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Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is working overtime at blaming any and everyone but himself and his fellow right-wing propagandists for the way his “kill the woke” policies have caused book bans in his state to get out of control.
Last week, the governor of protecting white people from their own fragility said during a news conference in Orlando that he supports a House proposal he claims is designed to limit “bad-faith objections” to school library books and instructional materials. DeSantis also claimed that the idea that Florida bans books all willy-nilly is part of a “false narrative.”
From NBC 6 Miami:
During a news conference Thursday in Orlando, DeSantis said Florida doesn’t ban books but has allowed parents and others to object to certain material. But DeSantis said some have abused the process to “score cheap political points.”
“A lot of the things that people say in the media that were, quote, ‘objected to,’ were actually on the summer reading list of the Florida Department of Education, so this is all a big fraud,” DeSantis said.
The issue of school-book scrutiny has been a political battleground in Florida in recent years. The Legislature and DeSantis since 2022 have approved measures that eased the process for people to object to books and other materials.
The Parental Rights in Education Law was a priority of the DeSantis administration a couple of years ago. The “Don’t Say Gay” law did a number of things, including creating a system in which anyone could challenge a book inside any public school for almost any reason. That book would have to be pulled from the shelves, evaluated by the school district, and then it would be either returned to the library or removed permanently.
A House bill (HB 7025) includes imposing $100 “processing” fees for unsuccessful book objections. The proposed fees would apply to people who do “not have a student enrolled in the school where the material is located” and have “unsuccessfully objected to five materials during the calendar year.”
During the news conference, DeSantis criticized some book objections.
“Likewise, members of the community, although we like people wanting to be involved in what’s going on, to just show up and object to every single book under the sun, that is not an appropriate situation here. And we have seen that occasionally,” the governor said.
According to a House staff analysis of the bill, Florida had 1,218 book objections during the 2022-2023 fiscal year, resulting in the removal of 386 books, with the vast majority coming in Clay and Escambia counties.
For whatever reason, DeSantis is out here pretending he hasn’t based his entire political existence around stripping Florida schools of any educational material that makes white conservatives and anti-LGBTQ bigots uncomfortable.
A person holds a placard at a rally to protest Florida education policies outside Orlando City Hall on April 21, 2023, in Orlando, Florida. | Source: Anadolu / Getty
Here’s what actually happened: DeSantis gave a bunch of closed-minded conservatives the right to challenge any book that they feel falls under the governor’s ridiculously broad and biased definition of “woke,” and now he’s acting surprised when mobs of the most ignorant, bigoted and regressive people in his state took his white-and-fragile anti-woke nonsense and ran with it.
Now, DeSantis is claiming, without evidence, that it’s all part of a “hoax” driven by political “activists,” including people who aren’t even parents of school students.
“If you have a kid in school, OK. But if you’re somebody who doesn’t have a kid in schools and you’re going to object to 100 books — no, I don’t think that that’s appropriate,” DeSantis said.
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In fact, DeSantis’ office put out a press release titled, “Governor Ron DeSantis Debunks Book Ban Hoax,” although he didn’t actually debunk anything, because, again, that would require evidence as opposed to simply taking his word for it that “activists” are at fault. It’s also worth pointing out that his office put out a press release with the same exact title last year claiming it was “leftist activists” who were to blame for the same “hoax,” because obviously, this isn’t a new problem for him.
Last week, we reported that a Florida school sent students home with permission slips just so they “participate and listen to a book written by an African American.” Here’s what I wrote when a Florida Republican also claimed that was a hoax:
It wasn’t a hoax when DeSantis and the Florida Board of Education approved lessons that taught enslaved people benefited from slavery. It wasn’t some giant prank when Florida officials said they rejected an Advanced Placement course covering African American Studies because the curriculum didn’t offer any “opposing viewpoints” or “other perspectives” of slavery. The “education” board wasn’t just playing around in our faces when it put unqualified Black conservative “educators” with no real expertise in Black History in charge of its new Black history standards, and those non-experts got most of their “history” completely wrong. And it was no hoax when those same Florida officials selected PragerU—an unaccredited conservative non-profit organization founded by racist conservative radio host Dennis Prager—to provide classroom materials to Florida schools. (We previously reported about how PragerU produced animated videos for children that taught, among other things, that ex-slave and iconic abolitionist Frederick Douglass would have agreed with America’s choice to prioritize white supremacy over ending slavery.)
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