Speaking in Parliament 83 years ago today – it was June 4. 1940 – Winston Churchill inspired his fellow Brits to battle the Nazis: “We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.”
Churchill never could’ve imagined that one day his pugilistic eloquence would be ripped off by a guy who gets beaten up by Mickey Mouse.
Campaigning the other day in New Hampshire, the ayatollah of DeSantistan yammered: “As president, I recognize that the woke mind virus represents a war on the truth, so we will wage a war on the woke. We will fight the woke in education, we will fight the woke in the corporations, we will fight the woke in the halls of Congress, we will never ever surrender.”
Butchering Churchill is apparently a standard DeSantis shtick, and, who know, maybe that can help him gain ground with the Republican base. But he seems woefully unaware of how imbecilic he sounds. Whereas Churchill was seeking to unite the British people in the fight against a legitimate foreign enemy, DeSantis is seeking to divide the American people in the fight against an imaginary domestic enemy.
The British people knew exactly what the Nazis were all about, and the existential threat they posed to the island nation. But roughly 25 percent of the American people aren’t sure what “woke” is all about and don’t know enough to even form an opinion – while most people who are familiar with the term say it’s a good thing for the country, the opposite of a threat.
So says a recent national poll. A healthy 56 percent of Americans believe that “woke” means “to be informed, educated on, and aware of social injustices.” That stat includes three-fourths of Democrats, a majority of independents, and more than a third of Republicans. So when DeSantis vows, as he did yesterday, to consign “the woke mind virus” to “the dustbin of history,” he’s signaling a desire to divide us even further, to declare war on the forward-thinking American majority, to fight us in the schools, to fight us in the libraries, to fight us in the Targets, and never surrender until he turns us into Florida.
Granted, DeSantis for the foreseeable future has no interest in wooing the American majority; he’s solely focused on the MAGA bubble-dwellers who pine for a white nation circa 1950, and wish to be (and want us all to be) ahistorically ignorant. As pollster Cliff Young recently noted, while summarizing the aforementioned stats, “Most Americans understand that to be woke is to be tuned in to injustices around us – but for a key segment of Republicans who make up the Trump-DeSantis base, ‘woke’ is a clear trigger for the worst of the politically correct, emerging multicultural majority.”
I get it, another Republican primary season has begun. I just wish Florida man would refrain from cheapening Churchill in his hustle for votes. And I have a sneaking suspicion that the last thing mainstream Americans want is to live in Florida writ large, a place where teachers are too terrified to properly do their jobs and people who aren’t white and straight feel the heel of oppression.
As Winston Churchill once told us, “Tyranny is our foe. Whatever trapping or disguise it wears, whatever language it speaks, be it external or internal, we must forever be on guard, ever mobilized, ever vigilant, always ready to spring at its throat,” so that we may defend “those realms of thought which are consecrated to the rights and the dignity of man.”