Gov. DeSantis charges ‘elite corporate outlets’ with ‘gaslight’ on critical race theory

DeSantis 6
DeSantis turns the Miami sound machine on, targets 'faddish ideologies.'

Gov. Ron DeSantis renewed his vows to stamp out critical race theory in Florida classrooms.

Speaking at Florida International University, DeSantis insisted the corporate media was trying to “gaslight” people about the effects of the philosophy.

“There’s a movement now in some of the elite corporate outlets to gaslight people about what critical race theory is. I saw one thing saying Texas has a bill, ‘they don’t want people to learn about slavery,’ that’s nonsense,” DeSantis told reporters Monday.

“You teach the facts. You teach everything that’s happened. But what critical race theory is, is basically race essentialism,” DeSantis added, using a phrase favored by other critics of the philosophy around the country.

“It teaches people to view that as the most important characteristic. And obviously if you’re certain races, Caucasian, what-not, they view that in a negative fashion. That is not something that’s appropriate for schools. It’s based on historical falsehoods,” DeSantis added. “For example, some of these people have said the American Revolution was fought, uh, because they wanted to preserve slavery. Really? In Lexington and Concord, that’s what they were fighting about?”

“Just open up a history book,” DeSantis advised. “Read the pamphlets. Read what they were doing at the time. It doesn’t have a place.”

DeSantis noted that while the Board of Education will meet in “a week or two” to discuss the philosophy, the buck ultimately stops with him and the Legislature.

“If you continue to have some of this movement in spite of the state policy, it really should have funding consequences that flow from it. Look, have we done so well on the basics that we go off on these political and ideological tangents in our schools? They’re not supposed to be indoctrinating kids with faddish ideologies. They’re supposed to be teaching the basics. Let them make sense of this for themselves,” DeSantis said to applause, at yet another event that melded a formal ceremonial bill signing with the optics and exuberance of a political rally.

The critical race theory condemnation continues a sequence of crowd-pleasing quotes on the subject, a hot button issue for the right.

“You can put lipstick on a pig, it’s still a pig,” DeSantis said in Pensacola on Friday.

“If we have to play whack a mole all over the state stopping this critical race theory, we will do it,” he later added.

A.G. Gancarski

A.G. Gancarski has written for FloridaPolitics.com since 2014. He is based in Northeast Florida. He can be reached at [email protected] or on Twitter: @AGGancarski


5 comments

  • tjb

    May 24, 2021 at 2:38 pm

    DeSantis, you say CRT has no place in the classroom, but what about studying White Supremacy in today’s society?

  • Frankie M.

    May 24, 2021 at 4:21 pm

    Instead maybe lil Dickie Corcoran can indoctrinate the kiddos with some junk science curriculum he picked up from his neocon buddies?

  • Javan

    May 24, 2021 at 6:27 pm

    CRT sees racists or white supremacists behind every bush, and invites criticism of everything but itself as criticism of it is denounced as “fragility”. The 1619 Project founder Nikole Hannah-Jones’ work was roundly criticized by numerous historians, left and right, as fictitious. Critical Race Theory is the friend and ally of Woke Capitalism (the newest iteration in the merger of Big Business and Big Government) that Matt Taibbi and TheHill have shown in the YouTube video “Matt Taibbi Dismantles Woke Corporate Race Book “White Fragility.”

    CRT doesn’t seek to examine racism, but rather is a leftist construct of false arguments that has no scientific methodology to achieve this. Instead, it relies upon anecdotal evidence to paint “whitey” with a broad brush, is bolstered by the “Kafka Trap”, falsely labels groups as oppressed or oppressors, and says racism is an unchangable part of America while ironically advocating for black only spaces; All the while it ignores that black Moors enslaved whites, ignores blacks and whites being enslaved in the Middle East in the 700’s-1000’s and later enslaved again when Christian Eastern and Western Europe were invaded, ignores that other Semites owned a disproportionate share of slave ships and slave markets in the Trans Atlantic Slave Trade, etc. Point is we shouldn’t single out and beat up on any religion or race because they’ve all hand their hands in this.

    CRT isn’t actually a social science, but is rather a pseudoscience masquerading as science as it laughably claims that science (math, chemistry, etc) is subjective. And the irony is that the science-denier CRT proponents outright reject objectivity and logic as well.

    Watch videos on Noel Ignatiev (“Noel Ignatiev on Whiteness”) as he projects his internal bias thinking he is being anti-racist and you will see the madness of this as CRT was founded upon Critical Theory from the Frankfurt School of Herbert Marcuse, Max Horkheimer, etc.

    • K. Day

      May 25, 2021 at 1:42 pm

      Well said, Javan.

    • KariAnn

      May 26, 2021 at 7:46 am

      Nicely stated, thank you. Our teachers are being brainwashed by the Critical Race UNIONS (their livelihood depends on their “agreement”). That in turn trickles down to the most IMPORTANT PLAYERS, the CRITICAL PIECE to education itself…the STUDENTS.
      What can you do??? Go here…
      https://1776projectpac.com/

Comments are closed.


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