Ep 176 | DeSantis: 'The Ruling Class Needs to Be DEPOSED' | The Glenn Beck Podcast

Charlie Sheen is an icon of decadence.

I lit the fuse and my life turns into everything it wasn't supposed to be.

He's going the distance.

He was the highest paid TV star of all time.

When it started to change, it was quick.

He kept saying, No, no, no, I'm in the hospital now, but next week I'll be ready for the show.

Now, Charlie's sober.

He's gonna tell you the truth.

How do I present this with any class?

I think we're past that, Charlie.

We're past that, yeah.

Somebody call action.

Yeah, aka Charlie Sheen, only on Netflix, September 10th.

No elected official scares mainstream media more than my guess today.

Yeah.

I mean, Donald Trump was the devil, which makes my guess today

worse than the devil.

The whirlwind started in 2018 when he was elected governor of the third most populous state in the U.S., a margin of just 32,000 votes, hardly what pundits would call a mandate for sweeping policy changes.

But then a once-in-a-century pandemic hits, and he dared to question the lockdown policies of the DC establishment, erred on the side of maintaining freedom for the people of his state.

Very risky.

But this immediately put him right in the crosshairs of the national media who wanted to make them their new favorite, you know,

grandma killer monster.

CBS even fabricated a story about him on 60 Minutes and never to this day has retracted it.

Even Even when Democrats point out the lie, doesn't matter, but it's okay, they can lie because he's a Republican governor.

Then he goes on a streak of common sense reforms that draw the ire of left-wing forces from teachers unions to banks to the Walt Disney Company.

And all of that is on top of him trying to help his wife with her battle of cancer and guiding his state's recovery from one of the most devastating hurricanes in history.

Meanwhile, outlets like MSNBC keep labeling him dangerous.

Yeah, Mitt Romney was too.

And

actually, I would label Mitt Romney dangerous.

Now, anyway, despite the media's very best effort, he runs for re-election last fall.

He wins by 19 points.

That is the largest raw vote margin of victory in his state's history.

These are the adventures of Ron DeSentis, the swashbuckling governor of Florida.

We had to pay Errol Flynn for the use of that word swashbuckler.

He crammed a ton of action into his first term

in office,

but talking with him, you get the distinct feeling that he's just getting started.

Today, please welcome Governor Ron DeSantis.

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Or he would have to get some special document.

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It's 60 to 90 days to even figure out that they're the victim of this crime.

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Ron Reagan said that

everybody has their own time.

He said, I didn't change.

You know, I was the same guy with Goldwater.

He said, but it's like you just kind of time goes on.

You just slot in and then you pop back out and your time has passed.

You think your time, you're slotting in now?

Well, I think, you know, you look, Glenn, like the last five years for me being governor, had I been like a U.S.

senator.

or something else, I would not have been able to do the things I've done or get the notoriety that I've done.

People in other states probably wouldn't know who the heck I was.

I was put, you know, God put me in a position to be at the helm of the third largest state at age 40, youngest governor in the country.

And, you know, we had a lot of good things going for us.

We did a lot of good things.

Then COVID hits.

Then all this other stuff with cultural Marxism is attacking our families.

And I'm standing up against that, staying up at Disney.

So you're in positions to lead, and some people do, and some people don't.

And I think that I've been able to lead under difficult circumstances in a way that I think people appreciate.

So, you went to Congress.

You were a congressman for a while and

kind of a Tea Party kind of guy.

Would you consider yourself a Tea Party?

I mean, I was the founder of the Freedom Company.

I mean, we were anti-establishment.

You know, we wanted to overturn the D.C.

order and really bring fundamental change.

I know you were involved in that.

And, you know, it was tough.

What happened?

It was tough.

What happened?

Because there was a time period, and I see it differently now.

There was a time period where I thought all of that was a waste.

It didn't, nothing.

And I don't think so.

I think we planted early seeds, and you're seeing it a much more mature

kind of approach to it now, much more wise, too.

Well, I think what happened, so the 2010, I was not in then.

I got in in 2012.

So I was in there for three terms.

I think the 2010 was a massive wave, but I think that the wave just got ahead of the D.C.

Republicans.

They didn't know what to do with it.

And I think they decided that the way they wanted to govern the insiders is to focus more on batting back our own base rather than trying to harness the energy from our base to take down Obama and to beat Obama.

And I think that led, that

sowed the seeds for Trump being able to win the nomination.

People were so frustrated with the D.C.

Republicans.

Nothing was changing, and they wanted something more dramatic.

But I agree with you.

I think a lot of the people that got into politics then on the grassroots level are still some of the people that are really making a difference now.

Aaron Powell, and even a next generation is coming.

But

you still see the same kind of problems.

And we're going to get to Florida here in a second, but

I want to kind of take it chronologically with you.

The DC politics that the GOP still doesn't seem to really understand.

I think we are

in a

time period where, in our lifetime, and maybe very soon, we could see the collapse of this country if we're not careful and wise.

And there's so many people that just in politics in Washington that either don't see it or they're so arrogant that they just think, ah, we're doing it.

Or it's or they're part of the problem.

Well, just think about we're in Texas, right?

I'm from Florida.

If it wasn't for Florida and Texas in this country, some of the other reds, where would we be?

Right.

I mean, you you know, we would be California writ large.

Yes.

We'd be suffering under the cloak of woke ideology, and America, as we know it, would be gone.

I think the challenge for us, and I think the people inside D.C.

just don't see kind of where the battle lines are, is we're very much in a post-constitutional era.

We have a bureaucracy that's running totally amok.

It's been weaponized against factions of society it doesn't like.

It is not accountable to the electorate.

I mean, we had an election in 2016 where president was elected, Republican president, Trump's elected, and the government decided that they didn't want to accept the results of the election.

And so I think like if you look back in the past when we were fighting big government, like under Ronald Reagan, you know, yeah, government was a problem, but the way it's different.

And I think it does call into question who governs?

Are we governing according to what the founding fathers envision, or are we in this era in which the elites are going to get their way one way or another?

And that's really the central fight.

It was 2003, I think.

I went to the White House.

I met with George W.

Bush.

And

I said,

we were starting to be mired up in Iraq and everything else.

And I said, Mr.

President,

he spoke very frankly with me off the record.

And I said,

where is this guy?

Where's this guy?

This just speaking and saying this is what it is.

And he talked about the responsibilities of a president.

And then he said, I said, What happens here with the next guy?

And he said, Don't worry.

The next guy that gets in, he said, He's going to sit in this chair and he's going to have most of the same people advise.

And they will realize the president's hands are tied.

He's got to go down this road.

And he said that to kind of comfort me.

And I was freaked out by him.

I'm like, well, then what good are you?

What good is any president if the same people are just running things yeah and I mean you know Article 2 invests the executive power in that elected president they don't invest they don't vest it in the permanent bureaucracy but yet this has been able to really consolidate why is it consolidated though Congress has abdicated its responsibility.

They're supposed to make laws.

What do they do?

They kind of do suggestions and tell the bureaucracy to figure it out.

Well, that's a transfer of power from the American people to unelected bureaucrats.

How do they handle handle their most potent weapon, what James Madison says the most potent, the power of the purse?

They pass continuing resolutions to keep the government going on autopilot.

Okay, well, if you have the FBI where there's malfeasance there, you're not holding them accountable by continuing the gravy train to them.

If there's abuse of government, The way to do it is to have the House of Representatives stop funding the abuses.

They have never been willing to do that for really my entire adult lifetime.

And so the government just keeps going on autopilot.

And founders would have said, it's human.

It's, you know, the deep state's not a conspiracy.

It's the natural.

It's the logical culmination of human nature without constitutional constraints or accountability.

Of course, you're going to have a consolidation of power.

And then I think what's happened in our country, because the universities are churning out people that have the same kind of philosophical bent, they're all gravitating to be in D.C.

That's why you'd have D.C.

as the most democratic jurisdiction in the country, 95% to five in the 2020 election.

And it raises huge implications for whether we're a self-governing people.

So, but I don't think our founders saw

one of the branches just ceding their power to the other.

The opposite.

I mean, you know, Federalist 51, ambition must be made to counteract ambition.

You're the president.

I'm in the legislature.

You're going to try to increase your power.

I'm going to be very jealous of that.

And I'm going to push back because I don't want my branch to be subservient to you.

But that's not what's happened.

And why is that?

I think it's because it's easier for them to remain in office to pass the buck.

Because

when you have to make big decisions, there's going to be some people that like it, but there's going to be other people that don't like it.

And so I think the inertia of, okay, their number one goal is to remain in office.

And so they're fine giving away their power as long as they get to be nominal members of the legislature in perpetuity.

That's not the way the system's supposed to operate.

Okay, so you leave Congress.

Before you leave Congress, you're there on the baseball field because you're a good baseball player.

Yeah.

You're on the baseball field the day of the shooting.

Tell me a little bit about that.

So a lot of people,

I guess, don't appreciate like the members of Congress, they take this baseball game very seriously.

So it's a charity game every year.

They play it at Washington National Stadium, and it is hardball.

It is bas, now they're not throwing, you know, very hard, but it is what it is.

And so

they would practice for like six weeks leading into it.

And, you know,

I played sometimes, sometimes I didn't.

But anyway, so we're there.

So the day before the game, we have practice.

And I'm at third base.

Jeff Duncan from South Carolina Congressman was at shortstop.

He drove me, his aide drove me and Jeff to the field.

We had already taken batting practice.

We're just shagging balls.

And I just, I didn't want to get caught in traffic that day.

So I told Jeff, why don't we just get out of here early, beat some traffic?

He's like, okay.

So we went, we walked, took off our spikes, walked to the car.

Some guy stops, Jeff and I, and he asks Jeff, he's like, are those the Republicans or are those the Democrats?

And Jeff's like, that's the Republican congressional baseball team.

The guy's like, okay, turned around.

He starts walking towards the third base side of the field, you know, outside where the stands are.

We get in the car, we leave.

I get to Capitol Hill, turn on, I'm in the gym showering, getting ready to shower.

The shooting at the baseball field is there.

So what he did, he went to his van, he pulled out a rifle and a pistol.

He sat, he set up right on the third base side of the dugout and started shooting.

So Jeff and I would have been number one in the line of fire had we stayed for probably

five or seven more minutes.

As it was, he's shooting and he shot Steve Scalise, who was playing second base.

Ten minutes before Scalise was shot, I'm fielding ground balls and throwing double plays to Scalise at second base.

And then 10 minutes later, Scalise him.

So

the only reason there wasn't a big massacre that day is because Scalise was a member of the Republican leadership.

He got a capital police detail because of that.

So So we had capital police officers there, not because any other member, just because of Steve.

So they started engaging and they ended up shooting and killing this guy.

So he shot a few people.

Scalise was the only congressman that got shot, but he would have had free reign for the whole thing.

And this was a guy.

So as soon as

we saw,

people started to try to figure out who it was.

And the guy had a Twitter account and he was a raging leftist.

And we saw his picture.

I showed it to Duncan.

I'm like, that's the guy.

Jeff's like, that's the guy.

And it was clearly politically motivated.

And, you know, one of the things that happened was the media, they tried to just totally ignore that.

I mean, just think about it.

If there was somebody who once listened to your show who did anything,

they would be all over you telling your advertising all this stuff.

Instead, this was a clearly politically motivated assassination attempt.

And they basically just buried it.

And the FBI said initially, it was not something that was politically motivated.

It was death by suicide by cop.

I mean, how outrageous is this?

And so, you know, it was the type of thing where, you know, you see that and I just thought, okay, you know, my, my life would have been different maybe if I had been out there for 10 more minutes.

And that's not something you typically think about, but I mean, it was a pretty close call.

The press,

is there any

how does this turn around?

I mean, CBS did 60 minutes.

They've never corrected it.

It was bald face lie.

To my knowledge, they've never even apologized for it.

They tried to defend it.

I mean, you know,

they tried to defend it from other angles, and they did acknowledge that they kind of, or at least tacitly acknowledge that they got caught red-handed.

But I think it's just arrogance.

I think that they believe that, look, if they put out something false, yes, people like you and me aren't going to believe it because we're onto them.

But there may be a segment of people that believe it.

And smaller and smaller.

Yeah, it is.

And so, but I think what's happened is because they keep doing this, they lose credibility and lose trust more and more.

So they're playing for a smaller audience that will actually believe what they say.

I think a good example of this is like, just think about the last few years in Florida.

I mean, they did all they could to demonize me in COVID.

They were acting like we're a COVID wasteland.

How reckless to have kids in school, businesses.

Chief grandma killer.

And yet, how did the American people respond to that?

They responded by visiting Florida on record numbers and moving to Florida on record numbers.

So that tells me that what they're doing just isn't working.

And in fact, the 60 Minutes, you know, we looked in to see like the defamation.

It's very difficult for someone like me to do it.

But the reason why, I mean, two reasons.

One, I'm governor.

I can't be getting involved in litigation.

But two is like I couldn't show damages.

It benefited me because it was so obvious that they wanted, they were there, they're threatened by me and my success in Florida, and they wanted to try something

to rough me up.

And they really face planted.

So I'd go in and say, wait a minute, you know, I'm better known now, and more people probably support me now.

But I think it's just there's got to be a recognition on the financial incentives on some of this stuff.

Because if you were to pivot some, you know, there is a bigger market to be able to be had.

I think the problem, though, is because I've talked to like heads of corporations who oversee some of these news channels and they understand.

But I think part of the problem is it's like the inmates run the asylum there.

If you wanted to move CNN or NBC to center or even maybe even like throw us a bone once in a while, you'd have to fire the entire company because they're all wired.

They're getting into media because they want to change policy.

They want to impose their views on the rest of us, but they know they couldn't get elected to anything.

So they're not going to be able to do that.

So this is a way for them to be able to have some power over what's going on in society.

So it's very difficult to see how you do.

But here's just fine.

I mean, during COVID, so like, you know, Disney World is open in Florida, Disneyland is closed in California.

Universal is open in Orlando.

It's closed in California.

And, you know, these executives are like, Florida's doing it right.

California is doing it wrong.

It's a disaster.

They're all saying this.

They're telling me this privately.

And yet their news arms of those companies are reporting just the opposite.

They're saying how bad Florida is and how good California is.

And I'm just thinking to myself, this is your own company.

You guys who over, you're acknowledging the truth, and yet you have news organizations that are putting out things that are contrary to what you yourselves are saying are the facts.

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I remember when you, and you talk about it in the book, and it is fascinating, the decision to

open the state up.

And I remember my wife and I prayed for you tonight because

that was extraordinarily risky.

I mean, we can't forget, listen, I give people at the very beginning a pass.

I don't care.

You were for mask.

You were for closing everything down.

At the very beginning, they were welding people in their homes in China.

We had no idea what was coming our way.

But even when you said go,

It wasn't clear that that was the right move,

just medically speaking, wasn't clear it was the right move.

And I remember praying for you, going, Lord, give him strength and please

advise because this could go horribly wrong.

I was thrilled that you did it.

It was unpopular, though.

But I'm glad I didn't have to make the decision.

It was unpopular.

I mean, I think part of the problem was there was data and evidence supporting what I was doing, but it was getting no play with the meeting.

They had their narrative, and that's just what they were going to do.

So I talk about it a little bit in the book.

We all got models from these epidemiologists.

Every governor did, and the White House was looking at them too, about the hospitalization spikes that were going to happen.

And they were projecting, I mean, horrific, horrific death because...

We wouldn't have enough hospital beds to care for almost any patient other than COVID.

And so it's like, okay, you know, you either need to, you know, to separate and not have, you know, groups getting together to reduce the spread, or you're going to have some serious.

And, you know, in Florida, I'm sitting here third largest state we're an international hub we're a domestic tourism hub and I've got elderly I've got senior citizens I've got almost 4,000 long-term care facilities I've got elderly lined up in condos all across the coast particularly in southern Florida so this was an existential threat to our state in terms of something that's affecting elderly people but you looked at those models and and they were just grievously wrong and I'm following it to the day I mean like I'm looking to see what they're predicting for Florida and I'm seeing it's much less, and then I'm seeing it's much less.

And so, this is like late March, early April 2020.

You also had people like Bhattacharya from Stanford that are looking at the antibodies.

Well, it turns out a lot of these people had antibodies.

That means it had spread far enough that doing this indefinitely was just not going to work.

It was also mattered that it also meant that it was not as lethal as we initially feared because whatever's testing positive, there's way more people who had it, therefore the death rate was lower.

So, we looked at all those, and then I was just concerned about the toll.

You know, it's one thing to say, you know, take two weeks off from school or whatever.

That's not, that's not great, but it's, but to just say different, and I think the thing that really gave me the determination was Fauci came out in sometime in April of 2020, and he was asked, well, when can people open?

And he's like, when there's no cases and no deaths.

That means that changes it from slow the spread for a few weeks to all of a sudden lockdown until when?

Because you're never going to get to that point.

So basically what Fauci was saying, saying, the default posture of the United States needed to be locked down.

And that was unacceptable to me.

So I was like, okay, we're going to do this.

And so we worked on all that.

And particularly with the schools was very important and the businesses.

And you know what happened was as we got into June, People were like, you know what?

They didn't admit it publicly.

You know, maybe the governor was right.

Things seemed to be going good.

But then the South, you know, we get some, we got a summer wave of COVID.

That's just the way it was.

So we get hit with the way, and the media is like, DeSantis caused it.

He's reckless, opening the state.

This is all his fault.

But you know, I knew that that wasn't the reason because I had looked to see the different charts of how the waves had been in other parts of the world.

Whether you locked down or not, it was a six to eight week cycle and then it would move.

Now, we didn't appreciate at the time just how sharply seasonal this was.

I started to say that nine months in, and the media said, oh, just Santis is saying it's seasonal.

Now they all admit it's seasonal, but it was obvious because it was happening.

So I was in a situation where Fauci saying to shut down.

I had every Democrat member of Congress from Florida write write me a letter saying, you're killing people.

You're reckless.

You need to shut down this state.

You can't have kids in school, all that in July.

I can't be in your position with the data that you have, but still,

if you're human, you still had to have lingering doubt.

Did you, at any point, did you look and go, God,

I mean,

I really think I'm right, but gosh, what if I'm wrong?

Yeah, I mean, you know, clearly, I mean, I had humility in all this, humility.

I mean, you know, I'm just a governor.

I mean, I'm working on the data and I got into it and I ended up, I mean, bottom-chari and somebody's going to say DeSantis knew the data more than a lot of the doctors did because actually doing it.

You know, I started to get a lot of supporters, you know, friends, like long-term call me, he's like, man.

You are, you're getting killed.

You need to do something different.

You know, you need to mandate masks.

You need to do, just do a two-week shutdown.

Just do something.

You know, the kid, the parents, you know, the grandparents are upset about the kids going back to school soon.

And, you know, I was just like, look, I was like,

I think that would be harmful to do everything you're telling me.

It may be beneficial for me in the short term politically.

Maybe I've dug myself a hole politically that I don't recover from.

It is possible, but my job is to defend the jobs and the well-being of the people that I represent.

I can't be worried about my own job.

over that.

And so I basically said, let's let the political chips fall where they may.

I'm going to stick with it.

And so basically we held firm.

The wave passed.

And then, as we started to get into August, early September, people are like, you know what?

Maybe Florida was right.

Because at that point, they said the only way the COVID curve will bend down is a lockdown.

If you don't do it, it's just exponential growth infinitum.

And we showed, because I saw what happened in Sweden and other parts of the world, that that wasn't true.

So then once we got over that,

a lot of Floridians started to get confidence.

Because I think, like, the first couple months of it, what I was doing was not popular.

And I was popular going going into COVID.

It was not popular.

The schools were very unpopular because the elderly, they were scared and they thought the schools would lead to more.

And I knew that wasn't the case.

And so we did.

But then as we got over, then all of a sudden it's like...

People are like ready.

The state started to boom.

People started coming down.

And we were really off to the races at that point.

But I would say, you know, that was really a critical juncture.

And I think had I caved or buckled there, I think the future of the state would have been dramatically different.

Oh, yes.

And possibly the the future of the country the country because I think we really because I took all the abuse that made it easier for other people to follow in our path at that point.

Are you guys out of state of emergency?

Oh, yeah, yeah.

And the only reason.

Texas is not.

I just talked to the Freedom Caucus yesterday.

When are we going to get out of this?

And actually, what we did, so we did the state of emergency for about a year.

The only reason I kept it is because

I used the state of emergency to force the schools open.

So I had to get through that first school year to ensure that all schools in Florida would be open.

I probably would not have been able to do that absent at the state of emergency.

So that was our leverage because I can control money.

Basically, the state of emergency allows you to move money around a little bit more.

So we did that.

It also allowed me to overrule local governments, particularly some of the liberal governments, and say, you're not going to be penalizing people for masks, no business closures.

We set that down, and I needed the state of emergency to do that.

Then the legislature came in the next spring and we made these protections permanent.

And we actually, I asked them, I said, do a bill to rein in the governor's executive emergency powers and to rein in local governments.

And so Florida actually has constricted the powers.

You know, one of the crazy things about this, and you'd appreciate it.

It was almost not questioned in American history that these local governments have like these massive health problems, like emergency health problems.

And I'm just like, okay, you know, it's like, but I couldn't find, so I was one of my concerns when I'm fighting back against this, I was afraid I was going to lose in court on some of this.

The law was not great on it, but I think what happened was I was strategic in when I was pulling these levers so that when I would do it, you know, I had like a lot of business guys excited, people going back to work, and it made it harder for a county to try to sue me to basically throw people out of their jobs.

And so we were able to get through that, and I never lost a case in all the things that I was doing.

Did

you talk about this in the book with Burks?

And it's a little terrifying when she said, well, this is kind of just our little science experiment.

Very much so.

Can you tell that story?

So

the White House task force was hammering me for like the first, like really like three months because they wanted me to be

clamping down harder.

And

she said, so I saw a call.

I was like, Deborah, just tell me, when in American history model has this been done and what were the results?

Because I kind of feel like we're flying blind here and we may be doing things that could be damaging.

And as she said, she's like, you know, it's kind of our own science experiment that we're doing in real time.

And that didn't sit well with me.

I mean, you know, you're a citizen of a republic.

You're not a guinea pig.

And so

I think that that, there's a whole bunch of other things I talk about in the book.

You remember the George Floyd riots, the epidemiologists.

Because people were saying, you've been telling people, you have to stay in your home.

And like in Florida, they were killing us because even in those early days, you know, when we were following federal guidelines loosely, but we were following some, we were playing golf.

I mean, the villages, they're setting record for golf.

People are boating all this stuff.

They were so mad at Florida for doing that.

People on the beach, all this stuff.

That was their position.

You are killing people if you leave your house.

So then all these people are like thousands of people are protesting.

2,000 of these epidemiologists write a letter saying, we do not condemn these protests because of COVID.

Indeed, we think they're vital for public health because they're fighting racism.

It's a bigger disease than COVID.

And so that's when I knew.

This public health

clan of people, they are sick.

I mean, they are ideologically captured, and these are not people that should be anywhere near the levers of power.

So I basically, from that point on, I would exclusively listen to a very handful of people.

You know, Bhattacharya from Stanford, Martin Kaldor from Harvard, Scott Atlas, Sinetra Gupta from Oxford, and then my surgeon general, Joe Latipo, we brought in from UCLA.

Great.

But I mean, Joe Latipo to this day is the only surgeon general, Florida is the only state that has said don't give MNRA shots to the babies, to the six-month-old babies.

There's no evidence that this is anything helpful.

And we're basically saying there's no evidence to do it.

We don't know what the, what the harms would be.

And there may be some, but you don't even have to go there.

If it's not beneficial to you, don't put it in your arm.

I mean, that's just, we're the only state that's done that.

Why?

I think some of these other states agree with us, but in that kind of profession, they don't want to buck pharma.

They don't want to buck the consensus.

And so that was something that, but that letter was very eye-opening because it was just patently upset.

And they actually said in that letter.

You can protest for the George Floyd stuff, but you can't protest against lockdowns.

So they were drawing a content-based distinction between why you're gathering.

Like the virus knows.

Oh, okay.

It's a woke virus.

Come on, you know?

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I mean, I don't.

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It's not today.

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You have done so many

things that at the beginning, you kind of held your breath, at least those of us who watched it, kind of held our breath going,

I really agree with this.

I hope this is right.

Because

you were just reestablishing a democratic republic.

You know what I mean?

You can't do this to your people.

And now the results are so clear,

just based on the success, the health and the welfare, the economy, everything about Florida is booming, absolutely booming.

Why aren't we...

I hope you don't mind, but I'm going to send these to all 50 governors.

I got 50 of them made.

And I'm not comparing you to the other one that has the band, but it's WWRD.

What would Ron do?

Why are the governors not taking the things that have a clear success record

and just mirror them?

I don't understand.

Just politically, why aren't they doing that?

I think you're starting starting to see that, though, Glenn.

I mean, I think that's one of the reasons I work so hard for re-election.

Because in this business, you have a guy like me.

I just want to do what I think is right, and I want to be able to look in the mirror and say, I'm fighting for the folks and I'm delivering.

And the political calculations just aren't as important to me.

I just figure, you know, it'll all work out.

But there's a lot of people in this business that are different, you know, and they really want to know what the politics of it.

They want to know what that means electorally.

Well, we now have a record of that.

I came in, won by 32,000 votes.

You know, close is one of the closest governor's races.

Swing state, very, very famous swing state.

Nobody says that now.

Four years later, we win by 1.5 million votes, almost 20, 20-point victory, and we sweep in supermajorities in the legislature, school board, all this other stuff.

I mean, we've left the Democratic Party in Florida dead on the side of the road.

I mean, this has been a major, major realignment.

So I think people are now looking, and I think they're saying, you know what?

This guy's doing this stuff.

Yeah, the media has a spasm anytime he does anything.

The left has a spasm.

But the vast majority of the public thinks this is common sense.

And he's speaking to people through that media filter in ways that are effective.

So you are seeing now in state capitals.

I mean, Texas is going to be doing a lot of the stuff we're doing.

I've already talked to some of the legislators.

They're ready to go.

There was an article that said, DeSantis' shadow looms over state capitals as they reconvene because people are looking at the

Florida model and they're saying, okay, Florida did this.

We need to be doing this too.

So I do think you're starting to see it.

I think

what's crazy is the people who write that, it's not that you are some dictator going against the people.

They all want democracy.

Floridians love what you're doing.

So why do they have a problem when it's popular with the people all of a sudden?

And not only that, they will act like somehow this is a perversion of the system to put an idea in front of the legislature, have them act favorably on it, and me sign it into law and execute it.

That's how constitutional government works.

But they say that that's somehow bad.

Meanwhile, Obama and Biden, they do executive orders.

They don't even go through the legislature and the media praises that when they're basically changing society and laws through executive fiat.

So they just don't like what we're doing.

And here's the thing.

We're beating them.

That is why they're so upset.

We are beating the left in Florida.

And I don't think we've had an example in my lifetime where you had a government systematically beat the left across a wider range of issues than we've beat them in the state of Florida.

We've beat them in a way that has fundamentally realigned the state and I think has put us on a trajectory to be the leading red state in America for the next 10, 20 years.

I will tell you, I'm, again, talking to the Freedom Cockies yesterday, say.

Texas.

I bet on Texas.

And,

you know, my wife and I are looking at a place in Florida.

And,

I mean, you've done horrible things to the real estate.

It's bad for people who try to want to move in now.

The real estate is shot through the roof.

It's bad for my wife and I.

We see we have a young family, so we sold our house, moved to the governor's mansion, and we priced ourselves out.

I know anything.

I know.

It's crazy.

But I mean, that's good for the people of Florida.

But

I want to address something that you and I talked about

maybe two years ago.

And I want to ask

again,

our country has a problem that cannot survive just on this system of massive swing this way.

And then the next guy gets in and it's a massive swing that way.

It's destructive.

And that's because we are governing by fiat.

Tell me how you are

stripping power

so you can't, or restoring constitutional norms in Florida.

So when you leave, because you can't do a third term, when you leave, it doesn't become New York.

Well, one of the things I was able to do is we had the most liberal Supreme Court in the country for a long time.

You remember Bush versus Gore in the total circus.

I get elected.

It's a four to three liberal split by that time, but three of the four liberals had mandatory retirement.

So the day I got sworn in, they're off the court.

So my first month in office, I put three conservatives to replace the three liberals.

What that has done is that has ended judicial activism in the state of Florida.

And all these justices are between like 44 and 50, so they can serve till they're 75.

Now, some of them may end up on federal courts or whatever, but the bottom line is that had been one of the biggest, biggest impediments in Florida that you could win elections, you could actually implement policy, and a liberal court would serve as a council of revision to basically veto things they didn't like politically.

There wasn't anything wrong legally.

So we were able to do that.

And so I think just having a judiciary that's within its place is a huge, huge positive.

And so we were able to do that.

You know, our bureaucracy, it's interesting, our state's growing.

I have needs to be able to bring services for people.

And I had to

do a lot more people in this budget, but I'm like, I'm not just going to expand government.

So whatever we added, we subtracted from other areas.

So we're actually having an, even though the state's growing, a net reduction in people serving in government because we're looking to see what do you need and what don't you need.

You can't do that in Washington.

I mean, you go to Washington, there are so many laws and rules and you can't fire people, et cetera, et cetera.

And

do those people work for the president?

Or do they work for the Congress?

I mean,

they work for Article, they're Article II employees, right?

So why does Congress, why would we need all the Congressmen to get together to pass legislation to allow the president to fire his own employees?

Here's the thing.

I think the idea that somehow you can't do anything at all, we've just accepted that.

I think that needs to be challenged.

I mean, just think about it.

You have some of these, quote, career people.

They're making policy decisions.

And somehow they didn't get elected.

They didn't get appointed.

And somehow they can do it.

So

there's a proposal a lot of conservatives want to do, including me for a long time, to classify, I think it's about 50,000 in federal employees, classify them as a Schedule F because they are involved in policy.

They have discretion.

Schedule F, you serve at the pleasure of the president.

Now, that will be challenged, but I think you'd win in this Supreme Court.

You would have to.

Yes, I think you would.

And here's the thing, too.

I think there's a difference between, you know, if I'm like a supervisor at like a low level and I fire you, you know, maybe you have grievance procedures or whatever.

But if the president of the United States invokes Article II to fire you, I think the founding fathers would have said they have every right to do that because you can't insulate somebody because what you're basically doing is

you're putting a check on the American people's decisions about who they're elected.

Correct.

And that's not the way it's going to be.

And they become arrogant.

I mean, we saw this in the State Department all the way back to the creation of Israel where they threatened Truman.

You're not going to do that.

You're not going to do that.

Well, yes, I am.

And they were determined to take him down.

And he had to race to a microphone to be able to announce some

and they were wrong about that correct and I talk about in the book that when President Trump came in you know we were excited about getting the embassy moved to Jerusalem and and and he and he punted on it at first because he was getting killed by everyone saying don't do it don't do it so I did a trip over there because I oversaw the State Department of the subcommittee I was working on and I met with CIA state all the people there at the embassy in Tel Aviv and I asked them okay if we move the embassy what's going to happen go around the room

everyone World War III, World War III, World War III.

They all thought that, right?

And they believe it.

They believe it.

So you end up having the embassy move.

Did we have World War III?

No.

No, no.

And actually, I would argue the embassy, as much as getting out of the Iran deal, set the foundation for the Abraham Accords.

Because those Arab countries are looking at it and they're like, they didn't want it moved to Jerusalem.

But the fact that other presidents had balked it doing it after they promised it, it showed strength and they respected the strength.

And so, but that's the problem.

It's It's like these people are insulated from accountability and they've just been wrong about so many things.

It's like, what's the use?

How are they serving our country well?

They're just entrenched and they basically have groupthink.

And the State Department,

I mean, you had oversight, so you probably know this.

When the president was impeached, I did almost a year-long investigation on just Ukraine.

What was happening in Ukraine?

And

what we found was horrific, horrific.

You know, we are, I mean, it was just another one of the Arab Spring countries in many ways.

You know, we're toppling the government.

Money is being laundered and lost and everything else.

And now we have the same people

getting us into this war in Ukraine.

And

I have to tell you,

I am for the people of Ukraine.

Putin is a very bad guy, but I can't find a white hat in this story, except for the people in all three countries.

I think our government is absolutely corrupt.

$100 billion

with nobody looking and going, can I get a receipt?

In the most corrupt country,

and then you have Putin on that side, side.

There's not a good guy around.

And yet I feel as though the same people that said World War III

are almost dying to get us into a war because either they think they'll have the opportunity to change the entire system and the entire world, or they just think, you know what, we've wanted to topple him for a long time and they're ripe for the picking

and not realizing because of of their arrogance, we are also ripe for the picking.

I mean, I think Putin should be looking at us going, this might be

their spring.

What they did to us,

what we did to them with Gorbachev and Yeltsin, I think they're doing to us right now.

And think about what Putin's already done.

The backdrop for all this is the Russia collusion hoax and hysteria.

Correct.

He puts very little, Russia did very little in the the election.

Okay, what?

They did like some social media.

But that was spun up to be some like massive conspiracy.

They were trying to act like Putin won the election, the 2016 election.

And they took a country who, look, their interests are not aligned with ours.

Putin's a bad guy.

But the threat to us is orders of magnitude less than China represents to us.

But they elevated this as like, you know, that they were about to take over the White House.

I mean, remember that Time magazine cover that had the White House half in the Kremlin and the rest of it?

I mean, it was massive hysteria.

And I think that's fueled a lot of the stuff that we're seeing now.

I mean, how do you do $100 billion?

You're paying pensions for people and all this stuff, and not one single accounting.

And the Congress tried.

Some of the guys tried to get it in.

And defense fought back.

State fought back.

You know, they think that our taxpayer money is just their play, like monopoly money, that they can just use it however they want to use it.

And as a taxpaying citizen, I am fed up.

I'm fed up.

I mean, I know what I can do, and I do a lot of charitable work.

I create jobs.

I know what I can do with that money.

And you are taking that money and just pissing it away.

Everything I've paid for my entire life doesn't scratch the surface of what they're spending right now.

On anything.

And they're doing that while neglecting their their core duties at home.

They're concerned about foreign borders.

They're not concerned about our own border.

I mean, how many people have died of drug overdoses in the last year?

I think it's a record number.

It's like 110,000.

Most of those are fentanyl overdoses.

Which is the opium war that the British fought against China that China is now using with us.

Yes.

They're sending it to the Mexican cartels.

And the cartels are making some of their own now and bringing it across.

But we have tens of thousands of people dying.

This regime does not want to secure the border.

They don't do anything to the drug cartels.

They put no pressure on Mexico.

They're just content to let it happen.

Biden brings up the fentanyl desk from the woman the other day, and he's laughing about the fentanyl desk.

They also let the communist Chinese fly a spy balloon clear across the United States.

Not only clear across our country, but over maneuvered, over strategic air command.

And nobody says anything.

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Let me show you something.

I thought you would appreciate this.

This is from Stephen F.

Austin.

This is the conditions for the colonization of Texas.

And the reason why I brought it in is because I would like a government that treats their people and their country like Mexico treated their country.

So this is from 1825 in his own hand, going to Mexico and saying, we want to open a little colony in Texas.

What do we need to do?

Number one, know people of ill repute.

We need to know who they are.

And if they ever change, you must eject them immediately.

Number two, Spanish-speaking only schools.

You only speak Spanish.

Number three, you have to build churches and they have have to be Catholic Spanish-speaking churches.

These guys, there's like 10 different things.

They did the things to protect their country and we went along with it.

Where is our country?

Where is anyone in our country on the federal level that gives a crap about our country?

I know.

I mean, and think about it.

How does the left view the border?

Remember the Democratic debates in 2020 cycle?

They basically say border security, having a wall, enforcing immigration law is racist.

They say you're a racist just because you want the rule of law to prevail.

And think about it, we've had periods of our country, we've had a lot of immigration, some less.

Ellis Island, if you stepped out of line, you're gone.

I mean,

they had rules.

People came in, you either abided by it or you didn't.

If you didn't fit the criteria, that was the way it is.

And we need to reassert our right to govern ourselves at the border and in so many other ways.

Look, in Florida, we're doing some of the stuff with the universities.

The media is like, oh my gosh, you're interfering with universities.

No, these are publicly funded institutions.

Our taxpayers fund them.

Are they accountable or not?

If they're accountable, it's through the people as elected representatives.

And so

we're making sure we have that mission set.

But we've just gotten away from this idea that we have a right to make sure that we're doing things in a way that is reflective of the values of the people that sent us to office.

office.

I don't want to send my kids to college.

I mean, I do, but unless it's maybe two or three colleges, why would I pay money to have them destroy all of my work and raising these kids?

And you're not the only one that asked that.

And here's the thing, like as a Navy guy, I look at like the service academies have gone woke.

I mean, I used to think like you go to the service academies like unimpeachable, right?

There's wokeness that's crept into there even.

Well, we did in Florida, so we're doing a lot overall writ large universities, but we have a small liberal arts college called New College in Sarasota.

Most people had never heard of it prior to me getting involved.

And actually, some of the people in the lecture wanted to close it a couple years ago.

I'm like, what is it even doing?

I mean, a very low enrollment, low scores, and it is left of the left.

I mean, it is basically about ideology and about leftism.

That's what the school's about.

And so I'm like, you know what?

No.

So I put six conservatives on the board of trustees.

They fired the president.

They brought in a conservative president.

They said the mission of this university is going to be to be the number one public classical liberal arts college in America.

It's going to be kind of like our Hillsdale College.

We gave them $15 million.

They're going to be able to recruit professors from all across the country.

They've already eliminated their DEI department and DEI programs.

And so I think what you're going to see,

once people see the professors come in, you're going to see a flood of applications.

Oh, yeah, you will.

And it's interesting, there's professors from all over the country and from very great schools that are asking the trustees, reaching out to some people I appointed, saying, Can I, can I come?

How do I come?

Because they're my guess is, my guess is they're not all conservative.

They're not, but they reject this oppressive, correct, woke environment.

Where if you, it's like you're walking on eggshells.

You say one thing and you can get fired.

That is not.

But it's not only that.

Anyone who truly wants to teach and truly wants to learn does not want one side.

I want somebody to challenge me.

That's how we, that's how we learn and grow.

Opposition in all things.

So, I mean, I know a lot of classical liberal people that they believe in that still.

One of the things I think that's happened over the last generation is because it's all been about imposing the orthodoxy.

I think it's been a disservice to a lot of those liberal students who have graduated because their assumptions are never challenged.

And so, they don't develop the sharpness of thought that you really want these students to do.

They end up getting into corporate America, whatever.

There's a lot of group think,

but there's not really a lot of really sharp critical thinking.

And so we want to make sure we have a situation where we're doing that.

But I think that overall writ large, what's the purpose of a university?

I think it's the search for truth.

I think it's academic rigor.

I think it's to teach kids to think for themselves so they can be citizens of our republic.

It's not to impose ideology.

It's not for political activism.

It's not for social justice.

So we're making this pivot in Florida and with our money and the appointments and everything and some of the rules we're doing.

And I think it's going to be really, really significant.

I think other red states are falling.

Texas is going to do.

They're going to eliminate DEI just like just like we did.

I think you'll see Tennessee and these others doing it.

We have basically gone in a situation, Republicans for generations are like, okay, we need to get elected so we could cut taxes and then just leave everything else alone.

Well, the left has gone in and they're using these institutions to impose their worldview.

So, what we're saying is: wait a minute, these are not the left's institutions,

these are the people's institutions.

And if the people want to elect leftists to governor and stuff in Florida, then maybe the institutions will reflect that.

But they're not doing that, they're going the other way.

So, we have a responsibility to govern accordingly and hold them accountable, set the mission, and make sure that they're pursuing the best interests of the state.

So,

as you look at all of the problems that you're facing as a state, education is massive.

Parental rights, massive.

The end of

this denial of truth, massive.

But the other thing that the left and people didn't see it coming, and I started talking about it three, four years ago, and even I thought five years ago,

that sounds like a conspiracy theory.

That just can't be true.

The ESG and the great reset.

And the media

smeared everybody, said that

you're crazy.

That's not happening.

We're seeing it happen now in real time.

And much worse is coming.

Are we winning?

Are we making a dent because of states like yours?

We are.

I mean, I don't think there's any question.

I mean, you look at all these things.

We're slaying it all.

ESG, we're slaying that.

The DEI stuff, critical race theory, we're slaying that.

We're creating a model for really, I think, what a free society should be.

Yes, freedom for you to not be constrained by government.

All conservatives have always believed in that.

But also freedom for you to live your life without having the pathologies of the left imposed upon you from all the other institutions in society.

And maybe that's a woke corporation.

Maybe that's Soros funds a DA in your community, and then this DA says he's not enforcing the law, putting you and your family at risk.

We had a Soros DA in Tampa that said he wasn't going to enforce the law.

I removed him from office and he's litigating, but I'm winning the cases.

And, you know, you just have to recognize that the threats to freedom are more than just whether someone's going to come in and raise your taxes or pass a bad piece of legislation.

So I think Florida, we're fighting full spectrum.

I think more conservatives now across the country are recognizing that we need to fight full spectrum.

I mean, this Disney thing that I had, there are some people on the proverbial proverbial right who have criticized me, but I'll tell you,

the people are with me on this one because they understand why are you going to have a situation where you have a company that's been given its own government all these state subsidies, privileges over decades, and then they're going to do woke activism against your parents and your students.

We're subsidizing our own opposition.

Are you kidding me?

So we said the ball game's over, and we got rid of their self-governing status.

That's not a perversion of the free market.

The perversion, honestly, the perversion was the original deal with Walt.

Of course.

Yeah.

I just released some information on

the

what are they calling it?

The Inflation Reduction Act.

It's actually the Build Back Better Act.

And we have pieced pieces together

that show that

we are now paying 150% of your profit.

If you have a coal-fire plant, 150% of your profit for the next 10 years,

if you will not only shut that power plant down,

but then you only get the money if you sell it or dismantle it.

Okay.

I read another study just this morning that shows that

we have

the projection is that we will be short by 25%

power

from what we have now.

If

you already know that they're shutting them down, and then you take away those plants so you can't recreate that power.

And I'm not going to ask you to comment on this.

Personally, I think that's the closest thing I've actually seen to treason.

You are dismantling the ability for America to survive because you have a global warming scheme.

And you are taking billions and billions of dollars and incentivizing people.

We are doing to our power what we are now, what we used to do to our farmers and still are doing to our farmers.

And I think that it allows them to control us.

I mean, that's what they want to do.

How stupid can you be to try to neuter our own ability to produce our own reliable energy?

But they're doing it.

No, I know.

But I mean, the question is, is how does that make our country stronger?

Doesn't matter to be relying on, and here's the thing.

biden will not want it done here he'll go beg maduro for oil he'll go beg other people for oil you know everything we produce in terms of fossil fuels is so much it's done so much cleaner here than it is in these other countries are you kidding me so it it's all it's all for them to exert more control over us that's what all this is about and you know the good thing about it is is that you know some of this stuff can be um i think can be remedied through changing some of the bureaucratic rules because there's a lot of people that out there in these industries that really want to get going again, but they just can't under the current circumstances.

Texas is thinking about making it their own bank just for energy.

Yeah.

And Florida, look, I have private investor-owned utilities.

So like they have, they're on, they have investors that they, so they have to make money.

And I have some that are doing more solar.

Not, we don't have subsidies or anything like that.

They're doing it, and it's economical in certain situations.

Fine.

I'm getting solar on my house.

No, it's fine.

Like, it's fine.

But here's the thing.

Don't force me to do it.

When I had Hurricane Ian come through, you know, we had millions of people knocked out of power.

We had 52,000 linemen get it restored.

Largest restoration, fastest in history.

I needed oil and gas.

Like, you know, I just wasn't, the wind and the solar were not going to get those people going again.

Yes.

You had to have it.

We actually had some people who had the electric cars, and some of them were catching on fire because of the salt water and all that stuff.

But if you can't charge it, then you're having that tank of gas in your truck or your car can mean everything.

So we are not going to be without fossil fuels in our lifetime.

And if we try to go without fossil fuels in our lifetime, you are going to see the standard of living plummet.

You're going to see our security plummet.

It's going to be a disaster.

You have some of the biggest ranches and farms

in your state.

What about fertilizer?

We produce fertilizer, actually.

We have some of the bigger fertilizer companies and some of these ESG, they're targeting that.

I know.

How the hell are you going to feed people, Glenn, without fertilizer?

I mean,

you need it.

And we've dealt with issues because

on the farms or whatever,

it rains, there'll be runoff.

It goes in, we have Big Lake Okeechobee.

It can create algae.

So I just said, you know what, I'm going to deal with it.

So we've done stuff to clean the lake.

We've created reservoirs to clean the water.

And we're restoring the Everglades.

We had to put some love into it, but we're doing it all.

The left really wanted to

target the fertilizer because they think it's so dirty.

But it's like, you need this to be able to have a society.

I think there's a lot of people, though, unfortunately.

I mean, James Cameron just came out and

said,

what was the, oh, she, what was the Marvel comic guy that had all of the stones?

I'm sorry, you probably don't even know this.

That, you know, evaporated, it just took and disintegrated 50% of the universe's population.

And James Cameron said, I mean, nobody wants to really do that, but that's not a bad idea.

There's a strain of the left that thinks there's too many people in this planet.

and they want to see, and it's totally wrong.

I mean, like, you know, we have, we need more people, we need bigger families in the United States.

I mean, if you really want to do that, that's the truth.

So, so, but, but it really leads to some very, very ugly things in terms of what they would do in terms of policy.

So, let me, let me

leave you with this because the last few chapters you talk about, you know, playing offense, not defense.

You talk about make America Florida.

Um,

To get there, we have to have,

and I haven't seen them, we have to have somebody who not only can do it, but can stand and like John F.

Kennedy and say, we're going there.

And we do it because it's hard, but that's what we do.

We need a vision and an unum again.

e pluribus unum.

What is it that brings us all together?

What is the vision for the future?

I think in Florida, what we've done is, you know, we've articulated what a free society means in the 21st century.

So yes, being protected against government overreach, also being protected against big tech censorship, big tech overreach, some of the corporate discrimination that we see.

What, you own a gun store and you're not going to have access to be able to have capital or any of that.

Making sure you have access to an education that's not going to impose an agenda on your students.

We've worked very hard to do that.

So I think what we're doing is we're protecting the individual space to be able to make the most of their lives, own lives on their own terms without having to play on the playground of the left.

And we've really insulated our folks from that.

So I think looking forward, like if you look at nationwide, you know, we've got very politicized elites.

that are not popular with the public.

What they're selling is not popular.

That's right.

They have a lot of cultural cachet.

They've got a lot of political cachet.

And I think in Florida, what we've shown is, you know, you can beat the elites and you can win victories for people.

And ultimately, that's what's going to do.

This ruling class is going to need to be deposed.

And you're going to have to have strong leaders, not just whoever's the president.

But I mean, you need patriotic Americans across this country that may be willing to go to Washington for two to four years to serve maybe in the mid-level of the bureaucracy.

Because unless we have people that have that mindset, then it's not all going to work anyways.

And so I think people get it.

I think, and I've had people come up to me saying, Look, I'm doing well.

I'm willing to put that on hold to come help in whatever way.

And I think people see that because for too long, you know, we, I think we've kind of just hoped that things would get better and maybe you win an election or something.

I think people realize the problems are a little bit more profound.

Ron, thank you very much.

Thank you.

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