Ron DeSantis Quotes

DeSantis returned to his culture warrior roots, with answers that focused disproportionately on Mexican fentanyl and children’s genitals.

We're going to have all of these deep state people, you know, we are going to start slitting throats on day one.

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis is rather like Donald Trump, only without the charm.

I know a lot of people that were there who were just there [...] They didn't have any designs on doing anything. [...] But to say that they were seditionists is just wrong.

<nowiki>[DeSantis pollster Ryan]</nowiki> Tyson pointed to a voter he had heard speak at a recent focus group in Alabama. “The voter said, ‘I’m voting for DeSantis in 2024 because he is Donald Trump without the crazy’ — his words, not mine,” Tyson said. “That is the kind of voter that we see that is gravitating toward the governor.”

Too many in Washington display a ruling class mentality and congressional term limits would go a long way towards restoring the citizen-legislator ethos of the Founding Fathers, Americans of all political background overwhelmingly support term limits, yet term limits have floundered in Congress. An approach that phases in congressional term limits reconciles the self-interest of members of Congress with the public–s desire to see these changes enacted and gives us the best chance to make term limits a reality.

Ron DeSanctimonious is playing games! The Fake News asks him if he's going to run if President Trump runs, and he says, "I'm only focused on the Governor's race, I'm not looking into the future." Well, in terms of loyalty and class, that's really not the right answer.

We looked at the data that we had from other parts of the world as we were getting into March, and we saw that this was a virus that had a disproportionate impact on elderly people and we're the second-oldest state in the country, so that was something that was obviously very concerning to us

In the following years, however, more and more of the ideological arguments behind this rebranded white nationalism made their way into the conservative bloodstream. Fox News hosts spoke loudly and frequently about "demographic replacement," a paraphrase of the white nationalist conspiracy theory of "white genocide." Car ramming would become startlingly common at the Black Lives Matter protests that manifested in response to the killing of George Floyd by police, to the point that Republican elected officials like Florida governor Ron DeSantis would urge the passage of laws that define a tactic popularized by the Islamic State as self-defense. (p 110 "The Cruelty of the Nativists")

He's a chilly man, with a heart of ice and — like so many politicians on both the right and left these days — full of resentments, grudges and the urge to destroy anyone who doesn't aree with him. The courage he claims for himself he would deny to many others.

Finally, we shouldn’t let DeSantis co-opt positions on which Democrats have historical strength and a natural advantage: education, health care, jobs...As many liberals will quietly acknowledge, the Parental Rights in Education Act, which DeSantis signed last year and which opponents nicknamed the "Don’t Say Gay" law, has reasonable and legitimate attractions for a broad range of parents who worry about the focus, efficacy and age appropriateness of what their kids are learning in primary and secondary school. Democratic leadership should worry, too. Keeping quiet or pretending those concerns aren't real won't make them go away.

The central question about DeSantis is this: Is he a corporate tax-cutter or a conspiratorial frother? Is he closer to Mitch McConnell or Marjorie Taylor Greene? The great DeSantis innovation has been to realize how much cover calculated outrage provides for rewarding cronies—and that the more you preach "freedom," the more you can get away with authoritarianism.