Opinion | DeSantis Weathers a ‘Spasm’ of the Woke

I considered this Sunday morning as I arrived for the Tikvah Fund’s Jewish Management Convention. Outdoors, a crowd numbering maybe two dozen had gathered to protest a deliberate look by Florida’s Gov.

Ron DeSantis.

I snapped pictures of them from the again seat of my cab, and so they shouted insults at me, some printable (“You’re complicit!”), some not. “You’re a very good German,” stated a man holding a preprinted signal studying DeSANTIS IS A TYRANT.

The set off for his or her rage was the Sunshine State’s Parental Rights in Schooling Act—inevitably termed the “Don’t Say Homosexual” invoice in propagandistic media stories—which Mr. DeSantis signed in March. The regulation prohibits “classroom instruction . . . on sexual orientation or gender id” earlier than the fourth grade and requires that any such educating of older kids be “age-appropriate.”

That made the governor persona non grata on the Museum of Jewish Heritage, the place Tikvah had deliberate to carry its occasion.

Elliott Abrams

and

Eric Cohen

wrote in these pages final month that museum workers advised organizers Mr. DeSantis didn’t “align with the museum’s values and its message of inclusivity” and subsequently needed to be excluded. (In a later assertion to the press, the museum stated that “nobody was banned or cancelled” as a result of “no contract with the Tikvah Fund was ever signed.” The assertion additionally claimed the article “incorporates many factual inaccuracies” however didn’t specify what they had been.)

Tikvah as an alternative rented Pier 60 on the Hudson River waterfront’s Chelsea Piers Sports activities & Leisure Complicated. The Chelsea Piers group got here underneath stress to cancel too, together with from Home Judiciary Committee Chairman

Jerrold Nadler,

who tweeted that “it’s disgraceful” Mr. DeSantis could be allowed to talk on the venue “throughout the month by which we have a good time the variety and resilience of the LGBTQ+ group.”

The group responded in a approach assured to make no person joyful: by kowtowing with out knuckling underneath. On Friday it issued a assertion each denouncing Mr. DeSantis’s unspecified “abhorrent habits” and disclaiming the power to regulate “the content material, program, or audio system” at occasions organized by its rental prospects.

In his wide-ranging 40-minute speech, Mr. DeSantis took the kerfuffle in stride: “When the left’s having a spasm, that simply tells you that in Florida, we’re successful on the problems that matter.” His knack for bringing out the worst in his political enemies is harking back to

Donald Trump,

however with the benefit that the governor doesn’t take it personally.

Chelsea Piers stated in its assertion that in mild of the “huge stress” Mr. DeSantis had induced within the firm and “the LGBTQ+ group,” Chelsea Piers would donate all proceeds from the Tikvah rental to “teams that defend LGBTQ+ communities, and foster and amplify productive debates about LGBTQ+ points.” That ought to—however certainly gained’t—pass over any group that demanded Mr. DeSantis’s cancellation. Prohibiting one facet from defending its views—particularly when these views are official coverage—makes nonsense of the concept of constructive debate.

Not that there was a lot urge for food for debate among the many protesters exterior. Strolling alongside the sidewalk after the convention wrapped up, I noticed two sexagenarians—a person with a sprawling beard and a girl in a black SILENCE=DEATH T-shirt—following an older convention attendee and screaming on the high of their lungs: “Disgrace!” “Fascist” “Nazi!” “You spit on the six million!”

All of it made the Onion’s “debauched and distorted” gay-pride stereotype appear quaint. A nasty mob concentrating on a Jewish convention as a Nazi entrance—a actuality in 2022 New York—was past a satirist’s creativeness twenty years in the past.

Mr. Taranto is the Journal’s editorial options editor.