Ron DeSantis believes there’s a quiet boycott of Disney – both its theme parks and movie releases – going on by parents who “don’t want an agenda shoved down their throat,” blaming the “catastrophic” decrease in foot traffic and ticket sales on a “cadre of woke executives in Burbank.”
DeSantis appeared Monday on “The Clay & Buck Show,” the conservative syndicated talk radio show hosted by Clay Travis and Buck Sexton. Travis asked the Florida governor if he thinks Disney, which has suffered a still-going streak of box-office failures and down-trending theme park traffic, is being “Bud Light-ed.”
“A big article in The Wall Street Journal, the headline is Disney World hasn’t felt this empty in years,” Travis said. “Do you think Disney is getting ‘Bud Light-ed’ by many people out there? … From a business perspective, it feels to me like Disney has gone woke and Bob Iger is now paying the consequences. Do you see it that way?”
DeSantis – who has been feuding with Disney ever since state laws restricting LGBTQ topics in schools were passed in Florida last year – answered that he believed that was indeed the case:
“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 throat,” he said. “That’s why we stood up to Disney with respect to our parents rights and education bill. And I think that it is impacting parents willingness to want to take their kids to the Disney stuff.”
DeSantis is trailing former President Donald Trump in GOP primary polls, and has been doubling down on his strident culture-wars stances, including a widely panned video created by supporters that his “war room” Twitter account re-tweeted last week. Disney did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
DeSantis also suggested that “most of the employees” at Orlando’s theme parks agreed with Florida’s so-called “Don’t Say Gay” legislation, which was opposed by the company’s California-based leadership at the time.
“So this is really a cadre of woke executives in Burbank trying to impose this agenda down on the rest of the company,” he continued. “I think it’s been catastrophic. My advice would just be, look what made Disney kind of the all-American company under Walt and beyond was a focus on family, a focus on, you know, traditional pro-American values.”
He also implied that Disney’s legacy leadership “would never have wanted to sexualize children the way Disney has done down there.”
“It is ultimately to the detriment of the company,” DeSantis said. “It’s in the best interests of Disney shareholders that they get refocused on their previous core mission and get the woke out of there.”
Watch the entire exchange in the video above.
