Alright, here we go. Alright, I think we're broadcasting. Man, I think we melted the internet there. Yeah, that was insane. Sorry. We actually doing this from David Taxis Twitter account because it looks like doing it from my own basically broke the Twitter system.
Alright, thanks for joining. We're incredibly excited to announce that we want to have a government of Sanders on with us with this historic announcement. And then look forward to live Q&A from the audience. So yeah, with that.
Yeah, I mean, so Governor Santos, are you there? Can we go ask? I think you're breaking. I know. I think I think you broke the internet there. We had over half a million people in one Twitter space. And it was growing by like 50,000 a minute. So congrats on breaking the internet there. Well, yeah, yeah, you tried some new things you're going to. It's adventurous. So I think the value here is actually really high for people to hear directly from presidential candidates and to answer Q&A live.
And you can get a sense for how a candidate really is, you know, and where it's not just a canned speeches and teleprongers. It's a, in fact, you can tell by the, you know, some of the mistakes that that it's real. Yeah. So, you know, with with that, I guess I should turn it over to.
Yeah. Well, let's see. So yeah, Governor, there's been a lot of speculation over the last couple of months about your plans. I understand that you may have an announcement to make. We've got, I think, a record audience assembled here. You know, probably the biggest room that's probably ever been assembled online. What would you like to tell them?
Well, I am running for president of the United States to lead our great American combat. Look, we know our country's going in the wrong direction. We see it with our eyes. And we feel it in our bones, our southern borders collapse. Drugs are pouring into the country. Our cities are being hollowed out by spiking crime. The federal government's making it harder for the average family to make ends meet into a pain and maintain a middle class lifestyle in our president. Well, he lacks vigor, flounders in the face of our nation's challenges and he takes his cues from the woke mob. I don't think it has to be this way. American decline is not inevitable. It is a choice. And we should choose a new direction.
A path that will lead to American revitalization. We must restore sanity to our nation. This means embracing fiscal and economic sanity. Stop pricing hardworking Americans out of a good standard of living through inflationary borrow print and spending policies and please embrace American energy independence. This also means replacing the woke mind virus with reality facts and enduring principles. Marit must trump identity politics. We must return normalcy to our communities. America's a sovereign country. Our borders must be respected.
We cannot have foreigners pouring into our country illegally by the millions. We cannot allow drug cartels to poison our population with fentanyl public deserve safe communities and law and order must be maintained in American cities. We can't have inmates running the asylum. We must reject attacks on the men and women of law enforcement. We also must reestablish integrity in our institutions. This includes the military. I'm proud to be a Navy veteran and a rack veteran. And I revere our services. But when revered institutions like those that are military are more concerned with matters not central to the mission, whether it's global warming or gender ideology and pronouns.
Morale declines and recruiting suffers and you need to eliminate these distractions and we need to get focused on the core mission. We also cannot have true constitutional government of the most significant issues are decided by the whims of unelected bureaucrats rather than the people's elected representatives. Reestablishing integrity and our institutions means we must reinvigorate our constitutional system by returning the government to its rightful owners. We the people know social or economic transformation without representation truth needs to be our foundation common sense to no longer be an uncommon virtue and in Florida we proved it could be done.
We chose facts over fear education over indoctrination law and order over rioting and disorder. We held the line when freedom hung in the balance and we're thriving as a result Florida's the nation's fastest growing state were number one and net in migration number one in new business formations recently ranked number one in education. We have a 50 year low crime rate and one of the lowest tax in debt per capita in America but we also understand governing is not entertainment. It's not about building a brand or virtue signaling. It is about delivering results and our results in Florida have been second to nine.
We can and we must deliver big results for America. I pledge to be an energetic executive that will take on the important issues. Biden's pursued inflationary policies that are hurting working people we will reverse those policies and we'll build an economy we're working Americans can achieve a good standard of living.
Biden's open the southern border and allowed massive amounts of drugs to pour into the country will shut down the border construct the border wall and hold the drug cartels accountable. Biden's embrace medical authoritarianism such as unconstitutional covid back mandates we will ensure that those violations of liberty can never happen again. Biden's allowed woke ideology to drive his agenda we will never surrender to the woke mob and we will leave woke ideology in the dustbin of history. Biden's also politicized the military and cause recruiting deployment we will eliminate ideological agenda's from our military focus the military on the core mission and we will reverse the poor recruiting trends.
Finally, Biden's weaponized the power of the administrative state to advance his left-wing agenda we will reconstitutionalize the executive branch and will bring the administrative state to heal. Now you can't do any of that if you don't win. There is no substitute for victory.
We must end the culture of losing that has infected the Republican party in recent years. The tired dogmas of the past are inadequate for a vibrant future we must look forward not backwards we need the courage to lead and we must have the strength to win and to voters who are participating in this primary process my pledge to you is this.
If you nominate me you can set your clock to January 20th 2025 at high noon because on the west side of the US Capitol I will be taking the oath of office as the 47th president of the United States no excuses I will get the job done.
Now these past few years have given me a new appreciation for the fragility of our freedoms I never thought I would see things in America that we saw during the COVID-19 pandemic but our founding fathers were keenly aware of the fragility of freedom when they framed our constitution they came to arm with having studied the history of every republic and the history of mankind and they noticed that all of those experiments only had one thing in common and it was this every single one of them had failed.
And so they knew it fell to our country the United States of America to determine whether people could really govern themselves could we have a society based on the idea that our rights are God given not government granted and that society functions based on the rule of law not the rule of individual men. And when doctor Benjamin Franklin walked out of that convention he was asked did you deliver a republic or a monarchy he said a republic if you can keep it they knew freedom didn't run on autopilot they knew each generation would have a responsibility to safeguard freedom and it's our responsibility to do so at this important juncture and our nation's history we have a lot of work to do to ensure the country gets back on track.
I ask everybody listening to please join me on this mission please invest in our campaign by going to Ron to Sanis dot com and making a donation thank you God bless and I look forward to the discussion.
我请求所有听众加入我们的行列,请通过访问Ron to Sanis.com并捐款,投资我们的运动。感谢上帝保佑,期待讨论。
All right thank you governor appreciate that. I guess just as a first follow up here thank you for putting up with these technical issues I think we're definitely breaking you ground here as far as I know no major presence. No major presidential candidates ever announced their their their candidacy on social media this way certainly in a in a Twitter space so thank you for doing that.
What made you want to kind of take the chance of doing it this way as opposed to just doing on cable. I think that's the only thing that I think is really important is to preserve the usual way. Well when COVID hit I had to make decisions about do you go with the crowd or do you look at the data yourself and cut against the grain and I chose to do the ladder.
I faced huge blowback for doing that from the bureaucracy from the leads from the media but my view is I had to look out for the people I represented and I was going to be able to do my own political hide but it was very very lonely and a lot of those decisions and part of the reason it was so lonely is because there was a concerted effort to try to stifle descent there was an official narrative about lockdowns about closing schools about forced masking about all these different things that we had to navigate during COVID was an orthodoxy being enforced by the major tech platforms in conjunction with the federal government and if we can't have an honest debate in a free country about issues that affect hundreds of millions of people like lockdowns then what good is the first amendment at that point those are precisely the times when we needed to have debate be robust you should not be taking down articles.
That criticize those draconian policies and yet that's exactly what happened so it occurred to me that if that had continued I think free speech in this in this country was on its way out the door so when Elon must stepped up to purchase Twitter he paid a lot of money for it and I'm sure because he's a good business man Elon I'm sure you'll end up making money off it but bottom line is you had to put your money where your mouth is because I think you recognize that you can't have a free society unless we have the freedom to debate.
And we have to do that and we have the freedom to debate the most important issues that are affecting our civilization that did not happen during COVID the truth was censored repeatedly and now the Twitter is in the hands of a free speech advocate that would not be able to happen again on this Twitter platform so I think what was done with Twitter is really significant for the future of our country and we don't have a society in which government is colluding with major tech platforms to enforce an orthodoxy Well thank you yeah we're absolutely committed to free speech on a level playing field and just a vigorous debate and hopefully this can be a platform that brings people of dev urgent to political views to exchange those views and perhaps some minds will be changed when or the other but it's just incredibly important as you as you highlight that the first amendment is irrelevant if all the media and all the and the government are operating in lockstep it makes the most important amendment the one that was most urgently added to the constitution moot if you if you cannot have free and open to debate so so Twitter wise indeed expensive but free speech is priceless
Awesome thank you so government I'm going to ask some questions while we get some other kind of speakers in the queue to ask questions I think maybe some people knew this announcement was coming because there's no shortage of hip pieces on you in the press over the last week or two I want to ask you about some of these accusations that are being leveled at you last week the NAACP issued a travel advisory against your state claiming that Florida is not a safe place for minorities to visit what do you say to those who've been advised that somehow they aren't welcome in your state claiming that Florida is unsafe as a total farce
I mean are you kidding me you look at cities around this country they are a lost in crime in Florida our crime rate is at a 50 year low you look at the top 25 cities for crime in America Florida does not have a single one amongst the top 25 and if you look at cities like Baltimore and Chicago you got kids more likely to get shot than to receive a first-class education yet I don't see the NAACP batting an eye about all the outrage and the carnage that's happening in those areas so this is a political stunt these left wing groups have been doing it for many many years and at the end of the day what they're doing is colluding with legacy media to try to manufacture a narrative now the good news is fewer and fewer Americans are gullible enough to believe this dribble and platforms like Twitter are there where people can debunk these lies in real time and I would just say as an American citizen if you are uncritically accepting narrative spun by legacy media and left wing groups you're failing at your job of being a conscientious citizen and I think people just see right through it and oh by the way have any of these travel advisories because they've been doing this for a while these left wing groups have any of them worked well we're the number one state for net in migration and have been every year since I've been governor we just capped the highest quarter for tourism in the history of the state of Florida and our view is we want everybody to succeed regardless of their skin color we don't divvy up people by race.
At the same time it is worth pointing out that we have in Florida more black owned businesses than any state in the nation and we've also had more African Americans lead state agencies under my administration than in any time in Florida history but with us you know they're there because of merit not because we're trying to play identity politics and if you want to look at education the black students in in Florida perform much higher than black students in most other states we rank number three in fourth grade reading and number two in fourth grade math amongst our black student population and oh by the way the head of the NAACP lives in Florida and a lot of their board members have put out on social media during my governorship Florida vacations where they seem to be having an awful good time that's great well I mean Florida is great state and I think the people realize that the some of the things that are being said are just truly absurd.
I mean I saw some headline from the Atlantic basically claiming that anyone who listens to this spaces on Twitter is basically a Nazi so yeah that's the Atlanta and then Vanity Fair said that that you were you were hosted or interviewing because David Duke wasn't available although I'm not totally sure who they were saying was David Duke I don't know if it was you or governor to Santa's a little bit unclear but I think this is a function of these the legacy media these corporate journal they're in their little bubble and to draw illusions to stuff like that I mean how crazy do you have to be but in their little bubble it sounds like they're making some type of profound point and so part of I think what Twitter is standing for is people should be exposed to different viewpoints and I think the elites in our society have tried to cluster themselves to where their assumptions are never challenged that's not a good way I think to live it's also not a good way to be a critical thinker because no one's ever got a question obviously wrong assumptions because everybody around you shares them absolutely and I think they become totally hysterical because they don't like the idea that their control over the media is being you know disarmediated because now candidates for president can to speak directly to people through platforms like Twitter yeah I mean the amazing thing about Twitter things like spaces are that although I happen to be hosting it I just switch over to David hosting it because my account was actually too much interest that was my account was breaking the system but it's it's a it's really never been a mechanism before where someone could address the nation or anyone who wanted to listen to them could from anywhere in the world the United States or anywhere so this is a I think this is a really profound change.
It's also like the is not just whether the media reports something and an article is true or not even more powerful is deciding what the narrative is and so you know it's just like if there's only so much you can actually fit in newspaper or magazine and what and there's only one thing you really put on on the cover of magazine so that that whoever's deciding that is deciding to not talk about other things whereas with a public digital town square like we have here it's possible for the public to choose the narrative it empowers the people instead of a very tiny elite cabal which I don't recognize the irony of using that phrase but nonetheless it's it's. true and judged by the results that this is a means for people to decide the narrative and for the people to decide what you know which which way of debate will go not sort of five editors and chiefs of a few newspapers basically yeah.
and I think one of the really crazy things that happened during covid is that that social networks really started censoring dissenting viewpoints on covid medical viewpoints that ended up being totally correct in lockstep with what the mainstream media was doing so basically big tech platforms were undermining their main reasons for existing which is giving people a choice and actually there's there's somebody who I think knows more about that than any of us which is Dr. Bate Jay Bauticharia who's a professor of medicine at Stanford I want to pull him in here Jay go ahead and unmute yourself if you can be great to to hear from you I know that during covid you work with governor de Santos to be great just to hear a little bit about your interactions and if you have a question for the governor thank you David yeah I mean it was it was an absolute honor to work with with governor de Santos and I was really impressed by his decision making in the face of an absolute firestorm of criticism but he you know governor you did the right thing when you open the schools and my kids in California for a year and a half didn't see the inside of a classroom whereas Florida kids were in school you can see in the results and the learning loss numbers are so much better in Florida.
I'm really curious governor you guys as you're running for president what are your thoughts about reforming the public health authority in the United States in the federal government that you know the CDC the FDA the NIH how do you see reforms we need so that the mistakes of the lockdowns that happened during the pandemic don't happen again when there's another pandemic well first we need an honest reckoning about what happened during covid and the only honest reckoning is that all of those agencies all of the elites the public health establishment they failed they instituted bad policies obviously it's a novel virus but I think what happened was when the data was becoming more and more apparent that the path they were on was wrong they double down and wanted to do it even more and I really believe had Florida not just kind of stood in the way I think this country would have had rolling lockdowns for probably a two year period and so their impulses were authoritarian they were not following the data and I think the US government needs to acknowledge the failures and I think all of those agencies need to be cleaned out what I saw just dealing with them was I saw a interest in the narrative and in politics over evidence based reasoning and evidence based medicine and so I don't have confidence that those agencies are up to the task and I think you need major major overhaul of the whole and Shalada with respect to public health in this country.
我认为新冠肺炎期间发生的一件真正疯狂的事情是社交网络开始审查对疫情医学观点的反对声音,这些观点最终被证明是完全正确的,而这些社交网络与主流媒体步调一致。基本上,大型科技平台正在破坏它们存在的主要原因——给人们选择的机会,实际上,我认为有人比我们任何人都更了解这个问题,那就是斯坦福大学的医学教授Dr. Bate Jay Bauticharia。我想让他加入我们,Jay,请解除静音并发言,如果可以,我很高兴听听您的看法。我知道在新冠肺炎期间,您与德桑托斯州长合作,听一听您他们的互动情况,并了解一些您对州长的问题的看法。
谢谢David,与德桑托斯州长一起工作是一种绝对的荣誉。我对他在面对绝对的批评风暴时做出的决策印象深刻,但是他做得很对,他对开放学校的决定,我的孩子在加州一年半没有看到教室内部,而佛罗里达州的孩子已经返校,结果是显而易见的,佛罗里达的学习损失数字要好得多。
我真的很好奇,州长先生,您在竞选总统期间对美国联邦政府的公共卫生权威机构——疾病控制中心、食品药品监督管理局、国家卫生研究院等——的改革有何看法?您如何看待我们需要进行的改革,以避免再次出现封锁带来的错误?
首先,我们需要对新冠肺炎期间发生的事情进行诚实的反思,唯一的诚实反思是,所有这些机构,所有的精英人士,公共卫生机构都失败了,他们实施了糟糕的政策,显然,这是一种新型病毒,但我认为发生的是,当越来越明显的数据表明他们所走的道路是错误的时候,他们加倍努力,想要更加封锁。我确实相信,如果佛罗里达州没有挡住它们,这个国家在大概两年的时期里会不停地封锁。他们的冲动是威权主义的,他们不是按照数据行动,我认为美国政府需要承认失败,我认为所有这些机构都需要被清理出来,因为我在与它们打交道时看到的是他们对叙事和政治感兴趣,而不是基于证据的推理和证据为基础的医学。因此,我不相信这些机构有能力胜任任务,我认为整个公共卫生领域需要进行重大的整顿。
can I so can I follow up with that with that I mean I think the other thing that I saw during the pandemic governor and you knew was subject to it just as much as I was when we were talking about COVID the YouTube censored a video of us speaking about in a roundtable that you hosted on COVID policy there's so much of the federal government infrastructure went into suppressing on a scientific discussion during the pandemic so it's not just public health agencies but other agencies inside the federal government that worked to suppress the speech of Americans and I'd love to hear your question no question.
So I'm actually in Florida we recognize the danger there so I'm actually going to be signing a digital bill of rights for Florida pretty soon which will bar all state and local government officials from colluding or working with a technology company for the purpose of censorship of speech because you're exactly right you had people in the White House you had people in all these other agencies working with these platforms to try to take it down.
By the way, what did they censor Dr. Bada Chariah for? It was a roundtable discussion that I led and convened. We had Dr. Bada Chariah MD PhD from Stanford, we had Martin Calldorf from Harvard Medical School, and we had Sinetra Gupta from Oxford who was generally viewed as one of the best epidemiologists. across the pod until she became anti-lockdown. These are all eminent people and what are we discussing? Whether there's any scientific basis to force a school child to wear a mask for eight hours a day. They all agreed there was no basis to do it and that you should not have school mask mandates.
YouTube thought that was "anti-science" and that that should be taken down. But even at that point, we had already had enough experience in Florida where you had some schools that had done it before before the state banned the mandates. You had some schools that had done it, some schools didn't and the results were no different. And yet his video was taken down by Google YouTube, so it was a huge, huge problem.
And yes, I think the federal government FPI, DHS, any of the health agencies, it's unconstitutional for them to be delegating speech restriction to a private company. You can't do indirectly what the Constitution would clearly forbid you to do directly.
Let me pull in, we have Congressman Thomas Massey, if you're there, go ahead and unmute yourself. I mean what we're talking about here is I think really unconstitutional actions by federal agencies. Congressman Massey, I know that you've been involved in this problem of government agencies being weaponized and used against the American people in an appropriate way, do you have a comment on this and do you have a question for Governor DeSantis?
Well first of all let me say a big thank you to Elon Musk for buying Twitter and exposing all of this. On our weaponization committee we wouldn't know so much of it if he hadn't done this, almost as a public service to the First Amendment.
It's a disturbing trend, as the governor said, the government is colluding with big corporations. We found out this week from an FPI whistleblower, the Bank of America voluntarily gave names of information on anybody who bought a hot dog in Washington DC from January 5th to January 7th and then overlaid that with gun purchases that they had on record anywhere in the country for any period of time. They say they voluntarily gave that to the FBI so that's disturbing to me.
By way, I've never met Elon Musk but I'm one of your biggest fans and the first Congressman to have a Tesla. I'm on Starlink and I wouldn't have bought a power wall but I'm off the grid and you wouldn't sell me one, so I had to make one with a wrecked Model S and it's been running our house for five years. But my and just for the record, I was with Thomas our first year in Congress, he's got the Tesla but his license plate is Kentucky Cole, so it's he's probably one of the only people that have that in the country.
Thanks for outing me governor DeSantis but no, governor DeSantis, my question to you is you know you served here in Congress for six years with me and why is it that Congress is so feckless at raining in these government agencies and what do you think we need to do and if you were president what would you urge Congress or what bills would you like to see and sign to reign in this sort of overreach of government bureaucracy?
Well first I think there's a lot that the executive branch can do and I will say when it comes to these agencies, we'll put, we'll go into this a little bit more as the campaign goes on, but buckle up when I get in there because the status quo is not acceptable and we are going to make sure that we re-constitutionalize this government and these agencies are totally out of control. There's no accountability and we are going to bring that in a very big way.
Now part of the reason it's gotten so bad, power has been consolidated and effectively a fourth branch of government because Congress hasn't used its two main powers that it has under the Constitution. First, the power of the purse. If an agency is engaging in conduct that is outside the realm of what is legal or you think it's not good for the public interest, then you can remove the funding for those operations.
There's nothing that they're not entitled to get the same level of funding every year and yet Congress runs the government on autopilot either continuing resolutions or massive on the bespending bills so these agencies are all bulletproof, they know that they're going to end up getting something. similar or more every single year and it creates an incentive for them to abuse their power the other thing you can do is actually legislate so you're not delegating to the bureaucracy key issues regarding how to enforce federal law you should define what you want all they should be doing is implementing instead Congress will basically give an invitation for the bureaucracy to make really important substantive decisions and so Congress may never vote on something and the bureaucracy will cite a law from 20 years ago and do things that are going to transform our society or our country that is not the way the founding fathers drew up the Constitution so would you sign the Reigns Act we passed it out a judiciary today oh yeah no of course yeah that's a no-brainer that would I think be a great check for that I also think that we're going to have a good chance to see some of the Chevron deference really curtailed or maybe even eliminated based on the US Supreme Court's upcoming jurisprudence and I think that's another reason why the bureaucracy has become so powerful because courts have basically been told they can pretty much do what they want and courts are supposed to just defer I don't think that that's actually correct I think the courts they have to make a judgment about what does the law actually say and you can't just defer to quote unquote experts in the bureaucracy thank you all right
shifting gears governor I want to ask you another topic that's been in the news a lot is Disney they blame you for canceling plans for a billion dollar investment in Florida said it would they were canceling 2,000 jobs I saw other reports that suggested Disney was going to make the cuts anyway and due to a larger budget cutting initiative regardless of why they did it why do you feel your fight with Disney remains important considering you already beat them on the parental rights bill that they opposed and what would you say to some of your opponents in this race who argue that the fight is dragged on too long
so first of all Florida stands for the protection of children we believe jamming gender ideology and elementary school is wrong Disney obviously supported injecting gender ideology and elementary school they did oppose our parents rights legislation and the fact is when they opposed that that was a big deal because for 50 years any time Disney wanted something in Florida politics they pretty much got it but not this time I signed the bill we did as you say went on the issue but what happened was Disney's posturing some of the other statements that their executives were making kind of the corporate culture had really been outed as trying to inject matters of sex into the programming for the youth and I think a lot of parents including me look at that and say that's not appropriate I mean we want our kids to be able to just be kids and that's kind of our mantra
so you had this this setup that Disney engineered many decades ago where they actually had their own government that they controlled with no accountability they were exempt from the laws that all their competitors had to follow massive tax breaks and they even racked up municipal debt and Florida basically put them on a pedestal many decades ago enjoying the state with this one company at the hip we just didn't feel that that we were comfortable maintaining that relationship and so we ended their self-goverting status so Disney has to live under the same laws as everybody they got to pay the same taxes as everybody and obviously they'll be responsible for those debts
So, the reason why there's a quote fight is just because they filed a lawsuit against the state of Florida trying to get their special privileges reinstitute it, but I don't think that that's good policy. I think some of these Republicans that are taking Disney's side are basically showing themselves to be corporatists because these are all corporate goodies. This is not the way you would run a competitive economy, and the arrangement had really outlived its usefulness. But it persisted because Disney was so politically powerful.
I think the company's ethos have changed in a way that's alienated a lot of people in our legislature and in Florida, and so there was really no justification to keep it. But make no mistake, they're suing to try to get special privileges. People are making money in Florida hand over fist because we have a great business climate. That's not good enough for them. They want to be treated differently than Universal and SeaWorld, and we don't think that that's appropriate.
So, you know, I think that they should withdraw the lawsuit, but obviously, we're going to defend our actions because we think we have the right to do what we did. You know, it's funny, the media used to criticize Republicans for being in the pocket of big corporations, and now, they're attacking you because you're not. Well, not only that, David, it's interesting because the media in Florida, for years, had hammered Disney.
And they would point out like that this was not a good arrangement because, you know, Disney was not accountable to anyone. I mean, when we, when the state control board took over this district, the firefighters came to the board, and they said, "Hey, we weren't getting survivor benefits for some of these widows." And so the state control board actually paid out some of the benefits that they were getting stiff on.
There were a lot of people in central Florida who were really thankful that there was some accountability being brought to bear because I mean, you know, it's human nature. If there's no accountability over any individual or entity, of course, they're going to behave differently than if you have normal accountability. But the media was always very hostile to that.
But just because I happen to be involved in bringing it back to reality and making sure that they were under the same laws, well, then, all of a sudden, they're running to Disney's defense. I mean, are you kidding me? I know, by the way, on this project, they had announced this many years ago. They had not done anything for but that is actually not in Reedy Creek, so that was in a different part of Orlando. And so none of the issues that are involved in their suit would have made a difference there.
Obviously, as a publicly-traded corporation, you know, they have a fiduciary duty to do its best for their shareholders. So, I'm assuming if they were in better financial shape and they saw the project as lucrative, they would have gone forward with it. But I think clearly they've had some problems with their stock price and a lot of other issues. And I'd also just finally point out nobody probably has made Disney more money than me because they were open during COVID, and they were closed in California.
And that went on for many, many months where literally I had all the theme parks in Florida opened in 2020. People are going, "it's safe, they're having fun," and the California parks were closed. I think they were closed for over a year out in California. So we were I think a much better place to be doing business, certainly since I've been governor.
Great, let me shift gears here to the topic of education. I want to pull Chris Rufo into the conversation, but I don't work with you on some initiatives. I think, you know, one other thing that the mainstream media is promoting this narrative that you want to ban books from school libraries. You're free to use to teach kids about slavery or other unpleasant realities of American history or pretend that gay people don't exist. Many people I think in this room, we're now up to well over 271,000 people, so this is I think totally unprecedented in terms of the numbers of people we have participating.
By the way, I think Twitter is working much better now. I think it crashed because when you multiply half a million people in a room by an account with over 100 million followers, which is a Ewan's account, I think that creates this to scalability level that was unprecedented. But with my meager followership, it seems to be working much better. Yeah, no. We have some scaling issues specifically related to my account. At one point in January, if I tweeted a bit of a certain size, it would crash the service, and then anyone else who was tweeting at the same time would lose their tweet as well. So, an AIBab's scaling issues.
Yeah, well, we're breaking your ground here. We're breaking your ground when there are bugs and scaling issues. But in any event, back to the question I was asking you, the governor. is about education the media has been you know saying you're trying to ban books you're free to teach kids about slavery you want to say that gay people don't exist what is the truth of the matter for people who maybe have never heard from you before and then I want to pull Chris Rufil in on this as well yeah.
So the whole book ban thing is a hoax there's not been a single book banned in the state of Florida you can go buy or use whatever book you want what we have done is empowered parents with the ability to review the curriculum to know what books are being used in school and then to ensure that those books match state standards and are age and developmentally appropriate.
So for example parents have flagged books in schools that for example teach middle school kids how to use sex apps that provide graphic depictions of sex acts and sex toys for people as young as fifth grade and so clearly that is not appropriate to be in a middle school classroom and so parents object and the schools take them out.
I did a press conference that we called exposing the book ban hoax and before I had the parents come up before I spoke I just played the video that had the images of the books that the parents had objected being in their kids classroom and the local news had to cut the feed because they said it was too graphic well if it's too graphic for the six o'clock news how is it okay for a sixth grader or fifth grader and so nothing's being banned they're basically ensuring that we make curation choices that are consistent with state standards and on the racial history we eliminated critical race theory from our K through 12 schools that was the right thing to do is to get a kid who comes in at six years old and say they're an oppressor or a press based on what their race is that's divisive that's wrong we're also not going to be teaching people to hate their country but what we are going to do is teach the accurate history so in the same bill that banned critical race theory we required teaching thoroughly about racial discrimination that occurred in American history Florida's history standards require all of those subjects from slavery, reconstruction, segregation all of that to be taught and we'll continue to do that.
So I think what you see is the left and the media colluding on this they don't want to actually defend what it is that we are actually legislating or regulating so they create these hoaxes that somehow you don't want kids to learn that slavery existed in America which is preposterous no one actually defends the offending material and the question is is why are there people intent on trying to get this stuff into the classroom and I think it's part of a political agenda so our mantra in Florida is this purpose of the schools is education not indoctrination.
Yes I think it's very inappropriate to have sexually explicit material in a fifth grade library, 100 percent but it's also the case that if you're focusing on that type of instruction there's an opportunity cost involved why shouldn't we be doing more on science or reading or math and so I think we're getting it right and I think almost invariably in Chris Rufos had to deal with this too when they're trying to craft these narratives you just peel back the onion you realize that this is something they're manufacturing that makes a lot of sense.
I mean I was actually under the impression that that's a worse than books ban so this is news to me and they actually there was a one this week was that Miami-Dade County took a book that was about like poems from I think like Biden's inauguration and they moved it from elementary school library to middle school library the media tried to act like somehow this is being banned and you actually had Miami-Dade County public schools spokesperson have to come out and say there's nothing that's been banned or removed it was basically just determined that this particular book was better suited for middle school and so they put it in the middle school media center and the media tries to act like somehow that is offending something with a book ban but I think part of the reason that they're doing that is because you know there is actually a movement to ban books from like Amazon and some of these others California some municipalities have banned things like to kill a mockingbird what they're trying to do is see if some of these books pass a woke test and if they don't they are going against some of those books whereas in Florida you can buy whatever book you want but that's a different question than what would be appropriate for a third grader or what would be appropriate for a sixth grader government by definition has to make those choices about what type of curriculum we want to put in front of our students and the parents obviously have an.
important voice in that Absolutely we'll infect a friend of mine Tim Oben who has a blog called Weight-Waped Wine is really one of the most reasonable people on earth and one of the most reasonable people on Ivo and Matt had a lot of trouble actually publishing his book simply because it debated sort of sacred cows of woke ideology but a fairly reasonable book so that is the kind of de facto book banning and de facto book suppression that I see quite a lot of is that publishers are unwilling to take risks
Let me shift gears here for a second because I know we're running out of time we're still standing I think around four but for Pacific but thank you for giving us a little bit of extra time here governor
Shifting gears to a major federal issue immigration we see kind of I've seen these videos on social media and on TV of what looks like just insanity at the border what is your take on what's going on there and how would you address that as president? I'd reverse what Biden's doing you need to shut the border down you should not be entertaining these asylum claims for people crossing illegally you know asylum is a legitimate thing but these are people that when they come I mean they're being persecuted these people coming overwhelmingly are economic migrants that are coming across many other different countries they should be applying for asylum there if they were you know truly qualifying for that but they're not they know that if they just show up at the southern border and these are people all over the world that are coming illegally they know that they will get a sheet of paper saying okay come back for a court date in three years and they get released to the interior of our country it's an absolutely insane system so we'll stop that we will move on day one by declaring a national emergency we will construct a border wall we will make sure we have remain in Mexico and that we're not entertaining those claims in that way and we really need to hold the Mexican drug cartels accountable because they're facilitating a lot of this migration they obviously make money off of it they treat a lot of these people very horribly as they're trafficking them through Mexico and into the United States and of course the cartels have been responsible for moving massive amounts of fentanyl into this country and that's killing tens of thousands of Americans every year now and what they're doing is they lace the other types of drugs with the fentanyl so you may have like a teenage kid doing something they probably shouldn't do but in prior generations would not have been fatal and now if it's lace with fentanyl you know these kids can overdose and die and so mothers are losing kids as a result of this fentanyl epidemic and I just don't think you could allow these criminal organizations to continue poisoning our population so it'll be a day one issue we will bring overwhelming amount of resources to deal with it and we are going to stop this insanity once and for all
There's a I think followed question of immigration from Steve Dase who is a national radio personality and I think an important commentator in the great state of Iowa Steve do you have a you have a comment or question I think you just need to unmute if Steve can unmute then we'll go ahead and ask him for a question if not we'll keep rolling here all right three is going going sorry
I don't know if I put down money on January 1st 2022 that Twitter was going to be the last bastion of free speech on earth brother I'd be about as rich as you are on that bet right now I mean it's incredible what you have done here and the restoration of a lot of accounts of people that were truth tellers and were ran from here for telling the truth I saw a mean the other day that said of course you have scientific consensus you have to answer all the scientists who disagree so I wanted to just say first and foremost on behalf of a lot of grateful people around the country and the world really thank you very much for that and the investment you made in that cause
thank you a question is a follow-up to you governor on this very issue with immigration we have heard a lot over the years locker up, drain the swamp, get a build a beautiful wall pay for it and crowd cheer and everybody loved it and brands got built and nothing got done what is the bottom line assurance that you can make to the people that are listening right now all over the world and all over the country that you can actually do the agenda that you just articulated when others tweeted about it and talked about it then couldn't actually follow through it's a great question because I shared that frustration even my worst critics in Florida will acknowledge when I tell people I'm going to do something I don't say I don't make promises or say I'm going to do something lightly I've thought it through and I know that I am going to follow through on what I tell people I'm going to do so this is one there will be follow-through number two
I understand the different leverage points that you would have under Article 2 of the Constitution I study that a lot becoming governor about Florida's Constitution doing the same thing for the federal Constitution and you've got to know how to use your leverage to advance what you're trying to accomplish so for example you know there's leverage that we can use these of the Mexico that I think presidents have not been not been willing to do
I think sometimes for political purposes but I'll look at okay what are all the variety of options we can do which buttons can I push and I will do that to be able to bring this issue to a conclusion once and for all we had Hurricane E and come through Southwest Florida Patigory 4 plus storm September of 2022 and it did a lot of damage but one of the things that did it knocked out of bridge going from the mainland to Pine Island and it severed the Santa Bel Causeway in three different locations and the locals were being told it's going to take six months to get that stuff repaired and so they came to me even though these were not state-owned bridges and they said can you help us and I said okay I'll do it
so I got my guys together I said listen no bureaucracy no red tape and no excuses get it done we need to open these bridges back Pine Island bridge re-open three days later Santa Bel Causeway opened two weeks after that way way ahead of schedule because we wouldn't take no for an answer and we wanted to make sure we got it done so for me it is not a campaign slogan that you get in and then forget about it
I'm as an American citizen if I wasn't running this would be an issue that bothers me I've put a lot of my capital as Florida governor involved in combating illegal immigration we banned sanctuary cities my first year we just did a strong anti-illegal immigration bill in Florida that's working I put marine assets in the Florida Keys to help the Coast Guard repel boats from places like Haiti I had people at the southern border right now helping Texas and we've even been able to relocate illegal aliens to places like Martha's Vineyard so I don't think any governor has probably gone out of his way to do more to try to make an impact on this issue and I'm not going to take no for an answer and I think our voters are sick of the empty promises they want to see action thank you governor
well governor I saw yeah I saw a cover of time magazine this week and I think they were trying to do a negative story because they had the you were sort of scowling in this portrait they made of you and in the article they call you that they compared you to the terminator and I think that's an insult
But I thought it was kind of cool I thought it was a good thing because I think we need a cool headed ruthless assassin to go in and they take on the woke mob take on our out of control government and take on problems like the ones at the border so again I thought it made you sound great even though that may not have been their intention well look at the end of the day this whole business that we're in is about producing results.
I don't care about fanfare you know I'm the governor like that is I'm known right and I go around the state and everything and people are very nice and so I mean I appreciate the well wishes but but I don't need any of the fanfare I don't need any adulation I just know I'm in a position where I have a chance to make a difference and I'm either doing it or I'm not and I remember sitting at the desk and in the state capital my first day as governor four and a half years ago I looked around the room and I thought to myself I don't know what SOB is going to succeed me in this chair but they are not going to have anything to do because I'm getting all the meat off the bone.
I am going to make sure that I'm leaning into issues and making an impact and we have done that in the state of Florida and I bring that exact attitude up to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue governor.
I'd love to jump in and follow up on that this is Chris Rufo and you know how the honor of working with you in the past few years on critical race theory gender ideology and the D.I. bureaucracy and what I've seen up close and personal is that while many conservative politicians going back decades have made headlines and got on the television playing culture war they never actually get anything done and what you've done over the last few years is really astonishing.
You've eliminated CRT from all Florida's public institutions you've stopped gender ideology dead in his tracks in K through 12 and just last week you eliminated the D.I. bureaucracy and all of Florida's public universities they'll be shut down completely and I think what you've done is established a blue print for fighting back against the left's long march of the institutions and making sure that those institutions reflect the value of Florida voters not left wing activists and the partisan press so my question for you is you know D.C. is another animal it's quite different the scale of the federal government and how are you going to deliver results and what is your cultural culture war strategy facing down the swamp in D.C.
Well some of it is similar in this respect when we're taking on things like D.E.I. you get blowback from legacy media and the far left but though that's an example of an issue where they are out of step with the vast majority of Americans it's not just Republicans it's independence and a lot of Democrats because you think about if you're a if you're a parent and you've got kids you want to know when they apply to college they're going to be judged based on their merit and they're not going to be roadkill in some type of woke Olympics where they didn't fit some category and so they're denied opportunity they want to make sure that achievement matters and so we get a lot of quiet support for a lot of those things and so I think what I do just because look I'm a blue collar kid I grew up in the Tampa Bay area working minimum wage to get through school my grandfather worked in the steel mill in western Pennsylvania.
I just know instinctively kind of what like normal people think about all this stuff and I have a good sense of when the legacy media and the left are outside of where the average American is because people want you to be using common sense and things like D.E.I. I mean when I was growing up I think it things were better because people are actually told you should try to get along now they're told you need to segregate and it's just crazy that they're trying to do all this stuff so by eliminating that there's a lot of people that were really happy about that including people that certainly are not traditional Republicans and I think there's similar issues when you do in the federal level it's also the case that there are some tools at the federal level that we don't necessarily have at the state level.
For example some of the problems with the university and the ideological capture that didn't happen by accident can trace back all the way to the accreditation cartels well guess what to become an accreditor how do you do that you've got to get approved by the U.S. Department of Education so we're going to be doing alternative accreditation regimes where instead of saying you will only get accredited if you do D.E.I. you'll have an accreditor that will say we will not accredite you if you do D.E.I. we want a colorblind merit based accreditation scheme and so as president controlling that agency you can then approve other types of accreditation so I think part of it is just knowing where all the pressure points how does it get to the point that.
we then see and that somebody like you will run a report on like when you see some of the outrageous stuff that's generated in some sociology department at a university that didn't just happen at a thin air there's a reason why we got to that point and I think that there are some tools with federal government where you can push back and try to get these institutions more in a more foundational direction about hey we're pursuing truth here and we're not here to try to impose one niche ideology on the entire student body.
Great shifting gears. Daniel Ash you have a question or comment for the governor? I do and thank you both so much for your time for joining us in a very new way I really appreciate that I think it's really cool and for your support of free speech too and Elon I have to say thank you for taking the arrows and for unthrottling the accounts of all of us who got in trouble for sharing in your post story about a laptop and governor I wanted to thank you for your leadership and your unwavering support of second amendment rights and you're on my program tomorrow and I just got to say you got my vote in the primary so I appreciate it very much.
I you were talking about DEI just a minute ago and I want to ask you both about this growing threat against natural rights and free enterprise it's this threat of debanking. Now I know that you know Elon I've read so much about you and what you've gone through you've called ESG criteria evil incarnate governor DeSantis Florida saw financially weaponized wokery earlier this year when Wells Fargo bank dumped both the business and business and personal accounts of a very prominent and well respected gun dealer in Florida they've been together for 25 years working with Wells Fargo and they cited new ESG guidelines.
Now similar to the DOJ's previous operation chokepoint all these activists for various causes are using this regulatory guidance to debank what they consider to be politically incorrect businesses for the sake of risk management. Now we say that our rights should not be infringed upon by the government but what can and should be done about activist guided financial institutions and these no payment processors who are essentially cutting off law-abiding citizens and businesses.
Well I think it's just it's a fundamental issue that I think not enough conservatives have been wise to you I think more and more are but at the end of the day we have certain fundamental rights and so maybe you're somebody that is you know really excited about your second amendment rights and obviously if the government comes in and infringes that we know you blow the whistle on that that's a problem but what if Wall Street banks are colluding so that somebody can't function in that space whether it's running a store or or anything involving that your rights are still being infringed upon in that situation and so I think this whole ESG movement is really trying to do through the financial sector what they could never achieve through the ballot box and so they're trying to do an end run around the constitutional system and they're really trying to change policy they're trying to change society and they're trying to change the scope of people's rights and so in Florida I just signed into ESG legislation which said things like no ESG criteria in our pension fund we got a hundred eighty billion dollar state pension fund no social credit scores for consumers when they're going to bank in other words if you apply for a loan that loan should be judged based on your credit worthiness not whether you're genuinely reflecting to the appropriate left wing causes but one thing we did do is we did provide protection against this debanking with the woe banking no discrimination based on your religion and other things which we are we know is happening so I think it's a it's a fundamental question but we will not be a free society if major financial institutions can do through the economy what people could not achieve through the ballot box our rights will be restricted will be the end result and that's not healthy for a free country.
You know as a fall up to that I got our Dana mentioned operation to point and that is a term that's very familiar to crypto. companies in Silicon Valley and FinTech companies basically or it refers to an effort by the federal government including the SEC to basically regulate blockchain and crypto companies out of existence they really feel like they're being driven out of the country and I'm not talking about scammy ones or the totally fake ones like FTX but really high quality good companies including companies that are public like coin base and these guys are basically begging the government for just a framework they're just like tell us how to operate legally and we'll do it.
You know I guess where where do you come down on this what what is your view I guess broadly a Bitcoin and people's right a whole Bitcoin into transact Bitcoin and those coin you have every right to do Bitcoin the only reason these people in Washington don't like it is because they don't control it and they're central planners and they want to have control over society and so Bitcoin represents a threat to them and so you as you're saying they're trying to regulate it out of existence look could Congress enact a statute to ban things like Bitcoin under the Constitution they may be able to do I would oppose that I think we should you people should be able to do Bitcoin but Congress has never addressed this in this in this fashion and for the bureaucracy to just do it on their own and make it so people can't operate in that space that's what we mean when we say we've got to return the government to the people selected representatives who are our voice to be able to make these decisions and so as president will protect the ability to do things like like Bitcoin I think these are people that are that are sophisticated they can make decisions there's risks involved with it but but let them do that I just do not have an itch to have to control everything that people may be doing in this space and I think that the current regime clearly they have it out for Bitcoin and if it continues for another four years you know they'll probably end up killing it yeah I think you're right and I think that is the strong feeling of people in the book and Valley who are in this space and I think will be heartened to hear your answer on that.
I mean the weird thing is that and there is a huge constituency of crypto twitter so for people who are maybe part of political twitter who are wondering while we're talking about this it really is a has a big audience for this topic at those going to us when I've said yeah Bitcoin and dogecoin so shout out to all the the doge the doge trans out there but the weird thing is that this this administration they seem to want to ban Bitcoin but they want to create a CBDC which stands for a central bank digital currency what's your take on that so we were the first state just last month we actually got the Florida legislature to pass a law that says Florida does not recognize central bank digital currency because some states were actually adding that to the uniform commercial code you know the federal government studying this we did the opposite and say we didn't now the reason why we did that is because what the federal reserve is said as well you know we're going to consult with Congress we'll consult with the executive branch we don't have a CBDC right now and ideally we would get authorization for Congress well wait a minute it's not ideally you must get authorization from Congress I don't think Congress would authorize it so they unilaterally try to do this we're trying to provide protection for people here in Florida I know Biden did executive order they're studying it I can tell you if I'm president we are not doing a central bank digital currency I think that that would be a huge huge imposition on people's financial freedoms and financial privacy and oh by the way what would the logical result of this be if the central authority has oversight over this of course they're going to start imposing ESG criteria oh wait a minute you you filled up your gas tank three times this week you can't you can't do any more the sky how they would be able to manipulate this so I see it as a massive transfer of power from individual consumers to a central authority and I don't think that that's good for a free society so I'm a no on central bank digital currency.
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Yeah great well governor I want to thank you for the time I mean we could go for hours here but I know you only had an hour we've gone over that so when we respectful of your time I know there's so many people want to ask questions and we should do it again I mean I think it was fun I think this is great and we'll make sure that that we come back and do it again this is a this is a great platform.
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I mean we I would like to see other platforms going in the same direction but you know a healthy democratic society needs the robust debates I just want to thank everybody for listening and I'll just make that pitch again you know we want you on the team we'd love for you to go to rondesantis.com and make a donation so that we can get this done on this nomination and win the election in November of 2024 God bless everybody and thank you governor and yeah we have over 300,000 people in the room it's really been pretty readable and you know we started with some technical issues because of the sheer scale and unprecedented nature of what we're doing but it's not how you started how you finish and I think that's finished really strong so yeah.
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I think it's just it's just really great for the people to hear directly from presidential candidates and to have have it in a conversational tone I wish obviously results in you know it's it's it's going to be imperfect because it's not scripted so but it's genuine and I think that that really gives the people an opportunity to understand who who might be their president in a way that's real so thank you very much for coming on doing this and the invitation is open to any other candidates who might want to do this.
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Absolutely it is important for people to hear directly from candidates so thank you for working this on this historic event and yeah looking forward to future conversations and just having a great national dialogue. All righty everybody thank you for watching.