By Michael Moline | Editor in Chief
“I’m hopeful we won’t have any problems here in Tallahassee, but no one should assume anything. We just have to have monitors, we need to have people present. People need to come out and vote. That’s how we’re going to take care of all this stuff.” — Karen Woodall, Florida People’s Advocacy Center
Around 2,000 people crowded the lawn at Florida’s Old Capitol on Saturday, Oct. 17, 2026 for a No Kings rally. Attendance was down from previous events. (Photo by Michael Moline/Florida Phoenix)
Turnout was down during the No Kings rally in Tallahassee over the weekend, one of many across the state. “We expected, across the nation, actually, that their own turnout would be a little bit less, just because it’s focused on getting out the early vote,” said Sabrina Harley of Indivisible Tallahassee, who emceed the event. Vote early, the idea was, and perhaps people can out-organize any Trumpist skullduggery on Nov. 3. “We’re all concerned that people will be afraid to come out and vote because of the ridiculous immigration activities — either by ICE or in Florida our own Florida Highway Patrol, our own state agencies — all of that’s designed to suppress the vote and scare people. People who are legally here, who are registered to vote but they’re immigrants,” said Karen Woodall of the Florida People’s Advocacy Center.
HHS is slow walking the demand by abortion-rights foes to revisit the safety of mifepristone, the abortion drug. They’ve indicated they will attack if the review concludes the drug is safe. “The FDA’s court-ordered update on its abortion-drug study is alarming,” said Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America President Marjorie Dannenfelser in a written statement released last week. “Instead of the promised gold-standard study, the FDA is trying to peddle fool’s gold.”
COMMENTARY
Columnist Diane Roberts delves into the iconography of Florida’s new driver’s license design. It includes the motto, “Let Us Alone.” This “originally appeared on a flag presented to our first statehood governor, William Dunn Moseley, at his inauguration in June 1845,” she writes. “The flag was a demand that the federal government butt out of Florida’s highly profitable economic system woke types call ‘slavery.’” It also appears in Jefferson Davis’s inaugural address as president of the Confederate States of America. Meanwhile, Florida offers a license tag bearing the “Don’t Tread on Me” motto from the Gadsden Flag waved during the 2021 Capitol attack. “The Jan. 6 Heritage American activists expressed their belief in white America by beating up Capitol cops and threatening civil rights,” Roberts writes. “Now you can drive your nativism.”
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