The New York Times spent years telling America the Great Emancipator was secretly a racist.
This week Ron DeSantis decided Florida would tell the real story instead.
What DeSantis unveiled in The Villages is already driving liberals up the wall.
DeSantis Brings Lincoln Home To Central Florida
Gov. Ron DeSantis stood in The Villages this week and pulled the cover off a brand new statue of Abraham Lincoln.
This wasn't some random photo op.
It's the latest installment in Florida's America 250 project, a statewide push to put the Founders and the men who saved the country back where they belong.
DeSantis didn't waste time on platitudes.
He talked about a kid born dirt poor in Kentucky who grew up in the Illinois backwoods with no money and no connections.
"He was just somebody that was very smart and worked very hard," DeSantis said.
https://twitter.com/FLVoiceNews/status/2072055093021606310?s=20
That's not a fairy tale.
That's the actual story of the man who freed the slaves, won the Civil War, and held the country together when half of it tried to walk away.
Florida Secretary of State Cord Byrd stood next to the statue and made it simple: Lincoln belongs in the top tier of American presidents, full stop.
He's right, and it's worth asking why anyone would need to say that out loud in 2026.
The New York Times Got There First
Here's what DeSantis is actually up against.
The New York Times built an entire curriculum around the 1619 Project and pushed it into thousands of classrooms.
The project recasts the nation's founding around slavery instead of the Declaration of Independence, and Lincoln gets caught in the rewrite.
Even historians who lean left couldn't defend what it did to his record, blasting the project for factual distortions serious enough to call it anti-historical.
The man who signed the Emancipation Proclamation and put nearly 200,000 black soldiers into Union blue got recast by the paper of record as part of the problem instead of the solution.
https://twitter.com/GovRonDeSantis/status/2071998228040421622?s=20
Florida banned the curriculum outright, first in 2021 and again under the Stop W.O.K.E. Act in 2022.
DeSantis didn't just block a bad textbook.
He's now putting Lincoln back where the Times tried to erase him from, one statue at a time.
Why This Statue Matters More Than It Looks
Lincoln didn't grow up near Florida and he never set foot in The Villages.
DeSantis put him there anyway, because America 250 isn't about geography, it's about restoring the story Americans are supposed to grow up believing.
The Heritage Foundation laid out exactly why that fight matters, warning that when the left expands "equality" into an ever-growing list of progressive demands, the original meaning gets erased entirely.
Lincoln himself called the Declaration of Independence the "apple of gold" and the Constitution the "picture of silver" built to protect it.
The 1619 Project flips that order, making 1619 the founding moment instead of 1776, and slavery the defining feature of the country instead of the thing Lincoln gave his presidency to destroy.
DeSantis is putting statues in front of millions of Floridians that say the opposite.
https://twitter.com/GovRonDeSantis/status/2072027662009168026?s=20
George Washington in Washington County.
Frederick Douglass in St. Augustine.
Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, Calvin Coolidge, James Madison, James Monroe, and now Lincoln, all standing as a rebuttal nobody in Manhattan can edit out.
This fires me up because it's so simple.
You don't beat a lie with a press release, you beat it with granite that's still standing fifty years from now.
The Times can publish whatever revisionist nonsense it wants, but it can't stop a six-year-old in The Villages from walking past Lincoln's statue and asking his grandfather who that man was.
That conversation is the whole ballgame, and DeSantis just made sure Florida wins it.
Sources:
- Michael Costeines, "DeSantis Unveils Statue of Abraham Lincoln for 'America 250'," The Floridian, June 30, 2026.
- Office of Governor Ron DeSantis, "Governor Ron DeSantis Unveils Statue Honoring 'Father of our Country' George Washington," flgov.com, 2026.
- The Heritage Foundation, "The Story of the Declaration of Independence," heritage.org.
- Fox News, "Why schools adopted the 1619 Project as a curriculum when it was full of historical errors," foxnews.com.
