By Michael Moline | Editor in Chief
“I visited a family with a home, you open the door and you’re hit with the noise pollution. You walk outside, you see the turbines that are fueling the energy. Down the street, there were four kids who developed respiratory conditions who had to seek medical help.” — David Jolly after his visit to data centers in Virginia
The Democrat continues to use data centers against Republican Byron Donalds, traveling to an area of Virginia loaded with the things. Donalds, you’ll recall, has drawn considerable campaign donations from that sector. “Big tech, big data, the utilities are rushing into a relatively unregulated environment, or at least a favorably regulated environment. And that’s why you’re seeing voters who feel like they don’t have the economic or political power to push back, stand up, and say, ‘Please don’t do this,’” Jolly said. Donalds said, “In Northern Virginia, they built them next to apartment complexes and residential neighborhoods,” he said. “We’re not going to allow that in Florida.”
Donalds skipped a meeting of the Tampa Tiger Bay Club to which he’d been invited, but sent Bryan Avila, his running mate. Avila didn’t directly answer questions about U.S. Rep. Maria Salazar’s declaration in a campaign ad that Donald Trump’s deportation campaign had “gone too far.” Instead, he offered that the campaign was seeing “tremendous energy” and “momentum” and that “we are definitely in disagreement with how the Fed has been handling our interest rates.”
COMMENTARY
A documentary film tells the students’ version of the conservative takeover of New College of Florida. It’s called “First They Came for My College,” and producer Harry Hanbury hired some of those students to film it on cellphones. As columnist Diane Roberts writes, the filmmakers took pains to interview students who approved of the conservative changes as well as critics. “’I wanted to create a historical document,’ says Patrick Bresnan, the documentary’s director, to ‘bear witness’ to how Ron DeSantis’ hatred of what he calls ‘woke’ and New College’s former students call ‘radical acceptance,’ led him to target this small, diverse, welcoming institution,” Roberts writes. It’s showing at venues around the state and at the Tallahassee Film Festival on Oct. 11th.
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