Florida crosswalk wars take DeSantis’s ‘war on woke’ to street level

Cities fight back as purge of street art broadens from Pulse nightclub memorial to bike lane designed by fourth-graders

A battalion of transportation workers armed with cans of black paint has been deployed to open a new front in Ron DeSantis's war on woke", while young students trying to make their schools safer have joined the LGBTQ+ community as targets of Florida's Republican governor.

The saga began with the state moving in the dead of night to paint over a rainbow-colored crosswalk outside Orlando's former Pulse nightclub, where 49 people were killed in a 2016 shooting. The city's mayor, Buddy Dyer, called the erasure of the memorial to the mostly LGBTQ+ victims a cruel political act".