Jason Garcia is an investigative journalist who persistently exposes Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s attacks on the Constitution and dubious dealings.
In this post, he details DeSantis’s determined efforts to silence those who disagree with him.
“Don’t Say Gay” is the centerpiece of his attack on the First Amendment, but the attack radiates out to anyone who takes issue with DeSantis, like the Disney Corporation, which had the temerity to defend its free speech rights. The result: DeSantis took control of the entity that runs Disney World and engaged in a public battle with the state’s biggest employer.
This may impress some voters but it must frighten other corporations. Imagine an elected official empowered to take charge of your business because you disagreed with his extremist policies.
DeSantis’s war on the Disney Corporation should frighten every big corporation. How dare he?
Florida is the state where freedom of speech goes to die.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Duh-SATAN strikes again and at those he wants to suppress. He has no good plan so he does what he does best…CENSOR. Wonder if he is getting Rubles?
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Wait, corporations have free speech rights? . . .
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If corporations do not have free speech rights, then DeSantis is persecuting and punishing his state’s biggest employer simply for issuing a statement disagreeing with him. Either way, with or without constitutional protection, the Governor is harassing a very important employer. As a rule, businesses don’t like that kind of oversight.
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They do have first amendment rights — I was just being cheeky, in reference to the many commenters who maintain Citizens United was wrongly decided because corporations don’t have (or shouldn’t have) first amendment rights.
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I should have recognized this, Flerp. My apologies.
Another:
https://constitution.findlaw.com/amendment1/freedom-of-speech-in-campaign-finance-and-the-electoral-process.html#corporate
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Yes, corporations have free speech rights.
https://constitution.findlaw.com/amendment1/freedom-of-speech-for-corporations.html
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Interesting. Corporations have 1st Amendment rights under Citizens United, which is one glaring example of the Roberts Court going afoul of sense and reason. It’s dumb. Saying that Disney, an abstract noun, has rights is the same as saying other abstract nouns like Godzilla have rights. Dumb. Think about how truly disastrous it would be to give free speech rights to an abstract noun like ChatGPT. Exponentially multiplicatively dumb.
Governments also, however, should not have “free speech” rights in the form of picking and choosing which companies can have competitive advantages over other companies. DeSantis is trying to single out a company with laws. That’s indefensible. Corporate competition and antitrust laws must govern companies and their relationships with governments, not the Bill of Rights.
Disney is a conglomerate behemoth. It can and absolutely should be regulated, but it cannot be regulated without fairly restricting the business operations of other oligopolies like Amazon and Comcast, and of other companies like Six Flags and Royal Caribbean. Godzilla does not have the right to free speech. Maybe give Godzilla neither rights nor deregulatory advantages over King Kong, that’s what I’m sayin’.
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Jill LePore wrote a wonderful essay in The New Yorker about animal rights. It included stuff about how cruel people have been to elephants. Animals may not have rights but they have emotions and feelings.
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In summation, two wrongs do not make a right.
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Two wrongs make two right wingers.
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Two rightwing Floridians make more than one wrong.
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I truly enjoy Flerp’s debates. I anticipate questions. Might Flerp argue that my teachers union, UTLA, is also an abstract noun? It is. My teachers union does not have rights. It has a collective bargaining agreement. I, a UTLA teacher, have rights.
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FLERP is a lawyer. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
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Animals have rights. They are living beings. But if elephants were to form a company, I would argue that Loxodonta LLC would not have the right to free speech.
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It’s intuitive, Diane. Most young people know about the rights of animals. When my students get upset about a spider in my classroom, they always still want me to scoop it up and lay it outside rather than squash it.
Trees have rights too. Timber companies do not.
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They can stand on their soap box all they want. If a corporation is a person than donations should be limited to what an individual person can contribute to a candidate or PAC. In reality is there such a thing as a non connected PAC
Also using the logic of Janus are they not violating the free speech rights of the share holders who disagree with the position. Could those political donations to PACs not be distributed to the shareholders who disagree with the political position, as returns. Now of course you could argue that Janus applied to State Governments not private entities. .
I would argue if share holders were willing to sacrifice the special statuses granted to them by Government let them donate as much as they like. How many would give up Limited Liability to make political donations or perhaps the capital gains rate.
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Diane, can you get this out to all your readers? We need to demand that Gov DeSantis remove Bridget Ziegler from the Sarasota County School Board! https://www.supportourschools.com/sos-blog/its-time-to-tell-ron-desantis-to-remove-bridget-ziegler-from-the-sarasota-county-school-board
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Lisa, I want her to stay on the board as a glaring reminder of her hypocrisy. Will she dare to complain about gay students since she was engaged in lesbian sex?
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I respect your thoughts, but….here’s the deal: her term isn’t up until November 2026. If she is removed, an election to fill her seat will be held in August 2024. This is one of the many reasons why she should be removed. We have a fighting chance to take the board majority if she is removed. Folks are awake, you might even say WOKE to the hypocrisy of the board majority.
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Lisa, that’s a good reason to remove Bridget. But only her dear friend Ron DeSantis can do that. I truly don’t understand why any state allows the governor to remove school board members or county prosecutors. In the hands of an authoritarian like Ron, it can be and has been used capriciously. Frankly, I thought she would be ashamed to show her face in public. She is truly shameless.
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Pretty soon Lil Duce, as I lovingly refer to him, will be hiding under our beds. And no, I am not joking.
Thank you for all that you do for all of us.
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DeSantis is running in first place as the meanest, cruelest governor
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Thanks for clarifying this, Lisa. That’s really important.
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Lisa,
I don’t think Governor DeSantis reads my blog. He should.
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As long as she stays, she is a reminder of the hypocrisy of these people. I hope she stays on. I think that it’s breathtakingly undemocratic that in Flor-uh-duh, a go-go booted autocrat in the governor’s office can remove a locally elected school board member.
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Apparently Bridget Z has no sense of shame.
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I prefer to think that there is simply a freer person (freed of those mind-forged manacles) inside her longing to break out.
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Here’s the deal: her term isn’t up until November 2026. If she is removed, an election to fill her seat will be held in August 2024. This is one of the many reasons why she should be removed.
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Florida. The other F-word.
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Good state travel promotion slogan
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Several African-American groups and LGBTQX groups have issued travel advisories against going to Flor-uh-duh.
Florida. The other F-word. Where tolerance and democracy go to die.
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DeSantis’ version of freedom includes only his own personal beliefs. He crows about how business friendly Florida is, but his repressive actions against Disney and the fact he would like to rein in social media should give businesses cause to avoid coming to the state. “Freedom” in Florida is defined as operating under the watchful eyes of the governor’s spies as well as the governor’s ever repressive thumb.
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“The big picture: DeSantis and his state are facing a swarm of lawsuits challenging his policies aimed at abortion, trans rights, drag shows, voting by felons, discussion of racial issues in schools and more.”
https://www.axios.com/2023/08/11/desantis-lawsuits-florida-2024-election
“TALLAHASSEE – Tens of thousands of lawsuits – an almost 700% increase – flooded the offices of court clerks across Florida days before Gov. Ron DeSantis signed sweeping new business-backed legal restrictions which help shield insurance companies, property owners and others accused of wrongdoing.”
https://www.tallahassee.com/story/news/politics/2023/03/24/thousands-lawsuits-filed-florida-before-limits-kick-in-desantis/70045705007/
There’s a lot of news about the war being waged against Dangerously Deranged DeSantis in the courts.
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Trump’s latest: He says of immigrants (who have the lowest crime rates of any subgroup in our population), that they are “poisoning the blood of our country. . . . They are poisoning our prisons. . . . We’re going to have the highest crime rates.”
Poisoning the blood. THIS IS NAZI TALK. It’s precisely the stuff that Joseph Goebbels and Hitler said. There is pure Aryan blood, and there is bad blood from inferior groups.
No exaggeration. The man is taking his talking points directly from the Nazis. Well, perhaps from the Nazis via Bannon and Stephen “Goebbels” Miller because Trump has probably not read a book in his entire adult life.
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How does Stephen “Goebbels” Miller get a pass? He’s Jewish! Jared, too, and didn’t the royal princess convert? All that tainted blood! (snark alert, in case anyone wondered)
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Watch the astonishing Frontline documentary, available online for free, called Zero Tolerance. It documents how Miller, Jeff Sessions, and Steve Bannon went looking for someone to run for president on an anti-immigrant platform and settled on Trump because of his fallacious, racist Central Park 5 contentions and other racist crap in Trump’s past (such as denying rentals to black people at the beginning of his career). Miller served as Trump’s brain, and it was a Nazi brain. Miller just targeted and scapegoated different Others than did Goebbels, but target and scapegoat Others he did. He and Sessions both should be in prison for mass kidnapping for taking children from their parents, legal asylum seekers, at our border. Mass kidnapping is a crime under international law as well. So, they both should be standing in the dock at the International Court of Criminal Justice.
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https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/documentary/zero-tolerance/
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Thanks for the link, Bob.
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This episode really is mind-blowing.
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