Ron DeSantis's FLAWLESS VICTORY, Graciously Ready To Let Disney Stop Suing Him
We good?
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, his presidential campaign starting to drip and melt like a Mickey Mouse ice cream bar dropped on a hot Orlando sidewalk in August, says he’s ready to “move on” from his culture war fight with the Walt Disney Company, as long as Disney just drops its lawsuit against Florida and lets DeSantis revoke the special tax district under which Walt Disney World operated for over 50 years.
Generous!
In an interview on CNBC’s “Last Call” Monday, DeSantis explained to host Brian Sullivan he’s willing to let bygones be bygones, as long as Disney agrees he wins.
We’ve basically moved on. They’re suing the state of Florida. They’re going to lose that lawsuit. So what I would say is, drop the lawsuit.
For reasons we can’t possibly begin to understand, Politico wrote up that ultimatum as if it indicated a new flexibility on DeSantis’s part, claiming that DeSantis had “signaled … that he wanted an end to his war with Disney.”
We aren’t so sure Politico understands what DeSantis has in mind here. Telling Disney it should capitulate in its federal lawsuit is pretty far from a peace offering. By that standard, Vladimir Putin has been letting Ukraine know for well over a year that he’s willing to end that war, too, if Ukraine would please surrender.
The Disney lawsuit argues that DeSantis violated the state’s contract with Disney for no reason at all. In doing so, the suit says DeSantis stomped all over Disney’s due process and First Amendment rights, because the whole mess got rolling after Disney’s then-CEO Bob Chapek very cautiously spoke out against Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” law.
As Yr Wonkette’s Liz Dye pointed out in May, when Disney sued, Disney’s claim that Florida was engaging in unlawful retaliation “was helped by DeSantis and his allies fairly shouting into every microphone they could find that they were doing this to punish Disney for its speech and had no other reason for enacting the laws.”
So what else did DeSantis offer to Disney Monday, to show how willing he is to just let this be untreated wastewater under Cinderella’s Castle? Let’s see him close the deal!
Asked why he doesn’t just call Disney CEO Bob Iger to iron out an agreement, DeSantis graciously reminded Disney that “No one has made Disney more money recently than me,” because during the pandemic, Florida was wide open for business, and even though Disney shut its California park down, it was free to play disease vector all it wanted in Florida!
But when Disney did close anyway, its cast members got unemployment, and wasn’t that kind of DeSantis, to provide the bare minimum of government services as required by law?
Sullivan attempted again to ask why DeSantis doesn’t just ring up Iger, and DeSantis denied him a second time, going off on a tangent about how Disney had a lot of problems outside Florida, like “the skirmish they got in with these young kids,” a vague reference to DeSantis’s own bizarre claim that opposing Florida’s law amounted to “sexualization of children.” Wasn’t that a neat trick? Disney didn’t have a fight with DeSantis, it had a fight with “these young kids,” none of whom exist.
In any case, Disney needs to “go back to what you did well,” before it sexualizes all the children that it never sexualized, and then maybe Disney could take advantage of what a great place Florida is to do business as long as you don’t upset the governor.
Disney just needs to see that it’s already in “the state that even CNBC ranks as number one of all 50 states for economy,” DeSantis explained.
“Your competitors all do very well here, Universal, SeaWorld. They have not had the same special privileges as you have.
“So all we want to do is treat everybody the same, and let’s move forward. I’m totally fine with that. But I’m not fine with giving extraordinary privileges, you know, to one special company at the exclusion of everybody else.”
So wow, that Ron DeSantis sure is entirely open to allowing Disney to let him off the hook. We’re sure The Mouse That Lawyered up will be very impressed.
[Politico / CNBC / Insider / DeSantis image snipped from photo by Gage Skidmore, Creative Commons License 2.0]
Yr Wonkette is funded entirely by reader donations. If you can, please subscribe, or if you prefer, you could put on your Mickey Mouse ears and make a one-time donation using the button below. You could even do that without any amusing branded headgear.
Sea World makes $1.7 billion annually. Disney World makes $22 billion annually. And it seems likely that a decent chunk of Sea World tickets are a "Well, while we're in town for Disney we might as well see tortured orcas, too" sort of thing. So, no. They're not in the same ballpark.
Also fuck Ron DeSantis for making me defend Disney.
So, obviously DeSantos knows Florida will lose in court. Perhaps due to the fact that he and his cronies couldn't conceal the glee with which they bragged about doing this in retaliation for Disney's "free speech." As if corporations were actually people, you see.
DeSantos didn't think it all the way through. He thought about the short-term bump he could get from his cackling hyenas. If he thought at all about how Disney would respond, he only thought about it for a second and guessed that they'd knuckle under without much fuss.
He didn't stop to think that, of all right-wing corporations, Disney may be most dependent on Creative Class labor; which is disproportionately liberal and, dare I say, gay. He didn't consider that Disney may have more staff lawyers than the state of Florida; and better ones, at that. Nor did he consider that Disney has nearly 100 years of beloved characters and among the best name-recognition and brand value on the planet; as opposed to...um...Ron DeSantos and some sneering Florida white-bread thugs?
So now that he has thought about it, watch him grovel more and more cravenly as Disney refuses to let him out of the hole he dug.