Ron DeSantis: His Deeds & Words

On November 6, 2018 Ron DeSantis won the Florida governor's race in a squeaker by 32,463 votes out of over 8 million votes cast, 49.6% to 49.2%.

Over the next four years DeSantis governed with such leadership that he was reelected on November 8, 2022 by 1,506,994 votes with over 460,000 fewer votes cast (8,220,560 - 7,758,938 = 461,622 fewer total votes cast) 59.4% to 40.0%.  No governor ever got a higher % of the vote in Florida history than DeSantis did in 2022 as he provided coattails for Rubio, & virtually every other Republican candidate on the ballot.  DeSantis won 62 of 67 counties including Miami-Dade County which is majority Hispanic.   Statewide DeSantis won more than half the Latino vote as he increased his vote total from the 2018 race by over a half million votes (4,076,186 to 4,607,597 = 531,411 vote increase).

The Florida election provided a glowing example that the American dream of obtaining personal excellence was recognizable to the electorate & was within their reach.  

The people of Florida followed, & want to follow, Ron DeSantis after he ground out four years of doing an inspirational job tackling one controversial issue after another - from Covid to Disney World. 

The Disney trouble started last spring after the company objected to the Florida Parental Rights In Education Law that barred teaching gender identity & sexual orientation to school children through the 3rd grade, & limits it to older children that is "age appropriate."

DeSantis's aim in working with the majority GOP legislature in passing the bill was to give more parental control over children's education & prohibiting inappropriate classroom instruction.

Disney escalated their protests vowing to fight for repeal of the bill, & even to fight against other bills like it in other states, to the point that the CEO was abruptly fired & the company is in the process of losing their special status of self government of the land that Disney World sits on.  On February 8 Disney announced that it plans to cut 7,000 jobs & shed $5.5 billion in costs as part of a major corporate reorganization.  Not all of this bad news stems from the Florida matter but its decision to drop all references to "boys & girls" from its theme park announcements isn't helping Disney's image.

DeSantis continued his program for improving the education of young Americans when he banned the College Board's new Advanced Placement African American Studies (APAAS) course from deployment in Florida until it was revised.  

Thanks to DeSantis, the College Board revised the APAAS curriculum to omit topics filled with socialism, Critical Race Theory (CRT), or some other radical perspective such as Frantz Fanon's glorification of violence & its influence on black radicals in America, a unit on black queer studies, & Afrocentricity.  

Also excluded are units promoting reparations, prison abolition, intersectionality, the socialist platform of the Movement for Black Lives, & the revolutionary mediations of Marxist radical Robin D.G. Kelley who uses the concept of racial capitalism (the theory that all capitalism is inherently racial capitalism, & all racialism is present in all layers of capitalism's socioeconomic stratification) in his work.  A CRT-based unit calling colorblindness racist (in direct violation of Florida law) is also gone.

Source of the AP revisions: scholar Stanley Kurtz, National Review

It's not that DeSantis is against African American studies - but from the above list you can see that he is for it being taught correctly.  This makes Florida ground zero in the fight for quality education.  DeSantis is on offense as much as he can be in a world that is usually on defense just waiting for the next Marxist shoe to drop.

In this regard DeSantis got behind twenty school board candidates & campaigned for them including travelling the state & rallying for them as if they would be in his administration.  Very impressive & real.

This work has never been more important as more Americans realize that the woke culture afflicting so much of our society was born on college campuses decades ago & fills it to the rafters today.  DeSantis says Florida is where woke goes to die.

And DeSantis's program of sending migrants to blue city destinations is not over with the fifty he sent to Martha's Vineyard last summer.  The New York Times reported that NYC's mayor Eric Adams, who once bragged about NYC being a sanctuary city, is pitifully sending migrants to Canada because NYC can't handle the small fraction of the hundreds of thousands of migrants that Florida & each of the southwest border states have been subjected to because of Biden's utter disregard & refusal to enforce the laws enacted in accordance with the Naturalization Clause of the Constitution.  Adams denied the Times report on CNN but then confirmed on Fox-5 that he was re-ticketing people to Canada in assistance with Catholic Charities.  Either way the migrants will keep coming Adams' way.

From 2013 to 2018, before becoming governor of Florida, DeSantis was a Member of the U.S. House of Representatives where he once voted for Paul Ryan's Medicare premium support reform.  Biden has gone out of his way to put down any reform to Social Security & Medicare no matter how bleak or urgent the Trustees' reports show the looming insolvency of these programs to be.  

I have regularly not only advocated for the premium support solution to Medicare's financial problems, but also as a way to break the dependence on government provided healthcare insurance.  I first presented the graph below on RTE on January 31, 2012.  It shows that the premium support solution, depicted on the bottom curve as Ryan Plan - Price Indexing, actually bends the Medicare cost curve down.  Long time readers of this blog who have studied premium support know that the resolution that House Republicans actually voted for contains no price-indexing formula & therefore bends the Medicare cost curve down faster than shown on the graph.

The fact that DeSantis once supported this program as a congressman with an actual vote is particularly encouraging & provides the right answer to the presidential debate question about Medicare that I had hoped would have been asked to Biden & Trump.

Examples of DeSantis's deeds in elected office are provided above.  

During DeSantis's January 3 inaugural address he talked about the federal government eroding freedom & stunting commerce; going on an inflationary spending binge that has left our nation weaker & our citizens poorer; recklessly facilitating open borders making a mockery of the rule of law, allowing massive amounts of narcotics to infest our states, importing criminal aliens, & green lighting the flow of millions of illegal aliens into our country, burdening communities & taxpayers throughout the land; imposing an energy policy that has crippled our nation's domestic production, causing energy to cost more for our citizens & eroding our nation's energy security, &, in the process, our national security; wielding its authority through a sprawling, unaccountable & out-of-touch bureaucracy that does not act on behalf of us, but instead looms over us & imposes its will upon us.  

He said "Decline is a choice.  Success is attainable.  And freedom is worth fighting for."

Examples of DeSantis's words from his inaugural address: "land of liberty, freedom's linchpin, a citadel of freedom, navigate the boisterous sea of liberty rather than cower in the calm docks of despotism, vision for a free and prosperous state, persistence & hard work, academic excellence, & merit & achievement." 

You can't find one Democrat that talks like this or uses any of these words.  In fact you are hard pressed to find many Republicans who do.  And if they can't utter the words how will they ever do the deeds?