Ron DeSantis blew this one royally
As it’s an election year – particularly for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and his fellow Republicans in the state legislature, you can expect a number of stupid moves being made to score political points. It’s easy to hand wring over the damage that the governor is doing to his state by revoking Disney’s self-governing privileges, something the company has held since 1967 – or to laugh off the preposterous QAnon conspiracies that the GOP has tried to conflate with Disney cartoons, but the problem is that there are a number of people who sincerely subscribe to this nonsense who will turn out and vote Republican, and getting outraged about it does absolutely nothing to keep DeSantis and company from doing what they’re doing.
Those in the middle don’t really want to associate with people who complain a lot, because they see them as losers. So making bold moves as risky as this one is could sway over a few of them.
However, DeSantis like everybody else in the world of politics, doesn’t have a magic wand that can just will his reckless agenda into being. He’s already facing considerable pushback for his latest effort to act like Donald Trump by the entertainment conglomerate itself. DeSantis, counting on his supporters to cheer and his opposition to despair, decided to revoke their status without checking what the original law actually says – leaving the door wide open for a number of legal challenges.
The law required that the state of Florida could not interfere with their special status until all debts are paid – requiring that Disney be given $1 billion in currently outstanding debt before their official status is canceled. That would mean DeSantis would either be forced to raise taxes an exorbitant amount during election season – something the Democrats would absolutely remind voters of – or just call off the whole thing, which would make him look powerless to his supporters while firing up his opposition further.
James Sullivan is the assistant editor of Brain World Magazine and an advocate of science-based policy making