His Instagram videos move fast – jump cuts, punchy monologues, biting accusations, and populist flavor. He even has a catchy moniker: “Matt the Welder.” With his face or body wedged somewhere into the limited screen space for just an extra dose of authenticity, Matthew Taylor has managed to turn his social media skills into a fairly large audience on Instagram. He did it by playing the role of a common-sense, hard-charging everyman, willing to call out anyone and everyone on Florida’s conservative side of the political aisle if he thinks they deserve it.
And now, he wants to turn his internet fame into political power.
Last week, Taylor announced his candidacy for Florida Agriculture Commissioner, promising to “stop overdevelopment” and “protect farmland” from “crooked bureaucrats.”
Sounds good to me.
Except…hold on a minute. Isn’t that the same sort of thing every candidate for Ag Commissioner promises? Fight for farmers and protect our state’s natural beauty? Sure, Taylor’s delivery is entertaining enough, so maybe that’s all Florida needs is someone who’ll crank out 15-second social media videos to help feed our growing doom-scrolling habit.
But beyond that, is there enough actual substance to this guy to entrust him with responsibility for Florida’s Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services?
Last year, Taylor ran briefly for governor. And then…he changed course and made a run for a County Commission seat in Hillsborough County. Legacy media outlets like the Tampa Bay Times, undoubtedly attracted to Taylor’s willingness to blast Republicans, helped grow his online profile, treating his internet persona as a colorful citizen-watchdog and, at least for a time, a legitimate catalyst for government scrutiny. But as with most things in the media, there’s always more lurking beneath the surface if we just dare to scratch it.
Times stories introduced Taylor as “Matt the Welder,” a blue-collar truth-teller with a tool in one hand and a camera in the other, a quirky Plant City character who even helped spark legitimate questions about fire inspections at a pair of his campaign event venues. But when nothing came of those accusations and voters ultimately rejected Taylor’s candidacy, the real-life Matt Taylor faded from public view. His feed went dark for months, and at least some of his fans noticed:
Screenshot from deleted video
Screenshot from deleted video
After reaching out to Taylor about leaving the state of Florida, Taylor explained his two-month absence as that he’d “taken a vacation.” But while this article was being drafted, the video at the link above, and other less flattering videos, were quickly removed from his social media feeds.
What Taylor himself revealed in those videos, including one entitled “Later Bros,” was that he’d had a minor run-in with the law that resulted in his detention and evaluation by a mental health professional, and he was now posting his Florida videos from the “safety” of another state. Property records show that Taylor had, in fact, sold his Florida home and bought a property in West Virginia in April of this year. But his head-first run-in with Florida law enforcement – and the state’s Baker Act evaluation protocol – occurred in early November of 2024.
Despite what Taylor said in the video, it’s not clear two issues are linked, in part because he continued posting content for months before he ultimately disappeared in February.
When confronted with specifics about his legal residency status, Taylor insisted he was still a Florida resident, despite evidence to the contrary. He fired a defensive email back:
“I do live in Florida. My family owns property both here and up north, and I spent a few months away after what I felt was political targeting,” Taylor wrote in an email to The Capitolist. “But Florida is home. It’s where I was born, raised, and where I’m proud to be running to serve.”
But he didn’t stop there. After a few more basic questions related to how he planned to explain his West Virginia residency to Florida voters, he again fired back:
“As far as my residency, I’ve always lived in Florida, and I have never stated that I “moved to West Virginia.” In fact, I’ve never even mentioned West Virginia publicly. I would love for you to cite your source on that information. I did take a vacation from the state for a short time to keep myself and my family safe from political targeting.”
In fact, what he said is true: Taylor didn’t mention West Virginia in his videos. But he didn’t need to. His social media posts, including the “Later Bros” video, revealed plenty, including the fact that his new West Virginia house and front porch featured in his social media feeds match state property records and real estate listings for the address listed in the deed to his new West Virginia home…well, except for the conspicuously placed Florida flag:
Compare that with images from real estate listings for the house, the fact that the image matches the property records, and we have a winner:
No matter how he spins it, Matt the Welder appears to be a Mountain State man.
To his credit, in the same video proving his West Virginia residency, he at least fessed up to the mental health incident with law enforcement, acknowledging he’d not been behaving properly, and, more good news: his mental health evaluation came back clean. Well…that is, except for one note by the examining psychiatrist, who wrote that Taylor “presented with a preoccuption with the environment and radiation.”
We know this level of detail because (a) the police report is a matter of public record, and (b) we didn’t even have to ask for it because Taylor himself posted a screen shot of it in one of his videos, even superimposing his own image over the top of it, as he often does:
And that brings us to the more disturbing part of the Matthew Taylor story: his online content. On Instagram he’s a one-man newsroom on fast-forward. He’s brilliant at presentation – his snappy videos feel substantive – but when you check the math, most of it doesn’t add up, and worst of all, the footnotes are missing. He’s A Beautiful Mind’s John Nash, but instead of an insane network diagram on his office wall, he’s churning out non-stop Instagram reels alleging corporate and political corruption in every nook and cranny he pokes into: it’s literally everywhere, according to him.
Even the Tampa Bay Times in its heyday, with teams of investigative reporters, could only dream of publishing a major breaking news scandal once every few weeks. But “Matt the Welder” cranks out new ‘scandals’ faster than the Weather Channel cranks out Florida thunderstorm warnings.
If you’re a hammer, everything looks like a nail; if you’re Matt the Welder, every park near an old phosphate mine looks like the site of a radioactive meltdown from Fujishima or Chernobyl. Taylor’s delivery is surgical, but his sourcing is “trust me, bro.”
One of his recent video investigations features him walking around Florida parks with an Amazon Prime-grade Geiger counter pressed into the ground, posting screenshots of the meter flashing “High” and claiming that’s proof that Florida is being poisoned by phosphate mines and corrupt politicians. It looks dramatic because that’s how those gadgets are designed to look – especially when you stick the gadget directly on top of Florida’s naturally-occurring phosphate. It’s no secret, and Taylor himself has since acknowledged, that phosphate has a very low level of natural background radiation.
The problem is that Taylor’s readings were taken from ground level, even though trained survey technicians and government regulators from around the world (the government of Japan and the University of Georgia, to name a few), including the Florida Department of Health and local health officials, all take measurements at a 1-meter survey height and compare that data to background radiation over time.
But…if you’re trying to make a sensational internet video, a much more exciting method is to put the probe on naturally radioactive phosphate – the same stuff we use to fertilize our crops – and you can make almost anywhere look like Chernobyl, thanks to the Inverse Square Law. Hold it above the ground where it’s supposed to be held and the count rate drops back toward reality. Taylor’s videos never quite spend enough time explaining issues, and that little piece of radiation survey methodology is just another victim of the modern day social media attention span.
Radiation is just one of Taylor’s obsessions, though. Sometimes it’s utilities. Next up, it’s overdevelopment. Then corruption at the Florida Fish and Wildlife Commission. Then it’s political persecution by a Tallahassee political consultant, or Ron DeSantis himself, or maybe it’s a “greedy corporation” that dared to try to turn a profit. It’s always someone powerful, always someone allegedly but only vaguely involved in something Taylor claims is corrupt, always someone responsible for whatever random number his Geiger counter happened to flash that day. Notably, there’s always a link to support “Florida coverage” through his Florida Cracker News Network brand and to purchase his merch.
He says he’s doing it “for the people.” But he is also very clearly doing it for the people’s money, and that means he’s got to crank out the hits or the well goes dry. Taylor appears to have found a way to keep the cash flowing, even if that means the truth is only sprinkled into his videos.
