May 24, 2023 - Bannon's War Room
53:02
Participants
| 
| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
|
unidentified
|
Peace out yo! | |
| I mean, every day you're out there. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What they're doing is blowing people off. | |
| If you continue to look the other way and shut up, then the oppressors, the authoritarians, get total control and total power. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Because this is just like in Arizona. | |
| This is just like in Georgia. | ||
| It's another element that backs them into a quarter and shows their lies and misrepresentations. | ||
| This is why this audience is gonna have to get engaged. | ||
| As we've told you, this is the fight. | ||
| All this nonsense, all this spin, they can't handle the truth. | ||
| War Room, Battleground. | ||
| Here's your host, Stephen K. Bannon. | ||
| Okay, welcome. It's Wednesday, 24 May in the year of our Lord, 2023. | ||
| We're going to go to the Twitter spaces is up. | ||
| We are connected. My Always Cracked staff want to thank Lindell TV and Frank Speech for doing this. | ||
| So we're hooked in. | ||
| There are many other people hooked in right now. | ||
| In fact, there'll be millions before this thing gets rolling. | ||
| They're going to start. As soon as they start, we will go to it live. | ||
| Now, here's my assessment just coming out of the box. | ||
| And I don't know if Memphis has this, you don't need to put it, if you've got to put it up, but the New York Times reports today that the strategy of DeSantis is quite simple. | ||
| He is, as I've said from the very beginning, and I think Governor DeSantis is doing a very good job as governor. | ||
| I like the way he's going after Disney's and corporations. | ||
| I think he ought to be more aggressive, even more aggressive. | ||
| I think a lot of it has been performative, and we need to really get down To Basics and you see these companies are the most progressive things in the world. | ||
| So I think Governor DeSantis is doing a good job there. | ||
| I don't think he's anywhere near being ready to be President of the United States. | ||
| As I said, I think the international trip he took for four or five days was so amateurish and finishing in London and what we call the City of London, which is their Wall Street, was so pathetic that, you know, it was just I can't tell you how bad it was. | ||
| People just didn't think he was a world leader. | ||
| People didn't think he would ever beat Trump. | ||
| It was just terrible. The Economist, in fact, has come out, just put out moments before DeSantis is going to take this Twitter space and said there's no chance or very little chance, very low probability that he could beat Trump. | ||
| I think in their poll, he's down, I don't know, 58, 29, something. | ||
| It's a huge gap. But it's also direction, not just the point in time, but it's the slope of the curve. | ||
| And like I said, as soon as they start going, we're going to cut right to it. | ||
| Okay, let's go ahead and do it. | ||
| We're not going to have a commercial break. | ||
| Okay, you're in the war room. Let's go listen to DeSantis. | ||
| It's David Sachs here. | ||
| Elon is sitting next to me. | ||
| And we want to welcome you to this historic Twitter Spaces event, and more broadly, a first in the history of social media. | ||
| Tonight I'm pleased to introduce two individuals who've done more to loosen the grip on the pandemic. | ||
|
unidentified
|
They've done a lot to lift the virus. | |
| I'm going to turn it over to you, Dr. Han. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| I'm going to start with a quick question. | ||
| I know this is a little bit of a stretch, but I'm wondering if you can give us a little bit of a sense of what you're doing. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I know this is a little bit of a stretch, but I'm wondering if you can give us a little bit of a sense of what you're doing. | |
| I know this is a little bit of a stretch, but I'm wondering if you can give us a little bit of a sense of what you're doing. | ||
| I know this is a little bit of a stretch, but I'm wondering if you can give us a little bit of a sense of what you're doing. | ||
| I know this is a little bit of a stretch, but I'm wondering if you can give us a little bit of a sense of what you're doing. | ||
| I know this is a little bit of a stretch, but I'm wondering if you can give us a little bit of a sense of what you're doing. | ||
| I know this is a little bit of a stretch, but I'm wondering if you can give us a little bit of a sense of what you're doing. | ||
| I know this is a little bit of a stretch, but I'm wondering if you can give us a little bit of a sense of what you're doing. | ||
| You don't need to look. People don't need to see me. | ||
| It's another trick. Boy, you don't get that on Getter. | ||
| On Getter, you don't get these questions. | ||
| Sorry about that. We've got so many people here that I think we are kind of melting the servers, which is a good sign. | ||
| All right, I'd like to just introduce the folks in the room here. | ||
| So it's safe to say we wouldn't be making history without the man sitting next to me, Elon Musk. | ||
| his decision to purchase this platform last year, to restore it to its original mission as a beacon for free speech, and even to expose Twitter's past complicity with a government censorship regime, might have surprised many, but not those of us who've known and worked with Elon for nearly a quarter of a century. | ||
| ... | ||
| Go ahead and send a heart up if you want to say thank you, Elon. | ||
| Bye. | ||
| Governor DeSantis first drew my attention and support when I saw how he responded to the COVID pandemic. | ||
| And refused to believe what we now know to be the many falsehoods that government experts and their media mouthpieces were feeding us. | ||
| He kept Florida schools open and its economy thriving while my state of California chose two years of learning loss and lockdowns that we have yet to fully Okay, | ||
| I'm just coming in on a voiceover. | ||
| This is Stephen K. Bannon. | ||
| Twitter keeps crashing because Elon Musk, for all his big talk, hasn't taken care of the basic engineering problems. | ||
| You don't get that problem with Getter. | ||
| I never get that problem with Getter. | ||
| David Sachs is the oligarch that drove the bailout of Silicon Valley Bank with your money. | ||
| Another total phony. | ||
| And of course, Twitter is not a free speech platform because since Elon Musk is bought and paid for by the CCP, he will not let any of the voices of the leaders of the anti-CCP movement on Twitter. | ||
| And as Dr. Shiva tells you, they've got a backdoor into the government. | ||
| They've never fully explained to people. | ||
| And Dr. Shiva says it's still there. | ||
| So we're going to hang around and we're going to do this. | ||
| This is another kind of... | ||
| This shows you the sanctimonious should have been more on point here. | ||
| And these guys should have committed to him that they could actually launch. | ||
| How are you going to beat Trump when you can't even get a... | ||
|
unidentified
|
You can't even launch on Twitter. | |
| Here we go. Yeah, I think so. | ||
| Just to simplify this. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I think we're just going to use your. | |
| Silence. | ||
| Silence. | ||
| you you There's 392,000 people in the room. | ||
| All right, great. So, let's see. | ||
| It's okay to keep crashing, huh? | ||
| Yeah, I think we've got a Just a massive number of people online. So it's service restraining somewhat Um Yeah Yeah So Yeah | ||
|
unidentified
|
You | |
| This is something right we're just reallocating more server capability to be able to handle load here It's really going crazy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So, yeah, I'm obviously very excited to have Governor DeSantis make this Okay, | |
| we don't know if they're coming back or not. | ||
| This is a clown show. This is a clown show. | ||
| If you're gonna launch DeSantis, you gotta be, you know, you gotta launch. | ||
| This is failure to launch. | ||
| I don't have, they're coming back in rooms, they're not going in rooms. | ||
| We're busy people. You know, we're what, we're 20 minutes into the show, we're 15 minutes into the show and I'm bored already. | ||
| I got Elon mumbling, right? | ||
| He's on the spectrum. I got him mumbling. | ||
| I got DeSantis. Who knows where DeSantis is? | ||
| I got David Sachs trying to tell me how historic this is. | ||
| This is historic screw up. | ||
| They bought a crime scene. | ||
| Am I sitting here just talking trash about these guys? | ||
| Is it back up yet? | ||
|
unidentified
|
The elevator music. | |
| Okay, here we go. | ||
| This is the great engineering. | ||
| Don't have this problem on Getter. | ||
| Ken Wong and the team over at Getter, little Getter, not having this problem on Getter. | ||
| And it was not massive. | ||
| I mean, 300,000 people is a lot. | ||
| Don't get me wrong. That's good. But that's not like millions. | ||
| It's not tens of millions at the beginning. | ||
| Not massive at all. | ||
| You got to be able to hunt. And don't blame it on the servers. | ||
| It's not the servers. | ||
| The servers are not crashing with 300,000 people. | ||
| I'm calling that out. | ||
| And David Sachs, who now is like, oh, I'm a conservative. | ||
| You're not a conservative, dude. You gave money to Hillary Clinton, okay? | ||
| You were a grown man when you did that. | ||
| You were already a mini oligarch. | ||
| No, I'm going to keep talking trash. | ||
| My own staff is saying, hey, can't we play your takedown of Silicon Valley Bank? | ||
| I'll do it word for word right now. | ||
| Okay, if Ron DeSantis is serious, to be the champ, you've got to beat the champ. | ||
| This is not how you're going to do it. | ||
| Donald J. Trump would not do something like this. | ||
| If you're going to come at Trump, where's your 200 million, dude? | ||
| If you're going to come at Trump, you've got to come. | ||
| You've got to bring it. You've got to bring the heat. | ||
| Bring the fire. Where's the fire? | ||
| All I have is disembodied voices. | ||
| First off, ladies and gentlemen, who launches a presidential campaign that's not either in person in a room like Tim Scott or, you know, who does it that way? | ||
| Or on TV in front of people and, you know, with an audience and you're interacting? | ||
| Who does it in a Twitter space when it's just audio, not even video? | ||
| Is Ron DeSantis that afraid of how he comes across? | ||
| Okay? He comes across as maybe not, you know, the most presidential, a guy that comports himself or holds himself as a president, but hey, you got to work through that. | ||
| You got to take your brand and run with it. | ||
| We are, and people know I'm a nut about not wasting time. | ||
| We're 16 minutes into this, and we're still, you know, they're still playing elevator music. | ||
| They're still playing elevator music. | ||
| This is, what, did he not do due diligence? | ||
| Did Elon Musk sell him a bill of goods? | ||
| This is more of Elon Musk's just happy talk. | ||
| All this great engineering, look, he's done some great stuff on the rockets. | ||
| I think Tesla's a mess. | ||
| Right? And it's totally financed by the CCP or underwritten with tax breaks from the American people. | ||
| I think that's a mess. | ||
| I know people disagree with me on that. | ||
| His other companies, I think a lot of these companies are a mess. | ||
| Twitter is a train wreck. | ||
| It's a crime scene that became a train wreck because, you know, he's supposed to be bringing all these great engineers and they're redoing it. | ||
| Does anybody feel that on Twitter? | ||
| And I realize I'm just kind of rolling on smack tar, which I normally don't do, as you know. | ||
| But I'm 18 minutes in this. | ||
| I'm a busy man. I want to get to it. | ||
| I want to hear Ron DeSantis give me some pearls of wisdom with the CCP asset on the spectrum, transhumanist Elon Musk. | ||
| Okay, here we go. We're going to have it again. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Let's go ahead and roll. All right, | |
| I'd like to welcome Governor DeSantis for this historic. | ||
|
unidentified
|
We're just trying to get it going because there's so many people. | |
| It's unfortunate. We've never seen this before. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Governor DeSantis for this historic. | |
| We're just trying to get it going because there's so many people. | ||
| Okay, I'm going to come back and smack talk again. | ||
| There's not that many people. | ||
| There's 300,000 at the open. | ||
| You're supposed to be Mr. | ||
| AI. AI is all about computing power, dude. | ||
| Computing power, yes, you're going to have a crowd here, I got that, but that's not why it crashed. | ||
| It crashed because your engineering sucks. | ||
| Twitter sucks. Twitter sucks, and no offense, Elon Musk sucks. | ||
| I understand all the Conservative Inc. | ||
| fanboys out there. They're all rubbing up. | ||
| Their maturity is all 11 years old. | ||
| They all want to be Iron Man. | ||
| They all want to be Batman. | ||
| They all want to be some Marvel cartoon character. | ||
| What's the guy? Tony Stark. | ||
| They all want to be Tony Stark. That's Elon Musk. | ||
| Elon Musk gets all the hot girls, goes around and creates all kinds of great war fighting machines, jumps in and out, right? | ||
| That's where they all want to be. | ||
| And here we are. | ||
| We're 19 minutes into this. | ||
| I hope that Jeff Rowe and those guys are sucking down big bucks, big dollars, big dollars, and telling us $200 million. | ||
| You know, I put $200 million in the campaign and all I got was a crummy t-shirt in this, a non-event on Twitter spaces. | ||
| How about Twitter silence? | ||
| It's called Twitter silence. I've got a new name for this. | ||
| Can I say this on Frank's speech? | ||
| It's the Ron the Shit Show, okay? | ||
| The boys in Memphis, are you blocking me out? | ||
| I don't like sitting here in a stream of content. | ||
| You know, we have very structured shows in the War Room. | ||
| Why are the shows so structured? | ||
| Why do we get guests on? | ||
| We have clips to get the team. | ||
| Everything's clicking. And I give a little bit of commentary, some analysis. | ||
| We have another guest. We ask questions. | ||
| They give you two cents. | ||
| The audience is live streaming the whole time. | ||
| War Room is highly structured. | ||
| That's how we get too much stuff in the day. | ||
| This is not structured. | ||
| This is Elon Musk. | ||
| This is another Twitter disaster. | ||
| And if Ron DeSantis can't launch his campaign, how's he going to take on Donald Trump? | ||
| Are people mocking him right now on Twitter? | ||
|
unidentified
|
They did not. They just did. | |
| Cut the camera back to me. | ||
| This is too good. | ||
| So now I'll mock him. | ||
| Come on, bring it back. | ||
| Okay, Denver, there I go right there. | ||
| Now I've got to sit here and figure out what we're going to do for the next 40 minutes. | ||
| This is just a clown show. | ||
| It just ended. Are they going to reboot it? | ||
| Or my crack staff, are they going to reboot? | ||
| Is there anything to reboot? Okay, as soon as we know. | ||
| Can't they play some elevator music? | ||
| Here's what you got. You're going to have a Twitter space that can put their pictures up. | ||
| You're going to look at my ugly mug for the next 40 minutes where I kind of wing it because we're supposed to. | ||
| We have no guests. | ||
| I've got a couple of clips I'm going to play. | ||
| Okay, full stop. This is trying to be serious. | ||
| And how can I be serious? I can't be serious. | ||
| You can't be serious because this is not serious. | ||
| If they're going to be serious, I'll be serious. | ||
| I'll give you the knitted brow. | ||
| I'll give you the knitted brow. | ||
| Is he coming back up? They're going to move it to what? | ||
| Okay, we're moving over. | ||
| We're shifting. We were on Elon Musk, and now we're going to be on David Sachs. | ||
| Okay, David Sachs. The mini-me oligarch. | ||
| Peter Thiel's wingman. | ||
| Peter Thiel's wingman, the guy who drove the Silicon Valley bank bailout for the billionaires. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay, can we play that music? | |
| You know, that music is horrific. | ||
| Can we go ahead and mute the music and I'll go ahead. | ||
| No, you're trying to... | ||
| That's not even elevated music. | ||
| That's like Bridge on the River Choir. | ||
| You're in the box music, right? | ||
| They play that music all day long. | ||
| You're like, ah, okay. | ||
| I guess I'm just going to keep stream of consciousness here. | ||
| I would be serious. | ||
| I'd give you the knitted brow. | ||
| I'd talk about transhumanism. | ||
| I'd talk about the debt ceiling. I'd talk about the invasion of the southern border. | ||
| I'd talk about Ukraine. I'd pick a topic that is not just of interest, but worthy. | ||
| I'd pick a topic that's worthy of the war room audience. | ||
| This is the same war room audience that's got everybody going home. | ||
| And they just put out, by the way, now is everybody going home? | ||
| They said they're calling back, but they get 72 hours to read it if they come to everything. | ||
| So guess what? Just some basic math. | ||
| I think that goes through the 1st of June, so we call it bluff. | ||
| Now, I'd go through some big rant. | ||
| I'd go through something serious. | ||
|
unidentified
|
If this was serious, it's not serious. | |
| This is another, this is why, think about it for a second. | ||
| This guy started, he was ahead of Trump after the midterms. | ||
| Trump was terrible. Trump pulled everybody down. | ||
| Trump's awful. Trump's alone. | ||
| You know, Trump's down Mar-a-Lago. | ||
| Nobody loves him. All that. | ||
| You know, Ron DeSantis, he's next to all these billionaires. | ||
| He's going around the country and all the things. | ||
| DeSantis is there. He's Trump without the baggage. | ||
| He's Trump. Okay, here we go. | ||
| We're going to go right back to this fiasco. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Let's go and pick it up. 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' 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, to have Governor DeSantis on with us for this historic announcement. | ||
| And I look forward to a 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 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. I mean, try some new things. | ||
| Sure it was. It's adventurous, so... | ||
| Yeah. But I think the value here is actually really high for people to hear directly From presidential candidates and to answer Q&A live and you can get a sense for how a candidate really is, you know, and where it's not just canned speeches and telepronters. | ||
| In fact, you can tell by some of the mistakes that it's real. | ||
| So, you know, with that, I guess I should turn it over to... | ||
| Yeah. Well, 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. | ||
| You know, probably the biggest room that's probably ever been assembled online. | ||
| It's 80,000 people. Don't let me lie to you. | ||
| This guy's a clown. 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. | ||
| I don't think it has to be this way. | ||
| American decline is not inevitable. | ||
| It is a choice. | ||
| 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. | ||
| 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 deserve safe communities and law and order must be maintained in American cities. | ||
| We can't have inmates running the asylum. | ||
| We must reject attacks on the men and women of law enforcement. | ||
| We also must re-establish integrity in our institutions. | ||
| This includes the military. | ||
| I'm proud to be a Navy veteran, an 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. | ||
| You need to eliminate these distractions and we need to get focused on the core mission. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Re-establishing 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 economic transformation without representation. | ||
| Truth needs to be our foundation. | ||
| Common sense can 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. | ||
| 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. | ||
| We can and we must deliver big results for America. | ||
| I pledge to be an energetic executive that will take on the important issues 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 COVID vaccine mandates. | ||
| Didn't Elon promise us a live conversation? | ||
|
unidentified
|
He's reading a speech. Why don't cut the cameras on? | |
| This is bullshit. I thought we were going to get Elon Musk give and take. | ||
| All I got is some clown reading a frickin' boring speech. | ||
| 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 reconstitutionalize the executive branch and we'll bring the administrative state to heel. | ||
| 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 past 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. | ||
| 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 U.S. 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. | ||
| 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 fell 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. | ||
| 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 candidate has 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 kind of 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 blowback 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 forced 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. | ||
| 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's 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. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Thank you. We're absolutely committed to freedom of speech on a level playing field and just a vigorous debate. | ||
| 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 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 awash in crime. | ||
| In Florida, our crime rate is at a 50-year low. | ||
| 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. | ||
| 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 narratives 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 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, you know they're there because of merit, not because we're trying to play 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 is a great state and I think 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 on Twitter is basically a Nazi. | ||
| Yeah, that was the Atlantic. | ||
| And then Vanity Fair said that you were hosting or interviewing because David Duke wasn't available. | ||
| 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 a little bit unclear. | ||
| But I think this is a function of The legacy media, these corporate journals, 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 them. | ||
| Absolutely. And I think they've become totally hysterical because they don't like the idea that their control over the media is being, you know, disintermediated. | ||
| Yeah. Because now, you know, 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 it, I had to switch over to David hosting it because There's too much interest. | ||
| 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, the United States or anywhere. | ||
| I think this is a really profound change. | ||
| It's not just whether the media reports something and an article is true or not. | ||
| Even more powerful is deciding what the narrative is. | ||
| There's only so much you can actually put in a newspaper or a magazine. | ||
| There's only one thing you can really put on the cover of a magazine. | ||
| 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 using that phrase. | ||
| But nonetheless, it's true and judged by the results that this is a means for people to decide the narrative and for the people to decide what 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. | ||
| Big tech platforms were undermining their main reason 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, 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 would be great just to hear a little bit about your interactions and if you have a question for the Governor. | ||
| Thank you, David. It was an absolute honor to work with Governor DeSantis. | ||
| I was really impressed by his decision making in the face of an absolute firestorm of criticism. | ||
| 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. | ||
| You can see it 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, in the federal government, the CDC, the FDA, the NIH? How do you see the reforms we need so that the mistakes of the lockdowns that happened 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 have 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. | ||
| Can I follow up with that? | ||
| I think the other thing that I saw during the pandemic, Governor, and you were 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. | ||
| 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 it. | ||
| No question. So I'm actually 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 roundtable discussion that I led and convened. | ||
| We had Dr. Bhattacharya, MD, PhD from Stanford, We had Martin Kaldorf from Harvard Medical School. | ||
| And we had Sinatra 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. | ||
| 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, quote, 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 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 Massey. | ||
| 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 Massey, 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? | ||
|
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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 hot dog in Washington, D.C. from January 5th to January 7th and then overlaid that with gun purchases. | ||
|
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That they had on record anywhere in the country for any period of time. | |
| 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 Starlink. | ||
| And I would have bought a Powerwall, but I'm off the grid, and you wouldn't sell me one, so I had to make one with a Rekt Model S, and it's been running our house for five years. | ||
| 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 he's probably one of the only people that have that in the country. | ||
|
unidentified
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Thanks for outing me, Governor DeSantis. | |
| 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 reining in these government agencies, and what do you think we need to do? | ||
|
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What would you urge Congress or what bills would you like to see and sign to rein 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 reconstitutionalize 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 and 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 for those operations. | ||
| There's nothing that 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. | ||
| 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. | ||
|
unidentified
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So would you sign the RAINS Act? | |
| We passed it out of judiciary today. | ||
| Oh, yeah. No, of course. | ||
| Yeah, that's a no-brainer. That would, I think, be a great check. | ||
| I also think that we're going to have a good chance to see some of this Chevron deference really curtailed or maybe even eliminated based on the U.S. 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 quote-unquote experts in the bureaucracy. | ||
| Thank you. Alright, 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 2,000 jobs. | ||
| I saw other reports that suggested Disney was going to make the cuts anyway 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 is 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 To just be kids, and that's kind of our mantra. | ||
| 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. | ||
| 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 It's 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. | ||
| And I think some of these Republicans that are taking Disney's side, they're basically showing themselves to be corporatists 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. | ||
| 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, you know, 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. | ||
| 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, you know, 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- Okay, we're going to continue this on Getter right now on War Room, |
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