Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) speaks at the Florida Homeschool Convention in Kissimmee, Florida.
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00:01Thanks so much.
00:05Y'all doing good?
00:07You look good.
00:09Very punchy.
00:12Ready to roll.
00:17Aren't you glad to be citizens of the free state of Florida?
00:25We're proud to be ranked number one in economy,
00:29number one in education freedom, higher education, all these things.
00:34But I will tell you without a shadow of a doubt,
00:37we are number one for homeschooling families of all 50 states by a country mile.
00:49And we've been able to work with folks, particularly in the past in the legislature,
00:54to deliver really significant reforms that recognizes one simple fact.
01:01Parents have the fundamental right to direct the education and upbringing of their children.
01:06And that's something that is a principle that applies to a whole host of different issues that we see.
01:18For example, it applies to our enactment of universal school choice.
01:24The idea is everyone, parents have a right to direct the education.
01:29As a society, we believe in education and want to provide that for people.
01:34But ultimately, it's not about bureaucracies that are existing or that were created years ago.
01:41It's not about the system.
01:43It's about the students.
01:44And that money should follow the students.
01:46And so if you want to go to your local school in the school district, that's what I did.
01:51Going to Dunedin High School, great.
01:53If you want to go to a different school in your school district in Florida,
01:57most of these districts are now offering those choice.
01:59If you want to go to a charter school, you don't have a better state in the country for that.
02:03You have all these great options for charter schools.
02:06And if you want to take a scholarship and go to a private school, you should be able to do that regardless of your income.
02:12But if you choose to homeschool, we also recognize, you know, you're paying the same taxes that everybody else is paying.
02:19And you ought to have that money follow your student even as a homeschool family.
02:29So that's first thing.
02:30You know, the second thing is we've had some some battles in Florida over the years on what role parents play in the education of our children, particularly with things like curriculum.
02:42And I took a position that was met with a lot of hostility by the left and by legacy media.
02:49You even had a lot of weak Republicans that weren't willing to stand with me back then.
02:53But basically, I said in the state of Florida, as a parent, you have a right to send your kid to school without having the teacher tell them that they can change their gender, that they were born in the wrong body.
03:05That's just the way it is.
03:07So.
03:12So there's a lot of people that didn't like that, but we had legislation that basically protected that.
03:16And the use of schools to inject toxic ideologies is unacceptable.
03:23And it has no place in the state of Florida.
03:25So we wanted to provide the protections for parents so that you knew that, you know what, education is about the core academic subjects that when we grew up and our parents and grandparents did,
03:39trying to put things in with all this basically hard left ideology, that doesn't work.
03:46Now, most people, I think, agreed with that.
03:50Certainly most parents agreed with that.
03:52Not very many people in the media agreed with it, obviously people on the left.
03:56And we even had a company down the road from here who did not agree with that.
04:01And so we had to get into the tussle there.
04:05But, you know, a lot of people said that because they were the most powerful company in Florida, that when they oppose something,
04:13that somehow you just had to wilt and not stand up for what's right.
04:16And that may have been true in the past.
04:18That's not how we roll in Florida under my watch.
04:20We're going to stand up for what's right.
04:27So we did that.
04:28We had some battles and we ended up successfully navigating that issue.
04:33But it also was an issue years ago.
04:37You know, they're talking now in the Congress about, oh, you know, we must save women's sports.
04:42We did that like five years ago in Florida where we said that girls have a right to compete against other girls.
04:50I'd have some guy come in and win the championship.
04:54How is that fair?
04:56And I've got two daughters and a son and I want them all to have opportunities.
05:01And you think about it, these swimmers were training their whole lives to be able to compete in high school and college.
05:08And then you got somebody that was on the men's swim team the year before, two years before, all of a sudden competing in the women's swim and then wins the championship.
05:18That's a total fraud on fair competition.
05:22And to allow that to happen, it was unacceptable.
05:25So we were very quick to that fight doing it because I think parents look at it from a perspective of, you know, why would I teach my daughter, you know, work hard?
05:36You can get ahead if then they do that and they end up having to compete, you know, against somebody that shouldn't even be in the competition to begin with.
05:44So and it's also just, you know, you have to just speak the truth and you can't just say I can go from the men's to the women's team.
05:53And I was a man before now.
05:55That's just not true.
05:56And we've got to be honest about what's true and what's not true.
05:59One of the things so we've been very much standing with parents about we don't want the nonsense in the classroom.
06:13So you have the ability and if you're in like your kids in a public school, you can look at the curriculum.
06:18And there's stuff that they try to jam in there that is just totally inappropriate.
06:23And so we've worked really hard.
06:25We're doing even more to make sure that that that goes.
06:30And obviously, when you homeschool, you're taking that that power.
06:34It's solely in your own hands and a lot of people homeschool because even with great reforms, they want to be the ones that leave the imprint on their kids.
06:43I mean, you know, you think about it, you send your kid even to a great school.
06:47That's huge numbers of hours of the day that they are being shaped in some ways by people that are not their parents.
06:55And that can sometimes be good.
06:57Don't get me wrong.
06:58I'm not saying they're bad.
06:59But I know a lot of the parents at homeschool are like, wait a minute.
07:02You know, this is my responsibility.
07:04We want to make sure we're instilling the appropriate values.
07:07We don't want there to be any static in that.
07:10We don't want there to be any ambiguity.
07:12And what a school may offer may just be a little bit different than what you want to offer.
07:16And I think that that's something that, you know, a lot of parents have told me over the years, especially as so much of education has just gone off the rails around the country.
07:26It's crazy what's happened.
07:28You go to like California.
07:29Oh, my gosh.
07:30We don't even want to talk about that with education.
07:33They've also got some other problems.
07:35I mean, I, you know, was able to do this debate with the governor of California.
07:40I think it was like a year or two ago.
07:42And, you know, he was trying to argue with a straight face that California had lower taxes than Florida.
07:49Now, I don't care if you're the biggest supporter account.
07:52Nobody believes that.
07:54They have the highest income tax in the state.
07:56We have no income tax.
07:58They have we only rely on sales tax, basically.
08:01And they have a higher sales tax than Florida.
08:03So you can't make that up.
08:04But one of the things that I think we pointed out there is this ideology that we've seen even in the education.
08:12It infects other parts of society.
08:14So how they've handled like crime and homelessness has just been totally outrageous.
08:20You could go in and steal $999 from a store and they would say, well, if you don't do a thousand, then there's nothing we can do.
08:30Who the hell thinks that makes any sense to do?
08:33You know, they've actually some of those ideas have been percolating in Florida from time to time.
08:38There have been folks that want to have that thousand dollars, a $1,300, whatever threshold in the state of Florida.
08:44And trust me, I will never let that happen.
08:47But what it does, it's created a culture of lawlessness.
08:55They've incentivized public drug use and homelessness and all these other things.
09:01And so it was the type of thing that I had gone to San Francisco.
09:05I think it was like, you know, maybe a few months before I did this debate.
09:08And I'm walking down the streets and literally within five minutes of me being on the streets, there was somebody defecating on the sidewalk in broad daylight.
09:19And I'm like, this is crazy.
09:21And sure enough, it was such an epidemic that somebody created a app where anytime people saw this feces on the streets, they could plot it on the map.
09:34So if you held up this map with all the dots of where everybody has seen the entire city of San Francisco, you know, has seen somebody drop some poop on it at some point.
09:47So you have that map and I'm just thinking to myself, like, how would that possibly be acceptable?
09:52But it's the ideology that goes into it.
09:54So this permeates more than just education.
09:56We see it, quite frankly, in fighting the ESG and some of the things we fought with corporate America,
10:02where they want to jam things like climate ideology in through the economy without your consent, without your participation.
10:10And we really, more than anyone, Florida has been responsible for nuking ESG.
10:15It's basically dead because of what we've done.
10:18So, but I raise this about, because I think that all this stuff is an outgrowth of failures in education.
10:28When you have destructive ideologies that are really ruining lives all across this country.
10:35And I know because people that move here and flee those tell me about what goes on in these other states.
10:42And they tell me about how they've been managed so poorly and how they've had all these problems.
10:48So when you're critiquing some of the stuff that's gone into education recently, I think that we've been on the right side of that 100%.
10:56We know what we're against.
10:57But you also have an obligation to say what you're for.
11:01What do we think education is about?
11:04And part of what education is about is, no question, reading, writing, arithmetic, all the core things that are important that people are able to know.
11:13And there's a lot of great that comes with that, that powers you to live a great life, everything like that.
11:19But we have a responsibility with education, whether it's you as homeschool parents, whether it's me as governor,
11:26as I look to what policies and programs to support, whether it's folks that work in school districts or private schools.
11:33We have an obligation that this education, however, whatever form it takes from homeschooling to traditional public school,
11:42that we're doing what we need to do to prepare our students to be citizens of this republic.
11:48That they understand the core foundational principles that the United States of America was founded upon.
11:56That they have an appreciation about how those principles are reflected in our founding documents.
12:02And how they've animated key portions in American history all since 1776.
12:09And unfortunately, in many parts of this country, that's become a total lost art.
12:14There's some places they don't want to teach about the American Revolution and the creation of the Constitution.
12:20And so that's not acceptable in Florida.
12:22So we've led a real serious effort to get civics back in the classroom in a major way.
12:29We launched the Civics in Debate Initiative.
12:32It's now the number one in America.
12:33We host the national championships.
12:36But we also recognize we can sit here and say, you've got to teach the Declaration of Independence.
12:41You've got to teach the Constitution.
12:43You've got to teach about James Madison and Washington.
12:46And yes, you do, but you have to have instructors that are really well versed in this.
12:52And that really have a passion and appreciation for it.
12:55And it is just the truth that if you go to most universities in this country,
13:00and you want to learn about the foundations of America, a lot of times that's pretty hard to do.
13:06A lot of these universities are more interested in intellectual fads.
13:10They're interested in things like race and gender and ethnicity and focusing history through those lenses,
13:19rather than giving an accurate assessment of what's going on.
13:22Many of these people think that the founding fathers should just simply be ignored,
13:27because, oh, why do they want to study folks like that who were, you know, relatively wealthy and white.
13:34And that's the mindset that permeates academia.
13:38So I think a lot of it's fallen out of favor over the years.
13:41And I think to great consequence to our country.
13:44Because I think that you look at some of the divisions,
13:47we should all have the same foundation about what it means to be an American.
13:51When we're going out, when you turn 18, whatever vocation you do,
13:55when you're participating in our republic as a citizen, you should be educated in those foundations.
14:02You should understand freedom.
14:04You should appreciate the sacrifices that people have made.
14:07And I think that that foundation is really eroded,
14:10where there's some people that they're just singing off a different sheet of music.
14:13If we have the same foundation and belief in the foundations of our country,
14:18it doesn't mean we're going to agree on what tax policy should be.
14:21It doesn't mean we're going to agree on every type of policy issue.
14:25But it means that we do have common currency and common values.
14:31And I think that's probably true for any country you would need that.
14:34But for us, it's definitely true.
14:36Partially because, you know, we're a nation that was founded on a belief,
14:42which people did not recognize before 1776, that our rights do not come from the government.
14:49They're not bestowed on us by a king, but they come directly from God.
14:54And that we are endowed by our creator with these inalienable rights.
15:02And that turned the whole concept of government at the time on its head.
15:08Because at the time, it was thought that your rights or privileges were bestowed upon you by the sovereign, usually a king.
15:18There was a belief that there was a, quote, divine right of kings,
15:21and that God was endowing the kings with the power to be able to regulate society.
15:26And at that time, you know, there were people that enjoyed freedom.
15:30Not everyone. There were some.
15:32But the freedom was the courtesy of the state.
15:35It was not yours as a matter of inalienable right.
15:38And so what a king could giveth, a king could taketh.
15:42And our founding fathers rejected that.
15:44They said that is not the way it goes.
15:46These are not government's rights to give.
15:49These are God. God has already spoken on those rights.
15:51The role of government is to protect the rights that we already possess as free people.
15:57And so you enacted it.
15:59You sign a Declaration of Independence.
16:01You fight a war.
16:02You have an Articles of Confederation that didn't really work the way the founders wanted.
16:07And so they met in Philadelphia in 1787 to design a new constitution.
16:13And the odds were against them.
16:16One of the things they did, these were very smart guys.
16:19I mean, the reason why I want people to study these people is because we were fortunate to have a very, very strong, very virtuous leadership class at the time.
16:32Could you imagine if, like, they had to do a constitution now and you had people like Pelosi that had to be involved in it?
16:39I mean, they would crash, right?
16:41So the delegates, like, when you had people like James Madison show up in Philadelphia in 1777, they studied the history of every republic in the history of mankind.
16:53And the one thing, and, you know, there were different permutations going back to ancient Rome and Greece, all these things.
16:59They noticed that all those republics, if you studied them in depth, there was really only one thing that they all had in common, and it was this.
17:08Every one of them had failed.
17:11And so they understood it fell to the United States of America to determine once and for all, can you really have a society based on the consent of the governed?
17:21Can we really have a society in which we, the people, ultimately control our own destiny based on the rule of law, not the rule of the whims of individual men?
17:33Could you actually do that?
17:34Could that succeed?
17:35Or was mankind forever destined to live under various forms of despotism?
17:41And they really believed, and I think they're right, that the American experiment was ultimately was going to answer that question.
17:48Because if it couldn't succeed in America, there was really no hope for mankind.
17:54And so when we say the United States is the last best hope on Earth, that's what we mean.
18:00They were fighting against the tide of history.
18:02They were fighting against the currents.
18:04They were fighting to, in many ways, restrain the problematic impulses of human nature as flawed beings.
18:11The founders understood that people, unfortunately, are prone to do things that are destructive.
18:17And so they had to, they had to harmonize all this stuff, all this history where no one got it right.
18:23Trying to figure out how you could have a government that was powerful enough to keep order.
18:28And do things like, like regulate commerce amongst the states, defend the country, but would not trample on the rights of states,
18:35would not trample on the rights of individuals.
18:37And what they were able to produce was the best attempt at ever doing that in all of human history.
18:44I think it's important that our students understand what went into that.
18:49This wasn't just something that they drew on the back of a, of a napkin somewhere at some bar.
18:53I mean, this was something that, that, that centuries went into this.
18:57And if people study this, I'm convinced, having done it myself, when I was younger, when you, and I asked, why does the left not want this people to study this as much?
19:09And I think it's because when people study this, when they read what the founders did, when they, when they follow these debates that they had,
19:16whether it's in Philadelphia or other places, the ratification, the bill of rights debates, all these things that happen, these ideas are powerful.
19:26These ideas are infectious. And people are going to want to see their country live up to those ideals.
19:33And the left knows what they're trying to do is not consistent with those ideals that it would not be what the founders thought was a good virtuous Republic.
19:43And so we have to do this as a people.
19:46I know you as homeschool parents care very deeply about preparing your, your kids to be citizens of this great land.
19:54I know as governor, I think it's essential that our students are able to graduate with a working knowledge of American civics and American history.
20:04And if we don't have that, you know, this stuff is just going to continue to fray.
20:09And ultimately, we're not going to be successful as a people.
20:14So you're playing a vital role, not just in what you're doing for your family, but I really believe in the preservation of American liberty in this great republic.
20:24So you have a lot of power to shape this in a positive direction.
20:29Final thing I'll say, you know, we also have power, you know, you look at like Washington, all this stuff.
20:37We, you know, we have power as people to hold Congress accountable, to change the trajectory of how they behave.
20:45I'm involved in two things right now amongst the states to propose amendments to the federal constitution under Article 5,
20:53which you're allowed to do.
20:55Congress can propose, the states can propose.
20:58Three quarters of the states have to ratify either way.
21:01But I believe we're never going to get the country back on track unless we change the behavior of the people that are in Congress.
21:10And to do that, you need term limits for members of Congress.
21:17And you need a balanced budget requirement for the federal constitution.
21:25So, and don't tell me it can't be done.
21:30In Florida, we have term limits for our state legislators.
21:35I'm telling you, people can say there's things that aren't as good, and there's always pluses and minuses.
21:40But we are much better off having term limits, even when we have folks that aren't doing a good job.
21:48I'd rather have that than have entrenched politicians in there for 20 or 30 years.
21:53I would not have been able to get done all that we've gotten done.
21:57I mean, think about what we've done.
21:58You know, we ban sanctuary cities.
22:01We're requiring state and locals to help the feds with immigration enforcement and deportations.
22:07We did the anti-woke.
22:10We banned DEI.
22:11First state in the country to do it.
22:13On and on it goes.
22:14You look at all the stuff we've done.
22:16I can sit here for a long time and do it.
22:18I don't think we would have been able to get that done if we didn't have term limits.
22:21So I think Florida shows that's good.
22:23In the last six years, we've been more productive than any state in modern American history, and we're proud of that.
22:30But also look at the financial.
22:32So when I became governor, you know, we had if you look when I became governor till today, all the debt in the history of Florida, 180 years, we've paid off 41% of it just in my tenure.
22:44And so that's not that's running surpluses and then paying off debt that was incurred in previous previous years.
22:53We've run big budget surpluses.
22:55We've almost quadrupled the state's rainy day fund.
22:58And yet and we're spending less today in this current year than we did in the previous year.
23:05So you have a budget that's actually reduced spending.
23:07We have the second lowest per capita spending of any state in the United States.
23:12And we have the lowest number of state government workers per capita of any state in the United States.
23:19And so I tell people Florida was Doge before Doge was cool.
23:34I just wish the Congress would listen to Elon and actually implement those Doge reductions.
23:38That's what we need.
23:39So we've done all that.
23:43And yet over that period of time, we've done billions and billions of dollars of tax relief for Floridians.
23:50And that spanned a bunch of stuff.
23:52We now be under my tenure have enacted permanent tax free for baby items.
23:58And so diapers wipes, you don't pay any any sales tax on that, which is really important.
24:04Now, I didn't I didn't end up getting the legislature to do this until after our youngest was out of diapers.
24:11And my wife reminds me we could have saved a lot of money with that one.
24:15But that's fine.
24:16We didn't have by inflation when I first became governor either.
24:19So there's a lot.
24:20So we did did that.
24:22We did the toll relief for which is big in central Florida and we 50% reduction in tolls for our commuters two years in a row.
24:29We've done law enforcement bonuses.
24:31We've done we've done a lot and we'll continue to do more.
24:34So the tax relief.
24:36But then we've also done really big things that benefit Floridians.
24:40Our school choice program is a big investment financially because it's 8000 plus whatever it is per person.
24:48And that's a big deal.
24:49Obviously, it's beneficial for home school.
24:51It's beneficial for private education.
24:53But that's a big commitment.
24:55But we met it and we're doing more on education financially than we've ever done in the history of the state, including increases for teacher salaries.
25:03We're also doing more than we've ever done for law and order and law enforcement, including $5,000 bonuses for all new recruits.
25:10Why would you want to be working in Seattle when they treat you poorly?
25:14You can come to Florida, you'll be treated well and you get $5,000 to start.
25:18A lot of people like that.
25:19So they do it.
25:20We're also doing things to protect Florida and conserve Florida's natural environment like Everglades restoration, Springs restoration, all these great things that are really, really significant.
25:31And people didn't really want to take it on in a big way until I came and we're doing it.
25:35We've also done things with transportation and infrastructure.
25:39So those of you who do I-4, we just opened these temporary expansion lanes eight months early.
25:45Honestly, it's made a difference.
25:47And we're going to do that whole I-4 project, all these things.
25:50We had billions and billions of dollars and we accelerated it because I don't want to start these.
25:55They were scheduled to start 10, 15 years into the future.
25:58We're going to deliver projects now five, 10, 15 years ahead of schedule.
26:02So we're doing big things, but we're doing it in a fiscally responsible way that protects taxpayers, that holds the line on spending, that pays down debt, that adds to the rainy day fund and doing it.
26:15So don't tell me it can't be done.
26:17But if the path of least resistance politically is to charge it on the credit card, that's what politicians are going to do.
26:26And so you have to have a requirement that they actually have to make tough decisions.
26:30We had to make tough decisions in Florida when COVID hit.
26:33Everyone said, oh, no one's going to go to Florida and they're not going to have a budget.
26:37That was like the opposite of what happened.
26:39Everybody came to Florida because we were open during COVID and many of these other places were not.
26:44So it can be done.
26:51And I've been working with other states.
26:53Florida's already certified both of these.
26:55Other states are coming on.
26:57But don't act like, you know, if someone in Washington, you know, the Congress, if they're not doing what you think they should do, don't act like you're powerless.
27:06We, the people in the states, have the ability to do really significant reforms through constitutional amendment.
27:13And I think that that needs to happen.
27:14And I think that'll be a big, big plus for the country as a whole.
27:18So I just want to say thank you for what you're doing.
27:21I think that as important as the education is, I think it's a broader issue that you're supporting of vindicating parental rights and making sure that the students that are growing up in Florida, the kids that are growing up in Florida, yes, prepare them to go to college or to go to a job or all that.
27:40But no matter what pathway you take, you will be called upon to be citizens of this republic.
27:46And we need to make sure that when they're doing that, they're not just some blank slate with no foundation, that they actually have a good understanding of what it means to be an American.
27:56Because when you're here as an American citizen, you've effectively won life's lottery.
28:02And I would not want to have my kids growing up in any other country or in any other state in this union.
28:10God bless you.
28:11And keep up the great work.