This will be the year that America “fought back” against wokeness and authoritarianism in the words of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.
DeSantis gave a speech Thursday at the Conservative Political Action Conference (Florida) in which he explained how he has helped Florida become a bastion against growing authoritarianism. DeSantis also spoke out about how the main issue of our time is the transformation and control of institutions.
DeSantis opened his speech by stating that Florida had set a new record for domestic tourism in the United States in 2021. He said that he thinks the reason so many people are coming to Florida, including “lockdown” politicians and celebrities, is that Florida didn’t pursue a path of extreme lockdown.
“We refused to let this state descend into some type of Fauci-an dystopia where people’s freedoms are curtailed and their livelihoods are destroyed,” DeSantis said, referring to Dr. Anthony Fauci, who serves as the chief medical director to President Joe Biden.
This meant, DeSantis said, protecting people’s rights, jobs, and small businesses
DeSantis said that Florida was a leader in rejecting the “biomedical security state” which erodes freedom, as well as nongovernmental policies, like vaccine passports, because it’s “unacceptable to subcontract out Fauci-ism to big companies.”
If Florida had not led in this way, DeSantis said, the United States could have looked more “like Canada or Australia.”
To illustrate what he meant about the biomedical security state, DeSantis referred to President Dwight Eisenhower’s farewell address. Most Americans remember that Eisenhower talked about the “military-industrial complex” in that speech, but DeSantis said that it is also important to heed Eisenhower’s warnings about a rising “scientific and technological elite.”
The connection between government funding and scientific and technological research could lead to public policy being “held captive” by this elite.
The statesman’s job, according to Eisenhower, is to not just follow the dictates of this elite, but to assess the interests of all society to pursue the common good.
Politicians in the last few years have too often deferred to health bureaucrats because it was “a safe thing to do politically,” DeSantis said. They could blame bad outcomes on medical bureaucrats.
DeSantis explained then how Florida has come under fire from President Joe Biden for being willing to oppose his policies.
This includes opposing the vaccine mandate, suing the administration over its border “catch and release” policies, the “weak on crime policies,” and the “reckless” spending that has triggered inflation, according to DeSantis.
“The inflation is because of his policies and we’re not going to let anyone forget that,” he said.
The Florida governor said the Biden presidency has had the worst first year of any president “since the 1800s.”
DeSantis then explained the policies he’s pursued in Florida.
He listed putting more “conservative” justices on the Florida state Supreme Court and turning it from one of the most liberal in the country to the most conservative. He said Florida “banned” sanctuary cities, remained a leader in school choice that has “liberated” hundreds of thousands of children so they may get a good education, and protected women’s sports from being destroyed.
DeSantis said his was the first big state to legislate against “Big Tech censorship, because they want to silence us, they want to deplatform us, and we cannot have a free society if most of the speech in this country is controlled by a handful of left-wing oligarchs in Silicon Valley.”
Florida took a different path compared to places “like Portland,” DeSantis said, and passed laws that would punish people who engage in lawless mob violence.
“In Florida, you’re not getting a slap on the wrist, you are getting the inside of a jail cell,” DeSantis said.
We have banned spending taxpayer money to teach our children hate for our country or hatred for each other. [critical race theory] in K-12 education,” DeSantis said. “And instead, we have the most robust civics education anywhere in the country. We’re going to have citizenship exams for graduating seniors and we’re giving teachers the opportunity to go through a civics boot camp and get a $3,000 bonus.”
He said it wasn’t enough to just be against CRT.
“I’m for the Constitution, I’m for the Bill of Rights, and we need to have our young people understand what that means,” DeSantis said.
DeSantis closed his speech by explaining the threats to freedom that have increased since he began politics a decade ago. He said that when Biden took office, it was only a few votes in the Senate that prevented ideas like packing the Supreme Court, making the District of Columbia a state, federalizing “fraudulent ballot practices,” and abolishing the Electoral College from becoming a reality.
This wasn’t what the average American really wanted, DeSantis said, but it was a part of the left’s desire to “marginalize” the conservative half of the country so that it becomes powerless and voiceless.
DeSantis called wokeness the new religion of the left and a “form of cultural Marxism,” intended to divide the country and give the left power.
“That’s why they remove statues of Thomas Jefferson, and Abraham Lincoln, and Teddy Roosevelt, take George Washington’s name off schools, because they want to erase that history, they want to delegitimize our founding institutions, and they want to replace that with their left-wing ideology as the foundational principles of our modern day society,” DeSantis said.
He then said that the problem conservatives face is that “a lot of major institutions in our country have become infected with this woke virus.”
He cited higher education as an example of higher education working to indoctrinate young people to embrace the woke ideology. He pointed out how corporate America is engaging in woke activism and supporting communist China. He pointed to government bureaucracies, which have become “off the rails” in many different agencies. And finally, he pointed to the “dishonest” legacy media that is now in the business of “spinning partisan narratives” instead of telling the truth.
“They’re not speaking truth to power, they’re defending the regime and power,” DeSantis said.
To “top it off,” he continued, Big Tech has become the “number one institution for censorship” that works alongside the legacy media and the Biden administration to silence conservatives.
In these times, where freedom is being threatened from so many sides, DeSantis said that there “is no substitute for courage.”
Americans need to show courage in opposing cancel culture, rejecting “corporate media narratives,” resisting institutions like Big Tech, and standing in the way of the Biden administration.
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