The Iowa GOP primary vote is coming up very soon, and I just want to make sure that everyone has a chance to get to know the candidate with the best record of achievements. DeSantis’ appearance on CNN was praised by CNN and others as the strongest they have seen him speak. He’s improving his speaking ability, and so I thought I would post it along with an article.

Here’s the video:

And the article from the far-left Iowa Capital-Dispatch.

Birthright citizenship:

DeSantis said that if elected, he would sign an executive order eliminating the constitutional guarantee of citizenship for children of undocumented immigrants born in the U.S., also known as “birthright citizenship.” While president in 2018, Trump said he would sign an executive order to eliminate it, but never did so.

“The 14th Amendment obviously applies to U.S. citizens,” DeSantis told CNN moderator Kaitlan Collins. “It was never the intent to say, ‘you come illegally across the border, have a kid and all of a sudden, the kid is an American citizen.’ That creates an anchor in the society so that you then can’t deport the illegal aliens who came in. It’s an incentive to come in illegally. That was not the intention of that.”

[…]The governor then followed up by bashing Trump for saying that he would do the same thing, but never did so. “What is he now telling people in Iowa this time around? He says he’s going to do the same thing that he didn’t do the first four years. I mean sometimes you can say ‘Congress stymied you’ and all this other stuff.  All he had to do was put his John Hancock on a piece of paper, and he did not do it. When I tell you I’m going to do something, you can take it to the bank. I’m going to do it.”

Abortion legislation:

On abortion, DeSantis defended his signing of a bill last year that would ban abortions in Florida after six weeks of pregnancy, with some exceptions (the law has not gone into effect as the Florida Supreme Court is reviewing a legal challenge to the 15-week ban passed in 2022. If they do maintain that law, the six-week ban would go into effect short afterwards). And he said Trump was weak on the issue.

“This was a guy who was at the March for Life in January of 2020, and he said that all life was a gift from God. He said the unborn was made in the image of God. He said that there should be protections. That’s what he was saying when he was president at the March for Life. Now he’s saying it’s a terrible, terrible thing. So how do you reconcile those two views. Did he flipflop? Did he not believe it at the time?”

When Collins asked him if he thought that Trump wasn’t actually “pro-life,” DeSantis replied, “Of course not.”

“Some issues are pretty fundamental,” DeSantis added. “How do you flipflop on something like the sanctity of life?” as the audience cheered.

Trump supported pro-life during his first term as president, but recently he’s been critical of the repeal of Roe v. Wade decision, and also critical of states like Florida, that have restrictions on abortion.

All 99 counties:

DeSantis has gone all in on Iowa, the first state in the country where Republican voters will be able to decide on who their presidential nominee will be in November. He’s campaigned in all 99 counties in the state and received the endorsement of Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds.

Gun rights:

[…]The town hall took place just hours after six people were shot at a high school in Perry, Iowa, approximately 40 miles northeast of Des Moines earlier in the day. DeSantis called the shooting a tragedy, and then pivoted to how he had worked to enact a comprehensive gun safety law that was passed by the Florida GOP-controlled Legislature in the immediate wake of the massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland in February 2018 that killed 17 people.

Collins asked him about one provision in the law that GOP lawmakers now say that they want to repeal: a three-day waiting period to purchase a firearm in the state.

“I think the background checks should be instant,” he said, giving a boost to the proposed legislation. He added that if the background check reveals a criminal conviction or a mental health issue, the purchase would then be prevented. “But I think that you want instant background checks, and so that’s what I support.”

Ukraine funding:

DeSantis… said on Thursday that “we need to bring it to a conclusion.”

Did that mean ending U.S. support for Ukraine? Collins asked.

“It means end the conflict,” DeSantis responded, before blasting President Biden for not giving the American people a clear message on what the U.S. objective is in the conflict. Collins again pressed him what “ending the conflict” actually meant – did that mean no more American dollars or military aid to the Volodymyr Zelensky administration?

“What it means is bringing it to a situation where Russia is in a box and you’re not having wars break out to Europe,” he said, adding that he would never send U.S. troops to fight in the conflict – something that Joe Biden said when the war began nearly two years ago. He did say that he would be willing to help out Europe “to bring it to a conclusion.”

As he had done on the campaign trail, DeSantis spoke about his own military experience, saying that if elected he would be the first veteran to serve in the White House since George H.W. Bush in 1988.

Just to help the author of the article out, DeSantis wants no more funding, and no more weapons. He thinks that Europe should supply Ukraine with funding and weapons, because the United States has to prioritize the threats from China and America’s Southern border.

Does it really make a difference whether a person thinks that God is objectively real, and has designed the universe in such a way that human beings have objective moral duties? Well, we just had a recent shooting featuring a transgender terrorist attacking a Christian school in Nashville. Now, we have another shooting featuring another transgender terrorist.

Here’s the latest from Mia Cathell, writing for Townhall:

The now-deceased suspected gunman who shot at least six victims—killing one, a sixth-grade middle schooler—at a small-town high school in Perry, Iowa, early Thursday morning has been identified by authorities as 17-year-old student Dylan “DJ” Butler.

[…]An emoji of the gay Pride flag was featured in the TikTok page’s bio and an image of an anime girl was selected as the profile’s avatar. In another TikTok video, the account used the hashtag “genderfluid.” Using an identical profile picture on Instagram, user @DylanSayWhat212 identified as trans non-binary with “he/they” pronouns. However, the account has also since been scrubbed.

Reddit comments:

According to a series of Reddit posts that Butler appears to have authored, he interacted with transgender and “femboy” forums.

In response to the question “For those who haven’t started transitioning yet. What’s holding you back?” posted to the r/Trans subreddit, the username u/Dylanpickle1996 replied, “I don’t want to look ugly.” Other replies were comments on pornographic ocntent. Over on the platform X, formerly Twitter, the since-suspended account @DylanSayWhat212, under the screenname “Dylan Jesse,” professed his love for My Little Pony and “f*cking furries” while replying to a Happy Pride Month post. Officials have yet to verify these social media posts—all of which were subsequently deleted in the aftermath of Thursday’s tragedy.

LibsOfTikTok has more:

https://twitter.com/libsoftiktok/status/1743027883029987547

And more generally:

On the positive side, the response from law enforcement was pretty fast and extensive. But all they can do is respond. They can’t do anything to fix the source of the problem: public schools run by “don’t judge” secular leftists who manufacture students with mental illnesses.

The public schools administrators choose the easiest majors in college. They often have student loans for useless non-STEM degrees. They have little or no work experience in the competitive private sector. They make decisions with their feelings, instead of using reason and evidence. They can’t solve any real-world problems. And they are passing on their emotion-dominated behaviors to the children. This will not be the last time something like this happens, because the secular left keeps making more people with serious mental illnesses.

Homeschool your kids, and vote for politicians who have a record of supporting school choice.

My podcast partner Rose suggested that I blog about the rapidly increasing national debt. This will not be a political post, as the federal national debt increased a ton under Obama, again under Trump, and again under Biden. (If you want fiscal responsibility, you have to look for governors of red states who are running surpluses). Let’s see the latest news, then talk about what it means.

Here’s the news from the Epoch Times:

The U.S. national debt recorded its third “depressing achievement” in the past 12 months, topping $34 trillion for the first time to close out 2023, according to the latest Treasury Department Debt to the Penny data.

On Dec. 29, 2023, the debt climbed about $90 billion in one day, to exceed $34.001 trillion. It took Washington roughly three months to add $1 trillion to the gross federal debt and six months to amass $2 trillion.

In a single year, the federal government’s total public debt outstanding rocketed by about $2.65 trillion. By comparison, it took the United States more than 200 years to cross the $1 trillion mark in October 1981.

The long-term predictions are even worse:

In the coming months, the Treasury forecasts that it’ll borrow roughly $1 trillion to fund higher budget deficits and manage growing interest costs. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projected this past summer that the national debt will nearly double and account for 183 percent of gross domestic product by 2053.

[…]According to President Joe Biden’s 2024 budget, the federal deficit is expected to be close to $1.9 trillion this year. The annual budget gap is predicted to remain above $2 trillion after 2030.

Let me give my thoughts about this.

Right now, you can already see that interest rates are rising due to counter the inflation caused by massive government spending. Higher interest rates make it harder for innovators to borrow money in order to take risks on new products and services. So, the economy slows down.

Our creditors may demand higher interest rates on our borrowing, because of the rising risk that we will be unable to pay them back. That will increase the amount that we are paying in interest. My concern about this is that we won’t have money available to deploy our military in the event of aggressive behavior from countries that don’t like us very much.

Speaking of interest, our interest payments on the debt are taking up more and more of our discretionary spending. Soon, we won’t have any money to spend after spending on mandatory programs, like Social Security and Medicare. Eventually, we won’t have money for those. Pity the young people who are paying into social programs that are about to go into deficit.

That leads to my last point. The current generation is seeing the benefits of all this spending, but the upcoming generation is going to get the bill. What’s amazing is that the younger generation is so brainwashed by the schools that they can’t even vote in their own interest. They come out of the schools voting for more government, more spending, and higher taxes. They don’t realize that they are the ones who are going to get the bill. They want to be communist, like Venezuela, but they don’t really understand what it will be like.