Speaking to moderator Sean Hannity at the Fox News Republican governors’ town hall on Wednesday evening, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida said the media slammed his state’s coronavirus response out of animus for President Donald Trump, and discussed how residents in blue states are flocking to the Sunshine State.
“So, it’s interesting with Florida, the media at the beginning of this said Florida was bad,” DeSantis said. “I think it’s because they wanted to damage Trump and Florida — wanted to damage me. So they just kept saying it was bad even though the facts didn’t say it. Like, literally, last April they were saying Florida is doing worse than New York. New York was like 10 times worse. So I think what it did is, the people that buy those phony narratives from these media, they probably aren’t coming to Florida. But most people see through it. The people that see through it, they think like us.”
The legacy media have tried to frame Florida as botching its coronavirus response since the very beginning. CBS’ “60 Minutes” produced a highly-edited tape in April that erroneously claimed DeSantis chose Publix grocery stores for vaccine rollout due to the company’s routine political contribution a year prior. “Reporter” Sharyn Alfonsi and the team at CBS deceptively excluded portions of the governor speaking in which he debunked their narrative.
“So I think a lot of these people are coming. I think they are registering as Republicans overwhelmingly, and I have also come across a lot of people who, quite frankly, were Democrats, but lockdowns turned them into Republicans,” DeSantis said. “People say, ‘I was a Democrat because of education, and I am in California and they are locking my kids out of school.’”
“So I think this whole process has caused some people to re-evaluate some of their prior commitments,” the governor continued. “And if you have a political party that puts the interest of teachers unions over the interest of kids being able to just access an education at all, that tells you all you need to know about the modern Democrat Party.”
Republicans gained 58,000 new voters in Florida last August, as reported by Politico. This number was 41 percent more than newly registered Democrats in the state. Florida also went red in the 2020 presidential election, with Trump winning 51.2 percent of the vote and Joe Biden taking 47.9 percent.
