Florida’s Governor is unambiguous in his support for keeping up Confederate monuments, describing such efforts as a slippery slope that could lead to the removal of tributes to Martin Luther King Jr. if today’s standards are applied to bygone history.
“I’m 100% against removing the monuments. I think it’s just gone too far,” Ron DeSantis said on the first day of Black History Month.
DeSantis was responding to reporter questions about proposed legislation that would impose punishments on localities for taking down the memorials to the Civil War losers, which have a special provenance to certain Floridians.
“I have not seen the legislation, but I’ve been very clear ever since I’ve been Governor, I do not support taking down monuments in this state,” DeSantis said Thursday in Jacksonville.
The Governor said calls for the removal of “some Civil War general or whatever” have evolved into other forms of historical erasure, such as “taking down Thomas Jefferson and Teddy Roosevelt and (Abraham) Lincoln, taking (George) Washington’s name off schools.”
“I think it’s totally appropriate for the Legislature to say we’re going to stop the madness,” DeSantis said.
He then referred to a local activist calling to take down the city’s Andrew Jackson statue downtown.
“What are we going to do: rename the city? I mean, come on, we’ve got to stop doing this and I think that it’s just, it’s not something that’s going to end up working out well for us and especially it’s like, you know, who’s next?” DeSantis said.
“You’re already up to, like, Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt. I mean, you’re going to go on and on there because … if you’re going to apply some type of hyperwoke 21st century test to pass people, you going to run into turbulence with MLK Jr., you’re going to run into turbulence with a lot of people.”
Bills are moving to stop monument removal in both the Senate and House. The Senate version envisions a retroactive provision allowing for the reinstatement of monuments removed since 2020, which would include two Jacksonville structures erected during the Jim Crow era of enforced racial segregation. The House version has been changed through the committee process to apply only to future monument removals.
Remarks DeSantis made on the presidential campaign trail suggest that he is taking a newly sympathetic look at preserving Confederate history, including reversal of one base renaming despite the ignominious military history of its former namesake.
In June, the Florida Governor said the newly rechristened Fort Liberty in North Carolina should have its name changed back to honor Braxton Bragg, whose legacy as a rebel commander was undistinguished even by the markers of the rebel army.
“Here’s what I said with respect to Fort Bragg is, that’s an iconic base in this country. I didn’t even know it was a Civil War general,” said DeSantis, who graduated from Yale in 2001 with a B.A., magna cum laude in history.
“I don’t think most people knew it was a Civil War general. You just know you’ve been to Bragg, right? And they’re changing it for political correctness reasons. And so I don’t believe in doing it for political correctness reasons and that’s just kind of how we’re going to roll on it. And here’s the thing, you know, you learn from history, you don’t erase the history.”
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