Here Comes Our Hero Of The Culture War: “We Will Never Ever Surrender To The Woke Mob”

This Could Be Your Future And It’s Awfully Grim

That's Meatball waving goodbye to thousands of good woke jobs

I’ve never been to a Disney property— although I live on a hill in Los Feliz that was once part of Walt’s estate. When I was in college, Disneyland would have been far more to DeSanctimonious’ liking. They weren’t just homophobic, the gatekeepers actually had rulers and if a man’s hair fell too far over his shirt collar, he wasn’t admitted. Yes, no hippies allowed. I pledged to never go— and I haven’t. Anyway, who was anti-woke first, Meatball?

But Disney quickly evolved— and became a target for America’s silliest fascist. (Silly doesn’t mean “not dangerous.”) Disney isn’t about to close down it’s Florida properties, is it? Well… yesterday L.A. Times editor Ryan Faughnder reported that Disney-- Florida’s second biggest private employer (after Publix, the grocery chain)-- has canceled a plan to move 2,000 workers to Florida. The company had planned to open a new campus in Orlando’s Lake Nona area near the airport to take advantage of roughly $570 million in tax breaks.

Faughnder: “Josh D’Amaro, chairman of Disney’s parks, experiences and products division, on Thursday said in an email to staff that the relocation is no longer happening… ‘Given the considerable changes that have occurred since the announcement of this project, including new leadership and changing business conditions, we have decided not to move forward with construction of the campus,’ D’Amaro said. ‘This was not an easy decision to make, but I believe it is the right one. As a result, we will no longer be asking our employees to relocate.’”

While some employees have already moved to Central Florida, the plan faced considerable pushback from other workers, especially as the political climate in the state became openly hostile toward Disney and DeSantis embraced legislation that many people viewed as anti-LGBTQ+.

“For those who have already moved, we will talk to you individually about your situation, including the possibility of moving you back,” D’Amaro wrote.

The planned move was the source of significant animosity toward then-Chief Executive Bob Chapek. Disney’s board of directors fired Chapek in November, replacing him with the Burbank entertainment giant’s previous longtime leader, Bob Iger.

…Disney recently sued DeSantis for what it called a “campaign of government retaliation” to strip the company of its special privileges in the district that encompasses Walt Disney World. DeSantis earlier this year handpicked a new board for the former Reedy Creek Improvement District, which Disney previously controlled as essentially its own municipal government.

Disney outmaneuvered DeSantis’ incoming board by inking new development deals with the outgoing government body that significantly limited the new group’s power. The DeSantis-backed board last month voted to invalidate the agreements, prompting Disney to sue in federal court.

“I remain optimistic about the direction of our Walt Disney World business,” D’Amaro said in the email. “We have plans to invest $17 billion and create 13,000 jobs over the next ten years. I hope we’re able to do so.”

Now that sounds like a threat to me. A big one. $17 billion creates a lot of jobs and tax revenues. And it’s not just a threat. Yesterday Brooks Barnes wrote that “that $17 billion in planned investment in Walt Disney World was on the line. ‘Does the state want us to invest more, employ more people, and pay more taxes, or not?’ Robert Iger, Disney’s chief executive, said on an earnings-related conference call with analysts last week.” The Florida Department of Economic Opportunity estimates that the billion dollar move that they just cancelled “would have brought more than 2,000 jobs to the region, with $120,000 as the average salary.”

Francis Suarez, Miami’s conservative Republican mayor, blasted Gov. Meatball for the deranged game playing with Disney: “Look, he took an issue that was a winning issue that we all agreed on, which was parental rights for K through third-graders. And it looks like now it’s something that spite or maybe potentially a personal vendetta, which has cost the state now potentially 2,000 jobs in a billion-dollar investment… [H]e hasn’t spent much time in the private sector. And I wonder if that influences his thinking on some of this stuff.”

Don’t expect any sympathy from Suarez on this front, but yesterday, Rebekah Entralgo reported that in DeSantis’ Free State, “the freedom to belong to an effective union is under a ferocious attack… [N]ew DeSantis-signed dues legislation also includes, hidden deep in the text, a killer provision that requires public-sector unions outside law enforcement to have an arbitrary super majority of eligible employees— 60 percent, not just a 50-percent-plus— if they want to keep the right to represent and bargain for public-sector workers. ‘This will hurt working people and the middle class,’ says Karla Hernández-Mats, the president of United Teachers of Dade, the largest teacher union local in the entire Southeast. ‘This is about going after our freedom, about going after workers and their right to a fair contract.’… Florida currently stands 48th in the nation when it comes to teacher pay and, not surprisingly, is facing a massive teacher shortage, opening 2023 with over 5,000 vacancies. Weakening unions, Hernández-Mats believes, will only exacerbate the crisis and speed the larger right-wing agenda to defund public education.”

Another bill signed into Florida law this year advances that agenda by expanding the state’s charter school voucher program, a move that will allow parents to opt out of public schools and send their children to private schools on the state dime. This “school choice” bill will cost the state an estimated $4 billion in funding and starve local school districts. In the Tampa Bay area, for example, almost $850 million will be routed out of public schools for the 2023-2024 school year.

Florida hasn’t always been a testing ground for attacks on public educators and their unions. In fact, back in 1968, educators in Florida staged the nation’s first successful statewide teacher strike to protest chronic school funding shortages and bargain-basement teacher pay. But today the Florida Constitution and state law bar teachers from striking and threaten “hefty penalties” if they do.

That reality has the current struggle against the DeSantis attack on public education and public educators going down a different lane. The statewide teacher union, the Florida Education Association, has just filed a lawsuit in federal court to prevent the implementation of the newly signed DeSantis legislation.

Governor DeSantis, says FEA president Andrew Spar, “has made it clear that he is targeting educators because we exercise our constitutional right to speak out against attempts by this governor and others to stymie the freedom to learn and to stifle freedom of thought.”

The governor, adds Spar, “is using this legislation to retaliate against his critics,” a retaliation “very similar to what we’ve seen in the attacks on Disney.”