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December 4, 2021

No, Ron DeSantis is not creating a private army to take over America

By Andrea Widburg

Governor Ron DeSantis proposed reinstating Florida's State Guard — and the entire leftist establishment went mad.  So mad, indeed, that Sarah Silverman, of all people, issued a "calm down" warning to MSNBC's professional hysteric, Joy Reid.

State guard forces are nothing new and nothing exciting.  Indeed, even Wikipedia has an honest and temperate description of them.  It explains that they are military units that operate under the aegis of the given state's governor.  Unlike a state's national guard forces, they cannot be federalized.  (You may recall how the Democrats called National Guard forces to D.C. in January so there'd be someone there to witness the inauguration of our current [p]resident.)

State guards, writes Wikipedia, have a long and honorable history in America (hyperlinks and footnotes omitted):

From its founding until the early 1900s, the United States maintained only a minimal army and relied on state militias to supply the majority of its troops, with the training and readiness of the latter varying widely. As a result of the Spanish–American War and the performance of the militias and other volunteer units during that conflict, Congress was called upon to reform and regulate the training and qualification of state militias. In 1903, with passage of the Militia Act of 1903, the predecessor to the modern-day National Guard was formed. It required the states to divide their militias into two sections. The law recommended the title "National Guard" for the first section, known as the organized militia, and "Reserve Militia" for all others.

Wikipedia even has a graphic, reproduced below, showing those states that have active forces (green) and those with inactive forces (red).  As you can see, Florida's force has been inactive, but both New York and California have active guards:


Image: Map of U.S. states and territories showing current State Defense Force status, current as of March 2021, by SSaint04.  CC BY-SA 4.0.

On Thursday, however, state guards morphed from a longstanding American tradition into the second coming of Hitler.  The reason?  Ron DeSantis included in his proposed budget a $3.5-million request "to establish the Florida State Guard."  In the same press release announcing the budget request, DeSantis's office explained how the state guard would serve Florida's residents:

The establishment of the Florida State Guard will further support those emergency response efforts in the event of a hurricane, natural disasters and other state emergencies. The $3.5 million to establish the Florida State Guard will enable civilians to be trained in the best emergency response techniques. By establishing the Florida State Guard, Florida will become the 23rd state with a state guard recognized by the federal government.

If sanity were abroad in America, most people would sagely nod and say, "Well, that sounds like a fine, sensible idea, perfectly in keeping with American pattern and practice over the centuries."  But sanity has left these shores, and leftists, many of whom should be assumed to know better, promptly announced that DeSantis was setting up a private army to take over America:

Of course, when it comes to hysterical and uninformed responses to any piece of news, one can always count on MSNBC's Joy Reid:

But here's something I bet you didn't see coming.  Sarah Silverman, one of the most reliable leftists in Hollywood, politely called out Reid for spreading misinformation:

If Sarah Silverman can have that kind of lucidity, it's to be hoped that other people will, too.  More importantly, if people realize that the media are lying to them, maybe they'll start taking what they hear with a grain of salt until the point comes when they realize that the mainstream media lie compulsively.  They are, collectively, the embodiment of the way in which Mary McCarthy described Lillian Hellman, an old-school leftist sympathizer: "Every word she writes is a lie, including 'and' and 'the.'"

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