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The Powell House Press

Florida is Hell - Ron DeSantis is the Devil Dancing with Ladapo.

A Racist and a Self-Hating Black Man Will Kill Innocent People for Power.

Joshua Powell's avatar
Joshua Powell
Sep 04, 2025
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Dr. Joseph Ladapo's vile comparison of vaccine mandates to slavery represents far more than a momentary lapse in judgment—it's the grotesque apotheosis of Ron DeSantis's calculated assault on Black historical memory, delivered with the particular cruelty that only comes when a Black man is enlisted to degrade his own people's suffering.

Standing before an applauding crowd in Hillsborough County, Florida's surgeon general declared that vaccine requirements "drip with disdain and slavery," transforming centuries of unspeakable human bondage into a cheap political metaphor for public health measures that save children's lives. The applause that greeted this obscenity tells us everything we need to know about how successfully DeSantis has normalized the weaponization of Black trauma.

But here's what makes this particular moral atrocity so chilling: Ladapo was born in Nigeria, the very epicenter of the slave trade that ripped millions of Africans from their homeland and condemned them to gen…

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