That's when the Medical Center at 959 East Venice Avenue became a reality. Florida's a great place to do this. Tanya's side is winning in Florida. In September 2021, DeSantis hired this vaccine-skeptical surgeon general to run Florida's response to the COVID pandemic, someone who altered a report's findings to claim the COVID vaccine had more adverse side effects than it actually has.

DeSantis started publicly questioning the vaccines, saying they could be dangerous, and publicly deriding CDC protocols. This anti-vaccine agenda in Florida arguably had consequences. One study estimated 30,000 extra deaths just in Florida because people didn't get vaccinated.

DeSantis also created this brand-new committee of physicians who would assess any federal health guidelines coming into the state. Dr. Gordillo at Sarasota Memorial Hospital calls this group radical, extremely right wing, outside of mainstream science. The same day he announced that committee, DeSantis filed a petition with the Florida Supreme Court to convene a grand jury, a grand jury to look into things Pfizer and Moderna claimed about the vaccine, which he says were criminally misleading. Dr. Gordillo was like, what is happening?

Zoe Chace

DeSantis is now campaigning for president on his COVID policies, the way he, quote unquote, "fought back the Iron Curtain of Faucism." The language he uses seems designed to appeal to anyone who believes that COVID was a virus created to control us all.

Zoe Chace

This is him at CPAC a year ago.

Zoe Chace

Governor DeSantis just signed a set of four medical freedom bills into law two months ago. The press release reads, "Permanent protections for Floridians from the biomedical security state." It not only outlaws any, quote, "discrimination based on vaccine status," it also protects a doctor's right to disagree with what DeSantis has called, "the preferred narrative of the medical community."

The legislation protects doctors from any discipline by state medical boards for spreading wrong information about, say, ivermectin or the vaccine. That's good news for Vic's clinic and any doctors or nurses who choose to work there. DeSantis wants them to keep practicing here in Florida.

There have been a bunch of other medical freedom-type bills introduced in state legislatures around the country in the past year. And you can see some Republican legislators citing what's happening in Florida as their inspiration. Some of these bills protect doctors who want to promote things like ivermectin for COVID. Florida's law is far and away the most comprehensive. It's the only one that prohibits, quote, "international health organizations"-- the ones Vic and Tanya are so worried about-- "from dictating state policy," for example. Florida stands alone.

As Vic prepares for his clinic's opening in September, he's part of a growing market for anti-vax enthusiasts. The medical freedom movement already has blood banks for the unvaccinated, a whole suite of unvaccinated fertility options, unvaccinated sperm, unvaccinated surrogacy, unvaccinated eggs, unvaccinated breast milk donation.

Unvaccinated dating apps are a thing. Mike Flynn recently soft-launched an unvaccinated online community called 4thePURE. And Vic, he's already planning an outpatient surgery center next to 959 East Venice. And he says word is getting out about the clinic.

Zoe Chace

When Tanya showed me around the clinic, she pointed to the very front wall. To explain what she wants to put there, she tells me that when she staffed the clinic, she reached out to some of the doctors who'd lost their jobs for what she saw as telling the truth, going against the mainstream. Like the pediatrician she hired, Dr. Renata Moon, she'd been terminated from her practice in Spokane, Washington, she says, for refusing to turn over paperwork showing she was vaccinated against COVID.

Zoe Chace

What she's describing is the world DeSantis wants. And Tanya and Vic, they're just living in it, thriving in it. DeSantis wants this for all of America. He's out there selling it. Little problem he's having though, Vic anyway, he'd never go for DeSantis for president. He's a Trump guy.

Ira Glass

Zoe Chace is a producer on our show.

Coming up, you finally figure out what your dream job is, and it more or less gets outlawed by the Florida legislature. That's in a minute, from Chicago Public Radio, when our program continues.

Ira Glass

It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Today's show, "The Florida Experiment." Ron DeSantis wants to make America more like Florida. We go for a visit to see what that might be like. We've arrived at Act Two of our program. Act two, Their Eyes Were Watching Tallahassee.

So probably the biggest part of Governor DeSantis' agenda focuses on education. He and Florida Republicans have passed law after law defining what can and cannot be taught in the classroom. And that's not just in elementary and high schools. It's also in universities.

This February, Florida Republicans in the statehouse introduced this big bill, HB 999 to limit what you can teach in every public college and university in the state. The earliest versions of the bill were far-reaching. They didn't just ban critical race theory and identity politics from all general education courses. They made it so no student could major or minor in gender studies or in what the bill calls "radical feminist theory," things that have been standard in universities for decades.

For professors who might try to sneak something by, early drafts of the bill didn't explicitly say what would happen to them. But they did say that tenured professors could have their tenure reviewed at any time. Understandably, professors all over the state wondered what this new bill was going to mean in practice.

Emmanuel Dzotsi wondered that too and followed things for one semester between the introduction of the bill and its final passage at one of the biggest universities in Florida, Florida State. He has this story about what it was like for a professor and one of her students.

Emmanuel Dzotsi

So one of the many students affected by this new law is Kaysin. She's Black, moved to Florida as a kid. She was a freshman this past year. Kaysin's very bright, and not just in the smart and intelligent kind of way. She's a really positive person, very earnest. At a school with more than 30,000 undergrads, she couldn't meet enough of them.

Emmanuel Dzotsi

Kaysin was also super passionate about the academic side of things. She chose Florida State, in part, because she got a scholarship, and she was aiming to be the first person in her family to get a bachelor's degree. Her focus was to do something that would get her a job, so she looked into picking up a major in entrepreneurship, which would give her the tools to start her own business.

But then she signed up for this African-American studies class, just, you know, to try it, which, as any disappointed parent of a business major who drops it all for a life in humanities can tell you, this is how it starts. Kaysin loved the course, couldn't ask enough questions of her professor.

Emmanuel Dzotsi

Kaysin loved the class so much that by the end of the semester, she switched her major to English and added a minor in African-American studies. She wanted to dive deeper on Black writers from her state, from Florida. So for her second semester, she signed up for a class on Southern Black literature, the Literatures and Cultures of the Afro Gulf South, taught by a Black female professor named Dr. Alisha Gaines. And when Kaysin met Dr. Gaines on the first day of class, she was obsessed with her.

Emmanuel Dzotsi

Within a few weeks of meeting Dr. Gaines, Kaysin decided she was going to become just like her, become a professor of African-American literature. But right as she figured out what she wanted to do with her life, HB 999 was introduced. It was late February, a few weeks into the semester.

Emmanuel Dzotsi

Kaysin realized that a lot of the things that she loved most about Gaines' class might be affected by this bill. The class was, of course, about literature. But it also involved discussions about the cultural and political context for each book. For example, at one point, they read a novel about one family's experience of Hurricane Katrina, and they talked about the role systemic racism played in the government's response to it.

It felt like without those sorts of discussions, Literatures and Cultures of the Afro Gulf South just wasn't Literatures and Cultures of the Afro Gulf South. And she felt like her entire field of study, Black literature, specifically Black literature that probed the true legacy of what it means to be Black in America, the thing she had just realized she wanted to make her life's work, was under threat.

Like, there was one day where they were discussing Their Eyes Were Watching God in class, and Kaysin just couldn't stop thinking about the bill.

Emmanuel Dzotsi

Kaysin wondered how seriously she should take the bill. It was something I was wondering about too. I thought, this bill is just a draft. Surely a lot of this sweeping language targeting subjects, that was going to come out, right? And even if it didn't and the bill passed, it's such an attack on free speech, surely it wouldn't hold up in court.

But pretty much every one of the professors who talked to me at FSU said that the bill's very introduction had a chilling effect. The language in the bill was so broad, it was hard to pin down exactly what would be prohibited. Professors told me that they and their colleagues were feeling pressured to change things about their work, regardless of what happened with the law. And Dr. Gaines says, that didn't seem like an accident.

Emmanuel Dzotsi

But even believing that, it was hard to know what to do. Like, the same week the bill was introduced, Dr. Gaines got word that she was going to be teaching a course she hadn't taught before in the fall, Major Figures in American Literature, which is a really broad subject, right? In theory, you could teach any assortment of great American authors. And Dr. Gaines was considering making the focus of the class the authors of the Harlem Renaissance.

Emmanuel Dzotsi

Gaines wondered, with HB 999 and all of the discourse around education in the state, if she could teach the historical racial context around an era like the Harlem Renaissance and its continued relevance today in a class where some students would just be there to fulfill a writing requirement.

She would encounter students from all different kinds of majors, students who might not necessarily be trying to learn about Black writers, and who would be able to record her classes and report her.

Emmanuel Dzotsi

In March, I heard about something that was adding to the sense of dread so many people I talked to were feeling. It was a list that was getting passed around, and on it were 34 classes at FSU. Most of the professors I talked to about it didn't know exactly what it meant to be on the list, but they figured it wasn't a good thing.

At first, it wasn't exactly clear who created the list. The DeSantis administration? The university?

Dr. Gaines and I looked through the list. There are programs and classes you'd expect to see, courses that talk about race and gender in ways that might concern Republicans on an anti-woke crusade, like AMH 2096, Black Women in America, or SYD 3800, Sociology of Sex and Gender.

But there are many classes missing. Dr. Gaines' class that Kaysin was in, Literatures and Cultures of the Afro Gulf South, wasn't on there, which made no sense, not that she was complaining.

Emmanuel Dzotsi

You also had a lot of classes that didn't seem to fit, like Classical Perspectives on Dance, Masterpieces of German Literature. After looking into it, I figured out that the university made the list. The DeSantis administration had requested all public universities send in a comprehensive list of anything on campus related to diversity and inclusion and critical race theory.

I couldn't get anyone at the school to explain to me why this oddly random list of courses was what they decided to send in. Was it some Machiavellian mind game? Was it incompetence? Who knows? But this disembodied list being passed around, it had an effect. It added to the web of self-doubt and fear that professors at FSU were feeling.

Some of them were already changing their courses, trying to make them hold up to scrutiny. I talked to one professor who removed work by Ibram Kendi from his syllabus and emphasized empirical studies about traffic stops and hiring discrimination instead.

Two other professors took the understandable step of changing the names of their courses, basically erasing the giant targets they had on their backs. A class called "Critical Race Theory" will now be listed as "The Sociology of Race and Ethnicity." Another class, "Feminism and Travel," you can find out under the new name, "Journeys in Women's Literature." Both courses are, content-wise, basically the same as they were before.

Emmanuel Dzotsi

That's Dr. Celia Caputi, one of Dr. Gaines' colleagues in the English department. She teaches classes about women's literature. And the subjects targeted in the legislation were so open to interpretation with no explanation of what the punishment would be that she honestly couldn't figure out what she should be teaching.

Feminist theory and gender studies were baked into her courses. She worried about losing her tenure and getting fired. And so she spent an enormous amount of time this past semester trying to do whatever she could to protect herself.

Emmanuel Dzotsi

In other words, if you're a Florida Republican who believes that radical liberal professors are turning students gay, this article would be a red flag.

Emmanuel Dzotsi

This is one of the people who wrote HB 999, State Representative Alex Andrade. He'd been hearing about this chilling effect from so many critics of the bill. He was defensive when asked about it at first, about his intent, very angry that people thought he and the bill were racist, which he denies.

He says the fear that greeted HB 999 was inflamed by Democrats and the media. When I said that professors were feeling like they needed to change their courses, he was like, good. Maybe they need to.

Emmanuel Dzotsi

Here's the thing. Andrade doesn't believe that systemic racism is inherent to the institutions of the United States today, even though a whole host of academic work says it is. He says, it's important that people learn about the systemic racism of the past. Learn about Jim Crow, for example. But that's the past, he says. If there's an institution that's racist right now, he said to me, I'll fight it with you.

I hope you're noticing the distinction Andrade is making here. He's saying, there are isolated instances of, say, Black men being arrested because they're Black. But that's not proof of institutional racism.

He did this a few times. Presented with the weight of the evidence, he'd just say, there's no evidence, or he'd mention a study that he'd seen. And this is what's making life for professors so hard. They do already present clear and fact-based evidence.

But Andrade is telling them they can't state what their evidence adds up to if it's a conclusion he and the Republican legislature don't agree with. How do you navigate that? As one professor told me, we can't just get up there and be like, so there's these discrepancies in health outcomes, but I can't tell you why. That's just not teaching.

I reached out to the DeSantis administration to ask them about HB 999. They didn't directly respond to my questions. Instead, their press secretary sent me links to a DeSantis press conference and a couple of other public statements about the bill. And the message from those was pretty clear. If you want to teach stuff about critical race theory or gender ideology, we're not going to be funding it. Go somewhere else.

Dr. Gaines said that professors heard that message loud and clear. Students did too. Kaysin, for sure, she was following the news about the bill.

Emmanuel Dzotsi

Kaysin said she actually meant something a little different.

Emmanuel Dzotsi

Dr. Gaines told Kaysin she wasn't going to change her class at all, but she'd been feeling the pressure. A few weeks earlier, she decided to show a documentary in both of the classes she was teaching that semester.

The documentary was called Invisible History, Middle Florida's Hidden Roots, and it was a documentary about the legacy of slavery around Leon County, where FSU is located. The first class she showed it to was all grad students. And when the film was finished, there was this stunned silence in the room.

Emmanuel Dzotsi

As in, Dr. Gaines, you just did something that could get you in trouble. Dr. Gaines was surprised. This was just a fact-based documentary that had been made by a filmmaker in residence at FSU, though it is pretty unflinching in the way it ties Leon County's Jim Crow past with its present.

Half an hour later, she screened the same documentary for Kaysin's class. And they were in the middle of a film when she noticed something.

Emmanuel Dzotsi

Dr. Gaines started panicking.

Emmanuel Dzotsi

Gaines wasn't sure what would happen if she had offended his kid. So she wrote down some notes about where exactly in the film he'd walked out and then sat there, anxiously looking at the other students to see if anyone else was going to follow. And then--

Emmanuel Dzotsi

I checked with the student, and he hadn't actually gone to the bathroom. He stepped into the hall because of some news he'd gotten. But Dr. Gaines was seeing threats where there weren't any. She was beginning to doubt herself.

Emmanuel Dzotsi

By early April, as the bill was being debated in committee, Kaysin was finding it increasingly difficult to stay upbeat as she saw news about the bill's progress. It had been a rough semester.

Emmanuel Dzotsi

Right after the semester finished, DeSantis signed his big higher ed package. That final law did not have some of the things the professors I spoke with found most alarming. They dropped the idea that no one could major or minor in gender studies or feminist theory or critical race theory. They dropped the idea that unruly professors could have their tenure reviewed at any time.

But the law does say that in general education courses, you can't teach identity politics or that systemic racism or sexism are built into the institutions of the United States. Kaysin saw the news about the bill passing and thought about her future. They're not going to stop here, she told me. Who knows what further restrictions to higher education they might make next year? Would you want to stick around for that?

It's a thing she's talking about a lot nowadays with the people in her life, with her friends, with her parents, just what staying or leaving would mean, especially as a Black person in the South.

Emmanuel Dzotsi

Whether or not Kaysin stays in Florida through grad school, the one thing she knows for sure is that she still wants to be a professor, just like Dr. Gaines. The new law didn't change that.

It did have a chilling effect. But what that looks like right now among the professors I talk to is people feeling fear, maybe changing their course names or removing things from their CVs. But mostly, these educators are standing their ground and teaching the same things they were before.

Dr. Gaines, for instance, that class about major American writers, she decided to go ahead and teach only Black authors from the Harlem Renaissance. Dr. Celia Caputi is moving ahead with her article referencing the lesbian continuum. The faculty union is telling everyone, don't change your classes. If they try to use the law to stop you, we'll fight.

Ira Glass

Reporter Emmanuel Dzotsi.

Ira Glass

Act three, Goodbye Sunshine.

Ira Glass

So we started our show with people moving to Florida. We end with somebody moving away. Eliza's 16, just finished her sophomore year of high school. And I talked to her two days after she arrived in the house her family just moved to in Virginia.

They moved because of the law that Ron DeSantis enacted in May that bans gender-affirming care for anybody under 18. Eliza's trans, takes a hormone blocker, an estrogen.

Ira Glass

Eliza's dad is in the military, so she's moved around a lot, Ohio, Texas, Germany, Los Angeles, Huntsville, Montgomery, been to lots of schools. She says, usually there's an even split between people who believe different kinds of things, but not in her school in Florida.

Ira Glass

Parts of the law that made Eliza move have been overturned by the courts. But that doesn't matter to her family. Eliza wasn't out to many people in Florida. Most kids at school didn't know she was trans. So when she had to explain to them the reason why she was leaving, she kept it simple. "Politics," she said.

Well, our program was produced today by Zoe Chace and Alaa Mostafa.

The people put together today's show include Bim Adewunmi, Chris Benderev, James Bennett II, Phia Bennin, Sean Cole, Michael Comite, Aviva DeKornfeld, Bethel Habte, Cassie Howley, Valerie Kipnis, Seth Lind, Caitlin Love, Stowe Nelson, Katherine Rae Mondo, Nadia Reiman, Ryan Rumery, Alissa Shipp, Lilly Sullivan, Christopher Swetala, Matt Tierney, and Diane Wu.

Managing editor is Sarah Abdurrahman. Our senior editor is David Kestenbaum. Our executive editor is Emmanuele Berry. Ike Sriskandarajah produced act three of our show.

Special thanks today to Paul Westcott of L2 Data, Devan Vilfrard, Jacob Perry, Dominique Jean Louis, Taylor Cox, John Gregory, Laurel Bristow, the National Conference of State Legislatures, Julio Ochoa, Stephanie Colombini, Earle Kimel, Paul Offit, Kim Savage, Rob Brooks, Ann Davies, Christopher Spata from The Tampa Bay Times, Zac Anderson from the Sarasota Herald-Tribune, Tho Bishop, Paul and Brenda Chabot, Selene San Felice, Adam Steinbaugh, Aubrey Jewett, Susan MacManus, and Julia Manchester and Max Greenwood, who wrote about Florida turning red for The Hill.

This American Life is delivered to public radio stations by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange. Our website, thisamericanlife.org, where we have new merch, including great new T-shirts and more. My favorite is this really beautiful illustration of our show's co-founder Mr. Torey Malatia. Check it out, thisamericanlife.org.

Thanks, as always, to our program's co-founder, Mr. Torey Malatia. He refuses to go to dinner and a movie with me if it's just the two of us. And here's why.

Ira Glass

I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life.