To the editor:

DeSantis’ election platform was “no sanctuary cities” for immigrants without documents. Of course, at the time there were no sanctuary cities in Florida. Just as there are no grade schools teaching critical race theory today. His more recent tack, refusing to cooperate with the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Service, is exactly what Sanctuary City advocates propose. So, thanks to DeSantis we are now a sanctuary state, refusing cooperation with ICE using Florida airspace to transport deportees. People in Florida who can not vote seems to suit DeSantis just fine, as they make great scapegoats.

Promising to rid Florida of nonexistent problems is a well-worn propaganda tactic that would bemuse if Florida did not have real problems that call out for real legislation. Attacking immigrants, transgender children, attempting to intimidate and reduce the right to vote, and undermine women’s health services with dubious logic and no legitimizing cause, is more than a tiresome legislation policy for Florida. As smokescreen for dereliction of duty, the propaganda is downright insulting.

Ron DeSantis has requested his own private battalion of armed thugs answerable only to him, $100 million in state funding to establish three new armories, and to build a new HQ for the National Guard. Who is DeSantis going to war on? No politician, in the context of an election year where his party is dedicated to suppressing voting rights, has ever requested this military build up of civilian thuggery “unanswerable to the Federal Government” in America memory. You would have to return to 1930s Europe to find Mussolini marching on the Capitol with his Black shirt thugs demanding Rome appoint him to leadership he had not earned in the election. Brown shirts in Germany intimidating, beating and killing voters there to sway election outcome.

But here there has never been a time when US governors with tinpot Generalissimo pretensions were given, “…more power than a good man would want and more power than a bad man should have.”

Ellen Starbird

Cape Coral