Ron DeSantis Warns ‘Stakes Are High’: I Let Media ‘Shoot at Me so They Don’t Get to You’

Stakes are high in the next election, mere weeks away, Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) said during a campaign stop in The Villages over the weekend, reminding supporters that he embraces his role of standing as a target of the media and the D.C. swamp to keep Florida free.

“The thing that we’ve done in Florida is recognize that we have some serious battle on our hands to keep this state free, and quite frankly to save our country from going into the abyss,” DeSantis said during the speech. Notably, during another speech over the weekend in Cape Coral, DeSantis reminded attendees that Florida’s reality could have been much different had his Democrat opponent, Andrew Gillum, secured a victory in 2018. DeSantis won that election by less than half of a percentage point.

The governor identified one of the biggest threats as “leftist ideology” and their “woke agenda.”

“It’s not limited to the halls of Congress or people getting elected to various levels of government. You obviously see it there in different parts of the country in particular, but you now have corporations that have been captured by this,” he said, warning that they are trying to impose this woke agenda “through economic means that they could not achieve through political means or win at the ballot box.”

“They’re trying to stifle dissent. They’re trying to impose an orthodoxy on this country,” he said. “And in the state of Florida, you know, I’ve had to be the one standing out there and taking the arrows from the media, from the left, from some of the big corporations, but you know, that’s my job,” adding, “I let them shoot at me so that they don’t get you” to applause.

However, a leader must be “right on the issues” and “understand that the stakes are high,” he continued, emphasizing that there is absolutely “no substitute for courage.”

“You have to be willing to go out there knowing that they are going to come after you. And it’s not just people like me, who’s governor. If a parent speaks out at a school board meeting you know — they were going to mobilize the FBI to go after the parents going to school board meetings,” he said, explaining that being active and vocal will make you a target.

“You can be smeared by the media. You can be smeared by the left. But these are sacrifices we just have to make because it’s too important not to, and part of my motivation for being out in the thicket and being in the fight is our kids,” he added before briefly discussing his brief time in Congress, recognizing himself as a recovering member.

“I didn’t drink the Kool Aid and I never caught Potomac fever,” he said, noting that on the trips and back and forth he looked at the national monuments and realized the most important ones are those that are “much smaller, very nondescript, arranged in row after row over what appeared to be rolling hills.”

“And those monuments were in a place called Arlington National Cemetery,” he said.

“And it underscored for me that you can have the best Declaration of Independence in the world which we, you can have the best Constitution in the world, which we do … you can have the best ideas in the world,” he said, explaining that those ideals must be worthy of individuals who stand up and are “willing to put on that uniform, stand up on the wall and say, ‘You know what, I will risk and give my life for those ideals.'”

“And that’s what we’ve had in this country. So I want to thank everybody who served,” he said. “I want to honor the memories of all that were killed in action and are missing in action. We not only fight for ourselves in the next generation. We fight to vindicate their sacrifices, and we will do that here in the state of Florida.”