IRVING, Texas — Republican Governor Ron DeSantis said Friday night that he planned to remain on “offense” in Florida as he pressed conservative lawmakers gathered from across the country to govern boldly.
DeSantis, whose time as governor has been punctuated by major conservative victories from education to illegal immigration, said he hopes to push Florida to have greater medical freedom and to eliminate property taxes. He made the remarks during a keynote address at the second annual State Freedom Caucus Summit at the Omni Las Colinas Hotel just outside Dallas.
“I didn’t get in there to be mushy on policy,” DeSantis said. “I knew what I believed. I told people what I was going to do. And my view was, I’m sitting at the desk the first day I was governor, I looked around the office, no decorations yet, it was empty, and I said, you know, I don’t know what SOB’s going to succeed me in this office, but they are not going to have anything to do.”
DeSantis was a founding member of the House Freedom Caucus, a coalition of House Republicans who have fought to reign in federal spending and to advance conservative policies at the federal level. The State Freedom Caucus Network was founded in 2021 with the goal of creating state level organizations of conservative lawmakers and equipping them with “the high-level staff, strategy, and community conservatives need to take ground across the country.”
On the lines of medical freedom, Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo announced that the state would seek to end all vaccine mandates, including requirements for schools. DeSantis said Friday that he didn’t believe government should coerce people into certain treatment. He also said people couldn’t truly have private property if they effectively had to pay “rent” to the government for it.
During his speech, DeSantis highlighted his record on fighting lockdowns during COVID, battles to protect parental rights in education, elimination of DEI at public universities, and fights with Disney.
“ I think woke ideology is toxic whether it’s being imposed by a government agency, or whether it’s being imposed by a multinational corporation. I think it’s wrong,” DeSantis said.
The Florida governor also celebrated the Thursday decision from the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals that blocked a lower court’s order to shut down the Everglades-based illegal alien detention center known as Alligator Alcatraz.
“Every time I get out of bed in the morning, I get sued by the Left,” DeSantis said. “You can’t be worried about getting sued, you know that’s what they’re gonna do, and they go to liberal judges, and we know based on the judge, we have no chance at the trial court, and so we know we’ll just win on appeal.”
He said that Florida would be partnering with the Trump administration to establish other illegal alien detention centers.
DeSantis said that Florida’s massive shift to the Right under his leadership showed the impact of governing conservatively, saying that “people respond to results.”
“It’s not always easy,” he said. “None of this is cost free, but it’s worth it. And what we are doing in these states by showing that conservative policies that built this country, that our Founding Fathers believed in, we show that those work, that people vote with their feet — that is the best possible evidence we can produce to show people this is the way forward, not just us, for our kids and our grandkids.”