Florida GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis had to know he was in unfriendly territory during a trip to New York City on Sunday — and he wasn’t backing down a bit.
He didn’t back down when the original site planned for his speech canceled him. He didn’t back down from Democrats protesting outside.
And he didn’t back down from his message on Sunday, and it was what Republicans, and all Americans, needed to hear.
“You know, I saw that there was a little opposition to me coming here,” DeSantis said, according to Florida’s Voice. “All I can tell you is this: When the left is having a spasm, that just tells you that in Florida we are winning.”
DESANTIS: “They tried to cancel me but here I stand”https://t.co/ZjHBnUS4wi
— Lydia Nusbaum (@LydiaNusbaum) June 13, 2022
DeSantis wasn’t exaggerating about the opposition.
He was originally scheduled to address the Tikvah Fund’s Jewish Leadership Conference at the Museum of Jewish Heritage, an audience and a venue that would have been appropriate for the governor of a state with one of the largest Jewish populations in the country.
Unfortunately, leftist ideology got in the way and the museum canceled the DeSantis appearance.
And on the day of his appearance, according to the New York Post, big-name New York Democrats joined gay and lesbian activists demonstrating outside Pier 60 of the Chelsea Piers Sports & Entertainment Complex, where the Tikvah Fund event ended up.
“They can’t cancel me. I’m gonna speak my mind. When the left is having a spasm, that just tells you that in Florida we are winning.”
– Governor DeSantis, at the Jewish Leadership Conference in NYC yesterday
— Christina Pushaw (@ChristinaPushaw) June 13, 2022
As news writer Zachary Evans reported at National Review, DeSantis used his time to tout the Sunshine State’s approach to handling the COVID-19 pandemic — a model for freedom that leaders of deep-blue cities like New York won’t follow to this day — and to defend Florida’s law keeping sexual education out of classrooms when children are too young to understand it.
And he made it clear his state isn’t going to be bullied, not even by behemoths like the Walt Disney Co.
Under DeSantis, Florida kept its economy, schools and everyday life open as much as possible — without the onerous lockdowns, vaccination mandates and masking that was fetishized by liberal-run states like New York.
Only on Monday, a day after DeSantis spoke, did New York City Mayor Eric Adams lift the city’s mandate for kids aged 2-4 in city-run preschools and daycare centers, the New York Post reported. That’s an obscenity of government overreach that wouldn’t be tolerated in a state that’s run by conservatives — or anyone who cares about individual liberty.
“Now I know New York for a long time, until very recently, force-masked these toddlers, which I think, quite frankly, is inhumane. And so we would never impose those policies in the state of Florida,” DeSantis said, according to the National Review report.
And he made no bones about not kowtowing to the kind of progressive bullying that’s overrun so much of the country. One proof of that is Florida’s Parental Rights in Education Bill, which DeSantis signed in March, that keeps discussion of sexuality — homosexuality, transsexuality, pan-sexuality or whatever else progressives come up with — from infecting the education of young children.
“We have said that the state of Florida is not going to be overrun by woke ideology. It’s just not going to happen,” DeSantis said, according to National Review.
“I think it’s a cancer. I think it will destroy this country if it’s able to get more of a foothold than it already has.”
And if major corporations in thrall to their own leftist employees have a problem with that, they can solve it in their own boardrooms, not the classrooms of public schools.
In April, Florida lawmakers passed and DeSantis signed a bill to strip Disney of the special status it has enjoyed over the Orlando-area’s Disney World since 1967.
Do you think Ron DeSantis should run for president in 2024?
“My duty and my oath of office was to not subcontract out responsibility to a corporation based in Burbank, California,” DeSantis said, according to NR. “That is not going to happen; they’re not going to run this state.”
DeSantis, who’s often talked about as a prospective presidential contender, was delivering a message that contained exactly the kinds of words Americans sorely need to hear from leaders in elected offices.
A crisis like the pandemic is the time for governments to protect American lives and liberty — not use it as an excuse to abrogate the rights guaranteed by the Constitution. (According to the data analytics site Statista, Florida ranked 19th among the states in its death rate from COVID-19. Considering its large percentage of elderly residents, that’s a success by any measure.)
Americans are governed by their elected leaders, not by the bullies of the mobs, which in the 21st century run almost exclusively to the left end of the spectrum in American politics. Woke ideology really is the “cancer” on the body politic today. The failure of Democrats, from President Joe Biden on down, to fulfill their oath of office by standing up — or even adopting it as their own — is the national disgrace of our time.
And elected governments shouldn’t be bullied by major corporations (Disney, say, or a sports team, or even a league like Major League Baseball as a whole). In today’s United States, those corporations are almost infallibly run by cowards who cave to the leftist mob.
DeSantis knew where he was talking on Sunday, and he knew where he was taking the fight.
Predictably, it gave the left spasms.
But to paraphrase DeSantis: When the left is having spasms, the right side is fighting back.
