Whatever else it is known for, the Great State of Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis keeps telling the world, is also a graveyard. He did it again while campaigning for candidates in other parts of the country. Speaking at a campaign stop, he declared, “I think in Florida, and we need this to be true in Pennsylvania, around the country, we can’t just stand idly by while woke ideology ravages every institution in our society. We must fight the woke in our schools. We must fight the woke in our businesses. We must fight the woke in government agencies. We can never ever surrender to woke ideology. And I’ll tell you this, the state of Florida is where woke goes to die,” The Hill reported.

It sounds like a cute sound bite and it evoked applause – as it does wherever “woke” is mentioned at Republican gatherings. It has replaced the dreaded term “critical race theory” as the insult du jour against “liberals” and sundry other “evil” Americans who want to destroy the country.

It can be argued that telling Republicans to denounce “woke” is an apt recommendation because the millions of Americans who blindly follow people like DeSantis, former President Donald Trump and the mysterious “Q” must be sleeping and it would be politically dangerous to get them to wake up – to become woke.

That is not being facetious. The origin of the word “woke” goes back to the 1920s and, more recently, has come to describe African Americans who have awakened to the racist conditions in which they live and its connection to history. If it is assumed that “woke” is grammatically incorrect, it depends on the person making the judgment. It is part of what used to be called “black English,” formerly Ebonics, now known as African American Vernacular English (AAVE).

Those, like DeSantis, who mock what they call “woke ideology” obviously think they have a less offensive way to promote racism. In Florida, particularly, that should be no surprise, given the state’s racist past which includes lynching, destruction of whole communities and the preponderance of monuments and other tributes to the Confederacy and ongoing efforts to suppress African concerns.

Indeed, several of the laws which DeSantis and the Republican-dominated Legislature have enacted and which are broadly covered by the governor’s anti“woke ideology” campaign are aimed specifically at African Americans. They include criminalizing protests following the mass demonstrations against the killing of George Floyd, the banning of non-existent critical race theory — that is, teaching about slavery — in schools and at business training programs; voter suppression; reintroduction of the poll tax to keep tens of thousands of ex-felons from voting; and the elimination of two of the four majority African American congressional districts. During his campaign for governor in 2018, DeSantis said that voters should not “monkey up” the election; his opponent was an African American, Andrew Gillum.

African Americans have been “woke” to what is going on, even though not many of them or other Floridians have strongly opposed the governor’s drive to, as he puts it, make Florida “the freest state” in the nation. But there has been some resistance. Ben Frazier of the Northside Coalition in Jacksonville and Community Justice Project attorney Denise Ghartey complained about the Combating Public Disorder Act or antiprotest law to a recent meeting of the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) in Geneva, The Miami Herald reported. The committee comprising human rights experts meets every two years “to evaluate international efforts to eradicate racial prejudice,” The Herald noted.

The two “woke” Floridians caught the attention of Faith Dikeledi Pansy Tlakula of South Africa, the committee’s country rapporteur, who asked, “What measures are being taken to guarantee the exercise of the right to freedom of peaceful assembly of individuals belonging to racial and ethnic minorities?” Of course there was no answer. In fact, Frazier told The Herald.,“There are more than 22 states who are considering the same type of anti-protest legislation to abridge and to violate our First Amendment rights to assemble and to protest.”

None of this seems to be making an impact on DeSantis. His latest stunt came this week when he ran a campaign ad, not in Florida, but in Ohio, showing him in a bomber jacket similar to the one Tom Cruise wears in “Top Gun” and then in a flight suit while sitting in a plane with the words “Top Gov” on his helmet. This was probably a reference to DeSantis’ service in the U.S. Navy, except he was a lawyer in the Judge Advocate General Corps (JAG), not a fighter pilot. He announced that he was suited up for “taking on the corporate media,” adding, “The rules of engagement are as follows: number one – don’t fire unless fired upon, but when they fire, you fire back with overwhelming force. Number two – never ever back down from a fight. Number three – don’t accept their narrative.”

This was not surprising from a politician who launched his run for governor with a campaign ad showing him teaching his child to “build the wall” with plastic blocks – a reference to former President Donald Trump’s commitment to constructing a wall along the southern border to keep out refugees and immigrants. DeSantis is also shown reading from Trump’s book “The Art of The Deal” to a child and teaching another to talk by saying “Make America Great Again.” The latest pitch does not make reference to Trump, obviously because DeSantis is planning to run for the presidency in 2024, which the former president seems intent on doing also.

But, instead of making a military pitch, the governor could have been true to himself by donning the 1600s garb of Alonso Quijano, climbing up on a horse and grabbing a lance as today’s Don Quixote. Of course, he would not have to go off to tilt at windmills because he has already created so many of them through his assault on freedom that he would need, rather, to fend off the foul knaves trying to knock them down, ensconced as he is in the windmills of his mind, to borrow a phrase from the song which Alan Bergman, Marilyn Bergman and Michel Legrand wrote in 1968.

“Round like a circle in a spiral, like a wheel within a wheel/Never ending or beginning on an ever spinning reel,” the song says – which aptly describes the amazing ride on which DeSantis has taken Floridians in the name of “freedom” while actually suppressing freedom and belittling those who do not accept his windmills.

“We can’t just stand idly by while woke ideology ravages every institution in our society,” the governor proclaimed in Pennsylvania. Really? Somebody needs to get a set of American History books and sit this troubled brother down and help him get woke.