The governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis, has pushed back against calls to condemn a series of neo-Nazi protests that took place over the weekend, saying people are attempting to “smear” him.
On Saturday and Sunday, a group of 15 to 20 protesters donned Nazi symbols and chanted antisemitic slurs along the North Alafaya Trail in Orlando. According to videos that quickly circulated across social media, the protesters gave Nazi salutes, yelled “White power!”, waved an anti-Biden banner and at one point got into a brawl with a driver.
The protests have been met with disgust from Democrats and Republicans alike. However, DeSantis did not publicly condemn the marchers until Monday during a press conference, and then largely to deflect blame on to his political opponents.
“So what I’m going to say is these people, these Democrats who are trying to use this as some type of political issue to try to smear me as if I had something to do with that, we’re not playing their game,” he said.
DeSantis also accused the Democrats of fostering antisemitism on Capitol Hill: “I’m not going to have people try to smear me that belong to a party that elevated antisemites to the halls of Congress.”
He called the protesters “some jackasses doing this on the street” and suggested the matter was a police issue. “First of all, state law enforcement is going to hold them accountable because they were doing stuff on the overpass, so they are absolutely going to be doing that and they should do that.”
DeSantis’s comments came a day after his press secretary, Christina Pushaw, drew widespread criticism over a tweet that she posted, then deleted, on Sunday. She wrote: “Do we even know they’re Nazis? Or is this a stunt like the ‘white nationalists’ who crashed the Youngkin rally in Charlottesville and turned out to be Dem staffers? I trust Florida law enforcement to investigate and am awaiting their conclusions.”
The “stunt” Pushaw referred to was an incident last October in which the Lincoln Project, an anti-Trump Republican political action committee, sent a group of people pretending to be white supremacists to an event for the Republican gubernatorial candidate Glenn Youngkin in Charlottesville, Virginia.
In response to Pushaw’s comments, the Anti Defamation League wrote that it was “alarmed that @ChristinaPushaw would first give cover to antisemites rather than immediately and forcefully condemning their revolting, hate-filled rally and assault”.
The Orange county sheriff, John Mina, announced that his office is launching an investigation into the protests, saying: “This hatred has no place in our society. Any reports of criminal activities will be thoroughly investigated.”
