Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis slammed critical race theory as “race essentialism” as part of his remarks on Monday ahead of signing his bill to stop Big Tech deplatforming and censorship.

Speaking to the press at Florida International University, DeSantis renewed his vow to stamp out the ideology from being taught in Florida classrooms. He insisted that the corporate media was engaged in “gaslighting” the public about the effects of the left-wing ideology.

“There’s a movement now in some of the elite corporate outlets to gaslight people about what critical race theory is. I saw one thing saying Texas has a bill, ‘they don’t want people to learn about slavery,’ that’s nonsense,” DeSantis said. 

“You teach the facts. You teach everything that’s happened. But what critical race theory is, is basically race essentialism,” DeSantis added. “It teaches people to view that as the most important characteristic. And obviously if you’re certain races, Caucasian, what-not, they view that in a negative fashion. That is not something that’s appropriate for schools. It’s based on historical falsehoods.” 

“For example, some of these people have said the American Revolution was fought, uh, because they wanted to preserve slavery,” he said, referring to the widely debunked New York Times 1619 Project. “Really? In Lexington and Concord, that’s what they were fighting about?”

“Just open up a history book,” DeSantis suggested. “Read the pamphlets. Read what they were doing at the time. It doesn’t have a place.”

DeSantis says that while Florida’s Board of Education will be meeting in the next couple of weeks to discuss the ideology, it will be up to him and the state’s legislature to deal with it.

“If you continue to have some of this movement in spite of the state policy, it really should have funding consequences that flow from it. Look, have we done so well on the basics that we go off on these political and ideological tangents in our schools? They’re not supposed to be indoctrinating kids with faddish ideologies. They’re supposed to be teaching the basics. Let them make sense of this for themselves,” DeSantis said, receiving applause for his remarks. 

DeSantis previously took aim at critical race theory on Friday. “You can put lipstick on a pig, it’s still a pig,” he said of the race essentialist ideology. “If we have to play whack a mole all over the state stopping this critical race theory, we will do it.”