Florida Republican Governor Ron DeSantis signed a bill into law this week aimed at ending extreme left-wing political indoctrination on college campuses by requiring state colleges and universities to conduct annual assessments of the viewpoint diversity and intellectual freedom at their institutions.
The goal of House Bill 233, which was signed into law on Tuesday, is to “ensure that Florida’s postsecondary students will be shown diverse ideas and opinions, including those that they may disagree with or find uncomfortable.”
According to the law:
The State Board of Education shall select or create an objective, nonpartisan, and statistically valid survey to be used by each institution which considers the extent to which competing ideas and perspectives are presented and members of the college community, including students, faculty, and staff, feel free to express their beliefs and viewpoints on campus and in the classroom. The Board of Governors shall annually compile and publish the assessments by September 1 of each year, beginning on September 1, 2022.
“It used to be thought that a university campus was a place where you’d be exposed to a lot of different ideas,” DeSantis said at a press conference this week. “Unfortunately, now the norm is really these are more intellectually repressive environments, you have orthodoxies that are promoted and other viewpoints are shunned, or even suppressed. We don’t want that in Florida, you need to have a true contest of ideas.”
DeSantis repeatedly stressed the importance of intellectual diversity on college campuses and noted that many parents are worried about what will happen to their kids when they enroll in postsecondary education.
“We obviously want our universities to be focused on critical thinking, academic rigor; we do not want them as basically hotbeds for stale ideology. That’s not worth tax dollars,” DeSantis said. “And that’s not something that we’re going to be supporting, going forward.”
“Two weeks ago, at my direction, the State Board of Education took action to stop Critical Race Theory and the 1619 Project curriculum from being a part of our school system,” DeSantis continued. “We do not want curriculum that is judging students based on their race and we do not want false history, like you see with the 1619 Project.”
Naturally, the media has started to panic over a conservative politician wielding power to push back on the far-left indoctrination that is occurring on the campuses of America’s colleges and universities.
In response to DeSantis’ actions, far-left MSNBC propagandist Joy Reid had a deranged meltdown on her failing television show, suggesting that DeSantis was trying to turn Florida into communist China and calling him “Ron Comrade DeSantis.” Fellow far-left MSNBC propagandist Chris Hayes was outraged that DeSantis signed a bill into law that mandates that students be taught about the evils of communism, which is responsible for the deaths of roughly 100 million people. The fact that these two media personalities have to lie about what DeSantis is doing — trying to promote intellectual diversity, which the political Left despises — shows that they fear him because of the impact that he is having.
DeSantis spoke specifically about how some people will see on some college campuses that murderous communist dictator Mao Zedong is treated “positively” and that people are walking around sporting shirts of Che Guevara, whom DeSantis correctly noted was a “communist thug.” DeSantis said that he wants to stop the whitewashing of the horrors committed by these communists. Reid and Hayes oppose this.
“We believe power comes from our Creator to the people, not to the government,” DeSantis added at the press conference as he noted that students will be taught the historical truth about the United States. “We the people create a Constitution with the power, that’s our natural rights.”
Aside from DeSantis’ recent action to stem far-left indoctrination in the public school system, others in the media have sought to tie him directly to former President Donald Trump in an apparent effort to turn off as many Independent voters and moderate Democrat voters to DeSantis before they get a chance to make their own assessment of him.
Washington Post columnist Max Boot, a supposed conservative who has encouraged people to vote only for Democrats, claimed without evidence in his latest piece of Democrat propaganda that DeSantis was trying to show “a genius for appealing to every disreputable prejudice of the GOP base.” Another notorious, although craftier, propagandist at The Washington Post wrote a piece trying to cause conflict between Trump and DeSantis.
The pieces come as a recent straw poll from a top conservative political summit found that DeSantis was the candidate that attendees most approved of to be president, beating Trump.
“What DeSantis is doing is offering Trumpism without a) Trump himself or b) the crazy conspiracy theories about the 2020 election,” CNN blogger Chris Cillizza wrote this week. “And it appears to be working.”
Cillizza noted that “an attempted exposé by ’60 Minutes’ that suggested a link between a campaign donation and vaccine distribution in the state turned into an utter debacle for CBS — and manna from heaven for DeSantis.”
MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” appeared to try to cause conflict between DeSantis and Trump this week, hoping that the latter will attack the former, by noting that DeSantis does not have Trump’s weaknesses.
“He fights all the same fights on issues and on cultural questions that President Trump fought and continues to fight. But he does it without the exhaustion,” left-wing commentator Willie Geist said. “He doesn’t come with all the drama.”
“He checks all the boxes,” co-host Joe Scarborough said. “This news about DeSantis is the best news Mitch McConnell has heard.”
“It will be very interesting to watch, Joe, as DeSantis is elevated by the party, whether in public ways or private ways, how Donald Trump takes that news, because he still wants everyone to believe that he is the leader of the party. And he still is, at the moment. And he still wants everyone to believe that he is going to run again in 2024,” Geist added. “But as DeSantis’ name comes up again, and again, and again, among Republicans, it feels like a matter of time before Donald Trump turns on him.”