News

GOP Primary: The Ron DeSantis origin story, and some of his accomplishments

Leave a comment

I have today off, so I have been mostly tending to the outdoor bird feeders, keeping the water from freezing, and making sure that all the birds are sharing the food. But, I did want to post something about Ron DeSantis today, since we are starting the Republican Primary Election. This is when Republicans choose a candidate to represent the party in the presidential elections.

Whatever I was going to write, it’s not going to be as good as this tweet from Josh Power, a Ron DeSantis supporter:

Ron DeSantis: His great-grandparents immigrated to the United States from Italy. They settled in Western PA and OH, where Ron’s parents were born. His mom was a nurse and his dad worked with his hands, installing cable boxes and such.

They moved to Florida in the 70’s and Ron was born in Jacksonville and grew up as a middle class kid in the Tampa Bay area. He played baseball, worked minimum wage jobs and excelled in school. He was recruited to play baseball at Yale, and his middle class parents were proud and excited for him to have the opportunity at such a great education.

He excelled at both athletics and academics at Yale – he was selected by his teammates to be the captain of the baseball team, due to his leadership skills and the respect of his peers. He did well enough in class at Yale to be accepted into one of the best law schools in the world – Harvard Law. He excelled in his time there, graduating with Honors.

As he neared the completion of his degree, he knew he had the opportunity to cash in on his fancy education and take a high paying job, but he decided instead to join the military, largely because what he saw during 9/11. He felt a call to serve the Country, as American Patriotism had been engrained in him by his family and community since he was a child.

While at Harvard, he earned a commission in the US Navy’s JAG Corps. He served as a lieutenant in the Judge Advocate General’s Corps of the U.S. Navy Reserve. Deployed to Iraq as an advisor to Seal Team 1, Naval Special Warfare. During his military career, DeSantis was awarded the Bronze Star Medal, the Navy and Marine Corps Commendation Medal, the Global War on Terrorism Service Medal, and the Iraq Campaign Medal.

After his military service, Ron came back home and ran for Congress in 2012, in Florida’s 6th Congressional District. He would later become the 46th Governor of the State of Florida.

He served his home State with honor and courage throughout the Covid pandemic and the ensuing insanity which gripped much of the Nation, and the world. As a result of his leadership, and thanks to the rebellious nature of Floridians themselves, Florida became known throughout the Country as The Freedom State.

Governor DeSantis, now in his 2nd term, has been one of the most productive, effective conservative governors in American history.

Some of his greatest accomplishments include:

Made child mutilating surgeries illegal
Protects women’s spaces & sports
Protects Life
Made child rape a death penalty offense
#1 economy in America
#1 for education
$20B budget surplus with no state income tax
Largest tax cuts in FL history & paid down 24% of Florida’s debt
Crime at 50 year low
Turned battleground state deep red
Fights and wins against CRT, DEI, ESG
Banned Chinese land ownership
Banned sexualization of kids in school
Parents Bill of Rights
Largest School Choice program in American History

I wanted you all to know this about Ron. I myself am a Native Floridian, 4th generation. My wife, Lauren is a Georgia Girl. We’re both big supporters. And we’d be happy to tell you why if you’d like to talk. We support DeSantis because he’s a good dude, a family man, and he gets RESULTS. Everyone can talk a big game, but we need people who can DO IT. Ron is a Florida Boy, the best governor in our state’s history, and we’re proud to have him.

We’re both wishing him the best in the Iowa Caucus tonight!!

For Ron DeSantis in 2024

Ron DeSantis is my pick for the 2024 Republican primary. The primary arguments against Ron DeSantis are as follows:

  • he is too short
  • his shoes are funny
  • he’s too young to be President

These arguments come from people who put zero effort into looking at the accomplishments of each candidate. They think that presidential elections are like a classroom election: you pick what you like. You pick what feels good. Or many people, mainly men, think it’s a football team. You pick who you think is going to win, so that you can vicariously win. My case for Ron DeSantis is simple: he is the governor of the most successful state in the United States. He won election 50-49 in a purple state. Then by the time he got to re-election, he won by 20 points, and had turned his state deep red. That’s what I want in America. Not moderate conservatives like Trump who push amnesty for 2 million illegals (in 2018) and who lock the country down because the Swamp told him to (in 2020). We can do better than Trump in 2024.

Related posts on DeSantis’ achievements

News

Why you should read “Up From Slavery” by Booker T. Washington

Leave a comment

Lately, my friends have been very excited that I’m a non-white conservative. They want me to answer the grievances of BLM people, and explain from my own experiences what Christianity and conservative policies have to say about making the lives of non-whites better. My friend Wes recommended “Up From Slavery” by Booker T. Washington to help me focus my thoughts.

Here’s a summary of the book:

Dignity through Labor

Over the course of Up From Slavery, Washington develops the idea and ideal of dignity through labor. For Washington, the gravest aspect of the institution of slavery is the denigration of labor for both blacks and whites. Because the enslaved had no personal investment or return on their labor, they did not complete their work with an attitude toward improvement. Likewise, whites, largely deprived of meaningful labor, were robbed of the ability to achieve self-sufficiency. In both races, this produced personalities and characters that seek to escape labor. Washington emphasizes labor as the only way to make oneself useful in an interdependent, modern society. Throughout the whole of Up From Slavery, Washington searches for and obtains work. Further, once he obtains it, Washington completes all labor to best of his ability, no matter how lowly the task. At the Tuskegee Institute, Washington makes this idea and ideal a foundational ethos. All students who study at the Tuskegee Institute must learn a trade or industry alongside their more traditional academic pursuits. In addition, many of the buildings, most of the furniture, the wagons, and the materials used at the school are produced by students. This level of practical skill and diligence also acts as the foundation of Washington’s theory and program for racial uplift.

Selflessness, Desire to Be Useful to One’s Community

The people that Washington most admires and models himself after are those he labels selfless. Washington defines this as the willingness to work on the behalf of others. For Washington, this is not only about duty or labor, but also about the willingness to do one’s best for the benefit of the collective good. Washington believes that racial prejudice can be overcome if black people make themselves indispensable to their communities and their nation. The brick-making episode provides an example. Though the brick-making enterprise at Tuskegee felled three kilns before successfully producing bricks, the venture eventually proved successful and the school began to sell its bricks on the open market. Washington describes how whites who were unsympathetic or apathetic to the education of blacks and the overall project of the Tuskegee Institute were willing to purchase Tuskegee bricks due to their quality and convenience. Washington suggests that if black race can find their niche in society by fulfilling a need, then they can co-exist peacefully and productively with whites.

Impracticality of Political Agitation

Throughout Up From Slavery, Washington defends his ideas about racial advancement and uplift by subtly undermining the proposals of his critics. Though Washington does not explicitly state his objection to the strategies of specific thinkers like W.E.B. Dubois or even his predecessor, Frederick Douglass, he nevertheless highlights the wastefulness of political agitation for equal rights at every chance he gets. To do this, Washington shows that political agitation results in worse relations and outcomes than those that existed before. For example, when he goes home to Malden after his second year at the Hampton Institute, Washington finds that both the salt-furnace and the coal-mine are not in operation due to worker’s strikes. In Chapter IV, Washington describes how strikers usually spent all their savings during the strikes and returned to work in debt, but at the same wages. He raises the impracticality of political agitation again after his controversial Atlanta Exposition speech. After the success of his speech, he hypothetically asks if a black man would have been invited to give a speech had people agitated to put a black person on the program. He answers in the negative, saying that such opportunities can only arise through merit.

And here’s a summary of his most famous speech:

On September 18, 1895, Booker T. Washington was selected to give a speech that would open the Cotton States and International Exposition in Atlanta, Georgia. The speech, which is often referred to as the “Atlanta Compromise,” was the first speech given by an African American to a racially-mixed audience in the South. In it, Washington suggested that African Americans should not agitate for political and social equality, but should instead work hard, earn respect and acquire vocational training in order to participate in the economic development of the South. By doing so, eventually, he stated, African Americans would gain the respect of white society and be granted the rights of full citizenship.

There’s a free full audio version of the book, and the full text is online. I recommend this book to people of all races, because as the sexual anarchy brought on by feminism becomes widespread, the majority of the children of tomorrow will face the same kinds of challenges.

I see Washington’s ideas as consistent with a Christian worldview, where we don’t expect to be treated fairly. We expect sinful people to treat us badly. What Christianity says is to be patient, and focus on your relationship with God and loving your neighbor. And one way to love your neighbor is to sell them something valuable that you made through your labor. Another way is to work and save, and give to charity.

Government solutions to problems like racism and poverty aren’t a top priority for Christians. Most of all, we need the freedom to be good, and to do good. That’s priority one. You may not make your life better by being moral and diligent, but it’s rare that doing so causes you to harm yourself. It’s very important that you not harm yourself.

So, this dovetails nicely with my own story. My married non-white parents were not smart enough or willing enough to monitor my education, but they were clear that they wanted me to do well in order to find good-paying work. So I completed my BS and MS in a STEM field, and went to work right away, and I’ve been at it continuously for 22 years now. I save most of what I earn for charity and early retirement.

I’ve never experienced any of the racism or police brutality that American blacks complain about. And that’s because I follow what Washington is teaching. I dress in a clean way that doesn’t communicate danger to others. I’m careful to spend my time reading apologetics, economics and military history. I don’t listen to popular music or watch popular TV or movies. I don’t hang out with people who blame other people for their lack of success.

I got my first job by volunteering to do it for free on Saturdays for 7 months. My first full-time job salary after college was $50,000. Then I got a raise of $6,000 and then a raise of $9,000. I used to work 70 hour weeks in my 20s. I graduated college with $9,000 dollars in the black, because I went to a small local college and lived at home, and never spent any money on alcohol. My net worth is now about $1.35 million. By the way, the secret to becoming wealthy is to not spend money on showing off. You can be very generous to your friends and still get rich. Just never buy anything that is designed to communicate “status” to anyone. And never spend money on alcohol or chasing sex outside of marriage.

At no time did I accept that the problems defined by the secular left were my real problems. And at no time did I accept their “solutions” as real solutions to anything. As black economist Thomas Sowell writes, the “solutions” of the left are not effective at helping people like me. The “solutions” of the left are designed to make leftists feel better, and look more virtuous to others. You are much better off reading the Bible, Christian apologetics, free market economics, American military history, etc., and then respecting what you learn from that in your decision-making. I think that reading the right stuff is even more important than having good parents or attending church.

News

Green New Deal: Canadians told to conserve energy to avoid blackouts

3 Comments

This story from Canada is interesting. In America, the secular left wants to use global warming myths to control energy production and energy consumption. I call it “global warming socialism”. They want to force people to own smaller homes, stop using electricity, stop owning gas cars, stop having children, stop owning appliances, and so on. Let’s look at how it works in Alberta, Canada.

Alberta Blackout Warning

Here’s the story from Canada’s far-left CTV:

Albertans were asked for the second evening in a row on Saturday to limit their electricity usage to essential needs only.

According to an alert issued by the Alberta Emergency Management Agency to all cell phones shortly before 7 p.m., a high demand for power during the extreme cold placed the province at a “high risk” of rotating power outages.

“On top of high demand of our own energy generation, Alberta’s grid receives electricity from neighbouring provinces. Extreme weather in Saskatchewan and British Columbia is impacting electricity sharing, which is also a contributing factor to tonight’s grid alert,” Nathan Neudorf, the province’s utilities minister, said in a statement.

“The Alberta Electric System Operator has activated its emergency grid management plan to work with local distribution utilities to avoid potential rolling brownouts.”

[…]A similar request was made of Albertans on Friday, when the Alberta Electric System Operator recorded a new record for power use.

How come Saskatchewan has power to share, but Alberta doesn’t? Well, Alberta had elected a far-left communist Rachel Notley as Premier, and she embraced Green New Deal energy policies. Notley has no earned STEM degrees, and no relevant private sector STEM experience. She literally knows nothing about mathematics or science. And that’s what Alberta voters wanted. They wanted a pretty face to tell them things that felt good, and made people like them. They didn’t want a problem solver. Now, Alberta has to beg for energy from their neighbor, Saskatchewan. Because she shut down their cheap, reliable energy production from 2015-2019.

Wikipedia says:

On November 22, 2015, Notley unveiled Alberta’s updated climate change strategy, in time for the COP 21 conference in Paris. The plan included an economy-wide carbon price starting in 2017 and a cap on emissions from the oil sands. The plan also included a phase-out of coal-fired electricity by 2030, a 10-year goal to halve methane emissions, as well as incentives for renewable energy.

In November 2016, $1.4 billion was paid to compensate three major Albertan power producers (ATCO, Capital Power, and Transalta) to expedite the transition caused by the closure of six coal-fired power plants. The compensation was derived from the carbon tax and was to be paid over a period of 14 years.[48]

Over in Saskatchewan, they elected a very conservative premier, who rejects green energy policies.

Far-left CTV reports on that:

Saskatchewan provided Alberta with over 150 megawatts of power over the weekend – as the province faced the possibility of rotating power outages due to extreme cold.

In a post to X Saturday evening, Premier Scott Moe announced the province was assisting its western neighbour.

“SaskPower is providing 153 MW of electricity to AB this evening to assist them through this shortage,” Moe said in the post.

The premier added that the electricity would be provided by SaskPower’s natural gas and coal-fired power plants – taking the opportunity to criticize the federal government’s environmental policies.

“That power will be coming from natural gas and coal-fired plants, the ones the Trudeau government is telling us to shut down (which we won’t),” Moe said.

As Americans, we have to learn from the mistakes of other countries. We have people in America who want to impose Green New Deal socialism policies. They don’t know how to do math. They’ve never solved a problem in the private sector. But they have tremendous confidence in their moral superiority over you. They think they should be allowed to decide how much energy companies can produce, and how much energy you can use, and what kind of car you can drive, and how many kids you can afford. Their brains are filled with irrational, unfounded fears about overpopulation, resource exhaustion, and other untestable, indefensible nonsense. Don’t let them get control of your country.