Presidential hopeful Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis needs to keep it simple and focus on five letters: Covid. No other candidate, never mind governor for that matter, managed the manmade disaster better. It’s about freedom. There are plenty of voters who want to make America Florida. Stay focused. There’s a great story to tell.
DeSantis Describes the Great American Exodus
Americans are moving to where their money and freedoms are respected. Below, The Wall Street Journal’s Daniel Henninger described in September of 2022, Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida, explaining what he calls the “Great American Exodus.” Henninger wrote:
Shortly before the Vineyard controversy, Gov. DeSantis delivered an interesting speech near Miami to a convocation of conservatives. Some called it a test drive of ideas for a presidential run, and it probably was. One DeSantis idea, though, should have caught the eye of anyone focused on the flow of U.S. history.
The governor described something he called a “Great American Exodus.” In short, he means the recent movement of U.S. population out of California and the North—primarily New York, New Jersey and Illinois—into states in the South and West. He says this shift has a “political character,” which he was happy to describe. Since the pandemic began, he said, “more adjusted gross income [moved] into the state of Florida than has ever moved into any one state over a similar time period in American history.”
Americans Are Fleeing Cities for Land, Low Taxes, and This…
Americans are fleeing to the Super States, where taxes are low, and the cost of living is also lower. But money isn’t the only motivation. Americans want peace and freedom too. The big blue blob cities have proven over the last two years that they do not care about Americans’ safety. They prefer to empower criminals and defund the police rather than protect the weak and vulnerable. And when you try to protect yourself, they ban your guns. And when COVID hit, their only solution was job-killing draconian lockdowns. Gov. Ron DeSantis showed them an alternative path, but they ignored it anyway.
The Free State of Florida!
The results are in. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s refusal to buckle to the radical #DEFUNDTHEPOLICE movement is paying dividends for Floridians. Marc Sarnoff explains in National Review:
Crime is skyrocketing across the country — but not in Florida. After the Covid-19 pandemic started and the George Floyd killing led to riots in one city after another, many local officials embraced “Defund the Police” and other soft-on-crime approaches, with disastrous results. But in Florida, Democrats and Republicans alike realized that personal safety is an overriding human need. And they delivered. That is another reason that residents of other states are voting with their feet and moving to the Free State of Florida.
The “Defund the Police” movement began in 2020 with self-designated “autonomous zones,” where police were barred from parts of Portland, Seattle, and Minneapolis. Seattle mayor Jenny Durkan welcomed the officially sponsored anarchy as a “summer of love.” Shootings and murders proliferated along with allegations of sexual assault, and a quickly brewing mental-health crisis was being reported, but there was no one to investigate. The experiment was an utter failure, as each zone logged record crime rates. The inmates were running the asylum.
The failed result did not deter calls to “defund the police,” and 21 cities voted to do so. The results have been disastrous. In 2020, murders skyrocketed by 63 percent in Seattle, 43 percent in New York City, and 150 percent in Chula Vista, outside San Diego. The major city with the biggest crime increase during the pandemic appears to be Austin, Texas, where the murder rate rose 48 percent in 2020, and another 86 percent in 2021. In 22 major U.S. cities, murders increased 44 percent from 2019 to 2021.
Miami, too, was tested by protests in 2020. But the police in Miami did not allow the state’s monopoly of force to be contested by criminals. Violent protesters were arrested and prosecuted for aggravated assault. Video of police officers forcefully responding to protesters attacking their vehicle went viral and helped make clear that law and order would be preserved.
Protests across Florida quickly petered out, and the results are now in: Bucking the national trend, Miami saw violent crime drop significantly in 2021 after rising in 2020, with the murder rate falling more than 15 percent.
Despite the spectacular failure of their policies, officials in blue states have doubled down. In Los Angeles, where rail theft has increased 356 percent, Union Pacific says its patrolling officers have arrested more than 100 people in the past few months, but none have been prosecuted by LA District Attorney George Gascon, who issued special directives that, unless it is committed with violence, a felony be reduced to a misdemeanor with no jail time. Defunding the police doesn’t just limit the number of available police. It also creates a disincentive for the police to perform their duties at all.
New York County District Attorney Alvin Bragg believes, along with his LA counterpart, that nonviolent crimes do not need prosecution. Bragg was recently called out by the widow of Jason Rivera, a young policeman who, along with his partner Wilbert Mora, was gunned down responding to a domestic-violence call in January. “We are not safe anymore, not even members of the service,” Dominique Luzuriaga, Rivera’s widow, said in her eulogy. “I know we are tired of these laws [a reference to Bragg’s memo to prosecutors that nonviolent felonies will not be charged], especially from the new DA. I hope he [Rivera] is watching. You speak through me right now!” So far in 2022, 19 police officers have been shot dead in the line of duty, and 71 have been shot and wounded.
Action Line: Do your local politicians care about you? Or would they rather defund the police and leave you to fend for yourself? The easy way to tell is by looking at how they treat you. Do they maximize your freedom while minimizing their impact on your livelihood? If not, if instead, they treat you more like a piggy bank and someone they have power over, it’s time to look for a better America. Start your search with my Super States. If you need regular guidance on the best places in America, click here to sign up for my free Survive & Thrive letter. I’ll help you find a better America, today.
