TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — Charlie Crist, the Democrat nominee for governor, announced today Karla Hernández Mats to run with him as candidate for Lieutenant Governor. 

“Charlie Crist choosing a radical Left-wing teachers’ union boss as his running mate is a slap in the face to Florida families.  

If it were up to Crist and Mats, our children would be locked out of the classroom and indoctrinated with woke ideology, millions of Floridians would have had their livelihoods ripped away from them, our police would be defunded, and our communities would be far less safe. 

Crist and Mats are Biden’s ideal ticket and they will do to Florida what Biden is doing to our country. The choice could not be clearer for those who want to Keep Florida Free, and Floridians will reject their destructive agenda in November,” Helen Aguirre Ferré, Executive Director of the Republican Party of Florida, said. 

In case you missed it, here are some initial details on Mats: 

Karla Hernández Mats is anti-parent and equates parents who petition their child’s school board to serial killers. 

• She is Vice President of American Federation of Teachers, Randi Weingarten’s teacher union.  
• Last year, parents across the country showed up at school board meetings to protest covid mandates, critical race theory indoctrination, and radical gender ideology being injected into classrooms. AG Merrick Garland threatened to send the FBI to intimidate these parents for the “crime” of being concerned about their kids’ education. The DOJ memo smeared parents as “domestic terrorists.” 
• Right after Garland’s threats, Karla Hernández Mats piled on by publicly attacking parents. On social media, she likened concerned parents to serial killers and called them crazy. Her tweet compares parents to horror movie villains Freddy Krueger and evil clowns. 
• From the United Teachers of Dade (UTD) social media she tweeted in response to a news story about parents protesting at a school board meeting: “Except those aren’t parents. In fact, many of them dont even have children. They are soldiers of faux rage, false narratives, and political interests that want to create chaos and keep their base fired up with boogey men and conspiracy theories. #fakenews” 
• Mats supports allowing sexualized lesson plans in grades K-3 and opposed the Parental Rights in Education law. 

Karla Hernández Mats advocates for indoctrinating children with critical race theory and radical gender ideology in the classroom. 

• Mats promotes CRT trainings and nodded along approvingly to the claim that “systemic racism permeates American society at every level and should be taught to kids.” 
• Mats promotes “antiracist trainings,” a tool of CRT ideology, for teachers with far-left Squad member, Congressman Jamaal Bowman. 
• Mats tweeted about “explaining white privilege to a broke white person.” 

Karla Hernández Mats would have kept our state closed and Floridians out of work. She supports locking down businesses and extended school closures. 

• She fought to keep kids out of the classroom, claiming COVID lockdowns “just [haven’t] had an impact” on young people 
• Criticized Gov. DeSantis for keeping our economy open for reopening schools in 2020 and kids in school as “dangerous for our communities at large,” despite new studies proving remote learning widened the achievement gap for low-income students.  

Karla Hernández Mats is pro-defund the police and thinks our law enforcement officers are racist. She sides with violent rioters and has actively worked against laws that put violent criminals behind bars. 

• Mats thinks that putting criminals in prison is equivalent to genocide. 
• Mats supports violent rioting in the state of Florida, advocating against the Governor’s Anti-Riot Bill, calling the bill “racist.” 

Charlie Crist, Karla Hernández Mats and her boss, AFT president Randi Weingarten, are Biden’s biggest cheerleaders in Florida. 

• Mats praises Joe Biden’s failed and destructive policies, saying she was “glad to see” his first one hundred days in office. 
• Joined President Biden at the White House for a union boss roundtable. 
• Karla Hernández Mats’s teachers’ union lobbied and worked with the Biden administration to cover up and stop collecting sexual assault data from schools.  
• Mats’s work with the Biden administration to hide information about sexual assault in public schools is especially troubling when considering her career history.  
• As president of UTD, Karla Hernandez Mats protected a sexual predator for years and accompanied him through numerous investigations into his sexual assaults of multiple students at a Miami-Dade middle school. The rapist, Wendell Nibbs, was a high-ranking UTD member and strong supporter of Hernandez Mats. He pled guilty to child sexual assault and was sentenced to 8 years in prison in January 2020. (Ironically, after this scandal, Mats tweeted from UTD that “Charters lack accountability and transparency of traditional public schools. They are not subject to the same regulations in hiring certified teachers”)