During a recent speech at the Heritage Foundation Leadership Summit, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis discussed his ongoing battle with Disney over their special legal status in the state, saying that it is “corporatist” to allow Disney to receive special treatment.
“As conservatives, it is not conservative to simply defer to every corporation in America,” DeSantis began. “That’s being a corporatist. When I have to look and see in the state of Florida, are we being governed appropriately, are we advancing the rule of law, I have to take on a company like Disney. A corporatist would say you have to give Disney everything it wants.”
“In reality, Disney was enjoying unprecedented privileges and subsidies,” he continued. “They controlled their own government in central Florida. They were exempt from laws that everybody else had to follow. They had great tax breaks. They were even able to rack up debt. No single entity or individual in the state of Florida enjoyed such privileges.”
“You know, that’s not good government, that’s not free enterprise, but it is certainly even worse when a company takes those privileges which have been bestowed over decades and uses that to wage war on state policy regarding families and children,” he added. “So we said that arrangement doesn’t work for us, that self-governing status is gone. And that is exactly what we did and we were right to do that. and now more recently they tried to do an end run around that, to preserve self-governing in defiance of the legislature, and we’re now counteracting that.”
“Again, if you are a corporatist, you would not want to counteract that because you would let them do whatever they want,” DeSantis concluded. “But if you’re somebody who believes the people ultimately govern, and we should have a rule of law, and free enterprise means actually everybody follows the same set of rules.”
Governor DeSantis on his victory over Disney: "It's not conservative to simply defer to every corporation in America. That's being a corporatist." pic.twitter.com/3rcX7QIPxu
— DeSantis War Room ???? (@DeSantisWarRoom) April 21, 2023
