Ep 150 | Ron DeSantis vs. Everyone: The Governor Who BROKE the Media | Ron DeSantis | The Glenn Beck Podcast

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The New York magazine said, if today's guest were elected president, he would kill democracy slowly and methodically.

He is deeply authoritarian.

Wow.

Esquire said, Dear America, run, do not walk away from this dangerous man.

The Washington Post said that he is creating a paradise of authoritarianism.

Joy Reed, I mean, she wanted some scraps on the table here.

She got involved.

She accused him of, yes,

racism and child abuse.

60 Minutes accused him of corruption and racism.

The Atlantic accused him of being anti-freedom.

Business Insider called him a very dangerous individual.

ABC's chief legal correspondent called him a fascist and a bigot.

LA Times accused him of being homophobic, using homophobic tactics that were right out of Russia's authoritarian playbook.

Vanity Fair, excuse the language here, Vanity Fair called him a smug asshole.

The New York Times has called him a racist and radioactive Republican.

He's been compared to, now this is weird, Hitler, and described as Donald Trump, but worse.

I didn't think it could get worse.

That's what they told us.

It has.

These are all lies.

In reality, our next guest is the man who faced off with Disney and won.

He defends corporate wokeism and ESG.

He fights against it every day.

He fights for parental rights and personal freedoms.

During COVID-19 lockdowns, he kept schools open and businesses running.

He blocked county and municipal COVID-19 fines.

He fought vaccine passports, mask mandates, school closures.

As Blue States collapse, today's guest has maintained one of the strongest economies in the world, with job outgrowth outpacing the national rate.

He has shown more attention to the border crisis than Biden has.

He has an A-plus from the NRA.

He's 36 years younger than Joe Biden.

Please welcome today's podcast guest, Governor Ron DeSantis.

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Governor, how are you, sir?

I'm doing good.

How are you doing?

It's great.

Thank you for being a part of the podcast.

I appreciate it.

Happy to do it.

I've been watching you now.

I'm sitting here in Texas, and I've been watching you for a while, and my only complaint is that you're in Florida and not Texas.

Governor Abbott is, I think he's doing a fine job, but you seem to be leading the way.

You're at the, I think, I expressed it earlier this week as

you are

hitting all of the right things and you're doing it at the right speed.

And it's a little breathtaking if you're on the left, because I don't think I've ever seen anyone correct course as fast as you are.

Can you keep that?

Well, Glad.

When you get elected,

as I did, I actually sat at the desk I'm sitting at right now, my first day as governor, and I looked around the desk and I said, you know, I don't know what SOB is going to succeed me in this office, but they're not going to have any meat left on the bone.

I'm just going to take it off.

I've been given an opportunity to lead.

I've been given an opportunity to use the authority vested in me under the Florida Constitution.

And if I see ways to make a difference, I'm not going to sit here and take 20 polls.

In fact, I haven't taken a poll since I've been governor.

I'm going to know what I believe and have faith that if I lead the way and show a strong vision, implement that vision, and we get good results, and the people of Florida are going to have my back.

And that's exactly what's happened.

So, as a casual observer,

how much of what you do is through executive order, and how much is through legislature?

We do a lot through the legislature.

We've had now had four legislative sessions under our belt.

There's been no governor in the history of Florida that's been able to work with the legislature to generate as much as we've been able to do.

Now, during COVID, a lot of what I was doing was executive orders to rein in local governments, for example.

provide protection for people to work and businesses to be open.

We did use an emergency order to make sure kids were in school in summer of 2020 and we were creative about how we use those authorities and it obviously worked out very well for us.

But if you look at most of the stuff that we've done, take critical race theory for example.

Yes, through our Board of Education at the state, we did ban it.

through effectively an executive function.

However, in order to really make that effective, you need to codify that in the legislature and you need the legislature to provide parents with the recourse to make sure those standards are followed.

So we did a Stop Woke Act, we called it, it's Stop Wrongs Against Our Kids and Employees Act that provides protections for parents in K-12, also for employees, because the corporations are trying to shove the CRT down their throats too, to be able to vindicate their rights.

And so if a school district departs from our state standards, parents can now go in and sue the school district to be able to enforce compliance.

And so you can't do it all just through executive action.

You need the legislature to do it.

And so we've been able to do really, really big reforms.

Now there are certain things that I do that are not legislative in nature that are in the state constitution.

So for example, my first week in office, it was almost a year after the Parkland massacre at Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School.

And I became friends with a lot of the victims' parents over the course of that year.

And the thing that they were so frustrated about is no one had been held accountable.

They passed the buck on this guy.

Everyone knew when the shooting happened exactly who it was, exactly.

They were not surprised by it, yet No one was held accountable.

So I removed the sheriff of Broward County that first week.

And that was the first time they had had any accountability.

But I have authority under Florida's Constitution to suspend these elected officials at the county level.

They are not subject to impeachment under our Constitution.

The governor serves as kind of the way to ensure that they're following their duties.

And if I suspend you, yeah, you have the right to contest that in front of the Senate in Florida.

But if the Senate agrees with me, then you are gone.

And that's exactly what happened with the Sheriff of Broward.

And then, of course, more recently, we just did the thing with the Tampa prosecutor for similar reasons, that he was not following his duty.

Now, he's going to have an opportunity to contest that in front of the Florida Senate.

But if the Florida Senate agrees with me, then he's going to continue to be out of office.

Well, I will tell you that it was interesting to me.

I think it was oh, I don't remember who wrote it.

It was somebody on the left.

And they wrote that you are an absolute dictator for doing that because you just want him

to

enforce the, I think they even use the word dictates or policies that you choose.

And that's not what he was doing.

Right?

No.

And he had, and what happened was I had my legal office here undertake a review of all of our state attorneys.

We've got 20, most places call them district attorneys.

In Florida, they're considered state attorneys.

And I said, you see this pathogen across the country of these prosecutors nullifying the law.

And as bad as the defund the police movement's been, Glenn, I think these prosecutors have been equally, if not more, detrimental to the society because when these prosecutors get in, the community becomes hollowed out with crime.

That's what's happening in Los Angeles.

That's what happened in San Francisco.

So they did a review over many, many months, and it all came back to this guy in Tampa.

Law enforcement hated the guy, but he had signed multiple letters saying he was not going to enforce certain laws.

And then he had policies in his own office that were called presumptive non-prosecution.

Well, Glenn, when the legislature passes a law, they're presuming that you're following it, not presuming that you're not following it.

So he basically says, well, I'm not going to enforce the law.

Maybe in a special circumstance I will, but otherwise I'm just going to take a pass.

So for all those reasons, he was not satisfying his duty under the Florida Constitution.

So, we acted pursuant to an express provision of the Constitution.

He now has the ability to contest that in front of the Florida Senate.

But, Glenn, put yourself in his shoes.

Would you want to be arguing in front of a legislative body that whatever they enact into law is not binding on you, that you're allowed to yourself?

I don't think he's going to get a very favorable reception from there, but he has every right to do it.

See,

this is the problem.

And I'd love for you to spend just a minute talking about the the importance of this.

We pass laws.

That's different than edicts.

I even think it's different than what the administration is doing through all of the departments.

We pass laws, and that's what our elected officials are for.

And then no one is held to any kind of standard.

No one is held and has to pay for their crimes at the highest of levels.

And you're getting this attitude from the general public the bad ones are just saying i'll just gonna do whatever i want the good ones are becoming extraordinarily disillusioned and they feel under attack at the same time from the government and the crimes in the community bundle and safe with expedia you were made to follow your favorite band and from the front row we were made to quietly save you more Expedia, made to travel.

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So I think what we've seen is when the progressives talk about, you know, they want to, quote, protect democracy, they don't have any allegiance to any particular institution or the rule of law.

What they have allegiance to is leftist ideology.

So if any institution in society is advancing leftist ideology, then that's what democracy means.

But if an elected official like me is standing up against that, then all of a sudden they consider that a threat to democracy.

So it's totally results-oriented.

They don't care about the rule of law for itself.

And so, you end up with situations where prosecutors are nullifying laws.

You end up in situations in Washington, D.C., Glenn, right now.

If you are in that jury box and you are somebody that is opposed to the swamp, they are going to tie you up and they are going to nail you to that wall.

But if you're somebody that's part of that swamp, it doesn't matter if they have you dead to rights.

They're going to let you walk, just like they let that Russia collusion hoaxer walk a couple months ago.

So, the standards of justice are different.

And basically, I think it's driven by a progressive impulse that the ends justify the means.

We are,

you know, George Washington said what makes us different is we are a nation of laws and not of men.

We are truly a nation of men now, where it just depends on whose side you're on and who's in charge.

We can't, just like the executive orders,

we can't do things through fiat because the country keeps swinging so far back and forth.

We have to stop and start to

follow our Constitution and the actual laws.

How long can this last before this pendulum just snaps?

Well, I think the good thing is at the local level, you are seeing a reaction against these prosecutors basically putting themselves above the law.

I mean, imagine.

Someone got recalled in San Francisco.

Who would have thought that was possible?

Although I will note, Glenn, if you look at that vote on that recall, the wealthy, mostly white people, voted to keep him in power because they don't bear the brunt of his bad policies.

It's all about woke virtue signaling to them.

But you get down on the working class levels in San Francisco, they all voted to kick this guy out because they were having to pay the price for it.

So I think the vast, vast majority of the public recognizes that rogue prosecutors are a threat to public safety and ultimately a threat to individual freedom.

Now, on the federal level, I think what you've had develop, and you know this better than anyone, many, many decades, you have an administrative state that stands as a fourth branch of government.

And the problem, I think, for Republicans is, is that when Democrats win, the bureaucracy tends to want to do what the Democrats want to do anyways.

Well, when Republicans win, It's like the Democrats still control the machinery of government.

I mean, we saw it with Donald Trump where they weaponized some of these agencies to try to kneecap his presidency.

But we've also seen them in prior years frustrate basic conservative policy.

And so I think that bureaucracy, how much it's grown, the power, the lack of accountability, and you know, Congress is to blame for a lot of this because they've abdicated their responsibility.

They have the power of the purse and they will not use it.

IRS agents, they're going to do, give me a break.

You could defund that crap easy if the Republicans take control.

Do you think they will?

I wouldn't bet on them actually doing that.

So you have the tools under the Constitution.

It's just, you know, politicians would rather, they don't want to make waves.

They don't want to get into a confrontation where they could potentially lose an election.

And so that's why they don't use the tools that they have.

But the founders were smart.

The body closest to the people, the House of Representatives, controls the purse strings.

And we can come and have a red wave and we can send people there on that mission.

The question is, are they going to actually heed that and are they going to try to get this constitutional system back into good shape?

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Talk directly to the people that are maybe running for governor, running for Congress, Senate.

Talk to those people because you,

I don't know what it is, and I want to get into this a little later.

You have the courage, and courage is a muscle.

And unless you exercise it, it gets weaker and weaker.

And I'm guessing that your courage is getting stronger and stronger as you exercise.

Talk to the people who are going in.

What makes you different than

the regular run-of-the-mill GOP that we can't trust?

What is it that they need to have?

Well, look, I think two things in respect to governors, because a governor really is different than somebody going up into the Congress.

And the governor, you've got to be a leader.

If you're not going to lead, you're just not going to be effective.

So what I did when I got elected, I had my transition team give me just a notebook filled with all the powers that the governor has constitutionally, statutorily, customary powers that governors have wielded, what your relationship to local government is, such as suspending these elected officials.

So I had an agenda.

I had a lot of things I wanted to do, but I also recognized this is a constitutional system with checks and balances.

You better have a strategy for how you're going to be able to navigate those different pressure points and make sure you're using the leverage that you have.

So I would just tell people, be very, very conscientious of what you can do on your own, what you need legislative buy-in for, because when you are saying you're going to do things and then you fall on your face, the voters get frustrated with that.

And I think with me, I deliver on what I said.

And it's not because I'm the only one willing to do it.

I think part of it is I have a strategy about how to get it done.

Now, in terms of the courage thing, what I will tell folks is, so the great example for me is the summer of 2020 with COVID.

You know, we get a COVID wave in Florida.

They're telling me to shut down the state.

We had our schools going to reopen.

Everyone's saying it's a disaster.

They were accusing me of wanting to kill all these kids.

I was getting hammered day in and day out.

I knew what the right thing to do was and I just made the decision that whatever, however the political chips fall, I am totally fine with that.

I would rather have stood up for the jobs and education of the people I represent than try to salvage my own hide or my own job.

And at that point, no one knew politically how it would turn out for me.

But I think what's happened is when people see you're willing to stand up for them when it's not easy, man, they will have your back.

They'll come out in droves to support you.

So in the moment, sometimes it feels like, you know, the world's coming down on you.

You're getting hit from the left and the press and everything.

But in reality, there are so many people who are just good, God-fearing, hard-working people who are watching that and they're seeing you.

And if they see you stand and take the arrows for them, man, they're going to to be with you for good.

Yeah, I think that's the secret of Donald Trump as well.

He just continued to take the arrows and he was

doing it for the American people as he says.

Let me switch subjects to one of my favorite subjects,

ESG and the Great Reset.

I'd like you to define, if you can, fascism, because you're called a fascist all the time.

And I don't think the press knows what a fascist is

because ESG and the Great Reset, that is the definition without the concentration camps of fascism.

Well, the melding of corporate power and government power has traditionally been what fascism has been defined as.

And I think the problem with ESG is they're trying to do a lot through the economy,

which I disagree with, but what they cannot get through through the ballot box.

And so in some respects, it's government subcontracting out the ruling class ideology to titans of industry.

And so you have these massive corporations essentially exercising public power.

I mean, Glenn, if you have the top Wall Street banks that collude to say, we're not going to finance a gun manufacturer, we're not going to finance a company involved in border security, they have enough power where they're effectively altering the policy of the country.

And that is not a healthy thing.

That is changing policy outside the normal constitutional process.

And so I think it's healthier for a society to have businesses focusing on doing their core missions, but not leveraging their economic power to try to advance a partisan political agenda.

So

has your treasurer divested from places like BlackRock?

How are you fighting it in Florida?

So

we

got all our proxy rights back.

So when I became governor, BlackRock was voting Florida's proxy rights.

So we have all our proxy rights back.

The next board is...

Hang on, explain that for the average person so they know how powerful that is and what that means.

So when you own stock, you have the ability to vote as shareholders.

Now, an individual, even people that are very wealthy, likely aren't going to own enough to make a huge difference.

But a state of Florida with almost a $200 billion pension, you know, that's some significant voting rights.

And then if you pool those with other red states, you're talking about really making an impact.

The default was these asset managers were just voting those shares.

So they were voting those accordance to their political preferences.

So we took those back.

We do not allow them to vote our shares.

We're going to be implementing a rule on August 23rd with our state board of administration, which is saying you're not allowed to do ESG.

That's going to set us up in the next legislative session to codify.

that in statute.

And so it's going to make a big splash because we're a big, a big pension system and some of these businesses are going to have to choose between going down the ESG rabbit hole or being able to be invested with the state of Florida.

And I think what you're going to see is a lot of other states also get on this bandwagon.

What I'd like to see is them all do statutory changes that puts the wall up against ESG, but then us vote our shares together because if we pulled our voting rights together, we would be able to counteract what California and New York and

a lot of these other pension pension plans are doing.

Talk to me about the S and the G.

I see some states going after the E to protect energy, but I am continually frustrated by the states not taking a stand on the S and the G, which is going to affect not only the companies, but the individuals as well.

You could be apparent, outspoken, and you'll get a low S score.

and it will hurt you.

Yeah, look, I think, I mean, just think about about what they've done with SNG and major high-profile things in the United States in the last couple of years.

The Georgia voting law.

You had all these major corporations in Georgia come out and compare voter ID to the second coming of Jim Crow, where people were denied the right to vote at all based on their skin color.

And you'd have Delta, Coke, they're all issuing these statements.

And then what ended up happening?

They just had their primary in May, made a massive increase in voter turnout.

Give me a break.

And,

of course, when Disney taught us on the parents' rights and education bill, this is their social agenda that they're trying to basically impose on society.

So, they opposed our law, which was trying to keep out sexuality and gender ideology from elementary school and making sure that parents were informed about what was going on with their student.

For example, Glenn, there were some schools in Florida that they were changing quote-unquote the gender of a student without the parent even knowing about it.

First of all, they shouldn't be doing that, anyways.

But to do that behind the parent's back, that's not what we believe is a fact.

But Disney thought that that was bad legislation.

So they came out.

And here's the thing: from the shareholder perspective, if you look from the time Disney came out against this to now, they've lost massive market cap, way above and beyond what the market has gone down as a whole.

So they've gone even more.

And I think they alienated a lot of folks.

And so it raises the issue of: okay, ESG is not good for our economy.

It's not good to have major economic power trying to impose these basically leftist agendas.

But just from a fiduciary duty perspective, a CEO getting involved in this stuff is not following the best interests of the shareholders.

So there's a lot of people that have Disney stock and their pension plans in 401k who were hurt by what Disney did to impose our parents' rights law.

And you are a you're an attorney that went to Yale and Harvard, a good attorney, you were a jag officer.

It strikes me, being a nobody, not knowing the law, that there is a class action lawsuit waiting to happen at some point.

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I think that's going to happen.

I think that's inevitable because I think that you can't define, and that's actually one of the things that we're doing, Glenn, in Florida, is we're defining fiduciary duty in a way that excludes.

this stuff to say, well, you know, if we do ESG 100 years from now, it's going to be better.

No, no, no, no.

It's what is doing the best for the shareholder.

And so making sure that that fiduciary duty definition is what the traditional definition was is really important.

And as long as that definition is upheld, then they clearly are violating their fiduciary duty because they're going off in all these tangents.

And oh, by the way, these ESG-dominated funds have performed poorly.

They've performed worse than funds that are not doing that.

BlackRock came out today and said, expect bad returns for the next 10 years.

No, thank thank you.

No, thank you.

Let me stay on this for just a second.

There was a study, in fact, a couple of studies that came out of Europe that I saw just last week, maybe been a couple of weeks ago,

from England, the National Institute of Health.

You also have Sweden and Finland, and there was another country that have done studies now on the effects of changing children's gender.

And they they have now outlawed it and said only in the most extreme cases can anything be done because they're finding all kinds of evidence that it is

society is changing and it is now a popular thing and it is affecting

mainly girls.

We are seeing an attack on our children and especially on our girls.

You just banned banned this kind of

gender treatment, and again,

you're called a monster for it.

Why did you ban this?

Well, I think it's interesting, Glenn, if you look over the last couple years with COVID as well, these European countries, you know, they're basically secular, more liberal democracies than we are, but yet the medical profession has not been kind of taken over by ideology and partisanship the way it has in the United States.

So if you looked at Sweden and some of these countries, how they handled COVID, it was evidence-based.

And you see the same thing with this.

They did go down the road of trying to do, and they'll call it gender-affirming care, but you're giving people, very young kids, puberty blockers.

You're doing sex change operations that are irreversible on them.

And what they found was like this was very, very damaging.

Over 80% of the dysphoria that young people have resolves itself by the time they get older.

Why would you disfigure these kids knowing the harm that that could do in the future?

And so the science on this is incredibly weak to justify being able to do it.

And yet we have people testifying at our Board of Medicine hearing who went through these procedures and regret it and talk about how damaging it's been.

And so our view is in the state of Florida, if you're 14 years old, you cannot go and get a tattoo in the state of Florida.

Why should you be able to go, and the left wants you to be able to do this without parent permission, why would you be able to go take your have someone take your private parts away?

It just doesn't make sense and it's not justified by the science.

And so we put a lot of science in, showed what the studies showed, and particularly in Europe, they're following the science.

In the United States, it's being driven by ideology.

So here we are putting our foot down.

I think woke medicine is a huge threat

to our social well-being because people are not going to trust these people going forward.

You know, you go back even five years ago, someone had an MD by their name.

I instinctively gave them respect.

I'm like, man, you graduated from medical school.

Now a lot of the medical education is going woke.

Ideology is really dominating.

We saw it all throughout COVID and you see it in this issue.

And it's really, really damaging a lot of people.

And I've said, we think they may be able to anyways, but we're going to make sure in our law that people that have undergone this, if they get older and they they have big-time problems, they should be able to sue these physicians for damages because these physicians are not upholding the Hippocratic oath.

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The thing that is puzzling to me,

and maybe it's just they win either way, they are doing doing so much damage to these institutions.

As you said, medicine has really no credibility.

Pharmaceutical companies no longer have any credibility.

The government, the courts, everything has lost its credibility.

That's one of the things that they are looking for.

They want that trust in this system to be destroyed, so we have to build something new.

Is it their

arrogance that is driving this?

Is it

they just are hell-bent on destroying it?

Or do they know something we don't know?

Because they're not acting like rational human beings at all on any of this.

Well, I think it's two things.

I mean, I think there's a lot of people that are very militant, and I think that they view our society as being

basically illegitimate in many respects.

That's why you see things like the 1619 project trying to say that the American Revolution was fought to preserve slavery.

I mean, that's just factually false.

We know the pamphlets, what they wrote, we know why they did it, but they're doing that to try to say, you know what, this country

right from the very beginning was bad.

And I think they want that with all these institutions now to do it.

So I do think that there's that impulse, but I think there's a lot of these people involved in these fields that just don't have the courage to step up and say this is wrong.

Because if you speak out, man, they will bring down a ton of bricks on you.

And we saw that with COVID, where a lot of these physicians would privately tell me, yeah, that you're right about the lockdowns not working, you're right about kids needing to be in school, you're right about the masks not working, you're right about the vaxes, all this, but they wouldn't say it publicly because they would face a lot of professional harm.

And so they've created, I think it's a minority of people, but it almost goes unquestioned and unchallenged because the people that are willing to stick their neck out, man,

they get hit and they get hit hard.

If you think about some of the people during COVID who are willing to speak out, people like Jay Bhattacharya from Stanford, Martin Kaldor from Harvard, Sinetra Gupta from Oxford, they were right on all these things, but man, they took a lot of fire in the process.

So what is it going to take to get the average person?

Because once the average person, Stolis-Nietzhin said in his letter to the Russians,

All we have to do is stop giving it power.

All we have to do is say, no.

But that's really hard to do.

Not as hard as it was for them, but it is hard to do.

What is it going to take to

flip the direction?

Or has it already been flipped?

I think it's really changing.

I mean, just think about the media and how conservatives now approach the media.

If I'm not getting attacked by corporate media, then I don't think I'm doing my job right.

And my voters don't think I'm doing my job right.

They expect me to get smeared by CNN and NBC.

And if that's not happening, then they wonder.

And if all of a sudden CNN started to say good things about me, a lot of our voters would be like, man, what are you doing that I don't know about?

I don't know why they're saying that for you.

So the corporate press basically over half the country doesn't believe a word they say anymore.

And so their power to shape the narrative is much diminished from even just a few years ago.

And I think you're going to see that as well with how Americans respond to the medical establishment in the future.

They're watching this stuff in terms of a sex change operation on a 12-year-old.

They know instinctively that that is wrong.

Same thing with how they view teacher unions.

You know, teachers unions for a long time in this country got enormous respect from the public, even a lot of Republican voters because they were representing teachers, gave them the benefit of the doubt.

Well, now they've seen they tried to lock the kids out of school indefinitely.

They see different types of ideology they're trying to do.

And so they don't trust anymore.

And the parents now want more of an involvement.

So I think it's been a massive overreach on part of the woke left.

I think people are reacting.

I don't think it happened just overnight, but I definitely think we're on a pathway where a strong majority of the public is basically telling these people, who the hell do you think you are?

Well, the other side of that is we just passed a climate bill and an inflation reduction bill that is neither of those things.

The most disturbing thing is the 87,000

CIA agents,

not CIA, I'm sorry, IRS agents.

The numbers are staggering.

We don't have that many billionaires to sift through their garbage to find out if they're cheating on taxes.

I believe this is

first in line, I think, are going to be our farmers, but the average person will get it too.

It goes to

You know, in seven years, you'll own nothing and you'll be happy.

We are intentionally being impoverished.

And there was actually an amendment when they were debating this in the Senate to say, okay, you can't use any of these IRS agents if someone makes below $400,000 and every Democrat voted that down.

And the reason is simple, because that's where they're going to be focusing most of the fire.

Billionaires hire people.

They hire high-priced lawyers and accountants.

What they're doing is they're using the loopholes that Congress has put in there over the years to the best of their benefit.

So going after, quote, the billionaires, they're going to have a fleet of lawyers and accountants that are going to be able to defend them.

They're going to go after the mom and pop.

They're going to go after the small business person, the independent contractor, the Uber driver.

And they're going to focus on basically parts of the country that don't support what the regime is trying to do.

So I think it's so outrageous, Glenn, that I do think it's going to backfire big time on them politically.

The Republican Congress, if we do get House incentive, which we do, they must defund all of those IRS agents.

That is a total travesty.

I wonder if we have the backbone in the Republican Party, but I certainly hope so.

I mean, I was at CPAC

last weekend, and the biggest applause line that I saw in Donald Trump's speech was abolish the Department of Ed.

And I think there's a lot of these agencies.

I mean, we have to clean out the FBI.

I don't know how you we don't need a a great reset, but we do need to reboot the system and restore its original factory settings.

And think about where we are with some of this.

I mean, you know, 10 years ago, if you had asked me about Department of Education, EPA, IRS, I would have had a negative view.

But if you had asked me about DOD or FBI or some of those, I would have, because, you know, I was in the military.

I've worked with some of these people.

I would have said, no, those are good.

I can't think of an agency

that is performing

to the benefit of the American people.

DOD.

I take my son to watch Top Gun Maverick, right?

And you're proud of seeing the pilots and all that.

Then in real life, what's the Navy doing?

They're focusing on pronouns and all these other things, this woke garbage, while China's laughing at us.

The FBI, what they're targeting parents, going to school board meetings, doing basically hoax investigations, whether it's the Russia hoax or whether it's the Michigan kidnapping hoax.

This is an agency that's totally lost its way.

And then of course, NIH, CDC, FDA, you telling me they need to be fumigated as much as anybody after how they performed over COVID.

And so I think that this bureaucracy is in such need of a total overhaul.

You need to fumigate.

And we could do it with Republican majorities at least start and get a lot done.

But it's going to be tough.

The swamp's going to fight back against them.

And the question is, do they have the courage to stand there and stand for us?

Because I can tell you, I do not feel as an American represented by this bureaucracy.

I feel that this bureaucracy is working against me.

Oh,

in many levels.

This bureaucracy is beginning to scare me, the power that they are

gathering.

And it's clear.

They are, I mean, if you just look at the map of where audits are already happening, a lot of them are happening in Florida.

A lot of them are happening.

Most Most of them are happening in red states.

They're not happening in New York.

Well, that's where a lot of those billionaires, well, at least used to live.

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No, I think you're right.

I mean, I think, and that's the thing.

It's when Reagan came on the scene, it was just, you know, the government was clunky.

It was too big.

It was holding us back.

But I think the difference between Reagan's time when he said government is the problem versus now is just the government, these agencies have been weaponized to go after people who dissent from the narrative and who dissent from the regime.

And that makes them much, much more of a threat to freedom than even in Reagan's day.

And I think we have a fourth branch of government now.

I think we have the intelligence agencies.

I think the intelligence agencies are working against,

they're working for themselves, it feels like,

and against the American people.

Do you agree with that?

They have no accountability.

And as somebody who was in Congress during the Russia collusion hoax, you know, a lot of those elements were fueling a completely false narrative that basically upended our politics and in many ways kneecapped the Trump administration.

And that was all based on a lie.

And it was a lie that was mobilized because they didn't like who won the 2016 election.

And so We, the American people, are supposed to govern, not some unelected bureaucracy that is operating in secret.

But I do think that the way they work with the media to do these narratives based on classified classified information has been very destructive to our politics, particularly over the last five or six years.

Okay, we've been celebrating now Roe versus Wade, that it has been overturned with great joy for a while.

It is still remarkable

that after 63 million babies,

that we have finally stopped it.

But it's not stopped

nationwide by any stretch, and it's really never going to stop until we change people's hearts.

the way to change people's hearts especially moms when they come in they get an ultrasound this is why the state of New York is against our pre-born centers because they they a don't call the baby a fetus look it up what's the Latin

definition

but they also give an ultrasound

80% chance the mom says, oh, wait a minute, that is a child.

I can't, no, I won't.

I want to keep my child.

We have been working with pre-born centers now all across the country to try to save 50,000 babies by the end of the year, and you can help.

But now we're doing double time because

they have to outfit these pre-born centers with safety protocols because they're coming under attack.

I can't imagine the fear you might have if you were working at one of these centers.

Please help us save babies and keep pre-born centers safe so they can continue their life-saving work.

Donate whatever you can.

A buck helps.

A thousand bucks helps as well.

Whatever you can do.

Donate at pound250 and say the keyword baby.

That's pound250.

Keyword baby.

Or go to preborn.com slash Glenn.

That's preborn.com slash Glenn.

I read a article in Vanity Fair this morning that was hysterical about your new civics,

where they say that Thomas Jefferson absolutely raped his slaves.

That's not true.

Even the best work on this says

maybe

with Sally Hemings, maybe, but very doubtful.

They tried to say that you're dismissing slavery by pointing out that We were a small member.

There was slavery that was happening in the Western Hemisphere that was far worse.

Brazil, far worse than the United States.

That doesn't lessen it, does it?

No, not at all.

It's basically accurate history, Glenn.

I mean, the fact of the matter is, and this is what Abraham Lincoln thought, this is what Frederick Douglass thought when they were having these debates around the time of the Civil War.

They said, hey, this had been something that had been in the colonies for 150 years.

The founders laid down principles that were the first principles to ever call slavery into question.

That was the ammunition that abolitionists later used, that Martin Luther King invoked when he was on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in the 60s.

And so the country was founded for this birth of freedom, and they created a constitution which they honestly believed would set slavery

to basically fade away.

Now, that didn't end up happening.

We fought a great civil war over it, but I think the left tries to portray American history as it being founded because of slavery and that this was something that, you know, the founders were really holding up about what their the country was about.

Actually, a lot of them were embarrassed that this was something that was there.

Even people like Washington, who owned slaves, freed slaves.

Jefferson would always, you know, he agonized about slavery, and I know he participated in it, but he recognized that it was wrong.

So intellectually, you had very few of the revolutionary generation make a compelling positive case for slavery.

What these people, though, are doing on the left, they're basically taking the position Stephen Douglas took when he debated Lincoln in 1858.

I mean, Douglas was saying, hey, no,

the Constitution is about slavery, and he supported the Dred Scott decision.

Lincoln was on the other side of that.

He said, this was a country conceived in liberty.

It doesn't happen overnight.

This is a fight that you have to keep fighting.

But that's what he believes.

So we're teaching the accurate history, and we're basically teaching it from the perspective of a Lincoln or a Frederick Douglass rather than a Stephen Douglas.

People ask me all the time.

They ask me, and I barely know you,

but they'll come up to me and say, what is it do you think drives him?

And I've said, well, I think one of his biggest assets is his wife

and

her philosophy.

She knows freedom very, very well.

By the way, how is she?

She's doing really, really well.

So thanks for asking.

You bet.

Please say hello to her.

What is it that drives you?

What is it that...

Because when we first saw you come into Congress, and maybe it was just the time.

You just didn't have the,

you know, COVID.

You, the window of time, it's your window of time now.

What is it that drives you?

Where was your turning point?

Well, look, I think in elected office, I mean, as Congress, you're one of 435.

And so I think I had a lot of great ideas.

I just didn't have the capacity to implement those ideas at the time.

As governor, the buck stops with you.

And I think people either are,

some leaders gravitate towards that.

They want to be making these decisions.

Some people don't like that, and they'd rather be one of 435 where the spotlight isn't on them.

But you know, from a very young age, growing up playing baseball and eventually going into the Navy and doing all this stuff, what I always just understood is there's a lot in life you can't control.

The one thing I can control is when I wake up in the morning and I look in the mirror, am I getting all out of the talent that God gave me or not?

Am I working hard to reach my full potential or not?

And so when you're playing sports, you're making sure that you're practicing, doing what you need to do to improve there.

As a governor, I look in the mirror and say, what else could I be doing

to make life better for the people that I represent?

So, one of the reasons we're on offense on a lot of this stuff is because I just have that sense of urgency of wanting to be able to use my time to get things done.

And I will say, when my wife was diagnosed with breast cancer last year, it does put some things into perspective because you're just going on.

You know, we're relative, I'm still the youngest governor in the country.

Our kids are now five, four, and two.

Wow.

We haven't had a family that young in the governor's mansion since the 1800s in Florida.

So you kind of just do that.

And then to see something like that happen and you're like, wow, you know, you never know what tomorrow will bring.

And every day is a gift.

And do whatever you can in the here and now and just make the most of the opportunity.

And so I do think people, look, even a lot of my critics will acknowledge that I have energy.

Hamilton said energy in the executive is the leading characteristic of good government.

You know, we are an energetic executive, and we're out there making things happen.

And obviously, the state has responded very positively, and we've done really well under my tenure.

And we're going to just keep going.

Last question for you, because I want to keep you on time on your busy day.

Everybody has tried to pit you against Donald Trump.

Everybody is speculating whether you would run.

I'm not going to ask you that question.

Here's the question: The worst thing that could happen to

the right and the constitutional, the constitutional Republicans is

for there to be a scene where you two were eating one another.

And Donald Trump is very good at isolating

his opposition.

How's your relationship with him?

And

is it possible?

Are you guys working together?

And I'm not talking about an election, but do you have a good working relationship with him?

Look, I think a lot of that is, I mean, first of all, when he was president,

he was great for Florida, very accessible, really helped us with a lot of things.

And I can tell you, having Biden for a year and a half has been a disaster for Florida, and he tries to do whatever he can to throw sand in the gears here.

But I think a lot of that's just the media.

I think the media, they know the Democrats are going to have a rough 22.

And so they want to try to figure out ways to try to trip the Republicans up.

And so just because I've become become well known now as governor, they think that they're trying to do that.

So what I'm doing is just focusing on beating the left.

And we're excited about the opportunities in Florida.

You know, I'm not only doing my election, which is very important, I'm helping our legislative candidates.

We may have a super majority in the Florida legislature veto proof after this election.

And I've also endorsed now 30 school board candidates.

And a lot of people used to forget about these races and they're nonpartisan races, but the union will support usually a liberal activist.

We have to have candidates that represent our values.

And so we've not only endorsed, you know,

we've put in a lot of money to help them get across the finish line.

And so I think we got to understand like people can try to do this or that.

But at the end of the day, to me, you know, the threats to our freedom are coming from the left.

There's, of course, establishment Republicans.

There's other stuff that we can talk about within our own tent.

But I think the focus now really needs to be beating back the left.

We've done that more than anybody has.

I think in the country, in the state of Florida, that's one of the reasons why people are flocking here in record numbers, because they realize in some of these other states that have gone woke, something's wrong.

Something's wrong when criminals are allowed to run wild in the streets.

Something's wrong when our kids are subjected to indoctrination.

Something's wrong when hardworking people are locked down and not allowed to earn a living.

And so we've really been, I think, the refuge from a lot of that.

But

it has nothing to do with any of these other things that talk about.

I know people love to just gossip and talk, but I can tell you, like, focusing on these future things when we have so much on our plate now, that's just never the way I think.

And so that's just not the road I go down.

Governor DeSantis, I have to say that you have given me and I would imagine millions of Americans hope.

We are at the crossroads of our country.

We can very well lose it at this point.

We're not going to win it through fighting, arguing, calling each other names.

We're going to save it by having

intelligent people who are not afraid to speak the truth.

And you have done that very effectively without getting

greasy or dirty.

And

I'm one American that would like to sincerely thank you for the way you are running Florida and the hope that you are giving all of us that, yeah, decent people still exist and we can really actually find people to to run to run things in our interest.

So thank you.

Thanks, Glenn.

It's an honor to be with you.

You bet.

Just a reminder, I'd love you to rate and subscribe to the podcast and pass this on to a friend so it can be discovered by other people.