How DeSantis accidentally handed Disney a potent weapon against him
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.)
Which points to another way DeSantis might have undermined himself. Because Disney’s case is real, it will likely end up in discovery, says Lee Kovarsky, a law professor at the University of Texas at Austin. That could yield damaging internal communications that undercut DeSantis’s excuse that this was just about revoking Disney’s special privileges in the name of good governance.
“Discovery will probably show that the real reason was viewpoint motivated,” Kovarsky told me, adding dryly: “I doubt it will show that this was a principled business response to Disney’s long-standing governance carveout.”
DeSantis and his advisers had good reason to calculate that boasting about his war on “woke Disney” would be a winner. Only a year ago this did look like formidable politics. But since then, a string of DeSantis’s staged uses of state power against assorted woke and liberal enemies have flopped.
The governor chartered planes to transport unsuspecting migrants from Texas to liberal Martha’s Vineyard. But
investigative reporting revealed the scheme as almost a political version of an
opera buffa, and he hasn’t chartered another one since.
Meanwhile,
as The Post reports, the voter fraud police that DeSantis created to great fanfare have struggled to find anything real. Their targets have suffered serious life consequences, mainly demonstrating arbitrary cruelty.
All of this shows how hollow these right-wing theatrical exercises have become. When you start with the thrills you hope to inspire in the Fox News audience and build policy around that, the results tend to collapse once the lack of a real policy rationale becomes widely understood. If quotes from DeSantis’s own memoir lead to another such implosion, it would represent a spectacular and richly deserved form of political justice.
