Good News! Disney is Not Opening a New Campus in Florida.

By John R. “Buck” Surdu

Recently Woke Disney Corporate announced that they had canceled their plan to move 1000 positions from Kalifornia to the Lake Nona area outside Orlando in Florida. Because of the weasel wording by Bob Iger, the America-hating and Florida-hating media jumped on this announcement to further push their anti-Florida and anti-DeSantis narrative. They reported that the decision was based on the ongoing feud between the Florida legislature and Woke Disney. They also implied that this decision would hurt Florida. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Once the media feeding frenzy has passed, Florida will be no worse for the kerfuffle and may benefit from this cancelation.

As an aside, Disney risked their sweetheart deal with the state (self-government under the thin veil of the Reedy Creek Improvement District), when they decided they wanted to be a PAC instead of an entertainment company. I thought the compromise position from the Florida State Legislature was a good middle ground. But Woke Disney decided to continue to wage war against Florida on social media and to play silly tricks to circumvent legitimate legislation. I think that Iger and DeSantis could probably figure out a way to get beyond this if they met personally to discuss it like Tip O’Neil and Ronald Regan. We need no more petulant drama.

The decision to move part of their operation out of Kalifornia to Florida was announced during the government- and media-created pandemic hysteria. Like many companies, Woke Disney believed that moving part of their operation to a lower-cost, lower-tax area would benefit the bottom line. It was described as a cost-saving measure that would be good for the bottom line and good for investors. Disney, Anheuser-Busch, Target, Walmart, and others have shown that they are way more concerned with their DEI score and wokeness than their fiduciary responsibility to shareholders. They are under the stranglehold of the woke governance of State Street Bank, Vanguard, and Black Rock – who should be destroyed under anti-trust and RICO laws.

The decision not to move a portion of their operation to Florida was not forced by the ongoing feud between Florida and Disney. Kalifornia employees protested at Disney. Kalifornians didn’t want to leave their Marxist paradise to move to the Free State of Florida. Faced with employee backlash over Florida limitations on transgender indoctrination of kids (like having a fat hairy guy dressed as a woman at the Bibbidi Bobbidi boutique grooming children), Disney caved. Period. Iger tried to put a good face on the fact that the inmates control the asylum at Woke Disney and shift the blame to DeSantis.

The media erroneously reported that the decision would cost Florida 2000 jobs. Only 1000 of those workers would have been permanent. The other 1000 were transient construction workers who would be cast aside once the construction was done. A thousand jobs seem like a lot, but they’re not.

Even without the influx of Woke Disney perverts and limousine liberals, you can’t swing a dead cat without hitting building or road construction projects. The Orlando Business Journal recently reported,

However, early signs suggest that multifamily developers are as enthusiastic as ever about the Lake Nona region — with one developer who has a growing presence there telling Orlando Business Journal that Disney’s canceled plans announcement “isn’t even a blip on our radar.”

So many political and economic refugees from Marxist paradises like Venezuela, Kalifornia, and New England are moving here that we added a representative to the House of Representatives even though the Census Bureau intentionally made “mistakes” with the numbers so as not to take too many blue representatives away.

Lake Nona, where the new campus would have been built, is already overcrowded. The infrastructure has been unable to keep up with the growth. The last thing they needed was another 1000 people working and living in the area. I avoid the area due to the traffic. There is nothing there worth an hour in traffic.

To entice Kalifornia leftists to move to Florida, Woke Disney promised to continue to pay them their Kalifornia wages. Kalifornia is a much higher-cost area than Florida; although blue refugees are changing that. Our real estate markets are already suffering from political and economic refugees fleeing high-cost blue states who are offering above-the-asking prices for housing. If 1000 new tech jobs moved into the area, all the existing businesses would be forced to inflate labor rates to avoid poaching by Woke Disney. That would have driven up our cost of living artificially.

When leftists published a “travel advisory” warning people not to visit Florida due to imagined and false persecution of BIPOCs (Black, Indigenous, People of Color) in our state, Derek Hunter opined on Townhall in May,

Democrats seem to labor under the delusion that the rest of us long to spend time with them, that we’d be lost without their nagging or just their smell. When there are long stretches of time without some Karen screaming about how you should wear a mask at the park or use whatever pronouns they or their kid “decided” they felt like on that day, no one misses them. Life is better without all of them. So, when you see groups from the Alphabet Mafia – the NAACP, the LGBTQRSTUVWXYZ “community,” etc. – telling fellow leftists to stay out of somewhere I say GREAT, stay the hell away.

I have the same feeling about Disney’s decision not to erect a new campus in Florida. I once thought it might be fun to work for Disney Imagineering, but I no longer have the desire to be associated with the woke fascists who run the company. We canceled our annual passes and have been perfectly happy not going to the parks for over a year; although, I do miss a few of the restaurants. We went to Disney to forget that the world sucks, not to have the suck and political indoctrination shoved in my face. The “show” no longer gives me joy. So, regarding the abandoned plans for a new campus in Florida, I say, “We don’t need you, and we don’t want you.” Thank goodness you made this self-harming decision not to move to Florida. I couldn’t be happier.