Author

Diane Roberts
Diane Roberts is a columnist for the Florida Phoenix. She has been writing for news outlets since 1983 and her work has appeared in the New York Times, the Times of London, the Guardian, the Washington Post, the Oxford American, and Flamingo.
In the U.K. and U.S. alike, the conservative movement is falling apart before our eyes
By: Diane Roberts - November 20, 2023
LONDON — The British government now has a Minister for Common Sense. Esther McVey, a former talking head on GB News (a kind of low-rent Fox), has been installed by Prime Minister Rishi Sunak to “tackle the scourge of wokery.” She wants to stop diversity training, keep combustion engines around forever (to hell with the […]
U.S. House leader Johnson may be a ‘nice guy,’ but he’s also an utterly retrograde Speaker
By: Diane Roberts - November 8, 2023
Mike Johnson, the smiling and utterly retrograde new U.S. Speaker of the House, got the big job because Matt Gaetz and Donald Trump allowed it. That’s right, y’all: The guy with the 91 felony charges and the loudmouth jerk with the penchant for very young women pretty much control what goes on in one half […]
We aren’t supposed to imply that the Founders (slaveholders) weren’t always paragons of virtue
By: Diane Roberts - May 26, 2023
LONDON – In 2022, the Prince and Princess of Wales (you know them as William and Kate) toured the Commonwealth countries of the Caribbean, former slave colonies. They made a bit of a mess. At one event the royal couple were supposed to meet a bunch of children, but found themselves separated from the kids […]
On anniversary of Rosewood attack, it’s sad to see DeSantis embrace FL’s Old South legacy
By: Diane Roberts - January 4, 2023
It began in the usual way: A white woman (her name was Frances Taylor) accused a Black man of beating her. That was on New Year’s Day, 1923. It ended in the usual way, with violence, lynching, and destruction. That Jan. 2, a mob of white men drove to Rosewood, a mostly Black turpentine village […]
Your new Congress: Owning the libs, no matter the cost
By: Diane Roberts - November 28, 2022
Are you excited about the 118th Congress? If not, you’re a communist. True, the U.S. Senate is still in the hands of the godless Democrats who want to destroy America, but the House of Representatives now belongs to Republicans, the party of God, AK-47s, F-150s (and not the electric kind, either), manliness, Merry Christmas, and […]
Florida is turning its back on the New South, embracing its Dixie-fied past
By: Diane Roberts - November 23, 2022
Florida was once a New South state. From the early 1960s to 2000 or so, Florida had leaders who looked to the future, determined to leave Jim Crow behind and separate ourselves from the likes of Alabama. We had governors committed to equal justice, open government, and voting rights — however imperfectly achieved. No more. […]
FL’s U.S. senators fight phantom communists, Gestapo as the world burns
By: Diane Roberts - August 18, 2022
It’s been a while since we checked in with Florida’s two brilliant and attractive U.S. senators, Rick Scott and Marco Rubio. First of all, they are both very upset about that terrible, horrible, no good, very bad FBI attack on Mar-A-Lago which happened for no reason other than the president took some boxes of paper […]
The impending miseducation of Florida’s schoolchildren
By: Diane Roberts - July 26, 2022
As a great president once asked, “Is our children learning?” Well, is they? It don’t look good, what with government schools forcing them to become communists, hate America, and vote wrong. But never fear: Florida’s governor’s fixed that mess with new rules stopping those union-loving, Toni Morrison-reading, evolution-accepting, comfortable shoe-wearing, foreign movie-watching, gay-coddling teachers indoctrinating […]
We looked to the Supreme Court to protect our rights; now, it is taking them away
By: Diane Roberts - June 27, 2022
The United States of America is no longer a free country. Women are no longer full citizens with equal rights. The theocracy also known as the U.S. Supreme Court has decided that our bodies don’t belong to us. Anyone who is or can become pregnant will be a ward of the state, captive of a misogynist minority.
As the nation’s body count continues to mount, the NRA and its acolytes party on
By: Diane Roberts - May 31, 2022
Despite what the braying anti-Roe Right wants you to think, America is not pro-life. This country is pro-death. Fetuses and firearms: that’s what makes America America — that and the ability of an 18 year-old to buy military grade weapons. At least 21 shot dead in Uvalde, Texas; 10 shot dead in Buffalo, N.Y.; a […]
U.S., U.K. vie to outdo each other in misogyny
By: Diane Roberts - May 10, 2022
LONDON — Which country hates women more, the U.S. or the U.K.? In America, a woman will apparently soon be forced to carry a child to term, even if she was raped, even if she was trafficked, even if she can’t care for the kid, doesn’t want it, and having it means ruining her life. […]
Why are highly educated Republican politicians so anti-education?
By: Diane Roberts - October 5, 2021
College is for pussies. Ron DeSantis, presidential candidate and part-time governor of Florida, celebrated the decline in the numbers of men entering higher education, citing a Wall Street Journal article that says 60 percent of college students are now women, while in 1970 the number was closer to 40 percent. “I guess there was a […]