On Daniel Uhlfelder, Corona-activist and Panic-pusher; an exploration into “why” some embraced the Corona-Panic

(9500 words)

Who is Daniel Uhlfelder?

You’ll see him described as a Florida lawyer. Really he’s a central figure in the drama of our time, the Great Corona-Panic social phenomenon of the early 2020s.

As a major figure of the Pro-Panic side, it’s worth a look at who this man is, what might motivate him, and try to come up with reasons why he decided to so aggressively push the Panic. This is a bottom-up approach in our ongoing search for answers for why the Corona-Panic happened.

After Daniel Uhlfelder emerged as a major political figure, a Corona-Panic activist-agitator on the Pro-Panic side, he ended up with regional (Florida) influence, but soon national influence, and really even indirect global influence (even if few know his name), mostly because Florida was a key flashpoint throughout the Panic.

It all comes back to the Anti-Panic stand taken by the governor, Ron DeSantis, who some time in spring 2020 concluded that Sweden was right in refusing lockdowns, and sensing the Pro-Panic side had ridden into power on a kind of coup d’etat and would not let go of its power.

The two men — Uhlfelder and DeSantis — share certain biographical similarities, both being born in Florida in the 1970s, but everything changes when we dig beyond such superficialities and into their family-histories, and that will by my purpose here.

(Note: The following is therefore in part a follow-up to the major research piece “The ancestry of Ron DeSantis,” published here last week. DeSantis is a portrait of a leading Anti-Panic figure. The subject here, Daniel Uhlfelder, gets a similar treatment except that in Uhlfelder’s a leading Pro-Panic figure.)

It was a novel political split, the Pro-Panic side versus the Anti-Panic side over a flu virus. There were plenty of Neutrals in the middle but most of the time they were intimidated into silence or acquiescence by the strength of the Pro-Panic side.

But Daniel Uhlfelder was never a Corona Neutral. Nor was he even an ordinary Pro-Panicker. He was rather a highly successful core Pro-Panic activist, even a hardline and extremist Pro-Panic agitator, to use less delicate language. The role he played was as one to “Keep up the Panic; Don’t let the Science-Denier Covidiots win; contain the influence of the dangerous cattle-people who don’t know what’s good for them; ‘Lockdowns today, lockdowns tomorrow, lockdowns forever!!‘…”

I’ll get back to Uhlfelder’s activities within the Corona-Panic era shortly.

For now, I’ll state the purpose of this present study: It is about Daniel Uhlfelder himself but mostly approaches him highly indirectly through his father, grandparents, and even tocuhing on great-grandparents, the people who mostly form our senses of identity, and through whose inherited traditions and attitudes we tend to live out our own lives.

It is more on his family and genealogy, but the purpose is to trace out likely strains of identity-formation which formed Daniel Uhlfelder’s sense of self as as it existed when we all stumbled into the Corona-Panic in early 2020 and Uhlfelder entered History as a leading Corona-fanatic and Panic-enforcer. (Our friends on the Pro-Panic side would characterize him as someone who maybe-overzealously-but-still-righteously warns of the dangers of “Covid” against the capital-s Science-deniers.)

I am glad to say I was able to trace all lines of Daniel Uhlfelder’s ancestry back to the 19th century, some with more information than others, but all with at least something there, so no big lacunae.

Much of it is about Uhlfelder’s own father (Steve Uhlfelder), a semi-public person who was a prolific lobbyist with top political connections and is still living, recently retired from a half-century of activeley exterting political influence.

To state the purpose one more time before moving into the summary-of-findings and then the main content:

The goal here is to look for clues to the psychology behind the kind of person which emerged as a major and influential Corona Pro-Panic activist, through the close study of one major such figure and his family origin. The profile is not just the type which ended up drifting into being on the Pro-Panic side, but into being a leading figure within the Pro-Panic side, an anchor for Pro-Panic rhetoric, activism, framing, narrative-shaping, narrative-control, and narrative-policing, and alas one who successfully helped use info-terror tactics to intimidate or shame opponents or skeptics.

Daniel Uhlfelder is the kind of person who personally helped create the Panic and helped enforce the Panic and key junctures. And make no mistake! Daniel Uhlfelder is one of the most influential and successful Corona Pro-Panic activists and agitator. Those who follow along for this ride will get to know him a bit.

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Summary of findings

(1) Daniel Uhlfelder is half of recent Jewish ancestry. Both paternal grandparent lines arriving in Florida (separately) in the 1930s. He identifies as Jewish but his maternal ancestry is Christian.

(2) He has elderly relatives in Europe who are said to have died in the Theresienstadt concentration camp in WWII. That is where old, weak, and/or sick and socially prominent Jews were sent. They were interned in 1942.

(3) The Corona-activist’s father (Steve Uhlfelder) was an influential political figure, a decades-long lobbyist, and really one of the most influential men in Florida of the 1990s and 2000s and not far out from the front even in the 1970s and 1980s. The father (Steve Uhlfelder) even had some degree of a national role and influence with both parties despite being a Democrat. A favorite of the Bush family (via former governor Jeb Bush) and the Clintons and Obama.

(4) The father (Steve Uhlfelder) has had a lifelong tendency to agitate against a certain type of archetypal figure or institution which I would define as “power-structures and symbols of White-Christian America.” This began when he was active in student politics at the University of Florida in the late 1960s and early 1970s; he became student body president at the University of Florida, 1970-71 and traces of this attitude date to that time and since. (In a revealing anecdote, in the 1990s Steve Uhlfelder successfully managed a media campaign to remove the president of the University of Florida after the president had jokingly used the word “Oreo” to describe a Black university figure. Steve Uhlfelder slammed as a racial slur and began a campaign to remove him for racism.)

(5) The Corona-activist’s grandfather went by the name Willie Uhlfelder. He arrived in the USA in the mid-1930s in his twenties and later ran a successful moving company. He became highly politically active in Florida and held elected office. In some of his political ads in the early 1960s, Willie Uhlfelder called his opponents “hate groups,” a fascinating early appearance of this term which I elaborate on below.

(6) Both the Corona-activist’s father’s and his grandfather’s political careers no doubt served as inspiration for Daniel Uhlfelder’s own embrace of a role as political Corona-activist.

(7) His maternal grandfather had a high position within an aerospace company’s Orlando office; the company later merged into Lockheed.

(8) Daniel Uhlfelder’s mother’s side is entirely White-Christian, including substantial ancestral connections to colonial-era Maryland and Virginia (Episcopalian) but also Late Ellis Island-era arrivals from Ireland.

(9) In terms of his all-branch ancestry, Daniel Uhlfelder is 50% recent German-Jewish (arrival in the USA only in the 1930s), up to 25% colonial-stock mid-Atlantic Protestant US ancestry, and 25% Irish (religiously, probably Catholic ancestry there). However, Daniel Uhlfelder clearly takes more after his Jewish (paternal) side in how he has framed his life in the law and politics.

(10) The Corona-agitator Daniel Uhlfelder’s parents were both b.1940s, raised middle class, and highly educated. We can say Daniel Uhlfelder is a third-generation middle-class-or-above person.

(11) Daniel Uhlfelder himself is a Stanford graduate (1993) before characteristically following in his father’s footsteps to Florida Law (1996) (his father was Florida Law, ’71). He briefly attained fame in late 2019 for some anti-Trump social-media thing, and it is probably that small springboard which let him leap into fame in 2020 with his Corona-crusading, his DeathSantis and Remove Ron campaigns. He became a CoronaPanic-apparatchik.

(12) I believe there are key biographical- and identity-based clues to understanding why Daniel Uhlfelder embraced the Panic. They amount to forms of social class prejudice and inherited ethnopolitical attitudes which we see especially in the three generations of Uhlfelder males in America. Further, this finding could be scalable and apply to lots of core Corona Pro-Panic activists and enforcers, a way to outflank their domestic opponents and traditional rivals.

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A preliminary discussion:

“Why did the Corona-Panic happen?”

This is one of the big, important, basic questions of our time.

Forms of mass-delusion can spring up and can even spill over into causing social or economic or cultural disruptions. They can happen, granted. But how could something this crazy, this wrong, this destructive…happen?

How could the Corona-Panic social movement not only emerge but triumph and sustain itself for two years? Why didn’t the whole thing die on the vine?

Once it did break out, why wasn’t it dismantled after it became clear it was a major overreaction?

(And that is how History will remember it. Challenges lay ahead we cannot expect, and a flu wave that matches a once-to-twice-a-decade peaks will seem laughable to people of the future.)

The questions keep flowing. Why was the Corona-Panic never successfully dismantled even later, long after it became clear it was a majorly destructive overreaction when any of the face-saving natural “off-ramps” over two years present themselves? Why did “they” bitterly cling to the Panic despite knowing the damage it was doing? But, backing up, who is the “they” I refer to? Pro-Panic believers, maybe, but most of them are just following orders. Who are the Pro-Panic leaders, and what was/is the Pro-Panic leadership’s motivation? Even calling it all a mass-delusion is not an answer. Who, what kind of person, was likely to emerge as central figures?

There have been lots of Big Ideas proposed trying to grapple with this set of questions. Our collective dignity demands answers, demands we make amends for this ugly blight on the history of Western civilization (non-Western countries also caved into the Panic but were mostly following the West’s lead, and many have strong cultural-political authoritarian traditions anyway). We endeavor to keep some degree of civilizational dignity.

I do not have a one-word answer to explain the Corona-Panic. Nor, I think, does anyone. There are thick layers of group-think-muck covering all aspects of the thing. Still, people try. We often look for answers from above, in the theoretical sense, applying a theory to the the whole thing to explain the actions of individuals. This is really what the Corona-as-Religion hypothesis is about.

While it is worth approaching the Corona-Panic Question with the wide-angle lens, from the top down, we might get betters results with an opposite approach, an “inductive” approach by which we start with a single data-point and work out way up from there. I propose to try this here via a deep portrait of Daniel Uhlfelder, one of the most influential Corona Pro-Panic agitator-activists. I seek to understand who he is and what motivates him.

This is an exploratory, inductive approach to the Corona-Panic Question (i.e., Why did it happen? How did it become so crazily extreme and last two years?), tries to find clues to what motivated Uhlfelder, the major Pro-Panic activist, through an investigation into his own family and origins. Some findings from this up-close approach, if properly evaluated, may be scalable upward towards a general type. An up-close look may provide insights that may be missed by that top-down grand theory family of explanations for the Corona-Panic debacle. That is the idea.

Daniel Uhlfelder is perhaps an especially useful case-study because he was not well known before the Corona-Panic and leapt to fame, or at least major influence, on the coattails of the Panic (along with a few others usually claiming medical or public-health credentials like the odious Eric Feigl-Ding, deranged Corona-fanatic par excellence.)

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I previously said this about Uhlfelder and the anti-DeSantis television spot which his group had just released (Sept. 2021):

Some have called it a Covid Rorschach Test; committed Anti-Panickers see it as effectively a pro-DeSantis ad.

The ad comes from a local Pro-Panic fanatic Daniel Uhlfelder (Stanford, BA, 1993; Univ. of Florida, JD, 1996; ties to Democratic Party), a man who gained attention in 2020 for parading around Florida beaches dressed as the grim reaper, to warn the sinners of the Wuhan Virus Apocalypse and to preach upon whence salvation comes per the Corona Gospel.

Covid-agitator and Lockdown-pusher Daniel Uhlfelder doing Corona-Panic agitprop stunt, Florida, 2020

Some have questioned whether Daniel Uhlfelder was serious or not, and reasonably so. Another natural question is “Why him?” which is to say how did this man jump from ‘Zero’ to such a major Corona-Panic figure? I addressed both these questions and will repeat the points here:

If you check the Twitter feed of the man behind the ad, Daniel Uhlfelder (@DWUhlfelderLaw), you can confirm that he is serious about it, and that the ad is intended to be anti-DeSantis. He even brags about the ad and slams “bots” mocking it.

Mr. Uhlfelder is — was — an obscure Jewish lawyer in Florida. He had a few hundred Twitter followers on Dec. 1, 2019. His follower-count jumped to 50,000 in a 48-hour period, about Dec. 6-8, 2019. At that time he got attention over some kind of lawsuit against Mike Huckabee. A forgettable affair but he briefly became a social-media star in 2019.

Uhlfelder’s big jump into fame was yet to come, in 2020 with the Corona-Panic. It paid great dividends. As of today, Uhlfelder has over 200,000 followers. All these new followers are from attention he scooped up during his media-promoted “Covid Grim Reaper” and “DeathSantis” campaigns, aiming to righteously remove Ron DeSantis for crimes against humanity, refusing Lockdowns, rejecting masks, and mocking other tenets of Corona.

Daniel Uhlfelder is probably many things to many people, but for these purposes he was a social-media star freshly minted in Dec. 2019 just weeks before the Corona movement’s breakthrough. He transitioned from humble beginnings to become a major Pro-Panic partisan, and Corona-Panic Enforcer, in 2020-21.

The blog Peak Stupidity posted a reaction essay to the DeSantis ancestry-biographical investigation, titled: “They hate him for his freedoms!”

It was largely focused on Corona-agitator Daniel Uhlfelder and Uhlfelder’s place in U.S. political culture in the early-2020s “Corona Panic” era.

Here is some of Peak Stupidity‘s commentary on the Daniel Uhlfelder question, which includes some biographical info; the first line is in refence to the television ad Uhlfelder produced (see Youtube video, above):

Here is just one taste of what Daniel Uhlfelder did, day after day, agenda-setting and agitating on behalf of a flu virus:

By June 2020, Uhlfelder’s “DeathSantis” Grim Reaper stunt had already gained enough attention that political cartoonists were using it. There are many other examples of this. Even heavy news followers during the Corona-Panic likely don’t know the name Daniel Uhlfelder, but they saw his influnece anyway.

I think that just about catches us up on where Daniel Uhlfelder fits within the general Corona-Panic narrative for Florida.

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The importance of Daniel Uhlfelder

Uhlfelder is a nodal Pro-Panic fanatic, a highly successful Pro-Panic agitator in Florida, and despite lack of name awareness he really is a figure of global influence within the Corona-Panic itself.

I have previously mentioned Florida CoronaPanic-pusher Daniel Uhlfelder in the discussion of Ron DeSantis’ ancestry. The two are as Corona-Panic archetypal nemeses, and poetically both are lifelong Floridians except for Ivy League educations. I had first mentioned Uhlfelder in the comments to “Tucker Carlson on the ‘Corona Cult’.”

We can trace a chain from Daniel Uhlfelder’s role in Corona agitation — pushing Endless Virus Panic, policing the narrative to keeping up the Panic and keep Pro-Panic loyalists from defecting, histrionically slamming the Anti-Panic side — from Florida on up.

After he began his high-profile Corona Pro-Panic agitation, his “DeathSantis” and “Remove Ron” campaigns, Uhlfelder gained hundreds of thousands of new social-media followers, many of them I think finding him directly through the Pro-Panic talk circuit, which is most of the media. Plus he got what must be billions of dollars’ worth of indirect exposure via reports on his activities, and the drumbeat of reporting on the tone he helped set. He alleged the lack of lockdowns or aggressive state-backed Corona-Panic meant Corona Genocide, or something, and DeSantis and his collaborators were guilty.

The idea was there was a grassroots movement of outraged Floridians angry at (supposed) high infection and/or death rates under Governor “DeathSantis.” This was a powerful meme. It became front and center at some critical points as a rallying point for the Pro-Panic side to direct its hatred, DeSantis as a heretic.

The way the Corona-Panic’s Pro-Panic side evolved was to cast DeSantis as demonic, as DeSantis equals Genocide. Lack of loyalty or enthusiasm for the Corona-Panic itself equals Genocide. The people are outraged! But — it turns out to have been a tightly coordinated campaign, led by well-connected lawyer-agitator Daniel Uhlfelder. In the full light of day the whole thing seems rather like a “giant with feet of clay,” if “clay” means shallow backing by any kind of real data, not counting those infamously, stupendously wrong “millions of deaths” models.

But putting asidethe arguments, Daniel Uhlfelder is a mirror to Uhlfelder’s nemesis the Corona Anti-Panic stalwart, Ron DeSantis. It is worth comparing the two side by side.

This can work as a companion piece to the ancestral investigation of Ron DeSantis I previously published. (“The ancestry of Ron DeSantis: son of Florida, grandson of industrial Ohio, great-grandson-of Italy“), keeping in mind the contrasts between the two.

Students of the social phenomenon that was the Great Corona-Panic of the Early 2020s should want to know “who is Daniel Uhlfelder?” and “what made him to emerge as a leading, successful Corona-agitator?” As one of the ringleaders of the Neverending Virus Panic, and as perhaps someone representative of the type which came to embrace the Panic and did not want it to end.

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Next is original research portion of this post. It is framed by genealogy, but focuses on relevant political or biographical portions of ancestor’s biographies, keeping in mind the goal to try to flesh out possible motivations behind why this man, Daniel Uhlfelder, embraced the Corona-Panic in such an extreme and destructive way.

I didn’t quite know what I’d find when I began researching the target of this investigation, Daniel Uhlfelder, his background and family history, with aim to finding tie-ins with our time and possible motivations.

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Daniel Uhlfelder: Family and Ancestry

• Daniel Will Uhlfelder. Born August 1972, Florida.

Parents:

• Steve Uhlfelder (1946-), and
  
• Mary Mifflin Hollyday (1947-).

Both parents attended high school in Florida and then attended the University of Florida. But earlier than that the ancestral portraits diverge significantly.

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Daniel Uhlfelder’s grandparents and their periods of ancestral-arrival in the USA:

• (1) Willie Uhlfelder (1916-1971), a German-born Jew; arrived in the USA in 1934/35;
  
• (2) Selma Schloss (1922-1980), of fully German-Jewish origin, New Jersey birth, but frequent cross-Atlantic trips while growing up, Florida resident from 1931 until death;
  
• (3) John M. Hollyday (1905-1977), personally of Maryland origin, and long of American ancestry back to colonial period in Maryland and Virginia;
  
• (4) Marian Devine (1917-2002), of Late Ellis Island-era ancestry from Ireland, likely Catholic origin, parents arrived several years before her birth.

Towards the goal of understanding Daniel Uhlfelder, who probably roughly fits the type of “influential, core Pro-Panic activist,” I present some findings on the Uhlfelder family and ancestry, including much on his father’s life and career — Daniel Uhlfelder appears to have closely followed in his father’s footsteps — but also much on the ultimate European origins of his ancestry.

Mean arrival years:

• Father’s side: 1917 mathematically computed from dates of first arrival, but in terms of full orientation towards the USA alone the mean dates to the 1930s.

• Mother’s side: half her ancestry (father’s side, Hollyday) likely has a mean arrival in the early 18th century; the other half (mother’s, Devine) has a median in1911.

• (Mathematical all-branch mean arrival period: 1860s; median: 1910s.)

Arrivals in Florida

• Paternal side arrival in Florida: Daniel Uhlfelder’s paternal grandparents, both of recent European Jewish origin, were already active in Florida in the 1930s.
  
  The grandmother, Selma Schloss, grew up in Palm Beach from the early 1930s at age 9; the grandfather, Willie Uhlfelder, showed up first in the Sunshine State in the late 1930s as a young man in his twenties arrived from Germany several years earlier (mid-1930s).
  
  Willie Uhlfelder worked at several department stores and later founded a moving company in Palm Beach. But the key location for this union is Tallahassee, where the grandmother studied at a women’s college and the grandfather was working at a department store, when they met and married.

• Maternal side arrival in Florida: Daniel Uhlfelder’s mother arrived in Orlando in 1960, the year she turned thirteen. This was for her father John Hollyday’s defense-contractor job. The family had no previous contact with Florida.

The mean year of arrival in Florida here calculates to 1947, and must be far earlier than the typical Florida resident’s.

But let’s first start with the father’s activities, for we see he is a remarkably influential figure in Florida even if few have ever heard his name.

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FATHER: The Lobbyist

Daniel Uhlfelder, the Corona-Panic-activist, has a politically influential father, Steve Uhlfelder. The elder Uhlfelder is a longtime lobbyist. Here he is pictured with George W. and Jeb Bush in the 2000s, the latter the then-governor of Florida.

Steve Uhlfelder was close to, and influential with, both Bush brothers. He held similar roles at the Florida level between the 1970s and 2010s.

Here is another shot of the Uhlfelders with Jeb Bush and wife Columba (pronounced Koh-LOOM-bah). A younger Daniel Uhlfelder is at right in blue shirt:

Steve Uhlfelder’s career was been written up in brief the Tallahassee Democrat newspaper (“Retiring lobbyist Steve Uhlfelder made a difference for Florida,” by Bill Cotterell, “Capital Curmudgeon” column, Feb. 27, 2021). Some excerpts:

“For about a half-century, the Tallahassee lawyer [Steve Uhlfelder] has quietly become one of Florida’s most respected and influential political insiders….He’s even remained a Democrat, more than 20 years after the Republicans took over everything in state government.”

Steve Uhlfelder was a student at the University of Florida from 1964-1968, and soon thereafter a law student (JD, 1971).

“As student body president at the University of Florida, [Steve] Uhlfelder volunteered in the campaign of an obscure Pensacola state senator, Reubin Askew [later two-term Florida governor].

He was elected student body president in a campus-wide vote held April 23, 1970, to serve in the 1970-71 academic year. Campus politics were a big deal. The AP picked up the story and described Uhlfelder as the “liberal” candidate, “bypassing two extremists, a moderate[,] and a cape-clad punster…who campaigned for emperor in cape and T-shirt” (“U of F Students Elect Liberal President,” AP, April 24, 1970). (Steve Uhlfelder got 42% of the vote, against the “moderate” who got 29%, the main “extremist” with 20%, and the guy in the cape got 7%. But only about half of eligible students showed up to vote, so he really won with a bit over 20% of votes of all students.)

The biggest ‘political’ issue on campus by far was campus disturbances by Black students over some set of grievances.

Steve Uhlfelder sided with a protests by many of the University of Florida’s Black students. At one point in late April 1971, some 117 of the 352 enrolled Black students staged a “mass withdrawal” protest, the extreme step of severing their ties to the school, making themselves unable to continue their studies there at all–unless demands were met. The whole thing would look so bad that surely the school would cave in, was the idea, but many held firm. One demand was all students who had been disciplined in any way for “disturbances” that semester be amnestied. But “their pivotal demand,” Steve Uhlfelder told the AP, was “for a separate office of minority affairs responsible only to the university president.” Steve Uhlfelder made clear that he backed this idea. He was quiet on the Black Student Union’s further demand a Black quota of 500 students among all new freshman class intakes, or 18% of students, and various other new Black faculty, but said nothing against it.

This was 1971, some fifty years ago. It sounds strangely like something from the present.

I should also add that 1971 is about the time Ron DeSantis Sr. and his newlywed wife arrived in Florida from Ohio (see “The ancestry of Ron DeSantis“), but DeSantis Sr. had no interest in anything like campus politics and no real connection to it, being a blue-collar worker with a high school education. Ron DeSantis Sr. and Steve Uhlfelfder also happen to be born in the same year, but that is about where the similarities end.

As DeSantis was setting up his life in the greater Tampa Bay area, a young Steve Uhlfelder was a big man on campus as student body president, but leaned towards the radicals and protestors despite being elected as a non-radical.

Steve Uhlfelder joined one raucous mid-April 1971 protest that demanded the resignation of University President Stephen O’Connell. O’Connell’s wiki entry has a lot of this Black student protest story, of which a 25-year-old Steve Uhlfelder played a central role as student body president siding with the Black radicals’ demands. Uhlfelder went out of his way to denounce O’Connell for belonging to a supposedly “Whites-only country club.” (What would the young Ron DeSantis Sr. have thought of this attack-line?)

The AP interviewed Steve Uhlfelder and published his comments supportive of the protestors on the University of Florida campus (including i: “Appeals Fail to Halt U of F Black Exodus,” April 29, 1971, Associated Press).

The university’s 352 Black students at the time amounted to <2% of the student body, and that after several years’ worth of recruitment efforts. A sudden increase to 18% Black for the 1971-72 incoming class would have been a radical and destabilizing move. (See Ron Unz’ College Demographic Tool for more recent data, 1980-2019; they never came close to the demand of 18% Blacks, but the White:Black ratio is became steadily lower, down from about 50:1 in the early 1970s to 6:1 by the mid-2000s, in addition to a now-bare-majority White student share.)

I presume everyone knew the sudden 18% Black quota would be a a radical and destabilizing move, including ostensible supporters, and probably even most of the Black Student Union backers of the idea. So of course it didn’t happen. But a softer form of the same happened with the hardening of the racial-favoritism system all Americans below age 50 or so were born into, many accepting a racial-hierarchy which disfavors Whites and especially White Males as natural. It was not yet something firm in national consciousness in 1971.

When we ask how the racial-hierarchy system emerged, we can point to people like Steve Uhlfelder who backed it. He did not create it, but he did seem to back it for whatever reasons of his own. Christopher Caldwell wrote in the late 2000s:

“One moves swiftly and imperceptibly from a world in which affirmative action can’t be ended because its beneficiaries are too weak to a world in which it can’t be ended because its beneficiaries are too strong.”

Steve Uhlfelder in his twenties was on the “beneficiaries are too weak to end this” side, and so it went.

In 1995, Steve Uhlfelder published an article titled “A True Hero” in the journal Florida State University Law Review (Vol. 22, Issue 4, Spring 1995), praising Rosa Parks and a mentor he had had named Steve Goldstein (1945-1994) who had traveled with him in Florida legal circles in beginning in the early 1970s.

To make a possibly-longer story short: Steve Uhlfelder was an active Democratic operative, lawyer, and prolific lobbyist starting soon after his May 1971 graduation. His political-career start-date really dates to his youth in the late 1960s, and he was socialized from the early 1950s to about mid-1960s.

(Addendum, from the comments section: When Steve Uhlfelder was on his campus political crusade, his father was dying of cancer. Steve ended tenure as student body president in May 1971. His father died of cancer in Dec. 1971.)

Steve Uhlfelder stormed onto the scene, as did so many of his type in that era, and remained on the same wavelength for fifty years, almost as long and steady a career as Doctor Fauci.

Another interesting flash from Steve Uhlfelder (the Corona-activist’s father)’s past:

“During the 36 days of court fights and street circus following the 2000 presidential election, he [Steve Uhlfelder] scored a sort of media hat trick as an on-air consultant for NBC, ABC and Fox News.”

…

“In 2001, President George W. Bush named Uhlfelder to the Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board, on recommendation of his brother Jeb Bush, and he chaired that panel in 2003.”

We also have photographic evidence of Steve Uhlfelder’s extensive ties to the two major parties. Despite being a lifelong Democrat, he was a personal favorite of Jeb Bush (and it would be in poor taste to here mention the medieval tradition of the “Hofjude,” so I will not do that). But here he is with the top Democratic Party figures of the early-1990s to mid-2010s, two presidents and one near-president:

In 1998, Steve Uhlfelder again made the news for slamming a University of Florida administrator, this time demanding that University of Florida president John Lombardi resign because he had used the phrase “Oreo” to jokingly describe the new university chancellor (“black on the outside, white on the inside”)(“Chairman of the board a burr under saddle of UF presidents,” by Lloyd Dunkelbeger, Sarasota Herald-Tribune, Jan. 20, 1998.)

Whatever the real reason Steve Uhlfelder wanted Lombardi out, Uhlfelder was influential enough by the 1990s to get his way, and Lombardi resigned in 1999 but fell into a cushy position as chancellor of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst thereafter.

By this time, Steve Uhlfelder’s son, the future hardliner pro-Lockdown Covid Activist Daniel Uhlfelder, had himself just passed through the University of Florida Law School, graduating with a JD in 1996.

Finally, here is a less-than-flattering slice from the lobbyist life of Steve Uhlfelder in which we get a peek into his methods and personality. He apparently threatened a form of legal blackmail the then-president of the Florida Senate, Tom Lee, and otherwise acted boorish, aggressive, and menacing:

The profile of the retiring forty-year lobbyist Steve Uhlfelder includes this near the end:

“His son, Daniel Uhlfelder, has made headlines recently by strolling beaches, dressed as the Grim Reaper, to warn visitors about COVID danger. […]

In a recent Pensacola News Journal story about his activism, Daniel Uhlfelder indicated such activism comes naturally to him.

‘If I wasn’t raised the way I had been, I wouldn’t be doing this now,’ he told the News-Journal. ‘My parents taught us at a young age the importance of standing up when you believe in something’.”

So here we have it from the man himself, Daniel Uhlfelder, the ostentatiously extreme ‘Covid’ protestor (a possible slogan for these people is “extremism in opposition to Covid is no vice!”). By his own account he got it from the way he was raised and otherwise from family inheritance.

(Addendum from the comments: Shortly after this essay was researched, written, and published, the very same Steve Uhlfelder appeared before the Tallahassee city council to protest against the city police chief appearing at a Christian event, shame him for it, and attempt to get him removed. See video and comments below. Thank you to the commenter Adam Smith.)

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What I want to try to do is create a general profile of Daniel Uhlfelder’s ancestors, beyond the (revealing) portrait of the longtime-lobbyist father. What were their places in European and American politics and culture? The goal is to parallel the DeSantis ancestral profile I made earlier.

I’m going to do this in five further sections:

(1) “father’s father’s side” back to great-grandparents;

(2) investigation into the origin of the name “Uhlfelder,” back to the Napoleonic-era Germany — a rather interesting story tied in with Jewish Emancipation;

(3) ancestry along “father’s mother’s side,” back to great-grandparents;

(4) “mother’s father’s side,” back to great-grandparents;

(5) “mother’s mother’s side,” back to great-grandparents;

(6) Then some concluding remarks restating some findings and their relevance to the Corona-Panic (through these people’s descendant, Daniel Uhlfelder) and expanding on those thoughts.

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FATHER’s FATHER’s SIDE

• [Father of Daniel Uhlfelder]: Steven Joel “Steve” Uhlfelder, born May 1946. Lifetime resident of Florida: Long of Tallahassee (the state capital), and later of nearby Walton and Santa Rosa Beach, Florida panhandle. He was a lawyer and lobbyist, active as such from the late 1970s to early 2020s.
  
  
  • [Grandfather]: Known as Willie Uhlfelder, born Wilhelm Uhlfelder in 1916 in Erlangen, Germany (near Nuremburg). Jewish. Emigrated to the USA in 1934/35. (Obituaries and interviews variously give 1934 or 1935).
    
    Willie Uhlfelder found immediate success in America where someone, probably a distant relative or friend of a distant relative, gave him a nice job as a “receiving manager” at Rich’s Department Store in Atlanta. He worked for a series of other department stores into the 1940s, including one in Tallahassee in 1938 and West Palm Beach by 1941.
    
    A biographical account he wrote has this on his activities 1942-45: “He served in the [U.S.] Army Intelligence Service from 1942 to 1945, handling prisoners.” (“Candidates Give Background, Views,” Palm Beach Post, March 16, 1958). Presumably he got this job because he was a native speaker of German.
    
    He was a leading figure in Jewish circles in West Palm Beach in the 1950s, on the board of directors of the synagogue Temple Israel throughout the decade. He was also a repeat political candidate for city commission and won several of his races, serving 1958-64, then losing a narrow re-election race in 1964.
    
    Willie Uhlfelder died in December 1971 of cancer (obituary in Miami Herald, Dec. 24, 1971).
    
    
    • [Great-grandfather]: Josef Uhlfelder (or Uehlfelder), born 1881 in Bavaria. Jewish. Said to have died in 1944 in Theresienstadt, the German concentration camp for socially prominent German Jews who were elderly or ill. Died at age 63. His name is listed in a Holocaust Victims database.
      
      
    • [Great-grandmother] Frieda Flink, born 1883 in Bavaria. Jewish. Several generations of her ancestors are associated with Altenmuhr, a town south of Nuremburg. Altenmuhr had attracted Jewish migrants from elsewhere in the late 1700s. There had been some Jews there in earlier centuries but local Jews were repeatedly driven out by locals, including a major one during the Black Death. For whatever reason some groups of Jews always eventually came back. The latest beach-heed was set up again in Altenmuhr in the early 1700s, but the local Jewish population really firmed up in the late 1700s, even before Jewish Emancipation.
      
      Frieda, the 2020s-era Florida Corona-DeathSantis GrimReaper-costumed-guy’s great-grandmother, is said to have been deported from the city of Nuremburg to Theresienstadt concentration camp with her husband in Sept. 1942, and died later that year at the camp. Her name, too, is listed in a Holocaust Victims database.
      

First of all I note that the Corona-agitator who shot to fame in 2020 for his “DeathSantis” and “Remove Ron” campaigns has the middle name “Will,” which seems clearly in reference to his grandfather, this Willie Uhlfelder.

“Holocaust ancestry”

The Corona-activist’s father, Steve Uhlfelder, has described his own father Willie as someone who “escaped Nazi Germany” (Sarasota Herald-Tribune, Jan. 20, 1998). Given a 1934/35 arrival in the USA — the second or third year of the Nazi regime — that is something of a self-serving stretch.

Willie Uhlfelder’s own obituary had this: “His parents died in a Nazi concentration camp.”

I don’t know the exact circumstances of their deaths, but they died in the camp for elderly and socially prominent German Jews, which means no one in standard Holocaust historiography would even alleged that they were killed in some kind of systematic extermination program.

The shift from the early-1970s wording “died in a Nazi concentration camp” to Steve Uhlfelder’s later claims which elevate their statuses to sacred status, imbuing descendants like Steve (b.1946) and Daniel Uhlfelder (b.1972) with Holocaust Ancestry, which had great cachet in US culture by the end of the 20th century and still today, as careful observers could tell from the big Democratic Party debates in 2019, when two different candidates went way out of their way to play up their own distant “Holocaust ancestry.”

Grandfather’s politics

It’s somewhat unusual that an emigrant who arrived as an adult would run for local political office (cf. the stereotype of the quiet, hardworking immigrant-arrival versus the activist child). Willie Uhlfelder threw such caution to the wind and became a repeat candidate for office in the 1950s and 1960s in local politics in Palm Beach.

Here a paid political ad he put out during one of his runs for Palm Beach City Commission, his final run (which he narrowly lost after winning several races in a row):

(Political ad in Palm Beach Post, March 28, 1964.)

His wording is tantalizingly vague as to what these “shadowy” people are, but he clearly feels nefarious people are engaged in a conspiracy to keep Willie Uhlfeler down. He calls them “hate mongers” and “hate groups,” an interesting early use of that term.

Ngram suggests “hate group” first emerged as a term in the mid-1940s but not until the 1990s did it begin to emerge into more-normal use, especially gaining ground in 1993-1997, then on a more-or-less long plateau for twenty years until spiking again in — guess it! — 2016. Nazi-era Jewish emigrant Willi Uhlfelder was using a term characteristic of discourse more than fifty years after he used it. He may not have meant exactly what the SPLC and ADL mean in our era by “hate group,” it’s too vague to guess at, but the psychological effect of the term he must have appreciated well.

Some traces of CoronaPanic-activist Daniel Uhlfelder’s grandfather and grand-uncle, both German Jews, and what they were up to in mid-20th-century West Palm Beach, Florida:

(1969 ad for Willie Uhlfelder’s Transfer & Storage Co.)

A grand-uncle and Canadian communist activist

An elder brother or Willie’s, Martin Uhlfelder (born 1908 in Bavaria; died 1985 in West Palm Beach) may have been in Germany throughout the war. Martin, like his brother Willie, was active in West Palm Beach as of the late 1940s (he ran a carpet-cleaning service) but I find no trace of him in the USA before 1945. I am left to presume that Martin Uhlfelder — this is the uncle of Steve Uhlfelder an grand-uncle of the anti-DeSantis Corona-activist Daniel Uhlfelder of our time — gained entry to the USA soon after 1945 and easily walked into permanent residency as a refugee from immediate-postwar Europe. He may have been classified a Displaced Person. In this scenario he was likely under the direct sponsorship of the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS) which sponsored most of the Jewish resettlements.

Martin Uhlfelder married to a Quebec-born, Moravian-Jewish-ancestry woman Rachel “Rae” Satov (1910-2005) (obituary in Palm Beach Post, April 25, 2005). Rae — the extreme Corona-Panic activist’s grand-aunt by marriage — had family ties to a Communist Party figure in Canada. Her brother, Henry Satov, was arrested in late 1939 and held in jail under charge of anti-war and pro-communist agitation. The Canadians charged Satov and the activist network of which he was a leading figure, under a wartime emergency law “banning the uttering or publishing of material likely to cause disaffection…or to hinder recruiting, training, discipline or actions of Canada’s fighting forces.”

Henry Satov and the network of Communist Party activists were apparently following the Moscow line and pushing for peace after the Soviet Union took eastern Poland. The Satov et al trial in January 1940 trial was of nearly as much local interest as the war in Europe itself, which was then stuck in the “Phony War” period of inaction. The case decided whether or not Henry Satov and his Communist activist cadre’s anti-war agitation fell under protection of free speech, and the Canadian court ruled that it did not.

Henry Satov was convicted and the court imposed a $500 fine or six months in jail and the implied warning of more penalties if he kept it up.

Later reports suggest Henry Satov was a key organizer of the Communist activism. His co-defendants — the rest of the local Communist Party network they arrested — had the following names: Anton Kaczmar (released early), Steve Hasiuk, Dan Yaruchewski, Walter Mazurkiewicz, Bessie Schechter, James Smith, Evariste Dube, Dmytre Bendas. (Montreal Gazette, Dec. 11, 1939, “One Freed, 8 Held on War Act Counts,” which starts with “One Communist suspect was freed Saturday…”)

Here is snapshot of Martin Uhlfelder (our subject’s great-uncle)’s business down in Florida in the late 1950s:

This purports to be a photograph of Martin Uhlfelder:

Martin Uhlfelder embraced the Democratic Party, the traditional party of the Jews in the United States until some defected to the Republicans in the late 20th century, the intellectual core of which were the so-called Neoconservatives.

In 1960, Martin Uhlfelder backed Doyle E. Carlton Jr. for governor in the Democratic primary and signed a public petition backing Carlton (published in the Palm Beach Post, May 22, 1960). The main issue in the 1960 governor’s race was integration. Carlton was a moderate anti-integrationist while the winner C. Farris Bryant who ran to Carlton’s Right on the popular anti-forcible-integration issue. (Bryant narrowly won the primary and won the general election but governed as a moderate and disappointed some backers by refraining from going the “massive resistance” route like some Southern state governors were trying.)

Wrapping up this “father’s father’s” section:

Alas, the most important thing on this line, which probably animates both the Florida mega-lobbyist Steve Uhlfelder and his son the Corona-agitator Daniel Uhlfelder must be the tie-in with Nazi Germany

Steve Uhlfelder apparently insisted that the following be added among his list of accomplishments compiled by the local Tallahassee Democrat columnist upon his 2021 retirement after fifty years in politics and the lobbying biz:

“He [Steve Uhlfelder] was instrumental in creation of the FSU Holocaust Institute for high school teachers and started the Holland and Knight Holocaust Writing Program, in which students nationwide compete for scholarships and visits to the holocaust museum. Uhlfelder also worked for legislation creating a Holocaust Memorial at Florida’s Capitol.”

Finally I should add this on the Jewish origins. We can confirm that they are relevant in a very personal way to Daniel Uhlfelder, the radical Pro-Panic Corona activist, in this way: Daniel Uhlfelder himself identifies as Jewish, and not just in a passive or private way but in a public-enough way that he has appeared all over the English-language Israeli media, such as this from the Israeli JTA in May 2020:

“Daniel Uhlfelder says he was inspired by his family’s tragic Holocaust history to protest beach reopenings.”

In case there is any doubt or nuance here, there are also multiple cases of Daniel Uhlfelder saying directly: “I’m Jewish.” (Cf. Barack Obama’s response to the census in which he called himself “Black alone.”) He is a member of a “Reform synagogue.”

He told the JTA reporter (of New York City) this:

“My great-grandparents were murdered, and their ancestors were murdered in broad daylight,” Uhlfelder said. “And I’m not [comparing the two], but when you have 70-80,000 people dying [of ‘Covid’] in the wealthiest country on the planet, and it seems like nobody cares, I couldn’t sleep at night if I didn’t do something about this.”

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Origin of the surname “UHLFELDER”

The Corona-fanatic Florida lawyer Daniel Uhlfelder’s great-grandfather, Josef Uhlfelder, is said to have died during WWII. He was a descendent of several generations of Jews in what is now northern Bavaria.

We can trace this “Uhlfelder” surname back about two centuries to a particular town named Uehlfeld. I find this interesting historical strand to pull on, in trying to reach for understanding of the the psychology of these Uehlfelders, and ultimately to clues to the mind which ended up becoming one of the leading and most aggressive Corona Pro-Panic agitators in 2020-21.

The original Uehlfelder ancestor was a certain Mr. Cohn. This Cohn with three sons. Each of the three junior Cohns were apparently merchants active in the early 19th century. As young men, they each fanned out to “set up shop” in different places — perhaps not so different from what their distant descendants did in mid-20th-century Florida. The three sons each took the place name of their new abodes as surnames, and the next generation used them as fixed surnames, dropping away the too-nonspecific and very-Jewish “Cohn.”

One of these men, we can safely presume, rolled into the town of Uehlfeld some time in the first half of the 19th century.

(See comments section for more on this.)

The town of Uehlfeld had very few Jews before the 1810s/20s. But soon thereafter it became one of the few towns anywhere in Germany which ended up with a major-percent Jewish population. The town got enough Jews eventually gathering here, some presumably from points east, that they came to socially dominate the town, not as a small, local “market-dominant minority” elite (the term coined by Amy Chua — whose children are half-Jewish — with groups like Overseas Chinese and European Jews in mind), but as an on-the-ground reality.

At its height, Uehlfeld was at least 1/3rd Jewish. (English wiki claims half, but that’s too high, per censuses), reminiscent of the shtetls of Eastern Europe. With the rest of the locals generally being typical German-Protestants (Lutherans) with perhaps lesser numbers of Calvinists and Catholics, they didn’t have much of a chance, and had no legal recourse to block the Jewish arrivals.

We can guess at the Jews relative position in town because this man, who was born a Cohn, took the name of the town for his own.

It happened about like this:

In the Napoleonic era, near the height of his power, Napoleon decided to get rid of some of the minor German principalities. He maneuvered to dissolve the so-called Principality of Bayreuth, one of these minor states with often non-contiguous holdings, reminiscent of those “gerrymandered” legislative districts you see. In any case, the Margrave of Bayreuth controlled Uehlfeld and much other territory, but in the 1790s had sold it to Prussia. Napoleon effectively canceled the sale. He then made a new sale, selling much of the dissolved principality to the new Kingdom of Bavaria, his dependent ally. So it was that the new King of Bavaria took control (in 1810) of the towns of Uehlfeld and Altenmuhr, the towns associated with Josef Uehlfelder and Frieda Flink, respectively (though the two of them in adult life appear to have lived in the relatively big city of Nuremburg).

The Napoleonic era disrupted the traditional order in all kinds of ways, and it’s said that no topic in European history has elicited more writing than the French Revolution. As for the town of Uehfeld, big things were about to roll in here; one thing led to another, and within a generation this once provincial little town, in the Lutheran camp since the 16th century, had risen to around one-third Jewish. The pre-Napoleon ruler, a German aristocrat called Christian Friedrich Karl Alexander (1736-1806) was anti-Jewish and had taken measures to limit their influence, but with him out of the way, the way was open.

The Napoleonic era also brought what is called “Jewish Emancipation” in which all legal restrictions on Jewish activities, which many local rulers or Christian elites had long maintained, were removed. In most parts of Germany, this occurred in the mid- and late-Napoleonic era; the new Kingdom of Bavaria itself emancipated the Jews in 1813.

The Napoleonic disruption and Jewish Emancipation was the open door. But why did the Jews choose Uehlfeld? Was it a kind of internal-German trade entrepot spot on the trade routes between Nuremburg — which was a major trading center back to the Middle Ages — and Bamberg to the north and Wurzburg to the west, and of course points farther west (Rhineland)?

Now, one might be inclined to say this is all so much trivia. But we have these words from Daniel Uhlfelder’s own mouth: “My great-grandparents were murdered, and their ancestors were murdered in broad daylight,” which he told reporter in May 2020 near the height of the initial Corona-Panic.

What did he mean by “their ancestors were murdered in broad daylight”? It seems he could only be referring to medieval anti-Jewish riots. You say I’m going too far back, well our subject himself has gone back far earlier than the earliest I’ve gone directly, with feelers in the late 18th century but the Uhfelder narrative focusing on the 19th century in post-Napoleonic Germany.

Next we’ll see that his father’s mother’s side is much the same, Jews generally from the same general area of Germany.

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FATHER’s MOTHER’s SIDE

• [Father of Daniel Uhlfelder]: Steven Joel “Steve” Uhlfelder, born May 1946. The Florida political insider and lobbyist.
  
  
  • [Grandmother]: Selma Schloss, born in 1922 in Newark, New Jersey.
    
    Her father died around the time she was born and her mother took her to Selma Schloss graduated from Central Junior High School, West Palm Beach, in 1936, with honors, and Palm Beach High School in 1939. She was elected president of a chapter of the Tri Beta Sorority in Jan. 1939, for students studying biological sciences, by high school friends. Thereafter she attended Florida State College for Women, Tallahassee, 1939-41. She talked her way into a position writing articles for the Tallahassee Democrat starting in 1941.
    
    Selma Schloss had been active at Temple Israel in the 1930s and continued to be so whenever she was back in Palm Beach. She may have met husband-to-be, the recently arriving German-Jew Willie Uhlfelder in Tallahassee and not Palm Beach, though Willie Uhlfelder was later active at the same Temple Israel in West Palm Beach. They married on New Year’s Day 1942. It is clear from the wedding announcement that Willie Uhlfelder is not in the army at this point (he is described as “in business” in Tallahassee). (Account of wedding in Palm Beach Post, Jan. 2, 1942).
    
    Selma died in 1980 in Florida.
    
    
    • [Great-grandfather]: Salomon Schloss, born 1873 in Römerberg, Rhineland, Germany Immigrated to New York City area, 1888. Died 1922.
      
      
    • [Great-grandmother]: Johanna Held, born 1892 in Nuremburg, Germany. Arrived in Newark, New Jersey, in 1911, age 18/19.
      
      Her husband died around the time her baby was born. Johanna Held responded to the shock by planning a long trip to Europe, presumably to visit relatives; she was still a foreign national and had to apply for a special passport through her deceased husband’s naturalized citizenship. She returned to America and was active in Florida by 1931.
      
      Died 1973 in Florida.
      
      Here is a picture of Johanna Schloss (nee Held) in 1922, at age thirty, recently widowed, with five-week-old Selma Schloss (photo from her public-record passport application):
      

The widow Johanna Schloss and her daughter Selma were back and forth to Europe multiple times in the 1920s, returning from the final trip in late-year 1930 (Port of New York passenger manifest, S.S. Berlin, Nov. 10, 1930). Sometime that w inter (1930-31) Johanna and eight-year-old daughter finally left Newark for good and went south to Florida, probably at invitation of a relative.

In any case, t he Corona-activist’s grandmother, Selma Schloss, was of entirely German-Jewish origin. She was of Ellis Island-era ancestry, except with the unusual caveat that she never knew her earlier (1888)-arriving father who died the same year she was born. She only knew her 1911-arriving mother, who was back-and-forth to Europe so much that she was practically a dual-national (though officially she traveled on a US passport, which she secured through her deceased husband’s naturalized-citizen status and the USA’s generous citizenship allowance).

Young Selma must have absorbed much more of this even than usual up to age 9 given that she was physically back and forth to Europe. For practical purposes, Selma Schloss (Daniel Uhlfelder’s grandmother) could probably be considered “Post-Ellis-Island Jewish,” just like the actual Uhlfelder man who arrived in the mid-1930s.

Just as Willie Uhlfelder at age eighteen took up the Nazi regime’s encouragement for Jews to emigrate, and proceed to walk into a series of department store jobs in America before, some years later, setting up a Palm Beach moving company, a chapter closed in Selma Schloss’ life when she left Germany for the last time in late 1930; within 18 months an anti-Jewish political movement was nearing power.

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Summary of paternal ancestry for Daniel Uhlfelder, back to great-grandparent level:

(1) They were all German Jews. There is little-to-no sign of any Ostjuden within two centuries. There is sometimes a belief that it was specifically the Eastern European Jews, and their descendants, who were the real radicals and drivers of the cultural revolution of the 1960s, and that German-Jews were on the level of Barry Goldwater’s (half-)Jewish ancestry, people basically less interested in social upheaval or in attacking or undermining the system, or whatever set of behaviors they are supposed to engage in. I don’t know that we see much of a difference, starting with the Steve Uhlfelder generation at the least.

(2) Average weighted year of first-entry into the USA is: 1917. But this number deserves a heavy asterisk and the effective date is more like 1930. One great-grandfather was an Early Ellis Island arrival (at about age fifteen in 1888) BUT died about the same time his daughter was born, which means the daughter never knew him. Another great-grandmother was a Late Ellis Islander (arriving at about age nineteen in 1911) and she repeatedly traveled back and forth to and from Europe in the 1920s with her daughter. There were weak community ties here before the move to West Palm Beach in 1931. And really the more important entry-narrative is clearly the mid-1930s entry by Willie Uhlfelder “escaping the Nazis” (ashis son Steve Uhlfelder, the mega-lobbyist, put it).

(3) We also see that both Daniel Uhlfelder’s father and grandfather were active in Florida politics. Daniel Uhlfelder himself has slid into that role in our time, in a big way, though he will never be able to match his father’s (dubious) accomplishments as Florida’s number-one lobbyist, networker-extraordinaire, and occasional-agitator over a forty- of fifty-year span.

(4) Finally, we see that the Corona-fanatic Daniel Uhlfelder has direct “Holocaust ancestry,” with Holocaust list-compilers claiming the names of his great-grandparents, who are said to have died at Theresienstadt. In the U.S. culture in which Daniel Uhlfelder emerged into social-cultural-political consciousness in the late 1970s and 1980s, this was a big deal; he must have felt like a special person for having Holocaust ancestry, and his ever-active, ever-networking, ever-lobbying father was clearly interested in promoting the cause.

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MOTHER’s FATHER’s SIDE

• [Daniel Uhlfelder’s Mother]: Mary Mifflin Hollyday. Born May 1947. University of Florida graduate, 1969. Married Steve Uhlfelder in Aug. 1969, soon after she graduated; he had graduated a year earlier (wedding announcement in Palm Beach Post, June 22, 1969).
  
  
  • [Grandfather]: John Mifflin Hollyday, born 1905 in Baltimore. May not have finished high school. Worked as a salesman in the 1930s before a call-up to the U.S. Army in April 1941. He was swept up with the war-industry ramp up and soon became active with The Martin Company missile manufacturer in Denver in the 1950s.
    
    Married Marian Devine of New York in 1946. Lived in Ruxton, Maryland, circa mid-1940s to mid-1950s, then oved by by his employer at least twice, once to Colorado and then to Florida.
    
    John Mifflin Hollyday and family relocated to Orlando (from a posting to Colorado) in 1960. Mr. Hollyday was by then director of industrial relations for Martin Co.; the company later merged into Lockheed, its remnants remain with that defense-contractor powerhouse today. (Orlando Sentinel, Sept. 28, 1960.) They made a home in Winter Park, outside Orlando; eldest daughter Mary spent her high school years here.
    
    John Hollyday was an active Episcopalian and for a time was president of the United Way of Orange County, Florida.
    
    John Mifflin Hollyday died in Dec. 1977. (Obituary in Orlando Sentinel, Jan. 1, 1978.)
    
    
    • [Great-grandfather]: Henry Mifflin Hollyday, born 1883 in Baltimore. He was in the booming automobile business in the 1910s and died unexpectedly in 1920 in Baltimore. (Obituary in Baltimore Sun).
      
      Henry Mifflin Hollyday’s traceable all-branch ancestry all points to towards colonial-Maryland. Certainly the Hollyday line itself is colonial-Maryland, and was in Maryland by the mid-17th century. Grandparent surnames: Hollyday, Carvill, Chamberlain, Audoun.
      
      
    • [Great-grandmother]: Name given as “Anna Fendlay, of Virginia” in the genealogical compilation “The Hollyday Family of Maryland.” This may be Anne “Annie” Marcia Fenley/Finley (1872-1943) of Lynchburg and later Richmond, Virginia, first married to a William Hay Garnett (1866-1899) of Richmond and following first husband’s death remarried Maryland man Henry Mifflin Hollyday in the early 1900s.
      
      Grandparent surnames: Fendley, Burton, Lacey, Tyree. All lines in Virginia throughout the 19th century, presumably mostly or wholly colonial.
      

John Mifflin Hollyday, circa late 1950s

Mary Mifflin Hollyday, ca.1969

John Hollyday may well have been of entirely Maryland/Virginia colonial-era ancestry.

He was in the U.S. Army but unclear for how long, because by late 1941 he was in with the aeronautics industry with the company then known as Martin Co., later a missile manufacturer. He stayed with them until his 1970 retirement, and the company moved him to Orlando, a development which eventually put his daughter at the University of Florida where she met Steve Uhlfelder, who was already beginning a long career in politicking and influence-peddling (lobbying).

John Hollyday seems like the classic man of his time and place, a net positive influence on civic life all around him (e.g., as founder of Junior Achievement Association in Orlando, as head of county United Way charity group, as member of the Central Florida Development Committee), and a US Episcopalian back in a time when someone not on the political-cultural Far Left could be proud of the affiliation.

I find much less on his wife — the Corona-activist’s mother’s mother’s side, except the name Marian Devine.

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MOTHER’s MOTHER’s SIDE

• [Daniel Uhlfelder’s Mother]: Mary Mifflin Hollyday. Born May 1947. (Married Steve Uhlfelder in 1969.)
  
  
  • [Grandmother]: Marian Devine, born 1917 in New York City, died 2002 in Florida. This much is certain, but who her parents were is not quite certain but after much searching I believe the following to be right correct parents (names, dates, ages, and places all match) (1930 and 1940 censuses). As of 1940 she was a “statistic clerk” at a department store living in the Bronx, New York City. Marian Devine was a high school graduate in the Bronx. (Married John Mifflin Hollyday in the mid?-1940s.)
    
    • [Great-grandfather]: John Devine. Born in Ireland in ca.1886. Stopped at school in late 1890s (the 1940 US Census claims he completed the equivalent of Fourth Grade). Arrived in the USA in 1910. He became a firefighter with New York Fire Department. Long resident of the Fordham area of the Bronx (a neighborhood which tipped into being majority Black by about the 1960s/70s, and has been supermajority Black for decades by now). In 1915, John Devine married an eighteen-year-old recent arrival from Ireland.
      
      
    • [Great-grandmother]: Mary ______. Born in Ireland ca.1897. Arrived in the USA in 1912. Completed equivalent of 8th grade in Ireland and did not apparently continue school after arrival in New York. As usual with genealogy work, maternal lines are harder to track and I cannot even determine the maiden name here, but Irish origin is certain.
      

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Ancestral Summary

• Summary of Daniel Uhlfelder’s father’s side: Entirely European Jewish, largely comparable to the paternal Uhlfelder line itself. The Uhlfelder surname shows up on the scene during Napoleonic-era Jewish Emancipation. They became merchants in Uhlfeld, Germany, and were part of a Jewish migration to a formerly quiet Lutheran town along a trade network in the heart of Germany. The Uhlfelders had over a century of this until the Corona-activist’s paternal grandfather arrived in the USA from Germany in or about 1934.

Daniel Uhlfelder’s grandmother was born in the NYC area but was back-and-forth to Germany several times growing up, becoming tied to the USA/Florida beginning only in 1931.

Through some of these European Jewish family ties, the Uhlfelders also embrace a Holocaust ancestry identity, and the Corona-activist’s father in particular is a Holocaust activist.

• Summary of Daniel Uhlfelder’s mother’s side: Half colonial mid-Atlantic ancestry (overwhelmingly Virginia and Maryland), half late-Ellis-Island-era Irish(-Catholic?) ancestry.

The Corona-activist’s maternal grandfather in the mid-20th century worked for an aerospace company which later merged into Lockheed.

• Summary of all-branch ethnoreligious ancestry for Covid-activist Daniel Uhlfelder:
  • Half German-Jewish,
  • one-quarter Mid-Atlantic US Colonial stock (Episcopalian affiliation in the 20th century for this element),
  • one quarter Irish-Catholic(?).

• Educational ancestry: Both of Corona-activist Daniel Uhlfelder’s parents parents were highly educated, four-year college graduates, putting them in the top-30% for their age-cohort just by merit of having any Bachelor’s-level degree.
  
  The Corona-activist has at least one grandparent who attended college (Selma Schloss). Not much higher-education among US-tied great-grandparents.
  
  The Corona-activist’s father Steve Uhlfelder has a law degree (JD) from a good school, putting him around the top 5% of his age-cohort in educational achievement. Later, his son (i.e. Daniel Uhlfelder) also attended the same school, the University of Florida.

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Uhlfleder versus DeSantis

Despite the efforts of his nemesis Daniel Uhlfelder, most political-watchers and pollsters now believe that Corona Anti-Panic stalwart DeSantis will easily win reelection in 2022. He is also well placed for a 2024 presidential run.

Uhlfelder’s “Remove Ron” and “DeathSantis” demonization-and-agitation campaigns were effective in keeping Panickers loyal to the Pro-Panic flag throughout 2020 and 2021 and cowing some Neutrals. The goals, or the effects at least, were higher than one man or one race.

Uhlfelder and his fellow Pro-Panic activist cadres’ messaging was perhaps especially influential away from Florida, roughly along the lines of this June 2020 political cartoon directly inspired by Daniel Uhlfelder’s own Pro-Panic “DeathDeantis” grim-reaper stunts.

In the course of a week, a typical low-info and diffident news-consumer might hear a few lines about Florida. If those words/memes/ideas end up being “cases alarmingly rising after crazy governor lifted restrictions against grassroots protests by those getting sick and dying”-type of news, low-info people at any given time may have believed Florida was a disaster (in fact there is no appreciable difference, it is middle-of-the-pack by most any measure), so alarming that outraged-but-heroic ordinary people are parading around in grim-reaper outfits to protest the Corona-Genocide. The takeaway is “we need the tender loving care of loyal pro-Science figures [i.e., CoronaPanickers] to recover.”

Daniel Uhlfelder’s stunts and tireless activism, which continues today, helped create the impression of a vast grassroots Pro-Panic consensus and the imagery of it all spread worldwide to the effect of: “Don’t be like Florida, that’s where the stupidly lifted lockdowns and masks and the bodies piled up on the beaches. It’s because of raging maniacs like Ron DeathSantis who want you killed. They should have stayed loyal and kept the Corona commandments…like us!”

Daniel Uhlfelder is also behind the series of anti-DeSantis Corona tv advertisements, one of which has been much mocked (not all the Pro-Panic ads are that bad) but really these are just one strategy among many they are using. Do not underetimate this man, Daniel Uhlfelder’, for his activism accumulated him hundreds of thousands of twitter followers from a small start, and what can only be billions in free advertising for his messaging.

Florida had to be punished for breaking ranks and rejecting the Corona-Panic. With a supposed “Trump guy” like DeSantis in the governor’s office, it was a lot easier to criticize the Florida anti-lockdown, anti-mandate, anti-Panic positioning than it was to criticize the Western European hero of the Corona era, Sweden, whose government is not at all manned by “Trump guys.”

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Concluding thoughts

Daniel Uhlfelder has a fairly well-off background. He clearly modeled his life on that of his father, going into the practice of law in Florida just as his father did, even attending the University of Florida for law school, alma mater of both his parents, and where his father had earned a JD, becoming student body president along the way.

The junior Uhlfelder also followed his father into being attracted to the game of political influence and maneuvering, with some old-style agitation on the side to dash things up, and using moral-outrage as his stock-in-trade.

Our Uhlfelder (the Corona-activisrt), his father, and his grandfather were all ‘political’ people, all identified with the Democrats. The Corona Pro-Panic activist’s grandfather, Willie Uhlfelder, ran multiple political campaigns in the 1950s/60s for local office, and even used the phrase “hate groups” to describe opponents and critics, an interesting very-early use of that term and perhaps psychologically revelatory both to the grandfather himself, his ethnopolitical cohort at the time, and relevant to the “apples may not far too far from their trees” theory of understanding people which underlies this entire effort.

But why did Daniel Uhlfelder embrace the Corona-Panic and become a leading Pro-Panic activist?

I think there are several lessons here.

The Corona-Panic brought in with it a kind of political split from the start. Highly political people like Daniel Uhlfelder sensed this from early on, sensed the chance to exploit it. They were right. Many others of us were caught off guard, expected the Panic to pass, and gave ground throughout the critical weeks, and then found themselves outmaneuvered and trapped. Who outmaneuvered them? It wasn’t the extreme-hypochondriac wing of the Pro-Panic coalition. It was not the people who saw as appealing opportunity to grab a few weeks’ soft-vacation by throwing in with the Panic to get a “work from home” deal.

But there are multiple other lessons here. As to the social class and backgrounds of some of the most influential Pro-Panic activists — the men and women and nonbinaries who helped create the Panic’s initial momentum and breakthrough, but especially who policed the narrative to demand adherence to the Panic — there has been lots of talk on this, the idea of a Pro-Panic type being well-off and well-established, for whom major life-disruptions would affect only minimally. I think there is more to it, and that Daniel Uhlfelder’s biographical details may elucidate something of the type.

Daniel Uhlfelder, in educational terms (highly educated b.1940s parents), class terms (third-generation middle class or above), degree of politicization (high), and perhaps ancestral terms (three-quarters of ancestry arriving in the 20th century), we have someone who qualifies as the broad elite but also one not necessarily super-firmly rooted, especially the 20th-century-European-Jewish narratives that are all around his father’s side.

Yes, there is a Jewish angle here, and I don’t believe I have shied away from it. To be more direct about it: I would propose Steve Uhlfelder fits the archetype of the b.1940s/b.1950s Jewish radical in the United States and elsewhere, described by authors like Tom Wolfe even at the time. This is demonstrated by his influence in trying to induce the University of Florida to bow to Black students’ demands in the early 1970s, and much else about his biography.

And we have it from Daniel Uhlfelder himself that he identifies as Jewish, and not with the Episcopal or other Christian roots of his maternal side, so pay attention and do not neglect it.

It’s a complicated subject but there is clearly a Jewish mindset which is concerned about a too-strong, too-self-conscious White-Christian presence in society. Flashing forward to 2020, Daniel Uhlfelder saw Ron DeSantis as representative of the same type.

The contrast with DeSantis: His is of fully White-European-Christian origin (and a strongly identified Christian, at that), and he is formally speaking “in power” in that he occupies the governor’s mansion. DeSantis fits the same kind of role these presidents and board members at the University of Florida fit to Steve Uhlfelder in his time when he demanded they resign, or any of the other targets in Steve Uhlfelder’s long and lucrative lobbying career.

And yet! DeSantis own ancestry forms a distinct difference with Uhlfelder’s. Both are born in 1970s Florida, but DeSantis’ father was no lobbyist and no college guy, but a lifelong blue-collar man who once suggested the NBA ought to have a White player quota and a Black player cap at 13% to be fair on the principle of affirmative action (See “The ancestry of Ron DeSantis“).

There are various things going on here with Daniel Uhlfelder’s own psychology and sense of self, the early energies of the Corona-Panic in 2020, and the situation with DeSantis elected governor in 2018 even during a Democratic wave-year. It all merged gracefully into something about like this:

“The Middle America rubes are just too stupid for their own good. They need to be guided by experts. We cannot let the rubes, rednecks, and Wal-Mart people make their own decisions! They’re too dangerouslty stupid they’ll get lots of us killed. We’ll guide them towards the One True Way, but we can also tighten the screws to excise the rubes’ many negative characteristics along the way.”

Viewed from a social-economic-cultural and public-health perspective, the Corona-Panic was an incredibly costly missed call and demands explanation.

The initial mega-scale missed call (which in March 2020 already I called “our Big Mistake“), eventually dug into a culture war between “sophisticated, masked, Science believers” vs. “uneducated, anti-Science, maskless rubes,” the rhetoric of which occasionally shifted based on the needs or trends of the moment but did not fundamentally change.

Although there were Corona Pro-Panic fanatics of all classes, my close look at nodal pro-Panic figure Daniel Uhlfelder leads me to the hypothesis that the whole thing (the Corona-Panic) could never have been sustained without a kind of ethno-religious-class prejudice. It is the adherers to this class prejudice which yielded many converts to the Corona Cult in spring 2020, which shored up support for the new religion and which gave us some highly surreal cultural moments these past two years. This angle made sure it dug in and did not disappear as quickly as it should have.

The idea that it was just to make sure Trump lost the November 2020 election fits here but the hard form of that theory cannot have been true given that a year later the Corona-Panic is still with us.

I think we are winding down here to a nice conclusion:

It need not necessarily have been a grand conspiracy, nor even a grand-scale mass delusion. There may be elements of both those things — and clearly low-info people and even many normally-high-info people were in a kind of techno-induced mass delusion (believing implausible info-bites fed them by screens and/or suspicious-and-unverifiable anecdotes, rather than their own experiences, which spiraled up and dug in with group-think) — but the critical factor was perhaps something else, from near the start, something psychological.

The simple conclusion, the critical thing about the whole thing, is this: The Corona-Panic is understandable as a major war waged by the US elite, or the broad elite, against its own people, or at least the core of its own nation. The extensions of the Corona-Panic elsewhere tended to follow wherever major US influence was found, and so the dominoes fell.

Put another way: To understand the CoronaPanic-as-social-phenomenon, you need first understand US domestic politics, how different subgroups within the US see their fellow residents and some of the resentments or fears that drive some of US politics and culture.

Sadly, the Corona-Panic social phenomenon will define the early 2020s, along with the CoronaPanic-induced breakout of mass racial violence and riots, but the direct damage by the Corona-Panic is much greater than a few billions’ in riot damages and a few tens of thousands institutions announcing they’ll be ramping up Anti-White Male discrimination policies of all sorts. The two ended up hand-in-glove allies in a strange way that someone with just facts-on-paper would not have predicted in 2019. The two were such natural allies specifically because they were both excellent tools to use against the troublesome people out there.

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We now approach the two-year mark from when they first announced a “new virus” (Dec. 31, 2019?). It has been a bad two years, very bad, in all sorts of ways, and objectively so. Many may have been okay individually, but on aggregate this has been our lowest ebb of this century so far.

People talked themselves into the Corona-Panic, or simply caved into the pressure, snapped, or were broken (and some unfortunate subgroup of those ended up as Lockdown-/Panic-induced unnecessary deaths).

The ground was also partly seeded by new technologies and by higher-than-ever average ages, and a new religion was born. But we still unclear why people would cut their tether to reality and embrace something which, even at the time, had many the telltale signs of mass-delusion. Why they would stay with it when evidence was (at best) weak and weaker by the week. Why they would keep with the Panic after the core tenets were in essence disproved entirely (the “millions of deaths” scaremongering was effectively disproved in spring 2020 already), and rather than softening they just dug in harder with religious fervor.

This very close look at one of the major Corona Pro-Panic activists and enforcers is, I hope, a window into the kind of person who “dove in head first” and slopped around in the Panic and gained national and global fame for it. You can choose to write him off as just an anti-DeSantis demagogic figure using “the virus” as pretext to take down someone he dislikes.

I think there are deeper lessons for who is behind the Corona Pro-Panic coalition through who he is, how he sees himself and how he sees his place in the world. In other words, it’s true Uhlfelder is anti-DeSantis, but he is probably also independently Pro-Panic; the two merged together, and given his preexisting connections, he broke through as a major Pro-Panic figure. His Pro-Panic attitude may be drawn from ethno-cultural-political prejudices and inherited attitudes, and that may well be a scalable finding to other major Pro-Panic figures.

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[End.]

Update, July 2022:

Daniel Uhlfelder is running for attorney general of Florida in 2022.

See the comment section below for updates, including:

• Daniel Uhlfelder’s campaign-video (released in March 2022) and

• An overview of the other Democratic primary contenders with Uhlfelder (main rival, Aramis Ayala), and other running commentary.

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