The Stevens Method: State

“Dr.” Tony

The dissertation methodology explains, in Tony’s own words, who did the work:

“A designated officer with authorized security clearance downloaded an anonymized dataset from across sections of internal BSO databases.”

A “designated officer.” The public records strongly suggest BSO Captain Joseph Etter, who held the credentials to query RMS, CFS, CAD, PeopleSoft, and PowerDMS — and pulled six years of operational data on 1,500 BSO deputies for his boss’s homework.

A sheriff who failed Research Methods in Criminology needed an armed sworn deputy with felony-level database access to run his statistics.

This is not a doctorate. This is a group project.

A Group On of taxpayer-funded resources.

And the credential on the dissertation Tony signed and dated May 12, 2024 is Doctor of Education. Not Doctor of Philosophy. Not PhD. EdD.

He then ordered BSO to spend, per the Broward County Commission’s November 2025 budget reply, approximately $552,905 of public funds branding the agency with “Sheriff Gregory Tony, PhD“ — a credential designation that does not exist on his actual degree. Walls. Floors. Contracts. Press releases. The locker-room shower curtains at the BSO training center.

The shower curtains.

This is not stolen valor. This is stolen valet parking.

Nova Southeastern’s Question

A 45-year-old applicant walks into the Abraham S. Fischler College of Education. Undergraduate transcript: 1.942 GPA. Eight Fs. A withdrawn calculus. An F in Research Methods. Readmitted to FSU only after the first denial — registrar’s notation: “Denied: — GPA -fp low.“ No publications. No teaching experience. Two “Top Walk-On Player Award” credits on the FSU football team.

You sign him off for a doctorate.

You accept a dissertation built on data his subordinates pulled from non-public police databases.

You name him to the faculty.

The committee — chair Vincent Van Hasselt, PhD; members Ryan Black, PhD; Marcelo Castro, PhD; Grace Telesco, PhD — appears on the dissertation approval page. The names are public. Anyone with a question about peer review knows where to send the email.

I hold the Sally Struthers Correspondence College of Computer & Gun Repair in higher esteem than I currently hold Nova Southeastern’s Fischler College of Education.

The Receipts

What the documented record shows:

He shot an 18-year-old to death at 14, with his father’s handgun, in Philadelphia in 1993. He told reporters in 2020 he “doesn’t remember exactly how the shooting played out.” The dead man’s girlfriend remembered. She said the victim was unarmed.

He admitted on his 2004 Tally PD application that he had used LSD and marijuana. TPD disqualified him. He appealed. In the appeal, he tried to scrub the marijuana admission off his own paperwork.

He told Coral Springs PD on his 2005 application that he had never been arrested, never handled hallucinogens, never been detained, and never had moving violations. All four were false. Coral Springs hired him anyway.

He answered NO on three separate FSU applications to a question about driver’s license suspension. His Pennsylvania license had been suspended five times by January 23, 1998.

He answered NO to “Has your driving privilege ever been revoked, suspended, or denied in any state?” on 8 of 11 Florida driver’s license transactions over 17 years.

On February 1, 2019 — three weeks after his appointment as sheriff — he renewed his license at the Lauderdale Lakes DMV by walking in the back door in full uniform, accompanied by his Executive Officer in a business suit, who handed the clerk Tony’s BSO business card as proof of residence. The clerk, Brittni Romero, remembered the date because it was Bring Your Child to Work Day and the kids were in the office.

FDLE asked Tony for an interview. He took the Fifth.

Give him credit. He can count to five.

The Sanction

The Florida Department of Law Enforcement read the file. The State Attorney’s Office for the 17th Judicial Circuit read the file. The State Attorney’s Office for the 20th Judicial Circuit read the file. The Office of the Florida Attorney General, the Office of the Governor, the Florida Commission on Ethics, the Criminal Justice Standards and Training Commission, the Division of Administrative Hearings, Tallahassee PD, Coral Springs PD, Florida State University, Nova Southeastern, the Florida Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles, the Florida Department of Corrections, and the BSO chain of command — all read the file.

They read the 1993 Philadelphia arrest warrant for murder. They read the 1.942 GPA. They read the LSD admission, the scrubbed marijuana appeal, the eight false DL answers, the staged DMV visit on Bring Your Child to Work Day, the failed Research Methods class, the EdD-not-PhD branding spend, and the captain pulling the dissertation data on agency time.

The official Florida accountability record, as of February 6, 2025:

“a written reprimand together with administrative probation and ethics training.”

The man runs ethics training for 5,000 sworn personnel. The sanction is mandatory ethics training. They sentenced the wolf to a refresher course on wolves.

We’re Getting Trolled.

We are getting trolled by a man who got a 1.942 GPA at a state university, failed Research Methods, was rejected as a beat cop in Tallahassee, was hired anyway at Coral Springs, never told anyone he had killed a man, and was handed a 5,000-personnel sheriff’s office and a $700 million annual budget by a governor whose vetting consisted of one CJIS check his appointments director ran in 24 hours.

We are getting trolled by a man who paid Nova Southeastern University for a doctorate the way you pay for an extended car warranty.

We are getting trolled by a man who claims a PhD he didn’t earn, on a credential he didn’t deserve, from a degree program he qualified for only because nobody at the admitting institution asked to see his undergraduate transcript.

We are getting trolled by a system that read every word of the FDLE investigation, agreed that yes, this man has lied repeatedly under oath for thirty-one consecutive years, and concluded that the appropriate response was to make him take a class.

The man cannot pass a research methods class. They sent him to a different class. The other class will, presumably, fix him.

We didn’t buy tickets. We’re paying anyway.

Everything in this post is documented in FDLE Office of Executive Investigations Public Corruption Unit Case File EI-14-0173 — the 364-megabyte production “Combined & Attachments R Complete.pdf,” subpoenaed records, sworn interviews, signed applications, and the man’s own dissertation. I will send the file. Just ask.

Nova Southeastern, the email’s open.

— Chaz Stevens

A message from REVOLT Insights

Sufficient Records Win Before Appeals Begin

Trial records do not assemble themselves. Sufficient Records Engineering identifies missing rulings, weak objections, transcript gaps, and preservation problems before they become appellate failure points. We help litigators build the paper trail courts need: cleaner issues, stronger arguments, fewer surprises, and a record engineered to survive review.

We Can Help

Chaz Stevens is a First Amendment practitioner based in Deerfield Beach, Florida. His work has produced legislative rewrites, policy reversals, and one governor who had to put his own name on the reason he changed his own law. He drafts civil litigation pleadings for licensed attorneys at Sufficient to Show, engineers public records work product for law firms at the same practice, and is the founder of REVOLT Training.

Visit REVOLT Training

Unshakable. Unbreakable. Unsanctioned.

T. Chaz Stevens — Sun, 17 May 2026 14:36:37 GMT

Welcome to The Stevens Method. I’m Chaz Stevens.

If this issue was useful, send it to someone who’d use it.
Like it above if you got something from it.

Florida’s Commission on Ethics voted 3-2 in March 2025 to accept a settlement censuring Broward Sheriff Gregory Tony for lying under oath on his February 2019 driver license renewal. One month into his appointment, Tony signed a state form swearing facts he knew were not facts. Florida Statute §112.324 sent the recommendation to Gov. Ron DeSantis. The Governor’s office has held it for fourteen months.

Dan Christensen broke the silence this week at Florida Bulldog.

DeSantis removed State Attorney Andrew Warren on August 4, 2022. DeSantis removed State Attorney Monique Worrell on August 9, 2023. Both Democrats. Both gone in a single executive order each. Tony is also a Democrat. Tony is also the subject of an Ethics Commission finding. Tony is still the sheriff.

A message from REVOLT Insights

Civil litigation drafting built to survive a hostile read

Pleadings, motions, and statutory filings drafted for licensed Florida and federal practitioners. Practice areas: Chapter 119, §57.105, FDUTPA, §1983, qualified immunity, and dispositive motions. Every citation Shepardized through Lexis. Build Sheet with every draft. Flat-fee. Law-firm-only by design. The retaining attorney directs and signs every filing.

Need a helping hand?

The 2022 Commission vote was 8-1 finding probable cause that Tony concealed his drug-use history, his juvenile homicide arrest in Philadelphia, and other facts before the January 2019 appointment. The Commission’s own Advocate had recommended no probable cause. Eight commissioners overrode her. Three years later, a different Commission lineup voted 3-2 to accept a settlement arranged by the same Advocate that dismissed every charge except the driver license lie.

Christensen calls her “the same conflicted prosecutor.” He does not name the conflict. Florida Statute §112.324(5) governs Advocate assignment and recusal. The records will fill in what Christensen left blank.

Two Commissions. Two votes. One Advocate spanning both. An 8-1 probable cause finding became a 3-2 settlement that dropped the homicide concealment, the drug history concealment, and everything else but the one charge nobody could defend in trial.

That is what institutional appetite looks like when nobody is watching.

The pattern matters because Tony’s dissertation contradictions are not the first time he has been accused on the record of lying on a Florida document. February 2019: a driver license application. Probable cause sustained 8-1 in 2022. Settlement on the lie itself accepted 3-2 in 2025. May 2024: a Nova Southeastern University doctoral dissertation containing a factual contradiction between page 38 and page 40 about how Tony accessed Broward Sheriff’s Office internal records. A separate question about whether he has represented an EdD as a PhD. The driver license lie and the dissertation contradictions are not unrelated artifacts. They are the same pattern documented across six years.

DeSantis told Jake Tapper at a 2023 CNN Iowa town hall that Tony has “a great life story.” He said it after the 2022 probable cause finding. He said it before the 2025 settlement. The settlement now sits on his desk and has sat there since the petals fell off the campaign.

The Florida Commission on Ethics has been called a toothless tiger because the Governor alone can impose or reject its recommended penalties under §112.324. The Tony file confirms it. Six years from the 2019 license application. Three years from the 8-1 probable cause vote. Fourteen months from the 3-2 settlement. Zero gubernatorial signatures.

Tony posted “I am unshakable. Unbreakable. Unconquerable.” to Facebook after the March 2025 vote.

He left out the word that matters.

Tick.

A message from REVOLT Insights

Sufficient Records Win Before Appeals Begin

We Can Help

Visit REVOLT Training

Schrödinger’s Sheriff

T. Chaz Stevens — Sat, 16 May 2026 19:46:12 GMT

Welcome to The Stevens Method. I’m Chaz Stevens.

If this issue was useful, send it to someone who’d use it.
Like it above if you got something from it.

The account is verified. Blue checkmark. Category: Public Service, applied by Meta. Bio: “Sheriff Gregory Tony, Ph.D. Sheriff of Broward County, FL.” The bio link goes to sheriff.org. Sheriff.org’s footer lists the Instagram handle in the same row as BSO’s Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Snapchat. Sheriff.org’s Initiatives page is authored in Tony’s institutional voice and links to “important facts regarding BSO’s contract services with the City of Deerfield Beach.”

On April 27, 2026, the account posted to Instagram Stories. Audio: “Kung Fu Fighting,” Carl Douglas, 1974. Master sound recording. Mainstream commercial track.

I filed a Chapter 119 request for the synchronization license.

Records produced an Envato Elements stock-music license for a track called “Sports” by user SugarTape, purchased the same day as the request. The audio in the video is not the SugarTape track. The audio is Carl Douglas, performing his own song, on the recording the major labels have owned the master for fifty-one years.

I sent a five-day notice that the production was defective.

Twelve days later, BSO General Counsel Terrence M. Lynch, Esq. wrote back. Tony did not license Kung Fu Fighting from the publishers. Tony did not license it from Sony or Warner or whoever owns it this week. Tony used Instagram’s “public use library,” Meta’s consumer-side music catalog, and “properly attributed its use to the artist in accordance with Instagram’s terms of use for audio content from their library.”

The general counsel of a Florida constitutional officer just put in writing, on letterhead, that the Sheriff’s Instagram account qualifies for the consumer-side library.

The consumer-side library is the one Meta makes available to accounts categorized as personal. The library Meta does not make available to accounts categorized as business, brand, government, or institutional. Meta runs a separate Commercial Music Library for those accounts. Different catalog. Different licenses. The split exists because the music industry sued Meta to make it exist.

Position of the account as of Lynch’s letter:

BSO publishes the handle as a BSO institutional channel on the agency’s own .org.
Meta categorizes the account “Public Service.”
BSO’s general counsel says, in writing, that the account uses the consumer library reserved for accounts that are none of those things.

Institutional when BSO wants reach. Personal when BSO wants the cheap music. Whatever the next legal problem demands.

Lindke v. Freed

601 U.S. 187 (2024). Two prongs. Both required.

One. Did the official have actual authority, rooted in statute, ordinance, charter, or custom, to speak for the government on the subject of the post.

Two. Did the official purport to exercise that authority in the post being analyzed.

Prong one, for a Florida sheriff on agency-jurisdictional subjects, is the easiest box in the doctrine. Constitutional officer under Article VIII, Section 1(d). Chapter 30, Florida Statutes. The Sheriff speaks for the agency on agency business.

Prong two is the fight. Any particular post.

A music selection is not, by itself, an exercise of governmental authority. I do not sue over song choice. That is not the play.

The play is the license posture. The agency, through counsel, characterized the account in writing in a way that contradicts how the agency publishes the account on its .org and how Meta categorizes the account in its UI. The contradiction is admissible.

Posture

I am not suing BSO. I live in Broward County. My tax dollars run that agency. Suing my own county over a song clip is not a use of time, money, or process.

This is a pen test.

I work the margins on purpose. I send the records request. I read the response the way a lawyer reads a deposition transcript. For what the institution decided to say, in writing, when pressed.

High friction

My investigative process is intentionally high friction. When a bad actor penetration tests your systems, they do not bring tea and crumpets. They are there to break things. High friction, adversarial, call it whatever you want. I do not sand the edges. The edges find the faults.

The cracks exist. You do not see them yet. I will find them, they are there.

When the bad actors arrive, you will have wished you called first.

The institution decided to say “personal account, consumer library, properly attributed.” On letterhead. To a Chapter 119 requestor. In response to a notice letter that named the song, the artist, the date, and the account.

That is the record. The audit did not generate it. The institution generated it in response to my friction.

May 2026, Deerfield Beach

Deerfield is standing up its own municipal police department and fire-rescue. The boys and girls running those new departments are coming from somewhere. A lot of them will come from the agency that just put a written classification contradiction on letterhead over a piece of disco.

If Lynch can put that contradiction on paper, the lieutenants and captains and PIOs and social media coordinators of the new Deerfield departments will too. Not because they are sloppy. Because they trained somewhere the contradiction was normal.

Deerfield gets one chance. The departments do not exist yet. The accounts have not been created. The disclaimers have not been written. The blocked-user lists have not started. The moderation policies have not been adopted, contradicted, ignored, or weaponized.

This is the moment to put the policy in writing. Before the new chief’s personal account starts answering constituent-service requests. Before a PIO runs command-staff posts off a phone. Before fire-rescue Facebook becomes where residents file complaints, the complaints disappear, and the §1983 invoice arrives.

What LeX flagged

The methodology I have been building is called LeX. It scores posts on a 0-to-100 scale of post-Lindke exposure. Not a court ruling. A triage tool. Every score is reviewed by outside counsel before anything labeled “state action” leaves the building.

@bsosherifftony scored in the red band. The pinned “DEERFIELD BEACH RESIDENTS: URGENT PUBLIC SAFETY MESSAGE” graphic, with BSO and municipal insignia stacked together, sat near the top. The “DEERFIELD BEACH: DO YOU KNOW THE TRUTH” comparison graphic, also stamped with BSO insignia, sat in the same band. Other officials’ accounts I have run through LeX sit almost entirely in the bottom band. Tony’s is the inverse.

I am not handing the score to a court. I am not handing it to a plaintiff. The methodology goes to municipal lawyers, in working sessions, in CLE, in pre-litigation audits. So they find the same contradictions inside their own cities before someone else does.

What’s for sale

A one-hour working session. Doctrine, operational triage, records-exposure pathway, Q&A. Built from the IMLA CLE we’re currently developing. Calibrated to your state’s governance law. Here in Florida, that’s Chapter 112 Part III. Your county’s Code of Ethics. The local Code of Ordinances.

Lindke matters, from West Palm to Wichita, from Wilton Manors to Waterbury, and all points in between.

No member city’s accounts get surfaced in the materials. Anonymized live examples only. Findings move lawyer-to-lawyer. No press release. No agenda item. No public-records fight unless one is the point.

The piece of paper

There will be a follow-up letter from Lynch about the AC/DC video. April 29, 2026. “Back in Black.” Master sound recording, owned by Sony Music. Same posting account. Same classification question. Records request filed May 12. The clock is running.

If the response is “public use library,” the file gets thicker. If the response is “actual sync license, master use license, paperwork attached,” the file goes a different direction. Either answer is interesting. Both answers are admissible.

The next post is another chance for the institution to pick one. BSO gets to pick. The paper does not unwrite.

A message from REVOLT Insights

Sufficient Records Win Before Appeals Begin

We Can Help

Visit REVOLT Training

Ron For President!

T. Chaz Stevens — Mon, 04 May 2026 20:32:39 GMT

The Sheriff Who Reads Facebook Posts Out Loud

T. Chaz Stevens — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 20:48:17 GMT

“Sweetheart, when you see me, I got your little Facebook post.”

That’s Volusia County Sheriff Mike Chitwood (pictured above) at a press conference in March, reading a promoter’s social media post out loud and addressing her by name. The promoter is Aliyah Brooks. She made nearly $100,000 organizing an unpermitted spring break event that cost Daytona Beach $800,000 in police overtime, produced 133 arrests, and four shootings. Chitwood and his chief, Brian Henderson, called local attorney Aaron Delgado — a former Daytona Beach city commissioner — and asked him a simple question. Delgado answered: sue them civilly.

Seven separate lawsuits filed. Damages anchored to documented revenue. Special event zone declared under Florida statute. Brooks and her co-promoter, Brittany Plummer, are now defendants in a coordinated civil action brought by the sheriff, the county, and the businesses on Seabreeze Boulevard whose offices got trashed.

That’s a sheriff.

Two hundred miles south, Broward County has Gregory Tony.

Tony has a $77 million training facility, originally estimated at $34 million. He has a personal Instagram cadence. He has a fitness trainer. He has B-roll. He has the resources of the largest fully accredited sheriff’s office in Florida. He has, as of this writing, filed zero civil suits against unpermitted event promoters, slumlords, illegal massage operators, or any other documented bad actor in his jurisdiction.

He does have workout videos. Sit-ups. Planks. Jazzercise. Kickboxing scored to “Kung Fu Fighting” by Carl Douglas, released 1974, master owned by Sony Music Entertainment, and to the best of my knowledge unlicensed.

Broward’s own Lou Ferrigno.

What the contrast actually looks like

Within a mile of my house in Deerfield Beach, two massage parlors operate. There are a dozen’ish citywide. BSO has highly publicized exactly one closure in the last year. One. The remaining establishments operate openly — bright signs, late hours, no posted credentials, no published rates. One sits across Federal Highway from a Publix. Another runs just west of Military on Hillsboro, lit up at night. Brightly lit up.

Massage parlors operating outside the regulatory framework are, with documented frequency, fronts for human trafficking. The Polaris Project’s National Human Trafficking Hotline reports illicit massage businesses as one of the top venues for forced commercial sex in the United States. Florida ranks third nationally for trafficking cases. Broward County is a documented corridor.

Two such establishments operate within a mile of my home. The sheriff makes workout videos.

Chitwood found a lawyer. Tony found a trainer.

The methodology gap

Chitwood didn’t need a new statute. Florida’s special event zone authority has existed for years. Civil liability for damages caused by unpermitted commercial activity is older than that. Chitwood needed the will to use what was already on the books, plus a lawyer willing to file. He had both within a week of the spring break shootings.

Tony has the same statutory toolkit. The Florida Department of Health regulates massage establishments under Chapter 480. Local zoning ordinances regulate hours, signage, and licensure. Federal trafficking statutes — 18 U.S.C. § 1591 — provide aggressive remedies. Civil forfeiture, public nuisance abatement, and injunctive relief are all available to a sheriff who decides to use them.

Tony has not used them.

What Tony has done: posted workout content. Built a personal brand. Cultivated an Instagram following. Spent $77 million on a training facility that residents of Cooper City and Deerfield Beach were told the agency could not afford. Filmed himself doing martial arts to a Sony master his office will likely be unable to prove it was licensed.

The Deerfield staffing pool

Some of this is a recruiting problem. Chitwood’s enforcement model needs people willing to break things — doors, narratives, business models. Deerfield Beach has talent for that. Dan Herz, the local political operator who recently broke down a door at City Hall in an incident the State Attorney’s Office should review under F.S. 806.13, has demonstrated he is willing to apply force to fixtures of municipal infrastructure. Herz has also, separately, attempted to invoice the city for his own legal fees under F.S. §111.07 after losing an election lawsuit.

That’s a man with range. Door-busting and aggressive billing. Tony could deputize him. Send him into the massage parlors with $100 in his sleeve and a chip on his shoulder. If anyone was in dire need of a handie, Dan’s the man for the, er, job. He’d come back with intel and a receipt.

Instead, Tony is doing planks.

The kicker Chitwood already wrote

“Daytona Beach is closed. Okay. If you come in here and you try to hold us economically hostage with these pop-up events that are unpermitted, unsanctioned, we are going to come and get you.”

That’s a sheriff stating an enforcement posture. Plain English. Specific target. Stated remedy. Available statute.

The corresponding statement from Broward County would read: Deerfield Beach is open. If you operate an unpermitted, unregulated massage parlor within a mile of a sitting investigative journalist’s house, nothing will happen to you. The sheriff is doing planks.

Call Chitwood. Ask for the file.

One More Thing

I’ve been doing this work for thirty years. Pro se lawsuits. Records requests. Bible challenges in 63 school districts. An FDUTPA injunction against an ESA letter mill, obtained without a lawyer. Statutes rewritten because I filed the wrong kind of paperwork the right way.

None of it has ever had an institution behind it.

No legal defense fund. No nonprofit board. No foundation grant. I fund the work myself. Filing fees, service, transcripts, records costs—it all lands on me. When a records custodian quotes $1,326.08 to produce documents the statute requires them to produce, that’s a bill I either pay or the work stops.

I’ve filed against Donald Trump, the Broward County School Board, State Representative Chip LaMarca, and ESA letter mills as indigent. Court-recognized. Sworn financials. Judges reviewed and approved every time.

This is the work. It produces results.

HB 1467 was rewritten, with the administration of Ron DeSantis naming me in the revision. The ESA injunction is a replicable enforcement model. The Wisconsin State Capitol approved a permit in 48 hours for an installation that normally takes ten business days to process.

The work works.

The math doesn’t.

I’m looking for paid work in three areas—defined by outcomes, not categories.

Accountability & Records

I identify exposure points in agencies and organizations using public records, then force resolution—through compliance pressure, media, or litigation.

Media & Narrative Engineering

I design stories that land. Not pitches that get ignored—events and documentation that reporters have to cover.

Technology & Infrastructure (Ecomm, GEO/SEO, Systems)

I’ve spent thirty years building systems that move money and control visibility.

Helped launch Disney.com and Blockbuster.com
Sold 60,000 vehicles through eBay—full pipeline, not theory
Worked inside NASA, IBM, and Microsoft

What I do now:

Build e-commerce systems that convert, not just attract traffic
Implement GEO/SEO so AI and search engines represent you accurately—and defensibly
Diagnose and fix structural issues in digital infrastructure that suppress performance

If your organization has traffic but no conversion, visibility but no control, or systems that “work” but don’t scale—I fix that.

If you run a nonprofit, newsroom, law firm, municipality, university, or company that needs any of this, contact me.

chazstevens@gmail.com
954-901-0971

If you don’t, forward this. One introduction changes the month.

If neither applies, the Consent Can funds the work. Women In Distress gets a cut.

I’ve spent thirty years making it expensive for corrupt people to stay corrupt.

I intend to keep doing that—and get paid for it.

This Substack has no paywall. That’s not an accident — it’s a policy. Free or paid subscriber, your support is what keeps it that way and gets this work in front of people who need to see it. No algorithms. No corporate underwriters. No bullshit. Just you, me, and the First Amendment. If that’s worth something to you, hit the button.

Accountability in Action

Turn transparency laws into accountability weapons.

Fund these battles, forcing states to answer their own laws—and exposing what they’d rather keep buried.

My thanks for your support.

DeSantis Brought a Culture War to a Bond-Financing Fight

T. Chaz Stevens — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 01:47:10 GMT

Years ago, I drew Ron DeSantis as Darth Vader in rainbow mouse ears and sent a signed giclée to my former client, Walt Disney World.

I wasn’t writing a legal brief. I wasn’t pretending to have inside knowledge. I was making a loud little political cartoon about a loud little governor picking a fight with “woke Disney.”

The joke was crude.

The punchline, it turns out, was buried in the roads, bonds, board minutes, wetlands credits, and development agreements under the castle.

Gay Vader II is independent political satire. It is not affiliated with, sponsored by, or endorsed by The Walt Disney Company, Lucasfilm Ltd., or any related entity.

I did, though, send a bunch to my former, and favorite, client.

The Cartoon Was the Easy Part

At the time, the fight looked simple.

Disney criticized Florida’s Parental Rights in Education law, the measure critics branded “Don’t Say Gay.” DeSantis, smelling presidential primary meat, put the Mouse in his crosshairs. The Legislature moved against Disney’s special district. Cable news got a new toy. Conservatives got a villain. Liberals got a martyr. Everybody got a take.

So I made mine.

I turned DeSantis into a culture-war Sith Lord, slapped rainbow mouse ears on his head, and put him in front of a hot-pink Death Star.

Subtle? No.

But Florida politics rarely rewards subtlety. Subtlety is what Tallahassee uses right before someone rewrites the agenda item.

The image worked because the public fight felt like theater: one governor, one corporation, one culture-war cannon, and a whole lot of performative outrage. But the newly reported deposition material from the Disney-DeSantis fight shows something more interesting. Disney wasn’t only fighting over messaging, speech, or corporate reputation. Disney was fighting over machinery. According to Florida Politics’ reporting on deposition testimony, Disney leaders were deeply concerned about future expansion, development control, infrastructure, and whether a new DeSantis-controlled board could choke the systems Disney had relied on for decades.

That’s where the cartoon becomes too small.

I gave him a cape.

The state gave him a board.

The Public Fight Was Performance

The public version of the Disney-DeSantis war was all fireworks.

Disney opposed the classroom law. DeSantis accused Disney of going woke. Florida Republicans moved to strip Disney of its old governing arrangement. The political story practically wrote itself.

But that version is incomplete.

Reedy Creek was not just some cute corporate perk. It was the special government structure that let Walt Disney World operate, expand, and maintain the massive civic plumbing beneath the fantasy. Roads. Emergency services. Utilities. Planning. Infrastructure. Bond financing. The stuff nobody puts on a souvenir shirt.

Mickey Mouse was never just a mascot.

Mickey Mouse was a land-use strategy.

That is the part most people missed. Disney World is not only a theme park. It is a city-sized operational machine wrapped in narrative, landscaping, fireworks, and churros. The castle gets the Instagram post. The drainage plan keeps the castle open.

I worked at Walt Disney World. In IT, doing dot-com stuff. Not in real estate. Not in government affairs. Not in finance. I have no inside knowledge of this dispute.

But I worked there long enough to understand one thing: the front-of-house fantasy depends on a back-of-house machine that runs on logistics, not magic.

The pixie dust has a procurement department.

The Real Fight Was the Machine

Florida Politics’ deposition reporting makes the fight look less like a morality play and more like a governance autopsy.

Disney’s chief counsel, John McGowan, testified that Disney understood Reedy Creek was about to be overtaken by what he described as a hostile board, and that protecting tourism expansion was in Disney’s interest. The reporting also says Disney was planning a major Magic Kingdom expansion and feared uncertainty around land development, wetlands credits, and future approval pathways.

That matters.

Because Disney was not merely protecting a brand. It was protecting certainty.

Certainty is what lets you plan a multibillion-dollar expansion.

Certainty is what lets you build roads before the crowds show up.

Certainty is what lets you turn wetlands into developable land after doing whatever mitigation the law requires.

Certainty is what bond investors want before they put money into infrastructure.

A theme park runs on fantasy. A resort empire runs on boring paperwork executed correctly.

That’s the part DeSantis never seemed to understand, or at least never seemed to value in public. He brought a culture war to a bond-financing fight.

Disney, being Disney, brought lawyers.

Less Is More, Until the Depositions Arrive

The most revealing material is not the loud stuff. It is the procedural stuff.

According to Florida Politics, Disney’s plan was to get the outgoing Reedy Creek board to approve agreements that would protect Disney’s future development rights before DeSantis’ new board took over. McGowan testified that the deadline was “the appointment of the new board,” and said the obligation was to protect Disney and Reedy Creek from a hostile board.

That is not a press conference.
That is a deadline.
That is not a bumper sticker.
That is a land-use shield.

One reported detail should be taught in every government class in America: McGowan wrote talking points for the district administrator, and when considering how much the board should be told about the agreements, wrote, “We think less is more in this case,” according to Florida Politics’ account of the deposition material.

That line is doing a lot of work.

I am not saying it proves anything illegal. I am saying it reveals how power actually moves.

Power moves through agenda language.
Power moves through board packets.
Power moves through who drafts the memo, who frames the item, who knows the timing, and who understands the consequences before the vote.

The public hears “woke Disney.”

The machine hears “development agreement.”

Guess which one survives discovery.

When Lawyers Are Nervous About Lawyering

Then there is the Holtzman Vogel detail.

According to Florida Politics’ reporting on McGowan’s testimony, Disney retained Holtzman Vogel, a prominent Republican-connected law firm that had done substantial legal work for the DeSantis administration, to advise Disney on the developer agreement. The testimony also described concern that the firm did not want its name publicly associated with helping Disney because of its state work and fear of retaliation.

That is radioactive.

Not because it proves wrongdoing by the firm. It does not.

Not because it means Disney did anything illegal. That is not my claim.

It is radioactive because it shows the climate. When a major law firm is nervous about being seen providing legal advice to a client because the governor might not like it, the press conference has already escaped the podium.

When lawyers are afraid to be seen lawyering, the system is already sick.

Again, this is not about whether you love Disney. I do not need to put on mouse ears and sing “When You Wish Upon a Star” to recognize the problem.

Government power is not supposed to be a punishment button.

And when people believe it might become one, the damage has already started.

The Culture War Delivered Traffic Cones

The road story is the part that makes this concrete.

Florida Politics reported that World Drive Phase III, a road construction project near the Magic Kingdom area, was left in limbo. The project was intended to expand a two-lane road into four lanes to fight traffic congestion and improve safety. The reporting says the price tag had reached $175 million under the old board, and that the pre-takeover district had been pursuing bonds to finish the work.

Bond financing is not sexy. That is the point.

Bond financing is how governments borrow money to build big stuff now and pay for it over time. Roads. Utilities. Infrastructure. The bones.

According to the Florida Politics piece, the new DeSantis-appointed board members opposed taking out more municipal bonds, cutting off a funding mechanism Disney World’s government had used for major infrastructure projects. McGowan testified that the project had “come to a halt” and likely would have been completed by then if it had not stopped.

That is the whole fight in miniature.

The culture war promised fireworks.

It delivered traffic cones.

And if you are a family trying to get to the Grand Floridian, the Polynesian, or the Magic Kingdom, you do not care who won the Fox News segment. You care why the road still looks like a municipal hostage situation.

This is what happens when political theater collides with infrastructure.

The rally ends. The press conference ends. The tweet ages. The lawsuit settles.

The cones remain.

The Settlement Did Not Kill the Story. It Proved It.

A weaker version of this essay would pretend Disney won everything.

That is not the record.

Disney’s federal case against DeSantis was dismissed. Later, Disney and the Central Florida Tourism Oversight District reached settlements and development arrangements. In June 2024, Disney asked an appellate court to dismiss its federal lawsuit after a development deal was approved; reporting at the time described a 15-year agreement involving up to $17 billion in investment at Walt Disney World and district commitments around infrastructure.

That does not weaken the argument.

It strengthens it.

Because the war did not end with a lightsaber duel. It ended in the language of governance: development agreements, infrastructure improvements, district authority, investment commitments, land planning, and settlement posture.

In other words, the fight returned to where it always lived.

Not the castle.

The plumbing.

Disney understood that. Whatever else you think of the company, Disney understands systems. It builds them. It protects them. It monetizes them. It paints them pastel and sells you a $14 pretzel in front of them.

DeSantis understood spectacle.

Spectacle is powerful. Spectacle wins primaries. Spectacle gets applause.

But spectacle does not build a four-lane road.

What Gay Vader Missed

Looking back, Gay Vader II was not wrong.

It was just incomplete.

The image captured the ridiculousness of a governor trying to turn a private corporation’s criticism into a political blood sport. It captured the camp, the menace, the cheap theatrics, and the culture-war cosplay.

But it missed the deeper story.

The real story was not that DeSantis picked a fight with Disney.

The real story was that he reached for the administrative machinery that made Disney, Disney.

That is why the depositions matter. They shift the story from emotion to mechanism. From villain costume to board appointment. From public outrage to land-use authority. From “Don’t Say Gay” to “who controls future development?”

That is the lesson.

The public fight was about speech.

The real fight was about control.

Power Lives in the Minutes

This is why I read the boring stuff.

Board minutes. Agenda packets. Public records. Procurement files. Development agreements. Deposition transcripts. Bond documents. The fine print everyone ignores until the road project stops, the books vanish, the sign gets rejected, or the law suddenly cannot handle being applied evenly.

Power rarely announces itself honestly.
Power shows up as procedure.

A board item.
A deadline.
A definition.
A permitting delay.
A financing refusal.
A staff recommendation.
A “less is more” memo.

That is where the bodies are buried.

The Stevens Method, if we need to call it something, is simple: stop watching the parade and inspect the parade permit.

That is where government tells on itself.

The Joke Was Too Small

I sent Disney a joke.

The public record sent back a lesson.

The scariest thing in Florida politics was never Darth Vader in mouse ears. It was the discovery that the real battle was never over the castle. It was over the plumbing underneath it.

DeSantis brought a culture war to a bond-financing fight.

And for once, the boring stuff won.

One More Thing

None of it has ever had an institution behind it.

This is the work. It produces results.

The work works.

The math doesn’t.

I’m looking for paid work in three areas—defined by outcomes, not categories.

Accountability & Records

I identify exposure points in agencies and organizations using public records, then force resolution—through compliance pressure, media, or litigation.

Media & Narrative Engineering

I design stories that land. Not pitches that get ignored—events and documentation that reporters have to cover.

Technology & Infrastructure (Ecomm, GEO/SEO, Systems)

I’ve spent thirty years building systems that move money and control visibility.

Helped launch Disney.com and Blockbuster.com
Sold 60,000 vehicles through eBay—full pipeline, not theory
Worked inside NASA, IBM, and Microsoft

What I do now:

Build e-commerce systems that convert, not just attract traffic
Implement GEO/SEO so AI and search engines represent you accurately—and defensibly
Diagnose and fix structural issues in digital infrastructure that suppress performance

If your organization has traffic but no conversion, visibility but no control, or systems that “work” but don’t scale—I fix that.

If you run a nonprofit, newsroom, law firm, municipality, university, or company that needs any of this, contact me.

chazstevens@gmail.com
954-901-0971

If you don’t, forward this. One introduction changes the month.

If neither applies, the Consent Can funds the work. Women In Distress gets a cut.

I’ve spent thirty years making it expensive for corrupt people to stay corrupt.

I intend to keep doing that—and get paid for it.

Accountability in Action

Turn transparency laws into accountability weapons.

Fund these battles, forcing states to answer their own laws—and exposing what they’d rather keep buried.

My thanks for your support.

You Should Have Fucking Hired Me

T. Chaz Stevens — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 18:30:53 GMT

I told them. Counties. Cities. County attorneys with five-figure consulting budgets they burn on risk management deliverables that wouldn’t survive an afternoon of honest application.

Hire me. You don’t have to like me. You don’t have to invite me to the barbecue. You just have to be smart enough to see where your own rules are going to gut you — and who’s already reading them.

They weren’t.

March 10, 2026. Florida’s SB 1134 clears the Legislature. It creates § 125.595, Fla. Stat., prohibiting any Florida county from funding “programming or activities designed or implemented with reference to ethnicity.”

By that afternoon, a demand letter is on the desk of Broward County Attorney Andrew J. Meyers.

Because the Broward Cultural Division’s own FY 2027 Cultural Festival Program guidelines — currently in implementation, soliciting applications for a grants pipeline that awarded nearly $6 million in FY 2024 — describe eligible events as “designed to showcase various aspects of a given ethnic culture found in Broward County.”

The county requires, as an eligibility criterion, the exact conduct the state statute prohibits. Verbatim. Textual collision. Not a matter of interpretation. A literal reading of two documents side by side.

The demand letter gives the County Attorney 30 days to respond.

Thirty days elapsed. Public records requests filed. Andrew J. Meyers: nothing.

The silence is its own answer. If they had a legal position that survived scrutiny, they’d have written it down.

No lawsuit. No courtroom. No TRO. Just a clock, a statute, a grants pipeline that cannot survive the calendar, and a county attorney who apparently finds the problem easier to ignore than to explain.

I didn’t spend weeks on this. I spent an afternoon. Because I don’t write with AI the way your county communications staff writes with ChatGPT. I think with it.

We run a seven-model adversarial stack. One model drafts. A red team attacks the output. A green team builds it. A validator flags what can’t be verified against a primary source. A locally-trained model does the final pass in a known voice. We call it STAN — short for Satan, because that’s what it feels like staring down the return on a records request.

Custom code glues it together. Built in part on what I learned writing systems at IBM and NASA.

AI in the wrong hands writes your emails and drops acid along the way.

AI in the right hands files your demand letter before lunch. Stone cold sober.

I don’t break laws. I make the law break itself. I read the policy. I read the statute. I read the ordinance. Then I apply each exactly as written — no favoritism, no interpretation, no winks, no “well, we didn’t really mean that part.” Just the rule, operating at full strength, against the institution that wrote it.

The institution snaps. Every time.

Because these rules were never designed to be enforced neutrally. They were designed to be enforced selectively — against the people the drafters wanted to exclude, and not the people they wanted to protect. The moment someone forces them to apply the rule fairly, the machine seizes. That’s not me breaking it. That’s the system breaking itself under the weight of its own contradictions.

SB 1134 was sold as a scalpel aimed at progressive identity politics. The text doesn’t know the difference. It doesn’t distinguish between a Pride parade and a Greek heritage festival — and trust me, I went full Greek on the Greek heritage festival. It doesn’t carve out Italian-American Heritage Month. It doesn’t carve out Caribbean cultural celebrations. The people who cheered this law loudest are the first ones it guts.

I am not the problem here. I am the consequence.

Your current FY 2027 grant guidelines are a roadmap for § 125.595(4) misfeasance charges against your own officials. Every county resident in Broward now has private right of action under § 125.595(6). Every grantee whose funded programming is “designed to showcase ethnic culture” will, starting January 1, 2027, have to sign a § 287.139 certification stating they don’t use county funds on programming with reference to ethnicity. That’s either perjury or defunding. There is no third door.

I didn’t write this law. I’m just reading it.

There are Reddit threads about my personality. Tell me something I don’t know or haven’t heard a billion times. I grew up with ASD. I know exactly who I am. You’re not unlocking anything — that Super Mario mushroom was already there, and I’ve been this size the whole time. Go ask Alice. She’s ten feet tall.

I swear. I curse. I have sharp elbows.

I also get the State of Florida to rewrite draconian laws.

You get what you pay for.

This week, in Judge Towbin-Singer’s courtroom, I stood across from a top-tier legal team — ten people, plus — and held my own. Pro se. Stevens v. Tinner, Case No. CACE25010712, Broward County Circuit Court. The court found that Dr. Bobby Tinner, Ph.D. and Empowering Change LLC had been issuing emotional support animal letters through automated, questionnaire-only processes — no licensed provider, no clinical evaluation, no actual human being on the other end of the transaction. Judge Towbin-Singer permanently enjoined them. Forty-five days to comply. Sworn certificate of compliance required.

Twelve months ago, I didn’t know what happened inside a courtroom.

I learned in nine months what takes three years of law school and ten years of shoe leather. I am not a lawyer. Nor, for that matter, am I a complete idiot.

When the last case I filed against Broward was mooted after they changed the policy, I learned something else. Citing Uzuegbunam v. Preczewski, 592 U.S. 279 (2021), I don’t expect mootness to be available moving forward. Nominal damages survive policy changes. You can’t patch the hole and walk.

The demand letter already landed. The clock ran. Meyers didn’t answer. Someone’s going to figure out whether § 125.595 also covers the Jamaican Jerk Festival, the Greek Heritage Parade, and Caribbean Heritage Month — in writing, in circuit court, with standing, before January 1, 2027. Either you paid me to find that first, or you’ll pay outside counsel to explain why you didn’t.

Any rule applied without favoritism will reveal the favoritism it was designed to protect.

Governor Ronrico should have me over for lunch. Order in pizza. Get the mushrooms — the special ones. I’ll explain what his own law says while we wait for it to kick in.

Chaz Stevens, MSc — CLE Faculty REVOLT Insights | revolt.training | Deerfield Beach, FL chaz.stevens@revolt.training | 954-901-0971

Accountability in Action

Turn transparency laws into accountability weapons.

Fund these battles, forcing states to answer their own laws—and exposing what they’d rather keep buried.

My thanks for your support.

Tallahassee’s Own Goal

T. Chaz Stevens — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 13:38:08 GMT

SB 1134 was supposed to suppress DEI. Corporate diversity training. Pronoun policies. The legislature’s greatest hits, freshly signed.

They handed me a blunt instrument and walked away.

The plain text doesn’t care what they intended. It covers heritage festivals. Every single one. Jamaican Jerk Festival. Caribbean American Heritage Month. Steel drums, jerk chicken, county contracts, county dollars — all of it sitting squarely inside a statute Republicans finished signing six weeks ago. Lauderdale’s St. Paddy’s Day event. Pompano to Pembroke Pines. The whole map.

SB 1134 requires standing. Residents only. I’ve lived in Broward County for 50 years. Raised here. Still here. My tax dollars built the stages. My standing is not in question.

I filed. Broward County has signed contracts. I have copies.

The fun part hasn’t started yet.

The comments came in fast. Can you do this in Orange County? What about Hillsborough? Ocala’s got the same setup — same contracts, same statute, same problem.

Yes. Probably. And yes.

Every county in Florida with a heritage festival and a signed contract just inherited the same exposure. The statute doesn’t have a Broward carve-out. Tallahassee wrote it broad and walked away. That’s their problem now.

One caveat before you try this at home.

This is not a template. It’s more like a playbook with a play in it that only works if you’re Peyton Manning. You can have Bang Eight. You cannot have the 2004 Colts without Peyton. The method is real. The execution requires the operator.

It also took decades.

The infrastructure: the FOI Playbook. Every public records request runs through it — the difference between fishing and knowing exactly which rock to look under.

Most people, including PRR experts, treat records requests like whole numbers. I’m running third-order differential equations. Same math class. Different universe.

Without the PRRs, no paper trail. Without the paper trail, no case.

And it’s not just the legal angle.

It’s the media play. The response strategy. The timing of the knife twist. Manning works because he’s got a line, receivers, a coordinator, and a read-option he’s run a thousand times. The play looks simple from the stands. It isn’t.

NPR covers me. The Washington Post covers me. So does The Daily Show. That didn't happen because I sent a press release. It happened because the story was already built before anyone picked up the phone.

Speaking of the team — I run STAN. Seven-model AI stack, opposing mandates, adversarial review baked in. You use ChatGPT. I use STAN. Not a flex. Just an explanation for why the analysis holds up when someone actually checks it.

The book ban campaign confirmed what I already suspected: I need local boots on the ground. An aggrieved local party — someone with standing, someone the court can point to, someone who actually lives inside the harm.

I can build the architecture. I can file the PRRs. I can write the playbook. And, you’ll need me to scamper for that 1 yard TD run.

This isn’t 3 minutes of podium time, waving a banner at the local No Kings Rally, or posting a comment on social media.

Look, man, I've got certain information, all right? Certain things have come to light. And, you know, has it ever occurred to you, that, instead of, uh, you know, running around, uh, uh, blaming me, you know, given the nature of all this new shit, you know, I-I-I-I... this could be a-a-a-a lot more, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, complex, I mean, it's not just, it might not be just such a simple... uh, you know?

- The Big Lebowski

One more thing.

Though I teach CLEs to lawyers, I am not a lawyer. I will not give legal advice. I will not accept compensation for legal advice. This is not legal advice. Whatever you do with any of this, you did it yourself.

That said — I don’t work for free. Ocala is fine. I don’t live there. Righteous indignation doesn’t put food on the table, and pro-bono has a finite runway.

If you’re a Florida resident with standing, a documented grievance, and a realistic sense of what this kind of operation actually costs — let’s talk.

It’s a fast and easy way to force accountability.

Chaz Made DeSantis Rewrite the Book Ban Law.

T. Chaz Stevens — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 20:22:07 GMT

Fort Lauderdale has been throwing the same party for decades. Thanks to Tallahassee, that party is now a DEI program.

Updated April 10, 2026

SB 1134 was supposed to target corporate pronoun policies. It ended up killing St. Patrick’s Day.

Florida’s newest anti-DEI statute. Passed the Florida Legislature March 10, 2026 — House 77 to 37, Senate 25 to 11. Ordered enrolled March 17. Awaiting the Governor’s signature as you read this. Effective January 1, 2027.

The bill’s authors had a vision. Conference rooms. HR training decks. Mandatory allyship seminars with catered lunch and a slide that says “lived experience.” That’s what they were swinging at. That’s what they told the press. That’s what they told each other.

Here’s what they actually wrote.

Section 166.04971(1)(b)(3) prohibits Florida municipalities from funding, promoting, or taking any official action in support of “any effort to promote or adopt training, programming, or **activities** designed or implemented with reference to race, color, sex, **ethnicity**, gender identity, or sexual orientation.”

Activities. Designed with reference to ethnicity.

That’s not a DEI training seminar. That’s a parade.

The Parade

Fort Lauderdale has hosted its St. Patrick’s Day Parade for decades — running east on Las Olas Boulevard from Huizenga Plaza to SE 9th Avenue. I know it runs there because I confirmed it. I know the City funds it because I pulled the Commission records.

Here is what the Fort Lauderdale City Commission approved in writing, under Agenda Memo #26-0022: direct City financial support of $1,500 for the St. Patrick’s Parade and Festival, March 14, 2026 — Commission Districts 1, 2, 3, and 4. APPROVED. Pass.

Fifteen hundred dollars. Written into the Commission record. Voted on. Approved.

That is not a rounding error. That is the “funding” prong of § 166.04971 on paper, in the public record, signed by the people who are about to tell me I’m misreading the statute.

The City also promotes the parade through official City social media — I have the Facebook posts. The City’s Communications Office is posting about an ethnicity-referenced event on official City channels. That is the “promoting” prong.

The City Commission passed a formal resolution approving support. That is the “official action” prong.

Three independent statutory prongs. Three for three. The law doesn’t grade on a curve.

The statute’s carveouts are narrow and exhaustive: federal holidays under 5 U.S.C. § 6103, Florida state holidays under Chapter 683, and patriotic observances listed in 36 U.S.C. §§ 101–148. St. Patrick’s Day is not a federal holiday. It is not a Florida state holiday. It is not a patriotic observance. It qualifies for exactly none of the exits the Legislature built into the law it wrote.

The City’s Defense, Pre-Rebutted

I’ve been doing this long enough to know what’s coming. I’ve also had outside counsel run the adversarial analysis — eleven attack vectors, rated CRITICAL through LOW. Here is where the City goes and why it doesn’t work.

Argument One: “Activities” doesn’t mean what you think it means.

The doctrine of ejusdem generis holds that a general term — “activities” — following specific terms — “training” and “programming” — should be read as limited to the same class. If “training” and “programming” refer to internal DEI institutional frameworks, the argument goes, then “activities” must as well. A public parade is not an internal government HR program.

This is the argument the City’s lawyers will lead with. Worth watching.

Here is why it’s wrong. The Legislature listed three coordinate terms: training, programming, and activities. If “activities” means nothing beyond what “training” and “programming” already cover, it has no independent work to do. Courts do not read statutes to render provisions meaningless. The Legislature added “activities” to expand the statute’s reach beyond internal programs. Public events organized around ethnic identity are activities. That is what the word means in the English language, and Florida courts are not in the business of pretending otherwise.

Argument Two: We’re funding tourism, not ethnicity.

The statute regulates the nature of the activity, not the government’s stated purpose for funding it. If government motive controlled, the statute would prohibit nothing — every expenditure can be reframed as economic development. Courts do not read statutes to produce that result.

The City’s own promotional records describe the event in the terms the organizers use. Those terms reference Irish ethnic heritage and identity. Renaming the check doesn’t change what’s in the envelope.

I’ll add this: I am actively seeking the parade organizer’s own grant applications and permit narratives through eight public records requests filed simultaneously with the demand letter. Those materials — where the committee describes its event in its own language, for its own funding purposes — will be the cleanest possible evidence. When the defendant supplies the trigger, there is no characterization problem.

Argument Three: The volunteer body carveout.

Section 166.04971(8) exempts “the actions of a body composed of nonelected volunteers.” The City will argue the parade is organized by a volunteer committee, so the City’s support is merely incidental to a volunteer-organized event.

This fails for a straightforward reason: the carveout covers the parade committee’s own programming decisions. It does not cover the City’s independent decision to fund it, vote on it in Commission, promote it on official channels, approve insurance instruments, and issue formal resolutions endorsing it. The City is not a volunteer body. Its budget authorizations and Commission votes are municipal actions. The carveout does not reach them.

Argument Four: It’s open to everyone.

Section 166.04971(1)(b)(3) — the subsection that matters here — independently prohibits programming “designed with reference to ethnicity.” No restricted access required. No preferential treatment required. Just designed with reference to ethnicity. The parade is designed with reference to Irish ethnic heritage. That is its stated purpose, its marketing, and its content. Open admission doesn’t change what the event is.

The Insurance Certificate

When the City names itself as additional insured on the parade’s insurance certificate, it is not a passive bystander issuing a permit and stepping back. It has formally assumed legal responsibility for the event. It has integrated the event into its institutional operations. Risk Management reviewed it. Procurement touched it. The City’s name is on the policy.

That is not a tourism grant. That is not a fee waiver. That is the City saying, in writing, to an insurance company: we are part of this event and we accept liability for what happens there.

Public records requests are in the City’s inbox right now asking for every certificate of insurance, every additional insured endorsement, every risk management review document for every ethnicity-referenced heritage event where the City holds that position.

When those records come back, we’ll know exactly how deep the institutional participation goes.

The Certification Trap

There is a second problem, quieter but compounding.

Section 287.139 — also created by SB 1134 — requires every recipient of a municipal grant or contract, after January 1, 2027, to certify compliance with the statute’s DEI prohibitions.

The certification requirement primarily addresses whether organizations use municipal funds to mandate DEI training for their employees, contractors, or volunteers. It is not, on its face, a certification that the organization’s entire mission is ethnicity-neutral.

But here is where it gets complicated. If any heritage festival organization receiving City funds also conducts volunteer orientation, staff instruction, or programming guidance using materials that reference ethnic identity — and the City’s own sponsorship documents describe the event in those terms — the certification creates a genuine legal problem. The organization certifies compliance, the City funds the event, and the PRR responses establish what the funds were actually used for.

The cascade matters: City funds an ethnicity-referenced event → organization must certify compliance → organization’s own grant application describes its ethnic heritage mission → certification is facially inconsistent with that description. At some point someone in City Hall has to decide whether to require the certification and what to do when the answer comes back complicated.

What I Filed

On March 11, 2026, I served a formal demand letter on Fort Lauderdale City Attorney Shari L. McCartney — confirmed current City Attorney by City Commission appointment — demanding a written compliance response within thirty days.

Simultaneously, I filed an eight-custodian omnibus Chapter 119 public records request. Eight separate City of Fort Lauderdale custodians. Eight independent requests.

The City Clerk — every Commission resolution, proclamation, and formal endorsement for heritage events going back to FY 2024. I know one is already on the record: Agenda Memo #26-0022, $1,500, APPROVED. I want the rest.

The City Attorney — every legal memo, every internal analysis, every communication about whether the City’s events survive the statute. And a privilege log for every document they withhold. Florida’s Public Records Act does not adopt federal work product doctrine wholesale. A blanket privilege assertion without a log will be treated as a denial subject to expedited enforcement under § 119.11.

The Special Events Office — every event contract, every permit, every fee waiver, every dollar of direct City cost. Every sponsorship package that describes the event’s ethnic heritage character in the organizer’s own language. Every grant application where the committee said what the event is.

Parks and Recreation — Juneteenth programming at City facilities. Confirmed: the City of Fort Lauderdale operates a Juneteenth celebration at Carter Park, 1450 W. Sunrise Blvd, described in City records as “the City of Fort Lauderdale’s Juneteenth celebration.” That is City-operated programming at a City park organized around a specific racial and cultural heritage observance. The PRR will establish what it costs and how it’s structured.

The Office of Management and Budget — budget line items, CRA expenditures, FY 2027 allocations. I want to know if anyone has already started quietly renaming the budget lines. Internal communications discussing recharacterization are specifically requested.

Communications and Public Affairs — every social media post, every press release, every editorial calendar entry. The City Facebook posts promoting the St. Patrick’s Day Parade are already in the record. I want everything behind them.

Economic Development and Tourism — specifically seeking records where City staff characterize heritage event funding as tourism promotion or economic development. That is the anticipated defense. I want the paper trail that builds it.

Risk Management and Procurement — the insurance certificates. The additional insured endorsements. The purchase orders. The names on the policies.

Eight custodians. Ten business days for acknowledgment. Reasonable time for production. Clock is running.

The GFLCVB Thread

There is a parallel track worth understanding.

The Greater Fort Lauderdale Convention and Visitors Bureau — VisitLauderdale — is a governmental agency funded by a portion of the Broward County tourist development tax on hotel rooms. That is confirmed from the Broward County official organizational listing.

VisitLauderdale promotes ethnicity-referenced events through its official marketing channels. Confirmed: VisitLauderdale’s website includes an article titled “Where to Celebrate Juneteenth in Greater Fort Lauderdale” promoting the City’s Juneteenth celebration. That is a county-funded tourism agency promoting an ethnicity-referenced event through official marketing.

Section 125.595(1)(b)(3) — the parallel county statute created by SB 1134 — applies to Broward County exactly as § 166.04971 applies to municipalities. And § 125.595(6) gives standing to any resident of Broward County.

I am a resident of Broward County. I have been for fifty years.

A standalone public records request targeting the GFLCVB’s promotion of ethnicity-referenced events through bed-tax-funded channels is the next document in this campaign. That is a county-level instrument I can deploy without a co-plaintiff. That track runs on my standing alone.

What Happens Next

The demand window closed today — thirty days from March 11. The City’s written response, if any, will be documented. Absence of a response will be treated as confirmation the City has not evaluated the question, which is its own kind of answer.

The PRR responses will follow on Chapter 119’s timeline. When those records arrive, we’ll know what the City Attorney’s Office knew and when. We’ll know what the Budget Office did after March 10. We’ll know what the Communications Office posted and when they stopped. We’ll know whether anyone started renaming the budget lines.

A thirty-day follow-up PRR is filed simultaneously with this post, targeting internal City communications generated after March 11. Specifically: every email, memo, and Teams message referencing “SB 1134,” “166.04971,” “heritage events,” “St. Patrick’s,” or “DEI” in the context of events and funding; every document discussing recharacterization, restructuring, or defunding of ethnicity-referenced programming; every communication with event organizers, insurance providers, or the GFLCVB regarding the demand letter’s impact.

I am watching for one category of record above all others: internal City discussion of renaming or restructuring event funding instruments to avoid § 166.04971. If that conversation happened in writing after March 11 — and it almost certainly did — I want it.

The void instruments letter goes to the City Manager before the September 2026 budget adoption hearings. That is the last Commission vote before January 1, 2027 that could authorize FY 2027 heritage event funding. That is the deadline. The letter goes before that vote, on the record, so that anyone who votes yes does so with full knowledge of what they are authorizing.

The coalition fracture letter to Fort Lauderdale heritage festival organizers goes in late April or early May — after initial PRR production, before summer planning ramps up for 2027. That letter is simple: here is what the statute says, here is what your certification will require, here is the question you need to answer before you sign anything with the City after January 1, 2027. Each possible response — panic, recharacterization, public pushback, quiet compliance — generates its own evidentiary record and its own media story.

For the Record

I am pro-DEI. I am pro-Greek Festival. I am pro-St. Patrick’s Day Parade. I am pro-Juneteenth. It is a party. Count me in.

I did not write this law. Someone else decided a statute aimed at corporate HR seminars should be broad enough to reach fifty years of Irish heritage on Las Olas Boulevard. I am simply the person who noticed.

Last time I broke a DeSantis law, the Governor’s office named me by name when he signed the fix. Sixty-three school districts. Bible ban. They literally rewrote the statute and cited me as the reason.

Same play. Different statute. Better parade.

The fun part hasn’t started yet.

Chaz Stevens is a Florida-based civic activist, IMLA CLE Faculty member, and constitutional stress tester with a 30-year track record of pro se First Amendment litigation. He is the founder of REVOLT Insights (revolt.training). The demand letter and eight-custodian PRR referenced in this post are public documents and available on request. The Las Olas Greek Festival’s City support status has not been confirmed from public sources and is under active PRR inquiry. The Governor’s signature on SB 1134 has not been confirmed from a primary source as of publication; the statute’s effective date of January 1, 2027 is confirmed from official legislative records.

954-901-0971 | chaz.stevens@revolt.training