Former U.S. Attorney General Bill Barr revealed this week that he agrees with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis in the Sunshine State's ongoing feud with Disney.
Barr, a traditional Republican who generally disfavors government interference with corporations, nevertheless said he supports DeSantis' actions to strip Disney of its self-governing authority in Florida. Disney has accused DeSantis in a lawsuit of weaponizing the government "to punish private business" in retaliation for the company's political views.
"On this one, though, I actually support DeSantis," Barr said at the CNBC CEO Council Summit in Santa Barbara, California. "For me, what is important here is that Disney was getting special privileges," the two-time attorney general said, adding that he thinks Disney should be "treated like everyone else."
Those comments echo DeSantis himself, who has downplayed Disney's free speech lawsuit against Florida as meritless. "They’re upset because they’re having to live by the same rules as everybody else. They don’t want to pay the same taxes as everybody else, and they want to be able to control things without proper oversight," DeSantis said last month in Jerusalem.
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Disney filed a lawsuit against DeSantis in April alleging that the governor orchestrated a "targeted campaign of government retaliation" against the company that infringes on Disney's free speech rights. The lawsuit came after a board appointed by DeSantis to govern the Central Florida Tourism Oversight District – which houses the Walt Disney World resort – voted to nullify two development contracts Disney signed in February.
The lawsuit was an escalation of a feud between DeSantis and Disney that began when the House of Mouse campaigned to overturn Florida's Parental Rights in Education law, which detractors misleadingly labeled the "Don't Say Gay" bill. The legislation restricts classroom discussions of sexual orientation and gender identity to age-appropriate settings, removing such content from K-3rd grade classrooms.
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"I felt that Disney’s intervention here was very unfair because it unfairly characterized what DeSantis was doing as a matter of policy," Barr said. "It really pandered to and played to a narrative by his political opponents."
Barr called the DeSantis-backed parental rights legislation "reasonable policy." He predicted that the issue with Disney wouldn't impact the relationship DeSantis has with businesses in the upcoming presidential campaign. "If business people prefer the Biden administration over DeSantis, I don’t think they will be moved by this issue one way or another," he said.
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Barr has worked in both the private and public sectors. In between his tenures at the Department of Justice, he was executive vice president and general counsel of the telecommunications company GTE Corp., which merged with Bell Atlantic in 2000 to become Verizon. He retired in 2008. He said his opinion of DeSantis and Disney does not change his long-held view that business leaders remain more important to the future success of the U.S. than politicians.
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"Big business has to clean up its own act, but as far as the GOP is concerned, the message I deliver all the time is that regardless of what we feel about politics, at the end of the day, central to the GOP vision is strong economic growth and tech supremacy of the U.S., and who is going to deliver that?" Barr said. "It’s not people sitting in Congress, not bureaucrats. American companies will beat China, not the committee chairman in Congress."
