Ron DeSantis declared Florida is where woke goes to die.
DeSantis was not messing around.
And now Ron DeSantis dropped the hammer on the woke mob with one brilliant move.
After declaring war on woke in his inaugural address DeSantis set about making good on expunging left-wing indoctrination in Florida’s colleges and universities.
The first target was Florida’s New College – a left-wing bastion of the type of woke ideology that infected campuses across the nation.
DeSantis appointed seven new members to the college’s board of directors – who in the words of DeSantis’ education commissioner Manny Diaz – had the goal of turning New College into a “classical college, more along the lines of a Hillsdale of the south.”
Hillsdale College is a conservative, Christian institution in Michigan that teaches actual American history, free market economics, and rejects woke identity politics.
One of the new board members was Manhattan Institute scholar Christopher Rufo.
Rufo single-handedly raised the awareness of Critical Race Theory through his appearances on Tucker Carlson’s show.
Rufo has called for conservatives to take a more aggressive posture in reforming government-run education by defunding left-wing bureaucracies and programs that serve to indoctrinate students and impose an anti-American world view.
“We have to get out of this idea that somehow a public university system is a totally independent entity that practices academic freedom—a total fraud, that’s just a false statement, fundamentally false—and that you can’t touch it or else you’re impinging on the rights of the gender studies department to follow their dreams,” Rufo stated. “‘What the public giveth, the public can taketh away.’ And so we get in there, we defund things we don’t like, we fund things we do like.”
The number one target Rufo explained – were Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion programs.
“Some people don’t like thinking about it that way,” Rufo added. “But guess what? The public universities, the DEI departments, the public school bureaucracies are, at the end of the day, patronage systems for left-wing activists. And as long as there’s going to be a patronage system, wouldn’t it be good to have some people who are representing the public within them?”
These programs are nothing but Marxist racial spoil systems that promote preferences based on skin color.
Ron DeSantis is following this model.
DeSantis’ administration sent a letter to every college and university demanding they report how much money they spent on diversity, equity, and inclusion programs.
Vanity Fair reported DeSantis announced “in a press conference announcing a suite of plans to reform higher education, including defunding all diversity programs at public universities and requiring them to instead teach a core curriculum focused on Western civilization, further eroding the protections of faculty tenure, bolstering University of Florida’s conservative institutes with even more funding and autonomy from university administrators, and transferring hiring authority from faculty committees to college presidents and the trustees who appoint them.”
Ron DeSantis won a landslide re-election win and gained popularity nationally because DeSantis wants to tear apart the Left’s control over major institutions in America.
And the first front in this battle is higher education.
DeSantis Daily will keep you up-to-date with any new developments in this ongoing story.
