DeSantis Rails Against Fauci, CDC: 'No To School Closures, No To Restrictions, And No Mandates'

oop it's great to be out here i want to thank art laffer for inviting me it's great to be with alec did you not get the cdc's memo i don't see you guys complying and i say that jokingly but i i think that that may be a sign of potentially seeking to do more things into the future and i think it's very important that we say unequivocally no to lockdowns no to school closures no two restrictions and no mandates floridians are free to choose and all americans should be free to choose how they govern their affairs how they take care of themselves and our families and they should not be consigned to live regardless of which state in the union consigned to live in a faucian dystopia in which we're governed by the whims of bureaucratic authorities who care little for our freedom little for our aspirations and little for our happiness no more we can't let it happen going forward and i think it's important to learn some of the lessons of of what we saw over the past year and a half there's a number of things i think we can look back on and point to different things that were just total catastrophes um i think a lot of these interventions almost all of them were totally ineffective but they had catastrophic consequences for tens of millions of americans and to me probably the most significant policy failure were the states that kept schools closed last school year you had a situation where when the virus first hit traditionally when you talk about disease mitigation people would look at schools as a place where it would really foster a lot of spread throughout the communities and that's certainly true with influenza so there was a lot of precautionary things done initially distance learning all this but as the data started coming in it was very clear by may of 2020 that not only were our school kids at virtually no risk from the from coronavirus they were not efficient spreaders of it and so schools places that had schools open did not see major outbreaks and so my view was we have got to have every parent in florida they have a right to send their kids to school in person and we've got to make that happen and so we had to do this last summer and that was at the height of you know the the sun belt has a summer coveted season as we're seeing now uh this was something that um that that were we were dealing with in florida and the hysteria was off the charts you had people saying all this stuff you can't go to you can't send the kids to school the teachers union actually sued me to keep the schools closed and what they would do is they would actually bring coffins and put them in front of our florida department of education building um so it was really the the data was very clear that this something that should have happened and obviously from a policy perspective kids need to be in school parents need to have an ability particularly our single mothers so was evidence and facts and what was good policy and good for floridians on one side versus basically hysteria corporate media narrative and a bunch of fear-mongering and it was blindingly obvious that that was something we needed to do so we we we did it i remember when we first some of our first school districts when they first started the middle of august you had like these national corporate media come down there go oh my gosh these yokels what are they doing to the kids and all this other stuff fact is it was it was good people are very happy that that happened but just think about the millions of kids who got locked out of school for over a year in certain jurisdictions so it seems to be like if you you have certain god-given rights in the united states but i guess uh the right to better yourself through education if you happen to live in a real deep blue enclave controlled by the teachers union that's just not something that you have opportunities to do and we saw that and i think those lockdowns of the kids and these closures for a year year and a half i think those are going to have consequences not just months years but i think decades from now you'll be able to trace back problems that emanated because kids totally fell off the radar and fell off the map and so all it took was leadership all it took was an ability to kind of go into the fray and fight back on behalf of students and families in florida and it was obviously the right thing to do fast forward now and so in florida we never imposed mitigation we didn't impose a mass mandate on on anybody the whole time but but on schools we didn't you know we said that school districts have to you know do what they think is right so the result was you had a a difference of of approaches throughout the state we're a big diverse state that was fine and i can tell you regardless of the approach for those school districts that did not have mass or private schools or charter schools that didn't have mass there was no statistically significant difference in the outcome versus the ones that did more intensive mitigation and made the kids wear mass and so here we are now and the cdc is saying every single person in a school needs to wear a mask all day even if you're vaccinated even if you've recovered from covered which by the way you are immune if you've recovered from covid cdc doesn't admit that but it's true [Applause] and so in florida our view is is this is a decision that the parents can make about what's best for their kids if the parent really believes that that would be better for their kid i'm not going to prevent them from from doing that if that's what they want but that should not be imposed on all parents and all students and it's not healthy for these students to be sitting there all day you know six-year-old kids in kindergarten you know covered in mass so this is going to be something where either you're going to continue to have the unions and the cdc and they're basically one and the same right now they work in tandem and and they're going to be trying to do this and i fear that they're trying to set up additional school closures because as the season changes you'll start to see more coveted cases in northern places and areas where they have more of a foothold and i think they're setting the stage to deny even more kids in education so we can't let that happen now in florida we have robust school choice so we didn't let that happen but if it had happened people would have been able to go elsewhere and i think you're going to see more and more of that throughout the united states we are going to probably have by the time i'm up for re-election we'll probably have between 200 000 and 250 000 students on various types of private school choice we have a tax credit scholarship for low-income families a hundred thousand i created a new scholarship with the help of danny in the legislature so we have a family empowerment scholarship now which is uh likely gonna probably hit a hundred thousand kids in a couple years and then we've got scholarships for kids with special needs and so you have a lot of folks a lot of kids who have that so we have huge amount of folks and that doesn't even count all the public charter schools we have we have hundreds of thousands of kids on charter schools and if you look at a place like where danny's from miami-dade county they're the highest performing urban school district in the country and 70 percent of the students in miami-dade county do not go to their neighborhood school that they're quote zoned for they either go on private scholarship somewhere public charter somewhere and then school choice within the school district as well and i think the result has been students are in the best environment for them and the performance speaks for itself they're number one in the country so we're proud of them for that so over the last year florida chose freedom over falciaism we continue to do that that means having an economy that's open protecting people's right to earn a living making sure that people's livelihoods are intact we were projected to be an economic basket case when code would first hit because people said look no one's going to go tourism is going to dry up you're going to have all these problems whatever and you know i just i was resolved to make sure that you know while all these other states just continued to beat people down lock them down we would be lifting people up and so we steadily got people to work we got the economy going and as we got into the summer of last year you started to see it really pick up and then pretty soon florida became the respite for people yeah you have people moving down here but it's not always easy to just move your whole life but if people needed to escape lockdowns they came and stayed in florida for two or three weeks and that just became the norm and i'd run into people all the time doing that so the result was our unemployment rate throughout the balance of the pandemic was significantly less than the national average and almost half of what it was in some of the big time lockdown states like california and new york and some of those and that means huge huge for these families and for their livelihoods and yes for their health as well because people are destitute they lose their job their health sinks too so it's not just dollars and cents it's about physical mental health and it's about the pursuit of happiness so we were we're glad just this last month we added 70 000 additional private sector jobs partially because we removed the additional unemployment payment and incentivize people to get back to work i had a half a million jobs open sitting there and so we're going to continue to build off our success on the economy we're not missing a beat and our budget was projected to be a total disaster because again you're not having people come the sale we're sales tax driven it's not like california where the tech companies pay all the tax like we we do a lot of people based on tourism and whatnot and so we were projected with a major hole i vetoed a billion dollars out of the budget which was the most vetoes in the history of florida to do that so then we were in a situation where we had stabilized that but then because of the health of the economy we're bringing in more revenue even with the lowest per capita tax burden in the country uh because of the underlying incentives that we created uh for job growth business and all that and so we got to the point where during the most recent legislative session before the legislature did the budget they did the estimate for the rest of the fiscal year april may june which is our the rest of our fiscal year and this is real time estimate and yet we were coming in 800 million above estimate for april 500 million above for may i think 700 million for for june so just in the last three months of the fiscal year we took in 2 billion above estimate and we have the healthiest reserves that we've ever had as a state and throughout the entire covid pandemic i never touched one penny from the state's rainy day fund and in fact we've been able to add to the rainy day fund so we're well positioned going forward and that allows us to do things we're a growing state we got a lot of good stuff on infrastructure that we've had to do we have stuff with our water resources as a coastal state a boating state fishing very important that we have clean water so we're doing a lot of good stuff but we would not have been able to do that uh had we just decided to to lock down the state indefinitely throw hundreds of thousands of people out of work and ruin businesses up and down the state we've done the opposite i would say most of these folks not only are they doing good i mean in all regions of the state they'll say we've never been doing this good ever about what's going on now in florida and i think the the lesson from it is and i go back and i look at eisenhower's farewell address when you think about how you handle something like like covid eisenhower many remember because he pointed out the military industrial complex is very smart about that i mean it's pretty much right right on the money but he also in that speech talked about the rise of scientific research intermingled with government poli with government funding and government institutions and he recognized that as a danger and i think just as an aside that's a big problem now because when fauci makes these pronouncements people don't want to to contradict him even if he's wrong because they fear that they won't get funding in the future but what eisenhower was was worried about was okay you're going to have this he called it a technological scientific elite and he said you can't just let public policy be captive to some unelected group of people who are wielding a lot of this power through through the research and he's like a statesman yes take into account what they say and i'm thinking to myself this is kind of like the foul cheese of their time you can take into account but you should actually have a diverse group of views just right there because there was a lot of scientists who were right on a lot of this stuff while fauci was flip-flopping they got it right and they were marginalized because they were challenging the narrative but eisenhower said you got to look at all these other factors and the job of the statesman is to harmonize that and you can't just let one group of people hijack policy to the exclusion of every other consideration in society and i think some of those states did that they made this bizarre pursuit of having coveted disappear which was never in the cards was not going to happen their goal and they left a lot of destruction in their wake and so i think you need to see the big picture i think eisenhower was right and that's what we did in florida and that's what we're going to continue to do in florida in the battles ahead and so i thank you all for your involvement i thank you for fighting on behalf of freedom there's a lot of work to be done to defend federalism we we've tangled with the biden administration on a number of occasions we beat him in court on the cdc shutting down the cruise lines and forcing vaccine passports and we're fighting them on the border and on some of the elites and we'll keep doing that because i think that there's going to be a lot of battles ahead but the way it is right now in this country when you stand for freedom when you stand for those core values that make america unique there's a lot of folks that are going to come after you corporate media will come after you and smear you big tech will likely try to censor you or to platform and i don't even need to talk about the bureaucracy and what's going on in the in washington right now so it requires people to have courage when you're in this arena understand uh when you're fighting you got to be able to take a punch and stand strong but when you do that when you stand up for the people that sent you in your offices and they see you fighting and they see you fighting against the grain man they will be there for you thick and thin they will walk over broken glass barefoot to be able to support you so in florida we'll continue to stand firm we'll be holding the line we will not back down and i can tell you this we've only begun to fight thank you all appreciate it thanks

Channel: Forbes Breaking News

Views: 469,547

Keywords: Gov. Ron DeSantis, CDC, mask mandates

Id: XaCbZBWTr4Q

Length: 15min 35sec (935 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 29 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/Godbessyolie]

DeSantis Rails Against Fauci, CDC: 'No To School Closures, No To Restrictions, And No Mandates'

I JUST LOVE THIS MAN FOR ALL HE IS DOING FOR ''WE THE PEOPLE''!!!!