The governor of Colorado has rolled-out the red carpet for Disney.
Here is Dana Milbank:
Mickey Mouse needs a sanctuary city.
Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-Hades) got his state legislature this week to abolish the favorable tax arrangement that brought Disney World to Orlando and kept it there for 55 years. It’s the latest salvo against corporate America from the Trump right, which has already threatened Twitter, Facebook, Citigroup and Delta Air Lines. But now they’re canceling Mickey and Minnie? That’s just Goofy.
Taking aim at Ariel, Belle, Jasmine, Pocahontas and Moana? It’s not only cruel — it’s Cruella.
Suddenly, sad times are upon the Happiest Place on Earth. Jared Polis, the Democratic governor of Colorado, has promised to “grant Mickey and Minnie full asylum in Colorado” and offered Disney a “Mountain Disneyland” retreat from “Florida’s authoritarian socialist attacks on the private sector.” Many Disney fans online are urging Disney World to leave Florida.
Of course, you can’t just put a resort with six theme parks and two dozen or so hotels on a magic carpet ride to, say, New Jersey. (As it is, central Floridians could be stuck with more than $1 billion in debt and a massive property-tax increase because of DeSantis’s anti-Disney vendetta.) But Disney is the place where dreams come true, and mine is that the whole of Disney World, which employs roughly 80,000 Floridians and attracts tens of millions of tourists every year, will take the second star to the right and straight on till morning — and abandon Florida entirely.
DeSantis would be left with a 25,000-acre house of horrors in Orlando: an abandoned resort in a state nobody wants to visit, thanks to Ron’s Runaway Railway.
His “don’t say gay” legislation makes Florida unwelcoming to LGBTQ people. His voter-suppression laws and race-baiting attacks on teaching history and race make Florida hostile to Black, Latino and Asian Americans. Rising antisemitism (Florida’s most famous resident just had a film screening at Mar-a-Lago characterized by antisemitic swipes at Mark Zuckerberg) gives Jews pause about the state. DeSantis’s MAGA-signaling anti-immigrant and antiabortion laws repel more large swaths of the population. His banning of math textbooks should send educated Floridians packing. His opposition to Medicaid expansion and Florida’s excessive covid-19 death rate over the past year have sent many Floridians to the morgue.
Read the rest here.