James Fishback Says Florida Is Not an Economic Zone. Can This Message Take Him to the Governor’s Seat?

Fishback feels like a character ripped from a Twain tale: his dad was a bus driver and landscaper; he’s a former national high school debate champion who overcame a childhood stutter, he dropped out of Georgetown, took on a job at Greenbelt Capital, made them money, and then co-founded Azoria Partners, a hedge fund launched at Mar-a-Lago. He’s chased by rumors and just a little bit of controversy. His defenders include Martin Shkreli. He founded Incubate Debate, a nonprofit fighting ideological capture in classrooms, and has pushed ideas like the “DOGE Dividend” — the sale of federal assets and mailing every American a check. Just this month, the 30-something Trump donor has loudly launched a 2026 Florida gubernatorial run, and though he’s barely making a splash in the polls, we’ve seen eccentric, rich somebodies break into the establishment before.

His platform: zero foreign lobbyist money, total cancellation of H-1B visas at the state level, no data centers, and no homes owned by Blackstone. On the surface, this might sound like a grab-bag of slopulist sentiment, but there might be more than meets the eye. While the rest of the Republican Party bent over, pants down, coquettishly defiant in the face of the Great Awokening, Fishback built Incubate Debate from the ground up, offering alternative speech and debate opportunities to young people abused by Marxist college grads taking over the National Speech and Debate Association. While Florida employs only 8,000 H-1Bs, that still represents 8,000 jobs, and thousands of homes, with an outsized wage-suppression effect in a state that graduates 30,000 young people in STEM every year. Blackstone owns only 3,000 homes in Florida, but many of those are single-family homes converted into taxpayer-subsidized affordable housing, providing private equity firms with millions from middle-class paychecks. Data centers suck up water and don’t create many jobs, and have become symbolic of the differences in economic vision between Donalds and Fishback. And it’s more than fair for people to be frustrated with AIPAC. Slop and pop are similar but not the same, and if Incubate Debate is any indication, he’s not just blowing hot air: the dissident-right struggles to build anything, but Fishback built something for normal people.

He’s using the visa issue to attack Rep. Byron Donalds despite Donalds’ endorsement from Trump. Fishback’s style has won fans in DeSantis’ world while irritating others like Randy Fine. He’s the latest eccentric businessman threatening to do what Ross Perot and Donald Trump once did: turn money, controversy, and blunt talk into serious political power on behalf of white middle-class voters disenchanted with a feeble establishment’s inconsistent delivery. The H-1B fight is his wedge. He watched the 2024 Christmas war and came down on the right side. In an era when most college grads can’t find decent work and housing costs crush family formation, simplicity sells — and it’s why a hedge-fund debate bro from Florida suddenly matters.

A majority of Florida primary voters are undecided, so he has a real chance. And if you’ve written him off, you should give him a second one.

You’ve been vocal about the “great replacement” of American workers through legal immigration—can you explain what you mean and share what specific policies you’d pursue as governor to counter it?

You can’t make America great again with Chinese. You can’t make America great again with Indians. You can’t make America great again with Haitians. You have to make America great again with Americans.

For far too long our north star has been “Made in America,” well, we want to make stuff in America but if we’re making stuff in America with H-1 Bs, that does not actually achieve our goal, which is that every single high school grad in America should be able to get a great paying job to buy a home, get married, and raise a family and retire with dignity. So, when I speak about the great replacement, I speak about legal immigration programs that, for far too long, have been overlooked. Illegal immigration has been a primary concern for establishment Republicans but each one of many programs, such as OPT or other sorts of legal immigration programs, the prospect of 600,000 Chinese students coming to study at our universities, those by definition take spots and slots, jobs away from American citizens and my campaign is the one that stands up and says “America is for Americans” and we have to stop apologizing for that.

The beauty of our Framers is that the 10th Amendment actually allows states to do quite a bit to stand up for this, to stand up for our workers, and to recognize that we are not an economic zone — we are not the next Singapore or Dubai — we are a nation. America is our birthright. It is our home, and as governor, I would never let anyone steal that from us.

When you say the 10th Amendment gives states a wide latitude, how would you, as governor, work to prevent legal immigration from undercutting American workers?

Yeah, so what I would do is if you have a state contract, whether you’re cutting grass or serving food or providing uniforms or IT tech support or whatever the case may be, if you do any business with the state of Florida, now is the time for choosing: do you want to keep your $50 million contract or do you want to keep your 50 to 100 H-1Bs? That means you have to decide. You have 48 hours, no negotiating, you pick, and I think you’re gonna find a lot of companies are going to recognize that they have made an error and have put corporate interest ahead of the well-being of the workers of our state and they sidestepped a lot of highly qualified people in the process simply because they want slave labor that they could underpay, overwork, and exploit. I’m not gonna allow that to happen in our state, and so that’s just one angle. The state contract angle is another one: any state agency that employs H-1Bs, I’m going to fire them by the time the sun sets on my first day as governor. The third option, I don’t want to have to use this, but we’ll see where we are by January 27th, when I would take office, and that would actually place a fine on companies that discriminate against qualified Floridians and instead choose to import cheap foreign labor. My job as Florida governor is to stand up for Floridians, and if the Washington, D.C. establishment party won’t do that, I have to take that responsibility on.

Might I also ask, since you sometimes use the phrase “great replacement,” what do you mean by that? I ask because I interviewed Renaud Camus just a few months ago, who originated that phrase and has gained prominence in certain political circles thanks to Vauban Books’ release of Enemy of the Disaster.

I mean, quite literally, the great replacement. So, think about it this way Julia: great means extensive, large in magnitude, replacement quite literally means replacing, and so when you have people who are being fired on Monday replaced with an H-1B from Mumbai on Tuesday and then by Wednesday they were told to train that replacement over the coming weeks, that is the issue, and you know the problem with legal immigration is that, for far too long, even Republicans have been deluded and think that it’s a good thing because it’s legal and I take the approach of “It may be lawful but it’s still awful.” The problem with legal immigrants is that they can move up here, take jobs, qualify for mortgages, obviously qualify for work authorization, get food stamps, and get all sorts of entitlements. They’re on the path essentially to becoming citizens, and that replaces Americans who have been here, whose ancestors have died, fought, bled, and built this country, and I think that’s wrong. In no other country can your qualified local workers, citizens, be fired and forced to train their foreign replacements, and I think it’s about time that America starts standing up for Americans for once.

Sadly, my opponent, Byron Donalds, has made himself a shill to the H-1B lobby. In January of this year, he said sad that “Haitian Americans were integral to the Sunshine State.” That’s a lie, they’re not integral to anything. They’re integral to the great replacement because my own dad lost his landscaping business after Haitian migrants came here on TPS after the earthquake in 2010. This is all personal for me. I’ve seen the toll of so-called legal immigration quite literally bankrupt my family, and I’m not OK with that, and neither are Floridians, and so when someone like Byron Donalds — he has said that he is pro-legal immigration — I say I’m against any sort of immigration that steals jobs, steals our benefits, and robs us of our way of life.

There are critics on the left and right of the H-1B visa program and similar programs like OPT who want to see them ended completely. The Trump administration, through Secretary Lutnick, has fought for a $100,000 visa fee. What do you think accounts for the administration’s unwillingness to push congressional Republicans to end the program completely or to do so itself by other means?

I think many congressional Republicans, and some on the left and the right, are largely bought off. This labor is good for the Mag 7. When you fire an American worker and they then rely on the social safety net other taxpayers have to shoulder that cost, that’s not OK, and so they’re not just doing the ethically and morally wrong thing but also creating a massive tax liability for the rest of us, and that is to say nothing about denying that person their dignity, their right to have a great paying job, to raise a family, to buy a home, etcetera, and so my approach is that Congress is part of the problem: they created the H-1B program and they have stood silent throughout this entire dilemma. People like Byron Donalds, my opponent here, have not once submitted a bill to end this program and are still, unlike Governor DeSantis, unwilling to actually work and to deal with companies that are fueling the great replacement of our workers right here in Florida.

In addition to concerns about H-1B, there’s been a resurgence of interest in limiting the power of foreign lobbying groups, such as AIPAC, which lobbies for foreign countries, and you’ve argued for limiting AIPAC’s influence in Florida. As governor, how would you do so? 

We do it by not accepting AIPAC’s money. I’m not going to meet with AIPAC, and it’s about the principle of not meeting with any group that is aligned with a foreign country: it’s about prioritizing American interests. I’m not anti- any country. I’m just unapologetically pro-America, and so I would not meet with the AIPAC of Nigeria, the AIPAC of Argentina. I am going to only meet with people who have our best interests in mind, and the fact that AIPAC receives its money from American citizens doesn’t change the fact that it does, in fact, lobby for the interests of the Israeli government. AIPAC has yet to take a position that is contrary to the Netanyahu government, and I don’t think you can be pro-America if you are actively lobbying for positions that benefit the foreign governments of other countries.

How do your views align or diverge with the second Trump administration, one year in?

I think I agree that the President has been amongst the greatest presidents in history because he doesn’t make excuses, right, the border was the by far the largest issue in the election, though we can talk about second, which is affordability and inflation, but the number one issue for voters was the border and we were told for months that needed a new border bill with bipartisan support, that we needed to accept 50,000 migrants and we would tap out, and what the President showed is that executive power was able to close the border. Now there’s a stop in the flow.

I think there are issues at DHS; we can talk about that, but states also have an opportunity to step up. The governor has been the biggest ally of President Trump on this — Governor DeSantis — on ramping up the pace of mass deportations. We have 1.4 million illegals here in Florida and so when folks are frustrated about affordability, about housing availability, recognize that there are 1.4 million illegals in our state, they’re not all living under bridges, they’re not living in the Costco parking lot, they are living in homes that should be going to Floridians and so I view those two issues as inseparable. If we want to address housing affordability, as governor, I have to work with President Trump and our federal partners of ICE and DHS to ramp up the pace of deportations. So he’s gotten the flow argument right by bringing that flow down to zero; there have been zero crossings at the southern border, now, nine months in. Of course, we’re going to have our disagreements, but my job is to work with President Trump as the next governor of Florida.

We’re going to have substantive disagreements. I’ve told the President that a real friend is not someone who tells you what you want to hear, it’s someone who tells you the truth and I respect President Trump enough — I think highly of him enough to only tell him the truth, and the truth is he is the greatest president in American history but he and I are gonna have some disagreements sometimes and that’s in large part not because of him, but because of some of his advisors who, like James Blair, like Alex Bruesewitz, don’t really represent the America First movement, and I’ll always be a voice that stands for that movement because I’m never going to allow our country to be stolen from us right before our eyes. 

Who do you think those voices represent if not the base?

I think they represent corporate interests, I think they represent foreign interests, I think that they represent tech companies, like Nvidia, and I’m grateful for Nvidia and love Tesla, so I love these companies, but I want to work with them, I just don’t want to work for them. I don’t want to work for Musk, I don’t want to work for Sam Altman, or Jensen Wong. I believe that we are at the beginning of a golden age for artificial intelligence, but I also believe that the AI data center issue is real.

This is not hypothetical. You’re seeing electric bills in Tennessee, and in Georgia, right outside, where they built brand-new data centers, electric bills are up 30-40%, and you’re seeing the water supply threatened. What I respect about Governor DeSantis, as a conservationist, is that there’s this lie that we’ve been told by the Country Club Republicans and the Koch brothers that the environment is something we have to be willing to sacrifice —absolutely not — we have an incredible natural environment here. The Everglades is something I grew up going to almost every weekend as a kid. I lived just 5 miles from airboat rides and fishing, and all of that, that’s what I want to protect, and so I’m against offshore drilling, I’m against drilling in the Everglades. I’m against turning our state into an AI data center capital.

My opponent, Byron Donalds, has said time and again, his words, he wants “…to make Florida the financial capital of the world,” I’m sorry I don’t want to be the next Dubai or the next Singapore or Hong Kong and I’ve yet to meet people in rural or urban communities, large or small, black, white, Christian, Muslim, Jewish, who have come to me saying “Please, please be just like Byron and help us bring the financial capital of the world here to our state.” Now, they want to be the agricultural capital, the farming capital, the citrus capital, they want to be the Christian capital, they want to be a capital that really says, “In Florida, we prioritize our own, we look out for our own.” You know, Zohran being elected in New York, that’s tragic, but that’s also not our problem: that’s their problem to figure out. I’ve said time and again, Florida is full, that we are full, that we are going to grow smart. I’m not anti-growth, but we’re going to grow smart, and if that means a little bit slower than some of the line-go-up Republicans would like, so be it. I’ve seen my state just where I grew up in South Florida, I’ve seen the commutes from Fort Lauderdale to Miami grow from 20 minutes to 40 minutes to now well over an hour and a half, and that’s only a 20-mile drive, and so we’re not going to "LA" or "New York" our state. Enough with the property developers, enough with the overdevelopment, enough with the sprawl. We have to actually protect Florida.

I’ve said, kind of my campaign slogan, I’ll decide a final one, but the way I launched this campaign is with four words: Florida is our home. It’s a home. It’s not a financial capital, it’s not a hedge fund, it’s a home, and our home is not one in which we need overdeveloped overdevelopment; it’s not a home in which we let AI data centers get built and threaten our water supply and jack up our electric bills, it is a home where you look out for your neighbors.

This is a campaign that stands for the dignity of every Floridian to get a great-paying job, afford a home, and to be able to live out the full arc of the American dream. We can’t do that with 1.4 million illegals. We can’t do that with our share of 600,000 Chinese foreign students; we can’t do that with a legal immigration invasion that takes jobs, takes resources, takes homes away from the people who built this state.

That leads into my next question: the differences in vision between you and Representative Byron Donalds. If Donalds wants Florida to be the next financial capital, what do you want Florida to be?

It’s not that I’m opposed to investment or growth; I’m an investor. I spent 10 years standing up to Wall Street, I sued the Federal Reserve in federal court this year because there was clear evidence that they were trying to weaken President Trump by keeping interest rates at artificially high levels, that’s pain that people in my state were inflicted with because if you can’t get a mortgage, you can’t get a home, if you can’t get a home, you can’t get married, you can’t get married, you can’t have kids, you can’t have kids, what’s the point? So this is personal for me and I’ve seen it up close but here’s the reason why I don’t want this to become the financial capital and why Floridians don’t want to become the financial capital. Of course, I want great financial firms like Citadel and Ken Griffin to be based here and to move here and to live here, but also I need to recognize that financial firms almost exclusively hire college grads and up: MBA, PHD’s.

That’s not the kind of state that we are. We’ve been a state that’s historically involved in agriculture, cattle, and farming, and even for a long time in actual manufacturing. I mean our largest trading partner is Brazil, we send $19 billion of aerospace equipment to Brazil every single year, that’s why I said that “No, I’m not visiting Israel, but I’ll be visiting Brazil on my first trip,” because I want to create a trade deal and new investment that can create thousands of jobs for high school grads and so my north star is not GDP, it is not the stock market, it is what percentage of high school grads can get a great paying job and are getting great paying jobs right after graduating high school. I can tell you that you have to be a college grad, you have to be a graduate student,  to get into those roles at financial institutions and so quite literally, if we’re going to become the financial capital, what we’re telling these students is that high school is not enough, not even college is enough, you have to go to graduate school, and that’s a tough pill to swallow.

I want to create an economy that says if you do well in high school, if you understand math, reading, arithmetic, you understand the Constitution, you understand how to communicate ideas, that there should be a great paying job at the other end of your high school diploma: that’s the vision that I want that’s just not possible in a financial capital. It is possible in an agricultural capital, a manufacturing capital, a citrus capital, and that’s what we need to get back to. And by the way, those are the things that are really close to our identity as a state. And if you want to talk even more so about affordability, you know it’s very simple supply and demand, you know if we’ve got more of our own cows that are going to slaughter beef prices here in Florida are going to come down, if we don’t have to drive beef from Missouri or Arkansas and we’ve got beef in our own backyard (my grandfather ran 750 cattle in Okeechobee county) and if we’ve got more beef that’s being raised right here in Florida that’s a slaughter that means more beef means lower prices and it’s not traveling over a longer distance like 500 miles it’s just traveling perhaps 30 or 40 miles. So I want to deliver great-quality beef and great-quality ingredients at a low price, with low transit costs. That’s great for our environment and for people’s pocketbooks.

Far too often, by the way, this affordability question only focuses on one level of affordability, which is bringing down prices. Yes, I want to bring down prices, but I also want to bring up real wages. No one would be complaining about affordability if real wages had kept up with inflation. So how do we bring up real wages? Well, we know that cheap foreign labor, both legal and illegal, is holding down American wages, and so as I work with the President to ramp up the pace of deportations, as I make very clear that we are not going to tolerate the great replacement of our qualified workers. That is going to bring up real wages quite literally because we are shifting the labor pool from cheap foreign labor to good, market wage labor, for qualified Americans.

If Lieutenant Governor Jay Collins chooses to run, what makes you a better candidate, and how would you contrast your vision for the state versus his?

I’m grateful for his leadership and for his service to our country. He was a Green Beret, which is very brave. I am very blessed that my own great-grandfather served in WWI and my grandfather in WWII. I just haven’t seen any policy proposal from him that speaks to this need for an America First candidate, I haven’t seen him speak toughly about the H-1B issue, though he’s certainly copied my H-1Byron line, but he hasn’t actually been substantive about what he’s going to do to stop the great replacement, hasn’t been substantive about foreign interests and foreign influence in our state, and I have been, and so I am in this race.

I don’t need to be in this race. I’m in this race because there is not a candidate who shares this feeling that so many Floridians are hungry for. They’re sick and tired of AIPAC. They’re sick and tired of the H-1B. They’re sick and tired of being told and lied to that white kids need to apologize to the black kids, and black kids told there is something somehow wrong with them, they’re systemically oppressed, and they can’t achieve things unless we give them a DEI handout, that’s wrong, that’s a slanderous lie, and so I’m in this because no one else shares this feeling. It would be a lot easier for me, Julia, not to be in this race if there were qualified candidates speaking to this vision. The truth is that Byron Donalds has been in this race for nine months, he has, in his mind, some coveted out-of-state endorsements, and when I say out of state, I don’t count the President’s endorsement — he is actually a Florida resident — but there’s a reason why Byron Donalds still does not command the majority of voters in the polls. There’s a reason why 51% [of voters] in the most recent poll, which was actually paid for Byron Donalds’ campaign, that half of voters still say they’re undecided. I mean, if this guy is in fact the best candidate and he’s been in the race for nine months and he’s somehow on Fox News even more than me, then how on Earth are people still undecided? They are undecided because they had Governor DeSantis for nearly eight years, and they want someone who’s actually gonna stand up for workers. With all due respect to the congressman, he just isn’t that guy.

You know, I asked Floridians, “Can you name three things that Byron Donalds has done for you and your family?” He’s gone to Congress, he’s made millions of dollars trading stocks, but he hasn’t introduced a single bill to codify a single one of President Trump’s executive orders, he’s not introduced a single piece of legislation to tackle the H-1B scam, to tackle OPT, to tackle foreign influence — he supports the 50 year mortgages, the 50 years of usury, right, he supports all of that. So yeah, you can say, “He’s Trump-endorsed,” but he doesn’t endorse President Trump’s policies. President Trump is very clear that there’s going to be a fine on companies that want H-1B’s; he’s made it very clear that he’s opposed to what President Trump has done. He was asked at a TPUSA event at the University of Florida last week, he was specifically asked about my proposal, which is to place a fine on companies for firing qualified Floridians and hiring cheap foreign labor, and he said “No, I don’t believe in that because taxes” and all this slop right, Koch brother, Country Club Republican slop, right, and he’s at odds with the President of the United States’ own position, which is that if you’re going to do this you’re gonna pay $100,000. I think President Trump has the right instincts there. I think some on his team are trying to water that down, but at the end of the day, the President is very clear that the H-1B program is a scam, and Byron Donalds does not support the President’s position of placing this $100,000 fine on visas.

Some voters will look at your history, even if they’re not necessarily sold on Byron Donalds, in particular your past friendships with Vivek Ramaswamy and Byron Donalds, and some controversies relating to Azoria, Greenbelt, and DOGE, and think that you’re not a trustworthy candidate. What would you say to them?

What I would say is I will never ask Florida voters to blindly trust me. I will ask to earn their trust, for the opportunity to earn their trust, and I’ll do that by visiting all 67 counties — no county is too small or too big for me to visit in the coming months, and on those trips I’m going to give a 5 to 10 minute view of my vision, prepared remarks, but then I’m just gonna take 30-50 questions in a row, and roll up my sleeves and get into the weeds. I’m never gonna ask Florida voters to blindly trust the candidate. Byron Donalds has. He’s rested on his endorsements and his political operatives and his $30 million war chest as the reason you should trust him, and anyone else is an anti-Trump RINO, as he put out a statement today referring to me as one, but I’m gonna ask Floridians to earn their votes.

Now, look, with respect to your question about Byron, I have never supported him or endorsed him. I was asked to introduce him to moderate a panel at my local Republican club, just 5 minutes from my house, and, of course, I said yes. You know, they recognize that I’m on Fox, and they wanted me to do it; they were a little bit shy themselves to be up there with Byron, so I said yes, and I asked him tough questions, and I walked away from that really unimpressed with him as a candidate. I’m gonna say nice things about people, I’m not trying to pick on Republicans for the sake of it, but when there’s a real race, a race in which I genuinely believe that if Byron Donalds is the nominee for the Republican Party, there is a nontrivial chance the Democrat candidate can win, especially given what’s happened at the national level we saw two weeks ago with the DEI candidates losing, namely in Virginia, I’m not going to let that happen,

My relationship with Vivek is very simple. I met him a couple of times. Our friendship kind of fell apart after the H-1B tweet last winter, and he and I share ideas; we agree on much, but we disagree vehemently on the idea that Americans are dumb and stupid, and I think Americans are plenty qualified. I think we are the smartest, hungriest people in the world, and I wish he would change his position, but you know, I’m always gonna try to change someone’s mind. If I can do that to Vivek, I’ll do it; if I can do it to Byron, I’ll do it. I’ve tried, they don’t seem to budge, but that’s why I’m in this race, because the art of persuasion can only go so far. Now my job is to persuade Florida voters that this vision that we have is in fact their vision, that we’re gonna win this campaign in August.

You frequently describe yourself as an America First candidate or use the phrase “Americans First.” What do you mean by America First?

What I really mean by “America First” is “Americans First.” I think what happens with the America First movement is that it can actually become very quickly perverted by this idea of whatever it takes to advance this nebulous idea of America is America First, so for example, if we want to win the so-called AI arms race with China, that requires us — if you delude yourself into believing this — to import 600,000 Chinese students to do that. You could argue in some counter-intuitive way that importing 600,000 Chinese is, in fact, benefiting America and therefore is America First. You could argue that importing cheap foreign labor is America first because it allows for there to be cheaper grocery prices, some might argue that benefits America so it’s America First, and so I actually think that the north star of the America First movement — I still call myself an America First conservative — the north star of our movement, what we’re optimizing for, what we’re solving for, is actually the well-being of Americans. So when you think about it that way, if you frame it that way, how are Americans doing as a result of 600,000 Chinese students coming here? It becomes very clear that it is not a good idea. How are Americans dealing with the fact of cheap farm labor? That’s very clear; it’s not a good idea, and your yardstick to measure the movement becomes very clear. It’s not “line-go-up,” it’s not GDP, it’s not the stock market; it is actually the prosperity of American citizens.

And here’s how I measure that, Julia, two ways. The first of which Nathan Halberstadt put me onto, this is from New Founding: the number of 30-year-old men who own their home and are married. You can tell a lot about the state of America by the number of 30-year-old male citizens who are married and own their homes, right? So think about it: if you don’t own your home, you’re renting; if you’re renting, you don’t have equity; if you don’t have equity, then what’s the point? If you’re not married, you probably don’t have kids; if you don’t have kids, you don’t have a family; if you don’t have a family, then what’s the point?

Second, what percentage of American citizens can raise a family on a single income? If those become our north stars as opposed to corporate profit margins, GDP and the S&P 500, we’re going to do a much better job of delivering for the America First movement by putting Americans front and center, because if you argue for America First and say well America first really means doing whatever it takes to help American GDP go up, that’s America First, there are things that you are going to do that are going to be deeply detrimental to American citizens, like importing cheap foreign labor and letting companies run roughshod over their workers. That’s not OK, and so my vision of America First is one that is rooted in measuring the prosperity of the movement by Americans, not by GDP or the stock market, and I say this as someone who spent 10 years as an investor; it’s just not a good way to measure prosperity.

Another element of this “prosperity” discussion, which has been chasing the Republican Party around for maybe a year and a half now, is the question of healthcare in the United States. Florida has the largest Obamacare exchange in the nation, and the top 10 congressional districts with the highest Obamacare enrollment are in Florida. As governor, you would have significant power over the implementation of Obamacare and state-level healthcare. What would you do about healthcare in Florida?

So what you touched on is really important, which is that our state is extraordinarily dependent on Obamacare, yet some of these districts like FL 19 or up like FL 25, rather, which is Belle Glade, Hokey, the Glades, where sugar cane is grown, are rife with obesity and all sorts of preconditions so my goal is very simple: I reject the fundamental premise of Obamacare which is that everyone is the same. It doesn’t make sense for healthy people who are doing the right thing, rich or poor, to be subsidizing people who are doing the wrong thing, rich or poor — and this is often framed as a classist thing — but it really isn’t because I know plenty of low-income folks who are doing everything right with their health who are, in effect, part of a larger subsidy pool that is paying for older people who are not, or wealthier people who are not taking care of their health, and so I want to bring competition back. Obamacare is fundamentally anti-competitive, and I don’t view healthcare accessibility as measured by who has healthcare and who has health insurance; healthcare is not about who has health insurance. It’s who is living a healthy life and that starts with what kind of kids, what kind of school lunches our kids have access to, that starts with a real issue, which is, which are food deserts. That’s not something you hear Republican candidate talk about, but it is real; if I go to a community like Moorehaven and Glades county, where the nearest grocery store is 25 miles away, and there’s no public transit and only a third of the town has a reliable automobile, that’s a real issue.

So what I want to do as governor is, I want to tackle the root causes of why people are struggling — number one with obesity — and that means delivering a system that actually says that no health insurance is not going to make us all healthy. If we said every single Floridian gets health insurance tomorrow, that does not make us eat healthier. That does not help us address these underlying conditions. I’m a big proponent of “Make America Healthy Again.”

I’m going to move to my last two questions.

First, you’ve been speaking about affordability and shifting the focus of our politics to younger men and families. Florida is a state that is both rife with factional infighting in the Republican Party and dominated by an aging electorate — how will you deliver what you think young voters need in a state that is so dominated by aging interests and political infighting?

I think political infighting is a good thing to tell you the truth, I would just call it an earnest divergence of opinions that’s gonna be resolved at the ballot box. You know, we have a lot of Democrats in Florida who identify as Republicans in our legislature. Byron Donalds is one of them. If you look at Byron Donalds’ resume, the truth is that he registered as a Democrat, then stopped registering as a Democrat in 2010, just months before he ran for Congress, which was the first thing he did after registering as a Republican. This is a guy who supported, in the state legislature, a bill that would allow shoplifters to steal up to $1,000 worth of stuff and get away with it. That is not a conservative policy. That’s something straight out of California or New York City Democratic politics and so I think what I would ask for the voters to do is to do what they’ve always done, is to look at the what vision for Florida do you want: the Republican Party of the country clubs, of the good old boys club, of the Koch brothers, Dick Cheney, George Bush, neo-con open borders, pro-line go up that Republican Party politics has really rejected since President Trump’s been in office? There’s always going to be flashes in the pan. There’s always gonna be candidates who are gonna try to reemerge. Byron Donalds is sadly one of those candidates.

Ron DeSantis wasn’t, which is why he won Florida by 20 points in his reelection in '22. I would ask voters, as we’ve always done, to do their homework and research each R candidate’s vision. Look, if you want AI data centers to up your electric bills, Byron Donalds is your guy. If you want someone who will glaze immigrants like so-called Haitian-Americans, which don’t exist — I don’t believe in hyphenated Americans — or if you want someone who’s gotten millions of dollars from every developer that wants to, in his own words, to speed up the construction and reduce permits for AI data centers and quantum computing, and biotech, though I have yet to meet a Floridian who generally wants any of those things. Floridians want what our campaign is based on: a vision for Florida that says Florida is our home. It is not a franchise. It is not an economic zone. It’s not a financial capital. It is a home of people with equal dignity created in God’s image, and we need to look out for them.

Thank you. Last question: Do you read any political philosophy, and if so, who do you like to read?

Wow, gosh, I like René Girard a lot. I’ve spent a lot of time rereading The Federalist Papers and rereading the history of the summer of 1787, but I think Girard’s grasp of memetic desire and cognition feels so relevant to so much of what has happened these days, especially in the age of social media algorithms, and that’s what I’ve spent a lot of my recent time on, reading his work.

Thank you, Mr. Fishback. That’s all for today.