Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, after his brilliant mask stunt, made a hilarious joke at France’s expense when talking about the bravery of the Ukrainian forces, saying that France would probably just surrender.
That comment came when he was diiscussing how courageous it is for the Ukrainians to keep fighting despite the odds stacked against them and the massive firepower of the Russian Army, DeSantis said:
“A lot of other places around the world, they just fold when there’s any type of adversity. I mean can you imagine if [Putin] went into France?
Would [the French] do anything to put up a fight? Probably not. So those folks [the Ukrainians] are stepping up, but there’s a lot of problems between now and then, and I think, unfortunately, it’s going to end up very, very ugly over the next few weeks and months.”
Watch that hilarious speech here:
But France wasn’t the only country that DeSantis made fun of in his speech. He also went after Putin and Russia, hitting that nation as little more than an oil seller with a leftover military from the Soviet days. As Florida Politics reports:
DeSantis described Putin, again, as “basically an authoritarian gas station attendant.” Russia, meanwhile, is a “hollowed-out country but for the energy” and “legacy nuclear weapons,” DeSantis argued.
“His ideology is: try to reassemble some of the lost glory of what they had,” DeSantis said of Putin.
He quickly added “the Soviet Union was not a glorious entity” so his position would not be misconstrued, stressing it was Putin’s view “that the dissolution of the Soviet Union is a bad thing.”
In any case, DeSantis’ Florida joke, while funny, isn’t necessarily accurate. The “surrender monkey” trope applied to France stems almost entirely from that nation’s quick surrender in World War II in the face of Hitler’s blitz.
While that war did go poorly for the French and they didn’t show much fighting spirit, the French have a military reputation that’s otherwise excellent.
From Vercingetorix’s resistance to Caesar’s conquest of Gaul to Petain’s brave defense of Verdun, Napoleon’s “thunderclap” victory at Austerlitz (where the French defeated Russian forces) to William the Conqueror’s conquest of England, the French were renowned as brave fighters for many centuries.
The Franks, as they were known during the Crusades, struck fear into the heart of the Saracens and the massive columns of Emperor Napoleon’s army defeated many a foe.
Further, France’s modern military is far from a joke, even if many think it is one due to its performance in World War II. It won the long and bloody Algerian war and now is one of the stronger members of the NATO alliance. As the Daily Caller reports:
France’s military conducts nuclear training exercise every three months, according to a Forbes report. The exercises are roughly four-hours in length, which matches the flight time from French military bases to western Russia, and back, the article notes. The nation also uses Navy submarines containing 16 M51 intercontinental ballistic missiles. Overall, France had an estimated atomic arsenal of around 300 warheads as of 2020, per reports from Forbes.
So, though the joke was funny, DeSantis is wrong on this count; the French probably do have the bravery and martial spirit to fight like lions.
By: Gen Z Conservative, editor of GenZConservative.com. Follow me on Parler and Gettr.
This story syndicated with permission from Will, Author at Trending Politics