The left has attempted to impose woke gender ideology on children through a variety of means, including corporate pressure, but it is “not based on science,” Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) said during a Sunday speech at the National Conservatism conference in Miami.
“Focus on academics. Don’t try to impose ideology on young and vulnerable kids, and most people think that that’s common sense,” DeSantis said during his speech, explaining how the left recruited the establishment media and corporations to shove their agenda down the throats of parents.
“The left, you know, they’re smart about some of these things. They know if you run for election in Florida, saying we need to teach first graders that even though they were born a boy, they may really be a girl that is not going to go over very well with parents,” he said, identifying it as a “losing issue,” which ultimately led radical leftists to look to corporations for help.
“And at the end of the day, people were saying, well, if a company like Disney gets involved, they’re just so powerful. There’s no way that this bill is going to be able to make it the governor is not going to be able to sign it,” he said, explaining how he signed the Parental Rights in Education bill despite opposition from major institutions such as Disney. The law itself, in part, bars classroom discussions on gender ideology and sexual orientation for children in kindergarten through third grade — a standard most Americans agree with.
But the fight did not begin there, either, DeSantis continued, reminding the crowd that his administration enacted legislation to protect women’s sports. But the battle is far from over, he continued.
“We’re also now having to fight this thing where they’re actually taking minors and they’re performing very irreversible invasive sex change operations on people that can’t even consent to get a tattoo or can’t even do a lot of other things,” he said.
“So you’re seeing double mastectomy is be performed against teenage girls. You have boys that are have all kinds of really, really difficult stuff,” he added, making it clear that this is “not based on science.”
“This is not based on medical evidence. This is based on ideology. And so we now have– our Board of Medicine has instituted a proposed rule that will go into effect and will basically say, licensed practitioners cannot be performing sex change operations on minors in the state of Florida,” he said, explaining that he believes this backwards ideology is dominating the narrative because of what he described as “the woke mind virus.”
“I think this is ideology run amok. I think you’re seeing it all across a variety of institutions, which I think is one of the reasons why the moment we have right now is more challenging than maybe some moments that we had in the past,” he said, explaining that big government is not the only thing infected anymore:
Because I think when Reagan came on the scene, for example, it was really big government. That was to blame and big government that needed to be reeled in. Yes, we still need to do that. Don’t get me wrong, but you now have the woke mind virus has infected all these other institutions. I mean, just look at corporate America. Most corporations, some of these big corporations are now exercising quasi public power in terms of using their economic power to change policy in this country. You just saw what the credit card companies are going to try to do with the firearms. You’ve seen big Wall Street banks collude to deny financing to companies who may be involved in combating illegal immigration or firearms or things that they don’t like.
“I think the lesson for people on the right is I think there was a generation of people, that kind of the muscle memory was just if it’s private, just defer to it. If it’s a corporate, let them do kind of what they want to do, because, you know, look, we don’t want to micromanage different things in the economy. I’m not I’m not a central planner. I certainly don’t want to don’t want to be doing that,” DeSantis said, adding that “corporatism is not the same as free enterprise.”
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