Opinion Columnists | Florida’s anti-woke campaign emulates policies of bigoted regimes | Fred Grimm

Florida, as our governor avows, is where “woke goes to die.”

But there’s no need to wait around as Gov. Ron DeSantis slowly kills off entrenched liberal contrivances — all that diversity, equality, inclusion stuff. Woke, and any hope of woke, have already been annihilated in plenty of places around the globe.

Autocrats have created their own variations of what must seem like utopias to the MAGA mob — regimes awash in guns and bigotry.

The MAGA-inclined (or at least the 38% among them with valid passports) can choose from dozens of nations with policies induced by homophobia, xenophobia and inequality. Strong men controlling these regimes created a template for the new Florida — banning books, suppressing voters, denigrating science, rewriting history, outlawing abortion, scapegoating immigrants, busting drag queens, denying climate change, transforming religious tenets into government policies.

As he exploits cultural conflicts, DeSantis occasionally strays beyond the law. But in these places, autocrats wield a great advantage. They are the law.

While Florida’s far-right Christian activists fulminate against LGBTQ rights and censor textbooks that broach sexuality, 73 nations classify homosexuality as an outright crime. Just this spring, Uganda (with the urging of influential far-right American evangelicals) passed the Anti-Homosexuality Act, which added life imprisonment and the death penalty to sentencing options.

Other must-visit countries that execute gays include Sudan, Brunei, Iran, Mauritania, Saudi Arabia, Yemen and 12 northern states of Nigeria, where homosexuals are stoned to death.

Yemen should be especially appealing to MAGA travelers, given the nation has no semblance of gun control. It’s estimated that the nation has three times more firearms than people. Yemen is the Florida the NRA covets.

Florida’s constitutionally suspect campaign against drag queens has butt up against the First Amendment. Meanwhile, Forbes reports that 13 nations have outlawed cross dressing. Floridians whose sensibilities are offended by drag can find safe havens in Brunei, Gambia, Indonesia, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Malawi, Malaysia, Nigeria, Oman, South Sudan, Tonga and the United Arab Emirates.

The Ronald-who-would-be-Donald has tried mightily to out-Trump Trump with political stunts and callous rhetoric against undocumented immigrants. But DeSantis can only envy the unrestrained anti-immigrant policies pursued by other regimes. Especially, Libya, where, according to Medecins Sans Frontieres (Doctors without Borders), “entire families of migrants and refugees have been captured, handcuffed and transported to detentions centers. People have been hurt and even killed; families split up; homes reduced to piles of rubble.”

Florida’s cultural warriors might also consider relocating to one of the 16 countries where abortion is banned under any circumstance, with none of those namby-pamby exceptions for rape or incest. MAGA anti-abortionists can visit the likes of Iraq, Laos, Senegal, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Honduras or Haiti, confident that thereabouts, a raped 12-year-old must carry her child to term.

Certain foreign domains have pursued local variations of another DeSantis endeavor: cleansing history textbooks of references that might discomfit white students (or, more likely, ranting adults). So much for dreary details about slavery, Jim Crow, the Rosewood massacre, the Ocoee election day massacre, the Groveland Four murders, the Rubin Stacy lynching.

But autocratic regimes and more than a few democracies have been way ahead of Florida’s campaign to replace unsavory history with a smiley face. Chinese textbooks neglect the Cultural Revolution, Japan goes light on the Nanjing Massacre, Russia gives Joe Stalin a nice scrubbing, Turkey skips over the Armenian genocide. Meanwhile, Florida forgets a past laden with racist atrocities and banishes its historians to the same netherworld as epidemiologists and climate scientists.

(The overused George Orwell “1984” quote has gotten quite a workout lately, but the truth of it seems pertinent in 2023: “Who controls the past, controls the future [and] who controls the present controls the past.”)

Sadly, true believers who still cling to climate change denial — once a prerequisite for MAGA membership — may have a difficult time finding a foreign destination with many like-minded skeptics.

Trouble is, too many of the most strident anti-progressive, theocratic regimes in the world are regularly getting pummeled by unprecedented droughts, floods, storms, wildfires and other climate disasters. Far-right Russians would have had a hard time refuting global warming on June 8, when the temperature in Siberia was 103 degrees.

Our new friend Yemen, for example, may share the Florida GOP’s anti-abortion sentiments and its obsession with guns, but desertification, drought and famine have made climate-change denial a tough sell down on the southern reaches of the Arabian Peninsula.

If Florida is where woke goes to die, Yemen is where these anti-woke notions starve to death.

Fred Grimm, a longtime resident of Fort Lauderdale, has worked as a journalist in South Florida since 1976. Reach him by email at or on Twitter: @grimm_fred.