Far-right Florida Republican: 'We need to extinguish the left'

13 July 2023

During an angry, vitriolic July 12 speech, former Florida State Rep. Sabatini not only called for defunding federal law enforcement, but also, for abolishing public education in Florida and going to a private-schools-only system. And he wants to "extinguish the left."

Countless MAGA Republicans and pundits for right-wing media outlets have accused Democrats of wanting to "defund the police," conflating a slogan of street activists with actual Democratic Party policies. In fact, a long list of Democrats — from President Joe Biden to former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-California) to New York City Mayor Eric Adams — have emphasized that they are vehemently opposed to defunding the police. Democrat and former Pennsylvania State Rep. Cherelle Parker, likely to become Philadelphia's next mayor, has campaigned on increasing the size of Philly's police department.

But defunding the FBI and the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) is something that many MAGA Republicans are openly promoting, including far-right Lake County, Florida Chairman Sabatini.

The 34-year-old Sabatini, who formerly served in the Florida House of Representatives, told the crowd, "The only thing that's good enough is to completely and totally destroy the left in this county. Destroy it."

After that line drew applause from the crowd, Sabatini went on to say, "Defense gets you nowhere except where you already are in you're lucky…. It's tough to defund the left. I'm talking about defunding government agencies, defunding bureaucrats, defunding government schools and going to 100 percent private schools like Florida is making gestures at right now…. Let's truly beat the left at the federal level."

Sabatini called for "gutting the DOJ like a fish and defunding these government agencies."

"I think we should actually push for a government shutdown," Sabatini told attendees. "I think we actually need to defund and destabilize this terror that's happening to Washington, D.C. that's quite literally aimed at us and our families and our children and everything that's going on here. Defund and shut down and destroy the wokeism that exists in this country."

Sabatini has a long history of making inflammatory remarks. When Biden, in January 2022, promised to nominate a Black woman for the U.S. Supreme Court, Sabatini tweeted, "Biden MUST be impeached for his anti-white racist exclusion of any white nominee to the Supreme Court."

It was also in 2022 that Sabatini quoted Gen. Francisco Franco, the fascist dictator who ruled Spain from the late 1930s until his death in 1975. Sabatini tweeted, "I answer only to God and to History" — a Franco quote — and he later tweeted a photo of El Generalísimo with President Dwight D. Eisenhower and said critics of his pro-Franco tweet were "extremely unamerican."

Sabatini took that photo out of context. Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, Lyndon B. Johnson and other U.S. presidents had close relations with the Franco dictatorship during the Cold War, but not because they truly admired Franco. It was more a belief that as bad as Franco was, at least he kept the Soviet Union out of Spain.

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