DeSantis brings law and order to ALGOP dinner

The Gov. Ron DeSantis unofficial pre-presidential announcement tour rolled into Hoover to headline Thursday night’s Alabama GOP Winter Dinner.

An unannounced presidential candidate for the GOP nomination, DeSantis touched on a number of topics – one of which DeSantis referred to as “law and order.”

“I know the folks in Alabama feel the same way, but in Florida we stand unequivocally for law and order and we support the men and women who wear the uniform,” he said. “We rejected defunding the police, and in fact I signed legislation in the state of Florida that prohibits local governments in Florida from defunding law enforcement.”

“We rejected the George Floyd riots, as soon as we saw that happening in Minnesota and New York, I called out the National Guard and we dispatched state law enforcement as necessary around the state.”

The Florida governor also discussed anti-riot legislation he recently signed into law.

“We also signed legislation that says very simply if you riot, if you loot, if you engage in mob violence in Florida, we’re not going to treat you like they do in Portland where they arrest you, take your mugshot, slap you on the wrist and put you right back on the street,” he said.

“No, in Florida if you’re rioting looting, engaging in mob violence, you’re not getting a slap on the wrist you’re getting the inside of a jail cell.”

DeSantis is widely expected to announce a presidential run in the coming months.

He also spoke about large numbers of Americans moving away from places such as New York and California.

“We have witnessed in this country a great American exodus,” he said. “Americans have moved to places like Florida, where there looking to find the promised land. I don’t think you’ve ever seen anything in American history where you have so many people leaving one ideological bent and coming to another ideological bent.”

Other topics included:

• COVID and Dr. Fauci. “When the world went mad during COVID, when common sense suddenly became an uncommon virtue Florida stood as a refuge of sanity. People like Fauci and the legacy media and the left were wrong about issue after issue. They were wrong about lock downs, they were wrong about hospitalization models, they were wrong about masking, they were wrong about natural immunity, they were about seasonality, and they were wrong about the ethicacy of MRNA.”
• Alabama should get rid of its income tax, like Florida. “I can tell you as long as I am around we will never have a state income tax. You guys should try it. It works pretty good.”
• Illegal immigration. “Every state is a border state given whats going on at the US-Mexico border. The sheer number of people just overwhelms communities and tax payers who cant keep up with this.”
• Election integrity. “Florida is leading the country in election integrity. We have done things like ban ballot harvesting in our state, we’ve banned Zuckerbucks in our state, we’ve banned mass mailing of ballots in our state, and anybody that does an absentee ballot has to show a voter ID.”
• Education. “The purpose of our school system is to educate our kids, not to indoctrinate our kids. We believe in parents rights.”
• “Woke” Disney. “This company (Disney) is pursuing values that are totally contrary to the best interest of our children , for the best interest of our state, and to the rights of our parents. You have no right to force my citizens to subsidize your woke activism.”
• China. “The Chinese Communist Party is wielding influence all throughout the world, including here in our own country. We’ve banned things like Confucius Institutes at our state universities. In this upcoming legislative session, we are going to prohibit any CCP linked businesses from making land purchases in the state of Florida.”

Austen Shipley is a staff writer for Yellowhammer News.