Why I Like Ron DeSantis

Oh, let me count the ways!

I do love a good primary season. I like it when a slew of capable, interesting and driven candidates fight each other for the hearts and minds of their Party. I am a fan of Ron DeSantis. As a resident of the Last Free State in America, Florida, I sat here in relative comfort from March 2020 - late 2022 and watched the rest of the world except for Sweden and North Dakota go absolutely insane.

(My Texan friends can relax before they pounce on me - you had Texas judges locking up hairdressers for violating no-work orders - about my claim Florida has been more free for longer than Texas. Texas woke up faster than other States, but they were just as insane for awhile.)

That sanity was brought to us by Governor DeSantis who ignored the Howling Left and every lying maniac from Fauci and Birx on down who swore we’d all be DEAD if we let our kids go to school and if we didn’t huddle inside our homes like scared sheeple pussies with 9 masks on our faces, 12 masks when we opened the door to take a package from “an essential worker” which meant Amazon and restaurant delivery guys who were “essential” for the laptop class to stay home in their jammie-jams while “working” remotely.

I wrote in March 2020 that this was madness and idiocy of the first water. Sadly, everything I wrote in that essay came true and then some. We can never let the Wuhan Hysteria Totalitarians ever claim their bullshit “worked” and that their absurd dictates “saved us.”

I digress. It is so hard not to whenever the Wuhan Fakedemic rears its head. Fauci, Birx and hundreds of others deserve to be put on trial for crimes against humanity. I’m not holding my breath.

In Florida, we kept our schools open, went to work and didn’t force people to wear flimsy bits of useless fabric across their faces. We didn’t die.

Back to Presidential Candidate DeSantis. I am reading his book, The Courage to be Free and in his section on being a first time Congressman, the reader is treated to this delightful segment:

I was one of the earliest opponents in Congress of the Russia collusion investigation. The entire theory seemed fanciful to me and, as a former prosecutor, the ack of any hard evidence in support of any collusion was striking. Alsmost all reporting by corporate media on Russia collusion relied on so-called anonymous sourcing - a convenient way for activists in media to launder precooked, partisan narratives - and usually concerned the existence of investigations by the national security apparatus, but not that such investigations were coming up empty. [emphasis mine]

At the time, there were only a handful of us - Devin Nunes, Jim Jordan, Mark Meadows and a few others - who were willing to speak publicly in President Trump’s defense. The hesitance of some establishment Republicans to question the collusion narrative was rooted in their belief that it had to be true because they were so sure Trump would not haev been able to win withot some type of election interference. They did not want to acknowledge that Trump had poltical appeal for raising issues they had neglected; if Trump won only due to a conspiracy, then there would be no need for these GOP elites to change anything they had been doing.

What bothered me so much about the Russia collusion delusion was that it was so obviously manufactured as a way for the entrenched Beltway bureaucracy and political class to try to overturn the results of the 2016 election.

The malfeasance involved on the part of key agencies in our national security apparatus was shocking to me both as a military veteran and as a former prosecutor. They wanted President Trump out - and were willing to abuse the levers of power to do so.¹

Ron calls “bullshit!” when he sees it. There is a lot of it to see in American political life and his main insight in running for Congress was how disconnected the Swamp GOP elites had become from the concerns of rank-and-file Americans - you know, us great unwashed out here. He resolved then and there to fight for what is right on behalf of the people who elected him to office. He’s still doing it.

I emphasized a section of his quote. He raises a crucial point which most normal Americans - those not breathing in the fetid air of the Swamp - missed and which helps explain why otherwise smart people fell for this crap.

Laws assume good intention. In the case of something as serious as a person being “under investigation” by the FBI or any other of a slew of Federal agencies, the law requires that such an investigation be made public in some way. What I mean by assuming good intention is that if the FBI only investigates real issues or potential crimes, then such sunlight is to the benefit of the accused and all of society.

But when the FBI leadership are not acting as they should, then the people’s assumption that federal investigations only occur when there is ample reason, is hijacked to cast aspersions on innocent people. That is what happened here - the Democrats, the media and The Swamp took the fact of an investigation and used its existence to attack Donald Trump.

Even when there is no reason for an investigation, the very fact of its existence is used to smear people’s reputations.

No matter how much people know that one is “innocent until proven guilty” in the United States, most normal, law-abiding citizens have the sneaking suspicion that no one innocent ever gets arrested, indicted or investigated. Many people go their whole lives without that happening to them, so they have a subconscious belief - based, ironically, in faith in the government begin run by honest people - that if you are “under investigation,” there must be something to it.

Well, in the case of bare-knuckle Presidential politics, the “something” is that the people in control of the FBI hated Donald Trump. The Russia Hoax was concocted and paid for by Hillary Clinton’s campaign. This is fact beyond dispute - and yet, the Democrats are still lying, lying, lying about this nonsense.

Some insane number of Americans still believe that Trump “colluded with Russia,” although no one can ever tell me what this supposed to mean. Tens of millions of dollars were wasted in farcical “investigations.” The Obama Administration spied on a political opponent in a Presidential election.

President Trump was impeached twice over nothing.

The damage done to American society is incalculable. Ron knows it and is fighting to restore some semblance of decency to American life.

This is the first in a series I am committing to about each Republican primary candidate. I have other reasons I like Ron, but I’ll let this one sink in before I tackle the next one. He knew from the get go that this idiocy about “Russian collusion” was nonsense and he said so.

I like honesty, integrity and logic in a leader. Won’t that be a nice change?

1. DeSantis, Ron, The Courage to Be Free: Florida’s Blueprint for America’s Revival, 2023, pp.67-68