Authoritarian and proud

Three Fingers Ron deliberately targeted Disney for political retaliation. Just ask him (and whoever wrote his “book”):

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.)

I assume his counsel is cuing up some kind of Tuckeresque “there is no expectation that I am ever telling the truth” defense.