Bob Chapek, former CEO of The Walt Disney Company, complained to Florida Governor Ron DeSantis about having to get involved in the controversy surrounding the Parental Rights in Education bill, a.k.a. the “Don’t Say Gay” bill.
DeSantis wrote about Chapek calling him in his new memoir “The Courage to be Free: Florida’s Blueprint for American Revival.”
“As the controversy over the Parental Rights in Education bill was coming to a head,” DeSantis writes, “Chapek called me. He did not want Disney to get involved, but he was getting a lot of pressure to weigh in against the bill.”
According to DeSantis, Chapek said, “We get pressured all the time. But this time is different. I haven’t seen anything like this before.”
DeSantis told Chapek that if Disney stayed out of the situation, they would only face 48 hours of outrage when the bill passed. “Then there will be some new outrage that the woke mob will focus on,” he said, “and people will forget about this issue, especially considering the outrage is directed at a political-media narrative, not the actual text of the legislation itself.”
He continued to say that Chapek and Disney “ultimately caved to leftist media and activist pressure and pressed the false narrative against the bill.”
Governor DeSantis is holding a press conference at Reedy Creek Fire Station this morning to sign legislation into law that would allow the Florida government to take control of Reedy Creek Improvement District as retaliation for Chapek and Disney publicly opposing the Parental Rights in Education bill.
The new law will rename the district the Central Florida Tourism Oversight Board and consist of a board appointed only by the governor of Florida residents who cannot have worked in the theme park industry within three years. It will no longer dissolve the district on June 1, 2023. Walt Disney World will no longer lose their tax exemptions.
Current (and at the time former) CEO Bob Iger was among those who publicly spoke against the “Don’t Say Gay” bill before Chapek did. Chapek was fired as CEO in November and Iger returned to the position. At a town hall with Cast Members soon after his return, Iger said in regards to the “Don’t Say Gay” bill, “One of the core values of our storytelling is inclusion, [and] acceptance, and tolerance. And we can’t lose that, we just can’t lose that.”
“How we actually change the world through the good must continue,” he went on to say. “We’re not going to make everyone happy all the time, and we’re not going try to. We’re certainly not going to lessen our core values in order to make everyone happy all the time.”
Source: Fox News
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