Kudos to the Sunshine State for Inflicting Major DEI Defeat
Cheers rang out from Key West to Pensacola, and nationally, on Tuesday, when it was announced that the Florida State University System’s Board of Governors voted 10-6 to reject former University of Michigan president and DEI fanatic Santa J. Ono’s candidacy for the presidency of the University of Florida.
Ono, who was curiously the only finalist for the job, was unanimously recommended by UF’s search committee on May 4 and unanimously approved by the university’s Board of Trustees on May 27.
Gov. Ron DeSantis, R-Fla., who has pledged that our state is “where Woke goes to die,” was oddly reticent on Ono, stating first that he trusted the process and later that the governors, 15 out of 17 of whom he appointed, should follow their conscience in deciding his fate.
Other Florida conservatives, including Sen. Rick Scott, R-Fla., and Reps. Greg Steube, R-Fla., Byron Donalds, R-Fla., and Jimmy Patronis, R-Fla., denounced the appointment and called for a negative vote.
Ono’s rejection by the Board of Governors is an unprecedented but legally and procedurally correct use of its powers to reject the candidacy of a Florida state university president.
His demise came after a polite but charged meeting in Orlando, on the campus of Central Florida University.
Public comments included scathing denunciations and trenchant questions about his candidacy based on his well-documented record for supporting DEI, critical race theory, radical gender ideology, and other leftist shibboleths.
Supporters offered fulsome but vacuous praise, mainly dwelling on the supposed stature of Ono’s last job, at Michigan, and unevidenced faith in his purported “evolution” from a DEI guru who wrote that divisive ideology’s playbook to a “visionary leader” of principled alignment with the anti-Woke ideology characterizing the DeSantis years.
Ono left the room jobless.
The six governors who voted for him — and the UF trustees — should know only shame and should resign.
UF’s 54,000 students can continue their studies safe in the knowledge that they will be evaluated on their academic merits rather than the color of their skin.
Americans rejoicing in Ono’s humiliating defeat should continue forth with a profound lesson.
No matter what happens in elections, no matter what politicians promise, no matter how much progress appears to have been made, the scourge of DEI and its associated ideologies remains powerfully with us, ever ready to recapture our institutions and impose their malignant, hateful, and beyond intolerant beliefs.
DEI proponents, who are pathologically convinced they are right, will stop at nothing to reinstate their hateful beliefs in defiance of public opinion, evidence, and even law.
That Ono could have come so close to the presidency of our free state’s flagship institution shows how vulnerable all our institutions remain, even in Florida, conservatism’s greatest bastion.
To those who continue to advocate DEI, people of true principle should have nothing to say. The enemy deserves no quarter, no tolerance, and above all no second chances.
DEI must fall and be removed from our society, root, and branch.
For this, we must remain eternally vigilant, but eternal vigilance is the ultimate price of freedom.
Paul du Quenoy is President of the Palm Beach Freedom Institute. Read Paul du Quenoy’s Reports — More Here.
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