To review, DeSantis has made a big and ongoing political show of targeting the Walt Disney Company after Disney executives objected, in the most wishy-washy corporatist way possible, to the Florida “Don’t Say Gay” law that Florida Republicans used to ban all mentions of LGBTQ Americans, even if you are one, in Florida schools. (DeSantis has since moved to expand the law to include all students of all ages after initially pushing the law through with the claim that Republicans only intended it to apply to the wee tots in the youngest grades, because modern Republicans are liars first and foremost and don’t particularly give a damn whether you know it.)
Disney condemned the “Don’t Say Gay” law as being bad for business, upon which Dear Leader Ron had an absolute public fit over the audacity of a U.S. corporation announcing an opinion he didn’t like. Immediately after signing the bill into law, state lawmakers were already mulling a repeal of Disney’s 1967-granted special property rights in the area surrounding their Florida theme parks, explicitly citing Disney’s “woke ideology” as the reason why.
DeSantis and Florida Republicans would eventually follow through with that threat, though not before Disney’s allies could so badly outmaneuver them as to render the whole thing nearly a farce, and that leads us to the present. Disney is now suing DeSantis and other Florida state officials for a “targeted campaign of government retaliation—orchestrated at every step by Governor DeSantis as punishment for Disney’s protected speech.”
In order to win their lawsuit, Disney has to prove that DeSantis and other government officials sought to punish the company specifically for its political speech—a plain violation of the First Amendment. That’s usually difficult to prove because crooked political officials who intend to do such things are usually at least clever enough to try to cover up their intentions. Very few of them write books bragging about their most crooked acts, complete with little paragraphs diagramming out why it was crooked, but DeSantis has never once been accused of being subtle. He just … wrote it down.
Greg Sargent went through Disney’s lawsuit, and his new column outlines all the evidence the Mouse’s lawyers were able to glean from the pages of DeSantis’ own book. He wrote the book as his presidential pitch, and as such it brags about using his government powers to retaliate against the company.
The DeSantis memoir links his pressure on the state legislature to target Disney’s property rights to the company’s “support of indoctrinating young schoolchildren in woke gender identity politics,” notes Sargent. Ron brags that “things got worse for Disney” after Disney spoke out, and describes conversations with state lawmakers gauging their appetite for taking Disney on.
And, in launching the book, DeSantis wrote his own op-ed calling the moves an attempt to “fight back” against the company for its “woke ideology.”
A First Amendment expert told Sargent that those amount to “pretty clear statements” from DeSantis that “he is seeking to punish a corporation for its speech,” which is a plain violation. As a private citizen, or as any company or group not part of government, you are free to make all the retaliatory moves against a company that doesn’t share your “values” that you can muster. Government, however, is specifically banned from punishing political speech—a distinction that used to be quite clear in the public mind before proto fascist tweet-trolls and Republican elected officials alike began insisting that the First Amendment instead prohibited the exact opposite.
The danger here for DeSantis is twofold. First, it’s quite plausible that his own public writings and statements alone are ample proof that he retaliated against the company for its political speech, because that is what he repeatedly keeps saying he did. The perhaps worse danger is that Ron’s public claims give, at the least, sufficient evidence for Disney’s case to move to the discovery phase, upon which the Florida governor’s office will be obliged to turn over every document, email, and text conversation in which somebody in the office referenced the company.
The odds that anyone in that crowd of chucklef—s had the wherewithal to be more circumspect about their illegal motives in private than they were in public are approximately zero, which means that the Walt Disney Company may come out of this lawsuit not only with their extraordinary tax and property privileges intact, but with the right to tattoo the company logo onto DeSantis’ rear end. This will be a very hard case for Disney to lose even if they didn’t have more lawyers available to press the case than DeSantis’ memoir has pages.
DeSantis did all of this in an effort to become the next Republican president, of course. That is why DeSantis has done everything ever since he came into office, as he mimes and mimics his way into the Republican psyche by attaching himself to every scrap of “culture war” he can find. But DeSantis is never going to get the nomination, because he is very creepy, completely devoid of personality, and has no political moves other than grumpy, whining showboating.
Unless Donald Trump dies. If Donald Trump dies, DeSantis will dig him up, wear his skin, and cruise to the nomination claiming to be him. But that’s a tall order, and Ron no longer has a plausible Plan B.
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