Ron DeSantis Fights Corporatism in Florida: The great culture war between Walt Disney and Florida’s Republican Governor Ron DeSantis continues. After having initially won his battle with Mickey Mouse, DeSantis was surprised to see the way in which Walt Disney counterpunched. DeSantis managed to revoke Disney’s special status in the Reedy Creek Improvement District (where Walt Disney’s Florida property is located) and declared that the district would now be managed by a panel of people that DeSantis chose.
Disney quietly fought back by invoking an arcane law that basically deprived DeSantis’ new governing board for the Reedy Creek Improvement District of any power. Now, Governor DeSantis is having to hire a pricey law firm based in Orlando, Fla., to counteract Disney’s move. Of course, Ron DeSantis is doing more than just responding at the legal level to Disney’s sly move on the governing board.
He’s looking to make Disney pay.
In response to the moves by Disney, the DeSantis team in Tallahassee is exploring ways to hike taxes on Disney-owned hotels in Florida and to impose tolls on roads that serve Walt Disney World in Orlando. In response, Disney CEO Bob Iger told his board that DeSantis’ actions of late have been “anti-business” and “anti-Florida.”
Disney Making Bad Calculations
Iger is making the point that, in his view, Governor DeSantis is abusing his power to pursue an overtly political agenda against a private business that employs 80,000 Floridians. Yes, Ron DeSantis is using his executive authority to come down on a private business that employs many Floridians. Although, the reason that DeSantis is doing this is that Disney has been acting in contravention of the popular will of Floridians and their elected leaders.
Democrats do this all the time to businesses in the states that they run. Few would dare to challenge Democratic Party politicians when they use their governing power to force private businesses to do as their Leftist dogma demands.
Of course, for the Left, a Republican leader forcing a privately owned business to comply with a law that many Republicans favor (in this case, Florida’s Parental Rights in Education bill) is verboten. Business should only be made to comport themselves with the laws and standards of the states in which they operate if those laws are deemed ideologically appropriate by the American Left.
Disney is also making a (flawed) strategic calculation when it comes to resisting the popular will of Floridians. In Disney’s eyes, as an international company, it will hurt their bottom line by not standing against DeSantis’ parental rights law. Floridians may find it popular but other parts of the country and the world in which Disney conducts business might be less understanding. Plus, the Left has a well-oiled activist machine that can—and will—be used against any corporation that dares to wander off the Democrats’ ideological reservation.
By making such a public stand, Disney leaders like Bob Iger believe they are endearing their brand to many more people globally than if they either ignored the Florida parental law or accepted it. Where Iger is wrong is that Florida’s stance on refusing radical sexual politics to be visited upon children in kindergarten is very popular across the nation.
Whatever one’s opinion about taxing jobs-producing companies, like Disney, the fact of the matter is that private businesses are not above the law. Further, the law that DeSantis is feuding with Disney over has nothing to do with the company.
The Parental Rights in Education Bill is designed, as its name suggests, to give parents greater say in the education of their children. This was a response to the worrying trend of Left-wing activist groups pressuring school boards across the country to expose children as young as five to sexually explicit material and other concepts that most parents believe to be unacceptable, like “Drag Queen Story Hour.”
No one in Tallahassee asked or much cared for Disney’s opinion on the law, largely because the law doesn’t affect Disney at all. But, sensing a real threat to their ideological agenda, the Left began pressuring Disney because they understood that Disney was a major jobs-producer in Florida. Leftist activist groups thought that by bullying the Mickey Mouse corporation to come out against the bill Left-wing activists believed it’d force DeSantis to back down.
The activist wing of the Democratic Party was not wrong to make this assumption. Most Republican leaders routinely cower away from these culture fights as soon as major businesses get involved.
Epcot at Walt Disney World on August 12, 2022. Image Credit: 19FortyFive.
Ron DeSantis is a Fighter (Unlike Most Republicans)
DeSantis is doing it differently. He recognizes the danger of letting a major international company get away with shirking laws that have popular support in Florida. DeSantis is trying to set an example to the rest of the country that, while there is a separation between government and private companies, a private corporation does not get to simply ignore the law—or the elected leaders of a state whenever it suits them.
Nor do those companies get to use their position as a major component of the state’s economy to try to threaten the elected leaders into abandoning laws and policies that are supported by the people of that state.
Governor DeSantis is using legitimate means to ensure that a major corporation recognizes the limits of its power and influence and learns to respect the democratic will of the people. Should Disney be allowed to win this fight in Florida, it will set a dangerous precedent where any major corporation that dislikes the policies of a Republican governor can basically hold the state government hostage until it capitulates to the undemocratic will of the corporatist entity.
This is a fight for freedom against corporatist, oligarchic tyranny.
Being on the side of Ron DeSantis and Florida are the only sides to be on. Just as with his stance during the COVID-19 pandemic, DeSantis is prizing personal liberty and freedom of his people rather than the empty profits that come from appeasing multinational businesses in hoc to the Democratic Party.
A 19FortyFive Senior Editor, Brandon J. Weichert is a former Congressional staffer and geopolitical analyst who is a contributor at The Washington Times, as well as at American Greatness and the Asia Times. He is the author of Winning Space: How America Remains a Superpower (Republic Book Publishers), Biohacked: China’s Race to Control Life (May 16), and The Shadow War: Iran’s Quest for Supremacy (July 23). Weichert can be followed via Twitter @WeTheBrandon.
