Florida Governor Ron DeSantis Announces 2024 Presidential Run on Twitter Spaces with Elon Musk Transcript

All right. Here we go.

All right. Go ahead.

All right. I think we're broadcasting. Man, I think we melted the internet there.

Yeah, that was insane. Sorry. I'm actually doing this from David Sachs's Twitter account because it looks like doing it from mine basically broke the Twitter system. Anyway, thanks, everyone, for joining. We're incredibly excited to announce that... To have Governor DeSantis 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 DeSantis, are you there? Can you hear us? I think you broke-

I'm here.

I know. 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... I mean, you try some new things that you're going to ...

Yes.

It's adventurous, so ...

Yes.

But I think the value here is actually really high for people to hear directly from presidential candidates and to answer a Q&A live. And you can get a sense for, how a candidate really is and where it's not just canned speeches and teleprompters. In fact, you can tell by some of the mistakes that it's real.

Yeah.

So, anyway, with that, I guess I should turn it over to-

Yeah. Well, 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. 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 comeback. 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 and to attain and maintain a middle class lifestyle. And our president, well, he lacks vigor, flounders in the face of our nation's challenges, and he takes his cues from the woke mob. (05:09) 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. Merit must trump identity politics. (05:46) 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 deserves safe communities and law and order must be maintained in American cities. We can't have inmates running the asylum, and we must reject attacks on the men and women of law enforcement. (06:15) We also must reestablish integrity in our institutions. This includes the military. I'm proud to be a Navy veteran and Iraq veteran and I revere our services. But when revered institutions like those in our 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. (06:43) We also cannot have true constitutional government if the most significant issues are decided by the whims of unelected bureaucrats rather than the people's elected representatives. Reestablishing integrity in our institutions means we must reinvigorate our constitutional system by returning the government to its rightful owners, We The People. No social or eco [inaudible 00:07:07] transformation without representation. (07:10) 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. We're number one in 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 and debt per capita in America. (07:47) 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 none. And we can and we must deliver big results for America. I pledge to be an energetic executive that will take on the important issues. (08:08) Biden's pursued inflationary policies that are hurting working people, we will reverse those policies and we'll build an economy where working Americans can achieve a good standard of living. Biden's opened the southern border and allowed massive amounts of drugs to pour into the country. We'll shut down the border, construct the border wall, and hold the drug cartels accountable. Biden's embraced medical authoritarianism such as unconstitutional COVIC VAX 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 dust bin of history. Biden's also politicized the military and caused recruiting to plummet. We will eliminate ideological agendas 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 re-constitutionalize the executive branch and we'll bring the administrative state to heal. (09:15) 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 pastor 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. (09:38) 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. (10:02) 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 failed 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 Dr. 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 in our nation's history. (11:06) 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 RonDeSantis.com and making a donation. Thank you. God bless, and I look forward to the discussion.

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 new ground here. As far as I know, no major presidential candidates ever announced their candidacy on social media this way, certainly in a Twitter space. So thank you for doing that. What made you want to take the chance of doing it this way as opposed to just doing it on cable news or 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 latter. I faced huge blow back for doing that from the bureaucracy, from elites, from the media. But my view was I had to look out for the people I represented prefer, protecting their jobs, over trying to safeguard my own political hide. But it was very, very lonely in 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 dissent. There was an official narrative about lockdowns, about closing schools, about force masking, about all these different things that we had to navigate during COVID. And it was an orthodoxy being enforced by the major tech platforms in conjunction with the federal government. (12:49) 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 country was on its way out the door. And so when Elon Musk stepped up to purchase Twitter, he paid a lot of money for it. And I'm sure, because he is a good businessman, Elon, I'm sure you'll end up making money off it. But the 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 the most important issues that are affecting our civilization. (13:45) That did not happen during COVID. The truth was censored repeatedly. And now that 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. We cannot 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 freedom of speech and level playing field and just a vigorous debate. And hopefully this can be a platform that brings people of divergent political views to exchange those views and perhaps some minds will be changed one way or the other. But it's just incredibly important as you highlight that the First Amendment is irrelevant if all the media 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 cannot have free and open debate. So Twitter was indeed expensive, but free speech is priceless.

Awesome. Thank you. So, Governor, 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 been no shortage of hit pieces on you ...

Yeah.

... 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 is a total farce. I mean, are you kidding me? You look at cities around this country, they are a washed in crime. In Florida, our crime rate is at a 50-year low. If 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. (16:33) Now, the good news is, 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

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 at any time in Florida history. But with us, they're there because of merit, not because we're trying to play identity politics. (17:00) And if you want to look at education, the Black students 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's a great state, and I think the people realize that 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 or yeah.

Yeah, that was The Atlantic. And then-

The Atlantic, yeah.

And then Vanity Fair said that you were interviewing because David Duke wasn't available.

Oh, yes, yes, yes.

Although I'm not totally sure who they were saying was David Duke. I don't know if it was you or Governor DeSantis. It's sort of, a little bit unclear, but-

But I think this is a function of these, the legacy media, these corporate journalists, they're in their little bubble and to draw allusions 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. And 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 going to question, obviously wrong assumptions because everybody around you shares.

Absolutely.

And I think they become totally hysterical, because they don't like the idea that their control over the media is being disremediated. Because now candidates for president can just speak directly to people through platforms like Twitter.

Yeah. I mean, the amazing thing about Twitter and things like Spaces are that although I happen to be hosting, well, I had to switch over to David hosting it because my account was actually-

There's too much interest, but-

My account was breaking the system. But there'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, United States or anywhere. So I think this is a really profound change. And it's also not whether the media reports something and an article is true or not, even more powerful is deciding what the narrative is. And so just like if there's only so much you can actually fit in a newspaper or a magazine, and there's only one thing you can really put on the cover of a magazine, so 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 me using that phrase. But nonetheless, it's true, and judged by the results that this is a means for the people to decide the narrative and for the people to decide which way a debate will go. Not sort of five editors in chiefs of few of newspapers, basically.

And I think one of the really crazy things that happened during COVID is 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 we're undermining their main reasons for existing, which is giving people a choice. And actually, there's somebody who I think knows more about that than any of us, which is Dr. Jay Bhattacharya who's a professor of medicine at Stanford. I want to pull him in here. Jay, you go ahead and unmute yourself if you can. It'd be great to hear from you. I know that during COVID you worked with Governor DeSantis. It'd be great just to hear a little bit about your interactions, and if you have a question for the governor.

Yeah, thank you, David. Yeah, I mean, it was an absolute honor to work with Governor DeSantis, and I was really impressed by his decision making in the face of an absolute firestorm of criticism. But Governor, you did the right thing when you opened 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. And you can see in the results and the learning loss numbers are so much better in Florida. I'm really curious, Governor, as you're running for President, what are your thoughts about reforming the public health authority in the United States and the federal government, the CDC, the FDA, the NIH? How do you see reforms we need, so that the mistakes of the lockdowns have that happen 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 doubled 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've 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 enchilada with respect to public health in this country.

So can I follow up with that? I mean, I think the other thing that I saw during the pandemic, Governor, and you was subject to it just as much as I was when we were talking about COVID YouTube censored a video of us speaking in a Roundtable that you hosted on COVID policy. There's so much of the federal government infrastructure went into suppressing honest 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 thoughts about-

No question. No question. So, 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. And oh, by the way, what did they censor Dr. Bhattacharya for? It was a round table discussion that I led and convene. We had Dr. Bhattacharya, MD, PhD from Stanford. We had Martin Kulldorff from Harvard Medical School, and we had Sunetra Gupta from Oxford, who was generally viewed as one of the best epidemiologists across the pond until she became anti-lockdown. So these are all eminent people. (17:00) And what are we discussing? We're 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 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 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, FBI, 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 Massie. 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 Massie, I know that you've been involved in this problem of government agencies being weaponized and used against the American people in an inappropriate 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 FBI whistleblower that Bank of America voluntarily gave names and information on anybody who bought a hotdog 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. And they say they voluntarily gave that to the FBI, so that's disturbing to me. By the way, I've never met Elon Musk, but I'm one of your biggest fans, I'm the first congressman to have a Tesla. I'm on Star-

Thank you.

I'm on Starlink, and I would've bought a Powerwall, but I'm off the grid and you wouldn't sell me one. So I had to make one with [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 Coal. So it's probably one of the only people that have that in the country.

Thanks for outing me, Governor DeSantis. But no, so Governor DeSantis, my question to you is, you served here in Congress for six years with me, and why is it that Congress is so feckless at reigning 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 all I will say when it comes to these agencies, 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 institutionalize 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's been consolidated in 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 gauging 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. 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 omnibus spending 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. (17:00) 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 REINS 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, "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 blamed you for canceling plans for a billion dollar investment in Florida, said they were canceling 2000 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 has dragged on too long?

So first of all, Florida stands for the protection of children. We believe jamming gender ideology in elementary school is wrong. Disney obviously supported injecting gender ideology in elementary school. They did oppose our parents' rights legislation. And the fact is when they opposed it, that was a big deal because for 50 years, anytime Disney wanted something in Florida politics, they pretty much got it. But not this time. I signed the bill. We did, as you say, win 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. (17:00) So you had 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, and joined the state with this one company at the hip. We just didn't feel that we were comfortable maintaining that relationship. And so, we ended their self-governing status-

... that relationship. So we ended their self-governing 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 reinstituted. But I don't think that that's good policy. (34:24) And I think some of these Republicans that are taking Disney's side, they're basically showing themselves to be corporatist 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. (34:51) 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 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 that this was not a good arrangement because Disney was not accountable to anyone. I mean 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 stiffed on. (35:50) 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 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 happened 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. (36:19) I mean are you kidding me? Oh, by the way, on this project, they had announced this many years ago. They had not done anything for it. 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've made a difference there. Obviously, as a publicly traded corporation they have a fiduciary duty to do what's best for their shareholders. So I'm assuming if they were in better financial shape and they saw the project as lucrative, they would've gone forward with it. (36:45) But I think clearly they've had some problems with their stock price and a lot of other issues. 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. 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. I know he worked with you on some initiatives. I think one other thing that the mainstream media I think has [inaudible 00:37:35] is, they've kind of started promoting this narrative that you want to ban books from school libraries. You refuse to teach kids about slavery or other unpleasant realities of American history, or pretend that gay people don't exist. (37:52) Since many people, I think in this room we're now up to, wow, 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's working much better now. I think it crashed because when you multiply half a million people in a room by an account with over a hundred million followers, which is Elon's account, I think that creates just a scalability level that was unprecedented. But with my meager followership, it seems to be working much better.

Yeah. No, it's ... We have some scaling issues specifically related to my account. At one point in January, if I tweeted above a certain size, it would crash the servers. And then anyone else who was tweeting at the same time would lose their tweet as well. So-

So in any event ...

We've got scaling issues.

Yeah. Well, we're breaking new ground here.

We have scaling issues.

Yes. You know you're breaking new ground when there are bugs and scaling issues. But in any event, back to the question I was asking you, Governor DeSantis, about education. The media has been saying you're trying to ban books, you refuse 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? Then I want to pull Chris Rufo 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. (39:44) 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. 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. 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 a fifth grader? So nothing's being banned. They're basically ensuring that we make curation choices that are consistent with state standards. (40:26) On the racial history, we eliminated critical race theory from our K through 12 schools. That was the right thing to do. In other words, we're not going to take a kid who comes in at six years old and say they're an oppressor or oppressed 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. (41:02) 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. 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, why are there people intent on trying to get this stuff into the classroom? I think it's part of a political agenda. (41:45) So our mantra in Florida is, the 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, a hundred 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? So I think we're getting it right. I think almost invariably, and Chris Rufo's had to deal with this too, when they're trying to craft these narratives, if you just peel back the onion you realize that this is something they're manufacturing.

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I mean I was actually under the impression that there were some books banned, so this is news to me.

Actually, the one this week was that Miami-Dade County took a book that was about 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." (43:09) 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. (43:37) 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. Well, in fact, a friend of mine, Tim Urban, who has a blog called Wait But Why, and is really one of the most reasonable people on Earth, and one of the most reasonable people I've ever met, had a lot of trouble actually publishing his book simply because it debated sort of sacred cows of woke ideology. But incredibly reasonable book. So that is the kind of defacto book banning and de 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 supposed to end I think around 4:00, 4:00 Pacific. But thank you for giving us a little bit of extra time here, Governor. Shifting gears to a major federal issue, immigration, 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. Now, 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 truly qualifying for that, but they're not. (45:29) 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. (45:58) 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. What they're doing is, they lace the other types of drugs with the fentanyl. (46:28) So you may have like a teenage kid doing something they probably shouldn't do, but in prior generations would not have been fatal. Now if it's laced with fentanyl, these kids can overdose and die. 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 an overwhelming amount of resources to deal with it, and we are going to stop this insanity once and for all.

There's I think a follow-up question on immigration from Steve Deace who is a national radio personality and I think an important commentator in the great state of Iowa. Steve, do 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, two, going, going, gone. All right. Sorry, Steve.

I'm there, guys. I'm there, guys. Sorry.

There he is.

All right.

My bad. First of all, I want to echo what Congressman Massie said to Elon. Elon, 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. (48:08) I saw a meme the other day that said, "Of course you have scientific consensus when you censor 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 as a follow-up to you, Governor, on this very issue with immigration. (48:31) We have heard a lot over the years, "Lock her up. Drain the swamp. Going to build a beautiful wall. Mexico's going to pay for it," and crowds cheered 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, but then couldn't actually follow through.

It's a great question because I share that frustration. I think even my worst critics in Florida will acknowledge, when I tell people I'm going to do something, 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. (49:24) Number two, I understand the different leverage points that you would have under Article II of the Constitution. I've studied that a lot at 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. For example, there's leverage that we can use vis-a-vis Mexico that I think presidents have not been willing to do I think sometimes for political purposes. (49:55) 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 Ian come through Southwest Florida, a Category 4+ storm, September of 2022, and it did a lot of damage. But one of the things it did, it knocked out a bridge going from the mainland to Pine Island, and it severed the Sanibel Causeway in three different locations. The locals were being told, "It's going to take six months to get that stuff repaired." (50:27) 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 reopened three days later, Sanibel 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.

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. (51:10) We banned sanctuary cities my first year. We just did a strong anti-illegal immigration bill in Florida, that's working. I've put Marine assets in the Florida Keys to help the Coast Guard repel boats from places like Haiti. I have 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. (51:32) 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. 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 the cover of Time Magazine this week, and I think they were trying to do a negative story because you were sort of scowling in this portrait they made of you. In the article, they compared you to the Terminator, and I think they meant that as 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 take on the woke mob, take on our out of control government, and take on problems like the ones at the border. 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. I'm the governor. I'm known, right? I go around the state and everything. people are very nice, so I appreciate the well wishes, 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. (52:52) I remember sitting at the desk in the state capitol, 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. We have done that in the state of Florida, and I'd bring that exact attitude up to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

Governor, I'd love to jump in and follow up on that. This is Chris [inaudible 00:53:24]. I've had the honor of working with you in the past few years on critical race theory, gender ideology, and the DEI bureaucracy. What I've seen up close and personal, is that while many conservative politicians, going back decades, have made headlines and got on television playing culture war, they never actually get anything done. (53:42) 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 its tracks in K through 12. And just last week you eliminated the DEI bureaucracy in all of Florida's public universities; they'll be shut down completely. I think what you've done is established a blueprint 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. (54:14) My question for you is DC is another animal. It's quite different, the scale of the federal government. How are you going to deliver results and what is your culture war strategy facing down the swamp in DC?

Well, some of it is similar in this respect. When we're taking on things like DEI, you get blow-back from legacy media and the far left. But 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 independents and a lot of Democrats. (54:50) Because you think about 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. 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. We get a lot of quiet support for a lot of those things. (55:13) I think what I'd 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 what normal people think about all this stuff. I have a good sense of when the legacy media and the left are outside of where the average American is. (55:37) People want you to be using common sense. Things like DEI- I mean, when I was growing up, I think things were better because people were 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. By eliminating that, there's a lot of people that were really happy about that, including people that certainly are not traditional Republicans. (56:01) I think there's similar issues what 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 US Department of Education. (56:25) We're going to be doing alternative accreditation regimes, where instead of saying you will only get accredited if you de do DEI, you'll have an accreditor that will say, we will not accredit you if you do DEI. We want a colorblind, merit-based accreditation scheme. As president, controlling that agency, you can then approve other types of accreditation. (56:50) I think part of it is just knowing where are 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 out a thin air. There's a reason why we got to that point, and I think that there are some tools with the federal government where you can push back and try to get these institutions moored 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. Dana [inaudible 00:57:38], do you have a question or comment for the governor?

I do. 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 un-throttling the accounts of all of us who got in trouble for sharing a New York Post story about a laptop.

You're welcome.

And governor, I wanted to thank you for your leadership and your unwavering support of Second Amendment rights. 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. (58:14) 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 de-banking. (58:25) Elon, and 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 personal accounts of a very prominent and well-respected gun dealer in Florida. They'd been together for 25 years working with Wells Fargo and they cited new ESG guidelines. (58:50) Similar to the DOJ's previous operation, Choke Point, all these activists for various causes are using this regulatory guidance to de-bank what they consider to be politically incorrect businesses for the sake of risk management. 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 payment processors, who are essentially cutting off law abiding citizens and businesses?

I think it's a fundamental issue that I think not enough conservatives have been wise to. I think more and more are, but at the end of the day, we have certain fundamental rights. Maybe you're somebody that is really excited about your Second Amendment rights. 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 anything involving that? Your rights are still being infringed upon in that situation. (59:57) I think this whole ESG movement is really trying to do through the financial sector what they could never achieve through the ballot box. 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. (01:00:18) In Florida, I just signed anti-ESG legislation, which said things like no ESG criteria in our pension fund, we've got $180 billion 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 genuflecting to the appropriate left wing causes. (01:00:43) One thing we did do is we did provide protection against this de-banking with the woke banking. No discrimination based on your religion and other things, which we know is happening. (01:00:57) I think 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.

As a follow up to that, Governor, Dana mentioned operation Choke Point, and that is a term that's very familiar to crypto companies in Silicon Valley and FinTech companies. Basically, 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. (01:01:43) 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 Coinbase. 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." (01:02:03) I guess, where do you come down on this? What is your view, I guess broadly, of Bitcoin and people's right to hold Bitcoin and to transact Bitcoin and Dogecoin?

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. They're central planners and they want to have control over society. Bitcoin represents a threat to them, and so as you're saying, they're trying to regulate it out of existence. Could Congress enact a statute to ban things like Bitcoin under the Constitution? They may be able to do it. I would oppose that. I think people should be able to do Bitcoin. But Congress has never addressed this in this fashion. 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's elected representatives who are our voice to be able to make these decisions. (01:03:02) As President, we'll protect the ability to do things like Bitcoin. I think these are people that are sophisticated; they can make decisions. There's risks involved with it, 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. I think that the current regime, clearly, they have it out for Bitcoin, and if it continues for another four years, yeah, they'll probably end up killing it.

Yeah, I think you're right. I think that is the strong feeling of people in Silicon Valley who are in this space and I think will be heartened to hear your answer on that. The weird thing is that- (01:03:41) And there is a huge constituency of crypto Twitter. For people who are maybe part of political Twitter who are wondering why we're talking about this, it really has a big audience for this topic.

Dogecoin too. I just why I've said this a big deal.

Yeah. Bitcoin and Dogecoin. So shout out to all the Doge fans out there. But the weird thing is that 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?

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 their uniform commercial code. You know the federal government is studying this. (01:04:34) We did the opposite and say we did. The reason why we did that is because what the Federal Reserve has said is, "Well, 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." (01:04:49) Well, wait a minute. It's not, ideally. You must get authorization from Congress. I don't think Congress would authorize it. If they unilaterally try to do this, we're trying to provide protection for people here in Florida. I know Biden did the executive order. They're studying it. (01:05:03) 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. 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 filled up your gas tank three times this week. You can't do anymore." The sky [inaudible 01:05:33] of how they would be able to manipulate this. 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. I'm a no on Central Bank Digital Currency.

Sounds good.

Yeah.

Great.

Well, governor, I want to thank you for the time. We could go for hours here, but I know you only had an hour and we've gone over that. I want to be respectful of your time. I know there's so many people that want to ask questions and-

We should do it again. I mean, I think it was fun.

Yeah.

I think this is great, and we'll make sure that we come back and do it again. This is a great platform. I would like to see other platforms going in the same direction. A healthy democratic society needs the robust debate, so I just want to thank everybody for listening in. (01:06:22) I'll just make that pitch again. We want you on the team, we'd love for you to go to RonDeDantis.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.

Thanks, governor. Yeah, we have over 300,000 people in the room, it's really been pretty incredible. We started with some technical issues because of the sheer scale and unprecedented nature of what we're doing.

Yeah.

But it's not how you start, it's how you finish, and I think this finished really strong.

Yeah, I think it's just really great for the people to hear directly from presidential candidates and to have it in a conversational tone, which obviously results in it's going to be imperfect because it's not scripted. But it's genuine, and I think that that really gives the people an opportunity to understand who might be their president in a way that's real. So thank you very much for coming out and doing this.

And the invitation's open to any other candidates who might want to do this.

Absolutely. It is important for people to hear directly from candidates. Thank you for working with us on this historic event, and looking forward to future conversations and just having a great national dialogue.

All righty everybody. Thanks for just-

Bye.

All right. Bye-bye.

Cool.