The Patriot Post® · In Brief: Why I Stood Up to Disney
Back in the 1960s, Disney won a favorable arrangement with the state of Florida regarding tax status and land management for the area now known as Disney World. Fast-forward to 2022, and Disney had gone so far to the woke side that it joined the mob falsely attacking a Florida law preventing sexual grooming in the classroom. Republicans in the state began the process of stripping Disney of its special status. Cue an op-ed by Governor Ron DeSantis explaining his decision to sign that bill:
On Monday, I signed the law ending the Walt Disney Co.‘s self-governing status over 43 square miles in central Florida, an area almost as big as Miami. Disney no longer has its own government. It has to live under the same laws as Universal Studios, SeaWorld and every other company in our state and is still on the hook for the old district’s municipal debt.
Disney’s special arrangement, which dates to 1967, was an indefensible example of corporate welfare. It provided the company with favorable tax treatment, including the ability to assess its own property valuations and to enjoy the benefits of regional infrastructure improvements without paying taxes toward the projects. It exempted Disney from Florida’s building and fire-prevention codes. It even allowed Disney to build a nuclear power plant and to use eminent domain to seize private property outside the district’s boundaries. While special districts are common in Florida, Disney’s deal was conspicuous in the massive benefits it conferred. Disney’s self-governing status endured because the company’s unrivaled political power in Florida made its arrangement virtually untouchable.
For more than 50 years, the state of Florida put Disney on a pedestal. That all changed last year, when left-wing activists working at the company’s headquarters in Burbank, Calif., pressured Disney to oppose Florida’s Parental Rights in Education Act. The legislation bans classroom instruction on sexuality and gender ideology in kindergarten through third grade and requires that sex instruction in other grades be age-appropriate. Disney executives were seen on videos boasting about the company’s plans to inject sexuality into its programming for children.
Democrats often rail about corporations’ nefarious influence over politics and oppose favorable exceptions for big companies. Yet they supported keeping Disney’s special self-governing status. This confirms how much the modern left has jettisoned principle in favor of power. As long as large corporations help advance the left’s woke agenda, the left is willing to do their bidding.
DeSantis goes on at length about the danger of Disney advancing “the woke political agenda,” while explaining in part how activists bully corporations into going along. He also explains the wisdom of governing Florida in a new and better way than either power-hungry Democrats or the “old-guard corporate” Republicans have done. Specifically, he concludes:
For decades, GOP elected officials have campaigned on free-market principles but governed as corporatists—supporting subsidies, tax breaks and legislative carve-outs to confer special benefits on entrenched corporate interests. But policies that benefit corporate America don’t necessarily serve the interests of America’s people and economy.
When corporations try to use their economic power to advance a woke agenda, they become political, and not merely economic, actors. In such an environment, reflexively deferring to big business effectively surrenders the political battlefield to the militant left. Having private companies wield de facto public power isn’t in the best interests of most Americans.
Woke ideology is a form of cultural Marxism. Leaders must stand up and fight back when big corporations make the mistake, as Disney did, of using their economic might to advance a political agenda. We are making Florida the state where the economy flourishes because we are the state where woke goes to die.
Wall Street Journal subscribers can read the whole thing here.