DeSantis Campaign Press Release - ICYMI: Ron DeSantis on The Dana Show

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. – Ron DeSantis today joined Dana Loesch live on The Dana Show. The highlights are below.

Watch the full interview HERE.

On countering threats from China:

China is our top national security threat, and it's not even close. I think that there's other threats out there, don't get me wrong. But China has the second strongest military in the world, they have the second biggest economy. On this current course, under Biden's policies, they're going to surpass our economy this decade in size. And that creates a huge problem, because we've never had a peer competitor in our lifetime that had a bigger economy than we did. I mean, the Soviet Union, during the Cold War, their economy was a fraction of ours, even the Axis powers during World War Two, they were not at the level of the Allied powers. And so this would present for us a huge threat. And then compounding that, that our economy is intertwined with theirs, largely because we've had elites in DC and in New York who have pushed this over many decades... So this decade, I think is the decisive decade. Are we going to maintain our economic superiority? That means we've got to do strategic decoupling from China. We can't just keep sending them all this industry, have everything important made over there... If China does surpass us, and they become the dominant power in the world, that will affect the lives of every single American family. I mean, you see how much power they wield already, that would go up tremendously. And how would they have a vision of society, they would want society to function on things like social credit scores, where you're evaluated based off whether you're bending the knee to the party in power, and it's not just about your individual freedom, and their vision of society is one that would be very dark. And it would be something that would be totally inconsistent with our inherited freedoms here in the United States. And so this is an important struggle. I think, if we do what we need to do to deter them militarily, economically, and if we get serious about some of the stuff they're doing culturally, I think we can win the decade and I think we can ensure that this is an American Century, not a Chinese century.

On combatting ESG and woke corporations:

So this ESG is environment, social governance, and it's a relatively recent phenomenon, where they say that companies and businesses should adopt so-called ESG principles. Long story short, all that is is cover for companies and asset managers to be able to advance an ideological agenda, and it's a left-wing ideological agenda. And so for example, while the top Wall Street banks can get together and decide, they don't want to provide financing for people that have gun stores, and now it's already bad... that is not government, infringing your Second Amendment rights, but when you have these major power centers doing that, that is an infringement on your rights. They are changing policy, other companies trying to change our culture. So they're wielding power in ways that absolutely can erode our freedoms, that can change society, and that can change culture. So in Florida, we eliminated ESG from the state. In terms of our pension investing, we took $2 billion away from Blackrock who had been investing some of the Florida pension money because Blackrock is pursuing this type of social activism through the economy. And then we've banned things like social credit scores in Florida, and also prohibited woke banking.

On Florida's response to COVID and holding the bureaucracy accountable:

I think the lock downs were one of the most catastrophic mistakes this country has made in the modern history of the United States. And in fact, if you look at all the economic pain that people are feeling with how much groceries costs, the interest rates now going to be 8%, for 30 year mortgage or close to it. And all along down the line, the start of that was shutting down the economy in March of 2020, of turning the country over to Dr. Anthony Fauci, because it disrupted our labor market... they passed the Cares Act, which was over $2 trillion of printed and borrowed money that got put into the economy. The Fed started putting more money into the economy and it set the stage for the inflation that we see now, to this day... I think for a lot of the policies that lock kids out of school for a whole year, in places like California and Chicago, a bureaucrat like Fauci should not have that type of power. And what should have happened is he shouldn't have been coddled, he shouldn't have been able to be out on a platform, spewing his nonsense, he should have been fired. And if Fauci would have been fired, I think that that would have helped open up the rest of the country a lot sooner than what ended up happening. And instead, Fauci kept on and he was in there for another couple of years, doing a lot of damage to this country, but we have to acknowledge that the country made a catastrophic mistake. And as President, I've pledged [that] we're gonna hold the people accountable who lied to the public on all these things, whether it's lock downs, mass mRNA vaccines, people at the CDC, FDA, they did a horrific job. We're gonna bring accountability, because we can never let this happen in our country ever again.