Florida Versus Davos
The American way needs defending against a corrupt ruling class.
Thank you. Welcome to America and the Free State of Florida. Proud to be a refuge of sanity in a world gone mad, we’re holding down the fort.
It’s wonderful to be here. Thank you for hosting this in the great state of Florida. We’re proud of what we’ve been able to accomplish. It’s said that our federalist system creates laboratories of democracy where different states can approach things in different ways. But I don’t think we’ve ever seen such sharp contrast between different governing philosophies as we have in the last few years. It brings to mind a debate that three of our founding fathers actually had over what was the world’s oldest profession. The debate was between Benjamin Rush, Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Franklin.
Benjamin Rush was a doctor. So Rush said, the world’s oldest profession is the physician, because Eve was cut out of Adam’s rib—so it had to be the physician. And Jefferson, as you know, designed Monticello among other things, so he said, no, the world’s oldest profession is the architect, because it was the architect who brought order out of all the chaos in the universe. And Franklin said, that’s wrong. The world’s oldest profession is the politician: who do you think created the chaos in the first place?
And the reality is, as much as we’re proud of the great things we’ve done in Florida, you’ve had other folks, leftist politicians that have driven people away from their cities, away from their states. In fact, the last few years have witnessed a great American exodus from states and localities governed by leftist politicians. States and localities that are failing on core matters of concern for everyday Americans. These Americans have fled to states like Florida. And we’ve really served as the promised land for record numbers of people.
Over the last few years, the statistics are startling. Since COVID, more adjusted gross income has moved into the state of Florida than has ever moved into any one state over a similar time period in American history. In fact, since COVID, the next closest state to Florida in terms of receiving adjusted gross income was the state of Texas, which is not too shabby. But Florida has seen almost four times as much adjusted gross income moving to Florida as has moved into Texas. What are the states that are hemorrhaging wealth? California, Illinois, New York, New Jersey—you know the list.
Florida has also led the nation in net in-migration since COVID. Who has lost people? Same cast of characters. California, New York, New Jersey, Illinois. California had never lost people in the history of its statehood, up until the last couple of years, and yet you’ve seen hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people flee. I can tell you, I was born and raised in the state of Florida, and I don’t ever remember seeing a California license plate growing up. Suddenly we start seeing all these California license plates showing up in Florida. Honestly, the Floridians were a little bit spooked about this, particularly my supporters, because—who are these people from California? And how are they going to vote? That was kind of the big thing. But here is why the migration has been so telling: It has had a political character to it. It’s not just, “well, I’m going to continue to believe that this is a good way to govern on the Left Coast or in New York, but I’m just going to come to Florida to get the taxes”—because we’ve always had lower taxes. That’s not anything new. There’s a whole host of other factors that attracted people to states like Florida.
And so people will ask me, are they going to move from those deep blue states, vote like everyone votes there, and then change Florida for the worse? And here’s what’s happened. When I got elected governor in 2018 there were close to 300,000 more registered Democrats in the state of Florida than Republicans. Prior to my becoming governor, we had never had more registered Republicans than Democrats in the history of the state of Florida. Today, the latest numbers are, we now have 271,000 more registered Republicans than Democrats.
And we have registration open until the early part of October. We very well could end up going into this November’s election with 300,000 more registered Republicans than registered Democrats. And so that’s a huge sea change, five to six hundred thousand net registrations. And I think that a lot of it had to do with a certain blueprint we had here in the state of Florida. As was mentioned, part of what we’ve done is just exercise a little common sense: just because the media and the elites are saying to do something, that does not mean it’s the right thing to do. And we stood and kept our bearings about us. We also try to ground what we’re doing in core American principles. The founding principles of this country are enduring—they may apply differently at different times, when we are faced with different challenges. But those are the principles that we continue to rely on in the state of Florida. We are not afraid to buck the discredited ruling class and elites in our country. We did it during COVID, of course. But we’ve done it time and time again, across the board. And then finally, when you’re standing for what’s right, you don’t get very far—given all the things that are going on in our country—unless you’re willing to show a little backbone. Unless you’re willing to stand your ground when it gets hot in the kitchen. And we have done that time and time again…
Staring Down the Elite
When COVID hit, I had never experienced a pandemic. Probably most people here had never done that. And so I started to do research and consume data, because we were being told what to do by the White House task force, or this health bureaucrat or that. But did any of that actually make any sense? Was any of it justifiable?
I look back at Dwight Eisenhower’s farewell address. Most people remember it for his warnings about the dangers of the military industrial complex, and I think those were very smart observations. But if you read that inaugural address, he talked about this new phenomenon of the federal government funding so much scientific research. And he said, when those two things are intermingled like that, there’s a danger: public policy itself could be held captive by what he called the “scientific-technological elite.” And he rejected that as something that was acceptable. He said, A statesman’s job is not to subcontract out your leadership to a very narrow-minded elite. The job of the statesman is to harmonize all the different competing interests that are in society, weighing different values, and then coming up with the proper policy. And so my view was, we had to choose freedom over Fauci-ism in the state of Florida.
We had to make sure that our policies weren’t excluding all these important values, just because people with a very narrow-minded view, with some credentials by their name, were telling us that those values didn’t matter.
Border Integrity, Election Integrity
We see the rule of law breaking down in cities across the country. But we also see the rule of law breaking down at the southern border between the United States and Mexico. And that is a choice that this administration has made. Joe Biden came into office and reversed President Trump’s border policies, knowing full well what the results would be. And you know the results: you have massive numbers of illegal aliens pouring across the border, record sex trafficking, record human trafficking, record drug trafficking. The fentanyl that China is making to poison our society is getting into this country through the southern border. And now the leading cause of death for people 18 to 45 is overdose from fentanyl. So it’s been a policy disaster. But it’s also been a constitutional disaster. Joe Biden took an oath to take care that the laws of this country are faithfully executed, and he is violating his oath of office.
We’ll see what happens in November. But I feel good that the Republicans are going to take the majorities in the Congress. And if they do use the power that you have, you’ve got to hold Biden accountable on the border...
Protecting Kids
One of the things I’m proudest of in the state of Florida is here we have drawn a line in the sand. And we have said that the purpose of our school system is to educate kids, not to indoctrinate kids. We have done things like ban the use of critical race theory in our K-12 schools. We’re not going to teach kids to hate each other or to hate our country with your tax dollars. That is inappropriate.
We also, though, recognize that CRT is seeping into the corporate sector. And so we passed a bill—it’s being challenged in court but we’ll eventually win—that says employees have a right to opt out of this type of discriminatory training if some big corporation is trying to impose that on you. You do not have to self-flagellate just to keep your job. They can’t force you to affirm beliefs that you don’t have. And so it’s just a basic way to protect the workplace and to protect people’s individual conscience. And yes, we’re against CRT, we’re against distorting American history.
But what are we for? In Florida, we’ve launched an initiative to get American civics back in our schools in a really major way. We need to be teaching kids what it means to be an American. We need to teach them about the founding principles of our country. Why the Constitution is structured the way it is, why our Bill of Rights is what it is. We need to teach them that in the American system, our rights come from God, not from the government. We need to teach them how all of those philosophies and values have animated the key moments in American history…
The True Virus
And the question is, the question is why? Why would this be happening? That’s what people will ask me, because sometimes they don’t believe it’s happening. Then when they see the evidence, it really is a jolt to say, wow, why is this happening? I think it’s happening because of the woke mind virus. I think this is ideology run amok. I think you’re seeing it all across a variety of institutions, which I think is one of the reasons why the moment we have right now is more challenging than maybe some moments that we had in the past. Because I think when Reagan came on the scene, for example, it was really big government that was to blame and big government that needed to be reeled in. Yes, we still need to do that. Don’t get me wrong. But you now have a woke mind virus that has infected all these other institutions.
I mean, just look at corporate America. Most corporations, some of these big corporations are now exercising quasi-public power, in terms of using their economic power to change policy in this country. You just saw what the credit card companies are going to try to do with the firearms. You’ve seen big Wall Street banks collude to deny financing to companies who may be involved in combating illegal immigration, or firearms, or things that they don’t like. You look at the movement for ESG. And all ESG is, is an attempt to use corporate and economic power to impose an ideological agenda on society—an agenda that could not win at the ballot box.
And so these Masters of the Universe, not content to line their pockets, not content to make huge profits, want to use their power to change society. They are not accountable to any electorate the last time I checked, and there’s really no way for the private sector to reel them in at this point either…
The Greatest Monuments
Another difference between Reagan’s era and today is, Reagan was famous for saying: the most terrifying words in the English language are “I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.” And what he was identifying was 100% accurate. You had great-society central planners that thought they could socially engineer our economy and our way of life and make decisions for us better than we could make them for ourselves. And so that led to massive excess, it led to lots of unintended consequences. And Reagan was basically identifying that as something that was holding our economy back and holding our freedom back. He was 100% right.
But I think the difference between then and now is, government is bigger and more powerful. But these agencies, particularly in law enforcement and national security, have been weaponized, so that they really represent the enforcement arm of one particular faction of society against the rest of us. And you do not have equal zeal with which they wield their power. People talk about the deep state like it’s some conspiracy. It’s not a conspiracy. What we have right now is the logical result of having an absence of constitutional accountability in the administrative state…
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