While far-left lawmakers in D.C. continue to demonize protesters who took part in a demonstration on Capitol Hill in early 2021, leftist activists nationwide are storming state capitols at an accelerating pace in an effort to prevent Republican legislatures from enacting certain bills.
On the heels of a disruption at the Texas Capitol by LGBT activists opposed to a bill aimed at protecting self-identified transgender children from irreversible surgeries and other treatments, a mob laid siege to the Florida Capitol this week.
The protesters targeted GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis’ office and staged an occupation that lasted for more than nine hours. Organized by the activist group Dream Defenders, participants demanded a meeting with the governor to air their grievances over legislation designed to expand parental rights in the education of their children.
DeSantis has been a vocal proponent of laws restricting young students’ exposure to explicit sexual content and other material deemed age-inappropriate. Meanwhile, leftists continue to push for children to have access to adult themes and subjects that critics say amount to obscenity — without giving parents an opportunity to decide what is appropriate for their own children.
AOC says giving you the right to access school curriculum, books and budgets is “fascist.” The truth is socialists don’t what you to know what your child is being taught because it disrupts their agenda of indoctrination. #ParentsBillOfRights https://t.co/EnWu4kbbG6
— Nicole Malliotakis (@NMalliotakis) March 24, 2023
In Florida, protesters targeted a planned expansion of the state’s Parental Rights in Education law by locking arms and ignoring demands to vacate the premises.
One of the new bills would prevent teachers and students from being compelled to use a person’s preferred pronouns and another seeks to expand the prohibition on exposing students to lessons explicitly related to gender identity and related themes.
DeSantis, who is expected to launch a 2024 presidential bid in the near future, has indicated that he supports the measures.
As the Capitol building was preparing to close on Wednesday, law enforcement warned the protesters who remained that they would be arrested. In the end, 14 individuals were charged with trespassing.
Despite their efforts to compel the governor to meet with them, DeSantis was not in his office during the protest.
In a new conference the next day, he took the opportunity to highlight his own accomplishments, asserting: “When I became governor, the first day, sat in the office, I kind of just looked around and I thought to myself, ’I don’t know what SOB is going to succeed me in this office, but they ain’t going to have much to do because we’re getting all the meat off the bone.’”
