New York's governor, Kathy Hochul, must have thought she was being clever by demanding that the Republican citizens of New York to move to Florida if they aren't onboard with the wokester socialist way she is running her state:

"Just jump on a bus and head down to Florida where you belong, OK?" she said. "You are not New Yorkers."

New York Gov. Kathy Hochul tells Republicans to "jump on a bus and head down to Florida where you belong...you are not New Yorkers" pic.twitter.com/FazoHqPAZu

— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) August 28, 2022

Her state has already lost 1.5 million residents in the past decade, as the New York Post noted, and cannot afford to lose any more of them, given that those fleeing make up the largest portion of the tax base.  Her call for 5.4 million residents to leave comes just as her state is rapidly running out "of other people's money," as Lady Thatcher used to say. 

But she was hardly the first to engage in this leftist lunacy of ordering dissenting residents to live elsewhere.  New York's pervy previous governor, Andrew Cuomo, also insisted that residents not onboard with his socialist program move to Florida.

The list of them, though, is must grosser. 

Many residents of the intaking state, Florida, have heard these strange, counterproductive, and always socialist words before — from the southern direction.

Here's Venezuela's dictator, Hugo Chávez, also telling residents not onboard with his socialist program to move to Florida, back in 2006:

"Of course PDVSA [Petroleos de Venezuela SA] is revolutionary," Chavez said as he inaugurated a new subway line outside Caracas.

"Petroleos de Venezuela [state oil company] workers are with this revolution, and those who aren't should go somewhere else. Go to Miami." Chavez accused opponents of coup-plotting and said the military — like PDVSA — must be totally committed.

"Venezuelan soldiers are in this revolution, and I have told them: anyone who isn't had better leave here," he said.

Anyone with brains knew that the brightest, most productive, most technically advanced workers in that country were those state oil company workers, whom Chávez told to go live in Miami.  Many took him up on it and did. 

Like Hochul, Chávez screamed at them to go live in Florida.  It was his means of clearing out dissidents without having to go to the trouble of setting up a GULag or laogai.

Presumably, it was to be punishment, or perhaps a way of saying, "Go to hell."

Chávez's mentor, the late, unlamented, Fidel Castro of Cuba, had an obsession with sending dissidents to Florida, too.

Here's the violence-tinged talk the evil bearded beast had to say to Cuban dissidents back in 1962, according to the Cuban state propaganda organ Prensa Latina:

Then he spoke of the case of El Cano locality in neighboring Marianao district, where several enemies of the revolutionary government decreed a shutdown of some stores in solidarity with small subversive group that fired on a militia sentry while a company of the revolutionary national militia was engaged in training exercises. The assailants lost one man. Continuing his explanation of the case, Fidel said that administration of the stores that shut down was put in the hands of the revolutionary organizations of the locality, "a zone of much rotten political influence of the old bosses, where the bourgeois owned all the business and gave the workers the worst treatment. Of course the owners of the businesses taken over were left something to live on until they adapt themselves or go to Miami."

And then he said: "Let this example serve as a warning to the counter-revolutionaries and bourgeois that we are not playing at revolution, and show them what they can expect if they challenge the power of the proletarian revolution."

Castro also opened his prisons and mental institutions with the aim of sending them all explicitly to Florida, whether they wanted to go or not.  Most did, creating the great Mariel boatlift of 1980.

That brings us back to Hochul, who seems to have cribbed from the well trod territory of Latin America's socialist thug dictators, who have been telling dissidents to move to Florida for decades.

What a gal.  What does it make her, given her socialist agenda and the company she keeps?

It does suggest that Florida has a great historic role as both a beautiful, desirable place that millions of people would like to live in, and as a special spot in the minds of the world's most heinous dictators who have left their countries in rubble and ruins as a result of their socialism.  That's not good company for Hochul to be in, and rather presages that New York has a rather grim future ahead of it.

You can bet that many Floridians are going to be noticing.

Image:  Embassy of Venezuela, Minsk, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0.