‘We live in a second Red Scare’: what can we learn from a chilling book about Florida’s past?

Florida senators on the senate floor during a 1965 session. Photograph: Courtesy of Florida Memory

With his second book, Robert W Fieseler casts new light on a dark episode: the years in the 1950s and 60s when the Florida legislative investigation committee, commonly known as the Johns committee, persecuted Black and queer Americans in the name of anti-communist red scare politics.

“The state of Florida has a very poisonous political system,” Fieseler said, promoting a book published as Ron DeSantis sits in the governor’s mansion, whose virulently anti-LGBTQ+ policies had fueled, if briefly, his presidential ambitions.