Ron DeSantis Is In.

At last.

Gov. Ron DeSantis has entered the race for the presidency. No doubt the corporate media and his political detractors will make much of the fact that there were brief technical problems with Twitter Space, where he made his formal announcement during an unhurried, wide-ranging, amazingly informative interview with Elon Musk.

The glitches were due to so many people signing on to listen. As the cohost David Sacks explained later, Musk has over 100 million Twitter followers. When another 700,000 digital drop-ins arrived to listen to the announcement and thousands more were trying to get in, they literally broke the internet. Rather, the Twitter servers. As soon as  the transmission was moved to Sacks’ account the interview went off flawlessly.

Tonight was a perfect encapsulation of the campaign. If you're obsessed with the optics of the Twitter Spaces glitch, then you're probably not going to vote DeSantis. If you're interested in political substance, DeSantis is likely your candidate.

— Ben Shapiro (@benshapiro) May 24, 2023

I’m with Ben. The left - joined by Donald Trump - have been gunning for DeSantis for weeks. Their reasoning is clear: They believe Trump will lose to Biden again and they know DeSantis can beat the incumbent president.

As much as they loathe Trump, Democrats desperately WANT Trump to be the nominee. So there’s been a coordinated effort to kneecap DeSantis for weeks. 

Vanity Fair has a story headlined: “Report: Ron DeSantis Will Formally Announce His 2024 Bid With Elon Musk, Because Apparently, David Duke Wasn’t Available.”

Hillary Clinton, who wants Democrats to remember she’s still among the living and ready to serve, tweeted “Ron DeSantis: ultra-MAGA Florida isn’t safe for people of color, LGBTQ+ people or even multi-billion dollar corporations.”

Oh, please. 

The low point was a Politico hit piece last week on Casey DeSantis, the governor’s gorgeous wife, mother of their three young children and recent breast cancer survivor.

In the venomous story they actually quoted Roger Stone comparing Mrs. DeSantis to Lady MacBeth.

Hmmmm. Now that political spouses are fair game I wonder when Politico will take a shot at the grasping, clawing, power-hungry duo of Jill Biden and Gisele Fetterman? 

Dare to dream, I guess.

Back to DeSantis: If Musk releases last night’s Twitter Space announcement as a podcast, listen to it. The governor of Florida showed himself to be bright, relaxed and highly knowledgeable about a breathtaking range of topics, with a fire in his belly that much of America hasn’t seen.

DeSantis kicked hard at what should be Trump’s Achilles heel: The covid lockdowns. 

The governor talked at length about over-reaching covid policies of the feds and how the authoritarian instincts of government during the pandemic highlighted the fragility of our American liberties. 

“We held the line when freedom was in the balance,” DeSantis said, noting that had Florida not reopened so quickly - in the face of a “firestorm” of criticism - the rest of the country might have been subject to rolling lockdowns for two years.

He said the CDC, FDA and the NIH “failed” during the pandemic. Not only did they make mistakes, but they “doubled down,” refusing to admit their errors. He said those agencies need to be cleaned out.

Best of all DeSantis promised that if he’s president, he’ll bring the entire authoritarian administrative state “to heel.”

Awesome.

Democrats - joined by members of the corporate media - were smirking Wednesday evening, criticizing DeSantis for shunning a traditional campaign kickoff on TV, including a rally.

DeSantis actually had a monster rally last night. At one point there were 700,000 of us there.