That’s the message Gov. Ron DeSantis, who wants to be president, sent when he banned African-American studies from Florida schools.
One of his explicit objections to the course was inclusion of “Black Lives Matter” materials. According to him, “Black Lives Matter” has no place in the education of Florida children of any color.
Let’s get down to brass tacks: DeSantis is a racist. His party is racist. They fight for Confederate monuments and against police reform aimed at stopping the rampant police lynchings of black people.
He’s also a bigot and hypocrite. In the video clip below, he referred to a “queer agenda” and called it “political.” That’s hate speech. Why? Because being an LGBQT person is neither an agenda nor political; it’s a state of existence.
Conservatives are dead wrong when they claim homosexuality is a “behavior;” it’s a biological condition people are born with and can’t change. Why, in God’s name, would anyone choose to be LGBQT given the hate, discrimination, and violence they’re subjected to? (Earlier this week, Trump said it should be illegal to be an LGBQT person. He speaks for a considerable chunk of the Republican Party.)
The campaign of hate that DeSantis, Trump, and the Republican Party are waging against the LGBQT community, with the tacit approval of the six Catholic conservatives on the Supreme Court, is reminiscent of the Nazi persecution of Jews. Yes, I know you’re not supposed to compare anyone with the Nazis, because the Holocaust was unique; but I’m sorry, the GOP “culture war” against LGBQT people has the same stench of persecuting people because of what God made them.
For DeSantis to criticize anything as “political” is hypocritical when he’s trying to jam conservative ideology into Florida’s colleges, excluding liberal ideas from schools, and pushing for legislation to force private social media companies to disseminate conservative political speech.
The bottom line is that Ron DeSantis is an awful person, not an alternative to Trump that decent Republicans can vote for. That became obvious when he hijacked federal Covid relief funds to round up legal Venezuelan asylum seekers in Texas and dump them on a curb in Massachusetts as a political stunt. But DeSantis is worse than that; he’s a tyrant bent on suppressing the idea that black lives should matter.
Related article: A liberal commentator compares DeSantis to Mussolini (read it here).