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March 17, 2022 - Firebrand - Matt Gaetz
34:02
Episode 31: How To End Putin's War – Firebrand with Matt Gaetz
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The embattled Congressman Matt Gaetz.
Matt Gaetz was one of the very few members in the entire Congress who bothered to stand up against permanent Washington on behalf of his constituents.
Matt Gaetz right now, he's a problem in the Democratic Party.
He could cause a lot of hiccups in passing applause.
So we're going to keep running those stories to keep hurting him.
If you stand for the flag and kneel in prayer, if you want to build America up and not burn her to the ground, then welcome, my fellow patriots!
You are in the right place!
This is the movement for you!
You ever watch this guy on television?
It's like a machine.
Matt Gaetz.
I'm a canceled man in some corners of the internet.
Many days I'm a marked man in Congress, a wanted man by the deep state.
They aren't really coming for me.
They're coming for you.
I'm just in the way.
We have a jam-packed show for you this week.
My reaction to the brewing feud between Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and the Walt Disney Corporation.
Also, I'm going to have an interview with Matthew Tiermond.
He's a journalist who has been covering the Putin ambitions, Poland's take, Ukraine's take, America's for quite some time.
It's going to really give you an insight into the key decision points that are driving the conflict there now and that may ultimately lead to a resolution.
We all know that media tycoons love war.
It juices ratings.
It attracts advertising dollars.
Just take CNN, a propaganda network that was losing credibility by the hour, losing viewers by the moment.
Their CEO left under circumstances that maybe tell us we weren't getting the full story.
CNN went from an average of 633,000 viewers in January To 1.75 million average viewers last week.
That's a 178% increase.
Most businesses would do almost anything for a jump like that.
I mean, look, CNN's numbers before this war, I mean, their average daily numbers were lower than some episodes of this very podcast.
Now politicians, they love war too.
They can seem like they have access to more high-stakes information.
They can wrap themselves in the flag.
I know that war is hell.
Though I have not been, I have seen what really gets wrapped in the flag at the end of the day.
It's our bravest patriots, not the TV generals or pundits.
My fellow lawmakers in both parties are obsessed over 150,000 Russians moving on Ukraine.
It's about the exact same number of illegal aliens that move into our country every month.
I'm more concerned with America's borders than Ukraine's.
It's increasingly a lonely place to be, but I make no apology for loving my neighbors more than Russia's.
America is a friend to liberty everywhere, but a custodian only of our own.
And Joe Biden's plan to replace Russian oil with Venezuelan or Iranian oil is needlessly foolish.
It would make Americans poorer and less safe.
My compassion for Ukrainians won't force my hand to hurt my own people.
Biden hates American energy so much he would openly create more energy production in Venezuela and Iran before Colorado and North Dakota.
America last, for sure.
And while Russian oil is indeed stained with blood, so is Iran's, so is Venezuela's.
Hard-working Americans shouldn't have to pay higher gas prices to support Maduro or Khomeini over Putin, especially since Putin and his military are going to get the money either way.
Don't just take my word for it.
General Richardson leads SouthCom.
She testified in the House Armed Services Committee this week that American energy payments to Venezuela would likely result in Venezuela buying arms from, you guessed it, Russia.
Which Russian capabilities are you most concerned about?
I'm concerned about the relationships that they have with Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Cuba.
Capabilities, not relationships.
Capabilities would be the aircraft, the tanks, the air defense systems that they try to help Venezuela maintain in Venezuela that's close to our homeland.
And so if Russia wanted to marshal all of their South American capabilities to do as much damage to the United States as they possibly could, what would they do?
I think that they would provide parts to these capabilities that are in Venezuela.
As we know, the deputy foreign minister probably about three or four weeks ago talked about not taking off the table about increasing infrastructure capacity within the region.
Right now, the Biden administration is working to potentially purchase oil from Venezuela.
If Venezuela saw a mass infusion of cash, what do you assess they would do with the money?
I don't know what Venezuela would do with the money, but...
That's concerning, right?
If we're making policy choices that could move a lot of resources into Venezuela, if your biggest worry about Venezuela is Russian military cooperation, isn't it possible that if Venezuela all of a sudden ended up with a lot more cash, that they would use it to buy Russian military equipment?
They could.
They also have quite a big humanitarian crisis on their hands as well.
Yes.
Humanitarian issues have never really been as important to Maduro as military activity, right?
That is true.
In the same hearing, Congressman Austin Scott of Georgia gave an ominous preview about how the circumstances in Russia could destabilize food supply and thus governments themselves.
Twelve months from now, I think we're going to be talking about the issue of hunger and the disruption of democracies in the Western Hemisphere because of the lack of food supply.
This is a direct result of Russia's incursion into the Ukraine.
It is going to come from the loss of the ability to put fertilizer on a lot of crops around the world.
My understanding is that Russians have now said they're going to withhold fertilizer from the rest of the world, including Countries like Brazil, who produce a tremendous amount of food supply.
Russia and Ukraine are responsible for about 12% of the calorie supply inside the United States, is my understanding.
If the Ukrainians are not able to plant their crops over the next couple of months, and it certainly does not look like they will be able to, there's going to be a tremendous disruption in the food supply.
And if the fertilizer is not able to come out of the Black Sea region, and it does not look like it's going to be able to, there's going to be a significant reduction in The global food supply.
Russia is a revisionist power run by a gangster government which steals from its own people, rapes the environment, and deposits its ill-gotten gains through its oligarchs in Swiss bank accounts and mansions in the Hamptons.
Russia wants to redraw the map of Europe.
In these and other dastardly endeavors, it's not alone.
There are many other gangster governments throughout the world, and many sit atop natural resources we require.
There are few good guys in Eastern Europe.
Ukraine is the third most corrupt country in the world, the most corrupt country in Europe.
Everyone is working for an angle, and none of them are thinking of America first, nor apparently are our own policy leaders.
Driving Asia's largest energy producer into the arms of Asia's largest energy consumer would create a Russia-China alliance that would endanger Americans far more than Russia's brutal belligerence.
And Ukraine, we already see more and more that Russia and China are working together to our peril.
And China is our pacing challenge, not Russia.
I agree with Director Burns of CIA. We should not have had NATO expansion up to Russia's borders.
It isn't America first to make promises to foreigners we can't and won't really defend.
It either creates this weird security welfare state and lures the well-meaning into a false sense of comfort.
You see, banning Russian energy imports asks poor and middle-class Americans to shoulder the burdens of Washington's policy blunders.
And it's unfair.
We can help Ukraine without hurting ourselves.
Russia isn't Iran or Cuba.
They're a nuclear power.
And these sanctions likely increase the possibility of nuclear war.
My neighbors will go fight that war just as they would fight any war, just as they always have, and just as they always will.
But far better solutions are available.
We can hunt down the assets of Putin and his oligarch cronies, wherever they may be, and sell those assets off and hold the funds in abeyance until such a point as the Russian people actually force their government to behave.
We can disrupt Russian espionage in the West with the latest technology, tools which the Russians and Chinese are deploying against us to hurt Americans.
It amazes me that we are more interested in kicking Russia out of Ukraine than, say, our own neighborhood, South America, the Caribbean, where their influence continues to grow and where their actions are malign.
We can increase American investment in the rare earths that are designed to build the future and ensure that we have the battery capability to not necessarily need so much Russian oil long-term, but we can make the decisions now to enhance those investments.
Sadly, sanctions, the strategy we're using, they rarely play out as their architects' hope.
They mostly enrich the elites in bad countries and harm the vulnerable.
I haven't seen Maduro losing any weight over the sanctions in Venezuela, and if sanctions worked as intended, Cuba would be a Caribbean Garden of Eden.
Not the hellhole it is today.
Washington keeps reaching for yesterday's tools to solve this challenge.
But what do you expect?
Ancient politicians don't have to think of the long-term consequences of their actions.
Putin is 69. Biden is 79. McConnell is 80. Pelosi is 81. We are seeing in real time the dangers of a world ruled by a gerontocracy.
The Soviet Union collapsed because its very old leaders were unable to think beyond the present.
Let's hope the same thing does not happen in America.
Matthew Tiermund is a Polish-American journalist.
He writes and thinks a lot about how leaders in Europe are reacting to America's politics and global politics.
He joins us now.
Matthew, you have been on the border of Poland and Ukraine within the last several days.
You're going back.
I'm going to get into your prognosis about how this is going to end in a moment.
But first, just kind of give us a scene regarding what's happening.
Sure.
Well, you know, I think that both sides can agree without dispute that Russia invaded Ukraine.
I hope that that's at least, you know, a single point of fact that all can agree on.
All the reasonings behind that, obviously, there's a lot more that's disputed and a lot of politics that finds its way into this conversation.
But Russia has invaded.
They'd already controlled two breakaway regions in the east and Crimea, which was isolated.
And I believe that's the main motive that Putin made this invasion, especially at this moment, with Western weakness and fecklessness, both out of the EU, the US and DC, obviously, and NATO, because he needs a Crimean land bridge.
Right now, the destabilization that has occurred post that invasion is he's gone deeper into the country beyond those regions, and he's surrounding cities, blockading them.
And he's trying to do this to get Pawn concession pieces that he can trade later to secure the territorial gains that are firmly his, and the realpolitik is, they are firmly his.
There's a good chunk of Ukraine that no matter how this outcome, how this plays out, will be Russian territory, even if Putin gets a bullet to the back of the head in coming weeks for whatever reason.
There are regions that will be gone from Ukraine and part of Russia.
So already the Eurasian geopolitical chessboard has changed incontrovertibly.
Do you think they get that in Brussels?
Do you think there's an appreciation that for this war to end, there is going to be a redrawing in the map of Europe?
Or is there an impression that Putin can be put back in his original box?
I think they do get that because, for all intents and purposes, for the last eight years since 2014, when Putin took these breakaway republics and Donbass and Luhansk, And Crimea.
There's limited will or fight to re-litigate that.
There was a referendum held in Crimea after Ukrainians were pushed out and the Russian side won an overwhelming mandate because there were no Ukrainians to vote against it.
Many of them went to Mariupol, a city between Russia and Crimea that is now under siege because that's an important part of the chessboard for him to connect all of these taken regions.
But the Luhansk and Donbass, a huge city, Donetsk, They've controlled that with little green men, his mercenaries, his supplied fighting force on the ground there for eight years.
There haven't been many Ukrainians there.
They fled.
There was already a Ukrainian refugee crisis in 14 and 15, where 2 million Ukrainians went to Poland, another million or so scattered to other parts of central Europe.
Obviously, the current refugee crisis dwarfs that.
You know, estimates are that's about 4 million, and probably if this persists, there'll be another 4 million.
And that's the largest migration of people out of one region in Europe into others, especially Poland, but it will have impact across the European Union and the entire continent based on the scale of it.
And how are leaders in Warsaw thinking about this refugee crisis?
Well, the first part of the puzzle for them is to manage the people coming across.
Just something as simple as that.
And it's not simple.
This is the most organized, I think, any time in modern history that there's been a refugee crisis of this scale.
And it's been this organized.
If you look back just a few years to the migrant crisis, economic migrants from the Third World, North Africa, the Middle East, Syria, and a dozen Third World countries that were Fleeing into Europe across the Mediterranean via a destabilized Libya, going to Italy, going to Hungary and trying to get to Germany and France.
That was incredibly disorganized.
It was also mostly able-bodied young men.
Versus here, you have women and children.
I was at the border and it is women and children.
Men are mandated between the ages of 18 and 60 to remain in Ukraine under a martial law like diktat to keep them defending their homeland.
They don't need much push on this.
To give you an example, in Warsaw, all these eastern Ukrainians that I was Talking about that, we're pushed out of Donbass in the East.
They all went to Poland, big cities, became Uber drivers, worked in restaurants.
And for instance, an Uber, you'd be able to get an Uber driven by Ukrainian for next to nothing.
Supply went up and price went way down.
And when I got to Warsaw a couple of weeks ago, you couldn't find a Ukrainian Uber driver.
And an Uber, instead of taking less than a minute, took 10 to 15 minutes and cost three times the price because the Ukrainians were Who came to Poland five, seven years ago, all went back to Ukraine to defend their homeland, which is kind of interesting.
You don't see that very often.
So it's women and children coming through.
A lot of men escort them to the border, and then they go back to the cities and to the regions where there's fighting, and they join the fight.
So how's it going to end, Matthew?
How's it going to end?
Some say we're headed for a six- to eight-month insurgency here after these cities are leveled.
You think that there could be a resolution quicker?
Yeah, I think it's going to be quicker.
I don't think Putin's military is up to this.
They expected to roll over these cities.
In two or three days, take the regions they wanted with ease, surround Kiev to put pressure on the political class, possibly kill a few leading politicians, and then have all of the upper hand in negotiating their withdrawal.
Now they're kind of quagmired.
50% of their hardware capacity is stuck in mud.
It doesn't work.
I mean, this is, I don't know, for the viewers who've seen Chernobyl, this is the kind of military advice he was getting in a communist system.
You just tell the autocrat what he wants to hear, otherwise you're going to the gulag.
Before, now many will go to the gulag for the failure of this operation.
He's going to see further destabilization.
When you're recruiting Syrians and Central African Republic citizens to come and fight for you, you're not winning.
And so he does not have much wherewithal to continue this for that much longer.
If you see right now, there are two aggressive moves he's going to make.
There's one he made about two, three days ago when he started Coming from Belarus in the north with his vassal state, Lukashenko, the head of Belarus, he sent troops in and they went after a small city called Lutsk, which is very close to the NATO and Poland peripheral border.
That is an act of aggression of symbolism, of saying we're getting close to your border.
But the two big moves he has to make now, one is he's now bringing his navy into play to shell Odessa, which is The third largest city after Kharkiv, Kiev, Kharkiv, and Odessa.
And in Odessa, it's a very Ukrainian city.
They will defend it.
He won't get it, but it is strategically important because it's right next to Moldova, which would be his hope for a revanchist next move.
I don't think he'll be able to make that move.
Originally, I think he thought he could and get up against the Romanian NATO peripheral border, which is a much weaker one than the Polish one, given that the amount of military spend Poland has has put into upgrading their defense and offensive systems last ten years.
By that theory, then, Odessa becomes the key city to deprive Putin of a Black Sea strategy.
Because if you look at how he wants to connect these areas of eastern Ukraine that he's recognized as independent republics to Crimea and then down toward Moldova, it would seem that the Odessa front is one of the most critical in the next, you know, 72 hours.
Yeah, no, it's important if he can get it, it strengthens his position.
I don't think he can.
He can probably shell the city pretty well and put it in a defensive posture.
But ultimately, what he needs and what he wants, and this is where it's going to be, shock and awe, is Mariupol.
Mariupol is the 10th largest city.
It's halfway between the entry point to the Crimean Peninsula and where the Russian border starts on the Don River, Rostov-on-Don being the city.
And a lot of the Ukrainian Crimeans fled there when he took over Crimea itself.
And they went to Mariupol.
So they're holding out really well.
He needs the city to fall.
And I think because of the desperation of his weakened military state, at this point, he is going to need to go full Grozny.
Grozny was the capital of Chechnya that he absolutely leveled 10, 12 years ago when Chechnya was threatening to assert its independence and become a breakaway state within Russia.
And he violently quelled that, killed tens of thousands.
And now Chechnya is a lapdog.
He's got his puppet installed there and he uses Chechen mercenaries even in Ukraine.
They were some of the more savage fighters that he was using to go after the politicians in Kiev.
The Ukrainian government smoked them, which was kind of interesting to see how quick that happened.
But Mariupol, he's going to shell it like Grozny is my guess, because this is his whole reason for doing this right now is to create this Crimean land bridge.
Crimea is a peninsula, but it might as well be an island.
And he's had to feed it and supply it for eight years by waterway.
He needs an overland route.
All the rest of the regions that he has control of are lost leaders.
Now they redraw the maps.
He has to pay those pensioners pensions.
And that's not something he's economically even before these sanctions.
Able to do.
He had a very good chaotic situation there where he supplied them with weaponry to defend the contact line and maintain control.
But Mariupol is the absolute key.
It is why he did this whole exercise and this is why this moment was now the weak West.
And he went shock and awe, trying to get to Kiev, trying to take over as much of the country as he could to negotiate that firm settlement that he'd maintain, this Crimean land bridge.
So it's going to get ugly in Maripole.
Today, they're the first corridor, humanitarian corridor, where they let 20,000 people out.
But this is a city of half a million.
We don't know how many people are there, but you've got to figure it's 300,000, 400,000 still.
So what are the contours of the deal then that you think would bring this to an end?
A referendum in Donbass, so the two breakaway republics, Donbass and Luhans, which have no Ukrainians, it's all Russian, so much like Crimea, he'd win that referendum for full ascension into the Russian state.
The Crimean land bridge, and we'll see what the will of the world is depending on how violent he has to get in destroying the city to take over this territory.
But that is the number one most imperative for him.
And then He will also want some guarantee of no NATO ascension for Ukraine, which is a far cry from where it was 20 years ago.
20 years ago, he was saying if Ukraine wants to join NATO, that's going to be a decision for Ukraine, NATO, the EU, and all those powers that be.
It doesn't have anything to do with me.
In 2004, with the start of the color revolutions, that changed.
And he cannot have Ukraine ascend to the EU. Not that I think that is a realistic Well, we heard that from no less than Zelensky.
Quite recently, Zelensky came out and said, look, it is not as if we are, you know, in a position to be accepted into NATO right now.
And we already have seen Germany and the Netherlands object to any EU membership.
And so I guess the question would be, what is Ukraine giving up other than the obvious territory that you just described?
But what do they give up geopolitically In a deal like that?
Well, they certainly, you know, we've already been, and there is a fair argument that the right makes, that we were moving into what Putin declared was his near abroad, and he drew his lines in the sand, and unlike Obama, he stood by them.
Our movement with NATO. Kamala Harris at the Munich...
Wait a second, wait a second, Matthew.
Does that mean that NATO expansion in the Baltics was a bad idea?
No, I think that they were much more well equipped to join NATO because of their governments, because of their commitments to collective defense.
Estonia was paying the 2% back when there was only the UK, the US, Poland, Greece and Estonia.
Now Lithuania and Latvia have been paying into the collective defense.
They are more into the Scandinavian sphere.
Ukraine is the ultimate buffer because geography is destiny.
And there's no mountains.
There is a flat plain, the Eurasian plain, that puts Russia at incredible risk for hundreds of years.
It's why these regions have been disputed.
But Ukraine will certainly be giving up a lot of territory, economic potency.
I mean, it's going to need a Marshall Plan.
Cities are absolutely leveled.
It's the farming sector, which is a huge, huge economic driver for the whole region and supplies wheat to much of the third world.
That is all going to be offline.
There'll be no planting of grain this season.
That's going to throw the regional economics and global food supply into disarray.
Ukraine is going to be a much weaker state.
The governance is still very, let's say, early stage democracy.
The legislature is much more democratically elected, but a lot of the attacks On Zelensky and the people around Zelensky are accurate.
Ukraine, the governance structure was so corrupt.
There's a reason why it was ground zero for Hunter Biden's activity, which Schweitzer and I did a lot of work on, and many other globalist left-wing elite laundering money through Ukraine.
And the ability for that to continue to occur in the weakened post-Ukrainian state is probably going to be a lot less so, which, you know, maybe that's a good thing.
How these deals come together will obviously be a feature of what happens over the next several days on the ground.
One of the big, I think, moments of buffoonery for the Biden administration involved Poland and these MiGs.
From my standpoint, there would have been a willing receiver of those MiGs in Ukraine.
There would have been a willing provider in Poland.
But when Jake Sullivan went on the Sunday shows and ran his mouth about it, when we got our, in the South, we'd say we got Our ass up over our elbows a little bit.
What would be the perspective on how all this played out in Warsaw, do you think?
Well, their asses are certainly chapped.
There was a lot of miscommunication, and I personally think that these levels of miscommunication are a feature, not a bug.
These are supposedly the greatest geopolitical strategists we have, who have advanced fellowships from Johns Hopkins and SAIS and the Atlantic Council.
So they know that these levels of communication, if you do not hold your word, if you miscommunicate, misdirect, it creates ripple effects that are very adverse.
I think that they were happy to weaken Poland, much like they would be Hungary if Hungary was in a similar position, because just frankly, they don't like this government.
It's a conservative government.
So if it was a Donald Tusk-led government, the former head of state who was the head of the European Union as well after he was turfed out of Polish politics, then they would have been probably a lot more pliant working hand in hand, hand in glove, and would have gone through and followed through with their word.
This was a...
Really ludicrous leaving Poland hanging, and I know Poland's not happy about it.
Polish Prime Minister Morawiewski is in Kiev today with Kaczynski, the head of the party in DPM, with the prime minister.
But it could have been done, right, Matthew?
It could have been done.
It was just that so much discussion about it publicly created risks that Poland wasn't willing to shoulder in terms of potential retaliation.
And, you know, I can understand the frustration.
Poland was not going to be the direct giver for the simple reason that being on the NATO peripheral border and within cannon fire of Russian forces in Ukraine, they did not want to be the sort of escalating tipping point.
And the US doing it has a lot more optical commitment.
I think it was escalatory, but it would have been a lot safer a move where Putin would have had to think about what his next move was versus just making Poland the target of his next sort of breach of state.
So Poland was justly apprehensive.
They thought they had guidance from the U.S. that we came out with a really good workaround.
And then the U.S. bailed.
You know, the reports say that Biden just said it would be too escalatory.
Well, that kind of ship sailed.
They probably shouldn't have went out and started selling this idea publicly, you know, and then pull the plug on it.
I think that just made everyone continually look more feckless.
Final question.
One of the things that Donald Trump maintained in his relationship with Vladimir Putin was strategic ambiguity.
Not always forecasting every move, not always describing every specific feature of every red line.
Do you think that strategic ambiguity is going to have to be part of the new matrix of our dynamic with Vladimir Putin and Russia?
Yeah, I mean, it should be in theory, but we're not dealing with those who are playing 4D chess and are good negotiators.
These people have political agendas.
You know, right now, the White House is probably more concerned about how do they get the Iran deal back online?
And maybe they'll come to an agreement with Putin over that.
So that way we'll have multiple allies, including our NATO allies, weakened from the outcome.
This is not a strong U.S. This is not Reagan.
This is not Trump.
I mean, Trump, as you know, we widely saw and I've been hearing the story for a while, is he said, you know, you invade Ukraine on my watch and, you know, Moscow is not going to be around for much longer.
And as he said, even if it was five percent, 10 percent taken seriously, that, as you call strategic ambiguity, was enough.
You know, Teddy Roosevelt, speak softly and carry a big stick.
Well, Trump speak loudly and he might have a really big stick.
That's right.
At least tweet meanly when necessary.
Matthew, where can people follow up on your reporting as you go back into the region and continue to get these very important insights?
So just right now, Getter and just all the different conversations I'm having with, you know, good-looking guys like you.
So Matthew Terramont, T-Y-R-M-A-N-D, on Getter.
Twitter is just so dead.
It's just, what's the point?
And just all social media.
You know, when they kicked Trump at MTG off, it just wasn't any fun anymore.
I'm with you.
My wife likes Get Her Better, too.
And listen to her.
She is one of the best things about you.
If not the best.
Thanks for joining me on Firebrand, Matthew.
Thanks for your insights.
Look forward to your continued updates.
For quite some time in the state of Florida, if the Walt Disney Corporation opposed a piece of legislation in the state capitol, it was deemed to have a fatal rodent problem and it was unlikely to become law.
Disney had enormous power in Florida legislative politics, in part because they employed an army of lobbyists to dole out millions of dollars in political donations.
I'm talking about millions of dollars.
And in exchange, they expected favorable treatment from lawmakers, maybe a little more than their fair share.
The lobbyists were there to enforce the implicit deal.
I mean, look at what Florida did to bend over backwards for Disney over the years.
Florida created a state agency out of nothing, largely to subsidize Disney's vast marketing budget through an entity called Visit Florida.
It's quite literally corporate welfare.
Florida created an entire municipality, a city, just to give infrastructure grants to Disney directly on Disney property.
Want to know why Florida doesn't have stronger laws against illegal immigration?
Disney supports illegal immigration.
They love that it's downward pressure on wages.
Florida's premises liability laws have basically been written by Disney for 20 years.
But everything is going to change now.
For the better.
Disney CEO Bob Chappick says Disney will pause all political donations in Florida.
This is great news for Floridians.
Disney will no longer have outsized political power more than regular folks.
The Disney CEO explained the basis for this decision in a memo to co-workers.
You needed me to be a stronger ally in the fight for equal rights, and I let you down.
I am sorry.
He should know that things don't usually work out for those who grovel at the feet of the Woketopians.
But apparently, this Disney CEO is taking it personally that Florida passed legislation to keep schooling about schooling.
They call it the don't say gay bill, but that's a misnomer.
It's really just legislation that keeps instructors within the guardrails of academic instruction.
At a time when Americans are falling behind the rest of the world in math and science, you'd think we'd want to focus more on those things.
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis is a supporter of this legislation.
He replied to Disney with this statement.
And when you have companies that have made a fortune off being family friendly and catering to families and young kids, they should understand that parents of young kids do not want this injected into their kids kindergarten classroom.
They do not want their first graders to go and be told that they can choose an opposite gender.
That is not appropriate for those kids.
And so if you're family friendly, understand The parents who are actually raising families want to have their rights respected.
And I also think that if you have companies like a Disney that are going to say and criticize parents' rights, they're going to criticize the fact that we don't want transgenderism in kindergarten and first grade classrooms.
And so in Florida, our policy is going to be based on the best interest of Florida citizens, not on the musing of world cooperation.
DeSantis is right.
As part of his penance to the Woketopian gods, Disney is donating $5 million to the Human Rights Campaign.
They say it's to be used for LGBTQ plus purposes.
Here's the thing.
Disney doesn't give a damn about human rights, so long as they can make a profit.
This is the credit slide for the filming of their hit movie, Mulan.
They literally thanked the publicity department of the Chinese Communist Party in Xinjiang, as well as the Turpan Municipality Public Security Bureau.
Xinjiang is where Uyghur Muslims are interned in concentration camps, beaten, tortured, forced into labor camps.
Disney has no problem praising, thanking, and associating with the Chinese Communist Party.
But their association with Florida leaders like Ron DeSantis who stand up for parents?
Well, that is just a bridge too far for Disney.
Spare me.
Disney used to be a source of great pride for my state.
Imagination's Fountainhead.
Now, they're just far too much like many of the Fortune 100 businesses in America.
Woke and unrecognizable.
Now California Governor Gavin Newsom has noticed this kerfluffle.
He's called on Disney to divest in Florida and move investments to California.
Maybe California and Disney deserve each other.
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