Ron DeSantis on the Larry Arnn Show

welcome to the Larry Arn show I would be that man Larry yarn this is the first edition of that show and I've got a spectacular guest because the guest is in politics I will say at the outset that Hillsdale College is not a partisan Institution except that it loves the Constitution the United States and limited government of which it is a creature and has been from its beginning in 1844. I'm proud to have our guest today because he's important and he's important because he knows things and he does things that are remarkable in our politics today uh welcome Governor it's great to be here my first time I wanted to come we've talked about it for a long time so I'm glad we finally got it done yeah High Time um I want to talk about you've got a book out called courage to be free interesting that it takes courage to be free but it always has and especially now today and it begins with a discussion of a man that I met first in 1974 by the name of Angelo codavilla yeah I will tell you that the book is in the mood of the decline of the Roman Republic you call the government we have today the regime you call the media the praetorian guard those are Grim words if you know that history is that where you think we are well I think that part of the book is juxtaposing the success of Florida uh with the decline of our country and I noticed this when I was running for re-election that Floridians were really happy to be Floridians they were really happy about the direction of the state but they were so incredibly pessimistic about the direction of the country about what was going on not just in DC but with the elites on our society more broadly yes in the corporate press Wall Street all these other places and it causes you to kind of take a step back survey what's the America was like when I was growing up I mean I kind of graduated high school in the in the late 90s and we were probably the most powerful country in the history of the world or certainly one of them there we were really at our Peak and it seems like over the last 20 plus years we've stubbed our toe time and time again and we're not as strong as we were then and there's a lot of reasons for that uh I think some of the behavior of our ruling class is is first among them but there are other things and so yes the country is not doing well but I think that there is a positive aspect of the book to just show that what we put together in Florida shows that all the different folks who are making things worse in the country those are the same folks we beat time and time again on all these issues in Florida and we've now become the Citadel of freedom in the United States well the book certainly is a very hopeful but but we're not ready to go there yet we're going to talk about all the bad stuff first uh tell us about this ruling class who are they and what makes them what they are well I think Cota Villa was really the first to really crystallize this for me he wrote an essay probably 10 12 years ago at this point and what he pointed out was these are folks in in different organs of society it's not like a conspiracy or anything but they all have the same basic assumptions about the way the world should operate about how they should be able to exercise power over other people and so that is really the the governing ideology not just of our bureaucracy not just of our elected class but even people in High Finance and the media and all this and so it creates kind of an elite Cadre across institutions and then you kind of have the rest of us who feel differently and and we're kind of the the country folk uh it's different and I think he pointed this out you know if you were a hundred years ago you would have been if you're a Northeastern business guy all those people kind of thought the same there were big Regional differences in the country and I think with the Advent of kind of progressive ideology affecting all these institutions a lot of those differences are now muted because they're United by their overall leftism somehow ever able to act together uh in some ways the country do you think is more centralized than it used to be National media big engines of search and all that stuff uh what do you do about that well I think just in the in my adult lifetime that's true I mean when big Tech came on the scene it was very liberating in many respects uh it was a way to get around the Legacy Media and you could communicate ideas uh that has changed in the last five or ten years where Tech Works in concert uh with the bureaucracy uh to be able to limit information so we saw this during covid-19 when fauci is talking with Facebook about what is quote misinformation of course everything they said was misinformation is basically things that ended up being true whether that the virus came from the lab whether it's at the cloth masks were ineffective all these different things and so yes you have more people in high positions of authority working in concert to be able to advance an agenda and that's just I think an agenda that is not in the best interest of the majority of the people of our country you quote Madison you quote the founders a lot accurately whenever the real power in a government wherever the real power in the government lies there is danger of Oppression wherever there is an interest in power to do wrong wrong will generally be done and not less readily by a powerful and interested party than by a powerful and interested Prince uh is that what we have now we have a a people who think they can control elections and think that they're in the right and if you oppose them they will prosecute you well certainly I think the difference between maybe how government operates today and say when President Reagan came on the scene President Reagan said the most dangerous words in the English language ROM from the government and I'm here to help and it was true but a lot of that was kind of central planning run amok these were do-gooders that thought they could socially engineer Society of course it didn't work and So Reagan pointed that out I think now it's a much sharper use of government Authority I do think that they conceive of themselves as representing one faction of society against and other factions of society and so you see dissimilar treatment of people I saw this my first year in Congress when the IRS targeting Scandal happened they were going after these little conservative groups even in my district these groups of citizens and so so I think that that's something that's significant I also think that concentration of power the founders were really concerned about government power I think they'd be surprised at the extent to which these private companies are exercising de facto Public Power really I think on behalf of the regime and whether that's the the banks colluding to do things like ESG whether that's Tech colluding to sensor you know that's power being exercise in ways that are not accountable to the electorate and so here's a delicate thing and I think a very bold thing um it requires The Prudent use of political power to break up these centers of power in politics and outside that are oppressing people can you do that safely well I don't know that we have any other choice but to try I mean if you think about it what we have now is you know I can win an election in Florida by a million and a half votes and yet if I'm not diligent about protecting my people the left can still impose their agenda through universities through Corporate America through tech companies through the federal bureaucracy and so I think someone in my position you know I've got to be able to use my constitutional authority to be able to safeguard the liberty of my citizens not just against my own government getting out of hand that's easy for me to do but also against all these other arteries of society that have been infected by people that don't have their best interests at heart in your book you identify Congress as the mainstream of government because it makes the laws and you say that the hope is with them uh effectively you say that you're not saying those words uh what's wrong with Congress you were in the Congress so if you go back and you know this well the Federalist 51 articulated that the premise of our constitution by having separate branches and having the ability to check each other was that ambition would counteract the ambition you're the executive by human nature you want to expand your power I'm in the Congress it's human nature we want our our Branch to be the most powerful so you'd be fighting back and forth what's happened with the modern Congress is their desire to remain in office has inverted that to where it's easier for them to remain in office if they punt on all these important issues so they would rather draft vague legislation that punts the critical decisions to the bureaucracy so that they have plausible deniability in a re-election campaign they would rather keep the government going on autopilot rather than use the power of the person a way that would that would provoke a confrontation with the executive because they don't want to quote government shutdown and they don't want to quote be blamed for a government shutdown so I think the modern Congress has put its individual members desire to remain in office and perpetuity ahead of the institution's prerogatives to be what should be the most powerful branch of the government because you could have a runaway executive Congress can just simply not fund those activities and it stops and so unless Congress is taking affirmative action to keep the government doing these things those those behaviors will cease but they just don't have the gumption to be able to do it so I wouldn't say I'm hopeful that that will change I do think that there's a bigger recognition at least amongst Republicans who are in Congress now that it has to change because otherwise what the bureaucracy you know you know people we called a deep State people so it's a conspiracy there's not a conspiracy theory when there's no constitutional accountability you're going to have power accumulate and it's going to be wielded in ways that are going to be detrimental that's that's basically 101 from what our Founders thought so they need to get serious about exercising their Authority and I think the Decades of them defaulting on that responsibility have led to where we are now uh you mentioned a few things that Executives can do to turn that around sounds like you've done some of them can you what are those well look at the federal level uh well so one of the things I did when I became Governor is I had my my staff in the transition give me a as a compiler book of every possible Authority I have constitutional statutory customary powers that may have been used what are my Powers vis-a-vis local government because I've removed local government officials what about the legislature so I had all that and so you're like okay what levers can you pull to advance an agenda and I think in at the federal Level under article two you know there are certain levers that can be pulled I mean I talk about in the book how one way to deal with the bureaucracy is to take all the employees who exercise policy making decisions and classify them as a different schedule under federal civil service where they're not they don't have the Ironclad protections so that they can be removed I mean after all if you are making these judgments Article 2 says the executive the elected president has the has the right to wield executive power if you're making policy judges that are undercutting that you should be shown the door that would need to be put in obviously it would be challenged by the left uh and then I also think and we just had a judge um in the fifth Circuit Judge ho write a concurrence saying we need to determine whether Article 2 is is improperly circumscribed by some of these Civil Service laws because if you think about it right now what we have is a republican get elected president and the left still controls the the organs of the executive branch that's not the way the Constitution was designed it's one thing to have a civil service protection if I'm like some somebody in the bowels of the bureaucracy and you're working for me maybe I can't just fire you at will but to have that apply to the elected president where they can't make changes to be able to effectuate their agenda that's not the way it's done now the Democrats love it because they're in charge no matter what happens the way this has gone on for the last 20 30 years could that you call that schedule F in your book can can can the president do that well I think this was something in the previous administration that a lot of us were hoping for uh I think they tried to do it maybe at the very end it just didn't it didn't really get off the ground but but yeah I think I think you can do it I think it'll be litigated but I think there are members on the U.S Supreme Court now who've seen the way this bureaucracy is is operating and they and I think they'll recognize I think the majority of the Court will recognize that's not consistent with the original understanding of the Constitution you mentioned the number of fifty thousand yeah that's a few yeah make a difference I know a lot of people who've worked in the executive branch uh in the in DC uh it's a fearsome thing to do because people are out to get you no question um they can hurt you but I think that some of this has been there's always been an assumption that there's nothing you can do about it there's always been an assumption for example that agencies like the doj and FBI are quote independent that's like Washington Speak oh these are these are independent president can't be involved in those agencies and when they say that doj and FBI are independent what they're saying is they think they should be unaccountable so these are the agencies that can imprison you arrest and imprison you and they shouldn't be accountable to the one person elected in that Branch give me a break so I think Republican uh executive in particular you know you've got to be exercising proper oversight and holding those agencies personally accountable you can't just say that they're independent and hands off you can't do anything that's not the way the system's design I had a I almost afraid to tell the story I know somebody who was senior in the FBI he was retired now and I was talking to him and I wouldn't talk to him about the FBI really and as he was leaving I said I hope you're not mixed up in all that and he said I'm just trying to keep the FBI independent and I said independent of what and he said nobody ever asked me that question before you see and they're these people care million dollar question and I think what they'll try to say is well we want it to be independent of quote politics and yes is it appropriate for an elected executive to say FBI I don't like this person you go you go of course not that's an abuse of power but it's wholly appropriate to go bring in the FBI drugs hey wait a minute all these BLM rioters how come none of them have been held accountable how come you're going after these people and not these people you absolutely could do that and you should do that and if they don't have a good answer the FBI director should be fired and you should put someone else in there and I I sometimes think I've been saying this for years I resent you just a little bit because you figured out quicker than I did a whole bunch of stuff but um uh I've been saying for years don't the people understand that the only ones who really answer to them are the ones they vote for that's right shouldn't they be in authority and I talk a little bit about the books you know I was a U.S congressman for three terms and most of what my constituents would contact my office about had nothing to do with what I was voting on or anything that was before the Congress it was action that had been taken against them or pending action in some new rule or something from the bureaucracy so they're coming to me for help for what the executive branch is basically doing without any prompting from Congress they're just deciding they want to do a new rule or something and I'm like gee it's not really the way it should be I mean these constituents should be coming to Congress asking the congressmen about different things that Congress is doing but instead all the action was done via executive agencies I want to talk to you about the pandemic for a minute uh I know I have these three guys I call them my three Geniuses uh Jay bhattacharya Martin koldorf and Scott Atlas and you worked with at least two of them yourself and you went through a process that was just like the one I went through here that is I wanted to figure out if the people around here were going to be harmed by this virus and I wasn't prepared just to listen to the constantly shifting things from the CDC and the Michigan governor and health department and so I started trying to find out and I found out pretty quick that it's extremely unlikely that this virus would hurt a young person and so then that that liberated something you know because here the kids live in dormitories you can't keep them apart also they walk around with a sense of immortality all the time you can't make them afraid either you don't really want to unless it's right so we kept the college open you kept Florida open and how did you do that explain that well a lot of it was in fact I dealt with all I consulted with all three of those guys and they're all really good and then looking at the data myself I mean covid was potentially an existential threat for the State of Florida for two reasons one we have so many elderly people we have almost 4 000 long-term care facilities throughout our state we've got Condominiums up and down the coast particularly in Southern Florida where a lot of elderly people are there so a virus that impacts elderly disproportionately impacts Florida disproportionately also to the extent this was disrupting the economy we rep Hospitality tourism is our bread and butter that would be a huge economic threat to the state and so for both of those you know so we took it very very seriously what I started looking at was okay they say the hospitals are going to be overwhelmed unless you know we we shut down Society so they give you these models and these graphs all the governors were getting them and then I'm watching every day and it didn't quite you know match what they were saying so like by April 10th they said Florida is going to have a hundred thousand coveted patients and in reality I think we had like maybe like 3 000 or something like that I'm like okay this is something's wrong here and so what I I came to the realization of you know low impact on on non-elderly particularly kids uh kids were not necessarily transmitting it more because there was initially a fear about getting kids together in school that it would be like the flu where all of a sudden it starts spreading more so a lot of the elderly didn't want the kids in school and I took Flack when we had that because they were concerned about how the kids would spread it but it turns out they really weren't doing that the hospitals I was confident we'd have enough hospital room and then bhattacharya did a thing in Stanford where he looked at the antibodies because what we were doing like CD you test somebody you're positive I may have had covid and not had anything severe and never tested it so that wasn't showing up so by doing the antibodies what bhattacharya and his team showed was actually it is much more it had spread much more than what we thought but it was also so less lethal than we thought so that to me was like okay the appropriate course is to help the vulnerable Focus whatever protection on nursing homes on elderly you know with testing whatever they need but you have to have Society functioning and you can't just be in a Perpetual state of paralysis and basically what fauci said I think was mid April of 2020 they said well when can States open back up he said when there's no cases and no deaths well that's impossible there was no way you were going to eradicate it by doing that and so I was like that is not going to work we've got to go our own way and you know a lot of it was people like Jay and them they were not given any recognition they were actually smeared by people like fauci for for speaking the truth so that so the difficult thing just I think as an executive is and why a lot of Governors went different than me it's always easier politically to just defer to the medical people say well fauci's saying this so that or this this health bureaucrats saying that so when I was making these decisions you know they were very unpopular with the media with the bureaucracy with the left and even some Republicans you know were attacking me and I did not necessarily have that much medical backing not because it wasn't sound no one was willing to speak out except a few of those guys and and just the hysteria that it developed so I think that was that was a difficult part of it but ultimately you know after we went on went on our way people started looking and they're like okay Florida's not doing worse than New York they're not doing worse than any of these and so we really started to pick up once people realized I think part of it was there was so much fear in society so that really subsided and then we became very quickly a magnet for people all over the country to come to visit to move you name it and our economy probably in the last couple years has done as good as we've ever done in the history of the State of Florida and we've had more wealth move into Florida since covet than has ever moved into a single state in U.S history even adjusted for inflation uh and an entire nation to its homes that I I uh you know what so first of all it was it was good for me it was good for you I can see I had some responsibilities here I'm supposed to have college and you know if the kids are all going to die then you can't have college but I was supposed to find out about that and and then it was also apparent to me the cost of this because kids are young and take a year and a half out of their life that's an enormous thing and and very destructive I mean we've seen this in these universities particularly in New England how they were isolating these college students and it led to more depression I do believe it led to more suicides and in Florida what I told the universities was do not police their social life I was like these kids need to be kids they're going to go out guess what a lot of them will get covered no one will go to the hospital and then it'll be gone in six weeks in terms of going through the pot and that's exactly what happened I think we had in the first semester First full semester 2020 uh in the fall I think there was like one or two hospitalizations in our University system and I don't I think covet was incidental to the hospitalization so the cost of con restricting these kids was so much greater than whatever risk they were assuming by living their lives and I'll tell you to this day I will have people come up to me saying you know you saved my college experience you saved our senior year like I think like the fact that they were able to do school a lot of it a lot of the professors wanted to do remote and so the schools were I think probably a little bit too accommodating on that and that first semester back but the fact that they could live a normal life was huge and it was a stark contrast to what we saw throughout most of the United States elections uh it's a fact of the American government that it is the first purely representative government ever built that means whoever is The Sovereign doesn't run any part of the government they control them but James Madison writes that in the 63rd Federalist uh that means that the only way we have to control the government is through elections and elections are very controversial now and they're regulated in new ways that that worry me so what have you done in Florida to make sure elections are fair well we've done a number of things so when I became Governor we removed some of the supervisors in South Florida with my removal power because they had been bungling elections for a long time and got better people in there and those ran very well in 2020 as a result of us doing that we also have done things like ban ballot harvesting we've banned the use of Zucker bucks which Zuckerberg pioneered in 2020 where they would have private money through non-profit groups they'd give money directly to election offices so like a county election that administers the election would get millions in Zucker bucks and then the organization would send political operatives to work in that office and say you know you've got to do mail ballots you've got to do ballot harvesting you've got to do all those stuff so they basically commandeered the Machinery of the election for partisan purposes now they didn't say it was for partisan but they were going to Democrat areas and doing that so we've banned the use of private money we also don't allow mass mailing of unsolicited ballots in the mail if you want an apps T ballot Florida's had this for many decades you can request you got to show ID now and then they'll send you one and then verify your signature on the back end but just to send all these millions of ballots and just floating around in the ether is a real real problem so we put the kibosh on that but the thing is is you can have violations of election law are they actually going to be prosecuted so we created an office in state government the office of election crime so this is actually an office that will investigate and they can bring charges with it through the Attorney General's office so we've brought charges against people who were illegally in the country and voted who voted in multiple jurisdictions and had been con some had been convicted of serious crimes and are therefore ineligible to vote so we were able to do that in 2022 and it made an great impact on the 2022 election just in the sense of we didn't have really any problems I mean because I had these guys I'm like look for any problems you see not that it affected my race I mean we were fine but I wanted to see what happened and I think just the fact that people knew look it's not worth violating the election law why would you want to get prosecuted for voting if you're not if you're not eligible to vote so so we really I think the fact that we had legal reforms but then the credible uh mechanism to actually hold people accountable caused us to probably have the best run election in the country in 2022. so a lot of those things that you've done are called voter suppression no no yeah I know the left says that and why is that not voter suppression so first of all elections used to be you show up on Election Day You cast your ballot all this other stuff is really gone above and beyond what the original conception of election even was and so we have a right to ensure that the people that are showing up to vote are who they say they are and that there's no problems with the process in terms of people voting multiple times or whatever so what we've done I think is provide adequate safeguards where people in Florida can can feel good that the process has Integrity but the idea that showing ID to vote is somehow suppression is insane when I was active duty in the Navy if you wanted to come on that navy base you showed an ID no one said that was suppression that was just done now all of a sudden if you don't show an ID to vote somehow that's suppression it's nonsense the left wants anything that's done to ensure the Integrity of the process wiped away because they want to be able to exploit gaps in the process to be able to get their way I'm going to embellish the point if I may uh that we're living in a media mediated Society now the media is everything everything and so if there are people who are going around Gathering up lots of ballots the initiative is in them and it's not in the voter yes and and that means that you know what we want is to distribute the authority not collect it among the powerful so I praise you for that well and I mean if you think about it it's um what goes into collecting those ballots what are they doing at the doorstep uh part of the reason you have a secret bout is because you don't want to have any coercion you're in there you're in that Booth you do it no one knows what you did well if you have somebody from like a union showing up to uh union members family's uh house saying I need you know where's your ballot well they're not going to turn that ballot unless they know you voted the way they want you to vote so they're they're going to look at that they're going to they're going to prod you and actually you know Jimmy Carter and James Baker did a report on this I cited it in the book this is probably 10 20 years ago where they said when the ballots get out of the election offices and end up in people's homes the chance for coercion and manipulation goes up dramatically and that's just the basic fact so why would you want to invite more of that through ballot harvesting and Zucker bucks you should want to reduce that and so that's what we've tried to do in Florida now I I mean we have you know short period for early in-person voting all that I mean I I'd be fine to return to election day I think the public by and large likes to have more than one option and so the legislatures around the country I don't think any of them have gone back to just that single day voting but I mean there is a value of we're making a collective Choice with the same information and when you have some of these states that have early voting eight weeks before the election you have people voting for The Campaign as really even gotten into full swing and I just don't think that's the the best thing for the country that's so good uh James Madison uh he likes it that the America he talks about this in the Federalists the people have influence on the government and even control of the government on certain days and then what they're supposed to do in the meantime is talk a lot and then they come to a decision and then they get together and they're like a national legislature and if and you can I have a friend who's A pollster in California and he tells me that you can track the polls uh if you ask people in May what's the most important thing to them they'll say I have to remember to pick up my dry cleaning and if you ask them in October they're thinking about the country and it's governance in other words they got their minds on it now and that's so I think we should do the favor of treating people as if they're thinking people let's talk about education uh you first came to my site because we start charter schools in Florida and it's the best place uh and I noticed that uh your team they would ask us for advice about teaching things we're teachers around here and we know how to teach stuff and that it was easy to give them the advice and things would happen uh I thought somebody up there really knows what they're doing how do you make all that work I mean you've described to people what you've done in Education reform and well one of the things we did and we really appreciate Hillsdale helping is the uh American Civics initiative to get Civics back in our schools particularly our high schools in a really big way we got a private donation of five million dollars from Bernie Marcus from Home Depot to start a Civic speech and debate initiative we're now almost at all 67 counties are participating in that and we hosted the national championship last year for that and I think there's value in that because uh you know you may be a big Second Amendment guy but you may be asked to argue the other side of that so you got to get out of your comfort zone and vice versa and actually see things and be able to construct arguments so I think that one of the things that's been lost particularly in higher education in non-hillsdale institutions where the the Orthodoxy so strong is no one ever questions these kids assumptions and so we want to question your assumptions with that but then the broader issue of civics there's certain things that you should have when you leave our school system you need to have a certain Foundation to exercise the duty of American citizenship so part of that's having good standards we now give the seniors a citizenship test when they leave school and they can place out of civics requirements and higher ed if they do well we may start to say you have to pass it to graduate we didn't want to do that to start because we didn't fear we feared that the results wouldn't be that great and they weren't great they have gotten better but one of the things we said was you can have the best standards in the world you need teachers that really appreciate and understand the things and so we work with people from Hillsdale and other top Scholars to create a 50-hour course for teachers and so if they go through it they get a three thousand dollar bonus what are they learning about they're learning about the British constitution they're learning about the Protestant influence they're learning about all the intellectual currents that led to the formation of the American Republic and then the key episodes that have happened since then and the people that have looked at it the teachers that have gone through it we've got I think 2500 teachers gone through it 89 percent approval rate and and satisfaction rate on the course and then people that are looking at this I had because I meet with legislators from other states they're like I cannot believe you guys actually have you know this you have Aristotle you have you have play you have all this stuff that the teachers are learning like I had one legislative tell me brought tears to my eyes to see all this and so but that's really the foundation that anyone teaching Civics should have that so we're making the effort to get this right and to make sure that our students have an adequate Foundation my father was a high school teacher in Pocahontas Arkansas and he found his happiness you know making by the time he finished thirty four thousand dollars a year as a teacher I thought it was the greatest thing and he was a big wheel in our town uh when the clintons were elected in Arkansas she was placed in charge of Education and what they started doing was things that demote the authority of teachers it's uh you know first of all K-12 education is not rocket science only rocket science is rocket science and you know most anybody can do a fair amount of rocket science if they work hard enough but everybody can learn to read well and everybody and so this idea that there should be authority over the schools I mean I I put these numbers together and they shock me and I'm you know I'm experienced now I shouldn't be shocked since 2000 the number of students in the public schools have grown seven and a half percent the number of teachers eight and a half percent and the number of Administrators 92 percent that's a massive fact and they're now more slightly more administrators than teachers in the school system and why would that be what's that about because you know your your solution then is you help the teachers know but everybody loves to know and then if they know then they can teach and that's and you know it should stop there really because it's everybody wants to know well I think in Florida the reason and we may not have it that Stark with the admin but but it definitely has grown here too and a lot of that the majority of teachers in Florida are actually not members of the teacher Union um the majority of the administrator and other staff vast majority are members and so when they're bargaining they're actually putting the teachers in the back of the line and trying to service some of the other parts of the school system at the front of the line so what I did my second year as Governor is we because you know we we send money to the school districts to fund the schools and then they can negotiate with the unions or do whatever um and we're just like you know what we cannot have this money being put into Administration so we created What's called the categorical for just teacher salaries so we'll give you you know a billion dollars this year and other money can be use too but here's a billion dollars increase each drive it cannot be used for anything else and so that really helped a lot of our teachers and what would happen some of the districts some of the unions were holding up the pay raise for the teachers because they were using that as leverage to be able to do service some of the administrative staff and some of the others and so one of the things we're doing this legislative session is doing paycheck protection for for Teacher unions no automatic deductions because they give them a form and you sign the form and it's just authorizing the deductions but they don't even know how much money is coming out and of course when you have multiple deductions in your paycheck it's easy to get lost in that now if they want to join they have a right to join but they've got to write that check and hand that check to the union and so if they don't have 60 percent agree to do that then the union gets decertified and I think the issue with it is it's been mostly about advancing partisan politics within our school system the teacher unions not defending the right to teach in fact a lot of these teachers get in trouble if they just ensure discipline in their classroom the Union's not not getting their back the way they should on that the Union's more concerned about political correctness and some of the other things going on so I think Florida with that reform we are going to probably be more in line with how schools have been run historically prior to a lot of the problems we've seen in the recent generation I even think this now I think the growth of administration I think the temper of the administrator is different than the temper of the teacher because if you go in the classroom that's hard work and if what you're doing is regulating in some way from a distance where you never get in front of the kids well I think the power of the education Lobby comes from that class of person and you know the education Lobby is the start of the whole Public Employee regulatory state so you do something about that you'll do something good and restore the authority of the classroom that's that's where it happens right I mean since Plato's Academy 20 people 15 people sitting around in a circle talking that's how Learning Happens see and we know from the first line of Aristotle metaphysics everybody wants to do that and so facilitate that good for you one thing we're doing just uh and I didn't mention before so we're doing the Civics a big push important but we also want to give students a frame of reference to understanding the American experiment so we have one day a year November 7th where students learn about the victims of Communists and communist regimes and so they're getting truth about Marxism leninism they're learning about 100 million dead at the hands of marxist leninist regimes in the 20th century alone and that has special reverence in Florida because we have a lot of people that have escaped communism probably have more in our state than any place in the country and you know you think the Berlin Wall false you know that you know it doesn't die it's still there it's in our hemisphere again in all these other countries and so we want students to understand that and have the proper frame of reference because they go to most universities they're not learning about Mao's body count you know with the with the Great Leap Forward but they need to know that so you've been making a fuss about colleges in Florida lately there's a college in Sarasota and you've new college and you've changed the board and you put one of your guys in charge of it tried to put one of my guys in charge with it and you said you said to me you thought they'd all want to come because they want to live in the Sun and I said serious people don't decide where they live by according to the weather anyway tell us about that tell us about new College what you're doing there so it's interesting so new College when I got elected governor I didn't know anything about it uh we had either my first or second year as Governor the speaker of the house he's a friend of mine at the time came and said you know will you get rid of new college with me I'm like what is new College he's like well it's down in Sarasota it's it's like left to the left they're not doing great and I'm like yeah that's fine but the legislature just wouldn't go for that the people in Sarasota wanted to keep it and everything so we got that so I'm like all right well we got to do something with it and so we looked in Statute in Florida it's supposed to be our top Honors College in all of Florida yet enrollment is cratered test scores have gone down and it really became captive to left ideology gender ideology CRT all this stuff and so my view is you know a liberal arts university like the this does not have the right to just do whatever the heck it wants it's funded by Florida taxpayers and we have the right through the people and elections to set the mission of the University so we appointed six conservative board members they fired the president they hired my former Commissioner of Education who's a conservative he fired the Provost they eliminated Dei and CRT and then they basically said the mission of this University is to be a classical liberal arts university and and they reference Hillsdale College as as uh something to emulate and so what happened though is these trustees have professors from around the country reaching out saying how do I get to New College parents are asking how do I apply and I think it's a function of and I think hillsdale's benefited from this Academia has veered so far away from its traditional Moorings of seeking truth and teaching people you know how to think for themselves that it's um it's almost rare if you have a higher education embracing a return to truth and so there's a lot of uh I think excitement about this now Rome wasn't built in the day but what we did we started them off with 15 million dollars where they can recruit faculty to come and they've also started a ten thousand dollar scholarship right we see our in-state tuition's low it's like 6 500 so the ten thousand dollar scholarship you'll get the tuition and a lot of living paid for so it'll be really really good so they're doing things to be able to go but I do think it's something because the school's small enough where I think we're going to be able uh to move it in a direction and here's the thing yes that's what I think a a college should be doing and that's the direction but just from a market opportunity there's all these parents in the country you see all the people applying to your University where can I send my kid without having the university undo everything I've done for 18 years is what they worry about and so I think if if new college is one that they feel confident in that there's gonna be a lot of people all over the country that are going to want to apply there that's right uh and I want everybody to realize how magnanimous I am to advertise the competition but here but I do think like we we've been uh you know the Press had a conniption when we did this I mean I mean look I roll out of bed they have a conniption but but it raises the issue for a public institution uh you know do we have a right to have accountability in it do we have a right to set the mission as the people of Florida through their elected representatives and I think yes I think that we absolutely have to make sure that these universities are serving you know valid public purposes and to the extent to which they're being used to impose ideology or uh support political activism or quote social justice that's veering away from what we think is appropriate and so we're not only doing the new College we're going to do a hundred million dollars for the rest of the University system so that they can go recruit faculty as well the president so uh former Senator Ben sass is at University of Florida he's going to have money where he's going to be able to go to George Mason or MIT and say hey if you come here and teach engineer hearing we'll pay you this we'll do all that so we're trying to you know create a situation where we're attracting good people and then compensating them for for doing a good job well I think we're going to do okay here but I think a lot of colleges are going to be screaming at you hey that's not fair you're doing a good job that's right that's right uh I I my I want to say a word about classical education uh what what did what it has to do with is this it has two huge advantages classical learning is the first learning in the West and that means it's not about anything that anybody else said it's about the things that it's writing about the first book of history is called the histories by Herodotus the name wasn't taken first book of Ethics is called the ethics by Aristotle so you can go back to the beginning and then the second thing is you can step outside your time you know the people who give uh in school people give young people the advice you should follow the news every day I tell not to you know you should learn what things mean you see and that's liberating and then one of the things you learn if you study the classics is nobody ever learned a single thing except as a volunteer you can't you can deprive students of information you can't make them know anything so these people I mean all you're doing is introducing some diversity in this uniformity that calls itself diversity but all the other stuff that that would be uh replacing so much of that just intellectual empty calories I mean like if it really had value it may be different for me politically but fine but a lot of it isn't a lot of that is more of kind of spirit of the age stuff and the stuff you're talking about you know that has stood the test of time and that's something that gives people a foundation for the rest of their lives how think all this would play on the national well I mean I think it depends on on what part of what we've discussed I mean I think that uh clearly I think parents are more concerned about education than ever been before now Federal government's role in that is different than what our role in Florida has been or even on the school boards we work to elect a lot of school board members throughout Florida which has been good but one of the things we're looking to do in Florida and with other states and we would need the federal government to approve this for the doe is have a an accreditor that can have a process and have criteria that is more in line with how we believe a university should run and right now that's not really there and of course that reply you guys don't take the money which is smart but a lot of these others have done it so to be able to have that this Administration wouldn't approve it but the next one probably would that could really I think open up some positive things because there are some of these universities that say look I don't want to do a lot of this but the accreditor is going to ding me if I don't don't do it well if we have Florida Texas Georgia Tennessee having a different accreditor and that goes in a republican Administration a democratic Administration not going to be able to come in and undo that because there's too many institutions that will be at stake in that point so I think in terms of higher education reform I do think there's some things that can be done with accreditation let's go back to the the general for a minute at the grandest level yours is a book about the misarrangements of power in America there are three branches executive legislative and judicial and they're not doing their jobs and much of their job has been delegated to a fourth thing and what you're calling for is to arrange it the way it's supposed to be and that means the Congress has to make the laws and the president has to execute the laws and the courts have to judge according to the laws now that's a tall order that's a big thing and you give some examples of things you do to make that stronger in Florida uh the most exciting thing that I schedule F but the veto the line item veto those things do you think that somebody do you think a movement can start it it obviously is going to have to affect all the branches of government it's going to involve millions of people but it's sort of like uh walking back one of the great transformations in American history in world history in 1890 the government was eight percent of the gross domestic product and almost all of it was in cities and towns now it's 52 53 percent and it's centralized can that be walked back I think it's difficult but I think it can be just because I think people have have seen the contradictions in more recent years probably more than in in in previous generations and I think the fact that the the power has been exercised in a very sharp weaponized fashion has caused more Americans to take this very very seriously and really want to see some some significant change now it will require the executive who's very disciplined about about pursuing this case and it would probably take many many years it will require key people in the administration at the secretary and deputy secretary level then it would require thousands of people to be in kind of the bowels of the bureaucracy who were serious about reconstitutionalizing government so so it's a big project now one of the things we did in Florida was you know we had a very liberal state supreme court four to three liberal split when I took office three of the four liberals had to retire because of retirement age I put three conservatives on we changed the court for a generation we now have I would say a six to three loose U.S Supreme Court I don't think that the six are always Dependable I think we've got two that are 100 percent and I think the others are varying degrees but I think you have a court in place now uh based off the the Trump appointments that would be receptive uh to upholding some of the actions uh that we discussed which would probably not have been the case 10 years ago so that's another good thing and then I think the missing ingredient is how serious is Congress going to be about this if you're only uh priority is to avoid any quote government shutdown then you're never going to be willing to use the leverage that you need to to rein in the administrative state what leverage do they the power of the purse they can simply not fund uh offending conduct or if there's if there's agencies that are abusing the people's rights that's what that's why Madison said it was the most potent weapon that that the people's Representatives can be armed with because at the end of the day an executive if you do like if this if the left Florida legislature deprived me of funding for one of my agencies I physically can't do anything with that agency at that point uh or if they curtail it or limit the funding only to certain specified activities then you're running afoul the law if you violate that so so that's really I think key and then also the law making function stop delegating decisions to the bureaucracy your Congress you make a determination but this is all I mean it started you know with Wilson and all these other people over a hundred years but the idea that only experts can run government that oh you know Congress can't possibly make these decisions so let's just give a blanket grant of authority to the EPA so that it's constantly legislating things that have a profound effect on the American economy and can be interpreted differently depending on whether you have a Democrat or Republican Administration they have ceded the law making power uh which is kind of the the twin of the power of the purse in terms of those are the two functions of Congress and they don't want to exercise either of them well Governor uh I have watched you be governor and I never saw anybody better at it uh and you have a plan for the country and I want to thank you for coming on this podcast it's a proud thing to inaugurate it with you godspeed thank you

Channel: Hillsdale College

Views: 59,157

Keywords: hillsdale, politics, constitution, equality, liberty, freedom, free speech, lecture, learn, america

Id: FC7xPq8ts9c

Length: 51min 55sec (3115 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 20 2023