In light of all the criticism Governor DeSantis has been getting from Trump and his acolytes in the media over holding Disney accountable, I thought it would be good to post his statements on this from today.
At the Heritage Leadership Summit, DeSantis hit back against his critics and defended his state’s actions against Disney by pointing out that to simply defer to every corporation in America is not conservative. Rather, he says that’s being a corporatist:
Governor DeSantis on his victory over Disney: "It's not conservative to simply defer to every corporation in America. That's being a corporatist." pic.twitter.com/3rcX7QIPxu
— DeSantis War Room 🐊 (@DeSantisWarRoom) April 21, 2023
Here’s what he said, in part:
In reality, Disney was enjoying unprecedented privileges and subsidies. They controlled their own government in central Florida. They were exempt from laws that virtually everyone else had to follow. They had great tax breaks. They were even able to rack up debt. No single entity or individual in the state of Florida enjoyed such privileges. And you know, that’s not good government. That’s not free enterprise.
But it’s certainly even worse when a company takes all those privileges that have been bestowed over many, many decades and uses that to wage war on state policy regarding families and children. So we said that arrangement doesn’t work for us. That self-governing status is gone and that’s exactly what we did and we were right to do that…
Again, if you’re a corporatist you would not want to counteract that because you would let them do whatever they want. But if you’re somebody that believes that we the people ultimately govern and that we should have a rule of law, and that free enterprise means that actually everybody follows the same set of rules, then what Florida is doing is exactly and precisely correct. And we’re going to continue to do what is correct.
To quote a cute fictional little creature named Grogu, “Yes! Yes! Yes!”
Disney tried to use its power to keep this LGBT garbage in the elementary school classrooms, even pressuring its president to oppose the bill protecting young children by ceasing all political donations in the state of Florida and coming out against the potential new law.
At the time this bill was only protecting children ages 5-8 in Kindergarten through 3rd grade from classroom instruction on sexual orientation and gender identity. These children are too young to even think about such things and yet Disney wanted to force this on these innocent children and against the wishes of parents.
Governor DeSantis was right to oppose Disney on this and remove the special privileges they were enjoying that no other business was able to get.