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Ron DeSantis Is Getting an Assist From This Unlikely Figure on 'Book Ban' Narrative

Rebecca Downs
Rebecca Downs  |  May 31, 2023 8:15 PM

The supposed "book ban" that is going on in Florida is the leftist narrative that just won't die, despite it being a "hoax" that is false and has been disproven by Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) himself. Last week, around the time of DeSantis' announcement, media outlets claimed that National Youth Poet Laureate Amanda Gorman's poem had been banned at an elementary school in Miami-Dade. It had been moved to a different shelf for a different grade level. 

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who, like DeSantis is running for president, joined the fray and tweeted out a rebuke of the governor. Once he read up more on the issue, and realized his mistake, he actually owned up to It, our friends at Twitchy highlighted. 

After a tweet where RFK Jr. shared an article from The Washington Post and claimed "Ron DeSantis cheers removal of an Amanda Gorman poem from a school library in Florida."

Upon actually doing some further research, he saw where he had been wrong and sought to correct the record. "The poetry book was not banned, just moved to a different section of the library. And to clarify, DeSantis had nothing directly to do with the school’s action," he pointed out. He also made quite the cogent point about the mainstream media. "The WaPo was criticizing his failure to defend the author, Amanda Gorman. All in all, not as big an issue as the WaPo made it appear."

That RFK Jr. owned up to his mistake got the attention of many, including DeSantis War Room's Christina Pushaw. Others also chimed in to say they wanted to vote for him in the primary against President Joe Biden.

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The opinion article RFK Jr. shared was written by Greg Sargent, who in one particularly sensational part wrote:

All this confirms that the fever-pitch climate created by DeSantis is maximizing the impact that lone parents can have. That’s because it has encouraged officials to err on the side of caution and remove targeted titles rather than brave right-wing anger, which incentivizes parents-turned-activists to sweep ever more broadly in their efforts to ban as many titles as possible.

This is what DeSantis wants. Rather than seriously consider whether one out-of-control parent drove the process off the rails in the Gorman case, he leapt at the chance to engage in more culture-warring, this time casting the “legacy media” as the cultural enemy. DeSantis’s obvious relish of this moment shows he believes having an army of lone parents out there stirring up cultural controversies wherever possible can only help him in the 2024 GOP presidential primaries.

Twitchy has been following the story since it cropped up last week, including and especially how many red flags were immediately raised. As it turns out, The Washington Post is hardly the only to have made it seem like a bigger issue than it actually was, to use RFK Jr.'s apt framing of the situation. 

This includes multiple articles from USA Today, which sought to make the story a big deal, only to then acknowledge that the poem had merely been moved. There was also similar coverage from The Hill, POLITICO, and the Associated Press. Gorman keeps doubling down, so it's gotten harder for the truth out there.

Gorman has continued to double down, though, as Twitchy also highlighted. Her pinned tweet is a statement indicating she has joined a lawsuit for which she is soliciting donations.