Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has yet to announce whether he will seek the White House in a 2024 presidential run that many are speculating about, but he has taken steps in that direction and just sat down for an extensive interview with Fox News host Mark Levin.
The Sunshine State Republican discussed a wide range of topics during Sunday night’s edition of “Life, Liberty & Levin” in advance of the release of his new book which hits bookshelves on Tuesday.
(Video: Fox News)
DeSantis, a fierce advocate for traditional American values whose willingness to take the fight directly to the “woke” cultural revolutionaries in his state, was asked by Levin to explain what being a conservative means to him and delivered a stirring answer on faith in God and the U.S. Constitution that shows why he is a rising GOP superstar who fills the empty hearts of Democrats and their fellow leftists with fear.
“I think the foundation of it is understanding the American project,” he told the host. “Our rights come from God, not from the government.”
“The Founders rejected the divine right of kings and it used to be some people did have rights but it was a courtesy of the state, that’s not how our system works,” he added. “We have these God-given rights, we loan power to the government under a constitution to protect those rights.”
DeSantis continued, “And I think what we’ve seen in more modern society, is we’ve seen an unmooring of those constitutional foundations, we have an administrative state which is totally out of control, it violates people’s freedoms, it’s really been weaponized against factions of the country that the ruling class doesn’t like, and we need to re-constitutionalize this government.”
“But what we’re facing now, I think is not what the Founders intended in terms of how this government should be operating,” he said.
Levin followed up, noting that in his new memoir, the governor repeatedly stresses his principles as the foundation of his leadership, asking how he was able to maintain those principles, especially when attending the elite Ivy League universities that have served as incubators for leftist ideology.
After recalling his formative years growing up in Dunedin, Florida, and the “Rust Belt values” instilled in him by his parents, DeSantis spoke of his experience of being exposed to an entirely different culture in college.
“I was a fish out of water and it was a major, major culture shock, I wasn’t like a refined conservative in terms of politics because I was mostly into sports and things like that,” he said. “But you start sitting in some of these classrooms, and even though one of Yale’s mottos is ‘for God, for country, for Yale,’ sit in the classroom, attacking religion, attacking God, attacking the United States,” recalling the teachings at one of America’s most prestigious elite institutions of higher education.
“That was my exposure to the left and I think what it did for me was, it was so different from what I thought was appropriate that I wasn’t influenced by it in terms of it pulling me in that direction, I rebelled the other way,” the governor said.
DeSantis also recalled his first running for public office as an aspiring member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Florida.
“I was green, I had never run before, you know I had a kind of an impressive resume, I had served in Iraq and done things so there are things that conservative primary voters would like but you know, you see Yale and Harvard, that is like people say, liberal elitist stuff,” he told Levin.
He continued, “And so the question was, how do I prove that I actually mean what I say and that I was like listen, how many people that you know go up to Washington, they say they’re going to do these things and then the swamp co-opts them and they end up not following principle.”
“Well look at me. I got through Yale and Harvard and came out more conservative than when I went in, the swamp’s gonna have nothin’ on that and they appreciated that,” he said. “So I always told myself, none of this will fly in the real world, because you get out there, this is all just pie in the sky stuff.”
“Well I think though the joke was actually on me because I think what we see with a lot of the woke ideology and all these institutions in society, this is a reflection of what a lot of these universities have produced over the last generation and so we’re reaping a lot of what was sowed in those classrooms, ten, fifteen, twenty, twenty-five years ago,” he said, pinpointing the blame for America’s moral and societal decline.
According to Amazon’s description of “The Courage to Be Free: Florida’s Blueprint for America’s Revival” which comes out on February 28, “He played baseball for Yale, graduated with honors from Harvard Law School, and served in Iraq and in the halls of Congress. But in all these places, Ron DeSantis learned the same lesson: He didn’t want to be part of the leftist elite.”
It’s worth noting that Team DeSantis released a powerful video over the weekend that some see as a pre-announcement launch.
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