Ron DeSantis Has All The Right Enemies
Budget deal does not change path of out-of-control federal spending and enshrines high current levels for the rest of this Congress
A lot of people are upset with Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, especially as he launches his presidential bid.
Start with America’s wokest corporate titans. While perched in a Los Angeles County rapidly losing population and companies to Florida, Disney CEO Bob Iger’s company alleged DeSantis is “weaponizing the power of government to punish private business.”
What DeSantis and the Florida legislature actually did was revoke a cozy 1960s-era corporate welfare scheme for Disney on the heels of the company’s bullying intervention against a new Florida law that had nothing to do with its business. That law—supported by more than 60 percent of Floridians—prevents classroom instruction of sexual orientation or gender identity propaganda to students in the third grade and below. Disney, which banks on family entertainment, should be ashamed of its political intervention against this common-sense decency.
However, Disney is not used to politicians who don’t bend to its will. The woke company has vowed job and investment cuts in Florida, but that threat will have a limited effect in a state with just 2.6 percent unemployment and a massive influx in capital from investors fleeing progressive policies in states like California and New York and leftward-trending countries across Latin America.
Nike CEO John Donahoe also just added DeSantis to his woke company’s enemies list. Donahoe complimented Disney’s Iger just as DeSantis entered the presidential race, remarking “I think Bob’s doing a great job at this.” That’s quite the praise from the corporation that has boosted anti-American voices like Colin Kaepernick’s, accused America in 2020 of being generally racist, and just signed a deal with “trans influencer” Dylan Mulvaney of Bud Light fame. Two years ago, Donahoe said publicly that “Nike is a brand that is of China and for China.” It’s not a surprise Donahoe wants a president other than DeSantis.
Also among the Not Friends of Ron gang is the socialist president of Mexico, Andrés Manuel López Obrador. He is rapidly undoing the free market reforms of his predecessors as narco-violence escalates and Mexico allows illegal migrants and fentanyl to flood across its border into America. López Obrador instructed last Thursday: “I ask the Hispanics in Florida not to give one single vote [to Ron DeSantis]. Do not vote for those who persecute migrants.”
Of course, DeSantis does not “persecute” migrants, but has exposed the preening hypocrisy of progressive “sanctuary” jurisdictions. DeSantis famously arranged a voluntary flight of illegal immigrants to Martha’s Vineyard, a rich progressive playground off the coast of Massachusetts which then got rid of the migrants with the help National Guard within days.
DeSantis just signed legislation penalizing companies for hiring illegal aliens, requiring E-Verify for larger businesses, and prohibiting state agencies from issuing ID cards to illegals. By all accounts, reasonable steps like these in response to President Joe Biden’s de facto open-border policy are popular with Floridians of all backgrounds. In his reelection last November, DeSantis won 58 percent of the Hispanic vote, including by carrying Miami-Dade county by eleven points over his Democrat opponent. This is the electoral success that terrifies leftists like López Obrador and our corporate elite.
Also opposing DeSantis is every mainstream media organization in America. Their instinctive objective is to elevate Donald Trump, presuming the baggage-laden and unfairly indicted former president is most likely to lose to Biden or another Democrat in 2024. They have strong evidence, since Trump lost elections for Republicans in 2018 and 2020, and effectively lost them again in most places last November, keeping the Senate in Democrat hands.
The mainstream media also delighted in a technical glitch on Twitter when DeSantis announced his campaign. Trump bizarrely wrote that: “‘Rob,’ My Red Button is bigger, better, stronger, and is working (TRUTH!), yours does not! (per my conversation with Kim Jung Un, of North Korea, soon to become my friend!)”
As George C. Scott’s character deadpanned to the president in Dr. Strangelove: “We’re still trying to figure out the meaning of that last phrase, sir.”
Luckily, in America, what ultimately counts is the opinion of voters, not corporate titans, old media bosses, politicians doing their best to turn their states and countries into banana republics, or former presidents who want to emote while relitigating the past.
Polls show DeSantis trailing Trump but most voters aren’t paying close attention to the presidential race at this point and many Republicans have an understandable, reflexive support for Trump when the choice is between him and the media, abusive prosecutors, or Biden.
DeSantis’s opponents are terrified voters will adjust their preferences as the campaign heats up this summer and fall leading into next winter’s caucuses and primaries. It’s a marathon, not a sprint. So far, the public outside of Florida knows DeSantis mainly through how he has been defined by the media. The campaign will be a chance to meet him without the filter—a long interview with Piers Morgan this spring was a great preview.
They’ll find a young leader and military veteran who doesn’t speak in poll-tested sound bites like so many politicians or clever but counterproductive insults like Trump. They’ll meet someone who doesn’t back down to woke bullies like Disney (as Trump implicitly urged him to do) because he isn’t afraid to pursue both the cultural and economic policies needed to build a majority coalition and what would be the first Republican victory in the national popular vote since 2004. Finally, they’ll meet an executive who, unlike Trump as president, has control over his executive branch, would actually get things like a border wall completed, and not be befuddled by his own Justice Department and “Deep State” as was Trump.
What of those who are piling on DeSantis? As Winston Churchill said, “You have enemies? Good. That means you’ve stood up for something, sometime in your life.”
Christian Whiton was a State Department senior advisor during the George W. Bush and Donald Trump administrations. He is a senior fellow at the Center for the National Interest.
Original Daily Caller URL: https://dailycaller.com/2023/05/28/opinion-ron-desantis-has-all-the-right-enemies-christian-whiton/
The Debt Deal
Is the debt deal negotiated between President Biden and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy worth the effort? On one hand, McCarthy won minor concessions from Biden with work requirements for a small portion of federal benefit recipients. The IRS will lose some of its big budget hike from the last Congress. Streamlining big energy projects would theoretically help both Republican-backed oil and gas projects with Democrat-backed green projects funded by the so-called Inflation Reduction Act.
On the other hand, McCarthy agreed to spending levels for the rest of this two-year Congress that are close to where they are now—which is a level that is untenable over even the medium-term. In effect, the deal enshrines total spending levels that are 72 percent higher than when Trump took office in 2017, as well as annual deficits that exceed $1.5 trillion indefinitely. Thus the current path to insolvency has not been altered. Politicians and pundits love to confuse spending levels by talking in multi-year terms (often 10-year budget “savings” when everyone forgets the cuts after the current year) or by discussing only “discretionary” spending (i.e., that which excludes entitlements like Social Security).
You can see above the horror story of total spending that has brought federal debt to $24.6 trillion (the $30.9 trillion often cited is misleading because it includes “inter-governmental loans” like IOUs from the Treasury to the Social Security trust fund that will never be repaid). With 2022 GDP coming it at $26.5 trillion, total U.S. debt will soon exceed 100 percent of a full year of national production, especially if the U.S. economy shrinks in the second half of this year, which is a good bet. The only advanced economy in worse fiscal shape is Japan.
Judged on not altering the path to doom, the deal is a failure. However, McCarthy was hamstrung by a razor-thin majority in the House and a Senate that remains under Democrat control thanks to poor Senate candidates elevated by Trump who lost in the 2022 elections. Today’s balance of power is much worse for Republicans than the Newt Gingrich-led Congress that took on Bill Clinton and set the trend toward a balanced budget in the late 1990s. That 1995-1997 Congress began with Republican majorities of 230-204 in the House and 53-47 in the Senate. McCarthy has nothing like that power and mandate, and also faced a unified establishment media predicting doom. Even a short default also would have allowed Biden to blame Republicans for the looming recession that he and Democrats have caused.
Of note in the deal is the one percent increase in the defense budget, which in inflation-adjusted real terms will be about a four percent cut. We have been warning about this reality for some time: that the $858 billion defense budget will likely be cut, especially as debt costs squeeze more of the overall budget. It’s unlikely even a Republican president and Congress would make much of a change to this top line number.
It’s time to start having actual priorities in defense, which realistically must mean letting rich Europe defend Europe and realigning the military to recognize the reality that America is now an Asian-facing nation with China as its primary adversary. The
$100 billion we have sent Ukraine, letting Europe off the hook again, sure could have been used elsewhere.
Culture War: Transgender Activism is Anti-gay
In October 2021, I wrote that “Transgender fiction is about political control.” I argued:
Transgender radicalism is actually about forcing you to accept something you know to be a lie. It is a powerful form of tyranny. Basic propaganda, doublespeak, or newspeak might just obscure the truth and force people to doubt or step around the obvious. Deliberately forcing you to accept and embrace something you know to be a lie is a step farther. It is not for nothing that at the end of George Orwell’s 1984, the teary protagonist doesn’t just pretend to love Big Brother, he actually does.
A subtext of the argument was that transgenderism and homosexuality are unrelated and it is a serious tactical political mistake to let the cultural Leninists populating the transgender brigades to conflate their agenda with hard-won gay rights.
Recently, Andrew Sullivan, one of the last few honest liberals, in his recent article “The Queers Versus The Homosexuals,“ devastates the hijacking of gay and lesbian culture by transgender and “queer” activists and an agenda that is not just radical and abusive to children—but which is also fundamentally anti-gay. Sullivan asks:
Do you remember the homosexual? It’s been a while, hasn’t it?… The core belief of critical queer theorists is that homosexuality is not a part of human nature because there is no such thing as human nature; and that everything is socially constructed, even the body.
Damningly, Sullivan nails the most unforgivable element of transgender activism (everything after “B” in “LGBTQI+”) and why there is a well-deserved backlash against the agenda:
Then the queers upped the ante and did something we gays never did: they targeted children. If they could get into kids’ minds, bodies and souls from the very beginning of their lives, they could abolish the sex binary from the ground up. And so they got a pliant, woke educational establishment to re-program children from the very start, telling toddlers that any single one of them could be living in the wrong body, before they could even spell.
Later, he adds:
One more thing: the oldest and deepest slur against homosexual men is that we are not truly men; that our love for men renders us some kind of female. We spent decades insisting otherwise — only to have the queers tell us we’re just performing masculinity. Insisting on our essential maleness was intrinsic to gay liberation; as was the celebration of the intact male body, and its beauty. Just as the religious right told gay men to get used to liking vaginas, so too does the queer left. And just as the Christianists told us we weren’t men, so too do the queers.
Sullivan’s key conclusion:
If gay men and lesbians want to return to liberal politics, to protect gay children, and to win back the sane center, we are going to have to disown and distance ourselves from this nihilist extremism.
Read the full article: https://andrewsullivan.substack.com/p/the-queers-versus-the-homosexuals-cfd