Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis blasted woke antisemites and anti-Zionists in American colleges, the media, and the "worthless" United Nations on Saturday on Newsmax.
"I don't care what some imbecile on a college campus says; I don't care what liars in the media say; and I certainly don't care what worthless institutions like the United Nations say: We are going to stand with Israel in this dark hour for them," DeSantis told "Saturday Report."
DeSantis, who is campaigning for president and speaking Saturday in the Las Vegas gathering of the Republican Jewish Coalition Conference, hailed his state for having revoked Florida college students' "privilege" to support Hamas in the war against Israel over "material support to terrorism."
"You may have a right to say certain things, but that's material support to terrorism if you're saying you're part of what they're doing, so we deactivated the Students for Justice in Palestine and were the first state to step up to the plate and do that," DeSantis told host Rita Cosby before his RJC address.
"I was the first candidate to say that if you have foreign visa holders out there making common cause with Hamas, I'm canceling their visa and I'm sending them back," DeSantis added. "That's a bare minimum.
"They don't have a right to be here on a student visa. It's a privilege to be here on a student visa. There's a lot of Americans that would probably want those slots. There's other foreign nationals who actually like the United States who would probably want [one].
"They have no right to have those visas, and if they're going to make common cause with terrorism, we are going to eject."
The problem on college campuses in sharing anti-Israel progressive narratives has been building for a long time, according to DeSantis.
"I was a blue-collar kid. Growing up in Florida, I ended up working my way through Yale and Harvard, and I tell people I'm one of the few that have gone through both and come out more conservative than when I went in," DeSantis said.
"These universities have long been known as being hotbeds of left-wing activism."
It has only gotten worse, he continued.
"Actually celebrating a terrorist attack when the blood wasn't even dry on some of these Israeli civilians? You had students out there celebrating Hamas," he said. "It has gotten worse over the last couple of decades.
"There is a sickness on these college campuses. I don't know why American taxpayers are funding these universities if that's the type of garbage they're going to produce."
Progressive institutions, especially in the Ivy League, are "pathetic" in responding to antisemitism, DeSantis concluded.
"The response by a lot of these university administrators have been absolutely pathetic, particularly in places like the Ivy League," he said.
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Eric Mack ✉
Eric Mack has been a writer and editor at Newsmax since 2016. He is a 1998 Syracuse University journalism graduate and a New York Press Association award-winning writer.
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