To Twist Facts While Sowing Fear
AMERICAN ASSOCIATED NEWS: Tallahassee, Florida. (Saturday, February 30, 2023)
Following the example of other would-be presidential candidates, Florida governor Ron DeSantis released his political tome – The Courage To Be Free To Twist Facts While Sowing Fear – on Saturday, February 30 with a press conference at the boutique What-A-Weird-Story.
Weird-Story, one of the few book stores in the state to offer extensive selections of classic Hungarian, Bangladeshi and Moldovan authors, is the home of the state’s longest running Sunday drag brunch – dating to the stage productions of early European colonizers.
DeSantis frequently interrupted and challenged reporters in what sometimes seemed to be a political production of Wide World of Wrestling.
AuthenticHealers presents a transcript of the conference.
Reporter:
On September 15, 1963 Addie Mae Collins, Carole Rosamond Robertson, Cynthia Dionne Wesley – all fourteen years old, and Carol Denise McNair, eleven years old…
Governor:
Let me interrupt you right there. Yes, children are our most precious gift from God. That’s why we are proposing our “Help Our Children Grow-up Proud of Their History” program.
Reporter:
Were killed when four white supremacists…
Governor:
Wooo! We don’t use such judgmental, “woke” phrases in our new education in Western-and-Christian values program. We’d rather think of them as “defenders of Caucasian and Anglo-Saxon heritage and privilege…”
Reporter:
Please, Governor, if I may continue… When four white members of the Klu Klux Klan planted 19 sticks of dynamite attached to a timing device beneath the steps of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham. One child was decapitated and could only be identified through her clothing; another was killed by a piece or mortar embedded in her skull. My question, Governor, is will this be included in your new teaching Western-Christian culture program?
Governor:
No, no. Of course not. We don’t want to teach anything that might make small, white children feel shame or that they are responsible for what happened before they were born.
Reporter:
Sir, historians tell us that Islam made it entrance in to the Iberian Peninsula – today’s Spain and Portugal - in 711 AD and remained a powerful force there for almost seven-hundred years. Jews living in Spain enjoyed a relative degree of freedom during the years of Muslim rule…
Governor:
Again, I’ve said before we want to educated our children in Western-Christian history. And all this about Jews and Muslims…
Reporter:
Governor, I was going to ask about the Inquisition…
Governor:
“In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue.” That’s really all we need to know about….
Reporter:
Governor, the estimates for the number of people who were killed in the Crusades – between 1095 and 1291 – were anywhere from one- to nine-million, and most put the number around three-million…
Governor:
Again, Woo, woo, woo…. Maybe half of them were Arabs and Muslims. That’s not part of Western Christian history. So, we probably won’t be teaching about that.
Reporter:
Governor, on St. Bartholomew’s Day in 1572, French Catholics attacked and slaughtered thousands of Huguenots; a hundred years later there were more Catholic attacks against them and…
Governor:
Wait a minute. Many of my most loyal voters are Catholic, especially because of my determination to slowly eliminate abortion, even the so-called Plan B. I’m not going to say anything against Catholics and our public and charter schools aren’t ever going to teach anti-Catholic rhetoric. Have I made myself clear.
Reporter:
But, Governor, the Huguenot – French Protestant – colony at Fort Caroline near today’s Jacksonville, Florida was established in 1564, more than half a century before the Mayflower even set sail; they were wiped out in 1565 by Spanish forces from St. Augustine. In fact, the Spanish commander, Pedro Menendez de Aviles, wrote to the Spanish King Philip II that he had “hanged all those we found in [Fort Caroline] because… they were scattering the odious Lutheran doctrine in the provinces.” After a hurricane destroyed their fleet and they washed up on Florida beaches, 245 were put to the sword by the Catholic Spanish in two separate massacres.
Will Florida history teachers be allowed to teach about this slaughter – one of the first mass murders in North American history – a murder based on the victims’ religion and country of origin?
Governor:
We’ve said repeatedly that we do not want to make our children experience guilt and shame because of things that happened years ago. Teaching about the slaughter of innocent French Lutherans could make young people of Spanish heritage feel guilty and we won’t do that.
Reporter:
Governor, your state has been home of the Parkland shooting in which fourteen students and three staff members were murdered and 49 were killed and 53 were wounded at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, the second worst mass shooting by a single gunman in U.S. history and the second deadliest terrorist attack since 9-11. Will your Western-Christian values,…
Governor:
Stop! Again, stop!. We will teach Western-Christian reality: Guns don’t kill people, people do. Thirty- and one-hundred-round bullet clips don’t kill people. It’s the impact of those bullets tearing apart every organ in the torso or skull that kills people. The Spanish did not kill those French sailors! Their swords did!
Reporter:
Governor, if we can turn to the area of science for a moment. Darwin’s work on evolution was first published in…
Governor:
Again, I’m going to stop you right there. I already know where you’re going with that, ‘cause I went to Yale and Harvard. I want to make sure that everyone understands it is called the “theory” of evolution. There’s no “proof’’ of evolution. There were not eyewitnesses of evolution.
Reporter:
Governor, California has a population almost 18 million higher than Florida and Texas has eight million more, but on February 27 of this year your state had a total of reported – and I emphasize reported – 7,516,906 cases of COVID-19 - only behind California with 12,024,000 and Texas with 7,517,000. You keep insisting that Florida is the state where – your words - “’woke’ goes to die.” It appears that people also go to Florida to die of COVID under your administration. How do you explain that…
Governor:
Again, anyone can make figures, say whatever they want. I won’t even dignify that question.
Reporter:
Governor, on World AIDS Day, December 1, the Centers for Disease Control reported that the nation is experiencing an eight percent decline in cases of HIV but that does not apply to South Florida. Miami-Dade and Broward County - where Fort Lauderdale is - are the two counties in the country with the highest cases of HIV. What is your administration doing to address this on-going health crisis?
Governor:
Well, of course most of the new HIV cases are gay and minorities, Latinos and African Americans and they have limited access to the so-called PrEP – that stands for Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis – pills to reduce the risk of getting HIV from sex by about 99 percent and from injection drug use by at least 74 percent. But that is a question of personal responsibility and abstinence. Helping people learn about PrEP would be like saying it is okay to be LGBTQ and to have sex and, if I said that, I would lose the culture wars and people would say I was indoctrinating and certainly we are opposed to indoctrinating.
Reporter:
A multi-part question about your claims that you want a Western-Christian cultural emphasis in Florida education.
You’ve not yet explained what “Western” means. Does “Western” mean only from the eastern borders of Poland and Hungary to the Atlantic or does it extend as far east as the borders of China? And does your version of Western include Russian authors like Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy and Alexander Solzhenitsyn?
Are you planning to erase Plato and Aristotle and the philosophers of ancient Greece, the birthplace of today’s democracy?
What about the writings of Maimonides and Hippocrates? Will Buddhism and Confucianism be a part of this emphasis on Western-Christian education?
Governor:
You know I went to Yale and then Harvard Law School and I just thought all those guys – especially the Russians… Their stuff is so thick and heavy and the Greeks were so hard to understand that I really don’t think our kids need to carry around such big, hard-to-understand books.
Reporter:
If we can return to history again: in 1776, an estimated 90 percent of deaths in the Continental Army were caused by disease, especially smallpox and General Washington ordered the mass inoculation of his forces, despite a resolution by the Continental Congress that prohibited inoculations. Washington actually wrote “Necessity not only authorizes but seems to require the measure, for should the disorder infect the Army in the natural way and rage with its usual virulence, we have more to dread from it than from the sword of the enemy.". Historians have argued that without those forced vaccinations, Washington would never had been able to beat the English troops, who were immune to variola, and their immunity gave them an "enormous advantage against the vulnerable colonists," according to the Library of Congress. Given your policies during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, as president will you allow the nation’s high schools and universities to teach about Washington’s policies?
Governor:
COVID is not a problem anymore and I just don’t understand why anyone would be bringing up a problem that happened in 1776. No. I don’t think we have to talk as about Washington’s orders when we teach history in 2023.
Reporter:
Governor, their biographies and histories indicate that Benjamin Franklin and John Adams slept together in September 1776 in New Brunswick, New Jersey and Abraham Lincoln and Joshua Speed, his landlord and one of his closest friends, reportedly shared the same bed in Springfield for years. Would you allow high school and college students to be taught those facts from American history?
Governor:
Just one more example of LGBT radical propaganda and the liberal press defaming American heroes. I won’t even dignify your question.
Reporter:
Governor, you’re married, have a wife and children and it is fair to assume that you are heterosexual. Many in your party and on your side in gender/ sexual identity issues argue that this is a fad and that kids decide to be LGBTQ. So I am asking when you decided to be straight and who helped you decide and can LGBTQ kids somehow decided to be straight? How did you decide that you were heterosexual?
Governor:
I won the AP American History Award in high school and went to Yale and Harvard. I just know these things…
Reporter:
Governor, hundreds and thousands of students win AP awards and go to Ivy League schools and know that they are LGBT without anyone ever telling and they know from grade school or certainly from high school age. When and how did you decide.
Governor:
Next question!
Reporter:
During your time in the governor’s office, you have signed three death warrants and the latest execution was on February 23. Your bios indicate that you are Catholic and, in fact, have an uncle who is a priest and officiated at your wedding in Disneyworld. In 2018, a year before you became governor, “The Catechism of the Catholic Church” was revised and now says "in the light of the Gospel" the death penalty is "inadmissible because it is an attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person" and that the Catholic Church "works with determination for its abolition worldwide."
Other governors across the nation have eliminated the death penalty and changed death sentences to life in prison without parole. As governor you have the final word on executions – you sign the death warrants.
Some believe2 that you are going to being using signing death warrants as a vote-getter in your run for president.
Given the Catholic Church’s dogmatic condemnation, how do you justify….
Governor:
Religion is a personal matter. I’m not going to answer that question. I think it’s time to end this interview.