DeSantis: The Authoritarian

When DeSantis finds something funny... which usually involves stripping rights from a minority.

 

Fellow Republican mayors have some words for the Authoritarian.

Miami mayor says DeSantis ‘personal vendetta’ with Disney is costing state
https://thehill.com/homenews/state-...rsonal-vendetta-with-disney-is-costing-state/

 

What company or country is going to put their assets into Florida -- considering DeSantis' targeting of Disney and Chinese people?

DeSantis’ feud with Disney puts the future of foreign investment in question
https://sports.yahoo.com/desantis-feud-disney-puts-future-213245166.html

 

Florida prosecutor warns about the wanna-be authoritarian dictator.

Ron DeSantis Is About To Run For President. Andrew Warren Has A Warning.
The Democratic prosecutor for a Florida county was suspended by DeSantis, a move he believes has been chilling for democracy. "No one else should have to adjust their behavior to the whims of the dictator," he said.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/ron-desantis-president-andrew-warren_n_6464326fe4b056fd46d639f9

Of all the places Andrew Warren imagined his career would take him, it was never here: the lobby of an upscale chain hotel in downtown Montgomery, huddling with his legal team and preparing for a hearing that — maybe within a year if he’s lucky — will result in him getting his job back.

“I didn’t ask to be the tip of the spear in this fight for freedom and democracy,” Warren said, settling into a tall wingback chair on the morning of May 2, several hours before he was due in a federal appellate court just down the street. “But the governor picked a fight with me, so I’m fighting on behalf of everyone who cares about these issues.”

It has been over nine months since Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis suspended Warren, accusing the twice-elected Democratic prosecutor for Hillsborough County of “incompetence” and “neglect of duty” in a scathing 29-page executive order last August. The Florida Constitution gives the governor the power to remove elected officials in cases of extreme misconduct. But those powers have rarely, if ever, been used in a case like Warren’s.

“This is something you’d expect to see happen in Turkey or North Korea or China. This is not something you’d ever expect to see happen in the United States,” said Warren, whose general measured demeanor during our interview sometimes gave way to a quiet rage about the whole episode.

“The governor is the one who did wrong here,” Warren told me, “and no one else should have to adjust their behavior to the whims of the dictator.”

Frothing with the polite but pointed anger of a clean-cut attorney, Warren described the surreal events of the past year, which has included: Learning of his suspension in the middle of grand jury proceedings for a decades-old cold case. Being escorted from his office with his belongings by armed sheriff’s deputies. Watching the governor brag about his suspension on Fox News. Reading about his suspension in the governor’s book. Hearing about his suspension in the governor’s stump speeches. Reliving this episode of his life over and over again — in court, in interviews, in conversations with friends and strangers. Having his career and life essentially frozen. Receiving death threats against his family because of the bright spotlight that DeSantis put him under.

“This has been very difficult for me professionally,” said Warren, who is still living with his family in Tampa, “because I care so much about the office. It’s been very difficult for me politically, because the most powerful Republican in the country is targeting me specifically, as an individual. And it’s been very difficult for me personally ― everything from just the huge disruption it’s had on my life with my family, to getting death threats from people who tell me that my children deserve to die for the things I’ve done.”

In his lawsuit, now winding its way through federal courts and currently being heard by the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals here in Montgomery, Warren argues that DeSantis violated his constitutional right to free speech and removed him without cause. It will likely be decided as DeSantis is running for president on his record of governing “the free state of Florida.”

DeSantis is expected to announce his campaign for the Republican nomination in the coming days. He has already made Warren’s firing a staple of his stump speech, using the episode to show how he’s crushed foes using his executive fist. “[These state attorneys] want to weaponize the power of their office to target people they don’t like,” DeSantis said last month in Manchester, New Hampshire. “And when we had an attorney like that, a district attorney in Tampa who had been funded by [George] Soros and said he would not uphold the laws of the state, I removed him from his post. He’s gone.”

Warren was never bankrolled by Soros, the Democratic mega-donor who is a perennial target of conspiracies and hate on the right — but he likely benefited from contributions Soros made to the Florida Democratic Party at one point or another. DeSantis, perhaps projecting, also misrepresented the argument he used to fire Warren, who has never been accused, in either the executive order suspending him or in subsequent court filings, of going after people he didn’t like.

The governor’s office, which generally only interacts with certain friendly news outlets, never responded to a request from HuffPost to provide a comment for this article.

Although it’s easier to describe Warren as having been removed or fired, he’s technically in a state of suspension that could be reversed — or made permanent — pending a hearing by the Florida Senate. But given the heavy Republican makeup of that body, Warren is exploring other remedies.

Warren’s suspension came two months after he co-signed a letter with more than 80 other progressive prosecutors opposing the criminalization of abortion and transgender health care, in the wake of the Supreme Court’s reversal on abortion rights. In his executive order, DeSantis cited both the letter and what he characterized as a “blanket refusal” to prosecute some low-level crimes, such as the aggressive ticketing of Tampa bicyclists, most of whom were Black. Warren disputes that his office had “blanket” policies that endangered public safety, as DeSantis tried to argue in his order — and his case hinges on whether a panel of majority-conservative appellate judges see it the same way.

“The governor has his talking points, which are divorced from reality. From the day I was suspended, I said this was a publicity stunt, the allegations are false, this is un-American,” said Warren, on the edge of his seat, his legal team hovering nearby.

A trim 46-year-old with light salt-and-pepper hair, Warren sometimes doesn’t blink when he’s talking. During an interview, he comes off as a deeply focused person who has spent the last nine months of his life consumed by two overlapping objectives — getting his job back and sounding the alarm on DeSantis, whom he sees as a threat to democracy. “Powerful people without a moral compass are dangerous,” Warren said. “Politicians who are willing to break the law to get votes or to get applause are dangerous.”

Politics aside, however, the two men have, if not a lot, at least some major things in common. They are both Florida natives in their mid-40s. They followed similar paths into public service after graduating from elite law schools (Warren from Columbia, DeSantis from Harvard). As young lawyers, they both worked for the Justice Department as federal prosecutors. And they’ve both confronted family tragedies in recent years ― Warren, after his pregnant wife was involved in a car crash and the couple lost their baby, and DeSantis, after his wife was diagnosed and underwent treatment for breast cancer.

Their paths diverged dramatically once DeSantis became a congressman and joined the right-wing House Freedom Caucus, and Warren, having moved from Washington to Tampa to raise his family, decided to challenge a longtime GOP incumbent for state attorney.

The job of chief law enforcement officer, by its very nature, relies heavily on the discretion of the individuals doing the job to determine how crimes are prosecuted and sentenced. That’s why Warren’s case is so tricky and precedent-setting. It’s also why, in nearly every state, prosecutors are locally elected and therefore not subject to the political whims of a faraway official — the same principle behind a governor not picking the members of your city council or school board.

DeSantis isn’t the only Florida governor who has kneecapped a prosecutor. Sen. Rick Scott, the Republican who preceded DeSantis, got a judge to allow him to reassign murder cases from an Orlando prosecutor who was opposed to using the death penalty. But Scott didn’t try to get that prosecutor fired. “When I was there I was very clear — you have to prosecute your cases,” Scott told HuffPost, declining to comment on what’s happening now between DeSantis and Warren.

Warren came into office in 2016 after upsetting a longtime Republican in the purple west-central Florida county that encompasses Tampa, the state’s third-largest city. He says his backers were both Republicans and Democrats drawn to his mission of more equitable criminal justice outcomes amid a national reckoning over police brutality. Accusing his opponent of being too heavy-handed when the times demanded the opposite, Warren won a surprise victory followed four years later by his reelection to a second term.

At a time when Florida Democrats are desperately trying to build their bench, Warren has been floated as a possible U.S. Senate candidate against Scott in 2024. His close friend Nikki Fried, the newly elected chair of the Florida Democratic Party, told HuffPost that Warren would make a great candidate for any number of Republican-held positions that Democrats are hoping to contest. “He’s a true leader with a big heart, and unfortunately in politics right now you don’t find a lot of those,” Fried said.

Warren can also raise money. While he declined to give an exact figure, he said he’s brought in “several hundred thousand” dollars through a nonprofit for his legal defense.

But Warren isn’t interested in another office, at least not right now. “It’s wonderful to have people who are so confident in your leadership to encourage you to run for different positions,” he said. “But my focus is on the state attorney’s job.”

Running statewide in Florida won’t be easy for any Democrat. So far, no serious candidates have emerged to challenge Scott in what was once a Senate battleground. A bellwether for these times, Warren’s own swing county, Hillsborough, lurched to the right in the last election, shedding several Democratic officeholders.

DeSantis cites his own blowout reelection last year to justify the heavy leverage of his executive powers. The governor has single-handedly spearheaded measures such as banning transgender medical therapy for minors and expanding the state’s controversial “Don’t Say Gay” law into high schools. He also amped up his feud with a beloved American corporation that happens to be one of his state’s largest taxpayers. DeSantis wears these battles as a badge of honor. “My view is simple,” he told an audience last month at Liberty University, uttering a line that’s become a staple of his speeches and the overriding ethos of his governorship. “I may have earned 50% of the vote, but that entitled me to wield 100% of the executive power.”

DeSantis might even be going after another Democratic prosecutor. Monique Worrell, Orlando’s state attorney, said this month that she believes DeSantis is building a case to target her next, accusing the governor of seeking to “exploit his political agenda against me.”

Fried, Florida’s former agriculture commissioner and the last Democrat elected statewide, said DeSantis has created a climate of fear in Florida.

“We’ve got a governor who believes he’s the ultimate ruler of the state. He’s taking away people’s freedom of speech and he’s removing officers who have been elected by their constituents at the local level,” she said.

Warren’s best shot at reversing his suspension lies with the appellate court, which is reviewing his challenge to an earlier ruling from a federal judge in Florida. This ruling was both good and bad for Warren — good in that it seemed to generally side with Warren that DeSantis violated his free speech and removed him from office without citing “even a hint of misconduct”; bad because despite all that, the judge still found he didn’t have the constitutional authority to restore Warren as a local prosecutor.

Documents unearthed in discovery support the argument that DeSantis doled out a punishment driven overwhelmingly by his political agenda. An early version of the executive order made numerous references to Soros, the political lightning rod, which DeSantis ultimately struck out with a blue marker. Beyond that, the governor’s attorney struggled to build a case showing that Warren had undermined public safety, according to a New York Times analysis of the discovery documents.

That didn’t stop DeSantis from declaring, in an Aug. 4 press conference announcing the suspension, that Warren’s tenure had been “devastating to the rule of law.” He made similar comments that night to then-Fox News host Tucker Carlson.

“Tucker, you’ve documented the destruction that we’ve seen with these Soros prosecutors around the county, where they basically take it upon themselves to determine which laws should be followed and which laws should not be followed,” a grinning DeSantis said, with photos of Warren proceeding to flash across the screen.

Warren disputes that his policies had any negative impact on crime, noting that, by the state of Florida’s own crime reporting metrics, overall crime declined in Hillsborough County under his watch. “This isn’t a Portland or San Francisco scenario,” he said.

Republicans blame soft-on-crime policies, and the “woke” district attorneys they say promote them, for the visible homelessness and addiction in places like Portland, Oregon, and San Francisco, an idea that’s been relentlessly reinforced by conservative media. I asked Warren to define a “woke prosecutor,” and he didn’t know where to begin. In general, the term has become a catchall on the right for anything deemed too liberal or politically correct. “You have to ask the people on Fox News [what it means],” Warren said. “I’m a moderate prosecutor from a moderate county. I have done things that have frustrated the far left as much as the far right.”

Warren’s suspension was a direct result of DeSantis’ war on “woke,” his attorneys argue, a pretext the governor has used to go after schools, government agencies and businesses in a way that Democrats, at least, find chilling.

“The animus here toward woke ideas and woke viewpoints was a motivating factor,” Warren’s attorney David O’Neill argued to the appellate panel. Republicans have made the word so pervasive that it’s being used now in a deadly serious manner in federal courts.

DeSantis was represented in Montgomery by two young attorneys for the state of Florida who returned to a single, much-examined line in the abortion rights letter that Warren signed last June. The sentence in question seems to signal, beyond just the general opposition to the criminalization of abortion, that the co-signers would go a step further and refuse to prosecute abortion crimes altogether. Warren, as far as he knows, is the only prosecutor from the letter who lost his job over this single sentence.

In the chaotic and emotional days that followed the Supreme Court’s abortion ruling and the letter’s release, Warren said he attempted to clarify that he didn’t mean he would disregard abortion law in its entirety. At the time, Florida lawmakers had just passed a 15-week abortion ban. Since then, they’ve passed a six-week ban, which DeSantis put his signature on last month but hasn’t said much about since.

Warren can expect a ruling sometime within the next year. It may not be the ruling he’s hoping for.

The appellate panel is composed of three judges: one Democratic appointee and two Republicans, including a Trump nominee. And beyond this panel of judges in Alabama, there are only dead ends — the Republican-controlled Florida Senate and equally conservative Florida Supreme Court — underscoring how entrenched Republicans have become in Florida under DeSantis and throughout the age of Donald Trump.

Warren, who might violate the terms of his suspension if he were to take another legal job, has had a lot of downtime to reflect on this battle and what it all means. For himself and his future. For Florida. For the country, if DeSantis beats both Trump and Joe Biden and tries to run the federal government like the state of Florida — which he’s promised to do.

“The governor has made it clear that if he disagrees with who you are or what you said or what you stand for, then you’re at risk for being attacked,” Warren said. “I mean, look at the people he’s gone after. Disney, obviously. The Special Olympics. He’s attacked businesses. He’s attacked teachers. He’s attacking the LGBTQ community. He’s attacked universities and professors and boards of regents. He’s attacked elected officials. If you don’t say what he wants you to say, then you are at risk.”

My final question for Warren was whether he regrets signing the abortion letter — after all, had he not, he might still be employed. Would he risk this all over again? Or would he try to find another, less out-there way to signal his opposition to the abortion climate? Warren shifted uncomfortably in his seat. For the first time in our conversation he became a little less lawyerly and a little more pissed, channeling, in a certain sense, his nemesis.

“Your question to me is — should I have done something differently and not spoken my mind so as not to annoy the governor of Florida? Should I not have exercised my constitutional right to free speech? So I didn’t run the risk of the governor breaking state and federal law?” he said. “Americans don’t need permission slips to exercise their constitutional rights. No, I wouldn’t change a thing, and I shouldn’t have to change a thing.”

 

The dildo of consequences rarely arrives lubed

DeSantis Officially Enters the ‘Find Out’ Phase of His War With Disney
https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/desantis-officially-enters-phase-war-193236317.html



If there’s one rule that all Floridians live by, one credo that everyone in the Sunshine State must follow, it is this: Don’t fuck with the Mouse. (Also, something about alligators. But mostly, don’t fuck with the Mouse.)

When Gov. Ron DeSantis started his aggressive campaign against the Disney company following its criticism of an education law nicknamed “Don’t Say Gay,” pretty much everyone except Ron DeSantis knew it would end badly. Disney, which is Florida’s largest taxpayer, has enormous sway in the state, employing millions of residents and driving the majority of the state’s tourism with its Orlando-based theme park Disney World.

Now, DeSantis is about to find out exactly what a bad idea it was to antagonize Disney. Following a protracted, DeSantis-led battle over the company being stripped of its self-governing status in the area surrounding its 25,000-acre resort, Disney has officially canceled a $1 billion planned construction project in Orlando, which would have reportedly brought more than 2,000 jobs to the area, according to numbers reported by The New York Times.

In a memo to Disney employees, theme parks and consumer products head Josh D’Amaro announced the company would be putting the kibosh on the project, which would have been located next to the Lake Nona Town Center. The planned 1.8 million square foot complex outside of Orlando, which was internally controversial for a number of reasons when it was announced in 2021, would have involved the relocation of many employees from California to Florida, with D’Amaro citing Florida’s “business-friendly climate” as the reason for the change.

Apparently, however, the Disney company no longer deems Florida sufficiently “business-friendly.” In the memo sent Thursday, D’Amaro said he would be canceling the project due to “changing business conditions” in the state, though he “remain[ed] optimistic” about the evolution of Walt Disney World in general.

Disney’s abrupt cancellation of the project marks the latest in a series of antagonistic gestures between the company and the state government since DeSantis initially championed the “Don’t Say Gay” bill last spring, which effectively bans discussion of LGBTQ issues between kindergarten and third grade. Following internal pressure within the company, then-Disney CEO Bob Chapek came out against the bill, pledging $5 million toward LGBTQ rights organizations and stating the company was “committed to supporting the [LGBTQ] community going forward.”

DeSantis retaliated against Chapek’s statement by targeting the Reedy Creek Improvement District, the self-governing district established by Disney to control Disney World and the surrounding area, installing his own appointees onto its board. Disney responded by filing suit against DeSantis last April, alleging he was waging a politically motivated war against the company.

 

Members of the "Tsing Tao" family are disowning him if he votes for this moron DeSantis to be President . Are you blind to this fascist lol ?

 

Yep... this is the type of person Authoritarians appoint to government positions.

She stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6. Then Gov. Ron DeSantis made her a state regulator
A USA TODAY review of videos and an interview with a close associate show Sandra Atkinson was inside the Capitol.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news...lorida-appointed-sandra-atkinson/70245853007/

It was Jan. 6, 2021, and a group of die-hard Republicans from Okaloosa County, Florida, had traveled 15 hours north to Washington, for a rally where President Donald Trump urged his followers to try to stop the certification of the election.

After the rally, as a crowd marched toward the Capitol, some of the Florida contingent peeled off. But Sandra Atkinson – who had just been elected chair of the county's Republican Party – kept marching. The walk would put her in the middle of an insurrection, and eventually, of the dilemma now facing likely presidential contender Gov. Ron DeSantis.

According to a USA TODAY review of multiple videos from the day and an interview with a close Republican Party associate, Atkinson proceeded to the Capitol and through the doors. The same kind of activity has led to criminal charges for many who stormed the Capitol Jan. 6 – charges for unlawful entry, picketing or other nonviolent acts.

Two months later, Atkinson's name emerged in bold type, in an announcement from DeSantis. She was being given a new job: The governor was appointing her to a statewide regulatory board.

"Atkinson served in and received an honorable discharge from the United States Army," DeSantis' office noted when announcing her appointment, "and trained at the Soothing Arts Massage School."

Giving a political appointment then to a Jan. 6 participant puts DeSantis’ core political dilemma in sharp focus now.

The governor, who is expected to enter the race for the presidential nomination this week, said nothing during Atkinson’s appointment about her role in the insurrection, which was spurred by his main political rival: Trump. His office now declines to answer any questions about what DeSantis knew about Atkinson before her appointment or during her time as a regulator.

Long seen as a leading candidate for the Republican nomination, DeSantis has a fine line to walk regarding Jan. 6. On the one hand, he can draw support from people who believe Trump’s ongoing false claims that the 2020 election was stolen from the GOP. That also risks promoting his presumptive rival’s main talking point.

On the Florida Board of Massage Therapy, Atkinson would regulate providers in much the same way a medical board regulates doctors: By vetting licensed providers who will work, hands-on, with vulnerable, often disrobed clients behind closed doors. Atkinson, alongside six other board members, presided over repeated discussions about whether to grant or revoke state licenses to massage therapists, often because of their criminal histories.

Contacted by USA TODAY, Atkinson at first denied she had entered the Capitol. She then said she declined to comment.

But to others, her role in Jan. 6 was no secret.

Sherri Edwards Cox, who has long served with Atkinson on the Okaloosa County GOP committee, also marched in Washington, though she says she went back to her hotel rather than into the Capitol.

Cox told USA TODAY Atkinson later bragged about going into the building, and claimed to have entered the office of then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

After reviewing an online copy of video footage that appears to show Atkinson entering the Capitol, Cox said by text: “Oh, wow! Yup. That’s her alright!” She added: “Ooph.”

Atkinson’s apparent role in the insurrection does not appear to have interfered with her public role as an influential North Florida Republican. She was reelected chairwoman of the Okaloosa County GOP in December 2022. And she remained in the state oversight role DeSantis had given her for nearly a year.

Even when she did finally depart the board, there was no public discussion of her activity on Jan. 6. Her term ended with a blowup of a different kind.

Capitol riot arrests: See who's been charged across the U.S.

A Trump hat and shirt
Among the thousands of demonstrators marching for Trump Jan. 6, and the many of them who ultimately stormed the Capitol, it can be hard to isolate a specific face or name. But a collection of evidence points to Atkinson’s presence inside the building.



USA TODAY analyzed social media photographs and video and other footage from Jan. 6 first identified by a member of the Sedition Hunters community, a mostly anonymous volunteer collective of researchers that has identified hundreds of Capitol rioters and sent dossiers on many to the FBI.

The evidence starts with the videos posted by Cox, Atkinson’s local Republican colleague, which were public on social media. Atkinson can be seen in videos Cox posted on Facebook showing the two women marching through the streets of Washington, D.C. Footage shot by others also captures the two women as they make their way with the throng of protesters.

As she walks toward the Capitol, Atkinson is wearing a gray “Trump 2020” T-shirt over a long-sleeved black top. On her head is a backward blue baseball cap with “TRUMP” spelled out in silver sequins and “2020” in red ones. She holds a white phone in her outstretched hand and appears to be filming.

The social media videos from outside were posted during the Capitol riot, well before DeSantis issued his appointment proclamation two months later.

Other footage from inside the Capitol appears to show the same woman as in Cox’s earlier videos. Security footage released as part of a prosecution unrelated to Atkinson shows the woman in the same Trump shirt but minus her sequined hat, pushing into the Capitol with a mob of people. She’s still holding her phone.

Cox says her friend live-streamed from her phone throughout the day. Cox says she left the protest and went back to her hotel in Chinatown, but said Atkinson continued to the Capitol, later bragging about her role in the insurrection.

“She claims to have been in Pelosi’s office,” Cox said.

Cox added that she was interviewed in 2021 by the FBI about the activities of the North Florida GOP contingent on that day.

More than two years later, Atkinson is among more than 100 people who have been identified by online activists to federal authorities, but never charged.

Atkinson’s trip to Washington for the rally was also well known. She was one of the chief organizers of the local caravan to Washington. (In March 2021, when a man from Okaloosa County was arrested for entering the Capitol, Atkinson distanced herself from him, saying she didn’t know him and that he didn’t travel with her group.)

None of the footage reviewed by USA TODAY appears to show Atkinson hitting anyone or being destructive. But violence has not been a prerequisite for many of the Jan. 6 prosecutions.

A USA TODAY analysis of the more than 1,000 charges related to Jan. 6 found that hundreds of defendants have been charged with entering or remaining in the Capitol, even when they face no other major charges.

Many people have now been charged simply for entering the building, said Mary McCord, executive director of the Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C.

“There are people who got trespassing charges even if they didn’t do anything violent and just went inside,” McCord said. “If she went in with the mob, that was an unauthorized entry.”

Investigation: After Jan. 6 riot, why hundreds of identifiable people remain free

‘He knows who she is’
Even before Jan. 6, Atkinson had seen her political activism collide with law enforcement.

In 2020, she was arrested and charged with stealing the campaign signs of a political rival who she had run against in a Florida House race, in which she came fourth out of four candidates. According to court records, Atkinson entered a not-guilty plea to a larceny charge, entered a pretrial diversion program and paid $200 in court fees.

Atkinson also had crossed swords with her own party, drawing criticism when she claimed online that survivors of the school shooting in Parkland, Florida, were “crisis actors.”

Atkinson’s day job, though, was as a massage therapist.

Cox said Atkinson asked DeSantis to appoint her to the massage therapy board at an event where the governor spoke.

“I know, for a fact – I saw it – that she approached him about this in an uncomfortable situation when he was about to take the stage to talk to us as a group,” she said.

“He knows who she is,” Cox added.

In Florida, the governor's board appointments are subject to state Senate approval.

DeSantis' office repeatedly declined to answer questions from USA TODAY about what it knew about Atkinson, why he appointed her and why she later left the board.

Public records show the state Senate, which has the power to confirm or reject DeSantis' board picks, took no action on her appointment in 2021. However, she continued to serve as a board member for months after the legislative session ended in spring 2021.

In 2022, the Senate again took no action on Atkinson's appointment. It was not immediately clear why. Under Florida law, a board appointment ends when it isn't considered by the Senate for two years of legislative sessions. That meant she most likely was barred from the board as of the last day of the session, March 14.

But first, she would attend one final board meeting.

A short-lived stint on the state board
On March 9, 2022, less than a year after joining the massage therapy board at the invitation of DeSantis, Atkinson lashed out at Sujun Han, who was applying for a license.

“If she can’t understand or speak English, she shouldn’t be practicing massage. It’s ridiculous,” Atkinson burst out, as Han struggled to make herself understood to the board.

An audio recording of the meeting, posted to the board’s website, captures the exchange. When Atkinson’s colleagues chided her that there is no requirement to speak English to practice massage in the state of Florida, Atkinson doubled down:

“The law needs to be changed,” she said. “This is dangerous to the public.”

A month after Atkinson’s outburst, board chairman Christopher Brooks led a discussion about the incident, which he described as “alarming.”

“Ms. Atkinson made a comment that was viewed by myself and perhaps others of a discriminatory nature,” he said. “She made a comment that does not reflect the opinions of the board.”

Atkinson was not present in the following month’s board meeting, and left the board some time between that meeting and late May. The Florida Department of Health, which oversees the board, did not provide an exact date.

In response to a public records act request from USA TODAY, the health department provided an email Atkinson sent on May 26, 2022, in regards to a computer she had been provided for her public work. She wrote, “I am no longer on the board so will you please send me an address so I can send this laptop back?”

(Article has more photos and information.)