Gov. Ron DeSantis returned to his undergraduate Alma Mater Friday night, and turned his attention to whether conservatism is a “racket” or not.
He rooted his argument, which borrows unattributed phrasing from an antiwar speech from General Smedley Butler nearly a century ago, in the premise that there are conservative precepts that endure despite rhetorical and situational shifts that threaten the ideological framework.
“There’s a saying, you know, all great causes begin as a movement, transform into a business and degenerate into a racket. And I think whatever is on the right now, you know, we are very much in a racket stage. I mean, you have people that can monetize, outrage online. Some of these people that are always out there, they’re getting paid for certain positions. There’s a whole cottage industry,” he said at The Buckley Institute’s Fifteenth Annual Conference.
DeSantis benefited from his own online influencers, including Twitter tough guys, podcast interviewers who spent hours with him but never asked a remotely critical question, and two conservative websites in Florida that took aggressive positions on his behalf as alleged counterweights to the liberal media as he ran for re-election then for President.
But by the time he got to the end of his bid for the GOP nomination in 2024, he began to take a more critical look at the phenomenon from which he benefited.
“It used to be, ‘Oh, Republicans, you know, don’t like the liberal media, the NBC, CNN, all that stuff or whatever, but that the conservative media were like the good guys, right? They’re fighting for us,’ Well, let me tell you, it’s all a racket. OK? It’s all a racket,” DeSantis said in Iowa in January of that year. “They’re trying to get clicks, they’re trying to do all this stuff. There’s as much fake news on the right as there is on the corporate press now.”
The outlets don’t “want to lose viewers,” DeSantis said, and “almost every entity out there is plagued with this in one sense or another.”
At that time, the Governor fumed at Fox News offering no “pushback” against Donald Trump’s claims in a town hall, calling the conservative press a “Praetorian Guard” for him.
