Top 15 Ron DeSantis Quotes

<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.”

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're winning big, big, big in the Republican Party for the nomination like nobody's ever seen before

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")

Which brings us back to Trump. We know that he takes DeSantis seriously because Trump has shown signs that he's scared of DeSantis as a competitor. If even Trump knows that much, Democrats are capable of knowing more. Trump may think the best way to defang DeSantis — whom he calls "DeSanctimonious" — is to mock and belittle him. Democrats should recognize it will take far more than that.

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.

It would be easy to write off DeSantis as a cartoon culture warrior or as racist, homophobic, transphobic and xenophobic. He may well be all those things, and so may some of his constituents. But he may not be, and either way, it would be foolish to characterize all his followers as such. Assuming a stance of moral superiority will do us no good. (See: Hillary Clinton, "deplorables.")

It would be tempting to write off DeSantis, the bombastic Republican governor of Florida, as another unelectable right-wing lunatic unfit for national office. We’ve made that mistake before.

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.

The title of this book must surely be ironic: The Courage to Be Free. DeSantis is all about the restriction of freedoms wherever possible.

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

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

DeSantis led a Florida law that has already forced women to carry unviable pregnancies to term, just to watch their newborn die. But instead of acknowledge his brutality against women, he wants to scare you with his alleged accounts of struggling people, whom he also won’t help.

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.

There are people now attempting to suppress history and whitewash the systemic racism so central to our nation. Leading the pack of these revisionists is Florida Governor Ron DeSantis.