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Nov. 21, 2021 - The Ben Shapiro Show
47:35
Ron DeSantis | The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special Ep. 121
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August of 2021, we did better than August of 2019, pre-COVID.
And so it just shows you that freedom works.
And look, people vote with their feet.
If the media was right, and that these other states, the New Yorks and that, were the right way, and Florida did the wrong way, then you would see people leaving Florida to flock to those states.
And in fact, you see the opposite.
Back in 2018, after a hotly contested election, Ron DeSantis was elected governor of Florida.
It was a tight race, but since then, the governor has dramatically shifted the political tide in the state of Florida.
Florida now has a majority of Republican voters for the first time in state history.
Before this, Ron DeSantis served as a congressman here in Florida from 2013 to 2018.
But it was in 2020 his name really broke through.
His leadership through COVID-19 drew the eyes of many as he was unwilling to accept that society had to crumble and people's livelihood stripped in order to take on the virus.
And while so many governors over the last year had kept locking people down, Florida lifted people up.
Since then, Governor DeSantis has only grown in popularity, suing the Biden administration over the COVID-19 vaccine mandate, taking action against the immigration crisis on the southern border, and even acting to solve the ongoing national supply chain interruptions.
Governor DeSantis is often reading the tea leaves of national politics while defending rights within Florida.
His action is part of a new sense of state power that's gone unappreciated for a very long time.
In this episode, the Governor and I discuss the biggest lies the media has manufactured about Florida, and about him, over these past two years.
just how his trademark fighting attitude came about, and the surprising upside to all of the smearing from the mainstream media.
Hey, hey, welcome.
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Governor DeSantis, thanks so much for giving us your office and allowing us to... Welcome to the Florida Capitol.
I gotta tell you, this is a great state, and thank you for making this state so great.
Really, truly.
It's an amazing state to be in.
So, why don't we start from the beginning for people who really don't know your background prior to you leaping onto the national scene as governor of the state.
They don't live in the state of Florida, for example.
So, how did you get started in politics in the first place?
Well, sometimes people ask me that.
I say it was a momentary lapse in judgment because my first foray into politics was actually running for Congress in 2012.
And it was a redistricting year.
There was two additional seats.
I happened to be living in one of those areas.
I had some people tell me that I should run.
I started off seven-way primary.
I had no name ID and no money when I started.
And ended up winning by almost 20 points in a six-month campaign.
So I was in the Congress for three terms, and then I got elected as governor in 2018 here in the great state of Florida.
And what was sort of your driving motivation to get involved in elected politics?
Because it's not an easy job, and from where I sit it doesn't look like that fun a job, to be honest with you.
So what got you started thinking about doing that?
Well, in 2012, that was kind of in the Obama era, and I really saw Obama as taking the country in a direction that was not consistent with kind of the core founding principles of the country.
In fact, I even wrote a book prior to me going into office about it.
It was read by about a dozen people at the time, but nevertheless, it's out there, where I kind of talked about how kind of the founders conceived this, how people like Lincoln and Reagan applied these principles, and how we were really veering off that.
And those were good fights, and I'm glad we did it.
But I gotta tell you, I look back at that now, it's almost kind of quaint because I think what we're facing now has been much more aggressive from the left in terms of across a wide range of institutions, not just the federal government, which of course they are being very aggressive, but big tech, corporate media, academia, all these things, the bureaucracy, all these things that are happening.
So I got into it because I saw some things going wrong.
And here in Florida, I think the good thing about it is you actually can do something about it.
You know, in the Congress, you're one of 435.
So much of the power is all within the leadership.
So a lot of these big bills will be thousands of page bills.
They'll do it behind closed doors and they'll shove it down the throats of everyone.
You don't have time to read it.
And that's kind of how it's going.
So if you're somebody has good ideas and have a lot of energy, you kind of get ground down in Washington.
And so we were able to do some things.
But I looked at the governor and I was like, you know what?
If you are willing to lead and you're willing to get out in front on issues, you have an opportunity to do a lot of good things.
And so that's what we've been able to do.
And I think that I probably did more as governor in my first two weeks in terms of tangible, long-lasting accomplishments than a normal congressman can do in a decade.
It really is incredible, and it is a reminder, I think, to a lot of Americans that the states really do matter.
So, if you're like me, and you lived your entire life in California, the way you tend to think of yourself, just in terms of state identity, is you're sort of culturally Californian, but there's no such thing as sort of independent Californian political identity vis-a-vis the federal government.
Whatever the federal government does in terms of growing and expanding, that's what California's doing to you anyway.
It's actually, the federal government's usually trailing California.
Then once my family and I moved here, you see that there's an actual state identity, and that state identity Really rests in protecting liberties that the federal government may be encroaching upon and in upholding certain standards that the state of Florida actually sees differently than a lot of the rest of the country.
Yeah, and I think when I became governor, this is prior to COVID, of course, 2019, I had three appointments to the Florida Supreme Court.
So we had a very liberal Supreme Court.
I replaced three liberal justices with three conservative justices.
So we now have the most conservative Supreme Court in the country, arguably, in the state of Florida.
That makes a huge difference because what we do legislatively, what I sign into law, It's not going to be struck down based on state judicial activism.
As we started to get into COVID, and I think people appreciated when we did that in Florida and when we did some other things, but then when we got into COVID, you started to see radically different approaches to how do the people that you elect value your freedoms and your own decision-making and your own liberty?
And you had states across the country that just kept locking people down, mandate, restriction.
And in Florida, and we made the decision, we want to lift people up.
We want to empower them with the tools they need to make their own decisions, to be healthy, to do all that.
But we've got to have schools open.
People have a right to work.
You've got to have businesses have a right to operate.
And so we did that.
And then I think you started to see a lot of unrest in the country, the rioting, lawlessness, people attacking police, defunding police, rogue prosecutors.
And I think people are looking like, man, this is not the type of community I want to live in.
So you've seen a radical difference between a state like Florida where we're valuing people's freedoms, we're supporting safe communities, supporting law enforcement, doing all that, and then some of these other more leftist jurisdictions where they kept locking down, kept violating people's rights, and then seems like the only rights they respect are the rights of these criminals that are able to get away with a lot.
So I think the distinction between A liberal, quote, state in a state like Florida has probably never been so stark because of all the issues we've dealt with over the last two years.
For sure.
I mean, it bust wide open during COVID, but I think it's important to note that you were gaining—you very narrowly squeaked past Andrew Gillum in that last gubernatorial election, and then you quickly started consolidating support.
By the time that COVID came about, you were already polling very well.
this state because of your gubernatorial strategy, your governance strategy in this state. And then COVID hits and suddenly the media decide that you are Satan and Andrew Cuomo is going to be the haloed hero of COVID. And anybody who's watching what's going on understands that it's almost precisely the reverse in terms of which policy approach is being taken, both on a statistical level and also on a personal level. I mean, Andrew Cuomo is just yelling at people and bullying people and not taking account of anybody's needs as individual citizens.
And I got to tell you, it made a huge difference for me and my wife. So our story of moving to Florida, because we were Californian, my wife, since she was 12, me since birth. And I'd literally never spent any time outside of California living anywhere else except for three years in Cambridge.
So only blue cities, only blue states.
And the COVID and COVID hits, they shut down every park.
I couldn't take my kids to the park.
They shut down every overpass on Mulholland Drive.
They literally shut down like the turnouts on Mulholland Drive.
Couldn't take my kids anywhere.
And then the riots break out and they tell everybody you got to stay in your home and they double curfew you.
You can't go out because of COVID and then they double curfew you.
At 6 p.m.
you got to be home.
Because we have to make space for people to ride.
And we're hearing gunshots in our community, and we're hearing helicopters overhead.
And I said to my wife, maybe we should go visit Florida.
I was trying to push it for two years.
And finally, we visit here.
The first day, we walk off the plane.
It's not overrun with homeless people.
I don't see people shooting heroin into their feet in front of my children.
I don't see rioters in the streets.
And I make it sound like a dystopian hellhole, California, but that's only because it's become increasingly like a dystopian hellhole in some of the major cities.
And so I think that, honestly, maybe the biggest thing was, we came in, we hadn't had dinner as a couple.
And at a restaurant for two months, they shut down all the restaurants in L.A.
The first night we were here, we went to a restaurant.
They were still eating outdoors.
We ate outdoors at the restaurant because there was no evidence to suggest it was a problem.
And I turned to my wife and I said, we could be doing this all the time.
And it's a tribute to what the state of Florida is.
Well, the thing is, I mean, just, you know, your freedom to do that's important, but just think about all the people whose livelihoods depend on having an open economy.
And I remember with the restaurants, Fauci was railing about the restaurants, probably sometime at the end of summer 2020.
And I'm just thinking to myself, he wants all this closed.
And I was like, I'm going to highlight what this means.
So I did an event at a steakhouse down in South Florida.
And yeah, we had the proprietor there, the owner, to talk about thanks, Governor Sanders, for business.
But I had the butcher there.
He'd been there 24 years.
Said, I don't feed my family if we're not open.
I had the bartender.
I had the servers.
I had all these people throughout the organization come through.
And in a state like Florida, if we had done a California lockdown, We have a service-based economy between our lodging, our parks, our restaurants, and so we were able to keep those afloat.
In fact, August of 2021, we did better than August of 2019 pre-COVID.
Hotel reservations, Receipts in terms of revenue restaurant reservations, and so it just shows you that that freedom works and look people vote with their feet if the media was right and that these other states the New York's and that were the right way and Florida did the wrong way then you would see people leaving Florida to flock to those states and in fact you see the opposite and so I think it's been interesting because
The media has tried to gaslight on this and it's obviously nobody believes what the corporate press says anymore because people are beating a pathway here and even these lockdown governors and lockdown mayors, they would lock down their state or lock down their city and then they'd show up in my state out at the pool drinking a margarita and it was like clockwork that that would happen throughout COVID.
So in a second, I want to ask you about how you came up with your COVID strategy, because it wasn't a pure red-blue thing at the very beginning.
There were some red states, Maryland for one, that sort of locked down in terms of the governor.
Ohio was much more locked down, but you decided not to go that route.
I want to ask about that in one second.
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Okay, so let's talk about how you came up with sort of your COVID approach because obviously there were some red governors who decided to go in the more lockdown direction.
There were a few blue governors like Jared Polis in Colorado who seemed to be a little bit looser, but you from the very get-go were analyzing the data and you were looking at the data and you basically said from the start that we need to protect the elderly and we need to make sure that everybody else can get back to work and re-enter something approaching normal life.
How'd you come up with that strategy?
Well, I think there were two main things.
I mean, one is we were all given these models about the hospitalization spikes that would happen.
And they were literally predicting, like, ten times the number of patients.
And we even had hospital beds in all the states throughout the United States.
I mean, hundreds of thousands of patients they were predicting in Florida.
You know, we've got about 65,000 licensed beds at a given time.
And so you're looking at that.
In New York, they were predicting even more.
The ventilators, all this stuff.
But then in real time, I'm looking.
OK, March 21st, they said we're going to have 4,000.
We have 1,000.
Next day, you know, we have 1,010 instead of 4,300.
And so the models clearly were wrong.
And the whole reason the quote, 15 days to slow the spread, was to prevent hospital overcrowding.
And it was clear to me that, yes, a place like New York, if you had an outbreak like that, It would bend, but it wasn't clear to me that it would break.
And I think that's been true throughout COVID.
Then the other thing was you started to get research out of Stanford looking at the seroprevalence data.
In other words, how many people have actually had it.
And what they found was most people that had it had modest or no symptoms.
And so the mortality rate was much less than what the WHO had said.
Yeah.
High, you know, relatively high for elderly people if you have certain comorbidities.
But for the vast majority of people, you know, it would be something that would likely not present the risk of hospitalization or death.
And so I thought those two factors meant you got to have society open.
We can target protection to people that need it, to elderly.
And so that was initially making sure nursing homes were not having pain.
We barred sending sick patients back into nursing homes.
Make sure we protected that.
You know, I sent National Guard to do tests on nursing homes if there was ever an outbreak.
We prioritize elderly for vaccination.
And then we've done the monoclonal antibodies where we're getting early treatment to people.
And we're 100% about doing that.
But to kneecap your whole society, and here's the thing, it doesn't stop the virus.
It'd be one thing if we could all just go in a cave for two weeks and the virus would disappear.
But that is not true.
So you're going to have to deal with it.
And I think we're finding that out now because you look some of these very highly vaccinated countries in Europe are having massive spikes.
Vermont in the United States hitting records.
So that's just the reality and I think that living with it and not destroying your society was something that made sense and quite frankly was what the literature up until COVID for pandemic preparedness had said.
They always said, don't let the fear overcome society.
You have to keep things going.
You've got to keep people in a good state of mind.
Give them accurate information.
And it seemed like our leaders like Fauci, they would try to ratchet up the fear.
And they ended up spooking a lot of people.
And there's some people that really haven't gotten over that even today, particularly in some of those deep blue enclaves.
It's 100% true.
I mean, I have family members who are very paranoid about COVID after being triple vaxxed.
And I think that that sort of mentality has pervaded, because when you have the highest members of the highest scientific institutions in the land telling you over and over and over what risks you're undergoing by seeing your grandkids post-vaccination, I think a lot of people take that to heart.
Were you freaked out at all at the very beginning by the amount of media blowback that you got?
Because you would imagine that in a normal society that there would be at least a little bit of tolerance for the fact that nobody knew anything about the virus.
What we did know suggested that there were several different strategies that could be undertaken to be charitable to some of the other folks who took a different strategy.
And then as the data began to emerge, it became clear that Florida was actually not collapsing, that Florida was actually doing relatively well next to states like California and, well, really, next to states like New York and New Jersey particularly.
And yet the media decided that you were the villain of COVID from the get-go, from the jump.
You were the villain of COVID.
Did you find that surprising at all?
No, because I think they started weaponizing COVID against Trump, and I think their meta-narrative was, you know, Trump was bad.
That's why they elevated people like Cuomo, because they were saying this is true leadership opposed to Trump.
So I think that was that.
And then me as a Republican governor in a key state, I think I was target number two.
And so I think that that's just typical what they do.
The corporate press Creates partisan narratives.
They don't care about the facts.
I mean, there's a lot of facts about COVID they still won't recognize to this day.
But I also think there was a lot of pressure on the media from some of these scientific elites.
They didn't want a control group because they were advocating policies that were going to have a hugely detrimental effect to the social fabric.
And if you could show a Sweden or a Florida or some of these other places that didn't pay those terrible costs, And still had similar outcomes in terms of COVID, then it would show that what they were advocating was not only misguided, but it was actually harmful.
And I think that was part of the reason.
You know, you have these scientists like Jay Bhattacharya and Martin Kaldor, they will speak out.
They get absolutely killed because I think they just, these people don't want to have any evidence That people can point to to say they were wrong about this from the beginning.
And in fact, if you look, the corporate press has been wrong about this time and time again.
They shilled for lockdowns.
The lockdowns didn't stop COVID.
They said forced masking would end the pandemic in the summer of 2020.
Didn't end the pandemic.
They said if 50% were vaccinated, you wouldn't have surges.
People like Fauci said that.
That obviously isn't true.
So time and time... They said schools needed to be closed.
They said schools would drive the pandemic if schools were open.
Well, Florida, we had schools open, and it didn't do that.
And so they've been wrong time and time again.
But at the end of the day, they see all this through a partisan prism.
I reject their worldview.
They view me, I think, as a threat to their worldview.
And so I think that I'm a target.
But I'll tell you, I view that positively.
I think that when you're fighting back against leftist narratives and leftist policies, if they're attacking you, it means because you're getting traction.
And I think people around the country started looking to Florida and they were like, hey, you know, this guy's doing the right thing.
And that's why people have poured in here and not just people moving here.
We're by far the number one vacation destination.
Now, we've always been a top one, but I can't tell you the number of people I've run into over the last year and a half from lockdown states.
I'm amazed at the number of lies the media told over the course of this pandemic, about you and about Florida particularly.
So they lied when they said, for example, that monoclonal antibodies didn't work.
They lied when they suggested that you were falsifying the death data, which they And here's the thing though.
So like, let's take the school masking.
when they said that you were killing kids because you were telling parents that they didn't need to mask their kids or that masks should be optional for their kids.
And they just lied routinely throughout the pandemic.
They continue to lie about the idea that you're somehow downplaying the efficacy of vaccines.
When I was here when the vaccines rolled out and you were telling everybody who could to get vaccinated and you were prioritizing the most vulnerable.
And here's the thing though.
So like, let's take the school masking.
We put the kids in school and it's gone down 90 some percent since the kids went into school.
And these are overwhelmingly kids not wearing masks.
So they were wrong about that.
They will never admit that.
They will never come to terms with that data.
The vaccines, they attacked me because I said the efficacy wanes after a certain time.
Now Fauci is out there saying that.
He says you need a regimen because after six months or so, people are more liable to get infected.
The clinical data for Pfizer was 95% protection against infection and 100% protection against hospitalization and death.
That may be true initially, but the protection wanes.
And so I pointed that out months ago because Israel's data showed that, the UK showed it, and now our data in the United States shows it.
And they say that somehow I was downplaying When all I was doing was accurately describing what we were talking about.
That was one of the reasons why we needed to do the monoclonals.
Because people that were fully vaccinated were getting infected in Florida this summer.
And many of these people are the most vulnerable people.
And so they have a breakthrough infection, they go, they get it, and most of them invariably We're very happy with that treatment.
But the monoclonal lies they told, that may have killed some people because we went out there, it was clinically proven, and I would say of all the things that have been put out, this has performed 100% in line with the clinical trial data.
It reduces hospitalizations and deaths by the amount that they said it would.
And we have so many first-hand examples of that.
But they acted like this was some type of scam that we were trying to provide early treatment.
There very well may be people who believe these media narratives who got COVID and rejected seeking monoclonal antibody treatments and may have had a negative outcome.
So it just shows you they're more interested in pursuing a narrative than in informing the public in a factual way when even members of the public's lives could be at stake here with a COVID infection and early treatment.
Let's talk about the conflict between the state of Florida and the federal government.
The Biden administration has been very overt in its opposition to you personally.
You've had Jen Psaki ripping on you from the White House press room.
You've had President Biden making not particularly oblique references about you during press conferences that he manages to get through.
And the Sort of ratcheting up of the battle between the state of Florida and the federal government has become very clear to a lot of folks.
Frankly, it's been encouraging to me because I think that states actually need to stand up to the predations of the federal government at this point.
But can you give us sort of some insight as to, is there anything going on behind the scenes?
Is there any conversation between the governor's office and the White House?
Well, I would say anything that comes up, you know, they will try to politicize it.
Education, health, I mean, you name it.
I mean, that's just how they are.
That's how they're wired.
And so, for example, the monoclonal antibodies, when we had the height of our summer wave, they cut our monoclonal antibodies.
I mean, I rolled out a very successful program.
We had 25 sites.
People were getting it.
It had great results and they cut it.
I had to go find another company, GlaxoSmithKline, do a separate deal to be able to paper over the decline.
Now they've cut it so much, but our infections have gone down even more that we're ending up in good shape at this point.
But they deliberately did it.
They said there was no shortage.
They were just doing it for quote equity purposes.
And you've got to wonder why you would do that.
You also look at what they're doing with the contractor mandates and the OSHA mandates.
I mean look I think that that is more directed at states like Florida because some of these big blue states will probably impose those mandates on their own.
They know we will not do that and so we're fighting Back against that very strongly.
We have a special session of the legislature.
We have the lawsuits across the board about all those things.
But they don't respect states like Florida's prerogatives.
And the fact is, things like schools they try to butt into.
You know, we have conflicts where some school boards weren't following our state's parents' Bill of Rights.
And so the state board of education took the salaries away from the elected politicians.
Biden comes in and they put the money back in.
They're bailing out politicians who are disobeying state law.
How is that an appropriate use of the federal government?
And we're going to address that in our special session.
But time and time again, they want to come in and do it.
I think that they've really failed on this.
Cutting the monoclonal antibodies went over like a lead balloon in Florida.
Their obsession with force masking five-year-olds has not gone over well.
I mean, I think most parents look at it now, and they understand kids are doing well without this, and they need to be able to do that.
And so I think it's not worked for them, but I think this is just their viewpoint.
Biden is not really tethered by the Constitution.
I think he's got a lot of radical elements in his administration that push him to do certain things.
And I don't think he has the wherewithal or the leadership ability to say no.
You know, even Obama would tell the lefties that sometimes that they were going too far.
Bill Clinton would sometimes.
Biden's not doing that.
He just doesn't have the capacity to do it.
And so they're really pushing him in a direction I think that is very dangerous for the country and quite frankly shows his presidential candidacy was a fraud because he said he was going to unite the country.
He demagogued Trump on COVID.
He said he would shut down the virus.
That hasn't happened.
And he said he would unite the country.
And in fact, on policy, he's been the most divisive president of my lifetime, more divisive than the other Democrats even that have been in office.
So let's talk about Biden and his presidency for a second.
So President Biden obviously is really deeply underwater at this point.
His poll numbers look really bad.
They're in the low 40s, maybe high 30s.
His vice president is somehow even worse off, despite the fact that she's been completely Absent from the national scene, while not visiting the southern border.
And this administration seems to be in a bit of disarray.
But as you mentioned, they keep doubling down on this policy.
And as they keep doubling down on their policies, it seems like core to that policy is attempting to cram down national mandates on states.
So what tools do you have as a governor of a major state at your disposal in order to In order to hamper that.
So take, for example, the vaccine mandate.
So they're trying to cram down this vaccine mandate, which essentially forces all companies with more than 100 employees to either vax their employees or test them once a week or fire them.
And they're trying to do this via OSHA.
It's unconstitutional.
Our company has filed a lawsuit in the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals about that because our headquarters is over in Tennessee.
But what sort of tools do states have at their disposal to resist the federal government when they go this far?
Well, I think we have legal tools and legislative tools.
So the legal tools, we've sued as well in the 11th Circuit.
You have the great 5th Circuit decision that came down for the stay.
I think that that's probably going to stick, which will be great.
But we're also having the legislature come in and provide substantive protections for employees in the state of Florida.
No one should have to choose between their job and this jab.
If it's something that's good for you and you want to do, that's fine, but you shouldn't be forced out of work.
And then just think about who this applies to.
Nurses, truck drivers, all these, they've been working the whole time!
They've been working the whole time, and now all of a sudden you're going to potentially cast them aside, so we're providing those protections.
Legislature is going to debate some other things.
We've actually talked about taking some of Biden's stimulus money and paying off the OSHA fines for the business that don't comply.
Although having this stay in the court, you know, may make that be something that we don't have to do.
We also, in terms of the illegal immigration, So he's got a massive border surge that he's invited because he basically overruled Trump's policies that were working.
And so I sent people in June and July to help Governor Abbott.
And my guys in Florida, they're interdicting a lot of these guys.
Now, if they had drugs or they were trafficking, they'd get arrested and Texas would take them.
But if they were just illegally crossing the border, our guys would turn them over to the feds.
The feds would just release them or they'd put them on a bus or something like that.
So we're looking from a defensive posture in Florida If they're dumping people in the middle of the night here, you know, I want to be able to have an opportunity to do that and maybe transport them elsewhere.
We also are looking at maybe penalizing the contractors who are facilitating, which is effectively violations of federal law by transporting people who are in the country illegally.
So we're looking at all of those and of course we're suing Biden on his catch and release policies as well.
You know, they don't even really publish the policies.
They just kind of behave recklessly and to try to avoid any type of judicial oversight.
But I can tell you, having 200,000 people cross every month, that's basically a medium-sized American city that they're importing illegally from all, and not just Mexico, in fact, very minor Mexico.
It's over 100 countries, because people know Biden's president, you can get to that southern border, you're home free.
So one of the things I think a lot of conservatives love about your governorship and about your sort of persona publicly is your combativeness, is your willingness to go right at the media.
Where did you pick that up and why have Republicans, many Republicans, failed to participate in that sort of combativeness for so long, do you think?
I think it's just a matter of just understanding kind of what time it is.
Now, if this was a media that was dedicated to factual reporting, gathering facts, putting it out, then, you know, you may want to behave a little bit differently.
But in fact, I mean, they're highly partisan.
And not only are they highly partisan, they really are detached from reality and from facts at this point.
Their main goal is to pursue their narratives.
And so if you have facts that undercut their narratives, they are either going to ignore those facts or actively try to smother those facts.
And so that's just where we're at.
And so these corporate outlets, you know, I think in terms of what they've done to their reputations with the Russia collusion report, I mean, they were manufacturing that whole story.
They gave each other Pulitzer Prizes for reporting On a false conspiracy theory.
And so, you know, if you had asked me ten years ago about the media, I wouldn't have said they were our friend, but I'd say, you know, they have a liberal bias, you gotta be careful of that.
But now, you just gotta understand, those corporate outlets are so untethered from the truth, they are so highly partisan, that that's the way you have to treat them.
And so when they're trying to pursue narratives, I don't let them get away with it.
Uh, if they're trying to just get information to try to do a hit piece, I don't let them get away with it.
And the thing is, is when you have the facts on your side, it's very difficult for them.
Because a lot of them, all they do is recycle whatever the narrative du jour of the day is.
But I would say Republicans have to understand, you know, don't try to get these people to like you, okay?
That's not what they're going to do.
You've got to understand what their role is.
I think, quite frankly, there's a lot of conservative outlets where you can get great messages out.
And I don't believe in this where the corporate outlets will point to your outlet or Fox or all these and act like, oh, well, they're so... The fact is, conservative outlets are much more accurate in what they're reporting every single day.
Because you've got to be.
If you're not, you have the weight of the world that comes down on you.
So you have to do that.
And so that's just the reality.
And I can tell you, The most of the stuff that gets put out in these corporate outlets against Florida is fatally flawed, usually six ways from Sunday.
So that's just the reality.
And I think we've got to understand that.
And as conservatives, we just have to govern ourselves accordingly.
But the good news is, Most people don't trust these folks anymore.
You know, I think even 10 years ago, people knew the media had a bias, but if something was put on the news, I think they thought that it was probably true, otherwise it wouldn't have been run, at least in some... Now I think they believe, they're trying to trick me, they assume it's false, unless there's a strong evidence to show what the media is saying is true.
And I think that that's a lot of great progress, because that's just the fact, that's where we should be, you know, as a society, is how we view these people.
So in a second, I want to ask you, your gubernatorial strategy, your governing strategy, and your legislative strategy has been very aggressive in pursuit of certain goals.
And I want to ask where you draw the line between sort of a libertarian perspective and a conservative perspective.
We'll get to that in just one second.
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So let's talk about sort of the debate that's happening on the right.
It's really interesting.
There's some fun philosophical debates happening on the right between sort of the libertarian-oriented side of the right and the more conservative-oriented side of the right.
The libertarians saying things like, well, to take an example, when it comes to companies deciding whether their employees get vaxxed, that's a decision that should be left to companies because, you know, you can't tell anybody to bake the cake and you also can't tell anybody whether their employees ought to be vaxxed or not.
Those sorts of debates.
How do you decide?
You know, whether libertarians are right that liberty ought to be the first concern, or whether conservatives are right that the sort of preconditions for liberty need to be set by the government in certain cases in order to provide that tyranny doesn't happen even from companies.
Yeah, no, I mean, I think my job is to protect people's freedoms, but I understand that your freedoms can be infringed, yes, by government, but it can also be infringed in this modern society by big corporate power.
And it's also about the type of society you want.
So, for example, We banned vaccine passports in the state of Florida many months ago.
It was just getting off the ground in places.
And my view was, I want a free state.
I don't want a biomedical security state.
Now some say, well, if a company wants you to show your papers to be able to go to a movie, why shouldn't they have the right to do it?
And my view is, I care more about the rights of my citizens to be able to live in a free society.
And if that takes hold in a society where companies start to do that, we then, I think, you know, lose freedom as a society.
And quite frankly, if that would happen, our tourism would go down as a result.
And there'd be places that were not requiring that that would probably be hurt.
So we did that.
You look at something like a big tech.
Massive monopolies that control a huge amount of speech in this country.
You know, I believe there should be protections for individuals' right to speak.
I mean, they hold themselves out as being open forums, they get liability protection from the federal government, and yet they'll turn around and deplatform you if you say the wrong thing.
Or censor what you say if it's not in accordance with their narrative.
So they're not applying their terms of service in a way that's fair.
So I think people should be able to have the ability to go in and bring consumer fraud actions against big tech.
And then also I just say taking a step back.
Libert—if you just say, like, don't do anything, the problem is, you know, if you're opposed to woke ideology, leftism, all these things, that's the dominant ideology in most of these institutions in our country.
It's not just the federal government and the bureaucracy, although of course it is.
It's big tech.
It's corporate media.
It's academia.
It's now corporate America.
More and more who are really embracing this.
So if you say you're not going to do anything, you're basically ceding the field to the left at this day and age.
Much different than maybe what it would have been like in the 1920s, where you had a stronger civil society and there wasn't a need maybe to do as much in certain respects.
Well now, you're in a situation where you have people's freedoms being violated all the time and you may need to do it.
So you mentioned social media there and big tech.
Obviously, it's had a major impact on how people view the world, what big tech allows, what big tech does not allow.
One of your signature efforts was to allow liability for big tech when they, for example, crack down on people solely for political reasons.
And that's a measure that you're going to go back and rewrite now because there's some court battle over that.
What do you think can be done about big tech, realistically speaking, to sort of make them open up and be what they were originally purported to be?
Well, at the state level, we really have these consumer fraud actions.
I mean, that's probably the best thing that we can do.
The good thing about that, that's not a government agency telling them what they have to allow or not allow.
It's an individual who may have been aggrieved that can go in and say, wait a minute, I made this statement, you took it down.
But you didn't take down these other statements that are same subject matter, just maybe consistent with your perspective.
And so I think it's a better way to do it.
Now, ultimately, federally, you know, you're going to look at things like Section 230.
You're going to look at potentially breaking up or limiting the size of some of these companies because they have huge, huge power.
over the market. I think traditionally antitrust has been about cost, like they can raise the price.
That's what we're concerned about. Yeah, that may be something we're concerned about, but I think in a Republican form of government, for them to be able to control so much power, political power effectively, with really no check, that would be a reason for us to come in and provide a little bit of sanity in this marketplace.
So we've been talking a lot about what the state of Florida has done, providing a different model than say New York or California.
One of the things that you've mentioned, and it's been happening obviously, is this big sort.
A lot of Republicans, a lot of conservatives, independents moving down to below the Mason-Dixon line, moving to red states.
A lot of people who are on the left kind of staying up there.
And this big sort is good for a lot of people who are living in the red states.
It also does raise the question of what you think the future of the country is going to look like.
Because very often if people don't live near anybody who disagrees with them and they don't know anybody who disagrees with them, they tend to sort of hunker down and then it becomes sort of a battle at the top level for who gets to control everybody else.
Now the conservative vision presumably is if they got control of the federal government in all of its auspices, the conservatives, they would loosen up the grip of the federal government.
We wouldn't force blue states to live like red states.
The blue states obviously don't have the same sort of aspirations.
They kind of want to force red states to live like blue states.
But what do you think is the future of the country as it seems like a lot of the top line issues that used to unite us are now dividing us?
Well, you definitely are seeing migration that's being driven more and more by philosophy and basically by ideology because you're in certain areas and if you have a conservative perspective, I mean, law and order, no in some of these places, obviously lockdown, infringement, all these other things, that's enough for people to say, you know, this is, and like Florida, we've seen huge migration.
It's not just for low taxes because we've always had lower taxes.
And what you're seeing is people coming and people ask me, well, what's the complexion of this in terms of the political demography?
When I got elected governor, there were almost 300,000 more registered Democrats in Florida than Republicans.
Now, for the first time in the history of the state, we actually have more registered Republicans than Democrats.
So you're looking at almost 300,000 just since November of 2018.
And at this clip, you know, we're going to exceed that probably 10,000 maybe a month going on that.
So that is just the reality.
And I think you're going to continue to see that.
I think states like Florida, states like Texas, states like Tennessee, Arizona, those are places where people are moving to from these blue areas.
The question is, does that make the blue areas even more blue?
Because I think in New Jersey, we probably would have won that governor's race, but you have so many people, Republicans, that have moved out of New Jersey in the last four years.
I mean, just think if you didn't have maybe 30,000, 40,000, and you're seeing it out of the Midwest and all these other places.
So I think that that's a trend that's gonna continue.
You know, at the national level, I mean, the problem I think that we're seeing, you know, as conservatives is, you know, the government's just been weaponized basically against people who dissent from the regime, which is a little bit different than maybe a few decades ago.
You may have a president that you disagree with, but now how these agencies are acting, how so much policy is now designed to basically benefit kind of the people that vote for them, but really to turn conservatives almost into second class citizens.
I mean, think about what the agenda would have been if they would have had a couple more senators.
Make D.C.
a state so you have two permanent radical left Democrat senators.
Abolish the electoral college so California gets to elect the president. They wanted to federalize ballot harvesting ballot fraud Overrule voter ID laws, you know at the state level Impact the Supreme Court so you could have a leftist majority legislating under the auspices of constitutional interpretation Those are not issues that a middle-income family sitting over their dinner table is talking about They're talking about gas prices, inflation, all these other things.
That is an agenda of a more radicalized left that really wants to make conservative America, you know, inferior citizens.
And so the stakes in terms of what goes on at the federal government
Have probably not been higher in my lifetime, and I think it's something that ultimately you're going to have to have people on the right be able to beat this back, win some decisive victories, and certainly I think there's a strong majority in this country that, you know, not that the country is right-wing 60%, but I would say center-right, rejecting things like wokeness and all the nonsense that you've seen bubble up to the surface over the last many years.
So in a second, I want to ask you just on a personal level, how you deal with all of this.
I mean, it's a very busy life and you have a bunch of young kids and you have a family.
So I want to ask about that.
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Alrighty, so on a personal level, how do you deal with all this?
You've taken an enormous amount of crap for the last several years.
Your schedule is insanely busy.
I've been talking to some of your legislators over here from your party, and you guys have a packed agenda for the next term.
What does your day look like?
Well, I mean, it's busy.
I mean, so we have three kids under five.
I got a daughter that's almost five, son three and a half, and then a daughter that's about a year and a half.
And so that's a very fun age, but it's also very tiring.
And so we do our thing in terms of with the state.
When you're governor, you're governor 24-7.
I mean, I may not be sitting in this office.
I may be doing an event somewhere.
I may just be at the executive residence.
But you're governor, things happen all the time, so you're always on call.
But we have a big state, too.
So, I mean, it's not like, you know, I just go to, like, one city all the time.
I mean, I'm all over the place.
We do it.
I think that's the only way you can do it to be successful.
The good thing, though, is when I was in Congress, you're in D.C.
I mean, I just sleep on my couch as a member.
But when we had our first child, you know, you're there and you want to be home.
And so as busy as I am in Florida, Governor is more family friendly.
Because I can visit two, three cities, I can still be back at home for dinner.
And that makes a big, big difference.
You know, my wife, the First Lady, does a great job with just everything.
She's great for the state, great spouse, great mother.
You know, she's now battling the breast cancer, which was a very difficult thing for us when the news hit.
It's been difficult but I'll tell you and you have good days and bad days but I think she's fighting through it very effectively and so you kind of throw that on top of everything else and I would say certainly it's been been a wild ride but the last probably month and a half since the diagnosis came down you know has has really been surreal but you know her view is is you know I'm gonna get through it and you know I'm gonna come back better than ever so so I and I think that will happen I'll tell you the people that have reached out to her
From not just around Florida, but all over the country.
It's been really inspiring.
It's definitely boosted her spirits.
Because I can tell you, before we announced this publicly, you know, we were in a difficult spot.
She was in a difficult spot.
You know, I was very, very down for having to, you know, have this happen to someone, you know, my wife.
But then when the outpouring came in, I mean, it really made a difference.
It made a difference for all of us, but it definitely made a difference for Casey.
We're certainly all praying for Casey and best wishes to her.
Let's talk for a second about sort of your philosophical influences.
So how did you become conservative in the first place?
You know, it's interesting.
When I was growing up, I grew up in West Central Florida in a town called Dunedin in Pinellas County, a Tampa Bay area.
And, you know, I wasn't necessarily, I didn't have a political philosophy per se, but, and then I got, I was a baseball player, so I got recruited to play baseball various places, so I ended up going to Yale to play baseball.
It was a massive culture shock.
I mean, you know, I was a blue-collar kid, you know, I'd go to, you know, I'm a Catholic, I'd go to church every Sunday, you know, I just instinctively loved America, just because that was what you did.
I go up there, the motto was, for God, for country, for Yale, but yet, They were actively opposed to anybody that believed in God.
They hated the United States.
I mean, everything was about how bad the country was.
And I'm just thinking to myself, like, this is not something that I want to sign up for.
So I think just how being exposed to leftism, kind of raw leftism, really turned me off.
And then when I was in college, really was somebody that never accepted the leftism of academia.
By the time I got into Harvard Law School, I was set.
And that's a liberal place, but there was nothing that they were going to be able to do to change me at that point.
Do you have any particular thinkers that you like to read or favorite books that sort of changed your course?
Well, I mean, I think it's just, you know, I think you look at, you know, just the religious tradition of Western civilization.
And so, you know, I was a kid that grew up.
I mean, I went to Catholic school in elementary school.
You know, I went to public middle and high school, but it's continued with that.
And that's just been a foundation for me.
And then I think I really studied a lot of our founding fathers.
I studied the influences that caused them to want to revolt and then create the constitution.
And so you look at all the things they did.
I mean, they knew, I mean, obviously they knew Locke, they knew all the ancient Greeks and Romans, they knew that like the back of their hand.
And so to watch them create this country, you know, on the shoulders of kind of those influences was something that I really, really studied deeply.
Well, Governor DeSantis, it really is a pleasure to be here.
And I want to thank you for welcoming me to the state and so many others.
The state is fantastic.
And we hope that you stick around as governor for quite a while.
Governor DeSantis, really thank you so much for joining the show.
Thank you.
The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday special is produced by Mathis Glover, executive producer, Jeremy Boring, And our assistance director is Pavel Lydowsky.
Our guests are booked by Caitlin Maynard.
Editing is by Jim Nickel.
Audio is mixed by Mike Coromino.
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Title graphics are by Cynthia Angulo.
The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special is a Daily Wire production.
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