Why won’t DeSantis condemn neo-Nazi demonstration outside GOP event in Tampa? | Editorial

Neo-Nazi demonstrators in Florida climbed out from under their rock again on Saturday, this time outside a major Republican conference, Turning Point USA’s Student Action Summit, held in Tampa.

They put their hate-filled ideology on full and repugnant display, waving flags with swastikas and white-supremacist SS bolts, hoisting placards with anti-Semitic slurs. And somewhere in the mix of demonstrators, a “DeSantis Country” flag was unfurled.

A spokesman for Turning Point USA, a right-wing student group, disavowed the hate mongers. “Turning Point 100% condemns these ideologies in the strongest of terms,” Andrew Kolvet said. He said his group didn’t know who the demonstrators were or why they were there.

There’s no mystery here. The lineup for the conference included Gov. Ron DeSantis, Republican Reps. Matt Gaetz, Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert and, as the crowning touch, Josh Hawley, the Missouri senator now best known for egging on the Jan. 6 rioters with a fist pump and then running away from the crowds attacking the U.S. Capitol.

Among the topics of conversation at the conference: denying the existence of transgender people, anti-COVID vaccine rhetoric and the continuation of the lie that the 2020 election was stolen.

Court hatred for political purposes, and this is where it leads. This demonstration by a group of people embracing fascism and some of the most hateful symbols known to mankind wasn’t surprising. It was predictable.

Act of hate

And horrifying. Or, as the Florida Holocaust Museum called it, an “indefensible act of pure hatred.”

Museum chair Mike Igel said, in a statement: “This isn’t about politics or religion. It’s about humanity. The Florida Holocaust Museum calls upon everyone, Jew and non-Jew, regardless of political affiliation, to condemn this blatant anti-Semitism in the strongest possible terms. This should matter to everyone.”

Yes. It should.

So where, then, was DeSantis on this? He headlined the Turning Point summit on Friday night. He’s the top ranking politician in the state. Where was his public condemnation? The Editorial Board asked his spokeswoman if he had any comment on this eruption of extremism right outside a conference he’d addressed.

We haven’t gotten an answer. We wish we were surprised.

This wasn’t a one-off incident, either. The museum, in downtown St. Petersburg, was defaced with anti-Semitic graffiti in May, with police calling it a hate crime.

And on a weekend in January, more of these disgusting trolls waved Nazi flags near a University of Central Florida-area shopping plaza and on an Interstate 4 overpass. Where was DeSantis that time? It took him days to respond and then it was mostly to shrug off the behavior — he summoned up barely a flicker of outrage, calling the demonstrators “jackasses” — and then he attacked Democrats.

That’s Florida leadership for you. Ignore the monster of anti-Semitism in favor of playing politics.

Words matter in the fight against hate, especially from the top of the state government. But silence also matters.

Igel, of the Florida Holocaust Museum, made sure to thank DeSantis and the Florida Legislature for their support to expand the Holocaust Museum, saying the museum’s mission is to educate “future generations to prevent anti-Semitism and hatred of all kind.”

That’s great. Apparently, there can’t be enough education on the horrors inflicted by the Nazis.

And the governor, if he had an ounce of common decency, would use his far-reaching platform to say so, loudly and unequivocally, every single time such hatred rears its ugly head in Florida.