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The hostile tone that branded 2021 set in early in the year, when a mob in support of former President Donald Trump attacked the U.S. Capitol to disrupt Congress transfer of power to incoming President Joe Biden.

It cost Capitol Police officer Brian Sicknick, rioter Ashli Babbitt, and three other people their lives. Nearly 140 police officers were injured, dozens were disabled for months, and four later died by suicide, according to Capitol police reports.

More than 60 people in Florida have been arrested in connection with the attack, according to the U.S. Department of Justice. Ramifications of the partisan warfare that manifested on that infamous day reverberated in Florida throughout the year.

Like millions around the world, Floridians witnessed the riot as it happened, many stunned to realize that dissent could erupt into something so fundamentally un-American. The insurrection failed, members of Congress resumed deliberations after spending hours in hiding, and Biden was certified as president.

But 147 Republican members of Congress refused to certify the election results, including most of Floridas representatives in the U.S. Capitol. It was a declaration of Trump-centered partisan warfare that persisted over the year and infiltrated state politics.

White nationalist groups prominent at the Jan. 6 riot such as Proud Boys and Oath Keepers proliferated in Florida, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, and they sent representatives to a rally at Floridas Capitol on July 10 to protest the jailing of people they called patriots who have been arrested in connection with the insurrection.

The partisan strife throughout 2021 over the pandemic, racism, election integrity, academic freedom, gun violence, climate change, and much more was not violent as the attack on the U.S. Capitol, but it was corrosive and relentless.

Alongside COVID-19, which has killed more than 800,000 people in the United States, partisan hostility was a hallmark of 2021. Disputes over vaccines, face masks, lockdowns, freedom from public-health regulations, and the science behind the public-health response tracked the battle over the outcome of the 2020 presidential election that courts across the country said Biden clearly won and Trump clearly lost although Trump supporters both refuse to acknowledge it and fail to prove otherwise.

The best news of 2021 was the deployment of vaccines and treatments to tamp down COVID, which sickened and killed fewer people than in 2020 but continued to mutate into new variants. The rate of hospitalizations and deaths in Florida and elsewhere plummeted, thanks largely to the medical advancements, despite periodic surges in cases due to emergence of variants and resumption of public interactions.

Florida has suffered more than 4 million COVID cases and 62,000 deaths since the pandemic hit here in March 2020, many thousands of them coming after multiple vaccines became widely available for adults, according to state and federal health authorities. Later in 2021, COVID vaccines won approval for most segments of the population, including children. Widely available monoclonal antibodies therapy eased symptoms and speeded recovery for many COVID patients.

But even the deployment of medicines to fight COVID was not immune from partisan warfare.

Framing their stance as freedom from federal government overreach, Floridas Republican-led Legislature and Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis blocked essentially all public-health protocols recommended by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The Legislature held a special session in November to adopt laws blocking mandates for vaccines and face masks in public schools, work sites, and other public places and further shielding businesses from liability for COVID infections among their customers, employees, and patients.

The governors political action committee sold campaign merchandise with the slogan, Dont Fauci My Florida, mocking COVID protocols recommended by infectious-disease expert and presidential adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci. In response to the governors ban against local policies to limit COVID infections, bumper stickers began to appear, saying, Dont DeSantis My Democracy.

Florida discord over the wearing of face masks made national news when local school boards, starting with Broward and Alachua counties, voted in emergency sessions to defy the governors order against requiring masks to be worn at school as the fall term began.

DeSantis and Education Commissioner Richard Corcoran insisting that mask-wearing is a parental decision, not a public-health matter punished the defiant districts financially, but the Biden Administration came to their aid.

Mask opponents attended the emergency school-board meetings in droves, often disrupting them. Anti-mask organizations such as Moms For Liberty were founded and mobilized by Republican operatives.

Florida voters favored Trump over Biden in the 2020 elections, though Biden won nationally. Republicans in Floridas congressional delegation continued to support Trump in 2021, voting against impeaching him a second time for his role in fomenting the insurrection and for failing to quell it while members of Congress and Vice President Mike Pence were in harms way.

Many also continue to voice opposition to formal congressional investigation of what happened on Jan. 6, why, and who is responsible.

Three days after Trump lost the presidential race, DeSantis appeared on a national network to endorse the idea of Republican legislators refusing to certify Biden victories in their states and instead casting their electoral ballots for Trump. Floridas only statewide-elected Democrat, Agriculture and Consumer Affairs Commissioner Nikki Fried, called DeSantis remarks irresponsible, destructive and inflammatory to a fragile nation.

Famously, the ex-president retired to his resort in south Florida and continues to play a national role in Republican politics, possibly to include another run for the presidency. His ally DeSantis is considered a possible running mate for Trump in 2024 and even a presidential candidate himself if Trump does not run again.

A year out of office, Trump and the Trump Organization face a series of investigations related to the Jan. 6 riot, alleged attempts to interfere with the outcome of the 2020 election, potential business fraud, and sexual assault allegations, as reported in CNN and JustSecurity, a litigation tracker hosted by Reiss Center on Law and Security at New York University School of Law.

The congressional special committee investigating the insurrection, often cited as the Jan. 6 committee, has requested or ordered testimony and documents from high-profile Trump supporters such as campaign strategist Steve Bannon, who in August 2020 was arrested along with two Florida men and a third man and charged with defrauding Republican donors in an alleged $25 million southern border-wall scam.

Nikki Frieds office had investigated the purported charity at issue in 2019 and provided findings to federal investigators.

Trump pardoned Bannon at the end of his term. Brian Kolfage of Walton County, Andrew Badolato of Sarasota County, and a co-defendant from Colorado were not and faced prosecution.

Bannon defied the Jan. 6 committees subpoena and was charged with contempt of Congress.

In Congress, Republican Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida stood up for Bannon in regard to the contempt charge, after making national headlines himself along with former Seminole County tax collector Joel Greenberg.

Gaetz has been under federal investigation in connection with an alleged sex-trafficking ring involving Greenberg and underage teen-age girls. Greenberg negotiated a plea deal and is reported to be cooperating with Justice Department investigators, who gained reinforcement with two experts in public corruption in October, as The New York Times reported. Gaetz has denied wrongdoing.

Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Lucy Morgan bared some of the tangled backstory in the Phoenix.

In another Florida connection, Sarasota-based Cyber Ninjas, led by Trump supporters, was engaged for months by the GOP-led Arizona state Senate to audit presidential election results there that delivered fewer votes to Trump than to Biden.

The first-time election auditors who famously anticipated finding China-related bamboo fibers on ballots in Arizona uncovered no voting fraud. But the escapade cost Trump-friendly donors nearly $6 million and Arizona taxpayers $425,000, according to investigative reporting by Phoenix sister outlet the Arizona Mirror.

In October, Cyber Ninjas CEO and Sarasotan Doug Logan revealed by the Mirror to be a Stop The Steal advocate refused to testify before a U.S. House committee looking into the purported audit and its larger role in undermining voter confidence in American elections.

Throughout 2021, Florida Republicans continued to imply that voting by mail, done widely in 2020, facilitates voting fraud, and conspiracy theorists continued to rally around the discredited claim that re-election was stolen from Trump by election officials.

Florida Democrats and nonpartisan election supervisors disputed claims that Floridas 2020 elections were in any way seriously flawed.

Republican-sponsored election reforms framed as guardrails and adopted by the Legislature in Senate Bill 90 mirror measures in other red states that restrict access to voting, especially by mail, despite Florida being widely touted for running efficient, trouble-free elections in 2020 in the midst of the pandemic.

SB 90, sponsored by Sen. Dennis Baxley and Rep. Blaise Ingoglia, a recent former chairman of the state Republican Party, is being challenged in federal court by the League of Women Voters of Florida and other voting rights groups. The critics call the reforms unconstitutional and designed to suppress minority voters, who in some parts of the state tend to vote Democratic.

Florida tracked other conservative states in fomenting culture wars that further polarized Floridians. Gov. DeSantis convened a special session of the Florida Legislature in November to pass his so-called freedom agenda, including banning local governing boards from mandating COVID protocols. One new law allows a study into the feasibility of divorcing Florida from the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration, which labor unions looked to for help in making workplaces more COVID-safe.

During the special session, we will do everything within our power as a state to protect Floridians from the unconstitutional, un-American, and morally reprehensible overreaches on the part of the federal government, House Speaker Chris Sprowls and Senate President Wilton Simpson said in a joint statement of support.

Democrats such as Sen. Bobby Powell, who leads the Florida Legislative Black caucus, decried GOP attacks on so-called woke culture that seeks to reduce police violence against Black people, curb gun violence, address institutional racism, and expand voting rights, not restrict them.

For Floridians who look like me, or shades thereof, [the governors] agenda is decidedly unwelcome and anything but peaceful. Its about locking us up and locking us out, all while selectively plucking the words of Martin Luther King to somehow make this racist targeting okay, Powell said in written statement just before Christmas.

Its not okay to push what he calls anti-woke legislation thats a smoke screen for sanitizing history and erasing the lessons of the past, Powell continued. Its not okay to threaten teachers with litigation for simply teaching. Its not okay to muzzle those whose heritage was defined by Jim Crow or unleash those who have never moved beyond its hateful intent.

Over the objections of Democrats, the Legislature also passed an anti-riot law, House Bill 1, following Black Lives Matter protests in the summer of 2020, but civil-rights organizations are fighting it in federal court; a law purporting to crack down on Big Tech social media platforms that censored Trump for promoting the untrue conspiracy theory that he was cheated out of re-election; and a law to measure intellectual freedom at Florida universities that critics say is designed to stifle free speech and dissent.

Further, the DeSantis administration launched a fight with the federal government to block immigration policy that allows certain undocumented immigrants to be free on their own recognizance or under electronic monitoring while awaiting their day in the nations backlogged immigration court system. Arguing that some wind up in Florida, DeSantis wants the Legislature to give him $8 million to ship asylum seekers out of the state.

Those and other laws passed in 2021 face court challenges, making litigation against DeSantis and his allies another hallmark of the year. The League of Women Voters of Florida, the American Civil Liberties Union, the Southern Poverty Law Center, the NAACP, the League of United Latin American Citizens, and other civil rights groups have led the legal battle against such measures.

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Year that began with partisan violence spawned culture wars and litigation in FL - Florida Phoenix