Florida Governor Ron DeSantis brought explicit exhibits to his Thursday debate with California Governor Gavin Newsom.
Newsom and DeSantis’ Thursday evening debate was hosted and moderated by Fox News' Sean Hannity
During the debate, DeSantis hit back at Newsom's previous claims of California being the "freedom state."
“California does have freedoms that some people don’t, that other states don’t,” DeSantis continued. “You have the freedom to defecate in public."
The Florida governor listed off other "freedoms" of Californians, including the "freedom to pitch a tent on Sunset Boulevard [and] freedom to create a homeless encampment under a freeway."
"You have the freedom to have an open air drug market and use drugs. You have a freedom if you’re an illegal alien to get all these taxpayer benefits," he added. "So those are freedoms. They’re not the freedoms our founding fathers envisioned, but they have contributed to the destruction of the quality of life in California and the results speak for themselves.”
Newsom smirked and chuckled at the Florida governor and referred to DeSantis' concerns as a "rant."
”Here’s a guy who’s criminalizing teachers, criminalizing doctors, criminalizing librarians, and criminalizing women that seek their reproductive care,” Newsom said. “You’re making it harder to vote. You’re banning books. I mean, spare me this notion of freedom.”
DeSantis then displayed a map that appeared to be completely brown depicting fecal matter found in public areas across San Francisco as Newsom chuckled.
“In one of the previous greatest cities this country’s ever had, human feces is now a fact of life, except when a communist dictator comes to town,” DeSantis said of Chinese President Xi Jinping's visit to the city earlier this month. “Then they cleaned up the streets. They lined the streets with Chinese flags. They didn’t put American flags there. They cleaned everything up. So they’re willing to do it for a communist dictator, but they’re not willing to do it for their own people.”
At another point during their debate, DeSantis noted Newsom's claims of book banning in Florida and presented sexually explicit images from graphic novel Gender Queer: A Memoir by Maia Kobabe, found in Californian schools. The images presented by DeSantis, blacked out for the debate, depicted a child simulating oral sex on another child.
“So this is a book that’s in some of the schools in California,” DeSantis said. “In Florida, this is not consistent with our standards called Gender Queer. It’s, some of it’s blacked out. You would not probably be able to put this on air."
"This is pornography. It’s cartoons. It’s aimed at children and it’s wrong," he continued. "So this should not be in schools when people like on the left say that is not age appropriate.”
Newsom criticized DeSantis and noted Gender Queer was an LGBTQ+ book and claimed Florida banned other traditional books, which the Florida governor said was false.
