Gov. Ron DeSantis Is Trying To Clean Up His Book-Banning History

Tempting as it is to want to completely ignore the charmless curmudgeon that is Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, we should not ignore his slight omission that his “book ban” campaign has gone too far.

DeSantis, at a Feb. 15 news conference, supported a state House proposal designed to limit what he called “bad-faith objections” to various school library books and instructional materials. He said these objections were an abuse of the process, performed to “score cheap political points.”

“We obviously have to give parents the ability to be able to ensure that this smut doesn’t get into their schools,” the Republican governor said.

But he noted: “Although we like people wanting to be involved in what’s going on, to just show up and object to every single book under the sun, that is not an appropriate situation here, and we have seen that occasionally.”

Florida reportedly logged 1,218 book objections during the 2022-2023 fiscal year, resulting in the removal of 386 books ― often titles that are very Black, hella gay, pro-trans, and/or anti-slavery and anti-segregation.

Despite his call for the Florida Legislature to “fine-tune the process” to prevent what he described as activists saddling school districts with unnecessary work, he continued to argue that the mashup of bills and state education department policy that effectively allowed for the banning of books was not a book ban bill ― saying that was a “false narrative.”

“A lot of the things that people say in the media that were, quote, ‘objected to’ were actually on the summer reading list of the Florida Department of Education, so this is all a big fraud,” DeSantis claimed at the news conference.

He added, “No district in Florida has removed any dictionaries or