A Subtropical Hellscape I Call Home

Also known as Florida.

A Subtropical Hellscape I Call Home

The Slow Divestment

I remember when Florida’s problems felt normal. Not good, but normal. The kind of dysfunction you expect from a big, weird, humid state that’s half retirement community and half fever dream. The roads were bad, the politics were messy, the summers were brutal. But the bones were there. The public infrastructure worked well enough. The schools weren’t great but they weren’t being actively dismantled. You could live a working class life here without it feeling like the state itself was working against you.

That started changing around 2000. Not dramatically at first. More like a slow leak. Programs got quietly cut. Funding that used to show up stopped showing up. And the framing shifted: public investment started getting talked about like it was waste, like the idea of the government doing something *for* people was somehow embarrassing.

Here’s something I never thought I’d say: I miss Jeb Bush. Let that land for a second. Because compared to what came after, the Jeb years and even the Charlie Crist years look like a relative golden era. That’s not nostalgia talking. That’s just what the wreckage looks like in the rearview mirror.

Then Rick Scott happened. And the word I keep coming back to is *overt*. The corruption stopped trying to hide.

When The Mask Came Off

Rick Scott didn’t invent the divestment. He just stopped pretending it wasn’t intentional.

The unemployment system is the example I keep coming back to because it’s so nakedly cruel it’s almost hard to believe it was deliberate. Except it absolutely was. The CONNECT system, which Scott’s administration oversaw the creation of, wasn’t just badly designed. It was *designed to fail applicants*. Impossible navigation, arbitrary denials, a process so Byzantine that people who genuinely needed help simply gave up. That was the point. Lower the payout numbers, not by fixing the economy or getting people back to work, but by making the bureaucracy so hostile that people stopped trying to get what they were entitled to. When COVID hit and hundreds of thousands of Floridians suddenly needed that system, we found out exactly how well that strategy had worked. It collapsed immediately. Because it was never meant to function.

Then there was Medicaid expansion. Florida left billions of federal dollars on the table. Money that was already allocated. Money that would have cost the state relatively little to access. Because Scott and the legislature decided that letting poor people see doctors was ideologically unacceptable. People died for that decision. Not metaphorically. Actually died from treatable conditions because they couldn’t access care. And Scott, who had previously run the largest Medicare and Medicaid fraud operation in American history before becoming governor, stood there and lectured the state about fiscal responsibility.

Read that again. The man who ran Columbia/HCA, who oversaw $1.7 billion in fraud settlements, was making the call on healthcare access for the poorest Floridians. And nobody seemed to think that was disqualifying.

The environmental stuff hit differently because Florida’s natural world is the one thing that was supposed to be above politics. We’d managed to protect it reasonably well across administrations for decades. Not perfectly, but with some genuine commitment. Scott’s administration turned the permitting agencies into rubber stamps. DEP stopped being a regulatory body and became a customer service desk for developers. Protected lands got sold off. Water quality monitoring got gutted right before the algae blooms started choking the coasts. Coincidence is a word people use when they don’t want to say what they’re looking at.

What made the Scott years feel different wasn’t just the policies. It was the complete absence of shame. Previous administrations might do things you disagreed with but there was at least a pretense of serving the public. Scott operated like a man who had concluded the public was an obstacle to be managed, not a constituency to be served.

You Could Get Pills Though

I’ve lost friends. Not to dramatic things. To the ordinary, grinding cruelty of not being able to afford a doctor. People who had things that were treatable. People who waited too long because the math didn’t work, because the system Scott built was designed to make sure the math never worked. By the time they had no choice but to go, it was too late. I’m not speaking in abstractions here. I’m speaking about specific people whose names I know.

But here’s the thing. If those same friends had wanted OxyContin, they could have had it by Thursday.

Florida was the pill mill capital of America. At the peak, eight of the top ten opioid-dispensing doctors in the entire country were in Florida. You could drive down certain stretches of road and count the pain clinics like fast food restaurants. Cash only. No questions. Bring your MRI from three states ago and walk out with a prescription that would last a month. People were driving down from Kentucky and Ohio. Actual pill mill tourism. Because Florida was where you came to stock up.

And the state largely let it happen. For years. The prescription drug monitoring database that most states had already implemented sat unpassed in Tallahassee because the pain clinic industry had lobbyists and the lobbyists had relationships. Scott finally signed the legislation in 2011, only after the body count had become a national embarrassment and the DEA started showing up without asking permission first.

So let’s hold both of those things at the same time. The state that decided poor people didn’t deserve Medicaid, that left billions in federal healthcare dollars sitting unclaimed, was simultaneously presiding over the most predatory pharmaceutical distribution network in American history. The cruelty wasn’t random. The permissiveness wasn’t accidental. Both served specific interests. Both had specific beneficiaries.

The people who died waiting for a doctor didn’t have lobbyists.

The people running pill mills did.

Danny

I want to tell you about my friend Danny.

Danny came back from Afghanistan in one piece, mostly. Partial disability. Enough to get out, not enough apparently to get the VA moving with any urgency. So he did what you do. Moved back in with his parents in Florida, tried to navigate the bureaucracy, tried to get stable. Couldn’t afford a doctor. Couldn’t afford a dentist.

One day Danny was helping a friend move. Just being a good friend on an ordinary day. He sat down on the couch to rest and never got back up.

They think it was a dental abscess. Bacteria from an infected tooth that got into his blood and went to his heart. The kind of infection that gets caught at a routine dental visit. The kind of thing that costs a few hundred dollars to treat if someone finds it in time. The kind of thing that quietly kills you if nobody does.

Danny survived Afghanistan. He died on a couch in Florida before he turned 30.

The Dojo

I taught (mixed and traditional) martial arts for years. Real fighters, mostly working class dudes, the kind of people who don’t complain much and push through things they shouldn’t. People got hurt. That’s the nature of the sport. Shoulders, knees, backs. The accumulated damage of bodies used hard.

Almost none of them could afford a doctor.

But the pain pills were everywhere and they were cheap. You didn’t need insurance for those. You didn’t need a referral or a copay or a three month wait for an appointment. You needed cash and a short drive and a willingness to describe your pain to someone who was already writing the prescription before you finished the sentence. The pill mills were so thick in certain parts of Florida they had created mini boom towns.

So that’s what guys did. They ate pills and kept training and ate more pills and the pills stopped being about the shoulder and started being about everything else, and then they weren’t the same people anymore.

I watched it happen to more people than I can count. Some of them are dead. Not from fights. From their livers. From their hearts. From the ordinary biological consequences of years of self-medication that nobody ever interrupted because interrupting it would have required a healthcare system that gave a damn. Some of them are still alive but they’re not the people I knew. Radicalized, hollowed out, angry in a directionless way that eventually found a home in whatever political movement promised them an enemy to blame that wasn’t a pill mill or a state government.

Eventually I had to walk away from teaching. Not because I stopped loving it. Because I couldn’t keep watching what was happening to people I’d trained with for years and pretend it was just bad luck.

It wasn’t bad luck.

And I wouldn’t be even slightly surprised if money from the pill mill industry found its way into the pockets of people who were supposed to be regulating it. That’s not a conspiracy theory in a state where the governor who finally signed the prescription monitoring database legislation had previously overseen the largest Medicare and Medicaid fraud settlement in American history. In Florida, that’s just called Tuesday.

Florida Gonna Do Florida

Rick Scott graduated from dismantling Florida to doing nothing for it from a Senate seat in Washington. His constituents can’t afford doctors or dentists. His Senate legacy is military base renovations and calling China communist seventeen times per press release. He tried to sunset Social Security. He tried to throw out your votes. He got reelected by twelve points anyway.

Florida gonna do Florida.

Which brings us to Ron DeSantis. And here’s the thing you have to understand about DeSantis. He didn’t inherit a broken state and try to fix it. He inherited a broken state and decided it was the perfect stage.

Scott’s corruption was transactional. Money moved, favors got done, the wrong people got protected. It was ugly but it followed a logic you could at least trace. DeSantis operates differently. His corruption is theatrical. Florida isn’t a place he governs. It’s a content machine he operates. Every policy decision gets evaluated not by whether it helps Floridians but by whether it plays on Fox News by six o’clock.

The USS Flagg Kid

Let me be clear about something. Ron DeSantis is not an idiot. He’s also not particularly smart. What he is, is lucky. Lucky in the specific way that rewards a certain kind of hollow ambition.

He rode Trump’s coattails into the governor’s mansion, won his first term by less than half a percentage point, and then watched COVID hand him a bizarre political gift. While other governors were making hard calls and getting destroyed for them, DeSantis picked a lane. Open everything, deny everything, perform toughness. The people who were already primed to believe that lane rewarded him enough that he coasted to a thirty point reelection in a state that was supposedly a perennial tossup.

A weak legislature helped. An apathetic electorate helped. Fox News helped enormously. But mostly what helped was that he understood one thing intuitively. A significant portion of the Florida electorate didn’t want good governance. They wanted someone to own the right enemies. And DeSantis is genuinely talented at that one specific thing.

But here’s what he actually is underneath the manufactured toughness. You knew this kid growing up. He’s the kid who had the USS Flagg, that massive GI Joe aircraft carrier that took up half a bedroom, and would make you come over and look at it but never actually let you play with it. The kid who’d make you watch him play Nintendo for hours, handing you the controller only when he was comfortably ahead, then absolutely losing his mind when his Excitebike time wasn’t good enough. Throwing the controller. Changing the rules. Suddenly having to go to dinner.

That’s DeSantis. The cruelty isn’t incidental to the politics. It’s the entire point. Banning AP African American Studies. Sending Venezuelan migrants to Martha’s Vineyard on Florida taxpayer money as a human props stunt. Going to war with Disney because they had the audacity to have an opinion. Scrubbing the words “climate change” from state agency documents while the coasts flood and the insurance market quietly collapses. None of this makes Florida better. It was never designed to. It’s designed to let him feel the power of having something other people want and choosing to deny it.

He ran for president. Burned through forty million dollars. Got humiliated in Iowa. Dropped out before New Hampshire even voted and flew back to Tallahassee like none of it happened. The legislature barely noticed he’d been gone. That’s how much of an impression his actual governance had made. The place ran on autopilot because there was never much governing happening to begin with.

He’s an empty man who discovered that emptiness is very easy to fill with other people’s pain. Florida just happened to be available.

Hope Florida

I need you to hold all of this in your head at once because the only way to understand what happened is to see the whole shape of it.

Florida sued Centene, its largest Medicaid contractor, for overbilling. Won a $67 million settlement. Money that came directly from recovering Medicaid fraud. Money that in every other state that ran similar cases went straight back into Medicaid accounts where it belonged.

Not in Florida. In Florida, the DeSantis administration quietly carved $10 million off the top of that settlement and handed it to the Hope Florida Foundation. The nonprofit arm of a state welfare-to-work program run by Casey DeSantis. The First Lady. The woman positioning herself to run for governor.

That $10 million then got split between two nonprofits, which immediately turned around and funneled $8.5 million into a political action committee run by DeSantis’s own chief of staff. A PAC that was actively campaigning to defeat the marijuana legalization amendment on the 2024 ballot. The man who ran that PAC, James Uthmeier, was subsequently appointed by DeSantis as Florida’s Attorney General. The man now in charge of prosecuting financial crimes in this state.

But wait. It gets worse.

Separately, the DeSantis administration dipped into the opioid settlement fund. Money won in lawsuits against the pill mill industry. Money specifically designated to help drug-addicted Floridians get treatment. They spent $4 million of it on political ads. The same ads. Against the same ballot amendment.

The ads were against legalizing marijuana. Let that sink in for a second. Not fentanyl. Not meth. Weed. The one thing Floridians of every political stripe, every demographic, every county actually agree on. Marijuana legalization passed with 56% of the vote. Fifty six percent. In Florida. The amendment still failed because Florida requires a 60% supermajority for constitutional changes, a threshold designed to make popular ideas harder to pass. DeSantis spent stolen money to defeat something his own constituents wanted and still almost lost.

Floridians agree on approximately two things: weed and Publix subs. He came after one of them with Medicaid fraud money.

Think about what that means. The money extracted from the industry that hollowed out my dojo. That kept my guys medicated and compliant until their hearts and livers gave out. That killed people I knew. That money was supposed to come back and help people like them. Instead it paid for political advertising.

Rick Scott oversaw the largest Medicare and Medicaid fraud settlement in American history before becoming governor. Then as governor he refused Medicaid expansion and let people die. Then his successor took the money recovered from Medicaid fraud and ran it through his wife’s charity into his chief of staff’s PAC.

This isn’t irony. I’m tired of people calling it irony. It’s not a coincidence or a twist or a dark joke. It’s the same transaction running on a loop. The same people. The same money. The same victims. Just different paperwork.

Danny couldn’t afford a dentist. The settlement money from the pill mills that supplied his dojo went to Facebook ads.

And when Republican legislators, actual Republicans, opened an investigation and started getting close to something, the witnesses stopped cooperating, the investigation quietly died, and the man accused of wire fraud and money laundering got promoted.

That’s not irony.

That’s Florida.

What This Is

I want to be straight with you about who I am and why I’m writing this.

I’m not a journalist. I’m not a politician. I’m not a wealthy man with a platform and an axe to grind. I’m a (grown) kid who is two generations removed from Mississippi sharecroppers who got out of poverty because the United States, for one brief shining moment, decided that investing in people was worth doing. My family climbed because of policies that would get you called a communist at a Tallahassee cocktail party today. I got advanced education because federal money existed for gifted programs that believed poor kids with sharp minds deserved somewhere to put them. Those programs are largely gone now. The philosophy behind them has been methodically dismantled for twenty five years by people who called it waste.

It wasn’t waste. It was the whole point.

I’m comfortable enough now to look back clearly at what was taken and from whom. That comfort isn’t a reason to stay quiet. It’s the obligation to speak. Because a lot of the people this was done to aren’t in a position to document it. They’re working three jobs or they’re sick or they’re gone. Danny’s gone. A lot of my guys from the dojo are gone. An entire generation of Florida kids who needed the state to give a damn grew up in a state that had already decided they weren’t worth the investment.

That’s what this is about.

This is the first in what’s going to be a long, honest, unflinching account of what happened to Florida and who made it happen. We’re going to get into the environmental collapse, the insurance catastrophe, the gutting of public education, the housing crisis, the slow deliberate transformation of this state from a place people built lives into a place people with money park assets. We’re going to name names and follow money and tell stories about real people because real people are what this was always actually about.

I’ve lived here more than forty years. I watched it happen in real time. I’m not going anywhere.

Neither is the story.

*A Subtropical Hellscape I Call Home is dedicated to the Gen X kids and millennials Florida gave up on.*

*You weren’t unlucky. You were robbed.*