Ron DeSantis in conversation with The Telegraph on the war against wokery

In an exclusive Telegraph interview earlier this year, the White House hopeful reveals the UK is like a 'second home'

Ron DeSantis hailed Britain and US' 'shared values' on his first visit to London and also praised Kemi Badenoch
Ron DeSantis hailed Britain and US' 'shared values' on his first visit to London and also praised Kemi Badenoch Credit: Paul Grover for The Telegraph

This interview was first published on April 29th, 2023


It was his first visit to London, and Ron DeSantis wasn’t disappointed. The governor of Florida felt immediately comfortable in Britain, the birthplace of the philosophical principles that he holds dear.

“If you are an American and you really believe and appreciate America’s core values, it doesn’t matter your ethnicity, when you come here it’s like a second home,” Mr DeSantis, Donald Trump’s main rival for the Republican nomination for the presidential race of 2024, told me on Friday during his whirlwind trip to the UK. 

His intellectual and emotional affinity to the shared Anglo-American values of individualism, private property and government limited under the law were evident, and he speaks with passion when we reach the subject, his eyes lighting up.

“Our founding fathers, when they launched the revolution, were not revolting against the British way of life. They were revolting because they wanted the rights of Englishmen. That’s what they believed. The architecture and the infrastructure they built in America to preserve a free society really flowed out of their understanding of the best of British society and politics. You see that in everything that we do.”

A little later, Mr DeSantis goes even further. “Because of the shared values, I feel like this is home. I feel almost like I’m in an American city because we have such a commonality of culture.”

He recalls a previous holiday trip playing golf at St Andrew’s, describing it as a “once in a lifetime experience. It was fun”.

Joe Biden recently posed for a selfie with Gerry Adams. Barack Obama removed a bust of Sir Winston Churchill from the Oval Office. Mr DeSantis, by contrast, is a Churchill fan. His recent autobiography-cum-manifesto begins with the wartime hero’s famous quote about courage being rightly considered the foremost of virtues, and his only downtime during the British leg of his trip was to visit the Churchill War Rooms, which he describes as “very inspiring”. 

He adds: “His singularity of purpose when everything was on the line; he wasn’t going to fail, it was against the odds. That was inspiring to see.”

Does he still consider Britain a key ally of the US? “Yes, absolutely. 100 per cent,” he replies. For Mr DeSantis, Britain and America’s common anglosphere political heritage, what he describes as our “shared values”, remains central to understanding today’s world. 

“It’s a unique relationship because of that and I think we will always be very, very strong allies as a result.”

He adds: “If you think about it, and if you look at the world, there’s only a handful of countries that we could even plausibly say will be with us when the chips are down. For us the UK is one of those, without question.”

“I do sense, just for being on the ground for a day, the relationship with the US is something that people here really appreciate. They value the friendship. That’s meaningful.”

So does he recognise the term “special relationship?” “Yes, 100 per cent,” he answers. Mr DeSantis, who is wearing smart leather boots under his suit, had been meeting a variety of industry chiefs as well as senior ministers on his trip.

“It’s been very, very positive. We met with the Foreign Secretary, we had several meetings with business leaders. People have been really nice.”

DeSantis, meeting with James Cleverly in Downing Street, says Britain is a key ally of the US
Mr DeSantis, meeting with James Cleverly in Downing Street, says Britain is a key ally of the US Credit: Simon Dawson/No 10 Downing Street

At the start of the interview, held in a small room at a Park Lane hotel, Mr DeSantis looks at me with extraordinary intensity, but he soon relaxes and, contrary to what his critics allege, is personable and passionate in a one-to-one setting. He oozes competence and, as befits the CEO of a large US state, executive responsibility.

He is articulate and business-like, perfectly on top of his brief, his visit organised to the minute by his large staff.

I ask him about Brexit, and put to him that many Conservatives believe that Mr Biden has been taking Brussels’ side and seeking to undermine the project. He backs our decision to leave the EU unequivocally.

“I personally thought it was a good idea. If I lived here I would have supported it. From a US perspective, when you have an allied country that makes a decision you should accept that.” 

His point is that even US opponents of Brexit should respect our democratic decision. “It appealed to me philosophically. Even that aside, from an American perspective, we should not be trying to nudge in the other direction.”

Given all of that, would Mr DeSantis support a UK-US trade deal of the sort that many in Britain and in US Republican circles have been advocating for years, and which Brexit now makes possible?

Mr DeSantis, like many in contemporary US conservative politics, isn’t a fan of large multilateral agreements involving harmonised rules and restrictions.

“In America, the days of these massive trade deals with all these different countries, those days are probably over; there’s a lot of stuff that gets thrown into that”. 

But there could be an alternative. “The trading is going to be based on bilateral agreements,” he says. “There is a much better chance that there could be something that is mutually beneficial between the UK and the US, rather than doing something with the entire EU or the entire Pacific. It is possible. I would have to see the details.”

For Mr DeSantis, there is a clear connection between trade and geopolitics, and he floats an intriguing new concept – that of “friendshoring”. 

Friendshoring, also known as allyshoring, is promoting the manufacturing in, and the sourcing from, countries that are geopolitical allies, while simultaneously reducing relationships with geopolitical enemies.

“At the end of the day, our primary trade policy needs to correct the excesses of what’s gone on with China the last 20-25 years. We need to reshore more critical manufacturing and industrial base,” he says. This is where the UK could also come in.

“Part of that may be friendshoring where there may be allied countries that have the ability to do some of these things. If you are getting it out of China, which really has a lot of leverage over us economically, that could be a good thing. I can see a lot of that through the lens of how we are bolstering our security and supply chain vis a vis the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).”

One of Mr DeSantis’ principal policies has been to wage war in Florida on the relatively new but increasingly hegemonic set of ideologies usually described as “woke”, including critical race theory. The father-of-three has also banned gender transition treatment for minors.

I ask him why that fight matters so much to him and why he disagrees with the so-called social justice warriors, proponents of cancel culture and other “progressives” who now yield so much power over Western institutions.

Woke ideology undermines merit and achievement. It is really a war on the truth. When institutions get infected by woke ideology, it really corrupts the institutions.” 

He lists some of the areas of concern. “We look at woke infiltrating schools as a problem, woke infiltrating bureaucracies as a problem and woke infiltrating corporate America as a problem. We say that Florida is where woke goes to die. At the end of the day you cannot have a successful society if it is being operated by woke ideology. It is fundamentally at odds with reality and facts and truths, and ultimately a society needs to be grounded in truth.”

On his trip to Britain, he met James Cleverly, the Foreign Secretary, and Kemi Badenoch, the Business and Trade Secretary who is also in charge of Equalities. 

His discussion with the latter included her war on woke, which he enthusiastically supports. Gender-neutral lavatories and the decolonisation of school curricula are among issues against which the former Tory leadership candidate, 43, has campaigned.

I ask him how the meeting went. “She complimented what we are doing in Florida. She committed that it is what they are trying to do in Britain. She pointed out, and I think it’s true, that some of the woke has been exported from the United States,” he says.

“It’s like you are sitting here in the UK trying to just do right and then all of a sudden you have this dump. Part of that is that elites in America have heavily exported it. Elon Musk with Twitter has pointed out what was going on in Silicon Valley with these tech companies. They were exporting this ideology all over the world. Musk is changing that with Twitter, but you still have it with the others. Obviously Florida is counter to that, but it is true that you have elites in the United States who have been pushing that outside of our borders.”

Referring to Mrs Badenoch, he says: “I commend her and her efforts to make sure that this is not corrupting British society.” 

Mr DeSantis’ staff tweeted out a picture of the meeting between the governor and Mrs Badenoch, stating that “she has been branded by British media as the “anti-woke darling of the right” (a badge of honor!). Two great conservative fighters on a mission.”

Mr DeSantis commended Kemi Badenoch's efforts to ensure wokery 'is not corrupting British society'
Mr DeSantis commended Kemi Badenoch's efforts to ensure wokery 'is not corrupting British society' Credit: Executive Office of the Florida Governor

Mr DeSantis was born in 1978: to his supporters, he is the new Ronald Reagan, and some of his allies appear to be hoping that Mrs Badenoch could be a candidate to be the new Thatcher, in time potentially recreating the axis that bestrode trans-Atlantic politics during the 1980s.

I ask the governor whether he thinks there might be a generational shift among international conservative leaders, whereby younger centre-Right politicians have shifted their emphasis to fight the woke agenda more aggressively.

“I think so,” he replies. “On the right, for a long time, it was basically let’s keep government in its place and everything else will work out,” he says, describing his more robust approach at fighting for conservative values. 

“We always just assumed that all these other institutions in society were healthy, whether that’s corporate America, academia or all these other things. Now there is just more of a realisation that you can win an election, and we won an election big in Florida, and yet the Left can still impose its agenda through these other arteries of society, and that’s a problem. I think there’s a better recognition of the need to fight across the board.”

One of the big changes has been the Left-wing capture of many private companies. Mr DeSantis believes that he is right to step in, for both questions of economic efficiency and of democratic accountability.

“If you look at some of the things that corporations are doing, like ESG [environmental, social and corporate governance] for example, that’s them harnessing economic might. In some respects, like with these asset managers, they are taking shareholder assets and they are trying to impose a political agenda with that. It’s really a misallocation of capital, it’s not really true market economics, it’s a perversion of that. Just from an economic perspective it’s bad,” he says.

Yet there is also a democratic point. “I also think it’s a situation where they are trying to impose an agenda through the economy. This can change our culture, it can change our society, it can change our policy even when they collude to do it. So you have to take that seriously.”

What about his battle with Disney, the entertainment giant, I ask. The governor has been at odds with the company since it opposed a law prohibiting schools from discussing certain issues relating to sexuality and gender issues with young children in Florida classrooms. Unusually for a Republican, who traditionally don’t seek to interfere with private companies, often reflexively taking their side, he has been vocally fighting the firm for around a year now.

The Disney issue is a little bit unique,” Mr DeSantis argues. “They had their own government in central Florida. Legally, this was a special district, but in reality Disney had corrupted that and just ran it. They had no accountability, no transparency, none of that. That’s taking one company and treating it almost outside the normal legal system and constitutional system. That’s not good economics because we have other companies that have to play by different rules.

“With Disney, we were really saying they should live under the same laws as everybody else, they should pay their fair share of taxes, and they should not be able to actually control the government.” He emphasises his point: “You have one company that really doesn’t believe that the rules apply to it just because it is big and powerful, and that’s not healthy.…What they’ve tried to do to wiggle out of accountability has been disgraceful.”

He also believes Disney has made a strategic blunder in not supporting his new rules for schools. “When you start talking about the sexualisation of minors and young people and elementary kids in school, that’s wrong, and we as a state stand up and say that’s wrong. And parents believe that’s wrong, regardless of party. They want kids to be kids, and they want to focus on academics. Disney’s involvement as a company has been a huge mistake for their brand.”

Disney fought back last week in the Florida courts. What does the governor believe will happen? “Ultimately, in Florida, they are not going to be able to govern themselves. I know they have filed a lawsuit; I don’t think it has merit but nevertheless we will see it through.”

DeSantis is seen as the new Ronald Reagan by his supporters
Mr DeSantis is seen as the new Ronald Reagan by his supporters Credit: Giogio Viera/AFP via Getty Images

I ask if Mr DeSantis will win his court case against Disney. His response highlights the legalistic particularities of modern American politics, the overlap between politics and law and culture wars.

“Disney is in Orlando, yet they filed the lawsuit in Tallahassee. It’s forum shopping. There is a judge in Tallahassee who rules against us all the time. He just got reversed on an election thing. I think they will try and get him to bite on something. I would never put it past them to get him to bite. Clearly, that would be something that is an easy appeal for us. This is typically what happens. The judge in Tallahassee typically rules against us, and then we win on appeal. This has happened probably half a dozen times since I’ve become governor.”

Some of his critics believe that his battle with Disney in particular might give the impression that he is anti-business, and could chase investment away from Florida. He strongly resists this claim.

“Most businesses will look and say, we should not have one company that is treated differently and that has the ability to call its own shots. It’s more healthy for the free market. Having everybody live under a rule of law, that really is what a market is about. It’s not attacking a company, it’s having accountability across the board so that one company can’t govern itself and live under different rules than everybody else. They had a sweetheart arrangement that nobody else had. Ultimately a market economy is based on competition, it’s based on free choices, but corporate welfare really distorts the market.”

To Mr DeSantis, Disney’s arrangements are not about freedom but about corporatist privilege. “Find me an example of anybody who is considered a free market thinker to say that it’s OK to choose one company, not only to exempt it from laws and let them live under different rules but actually let them have their own government, I don’t recall reading that in Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations”, referring to the work of classical liberal economics.

One reason why Mr DeSantis remains the leading rival to Trump for the Republican nomination is the strength of Florida’s economy. The Sunshine state has dramatically outperformed the UK in the past few years: its economy grew by 2.6 per cent in 2019, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis (against 1.6 per cent in Britain), then shrank by just 1.6 per cent when it reopened rapidly during the covid annus horribilis of 2020 (lockdown Britain collapsed by 11 per cent that year). 

It then surged by 8.4 per cent in 2021 and 4 per cent in 2022, against 7.6 per cent and 4.1 per cent for the UK. Britain’s economy is now slightly larger than pre-Covid, and Germany is still a tad smaller – in radical contrast, Florida is well over a tenth larger.

Unlike most US states, Florida doesn’t levy a state income tax, which is paid in addition to the federal income tax. By contrast, California hammers those on $48,436 with an 8 per cent state income tax rate, rising eventually to 12 per cent for those on higher incomes. New York levies a 6.33 per cent rate on income starting at $80,650, rising to 10.9 per cent – and then, on top of that, New York City charges an extra 3-4 per cent. But tax policies haven’t changed much in recent years, so what explains Florida’s short-term boom?

The first big difference was Mr DeSantis’ approach to lockdown.“When Covid hit we approached it in a way that said society has to go on, we must trust people to make their own decisions, and so that really separated us. People who were under the more restrictive Covid regimes rebelled against them, and they wanted to come to Florida.”

A second important difference which helped attract more inward migration from other parts of the US was Florida’s attitude to crime in the post-Black Lives Matter era. “We also believe in public safety and law and order. There has been a movement in our country to go weaker on criminals, especially in some of the urban enclaves. That has been disastrous. You have seen crime go up. These are cities such as Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles. We have a framework which is good and you have these other states that have gone in the opposite direction. We are pulling people towards us, we are pulling wealth towards us, but they are pushing people away from them and they are pushing wealth away from them.”

With a booming economy has come a huge inward movement of population: not just the retirees of yore but young professionals, parents, hedge fund managers and many others fleeing California and New York. As recently as 2010, New York state boasted a substantially larger population than the Sunshine State; today, bolstered by huge numbers of intra-American migrants, Florida is the third most populous state, counting some 22.2m inhabitants against 19.7m for New York State. Florida gained some 700,000 people between 2020 and 2022; New York state lost more than 500,000 people, according to Census statistics.

“New York state abolished cash bail,” Mr DeSantis says. “People commit crimes. They go before a judge, they get released, they commit more crimes before they stand trial for that one. They release convicted criminals from prison early. They go out and reoffend.”

His booming population was thus caused partly by his own good policies but also the errors of others, he argues. “We’ve benefited from our policies, and we’ve got the big things right, but we’ve also benefited from the mistakes of these other states. It’s not stopping. Chicago has been a total disaster, and yet they’ve just elected a far-left Mayor, even further left than the one that caused problems. You are going to see more wealth move from Chicago to Florida. That is going to happen.”

Mr DeSantis also emphasises fiscal probity and the need for balanced budgets as key ingredients to achieve economic success. He points out just how much cheaper Florida is to run than New York state, an argument also made in his book The Courage to be Free. 

Even though its population is now higher, Florida’s state Budget for fiscal year 2022 was just $102 billion, less than half New York state’s budget of $220 billion. New York City’s own budget – an additional $101.7 billion – was almost identical to that of the whole of that of the state of Florida. On top of this, New York’s state has the fifth highest per capita state debt burden in the US; Florida the second lowest. Despite all of this public spending, extra debt and drastically higher taxes, Florida state’s services are usually deemed superior, Mr DeSantis insists, including its roads and state university system (ranked top in the country, against 14th for the State University of New York System).

“People leave, the economic base shrinks and they have to tax people more and more. They clung to really draconian Covid restrictions for far, far too long. The difference between life in, say, San Francisco and life in Florida during the second half of 2020 and 2021 was really dramatic, and so that drew people,” he explains.

I put to the governor that some people on the centre-Right in Britain and other European countries have given up on low taxes. He is unconvinced: it is clear that Mr DeSantis remains firmly in the low-tax, supply-side economics camp.

“I don’t think there is a need to have higher taxes. Government hasn’t shown the ability to restrain itself from spending too much. Why would you want to raise taxes to feed spending that is not reasonable? In the US at the federal level they’ve increased the debt by about $10 trillion over the last four or five years alone. It’s been a total, total disaster from a fiscal perspective. That’s not something you can solve with higher taxes. The only way you can solve that is to stop spending people into oblivion.”

He goes further, and even advocates more states going Florida’s way and abolishing their state income taxes altogether, making Art Laffer-style supply side arguments. “There is a movement for more states to get rid of their income tax. I’ve looked at some of the states. If you are in an area where there is a lot of bad governance, you get rid of the income tax, there may be a temporary revenue hit but I think in the medium term even it pays for itself because you will attract more people, there is no question about that, and you will attract more businesses.”

DeSantis emphasises fiscal probity and the need for balanced budgets as key ingredients to achieve economic success
DeSantis emphasises fiscal probity and the need for balanced budgets as key ingredients to achieve economic success Credit: Simon Dawson/No 10 Downing Street

I ask him what he thinks of the OECD’s corporation tax harmonisation drive, banning countries from levying a rate lower than 15 per cent, a policy backed by Joe Biden and Rishi Sunak. “I don’t know the details of it but it doesn’t sound like anything I would be supportive of,” he answers. “You want to be as attractive as possible. Florida doesn’t have an income tax, yet we run a massive budget surplus. We have revenue pouring in, but it’s because of economic activity. It’s not because we are trying to tax people too much.”

We return to Covid, a subject understandably close to the governor’s heart. He believes that his anti-lockdown approach has been entirely vindicated. “The approach to Covid in the US was a total disaster. It was induced by panic. It was based on a lot of flawed modelling and a lot of flawed data. A state like Florida, where we looked at the data and said that Faucism [his name for the approach pushed by Antony Fauci, America’s former public health chief] isn’t working, we were pilloried by a lot of the elites, by the media, even some Republicans. I was pilloried for having the schools opened. The teachers’ union sued me.”

Could shutting down society ever successfully tackle an infectious virus? “Whether lockdowns could ever work, I am not convinced,” he says. But he believes that once a virus has spread even marginally across society then lockdowns would certainly not work at that stage. “That had always been the epidemiology. CDC past studies would put out guidance that said that once 1pc of the community was infected, the mitigation doesn’t work at that point. Yet the lesson that Fauci was spouting was that if it spreads it means you are just not locking down hard enough and you have to lock down more and more.”

Mr DeSantis believes that Florida weathered the Covid crisis relatively well, in terms of excess mortality, thanks to, rather than despite, its more liberal approach.

“We helped the elderly, we did treatments, we did a lot of stuff. But I think it was that our society was just healthier. People were able to make their own decisions, they were able to live their lives. I think that’s better. It is abnormal for people to be isolated. If you think about the cost, you have the psychological costs, you have health costs for people who missed cancer screenings and weren’t going in to see the doctors, you have education costs for kids who got locked out of school – and what about the economic cost?”

Mr DeSantis’ central macroeconomic thesis is that the surge in inflation and many of America’s current problems, including its economic slowdown, are because of lockdowns. He highlights the scale of the fiscal and monetary stimulus launched in March 2020 as countries started to lock down.  “They did $2 trillion in deficit spending in Congress, the Federal Reserve then printed trillions and trillions of dollars more – what was that going to lead to? Milton Friedman said that 18-20 months down the road you are going to have inflation.”

There was yet more stimulus he adds, including when “Biden gratuitously did trillions more when he got in”. Lockdowns also caused disruption in supply chains, he says. “There is now inflation as a result, the Federal Reserve didn’t act quick enough. They are probably going to hike interest rates again, there are banks that are struggling, it is much more difficult to afford a mortgage. Most of the problems we are dealing with now all stem back to the Fauci policies from March of 2020.”

The Bank of England, which often stands accused of a similar failure in Britain, would find life more difficult in other ways too were Mr DeSantis to become the next president.

The Bank supports a digital pound, but the fashionable idea of central bank digital currencies is anathema to Mr DeSantis. He fears that the Fed will try and launch one unilaterally, without proper authorisation from Congress. He is threatening to pass a law in Florida refusing to recognise any new such currency.

“I think what they want to do with that is to crowd out and eliminate cryptocurrency. They want this to be the only type of digital currency. I think they would also want to move to a cashless society. The problem with that is that if you have a central bank digital currency under the control of the Federal Reserve, and that’s what you have to use, they would have an enormous amount of power to condition your use, to do a social credit type system, limit what you can do in terms of things they don’t like. I see it as a real danger of empowering unaccountable elites.”

He believes that officialdom’s power grab during Covid is a good reason to fight to preserve cash and restrain the power of the monetary authorities. “Covid should have taught us, you give these people an inch, they are going to take a mile.” 

He also rails further against the Fed, pointing out that there was far more QE during Covid than there was during the financial crisis. 

“Jerome Powell [the Federal Reserve chair] said we have to unlearn Milton Friedman. There was somehow just going to be transitory inflation. So they didn’t do anything, got behind the curve, and now they’ve hiked rates at an unprecedented clip, causing dislocations in the economy. It just shows you: central planning is inherently defective. Why would you want to empower central planners with more authority over your purchases and your financial freedom and financial privacy? It’s a terrible idea.”

I ask Mr DeSantis where he thinks America has gone wrong under Biden, and how he would change it. 

“We are in a malaise right now”, he replies. “Biden has pursued more of an ideological agenda. Had he been normal and been less ideologically captured he probably would have been a lot more popular. He came in really under false pretences. He said he would be a uniter but he has gone far-Left. We need a corrective from the leftism. We need to chart a better course.”

He then enumerates some of his key policies, all of which are bound to be popular among the Republican primary voters that will be entrusted with choosing a candidate to take on Biden.

“What do you want to do to cure inflation? Spend less money and expand energy production. These would both be deflationary. We need to secure our border and actually build a wall along the border and not allow people to come illegally into the country. That’s a huge, huge problem. There are drugs coming across that are killing a lot of Americnas.

“We need tough on crime policies across the board. We need to fight the woke agenda, particularly in the federal bureaucracy. It’s in the military now.”

Mr DeSantis, who served in the armed forces after graduating from Harvard Law School, expresses special concern for the state of US military recruitment. “We have some of the lowest recruiting numbers that we have had in our lifetimes. This is partly because people see the military reflecting more of a political agenda rather than being focused on simply defending the country. People see the country stabbing its toe. There is an appetite to chart a better course.”

Unlike Trump, Mr DeSantis has yet to declare his intention to run for the Republican nomination. He is trailing Trump in the polls, but the first primary elections are many months away and US presidential politics is notoriously unpredictable, made even more so this time around by his principal rival’s growing trouble with the law.

I ask Mr DeSantis when he will decide, and it is clear that the time has almost arrived.

“I have to fulfil the promises I made,” he says, referring to his reelection as governor. “I’m going to go through our legislative session, get the people’s business done. I’m still in the midst of that. I’ve got about another week or so of that, and then I have the Budget and everything. I’m not going to make any decision before then,” he says. But then, he adds, quickly: “But the end of that time is coming, it’s closer now than it was six months ago. So just stay tuned.”

This interview was first published on April 29th 2023.

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