From the Tom Woods Letter:
Today I want to share with you an example of how to handle the media.
Now brace yourself, because it involves Ron DeSantis, governor of Florida, and most people have lost their minds when it comes to DeSantis. I am perfectly aware of every DeSantis demerit, so resist the urge to tell me off.
The fact is, the man knows how to deal with the media. You’d have to be crazy to deny that.
He employs a crucial combination: firmness, and knowledge. He always knows more than they do.
This particular example comes from several months ago, when Florida was facing Hurricane Milton, but most people never saw or heard it, and it’s too good to disappear into the ether.
You can imagine the line the press took: why, doesn’t this strong hurricane and the tornadoes it’s bringing provide support for the “climate change” narrative?
Here’s how DeSantis responded:
Tornadoes? I think you can go back and find tornadoes for all of human history for sure. How does this storm rate in the history of storms? I think it hit with a barometric pressure of about 950 millibars. If you go back to 1851, there’s probably been 27 hurricanes that have had lower — so the lower the barometric pressure, the stronger it is — I think there have been about 27 hurricanes that have had lower barometric pressure on landfall than Milton did, and of those, 17 occurred prior to 1960.
The most powerful hurricane on record since the 1850s in the state of Florida occurred in the 1930s — the Labor Day Hurricane. The barometric pressure on that was 892 millibars. It totally wiped out the Keys; we’ve never seen anything like it. And that remains head and shoulders above any powerful hurricane that we’ve ever had in the state of Florida. The most deadly hurricane we’ve ever had was in 1928 — the Okeechobee Hurricane. It killed over four thousand people. Fortunately, we aren’t going to have anything close to that.
I just think people should put this in perspective. They try to take different things with tropical weather and act like it’s something. There’s nothing new under the sun. This is something that the state has dealt with for its entire history and it’s something that we’ll continue to deal with. I think what’s changed is we’ve got 23 million people. A storm that hits is likely to hit more people and property than it would have a hundred years ago, so the potential for that damage has grown.
But what has also changed is our ability to do the prevention, to pre-stage the assets. I mean, we never did the pre-staging of power assets until I became governor. Now, people expect that. But that wasn’t what was done in the past; that’s why people would be without power for three weeks when we had hurricanes.
He was ready. He knew that was coming. He knew the relevant material off the top of his head.
