One reason people stopped making fun of California three decades ago was that it got displaced as the butt of national jokes by a place where people were said to be weirder even than people in California. That was, of course, Florida. I’d guess the wildly popular novelists Carl Hiassen and Elmore Leonard kickstarted this trend, and a steady accumulation of tabloid stories about the odd doings of assorted “Florida men” closed the sale. (As I write this, a Florida Man is celebrating on Instagram his 26th consecutive day of eating raw chicken.) It’s been argued that the Florida Man became a national laughingstock only because Florida’s sunshine laws make police reports and mug shots more readily available than elsewhere, but lately that theory has been challenged; plenty of other states, it seems, make police reports, and sometimes mugshots, similarly available. “Florida has always been a silly place,” C.J. Ciamarella wrote last month in Reason.
But the birth of the modern Florida Man meme can be traced to three events. The first was the creation of a Florida tag on the snarky news aggregator Fark.com in the mid-2000s. The second was the time a naked Florida man allegedly high on bath salts ate someone’s face in 2012…. The third event was the creation of the @_FloridaMan Twitter account several months after the face-eating incident.
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis ushered Florida weirdness into the political realm by attacking LGBTQ protections, banning books, outlawing abortion after six weeks, and making life miserable in various ways for K-12 teachers as well as college professors. (For more on that, read my November 2023 story, “The Red State Brain Drain Isn’t Coming, It’s Happening.”)
DeSantis’ intended purpose was to get himself elected president; it didn’t work as planned. But along the way he accepted a challenge from Democratic California Governor Gavin Newsom to debate which state was worse to live in, Florida or California. This pseudo-event aired on Fox News in December, hosted by Sean Hannity (a far-from-neutral referee). I only caught the highlights, but apparently DeSantis hit Newsom on Covid lockdowns and crime; Newsom hit DeSantis on censorship and abortion. The lowest blow was a map DeSantis produced that purported to show places in San Francisco where people defecate in the streets. He was literally talking shit about my beloved home state. It was a very Florida Man thing to do.