Gov. Ron DeSantis (00:00):
Well, hello Iowa. I'm pleased to report that our great American comeback will start by sending Joe Biden back to his basement in Delaware. I want to thank Senator Ernst for hosting us. Also, thanks to Senator Grassley for his years of service. All your four Republican congressmen are doing a great job and, of course, your legislatures had a great run and your governor is doing an outstanding job. We look to Iowa... (00:42) We look to Iowa and Florida to see how it's done. And I think there's a lot of similarities in the success you have had under Governor Reynolds, and the success we've had in Florida. Now, we don't see that level of success throughout our country. We see the problems day after day. But I think American decline is a choice, and I'm running for president because I think if we choose another path, we can restore American greatness and that is the task that's before us. (01:10) Now in Florida, we chose facts over fear. We chose education over indoctrination. We chose law and order over rioting and disorder. We held the line when freedom itself hung in the balance. We refused to let our state descend into some type of Faucian dystopia where people's livelihoods were ruined and their freedoms were curtailed. No, we protected people's jobs, we protected their rights, their businesses, and made sure our kids could have an education. In short, we chose freedom over Faucism and we were right to do so. (01:54) And as you know in Iowa, under Governor Reynolds, leadership is not about entertainment. Leadership is not about virtue signaling or building a brand. Leadership is ultimately about results, and that's what we do in the state of Florida. We produce results for the people that we represent. We are the nation's fastest growing state, number one for net end migration, number one for education, most recently. Number one for education freedom and for parental involvement in education. Crime rate is at a 50-year low and we have no income tax, which I know your governor would like to get there. You guys should try it sometime. Second lowest per capita tax burden in the country. (02:36) Here are some of the things we've been able to accomplish just in recent years. We have prohibited land purchases by the Chinese Communist Party and its affiliates in our state. No farmland, no anything. We've enacted universal school choice because we believe every parent has a right to send their kid to the school of their choice. We signed the Heartbeat bill, the strongest pro-life protections in modern Florida history. (03:09) We've defended your Second Amendment rights by enacting constitutional carry legislation. We supported working families, who are struggling to make ends meet in an era of Biden inflation, by enacting $2.7 billion of tax relief, including permanent elimination of sales tax on all baby items, wipes, diapers, cribs, strollers. You raise babies tax-free in the state of Florida. We have enacted legislation to kneecap ESG in the state of Florida. No ESG in the pension, no social credit scores, and no woke banking to discriminate against conservatives, not in the state of Florida. (03:53) We proudly stand for law and order and that means we recognize the menace posed by left-wing prosecutors who get elected, usually with campaign contributions from people like George Soros, and they decide not to prosecute criminals, to let the inmates run the asylum. Well, I can tell you, in Florida when we had one of those prosecutors that said he wasn't going to enforce laws that he didn't like, I removed him from his post, he is gone. And we are not defunding law enforcement. We are standing by the men and women who wear the uniform and who keep us safe. (04:39) Florida's now the first state in America to eliminate so-called DEI from our universities and our state. They say it stands for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, but in reality it's an ideological agenda, and as practice, it's basically discrimination, exclusion and indoctrination, and that has no place in our public institutions. (05:09) We have led the nation in securing our citizens' medical freedom. No vaccine passports, no COVID shot mandates, no MNRA mandates, no emergency use mandates, and we've even banned gain of function research throughout our state. (05:26) Now, I'm a father of three and my wife and I very much believe that the purpose of our school system is to educate kids, not to indoctrinate kids. Parents have a fundamental right to direct the education and upbringing of their children. They have a right to know what's being used in school for the curriculum. We have eliminated toxic ideologies like Critical Race Theory from our K through 12 schools. We're not teaching kids to hate this country or to hate each other, not with your tax dollars we're not. And we also understand it is wrong for a teacher to be telling, say a second grade student, that their gender is a choice or that they may have been born in the wrong body. We've eliminated gender ideology from the schools in Florida. (06:17) Now, not everybody liked that. The parents loved it, but some of the left didn't like it, the media didn't like it. And then there happened to be a business in central Florida, some of you may have heard of, who didn't like it, called Disney. But I stand up for the people I represent. I don't subcontract out my leadership to a woke corporation based in Burbank, California. And I can tell you this, you've got a lot of Republicans now taking the side of Disney and saying that I did the wrong thing. But I can tell you straight up, we stand for the protection of our children. We will do battle against anybody who seeks to rob them of their innocence. And on those principles, I will not compromise. Here I stand. (07:11) So the one thing you know about me from Florida is when I tell you I'm going to do something, I'll do it. I don't just make idle promises just so you think something's nice and then get into office and forget. No, we set our sights on true north and we keep that compass there. So as president, I will be an energetic executive. I will go on offense. I will lean into all the issues that matter. We will reverse Biden's disastrous economic policies that are causing working people to lose ground and erode their standard of living. We're going to focus on small business, not big business. We're going to make sure we open up American energy production so we can be fully energy independent with our own resources here in the United States. (07:59) I've heard, as a Republican, talk about this southern border for years and years and years. I will finally be the president to bring this issue to a conclusion. We will shut the border down. We will build a border wall. We will end mass migration into this country and we will hold the Mexican drug cartels accountable for the carnage they have unleashed on the American people. (08:30) We will also usher in a reckoning about the disastrous COVID-19 policies that were propagated by our federal government. We must bring accountability for those who got it so terribly wrong with those wrong and destructive policies, so that we can be sure that never happens in this country ever again. (08:56) As president, I recognize that the woke mind virus represents a war on the truth. So we will wage a war on the woke. We will fight the woke in education. We will fight the woke in the corporations. We will fight the woke in the halls of Congress. We will never, ever surrender to the woke mob. We will make woke ideology, leave it to the dust bin of history. It's gone. (09:29) I'm proud to have served in the United States Navy and done a tour in Iraq and the people I serve with were honorable, patriotic people. For you veterans in the crowd, thank you for your service. I think all of us have a sense of pride in being able to wear the cloth of your country, but we've seen the military become politicized in recent years. You see woke agenda being imposed on it. On day one, as commander in chief, I rip it all out. We're getting the military back to basics. We're going to improve morale and we're going to get people to want to join the military again. (10:10) We will ensure that our constitutional system reflects the vision of the founding fathers. They never created a fourth branch of government, an administrative state that's unaccountable and that's been weaponized against segments of society that it doesn't like. Most of the key issues in our country right now are not even being decided by your elected representatives. They're being imposed by nameless, faceless bureaucrats who you can never vote out of office. We will re-constitutionalize this government. You're going to have a new FBI director with me on day one, I can tell you that. You're going to have an attorney general that has backbone and that's going to take these people on and hold them accountable. (10:56) We have a responsibility to return this government to its rightful owners, we, the American people. And in order to do that, we have to have a cadre of people who share our values and share our vision and to be able to uproot the... because you can't recycle people in from Washington DC... you uproot people from other parts of the country, send them on a mission to go to Washington DC and get to work holding this bureaucracy accountable. This bureaucracy has imposed its will on us for far too long. It's about time we impose our will on it. (11:36) And we look forward to talking with you in Iowa and in other states. And the weeks and months ahead, there's going to be so much more we're going to talk about, so much more we're going to do. But here's the thing, you can't do any of it if you don't win. There is no substitute for victory and we need to dispense with the culture of losing that has beset the Republican Party in recent years. Iowa shows it can be done. Florida shows it can be done. We had red waves in 2022. The rest of the country, not so much. (12:08) It's important because the Democrats are playing for keeps. If they're able to sweep into power in 2024, they're going to try to pack the US Supreme Court. They're going to try to eliminate the electoral college. They're going to try to make Washington DC a state, and they're going to try to eliminate voter ID laws in every jurisdiction in this country, and mandate ballot harvesting in every jurisdiction in this country. That will irrevocably change this country and we'll be in a hole that it'll take a generation to be able to dig out of. (12:40) President Reagan said, "Freedom's only one generation away from extinction. It's not passed along in the bloodstream. It must be cultivated and fought for." I used to think that was a little bit of an exaggeration, but if you've lived through the last three or four years in this country, you should appreciate just how fragile our freedoms really are. Our founding fathers understood this. When Benjamin Franklin walked out of the constitutional convention, he was asked on the street, "What have you given us, a republic or a monarchy?" He said, "A republic, if you can keep it." (13:10) You can have the best constitution in the world. You can have the best declaration of independence in the world, they do not run on autopilot. They require citizens in each generation to answer the call when freedom is under attack. And so we are called upon to carry the torch of what George Washington called the sacred fire of Liberty. We're called upon to stand firm for the truth and we are called upon to be resolute in defense of the enduring American principles that mark us as a free society. (13:40) And here's what I can tell you I will do, that if you support me and I earn the nomination to be the Republican candidate, you set your clock to January 20th, 2025 at high noon, because on the west side of the Capitol, I'm going to have this left hand on that Bible. I'm going to have this right hand in the air and I will be taking the oath as the 47th president of these United States. No excuses. We will get the job done. (14:07) Thank you so much, Iowa. We look forward to seeing you in the days and weeks and months to come. We've got to win and we will get it done. Thank you so much. (14:21) Thank you. God bless.