SMYRNA, Ga.—Hundreds of people lined up outside Georgia’s largest gun store hours in advance to hear Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis speak on tour for his book “The Courage To Be Free.”
DeSantis spoke at Adventure Outdoors in the Atlanta suburb of Smyrna on March 30. The crowd, estimated conservatively by DeSantis’s book tour team at over 650 people, crowded into a second-floor event room upstairs from what the company calls “the actual largest gun store in the world” on its website.
Conservatives, Republicans, book readers, and the just plain curious gave the governor of the neighboring state a warm welcome. The crowd didn’t dwindle as DeSantis gave a longer-than-average speech of around 70 minutes, in which he detailed the challenges he’s faced in Florida since his 2018 election and the often-bold steps he’s taken.
Dave Konen, 55, of Roswell in metro Atlanta, said it was the first such rally he'd ever attended.
“I’m a fan of his and I’m also a fan of [former President Donald] Trump,” Konen said. “I'd take four more years of Trump and eight years of DeSantis. Like with Reagan and Bush.”
In listening to DeSantis, he was curious about accusations that DeSantis was funded by establishment Republicans whom he considered “undesirable.” Konen, though, was spotted later enthusiastically applauding DeSantis’s speech.
“I’ve got family in Florida. They love DeSantis,” he said. “Here I don’t know as much about him, except what I heard in the biased news. I hope he steps up and knocks it out.”
Some Trump supporters were present, mostly outside, clustered around a “Trump for President” bus parked at the edge of the store’s massive parking lot.
Andy Soha of Cherokee County wandered slowly through the crowd of DeSantis fans lined up, waiting for the doors to open. He waved a big colorful flag picturing Trump holding a rifle and standing on a tank emblazoned with his name.
“I’m here to observe and support Trump and show people there’s another man, another presidential candidate, on the ballot. I’m not here to protest,” Soha said. The event was a few hours before news of Trump’s indictment in New York broke.
Some DeSantis supporters, wearing matching “Never Back Down” T-shirts, marched out toward the bus at one point, but there appeared to be no confrontation.
DeSantis has not declared his candidacy for president. Most Florida politicos think he'll do it after the state’s legislative session ends on May 5. A representative of the book tour said the group of supporters was probably organized by a PAC operating independently of DeSantis.
DeSantis gave a somewhat longer version of his usual speech for his book, published on Feb. 28. He told the account, familiar to Floridians now, of his election by a narrow margin in 2018. He said he shunned advice to govern cautiously: “I may have earned a mere 50 percent of the vote but I earned 100 percent of the executive authority.”
He talked about not using polls because leaders should lead. He quoted Alexander Hamilton saying that “energy in the executive is the leading characteristic of good governance.”
He talked about his administration’s avoidance of press leaks for four years.
He noted the vanquishing of his political adversaries.
“The Democratic Party in the state of Florida is dead,” he said flatly. There were 300,000 more registered Democrats than Republicans in 2018, and now the Republicans lead by 450,000.
Part of that, he said, was Americans voting with their feet, moving to Florida during and since the COVID pandemic because they preferred the state’s strong economy and political freedom culture to that of the states where they lived, like California and New York. The first year after COVID, he said, migrants brought $24 billion of adjusted gross income into the state.
New York, he said, is the closest state in population to Florida but has a budget twice the size of Florida’s. “And yet we have better roads, better services, higher performing K through 12 education, and the top-ranked public university system in America. So where is all this money going, that they’re taxing you and spending? It’s being wasted.”
He talked of his response to the COVID crisis, going against the federal public health line ‘because we would not allow our state to descend into some type of Faucian dystopia.”
DeSantis decried the nation’s “ruling class elites” as “bankrupt. They get almost every big issue wrong. They were wrong on lockdowns. They were wrong on forced masking. They denied the existence of natural immunity, which was wrong. They were wrong to oppose states like Florida that insisted on the schools being open.
“They were wrong about mRNA shots. They said you wouldn’t get COVID if you took it and so many other things. And they were wrong about where the virus came from. They tried to deny that it came from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, but we know it came out of that lab and didn’t come out of a wet market.”
He spoke of pushing against the federal government’s consideration of reinstituting mask bans on airlines and has protested the vaccine regulations keeping Serbian tennis star Novak Djokovic, who has chosen not to get vaccinated against COVID, from coming to Florida for the U.S. Open. He got laughs and cheers out of his crowd telling them how—with the regulations targeting airline passengers—he had mulled bringing Djokovic in by other means.
“I wrote [President Joe] Biden a letter. I said, ‘You’ve got to stop this insanity. But I also noticed that [with] your executive order, we may be able to sneak someone in by boat. Is that okay? ’”
Djokovic didn’t want to “press that button, but we were ready with a boat in the Bahamas,” DeSantis said to loud cheers and laughter.
Gov. Kemp
It wasn’t the only time in the speech that he paid tribute to Georgia’s Gov. Brian Kemp, who has followed a similar conservative path and won a convincing reelection victory in November over Stacey Abrams, who had significant national backing.Kemp said he had excellent relations with DeSantis and pointed out that while Florida had led on some issues, Georgia had on others. Georgia reopened business—against federal wishes—in April 2020, nine days before Florida did.
And Kemp went to war with significant corporate interests over a political issue—the state’s Election Integrity Act—a year before DeSantis took on Disney last spring. Kemp endured the wrath of Coca-Cola, Delta Airlines, and Major League Baseball, which moved the All-Star Game out of Atlanta because of it. DeSantis saluted Kemp’s push for election integrity as an issue.
He detailed his support for law enforcement while officials elsewhere in the country supported “defund the police” movements. He said the state now recruits police officers coming from—and fed up with—other states by paying them a $5,000 signing bonus. A state law he passed that would put rioters in jail “I’m happy to report ... was actually condemned by the United Nations.”
He said he’s the only governor in the country who has suspended a prosecutor financially backed by progressive financier George Soros, a prosecutor who has said he will pursue social justice instead of the law.
ATF Inspection
The site of his speech, Adventure Outdoors, was the subject of other news earlier in the week. A large team from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF) appeared on March 27 to inspect the store.Four Georgia Republican Congressional Representatives showed up to register their protest, and one of them, Marjorie Taylor Greene, posted a video of their conversation with the lead ATF agent on Twitter. The others were Barry Loudermilk, Rich McCormick, and Michael Collins. Lt. Gov. Burt Jones has promised an investigation, and the store’s general manager, Eric Wallace, confirmed he'd called Loudermilk, his Congressman.
Greene said on Twitter, “This is a prime example of Joe Biden and the Democrats weaponizing federal agencies to silence and intimidate their political opponents.
“This visit was unprecedented,” Greene said. “The sheer amount of agents from the bluest parts of the country is unusual and unnecessary to conduct a routine audit.”
Wallace said, though, the company has had good relations with ATF.
The agency said in a public statement, “Compliance inspections of federal firearms licensees are conducted daily across the country. While never ‘routine, there were almost 7,000 compliance inspections completed by ATF in Fiscal Year 2022.
“ATF will often deploy its Major Inspection Team staffed with investigators from throughout the country to assist with compliance inspections. The MIT provides support and assistance to field divisions with complex inspections involving large inventories, sites and/or other factors. The MIT concentrates ATF’s investigative resources and expertise on inspections where there is a clear need for additional resources while minimizing the time investigators are at a licensee’s business.”
The ATF said large teams are intended to get through the work and out of the store as fast as possible.
