In 1967, Florida gave the Walt Disney Company its own self-governing tax haven. That status is now under threat, and it’s leftists who have long despised the company leaping to its defense.How did the militant left learn to stop worrying and love the mouse? First, by opposing Florida’s Parental Rights in Education Law, which critics branded “Don’t Say Gay.” That the law doesn’t have a word about gays didn’t matter to Disney’s leadership, which jumped into the current LGBTQ+ push by declaring half of its new characters would soon be gay, trans, or Peter Pansexuals.This political meddling earned Disney a foe in Governor DeSantis, who prompted fellow Republicans in the state senate to sunset the sweetheart deal in a Tuesday vote. It’s not your columnist’s intention to take sides in the quarrel over the Florida school law. It’s rather to illuminate the way the left is flipping on a major capitalist corporation.Governor Polis, a Colorado Democrat infamous for avoiding three full years of federal income taxes, responded to the news by decrying the attempt to subject Disney to the laws regulating other corporations and their theme parks.Mr. Polis tweeted, “Florida’s authoritarian socialist attacks on the private sector are driving businesses away. In CO, we don’t meddle in affairs of companies like Disney.” Congresswoman Allison Tant, a Florida Democrat, followed suit, tweeting, “I never thought I’d see the day that Florida’s largest employer, @WaltDisneyWorld, would be under attack by the Florida Legislature.”Is this the same party whose presidential nominee in 2016, Secretary Clinton, said, “We’re going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business”? Somewhere, Adam Smith is chuckling. Does anyone really believe that Democrats have embraced laissez-faire capitalism? If so, it will be news to their allies in Hollywood, who cast corporations as their nemesis of choice. Under the Reedy Creek Improvement District, Disney has powers that sound like those evil fictional conglomerates. Mickey and friends run the police and local government, while enjoying immunity from Orlando’s local laws.Not enough to give Ralph Nader types fits? The corporation also controls environmental protections. It even has the right to build a nuclear power plant, presumably with cooling towers shaped like the iconic mouse ears. Disney also avoids millions of dollars in annual property taxes since it collects them, and thanks to an army of lobbyists in Tallahassee — donating to Democratic and Republican politicians alike — there’s always more cheese.Greasing the skids has ensured rubber stamping of endless subsidies, such as a half a billion dollars earlier this year for a new campus. A 1997 Washington Post piece dubbed Walt Disney World “Tax Dodge City.” Now, as the bill to bring Disney in line with other corporations heads to the Florida House of Representatives, the Post sings a different tune, citing “local officials … warning the repeal could leave them with a burdensome tax bill.”Even socialists like Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — who scuttled similar tax incentives for a local Amazon facility — are as silent as Jiminy Crickets.Take Senator Sanders, another socialist. In 2019, he demanded to know if Disney’s chief executive, Bob Iger, had “a good explanation for why he is being compensated more than $400 million …?”At the time, Mr. Sanders claimed that Disneyland “workers,” using the communist term to dehumanize employees, “are homeless and relying on food stamps to feed their families.”Mr. Sanders even described his 2020 campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination as “about saying to corporations like Disney: if you can pay your executives hundreds of millions of dollars, you can damn well afford to pay your workers a living wage.”Yet he has no such criticism of the current chief executive of Disney, Bob Chapek, whose pay, according to the Wall Street Journal, in 2021 “more than doubled.” Embracing the far-left’s agenda and attacking Mr. DeSantis has its perks.For half a century, Walt Disney’s family-friendly parks and movies entertained generations around the world, becoming synonymous with the best of American culture, and acting as a refuge from its political squabbles.Now Disney has decided to dive feet-first into the culture wars, and if the Florida House of Representatives passes the sunset bill, will pay a steep price in goodwill and cash for a few fawning headlines, all in hopes the socialists eat them last. Beware, mouse, the House that roars.
