What a difference a primary makes. Just a few months ago, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis was a loser looking for a vote in Keene, New Hampshire, and now he’s a loser looking for a future at home. At least there isn’t another family living there.

In the waning months of DeSantis’s relevance, the Florida legislature has taken decisive action against the scourge of squatting—the living-illegally-on-someone’s-property thing, not the posture that’s supposed to make pooping easier. Though I understand your confusion. Yes, there’s a squatting crisis in America, as real as The Knockout Game and as deadly as that wave of Ebola-infected Muslim terrorists who were going to illegally enter the U.S. through Mexico in 2014 any second.

You can tell it’s real because there’s a TikTok about it that Fox News considers scary. Joe Rogan—a man who thinks that parents who’ve covered their faces with their hands have disappeared—is certain there’s one. There’s even a study from a lobbying group, the National Rental Home Council, which surveyed its own members. If that’s not as convincing as the National Retail Federation’s claims about a $45 billion annual gang-shoplifting epidemic that also doesn’t exist, I don’t know what is.

Obviously, this isn’t about squatting. This is an empty exercise in image management. The dead giveaway is the decisive legislative intervention. Like a supremely confident man in a one-night stand, the higher the rate of performative hands-on certitude, the further it strays from the hot button, and the likelier it is that nothing good happens.

These are the wages of a governing philosophy that amounts to little more than, “No services, only cops.”

The Florida GOP has been scalded by going all-in on DeSantis’ War on Woke and discovering that the average voter properly considers banning the book “Treasure Island” from schools because it has the words “chest” and “booty” in it to be the work of freaks. Moms For Liberty’s current slogan, “My husband and I noticed you from across the bar and really dig your vibe,” might be bad, but at least its better than, “Come to the school board meeting and act like a neofascist shut-in from Lee County who’s flagged 450 books for banning and considers bidet usage a form of sodomy.”

So it’s back to normal for Florida conservatism, which means, to borrow the phrasing of a Trump voter in the aftermath of Hurricane Michael, helping no one while hurting the right people. Or non-people, in this case.

The trouble with the War on Woke is that the enemy can sometimes be a voter who drives a BMW or owns a small business. Or, as the Florida GOP conceives of them, people. Hence, this legislative session took on more characteristics of Terminal Cop Brain and focused on areas of law featuring NPI: No People Involved.

Consider HB 1365, which bans sleeping outside on public property and allows citizens to sue cities that tolerate it. As ever, the conservative principle of local control gets thrown out the window as soon as the locals aren’t trying to prevent the wrong people from attending public school with their children or putting masks on them. But the important idea remains: You can tell we’re a functional government because we’re punishing people in your name, and the great news is almost none of them will vote.

Ideally, that’s all it takes. The GOP hopes you will be complicit in terrorizing the underclass by allowing occasional feelings of discomfort or a “we’re all in this together!” attitude about private property to seduce you into approving the imposition of state violence on the most vulnerable, at the same time as it empowers cranks to use lawfare to shrink conceptions of the common weal to something small enough to fit in their tiny minds.

It’s hard to fault the poetry of it. Amid a home insurance crisis and soaring housing prices, the Florida GOP has brought all its power to bear on their symptoms. They’ve spent nearly 30 years Effing Around, so to be safe they’ve criminalized Finding Out. They’re counting on the fact that no people will mind, because those affected stopped being people when they stopped having their own mailbox.

There’s a bitter irony here. Not just that DeSantis spent his entire law-and-order, blood-and-soil campaign sounding like a tape loop of “Florida is NOT San Francisco or New York City” and that Jacksonville, Miami and Tampa are each deadlier, but that he has returned to Tallahassee to preside over Florida slowly becoming both in every sense but public safety.

These are the wages of a governing philosophy that amounts to little more than, “No services, only cops.” There will be no new homes, and there will be no public transit, but you can have destination cities unaffordable to anyone who cleans offices, pulls pints or slings hash in them. You will have pro sports, foodie paradise and cultural vibrance all a convenient hour’s commute away. Tampa Bay’s future’s so bright, you’re going to love your two-bedroom in Brooksville.

Tomorrow, you can return home safe in the knowledge that there will not be another family living there, just as you did yesterday, and in fact every other day of your life and in the living memory of anyone you’ve ever met. What a relief. It might’ve taken you 90 minutes to get there from work because you can’t live here, but look on the bright side: neither can homeless people.

Jeb Lund is a former national political columnist for Rolling Stone and The Guardian and hosts the Hallmark movies podcast “It’s Christmastown.” You can follow him on Twitter and Bluesky @Mobute.

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This article appears in Mar 21-27, 2024.