You almost have to try to mess California up. Yeah, that's what Gavin Newsom has done since he's been governor. He's the first governor to ever lose population. They actually at one point ran out of U hauls in the state of California because so many people were leaving. Of course, he's imposed restrictions on his own people while exempting himself from those restrictions and going to the French laundry while
his people were suffering. He led the country in school closures, locking kids out of school, while he had his own kids in private school. In person, now, he's very good at spinning these tales. He's good at being slick and slippery. He'll tell a blizzard of lies to be able to try to mask the failures. But the reality is they have failed because of his leftist ideology. And the choice for America is this what Biden and Harris and k news want to do is take the California model and
do that nationally. In Florida, we showed the conservative principles work. This country must choose freedom failure.
The Santus came out hot last night.
That was his opening remark about he's going to hit you with a blizzard of lies the debate between Ron De Santus of Florida and Gavin Newsom of California.
I was so excited about it.
What effect it will have, whether electorally or ideologically in America, I have no idea. I'm sure it'll be less than I would hope. By the way, that a response to that from Gavin Newsom was he went on a different topic.
He didn't respond to it, right, Yeah, I dodged it completely.
I know one interested observer along with the US and you, was Kevin Kyleie, Congressman for the third Congressional district in California. Also, Kevin, if you don't follow him on Twitter ex whatever you want to call it or otherwise, is one of the most articulate and thorough critics of Gavin Newsom and progressive politics in California around and he joins us, Now, Kevin, how are you, sir?
I'm doing very well.
How are you good? Good?
Did you force yourself to watch most or all of the debate last night?
That's a good term for it, having to listen to do some for that long.
But you know, I actually felt like it was important to fact check him as he sort of filled the airtime with a whole array of completely.
False and misleading statements. So I actually, yeah, I was.
On Twitter or x and trying to keep up fact checking what he said to make sure that the reality in life of California was understood for those watching.
Yeah, I followed your Twitter feed during and after the debate. What stood out to you most in terms of misleading things that the governor may have said?
Oh my gosh, where do we even start. I mean, the governor has this way of sort of just asserting the most absurd thing possible, Like, you know, Florida was a lockdown state, when California by far had the worst lockdowns of any state in the country. We're fifty at
out of fifty and getting kids back to school. So for the governor to stand up there and assert that the governor of Florida shut down schools when actually Florida was third in the country and getting kids back to school, California was fiftieth in the country and getting back.
To California was which is why my oldest is in private school. California was fiftieth and letting kids go back to school unbelievable.
Absolutely worst in the country.
Fiftieth out of fifty.
And that's true, by the way, across basically everything with COVID, business shutdowns, church shutdowns, all of the mandates, California was the most draconian in the country. Or when you talk about the California exodus, the reality of the situation where you have people leaving this state.
In record numbers.
California has led the nation and UHUL rentals each of the last three years.
This has never happened before.
In our history. We've gained population every single year. The state of California has been all that it's the state everyone wants to come too, because we have everything here. We have so much to offer. So we've run each and every year since we've been a state in eighteen fifty until Gavin Newsom became governor, when not only did that trajectory reverse, but we now have the highest outmigration
rate in the entire country. And yeah, last night Newsom stood up and tried to assert that it was directly the opposite.
You know, I don't want to get hung up on this point, but it was. That was one of a couple of occasions where Newsom tech dissensus from the right, calling him a lockdown governor. And I don't know if that's just because he'd prefer Trump to be the nominee or whatever, but that was just weird.
Kevin.
I know you have some pretty strong feelings about the so called homeless policy in Californian Knewsom's claims to that effect.
Sure, I mean, Newsom made some claims about how he's spent a ton of money on homework, and actually that was true.
Maybe the one true thing that he.
Said in the entire debate is that he has poured twenty billion dollars of our tax dollars in tulwith over the last five years. But even he has said that Californians are wondering where the heck all their tax dollars are going, because the problem has he spent more and more money.
Has gotten worse and worse.
California's homeless population has grown fifteen times faster than the rest of the country over the last few years. I mean, if you look at what's happening in San Francisco, I'd be walked through the streets of San Francisco and you're going to tell me that the problem is getting better. I mean, if it was getting better, they wouldn't have needed to do this fire drill to clean up the city for the arrival of the President of China like
they did just a couple of weeks ago. And so California at this point has half the unsheltered homeless in the entire country.
And you know this has only gotten worse on Diston's.
Watch, indirectly back to the COVID thing. So the reason states were shutting down on counties and cities was to try to save lives, right, So it's all about was that successful or not? Or is there you know that did Florida have a lot more people die because they didn't shut down as much? What are the actual statistics on that, because they had battling stats that didn't match up.
Well, the statistics are very clear, which is that California did not gain anything. If you look at however, whichever way is plice it. If you look it, for example, at excess mortality over twenty twenty to twenty twenty two, the COVID years, Florida and California are the same. But actually that means Sporta did better because California has the younger population. Generally speaking, you expect word to be harder hit by a disease that primarily affected seniors.
So when it comes to the or the lands.
That did a study which basically standardized for those factors and found that California actually had one of the worst mortality rates in the country, did worse than Florida. And so when you look at that, the fact that California actually.
Did worse from a public health perspective, and.
Then we had the absolute calamity to our economy, to our our education system, and all of the other harms from these lockdowns that we are going to be experiencing for generations to come in this country. I mean, it's hard to imagine a more consequential failure of political leadership than what happened here in California, which is why Governor Newsom is desperate, desperate to rewrite history.
Simply try to put it through.
I call it the COVID memory hold, to pretend we didn't shut down schools, to pretend.
We didn't do these lockdowns and everything else.
But you know, we have forty million people who actually get the little less more some thirty nine million and change now who remember all too well what we had to live through.
Well, he was up there defending the end defensible, and you've got to admire his pluck and even trying that. Kevin Colley's the congressman third District California on the line, what did you make of the exchange about pornography in schools, or, as Gavy would put it, the book banning binge in Florida.
Well, you know, the interesting thing about this is that you can ask the governor. He's talking about all of these books that are allegedly banned, so you can ask them, Okay, well, what grade level do you think kids should have access to this book or that book? And what wad L do you think it should be part of the curriculum in it? And I bet he wouldn't say it should be available in every grade level.
So this idea that we're banning books is just ridiculous.
The entire you know, issue is about what materials are age appropriate for which age groups. But the larger point is this, Gavin Newsom loves talking about this. This state is than in this book the status that he is very concerned about what kids in other states are reading.
He's not an all.
Concerned with the fact that our own kids in California all too often cannot read at all. We have the lowest literacy rate in the entire country.
We have eight hundred schools.
In California where seventy five percent of the kids are not at reading level.
Our eighth grade.
Reading I need you. I need you to say that again. Say that again.
Our eighth grade reading scores are the very worst in the entire country. Our fourth grade reading scores are third worst in the country, out of any state. So we're not teaching our kids the basics of reading at all. In fact, there was a lawsuit the state had to settle for tens of millions of dollars where kids sued the state of California for not teaching them to read.
By the way, I was.
A tenth grade English teacher in inner City, LA and Maya.
I saw this first hand. I've top tenth.
Grade and my students came in with an average reading level of fifth grade.
Wow.
Wow, Well, maybe I'm more concerned about the genderbread person than I ought to be because the kids can't read those words anyway.
But that is shocking.
Yeah, you talk about an under appreciated problem nationwide, and as you just heard, especially bad in California. Is this this kids not being able to do basic math and reading. It's just amazing. I don't even want to go to that argument when we're talking about teaching the kid's critical race theory, radical queer theory, gender theory, that sort of thing, because I think on its face it's awful and immoral.
But the fact that they're not learning the very basics is I mean that that should settle the argument enough, genderbread, person more phonics.
How could you disagree with that?
Well, the only way you can disagree is put it the way Gavin would have last night. Joe Getty is against the rights of LGBTQ plus minus students, which is not in the least true right.
He needs to take the basic failures of government and try to conceal them using these you know, culture war type issues. That's, you know, straight out of Newsom's playbook. And frankly, our whole governing class in California is to sort of conceal the very anti progressive realities the state where you have huge achievement gaps in our schools, when you have kids who are not being given.
The opportunities they need to succeed in life.
That they're not being taught the basics and try to conceal all of that with this smoke screen of sort of cartoonishly woke or progressive policies.
That's the playbook.
In California, and you know, it's what is enabling Newsom to go out and somehow tout California as a model for the nation because it's where sort of these uh, you know, progressive policies have been taken to the utmost extreme.
But if you look at the actual results in places like San Francisco, in places like Los Angeles, where they tell you not even to where your jewelry when you go outside, it's very clear that California is not some model for the nation, like Newsom says, it's a warning to the nation about the terrible consequences of these policies.
Kevin Kyleie, Congressman, third District, California. If you are not familiar with Kevin, you are now You've got to follow him on x or Twitter, whatever you want to call it. One of the truly effective fighters for reasonable, realistic conservative values. Kevin well done, is always good to talk to you.
Thanks, thanks so much.
That rising star right there, yeah, Armstrong and Getty