On a recent podcast, Florida’s Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, remarked how American citizens who joined him in opposing the woke agenda left the Florida Democrat Party as a “dead, rotten carcass on the side of the road.”

DeSantis nonetheless seems completely focused on the road ahead and on grander prizes than those hosed off of the asphalt in Tallahassee last Nov., despite the fact that this intuition about the fate of the Democrat Party in Florida may have been verified by a glance in the rearview mirror.

On Tuesday’s episode of Newsweek’s “The Josh Hammer Show,” DeSantis talked about his new book, “The Courage to be Free: Florida’s Blueprint for America’s Revival.”

In the episode, DeSantis discussed some ways Florida’s success in fending off “COVID fascism and also the biomedical security state,” “wokeism,” “identity politics,” and other crippling assaults on America promoted by the left and ESG-bound companies could potentially be scaled up, amounting to a rescue or even a “revival” for the nation.

The episode comes after DeSantis’ visits to NY City, the suburbs of Chicago, and Philadelphia, last week to speak with law enforcement organizations about crime, before his trips to California, Texas, Alabama, and other states. According to Axios, these appearances amounted to “a de facto campaign launch.”

DeSantis compared his seizure of the governor’s house four years ago with his re-election in Nov., noting that while his margin of victory initially was about 32,000 votes, it was over 1.5 million in November.

He claimed that part of the reason for his success was because he disregarded recommendations to trim his sails and steer clear of “creating a lot of waves.”

DeSantis stated that he went against the grain of doing what was prudent and caving into the sensitivity of ideological rivals. “That really works out to be a strong defense, too, since many Republicans are more prone to take a backseat than to go on the offense. The press attacks them. Media frames the discussion and puts the participants in a poor position.”

DeSantis stated that he understood that in terms of politics, inactivity was a dead man’s game “We were always out there trying to get things done and setting the parameters of the discussion. We didn’t avoid problems.”

“We’ve demonstrated a talent for spotting examples of the left acting completely out of control, isolating them, and effectively shielding Floridians from the worst pathologies of the left. To appreciate it, one does not have to be a Republican,” he continued.

Florida was a well-run state when the governor first took office, but in Tallahassee, the emphasis was more on a “plan of the chamber of commerce. Making sure you’re doing things for corporations and to improve the business environment, you know. Many of those ideas were good, but I believe we leaned too far, whether it was on immigration, education, or battling wokeness, a lot of different things.”