DeSantis Wants to Get Rid of Disney Employee Discounts, as Inane War Continues

Ron DeSantis knows he can’t beat Disney, so he’s going after the company’s employees instead.

The DeSantis-appointed board that oversees Disney World’s governing district submitted a complaint Monday to the state inspector general about employee perks. The board argued that employee benefits, including free season passes and discounts on Disney hotels, merchandise, and food, are unethical and cost Florida millions of dollars.

The board’s complaint is unlikely to stick. The discounts are simply employee benefits, a pretty standard policy for a lot of organizations, instead of a deliberate tax scam, Richard Foglesong, a Rollins College professor emeritus who wrote a history of Disney World’s self-governance, told Fortune.

Still, this new attack is an escalation in DeSantis’s bizarre, yearlong war with Disney World. When the company’s then chairman condemned DeSantis’s “Don’t Say Gay” law last year, DeSantis retaliated by stripping the park of its autonomous governing powers and installing a leadership board of allies.

Disney sued DeSantis in April, alleging that he and his administration carried out a “relentless campaign to weaponize government power” against the company’s free speech rights—and they have the receipts. Court documents cite extensively from DeSantis’s own memoir, as well as myriad quotes from DeSantis allies blatantly stating that the bill dissolving Disney’s autonomous district was in direct response to the company opposing the “Don’t Say Gay” law.

DeSantis tried to backtrack last week, telling CNBC that he and his administration have “basically moved on” from the legal fight with Disney. He also insisted that Disney is “going to lose that lawsuit,” so it should just drop it.

Disney, however, is refusing to budge. Not only has it not dropped its original lawsuit, but company attorneys filed counterclaims on Thursday against DeSantis’s handpicked board of supervisors. Disney is accusing the board of breach of contract, and is seeking damages and an order to force compliance over certain development contracts.

Another day, another terrible take from Vivek Ramaswamy. This time, the Republican presidential candidate insists that 9/11 was an inside job.

Ramaswamy is under fire over a profile published Monday in The Atlantic. When reporter John Hendrickson asked him what the “truth” about the January 6 riot is, Ramaswamy quickly spiraled into conspiracy theories about the 9/11 attack, including wondering how many federal agents “were on the planes that hit the Twin Towers.” When Hendrickson pressed further, he said he was really talking about January 6.

But Ramaswamy doubled down on his comments Monday night. “Our government, for 20 years, lied to the American people about it. That is hard fact, actually,” he told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins.

Collins pointed out that the official 9/11 commission published a report on the attack in 2004—which distinctly found zero evidence of a U.S. government plot.

“Yes, and it lied. And it was false,” Ramaswamy said.

He also insisted he is “speaking truth, grounded in fact.”

Ramaswamy is, of course, not speaking the truth, but instead is spreading dangerous and harmful conspiracy theories. In the Atlantic profile, when asked about the truth of January 6, Ramaswamy said, “I don’t know, but we can handle it.… How many government agents were in the field?” (No federal agents were involved in inciting the riot.)

As for 9/11, he said, “I think it is legitimate to say how many police, how many federal agents, were on the planes that hit the Twin Towers. Maybe the answer is zero.… But if we’re doing a comprehensive assessment of what happened on 9/11, we have a 9/11 commission, absolutely that should be an answer the public knows the answer to.” (Again, no federal agents were involved in orchestrating the tragedy.)

Ramaswamy is no stranger to spreading conspiracies. Last week, he blamed the tragic wildfire in Hawaii on diversity, equity, and inclusion programs.

His other major talking points include battling “wokeness,” taking away rights, and, apparently, caving to Russia and China.

A trio of appeals court judges on Monday allowed Alabama’s ban on gender-affirming care for minors to go into effect—and they justified the ruling by citing the Dobbs decision that overturned Roe v. Wade.

Alabama passed a law in April 2022 that made it a felony to provide gender-affirming care to transgender teenagers under the age of 19. This applied to puberty blockers, hormones, and medical procedures. A federal judge blocked the law the following month, ruling that parents have “a fundamental right to direct the medical care of their children,” including “transitioning medications subject to medically accepted standards.”

The state appealed the ruling in November, and on Monday the three-judge panel of the Eleventh Circuit Court—all of whom were appointed by Donald Trump—overturned the injunction, arguing that the right to transition is not a fundamental one.

Citing Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health, the landmark Supreme Court case that rolled back the nationwide right to abortion, the appeals court said that the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment guarantees people the rights listed in the Constitution, as well as some “fundamental rights” that are not mentioned in the document. It then quoted Dobbs directly:

To determine whether a right at issue is one of the substantive rights guaranteed by the Due Process Clause, courts must look to whether the right is “deeply rooted in [our] history and tradition” and “essential to our Nation’s ‘scheme of ordered liberty.’” … Although there are records of transgender or otherwise gender nonconforming individuals from various points in history, the earliest-recorded uses of puberty blocking medication and cross-sex hormone treatment for the purposes of treating the discordance between an individual’s biological sex and sense of gender identity did not occur until well into the twentieth century.

Essentially, because modern medicine has progressed, people do not have the right to bodily autonomy. It’s also unclear how far back something has to go to be considered “history.” Puberty blockers were first used in the 1980s, which apparently is not far back enough for gender-affirming care to be considered tradition. But abortion was first recorded in 1550 BCE, and it would seem that doesn’t count either.

The Eleventh Circuit’s ruling shows just how dangerous Dobbs is. It doesn’t only affect abortion. Other courts can use its twisted logic to deny other rights.

There’s only one thing to blame for the tropical storm that battered California over the weekend, according to Fox News. No, not climate change. It’s Joe Biden.

Tropical Storm Hilary unleashed record-breaking rainfall in Southern California on Sunday, causing floods, mudslides, and rockslides. The storm has begun to dissipate, but weather forecasters warned Hilary could still cause “life-threatening” flooding across the Southwest. Such extreme rain is unusual for California, particularly this time of year, and can be attributed to the effects of climate change.

But Fox News has an alternate theory. Hilary “made landfall in Mexico several hours ago, but they let it right into the country because it’s Biden’s America,” one of the hosts of The Big Weekend Show said Sunday.

It’s likely the hosts were trying to make a joke about Biden’s immigration policies, but maybe the Fox News hosts would prefer a president who thinks you can stop a storm by dropping nukes in it.

As if Hilary wasn’t enough of a crisis for California, a 5.1-magnitude earthquake rocked part of Southern California as the storm was rolling through. For actress Candace Cameron Bure, a Christian conservative known for her roles on the Hallmark channel and Full House, neither Biden nor climate change was to blame for the so-called hurriquake.

The House Freedom Caucus announced Monday that it will block attempts to pass a government funding bill unless its chosen policies are included.

Congress has not passed all the necessary appropriations bills, and it is unlikely to do so by its September 30 deadline. Party leaders on both sides have suggested passing a continuing resolution to keep funds flowing until all the bills have passed. If Congress fails to pass the stopgap measure, the government is at risk of a shutdown.

But the Freedom Caucus, a group of far-right House Republicans, said it would not support a stopgap. “We refuse to support any such measure that continues Democrats’ bloated COVID-era spending and simultaneously fails to force the Biden Administration to follow the law and fulfill its most basic responsibilities,” the caucus said in a statement.

The group demanded that any funding measures include policies to rein in immigration at the southern border “address the unprecedented weaponization of the Justice Department and FBI” and “end the Left’s cancerous woke policies in the Pentagon undermining our military’s core warfighting mission.”

The latter two points refer, respectively, to the indictments against former President Donald Trump and a Defense Department policy of refunding travel costs for service members who have to travel for an abortion. The caucus also said they would oppose short-term funding extensions and a “blank check” for Ukraine aid.

The Freedom Caucus has made similar demands before, such as when they tried to block the debt ceiling deal. That didn’t work out as planned. A deal was struck, and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy—whom the caucus keeps trying to undermine—somehow came out looking fine.

It’s possible, though, that the caucus has a different goal: tanking the economy. The government shutdown in 2018 cost the United States $11 billion, including $3 billion in economic activity that will never be recovered, the Congressional Budget Office said at the start of the following year.

With a presidential election on the horizon, the Freedom Caucus could be looking for ways to undermine Biden any way it can. Destroying the economy he’s helping to recover would do just that.