It sounds like a bad joke from a dystopian film – but the sentence was spoken, publicly and without a flinch: “If you’re driving on a street and a mob surrounds your car and threatens you, you have the right to flee. And if you hit someone while doing so, it’s their fault.” The person who said this wasn’t just anyone. It was Florida’s Governor Ron DeSantis. And what he announced is more than just a political slip – it’s a sweeping authorization of violence against protesters.
DeSantis made these remarks on the Rubin Report. His message: In Florida, the right to self-defense also applies behind the wheel. Anyone who feels threatened – subjectively, mind you – may hit the gas. Whether people are injured or killed in the process is secondary. The blame lies with the so-called “mob” blocking the vehicle. What DeSantis is staging here is nothing less than a state-sanctioned green light to crush all forms of civil protest – a Stand Your Ground law with a gas pedal instead of a gun.
There is a legal background to all this: the so-called Combating Public Disorder Act, which went into effect in 2021, grants drivers civil immunity if they claim to be in a threatening protest situation. But the governor’s words have turned this law into a political weapon. It is no longer just about legal technicalities but about a cultural declaration of war on the right to protest itself. The message to the public is clear: Anyone who takes to the streets is risking their life – and doing so legally.
How serious this rhetoric is – and how dangerous its consequences can be – became clear during a protest this past weekend: A pickup truck driver didn’t stop, plowed into the crowd, and ran over a woman. Out of respect for the victim, we have deliberately chosen not to publish the video – and we don’t want to see it in the comments either. Anyone attempting to post it will have their comment, including username, removed. The woman is, under the circumstances, doing well and was fortunately not critically injured. But the incident shows clearly what such laws can cause in reality.
Criticism didn’t take long to emerge. On social media, users compared the law to a license for vigilante justice. “What’s a protest, what’s a mob?” one Reddit user asked. “If I feel scared, does that mean I can run over anyone in my way?” And this is precisely the problem: When fear becomes the yardstick for violence, when subjective threat outweighs the right to physical safety, that’s when authoritarian arbitrariness begins.
Ron DeSantis likes to present himself as a hardliner – a bulwark against “woke culture,” migration, gender politics – and now also against leftist protests. But what is revealed here is more than conservative toughness. It is a calculated attack on the very foundations of democratic participation. Those who cannot defeat their political opponents with arguments declare them enemies – a mob – and, if necessary, clear them from the road.
This policy is dangerous. Not only because it legitimizes violence, but because it erases the line between justice and vengeance. Anyone who equates protest with threat, who denounces civilians as a mob and turns drivers into judges over life and death, is destroying the foundation of free societies: the public space as a place for discourse – not erasure.
There is no other way to put it: With his statement, DeSantis has reached a new level of brutality. And if no one speaks out against it, this ideology will soon become reality. Not just in Florida.
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