All Disney had to do was read Ron’s book to make their case:
When the Walt Disney Co. went looking for evidence to feature in its new lawsuit against Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, its lawyers found much of what they needed in DeSantis’s own recently published memoir.
Buried in Disney’s complaint against DeSantis is something surprising. Numerous quotes taken from “The Courage to be Free” appear to support the company’s central allegation: that the Republican governor improperly wielded state power to punish Disney’s speech criticizing his policies, violating the First Amendment.
Memoirs by presidential aspirants often lay out a blueprint for their coming candidacies. DeSantis’s does, too. It boasts extensively about his war on Disney to advertise how he would marshal the powers of the presidency against so-called woke elites.
Disney’s lawsuit cites exactly these passages. DeSantis — who signed a law taking control of Disney’s special self-governing district, and moved to nullify the company’s efforts to work around it — repeatedly flaunts the truth: These were retaliation against Disney for opposing his “don’t say gay” law limiting classroom discussion of sex and gender.
-DeSantis’s book brags about his rapid mobilization of the state legislature to target Disney’s tax district. The same passage declares that this happened because of the company’s “support of indoctrinating young schoolchildren in woke gender identity politics.” That admits to retribution against speech opposing his legislation.
-The book rips Disney for vowing to work to repeal the governor’s law, describing this as “a frontal assault” on it. That, too, is a description of political speech. Yet the book menacingly declares that, after this, “things got worse for Disney,” and that it would “soon find out” the truth about Florida’s war with Disney, i.e., the state would punish that speech.
-The book describes DeSantis’s discussions with Republicans in the Florida legislature about whether they were prepared to tackle the “thorny issue involving the state’s most powerful company.” That confirms Disney was the unique target of legislative action.
In a companion to the book’s launch, DeSantis wrote a Wall Street Journal op-ed that explicitly discussed governmental actions against Disney as an effort to “fight back” against its “woke ideology,” which is to say, its political speech.
This is unusual, says Scott Wilkens, senior counsel at the Knight First Amendment Institute. In such lawsuits, Wilkens notes, you “often have to make inferences” about the motives driving government officials.
That makes DeSantis’s admissions remarkable. “You have pretty clear statements from Governor DeSantis that he is seeking to punish a corporation for its speech,” Wilkens told me. “That’s prohibited by the First Amendment.”
On that basis and others, Disney is asking the courts to halt DeSantis’s assault. To get around the obvious First Amendment problem, DeSantis insists his moves were legitimate because they targeted special Disney privileges originally created by government.
But that doesn’t justify the revocation of those privileges specifically as retaliation for speech, as David French argues in the New York Times. French notes that Disney’s case is strong and raises serious First Amendment questions in spite of government’s role in initially creating its unique arrangement. (Note: Most liberals don’t think Disney deserves these privileges, just that government shouldn’t nix them to chill its speech.)
DeSantis was too cute by half on this one. He thought he’d hit the populist sweet spot by going against a corporate arrangement opposed by the left over a culture war issue that thrills the right. Instead he just pissed everyone off. Even the wingnuts aren’t thrilled about going after Disney and liberals are appalled at his authoritarian power grabs. Taking on the states’ largest employer to make a crude point about LGBTQ issues just seems bizarre.
He is actually a pretty terrible politician but I’m beginning to think he really believes most of the extremist stuff he’s spouting. The relentlessness of it, the daily roll-out of yet another atrocity suggests that he has no intention of trimming his sails even as his numbers tank. Today he announced that he will sign a law expanding the death penalty in Florida to include child molesters, something the the Supreme Court has deemed unconstitutional. What’s next? Slavery? This guy was involved in the torture regime in Guantanamo, after all.
Wouldn’t a simple opportunist take a pause on some of this satuff?