Report: 'No coincidence' between presence of extremist groups in Florida and hardline legislation

A prominent watchdog group this week cited a common denominator between Florida as a home for Jan. 6 insurrectionists, laws targeting LGBTQ+ residents and constraints on academic freedom in schools — the state's political tilt toward hard-right politics.

“Indeed, it is no coincidence that Florida has been subject to the targeting of LGBTQ+ people with laws that remove their rights, has a history of hard-right organizing as exemplified by leading the nation in defendants related to the Jan. 6 insurrection and is home to extensive organizing by groups like Moms for Liberty to ban books and roll back equal access to public education," said Maya Henson Carey, research analyst with the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Project.

Carey commented on the Sunshine State's status after the Southern Poverty Law Center, a nonprofit civil rights and advocacy group, released its annual report on the status of hate and extremist groups in America. In its "The Year in Hate and Extremism," SPLC researchers and analysts said they documented the status of 1,225 hate and antigovernment extremist groups.

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Southern Poverty Law's report is a national survey, but Florida got its share of mentions

The SPLC has been issuing the survey every year since 1990. It's a nationwide assessment, but this year Florida got numerous mentions as a number of trends the organization highlighted as disturbing have been politically prominent in the state.

However, the SPLC's work in the past has been dismissed, if not derided, by political conservatives who say it is a liberal entity.

Bridget Ziegler, a co-founder of the Moms for Liberty right-wing group, told the Sarasota Herald-Tribune that the SPLC's report on hate and extremism was meritless and its criticism of the parents' organization was "laughable."

"The Southern Poverty Law Group is not a legitimate organization with any merit," said Ziegler, who is chair of the Sarasota County school board. "Outside of it being a leftist attack, political hit job, there's no credibility behind it. It's truly laughable."

Among the concerns in this year's SPLC report is the rising influence of groups purporting to promote parental rights in education but are "simply attempting to maintain absolute authority on issues they oppose" in classrooms.

"A consistent tactic has been the attempt to ban books from classrooms and libraries based on what these groups deem inappropriate because the content addresses race, LGBTQ issues and gender," the report stated.

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PEN America, a New York-based nonprofit devoted to the free expression of ideas, has cited Florida for banning, removing or inappropriately reviewing hundreds of books in school libraries and on classroom shelves, including biographies of Hank Aaron and Roberto Clemente.

In numerous cases, other books, including ones about Anne Frank and Billie Jean King, came under review because fewer than a handful of parents in a school district complained.

The SPLC report cited other tactics used by extremist and hate groups, from distributing flyers to public "spectacles" that have been prevalent in Florida in the past year. Incidents involving anti-Semitic leaflets have been reported in the state, as have public spectacles, from neo-Nazis waving flags to hate messages being flashed onto facades of buildings and sporting venues.

Florida lawmakers did approve legislation sponsored by state Rep. Mike Caruso, a Delray Beach Republican, to crack down on anti-Semitic acts, which Gov. Ron DeSantis signed into law in April.

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But the GOP supermajority approved other pieces of legislation that civil and human rights groups have decried. And DeSantis, emboldened by a nearly 20-point landslide re-election in November, has been unabashed in his pursuit of policies he said are aimed at stopping "woke" indoctrination.

DeSantis, now running for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, recently said, "The woke mind virus represents a war on the truth, so we will wage a war on the woke.”

This week, the DeSantis administration acknowledged its role in shipping people seeking legal immigration status in the United States from Texas to California, a move critics have called cruel in its use of human beings as political pawns.

FAU poll: Floridians say racism, bigotry on the rise

Late last month, Florida Atlantic University and Mainstreet Research released a poll in which a "significant number of Florida voters" cited the increase in racism and bigotry as a concern. The number of respondents who said they were seeing a discernible increase in hate, 56%, far outpaced those who said the trend is in decline, 18%.

The poll and SPLC report come after a Florida legislative session that saw lawmakers embrace more hard-right policies. The 2022 Parental Rights in Education measure, dubbed the "Don't say gay" law by critics, was expanded.

This past Saturday, an outspoken leader in the national transgender community spoke at the Pride on the Block annual festival in West Palm Beach and said the legislation in Florida is specifically aimed at erasing the LGBTQ+ community from the state.

"We're going to say we know exactly what these bills are trying to do. They're trying to exterminate us, and we're not going to stand for it," Montana state Rep. Zooey Zephyr told the crowd.

Lawmakers also enacted a restrictive law they said targeted undocumented immigrants but that faith and aid organizations who assist immigrants feel puts their efforts in jeopardy. This week, state Rep. Rick Roth, R-West Palm Beach, told Insider he still believes the legislation was a good idea but worries it also has "a lot of negative consequences" that he and others are seeking to address.

Also last month, a jury in Washington, D.C., convicted leaders of the Proud Boys extremist group, including Enrique Tarrio of Miami-Dade County, of seditious conspiracy for their roles in the plot to attack the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 to thwart the results of the 2020 presidential election.

There have been flashpoints of pushback. On Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Robert Hinkle blocked enforcement of a relatively new Florida ban on transgender affirming care, calling the regulation "an exercise in politics, not in good medicine."

Is Florida a bellwether for the rest of the country? What are wider political ramifications of state's tilt to hard right?

While state leaders tout Florida as an "anti-woke" model for the rest of the country, SPLC researchers caution that local political factors and impulses are more determinant in how communities across the United States will act.

Rachel Carroll Rivas, SPLC research analyst, said that while Florida "can act as an indicator" of what's happening across the country, it isn't necessary the whole story for what is occurring elsewhere.

"What is happening in a locality, in a rural place, in Alabama, may not be the same situation that's happening in Florida or that's happening in the Pacific Northwest," she said.

"The important thing to note is that actually communities have the ability to engage. In some ways, in our ways, in our rural places and states, they actually have the ability to make big waves because they can really have an impact."

FAU and Mainstreet pollsters said in a statement that their poll showed women, Black and Hispanic respondents seemed more fearful of the rise in hate speech and actions. And, they said, it could lead to more political mobilization going into the 2024 election year.

“If there is a perceived rise in prejudice, group consciousness may drive more people to the polls believing that collective action will help the group’s interest along with an individual’s outcomes,” said Luzmarina Garcia, an assistant professor of political science at FAU who helped conduct the poll.

Part of the problem, said Margaret −Huang, SPLC president and CEO, is that many political leaders across the country are embracing the rhetoric and spirit of extremist groups and their leaders in pursuing public policy.

"We are seeing an increasing number of politicians embracing far right ideology, far more than in the past," said Huang. "In the past, you would see politicians seeking to distance themselves from far-right ideology and far-right extremism. Today, they are all aligned − they are using the same talking points."

Antonio Fins is a politics and business editor at the Palm Beach Post, part of the USA TODAY Florida Network. You can reach him at afins@pbpost.com. Help support our journalism. Subscribe today.

This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Post: Southern Poverty Law Center report links Florida extremist groups, laws