Hialeah doesn’t owe its ‘freedom’ to Gov. DeSantis. Neither does the rest of Florida | Opinion
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The flood-prone, working-class “streets of Hialeah” made it into Gov. Ron DeSantis’ inauguration speech Tuesday as he evoked swaths of the Florida we know and (mostly) love.
“From the Space Coast to the Suncoast, from St. Johns to St. Lucie, from the streets of Hialeah to the speedway in Daytona, from the Okeechobee all the way up to Micanopy,” DeSantis began, “freedom lives here in our great Sunshine State of Florida!”
The Hialeah contingent among the thousands at the Capitol steps witnessing the launch of DeSantis’ second term didn’t disappoint.
At the mention of Miami-Dade County’s second-largest city — and the most Cuban, after Havana — they hollered and applauded louder than anyone else. Political points well-scored. This is the kind of high-profile, public recognition that shapes party reputation and garners votes, on and off election cycles.
People remember flattery.
But in the real world, DeSantis’ words amount to little more than demagoguery.
Just as President Reagan’s famous “Cuba si, Castro no” didn’t usher in a new era of democracy for the island in the 1980s, DeSantis’ political antics aren’t giving Hialeah residents — or any other Floridian — what we need in 2023: affordable home insurance.
To the insurance industry, he hand-feeds a bailout. For Hialeah homeowners, DeSantis has assurances that he’s “preserving what the father of our country called the ‘sacred fire of liberty.’ ”
That is, if you’re not gay, trans, respectful of Black history in its totality, needing an abortion, a felon trying to get rights legally restored or a Florida Democrat.
Then, burn in the hell of state-sponsored persecution.
No freedom for the ‘woke’
Weary Floridians could’ve used some communal, post-election peacemaking from the state’s top leader. But although he won a second term by 20 percentage points, DeSantis prefers to continue to harp on cultural, racial and political divisions.
This preppy, domestic young-father version of Donald Trump isn’t calling Mexicans rapists, but anyone who doesn’t agree with his fascist edicts is lumped into his mythical Swampland monster: “the woke mob.”
Sounding like a 1970s preacher on a college campus, he ranted: “We reject this woke ideology. We seek normalcy, not philosophical lunacy! Florida is where woke goes to die!”
Never mind that Florida is home to the most people arrested for insurrection following the mob attack on the nation’s Capitol on Jan. 6, 2001. Never mind that DeSantis empowers the state’s Nazis to fly flags with swastikas from highways — didn’t he sign a law against highway protests? — by not condemning their flagrant acts against Jews. Not until heavily pressured, and then, he does so tepidly.
But how can we expect better of DeSantis, who seldom leaves a speech without spewing a racially tinged comment?
“We will never surrender to the woke mob,” he vowed.
READ MORE: In inaugural speech, DeSantis decries ‘philosophical lunacy,’ vows to fight ‘woke mob’
No ‘refuge of sanity’
He lacks the grace of a winner — and first lady Casey DeSantis’ Jackie Kennedy-esque ensemble of a cape and white gloves wasn’t enough to camouflage it.
The man has a super-majority of Republicans in the Florida Legislature, but he wouldn’t make a single bipartisan gesture to Democratic colleagues.
But he ridiculously claims that freedom lives “in the dreams of the historic number of families who have moved from states across this country because they saw Florida as the land of liberty and the land of sanity.”
The dreams of New Yorkers and Californians are more prosaic: no state taxes.
As for sanity, no other state has a higher proliferation of writers per capita documenting the state’s weirdness.
Sanity, when DeSantis and his surgeon general defy the country’s medical authorities with anti-vaccine and anti-trans quackery?
He claimed in his speech that “the world lost its mind” over COVID. Well, mitigating skyrocketing infections and the dead mattered. But for him, those 83,911 Florida dead can’t vote anyway.
“In captaining the ship of state, we choose to navigate the boisterous sea of liberty rather than cower in the calm docks of despotism,” DeSantis said.
There’s definitely some high-quality weed in the water.
Line after line, he delivers silly claims that we owe him our “freedom.”
You hear that, Hialeah?
Turns out it wasn’t our sacrificing parents, but demigod DeSantis, made by God on the eighth day according to a campaign video his wife tweeted, who granted us freedom.
In DeSantis’ psalm-quoting version of events, they who left it all behind to spare us dictatorship don’t count. Nor do the boat people’s desperation and determination, the kind bravery the privileged like DeSantis will never know.
But here he is, on his day of triumph, loudly applauded by throngs.
And here are prominent people like former Gov. Jeb Bush gracing and validating with their presence DeSantis and his policies in a desperate move to start distancing the Florida Republican Party from disgraced homeboy Trump.
To the nation watching Florida, our divisive governor is no Republican Camelot.
