Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is now making headlines with a provocative claim about Disney’s employees.
A return engagement on the Clay Travis & Buck Sexton Show became yet another controversial stance from DeSantis against Disney. To kick off the conversation with DeSantis, Travis asked DeSantis if Disney was “Budlight’d” while prompting him to offer business advice to the Walt Disney Company.
Canceled “Woke” Companies
On April 1, a transgender influencer named Dylan Mulvaney promoted Bud Light on TikTok, where they openly shared about their transition. When the post went viral, conservative voices like Kid Rock initiated a Bud Light boycott simply because the influencer was transgender. Since then, customers have publicly rejected the beer brand, hurting the company’s sales.
In 2022, the Disney feud with DeSantis gained traction when Disney openly opposed Florida’s HB 1557, also known as the “Don’t Say Gay” Bill. Accused of joining Bud Light and Target as a canceled “woke” company, Disney began its battle with DeSantis. To retaliate against Disney’s stance against his politics, DeSantis dismantled Disney’s control over its Reedy Creek Special District.
While the DeSantis and Disney camps are engaged in an ongoing legal battle, this interview has fueled the fire. Walt Disney World has seen lower numbers in Park attendance and at the box office, and DeSantis was quick to attribute that to “woke” policies in the interview shared by the Clay Travis & Buck Sexton Show:
Well, I’ll tell you, as parents of 6-, 5- and 3-year-old kids, my wife and I really believe that parents should be able to send their kids to school and watch cartoons without having an agenda shoved down their throats. That’s why we stood up to Disney with respect to our ‘Parental Rights and Education’ bill. And I think it impacts parents’ willingness to take their kids to the Disney stuff.
Presidential Candidate @RonDeSantis on woke Disney's woes in in talk with @ClayTravis and @BuckSexton.
Watch the full interview here: https://t.co/cOCYshlLNe pic.twitter.com/AcRZgYAOwp
— The Clay Travis & Buck Sexton Show (@clayandbuck) July 10, 2023
‘Most of the Employees Agree’
Unsurprisingly, DeSantis took that approach to Travis’s question about Disney’s business practices, but his claims about Disney’s employees brought shock value to the conversation. Based on the 2022 election, DeSantis added, “The sad part about it, guys is, when we were having this fight with Disney in 2022, most of the employees in their Orlando area theme parks agreed with us.”
He continued, “I won Osceola County for the first time a Republican has done in a generation by 7 (percentage points), which is where the majority of Disney employees live.”
It’s unclear how DeSantis derived those numbers from the 270,000 registered voters in the county. Still, he asserted Disney’s opposition to his policies came from “woke executives in Burbank trying to impose this agenda down on the rest of the company.”
Florida Disney Employees Vehemently Opposed DeSantis
Despite the claims made by DeSantis during this engagement, LGBTQ+ community members and allies at the Walt Disney Company spoke out against Disney’s slow response to the “Don’t Say Gay” legislation.
According to GIZMODO, employees staged walk-outs and expressed concerns about then-Disney CEO Bob Chapek’s new Florida Imagineering departments placing employees at risk in a state where their rights were being challenged. The related article includes an excerpt from an open letter issued by Disney employees at the time:
The recent statements by The Walt Disney Company (TWDC) leadership regarding the Florida legislature’s recent “Don’t Say Gay” bill have utterly failed to match the magnitude of the threat to LGBTQIA+ safety represented by this legislation. Primarily, those statements have indicated that leadership still does not truly understand the impact this legislation is having not only on Cast Members in the state of Florida, but on all members of the LGBTQIA+ community in the company and beyond.
