The Baker Act was invented in Brevard County, Florida, which is the same sunny southern county that raised the founder of Moms for Liberty, Tina Descovich, to national prominence within the Republican alt-right and dark money hierarchies. Descovich and I went to potlucks together at our local Mormon church while I was deeply depressed, trying to escape Mormonism. And quietly. At the time, Descovich despised the Department of Education, but she had not risen to a leadership position. This year, in 2025, she has been appointed to another term on the Commission for Ethics. In 2017, I sat next to Tina at a potluck in a church auditorium. Her son was living with an unsupported psychiatric disability. He had not received the special education services he needed.

Tina never admits to her personal motives in the press. Instead of increasing access to mental healthcare services in the DOE, Descovich chooses to annihilate public education and literature on the whole. As can be imagined, Tina endorses The Baker Act, because this law is the foundation of her ultimate majority power. Since 1971, Descovich and any untrained, private, biased, and often bigoted citizen has had absolute power over anyone that they consider to be defiant. The Baker Act allows a myriad of healthcare, police force, and education workers to immediately institutionalize anyone they deem in need of “care.”

I am aghast at Tina’s authentic warmth and competence. Like most behaviorally disordered people, she presents beautifully. Under any other circumstances, she could have been my best feminist boss. Tina Descovich is no one’s best feminist boss. Tina seemes as sane as the day is long. Descovich has constitutionally protected, unhinged, and irrational beliefs about transchildren, queer children, Joseph Smith, the planet Kolob, immigrants, America, and brown children. In Southern America this dogmatic, single-minded confidence is rewarded with freedoms. The separation of church and state has saved many a mentally ill Mormon from an asylum. 

“If Descovich can say Jesus is talking to her, she is profoundly, socially and eternally saved. If she thinks aliens are speaking to her, she could be immediately committed.”

In regards to my own mental health care, I closed the closet door of my bedroom in 2013, held my phone close, said goodbye to life, downed a bottle of antipsychotics, all the while repeating, “I will never be safe. I will never be safe. I will never be safe.” I heard my mother turn up the television to drown out my cries. I felt my body relax into certain death. I thought, So this is what death feels like. Then something jolted inside me—a will to live. I ran to the living room and told my mother what I had done. She called 911. The police showed up. I was handcuffed, thrown over the shoulders of a giant officer, placed in an ambulance, and hauled off to a center called Circles of Care. I passed out in the ambulance after I was given some oxygen. I woke with cuts and bruises all over my body and my favorite pants in shreds on the floor, a catheter attached to my lower half. My stomach had been pumped.

I was then placed in a holding cell with no locks on the doors, a purgatorial waiting facility with all sorts of people, some of whom had committed sexually violent crimes. A man with a wire-sewn and stapled-shut throat from a gang slashing wandered the halls. The staff played Criminal Minds above us on the TV set. The hospital knew I was a victim of sexual assault, but did not have any other place to put me. I was not able to stand before a judge or plead my case, so I was under a lazy sort of surveillance 24/7. One patient told me I was the male patient’s collective “favorite female patient.” The psychiatric lead nurse wanted to send me to a state facility. I found out that these institutions in Florida got kickbacks, money, for sending people like me away. Forever. Where no one would ever hear from us again.

“In the case of the defiant or mentally ill, mass confinement is lauded as the best answer. Therefore, today, in Brevard County, six-year-olds are being hauled off in handcuff s for having post-COVID behavioral health meltdowns.”

Parents are not asked for consent. Children are disappearing. It seems okay to lock a child away but not to give them a book to pass the days in baby jail. And I hardly believe Descovich is unaware of the problem of institutionalization in Florida. Rather, she wishes for people like me and children like me to be locked away, tortured in a slow, neglectful manner. Till it kills us or breaks our will to break her rules. In this way, she silences our voices, erases our stories, and quells our votes.

This is where the book-banning comes into play. When democracy is at stake, book-banning is always about winning elections, not saving anyone. When the book-banning doesn’t silence dissenting voices, when children find ways to read anyway, citizens tend to then go about disagreeing with the practice of book banning. When people disagree, then they are Baker Acted. And they cannot vote. Psychiatric wards and prisons are the sickest, most disgusting, form of gerrymandering.

I am glad Trump’s go-to home base is in Florida. I am glad Tina’s home is in Florida, too. Because a man ate another man’s face in Miami. On bath salts. Publicly. And no one cared. A kid was eaten by a gator at Disney and they did not close the park. Lightning strikes are common death threats there. Florida is the shark bite capital of the world. Jaguars. Heatstroke. Floods and hurricanes. I tell myself, Someday Florida will shit them out as fertilizer. And, in true Floridian fashion, no one will care. Inevitable Floridian Karma is my version of the American Dream.

So, when Trump moves back to Mar-a-Lago—can I Baker Act the President?