JUST IN: DeSantis Announces Stop WOKE Act To Combat Critical Race Theory In Schools

thank you thank you so much it's always wonderful to be in florida's friendliest hometown which happens to be the center of the free estate in the united states we've got a lot of great folks here and i want to thank keisha king for the introduction we have a number of people in my administration simone marsteller our secretary for the agency of health care administration we have our commissioner of education richard corcoran we also have legislators senator baxley representatives in goliath truenow and representative randy fine we have christopher ruffo who's the leading opponent of crt from the manhattan institute we have dr matt spalding a professor in constitutional government in hillsdale college and then we have um lele did i say that right lolly yeah we have lot we have we have we have lolly uh um jimenez hincapi who's a mother who's going to talk about uh her views in terms of education uh then we have lacasha hal who's also a mother from sarasota county and she's going to come up and say a few things and education really is so so very important and i think it's important that in florida we continue to do a lot of the good things that we have done education week the latest rankings rank florida number three for k-12 achievement in the whole country and that wasn't true when i was growing up here i'll tell you that and so we have and we'll talk a little bit about some of the things we don't want to see in our schools and in our society but i think it's important to say what are we doing positively in terms of what we want to be in our schools and i think we've done more than any other state to place a renewed emphasis on american civics and teaching kids about the constitution and what it means to be an american and we've been able to get requirements back into the high schools which is very important we have the ability and we'll be doing exams when people leave school which will be like a citizenship exam that naturalized immigrants have to take because at the end of the day everybody that comes through our school system some will go into a variety of different fields but everyone's going to be an american citizen and they're going to have duties and responsibilities and they need to understand what that means and they need to understand the principles that our country was founded upon we also have been able to help teachers uh we just launched and it's going to come into effect next year the civics we call like a civics training program where if you go through it really get deep knowledge and understanding on the fundamentals you get a three thousand dollar bonus and so that's something that we think is very very positive so so we want all our students to understand why was our our country founded what were some of the key ideas that made us different i mean for example you know our founding fathers said that we are endowed by our creator with unalienable rights the rights do not come from government so these are these are natural rights and we create a constitutional system not to give us rights but to protect the rights that we already have and we have a constitutional system that's laid out and not just having a judiciary an executive a legislature but also having 50 state governments in federalism and all these different things that are designed to be able uh to maintain and preserve a free society and we've seen those ideas tested over the years throughout our history and you've had different people with different views about it i mean if you look at president lincoln when uh before he became president running for the senate he was running against a guy named stephen douglas and douglas was basically saying that you know the founders you know wanted slavery it was important to have and also lincoln said no no no that wasn't what they wanted they disfavored it they wanted it to be they wanted it to to go away they created the declaration of independence to say everybody had rights and so lincoln prevailed ultimately in that debate once he became elected president and then you look at what the what people in our country have done defeating nazism in world war ii uh when the world really hung in the balance and that was america that did it and they did it because they believed in having a free society you think about what mlk uh stood for he said he didn't want people judged on the color of their skin but on the content of their character you listen to some of these people nowadays they don't talk about that and then more recently was the united states uh that was able to win the cold war and defeat soviet communism now i think that there's more of these people coming out of the woodwork than we ever thought nowadays which is unfortunate and there's a lot of problems with marxism and our hemisphere and we see what's going on with authoritarian countries like china but nevertheless people thought that we wouldn't be able to beat the soviet union and we did it and so these are really important things that that people need to have a great understanding of and i think what you see now with the rise of this woke ideology is an attempt to really delegitimize our history and to delegitimize our institutions and i view the wokeness as a form of cultural marxism they want to tear they want to just it's not just you know people say oh you know you know they're they're uh they're they're leftists or social it's not just like taxes and all that yeah they do want that and that's not good but they really want to tear at the fabric of our society and our culture and and things that really we've taken for granted like the ability of parents to direct the upbringing of their kids so this is really really significant and when you see these things throughout the country where they take down thomas jefferson statute in new york city where they take down abraham lincoln in massachusetts where they take george washington's name off schools in california you know that is an attempt to erase history uh they want to delegitimize the founding of the country uh in the institutions and they basically want to replace it uh with a very militant form of leftism that would absolutely destroy this country if that ever took hold and so we have a responsibility to stand for the truth to stand for what's right and we're doing that and we've put more resources and emphasis on teaching civics on teaching people about american history but we also have to protect people and protect our kids from some very pernicious uh ideologies that are trying to be forced upon them all across the country so earlier this year i directed the florida department of education to prohibit critical race theory in our k-12 schools and you know you'll hear these people it's you know they made it it was a big deal in virginia the these counties parents were really upset and a lot of the media they go it's not happening it's not happening and they would basically act like this is all just made up well let me show you some of the things that have been done throughout our country uh just in the last couple years the arizona department of education created a quote equity toolkit claiming that babies show the first sign of racism at three months old and that white children become full racists quote strongly biased in favor of whiteness by age five santa clara county office of education denounced the united states as a quote parasitic system based on quote the invasion of quote white male settlers and encouraged teachers to cash in on kids inherent empathy in order to recruit them into political activism and a philadelphia elementary school forced fifth graders to celebrate black communism and simulated a black power rally to quote free angela davis from prison and at that particular school 87 percent of students fail to achieve basic literacy by graduation and so this is something that you see all across the country and we have a responsibility in florida to say we're not going to do it so so we did do that so it violates florida standards to scapegoat someone based on their race to say that you know they're inherently racist to say that they're an oppressor or oppressed or any of that and that's good and that's important but we also have to realize that we got to do more to make sure that that actually carries the day in the classrooms and in our society so today we are going to be introducing to the public and and we have legislators who are going to help us with this a new piece of legislation for the upcoming legislative session called stop wrongs against our kids and employees act the stop woke act and it's something that [Applause] and this will do a number of things that are very important one it will put into statute uh the department of education's prohibition on crt in k-12 schools no taxpayer dollars should be used to teach our kids to hate our country or to hate each other and and that's important and that's all well and good but i think what we've seen recently is you can legislate things like parents bill of rights you can have certain things and sometimes the school districts don't always follow it and so we are going to be including in this legislation giving parents a private right of action to be able to enforce the prohibition on crt and they get to recover attorneys fees when they prevail which is very important and yes there will be a fortified ability for the state department of education to hold keep people accountable but honestly the parents know uh best what's going on and they're in the best position to be able to do and here's the thing uh a lot of times these people will fear lawsuits more than a fine from the state department of education because when you do a lawsuit you get discovery and you're subject to that and when they say they're not doing crt and then you have all this information showing that they are doing it uh it really is an uncomfortable position for them so i think that gives parents the ability to go in and ensure that our state standards are being followed and i think it's something that needs to be done we also need to understand that this has become a cottage industry the crt there's people making huge amounts of money they basically will get tens of thousands of dollars to go in and do a training sometimes at school sometimes at businesses you know basically saying like okay pay me fifty thousand dollars so i can teach your employees how racist capitalism is or something like that and i'm just thinking to myself well you're certainly charging a king's ransom to do that you don't you don't you don't complain about capitalism when you're lining your own pocket it's just when other people are doing well but the issue is you have these whole uh cottage industry of these consultants that will come and they'll go into a school district or they'll go to a business and they'll go to colleges and universities and they bring a lot of this into those institutions and they call it equity um just understand when you hear equity used that is just an ability for people to smuggle in their ideology because we don't need to have these terms we have society based on equality where you're treated equally regardless of your upbringing regardless of your race you have the same rights and and privileges as anybody else equity is used to put the thumb on the scale in favor of their ideology and so that's where you get things like crt and a whole host of other things so our legislation will defund any money for k-12 or higher ed going to crt consultants we are also not going to allow the staff or employees or teachers in our education system to be subjected to some uh to that type of training where they're forced to sit there and listen and they have had this in different parts of the of the country the san diego public schools did a training where they accused white teachers of being colonizers on stolen land and told them quote you are racist and quote you are upholding racist ideas structures and policies and they recommended that the teachers undergo quote anti-racist therapy so this is wrong when it's done to our kids but it's also wrong to force employees to have to go through that so you are not going to have that in any school in the state of florida which is good but you know it's not just in schools and i know that's been a big focus and understandably so because parents send their kids i don't think very i think most parents just want them to be educated on the kind of the basics i don't think that they're interested in this indoctrination i know i'm not and i know most of you are not and so and it's important and it is wrong when you're trying to take a kid uh who's there to learn basics and you're putting ideology and you're trying to to indoctrinate but this is also goes beyond education and it goes beyond uh just schooling and it really has become something that is being utilized by corporate america to i think create hostile work environments for many of their employees and you look at what some of these big companies have done in recent years bank of america has had training teaching that the united states is a system of quote white supremacy and encourages their employees to become woke at work verizon has taught employees that america is fundamentally racist and they've even promoted defunding the police and a google employee program claims that america is quote a system of white supremacy and that all americans are quote raised to be racist and so that is some of the stuff that we're seeing and you know i think about it if you're in a company and someone's telling you know dirty jokes or doing this that could be considered a hostile work environment well how is it not a hostile work environment to be attacking people based on their race or telling them that they're privileged or that they're part of oppressive systems when they're all they're doing is showing up to work and trying to earn a living so we believe that this corporate crt it's basically corporate sanctioned racism and they're trying to shove it down these employees throats we believe that that violates the florida civil rights laws but at the extent it doesn't we're going to make sure that the law does include this into these laws so that that employees have an ability uh to protect themselves against this kind of really which is harassment and some of these companies i mean you just think about like what goes through i mean they they this a lot of this is virtue signaling you know they don't want to be criticized on twitter or by the mob or something like that but you know you had a lot of these companies you know last year when we had the the protests and the rioting you know they were supporting a lot of these organizations you know you know blm is a radical organization they were pouring millions of dollars into it you know now they're all concerned because that ideology has been put into place in places like san francisco and these other places where they don't prosecute people stealing things out of the store so they want congress now to come in and say hey stop the smash and grabs well they're partially responsible for creating an environment by having these people elected to office so we think the corporate crt is just wrong uh we do not want any workers in florida to be subjected to this uh and we're gonna make sure that that that is the case and so if you look at what we've done uh in florida we've basically just stood for opportunity for everybody um if you look what we've done in education we've expanded opportunity to folks uh that have never had the opportunity we've had now you look at the different folks here who are all united in not having either state sanctioned or corporate sakes and racism in our state but this is something that's significant and they've they've tried to act like it's not happening and you'll have media who will say that this doesn't happen even though we have all these examples and you should hear rufo he's got many many more examples of this so it is happening and i think we have an ability to just draw a line in the sand and say that's not the type of society that we want here in the state of florida we want to treat people treated equally we don't want ideology [Applause] so we're gonna we're gonna hear from some folks who've got some good uh good things to say so i'm going to bring up them and we look forward to hearing those remarks so first i'm going to bring up from the manhattan institute really has done more than anybody else in our country on exposing crt in education and in corporate america christopher ruffo

Channel: Forbes Breaking News

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Length: 18min 32sec (1112 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 15 2021