The Sunshine State’s 2026 Forecast: Guns, Grifters, and the End of the Woke University

By Diane Roberts

It’s a new year here in the Free State of Florida and you’re freer than ever!

Free to tote guns; free to kill bears; free to drain and pave; free to call ICE if you spy some brown-complected fellows in the Home Depot parking lot.

Most of all, you’re free to make New Year’s Resolutions.

Not the usual crap about getting more exercise, practicing mindfulness, adding legumes to your diet or volunteering.

Nonsense.

We’re Americans: selfish, lazy, and overweight.

Now, I don’t know what resolutions your elected officials and other powerful Florida folk have made, but here are a few guesses and predictions for the Year of Our Lord 2026.

Assuming there’s not a worldwide conflagration, an almighty flood, or a plague of frogs, in which case all bets are off.

1. In preparation for a 2028 presidential run, Gov. Ronald Dion DeSantis will resolve to learn to smile properly.

And be nice.

Or nice-adjacent.

As you recall, voters didn’t exactly warm to him in 2024. He was, as one columnist put it, “an all-around odd duck and not in a good way.”

The solution? Charm School!

Avenues of Excellence in Coral Gables offers private lessons in everything from social discourse to how one does and does not eat one’s chocolate pudding.

1. Sen. Stan McClain and Rep. Dean Black resolve that in 2026 they will protect Florida’s Confederate monuments, slapping fines on Damn Yankees who dare try and remove them.

It didn’t pass last year but, by God and General Lee, the bill will be heard in the Legislature this year.

Why not go bigger? Get more Confederate names back on schools and roads.

Ditch the “Barack Obama” and “Harriet Tubman” street signs and return to calling the Old Dixie Highway the Old Dixie Highway.

The Pentagon has brought the names of Confederate generals Bragg and Benning back to the military bases where they belong. (There was a federal law against that, so Pete Hegseth found some people with the same last names that he could borrow.)

Now, how about righting the wrong done to Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest? Jacksonville wokesters forced N.B. Forrest High School to change its name to “Westside.”

Political correctness run amok.

Forrest was a valiant soldier, a human resources entrepreneur (some called it “slave trading”) and, as Grand Wizard of the Invisible Empire, a pioneering anti-DEI campaigner.

1. How ’bout them ’Noles!

I do not mean this in a good way.

FSU’s once-vaunted football team did not cover itself in glory this season.

Nor did the University of Florida’s: The Gators went 4-8; the Seminoles 5-7.

A couple of directional colleges went to bowls: FIU appeared in the Servpro First Responder Bowl (lost) and USF in the StaffDNA Cure Bowl (also lost).

On the plus side, the ever-annoying University of Miami beat the even-more-annoying Ohio State in the first playoff.

But Texas had eight teams in post-season play.

Texas. Eight.

Florida athletic programs are struggling. They have to build indoor practice facilities. They have to hire a coach and pay him millions, then millions more when they fire him.

It’s tough.

Therefore, every Floridian must resolve to give generously to the Name, Image, and Likeness Collective of their choice to help buy the best players in the nation.

While you’re at it, you can support some of their proud sponsors, including Cambio Tequila and Social House Vodka.

1. Why don’t we all pitch in and help ban more books this year?

Local cranks and Moms for Liberty can’t do all the work.

Many of Toni Morrison’s books are off the shelves, as well as “Slaughterhouse Five,” Kurt Vonnegut’s mind-bending anti-war novel, which one Mom for Liberty called “shocking and perverse.”

She elaborated: “I don’t think [my daughter] needs to fill her head with pictures and ideas of Shetland ponies having sex with girls.”

Still, too many works of literature remain unbanned.

John Keats’ 1820 poem “The Eve of St. Agnes,” for example, which promotes unmarried sex and the eating of strange, possibly hallucinogenic, foodstuffs: “spiced dainties” and “lucent syrops, tinct with cinnamon.”

Or “Moby Dick” (that title!) which depicts two men sleeping in the same bed and calling each other “husband and wife.”

Or William Faulkner’s “Go Down, Moses,” a Critical Race Theory novel which implies that slavery was really quite bad.

Get to work, people. Make 2026 the year our children read nothing but the clean-ish bits of the Bible.

1. Members of Florida’s well-upholstered “developer community” make the same resolution every New Year’s: erect strip malls, big box stores, golf courses, and ticky-tack exurban “communities” on what’s left of Florida’s unspoiled lands.

I wouldn’t be surprised if they inscribed their vow in the blood of road-kill critters on sheepskin.

Even though tiresome “knee-jerk obstructionists” (as one legislator calls people who care about clean water, habitat destruction, and sprawl) fight back.

Sometimes the tree-huggers even win.

As the Phoenix’s Craig Pittman reported, the Sarasota Audubon Club stopped the nation’s largest homebuilder from parking 170 houses next to a bird sanctuary.

In Orange County, enraged residents said a big hell no to a Texas outfit planning to build an 1,800-house monstrosity on land zoned rural.

But this year, developers are getting a little help from their friends in the Florida Legislature.

The peoples’ representatives plan to push through a brace of bills that would hamstring the public’s ability to object to developments, allow city or county administrators – not elected commissioners, answerable to the voters – to approve projects, and override local government.

No opportunity for corruption there, no sir.

6, The Florida Democratic Party (Yes! It still exists!) also makes the same resolution every New Year’s: Win an election.

Any election.

And dang, if they didn’t snag one in 2025!

A non-Republican female human beat a Donald-Trump-and-Ron-DeSantis-endorsed Republican male person to become mayor of Miami.

Republicans were typically gracious in defeat.

The Miami-Dade County Party Chairman said, Democrats were “making a mountain out of a molehill.

“It’s not a rebuke of the president or the party. Democratic city elects Democratic mayor.”

Even though this Democratic city hasn’t elected a Democratic mayor in 28 years.

If nothing else, it may perk up our Donkey friends.

A little.

David Jolly, a former U.S representative and former Republican, is running for governor as a Democrat.

But Rep. Byron Donalds, Donald Trump’s preferred candidate, leads in the polls.

As befits a MAGA man, Donalds is given to saying things divorced from both history and intelligence.

Perhaps you are unaware that, while Jim Crow wasn’t great, at least “the Black family was together” and politically “conservative.”

Never mind the lynchings.

1. Speaking of the gubernatorial race, the Republican Party of Florida might consider worrying about the upstart candidacy of one James Fishback, a 31-year-old Elon Musk fanboy now being sued by his former hedge fund employer.

Fishback’s building name recognition in a peculiar way, getting thrown out of an economic conference for confronting Federal Reserve board member Lisa Cook (the one Trump keeps trying to fire), demanding foreign students pay $1 million a year in tuition at Florida universities, and calling Byron Donalds a “slave” and “DEI Donalds.”

Combustible Florida U.S. Rep. Rep. Randy Fine, who was once ordered by a judge to attend anger management classes, and who said Palestinians in Gaza should “starve away,” calls Fishback “a total weirdo.”

Obviously, he’s an exemplary MAGA candidate.

1. The governor and the grim band of anti-intellectuals who rule higher education in Florida have yet to declare this resolution out loud, but it’s pretty clear they want 2026 to be the year they turn all our universities into New College.

Once a highly regarded liberal arts school where non-traditional students – outside-the-box thinkers, gay kids, trans kids, arty kids – were as welcome as more mainstream students, where learning was creative, not prescriptive, New College is now sad and second-rate.

Determined to quash academic freedom across the state system, DeSantis has installed ideologically aligned presidents at UWF, USF, FIU, FAU, and FAMU.

The interim (soon to be permanent) president of the University of Florida, a climate change skeptic, has ordered UF to be “institutionally neutral.”

What he means is “conservative.”

UF has shut down its Department of Environmental Horticulture (“environmental” is a bad word), abolished its Center for Inclusion and Multicultural Engagement, and shuttered its Office of Sustainability.

Many humanities and social sciences programs are endangered, too.

But the spanking new Hamilton School for Classical and Civic Education, run by the very conservative former state Supreme Court chief justice Charles Canady and endowed by, among others, by the right-wing Council on University Reform and billionaire DeSantis donor Ken Griffin gets all the money it wants.

Institutional neutrality roars into the future, charged with teaching the superiority of Western Civilization.

All I can say is Happy New Year, y’all.

And good luck.

We’ll need it.

Diane Roberts is an 8th-generation Floridian, born and bred in Tallahassee. Educated at Florida State University and Oxford University in England, she has been writing for newspapers since 1983, when she began producing columns on the legislature for the Florida Flambeau. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, the Times of London, the Guardian, the Washington Post, the Oxford American, and Flamingo. She has been a member of the Editorial Board of the St. Petersburg Times–back when that was the Tampa Bay Times’s name–and a long-time columnist for the paper in both its iterations. She was a commentator on NPR for 22 years and continues to contribute radio essays and opinion pieces to the BBC. Roberts is also the author of four books.