We’ve been expecting Florida Governor Ron DeSantis to announce his run for the GOP nomination for many months. It kept not happening. In these months, the peanut gallery has had a ball speculating away. We keep hearing that he “peaked too soon,” that his spat with Disney has hurt him, he is traveling too much, that he might be having fundraising issues, and so on.
It’s the kind of press prattle to keep clicks happening in the absence of real news.
But the day is finally here. And the governor has chosen an unusual method for his announcement. He will join Elon Musk on Twitter Spaces for a live discussion. This will certainly test just how scalable this platform is. I’m assuming that the live audience will top one million but we shall see.
It’s possible to listen on the web version and anyone with an account can do so. To engage in a Space requires the app on the phone. I’ve come to love the application as a kind of live radio without ads, as independent voices debate every manner of issue. You could spend every evening on this technology and never get bored.
Why is DeSantis doing this? The audience will be big and largely under 45, one assumes. To capture the older demographic, he will appear on Fox later in the evening.
There is some symbolic importance to going first with Twitter Spaces. After three years of censorship, Elon Musk showed up to Twitter, having massively overpaid for the property, and emancipated it from the censors. He fired 4 out of 5 employees, many of whom were feds. The financials are still suffering from the ad boycott of the major corporations in bed with the usual suspects.
After cleaning up the staffing mess, Musk gradually restored many banned accounts, particularly those of credible voices who had been saying true things about lockdowns, masks, and COVID shots and had been silenced in the largest censorship operation since World War I. Suddenly the venue was transformed into a haven for free speech, the only high impact social space to have taken this route. The rest remain heavily censored.
The technology of Spaces had a preexistence but never amounted to much before Elon took over. Suddenly it became the place to be on every topic imaginable. My first exposure to it was truly alarming in a good way. People were speaking their minds, without censorship. Moderators let people speak and debate. It felt extremely strange, at least to me.
It served as a reminder to me, and perhaps to others, just how used to censorship and controls we had become. It felt almost incredible to hear major experts on important topics freely speaking their minds. I can recall thinking: how is it possible that this is allowed? I kept having to remind myself that this is how it is supposed to be. Even I had forgotten what freedom feels like.
The most salient and shocking fact of the last three years has been the manufactured consensus on the most radical and extreme attack on liberty and rights in our lives. It was particularly spooky because the entire machinery of oppression was blessed by the mainstream media, the corporate elite, the scientific establishment, plus government. It was the triumph and full hegemony of the corporate biomedical cartel in a massive fascistic flex of power.
None of it achieved anything for the stated goal of mitigating a virus but it did fasten a wicked apparatus of control over the American people. The resistance was almost invisible at first and grew over time. What was also shocking was how the people and organizations that one might naturally expect to resist stayed silent throughout. The aggressive advocates of the compulsion—people I’ve come to call the lockdown junta—have not recanted. Not in the least. They are more aggressive than ever.
Ron DeSantis’s political experience as governor was shaped by all of this. Initially, he complied with the edicts coming from the Trump administration, which he had trusted, as did many Republicans around the country. If Trump had signed off on all this, he must know something that the rest of us do not. But quickly after, he grew incredulous and started consulting experts on his own.
Gradually, the fakeness of the entire exercise began to be exposed. He lost trust in every bit of it: the distancing, the masking, the closures, and eventually even the shots too. In April 2020, the governor of Georgia began to throw off the COVID yoke, and was personally slammed by Trump for doing so. By then DeSantis too had a change of mind and started relaxing restrictions. Florida had a normal spring break even in 2020, much to the howls of the mainstream press. A few months later, all restrictions were entirely gone, and then other states followed.
DeSantis was demonized by the national press and predictions of doom were everywhere. In the end, Florida did as well or better in overall age-adjusted mortality than lockdown states like California and certainly New York. His policies were vindicated. Now the establishment hates him for it. And keep in mind that he had opened up the entire state and condemned lockdowns at the very time when the Trump administration was still claiming that lockdowns had saved millions of lives. Even in the October presidential debates, Trump stuck by his story.
This is ultimately why DeSantis is running. It’s not because he is politically ambitious as such. It’s because he cares about the country and wants to see it emancipated from the lockdown junta’s controls and the woke ideology that goes along with that. He constantly draws attention to these subjects, and they are subjects that the establishment wants buried as deeply as possible. But he knows that they are issues about which the American people care deeply.
Running for the Democratic nomination is Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and he has a very similar set of concerns. They are united in their desire to uproot the corporatism that has invaded American life. Whereas RFK Jr. believes strongly that the administrative state can be reformed by eliminating agency capture, my read on DeSantis is that he is more interested in the complete abolition of multiple agencies and letting freedom take it from there.
In a sane world, DeSantis and RFK Jr. should represent the right and left (conservative and liberal) range of opinion. They should be the options for a country that was still governed by a constitution.
Alas, that is not the world in which we live, so both candidates are treated by mainstream media as “extremists:” DeSantis dogged by the lie that he speaks for the “far right” and RFK Jr. by the baloney that his entire rich career in litigation can be summed by the tagline “anti-vaxxer.” Both have the courage of conviction and will not be intimidated by the junta that wants them both destroyed as candidates.
This will be a fantastic election for testing out whether and to what extent the power of the people really can prevail against the corruption that has taken control of the commanding heights. Any outcome is possible. A battle between the two for the general election would be a wonderful sign of defeat for the whole establishment.
This is why DeSantis’s choice for announcing on Twitter Spaces really matters. He is putting his confidence in freedom and free speech on display, anxious to help anyone and anything that stands in opposition to the control freaks.
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