Dear Readers,

The first sign that things weren’t going well was how early they called Florida. “Miami-Dade is red,” my sister texted me. Twenty minutes later, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis was posting on X that the ballot initiative to pass Amendment 4, which would have restored abortion access by enshrining it in the state’s constitution, had been defeated. My heart sank.

For almost two years, my mother had given everything she had to this effort, carrying her clipboard everywhere she went—the grocery store, social engagements—to get to the nearly one million signatures required to put the amendment on the ballot. She nosed her way into conversations with strangers, seized the mic at events where she was only an attendee, anything to spread the word and protect reproductive freedom. Unsurprisingly, DeSantis did everything in his power to defeat the measure: He deployed his proprietary election police to intimidate petition signers, threatened TV stations for airing supportive ads, mounted legal challenges, and used tens of millions in taxpayer money to spread disinformation, in what The Intercept called “a troubling escalation in his larger efforts to subvert the direct democratic process in Florida and weaponize the administrative state.” Because of an anti-democratic GOP amendment, backed by Big Sugar and passed in 2006, the abortion initiative needed not just a simple majority, but a supermajority of 60%; in a cruel twist, Amendment 4 garnered nearly 58% of the vote, about the same share as the 2006 amendment. Needless to say, this set the tone for Tuesday night’s grim carnival of American democracy and its colossal losses.

This past summer, Jewish Currents put out a whole issue about Florida, arguing that it provided a sneak peek at the particular brand of American autocracy we could expect from Trump-Vance et al. We dove deep into the attacks on education—from book banning in grade schools to efforts to dismantle higher ed—laying out how claims of antisemitism, and by extension Jews, have legitimized and provided cover for this nefarious campaign. Such efforts will now doubtless be fast-tracked nationwide. We explored DeSantis’s agenda in his own words, and outlined the ways that leaders like Trump are poised to run with his authoritarian playbook: packing positions of power with cronies, punishing enemies, and subverting democratic norms, while executing on an astounding anti-queer and -trans, anti-immigrant, anti-Black, anti-woman, anti-poor shock and awe campaign. Florida is everywhere, we declared, ever so slightly prematurely. And now, here it is.

Scrolling through X in the wee hours of Wednesday morning, in a mix of numbness and terror, I saw so much disdain for the denizens of red states. “Sadly, those women shouldn’t live in Florida then. Same with Texas. If you live there you know the risks,” said someone who does not understand what the fuck is coming. I suddenly remembered—and here I’m quoting from my own editor’s note—“the warning we received repeatedly from Florida’s embattled left-wing organizers: This isn’t just our problem. Your state could be next.” “If there is any hope in this bleak picture,” I wrote,

it is to be found in those people who are already facing the onslaught, who are making homemade hormone therapy and providing mobile services to the unhoused; the organizers going back to basics—reaching out one-on-one to every member of the union to ensure it can withstand attacks, building difficult and unlikely coalitions on narrower issues in hopes of expanding from there.

I recalled the question that author and scholar Marina Magloire asked in her piece about a South Florida experiment in radical education: “What if we saw Miami as our North? What if, rather than pitying us, American leftists looked south for their strategy?”

Right now, in a moment when the future feels too terrible to imagine, organizers in Florida—indeed, in all of the red states—are showing us what it means to fight for our people where we live, with few resources besides each other: stepping in to provide care and support networks where the government won’t, and protecting one another when the state goes on the attack. They are teaching us how to talk to people who we don’t necessarily see as allies, in the pursuit of broader and stronger coalitions. I imagine that these shifts in the terrain—and the severely heightened threat of repression—will demand some changes on the left. I think about anti-Zionist organizer Donna Nevel, who has been part of building a small but mighty multiracial coalition for Palestine in South Florida. The demands of living in a “fascist climate,” she told reporter Max Freedman, in a piece exploring Miami’s Jewish communal dynamics, have cleared away the “egos,” the noise, and the feuding that is so common in left spaces, especially online. In South Florida, she explained, “we really rely on each other.”

This interreliance is what we have now, our only strength. In an interview with Shoog McDaniel, a photographer of queer life in rural central Florida, they said that while there are plenty of reasons to feel fear where they are, “at some point I realized that I didn’t want to be scared anymore.” “My Florida queer community is how I come together with folks to feel safe,” they said. “When we’re all together in rural areas and laughing and experiencing joy, we can create a force field around us.” Over the past few days, revisiting these words from Floridian artists and activists is one of the only things that has helped me breathe. Not because the portrait they paint of what they—we—are up against isn’t bleak, but because they have offered me a way to think beyond just the terror of what we’re facing, and given shape to what our lives will look like as we fight it.

- Arielle Angel,
Editor-in-Chief