Charlie Crist Running Mate Mocks DeSantis, Concerned Parents

Karla Hernández-Mats, Rep. Charlie Crist’s (D-FL) running mate in Florida’s gubernatorial race, openly mocked concerned parents and Gov. Ron DeSantis’s administration for proactively taking a stand against math books that include facets of Critical Race Theory (CRT) indoctrination.

“Today I want to talk about something that turned out to be a little bit controversial this past year with Governor Ron DeSantis. It was the banning of books,” Hernández-Mats, who is a teacher, said, identifying Florida as “the second state with the most banned books in the entire country.”

“Yes, what an awful statistic. We are the second state, which means we are the ones that keep kids or people from having access to knowledge, and we know that knowledge is power,” she continued,  minimizing the concerns of parents who stand against woke indoctrination in schools and going on to effectively mock them with a failed attempt at humor.

“I did a little bit of research to try to figure out why math was controversial this year, and why we banned math books — or not we, let me say, why he did. Why he banned math books. So I got this math book,” she said, reading from a fifth grade math book in public schools.

“And I started to do some research. As you will notice, with a lot of notes, there’s a lot of controversy in this book. Yes, the controversy is real. So let me show you some examples of the controversy,” she said before attempting to be funny.

“Example number one, Juan gets $6 for his weekly allowance and spends $4. His sister Tina gets $7. Girls shouldn’t make more money than Juan. We know why this was banned,” she said.

“Example number two: Dad has a flower shop. Boys? Flower shop? We’re not doing that,” she said, essentially cartoonizing the concerns of parents:

Earlier this year, Florida rejected 41 percent of proposed math books due to the inclusion of CRT, Common Core, and the “unsolicited addition of Social Emotional Learning (SEL) in mathematics.”

As Breitbart News reported:

According to the release, of the 54 rejected books, 21 percent were nixed due to having “unsolicited strategies,” including critical race theory. Another 11 percent were not included because they do not align with Florida’s educational standards and include critical race theory. Additionally, nine percent do not meet Florida’s standards outright.

“We’re going to ensure that Florida has the highest-quality instructional materials aligned to our nationally-recognized standards,” Florida Commissioner of Education Richard Corcoran said. “When it comes to education, other states continue to follow Florida’s lead as we continue to reinforce parents’ rights by focusing on providing their children with a world-class education without the fear of indoctrination or exposure to dangerous and divisive concepts in our classrooms.”

“It seems that some publishers attempted to slap a coat of paint on an old house built on the foundation of Common Core, and indoctrinating concepts like race essentialism, especially, bizarrely, for elementary school students,” DeSantis said in the press release at the time, explaining the decision and noting that books must align with state standards — not the standards of the radical left.

Hernández-Mats’ mockery comes as no surprise, as members of the radical left have openly opposed the DeSantis administration’s moves to weed out woke indoctrination and prioritize parental involvement in schools. Crist, for example, mourned the passage of the Parental Rights in Education bill in Florida, preventing classroom discussions on sexual orientation and gender identity for children in kindergarten through third grade, deeming it a “grim day.”