Judge Stops 'Stop WOKE Act,' And Ron DeSantis Is Maaaaaaaaad
The governor is very upset and adenoidal about this legal setback.
We had not polluted our minds with thoughts of Ron DeSantis, the stultifying sack of bile and awkwardness serving as Florida’s governor, since he tried to run for president and ran smack into the spinning buzzsaw that is Donald Trump. DeSantis got crushed early in the primaries, after which he slunk back down to America’s dingus, hopefully to never be heard from again unless he turns up in a Carl Hiaasen novel.
Then this past Friday a federal judge slapped a permanent injunction on part of Florida’s egregious Stop WOKE Act, which the state legislature passed in 2022 at DeSantis’s urging. The weirdo Florida governor had, in his typical bombastic and stupid fashion, touted the law as a civilizational bulwark against the society-corroding effects of the “woke mind virus.” Which, as any good Wonkette reader knows, is little more than wingnut code for I have a First Amendment right to use the n-word without anyone yelling at me.
The new injunction dealt with the part of the law that banned private businesses from instituting any kind of diversity training or program, on the solid legal basis that doing so might make white people feel bad.
The federal judge who made the ruling had previously ruled the Stop WOKE Act unconstitutional. That ruling was upheld by the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals this past March and the case was remanded back to the lower court. Friday’s ruling makes what had been a temporary injunction permanent.
Then on Monday morning, DeSantis was attending an event with his wife, Dollar Bin Jackie Kennedy, when a reporter asked him for his reaction to the judge’s ruling. What followed was a seven-minute-and-seven-second rant that started off defending Florida’s right to shield its white citizens from the scourge of reverse racism. (“If they are doing woke training, which is basically discriminating against folks on the basis of race, you have a right … to not sit there and listen to that nonsense.”) It meandered through his opposition to gender-affirming care for minors. (“There’s a lot of people making a lot of money off this, so you take some teenager and you cut off private parts and then they get into their twenties and they can’t reverse it.”) He complained that institutions captured by the “woke mind virus” become “hollow shells of what they were supposed to be,” attacked students at Columbia University for the sin of exercising their First Amendment right to protest government policies, and then, his voice rising like someone had snuck up behind him and shot a syringe full of crystal meth into his butt, he inveighed against the plague of Soros-backed prosecutors who now apparently refuse to charge people with crimes, leading to America’s cities becoming hellholes where criminals rule like clan leaders in post-apocalypse dystopias.
DeSantis wound up his whine-fest by complaining about the allegedly anti-Christian opening ceremonies at the Paris Olympics, complained that the closing ceremonies probably won’t mock Islam, and bragged that more people want to move to Florida than any other state. It was a lot.
The press event is here, and the seven-plus minutes of Florida’s governor screeching like a lunatic ranting on a street corner starts at the 1:16:22 mark:
DeSantis indicated that his administration will appeal this latest decision back up to the 11th Circuit, after which he’ll probably keep going until the inevitable 6-3 SCOTUS decision patting him on the head and telling him he’s a great warrior as it reverses the lower courts, an action that will possibly encourage him, God help us, to think about running for president again in 2028 so we can be subjected to another election season filled with his high nasally whine that feels like a three-quarter-inch screw being drilled into our ear.
One thing is for sure: DeSantis will not stop trying to impose all these bats zooming around his belfry on the rest of his state and his country. He’s like the Terminator, but stupid.
Wonkette can only keep churning out the finest snark thanks to the generous support of our readers.
Here's a lesson for you wingnuts and fascists:
If someone says "we need to be nice to people of color," and you feel *personally attacked,* YOU are the problem.
Thank you for coming to my Ted Talk.
"DeSantis was attending an event with his wife, Dollar Bin Jackie Kennedy"
Ye gods, Wonket is mean.
I LOVE IT.