DeSantis officials blast Axios for boosting claim that parental rights protections parallel Nazi persecution

Florida and other red states have enacted laws and policies protecting children from irreversible genital mutilations and sterilizing drugs as well as from sexualizing and racist propaganda in the classroom.

Axios boosted the bad faith suggestion Tuesday that these popular Republican efforts, Florida's in particular, are Nazi-esque.

Axios joined Jake Newsome, a self-described historian and California-based gay activist, in conflating protections for parents and children with antipathies for non-straight persons. The liberal publication further entertained Newsome's notion that Nazi Germany serves as a valuable analogue for the present moment in Florida.

"In 1920s Germany, a burgeoning Nazi Party looking to unite the political right targeted a group that party leaders knew was a common enemy: queer people," wrote Axios' Kathryn Varn. "They ramped up a propaganda campaign, banning publications by and about LGBTQ+ people and telling Germans the 'homosexual lifestyle' posed a danger to their children and the country's values."

"Sound familiar?" wrote Varn, quoting Newsome, who gave a recent talk to a crowd at the Florida Holocaust Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida.

Newsome has been trying to project this Nazi parallel for years, possibly because it could move product. After all, the activist has been peddling a book for two years about the identitarian socialists' persecution of gays and lesbians.

"In today's era of the Republican Party's 'Don't Say Gay' bills," Newsome said last week, "we need the pink triangle more than ever."

What Newsome and other radicals call the "Don't Say Gay" bill is in reality Florida's Parental Rights in Education Act. Contrary to activists' claims, the law merely prohibits teachers from giving "classroom instruction" on so-called gender identity and sexual orientation, straight or otherwise. Kids and students remain free to discuss their sexual preferences.

After striking the parallel between early 20th-century Germany and contemporary Florida, Axios proceeded to provide statistics on the numbers of gays persecuted by the Nazi regime.

The article also cited smears along similar lines advanced by other critics of Florida's parental rights legislation, including Wilton Manors city commissioner Chris Caputo, geriatric singer Cyndi Lauper, and the LGBT activist who refers to himself as Alyssa MacKenzie.

Officials from the DeSantis administration slapped back Tuesday, blasting Varn as a "journo-activist" for the Axios piece.

Bryan Griffin, communications director for Gov. Ron DeSantis (R), responded on X, "Journo-activists continue to repeat the lies about the Parental Rights in Education bill that — just last week — the media had to admit were all fabricated when the settlement was reached that dismisses the case against the law."

"Today, Axios actually published a story amplifying and pushing the perspective of an activist who compared removing sexual content and radical gender identity from K-3rd grade public school classrooms with Nazi Germany," continued Griffin. "Dishonest media activism at its very worst."

DeSantis' press secretary Jeremy Redfern similarly blasted Varn, writing, "This isn't news. This is propaganda, and it has nothing to do with the Parental Rights in Education Act. Equating parental rights with the Holocaust is absurd and disrespectful."

Christina Pushaw, also part of the DeSantis team, wrote to Varn, "So, if you're against porn in elementary schools ... you are a Nazi? Good to know."

Pushaw added in a separate tweet, "It is beyond absurd to equate Florida's parental rights law, which prohibits instruction in gender ideology and age-inappropriate materials, to the Holocaust. Any historian who makes such claims makes a mockery of his profession.

While touting himself as a historian, a cursory look at Newsome's recent social media posts indicates he may be more interested in advancing a strategically advantageous narrative than in presenting facts — and not just when it comes to Republican laws protecting children.

For instance, last month, Newsome rushed to judgment in the case of Oklahoma student Dagny Benedict's Feb. 8 suicide.

Benedict picked a fight with some girls in a bathroom, later suggesting to police it had been over comments wholly unrelated to her sexuality or identity. The next day she died, not of trauma — as the liberal media and LGBT activists had suggested — but from an overdose, according to the chief medical examiner in Oklahoma.

Just as Newsome has drawn an untenable connection between Florida policies and those exterminationist initiatives engaged in by the identitarian socialists of yesteryear, he claimed late last month that Bendict's death was "the result of the Republicans' years-long coordinated attack on the LGBTQ+ community."

Not only did the Axios-boosted activist implicate Republicans in the girl's suicide, he smeared the teenage girls Benedict attacked in the bathroom.

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