Want to join an “exclusive” club where you can “stay close to the magic for decades to come” and “make vacation memories to last a lifetime” and participate in “complimentary events” that “provide Members access to a select theme park after the park has closed to the general public! Enjoy shorter-than-usual attraction wait times, Character sightings, great entertainment and more” etc?
Terms and conditions apply, however. “Effective June 3, 2021, to obtain a Disney Vacation Club® Membership Card, Members must accumulate a total of at least 150 Vacation Points purchased directly from Disney Vacation Development, Inc.” Otherwise you’re shit to them. You do not matter to the Disney Vacation Club® unless you accumulate a set number of points… and buy a timeshare at one of their properties. High rollers only. Disney magic don’t grow on trees, libtards. If you want platinum-level service then you better do some platinum-level spending.
Disney themselves used to have this kind of deal going on with Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. They spent platinum-level on contributions to state GOP campaigns and got platinum-level service on legislation. Like last April, when the Governor’s awesome new law prohibiting social media bans on candidates for public office was about to pass. With just two days left in the 2021 state legislative session, Disney’s lobbyists called up and asked the DeSantis’s office to exempt them from it, seeing the knee-jerk response to Twitter nuking @realDonaldTrump in the aftermath of the Capitol riot as too broadly worded and conceivably preventing Disney from blocking users from the comment sections on their Disney+ streaming service if they were a candidate.
And they got the carve-out as requested. With just minutes to spare, an amendment to SB 7202 was added, exempting the owners or operators of any Florida “complex comprised of at least 25 contiguous acres owned and controlled by the same business entity and which contains permanent exhibitions and a variety of recreational activities and has a minimum of 1 million visitors annually”. This meant that Disney as owners of Disney World – and Comcast, as owners of Universal Studios Orlando, and Lego, as owners of Legoland Florida, would be free to ban Marco Rubio, Rick Scott, Nikki Fried, Charlie Crist, Val Demings, and others – plus of course Ron DeSantis himself – from any online service they own or operate. Spend $5 million in an election cycle as Disney did on Florida Republicans and Democrats alike in 2020, get special treatment.
But that was before the dark times.
Florida MAGA Bro House member Anthony Sabatini jumps in on escalating the anti-Disney rage.
In the first two installments of this series we toured the landscape of the quasi-religious devotion to the Disney entertainment empire and how that devotion increasingly coming into conflict with the company “going woke” (but actually simply making business decisions by attuning its content to the cultural mainstream) set up a powder keg of MAGA/QAnon rage just waiting to be lit.
For years, everything Disney did to piss off right wingers was simply passive – meaning they produced content or made changes that infuriated them one way or another. There was one (quite brilliant) incidence of not-so-subtle trolling of their beloved conspiracy media figures and the snake oil bullshit they sell in December 2021’s Spider-Man: No Way Home…
…but it otherwise essentially amounted to “Disney changes XYZ, MAGA trolls and elected Republicans bitch and scream until they get distracted by the next made-up controversy.”
That all changed in March 2022, when Florida Republicans passed and Ron DeSantis signed the draconian “Don’t Say Gay” law, which effectively outlaws acknowledging the existence of LGBTQ people to children under 10 years old in Florida schools. The law is ambiguous by design, written to instill a culture of fear in classrooms, and allows parents to sue teachers and school districts for any perceived violation, virtually guaranteeing courts to be clogged with obnoxious Evangelical Karens’ frivolous complaints and scaring teachers out of doing their job. The law predictably ignited a fury.
Disney CEO Bob Chapek, faced with a revolt inside the company – which employs 77,000 in Florida – was forced to respond publicly, telling the annual Disney shareholders meeting on March 9 that he reached out personally to DeSantis to ask him to back off, same as his lobbyists did over the social media ban bill. “While we have been strong supporters of the community for decades, I understand that many are upset that we did not speak out against the bill,” Chapek, whose company has already donated $50,000 to DeSantis’s campaign, said. “We were opposed to the bill from the outset, but we chose not to take a public position on it because we thought we could be more effective working behind the scenes engaging directly with lawmakers.”
Not a lot of people think Chapek handled this well, not his employees, media observers, or LGBTQ activists. And certainly not Ron DeSantis who said “I think [Disney] crossed a line. And you know, people ask me kind of about their posture on the bill. I said, ‘You know what? If we would’ve put in the bill that you are not allowed to have curriculum that discussed the oppression of the Uyghurs in China, Disney would’ve endorsed that in a second,’ and that’s the hypocrisy of this and we’re gonna make sure we’re fighting back when people are threatening our parents and threatening our kids.”
But the real dirty work had already been outsourced to his vicious attack dog spokeswoman Christian Pushaw, who had already in early March accused opponents of the bill as being “groomers”, meaning they wanted to prime children for sexual exploitation by pedophiles.
Which was like ringing the dinner bell for QAnon freaks.
A very loud dinner bell.
MAGA protest outside of Disney Land in California earlier in April.
MAGA protest outside of Disney World in Florida on Saturday.
What else are we supposed to say that hasn’t already been said about incitement? It’s not like warning “Someone’s going to get killed” is going to make any difference right now. Someone’s probably going to get killed and then DeSantis and Fox and all these other fucking assholes are going to “condemn all violence” and blah blah blah like they didn’t sic a violent doomsday cult on Disney. That’s it. We hope it doesn’t happen, but the way this is escalating it’s hard to see how it doesn’t end in people dying because some sick freak thought he was protecting innocent children by opening fire on a crowd of tourists on their way into a Disney theme park.
It’s a sad statement on the reality of right wing politics these days, but unfortunately it’s nothing new. What is different however is a separate dark turn this Disney vs MAGA war is taking. And no, we’re not talking about Ben Shapiro’s moronic plan to create right wing children’s content. Dumb and likely malevolent as that will be, it’s positively benign in comparison to this:
Next year, the woke Disney lobbyists will ask Congress to extend Micky Mouse’s trademark.
I think not.
— Rep. Lauren Boebert (@RepBoebert) April 4, 2022
Shitty spelling aside, this is not an idle threat. It’s one thing to get Republicans to grab their balls and actually revoke Major League Baseball’s antitrust exemption like the assholes pretended they would after the league pulled the 2021 All-Star Game from Atlanta in response to the Georgia GOP passing a voter suppression bill. The numbers weren’t there. However, should the numbers be there to not act to extend Disney’s copyright on Mickey Mouse’s earliest depictions from the 1920s when they expire in 2024, then it will happen. They’ve already made it quite clear they’re going to use the levers of power to punish a company for daring to challenge their sacred empire.
We need not tell you this is Putin and Orban-level shit. Sure, it’s just a copyright and there’s plenty of room to argue about whether or not a company worth billions should be given extra special protection for that century-old cartoon. There’s no place however to fucking use that as a means to an end of punishing that company for taking a stance against legislation designed specifically to inflict needless and cruel harm on teachers and schools for acknowledging gay people.
Literally, that is the lede to the Washington Examiner story on this copyright shitshow: “Republican lawmakers might try to use an expiring copyright on Mickey Mouse to punish Disney for its vocal opposition to controversial Florida education legislation.” There’s literally no other legislative objective to doing so. It does not have even a patina of “reform to copyright law” or whatever pretext past generations in Washington would have applied. Same goes for DeSantis’s moronic plan to challenge Disney World’s special jurisdictional status, though that’s far less of a sure thing.
This is the top of a slippery slope, normalizing retribution as governance. There’s no justice here, it’s simple bloodlust. Corporate America fucking sucks for a lot of reasons, but the path to “punishing” them runs through reforming taxation and regulation, making them better citizens. The kind of shit Republicans have been very clear they have no interest in doing when whipping up QAnon freaks and threatening their property are the quicker and easier ways to score points.
We’ve been a bit harsh on Disney in this series, mostly justifiably so. An amoral megacorporation that constantly finds insane new ways to cash in on the nostalgia of adults is an easy enough target for insipid Caucasian news sites like National Zero. Yet they’re not the lesser evil here because they’re not evil at all – or at least not any more evil than capitalism itself. The cynic who says every move they make to become more inclusive is just in service for the bottom line never follows up with how that’s ultimately supposed to be a bad thing if audiences are exposed to a little more diversity on screen, provided it’s handled properly.
Ultimately, they’re worth saving. However reluctantly Bob Chapek waded into this mess with “Don’t Say Gay” he went ahead and crossed the Rubicon. Then Republicans crossed an even bigger one and have fired up a Death Star of destruction aimed at private enterprise for daring to speak out.
“Go woke, Go broke” used to be the anthem of losers upset over popular culture leaving them and their “values” behind. It’s now a warning from an evil empire run by a hive of scum and villainy.