The Auron MacIntyre Show - The Future of Florida ｜ Guest： James Fishback ｜ 12⧸12⧸25

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00:00:30.540 Hey, everybody.

00:00:31.460 How's it going?

00:00:32.100 Thanks for joining me this afternoon.

00:00:33.580 I've got a great stream with a great guest that I think you're really going to enjoy.

00:00:37.300 My home state of Florida has enjoyed the glorious rule of King DeSantis for quite a while.

00:00:43.300 It's been fantastic compared to most of the rest of the country, especially during the COVID epidemic.

00:00:48.960 We had so much in Florida that was done better than every other state.

00:00:53.000 A lot of people have really appreciated that leadership.

00:00:56.280 But sadly, Governor DeSantis does have to go.

00:00:59.160 There are term limits in the Florida Constitution.

00:01:01.780 I thought he should change that, but other people decided perhaps not.

00:01:05.080 So instead, we have to talk about what comes next.

00:01:08.660 And there is a big fight over the future of the GOP, I think, in general, but especially here in Florida.

00:01:15.680 Joining me today is one of the candidates running for governor, James Fishback.

00:01:20.460 Thank you so much for coming on.

00:01:21.980 My pleasure.

00:01:22.360 Absolutely.

00:01:24.360 It's very interesting because there has been an endorsement already of a candidate in the race by President Trump, which I think is a critical thing for us to look at.

00:01:34.940 But ultimately, a lot of people are asking, is Byron Donald the person to carry on the legacy of Ron DeSantis?

00:01:42.120 So I'm going to dive into that with you, why you think that perhaps you might be a better candidate for that legacy.

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00:02:51.260 So a lot of people are going to talk about this governor's race.

00:02:54.360 I'm sure it's going to be something of a contentious issue going into the election.

00:02:59.600 But ultimately, I find it interesting because, of course, this is my governor's race for my state.

00:03:05.260 But even more interestingly, Byron Donalds was not only my congressman, he was also my state rep.

00:03:10.740 I actually remember interviewing him as I was a local reporter.

00:03:15.160 I doubt he even remembers this at the time for one of the local papers.

00:03:18.500 But this is a guy who's been in the area for a while.

00:03:21.220 He's reasonably well-liked.

00:03:22.900 However, a lot of people are asking questions about this continuity of the Republican Party in Florida.

00:03:29.260 Is he the guy to carry this thing forward?

00:03:32.460 Now, I think the endorsement from President Trump for a lot of people sealed the deal.

00:03:37.100 But now we're seeing other people jump in and say, maybe that's not the case.

00:03:40.800 Of course, you yourself are running.

00:03:42.340 We're seeing Paul Renner, who's a former speaker in the Florida House, has thrown his hat in the ring.

00:03:48.220 Though the fact that Governor DeSantis kind of said, I don't know what this guy's doing and I don't think he should have run, probably means that that campaign is over before it started.

00:03:56.980 Other people are speculating that the lieutenant governor will also throw his hat in the ring.

00:04:01.000 So I guess before we get into that, like, melee of all these different candidates and who's qualified and why, maybe you can just give people some background on yourself and why you thought you should jump into the race.

00:04:13.080 Well, Oren, I thought I would jump into the race because I had a chance to actually meet all the candidates beforehand and understand their policy platforms.

00:04:20.660 I've never run for office.

00:04:22.060 I'm a business guy.

00:04:22.900 I've run an investment firm and been in other investment firms for the last 10 years.

00:04:27.180 And so as a fourth generation Floridian, someone who grew up in South Florida, who now lives in the eastern panhandle,

00:04:32.080 I obviously, like you, Oren, have a vested interest in seeing, one, that Governor DeSantis' legacy is preserved, and two, that there's a real affordability policy put in place that can lower property insurance costs, property tax, auto insurance, bring up wages, and tackle programs like H-1B at the state level so our college grads, recent grads, can get jobs again.

00:04:54.540 So I entered this race, honestly, because I think I'm the only person who has a vision for the state that is America first, that is Florida first, and that will stand up to the biggest challenges that our state faces.

00:05:07.060 And so for us, that is overdevelopment.

00:05:10.140 That's the property developers running amok in the Florida House and the FWC, turning our state into the next Shanghai or New York, trying to pave over every little acre.

00:05:18.560 That's not the kind of identity we want as a state.

00:05:21.240 We are not, as Byron Donald says, we do not want to be the financial capital of the world.

00:05:26.340 We want to be the citrus capital again, the ag capital, the cattle capital, the tourism capital.

00:05:31.200 That's what Floridians stand for.

00:05:32.880 And so I'm in this race to come full circle for two reasons.

00:05:35.800 Someone has to preserve Governor DeSantis' wins on DEI, gender ideology, election integrity, getting out the Soros-backed prosecutors.

00:05:45.360 And then second, a candidate who will actually make life a little easier and a lot more affordable.

00:05:50.560 That's why I'm running for Florida governor.

00:05:52.600 And I think that is a huge deal.

00:05:54.720 Of course, ultimately, a lot of governors focus on the economic activity of their state, which is crucial, of course.

00:06:01.360 But at what cost?

00:06:03.380 Like, what does one sacrifice ultimately for those decisions?

00:06:06.920 I think a lot of people recognize, if you live in Florida, how ridiculous the prices are, how out of control housing and all of these other things are, especially, as you say, the insurance, multiple hurricanes blowing through, jacking up rates, car insurance.

00:06:20.700 All these things go through the roof as the claims are made.

00:06:23.440 And these are all hidden costs of living, things that don't necessarily show up in a simple chart.

00:06:28.620 But when you stack them all together, really do make it very difficult for, I think, the young person in Florida to move forward.

00:06:35.380 And that's something critical to me because, of course, while I know a large amount of the state is, I mean, even Governor DeSantis made this joke.

00:06:41.800 It's God's waiting room, right?

00:06:43.040 Like, there's a lot of very old people in Florida.

00:06:46.280 It's the classic, I'll move there as I get older because the climate's mild and all these things.

00:06:51.240 But over time, you recognize that more and more of Florida's economy and the different aspects of its tax policies and other policies have ultimately driven it towards this servicing one particular age group.

00:07:03.940 And, again, I have nothing against the older Floridians, but the fact that we have skewed so much of our economy and so much of our development and, you know, the elderly care is a high percentage of jobs in large months of Florida. 0.79

00:07:18.060 And so it's just this very skewed scenario.

00:07:20.820 However, at the same time, I think a lot of people look at the Republican Party and say, well, this has to be the party of free markets, right?

00:07:28.580 It's, you know, we are about the trade.

00:07:30.540 We are about capitalism.

00:07:31.700 We are about GDP.

00:07:32.620 These things do matter.

00:07:34.540 So how do you balance that?

00:07:36.220 How do you balance that desire to constantly grow and produce and be, you know, in a competitive economy with also allowing for that affordability factor so that young families can get started in the state of Florida?

00:07:49.440 Well, I'll just give you one example.

00:07:50.900 My parents bought their first home in 1996, where I grew up in Broward County.

00:07:55.040 They were bidding against two families, two other families that they had seen in the open house.

00:08:00.000 They put in a bid for $104,000.

00:08:02.120 They won it, beat the other bid by 500.

00:08:04.420 Today, Oren, when you're buying a home in Florida, you're not just competing against other families.

00:08:09.340 You're competing against hedge funds, private equity, Blackstone, companies that want to turn these single-family homes into Airbnbs or short-term rental properties.

00:08:16.580 That is not what our founding fathers set out to do when they envisaged private property, the idea being that we compete with other Americans for our soil, not with foreign interests, not with foreign speculators, and certainly not with private equity firms backed by foreign dollars.

00:08:31.200 I'm just going to come out and say it.

00:08:32.820 I am a staunch conservative, but I think the free market is highly overrated.

00:08:36.500 That's not to say that I believe in a Marxist socialist way of dividing up resources, not at all.

00:08:43.000 I believe that the free market is a great means to an end, but it is not the end itself.

00:08:48.940 And the way to test this, Oren, is that if the free market were the end itself, we would have never abolished the moral repugnancy that was slavery.

00:08:56.420 After all, slavery was a free market.

00:08:58.500 There were buyers, there were sellers, there was demand, there was supply, there was an equilibrium price.

00:09:03.060 It's the textbook definition of that.

00:09:04.840 But it was more morally repugnant, which is why it must have ended.

00:09:09.180 And at the end of the day, if the free market were the actual end, then we would be in the system we are now, which is the misprioritization of different policies.

00:09:18.740 So I'll just give you an example.

00:09:19.540 I think the end for our society, for the American experiment, should be a free people, not a free market.

00:09:25.840 So a free people is one in which you don't have to compete with Blackstone to buy your first home.

00:09:31.700 Because we recognize in America that a delay to home ownership is a delay to starting a marriage, is a delay to starting a family.

00:09:40.540 If you can't have a marriage, kids, then what is the point of all of this?

00:09:44.540 It goes further to say that AI data centers would fall squarely into free markets.

00:09:49.160 Well, why are we bothered if OpenAI or EX, AI, comes in and buys up 500 acres of land to build an AI data center?

00:09:57.780 Well, in a free market, you might say, well, it's a market-clearing price.

00:10:01.080 There was a buyer, a willing seller, and so on.

00:10:03.500 That is very different than a free people.

00:10:07.060 A free people would say, you know what?

00:10:08.440 We don't want this massive thing that makes a Costco look like a 7-Eleven convenience store.

00:10:12.660 We don't want an AI data center that threatens our natural landscape, even our water supply.

00:10:17.160 And we certainly don't want them hogging up the electricity on the market.

00:10:20.280 Because if the grid isn't welcoming new energy supply, by definition, a massive user of energy is going to drive up energy costs as a result.

00:10:31.000 And so when I say free market, I view that as a means to an end, but the end being a free people.

00:10:36.520 And that is a big rift in the GOP right now, the Republican Party, is do we want to continue down this path of line-go-up, GDP, stock market-obsessed Republicans?

00:10:45.880 Or do we actually want to focus on the prosperity of Americans?

00:10:49.220 For me, I'm an America-first conservative.

00:10:51.420 And I define America-first not by the stock market going up, not by GDP going up, but how are average American citizens faring economically.

00:10:59.080 I think the perfect way to measure this is what percentage of 30-year-old men are married and own their home.

00:11:07.280 What percentage of 30-year-old men are both married and own their home?

00:11:10.820 In 1960, when my dad was growing up in South Florida, half of 30-year-olds were married and owned their own home.

00:11:17.500 Today, it's less than 15%.

00:11:19.320 And so if I'm elected as Florida governor, my north star is how can we create both a political, economic, but also social policy set that creates the conditions for that 15% to go up, that allows more men and, by extension, women to get married, more men and, by extension, women to own their home and have a family, and all of the great things that come with that. 0.83

00:11:43.300 So that's great to hear, especially from somebody who has a background in finance and these kind of things.

00:11:51.560 But I'd have to ask, does this mean that you would support a ban on the ownership of residential real estate by private equity or foreign investors?

00:12:02.680 And if so, do you think a ban like that could hold up in court ultimately?

00:12:07.360 I think so.

00:12:08.200 Yes, I would support that.

00:12:09.420 And I think that that is the ultimate nuclear option.

00:12:11.960 I think it would hold up in court.

00:12:14.280 And the reason why is there's a compelling state interest in preserving homeownership for Americans.

00:12:21.260 I would also go as far as to say that, you know, right now, Oren, if we flew to Canada and wanted to buy a single-family home in Montreal, as American citizens, we would be banned from doing so.

00:12:30.140 Because two years ago, Canada banned all foreign nationals from buying up land.

00:12:35.260 I think we need to do the same thing in Florida.

00:12:36.780 I don't think it's right for a family of four that wants to move into a bigger house to become a family of six, seven, or just start a new, or whatever the case is.

00:12:46.860 They shouldn't be impeded from doing that because a foreign national was able to outbid them by $500 or $1,000.

00:12:53.040 And so this has actually happened in other countries.

00:12:55.980 I think it lines up squarely with a compelling state interest.

00:12:58.820 But lastly, there are things that we can do if a full ban were not upheld.

00:13:02.460 We have to have plan A, plan B, plan C.

00:13:05.080 The additional plans are how can we effectively fine with the purposes of deterring private equity ownership of our homes, which deprives Floridians the ability to buy that home.

00:13:16.300 And then secondarily, how can we create a tax system that further disincentivizes that?

00:13:21.020 Right now, the old Econ 101 aphorism, right, which is show me the incentive and I'll show you the outcome.

00:13:28.440 Right now, there is every incentive for private equity to outbid a family of four, to deprive them of the promise of homeownership, even though they've saved up and done everything right.

00:13:37.180 So I would change that a bit.

00:13:39.180 I would say show me the disincentive and I'll show you the outcome.

00:13:41.860 To show you the disincentive is to say, how can we actively disincentivize private equity from buying up homes, buying up entire neighborhoods, turning them into rental communities?

00:13:50.920 And how can we incentivize homeownership?

00:13:53.000 I say this because a home isn't just a cool thing to have.

00:13:55.980 It is in many respects an existential precondition to you getting married, starting a family, retiring, passing on multigenerational wealth.

00:14:05.700 This is common sense conservatism.

00:14:07.580 And, you know, we go back to this idea of the conservative movement being rooted in liberty, liberty, liberty, liberty.

00:14:13.800 I agree.

00:14:14.700 The question, the perennial question is liberty for whom?

00:14:17.740 Liberty for private equity firms?

00:14:19.300 Liberty for foreign nationals? 0.99

00:14:20.600 If there is liberty for everyone, Oren, there is liberty in turn for no one.

00:14:25.040 I believe the North Star of the America First conservative movement should be to deliver liberty, but exclusively and solely for American citizens, lest that liberty be diluted by an obsession with handing it over to private equity foreign nationals, which would strip Americans of their God-given liberty.

00:14:41.820 Now, going along with the actual purchase price of the home, as you pointed out, homeowners insurance, car insurance, flood insurance, which I pay on top of all of these things, very expensive, really putting what might have been a home that was in reach out of reach because of that additional cost on top of that.

00:15:01.700 The problem is that at one point we are required, the banks require you to carry all of these different insurances in order to own the home, but there's really no way you can find a healthy competition for these, especially with Florida being a state that is frequently visited by natural disasters like hurricanes.

00:15:20.240 So the question is, are these fair market prices coming in from these different insurers, are they just insurers doing business and responding to the fact that Florida just exists as a swamp in the middle of a place that gets hit by hurricanes, or is there price gouging involved?

00:15:36.940 Is there a way to work with these companies?

00:15:39.060 Do they need to be regulated?

00:15:40.580 How do we handle this situation?

00:15:42.340 Or is the situation simply not able to be handled because it is just a response of the market to the conditions in Florida?

00:15:48.340 Well, it is not a response to the market of the conditions in Florida.

00:15:53.300 And the best way to know that is we just had the first hurricane season in a very long time that did not constitute a major hurricane making landfall in Florida.

00:16:00.280 In a free market, Oren, you would have had your flood insurance and your property insurance and mine as well cut you a check and say, you know what?

00:16:08.160 We overestimated the premium you had to pay because we in turn overestimated the risk of hurricane landfall and the subsequent damage in coverage that we would have had to pay out.

00:16:15.980 And so a free market is clearly not what is happening.

00:16:18.920 I think anytime you have a system where prices are too high, you have to look at the natural culprit, which is there a lack of competition?

00:16:25.120 Absolutely, there's a lack of competition in this market.

00:16:27.480 But I also think we need to really be honest about these insurance companies and the games that they're playing.

00:16:31.580 Part of it is to do with litigation tort reform that sort of stops the type of fraud that takes place far too often after a hurricane.

00:16:40.560 I mean, I saw this growing up as a kid.

00:16:42.120 You know, everybody would be throwing stuff in the living room, not me, obviously, but, you know, neighbors and trying to drive up the ability to have a larger claim payout.

00:16:50.040 We have to crack down on fraud because when there's fraud in the system, what ends up happening is we end up paying for it.

00:16:57.340 Oh, well, the insurance company got defrauded by $50,000, $100,000.

00:17:01.060 And they might, the person who defrauded them might say, well, it's, I'm not taking from the people.

00:17:05.220 I'm just taking from a billion dollar insurance company.

00:17:07.500 No, those, those losses are going to get socialized amongst the rest of the pool.

00:17:12.320 So that's the first thing is to crack down on fraud and that will allow and work with insurance companies to tell them, look, here's our plan to crack down on both civil and criminal fraud, fraudulent complaints, et cetera.

00:17:23.680 But secondarily, how do we create a system that actually incentivizes insurance companies, as was the case this season?

00:17:29.440 Wait, hold on a second.

00:17:30.540 We paid for all this insurance.

00:17:32.200 Folks are not expecting a full refund of their premiums of the insurance industry would never be financially viable.

00:17:37.960 But we are, we are demanding a system that says, you know what, when you don't have a major hurricane at all in the entire state, when there's nothing to pay out, there should be a refund.

00:17:47.280 And that's what I would work with the legislature to do is when there are times when we don't actually have the conditions that are creating storms and creating the conditions for claims that there should be a refund system back to Floridians.

00:17:59.440 So obviously you're stepping into the ring against what I would say would be a rather well-established candidate at this point, somebody who has served for a while in Byron Donalds.

00:18:12.760 You may have other viable contenders soon, but we're not sure.

00:18:16.280 So we're just going to work with that as the kind of a lead candidate.

00:18:19.720 Now, on top of having a record inside of the Florida legislature and being a congressman, Donalds also has the endorsement of President Trump.

00:18:29.380 I imagine that many of the voters that you are trying to appeal to would value Trump's endorsement.

00:18:36.380 They would see that as something that speaks to Donaldson being able to carry on that DeSantis legacy.

00:18:42.760 What would you say in response to someone who says, look, Donaldson, he's got an established record, seems like a nice guy, has Trump's endorsement.

00:18:51.320 I'm just going to go with a safe bet here.

00:18:52.960 Why would someone choose you over someone who has President Trump's endorsement?

00:18:57.780 Well, he is certainly a safe bet if you want more AI data centers.

00:19:01.000 He's certainly a safe bet if you want your college grads to be replaced and not hired by foreign national H-1Bs. 1.00

00:19:06.980 He's certainly a safe bet if you want the property developers to continue to run amok, to pave over the Everglades, to start drilling off the shores of Florida.

00:19:15.160 That's exactly what Byron Donalds is.

00:19:16.980 He is a safe bet.

00:19:18.000 We don't have time for safetyism, complacency, or conceitedness.

00:19:21.860 We need a bold leader, just as Governor DeSantis has been for the last eight years, to step up, to preserve those wins, and to advance an agenda that actually puts Florida first.

00:19:30.360 I think the biggest distinguishing factor between me and Congressman Donalds is the fact that he supports the H-1B program and the alphabet letter soup that is the immigration system.

00:19:39.860 So this time last year, Oren, he said, quote, we want anyone from anywhere to come to America if they can contribute.

00:19:48.340 Now, that sounds nice to contribute.

00:19:50.680 But when you are in America and you are a foreigner, even if you're given a legal work visa, if you are here, you have a job. 0.57

00:19:58.800 That is a job that could have gone to a Floridian, somebody from Pahokee or Pensacola, Mariana, or Miami.

00:20:04.300 That is a job that could have gone to someone here, someone who now does not have an income and therefore is falling for the vices that are sadly everywhere in our culture.

00:20:14.020 Someone that doesn't have an income, which means they can't obtain equity and buy a home.

00:20:17.940 Someone who doesn't have a home, can't get married, can't get married, can't have kids, etc.

00:20:21.740 There are massive downstream consequences for not putting our workers first.

00:20:25.960 That's why I'm the only candidate in this race who, one, has vowed to end the H-1B scam, unlike Byron Donalds, who wants to continue it.

00:20:33.440 But number two, actually has a plan to address this at the state level.

00:20:37.980 Now, federal preemption is a very important topic these days.

00:20:41.180 As you know, Oren, the H-1B program is a creation of the U.S. Congress in 1990.

00:20:47.200 But I'm not going to sit here and throw up my hands and say we can't do anything because the federal government is trying to screw up our workers.

00:20:52.760 I believe in states' rights.

00:20:54.600 I believe in the 10th Amendment.

00:20:55.640 I believe that what is not given to the federal government explicitly in our Constitution is reserved for the states and her people.

00:21:03.160 That's me, you, and all of your listeners who may be struggling to get a job themselves, may want a better-paying job, or their kids or grandkids may be in college or in technical school now at the threat of having more and more foreign workers come into our state to take up those opportunities. 0.97

00:21:17.020 My plan is very, very simple.

00:21:18.600 I'm going to use the power of state contracts at the state level here in Florida to tell companies whether they're Deloitte or Microsoft, Accenture or KPMG, doesn't matter how large or small you are, that now, as President Reagan said, now is a time for choosing.

00:21:33.280 Do you want your 50 H-1Bs or do you want your $50 million a year state contract? 0.89

00:21:38.900 Because it would be a shame if something happened to that contract if you decided to screw over Florida workers and keep putting foreigners first. 0.97

00:21:45.080 And so my plan is to look at the incredible purchasing power that we as a state have, the leverage that we have to drive a very hard bargain for these companies and say, look, you're going to lose out on your state contracts unless you rehire great qualified Floridians for these roles.

00:22:01.980 And they're going to do the rational thing.

00:22:03.480 They're going to rehire Florida workers.

00:22:05.580 And additionally, they're going to be able to create an economic system that actually prioritizes Americans.

00:22:11.260 This goes back to this idea of a free market.

00:22:12.980 Free market for whom?

00:22:13.880 Is it a free market for cheap foreign labor from India, China to come here and take our jobs? 0.99

00:22:18.680 If it's a free market for them, it by definition cannot be a free market for us.

00:22:24.180 And so when I say liberty, I say give me liberty or give me death, but give me the liberty for our people, not for them.

00:22:31.640 If I say liberty, I say give us liberty for our natural environment and our Everglades and not for property developers and AI data centers.

00:22:39.320 And so I'm in this race because one, I voted for President Trump and Governor DeSantis, but I'm also in this race because our vision, my campaign's vision for the state actually respects the dignity of our workers and will always stand up for them.

00:22:51.940 If Congressman Donald's actually had a plan to save the H-1B program, I probably wouldn't be in this race.

00:22:58.040 I wouldn't need to be in this race.

00:22:59.360 But it's precisely because him and no one else really has an opportunity to really step up and say, how are we going to protect Florida workers from the great replacement?

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00:23:37.220 Terms and conditions apply.

00:23:39.360 Well, I certainly like to hear that.

00:23:41.180 Of course, you might be aware that H-1Bs and immigration are some of my key issues. 1.00

00:23:46.160 And I fear that they aren't taken seriously enough, even as we now attempt to push quite a bit on illegal immigration.

00:23:51.900 The debate over legal immigration is, of course, raging all across the GOP and the wider American electorate.

00:23:58.940 Oh, and guys, I'm sorry I didn't mention, but this is prerecorded, so we will not be able to take your questions at the end today.

00:24:04.840 Sorry about that.

00:24:05.900 But there is something I am concerned about.

00:24:08.620 I don't know if you're familiar, but over, I think it was last Christmas, so it's been about a year, we had the great H-1B Christmas debate.

00:24:17.900 We had Vivek Ramaswamy and Elon Musk kind of stepping on every rake they could discussing the H-1B program.

00:24:25.940 And I'm sure, you know, at some level, Elon Musk really sees this as just like the key to unlocking critical parts of things you think will be good for the United States.

00:24:33.760 I don't want to throw a bunch of, you know, disparaging remarks on the motivations of these men.

00:24:38.940 But I think ultimately that just their thinking on the issue has been wrong and they have put toward a forward a vision of even legal immigration that most of the GOP base disagrees with.

00:24:49.660 Now, I do really appreciate your point about how to use the Florida budget and its contracts to ultimately leverage these companies into utilizing Floridian labor and not foreign labor.

00:25:01.900 However, I was sent a text that had a screenshot of you kind of complimenting Vivek Ramaswamy after his post on this issue about American culture and we don't work hard enough and we watch too much say by the bell.

00:25:14.380 I want to give you a chance to kind of contextualize that and answer any concerns that people might have, because if you look just at that snapshot, I'll be honest, it understandably has people scratching their head saying, oh, man, is this guy just kind of saying this now because it sounds good?

00:25:27.880 What's going on here?

00:25:29.060 So it's a great question.

00:25:30.240 Thanks for the opportunity to clarify.

00:25:31.460 So it actually, I wasn't replying to Vivek's tweet.

00:25:33.820 I was replying to a guy by the name of Joe Weisenthal who works for Bloomberg and he snipped part of Vivek's tweet, which called out cultural degeneracy.

00:25:41.680 I think Vivek is right on that particular point that there is cultural degeneracy in our environment.

00:25:46.560 I visit high schools all across the state for my nonprofit debate, League Incubate Debate, and I see kids who've got vape pens.

00:25:52.000 They got an AirPod in the air walking into class.

00:25:54.200 They got their jeans sagging below the waist.

00:25:56.520 The cultural degeneracy that puts Cardi B on a pedestal and tells students that Thomas Jefferson is a racist, of course that's degenerate.

00:26:04.340 But that is not an excuse to import the third world and allow us to become the third world. 0.93

00:26:09.400 And furthermore, Vivek's criticism of Saved by the Bell, his criticism of the jocks, as opposed to the exemplification of academic scholars, that's wrong.

00:26:18.320 That's misplaced.

00:26:19.060 It's not the America I knew and I grew up in.

00:26:21.320 And so I think his comments are abhorrent.

00:26:23.100 I think that my record on the H-1B is I have never supported the H-1B program.

00:26:27.600 In fact, my investment firm had to take a massive L because we publicly listed an ETF called the Azoria Meritocracy ETF that we launched at almost $40 million of assets in it.

00:26:39.100 And then we committed the capital crime of going to our board and saying, you know, we want to be able to further enhance meritocracy by excluding companies that abuse the H-1B program.

00:26:48.600 And then nine days later, they voted to delist our fund because apparently that's xenophobic.

00:26:54.080 It's xenophobic to stand up for American workers.

00:26:56.680 And so our firm personally took, the firm that I started and I'm the CEO of, personally took a $40 million hit defending American workers against the H-1B scam.

00:27:06.280 That comment about Vivek's tweet that was actually not in direct response of Vivek's tweet, but it was in response to the cultural criticism of cultural degeneracy.

00:27:14.540 I, of course, stand by that.

00:27:15.760 I think that if you look at the way that there is a certain level of fatigue now when we go out in public, that there is a frustration that far too many Americans are wearing pajamas on the airplane or showing up to take the SAT in street wear, that is ultimate abhorrent cultural degeneracy.

00:27:31.860 And we should absolutely call that out.

00:27:34.120 Fair enough.

00:27:34.820 And, yeah, I'm glad that you made that clear because I think I said a lot of people were confused.

00:27:39.060 They're like, look, one side of this guy's mouth, I hear the H-1B thing.

00:27:42.380 The other side, I'm seeing this.

00:27:43.420 What's going on here?

00:27:44.180 Because a lot of people are, I think, rightfully worried about kind of opportunists in the Republican Party in this moment.

00:27:51.360 We're currently seeing a wider struggle between kind of the attempts of the old Mitt Romney, Jeb Bush, kind of neoconservatism, trying to kind of fight its way back into and gain control over parts of the Republican Party that have become more MAGA and populist oriented.

00:28:08.780 So everyone's kind of keeping their eye out for extra fakery and that kind of thing.

00:28:13.000 And so I think it's reasonable for people to be concerned about that, keep an eye out.

00:28:17.800 But it's good to know that there's good context for that comment.

00:28:22.120 Now, you said many times AI data centers.

00:28:25.860 And I don't think most people are – this is not on their radar yet.

00:28:28.380 But it's actually rather important.

00:28:29.760 Funny enough, I just ran into some guy in a restaurant yesterday who is a Chicago executive who is planning to do all these AI data centers throughout Florida.

00:28:41.020 He was very surprised to know that I knew anything about it.

00:28:43.420 He thought just another guy, he's not going to know what I'm talking about.

00:28:47.280 But, you know, there is a plan to just secure large tracts of property to, as you say, a lot of pollution, drawing a lot of energy, all these kind of things.

00:28:56.760 Can you talk a little bit about AI data centers, why they're becoming so plentiful, what kind of deleterious effect they might have?

00:29:05.560 Absolutely.

00:29:06.000 So an AI data center is a giant building full of servers, computers, cooling fans that is designed to do two things, train new AI models like ChatGPT 6 and infer, which is to say to keep up the existing models so when you or I go on to Grok or ChatGPT now that our existing request gets fulfilled rather quickly.

00:29:27.760 So they're giant computer labs, right?

00:29:29.960 They truly do make a Costco look like a 7-Eleven convenience store.

00:29:33.980 They're massive.

00:29:35.020 They suck massive energy up.

00:29:37.820 And the risk is not hypothetical.

00:29:40.020 We're seeing it right now in Georgia, Tennessee, and Pennsylvania that when they build an AI data center, your electric bill in the subsequent months goes up 30%, 40%, 50%.

00:29:49.300 That in Tennessee, in particular, outside of Memphis, that the water has literally become undrinkable because of the AI data center being constructed and the deleterious environmental effects it's having.

00:30:00.040 I think the great thing about Republicans in our state or in Florida is that we are actually conservationists.

00:30:06.040 We don't fall for the climate change hoax.

00:30:08.600 We don't fall for the green news scam.

00:30:10.720 But we do believe in preserving our environment.

00:30:12.840 That's why any Republican in our state should stand up and say, you know what?

00:30:15.920 We're not going to allow drilling in the Everglades.

00:30:18.060 We're not going to allow offshore drilling in the Gulf of America or in the Atlantic.

00:30:22.520 And we're certainly not going to allow you to spring up these AI data centers in Lakeland or in Loxahatchee and then drive up electric bills as a result.

00:30:30.740 And so I am pro-AI.

00:30:32.000 I am pro the technological revolution, absolutely.

00:30:34.520 But that cannot come at the cost of one, our environment, and two, our monthly electric bills.

00:30:41.280 And so it's important that I'm in this race because I think one of the reasons why I'm in this race is because of the threat that AI data centers have on our environment.

00:30:51.080 And I think the AI data center, to tell you the truth, is also a timely analogy for the perils of overdevelopment, right?

00:30:58.840 The AI data center is the new self-storage unit, is the new self-service car wash, is the new endless gas station liquor store weed dispensary.

00:31:07.880 The question we have to ask ourselves is what kind of state do we want?

00:31:10.940 If you want a concrete jungle, you got New York, you got Chicago, you got LA.

00:31:14.960 Are we sick of the traffic?

00:31:16.480 Are we sick of the endless urban sprawl?

00:31:19.000 Are we sick of strip mall after strip mall?

00:31:21.500 Are we sick of new and new Section 8-style housing units?

00:31:25.300 There's a law in economics you'll be familiar with, Orem, which is called Say's Law.

00:31:29.120 If you build it, they will come.

00:31:31.360 And guess what?

00:31:32.060 If we keep building, everyone and their mom, from New York to Illinois to California, is going to keep coming to Florida.

00:31:38.800 My view of the state that my family is known for four generations is very simply three words.

00:31:44.780 Florida is full.

00:31:46.000 To my own friends in New York, stay where you are.

00:31:49.020 That little communist, I'm sorry for your loss, but that is not our problem.

00:31:53.080 Florida cannot continue to be a refugee camp for the rest of the country fleeing from its problems. 1.00

00:31:58.240 And part of that is to stop building housing so endless New Yorkers can move here, drive up our costs, worsen our traffic.

00:32:06.380 I respect them.

00:32:07.160 You have a right to exist in this country, but you don't have a right to come down here and price out families and push us out.

00:32:13.120 And we've been here for a very long time.

00:32:14.660 Yeah, I mean, I'm not going to push your luck by asking you what we're going to do about the New Yorker problem, like whether we're going to erect border control at the Florida Georgia line.

00:32:26.180 But I agree with you 100%.

00:32:28.000 That's a massive issue.

00:32:29.780 There is, as you know, there is a constitutional right to mobility that's implied in the First Amendment.

00:32:36.340 Clearly, that is something we cannot do, even if we wanted to.

00:32:39.420 We're not building a wall.

00:32:40.360 We're not tariffing anyone.

00:32:41.760 But I think we can make clear that the benefits of Florida should largely accrue to Floridians,

00:32:45.240 which is why my property tax abolishment proposal only, only goes to Florida residents and their primary homesteaded residents, nothing else.

00:32:54.820 So if you're a snowbird from New York and you want to come down and spend five, six months out of the year in Palm Beach or in Polk County, be our guest.

00:33:01.860 But you're not going to get the incentive, the incentive of homeownership here.

00:33:07.660 And we have to be honest about, again, who are we serving, right?

00:33:10.880 Well, we need to serve everyone.

00:33:12.260 Well, if you're serving everyone, Oren, you are by definition serving no one.

00:33:17.720 If everyone has a million dollars, functionally, no one has a million dollars.

00:33:21.920 And so my job as Florida governor, if given this responsibility by the voters, is to put Florida first, to put Floridians first, to prioritize our workers.

00:33:30.160 I'll give you just one other example of this.

00:33:31.560 A couple weeks ago, President Trump had an interview with Laura Ingram in which he doubled down on this proposal to bring in 600,000 Chinese students.

00:33:38.600 Now, Chinese students would come to our universities, be given the F-1 visa, which allows them to study in the U.S. at an accredited university.

00:33:46.300 Now, I, as Florida governor, could not revoke an F-1 visa.

00:33:49.900 But here's what I could very clearly do, and I would pledge to do on my first day as governor, which is I would direct the board of governors that oversees our state universities, like UF, FSU, UCF, FGCU, not too far from where you are in Southwest Florida.

00:34:04.000 I would direct them to raise tuition on all foreign students to $1 million a year, and it has to be paid up front.

00:34:14.340 There's no financing and there's no negotiating.

00:34:16.620 And so when all of these foreign students can't pay, guess what? 0.87

00:34:20.040 That frees up admission spots, opportunities in our colleges for Florida students who want to come, who have gotten great grades, great test scores, but want to be at our university because they are from here.

00:34:31.660 And when they graduate, more importantly, they will stay here and contribute and build businesses and hire Florida workers.

00:34:38.960 Call me crazy.

00:34:39.800 If the Florida taxpayers like you and me are going to fund public universities here in Florida, then those admission spots, those seats in our classrooms and our lecture halls should go to Florida residents.

00:34:50.880 And as Florida governor, I'm going to use the full power of my executive to direct state universities to raise the price.

00:34:58.120 Again, show me the incentive, show me the outcome, raise the price, price out the foreigners, welcome back thousands of Florida students who have great test scores and grades so they can contribute to our universities. 1.00

00:35:09.540 So I want to go back and discuss something that you mentioned there at the beginning of that answer that I think is really important.

00:35:15.460 Obviously, there's a lot of discussion about abolishing property tax in Florida.

00:35:19.760 Now, I made a comment that was not particularly popular, but I also don't care.

00:35:25.180 That's my job.

00:35:26.160 So I pointed out that while I would love to never pay property tax again, I think it's pernicious that ultimately we have to constantly pay for our own property back to the government.

00:35:37.260 At the same time, Florida does not have an income tax, which, again, I'm very happy for.

00:35:42.160 But that means that the types of revenue that our municipalities, our counties, and ultimately our state can accrue to itself is limited.

00:35:50.060 The revenue sources are limited.

00:35:52.020 And so my concern is that if we eliminate the property tax, we'll be unduly shifting the tax burden onto younger people and families because the people who pay property tax in Florida,

00:36:03.740 the people who own property, and most of the people who own property in Florida are old.

00:36:08.020 They tend to be retirees.

00:36:09.340 They tend to be people who have been in their homes for a long time.

00:36:12.120 They bought their home back for $50,000, and now it's worth $500,000, these kind of things.

00:36:18.040 You can understand why you don't want them to be hit by these massive property tax increases.

00:36:21.400 But at the same time, if they're not paying those taxes, then you're eliminating the majority of that income that's going to come in.

00:36:29.520 Where else is that going to come from?

00:36:31.400 Now, I know you've said that you're going to limit that to Florida residents, which is great. 1.00

00:36:36.020 I think that's about half of the solution there because we don't have to worry about snowbirds ultimately utilizing this.

00:36:41.520 But what will we do for tax revenue in Florida?

00:36:44.240 And are you concerned about shifting that tax burden away from older property owners in the state?

00:36:50.680 Well, I'll just give you one example.

00:36:52.260 I was in Brevard County, which is where Kennedy Space Center is, Port Canaveral, which is a massive port.

00:36:57.980 There was the Carnival cruise ship there that was just unloading.

00:37:01.120 It was incredible.

00:37:02.220 What I think each county is going to end up doing is going to need to be a custom-tailored solution just because property tax is a wealth tax, right?

00:37:10.040 If you or I buy $10,000 of Apple stock and it doubles next month and we don't sell it, we don't owe them a tax bill.

00:37:17.340 But if you buy your home and it doubles, you now owe the government the increase in a yearly property tax bill.

00:37:24.800 So it is fundamentally a wealth tax, which strikes at the heart of the Constitution.

00:37:29.880 It's totally unconstitutional.

00:37:31.460 So again, I think two things can be true.

00:37:33.460 One, property taxes are morally repugnant, unconstitutional, constitute wealth taxes and need to go.

00:37:39.680 And then number two, solving for that revenue is not going to be easy, but we should still welcome the challenge because, you know, again, getting rid of slavery was not particularly popular in the South.

00:37:50.580 It was also a massive negative economic shock to the Southern economy, but it still made sense, obviously, to do it.

00:37:55.840 It was morally repugnant.

00:37:56.760 So here's how I think you end up doing it.

00:37:59.200 I'll give you just one example.

00:38:00.320 One county, Melbourne, which is in Brevard County, which is where Melbourne is, and it's Kennedy Space Center and Port Canaveral.

00:38:07.100 You can do what Osceola and Orange County have done.

00:38:09.320 You can place a tourism tax.

00:38:10.840 So every person coming in on a port in a ship, with the exception of Florida residents, can be charged another $25 to $50 a ticket.

00:38:18.880 You have an international airport in Melbourne that allows nonstop flights to the UK.

00:38:22.640 That airport can exact, through the county government, can direct the airport to exact a fee per ticket of $5 to $10.

00:38:30.120 We are a tourism capital.

00:38:31.500 You know who should be paying for our infrastructure?

00:38:33.300 The people who come into our state to spend a weekend with us.

00:38:36.980 And, you know, they are not price sensitive.

00:38:39.600 They are coming here.

00:38:40.260 They're coming to Disney because there's truly no place on earth like our beaches, like our theme parks, like our rivers, springs, and our Everglades.

00:38:48.220 And so I would welcome a shifting of the tax burden away from property owners and toward people who visit our state, toward tourists.

00:38:56.020 The second thing I'll say is it's not just raising new revenue.

00:38:59.000 It is also drawing down costs.

00:39:01.320 So I have said that one of the first things that I would do is direct our schools to do a full audit to ensure that every single student is, in fact, a citizen or legal resident of the United States.

00:39:12.540 In 1982, the Supreme Court had a disastrous decision called Plyler v. Doe, which found that children who are illegal immigrants still have a constitutional right to attend our public schools.

00:39:24.640 That was a horribly decided decision, much like Roe v. Wade.

00:39:27.820 And much like Roe v. Wade, when Mississippi stepped up and challenged the legality of that law in 2022, we as Florida and me as governor would stand up and challenge the legality of Plyler v. Doe.

00:39:38.740 Now, what is the downstream consequence of this?

00:39:40.580 We will be able to block illegal immigrant children from coming to our schools. 1.00

00:39:44.760 In some school districts, that could be anywhere from 10% to 18% of the student population are children who have no legal right to be in our country. 0.57

00:39:53.740 Now, what we do by kicking them out is, one, we reduce the cost at the county level, which is, again, curing the property tax burden.

00:40:00.940 Because, again, if 15% to 20% of a school is full of illegal immigrants, you could presume that getting rid of them would cut school funding against all else equal, would cut school funding by 15% to 20%, saving money for the taxpayer. 1.00

00:40:11.980 Secondarily, a lot of these kids don't speak English.

00:40:14.200 So when they're sitting in class dwindling their thumbs, they're also detracting from the actual productive classroom environment and hurting other kids in the process.

00:40:21.060 And third, to go to the immigration thing, if you take away the free childcare that so many illegals use, which is our public schools, you now give them an active disincentive to leave. 0.93

00:40:30.440 To leave, to leave, to leave, to leave.

00:40:33.140 And so this is really a multifaceted plan that's going to, I think, deliver for Floridians.

00:40:39.960 And at the end of the day, I'm not – Oren, you know, of course, what's happening with the Florida legislature.

00:40:45.600 There are a bunch of rhinos.

00:40:46.560 There are a bunch of Democrats who identify as Republicans.

00:40:49.380 Every single one of the plans that I think I've articulated in our conversation today and that I'll continue to share on the campaign trail,

00:40:55.580 every single one of them does not rely on the Florida legislature playing ball.

00:41:01.620 Every single thing I've talked about is really about using the power of the executive, using the power of the governor's office,

00:41:08.120 whether it's state contracts, whether it's education and kicking out the illegals, whatever it may be. 0.93

00:41:13.320 I have to be real that I am an anti-establishment candidate and the Florida legislature and largely the entirety of Tallahassee is the establishment.

00:41:22.260 And so it's nice to say these things.

00:41:24.040 One, I'm the only one saying them.

00:41:25.980 But two, how do you actually deliver them?

00:41:29.500 And I think I have a real plan, as I think I've articulated here in our back and forth, a real plan to deliver a bold policy vision,

00:41:35.880 not just for our state, but my hope is that other states will take our successful blueprint and do a little command C, command V.

00:41:42.940 That's the beauty of federalism.

00:41:44.300 You'll know that Justice Brandeis in the 30s coined this idea that each state is its own laboratory to perform experiments of its own.

00:41:51.040 And then the national government and other state governments can take cues from that.

00:41:55.300 And that's the kind of governor I'd love to be for the state that my family has known now for over 100 years.

00:41:59.380 Yeah, just in case people are skeptical at all, let me assure them that having just had the minor amount of experience I had working in Republican politics in Florida,

00:42:09.780 I have literally seen Democratic union bosses take the Republican baptism and run Republican the next round and win just because they have an R next to their name.

00:42:19.680 And that's how Florida works so that there's a very real instance of the Florida legislature being mostly Democrat while wearing an R on their uniform.

00:42:29.140 But I wanted to touch on schools there for a second and immigration because that's a cross section of things that I care quite a bit about.

00:42:34.980 I spent a long time as a public school teacher in Florida.

00:42:38.000 Florida, you go down to my local Walmart and there's not a single person speaking English, not the customers, not the employees.

00:42:46.200 They've got like one manager who's like, you know, break in case of emergency in case an actual American wanders in and wants to know where the avocados are.

00:42:53.920 But in general, you just can't have a conversation in the language of the United States here.

00:42:59.920 Obviously, immigration is primarily a federal issue.

00:43:02.780 But I wanted to ask you, you know, is there anything you can do to encourage employers to be held accountable?

00:43:10.080 Because there's just no way Walmart doesn't know that a good percentage of their employees are illegal immigrants in that Walmart.

00:43:18.860 And yet there's nothing is going to happen to them.

00:43:21.080 They're very confident about their ability to maintain that workforce.

00:43:24.480 So actually, I guess I'll ask you in two parts.

00:43:27.360 Is there anything you can do on the on the state level side to go after employees who employers who continue to employ illegal immigrants, even though it's very obvious that those people should not be there? 0.99

00:43:39.520 Yes, absolutely.

00:43:40.120 And so part of it is we actually have the laws in the books or and we just have to better enforce those laws that are already on the books.

00:43:47.040 Right.

00:43:47.500 Right. Murder is legal in Chicago as it is in Miami.

00:43:51.020 But there's a reason why no one gets killed in Miami on a weekend.

00:43:53.980 But so many people will get killed in Chicago because we enforce our laws here and they don't in Illinois.

00:44:00.340 And so my job as governor is to take the existing laws before drafting a new law, take the existing laws on the books and increase enforcement.

00:44:08.220 I'll take it even one step further.

00:44:10.020 Walmart has state contracts with the state government.

00:44:13.260 And so yet another lever to pull is to say, Walmart, your employees need to, one, be authorized to work in the United States, two, you cannot be taking away responsibilities from Floridians, and three, if your employees are not speaking English, then you are going to lose out on your state contract.

00:44:33.620 This goes back to this frustration that you feel, that I have felt, it doesn't matter where really you go in the state, a Walmart is full of, whether it's the shoppers or more often the employees who just don't speak our language, that we need to have a real standard for what it means to be an American.

00:44:50.520 It's really hard for Americans to be Americans in their own country anymore.

00:44:55.780 No one speaks our language.

00:44:57.180 Everyone insults our history.

00:44:58.800 There's this rampant, ubiquitous cultural degeneracy.

00:45:02.440 And what I want to do is I have, I think, a vision that a lot of Americans embrace for what being an American is.

00:45:08.500 But secondarily, I have an actual plan to execute on that, to actually go to Walmart's head of Florida and say, look at what's happening in Fort Myers.

00:45:17.400 Look at what's happening in Sarasota, Miami, Hialeah, it doesn't matter where it is.

00:45:21.120 We need to turn this around.

00:45:22.860 We need to fix it, or our future relationship, the one between Walmart and the state government of Florida, is going to really have some issues.

00:45:31.620 All right.

00:45:32.260 So my last question for you before we wrap this up, and again, guys, sorry, we won't be able to do questions today because this is prerecorded.

00:45:39.660 However, you already addressed part of this with immigration and the schools, but as a public school teacher, I was working in a majority-minority school.

00:45:49.340 Most of the school was either Hispanic immigrants from Venezuela or Mexico or immigrants from Haiti speaking Creole.

00:45:57.060 Lots of English as a second language.

00:46:00.200 Lots of students who can't understand what's going on.

00:46:02.640 Impossible to get certain lessons taught in school.

00:46:05.860 Very concerningly, also, immigrants basically got an automatic C or B in the classroom. 0.97

00:46:13.500 If you didn't do that, then the principal was going to come down and say, you're failing minority students and you have to fix this.

00:46:22.060 It's your fault if they're failing.

00:46:23.840 So therefore, you either bump the grade up or we fire you for not complying with all of these English as a second language requirements, which no one does.

00:46:32.700 So it's basically like we know you're not going to be able to comply with this, so we'll just use it as like this threat.

00:46:38.640 You know, okay, no one's going to comply.

00:46:40.060 It's kind of like the IRS.

00:46:40.940 We know that you broke the law because everyone breaks the law because the IRS has too many restrictions.

00:46:45.180 So we'll just selectively enforce it.

00:46:47.540 Similar thing with teachers and grading in schools.

00:46:50.160 Now, this has led to a far more concerning trend where when I was teaching during COVID, we changed to a system where basically all students could turn in all work at any time for no penalty.

00:47:02.520 And they called this grading with grace.

00:47:05.460 And after a while, it became really you could turn in as long as you tried to turn in an assignment, even if you did horribly, you couldn't receive less than I think a 50 or 60 percent on the assignment, which means a student could literally just turn in a piece of paper with their name scrawled on it.

00:47:19.280 And they get most of the way to a passing grade just by by doing this.

00:47:24.600 That system has stayed in place in the schools.

00:47:28.220 This is still, even after COVID, the way that now all students, not just immigrant students, not just during COVID, this is now how all Florida students are graded.

00:47:36.360 I know for a fact that we have at least one generation of Florida students who will have had their entire grades completely padded just because it looks better on the numbers.

00:47:46.160 Yes. Okay. We passed more minority students.

00:47:49.320 So therefore, we're not getting a lecture from the liberal paper.

00:47:52.440 But did we actually learn anything?

00:47:54.380 Did the children actually gain anything?

00:47:56.560 I think the answer increasingly is Florida is no.

00:47:58.840 There's no simple answer to this question.

00:48:01.280 But I wonder if you thought about this, you know, the desire to create this great inflation, to pump up these numbers, to bolster the idea that we're properly educating minority students and others.

00:48:10.120 But ultimately, we're not producing the quality of education that will allow Floridians to compete in the marketplace in the first place.

00:48:17.720 It's such a great question.

00:48:18.880 And it's one that you know firsthand that a lot of people just will never truly be able to grasp.

00:48:25.100 They'll look at test scores and they'll look at rankings.

00:48:27.880 But what belies all of that is the hard truth that you're talking about in the classroom.

00:48:33.260 So I think a couple things need to be done.

00:48:35.200 There needs to be a zero-tolerance policy first on classroom misbehaving.

00:48:40.560 And what that means is I would support a three-strikes policy that if a student is given three referrals in any part of middle school or any part of the full duration of high school, that they're immediately expelled and sent to an alternative school.

00:48:52.480 I think you may have seen this in the particular school that you were working in.

00:48:54.900 But one or two bad apples in the class can make it really frustrating and stressful for the teacher, but also can distract other students.

00:49:01.720 And so you've got 18 kids that show up to class, history, math, English, that are eager and ready to learn.

00:49:06.720 But one or two class clowns who are beefing or making noise ends up ruining it for the rest of us.

00:49:12.580 That cannot be allowed.

00:49:14.160 The second thing, and I think this is solved with the Plyler v. Doe challenge, is by blocking illegal immigrant students from coming to our schools, we also remove that detractor.

00:49:24.320 We remove that incentive that says, you know what, Oren, you have to give them a C or higher.

00:49:28.640 Well, look, they don't deserve anything above a zero because they don't speak English.

00:49:33.060 And I saw this firsthand.

00:49:34.160 I was in Hendry County at a high school, and I walked in, there was 27 kids in the room, and seven of them didn't even speak English.

00:49:41.380 Some were from Venezuela, some from Mexico, some from Cuba.

00:49:44.760 And just our public school had become a modern-day daycare.

00:49:47.660 That is not what our schools are there for.

00:49:49.600 They're there for Florida kids to be educated, challenged, to work with their teachers, to get career-ready, college-ready, whatever the case may be.

00:49:58.320 And so this is all part of a multifaceted plan to, I think, decrease the student population by getting rid of the illegals. 1.00

00:50:04.880 And two, once that is done, actually have a zero-tolerance policy for misbehaving in the class.

00:50:11.560 I'd also support mandatory drug tests if any student's suspected to be using narcotics or even things like marijuana.

00:50:18.280 Be very honest about continuing the doubling down of phone banning because, again, it's a distraction for the student using it, the student seeing the other student use it, and, of course, the teacher.

00:50:27.240 The teacher doesn't need that stress.

00:50:29.140 You know, it used to be my grandmother was a teacher in the 80s.

00:50:31.540 She taught for 25 years at Plantation High School English in Broward County.

00:50:35.480 And, you know, her frustration with students was they didn't bring a pencil or they got a bad grade.

00:50:40.180 Now it's the kid smells like weed, the kid's smoking a vape, the kid has an AirPod in it, the kid has a phone, the kid is Snapchatting, the kid is acting up, the kid doesn't speak English, and so on.

00:50:48.700 And so that makes it really, really hard for our teachers who want to do right to actually teach their students well.

00:50:55.160 And so part of that is really a comprehensive solution to actually tackle education.

00:51:00.420 So our students aren't just graduating career-ready, but there's actually, furthermore, a labor market that will welcome career-ready high school grads to become fully gainfully employed.

00:51:10.880 Well, James, it's been fantastic speaking with you.

00:51:13.060 I'm glad that we were able to go over so many different aspects of the issues facing Florida.

00:51:17.860 If people are interested in your campaign or perhaps supporting what you're doing, how can they check you out?

00:51:23.080 They can go to Fishback2026.com.

00:51:25.300 I'll tell you that in this economy, I'm not asking anyone to donate.

00:51:28.120 It's really, really tough out there with affordability.

00:51:30.080 But what I will say is if you've got a couple hours a week or a month and you want to volunteer for our campaign, whether that's door knocking, text messaging, social media, Fishback2026.com is a place to volunteer.

00:51:41.980 Fantastic, guys.

00:51:42.640 Well, make sure to check him out.

00:51:43.880 And, of course, if it's your first time on this channel, you need to click subscribe, click the bell notifications, all that stuff on YouTube.

00:51:49.820 If you'd like to get these broadcasts as podcasts, you need to subscribe to The Orr McIntyre Show on your favorite podcast platform.

00:51:55.380 And when you do, leave a rating or review.

00:51:57.280 It really helps with the algorithm magic.

00:51:59.000 Thank you, everybody, for watching.

00:52:00.160 And as always, we'll talk to you next time.

The Auron MacIntyre Show - December 12, 2025

The Future of Florida ｜ Guest： James Fishback ｜ 12⧸12⧸25

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