“These are people used to getting their own way.” So wrote commentator Mark Davis Monday, talking about how leftists are throwing a tantrum over the Florida government’s rescission of Disney’s 55-year-old sweetheart tax deal.
It’s the same tantrum liberals are throwing, committing actual violence, in response to the Supreme Court’s possible overturning of the unconstitutional Roe v. Wade opinion.
It’s the same tantrum the nation saw after President Trump was elected. As Davis points out, liberals aren’t used to actual push-back. They’re conditioned to expect inexorable movement, in terms of policies and culture, toward the “left.” For this is how it had long been, with conservative opposition being mere holding actions — being the act of standing, to quote William F. Buckley, “athwart history, yelling Stop” (and then continuing to just talk as the Left runs the stop signs and says “see ya’!”).
But Florida governor Ron DeSantis, Donald Trump, and other America-first figures won’t stay “in their place” — and they’re rising to the fore for a simple reason. “Fatigue runs high among Americans who have absorbed years of stories featuring corporate executives deciding to line up with social justice warriors, caring not a whit about the resulting alienation of millions of customers,” explains Davis, citing one culture-war motivating factor.
“Nike chose to confer sainthood onto Colin Kaepernick, whose race-baiting and derision of police have made him a NFL quarterback non grata for five years,” he continues. “Coca-Cola and Delta conspired with Major League Baseball to punish the state of Georgia for bolstering election security. MLB pulled the All-Star Game from Atlanta on the audacious premise that such protections constituted racist ‘voter suppression.’”
And Disney chose to inveigh against the Florida parental-rights legislation. Note here that the law is a rather tame response to government-school sexual devolutionary dominance, mandating only that sexuality (e.g., “transgenderism”) must not be introduced in kindergarten through third grade. Some critics complain that it doesn’t go far enough.
Yet any resistance at all means going too far for the Left. Enter Disney, whose cost-benefit analysis informed that it should not just join the battle, but on the sexual devolutionaries’ side.
The company apparently miscalculated.
As a consequence, it will lose a deal in which it governed a San Francisco-size area much as one would a sovereign nation; under this arrangement, Disney “has been responsible for providing services like roads, power, water and even firefighting in return for billions in relief from taxes and fees,” explains Davis.
In response, the Left has claimed this action stifles Disney’s freedom of expression, taking up the cudgels for a multinational, multi-billion-dollar corporation. A “characteristically shrill New York Times headline,” relates Davis, even called it an “assault on democracy.”
But, Davis points out, this is propaganda, as Governor DeSantis has every legal right to take his actions. Furthermore, the commentator continues, adding perspective:
In fact, this whole drama features all participants doing what they each have a respective right to do. Disney has every right to support or oppose whatever Florida laws it pleases. Any company in any state has the right to be vocal about any issue. No one has said Disney, or any other corporation, should be muzzled in any attempt to advocate on any topic in any fashion. The gasps of surprises have come from people who have spent their lives believing that companies may take the stances of their choice without consequence.
So, to summarize, Disney can oppose and even grossly misrepresent Florida’s legislative intent, peppering its activism with its expressed intent to shoehorn LGBTQ themes into layers of its children’s content. But in response, Florida may decide that it no longer wishes to offer the company a sweetheart tax deal.
Ironic here about those claiming that DeSantis is suppressing Disney’s speech is this:
They’re generally the same people who, when a conservative would be canceled, pointed out that it wasn’t at all a First Amendment violation. “You have every right to express your opinion,” they’d instruct — “but this doesn’t mean you’re free from the consequences for doing so.”
Well?
In fairness, though, there is a difference. When the Left seeks a person’s or entity’s “cancellation,” it means ending the individual’s career or shutting something down. It will use government to do this, too. Just consider the:
- Christian bakers and other establishments targeted by states for destruction for refusing to be party to same-sex “weddings”;
- Christian schools threatened with accreditation loss — an institutional death sentence — for upholding their traditional sense of sexual virtue; and
- local governments’ banning of Christian food chain Chick-fil-A from certain airports.
In contrast, the GOP Florida statesmen aren’t trying to shut Disney down; in fact, they likely don’t desire that outcome. They’re simply going to treat it like any other business — equally.
Nonetheless, it is push-back, and it may explain why Joe Biden’s earpiece said on Wednesday that the Make America Great Again movement is the “most extreme” group in recent American history. After all, leftists operate emotionally, and resistance is so alien an experience to them that MAGA certainly feels extreme.
For the only consistent definition of “conservative” is “a desire to preserve the status quo,” and our status quo has long been left-wing change and conservative capitulation. Thus, the world’s Mitch McConnells, Kevin McCarthys, and Mitt Romneys don’t threaten the Left: They’re the caboose to liberalism’s engine of change.
But the Left despises the MAGA movement because it acts as the Left does: It seeks its own change. It isn’t defensive, but aspires to reclaim lost territory. To leftists, who’ve enjoyed more than 100 years of continued imperial cultural expansion, this is alien, scary, and an existential threat.
