Ron DeSantis
Republican governor of Florida (elected 2018, took office 2019); Trump ally and rival; architect of “antiwoke” state-level legislative agenda; keynote speaker NatCon 3 Miami 2022 (“Florida is a Model for the Nation”); New College of Florida takeover; Stop WOKE Act; Don’t Say Gay bill; Martha’s Vineyard migrant flights
Who He Is
Ron DeSantis is the governor of Florida who became, between 2021 and 2023, the most prominent practitioner of Longmarcher institutional warfare at the state level — the figure who translated the New Right’s cultural agenda most aggressively into law and executive action. Field presents him as the bridge between Christopher Rufo’s propagandistic strategy and actual governance: where Rufo provided the intellectual and rhetorical framework, DeSantis provided the state power to enact it.
The Anti-CRT / Anti-Woke Legislative Agenda
June 2021: DeSantis moved to ban CRT in Florida’s public schools.
December 2021 / June 2022: DeSantis announced and then signed the Stop Wrongs to Our Kids and Employees Act (“Stop WOKE Act”) — prohibiting diversity training in Florida workplaces that “indoctrinate or persuade students to a particular point of view,” while simultaneously insisting on a particular antiwoke, “patriotic” point of view. Field: the law’s major tension was that it “forbade lessons from being ‘used to indoctrinate or persuade students to a particular point of view,’ while at the same time insisting on a particular antiwoke, ‘patriotic’ point of view.”
March 2022: DeSantis signed the Florida Parental Rights in Education bill — the “Don’t Say Gay” bill — prohibiting teachers from discussing sexuality or gender identity with students in pre-K through third grade. The practical problem: a lesbian second-grade teacher could not mention her wife or girlfriend. April 2022: The legislature extended it to grades 4-12 (with some exceptions for pre-existing curricular material).
Disney conflict: Disney’s then-CEO Bob Chapek spoke out against the Don’t Say Gay bill. In an undeniable act of political retribution, DeSantis took control of the governing body overseeing the district where Disney World properties are located and transformed the company’s tax status.
Other Initiatives
- “Fund the police” efforts (2021-2022)
- Tightened public disorder laws
- Revived the Florida State Guard (dormant since 1947)
- September 2022: Chartered two planes to fly Venezuelan asylum seekers from San Antonio, Texas, to Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts — a political spectacle about immigration that drew enormous media attention.
New College of Florida Takeover
DeSantis’s most radical institutional action was the overhaul of New College of Florida (Sarasota) — a public liberal arts honors college. He removed six of thirteen trustees and replaced them with loyalist conservatives and activists, including Christopher Rufo, Matthew Spalding (Hillsdale/1776 Commission), and Charles Kesler (Claremont Institute). DeSantis’s chief of staff expressed hope that New College would become “Florida’s classical college, more along the lines of a Hillsdale of the South.”
The revamped board:
- Fired college president Patricia Okker
- Dismantled the DEI office
- Changed hiring practices and training procedures
- Denied a whole round of early tenure applications
- Moved to dismantle the gender studies program
- Requested nearly half a billion dollars from state taxpayers
By the start of the 2023-2024 school year, nearly 40 percent of the New College faculty had resigned. Field: DeSantis’s New College actions “resembled Orbán’s project at MCC” — the same logic of using state power to transform an institution’s ideological character from the top.
Rufo was a visiting fellow at Hungary’s Danube Institute and was paid well by Hungary for his time — reinforcing the parallel.
NatCon 3 (Miami, September 2022)
DeSantis gave the keynote speech at NatCon 3 in Miami, titled “Florida is a Model for the Nation.” His legislative agenda was celebrated as proof of concept for what the New Right could accomplish with state power.
He also pushed to expand the charter school system to accommodate Hillsdale-style schools — with precedent in Florida’s existing Hillsdale-affiliated charter schools — and sought to partner with Larry P. Arnn for broader expansion. (Tennessee governor Mike Lee also pursued this plan but it was scuttled when Arnn made controversial remarks about how teachers today are trained “in the dumbest parts of the dumbest colleges in the country.”)
Significance
Field’s argument: DeSantis represents what Longmarcherism looks like when translated into executive power at the state level. Anti-CRT laws, anti-trans legislation, the New College takeover, the Disney fight — each follows the same Rufo-derived logic: identify an institution, declare it captured by the left, seize or punish it, replace its leadership with loyalists. The Orbánist parallel is not accidental — the New Right explicitly modeled some of its institutional strategy on what Orbán had done to Hungarian universities (banning gender studies in 2018, expelling Central European University in 2019, funding Mathias Corvinus Collegium with 1.7 billion dollars for “patriotic nationalist education”).
Cross-References
- Christopher Rufo — his key culture-war adviser; appointed to New College board
- Viktor Orbán — the model; DeSantis-New College mirrors Orbán-MCC
- Longmarcherism — the ideology justifying his institutional assault
- Hillsdale College — institutional partner for education reform
- National Conservatism — NatCon 3 keynote; DeSantis as the movement’s political champion
- MAGA New Right — the movement whose political ambitions he embodies
- Charles Kesler — appointed to New College board
- Matthew Spalding — appointed to New College board