Disney vs DeSantis

Bob Chapek, Disney’s CEO, was paid $32.5 million last year. It’s hard to feel sorry for someone on that sort of money. Poor Bob, though. He’s caught in the middle of a vicious fight between Florida’s conservative governor Ron DeSantis and Disney’s LGBTQ+ activists and he’s being pummelled from both sides. It’s nasty. Children probably shouldn’t watch.

The story begins with DeSantis’s Florida Parental Rights in Education Act, which passed in March and banned Floridian schoolteachers from discussing sexuality and mutable gender-identities with very young children. America’s progressives despise DeSantis and, it seems, the notion that parents should have more control over what their sprogs are told about sex. They successfully dubbed the legislation the Don’t Say Gay bill, even though it does not forbid saying the word gay.

Hollywood celebrities and talking heads on corporate media went to great lengths to denounce the bill, which worked a treat for DeSantis, because the law passed and the public enjoyed watching the impotent fury of the rich and famous. A polling company found that ‘fully two-thirds of voters believe it is inappropriate for teachers or school personnel to discuss gender identity with children’.

Most Democrats in Florida supported the law too. But Bob Iger, Disney’s former chief wizard, had other ideas. Iger doesn’t get on with Chapek, the man who replaced him; the two appear to have fallen out over mysterious Disney matters during the Covid pandemic. Iger – concerned only about the innocence of youth, no doubt – went on Twitter and CNN to say that he believed the Florida law to be ‘harmful to children’. Sure enough, his intervention put pressure on his successor to condemn DeSantis’s wicked new legislation.