Florida Man, the cliched figment of the liberal imagination and an object of constant mockery and memeification, has long been derided by elites. The website floridaman.com catalogs all news headlines beginning with the two-word phrase followed by something swampily insane. The Florida Man Reddit page has 734,000 followers, and an unrelated Florida Man Twitter half that. On the cover of the Florida Man “adult coloring book,” a guy in an American flag cape guzzles beer in his jean short cutoffs while stepping across a dirty pond full of alligators. Just think: For a mere $7.99, you could order this adult coloring book, break out the colored pencils, and show the world what a rube looks like.

But Florida Man is much more than what he is made out to be. There’s no doubt that there’s a Floridian ethos relating to an affection for sun and surf and the attendant lifestyle choices that accompany living in a state with excellent weather for the better part of the year. But the idea that men from Florida are, on the whole, crazier or more prone to partake in mischievous criminality than their Midwestern or Southern brethren is an artifact of — get this — the state’s unusually transparent government records laws. Eat your heart out, Rebekah Jones. The state’s Sunshine Act (as in, “…is the best disinfectant”) makes crime and booking reports public for media perusal.