The Daily Beast broke hilarious reporting this week, confirming that Florida Democrats are ironically weaponizing Right-wing Governor Ron DeSantis’ infamous, heinous book ban laws… To try to ban the Republican governor’s own new tell-all.
DeSantis’ vague yet disgusting and deeply disturbing law allows Florida parents to remove books from their children’s schools that they’ve arbitrarily deemed “inappropriate.” The verbiage of the law lacks any sort of concrete guidelines or criteria as to what qualifies a book to be “inappropriate.”
“In a clever bit of trolling, Florida Democrats are subjecting DeSantis’ new tome — ‘The Courage To Be Free: Florida’s Blueprint for America’s Revival’ — to the rules that he and GOP lawmakers established to weed out books with allegedly inappropriate content on race, sexuality, and gender from school libraries,” Jake Lahut reports for the Beast. “Fentrice Driskell, the minority leader in the Florida House, is leading an effort across 50 counties to see if any of them might review or ban DeSantis’ book based on his law’s vague and unwieldy criteria.”
Driskell gave a statement to the publication on the matter, saying, “The very trap that he set for others is the one that he set for himself.”
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The Beast makes note of the fact that, practically speaking, no Florida schools so far actually even stock the governor’s new book in their libraries, much less utilize the tell-all for any sort of classroom curriculum. However, it’s the principle of it, isn’t it? As the report notes that the whole point is “[draw] attention to how HB 1467’s vague and arbitrary language can be abused when taken to its logical conclusions — while putting a critical spotlight on the contents of the book, widely seen another clear sign that DeSantis will run for president in 2024.”
Fringe Right-wing activists have been taking advantage of DeSantis’ purposely vague and frankly confusing new law to essentially rip books out of the hands of children that contain any sort of content or theme that they even remotely don’t agree with — leaving FL schools and teachers unsure of what’s safe, and where to even go from here.
“Few policy projects have been more central to DeSantis’ brand as an education culture warrior than HB 1467, making it a natural target for Florida Democrats,” the Beast reports. “Particularly with the drop in Democratic turnout that helped DeSantis cruise to reelection, Driskell said the onus is on Florida Democrats to not rely solely on attacking the Florida governor … Driskell added that polling shows parents are largely not fans of government interventions such as book banning, but the rest of the country hasn’t had to deal with a law like DeSantis.”
Read the full report from the Daily Beast here.
Featured image via screen capture
