Gonna have to “excerpt” damned near all of this one, I’m afraid, since it expresses my own thoughts on DeSantis the Destroyer pretty precisely.

We Need to Talk About Mark Levin’s Interview With Ron DeSantis Last Night
On Sunday night, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis appeared on “Life, Liberty, and Levin” on Fox News, purportedly to promote his new book, The Courage to Be Free, which comes out this week.

While DeSantis has not yet declared that he’s running for president, he certainly sounded like a man who’s making the case for his candidacy. Or, if not, he’s making a case for conservatism as the path to American success and prosperity— the subtitle of the book is “Florida’s Blueprint for America’s Revival.”

As my colleague Stephen Green pointed out earlier today:

DeSantis isn’t traveling to early presidential primary states like Iowa or New Hamphire, at least not yet. Instead, his most recent tour was through three struggling Deep Blue cities to tout what he’s done differently in Florida… DeSantis is calmly but quite publicly holding up his state as a model for the nation, just like a governor running for president would do. Except that he has yet to announce that he’s running. He hasn’t even formed one of those exploratory committees that allows a not-yet candidate to fundraise.

I don’t see how it’s a bad thing for DeSantis to wait to announce, if he does indeed plan to run. Does anyone really think the primary season is too short and needs to be lengthened? The 2016 primary seemed like it would never end—and the personal attacks and circular firing squad did nothing to help spread the message about the benefits of conservatism.

To the best of my knowledge, contra the ceaseless nattering from Vichy GOPe blowflies seeking to play Da Guv off against Trump for their own purposes, the one and only thing DeSantis has said to date about running for Prexy in ’24 is that he ain’t gonna. He’s perfectly free to run if he wants, just as who even knows how many other ambitious governors have before him; there’s nothing especially sinister or shameful about that, really. That said, I still very much hope he won’t. For me, it all boils down to this:

Whether or not DeSantis decides to run for president, he’s demonstrated over and over again that it’s possible to stand up to the woke mob and The Swamp and win. He stood up to Disney and won—depriving the woke company of its special tax breaks and self-governing authority. He noted in the interview that on his first day in office, he sat down and read what authority the governor had and then went to work. He fired a George Soros-backed DA when he refused to enforce the law; remade a failing Florida university in the image of Hillsdale College; went after venues hosting perverts performing drag shows with little kids in the audience; and banned sexually explicit materials in the classrooms of children in grades K-2. He was one of the first governors to re-open his state during the covid pandemic and he ordered children and teachers back into their classrooms. He also refused to force vaccine mandates. Unlike Trump, who stood mutely next to Dr. Fauci while he stood at the podium and spewed his lies about the origins of the covid virus, masking, and the vaccine, DeSantis did his research and decided for himself what was best for his state.

And those are just some of the highlights.

There’s been an effort by some to portray DeSantis as a Swamp creature, beholden to Paul Ryan (who?) or something, but that’s laughable on its face. This guy is fighting the liberals and WINNING. Who cares if he ran into Kevin McCarthy in a men’s room once, or whatever it is the Twitter bots are saying this week? All I care about is winning and taking back the country. If the GOP elites want to pour money into his campaign, let them. You can’t win the presidency without money. There’s more than enough proof to indicate that DeSantis is his own man and not beholden to special interests.

Noticeably absent from the interview was any mention of Trump’s recent attacks on DeSantis. Levin mentioned that the book, which DeSantis actually wrote himself, doesn’t contain any of the gossip or attacks on other politicians that tend to be a staple in political books. Instead, it focuses on DeSantis’s biography and his policies and principles.

“It’s like if you and I would have had a private conversation three years ago, why should I regurgitate that and put that out there when you were talking to me in confidence?” the governor explained. “And so I try to focus on the policies. What does it mean to be a leader in this day and age because, as you know, Mark, when you’re standing for our values, you come under assault in American society.”

“If you’re standing for the right things, you’re going to have to show courage under fire if you ultimately want to bring this stuff in for a landing, and so we had to do that so many different times. And I just felt that’s something that people are gonna be more interested in than any kind of dishing about private conversations I may have had with somebody.”

If there’s one thing we all should have learned since 2016—the last two nightmarish years especially—it’s that the President is nothing but a figurehead, a dumbshow put on for the edification and/or entertainment of the flyover Great Unwashed rubes by the Men Behind The DC Curtain. Do yourself, your state, and your nation a solid, Ron: don’t fall for it. You’ve accomplished some truly worthwhile, significant things as governor, something no real outsider or reformer will ever be permitted to do in Mordor On The Potomac so long as the Barad-Dur still stands.

Let the Swamp players keep playing, the manipulators keep manipulating, the Beltway Bandits keep up their banditry; they’re going to, no matter what you or anybody else does or says. As we saw with the Agony of Trump, no one man can possibly fix all that’s wrong in the Garden of FederalGovCo. You’ll do much more good where you’re at than you will under siege in the White House—ineffectual, beset on all sides, while we look on in despair as the jackals strip yet another carcass clean to the bone.

Do not take this cup from them, no matter how passionately it’s urged on you. Stay the course. And for Christ’s sweet sake, stay right where you are.