A.G. Gancarski
Florida’s Governor is speaking out about Jacksonville’s removal of a Jim Crow era Confederate monument.
Ron DeSantis ripped Jacksonville Mayor Donna Deegan in the wake of the Mayor’s Office compelling the removal of the Women of the Southland structure from Springfield Park, equating Confederate statues with those honoring American heroes.
“I’m opposed to taking down statues. The idea that we’re going to just erase history is wrong. You’ve seen it now where they tried to take down Thomas Jefferson, they tried to take down George Washington off schools. It just gets so out of hand. So I don’t support taking down statues, particularly if you don’t have legal authority to do it,” DeSantis said.
“I don’t know what the legal basis was to do it. I just kind of got a report on it, but I would not be taking down statues,” DeSantis added.
The Governor made the comments Thursday in Ankeny, Iowa.
Jacksonville’s General Counsel tailored his argument for monument removal around questioning whether the structure was even “historical” or a “contributing structure” to the Springfield historical district, a position based in local ordinance not making that designation clear.
The memo also notes that DeSantis “cannot implement an unconstitutional statute retroactively to penalize the Mayor from exercising her exclusive executive powers over parks under the consolidated City’s unique Charter,” a reference to newly filed legislation that would allow him to remove lawmakers who took down statues.
DeSantis has no comment on the legislation, but he has equated Confederate and American military history as being one and the same this year. He has said North Carolina’s newly rechristened Fort Liberty should have its name changed back to honor Braxton Bragg, whose legacy as a rebel commander was undistinguished even by the markers of the rebel army.
“I’m not in a position to say that somehow I’m so much better than any of this. It’s a different time. People make mistakes. There’s different parts of our society, we look back and can say was a mistake. But this idea that we’re going to erase history, I just think, is fundamentally wrong, and we’re not going to do that,” he said in Texas this summer.
27 comments
Earl Pitts "Sage Expert on Everything" American
December 28, 2023 at 5:04 pm
Thank you President DeSantis for standing up to the “Duvall Dook 4 Brains” in the “Duvall Strong Talaban”.
EPA
Michael K
December 28, 2023 at 5:52 pm
It glorifies the pro-slavery insurrection of the confederacy that waged war against the United States. These monuments glorify the lie of the “lost cause” and were symbols of anti-Black intimidation during the Jim Crow era.
Ron is pandering to the white supremacists’ vote. Nothing more.
Cliff Page
December 30, 2023 at 10:38 am
Your comment is inaccurate propaganda, revisionist history, and Marxist garbage.
Dan Simmons
January 6, 2024 at 5:31 pm
When will the Mayor Deegan rename the city of Jacksonville? The name “Jacksonville” glorifies slave owner Andrew Jackson.
Doesn’t that run counter to the Mayor’s DEI sympathies? Perhaps it depends on context. Perhaps the Mayor has not yet been flashed the signal from up north.
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December 28, 2023 at 6:50 pm
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Seber Newsome III
December 28, 2023 at 7:03 pm
SB1122 and HB395. will punish the cities and counties who have taken down statues and monuments since Oct 1, 2020 at a minimum, it might go back farther. If they don’t put them back, the cities and counties will not receive any money from the state for cultural and arts, which will cost the city millions of dollars. So Deegan made a big big mistake and it will cost her. She is a one term mayor at the least of her troubles. It has just begun and thank you Governor DeSantis, the best Governor in America.
JustBabs
December 29, 2023 at 11:21 am
Too bad you cannot pass a new law and make it retroactive. Not even one year, never mind 6. This will just be more taxpayer money wasted in the courts. Desantis spends Floridian’s money as if it’s his own personal account. I believe it’s called waste, fraud and abuse of government funds. Let’s hope the future sees Desantis held accountable for his criminal actions.
Richard Owens
December 30, 2023 at 1:10 pm
I like the way you think.
WhatNow
December 28, 2023 at 7:24 pm
Perhaps all Confederacy-honoring statues should be shipped to DeSantis’s house so that he could pray to them in his back yard.
Cliff Page
December 30, 2023 at 10:38 am
Ignorant comment.
Stan Smith
December 28, 2023 at 8:48 pm
I don’t believe Ron DeSantis is making a statement about erasing history when he’s attacking American history trying to remove slavery from textbooks
Willie Shelton
December 30, 2023 at 11:52 am
I was thinking the same thing to know history is not to repeat history let’s just learn from the past mistakes and move on and move on
MH/Duuuval
December 28, 2023 at 9:32 pm
Our Mayor should declare the statue surplus property and offer it for $1 to a bidder who can post a bond guaranteeing they are able and willing to move it to private property at their expense.
Evergreen is a potential location.
"Saggezza"
December 29, 2023 at 7:31 am
It was once said, “History does not repeat itself but it often rhymes.” Despite the generational discussion and teaching of the Jewish Genocide by the Nazis, including the remains of the camps like Auschwitz, a faction of people around the world are today calling for the annihilation of the Jewish State and all its citizens. It is not the monument that inspires hate, it is an ideology fostered by evil people.
MH/Duuuval
December 29, 2023 at 11:32 am
The problem is zionism, or the belief of some Jews that their maker gave Jews exclusive right — 2000 years in advance — to the territory currently wracked by conflict.
Many Jews are not zionists.
Cliff Page
December 30, 2023 at 10:45 am
Your Zionist conflationary nonsense has nothing to do with a monument to the women – Mothers, Sisters, and Daughters who supported their Boys, Brothers, Husbands, Fathers, and Sons in defense of Florida and the Confederate States of America against a foreign invasion. The first soldier killed in this conflict was a Pensacola Militiaman shot by a Federal soldier in violation of a Federal Armistice initiated by President Buchanan. Not only did Lincoln violate this Armistice and violate international law by attempting to illegally collect tariffs and imposts in Charleston and blockade that port, but he also attempted to blocade Pensicola, a war provocation.
MH/Duuuval
December 30, 2023 at 2:10 pm
You Neo-Cons can spout all sorts of minutae about the South and the Civil War — some of it problematic — but the record is clear: White women owned outright, bought and sold, and abused enslaved Africans.
Not all of them, to be sure, and there were white Southern women who worked to end the war.
Mostly elite white women owned the human chattel and subsequently led the movement to put up monuments all over the South.
The statue in the park in Jax needs to go into private hands and not continue to be a public representation of anything.
Ladee KB
December 29, 2023 at 8:02 am
DeSatan should not comment on anything when he stated blacks benefited from slavery. Kudos to Mayor Deegan 👏.
Cliff Page
December 30, 2023 at 10:50 am
You know nothing about American and Southern slavery or history if you spout this kind of nonsense. Your comments can best be replied to with the answer that was given to reporters by Mohamad Ali on his return from his Uganda match in the “Rumble in the Jungle”. When asked, “How was Africa?, his reply was “Thank God my folks got on that boat”.
MH/Duuuval
December 30, 2023 at 2:22 pm
Ali said many things, some jive. Later, when prompted, he refused to repeat the comment you zeroed in on.
Here’s another thing he said: “I am an African, and my proper name is Muhammad Ali. There is greater dignity in my new name.”
Ali also refused conscription, saying no Viet Cong had ever called him the N-word, and why should he go ten thousand miles away to try to kill other brown-skinned people?
Sonja Fitch
December 29, 2023 at 2:06 pm
Please stfu Desantis! Lies and more lies spew out of Desantis mouth. Get out Desantis!
Ted Ehmann
December 30, 2023 at 10:52 am
I am thinking of what Reverend King once remarked today.
“Man is a sinner before the Almighty God. That is one of the basic facts of the universe and one of the basic facts of life. Now, we’ve tried to get away from this in the modern world, we hate to hear this word “sin.” We try to run from it, and we try to talk about it in other terms. This is one of the weaknesses of religious liberalism, that in throwing out certain traditional concepts…But in throwing out these old traditional conceptions, liberalism fell victim to the danger that forever confronts any new view, and that is that it became sentimental a feeling that man was evolving from a lower state to a higher state and eventually he would move on up the evolutionary ladder and throw off all of the evils and sin of his nature. Then, we came back to see that even after all of that man is still a sinner.”
The acknowledgment of us all being sinners allows us to be both humble and compassionate. The “new” and advanced state of the people can, therefore, be one where we have sympathy and compassion with the slave as well as the mother and wife caught up in a terrible war. That alternative was not sought and so the opportunity for healing
Cliff Page
December 30, 2023 at 11:10 am
DeSantis as Governor is one of the only State officials in the nation to show that he has something more than air between his legs. The majority of spinless Republican RINOS and evangelical do-gooders have shown no courage or spine whatsoever. DeSantis may not be thoroughly schooled in historical details, but he does know how to identify Marxist rhetoric and is willing to stand up to Wokeism and Cancel Culture. He may not recognize that all of this revisionist history derives from the 50+-year-old agenda of the national headquarters of the NAACP’s “Take em Down Movement, or that the genesis of much of the cancel culture today stems from the Marxist propaganda of revisionist history that has been infused since the 60s into our public schools from the works of the late Howard Zinn and his perpetual Marxist ideological machine The Zinn Foundation, but he certainly dares to smell a rat and to stand up for common sense and American values, character, and honor.
Attacking Confederate memorials is an utter disgrace, no different than what the Taliban or Issus did at Banypal or in the Museum of Bagdad or what Zionists are doing to Christian Churches or Muslim Mosques in Gaza today. The Federal Government is in the hands of anarchists, black racist, and a Woke fringe of American society that does not represent the vast majority of what Ronald Regan referred to as the “silent majority”. The Federal Government is engaged in a “Maoist Cultural Revolution”. This needs to end and only DeSantis has been willing to speak up and tell the truth and take action. Hardly any other political leader at the State or local level in the nation has had such courage to speak the truth.
MH/Duuuval
December 30, 2023 at 2:28 pm
If Mr. Page knew his history, he would know the “Silent Majority” was a term popularized by R. M. Nixon as he pushed to kill mo’ commies in southeast Asia.
Ken
December 30, 2023 at 12:21 pm
Cliff–
Your raging paranoia is definitional’–and should featured in one.
Abram Nicholson
December 31, 2023 at 8:02 pm
That idiot is pandering to racists and fails to understand the history that he could use to help this nation become better for all Americans.
Mary Stevens
January 9, 2024 at 12:31 pm
Thanks Desantis for standing up to this so called sanctimonious mayor. First, I have proof that Jim Crow started in the North not South. secondly, the war was about Lincoln forcing the South back into the Union. Lincoln cared nothing about slaves and made white supremacy comments in 1858. ( Feel free to Google) Lincoln made sure Southerners suffered for seceding from the Union. Too bad John Wilkes Booth did not act 4 years earlier. More people died in this war than any other war. In 1861, Atlantas mayor wrote to the Devil Gen Willam Tecumseh Sherman begging that he spare Atlanta. He refused and Atlanta was burned down with thousands of women, children, the elderly, left homeless , starving and suffering. That’s why Sherman said “war is hell.” He ought to know. In 1864, Sherman’s troops burned down a mill in Roswell, Georgia. His troops kidnapped 400 mostly young women and their families. They were forced to go 12 miles away to Marietta, Ga. They were put in rail cars and sent North to Kentucky and Indiana where they were abandoned. Many had to give away their children as they could not care for them. No one knows whatever happened to the “Lost Mill Workers “ as they were not able to return to Roswell, Ga. Read “The Women will Howl” by Mary Deborah Petite. There are more Stories like this. Shame on Deegan. Read “war Crimes against southerners “ by Walter Cisco.
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