Failed Republican presidential candidate and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) went on a wide-ranging seven-minute rant on Monday about the “woke mind virus,” gender-affirming healthcare, the Olympics opening ceremony, crime statistics, and student protestors when asked about a recent federal court ruing placing a permanent injunction on his so-called Stop WOKE Act.
The law, which DeSantis signed in 2022, prohibits businesses from requiring employees to attend mandatory diversity and inclusion training, including trainings focused on racial and LGBTQ+ inclusion. Last Friday, Chief U.S. District Judge Mark Walker placed a permanent injunction against the law. Walker called the law “positively dystopian” and said it violates business’s rights to free speech.
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Walker temporarily blocked the law in August 2022 after a honeymoon registry business, a Florida-based Ben & Jerry’s ice cream franchisee, and a workplace-diversity consultant firm sued, saying that the law violated their ability to speak “on important societal matters” and to engage “employees in robust discussion of ideas essential for improving their workplaces.”
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Walker’s ruling was upheld by the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in March. The three-judge appeals court panel said the law penalizes “certain viewpoints — the greatest First Amendment sin.” Last Friday, Walker — who is an appointee of former President Barack Obama — made his injunction permanent.
In a Monday press conference, DeSantis pledged to appeal the decision to the U.S. Supreme Court, which currently has a 6-3 Republican majority.
“We have every right as a state to provide protections for employees and businesses to say if they are doing woke training, which is basically discriminating against folks on the basis of race, you have right to opt out of that,” DeSantis said. “It’s not a question of what the company can say. They can say whatever they want, but you have a right to not have to self-flagellate. You have a right to not have to sit there and listen to nonsense. And so we were right on that.”
DeSantis then mentioned SB 7072, a law he signed in 2021, which seeks to force social media companies to host content that violates their anti-hate speech and other policies. This month, the Supreme Court told lower courts to re-examine the law’s free speech implications.
The governor then said, “The whole gender surgeries for minors. We said not going to fly in Florida,” claiming, “There’s a lot of people making a lot of money off this, and you take some teenager and you cut off private parts, and then they get into their 20s and they can’t reverse it, and it becomes a big, big problem. And it’s not based in science, it’s based in ideology.”
DeSantis continued by discussing the back and forth of court decisions and spreading more disinformation about gender-affirming care. He then said, “At the end of the day, we have every right as a state to say that of all the different things you have when you go go to work, that you can’t be forced to sit there and have to listen to this dribble. You can opt out.”
He then said, “I think if you look Columbia University, you look at some of these, these agencies that we have in government, you look at corporations, some of them, once they get infected and captured by the woke mind virus, the institutions just crumble, and they become hollow shells of what they were supposed to be. What [Florida is] doing when we say ‘We’re woke, goes to die,’ it’s because we don’t want our institutions to be infected with woke ideology. We want our institutions to be rooted in what’s right.”
He then added, “The minute you go into these other things where all of a sudden people get elected district attorney and they release criminals, or they refuse to prosecute criminals, crime goes up. Well, actually, statistics don’t go up, because what they start doing, they stop reporting crimes. So they say, ‘Oh, this crime is down all these cities, and everyone’s scared to walk down the street.’ And no, it’s not that crime is down — it’s that the reporting is down. Because first of all, if you get mugged in some of these places, it’s not even worth reporting it. There’s never going to prosecute somebody for that.”
He offered no proof for his bizarre claim.
He then claimed that Jewish billionaire philanthropist and investor George Soros’s investments in district attorney’s races make it so that “criminals are able to rule the roost.”
He then complained about the opening ceremonies of the Paris Olympic Summer Games — which featured a Dionysian feast with drag queens that was angrily mistaken by many conservative Christian as a mockery of The Last Supper (a famous artwork painted by gay artist Leonardo DaVinci and replicated countless times in modern pop culture).
“I was just sad seeing this,” he said. “It’s like, you know, that was really a symbol of the decline of Western civilization. I don’t think on the closing ceremony they’re going to do anything where they mock Islam, I don’t think that’s going to happen. I’d be willing to bet a lot of money that doesn’t happen. And so when they’re doing that, you know, and they’re mocking The Last Supper like that, it’s just shows that so much of, particularly Western Europe, you know, they’ve really walked away from the values that once made those countries great.”
DeSantis dropped out of the Republican presidential race in January after failing to gain any serious traction among primary voters. He will be ineligible to run again in the next Florida gubernatorial election in 2026. He will leave office in January 2027.
