The Jacob Engels attacks don’t worry me. This does

I’m interrupting Father’s Day to write this. The irony isn’t lost on me, because in a roundabout way this is a column about being a father.

I deeply appreciate every time a real friend pings me to ask whether I’ve seen the thing that someone who is not a friend said about me.

“Did you see what he just tweeted?”

“Did you see what they called you?”

And every time, I want to answer, “of course I saw it.” I’m in the business of seeing things. My radar is always on. Campaigns launch in our newsletters. Families trust us to share the news that a loved one has passed. Births, birthdays, nuptials, fundraisers, SPOTTEDs — it’s all part of the radar.

The challenge was never seeing the message, rather it’s separating the message from the noise.

A lot of that noise arrives via Google Alerts for my name and my business. Ninety-five percent of them are just a link to a story on Florida Politics, my name buried in the metadata because I’m the publisher.

But every once in a while an alert links to something about me that isn’t friendly. I’ll be honest, it hits in the pit of my stomach every single time.

Two months ago, sitting in chapel at our daughter’s school, an alert led me to a 40-minute-plus, AI-produced shitpost about me, published by an alt-right blogger named Jacob Engels — publisher of the Central Florida Post and a onetime Roger Stone protégé who orbited the Proud Boys and was later sued for defamation over a Florida House race. Nothing in the video was noteworthy except its length. It frightened me that someone spent that kind of time making it.

Imagine having to look at my face for long enough to make that video!

I’m upfront about the mistakes I’ve made. I’ve owned them, been given a second chance, and done the best I could with the third and the fourth. That I was sitting in that chapel next to my wife is probably the best proof of that.

But it was sitting in that place, our daughter’s school, that something profound hit me. My mistakes aren’t only about me anymore. As Michelle said then, eventually we’ll have to sit our daughter down and talk about all the things that are out there on the internet about her father.

I’m not worried about our daughter Googling me. I’m worried about her friends doing it, and weaponizing what they find.

These are strange times to be a kid. They trade lines about the Jeffrey Epstein files and Charlie Kirk’s murder on the playground, half of them with no real idea who either were. I was a political kid, too. But I talked about Magic Johnson and Ozzie Smith a lot more than I talked about George Bush. The President didn’t come up at recess.

So my only real question about Engel’s broadsides was, who was paying for them? Nothing happens in this state without somebody paying somebody.

I don’t begrudge Engels getting paid, I just wanted to know by whom. I suspected Stone, his old mentor. He and I have gone back-and-forth over congressional races, and we beat him every time. But the two have fallen out. Engels is hitting Susie Wiles and James Blair the same way he’s hitting me, and if Stone still had him on a leash, he’d have been told to knock it off by now.

Eventually I landed on the truth: Engels is doing this on his own, and it’s my own fault. I layer caked Engels.

In the movie Layer Cake, Daniel Craig’s character spends the whole movie preaching one rule, never underestimate your enemy. But then he cold-shoulders a nobody named Sidney early on, takes his girl, and never thinks about him again. At the very end — spoiler alert — having climbed to the top of the layer cake and walked away clean, Craig is shot dead on the steps by that same forgotten man.

Maybe a decade ago, I worked outside the Governor’s Inn, a wrought-iron table dragged onto Adams Street, blogging while the lobby corps walked to the Capitol. One evening Engels came by, probably from Clyde’s. He was gentle, kind, no sign of the brash man he would become. He was just a blogger then, like me, and I think he said something about wanting to be like me.

But I cold-shouldered him the way Craig’s character cold-shouldered Sidney. It wasn’t his fault. It’s just that Tallahassee asks you to network with so many strangers that I’d learned to slough people off.

Years later, he’d wrapped himself up with Stone and the alt-right and still never quite broke through. He got himself sued. Elizabeth Cornell, a Republican running for a Lake County House seat, accused him of running a pay-to-play smear operation out of the Central Florida Post during her 2022 Primary against Taylor Yarkosky.

A Judge held him in contempt for stonewalling discovery and issued a warrant for his arrest. Engels answered by taunting the court and announcing he’d fight it from South Dakota. It was somewhere in that stretch — him a fugitive, me watching him descend into right-wing madness — that he reached out to me again. I sloughed him off a second time. I told him, more or less, to leave me alone.

I never thought he warranted the attention. My vaunted radar didn’t protect me from that.

Years after that Adams Street encounter, Engels, powered by AI, is launching one strike after another.

Some friends say I shouldn’t acknowledge any of this, that writing it only draws attention to him. They’re right. But I care less about him than about the friends who keep asking if I’m OK. I’m grateful for them, and for my attorney Natalie Kato, who would pro bono sue the shit out of Engels if he had anything worth suing for.

As always, I let the work speak. Can anyone outwork me? And if they could, would they have the sources, the institutional knowledge, the trust of so many people in this Process?

So let me end not with an apology to Engels, but with one to you.

In the movie, the man at the top of the layer cake gets dropped because he underestimated the person he stepped over. That’s the part I get to skip. I didn’t underestimate Engels. I measured him correctly the first time, on Adams Street, and nothing in the years since has revised that number upward. The cold shoulder was the right call then and it’s the right call now. He has earned no apology from me.

What I am sorry for is that being right about him didn’t spare the rest of you. My friends shouldn’t have to ask if I’m OK. My readers shouldn’t have to scroll past his slop.

You come here for Florida politics, and instead you got a man who surfaced in a Wisconsin motel facing a felony methamphetamine charge and who still found the time, between court dates, to point an AI at my face for God only knows how long. That’s the part I regret. Not him. Never him.

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Ed. note: This story was drafted with assistance from AI. Editorial judgment, sourcing, and final review were performed by Peter Schorsch and the Florida Politics editorial team.