James Fishback on DeSantis’s Attack on Free Speech, Randy Fine’s Bloodlust, & America Last Globalism
James Fishback is running for governor in Florida. Pretty soon, all winning Republican politicians will talk like this.
Paid partnerships with:
Beam: Go to https://ShopBeam.com/Tucker use code TUCKER and get up to 40% off Beam's Dream powder.
SimpliSafe: Visit https://simplisafe.com/TUCKER to claim 50% off a new system. There's no safe like SimpliSafe.
Battalion Metals: Shop fair-priced gold and silver. Gain clarity and confidence in your financial future at https://battalionmetals.com/tucker
#TuckerCarlson #JamesFishback #RonDesantis #RandyFine #ByronDonalds #BenShapiro #Florida #identitypolitics #Israel #economy #news #politics #podcast
Chapters:
0:00 Why Is James Fishback Running for Florida Governor?
11:18 How Florida's Economy Is Being Sabotaged
15:13 Randy Fine and Ron DeSantis's Anti-Free Speech Laws
21:45 Why Does Florida Give So Much Money to Israel?
28:02 How Randy Fine Tried to Intimidate Fishback Into Not Running
33:43 Is Byron Donalds Bought and Paid For?
40:59 The Identity Politics Taking Over the Right
47:08 Why Does Ben Shapiro Have So Much Disdain for White, Christian Men?
50:19 Fishback Responds to the Attacks Against Him
1:00:07 Why Fishback Changed His Views on Israel
1:05:45 Can Fishback Actually Win?
1:09:40 Florida Lt. Gov. Jay Collins Wants to Limit Free Speech
And I got to tell you, Tucker, it's really hard to be an American in America these days.
It's really hard for Floridians who quite literally put this state on the map.
They're not being forced out of this state because they can't afford to live here anymore.
All while illegal immigrants still get the free stuff from the Biden years, all while H-1B still come into our state and take jobs that belong to Americans here in Florida.
And then I think the last straw was this idea of Washington, D.C. negotiating a trade deal with China, and then 600,000 foreign students are going to come to our universities, maybe a third of them to Florida colleges, where their taxpayer-funded universities are going to have to give up their seats from Florida kids from Charlotte County or Lee County to kids from Shanghai and Beijing.
It didn't make any sense.
And so I'm running because I'm the only- That's literally true.
Literally.
That's part of the current framework, this bilateral framework between the U.S. and China right now is that D.C. is now as a concession to the Chinese in this tariff war that we're going to have to accept 600,000 Chinese foreign students at our schools.
So University of Florida, Florida State, UCF, USF.
Now, I think it's easy to get lost in all those numbers, but just take one kid from a small fishing village in Florida and say, hold on, your ability to go to a horticulture program at the University of Florida has now been put on pause.
Your entire life has been shelved because we need to have a grand negotiating strategy with China and tariffs and the AI arms race.
It's destroying lives here in Florida.
It's just the latest analogy of we're losing sight of what the America First Movement is.
In fact, we'll be inferior to them in a sense because when you have this DC mandate coming down that says, hey, because of our grand strategy with China, because the U.S.-China, the Sino-U.S. relationship is on the line, wink, wink, nod, nod, in order to maintain détente with Beijing and Xi Jinping, we need this kid to get in.
And it's not going to ever be a direct order, but it's going to be implied in the zeitgeist that, you know, those pesky Americans, you know, the ones that paid to build this university, they deserve.
And forget this idea of fairness and who deserves what.
Just objectively speaking, Florida kids who grew up here know the state best.
The indoctrination in our schools, which maybe is the only silver lining from COVID is all the parents actually knew what was going on in the classroom.
The white guilt lessons, you know, to the white kids, we don't want the teachers telling the white kids to apologize.
And we don't want the teachers also telling the black kids that there's something somehow wrong with them and they're systemically oppressed and they can never make it.
You know, my posture on all of this is I think it's conservatives.
We have to stop playing defense, stop wagging the finger at things we don't like and start actually having concrete, falsifiable solutions.
So this issue of China, here's my solution, very simple.
On day one, my first executive order as governor next January is to raise tuition on all foreign students to $1 million a year.
So, Tucker, when they can't pay, they're out and our kids are back in their destinies, their lives restored at our great colleges.
Well, I should say they pay full freight relative in that moment to what the tuition is relative to the in-state student.
But think about the in-state student, 18 years old, probably worked a job in Florida, lived their whole life.
Their parents lived their whole life there, possibly.
So all of those taxes that they paid over their 18 years, their parents 45 years, collectively built that university, funded dormitories, janitors, professors.
And so it is full freight in an instantaneous sense.
But if you take a holistic view, the kid who just got here from Shenzhen, who doesn't know what a Florida orange juice, none of that can't possibly, both in an economic sense, but I think, I mean, not to sound gay, but in a spiritual sense, you know, like in a spiritual sense, does not represent our state and our heritage.
I think that was the last straw, to tell you the truth, because I met with a lot of college students in my life before this, which is to say four and a half weeks ago.
I've been running an investment firm called Azoria that actually launched at all places at Mar-a-Lago last December, 2024.
Kevin Roberts was there, President Trump, Kathy Wood.
And the firm was based on this idea that instead of channeling money into companies that hate America, why don't we channel money into companies that unapologetically stand for American values, like meritocracy, like colorblindness?
So in 2025, I'm proud to say we channeled up to $40 million of investor capital in companies that were doing the crazy thing of not hiring on race and gender and hiring on skill and merit.
And my company, Azoria, it's actually, it's ETF got delisted by our board of trustees.
They're supposed to be independent, but it got delisted because we submitted an amendment to them saying we wanted to now exclude companies that abuse the H-1B program.
We said, look, this abuse, it is systematic.
It is systemic.
It's hurting American workers.
And we gave them a five-page research paper that said it's actually hurting the bottom line of these companies because they're bringing in cheap foreign slave labor that doesn't actually add to the synergy of the company.
It leads to higher attrition.
It breaks down productivity, et cetera.
And their response was, you're a racist.
And they delisted our fund and the board of trustees of the title financial group in October, just nine days after saying, hey, here's our formal amendment to broaden the scope of our investment fund to not just exclude companies that are doing the DEI stuff, but actually exclude companies that are doing something that's far more insidious, which is you're a white guy?
No, you don't get a job.
We want an Indian guy to do it for half the price.
And it's interesting to hear you say that as a gubernatorial candidate, because even like six months ago, hearing that from an aspiring politician would have been totally shocking.
And it does seem like maybe because of you and people like you saying it more, just like who could disagree with that?
And so I was down in Frostproof, and this was a community that was teeming with life just 15, 20 years ago.
The peak of our citrus industry was the 2005 harvest.
230 million boxes of citrus.
This last season, only 14 million.
And this was predominantly a white man's industry.
And when I went there and I saw what used to be a small movie theater, now a Dollar General, what used to be a family-owned grocery store, now some weird perverted liquor store.
When I see entire towns across my state, whether it's Frostproof, Pahoki, Bell Glade, Canal Point, Moorhaven, utterly hollowed out, and the primary victims of what is effectively this America-last globalism that has prioritized other nations and other corporations' interest over our own people, it really does hit hard that we have been sold a bag of goods.
And the biggest victims in all of it are actually predominantly white men, to be completely honest.
I mean, the victimhood, not to be a victim, but the victimhood is very far-reaching.
But if you want to flip the caste system over, you'd be hard pressed to find someone more oppressed in my state right now than a rural white Christian man who relied on cattle, on citrus, on manufacturing.
My own dad was a tree trimmer for 20 years.
The devastating Haitian earthquake happened in January of 2010.
And then it was this brilliant idea from a guy named Barack Hussein Obama to let 100 Haitians who were here illegally just stay here and get work authorization.
Now, of course, they can't become SAT tutors.
So what happens?
They do manual labor, like tree trimming.
Next thing you know, my dad has lost his business of 20 years through no fault of his own, but because the open border legitimized that labor.
And now I'm living on food stamps with my parents.
We're on the brink of bankruptcy.
Thank God we didn't have to go that far.
But that is a real concern.
And I felt it in my own community, quite literally in my own family.
The new year is a chance to get your priorities in order.
And sleep ought to be at the top of that list.
If you take care of yourself by getting a good rest, you're fully yourself.
You can serve people.
That's why we recommend Beam.
Everyone who works on the show uses this American company to help them rest at night.
And unlike the junk pushed by Big Pharma, Beam's Dream Powder is clean.
There are no fillers, no weird synthetic stuff you can't pronounce, just real healthy ingredients to help you fall asleep fast and stay asleep through the night.
So when you wake up, you feel sharp, you focused, ready to face and dominate your day.
Beam's Dream Powder has already improved over 28 million nights of sleep by their calculation.
A bunch have been on our staff.
So trust us, give this stuff a shot.
Beam is giving the show's listeners a fresh discount to start the year.
Visit shopbeam.com slash Tucker.
Use the code Tucker to get up to 40% off Beam's Dream Powder.
And I grew up in Broward County, which is obviously a very urban place now, but where I grew up in Davy in West Broward, near the Everglades, we had citrus groves out there when I was a kid.
And so you could quite literally go out to like a flamingo gardens and you could smell, you could smell that orange scent on a crisp.
Look, I'm not going to sit here and blame Xi Jinping.
He's doing what he thinks is best for his country.
And that means screwing us over.
I guess that's it.
But I can't sit here and say, look, the Chinese are guilty of the fentanyl crisis.
These precursors come from interior of China, get shipped to Mexico, get pressed into fentanyl pills and sent across the southern border.
But really, it is our leaders that have the ultimate responsibility.
They're the last line of defense.
So I think as Republicans, we need to grow up and stop blaming all of our problems and embracing this left-wing victimhood culture.
And so, look, China, this, China, that.
Here's my solution as Florida governor.
Any scientist in the world who wants to develop a strand of citrus that is impervious to greening, we're going to pay you $1 billion cash.
If you can prove, and we'll grow it and we'll do it for 18 months, if you take the best scientist in the world, and they may be in Iran of all places, it doesn't matter.
If there's a scientist or a group of scientists in the world who want to step up and actually solve a problem that has torn asunder entire communities, it's unemployed men and women, hollowed out entire towns across my state, we're going to pay you a billion dollars because what that industry represented, that would merely be an investment in bringing back the number one thing that put my state on the map.
I always 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 slavery, but you have to go kiss someone else's wall to show your obedience.
And the issue is if you look at if you look at the statutory definition of anti-Semitism here in Florida, which is 10105 in our state statute, it actually says that criticizing the Jewish state, that would be Israel, holding them to a double standard, denying them their place on the world stage.
So if you're a college student at FSU and you're having an earnest, good faith debate with someone who sympathizes with the Israeli cause, you at the Palestinian Cause, whatever the case is, and one of you says Netanyahu is a war criminal or Israel is committing genocide, you could literally be punished and expelled from your taxpayer-funded university by that.
What, you know, I hold the governor to the incredible work that he did during COVID, education, all of that.
I think that what's quite telling just recent events is maybe you heard a foreign leader was here in Florida last week, one Benjamin Netanyahu's fifth visit to the United States.
He's a total criminal.
He's a depraved little man, to be completely honest.
And he was here.
And, you know, all of this, Ashley Moody, Bernie Moreno, all came down to meet with him.
The governor didn't.
Governor DeSantis didn't, but the lieutenant governor, Jay Collins, did.
And so I think it's easy for us to go back and say, you know, why did the governor do this, that, or the other several years ago?
But at this moment in time, when the governor had the opportunity to meet with Netanyahu, it seems like he deliberately chose not to, which was an absolutely wise decision.
But Jay Collins did meet with him, which is actually rather interesting because 40 hours before that meeting happened, Israeli media said that I am a quote threat, that I am a bigger threat to Israel than Donald Trump's.
And because I push out a policy that was actually quite popular with almost everybody, and it is the fact that Florida lends Israel $385 million as we sit here today.
And so what I said is at day one as governor, executive order number two would be to fully divest all foreign bonds of any country.
And there's only one country that we invest in abroad.
Is I said, I would then take the $385 million and create a statewide down payment assistance program for young married couples because we have to protect home ownership so young folks across our state can buy a place to live, get married, and have kids.
The Florida state government, state chief financial officer, Jimmy Petronas, who's now in Congress, he announced that to stand with Israel, we were going to start buying tens of millions, which became hundreds of millions of dollars in Israeli bonds.
This was a purely political decision.
It wasn't a decision that says, hey, the yield, the rate of return on Israeli debt is actually quite high, so we should buy some.
No, it was to stand in solidarity with a foreign country.
We are going to take taxpayer money and lend it in the form of a sovereign government bond purchase.
They weren't even hiding how nakedly political they were.
A country is going to war, is currently being confronted by a soon-to-be nuclear power in Iran, they say, is escalating tensions with all of its neighbors, just objectively, forget what country that is.
And now you think it's a good time to compromise your fiduciary responsibility and buy their government debt?
I mean, like, can you imagine someone saying like a good long-term investment, right?
Can you imagine someone saying like, whoever they are and saying, like, we just invaded Iraq in 03.
We should just stand with Iraq and buy their bonds.
Like, forget who Saddam Hussein was.
Like, why would it be a good idea to buy Iraqi government bonds?
Right.
And by the way, they don't offer a terrible amount of interest.
Actually, Israeli bonds often yield less than U.S. treasuries.
No way.
Yeah.
So it's not like they were yielding 20% and they were actually an objectively good decision for our pensioners.
No, it was a nakedly political position without any risk-reward.
It was all risk and no reward to appease the Israeli government.
So the donors in Florida, so there are a lot of very rich, very active donors in Florida who support Israel also.
Why don't they send their money?
I don't understand.
Like if you're a billionaire, why are you pressuring some poor low-IQ Florida politician to spend taxpayer money on a foreign country when you could just send your own money to a foreign country?
It's literally prohibited in their investment framework that you cannot buy the bonds of any country, Luxembourg, Switzerland, the UK.
And those actually may be good investments, but Israel, in their own words, to stand in solidarity with them after October 7th, we decided to send $385 million.
And that's why, as Florida governor, I'm going to divest that full $385 million and then start a statewide with that money, a statewide down payment assistance program.
Because right now, you got young couples across the state who are renting.
They're staring down the prospect of the 50-year mortgage.
They can't feel like they have any equity in their future.
But I think this is the frustration, not with the president, but with a lot of his advisors, is there are real concerns about affordability in my state.
And number one is homeownership, right?
If you can't buy a home, can you get married?
If you can't get married, can you have kids?
If you can't have kids, then what on earth is the point, Tucker?
And so I think the president instinctively recognizes that we have to solve this problem, but the solution isn't to go from 30 years of debt slavery to 50 years so you can save $100 a month.
I mean, my dad and I did the math.
And for the average home here in Florida, a 50-year mortgage would mean that if you paid $250,000 to the mortgage servicer, you would own precisely $18,000 of equity in your home.
This is literally what was called out biblically, what we were warned against.
That we are, I think, cucked to the point that we have to bend over.
We can't own anything.
We can't have jobs in our country anymore.
And if we ask questions about why we sent $385 million, if I stand up as a candidate for governor, I am smeared by the effectively the state media of Israel and called a threat to their country.
I heard some Cheez-Its rumbling around in the back seat.
I know that sound, Tucker.
I know the difference between a Cheez-It and a Pringle.
I did.
But, gosh.
So he calls me.
He says, I hear you're running against Byron.
And I said, it'd be Byron Donaldson.
That'd be Byron Donalds.
Yes.
It goes with many names.
We have H1 Byron, Apache Shakur.
We can get into that later.
But I hear you're running against Byron Donald's.
And I said, yeah, I'm thinking about it.
I perspective.
I said, I'm thinking about it, Congressman.
And he said, well, you know, you should know that it's not very nice to Byron if you did that.
I don't care what's nice to Byron, Congressman.
I'm fighting for my state.
My state is getting sold off in pieces by the property developers.
It's getting sold off.
What were once citrus groves and cattle ranches are now going to be scam altman's next AI data center?
That's not what we stand for here in Florida.
And so for 42 minutes, he proceeds to call me out.
And I'm just listening.
I'm brushing my teeth.
I'm on mute.
I'm just let him talk.
But it was very clear.
And this is before I had formally announced, but it was publicly talked about that I was seriously considering running, that a sitting member of Congress in Washington, D.C. at the time was taking 42 minutes out of his day, not to talk to a constituent about one of their needs, but to intimidate me into not challenging.
He has power in the sense that he's the only, he was the only Jewish Republican in Florida in the state House, state Senate.
He, of course, then when Mike Waltz got appointed to national security advisor and did such a brilliant job there, his seat was vacant.
And then Randy Fine quickly moved into the district and decided to run for Congress after quite literally two months beforehand, being elected to the state Senate after having served in the state house.
And that's why I'm proud to support my friend Aaron Baker, who's now running against Randy Fine, primarying him.
And of course, the president came in and endorsed him as well, but a lot of very powerful people pulled strings.
And it's actually a very deep red district that he only ended up winning by five points, which just shows you how deeply detested he is by the people of Florida's sixth congressional district.
I called the Speaker of the House when that happened, and I don't get involved in anything really, but I said, I don't know how you can have this guy in the Republican Party.
I'm not going to vote for that.
I would never vote for a party that endorses killing kids.
And I think whichever side of that conflict, and I think most Americans, they resonate with the words of President Trump is you want the killing to stop, whether it's in Ukraine, Russia, Israel, it doesn't matter.
And his idea of making Florida better, in his own words, he wants to, quote, speed up the construction of AI data centers.
His words.
He said in a private meeting with donors, I have a friend of mine who was there, and he said, what do you think about Fishback's proposal to ban Blackstone from buying single-family homes and forcing us to rent as opposed to own?
And what Byron told the donor in that meeting is that Blackstone bailed the economy.
They saved us in the financial crisis.
They deserve to be able to buy those homes.
That's capitalism.
That was his response.
And I say, look, the goal here is we need to look out for our own people when a family of four is getting outbid by $1,500 by a private equity firm that's taking Chinese money at the capital gains rate, as opposed to the rate that you and I pay and everyone else pays.
And he thinks that because of what Blackstone did, which they didn't actually do, what Blackstone allegedly did in 2008 gives them cover to run roughshod over all of us and to take homes from under our feet.
Because what I have said, executive order number three, is that I would ban Blackstone, any private equity firm, any Airbnb speculator, and any foreign national from buying a single family home in this state of Florida.
You don't get to have a right to our homes.
If you or I were to go to Canada right now and buy a single family home, we would legally be prohibited from doing so because say what you want about Trudeau or Carney.
I guess they got the memo that Canadian, that Canada is for Canadians.
America's for Americans.
And I don't think it's okay that a Chinese national, a Russian national or an Israeli national can come here and outbid a family that's known this state for two, three generations and say, you know what, that home that you wanted to buy to get married to your wife and to have three kids, that's not available anymore because a foreign national wants to vacation here for five weeks out of the year.
Well, I get a very positive reaction because I think, and you've pointed this out, I loved your speech at Amfest because you recognized that America First is not owned exclusively by any party.
In fact, if you went out and polled that very question, that framework that you put out, which is the American government should exclusively look out for the interests of its citizens, 90% of not just Republicans, of literally everyone would agree with that statement.
Yes.
And so what I was amazed by is we had a meet and greet in Tampa Bay this past weekend, and we had 50 or so people RSVP.
Over 200 showed up and a dozen on their way out said, I wasn't even a Republican.
I'm an independent.
I'm a Democrat.
I am changing my party affiliation so I can vote for you in the primary.
Because just like South Carolina, you had Paul on recently, just like South Carolina, Florida is a red state.
The next governor, mathematically, will be a Republican.
Yeah, I mean, if it's the Republican who laughs at dead children, I'm not voting Republican.
I'm not going to ever vote for anyone like that.
Anyone who's pro-death, who's against human dignity for hate speech laws, who doesn't think that providing the next generation a chance to get married and have kids and own a home, if you're not on board with that, then I have nothing in common with you.
Which is actually quite interesting because I got a call from the Foundational Black American Society here in Florida who reminded me that Byron's mother is Jamaican.
He is Panamanian.
And they found it quite insulting in their words that he would try to claim victimhood of slavery without a single descendant of American slaves in his family.
If anyone is, and you know, someone rolls in from Ghana and like, you know, gets an MSNBC slot and starts telling, you know, speaking on behalf of black people, it's like, shut up, honey.
And so for Byron's group, his team to call me and essentially our entire supporting base racists for saying that you're a slave when quite literally you took $45 million.
You won't tell us what you agreed to to take that money this early in a primary, which is unprecedented.
You know this, how unprecedented that kind of money is in an uncontested primary until now.
But secondarily, to actually go out and try to gaslight us and think that you're just one of those guys that has been here, you know, since the early 1800s and your family was in the struggle too, you're not.
And that's a very interesting term that the foundational black Americans use.
It's called tether.
They're tethering these tethers like Byron Donald's.
They come here, literally one generation in, and they try to just sit around and act so folksy that we're all part of the same struggle and we're all down on our and we need to fight against.
No, you just got here, dude.
Like the Haitians, like the guys from Ghana who just got here, you don't get to just be a part of our system and then lecture us about how our country went wrong.
Well, and if you're a Republican, supposedly conservative Republican to throw around the term racist, I mean, that's what I personally, I'll speak for myself, I voted against that in November last year.
And I'll tell you, the identity politics of the right is probably the gravest it's ever been, but it's actually codified into law, which is the scariest thing.
What's actually anti-Semitic, because this $385 million statewide down payment assistance program, this would, of course, go to any Florida resident who is young and married.
So the ironic thing is that actually opposing it, if anything, would be anti-Semitic because they're going to be young Jewish couples who are ready to buy a home, start a family, and live out the American dream here in the sunshine state.
And so it's amazing that we've gotten to this point of debate and discourse in America where the ad hominem attack precludes the debate from even happening.
Look, you want to have an honest, earnest debate about buying Israeli bonds?
Fine.
I welcome that debate.
But don't sit here and call American citizens anti-Semitic for opposing a third of a billion dollars being shipped overseas to fund some stupid war.
I've got nothing against Miriam Adelson personally.
I know her.
But I mean, she's an Israeli.
And Donald Trump said in his remarks on television and the Knesset, to her, you care about Israel more than the United States, which is her right.
But how is she a huge player in my country, not her country, my country's politics?
Like, how is that allowed?
If there was some Chinese guy and he was pretty open about caring a lot more about the CCP than he cares about the United States, it would not be cool to take money from him.
And that person would not be allowed to get on TV and be like, I don't like what you're saying about my actual country.
Therefore, I'm going to drown you in gambling money.
Move some comma the wrong way and it's suddenly wire fraud under the commerce clause.
Right.
But think about it.
Can you imagine how repulsed we would all rightly be if Jack Ma or some Ukrainian or Russian oligarch was openly, flagrantly being involved in U.S. politics?
And when I've met them and I've met them where they are at their universities, whether it's UF a couple weeks ago, I'll be at FSU in just a couple weeks from now.
Their number one frustration is that, look, they don't want to be lectured anymore.
They got a degree.
They got good grades.
They got good test scores.
They didn't study gender studies or black intersectionality.
They did the STEM thing that Republicans told them to do.
And, you know, someone like Ben Shapiro to come out at Amfest in one of the side panels and he said, I want white men to stop complaining and get off the couch because there are jobs that are available.
No, no, no, no.
Here's the truth, Ben.
When you say that, you say the Americans won't work these jobs.
No, Ben Shapiro, they won't work these jobs at the slave submarket wages that you are offering them.
You offer someone here in my state an honest wage for an honest day's work.
They'll take that every single time and they'll show up, but they'll take off on Sunday to praise our Christian Lord.
It's funny to see, I never mentioned Ben Shapiro because I don't think about him very often, but on those moments where sort of you see what somebody really thinks, just kind of, if you talk long enough, you reveal what you really think.
It's always been my view.
Ben Shapiro's total disdain and loathing for white Christian men is every bit as real, every bit as bristling with hostility as any kind of college Democratic socialist of America leftist.
So it's probably because, I mean, there's a lot of reasons, but I think that entire class of people doesn't have a real solution and in fact has profited on the demise of all of this.
And it's not just young white men.
It's young black women who literally studied engineering and said, you know what?
I want to go get a job working on this bridge.
No, that job, that's not available for you anymore.
That job was given to an Indian.
And it's actually effectively DEI for Indians in the name of capitalism.
Is it from Rona McDaniel's handbook on conservative principles?
Or is it from our Christian Bible?
Is it from our Constitution or Declaration of Independence, the Federalist Papers?
And I think this idea of the free market, I think the free market is a great place to get to the destination, but the destination is not a free market.
Tucker, we don't get to sit here and say, well, our people are suffering and they're unemployed and they're addicted to fentanyl and they can't have kids and they can't own a home and there's 50 years of usury.
But you know what?
We got a free market and we have the freest market in the world.
We have the freest market in the world.
No, if the goal was a free market, Tucker, there'd be a slave auction happening outside right now.
There's supply, there's demand, there's an equilibrium.
My view in the America First movement is our North Star should not be a free market, but a free people.
And when I say free people, I mean American citizens.
I don't mean the H-1Bs.
I don't mean the Haitians on TPS.
And I sure as heck, I sure as heck don't mean any corporation that wants to come here and plant a flag and say that our goal is to boost profit margins and stock price.
And all of a sudden, all that matters is not whether you can raise a family or buy a home, but the GDP beat expectations on your Bloomberg terminal.
Because I know to the extent this will be seen and criticized.
I'm sure that people will say, but this guy was in a sex scandal and you didn't mention it.
I just want, I'm not asking you to respond to this.
I just want to tell you my reasoning on it.
So the second you were deemed a threat, they sent people out and tried to call you a sex criminal.
You've not been charged with any sex crime that I know of.
And if you're a sex criminal, you know, I hope you go to jail.
And if you're not, I hope they stop saying it.
But a lot of the people who are pushing that have no basis.
I just, I don't want to, you know, attack anyone in particular, but it's pretty unbelievable that some of the people pushing that would accuse somebody else of having an unorthodox sex life.
I think it's shocking, actually, given what I know.
So I hope they'll stop doing that because they have no basis for doing that.
And, you know, the truth is, is that unlike a certain someone who deleted social media recently because he couldn't take the heat, I recognize that my entire life is going to be blown open, that there was a guy who was taking pictures of me outside of my house the other day.
People taking videos of me at a bar.
It's going to happen.
And I welcome it.
I welcome that.
I think if you're going to run the third largest state, you're going to control the life of effectively 23 and a half million people here in Florida.
You should have to be an open book.
But on that particular point, if you'll allow me just to address it.
Nowadays, false accusations against men are all too common.
Those accusations were brought before a judge in Florida's second judicial circuit.
And after two lengthy hearings, I was fully exonerated.
So don't take my word for it.
There was seven hours of hearing time, evidence, all of that.
And a judge said, you know what?
Not credible.
No evidence to support it.
Mr. Fischback, I apologize effectively, and you're exonerated.
And so I think the silver lining to this particular attack against me is that it's already gone through due process.
And the fact that it's coming out now, I think, shows that our campaign, our vision is a real threat to the deep establishment interests that have hijacked our state.
2009, where we actually debated an assault weapons ban, an assault weapons ban.
That's all things.
That's wild.
But yeah, grew up in Broward County.
And my career has been as an investor, looking at the world as a macro investor, saying, how is the Fed going to screw this up next?
Right.
Looking at what happened with COVID, the supply chain, the supply chain lockdowns, the massive fiscal transfers, the stimulus that was going into the economy, oftentimes to the lowest income folks, which had the highest propensity to spend, that was clearly going to cause inflation, alongside the money printing from the Fed, upwards of $5 trillion.
And so those are the types of trades that I put on as an investor.
And so I really viewed a lot of this world from quite literally the perch of a Bloomberg terminal.
So when I was saying, looking at GDP expectations on a Bloomberg, that was me for 10 years.
I spent a lot more time on the ground.
I started a nonprofit called Incubate Debate to offer free high school debate leagues all across my state from Pensacola to Miami.
And when I really got to travel these hollowed out places that were once teeming with life, booming with industry, I saw how detached that world was from this Bloomberg terminal where I had seen GDP and inflation and consumer spending and said, you know, I respect President Trump, but when I hear about another trillion dollars coming in from NVIDIA, I guess the obvious question is, how does that help a single dad who lost his job five years ago and hasn't been able to get back on his feet?
What are we optimizing for?
Is the goal GDP?
Or is the goal, as I think my friend Nathan Hobbelstadt from New Founding says, is the goal, I think, the ultimate economic statistic these days, which is what percentage of 30-year-old men own their home and are married.
If you think about your entire economic policy framework around that question, and I do.
Right.
And so if the question is, will we build this AI data center?
I don't know.
Does it help 30-year-old men get married or buy their home?
The answer would obviously be no, because it employs 50 people who are all foreign laborers for the most part.
That doesn't help.
But if we're going to revitalize citrus here in Florida, if we're going to actually build out local businesses and help people get on their feet and create local, great-paying jobs and end the H-1B scam and ban Blackstone, if we focus on those economic policies with the end goal being 30-year-old men are more likely on the margin to buy a home and get married as a result of this policy, then sign me up.
And so my distortion was: look, I spent much of my 20s going to events by the Brookings Institution and AEI and heritage and learning about the economy through that vantage point.
And so guilty is charged.
I think my views really, I voted for Trump proudly in 2016.
I've always been a Republican for whatever that's worth, quite literally since high school when I registered to vote in junior year high school.
Didn't vote junior year high school.
I don't want anyone to think I'm committing voter fraud.
But my views, I think if I were to give one reason, I think X, and everyone talks about X, but I want to talk about it in a very specific way to my life.
I think it's hard to watch something and get really red-pilled or nationalist pilled.
I think you have to have a steady stream of objective factual information.
For me, my grandma, that was your monologues in 2020, quite literally, and we bonded over those.
For me, the last year or so, it's been following AF Post, this X account that just puts out 30, 40 posts a day, kind of punchy, kind of funny, but really factually grounded news about what's happening, whether it's a company announcing H-1B hires.
And they editorialize in the sense that if Amazon announces that they're laying off 30,000 people, they won't just print that headline like the Wall Street Journal editorial board will, those globalist shills.
They will print that headline, but also contextualize it by saying that Amazon also just brought on 10,000 H-1Bs.
So they have no issue firing our people, but they will bring on foreign labor and not apologize for it.
And so when accounts like AF Post actually give us the full context around something, which the New York Times, the Wall Street Trunk would never do, I really appreciate that.
I think for me, on the issue, which I get the biggest pushback on, is Israel, right?
How you, you wrote for Barry Weiss, you wrote for the free press.
I wrote an article about high school debate going woke in 2023, which I'm really proud of.
It was the basis for my nonprofit really growing to the next level because there were quite literally high school debate tournaments that were taxpayer funded here in Florida.
They were told a young black girl before a speech about President Biden's foreign policy track record that if she mentioned Donald Trump's name, she would be disqualified in a public school.
We had one judge in writing saying, in writing, Tucker, I am a Marxist-Leninist Maoist.
And if you criticize any of the following subjects, you are automatically disqualified.
One judge went so far as to say, again, in writing, not hearsay, literally in writing.
Which tells you everything about the world of high school debate and academia, but it's really personal to me because high school debate changed my life.
And it always was a marketplace of ideas until this guy named Trump came down the escalator.
One judge said, if we're debating immigration and you refer to them as illegal, I will end the debate, give you the loss and lecture you, lecture you, because I will not have you making the debate space unsafe.
And so, you know, I cold emailed, cold called Barry Weiss because I knew the free press was kind of in this business of publishing edgy pieces about how institutions had been hijacked.
And this was in 2023.
And I said, hey, I have this crazy story.
I'm a former high school debate champion.
I have this crazy story about how high school debate has gone woke and my solution to it, which is my nonprofit.
And she published it and it went bonkers.
And so I think people are looking at that and saying, well, you were aligned with Barry Weiss.
And I think to their credit to that thing, I did put out a post when her book came out about anti-Semitism because after October 7th, I think like a lot of people, I saw what was happening on college campuses and said, that's wrong.
Not because it was exclusively focused on Jewish students, but any black lesbian with red hair running into a math class saying like free Palestine and white men need to apologize for the alleged sins of their ancestors, that's wrong.
I guess I was led to believe that that was all part of this anti-Semitism thing.
I called it out thinking it was anti-Semitism, but really it was anti-Americanism.
I was invited on one of these paid trips to Israel's as a young business professional, and I very quickly found out what it was.
It was a propaganda trip.
And when I was told that I couldn't go certain places on my own or had to follow a very simple script when I left about what I would be, I had to have to clear my experiences to share them online.
Yeah.
And I said, I'm not doing that.
I'm not, I'm happy to go to a foreign country, but I'm not doing it on your dime and have to parrot out some script that was approved by APAC.
That was the first straw where I kind of became a little bit more skeptical.
But there was this young man named Mohamed Ibrahim.
He's a 16-year-old kid from right here in Florida.
And he went to visit family in the West Bank last February.
And he was accused without any evidence of throwing a rock at an IDF vehicle.
Didn't hurt anybody, but he was accused of it.
So as a result of that accusation, he was put in an Israeli military prison without any due process, no trial for eight months.
And, you know, to the folks on the other side, I would say, I'm going to hold Israel to the same standard you want me to hold Israel to.
You say they're the only democracy in the Middle East.
Well, democracies are underpinned by a basic adherence to the rule of law.
And you don't get to take anyone, but least of all our citizens and who are teenagers and imprison them for eight months.
And then Randy Fine, that was half of the point of his call, was to call me anti-Semitic.
He said, well, you didn't tweet about the hostages enough.
And I said, Randy, what would have been the correct number of tweets on the hostages that would have given me license to talk about this young American citizen?
But because he's a Muslim, because he's a Muslim to them, he is a second-class citizen.
I said, look, I don't care what he is.
He's an American citizen.
He grew up two and a half hours from where I did.
I went and met with the family and I put out a video that I actually texted the president directly.
One of the principles I'll never give up is you shouldn't be allowed to come here and import your disgusting little ethnic conflicts into my country and make them the focus of my foreign policy.
And I would say that to any, any, any immigrant, Cuba, Venezuela, Israel, doesn't matter.
You may have had a thousand-year war with some other tribe, but that's not our problem.
And we don't do that here.
And I think the Muslim hate Muslim, you know, that's even with only what that's about.
And my dad showed me a video while we were on the way over here of a black pastor who I think rightly focused on the one nation under God and our Pledge of Allegiance.
And you think about that for a moment.
If you come here and to truly pledge your allegiance to our flag, it means you are committing to the one singular nation.
Not to import a generational, multi-generational feud between different nations.
So when you come here, whether you're Jewish, Muslim, doesn't matter, and you say and you stand for that pledge, and it's sad that we don't do that in our schools anymore.
I'll change that as governor as well, that it is a basic precondition that if you go to a public school, that you do attest that we are one nation under God.
That's not really debatable.
And so I think it's important because if you've got different, the Haitians and the Dominicans hate each other for some reason, there's a feud going on with different Muslim groups and this and all of that.
And I say, look, if you're going to come here at a minimum, you have to commit to the whole one nation thing.
Yes.
At an absolute minimum.
And I can't think of a better way.
And maybe that's why there's this insistence, this reluctance.
They're so loath to actually stand for our pledge.
I always thought of it, Tucker, as they were trying to be righteous and it was kind of like their version of bending the knee.
Imagine, you know, my mom's from Colombia and I spent summers going there.
I don't, of course, consider myself Colombian.
I'm a proud American.
My mom is as well.
But can you like going to a Colombian, just even something as innocuous as they call it football, but a soccer game.
Can you imagine going to a Colombian soccer game and not standing for the national anthem?
And like whether you disagreed with some Supreme Court decision or whether you had a different view of a board or whatever, like to not stand for our national anthem, to affirm the very ideals that set this country into motion is to hold the most vile form of contempt for this nation and her people.
And so I think this is going to, ultimately, we are in an attention economy and the attention is going to go to the person who can connect and show up and earn the trust of voters.
You don't get to earn the trust of voters in that Fox News studio in Washington, D.C.
He was going no carb and he lost at the end, of course, and I think South Carolina and we were in a diner together in South Carolina and he, whatever his many faults, he could be kind of funny.
And he's like, no, I'm getting the blueberry pancakes.
I don't care.
It's over.
And he just immediately, excuse me.
So you think your money is going to come from where?
Look, I think that I'm always meeting, open to meeting with donors, but it's on the basic precondition that you are donating to the campaign that already exists.
There's no influence on the campaign whatsoever.
And I would invite people to hold my feet to the fire on that one.
I think the biggest thing, though, is if you just look at what the turning point has been for Florida politics, we had an ag commissioner here in 2018 named Adam Putnam.
He was the establishment darling, a very good guy.
His family's been here for a very, very long time.
Well-respected family here in Florida.
And then this guy named Ron DeSantis comes on the scene.
And there's a lot of twists and turns, but that election in 2018 was really decided by the Fox News primary debate in the summer of 2018, where it was Ron and Adam on stage for an hour and a half, unfiltered, no handlers, no donors, just two and a half million voters watching at home.
I think if you put me on that debate stage, and I'll be in this race all the way to the end, when we get to that debate stage, I will end Byron Donald's career and I will show that my vision for my state that I've known for four generations, our family has known, is the right vision.
I view this as a fork in the road.
Do you want old Florida or do you want new Florida?
If you want AI data centers, if you want what Byron Donald says, which is he wants to make Florida the financial capital of the world, if you want that, that's the new Florida vision.
But if you like our state just the way she is, if you want to go back to the way things were 10, 15 years ago, cattle, citrus, space, ag, if you want to end the overdevelopment that has destroyed our communities, pull back the sprawl, I'm running for governor and I'd be honored to have your vote.
Well, but it's also like the most left-wing thing you could ever say.
It's like the MPCs, the people I spent my entire 15 years at Fox railing against these sensitive people who want to claim that words are violence, stochastic violence or whatever.
I mean, this was like, that's the whole ideology of the left.
And when someone actually goes out there and says, you don't have a right to hurt people with your words.
I mean, Timmy, Timmy, true or false, does the First Amendment give you a right to hurt people?
If you failed that in fifth grade civics, they would hold you back a year as governor.
I would hold anybody back who failed that question.
You know, it was funny.
He put out a comment about Venezuela and Maduro.
He was very critical of Maduro, as I think a lot of people should be for what he's done to the country.
But I responded and I think proudly ratioed him.
I said, with all due respect, Lieutenant Governor Collins, I'm formally filing a complaint with the Office of Hate Crime speech for insulting Maduro with your harmful words.
Right.
And that's what it's come to.
And so when you ask yourself, what vision for the Republican Party do we want?
I actually think everyone's talking about 2028.
2026 here in Florida, we are the formidable Republican parties.
And so this is a guy, not to go on a big tangent, but this is a guy who actually reached out to my own uncle, like my actual uncle, like my, my dad's over there, my father's brother, and tried to convince him to get me to drop out.
And so my uncle was calling me all of a sudden on a Saturday.
He hasn't spoken to me in a while for an hour and a half on the phone saying, Jay Collins, this, Jay Collins, that.
It's weird, but the governor, our governor, Ron DeSantis, is not endorsing Jay Collins.
He's certainly not endorsing Byron Donalds.
And this is a wide open race as far as I'm concerned.
May the best person win.
And the best person, Tucker, is not the person who looks best on Fox, although I don't think Byron looks all that good on Fox.
We say we go to Chapato and we say, can I have the polo bull with the phagitis?
But I was in Chapatl and a young man by the name of Aiden, he's 22 years old.
He works for Charlotte County in the maintenance division.
And he comes up to me, says, Are you James Fishbeck?
And I said, Yeah, I have never voted in any election, not even in a primary.
You have my vote.
I'm switching over to the Republican Party to vote for you on August 18th.
I think, and I don't want to take credit for our vision.
It's a vision that's been, honestly, I've watched a lot of your stuff, read a lot of what's happened in this space.
It's one that I believe in.
I believe it's the only way forward for my state.
And I think there's a real hunger because with whatever you want to say about Byron Donald and establishment money, even the polls that have come out about him, they still show 54% roughly of the electorate still undecided.
And this is a guy who's been in the race now for 11 months, who's got $45 million, who's on Fox News three times a week, regurgitating the same GOP slop.
And he still has half of the electorate undecided about whether to vote for him.
So I'm in this race because I think my state needs someone to step up and I want to earn people's support and being able to do that.
And so, my pitch to a public school teacher is: we may not agree on everything, but if you want someone who's going to fight for the dignity of American citizens, someone is going to make your job easier as a teacher.
When we have 1.4 million illegals in our state, many of whom, all of whom, have children enrolled in our public schools, met with a teacher a couple of weeks ago in Southwest Florida, not too far from here.
And she broke down crying because her ninth grade class had 20 students, seven of whom did not speak English.
They're illegals.
And so, executive order number four is to remove all illegal immigrant children from our school.
I had someone ask me recently, isn't that cruel?
And I said, No, ma'am.
What's cruel is to force American citizens to dilute their education, to take attention away from a teacher who has the second lowest teacher pay on average in any part of the country, and say, You have to teach half your class in English and the other half in broken Creole or Spanish for people who just got here.
And actually, it's weird because the Supreme Court in 1982 found in Plyler v. Doe rather disastrously that illegal immigrant children actually have a 14th Amendment constitutional right to attend public school.
And so, I would proudly, as Mississippi did, challenge Roe v. Wade.
I would proudly, as governor, pass an executive order to challenge that decision.
And I know we would win in the Supreme Court.
Whether it would be 5'4 or 6'3 would depend on how she's feeling that day, though.