Florida is a land of attainable possibilities.

Like the western gold rush of old, the move is on.

Florida is sunny, it’s warm, there’s a magic castle anyone can visit, there’s no income tax, and there’s enough beach for everyone.

This from reason.com.

Florida lacks the pristine old glamour of California or Hawaii, but it’s cheaper and more accessible in nearly every sense.

What it lacks in polish, it makes up for in unpredictability. It’s a paved paradise—with plenty of parking lots.

As a child and teen, trips to Florida were spectacular—the mid-winter warmth, the beach, visiting older relatives who wintered there and who seemed to pattern their lives around what meal they were eating and where. As a teenager I first heard the phrase, ‘Tee many martoonis’ from my uncle who I adored. Then returning back up to the frozen land of the far north all tan and refreshed I knew I stood out as the one who went to Florida for Christmas break.

And my grandparents and aunts and uncles, and even cousins who moved to Florida for retirement and a fresh start, all found what they sought. They rarely went to the beach, but they liked the idea that they could. And still their lives seemed to easily float from one meal to the next.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, more than 2 million people made the same pilgrimage, for much the same reasons. They fled the roped-off playgrounds of New York City, the shuttered schools of California, the cramped and chilly apartments of Chicago, and the masked streets of New Jersey. They didn’t necessarily want to go to the beach either, but they desperately wanted to know that they could.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis can rightly boast about the attractions his state offered at a terrible moment in history, and take real credit for resisting what turned out to be largely ineffective closures and mandates.

But most of what is magical about Florida existed long before DeSantis pulled on his boots. The siren song of the Sunshine State is the promise of freedom tinged with the idea of escape—most perfectly channeled by the late Jimmy Buffett.

Florida was not, and is not, a libertarian utopia, though the lack of income tax is pretty nice. DeSantis has chosen to focus his campaign on his more authoritarian culture war forays, including his punitive approach to Disney’s corporate political speech, his administration’s anti-woke efforts in school libraries and curriculum, and his no-nonsense treatment of immigrants.

As Floridians never tire of pointing out, there are many different cultures contained within the state. From Zora Neale Hurston’s black hometown of Eatonville to the infamous senior-centered community of The Villages to the nearly ungovernable Keys, Floridians love to carve out a little spot to try something new.

Florida newsman Craig Pittman told Reason‘s C.J. Ciaramella:

We’re the only state with mermaids on the state government payroll. The state employs python hunters. We’re the only state where we actually made a hippo an official citizen of the state so he could stay. That’s just not something you see anywhere else.

As recently as 2000, Florida was the butt of an extremely unfunny national joke about hanging chads, those tiny pieces of punched-out paper dangling off Floridian ballots.

Those little punchouts [decided] which president would deal with 9/11. In an astonishing tale of redemption, Florida has learned from its mistakes and now ranks among the nation’s speediest and most competent vote counters.

And the numerically strong Conservatives of the state remain well aware that the return to being butt-of-joke funny, sh*thole despicable, or—worse yet—California-like third world hopeless is only one statewide election away.

But even if DeSantis washes out, there’s a good chance a Florida Man will be on the ballot to continue the Conservative drive for nirvana.

Final thoughts: Selfishly, my personal Plan B for if President Trump’s Plan fails to materialize quickly enough, is for Florida and a handful of adjacent and nearby states to secede and form a new Constitutional Republic.

I also foresee the remaining states eventually peeling away from communism/globalism and joining the nation of the southeast. This will likely leave the land of California all alone under King Gavin in the west and New York as a lost lawless land of Mad Max similarities in the northeast.