Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has taken aim at Disney and Twitter over stances he doesn’t agree with, and now one of his fellow governors, a Democrat, is calling him a socialist.
Colorado Gov. Jared Polis criticized DeSantis Tuesday after the Florida Republican threatened to revoke Disney’s special tax status in the state because Disney’s CEO criticized Florida’s so-called “don’t say gay” bill.
“Florida’s authoritarian socialist attacks on the private sector are driving businesses away,” Polis tweeted.
DeSantis also hit Twitter on Tuesday, saying that his office is looking into how Florida could take action against the social network over its poison pill to block a takeover by Elon Musk.
Polis, a moderate who was once the only Democratic member of the libertarian House Liberty Caucus, invited both companies to come to his state. He said Colorado doesn’t “meddle in affairs of companies” and invited Disney to build a “Mountain Disneyland” in Colorado and for Twitter to open a second headquarters there.
“We will grant Mickey and Minnie full asylum in Colorado,” Polis added in a follow-up tweet
Republicans have historically been business friendly, but some have begun to turn on “woke corporations” who don’t share their politics, such as Sen Marco Rubio, R-Fla., who came out in favor of Amazon workers seeking to unionize last year, and Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, who said he wouldn’t accept corporate PAC donations. DeSantis has been among the most outspoken.
“In Florida, our policies gonna to be based on the best interest of Florida citizens, not on the musing of woke corporations,” he said last month, according to video obtained by Fox News digital.
Polis isn’t the first Democrat to flip the “socialist” label on Republicans. Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., an actual democratic socialist, has called former President Donald Trump a “corporate socialist.”
“People like Donald Trump are also socialists, except they are corporate socialists,” Sanders said in 2019. “They ... provide hundreds of billions of dollars every single year in subsidies, in tax breaks, to large corporations and the wealthy.”