CLAY: This just happened and is going to turn into a big story. Florida Republican House lawmakers just approved a new congressional map. Remember yesterday the Florida State Senate did this. So there will be four new Republican seats in the House based on this map. They also — and this going to get a monster amount of attention. They also have stripped Disney of its special powers, and they ended Disney’s Big Tech exemption. On now to the governor’s desk. Ron DeSantis will be signing this.
Let’s talk about each of these and why they are significant. First, Buck, let’s talk about the congressional map. We talked yesterday… Ryan Girdusky was fantastic. Encourage you to go listen to him breaking all this down. But effectively, Florida has added four Republican seats, which will count out the additions that New York, Illinois, and California — cancel out, I should say — have tried to do to add seats to the Democratic tally. So, assuming that this is upheld by the courts and a lot of these battles, a lot of these redistricting battles end up in the courts, four more seats to Republicans.
And you go to that in context, we are five seats from a Republican-controlled House from Kevin McCarthy taking back the gavel from Nancy Pelosi. So, Florida by itself is almost flipping that. Obviously, other states are making their own move. But this is big, number one, for the larger national political landscape.
BUCK: It’s one of the few times I can think of where a Republican politician anywhere has done something other than just talk a big game about pushing back on woke corporations. Woke corporations — understand this, everybody — were really the vanguard of both BLM propaganda and of covid lockdowns over the last two years.
Woke corporations, yes, they’re trying to indoctrinate your kids and trans ideology and all the stuff that’s going on. They support all that. Clearly, Disney does. But they have been used and really in concert with the White House. I mean, let’s understand: The White House openly says, “We’re telling Facebook to get rid of more disinformation online,” ’cause that’s more powerful than any other platform of information dissemination out there.
The White House is straight-up using these corporations. The Democrat Party is using companies as political weapons. So we can either sit there and say, “Well, we would like a neutral space where commerce and capitalism,” or we can say, “You know what? There are gonna be consequences for this too.” You can go back… I’ve talked to people in the ad industry about this for many, many years — and this is before things got quite so woke.
I remember having conversation with somebody at a big ad agency years ago and said, “You know what the difference in left and right is? The left doesn’t even have to boycott. They just do enough that the companies are always looking over their shoulder, always concerned about the possibility of one.” When was the last time the left really organized a boycott against a conservative company?
They’ll do it, but generally speaking, it’s just the threat of that’s enough to get companies to try to preempt. Think about how tilted the battlefield is in their in favor of on that circumstance. Now with Disney, we’re seeing real action taken — and, Clay, if Disney doesn’t like it, they can just build their own Florida.
CLAY: Yeah, I saw you tweet that out, and so that’s the second part of this. This is really significant, and certainly social media has made that worse. Because, Buck, I’ve been there; you’ve been there, but a lot of companies haven’t. When suddenly you have 500 or a thousand people angry and tweeting at you, it feels like everybody in the world the first time you go through this cares about whatever your issue is.
When the reality is, for 24 hours people are gonna get fired up, there’s gonna be a tempest, and then that tempest almost always passes. What DeSantis has done here to Disney is let it be known that there are consequences for left-wing, woke Disney politics, and the consequences are going to be pretty significant. And the reality is, despite what Governor Jared Polis might be trying to say in Colorado which got some attention…
“Oh, why don’t you just move here.” Yeah, are they gonna pick up Disney World and relocate it from Orlando, and all of the hotels, and put it in Colorado — and, by the way, has awful weather where nobody is gonna be want to be outside? Even if they could relocate Disney, I don’t think they would be picking Colorado, but they can’t.
They can’t relocate Disney World. They’ve got all this land. They’ve built all the hotels. Disney needs Florida at this point more than Florida needs Disney, and so what they have done is when Disney bought all this land back in 1969. Basically the state of Florida said, “Hey, you get to be judge, jury, and executioner over all of the decisions that are going to be made with these tens of thousands of acres. You want to build a new lakes…?”
BUCK: When it comes to development, right? This isn’t like they’re setting up —
CLAY: They don’t get to put somebody in prison. But in terms of the… In terms of the master plan, you want to build a new hotel? Good. You want to build a new lake to have right in the center of Epcot? Good. You can do that. But what, reportedly, Buck… They also get tax abatements and all sorts of benefits from this.
It’s hard to know the exact dollar value of this, but there’s a story in the Wall Street Journal, I believe, saying it’s worth tens of millions of dollars a year. Disney doesn’t like to talk about it because of the benefits that they’re getting, and now that’s gone. As soon as Ron DeSantis strokes his pen when this bill gets to him right there with the House and the Senate bill that they have passed.
So when he signed this, boom, this just disappears. And so this is a different level of battle. And the ultimately calling card on this, the referendum on it is going to be what happens in this election in November? Because if DeSantis wins by seven or eight points — and I think he probably is going to win by seven or eight points — that’s gonna be seen as a seismic shock wave in what was considered to be such a battleground state just a few years ago.
BUCK: I just also have to ask, why there aren’t more Republican governors — I posed this question earlier on in the week — who see what’s going on in Florida? Look, let’s be honest. There have been articles written about this. People have been saying leadership of the Republican Party right now — or I should say, the sense of the Republican leadership’s base of power has moved a bit from Texas —
— which has been the stalwart red state that people felt like they could go to for freedom — to Florida over the course of the pandemic. Now, Texas is still great, and there’s still a lot of obviously fantastic stuff going on there as a state even with Governor Abbott in charge. But you have to wonder why aren’t more of them seeing what’s going on and following here?
CLAY: Yeah.
BUCK: Because it’s not like Ron DeSantis… You know, think about what could have happened. He could have gone against the consensus on covid and he could have picked some of these battles and been politically destroyed over them.
CLAY: Yes.
BUCK: He could have. If they had a much higher percentage of not just covid cases but covid fatalities per capita than comparable states, if they had had economic ruination because they wouldn’t go along with the wokeness, if 80% of Floridians or whatever had disapproved of the parental rights bill. He keeps taking risks, he keeps throwing it out there and hitting home runs.
And you wonder, why aren’t these other Republican governors — some of whom probably listen to this show or at least their staffs do — follow in his footsteps. Corporate money for their campaigns? I really don’t know. Are they just…? They don’t have the stomach for the fight? Yeah, they don’t have the stomach for the fight.
CLAY: Because it’s hard, Buck. Initially the natural reaction among I think Republican politicians is, when the mainstream media comes for you, you curl up in the fetal position and hope they leave. And what DeSantis is natural instincts — and I think this is Trumpian in nature and I think that’s where the most lasting legacy of Trump may well be.
So many Republican politicians were terrified when the New York Times or CNN or the Washington Post or MSNBC came for them. And they would beg for forgiveness and/or run from whatever policy was getting a lot of attention. What Trump did was say, “No, I’m gonna own it,” and DeSantis is, I believe, a particularly politically adroit and skilled individual who has, along with his staff, correctly diagnosed that most of the outrage that exists in this country is not representative of the masses.
So if you just withstand a little bit of outrage and own your opinion, most of the time it fades. They’ve gotten used, the left wing has, to being able to bully people into doing exactly what they want. And when you don’t do it, you suddenly realize there ain’t a lot of power behind the punch of the left wing when you stare them down. It’s a lesson that everybody should be taking. Certainly, it’s one that we’ve been trying to instill in people with this show by saying exactly what we believe and owning it no matter what the reaction is.