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(WASHINGTON FREE BEACON) – Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis railed against California’s progressive policies in a Sunday speech that offered a glimpse into the Republican’s likely 2024 presidential campaign.
Speaking to a sold-out house at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, DeSantis lamented that California Democrats had driven people from the state with their progressive policies. The governor in particular blamed high taxes, public school “indoctrination,” and soft-on-crime prosecutors for driving half a million people out of the state over the past two years.
“From the beginning of this state’s history, all the way until like the last four or five years, people beat a path to California. You didn’t beat a path away from California,” DeSantis said. “Now you see the state hemorrhaging population.”
The speech was the latest stop on DeSantis’s book tour, which is widely viewed as a pre-campaign trek. If he chooses to run, DeSantis will join a Republican field that already counts former president Donald Trump, former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley, and “anti-woke” Silicon Valley entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy. A February poll of California voters showed DeSantis soundly beating Trump among Republicans.
Sunday’s event brought an array of donors, library members, and the curious public, including actor Gary Sinise and former Republican California governor Pete Wilson, who told the Washington Free Beacon that DeSantis’s speech was “magnificent.”
Wilson would not say whom he would endorse in 2024, noting that “we’re confronting the problem of having too much talent.” But, he added, “the nice thing is that everything [DeSantis] said is true, and he has done all the things that he has talked about.”
While many of his lines drew loud applause, DeSantis got a standing ovation when he declared that schools “should not be teaching a second-grader that they can choose their gender”—a perceived reference to California public schools’ forays into radical gender ideology.
“In Florida we say very clearly we will never ever surrender to the woke mob,” he said. “Our state is where woke goes to die.”
