Florida constitutional amendment proposals most likely to reach ballots in 2024. (Capitolist, July 30, 2023)

So is this the best we can possibly do in terms of 2024 Florida Constitutional Amendments?  

Are we serious?

From Capitalist:

These are the constitutional amendment proposals most likely to reach ballots in 2024

by Caden DeLisa | Jul 30, 2023

---

As the political world moves into the 2024 election cycle, leading candidates seeking to seize the nation’s most powerful positions have commanded much of the media’s attention. Stateside, however, constitutional amendment proposals are entering the final stretch of gathering and certifying signatures, racing to reach the necessary number to appear on ballots.

The process for a constitutional amendment initiative to reach ballots involves a petition-driven method. First, advocates must draft language addressing a single subject for the proposed amendment, which is then reviewed by the Florida Attorney General to ensure it is not misleading and meets legal requirements

Once approved, a specific number of valid signatures from registered Florida voters must be collected. In Florida, the number of required signatures for an amendment is equal to 8 percent of the votes cast in the preceding presidential election. For the current election cycle, this amounts to 891,589 valid signatures, which must be certified by February 1, 2024.

Florida also enforces a distribution rule which stipulates that at least 14 of the state’s 28 congressional districts must submit signatures totaling at least 8 percent of the district-wide vote in the most recent presidential election.

The proposed amendment then undergoes a second review, this time conducted by the Florida Supreme Court, to confirm its adherence to the one-subject rule and to eliminate voter deception. If the required signatures are verified and the Supreme Court gives its approval, the amendment proceeds to the general election ballot, where voters can cast votes on the proposal. If an amendment receives 60 percent of the vote, it is adopted.

Two proposals have already been referred to ballots by the state Legislature. The first, if approved by voters, would make school board elections partisan beginning in the November 2026 general election. Currently, four states — Alabama, Connecticut, Louisiana, and Pennsylvania — have state laws providing for partisan school board elections.

The second would provide a state constitutional right to hunt and fish, declaring that they serve as the preferred means for “responsibly managing and controlling fish and wildlife” and “shall be preserved forever as a public right.”

As of this month, three proposals — with varying degrees of probability — appear to be within reason of appearing on the 2024 ballots.

Safe & Smart Florida

The only proposal to surpass one million signatures (1,013,352), the Smart & Safe Florida political committee is seeking to amend the state’s marijuana laws to allow individuals aged 21 or older to “possess, use, purchase, display, and transport up to 2.5 ounces of marijuana and marijuana accessories for personal use for any reason.”

Trulieve — Florida’s largest medical marijuana distributor — has contributed more than $50 million to the initiative, accounting for nearly all of the committee’s fundraising, with less than $125 coming from other sources. All but about $100,000 of the money raised by the committee has been spent on collecting and validating petition signatures.

The proposal would also allow any of the state’s 22 licensed medical marijuana operators to “acquire, cultivate, process, manufacture, sell and distribute such products and accessories.”

The committee faces a potential hiccup, however, after the Florida Supreme Court stated in May that it would consider a legal challenge issued by state Attorney General Ashley Moody which contends the proposal violates the state’s constitution.

In her submission, Moody indicated that “the proposed amendment fails to meet the requirements” of specific state law. However, she withheld further details, promising “additional argument through a briefing at the appropriate time.”

With the validity of the proposal at the discretion of the state’s highest court, Safe & Smart Florida can be considered a coin-toss initiative, with its approval as likely as its denial.

Right to Clean Water Initiative

The Right to Clean and Healthy Water Initiative, sponsored by the organization of the same name, would establish a “fundamental right to clean and healthy waters” in the state constitution while granting residents the legal authority to sue organizations or government entities in order to enforce such rights.

The organization was formed following a successful water rights campaign in Orange County by a similar volunteer group that campaigned to protect water quality within the jurisdiction.

The amendment was adopted by 89.2 percent of county voters when it was placed for consideration on the 2020 ballot, making it the first county charter amendment in the United States to establish a legal foundation for protecting the waters within its bounds.

Despite picking up support from the League of Women Voters of Florida and being endorsed by the Alachua County Board of Commissioners, the proposal has procured just 43,410 signatures. With less than eight months until the cutoff date, it seems unlikely that organizers will be able to gather the necessary number of signatures by February.

Amendment to Limit Government Interference with Abortion

The least likely of the discussed initiatives to make it to ballots, the Floridians For Freedom-backed proposal aims to do exactly as its name states — establish that “no law shall prohibit, penalize, delay, or restrict abortion before viability or when necessary to protect the patient’s health.”

A relatively recent effort, having only been launched in May of this year, it was filed in direct response to legislation passed by state lawmakers during the last Legislative Session that saw Florida’s abortion regulations extended to six weeks.

The initiative has received the support of Senate Minority Leader Lauren Book, as well as Planned Parenthood of Southwest and Central Florida and the American Civil Liberties Union of Florida.

Thus far, the campaign has picked up 22,165 signatures. Though the cards seemed stacked against gathering 869,000 more signatures, News Service of Florida reported earlier this year that the backing committee raised $1.87 million in the week before its founding. Moreover, inevitable debates on the national stage could provide an increase in awareness. While it would be fair to consider the amendment dead on arrival, it still has a pulse.

Notably, an opposite measure sponsored by Protect Human Life Florida seeks to codify abortion regulation into the state’s constitution. Since its inception, it has received 16,053 signatures.

Share this:

A Minor Reboot Won’t Save Ron DeSantis’s Toxic Campaign. John Cassidy, (The New Yorker, July 24, 2023)

Over-developers' puppet Florida Governor, RONALD DION DeSANTIS, is having a tough time attracting 2024 Republican Presidential Primary votes in Iowa, N.H., S.C. and everywhere else.  

In 2012, when I first saw DeSANTIS in 2012 Republican primary debate at County Auditorium, figured he was an empty suit -- inauthentic, other-directed and demagogic.  

Now the world sees it.    

What do y'all reckon?

I pity the ambitious, pompous, asinine, egotistical, power-mad, whiny, upstart a corpulent corporate puppet swine from Yale U. and Harvard Law School. What a waste of a good education. 

No sense of humor. No charm.  No interest in our local issues in St. Johns County, where he disrespected our elected officials as Congressman. 

No social conscience. 

No empathy.  

He's lower than a snake's belly in a wagon rut.  Meaner than Richard Nixon.

The whiniest voice of any Presidential candidate in my lifetime. 

The wackiest policy ideas in the race.

As we say in St. Augustine, "Bless his heart."

From The New Yorker:

Our Columnists

A Minor Reboot Won’t Save Ron DeSantis’s Toxic Campaign

Florida’s governor will need to do much more than shake hands with voters at greasy spoons if he wants to beat Donald Trump.

By John Cassidy

As Ron DeSantis slips farther behind in the primary polls, the candidate’s team has struggled to find ways to compete with Donald Trump.Photograph by Anna Moneymaker / Getty

Out of Tallahassee, Florida, comes unsurprising news. After being barraged by negative media stories, watching its man’s poll ratings plummet downward like a kid on a zip line, and running into an early cash crunch, Ron DeSantis’s Presidential campaign is planning a “reboot,” NBC News reported last week. On Sunday, the Times followed up NBC’s scoop with a dishy story about overspending and infighting inside the campaign, which is a sprawling operation—although a bit less sprawling than it was a couple of weeks ago, before a looming money shortage prompted it to lay off roughly ten people.

News of the reboot emerged as the Florida governor found himself at the center of yet more damaging stories. Last week, Florida’s Board of Education approved new guidelines for the state’s public-school course in African American history, which said, in part: “Instruction includes how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.” When reporters asked DeSantis about the new guidelines on Friday, he said that he hadn’t had anything to do with writing them but continued to defend them, remarking that they would probably show some of the enslaved “eventually parlayed, you know, being a blacksmith into doing things later in life.”

Over the weekend, the Times published another article about DeSantis, this one focussing on his record during the coronavirus pandemic, when he initially pushed for Floridians aged sixty-five and older to be vaccinated but subsequently highlighted his opposition to vaccine mandates when the shot became available to younger residents. In the summer of 2021, the Delta variant hit the state hard, and about twenty-three thousand Floridians died, nine thousand of whom were under sixty-five. “These were preventable deaths,” Dr. Scott Rivkees, who was Florida’s surgeon general until September, 2021, told the Times. “It breaks my heart thinking that things could have turned out differently if people embraced vaccines instead of this anti-vax stuff.”

How bad are things for DeSantis? According to Real Clear Politics’ average of recent G.O.P. primary polls, he is still in second place, with the support of 19.3 per cent of respondents, but he’s trailing Donald Trump by more than thirty points. The latest individual survey, from Harvard caps-Harris, put the Trump-DeSantis margin at forty points—Trump is polling at fifty-two per cent, and DeSantis at twelve per cent. That poll also showed Vivek Ramaswamy, the biotech entrepreneur, who is attracting a good deal of media attention, running just two points behind DeSantis. The survey may have been an outlier, but for DeSantis the bad news keeps coming. According to the Financial Times, two of his richest potential backers, the billionaires Ken Griffin and Nelson Peltz, are now rethinking their plans to support him because of his far-right positions, including his clampdown on teaching about gender issues and his signing of a law banning abortions after six weeks.

On Sunday, officials from DeSantis’s campaign met with some of his remaining donors at a luxury ski lodge in Deer Valley, Utah, and told them that, going forward, the governor’s team would adopt a leaner, “insurgent,” posture, Politico reported. The NBC News story said that the new campaign strategy will involve “more handshaking in diners and churches,” more of a national focus with fewer references to his home state, and an effort to further engage the mainstream media. In the world of political consultants, campaign operatives, and political reporters, it is often taken as a given that operational details of this nature can determine a campaign’s outcome. Recent history doesn’t provide much support for that theory, though. In 2016, Trump’s local organization was spotty, many of his campaign stops took place in sports stadiums and aircraft hangars, and he was too cheap to blanket the airwaves. He won the Republican nomination easily. Four years later, Joe Biden got the Democratic nomination despite running a lacklustre primary campaign that saw him finish fourth in Iowa and fifth in New Hampshire. After he turned things around in South Carolina, with a big assist from Representative Jim Clyburn, other moderate Democratic candidates decided that he represented the best shot of beating Trump, and they dropped out before Super Tuesday.

This record suggests that Presidential races—primaries and general elections—are usually decided by major political forces that transcend the details of the campaign. In 2016, Trump successfully tapped into nativism, nationalism, economic disenchantment, and alienation from organized politics—all phenomena which were (and are) deeply rooted in American society. In 2020, Biden tapped into an even more powerful force at the time: revulsion at Trump’s Presidency. The question facing DeSantis isn’t whether he gives interviews to Newsmax or CNN. It’s what big political force does he have at his back that could sweep him to victory?

At the start of this year, the answer appeared to be electability. Following DeSantis’s runaway reëlection in Florida, the argument was that he could appeal to a broad spectrum of Republicans who believed it was time to move on from Trump. Today, that voting demographic looks a good deal narrower. Since April, when the Manhattan District Attorney, Alvin Bragg, indicted Trump on charges related to paying off the adult-film performer Stormy Daniels, many Republican voters have rallied around him. Meanwhile, DeSantis has undermined the electability argument by running to the right of Trump on cultural issues, evidently in the belief that “anti-wokeism” is the big force that will propel him to the nomination. It’s too early to say for sure that this culture-war strategy is doomed—he’s still in second place, and the Iowa caucus is nearly six months away—but one thing is certain: it has propelled him into the political netherworld of encouraging anti-vaxxers and inciting bigotry.

DeSantis’s suggestion that slavery had some positive aspects is only the latest example. Late last month, his campaign shared a video that criticized Trump for past statements expressing support for the L.G.B.T.Q. community and highlighted DeSantis’s signing of extreme anti-trans laws in Florida. Even after Log Cabin Republicans, an organization representing L.G.B.T. conservatives, criticized the video as homophobic, DeSantis defended its contents. He said that it was “totally fair game” to target Trump because, before becoming President, he allowed trans-women to compete in his Miss Universe beauty pageant.

Setting aside, for a moment, the sheer obnoxiousness of DeSantis’s tactics, strategic questions arise. Did anyone in his circle raise the question of how many Republican primary voters would be susceptible to the argument that Trump was a spreader of “gender ideology,” as DeSantis claimed in his defense of the video? More broadly, how strong is the evidence that “anti-wokeism” is as potent a force as DeSantis—a self-described “data guy”—believes it to be? Without a doubt, attacking Anthony Fauci and supporting the removal of some books from Florida school libraries fires up some right-wing activists, social-media influencers, and talk-show hosts. But there’s also evidence that most Republican voters are primarily concerned with many of the same things that other Americans care about: the economy, health care, immigration, guns, and crime. In the latest Harvard caps-Harris poll, just six per cent of all respondents, and just eight per cent of Republicans, said that “Political correctness/cancel culture” is one of the most important issues facing the country. (Thirty-nine per cent of Republicans identified “Price increases/inflation” as a top issue, and twenty-nine per cent picked “Economy and Jobs.”)

It’s sometimes overlooked that, in 2016, Trump twinned his race-baiting and attacks on cultural élites with criticisms of C.E.O.s, corporations, and bankers who had shipped abroad American jobs, and of the politicians who had enabled them. Although debates continue about the relative importance of economic and cultural factors in Trump’s victory, his championing of economic nationalism and protectionism surely played a role in persuading large numbers of working-class Americans to vote for him. Democrats have been forced to respond. The Biden Administration has retained some of Trump’s tariffs on Chinese goods and has adopted an aggressive industrial policy aimed at rebuilding U.S. manufacturing.

In running as the ultimate culture warrior, meanwhile, DeSantis has largely absented himself from broader debates about the country’s future. Back in March, when he delivered his annual State of the State address, he did talk about Florida’s economic record, boasting, “We rank No. 1 in the nation for new business formations. We are No. 1 in economic growth among large states.” Surprisingly, these themes haven’t figured prominently in his campaign to date. And, going forward, according to the NBC News story, he’s going to be making even fewer references to Florida.

Reboot or no reboot, DeSantis appears to be all in on the culture war. So far, this hasn’t worked for him, and appearing at more Iowa diners seems unlikely to change things. Like the rest of the Republican candidates not named Trump, he’s left hoping for a divine or judicial intervention. ♦

Historically Black fraternity drops Florida for convention because of DeSantis policies (AP)

"Ideas have consequences." So said the late Georgetown University Professor José Silverio Sorzano, my political theory professor (later Deputy UN Ambassador under Reagan Ambassador Jeanne Kirkpatrick).

Consequences are proliferating from the idea that Florida's goofy GQP Governor and Legislature in the State of Florida could flaunt their racism and insult Florida's tourism and convention customers. This is is the height of GQP arrogance.  

It is now irrefragable that Flori-DUH's Boy Governor RONALD DION DeSANTIS's hateful polices have economic consequences. 

Dingbat DeSANTIS is a loser.  His ideas belong in history's dustbins.

From Associated Press:

Historically Black fraternity pulls conference from Orlando, blames DeSantis' 'harmful, racist' policies

WESH2d

Historically Black fraternity drops Florida for convention because of DeSantis policies

BY MIKE SCHNEIDER

Updated 12:11 PM EDT, July 29, 2023

ORLANDO, Fla. (AP) — The oldest historically Black collegiate fraternity in the U.S. says it is relocating a planned convention in two years from Florida because of what it described as Gov. Ron DeSantis’ administration’s “harmful, racist and insensitive” policies towards African Americans.

Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity said this week that it would move its 2025 convention from Orlando to another location that is yet undecided. The convention draws between 4,000 and 6,000 people and has an economic impact of $4.6 million, the fraternity said.

The decision comes after the NAACP and other civil rights organizations this spring issued a travel advisory for Florida, warning that recently passed laws and policies are openly hostile to African Americans, people of color and members of the LGBTQ+ community.

Willis Lonzer, the fraternity’s general president, said in statement on Wednesday that the decision was motivated in part by Florida’s new education standards that require teachers to instruct middle school students that slaves developed skills that “could be applied for their personal benefit.”

“Although we are moving our convention from Florida, Alpha Phi Alpha will continue to support the strong advocacy of Alpha Brothers and other advocates fighting against the continued assault on our communities in Florida by Governor Ron DeSantis,” Lonzer said.

An email seeking comment on Saturday about the fraternity’s decision was sent to Jeremy Redfern, the governor’s press secretary and the governor’s office.

DeSantis, who is running for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination, has come under fire this week over Florida’s new education standards. Among those criticizing the Florida governor on Friday was a rival for the Republican nomination, U.S. Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina, the sole Black Republican in the Senate.

Responding to the criticism, DeSantis said Friday that he was “defending” Florida “against false accusations and against lies. And we’re going to continue to speak the truth.”

In May, the NAACP joined the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), a Latino civil rights organization, and Equality Florida, a gay rights advocacy group, in issuing travel advisories for the Sunshine State, where tourism is one of the state’s largest job sectors. The groups cited recent laws that prohibited state colleges from having programs on diversity, equity and inclusion, as well as critical race theory, and the Stop WOKE Act that restricts certain race-based conversations and analysis in schools and businesses.

They also cited laws that they say made life more difficult for immigrants in Florida and limited discussions on LGBTQ topics in schools. 

At least nine other organizations or associations have pulled the plug on hosting conventions in Orlando and Fort Lauderdale, two of the state’s most population convention cities, because of Florida’s political climate, according to local media reports.

Florida is one of the most popular states in the U.S. for tourists, and tourism is one of its biggest industries. More than 137.5 million tourists visited Florida last year, marking a return to pre-pandemic levels, according to Visit Florida, the state’s tourism promotion agency. Tourism supports 1.6 million full-time and part-time jobs, and visitors spent $98.8 billion in Florida in 2019, the last year figures are available.

___

Follow Mike Schneider on Twitter at @MikeSchneiderAP

Meet the student who helped boot the president of Stanford. (WaPo)

"The world will stand aside for a young man who knows where he's going."  -- line from Earl Hamner, Jr. 1970s tv series, The Waltons.

Meet the student who helped boot the president of Stanford

College journalist Theo Baker’s reporting paved the way for Marc Tessier-Lavigne’s resignation

By Lisa Bonos

July 28, 2023 at 6:00 a.m. EDT

The Stanford Daily’s Theo Baker interviews Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) after a class on Oct. 24, 2022. (Nikolas Liepins)

Listen

8 min

Comment770

Add to your saved stories

Save

Gift Article

Share

SAN FRANCISCO — On Christmas Day, Theo Baker was pacing around a relative’s home in Los Angeles, mumbling to himself: “How am I going to get inside Genentech? How am I going to get inside Genentech? How am I going to get inside Genentech?”

He was a freshman at Stanford University, just a few months into his career as a college journalist, and already fixated on a huge reporting challenge: Finding workers at a Bay Area biotech company, where Stanford’s president had once been a top executive, to scrutinize research he’d overseen. Baker’s parents were initially concerned and skeptical when he told them about pursuing allegations of research misconduct that could implicate Marc Tessier-Lavigne, a neuroscientist who had just completed his sixth year as the head of Stanford.

“Be careful here,” Peter Baker recalls telling his son. “This guy is a world-renowned scientist, and you’re a 17-year-old kid.”

As journalists, Theo Baker’s parents have covered wars and presidents. His mother, Susan Glasser, is a former Washington Post editor who’s now a staff writer at the New Yorker. Peter Baker, a former Post reporter, is the chief White House correspondent for the New York Times. Theo Baker’s investigation would soon win him a special George Polk Award. Not only did his reporting for the Stanford Daily get inside Genentech, it also contributed to Tessier-Lavigne’s resignation this month.

How did it all happen? Through a helpful tip from a friend, a dogged but careful reporting process, and a childhood — surrounded by his parents’ endeavors in journalism — that prepared him for the pace and heat of a big story.

Growing up with two notable bylines as parents, Baker learned through example and osmosis. Before he could read or type, Baker was toddling around the Washington Post newsroom. Some of his fondest memories, he says, are of workshopping unpublished headlines with his mother when he was 7 or 8.

“My parents have always included me, even when they had no obligation to,” Baker said. He’s had firsthand lessons in the demands of the 24/7 news cycle. Baker has seen his parents cut short vacations and dinners because of breaking news. On multiple occasions he’s nearly walked on camera, pajama-clad, as they’ve been in the middle of television hits at home. Now he’s doing TV interviews himself.

“He had the velocity of the news cycle ingrained in him from an early age,” Glasser said of her son. As a middle schooler during the Trump administration, Baker had multiple news alerts set up on his phone and would often text his parents during the school day, inquiring about the implications of the president’s latest announcement or executive order.

Baker chose Stanford because it was a place he could pursue an array of interests, from humanities to the ethics of artificial intelligence. He’s hosted campus hackathons and has embedded with a student group of amateur race-car drivers. Frank Zhou, Baker’s best friend from boarding school at Phillips Academy Andover, recalls intense ping-pong matches — Baker has a tell-tale tennis stroke, Zhou says — and late-night dorm hallway conversations about German literature.

Last fall, one of Baker’s friends, a recent Stanford graduate, directed him to a post on PubPeer — a website where scientists raise questions about published research — that pointed out aberrations in reports fromTessier-Lavigne’s research team. In early October, Baker engaged scientific experts to review the papers co-authored by Tessier-Lavigne that contained images alleged by experts to be manipulated. Baker’s reporting enlisted multiple scientific experts to examine, corroborate and ultimately expand upon the concerns raised on PubPeer.

On Nov. 30, the day after the Daily published the first of more than a dozen stories about the allegations, the university convened a panel of experts to independently examine Tessier-Lavigne’s research. Last week that panel found that Tessier-Lavigne had failed to correct errors in years-old scientific papers and had overseen labs with an “unusual frequency” of data manipulations. On July 19 Tessier-Lavigne announced in a statement that he’d step down as university president Aug. 31 but remain on the Stanford faculty. Tessier-Lavigne also said that he would ask for three papers to be retracted and two corrected.

The report from the panel “clearly refutes the allegations of fraud and misconduct that were made against me” online, Tessier-Lavigne wrote, adding that “in some instances I should have been more diligent when seeking corrections, and I regret that I was not. The Panel’s review also identified instances of manipulation of research data by others in my lab. Although I was unaware of these issues, I want to be clear that I take responsibility for the work of my lab members.”

In February, at 18 years old, Baker won the special Polk award for his reporting in the Daily. He’s the youngest person to ever win a Polk, though it’s not unusual for college journalists to have a profound impact on their universities. This month, Northwestern University fired its football coach after the Daily Northwestern reported on specific details of hazing that had led to the coach’s suspension.

From 2020: College newspaper reporters are the journalism heroes for the pandemic era

Theo Baker with his special Polk Award. (Courtesy of Theo Baker)

Sam Catania, the Daily’s editor in chief for the past academic year, said his role was to be the skeptic, constantly asking questions of Baker’s reporting and prodding him to consider whether his sources might have ulterior motives. “We tried to never be overconfident,” Catania said in an interview.

Oriana Riley, a rising junior and editor at the Daily, observed Baker working so many late nights that she would unsuccessfully urge him to get some sleep to avoid burning out. “A lot of people at Stanford have this trait,” Riley said. “Sometimes they will not give up on things to the point where maybe you should give up — or at least take a break.”

Baker and his parents insist that he and his peers did this work without the parents getting involved. The student journalists had the benefit of pre-publication consultations and edits from the Daily’s professional advisers — one of whom is a current Washington Post editor who also serves on the Daily’s board of directors — and a pro-bono legal review from the law firm Davis Wright Tremaine.

“My parents — they don’t read my copy before it goes out,” Baker notes, adding: “They’re not my editors.”

One way Baker’s parents have had a distinct influence on him is in hammering home the importance of attending classes even while you’re plugging away on an important story. Peter Baker dropped out of Oberlin College after two years to pursue a career in journalism — something his son doesn’t plan to emulate.

“He’s doing what his father never did — he’s going to classes,” Peter said in an interview. (The younger Baker concedes that he did skip a lecture on Machiavelli to break a story about Tessier-Lavigne.)

Former Post editor R.B. Brenner, a Stanford journalism lecturer who recently left the Daily’s advisory board, said that Baker brought to Stanford a “Washington sophistication” in his understanding of stories that “require a fair number of anonymous sources and there can be quite a level of risk involved.”

It was isolating for a campus newbie to be investigating the university president. Baker said he had a “great, fantastic team” at the Daily, but other outlets weren’t pushing this story forward. “I was really scared, and I felt really alone,” Baker said of the experience.

Sometimes, fellow students would treat him “like a zoo animal,” he said, by walking past his dorm room and pointing out that Baker was the student journalist investigating the president. “I just started at Stanford and I was still trying to find my friends,” Baker said. “It was a little weird when people would interrupt in the middle of class and be like, ‘Oh my god, you’re that kid!’ or come up to me when I’m trying to go to a party.” He gave up on Tinder after one week of swiping, he said, because so many matches commented about his journalism or suggested new reporting targets.

Baker is currently working in Berlin for the summer with the Anti-Corruption Foundation, Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny’s organization, to track down companies evading sanctions to provide Russia with materiel for its war against Ukraine.

Baker, a rising sophomore, has yet to choose a major. “I will probably end up doing some mix of humanities and STEM technology stuff,” he said.