DeSantis Sez, "L'État, c'est moi."

In the past year or so, Ron DeSantis has gone from looking like plausibly the best we can expect the Republican Party to produce as a presidential candidate to what we might as well start calling a banana Republican.

Your guess is as good as mine as to whether those are now the same thing.

It all started reasonably enough with the measure the left likes to smear as "don't say gay:" The government shouldn't be running schools at all, but since it is, it is not out of bounds for the government to set policy. DeSantis supporting or signing into law a measure to not propagandize far-left academic fads about sex and gender is hardly unreasonable.

Schools should be private, full stop. But until they are, the best we can hope for is a government to have a sex education curriculum (if it teaches that at all) that lies far from such travesties as puritanism or what DeSantis has justifiably likened to grooming.

Disney, which is a private corporation and as such has a right to free speech, vocally opposed the legislation. This should be the end of the story, but it isn't, because the ESG movement has, through state investment made Disney a sock-puppet of the likes of Gavin Newsom.

DeSantis, were he truly pro-freedom, might have discounted Disney's "stand" as, say, California's stand or Gavin Newsom's stand, and let it go at that, but he has taken things personally or is pro-freedom in name only: Rather than stand for freedom, DeSantis ripped apart a very old development agreement with Disney last year, ultimately replacing the board of the Reedy Creek Improvement District with his own cronies. At the start of this, I said:

The GOP should be talking about everyone getting the low taxes of Disney en route to no taxes -- not using taxes to stifle political speech.

I stand by those words.

This battle has entered a new phase with the revelation that the cronies in charge of what is now called the Central Florida Tourism Oversight District have their hands tied, legally:

Image by Hyacinth Rigaud, via Wikimedia Commons, public domain, as a faithful reproduction of a publc domain work.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis on Thursday promised a new round of action against Disney in his ongoing dispute with the entertainment giant, including looking at the taxes on Disney's hotels and imposing tolls on roads that serve its theme parks.

...

"They are not superior to the people of Florida," DeSantis said during an evening appearance at Hillsdale College, the conservative liberal arts college in Michigan. "So come hell or high water we're going to make sure that policy of Florida carries the day. And so they can keep trying to do things. But ultimately we're going to win on every single issue involving Disney I can tell you that." [bold added]

The way to fight bad ideas is with better ideas, not by abusing government force against people who spout bad ideas. And the rational action to take when it becomes apparent that one has made a mistake is to own that mistake, apologize, and try to do better going forward -- not doubling down.

This battle taken alone might not, in today's political context, disqualify DeSantis as a candidate for President. But taken together with other anti-speech, anti-property rights actions, it looks like an ominous pattern to me.

-- CAV