Ron DeSantis is on a run. He might be on a run for 2024. He might be moving early to establish himself as a top contender for 2024. And he is off to an incredible start.
It's one thing to propose things, "I'm the governor, I think we should do this. I think we should do that." It's another thing to move these through the legislature, get them passed by the State House and the Senate, and then sign the bill so that it becomes a law, and that's what DeSantis has been doing.
Let's go through some of his landmark pieces of legislation that have moved through at breakneck speed.
First, DeSantis just signed legislation that bans vaccine passports for COVID-19. It prohibits indefinite lockdowns. In fact, it ends local restrictions on small businesses because sometimes, even if you remove a statewide mandate, you can have local government moving in big. So, DeSantis is basically establishing a "zone of freedom." Florida just looks and feels different than other places.
Number two, DeSantis signed an incredible piece of legislation that strikes at the digital platforms for their censorship. Now, this is called doing something about a problem that other people just complain about. Like Sen. Lindsey Graham, "I'm finally going to get serious about Section 230." Talk about a loser mentality. When you could do something about it, you didn't. Now that you can't do anything, you're all ready to go. This is ineffective governance.
Contrast this with Florida, which basically passed a law that says if a social media platform de-platforms a user that they know to be a political candidate, either someone who's in office or someone who's running for office, $250,000 fine per day. And a $25,000 fine per day for a candidate who's not for statewide office, for local offices. This applies to platforms with over $100 million in revenue. It is a real warning shot. I'm sure it will be contested in court. We expect all that. But this is a state legislature going out front and setting a model for other states to follow.
In addition, the Florida Legislature has now passed a bill banning transgender athletes from competing in girl's and women's sports. We all know that the transgender thing is basically a destruction of women's sports, and the Left is willing to do it. They're willing to do it because they're so wedded to this ideological point. They don't really care, and they want women to go along. They expect women to be passively accepting of something that women have fought hard for, feminists have fought hard for, Title IX. Essentially, Title IX becomes a dead letter because women's sports itself becomes a defunct institution.
Florida is on the move on these hot-button, economic and cultural issues, and DeSantis is at the front of all that.
Now, this is not because DeSantis is doing this under the radar or moving stealthily. No, he has been in the face of a tempestuous media attack, a hit piece in "60 Minutes," The New York Times was basically doing an exposé on him every day. And there were articles in places like The Atlantic and others saying things like, "By lifting the lockdowns early, DeSantis is risking a kind of Holocaust."
So, DeSantis was facing all of this pressure. And how did he respond to it? This is the key because Republicans today are looking for leaders who don't wilt in the face of pressure.
Many of our leaders have proven just inadequate to the occasion. Think, for example, Kristi Noem, whom I was actually very enthusiastic about. I would have put her kind of in the same camp as DeSantis. But suddenly, faced with the transgender issue, and I don't even think she was scared of the issue. She talks to the Chamber of Commerce. And those guys are like, "Well, you know, we're gonna lose some money in South Dakota. You know, the NBA is going to be really angry, and some of these women's sports associations..." and Kristi Noem's like, "Okay, well, you know, I guess it isn't a really good idea..." Well, this is basically called disqualifying yourself for national leadership. And that happens. It's kind of nice it's happening early because you get to have a look at who these people are and how they deal with pressure.
In some ways, it seems to me that DeSantis is doing with the media even better than Trump. He has the same Trump fearlessness in dealing with the media, but he doesn't strafe them in an ad hominem way. He doesn't go to sort of "Sleepy Eyes Chuck Todd," which, I must say, I chuckled about at the time. Trump has this kind of unerring instinct for kind of getting to you.
But one of the problems with that kind of approach, with the ad hominem, is you do make enemies for life. And one of the problems with Trump is he's made some enemies for life on his own party. Think of Marco Rubio, "Little Marco." He still hasn't gotten over it; he's still sulking, still sort of reluctant to get on the Trump train. And we see that with other people, again and again.
Now, DeSantis doesn't do that. He doesn't do the ad hominem. He says things like, "Have you read the report? Did you even bother to read the article?" So he pushes back, but he pushes back on the substance, which I think is the best way to go. Why? Because you avoid Newton's Law, every action produces an opposite reaction. So when you do ad hominem to people, they develop this kind of vendetta. They'll go to great extents to get you.
With DeSantis, it's not like that. He snubs the reporter on the facts, and then he moves on; you don't get the feeling that he's obsessed with the person. He's just obsessed with getting it right. And he's obsessed with the agenda. And he's fearless about it.
Bottom line, we have, I think in DeSantis, somebody who is, at a time when we really need it, showing leadership. This is leadership. Leadership is formulating ideas, being able to articulate and make a case for them, moving the legislation through the Congress, and then not freaking out when the media goes berserk. In fact, you want them to go berserk. Them going berserk is a sign that you're doing something right. And one thing DeSantis is proving is that if you stay tough and cool, savoir-faire, a kind of serenity in the face of all this shouting and screaming, you realize that it's a sound and fury. It amounts to nothing.
At the end of the day, these media guys rely on this blitzkrieg attack, and if it doesn't work, they go and do something else. DeSantis is proving this is how it's done. This is the pathway to the nomination. My message to Ron is: Keep it up. You're doing great. We'd like to see more of this in the future.
