Jan. 11, 2022, before the state legislature.

Mr. Speaker, Mr. President, members of the Legislature and fellow citizens:

Welcome to Florumpia, a state of unreason, unreality and unrealism!

While so many around the country have followed science, sense and sentience, Florumpia is proud to be enlightenment’s graveyard.

In Florumpia we’re determined to prevent safeguards to people’s health and safety, to encourage and spread COVID to the greatest degree possible, to endanger our kids in schools and on the streets and as much as possible prevent free thought and inquiry in classrooms.

Florumpia seeks to become the proud dumping ground for ignorance, infection, and delusion, from a losing president who refuses to admit his defeat to anti-vaxxers who want to return to a time before understanding of germs.

Florumpia is a knowledge-free state. We reject all pandemic precautions. We reject all rules, from complying with state constitutional amendments to signaling lane changes.

Florumpia stands as a rock in a stone age! And with our stone tools we will build the future.

Thanks to an authoritarian, unconstitutional federal government, our treasury is full of money approved by Democrats in Congress and the evil President Joe Biden, from the Paycheck Protection Plan, to the COVID relief plan, to support for state governments to infrastructure improvements. With this money so recklessly poured into our state coffers, I will create a special office to invalidate election results I don’t like and a Florumpian military force answerable only to me.

In our classrooms we will stamp out any free or independent thought or critical thinking by our teachers, who will be under constant surveillance and subject to lawsuits by any aggrieved party whatsoever. We will purge all curricula of unpleasantness or discomfort. In Florumpia there have never been any wars with Native Americans nor slavery nor discrimination nor lynchings and no teacher will dare teach otherwise.

We will bring our universities to heel and prevent our professors from thinking any thoughts unapproved by me. They will labor as they should, like mute and mechanical field hands.

Speaking of field hands, we will be closing our borders to all but approved Florumpians, who will pick our crops and repair our roofs and mow our lawns and serve our food in restaurants. If that drives prices beyond what Florumpians want to pay or creates a labor shortage that closes down businesses and hurts the economy we will blame it on Joe Biden.

We will crush dissent expressed in peaceful demonstrations. In our streets, Florumpians can run over any demonstrator if the demonstrator is supporting the wrong cause. Those kinds of drivers will get a pass; all others will be jailed and held guilty until proven innocent.

When it comes to law enforcement we stand with sheriffs like Polk County’s  Grady Judd who put it so well: “We only want to share one thing as you move in, hundreds a day. Welcome to Florida, but don’t register to vote and vote the stupid way you did up north, or you’ll get what they got.” We will prevent any kind of what we consider stupid voting. Efforts by stupid individuals to get stupid voters to vote stupidly will be crushed. Only our kind of stupidity will prevail!

Our elections will be carefully monitored and audited to yield only results I like—including my re-election. We will gerrymander districts to ensure only Republican outcomes and prevent anything other than a Republican majority in any election, ever. We will make Florumpia the one-party state it should be.

We will prevent any forms of fact-checking, truth-telling or lie-preventing by social media platforms and actively promote falsehoods ranging from altered COVID statistics to The Big Lie of the 2020 election.

We will encourage the massive accumulation of guns by all right-thinking Florumpians and ensure that Florumpia is a fully armed society unbound by any limits on weaponry—and certainly not restrained by a well-regulated militia.

But while we endanger the lives of already-born Florumpians with guns and germs we will prevent women from having the right to choose their own health options. We will make Florumpia the leading unsafe abortion capital of the world, allowing me to surpass that charlatan, Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas, as the king of the back alley abortion promoters.

We memorialize the Surfside building collapse and applaud the first responders who answered the call but we will protect campaign-contributing builders and developers by reducing their liability for future catastrophes.

Speaking of Surfside, that sad incident brings me to a final, indisputable and absolutely true observation: “…You never know what tomorrow will bring. Don’t take anything for granted and make the most out of each and every day.”

And I say: Amen to that!

Liberty lives in light

© 2022 by David Silverberg

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