After Florida GOP governor Ron DeSantis signed a law prohibiting private companies from imposing vaccine mandates on their employees, which triggered Disney to back down from imposing a vaccine mandate on the employees at Disney World, DeSantis was lauded for his courage in standing up to corporations infected by woke perspectives, with former GOP South Carolina senator Jim DeMint, a staunch conservative, writing in an opinion piece, “DeSantis called Disney’s bluff. And sure enough, the mouse didn’t roar.”
In the piece, titled, “Courage Is Contagious,” DeMint began by asserting that members of the GOP “duck hard fights” because “the Left today seems like a three-headed monster. It’s not just Democratic politicians that conservatives have to battle, but the biased news media and woke corporations, too.”
DeMint ripped the Democrats pushing vaccine mandates:
On one side of this debate were Joe Biden, Anthony Fauci and other public health performance artists who have misled the American people for almost two years. They want vaccine mandates and vaccine passports. They want to lord future shutdowns over us. … On the other side are American workers, who have struggled under the elite’s triple burdens of the pandemic, Biden’s inflation and the public health community’s gross incompetence.
DeMint praised DeSantis for his record and contrasted him with former New York Democratic governor Andrew Cuomo:
To his credit, Gov. DeSantis has stood with the people and their constitutional freedoms from the beginning. While liberal pundits smeared him and Florida’s non-hysterical COVID response throughout the pandemic—even as they hailed a corrupt sexual predator personally responsible for the deaths of thousands of seniors in New York nursing homes—DeSantis stuck to his principles and the actual science of COVID-19.
DeMint wrote of DeSantis not only refusing to impose a statewide vaccine mandate but going further by signing the law prohibiting private companies from imposing mandates on their own workers. He noted the significance of DeSantis’ move:
In doing so, DeSantis took on not only leftists in Washington, Tallahassee and Twitter. He took on the real source of progressive power today—corporate boardrooms, where without passing any laws or winning any elections woke millionaires and billionaires leverage their economic power to tell everyone else what to do.
DeMint turned to Disney:
In Florida, of course, that means Disney—one of the richest, most influential corporations on earth. It is the economic engine of the Orlando area, and one of the biggest employers in the state. It is also increasingly “woke.” Like all good progressive plutocrats, Disney executives had already ordered their employees to get the jab or be fired.
By pushing his new law, DeSantis called Disney’s bluff. And sure enough, the mouse didn’t roar. Instead, it fell into line with the law, the public, the science and behind a conservative governor. The Left expected a vaccine showdown in the Sunshine State, but Disney surrendered without a peep.
DeMint concluded:
If the governor of Florida, with the national political media scrutinizing his every move, can take on Disney and win, other Republican governors have no excuse to shy away from fights of their own. Nothing in the Constitution allows vaccine mandates. GOP governors and state legislators—including Republicans in Congress—should lean into this fight relentlessly, defiantly and publicly.
The Left’s three-headed monster of politicians, journalists and corporations may seem daunting. But with the law, the facts, and the people on our side, conservatives—like DeSantis and Trump—should relish the fight, lead and win.