BY DAN HILDEBRAN
Monitor Editor
STARKE — Bradford, Union and Clay County residents saw Gov. Ron DeSantis in person as he made two campaign stops in the area during the closing stretch of his reelection campaign.
On Thursday, DeSantis spoke at Florida Gateway College in Lake City. The following day he appeared at Best Bet in Orange Park.
In the Orange Park appearance, State Representatives Bobby Payne and Sam Garrison and State Senators Jennifer Bradley and Aaron Bean warmed up the crowd at the poker facility on U.S. 17.
Garrison called the governor the most powerful, dynamic and transformative governor in the United States.
“You don’t need me to tell you that,” he told the crowd. “You wouldn’t be standing here; you wouldn’t have taken the day off work to be here if you didn’t know that.”
Cares about rural Florida
The Orange Park representative added that DeSantis is the same man in person as the image millions see on television.
“Ron DeSantis is our type of guy,” he said. “He’s a Navy veteran. He’s a blue-collar guy. It’s no B.S. and he gets Clay County.”
Bradley, who represents Bradford, Union and Clay Counties in the Florida Senate, told the crowd that DeSantis has a track record of supporting law enforcement and has made Florida the most military-friendly state in the nation.
“I can also tell you that no governor Florida has ever had, has cared about rural Florida and our rural communities more than Governor DeSantis,” she said. “He has visited all 67 counties, no matter how big, how small, from Lafayette, Dixie, Bradford, Baker, all across rural North Florida.”
Bean, who is running for the District 4 U.S. House seat, which includes Clay County, said that if Republicans gain four seats in the House, they will gain a majority in the lower chamber.
Bean warned the crowd against complacency in a governor’s race that some polls show DeSantis leading Democrat Charlie Crist by double digits.
“We are sitting on the four, maybe the two-yard line, ready to punch it in for the victory,” he said. “If we’re not careful, if we take anything for granted, then we can fumble going into the end zone. We can throw an interception on the one-yard line, and we know just like that it can be taken away, so let’s not do that.”
Blaming Biden
When DeSantis reached the stage, he did not mention his opponent on the Nov. 8 ballot: Crist, by name once. He did, however, rail against the policies of the U.S. President, mentioning Joe Biden seven times.
DeSantis predicted that after the Nov. 8 midterms, national media will start producing negative stories about the nation’s chief executive.
“The regime media will knife this guy in the back as soon as the Democrats get blown out on Tuesday because they see him as a liability,” DeSantis said.
The governor framed his own success in terms of opposing policies from Washington, like COVID-19 lockdowns and mask mandates.
DeSantis blamed Biden for inflation and the lack of domestic oil production.
He also called the recently enacted Inflation Reduction Act a farce, claiming the legislation does nothing to reduce price increases.
Martha’s Vineyard
DeSantis said that because of the administration’s border policy, Fentanyl overdoses are the leading cause of death among 18- to 45-year-olds; 90 terrorists have entered the U.S. through Mexico, and crime attributed to illegal immigrants has increased.
“We had a sheriff’s deputy in Pinellas County, Florida, killed by a twice deported illegal alien who came across six months ago because of Biden’s open border,” he said.
The governor added that the national media largely ignored the border crisis until he sent 50 Venezuelans to Martha’s Vineyard in September.
Where woke goes to die
DeSantis also railed against the Woke Movement, sparked by the 2020 killing of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police.
“You never saw me marching in those George Floyd protests or riots, and honestly, they were attacking police with those protests,” he said. “Instead of reducing (police) funding like so many other places around the country, we did two years in a row of $1,000 bonuses for all sworn law enforcement, all firefighters, and all EMTs in the entire State of Florida.”
DeSantis also highlighted his recruitment of out-of-state law enforcement officers, offering $5,000 bonuses as an incentive to work in the Sunshine State.
“I’ve spoken to a lot of these folks over the last two years, and they said it’s the best decision they’ve ever made,” DeSantis recalled. “To a man, they will say they couldn’t be happier to be in a state that actually values public safety and actually values them.”
DeSantis said that on a recent campaign trip to help New York gubernatorial candidate Lee Zeldin, he highlighted the differences in how Florida and New York are governed.
“We have millions more residents in the State of Florida now than in the state of New York, and yet our state budget is less than half of the state budget of New York,” he claimed, “but when the New Yorkers move here, what do they tell me? ‘You guys have better roads than New York, better infrastructure (and) better services.’”
DeSantis added that while Florida has the second-lowest per-capita debt in the U.S., New York has the second-highest.
He also said that with no personal state income tax and the second-lowest tax burden in the U.S., Florida has a $22 billion budget surplus.
DeSantis also talked about his initiatives to advance parental rights in public education.
“Our education system needs to be teaching kids and educating them in the classical sense,” he said, “not indoctrinating kids with ideology.”
He said critical race theory, a concept now off limits to public school teachers, teaches students to hate each other and to hate America.
“Now we have teacher training programs (and) we have a civics exam that the kids take because they need to understand about the founding principles of our country,” he said. “They need to understand about the Constitution and the Bill of Rights and our founding fathers. They need to understand what it means to be an American.”
He added that he will continue to fight Woke activists in public policy, education and media.
“Part of being a free society is that you should be free from having these ideas forced down your throat,” he said. “Freedom from indoctrination, I think, is a core part of a free society, so we’ve stood up against this in our classrooms, we fought this in the businesses, we fought this in universities, and we will never ever give up or surrender to the woke mob. Florida is the place where woke goes to die.”
Don’t say gay
The governor said his efforts to strengthen parental rights in public education, arose in part from his and his wife’s perspectives as parents of three preschool children.
“My wife and I just believe as a parent in Florida you should have the right to send your kid to school; they should be able to watch cartoons (and) do normal kid things without having some agenda shoved down their throat,” he said. “It is wrong to be injecting concepts like sexuality in elementary school classrooms. It’s wrong to teach a six-year-old that they were born in the wrong body. It’s wrong to teach third-graders that their gender is a choice, and yet that is going on in places throughout this country.”
DeSantis discussed his parental rights legislation, labeled the Don’t Say Gay law by its critics. He also talked about criticism of the law, the Walt Disney Company’s opposition to the measure, and the legislature’s bill that stripped the entertainment giant of many of its self-governing privileges.
“They have a right to do it,” he said of Disney’s position on the bill, “but they don’t have the right to have you and me subsidize their activism, and that’s what has happened is since the 1960s.”
