Florida’s new HB 1471, signed by Governor DeSantis on April 6, works like this: the FDLE’s Chief of Domestic Security designates an organization as a “domestic terrorist organization.” The Governor and Cabinet approve by majority vote. A companion bill, HB 1473, exempts from public disclosure the information used to reach that designation.
The label then radiates outward. Membership with intent to further the organization’s activities is a second-degree felony. Material support is a felony. State agencies and school districts are barred from spending public funds on designated organizations. Universities must expel students and revoke fee waivers. The Department of State can administratively dissolve the corporation.
The executive picks a target. The executive controls the evidence and keeps it secret. The target cannot see or challenge the basis for the designation. And the consequences of the label are automatic and severe.
At the signing ceremony, Lt. Gov. Jay Collins explained:
We will designate, defund and dissolve people who don’t stand for our values. Material support, now a felony. To give money, guns or military training to those savages is a felony. Join them with intent to spill blood, also a felony.
Note the word people, not organizations. That’s intent. The bill is terrorism, while claiming to prevent it.
Familiarity
This is a familiar mechanism. The KKK operated through legal and administrative infrastructure: the designation of enemies, the control of local government machinery, the marshaling of law enforcement to persecute targeted groups under color of law.
The violence was the enforcement arm of an administrative project. The lynchings were capital punishment crowds, operating as law.
The operational logic in Florida is identical. A political executive identifies an enemy. The designation is made through a process the executive controls. The evidentiary basis is shielded from review. The consequences attach to the label, and the label attaches at the executive’s discretion. Anyone associated with the designated group faces criminal liability, financial ruin, and institutional expulsion.
Lynchings are the precedent.
The bill was allegedly written to first target one specific religion. DeSantis issued an executive order in December 2025 declaring two Islamic groups terrorist organizations. A federal judge blocked that order. The HB 1471 legislative end-run undermines courts: codify the power the court said the executive did not have.
The KKK doesn’t stop at one group. Nothing in the statute limits the designation to Islam, completely undermining the alleged purpose. Any organization that the Chief of Domestic Security secretly determines engages in “terroristic activity” and poses a threat to Florida qualifies. The definition of the threat, and the evidence supporting it, don’t have to be true and won’t be subject to reality.
Political Capture
The companion public records exemption is the obvious link to the white hoods. Without it, the designation could be challenged on its merits. With it, the executive controls both the accusation and the evidence where nobody can see. The designated organization’s only recourse is judicial review of a secret record compiled by the accuser.
This is what capture looks like in statute form. The mechanism that is supposed to resolve the question of whether an organization is dangerous has been absorbed into the apparatus of the executive making the accusation. The resolution mechanism and the power it is supposed to check are now the same entity. And so there’s no representation allowed at all.
The people bringing the cross to burn on a lawn are the people answering the 911 calls.
An Islamic group’s lead attorney identified the structure precisely:
This bill is not about safety or making anybody safer. It’s about giving the governor the power to use the word ‘terrorism’ as a label to politically wield it against anybody he doesn’t like.
The bill is in fact that.
Any critic of power can be labeled a terrorist by the governor’s office, using secret evidence, with felony consequences for association.
That is the KKK as a bill. It takes effect July 1.
Florida just swapped “communist” for “terrorist” and “civil rights organizations” for “Islamic organizations.” The people writing the designation, the secrecy of the evidence, and the real targets all rhyme.
My father used to talk about the AGLOSO of 47, which the Klan pushed all the way to executive order. HUAC was the engine with Martin Dies of Texas the original chair steering it. John Rankin of Mississippi made it a permanent standing committee in 1945. The southern segregationist bloc used anticommunism specifically to target civil rights organizations. Tagging the NAACP and labor unions as communist-adjacent was how they attacked desegregation efforts without saying the word segregation. Domestic civil rights were rebranded a foreign conspiracy.
Florida is just going back to those dumb dictator days of Martin Dies.
https://vault.fbi.gov/martin-dies-jr/%20Martin%20Dies%2C%20Jr.%20Part%2001%20%28Final%29/view
The 1955 FBI clipping on page 33 says it all. Dies, the man who built HUAC, defended a federal employee accused under Truman’s loyalty program, saying the standards were too vague, the process took too long, the burden of proof fell on the accused, and it frightened him. His system frightened him.
He oscillated between recognizing the abuse (when it affected him) and demanding more of it (when it hurt his political opponents). Classic dictator mindset. He helped build the political weapon, then feared someone else would aim it.