I hope you get a chance to do what you love.
Month: September 2024
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Your daily reminder
And in case you needed proof, here’s the press release from the office of New York State’s Attorney General, Letitia James which states that in the civil fraud case against “Donald Trump, Adult Sons, and Former Executives,” they are ordered to pay more than $450 million and that Trump is banned from serving as an officer or director of any New York company for three years.
The saying is doubly true for anyone who works under Florida Governor Ron DeSantis: “No good deed goes unpunished,” and wow, did James Gaddis get punished for his good deed.
Gaddis, pictured above, was the employee at the Florida Department of Environmental Protection who leaked the state’s rushed-under-cover-of-secrecy plans to build golf courses, hotels, pickleball courts, and more land developer-friendly conversions of Florida’s state parks, which are natural protected lands. His leaking of that information and the Florida government’s rushed timeline led to the outcry that led to the postponement of those plans.
Here’s what Gaddis told the Tampa Bay Times:
“It was the absolute flagrant disregard for the critical, globally imperiled habitat in these parks,” Gaddis said in an interview Monday morning. Gaddis said he was tasked with making the proposed conceptual land use maps that depicted the golf courses and other developments. Two proposals were especially egregious in his eyes: The Jonathan Dickinson State Park golf course, and the 350-room hotel at Anastasia State Park.
“This was going to be a complete bulldozing of all of that habitat,” Gaddis said. He recalls his hand, hovering over a computer mouse, shaking with anger and frustration as he was told to rush his maps from senior leadership. “The secrecy was totally confusing and very frustrating. No state agency should be behaving like this.”
Unfortunately, doing the right thing sometimes means doing the career-limiting thing. For his heroic actions, he was fired. Here’s his dismissal notice:
While he was technically fired for “conduct unbecoming a public employee,” it’s the rest of Florida’s Department of Environmental Protection who are truly guilty of unbecoming conduct, for doing the exact opposite of what the Department is supposed to do.
Because the job market is tough out there, Gaddis has set up a GoFundMe to help him as he looks for new work. Because what he did was heroic, he’s surpassed the modest goal of $10,000, but don’t let that stop you from pitching in.
Thank you, James Gaddis, for taking the whistleblower risk and saving our state parks!
Recommended reading
This recent article in the New York Times [it’s a gift link, you’ll be able to read it without a subscription] is a good reminder of how easily people abandon their principle when they think it will help them “win.”
The problem with siding with fascists — or quoting them — in order to be on “the winning team” is that they start off with a big, welcoming “circle”in group” when they need you — and then recategorize you into one of their “out groups” when you’re no longer useful. Moms for Liberty is willing to ignore Trump’s (and by extension, the Republican Party’s) disdain for women if it means that gay and trans kids people go back to being closeted and shunned.
Maybe, they hope, what he consistently and unfailingly says about women and how he views and treats them won’t be part of how he’ll govern. But he’ll get rid of the rainbow flags and gender-neutral bathrooms!
Roman magistrates carried them as symbols of their power, and they were later used as emblems of authority in Mussolini’s Italy.
Creative Commons image — click to see the source.
Lest you think I’m throwing around the term fascist as hyperbole for “evil,” or at least “people whose ideas I don’t like,” I’m not. I’m using it as the adjective that describes people who’ve bought into palingentic ultranationalism, a phrase made of two ten-dollar words that can be boiled down to these three points:
- My nation is of the utmost importance
- The people running the nation should be a narrowly-defined “us”
- “We” should rule because it’s more or less our destiny
But once again, the New York Times buried the lede! The real story is in the correction at the end of the article:
Don’t vote with people who approvingly quote Hitler.
Worth watching
White Fascism, a disturbing yet necessary video by Ian Danskin and part of his video series, The Alt-Right Playbook, explains the topic very well.