In this episode of the War Room, Stephen K. Bannon and I discuss the impact of DeSantis' victory in the governor's primary race against Donald Trump for the Republican nomination for the 2020 presidential election.
00:27:23.580I'm proud to be a Navy veteran, an Iraq veteran, and I revere our services.
00:27:28.240But when revered institutions like those in our military are more concerned with matters not central to the mission,
00:27:34.660whether it's global warming or gender ideology and pronouns, morale declines and recruiting suffers.
00:27:40.760And you need to eliminate these distractions, and we need to get focused on the core mission.
00:27:45.060We also cannot have true constitutional government if the most significant issues are decided by the whims of unelected bureaucrats rather than the people's elected representatives.
00:27:55.980Reestablishing integrity in our institutions means we must reinvigorate our constitutional system by returning the government to its rightful owners, we the people.
00:28:07.440No social or economic transformation without representation.
00:29:45.700I thought we were going to get Elon Musk give and take.
00:29:48.400All I got is some clown reading a freaking boring speech.
00:29:51.640Biden's also politicized the military and caused recruiting to plummet.
00:29:56.340We will eliminate ideological agendas from our military, focus the military on the core mission, and we will reverse the poor recruiting trends.
00:30:06.220Finally, Biden's weaponized the power of the administrative state to advance his left-wing agenda.
00:30:11.580We will reconstitutionalize the executive branch and we'll bring the administrative state to heel.
00:30:17.760Now, you can't do any of that if you don't win.
00:30:36.340We need the courage to lead, and we must have the strength to win.
00:30:40.660And to voters who are participating in this primary process, my pledge to you is this.
00:30:45.860If you nominate me, you can set your clock to January 20th, 2025 at high noon, because on the west side of the U.S. Capitol, I will be taking the oath of office as the 47th president of the United States.
00:31:03.600Now, these past few years have given me a new appreciation for the fragility of our freedoms.
00:31:09.100I never thought I would see things in America that we saw during the COVID-19 pandemic.
00:31:14.220But our founding fathers were keenly aware of the fragility of freedom.
00:31:18.140When they framed our Constitution, they came to arm with having studied the history of every republic and the history of mankind, and they noticed that all of those experiments only had one thing in common, and it was this.
00:31:32.340And so they knew it fell to our country, the United States of America, to determine whether people could really govern themselves.
00:31:38.440Could we have a society based on the idea that our rights are God-given, not government-granted, and that society functions based on the rule of law, not the rule of individual men?
00:31:47.440And when Dr. Benjamin Franklin walked out of that convention, he was asked, did you deliver a republic or a monarchy?
00:31:54.180He said, a republic, if you can keep it.
00:31:57.060They knew freedom didn't run on autopilot.
00:31:59.360They knew each generation would have a responsibility to safeguard freedom, and it's our responsibility to do so at this important juncture in our nation's history.
00:32:09.000We have a lot of work to do to ensure the country gets back on track.
00:32:12.220I ask everybody listening to please join me on this mission.
00:32:16.220Please invest in our campaign by going to rondesantis.com and making a donation.
00:32:30.520I guess just as a first follow-up here, thank you for putting up with these technical issues.
00:32:37.100I think we're definitely breaking new ground here.
00:32:39.020As far as I know, no major presidential candidate has ever announced their candidacy on social media this way, certainly in a Twitter space.
00:32:52.220What made you want to kind of take the chance of doing it this way as opposed to just doing it on cable news or the usual way?
00:32:59.460Well, when COVID hit, I had to make decisions about do you go with the crowd or do you look at the data yourself and cut against the grain?
00:33:11.640I faced huge blowback for doing that from the bureaucracy, from elites, from the media.
00:33:16.960But my view was I had to look out for the people I represented, prefer protecting their jobs over trying to safeguard my own political hide.
00:33:24.920But it was very, very lonely in a lot of those decisions.
00:33:27.940And part of the reason it was so lonely is because there was a concerted effort to try to stifle dissent.
00:33:34.580There was an official narrative about lockdowns, about closing schools, about forced masking, about all these different things that we had to navigate during COVID.
00:33:43.520And it was an orthodoxy being enforced by the major tech platforms in conjunction with the federal government.
00:33:51.200And if we can't have an honest debate in a free country about issues that affect hundreds of millions of people, like lockdowns, then what good is the First Amendment at that point?
00:34:04.160Those are precisely the times when we needed to have debate be robust.
00:34:08.960You should not be taking down articles that criticize those draconian policies.
00:34:16.160So it occurred to me that if that had continued, I think free speech in this country was on its way out the door.
00:34:23.820And so when Elon Musk stepped up to purchase Twitter, he paid a lot of money for it.
00:34:29.320And I'm sure because he's a good businessman, Elon, I'm sure you'll end up making money off it.
00:34:33.960But the bottom line is you had to put your money where your mouth is because I think you recognize that you can't have a free society unless we have the freedom to debate the most important issues that are affecting our civilization.
00:34:47.320That did not happen during COVID. The truth was censored repeatedly.
00:34:53.700And now that Twitter is in the hands of a free speech advocate, that would not be able to happen again on this Twitter platform.
00:35:02.540So I think what was done with Twitter is really significant for the future of our country.
00:35:07.960We cannot have a society in which government is colluding with major tech platforms to enforce an orthodoxy.
00:35:14.200Well, thank you. Yeah, we're absolutely committed to freedom of speech and a level playing field and just a vigorous debate.
00:35:22.660And hopefully this can be a platform that brings people of divergent political views to exchange those views.
00:35:32.240And perhaps some minds will be changed one way or the other.
00:35:35.400But it's just incredibly important, as you highlight, that the First Amendment is irrelevant if all the media and the government are operating in lockstep.
00:35:50.000It makes the most important amendment, the one that was most urgently added to the Constitution, moot if you cannot have free and open debate.
00:36:01.500So Twitter was indeed expensive, but free speech is priceless.
00:36:14.940So, Governor, I'm going to ask some questions while we get some other kind of speakers in the queue to ask questions.
00:36:21.260I think maybe some people knew this announcement was coming because there's been no shortage of hit pieces on you in the press over the last week or two.
00:36:29.180I want to ask you about some of these accusations that are being leveled at you.
00:36:34.080Last week, the NAACP issued a travel advisory against your state claiming that Florida is not a safe place for minorities to visit.
00:36:45.040What do you say to those who've been advised that somehow they aren't welcome in your state?
00:36:49.220Claiming that Florida is unsafe is a total farce.
00:37:27.260These left-wing groups have been doing it for many, many years.
00:37:30.120And at the end of the day, what they're doing is colluding with legacy media to try to manufacture a narrative.
00:37:35.340Now, the good news is, is fewer and fewer Americans are gullible enough to believe this dribble.
00:37:41.420And platforms like Twitter are there where people can debunk these lies in real time.
00:37:47.920And I would just say as an American citizen, if you are uncritically accepting narratives spun by legacy media and left-wing groups, you're failing at your job of being a conscientious citizen.
00:37:59.720And I think people just see right through it.
00:38:02.040And, oh, by the way, have any of these travel advisories, because they've been doing this for a while, these left-wing groups, have any of them worked?
00:38:08.760Well, we're the number one state for net in-migration and have been every year since I've been governor.
00:38:14.360We just capped the highest quarter for tourism in the history of the state of Florida.
00:38:20.520And our view is we want everybody to succeed regardless of their skin color.
00:39:58.900But I think this is a function of these – the legacy media, these corporate journals, they're in their little bubble.
00:40:07.680And to draw allusions to stuff like that, I mean, how crazy do you have to be?
00:40:12.880But in their little bubble, it sounds like they're making some type of profound point.
00:40:18.000And so part of, I think, what Twitter is standing for is people should be exposed to different viewpoints.
00:40:25.200And I think the elites in our society have tried to cluster themselves to where their assumptions are never challenged.
00:40:31.240And that's not a good way, I think, to live.
00:40:34.100It's also not a good way to be a critical thinker because no one's ever going to question, obviously, wrong assumptions because everybody around you shares them.
00:40:43.980And I think they've become totally hysterical because they don't like the idea that their control over the media is being disremediated because now candidates for president can just speak directly to people through platforms like Twitter.
00:40:58.720Yeah, I mean, the amazing thing about Twitter and things like Spaces are that – although I happen to be hosting it – I had to switch over to David hosting it because my account was actually –
00:41:15.580But it's really never been a mechanism before where someone could address the nation or anyone who wanted to listen to them could from anywhere in the world, the United States or anywhere.
00:41:28.420So I think this is a really profound change.
00:41:33.560And it's also like the – it's not just whether the media reports something and an article is true or not.
00:41:39.100But even more powerful is deciding what the narrative is.
00:41:42.440And so, you know, it's just like if there's only so much you can actually put in a newspaper or a magazine and there's only one thing you can really put on the cover of a magazine.
00:41:51.780So whoever's deciding that is deciding to not talk about other things, whereas with a public digital town square like we have here, it's possible for the public to choose the narrative.
00:42:05.340It empowers the people instead of a very tiny elite cabal, which I don't recognize the irony of using that phrase.
00:42:13.980But nonetheless, it's true and judged by the results that this is a means for the people to decide the narrative and for the people to decide what – you know, which way a debate will go.
00:42:28.200So not sort of five editors-in-chiefs of a few newspapers, basically.
00:42:33.340Yeah, and I think one of the really crazy things that happened during COVID is that social networks really started censoring dissenting viewpoints on COVID, medical viewpoints, that ended up being totally correct in lockstep with what the mainstream media was doing.
00:42:50.420So basically, big tech platforms were undermining their main reason for existing, which is giving people a choice.
00:42:57.400And actually, there's somebody who I think knows more about that than any of us, which is Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, who's a professor of medicine at Stanford.
00:43:51.100And the learning loss numbers are so much better in Florida.
00:43:55.940I'm really curious, Governor, as you're running for president, what are your thoughts about reforming the public health authority in the United States, in the federal government, the CDC, the FDA, the NIH?
00:44:10.920How do you see the reforms we need so that the mistakes of the lockdowns that happened during the pandemic don't happen again when there's another pandemic?
00:44:20.480Well, first, we need an honest reckoning about what happened during COVID.
00:44:26.680And the only honest reckoning is that all of those agencies, all of the elites, the public health establishment, they failed.
00:44:39.860But I think what happened was when the data was becoming more and more apparent that the path they were on was wrong, they doubled down and wanted to do it even more.
00:44:49.900And I really believe had Florida not just kind of stood in the way, I think this country would have had rolling lockdowns for probably a two-year period.
00:44:59.700And so their impulses were authoritarian, they were not following the data, and I think the U.S. government needs to acknowledge the failures.
00:45:10.280And I think all of those agencies need to be cleaned out.
00:45:14.180What I saw just dealing with them was I saw an interest in the narrative and in politics over evidence-based reasoning and evidence-based medicine.
00:45:24.680And so I don't have confidence that those agencies are up to the task, and I think you need major, major overhaul of the whole enchilada with respect to public health in this country.
00:45:41.760I mean, I think the other thing that I saw during the pandemic, Governor, and you was subject to it just as much as I was when we were talking about COVID.
00:45:50.500YouTube censored a video of us speaking in a roundtable that you hosted on COVID policy.
00:45:58.360There's so much of the federal government infrastructure went into suppressing honest scientific discussion during the pandemic.
00:46:04.800So it's not just public health agencies, but other agencies inside the federal government that worked to suppress the speech of Americans.
00:46:12.060And I'd love to hear your thoughts about it.
00:46:14.220So I'm actually, in Florida, we recognize the danger there.
00:46:18.400So I'm actually going to be signing a digital bill of rights for Florida pretty soon, which will bar all state and local government officials from colluding or working with a technology company for the purpose of censorship of speech.
00:46:35.500You had people in all these other agencies working with these platforms to try to take it down.
00:46:40.280And, oh, by the way, what did they censor Dr. Bhattacharya for?
00:46:44.540It was a roundtable discussion that I led and convened.
00:46:47.440We had Dr. Bhattacharya, MD, PhD from Stanford.
00:46:51.640We had Martin Kaldorf from Harvard Medical School.
00:46:54.580And we had Sinatra Gupta from Oxford, who was generally viewed as one of the best epidemiologists across the pond until she became anti-lockdown.
00:47:06.340We're discussing whether there's any scientific basis to force a school child to wear a mask for eight hours a day.
00:47:13.560They all agreed there was no basis to do it and that you should not have school mask mandates.
00:47:18.480YouTube thought that that was, quote, anti-science and that that should be taken down.
00:47:23.840But even at that point, we had already had enough experience in Florida where you had some schools that had done it before the state banned the mandates.
00:47:32.580You had some schools that had done it.
00:47:41.920And, yes, I think the federal government, FBI, DHS, any of the health agencies, it's unconstitutional for them to be delegating speech restriction to a private company.
00:47:54.260You can't do indirectly what the Constitution would clearly forbid you to do directly.
00:48:07.220If you're there, go ahead and unmute yourself.
00:48:10.780I mean, what we're talking about here is, I think, really unconstitutional actions by federal agencies.
00:48:17.900Congressman Massey, I know that you've been involved in this problem of, you know, government agencies being weaponized and used against the American people in an inappropriate way.
00:48:52.980Government, as the governor said, the government is colluding with big corporations.
00:48:56.800We found out this week from an FBI whistleblower that Bank of America voluntarily gave names and information on anybody who bought a hot dog in Washington, D.C.
00:49:09.580from January 5th to January 7th and then overlaid that with gun purchases that they had on record anywhere in the country for any period of time.
00:49:19.100And just they say they voluntarily gave that to the FBI.
00:49:24.920By the way, I've never met Elon Musk, but I'm one of your biggest fans and the first congressman to have a Tesla.
00:49:31.340I'm on Starlink and I would have bought a Powerwall, but I'm off the grid and you wouldn't sell me one.
00:49:38.960So I had to make one with a wrecked Model S and it's been running our house for five years.
00:49:43.940But my my and just for the record, I as I was with Thomas our first year in Congress, he's got the Tesla, but his license plate is Kentucky coal.
00:49:56.700So it's he's probably one of the only people that have that in the country.
00:50:00.120Thanks for outing me, Governor DeSantis.
00:50:03.380But no. So, Governor DeSantis, my question to you is, you know, you served here in Congress for six years with me.
00:50:11.980And why is it that Congress is so feckless at reigning in these government agencies?
00:50:17.760And and what do you think we need to do?
00:50:20.460And if you were president, what what would you urge Congress or what bills would you like to see and sign?
00:50:26.700To reign in this, you know, sort of overreach of government bureaucracy?
00:50:33.960Well, first, I think there's a lot that the executive branch can do.
00:50:36.700And I all I will say when it comes to these agencies, we'll put we'll we'll go into this a little bit more as the campaign goes on.
00:50:42.300But buckle up when I get in there, because the status quo is not acceptable and we are going to make sure that we reconstitutionalize this government.
00:50:51.260And these agencies are totally out of control.
00:50:53.280There's no accountability. And we are going to bring that in a very big way.
00:50:57.000Now, part of the reason it's gotten so bad, power has been consolidated and effectively a fourth branch of government because Congress hasn't used its two main powers that it has under the Constitution.
00:51:09.280If an agency is gauging in conduct that is outside the realm of what is legal or you think it's not good for the public interest, then you can remove the funding for those for those operations.
00:51:21.880There's nothing that they're not entitled to get the same level of funding every year.
00:51:26.180And yet Congress runs the government on autopilot, either continuing resolutions or massive omnibus spending bills.
00:51:32.180So these agencies are all bulletproof. They know that they're going to end up getting something similar or more every single year.
00:51:38.700And it creates an incentive for them to abuse their power.
00:51:42.200The other thing you can do is actually legislate.
00:51:45.960So you're not delegating to the bureaucracy key issues regarding how to enforce federal law.
00:52:24.680That would, I think, be a great check for that.
00:52:27.940I also think that we're going to have a good chance to see some of this Chevron deference really curtailed or maybe even eliminated based on the U.S. Supreme Court's upcoming jurisprudence.
00:52:39.560And I think that's another reason why the bureaucracy has become so powerful, because courts have basically been told they can pretty much do what they want and courts are supposed to just defer.
00:52:49.960I don't think that that's actually correct.
00:52:51.740I think the courts, they have to make a judgment about what does the law actually say, and you can't just defer to, quote, unquote, experts in the bureaucracy.
00:53:03.320All right, shifting gears, Governor, I want to ask you, another topic that's been in the news a lot is Disney.
00:53:08.700They blamed you for canceling plans for a billion-dollar investment in Florida, said they were canceling 2,000 jobs.
00:53:18.180I saw other reports that suggested Disney was going to make the cuts anyway due to a larger budget-cutting initiative.
00:53:25.140Regardless of why they did it, why do you feel your fight with Disney remains important, considering you already beat them on the parental rights bill that they opposed?
00:53:36.520And what would you say to some of your opponents in this race who argue that the fight is dragged on too long?
00:53:43.480So first of all, Florida stands for the protection of children.
00:53:46.140We believe jamming gender ideology in elementary school is wrong.
00:53:50.920Disney obviously supported injecting gender ideology in elementary school.
00:53:55.600They did oppose our parents' rights legislation.
00:53:58.300And the fact is, when they opposed it, that was a big deal because for 50 years, anytime Disney wanted something in Florida politics, they pretty much got it.
00:54:12.260But what happened was Disney's posturing, some of the other statements that their executives were making, kind of the corporate culture, had really been outed as trying to inject matters of sex into the programming for the youth.
00:54:26.940And I think a lot of parents, including me, look at that and say, that's not appropriate.
00:54:30.460I mean, we want our kids to be able to just be kids.
00:54:35.040So you had this setup that Disney engineered many decades ago where they actually had their own government that they controlled with no accountability.
00:54:44.600They were exempt from the laws that all their competitors had to follow, massive tax breaks, and they even racked up municipal debt.
00:54:52.160And Florida basically put them on a pedestal many decades ago and joined the state with this one company at the hip.
00:54:58.680We just didn't feel that we were comfortable maintaining that relationship.
00:55:03.080And so we ended their self-governing status.
00:55:06.540So Disney has to live under the same laws as everybody.
00:55:09.580They've got to pay the same taxes as everybody.
00:55:11.840And obviously, they'll be responsible for those debts.
00:55:14.320So the reason why there's a, quote, fight is just because they filed a lawsuit against the state of Florida trying to get their special privileges reinstituted.
00:55:23.800But I don't think that that's good policy.
00:55:25.980And I think some of these Republicans that are taking Disney's side, they're basically showing themselves to be corporatists because these are all corporate goodies.
00:55:34.860This is not the way you would run a competitive economy.
00:55:37.920And the arrangement had really outlived its usefulness.
00:55:42.080But it persisted because Disney was so politically powerful.
00:55:45.000I think the company's ethos have changed in a way that's alienated a lot of people in our legislature and in Florida.
00:55:51.200And so there was really no justification to keep it.
00:55:53.620But make no mistake, they're suing to try to get special privileges.
00:55:58.480People are making money in Florida hand over fist because we have a great business climate.
00:56:17.980The media used to criticize Republicans for being in the pocket of big corporations.
00:56:21.920And now they're attacking you because you're not.
00:56:24.780Well, not only that, David, it's interesting because the media in Florida for years had had hammered Disney.
00:56:31.060And they would they would point out like that this was this was not a good arrangement because, you know, Disney was not accountable to anyone.
00:56:36.960I mean, when we when the state control board took over this district, the firefighters came to the board and they said, hey, we weren't getting survivor benefits for for some of these widows.
00:56:47.680And so the state control board actually paid out some of the benefits that they were getting stiffed on.
00:56:52.420There were a lot of people in central Florida who were really thankful that there was some accountability being brought to bear because, I mean, you know, it's human nature.
00:56:59.880If there's no accountability over any individual or entity, of course, they're going to behave differently than if you have normal accountability.
00:57:07.700But the media was always very hostile to that.
00:57:10.840But just because I happen to be involved in bringing it back to reality and making sure that they were under the same laws, well, then all of a sudden.
00:57:19.360OK, we're going to continue this on Getter right now on War Room.