While polls show DeSantis facing tough odds in 2024, make no mistake: any other candidate would be a waste.
Republicans give plenty of lip service to freedom, but only Governor Ron DeSantis has made strides to preserve it. Within his state of Florida, he faces assaults on liberty from three fronts: COVID-19 concerns, educational indoctrination, and media bullying. If he stuck with the traditional Republican playbook, he would be losing; as it is, he’s winning on all fronts.
The opposition is fighting on different terms: they have co-opted the conventional political economy to disguise their transition into a new political economy, one where dominance is the ultimate goal and the battles are increasingly fought outside of government. DeSantis has been the quickest politician to adapt to the change, choosing to leave behind the old terms and operate on the new terms—not to dominate, but to prevent domination of individual liberties wherever it looms.
Having political power means nothing if the one wielding it does nothing for his political principles. Where Republicans celebrate the power they’re not using, DeSantis is using his power and celebrating, because his people are freer than the rest.
THE COVID FRONT
DeSantis could have easily kept his state closed through 2020 with the same COVID excuses that most governors used, but instead he promised to give his people freedom. As early as June 2020, DeSantis told the media,
“We’re not shutting down, we’re gonna go forward, we’re gonna continue to protect the most vulnerable.”
Shutting down entire communities and states does more harm than good, and it is possible to take care of the sick while allowing society to still operate. DeSantis understands both of those things and has fought for them more fiercely than any other governor.
“You have to have society function, you have to be able to have a cohesive society, that’s the best way to be able to deal with the impacts of the virus. But particularly when you have a virus that disproportionately impacts one segment of society, to suppress a lot of working-age people at this point I don’t think would likely be very effective.”
—Ron DeSantis
In late September, CBS12 reports, DeSantis moved Florida into Stage 3 of reopening via executive order, allowing all businesses to operate at 50% capacity regardless of county mandates and halting collection of COVID-related fines for individuals—something no other governor has done. The order reads, in part,
“No COVID-19 emergency ordinance may prevent an individual from working or from
operating a business. This preemption is consistent with Executive Order 20-92.
This order, consistent with Executive Order 20-92, suspends the collection of fines and penalties associated with COVID-19 enforced upon individuals.”
Continuing into November, his office pledged,
“The Governor will not lockdown and hurt families who can't afford to shelter in place for 6 weeks. Especially not for a virus that has a 99.8% survival rate.”
In March of this year, DeSantis’s performance couldn’t escape even CNN, which reported that “despite far fewer rules and restrictions, Florida lands nearly in the middle of all states on a variety of coronavirus metrics.” Florida at that point had “about 8% fewer deaths per capita” than the U.S. overall, meaning that protecting men’s God-given rights didn’t just keep them free, it also kept them safe. Additionally, to help keep business booming in his state, DeSantis issued another executive order to waive all fines that local governments imposed on people and businesses since March 1, 2020.
Over the past months, DeSantis has moved from defense of freedom to offense for freedom. First, he threatened to withhold funding from schools with mask mandates, properly respecting the place of parents, instead of the government, as having the ultimate responsibility for decisions on their children’s health. More recently, the governor signed SB 2006 into law, which forbids businesses and schools to make vaccination a prerequisite for their services, and it imposes a fine of $5,000 per violation per individual. Every American has the right to make his own health decisions, and DeSantis has proven that he is willing to fight harder than anyone to protect that right.
THE EDUCATIONAL FRONT
DeSantis has protected public schools from the advancing tyranny of Critical Race Theory, which “hold[s] that … legal institutions in the United States are inherently racist.” Dr. James Lindsay defined CRT very concisely, “The belief that (systemic) racism is the fundamental organizing principle of Western societies.” At DeSantis’s urging, the Florida Board of Education adopted new rules for state curricula that banned CRT from classrooms.
The governor remains committed to his pro-America and anti-CRT stance despite earning significant backlash. Educators are hosting protests against undue “censoring and restricting [of] what teachers can teach” and signing pledges to “teach truth”—apparently referring to CRT. Similarly, the University of Nebraska student government is just one institution that condemned efforts to ban CRT as “directly contradict[ing] … American values: free speech and expression.”
However, there have always been limits on what government education can include, and there are certain limits that no reasonable person would oppose. None of the current protestors would defend the discussion of Ku Klux Klan or Nazi ideologies in the classroom, so the justification for the inclusion of CRT is a farce. The right to free speech does not apply when representing an employer, and that does not change if the employer is the United States. Fortunately, DeSantis understands that.
To keep the U.S. great and help it become better, it must tell the next generations all the reasons to love it instead of creating reasons to hate it. A country will die quickly after it starts teaching the youth that it is inherently evil, because nobody develops affection for something he believes to be bad, just as criminals commit crimes because they believe doing so will be, on some level, good for them. Cultivating patriotic citizens is therefore the first duty of every country, lest they all fail for lack of invested members. DeSantis is making sure Florida and its employees serve America by fulfilling that duty.
THE MEDIA FRONT
DeSantis is waging total war against the media. In April, CBS’s 60 Minutes aired a piece on Florida’s vaccine distribution linking campaign donations from Publix to a state partnership with Publix stores; when a CBS correspondent pressured DeSantis about the events, the governor gave a fiery rebuttal,
“It's wrong, it's a fake narrative. I just disabused you of the narrative and you don't care about the facts because obviously I just laid it out for you in a way that is irrefutable.”
That kind of language is exactly what is necessary for conservatives dealing with the media because it’s exactly true. Rather than catering to the media’s bullying, DeSantis gave no more than one explanation of what happened, and after seeing that it was unimportant to the media, he took charge of his time and used it for his own purposes over those of the bullies, punctuating the interaction with, “No, no, no, you're wrong, you're wrong, you're wrong,” and moving to the next correspondent.
After the 60 Minutes piece, two Democratic officials and Publix jumped to defend DeSantis. Both officials were involved in the decision-making process; one was the mayor of Palm Beach County and the other was the director of the Florida Division of Emergency Management. The latter tweeted that CBS’s accusations were “just absolute malarkey,” and CNN acknowledged that “‘60 Minutes’ never offered any substantive evidence to support the significant assertion.” Standing strong against bullies earns allies, and DeSantis does it well.
The governor spoke at the Allegheny County GOP’s Lincoln Day Dinner in May and gave solid advice, saying of the press,
“I would say to Republicans: Don't seek approval from these people. They don't like you. They will smear you. They will attack you. The way to win is to fight back and not take it anymore Don't let these people set the agenda for our party anymore.”
Lest anyone doubt his personal resolve, DeSantis also declared, “I have only begun to fight.” And fight he has; that same month, DeSantis continued to push back on the media, allowing only Fox News to witness a key bill signing and barring correspondents of all other outlets from attendance. If the media wants to act as illegitimate partisan hacks, they should be treated as such, and DeSantis is not afraid to make that happen.
In June, DeSantis re-upped his commitment to action at a faith conference,
“You got to be strong. You got to put on the full armor of God. You got to take a stand — take a stand against the left’s schemes. You got to stand your ground. You got to be firm. You will face flaming arrows, but take up the shield of faith and fight on.”
DeSantis proves time and again that those aren’t just words; they are his legitimate goals to defend the American people against those who seek only to deceive and control.
In August, The Associated Press thought it could succeed where CBS’s 60 Minutes had failed, and it published an article entitled, “DeSantis top donor invests in COVID drug governor promotes,” to once again attempt to link the governor to financial corruption. Because Citadel is one of DeSantis’s top donors, DeSantis is allegedly paying them a favor by “promoting a monoclonal antibody treatment sold by Regeneron,” a company of which Citadel owns $15.9 million in shares.
(However, AP notes within their article, “The Regeneron drugs … have been shown to cut rates of hospitalization and death by roughly 70%,” and, “DeSantis has had a very public war of words with Democratic President Joe Biden, … [but] they both encourage monoclonal antibody treatments.”)
The governor’s press secretary, Christina Pushaw, criticized the article’s author, Brendan Farrington, publicly on Twitter after Farrington ignored her private requests for revisions.
Pushaw allegedly sent multiple impassioned tweets, using phrases like “Drag Them,” and, “put you on blast.” While those were clearly not calls to physical action, AP issued an official statement whining about harassment and equating Pushaw’s tweets with “rape threats” and “stalking,” and Twitter slapped Pushaw with a 12-hour suspension that they wouldn’t explain to either her or Fox News.
However, Pushaw wouldn’t be pushed around, responding to AP’s accusations by telling Fox,
“They brought this on themselves by publishing this kind of dangerous misinformation.”
Saying about her Twitter suspension,
“This proves Governor DeSantis right - again. Those who challenge false narratives are often too silenced by corporate media and Big Tech collusion.”
And once again, resistance to bullies earned allies. An editor of the Florida Sun Sentinel tweeted his rejection of Farrington’s article, and PolitiFact rated Farrington’s claims “Mostly False.” The media consistently loses when it tries to attack DeSantis, and DeSantis has staffed his entire office with people who refuse to bow to bullies. America could use more of that.
If DeSantis can successfully govern a state amid a pandemic and emerge with fewer-than-average deaths, booming business, and little erosion of personal liberty, then he is well-equipped to have charge over the entire country and help her recovery. And DeSantis has told America what his approach for the country would be,
“All I can say to any state that has not followed suit: Open your state, open your schools, end these mask mandates, let people live and thrive. When it came right down to it, we chose freedom over Fauci-ism”
What more could any liberty-loving American want? The headline America needs to see in 2024 is, “Florida Man Wins Presidency.”
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