Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) on Wednesday signed a bill to ensure that students in the Sunshine State truly learn about the “truth of communism,” building upon past efforts of the Florida legislature to shine a light on the atrocities of the ideology.
Meeting on the sixty-third anniversary of the Bay of Pigs, DeSantis and other Florida officials held a press conference. The governor explained that the evils of communism often not only get “lost” in the shuffle of everyday life, but some colleges seek to “rehabilitate” and “whitewash” it.
DeSantis said:
Sometimes they’ll say, ‘Well, true communism has never been tried’ … So there’s apologists for communism in our society. And what we’re doing today builds off the stake in the ground that we planted in the state of Florida many years ago when I first became governor. It’s that we’re going to tell the truth about communism in the state of Florida.
He emphasized that Florida schools are going to “tell the truth about the evils of communism” and the “unprecedented death toll of the twentieth century at the hands of Communist tyranny, 100 million killed at the hands of communist regimes spreading from China to the Soviet Union to Cuba.”
“Those are the facts, and those are what we need to be very clear-eyed about now,” he said, noting he has signed legislation in years past aimed to honor the victims of communism and required “45 minutes of instruction in a U.S. government class” on topics related to the history of communism — from the Stalinist regime to the tyrannical Cuban regime and much more.
These topics, the governor said, are simply shining a light on the “truth of what actually happened.”
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“I didn’t see people fleeing into Mao’s China. I didn’t see people fleeing into the Soviet Union. People are fleeing these regimes, and they fled these regimes over many, many decades because of how tyrannical they were,” he said. “So this is the first full school year that that instruction was implemented,” DeSantis continued, bringing him to Wednesday’s signing of Senate Bill 1264, which “builds off the success that we’ve had in telling the truth about communism and communist regimes.”
“And so, this will add to the teaching standards,” he said, explaining that it will add the “history of communism in the United States as well,” highlighting the “tactics used by communist activists and movements here in the United States and throughout history.”
“So that is going to make the education about communism much more comprehensive, and it’s going to give the students the truth about communism,” DeSantis said, noting the stark reality that many students will not hear the truth once they go to college.
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Florida Education Commissioner Manny Diaz spoke after DeSantis and praised the bill, explaining:
[It] gives us the opportunity to ensure that we learn history so that our students in Florida are not apt to repeat that history and really understand the evils of communism, the over 100 million deaths as a result of communism, [and] all of the lives [that] have been shattered and destroyed.
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He continued:
And so, what will happen is the history of communism in the United States — domestic movements, including their histories and tactics, all of the atrocities that have occurred across the world, in foreign countries under the guidance of communist policies of Cuba and the spread of communist ideologies throughout Latin America [will be] spread across the curriculum K through 12 [in an] age-appropriate [manner.]
“Our students, from elementary school or middle school or high school, will have a foundation and an understanding. So when they get to the higher ed level, they will not be fooled by anyone trying to tell them the story,” he added.
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