Ron DeSantis Twice Went to Israel to Sign Censorship Laws (Bonus Episode)
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Sometimes there are certain events that take place in the world that you can't believe what you're seeing and you try and alert people to how shocking and disturbing and alarming it is.
And for whatever reason, sometimes it just doesn't get the attention that you think it deserves.
People are focused on other things or it just doesn't quite resonate at the moment.
And sometimes you just have to accept that at the right moment, people are going to realize what it is that you've been trying to get them to see from maybe they'll see it from someone else.
Maybe they'll finally, it'll finally break through and they're going to start to react.
Such is the case for me when it comes to what I consider to be something so unbelievable, just so something so extreme and bizarre, but revealing that I couldn't actually believe that it happened when I first discovered that it did.
And it took me a lot of time to research and confirm.
And I realized that it happened not once, but twice.
What I'm talking about here is the fact that Ron DeSantis, while he was serving as the governor of Florida, a state in the United States, on two occasions, not one, but two, once in 2019, flew to Israel in order to sign into law a bill that had been passed by the Florida legislature, which governs what people in Florida can say, what they can think, what they can do,
and punishes them if they don't comply.
And they were bills related to Israel and anti-Semitism.
And he flew to Israel in front of Israeli officials and signed the law, not in the capital of Florida, in Tallahassee or anywhere else in Florida.
He flew to Israel as the governor, an American governor, to sign these laws.
It happened once in 2019 and then again in 2023.
And both times, these were laws that were designed to punish people in various ways who were acting out of animus toward Israel or animus toward Jews.
There were speech laws, they were hate crime laws, and he flew to Israel to sign them.
And just to give you a sense, I mean, I've been trying to get people to pay attention to this for so long.
Here's just a couple examples.
Here is in June of last year, Governor DeSantis signs yet another bill solely to benefit Israel.
This one expanding punishments for companies or organizations that boycott Israel.
In 2023, DeSantis went to Florida, went to Israel to sign a quote hate crimes law.
At least he signed this one in Florida.
So Governor DeSantis in general is probably the most obsessively pro-Israel politician in high office, even more so than Trump.
In 2025, he signed a law punishing Floridians who decide they want to boycott Israel.
Like Americans are allowed to boycott whatever we want.
You can boycott any other country in the world if you're in Florida, but just not Israel.
But as I said, at least he signed that in Florida.
In 2019, in 2023, he actually flew to Israel to sign laws.
Here is just in December, Bill Ackman, the fanatically pro-Israel billionaire who's now trying to lure the United States military into a war, a regime change war with Iran, but only because he's a renowned humanitarian who cares deeply about liberating and freeing the oppressed peoples of the world.
Fact that the government he wants the United States to go and depose is Israel's greatest enemy, which is a totally irrelevant coincidence.
But anyway, that's Bill Ackman.
And in 2025, he wrote impressive, we need more governors like Ron DeSantis, loves Ron DeSantis.
So above that, I put the NBC News article from 2023, the headline of which was, Ron DeSantis signs legislation to combat hate crimes while on a trip to Israel.
The Florida governor is in Israel as part of his overseas trade mission as he prepares to launch a presidential campaign.
Now, there you see the picture in that tweet, which is the NBC News report where Ron DeSantis is sitting there and being applauded by Israeli officials in Israel at an event sponsored by the Jerusalem Post, where he signed a hate crimes bill, something the right has always opposed.
The American right has always opposed hate crimes laws, which I do too.
So they say like, if you go and commit a crime, you like beat someone up or you murder somebody, you get a sentence, you go to prison.
But if you do it because of the thoughts in your head, you're not murdering this person because you don't like the way they look or because they're just random.
You murder them specifically because they're Jewish and you don't like Jews.
That then becomes a harsher punishment.
And the argument has always been that these kind of laws punish people for what's in their head.
It's the same exact act.
You're murdering somebody in exactly the same way, but if you have a thought in your head that you don't like Jews or don't like black people or whatever, the sentence gets enhanced.
Now, that's a whole different debate.
People are in favor of that or not.
But why would you go to Israel to sign a law enhancing punishments for the people of Florida?
And you notice there that the person on the left in the photo that he's sitting next to is one Randy Fine, who at the time was in the Florida legislature.
He's now, he ran for the seat vacated by Mike Waltz in north central Florida and won with Donald Trump's support called America First.
And yet Randy Fine's only mission in life is to serve Israel has said some actually psychotic things about killing people in Gaza.
So you see here, I'm just trying to over and over bring people's attention to this extraordinary fact that no other country would tolerate.
And we would never tolerate American governors going to some foreign country and signing another law, signing a law governing the people back in their state, Americans, unless it were Israel.
Here is another tweet.
I mean, I have years of these.
This was when Governor DeSantis signed the bill.
It was back in 2023.
And I wrote, in 2023, Ron DeSantis traveled to Israel in order to sign an aggressive hate speech law that punished Floridians.
In 2019, he went to Israel to sign an anti-Semitism bill to govern Americans in Florida.
Imagine doing this in any other country.
I mean, I hope it just speaks for itself how insane that is, how utterly demeaning to the American citizenry and the residents of Florida.
Because of course, the foreign country he's going to serve and sign this in front of is the government that wants this.
They're the ones demanding these bills.
I'm going to show you these bills.
They're incredibly draconian.
They punish free speech in order to protect Israel.
Now, I know that a lot of people have been unaware of this because every time I mention it, people say, oh, wow, I didn't, you know, I never knew that.
I didn't notice that.
I'm shocked by this.
In the last few days, Tucker Carlson on his extremely well listened to and watched podcast had a interview with a gubernatorial candidate for Florida.
Running in the Republican primary against Donald Trump's endorsed candidate, who's Byron Donalds.
And his name is James Fishback.
I was supposed to have James Fishback on this show on my show a few days before Tucker did.
I didn't know Tucker was going to, but I think it was the night of Trump abducting Maduro from Venezuela.
So we had to cancel the interview and break news.
Just as a side note, James Fishback is a debate coach.
And back in 2021, five years ago, he wrote to me and said, oh, I've been following you for a long time.
I know you're a high school and college debater.
And it'd be great for you to come and speak to my students on the debate team and give them advice and inspiration.
So I actually went to his class and gave a speech to his students.
And now he's running for governor.
It's kind of griper adjacent.
Given that Trump has endorsed Byron Donalds, Byron Donald is a very well-liked congressman in the Republican Party and in the MAGA movement, James Fishback doesn't have a chance of winning, I would say, but he's certainly worth listening to.
And anyway, in any event, Tucker was asking about Ron DeSantis, who's supporting Byron Donald's.
And James Fishback started talking about Israel.
And Tucker raised the issue.
And this is what he said.
He's admired DeSantis.
Certainly during COVID, I thought he was just a remarkable leader, interviewed him many times.
I know him and his wife.
And it was the foreign policy stuff that made me wonder, like, what is this?
And how controlled is he by Ken Griffin and the rest of his donors?
And then he had this moment where he signed a hate speech law out of the country.
He flew to a foreign country, Israel, to sign a hate speech law for Florida.
And I thought, well, this is obviously unconstitutional.
It's immoral, but it's also part of an elaborate humiliation ritual where you have to go not just like enslave your own people with a hate speech law, which that is the slavery, but you have to go kiss someone else's wall to show your obedience.
And I was like, I'm out.
Now, I don't think Tucker knew because he didn't mention that that was actually the second time Ron DeSantis traveled to Israel, the first being in 2019, where he signed an even worse law that just outlaws certain speech about Israel and Americans.
But I do think it's worth remembering that most neocons, most hardcore Zionists, most of the fanatical Israel supporters were not behind Trump in the 2024 GOP campaign.
They were absolutely behind DeSantis.
That's where all the neocon and Zionist money was.
They worshiped DeSantis.
And only once he proved to be a kind of flop as a candidate, especially against Trump.
No charisma.
It wasn't really resonating.
People saw him as a good governor, but not really a viable presidential nominee, especially that they trusted to beat the Democrats when he was standing against Trump.
That's only then did those people migrate toward Trump and they're getting pretty much everything they wanted.
But originally they were high in DeSantis, and that's why DeSantis was doing things like in 2025, making it illegal for Floridians to boycott Israel.
He also ordered when the organization Fire.org, the free speech and civil liberties organization that the ACL used to be, totally nonpartisan.
In fact, they made their name defending the free speech rights of conservative students on college campuses when they were being censored.
Fire came out and said, this is such an egregious attack on free speech that college administrators have the obligation to ignore DeSantis' order because he ordered that student groups who are pro-Palestinian be shut down, be blocked from existing.
Obviously, you could have pro-Israel groups, but not pro-Palestinian groups.
And his argument was they're providing material support for terrorism.
And it's so well established under the law, obviously, that you can't be guilty of the crime of the felony of material support for terrorism simply because of things you say.
You have to actually provide money to terrorist organizations or other forms of support, arms, facilitate that.
American citizens have the right to express their views without it being criminalized.
But that was DeSantis' theory.
He'll do anything, even restrict the free speech rights of Americans for Israel.
But as I said, at least he signed that one in Florida.
He didn't travel to Israel, the 2025 one.
Here's the one that he went to in 2023.
And this is taken from this NBC article, the headline of which is Ron DeSantis signs legislation to combat hate crimes while on a trip to Israel.
And here's the text, which describes what happened.
April 27, 2023, there you see at the top, the dateline is Jerusalem, because that's where Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida from the United States, was.
And it says this: quote, Florida governor Ron DeSantis signed legislation cracking down on hate crimes Thursday morning after a high-profile speech in Israel known as the public nuisance bill.
The legislation passed one day by the legislature makes it a felony for hate groups to harass people for their religious or their religion or ethnicity.
Florida had the fourth highest numbers of anti-Semitic incidents last year, according to the Anti-Defamation League.
DeSantis in Israel, as part of his overseas trade mission, was stops in Japan and South Korea.
He didn't sign any laws there governing Floridians, only in Israel.
He also met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Thursday before he wrapped up the global trip in the United Kingdom.
Quote, he's a friend of Israel, Netanyahu said in an interview shortly after the meeting.
Huge understatement.
Quote, we talked about Iran.
We talked about Israeli-U.S. relations.
DeSantis is preparing to join the 2024 presidential campaign.
I mean, like I said, I've been trying for years to get people to see this.
And Tucker talking about it kind of broke through, brought a lot of attention, thankfully, because it's obscene, but highly revealing.
Now, as I said, the 2019 law that Tucker didn't, I think, know about and didn't mention is way worse.
Here's the article.
This is from WJCT News, which is a Florida affiliate, and it's dated March 30th, 2019.
There you see DeSantis with Israeli officials.
He has a little Israeli flag in front of him next to the American flag.
Again, in Israel, he signs a bill to curb anti-Semitism.
Listen to how absolutely censorship-oriented this bill is.
Quote: Flanked by Florida elected officials in Israel, Governor Ron DeSantis on Wednesday ceremonially signed a measure that prohibits anti-Semitic speech in the state's public schools and universities.
It just is an outright censorship bill banning certain ideas about Israel.
The proposal will add religion as a protected class when it comes to discrimination.
Currently, people are protected from discrimination based on race, ethnicity, national origin, gender, material status, or disability.
The legislation lays out examples of what would be considered anti-Semitism, including, quote, making mendacious, dehumanizing, demonizing, or stereotypical allegations about Jews, or quote, the power of Jews as a collective, such as, quote, the myth about a world Jewish conspiracy or Jews controlling the media economy, government, or other societal institutions.
Perish the thought.
If you pointed out that Larry Ellison, the single largest ever donor to the Friends of the IDF, Just bought Paramount and CBS and CBS News through his son, and then made Barry Weiss the head of CBS News, and then at the same time is leading a consortium that will control and buy TikTok and is also trying to buy to force Warner Brothers to sell itself to him with all of its properties, including CNN, instead of the Netflix, like they want.
And you suggest that that was kind of a part of a strategy that Benjamin Netanyahu talked about of recontrolling American media and putting it in the hands of pro-Israel loyalists, including social media.
That would be banned.
You can't say that under this law that DeSantis signed in Israel.
The article goes on.
The bill, HB 741, also defines anti-Semitism as quote, accusing Jewish citizens of being more loyal to Israel.
So if you wanted to say, like, hey, I think Barry Weiss or Ben Shepier seemed more loyal to Israel than the United States, this is banned.
Trump went to the Knesset a few months ago when Miriam Adelson was there and he said, Yeah, I once asked Miriam Adelson, look at her with all her money.
I once asked her, Do you like, who do you love more, the United States or Israel?
And he said, She refused to answer.
I think I got my answer.
Obviously, strongly implying Miriam Adelson is more loyal to Israel than the United States, even though she's a citizen of the United States.
That would be absolutely banned.
The measure will also ban certain speech against the state of Israel on campuses, such as quote, applying a double standard to Israel by requiring behavior of Israel that is not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation or focusing peace or focusing peace or human rights.
I mean, Ron DeSantis signed a censorship bill prohibiting ideas and opinions about Israel on college campuses in Florida, a place that's supposed to be the laboratory for free ideas and free speech since the Enlightenment.
And he signed that bill in Israel in front of Netanyahu, in front of Israeli officials.
How is this tolerated?
Especially by a movement that calls itself America First, there is, I don't know of any other country that would permit this, that would tolerate this.
It's only something American politicians get away with if they go to Israel.
Imagine being a Florida citizen and knowing that your speech was restricted because of a new law that Ron DeSantis signed in the country that you're no longer allowed to harshly criticize.
I mean, this should be the stuff that people go out on the streets over.
But it's done so kind of covertly, so quietly.
In a lot of ways, Americans have been inculcated with the idea that Israel is a country that we simply serve, and that's just how it is, especially Florida politicians.
That's a state I grew up in.
I grew up in South Florida from the time I was a little toddler until I was 18.
I know how politics there works.
Anyway, the more people who finally understand this happened, the better.