CLAY: Ron DeSantis down in Florida still doesn’t, by the way, have an opponent yet in the Florida governor’s race that’s coming up in November. I think both you and I, Buck, believe that he’s going to set, potentially, an all-time record for a Republican win in what was for most of the twenty-first century — let’s be honest — the state that everybody pointed to as one that was going to be decided on the margins.

Trump won the state of Florida by 3.5 points, stunning a lot of people with his overwhelming support that he gained in South Florida between 2016 and 2020. I think DeSantis is gonna win by seven or eight points, which is going to set off shock waves throughout much of the country. And a big part of that is because so many people have not only validated his governorship during the covid response, but they’ve moved there. And now there’s — for the first time ever — more Republicans registered in the state of Florida than Democrats.

And they’re probably gonna have 250,000 or so registered more than Democrats. And this is going to be the equivalent of a Florida landslide election. Reason why I bring that up, DeSantis keeps playing offense, Buck. And he’s done three things in the most recent budget bill — this is in the last four hours — and a lot of people still aren’t talking about them, but they’re growing, and I think as you head into the weekend, more and more of you out there listening are going to hear about all these things.

Let me give you three big wins, in my opinion. First, Tampa Bay Rays baseball team decided along with the Yankees to spend one entire game tweeting and Instagramming from their social media accounts just about gun violence. They didn’t even mention the game against the Yankees. They went as full bore into politics as you can go. They wanted to get $35 million, Buck, in state funds to be able to build a spring training facility there. Ron DeSantis vetoed it as a part of his new bill.

Couple of different rationales. One, you can argue state governments shouldn’t necessarily be involved in providing funds for stadiums. You can argue that. Disagree, agree, variety of perspectives. But this was motivated to a large extent by the Tampa Bay Rays deciding to go full bore into politics and virtue signaling on social media. Cost them $35 million in state of Florida funds. Broke that story, by the way, Bobby Burack did at OutKick.

He does great work for us. Encourage you to read those stories. Special Olympics was demanding, Buck, that every single participant in the Special Olympics — which was taking place in Florida — have a covid shot. Florida said that violates our law to require covid shots in order to participate. Special Olympics dropped its covid requirement when the state of Florida stood up to them.

And finally, state of Florida has said if you’re under 18, state funds are not going to be expended to allow you in any way to be getting transgender surgeries. Those are three massive wins. Standing up. We saw already the response to Florida over the grooming bill, the parental rights bill, with Disney, and now he’s throwing more haymakers. This guy isn’t just saying that he’s going to take action; he’s doing it, Buck.

BUCK: Ron DeSantis is really continuing what I would say is an awakening on the right. He has taken the torch. He is pushing forward now with the awakening among conservatives that we have to be willing to wield power in defense of our principles. It’s not enough to just talk about principles and then say, “Well, maybe we’ll find a moderate path or a neutral space.” We love the idea of the neutral space, right?

Let’s just let the market decide. And we find out, well, in blue states, they’re making all kinds of decisions to shape and direct the market, to pick winners and losers based on politics. And we sit around and say, “Oh, no, we just want this neutral space to exist.” Disney wasn’t operating in a neutral space. It was operating with favoritism. So Ron DeSantis said, “Look, if you’re going to come at us for politics, if you’re gonna play in that arena, we are going to fight back.” I think Trump was really a big part of this awakening, too —

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: — in that he was the one who said, “No, no. Not only are we going to fight back, we’re gonna punch back harder and begin this process of ideological offense.” And now Governor DeSantis — obviously Trump’s not in office now, doesn’t have political power right now — comes in and says, “Oh, we’re gonna keep going with this.” I mean, just even some of the basic perceptions that have existed in this country.

Honestly my entire adult life, it was just accepted that the left boycotts. Democrats boycott. You upset some liberal sacred cow issue and you’re gonna face the wrath of an organized activist base. And so that made people wonder, “Well, how did they take over, not just the HR departments, but now how are all these CEOs so woke?” Well, they got their people, so to speak, their ideologically aligned people into these places because otherwise these companies were, in the early stages, worried about their bottom line.

Now they’re run by true believers. So we moved into this other phase. Ron DeSantis is saying, “We either fight back or we keep losing.” Is it worth taking the wrath of CNN and the New York Times to protect children from transition surgery? We know there’s an ideological indoctrination program going on in a lot of places for kids to go trans, that trans ideology is something that is being taught in schools in different ways now. Should we protect kids, or should we just say, “Hey, stop indoctrinating our kids”? No, he goes beyond the asking polite, Clay. It’s a huge, huge move in the right direction.

CLAY: Yeah. Look, people listening to us right now know what manufactured what I call faux rage is like because it happened to Rush all the time, right? You guys lived through this show being under attack all the time. And it was manufactured, made up, not real representative of the larger American population. I actually think, Buck, that a lot of these CEOs are not woke at all. I think they’re afraid of losing their jobs if they don’t appear woke.

And what DeSantis is doing… It’s an interesting question, right, because, to your point, for a long time — I’ll use the world of sports — people would walk up and just slap a sports fan in the face and they would say, for instance, U.S. women’s soccer team Megan Rapinoe basically saying American is an awful place; we refuse to stand for the national anthem. You got Colin Kaepernick. Now you got Gabe Kapler, Steve Kerr, Greg Popovich, all these guys.

You like sports? They would constantly walk up and slap you in the face metaphorically by sharing their political opinions. And a lot of people would just say, “Well, just turn the other cheek, just pretend it’s not happening,” and then I think a place like OutKick, we started throwing punches back, saying, “No, no, no. You need to respond in kind. If anybody punches you in the face, punch ’em back,” and look what happened to Disney.

They’ve been bullying, they’ve been bullying, they’ve been blackmailing bullying. Have they issued a single response my son Ron DeSantis took away their access status is in the state of Florida? I don’t think they’ve said a single political thing then and the Rays haven’t responded to getting slapped back, and I think you’re right. Trump was a big part of this. You throw a bunch back what it could actually create is a neutral space because eventually people say, “Well, I don’t just want to be throwing haymakers back and forth all the time. Let’s just get back to doing whatever our business is.”

BUCK: You can only have the neutral space for commerce when you have what would be politically mutually assured destruction as in, “We’ve got nukes on our side, you’ve got nukes on your side, let’s just do business here, folks.” What the right, unfortunately, had allowed to really happen over the last 20 years particularly — and I would say, Clay, I think you’re right. I think it was pressure on the CEOs, but I mean the head of Twitter? Woke. The head of Google? Woke.

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: The head… I mean, these people are true believers now in a lot of these places.

CLAY: I do think you’re right about certain companies.

BUCK: Right but they’ll hurt their bottom line is the point based on ideology, like, they will antagonize their customers in the service of leftism and wokeism. Over 20 years, what we got to was it became the rational response. We saw this happen. The rational response for companies was, “Oh, gosh, we better do whatever we can. We better placate the woke. Placate you with better…”

You know, and on the right we were saying, “Oh, no, come on,” and some people would write some essays about how the free market will eventually… Yeah, I mean, throng run we’re all dead, right? The free market in 30 years might correct this but give me a break. DeSantis takes, Trump took the position of, “You punch me, I punch back,” and now DeSantis is taking the position of, “Oh, no, I’m gonna keep punching until you’re not a threat to punch me anymore, until —

CLAY: Right.

BUCK: “– we agree that we’re going to start to have the neutral space,” so to speak, that we can have until both sides realize, “You want to fight? You want to keep this going?” And, by the way, if we can’t have a neutral space, I’d rather have conservative principles in companies reflected in day-to-day life than what they have, than the other side. So —

CLAY: Yeah, I mean, one answer to this is we just have blue companies — and we have red companies, right? And there certainly is an element of that, that is going on in the country. I mean, I found that a company OutKick —

BUCK: I think we have more of that than we already… You know, ESPN, blue sports company. OutKick, red sports company. I mean, let’s be honest.

CLAY: Yeah. We’re covering — and, by the way, what is also becoming a reality is — and this is where I think the market-based reality becomes an incredible business opportunity for a lot of people out there listening. Like, 80% of people or maybe 90% are not woke, right? So you can be a red company and also appeal to a lot of blue people who are just normal, right, who aren’t sitting around looking for systemic racism in every cup of coffee, right, and don’t feel like their shampoo company needs to have an opinion on global warming, right? I think that’s the vast majority of Americans.