Ron DeSantis: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)

foreign we're actually going to start with our main story tonight which concerns Ron DeSantis business Fred Flintstone DeSantis has been all over the news this week as he is seemingly every week he appointed his political backers to a new Disney oversight board he released a new book the courage to be free and by the way I have a little gift for our studio audience look under your seats the gift is it isn't there you don't have you're welcome and he also put out this eye-catching video Florida is proof positive that we the people are not destined for failure the Santa's wins he has made a promise and he's making good on the promise Florida is leading the nation decline is a choice Seth is and freedom is worth fighting for wow there is a lot there but Florida's proof that we the people are not destined for failure I don't know about that Ron last year alone in Florida a man tried to steal a crossbow by stuffing it down his pants a woman instigated a police chase so she could cross getting arrested off her bucket list and a man was charged with battery for throwing a hot dog at a police officer we the people may not be destined for failure but a lot of individuals down there sure do seem drawn to it this all feels like part of a coordinated rollout of desantis's inevitable presidential campaign because even though he hasn't yet officially announced he's running he's already made V's favorite candidate after his Landslide re-election as Governor last November the New York Post proclaimed him the future which is you know depressing and he received this cringing juicing introduction from Carrie Lake I'll tell you what he's got I don't know if you heard of this but he's got bde anybody know what that means ask your kids about it later big DeSantis energy okay that is obviously terrible but just to be clear if you don't know what bde is please don't ask your kids about it later in fact for the sake of those kids I'll just tell you right now it stands for big dick energy a kind of easy magnetic confidence that doesn't necessarily mean you have a large penis or indeed a penis at all it's just the energy associated a list of those with bde would include Brian Cranston Christine Baranski the Pixar lamp Charles Darwin and Snoopy does that make sense please come to me and not your kids if you need any penis related slang explained in the future and look it is worth noting in general you can't predict much about a presidential race 20 months out previous early Front Runners includes Jeb Bush the late Jeb Bush I don't know it's unclear Howard's Dean and Rudy Julia only who is currently wandering around Central Park covered in Thousand Island dressing and screaming about election fraud to pigeons is eventually likely to have to go up against Donald Trump Which history has shown is no easy task and while Trump initially struggled to coin a damaging nickname for DeSantis with his first attempt being the embarrassingly weak Ronda sanctimonious he later unveiled something with a lot more punch according to the times Trump has spent weeks trying to go DeSantis into a fight describing him in conversations as meatball Ron yeah apparently he was calling him meatball Ron and I hate to say it but Trump's still got it it's perfectly stupid childish and hurtful in a way that's genuinely difficult to articulate also it's a pretty good name on its own if you ask me to describe the perfect meatball Ron I'd say I don't know maybe a round little hamster or or this smiley cartoon character you know little arms and legs little mustache maybe voiced by Chris Pratt in the straight to streaming kids movie with weirdly Christian undertones that feels vaguely anti-italian somehow but then if you simply showed me a photo of this guy I'd say forget everything that I just said that is my meatball run right there that is my meatball but whatever Trump calls him in the future the fact is meatball Ron remains a strong Contender for the Republican nomination and while many commentators insist on framing him solely in opposition to Trump saying things like he's Donald Trump with a brain that doesn't seem particularly meaningful it's like saying that new restaurant is better than this chicken pot pie that fell on the sidewalk sure it is but you're not really giving me much useful information there so if I make quote Tom Brady's publicist while reviewing his old golf photos let's take Trump out of the picture and tonight let's examine DeSantis on his own merits and and look at just some of what he's done two and four the over 20 million people of Florida because it's sometimes less than he claims sometimes less than his critics claim and sometimes worse than you may know and let's skip over his early life the short version being he grew up in Florida was a standout baseball player and even got to the Little League World Series with his local team he then went to Yale then Harvard Law School and subsequently joined the Navy as an attorney eventually he married his wife Casey despite having the most bizarre dating tactic I have ever heard according to a former classmate DeSantis would apparently tell dates he likes Thai food but pronounced it thigh and if they corrected him he would make up an excuse and leave because quote he didn't want a girlfriend who corrected him and if that is wow just imagine being on that date you're out at dinner and out of nowhere your date tells you that he really likes Thai food and you think wait did he just call Thai food thai food I must have misheard but then he goes on to say that he knows a great Thai food restaurant in the area or while staring very intently at you almost studying your reaction to us politely as you can you say wait do you mean Thai like from Thailand and then suddenly his face drops and he says sorry I forgot I have a doctor's appointment tonight and he leaves leaving you both with the check and the single greatest first date disaster story of all time flashing forward in 2012 DeSantis was elected to congress though while there a former colleague says that he always had his earbuds in to keep people away and if you're picking up on a theme of Rhonda santis doesn't like hearing anyone's voice but his own you're on to something because in Florida Governor he's made shutting down dissenting voices something of a feature here is a campaign ad from last year in which he shows off his skill at battling the media good morning ladies and gentlemen this is your Governor speaking today's training Evolution dog fighting taking on the corporate media number one don't fire unless fired upon but when they fire you fire back with overwhelming force does it say that in the bill I'm asking you to tell me what's in the bill number two never ever back down from a fight if I could complete the question though so you're going to give a speech or ask a question number three don't accept their narrative it's wrong it's a fake narrative I just disabused you of the narrative and you don't care about the facts amazingly until around 40 seconds ago top gun Maverick was my favorite movie off last year but now I'm sad to say it's my least favorite movie of all time tied with cats and there's a brooder film DeSantis is constantly complaining the media is taking him out of context although it is worth noting that in that ad he's removing some pretty important context from the media take that clip where he said are you going to give a speech or ask a question if you look at the start of that exchange you'll notice that only one person is doing the fighting there Governor what has gone wrong with the rollout of the vaccine that we've seen phone lines jammed websites crashed it's a lot of demand I mean I think at the end of the day excuse me excuse me I just said what has gone wrong so I'm answering the question if I could complete the question though so you're going to give a speech are you going to answer ask a question without due respect Governor you asked the question I'm going to answer it no you're you're giving a speech you asked the question I am trying to ask you that you're going to ask how many questions you get three they only got one question why do you get three with all due respect Governor I'm just asking if I could finish my question you didn't you finished the question no she didn't is some basic accountability when you see that in context that's a pretty gross case of someone meatball splaining to a journalist who's just trying to do a job though to be clear DeSantis doesn't hate all media because there is one notable exception and it's the exact one that you are thinking of DeSantis is on Fox News all the time morning noon and night even by Republican standards the mutual affection between him and fox is pretty extreme in just one four-month stretch the network asked him to appear on his Airwaves 113 times or nearly once a day with one Fox producer even offering to let him pick the subject matter if he agreed to come on which is just pathetic I'll put it this way if Fox News ever went on a date with Ron DeSantis they definitely wouldn't correct him when he called it Thai food the percentage isn't just another Fox talking head he sells himself as someone with a proven track record and he has done some terrible stuff for instance at his urging his State's Medical Board banned gender affirming care for minors and he signed a 15-week abortion ban into law while recently suggesting he'd sign a six-week one if it reached his desk but look lots of Republican Governors have done things like that what makes this santis extra popular on the right is his willingness to wage big symbolic culture wars he's bragged that he's made Florida the freest state in America while defending its residents from the greatest scourge of our time wokism is really a form of cultural Marxism the wokism is the new religion of the left we are not and will never ever surrender to the woke mob Florida is where woke goes to die okay first Florida is not where woke goes to die it's where wealthy Upper East Side New Yorkers go did I get you fact strikes but second DeSantis says woke so often it begins to lose all meaning but if you wonder what he thinks it actually stands for his general counsel wants helpfully defined woke in court as the view that there are systemic injustices in American society and they need to have policies that address them which is a hell of a thing for someone to admit to everyone that you are against DeSantis might really want to invest in a lawyer more willing to lie for him I actually understand there's one currently wandering around Central Park who is available if you can catch him but you have to be careful he's slippy de Santa spends a lot of energy decrying wokeness and empty virtue signaling although he also seems to spend a huge amount of time doing the right wing version of exactly that for instance there was the time that he waited on in on Leah Thomas a trans woman who'd won an event in an NCAA swimming Championship the second place finisher happened to be from Florida which DeSantis then took as an excuse to come out and do this look at what the NCAA has done by allowing basically men to compete in women's Athletics in this case the swimming you had the number one woman who finished was from Sarasota we're going to be doing a proclamation uh saying that Emma is the best female swimmer in the 500 meter freestyle because she earned that okay a aside from being gross and awful to be very clear DeSantis doesn't have the power to declare or disqualify winners in college sports rendering that Proclamation completely pointless but since men in suits seem to be using their platforms to invalidate past athletic achievements out of pure spite I hereby declare that by signing this Ron desantis's Little League team the soyin meatballs did not in fact ever make the Little League World Series instead Houston's Place wasn't henceforth be taken by the season six cast of RuPaul's Drag Race I declare it it is declared it is done but but it's gone Way Beyond just empty hateful proclamations DeSantis has also signed a bunch of attention grabbing bills that seem designed to Delight conservatives and enrage liberals and while the announcements of these bills tend to get a lot of national media coverage the actual implementation of them can get far less scrutiny take to Santa's so-called anti-riot law which he passed following the black lives matter protests in the summer of 2020. that law among other things strengthens criminal penalties for those deemed rioters at demonstrations and he loves to brag to conservative audiences about just how mad it's made people and I have to say brag a little bit our anti-riot legislation was recently criticized by the United Nations so I wear that as a badge of honor okay but being chastised by the UN isn't innately positive what other admonitions would fill DeSantis with a misplaced sense of Pride I was also criticized by the Holocaust Museum Lego called me a scumbag and Malala yousafzai said she punched me in the throat if you ever got a chance so I wear that as a badge of honor but it is not just the UN that had a problem with that law a judge issued a preliminary injunction blocking the key part of it from being enforced arguing that it could effectively criminalize legal protected speech and that it was vague to the point of unconstitutionality and the same thing happened to his stop social media censorship act which again got a huge amount of attention when he first signed it they threatened social media platforms with fines for Banning political candidates and he proposed it shortly after a number of them had removed Trump in the wake of January 6th because of you know that thing but that law is also under a preliminary injunction from a judge who at one point told the DeSantis administration's lawyers I won't put you on the spot and ask if you've ever dealt with a statute that was more poorly drafted and look he is still fighting those lawsuits and future decisions could wind up going his way after all these cases are going through higher courts that range from Fairly conservative all the way up to overturned Roe v Wade but even when DeSantis has existing laws on his side his application of them can be slap Dash and gross just last year he made a big show of announcing his new elections crime and Security Office had spearheaded the arrest of 20 people who'd voted illegally but these were lastly people who the state had cleared to join the voter rolls so they assumed they were eligible to vote despite the fact that they technically weren't now one way of dealing with that would have been to Simply contact those people explain the mistake and remove them from the roles but instead what DeSantis chose to do was to send armed cops to conduct arrests with body cam video later revealing police with guns drawn pulling people out of their houses and if you listen to the cops involved even they seem annoyed and embarrassed at what they're having to do foreign commit no fraud well so that's the thing I don't know exactly what happened with it but you you do have a warrant that's what it's for we are doing this now and this happened years ago I don't know I I have no idea man wow do you have any idea how sketchy your order needs to be for cops to enforce it reluctantly enforcing laws on scared people is one of their favorite things to do it's that make siren go wee-woo and end off list now now since then several of those cases including all those we just showed you have been dropped or dismissed but it really feels like desantis's main aim there as in so many cases was just to instill fear to make people afraid to protest or to moderate content or even to vote and that is the thing even his sloppily written laws can end up doing real harm and maybe the clearest place to see all of this in action is in Florida schools because he's been very busy there you probably remember last year's passage of HB 1557 the Florida parental rights in Education Act also known as the don't say gay Bill though DeSantis says that name pushes a false narrative and has claimed that the bill simply says no sexual instruction to kids pre-k through three but the truth is the bill is not as narrow as that at all as this DeSantis supporter openly acknowledges well this bill is trying to prevent his indoctrination of our children but the bill is a sweeping General piece of legislation that doesn't just apply to young children it applies throughout the entire school age where it says age-appropriate teaching of gender identity and sexuality so the bill is it does you're right it targets kindergarten to third grade and it says or age appropriate yeah yeah so when is it age appropriate to talk about uh homosexuality it varies by the by the individual you would you would sue a teacher if they started talking to your daughter about same-sex marriage or lgbtq issues at the age of 17. if they don't have my concern and I think it's it's not appropriate for my daughter yes wow yeah I think a lot of people would be quite shocked to hear that well because it's kind of a mainstream that is that is the law exactly I know that's rough to hear but he is technically right there thanks to Ron DeSantis right now it is the law in Florida and quick side note it's funny how it's always the people who think homosexuality is a concept needs to be taught at an appropriate age they don't give a second thought to when they teach their kids what heterosexuality is although I could be wrong maybe in that guy's family his kid asks every day who are you people living in my house and he responds well my name is Dad that lady is Mom and we are we're friends don't ask me any more questions until you're 18 or I will sue you and it is not just sexuality into Santa's crosshairs he's also passed an act called the stop woke act which limits the ways concepts related to systemic racism and sex discrimination can be discussed in schools and to hear him tell it laws like that are badly needed because the wokeness in schools goes way deeper than anyone might think I will have math books sent to my department of education for a review these textbooks and they will do things like woke math and I'm thinking to myself two plus two equals four it's not two plus two well let's have a struggle session over that how do you feel about it no no no there's a right answer here I mean out of context he's completely right there numbers don't have feelings if they did this one would be sad this one would be giggly and this one will be exciting for a few minutes but then the novelty wears off and it mostly just gets tired and sore the same Atlantis has claimed that his state had to reject math books for containing indoctrinating Concepts like race essentialism especially bizarrely for elementary school students now that is a big claim and if it sounds like to you that's because it absolutely is reporters for these Outlets come from thousands of pages of Elementary School textbooks and their reviews and couldn't find any such examples and when the dissensitive administration eventually produced just four tiny Snippets of what they claimed was objectionable material for the two that came from grade school books there is nothing about race although one does suggest students practice with empathizing with classmates while they fulfill a lesson objective of identifying numbers from one to five in sequence that is it so his big claim of woke math and race essentialism in grade schools is basically regular math and trying to teach kids not to be dicks to each other a kind of math education that descents himself frankly might have benefited from us his solution to figuring out the difference between one and three questions seems to be yell until the other person stops talking and the most recent thing you may have heard about our books being pulled from shelves in Florida schools with viral images like these making the rounds online now in classic fashion DeSantis has pushed back on those images hard they've tried to create in Florida a narrative um it's basically a book ban hoax it's a hoax what they're doing and they're trying to say that because we have parental rights and because we have curriculum transparency if you have a book that has hardcore pornography for 10 in a library that 10 year olds can access a parent objects to that that does not satisfy Florida standards it should not be in the library with those young kids and I think I think 99 of parents agree with that okay first let's debunk the most egregious claim there because 99 of parents don't agree on anything I'm pretty sure you can find at least 10 percent of parents who are against covering electrical sockets in reach of toddlers they're called zap moms and they're all about letting kids discover their own limits of electricity but I will give to Santa's this there has been some misinformation floating around online this viral list of books that were supposedly banned Statewide in Florida circulated widely but it's nonsense having said that those images of empty shelves are very real and are the direct result of desantis's actions because he signed legislation mandating the only approved books could be included in any school or classroom library and that approval must come from a certified media specialist that led some districts including the ones those photos are from to tell teachers to remove or cover books not because they were pushing a false narrative but because they were trying to comply with this Santa's his stupid law and what DeSantis might say well this isn't overreaction because those books will return once they are approved not all of them because thanks to his new law as well as that don't say gay bill and his stop woke act he has turbocharged the movement among conservatives to get books removed from libraries that they just don't like and this goes Way Beyond removing hard hardcore pornography or the usual kind of give and take between parents and school boards that has been going on for decades now what does santis has done is make it so anyone in a community can challenge these books reporters track down one woman who submitted 21 book challenges in one County only to find that she's a retiree with no children who fully admits that she hasn't read all of them but I've read them in partial so basically she just skimmed them and said I'm pretty sure nobody should read this which is coincidentally exactly how I feel about Rhonda Santa's new book but I'm not trying to get it taken out of libraries am I meanwhile this teacher in Escambia County Florida challenged around 115 books among them titles like and Tango makes three a picture book based on the true story of two male penguins at the Central Park Zoo who raised a baby chick together Apparently one of her objections to it is that a second grader could read it and the idea would pop into their mind that these are two people of the same sex that love each other and the problem is schools are acting on those sorts of complaints there was a recent school board meeting in that county to address the calls to ban three of the books on that teacher's list including the penguin one multiple community members came to testify in favor of banning it and some made it abundantly clear exactly what law they felt empowered them I probably wouldn't even talk about this book except for right and wrong as a clear line and it's not gray so it is black and white it's black and white with the law when we talk about h-1557 we're talking about indoctrination and when you look up this book on Destiny discover on the schools and County website the book says this book is about two male penguins that fall in love Jesus said go and sin no more so this this it's against the law thank you wow just about the work he had to put into that that man had to shower put on a pair of pants decide what shirt to wear choose the light blue one that's two sizes too big drive to the meeting Park his car walk into the building wait a while for his turn to speak also they could eventually stand behind a Podium and say out loud as an adult that he's mad about gay Penguins you almost have to admire his dedication to being such a idiot for the that idiot one at that meeting the board voted to ban and Tango makes three from its schools and when you take all of this together the book's being removed the inane proclamations to shame trans athletes these sloppy attempts to criminalize protests and you combine it with everything else from the support for restrictive abortion bans to the efforts to stop gender affirming care it really begins to feel like the freest state in America is only free to the extent that anyone wants to behave exactly the way that Ron DeSantis thinks they should and look in the months to come you're going to hear a lot of DeSantis versus Trump comparisons and the truth is he'll probably come out well in a lot of them more or less by default but that cannot be the bar here it is important to consider the scientists in his own right if Donald Trump never existed and that's just all pause and enjoy that hypothetical just for a second is Donald Trump never existed and you were forced to learn about Rhonda santis from scratch with no basis for comparison what you would see would justifiably horrify you because you've been discovering a petty autocrat and a bully a man with no interest in hearing dissent questions or indeed the correct pronunciation of Thai food and all in all a man who is and I do not use this term lightly just a meatball

Channel: LastWeekTonight

Views: 9,126,925

Keywords:

Id: M81-GM0mTc4

Length: 25min 38sec (1538 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 05 2023

Reddit Comments

[u/mirattes]

Please at the next Press Event someone has to ask him if he likes Thai Food pronounced the right way and watch his reaction

[u/jwil06]

And John didn’t even get into the fact he ignores actual issues we Floridians face like the fact nobody will be able to afford property insurance soon

[u/MudiChuthyaHai]

The fuck is woke math

[u/monchota]

If you don't want him office, go vote. Trump won because younger people don't vote. If you don't vote, your opinion and anything you have to say is absolutely useless.

[u/bearbrannan]

So according to some, the bible talks about how being gay is bad, wouldn't that technically fall under books that should be banned cause it brings up a woke issue?

[u/MySockHurts]

If this fucker becomes President, it’s game over for America

[u/Impossible-Pie4598]

I no longer believe that presidents aren’t above the law, and I don’t believe America will ever fix this problem without eventual violence, because I don’t believe legal accountability exists anymore. I believe the United States is that in name only. There is the new fascist authoritarian party that hates everyone that isn’t 100% loyal to them and there are the Democrats, the remnants of an old democratic republic, clinging to something that no longer exists. Clinging to a decoy really.

[u/DLun203]

How the fuck did they leave out the fact that DeSantis vetoed the district map the FL state legislature drew and drew his own in which he eliminated blue districts? Some black majority districts.

That’s a huge story that’s not getting nearly enough coverage and the LWT team just left that out? How weak is the writing team that brazen voter suppression didn’t make this episode?

source

Edit: I have to imagine this is part one of a multi part series. This barely scratched the surface of DeSantis’ history as FL’s governor

[u/Amarice]

Those Radiant Plumbing ads are glorious, rofl...