In the last gasps of his presidential campaign, Florida’s Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis continues to brag that he made his state the place where “woke goes to die.” He has made his war on woke a central plank in his ongoing effort to secure the Republican nomination.
There has been nothing subtle about DeSantis’ effort to promote himself as a leading culture warrior or to take credit for slaying the woke dragons. That self-promotion was quickly put on display in his victory speech after he was re-elected governor in a 2022 landslide. Standing behind a banner with an image of Florida and the words “Freedom Lives here,” DeSantis proudly proclaimed, “We reject woke ideology.” He then listed in his ongoing battles against that ideology: “We fight the woke in the legislature. We fight the woke in the schools. We fight the woke in the corporations. We will never ever surrender to the woke mob.”
He repeated these lines in his second-term inaugural address and has used them throughout his effort to win the Oval Office. In debate after debate over the last several months, DeSantis has faulted his rivals for being unwilling to “stand up and fight back against what the left is doing to this country” and boasted of many victories over the woke mob.
Among them, DeSantis lists wins over the teachers union on school choice, over Dr. Anthony Fauci on COVID policies, and over George Soros after the Sunshine State governor “removed two of his radical district attorneys.”
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On Wednesday, DeSantis suffered a stinging defeat when a three-judge panel of the notoriously conservative 11th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in favor of Andrew Warren, one of those district attorneys in a suit he filed last year. That suit alleged that DeSantis had suspended him “in retaliation for exercising his right of free speech….” and asked “the court to declare the suspension unconstitutional and require that DeSantis........