Ron DeSantis: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)

Actually, we're going to start with our main story

tonight

, which concerns Ron DeSantis' business. Fred Flintstone DeSantis has been all over the news this

week

, as he seemingly every

week

appointed his political supporters to a new Disney oversight board and launched a new Reserve the Courage to Be Free and, by the way, I have a little gift for our studio audience. Look under your seats. The gift is not there. Does not have it. You are welcome. And he also posted this striking video. Florida is proof positive that we, the people, are not destined to fail. Santa wins.

He has made a promise and is keeping the promise. Florida is leading the nation's decline. It's a choice. Seth is and freedom is worth fighting for. Wow, there's a lot. there, but Florida is proof that we, the people, are not destined to fail. I do not know anything about that. Ron,

last

year, just in Florida, a man tried to steal a crossbow by stuffing it down his pants. A woman instigated a police chase to get across. arrested from her bucket list and a man was charged with assault for throwing a hot dog at a police officer.

We the people may not be destined to fail, but many people down there seem drawn to it. This all feels like part of a coordinated launch of Desantis's inevitable presidential campaign because, although he has not yet officially announced that he will run, he already became V's favorite candidate after his landslide re-election as governor

last

November, the New York Post proclaimed that its future is depressing and I received this embarrassing introduction from Carrie Lake. I'll tell you what she has. I don't know if you've heard of this, but someone needs to know what that means. Ask your kids about this later.

DeSantis' high energy okay, that's obviously terrible, but. Just to be clear, if you don't know what bde is, please don't ask your kids about this later, in fact, for the sake of those kids, I'll tell you right now that it means big penis energy, kind of easy magnet. Confidence, that doesn't necessarily mean you have a big penis or even a penis, it's just the energy associated with it. A list of those with bde would include Brian Cranston, Christine Baranski, Pixar's Lamp, Charles Darwin and Snoopy. That makes sense? Please come see me. and not to your kids if you need some penis-related lingo explained to you in the future, and look, it's worth noting that generally speaking, you can't predict much about a presidential race 20 months from now.

Early favorites include the late Jeb Bush. I don't know, it's not clear that Howard's Dean and Rudy Julia, who are currently wandering around Central Park covered in Thousand Island dressing and yelling at pigeons about voter fraud, will eventually have to confront Donald Trump, which history has shown they won't. It's an easy task and although Trump initially struggled to coin a damaging nickname for DeSantis and his first attempt was the embarrassingly weak and self-righteous Ronda. He later revealed something with much more impact based on how many times Trump has spent weeks trying to get DeSantis into a fight, describing him in conversations as a meatball.

Ron, yeah, apparently he was calling him Ron Meatball and I hate to say it, but Trump still gets it. He's perfectly stupid, childish, and hurtful in a way that's really hard to articulate. Plus, it's a pretty good name on its own if you ask me to describe the perfect meatball, Ron, I'd say I don't know, maybe a little round hamster or this smiling cartoon character, you know, little arms and legs, mustachioed, perhaps voiced by Chris Pratt in the children's movie that comes straight across with a vaguely felt, strangely Christian undertone. In some ways it's anti-Italian, but if you just showed me a picture of this guy, I'd say forget everything I just said, that's my meatball, run there, that's my meatball, but whatever Trump calls him in the future , the fact is Ron meatball.

He remains a strong contender for the Republican nomination, and while many commentators insist on incriminating him solely in opposition to Trump by saying things like he's Donald Trump with a brain that doesn't seem particularly significant, it's like saying that new restaurant is better than this pie. chicken. that fell on the sidewalk, I'm sure it is, but you're not really giving me much useful information there, so if I quote Tom Brady's publicist while going through his old golf photos, let's get Trump out of the picture and

tonight

let's examine to DeSantis on his own merits. and look at just some of what he's done two and four for Florida's 20 million-plus residents because sometimes it's less than he claims, sometimes less than his critics claim, and sometimes worse than you imagine and let's jump the short version of his first years of life.

Growing up in Florida, he was an outstanding baseball player and even made it to the Little League World Series with his local team, then went to Yale, then Harvard Law School, and subsequently joined the Navy as a lawyer and finally married his wife Casey despite having the The strangest dating tactic I've ever heard, according to a former classmate, DeSantis apparently told people he likes Thai food but pronounced it thigh and if they corrected him , he would make an excuse and leave because, quote, he didn't want a girlfriend to correct him. him and yeah that's wow, imagine being on that date, you're having dinner and out of nowhere your date tells you that he really likes Thai food and you think wait, did he just call Thai food Thai food?

I must have heard wrong, but then he goes on to say that he knows a great Thai restaurant in the area or while staring at you almost politely studying your reaction to us, since you can say wait, you mean Thai like from Thailand and suddenly His face falls and he says I'm sorry, I forgot, I have a doctor's appointment tonight and he leaves, leaving them both with the check and the biggest first date disaster story of all time moving forward to 2012, DeSantis was elected to Congress, although while he was there, a former colleague says he always had his headphones on to keep people away and if you're picking up on a Rhonda Santis topic she doesn't like to hear anyone's voice but her own. , you're on to something because the Governor of Florida has made silencing dissenting voices a kind of Here's a campaign ad from last year showing off his ability to fight the media.

Good morning ladies and gentlemen. This is your Governor speaking. Today's training. Evolution. Dogfight taking on the corporate media. Number one. Don't shoot unless you get shot at, but. when you are shot, you respond with overwhelming force, does it say that in the bill? I'm asking you to tell me what's in bill number two, never back down from a fight, if I could complete the question then are you going to give a speech or ask a question number three don't accept their narrative, it's wrong, it's a false narrative. I just disabused you of the narrative and you surprisingly don't care about the facts until about 40 seconds ago, top gun Maverick was my favorite movie. last year, but now I'm sad to say that it's my least favorite cat-related movie of all time and there's a more disturbing movie that DeSantis constantly complains about being taken out of context by the media, although it's worth it To point out that in that ad he's removing some pretty important context from the media, take that clip where he said, are you going to give a speech or ask a question?

If you look at the beginning of that exchange, you'll notice that only one person is fighting there, Governor, what happened? bad with the vaccine rollout we have seen phone lines jammed, websites crashed, there is a lot of demand. I mean, I think at the end of the day, excuse me, excuse me, I just said what went wrong, so I'm answering the question. If I could complete the question, then you are going to give a speech, are you going to respond? Ask a question without due respect. Governor, you asked the question. I'm going to answer it. No, you're, you're giving a speech.

I asked the question I'm trying to ask you that you are going to ask how many questions do you get three they only got one question why do you get three with all due respect Governor, I'm just asking you if you could finish my question, you didn't Did you not finish the question? No, she didn't, it's a basic responsibility when you see that in context, it's a pretty serious case of someone explaining to a journalist that they're just trying to do a job, although to be clear, DeSantis doesn't hate everyone. media because there is one notable exception and it's exactly the one you're thinking of DeSantis is on Fox News all the time morning, noon and night, even by Republican standards the mutual affection between him and Fox is pretty extreme in just one period of four months. the network asked him to appear on Airwaves 113 times or almost once a day and a Fox producer even offered to let him choose the theme if he agreed to appear, which is just pathetic.

I'll put it this way if Fox News ever went on a date with Ron DeSantis, they definitely wouldn't correct him when he called it Thai food. Percent isn't just another Fox talking head, he sells himself as someone with a proven track record and has done terrible things, such as urging his state's Medical Board to ban gender-affirming care for minors and enacting a 15-week abortion ban, while he recently suggested he would sign a six-week one if it got to his desk, but look, a lot of Republican governors have done things like what makes this santis more popular on the right is his willingness to waging great symbolic cultural wars.

He boasted of making Florida the freest state in America while defending its residents from the greatest scourge of our time. Wokism is actually a form of cultural Marxism. Wokism is the new religion of the left, we are not and will never surrender to the woke mafia. Florida is where wokeness goes to die. Well, first, Florida isn't where woke people go to die, it's where rich New Yorkers from the Upper East Side go. The fact is striking, but secondly, DeSantis says he woke up so often that it starts to lose all meaning, but if you're wondering what he thinks that really means, his general counsel wants to helpfully define wokeness in court as the view that there are systemic injustices in American society and that we need to have policies that address them, which is a big thing for someone to admit to everyone that they are against DeSantis.

He may really want to invest in a lawyer more willing to lie for him. In fact, I understand there is one currently wandering around Central Park that is available. Yes you can catch it but you have to be careful, it's slippery. Santa spends a lot of energy denouncing wokeness and empty virtue signaling, although he also seems to spend a lot of time doing the right version of exactly that - for example, there was the time he cared for Leah Thomas, a trans woman who had won an event at an NCAA swimming championships, second place happened to be Florida, which DeSantis then took as an excuse to go out and do this look at what the NCAA has done by basically allowing men to compete in track and field. female.

In this case, in swimming, the woman who finished number one was from Sarasota. Let's make a proclamation, saying that Emma is the best swimmer in the 500 meter freestyle. because he earned that nod, in addition to being disgusting and horrible, to be very clear, DeSantis does not have the power to declare or disqualify winners in college sports, which makes that Proclamation completely useless, but since the men in suits seem to be using their platforms to invalidate the past. athletic achievements out of sheer spite, I hereby declare that by hiring this Ron Desantis minor league team, the soybean dumplings in fact never made it to the minor league World Series, instead, Houston's spot was not filled onwards by the cast of the sixth season of RuPaul's Drag Race.

I declare it, it is declared, it is done, but it has gone far beyond simple empty and hate-filled proclamations. DeSantis has also signed a ton of attention-grabbing bills that seem designed to delight conservatives and enrage liberals, and although the announcements for these bills tend to get a lot of attention. from national media coverage, its actual implementation may receive much less scrutiny. Consider Santa's so-called riot law that he passed following the Black Lives Matter protests in the summer of 2020. That law, among other things, strengthens criminal penalties for those deemed troublemakers at protests and loves to boast to conservative audiences how angry it has made people and I have to say brag a bit that our riot legislation was recently criticized by the United Nations so I wear it as a badge of honour, okay but being reprimanded by the UN is not innately positive what other warnings would fill DeSantis with a sense ofmisplaced pride.

I was also criticized by the Holocaust Museum. Lego called me a bastard and Malala Yousafzai said she would punch me in the throat if I ever got a chance, so I wear it like a badge of honor, but it's not just the UN that had a problem with that law: a judge issued a preliminary injunction blocking enforcement of the key part of it, arguing that it could effectively criminalize protected legal speech and that it was vague to the point of being unconstitutional and the same thing happened with his law to stop social media censorship, which It again received widespread attention when he first signed it, threatened social media platforms with fines for banning political candidates, and proposed it shortly after. several of them had impeached Trump in the wake of January 6 because they already know that, but that law is also under a preliminary injunction from a judge who at one point told DeSantis administration lawyers: I'm not going to put you in a I tighten up and ask if he's ever faced a statute that was worse written and look, he's still fighting those lawsuits and future decisions could end up going his way.

After all of these cases are going through higher courts ranging from Pretty conservative until Roe v Wade overturned, but even when DeSantis has existing laws on his side, his enforcement can be a slap in the face to Dash and disgusting, last year he made a big spectacle of announcing his new picks The Crime and Safety Bureau headlined the arrest of 20 people who had voted illegally, but ultimately these were people who the state had authorized to join the voter rolls, so they assumed they were eligible to vote even though technically, now it was not a way Dealing with that would have been to simply contact those people, explain the mistake, and remove them from their roles, but what DeSantis decided to do was send armed police to make arrests with body camera video that he then revealed to police. with guns in their hands pulling people out of their homes and if you listen to the police officers involved, even they seem upset and embarrassed by what they have to do abroad, they don't commit any fraud so that's what I don't know exactly what happened to that. but you have a warrant, that's what it's for, we're doing this now and this happened years ago, I don't know, I have no idea, man, wow, do you have any idea how incomplete your warrant must be for the cops to do it? reluctantly comply? enforcing frightened people laws is one of his favorite activities, that makes the siren sound and ends the list now, since then, several of those cases, including all the ones we just showed you, have been abandoned or dismissed, but it really feels like Desantis' main goal there, as in so many cases, was simply to instill fear so that people would be afraid to protest or moderate content or even vote and that's what even his poorly written laws can end up causing harm real and perhaps the clearest place to see all of this in action in Florida schools because it's been very busy there, you probably remember last year's passage of HB 1557, the Florida Parents' Rights in Education Act , also known as the "don't say gay" bill, although DeSantis says that name pushes a false narrative and has claimed that the bill simply says there is no sex instruction for children in preschool through third grade, but The truth is that the bill is not that narrow at all as this DeSantis supporter openly acknowledges that this bill is trying to prevent his indoctrination of our children, but the bill is a sweeping omnibus law that not only It applies to young children, but it applies throughout school age, where it says that teaching gender identity and sexuality is age-appropriate, so the bill is like that, you're right.

It addresses kindergarten through third grade and says o age appropriate, yes, yes, so when is the appropriate age to talk about homosexuality? It varies depending on who you would sue, you would sue a teacher if he started talking to his daughter about same-sex marriage. or lgbtq issues at the age of 17. If you don't have my concern and I think it's not appropriate for my daughter, yes, wow, yes. I think a lot of people would be quite surprised to hear that, because it's kind of mainstream. that's the law exactly, I know it's hard to hear but you're technically right thanks to Ron DeSantis right now, it's the law in Florida and a quick side note, it's funny how it's always the people who think that homosexuality It's a concept that needs to be taught at an appropriate age.

You don't give it a second thought when you teach your children what heterosexuality is. Although you could be wrong. Maybe in that guy's family, your child asks every day who you are. They live in my house and he answers well My name is dad, that lady is mom and we are friends, don't ask me any more questions until you're 18 or I'll sue you and it's not just sexuality that's in Santa's sights, he He also passed a law called stop. woke law that limits the ways in which concepts related to systemic racism and sexual discrimination can be discussed in schools and to hear him say that laws like that are very necessary because wokeness in schools is much deeper than anyone could think.

I will send math books to My education department to review these textbooks and they will do things like woke math and I'm thinking to myself that two plus two equals four, it's not two plus two, well let's have a wrestling session about that, How do you feel about that? No no. no, here is a correct answer, I mean, out of context, you are absolutely right, numbers don't have feelings if they did, this one would be sad, this one would be laughing and this one will be exciting for a few minutes, but then the novelty wears off. and mostly just get tired and hurt, Atlantis himself has claimed that his state had to reject math books for containing indoctrinating concepts like racial essentialism, especially in ways that are strange to elementary school students, now that's a big claim and If it seems that way to you it is because Absolutely, the reporters of these outlets came from thousands of pages of primary school textbooks and their reviews and could not find any such example and when the callous administration finally produced only four small fragments of what which, according to them, was objectionable material to the two that came from In grade school books there is nothing about race, although it is suggested that students practice empathizing with their classmates while meeting the lesson objective of identifying the numbers one through five in sequence, so your big claim about woke math and racial essentialism in elementary schools is Basically, normal math and trying to teach kids not to be idiots to each other.

A self-descent type of mathematics education, frankly, could have benefited us. Your solution to figuring out the difference between one and three questions seems to be to yell until the other person stops. talking and the most recent thing you may have heard about our books being pulled from shelves in Florida schools with viral images like these circulating online now classically. DeSantis has strongly rejected those images that they have tried to create in Florida. narrative um it's basically a hoax about book banning it's a hoax what they're doing and they're trying to say that because we have parental rights and because we have transparency in the curriculum if you have a book that has hardcore pornography in it for 10 in a library that 10 year olds can access, one parent objects that that doesn't meet Florida standards, he shouldn't be in the library with those young children and I think 99 of the parents agree with that.

Well, first let's debunk the most egregious claim there because 99 of parents don't agree on anything. I'm pretty sure you can find at least 10 percent of parents who are against covering electrical outlets within reach of young children. They are called zap moms and they are in favor of letting children discover their own limits. electricity, but I'll grant Santa that there has been some misinformation floating around online, this viral list of books that were supposedly banned throughout the state of Florida was widely circulated, but it's silly to have said that those pictures of empty shelves are very real and are the direct result of Desantis actions because he signed legislation requiring that the only approved books can be included in any school or classroom library and that the approval must come from a certified media specialist which led to some districts, including those where those photos come from, to telling teachers to remove or cover books not because they were pushing a false narrative but because they were trying to comply with their stupid Santa law and what DeSantis might say, well, this is not a overreaction because those books will return once they are approved, not all because thanks to their new law.

On top of that, don't say gay bill and his stop-woke act, has fueled the movement among conservatives to remove from libraries books they simply don't like and this goes far beyond removing hard-core porn or the usual kind of donation. and the discussion between parents and school boards that has been going on for decades, what santis has done is make it so that anyone in a community can question these books. Reporters track down a woman who filed 21 book challenges in one county only to discover that she is a childless retiree who fully admits that she hasn't read them all, but I have read some of them, so she basically flipped through them and said: I'm pretty sure no one should read this, which is exactly how I feel about it.

Rhonda Santa's new book, but I'm not trying to get it out of the libraries. Meanwhile, this teacher in Escambia County, Florida, tackled about 115 books, including titles like Tango and Makes Three, a picture book based on the true story of two male penguins. at the Central Park Zoo who raised a chick together Apparently one of their objections is that a second grader could read it and they would come up with the idea that they are two people of the same sex who love each other and the problem What are the schools? who are acting on those types of complaints?

There was a recent school board meeting in that county to address calls to ban three of the books on that teacher's list, including The Penguin, one at which several community members came to testify in favor of banning it and some made it very clear exactly which law they felt empowered them. I probably wouldn't even talk about this book except that good and evil is a clear line and it's not gray, so it's black and white, it's black and white with the law when we talk. about h-1557, we're talking about indoctrination and when you look up this book about Destiny, you find out on the schools and county website that the book says this book is about two male penguins who fall in love.

Jesus said: go and sin no more, so this. it's against the law, thank you, wow, just because of the work he had to do, that man had to shower, put on a pair of pants, decide which shirt to wear, choose the light blue one that's two sizes too big, drive to the meeting, park your car. He enters the building, he waits a while until it is his turn to speak. They might also eventually stand behind a podium and say out loud as an adult that he's crazy about gay penguins. You almost have to admire his dedication to being such a jerk for that jerk. at that meeting, the board voted to ban and Tango makes three in their schools and when you take all of this together, the book is being removed, the silly proclamations to shame trans athletes, these careless attempts to criminalize protests and you combine it with everything else, from support.

From restrictive abortion bans to efforts to stop gender-affirming care, it's really starting to look like America's freest state is only free to the extent that someone wants to behave exactly the way Ron DeSantis thinks they should. should and will be seen in the coming months. You're going to hear a lot of comparisons between DeSantis and Trump and the truth is that he'll probably ace many of them more or less by default, but that can't be the limit here, it's important to consider scientists in their own right if Donald Trump never existed and that's it, pause and enjoy that hypothetical just for a second if Donald Trump never existed and you were forced to learn about Rhonda Santis from scratch without any basis of comparison, what you would see would justifiably horrify you because you have been discovering a petty autocrat and a bully, a man with no interest in listening to dissenting questions or even in the correct pronunciation of Thai food, and, ultimately, a man whoIt is (and I don't use this term lightly) just a meatball.