DeSantis Appoints Nutcase to Disney Oversight Board

As Florida lurches ever closer to being a fully fascist state with Ron DeSantis following Adolph Hitler's play book of attacking the free press, punishing businesses that question his policies, targeting minority groups - namely blacks and LGBT individuals - and seeking to silence bloggers and others critical of his abhorent policies, DeSantis is also appointing nutcases to positions of power provided they are loyal to him.  A case in point is DeSantis' appointment of Ron Peri (pictured at right) to the oversight board for Disney's special tax district.  Peri is in  my view a total whack job who strikes one as just as crazy and dangerous in his own way as Heinrich Himmler, Hitler's Reichsführer of the Schutzstaffel (Protection Squadron; SS), and and a main architect of the Holocaust.  While Himmler was obsessed with hunting down and extermination Europe's Jewish population, Peri is obsessed with homosexuality and has a history of bizarre and vile statements against gays.  His obsession makes me wonder if the man "doth not protest too much" like so many "pastors" and far right Republicans who have been caught up in gay sex scandals (locally, think of former congressman Ed Shrock who had one of the most anti-gay voting records yet sough gay trysts on the down low).  A piece at CNN looks at Peri's appointment and others lacking any legitimate credentials which underscores that DeSantis wants to empower extremists as he seeks to win over the most insane elements of the Republican Party base.  Here are article highlights:

An appointee to Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ new oversight board in control of Disney’s special tax district called homosexuality “evil” last year and shared a baseless conspiracy theory that tap water could be making more people gay.

On Monday, the Republican governor appointed Ron Peri, an Orlando-based former pastor and the CEO of The Gathering – a Christian ministry focused on outreach to men – as one of five people who will now oversee the Reedy Creek Improvement District, the government body that has given Disney unique powers in Central Florida for more than half a century.

DeSantis signed a bill in February that allowed him to replace the district’s existing board – mostly people with ties to Disney – with a five-member body that he hand-picked. The move to remove power from Disney comes nearly a year after the company spoke out against a Florida bill – which DeSantis later signed into law – to restrict certain classroom instruction about sexual orientation and gender identity.

A CNN KFile review of Peri’s past comments found that he frequently made derogatory remarks about the LGBTQ community.

“So why are there homosexuals today? There are any number of reasons, you know, that are given. Some would say the increase in estrogen in our societies. You know, there’s estrogen in the water from birth control pills. They can’t get it out,” Peri baselessly said in a January 2022 Zoom discussion, later put on YouTube. “The level of testosterone in men broadly in America has declined by 50 points in the past 10 years. You know, and so, maybe that’s a part of it.”

“But the big part I would suggest to you, based upon what it’s saying here, is the removal of constraint,” he continued. “So our society provided the constraint. And so, which is the responsibility of a society to constrain people from doing evil? Well, you remove the constraints, and then evil occurs.”

Testosterone levels in men have dropped in recent decades, and researchers are unsure why, but the drop is not 50%, and there is no indication that a drop in testosterone affects sexual orientation. Likewise, there is no evidence that estrogen in the water supply, for which birth control pills account for a statistically insignificant amount, affects sexual orientation. The claim that chemicals in tap water could turn people gay has gained ground with conspiracy theorists over the years, most memorably with fringe commentator Alex Jones . . . .

Peri called homosexuality “shameful,” linking it to disease. . . . Peri has also said that LGBTQ people “don’t have a stake in the future” because many do not have children, and he called gay people “deviant.”  In one discussion, he linked homosexuality to the fall of the Roman Empire – a fringe historical belief occasionally pushed by some Christian activists. . . . . Peri and DeSantis did not respond to CNN’s requests for comment.

Peri’s appointment to the oversight board comes after a long-standing battle between DeSantis and Disney over the Parental Rights in Education Act – which critics have called Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” law. The law bars schools from teaching about sexual orientation and gender identity in kindergarten through third-grade classrooms and in older classrooms that do not meet yet-to-be-defined standards.

After Disney’s then-chairman spoke out against the bill last year, DeSantis stripped the company of its unique governing power within the Reedy Creek Improvement Distric

The new law ousted the existing board, renamed it the Central Florida Tourism Oversight District and allowed DeSantis to appoint all five members – one of whom was Peri.

This week, DeSantis told supporters that Disney’s opposition to the Parental Rights in Education Act was a “only a mild annoyance” and that the motivation for effectively punishing the company was in response to it allegedly injecting “a lot of this sexuality into the programming for young kids.” He has suggested that the new board could influence Disney’s business decisions by adding park discounts for Florida residents and even altering the company’s entertainment offerings.

In addition to Peri, DeSantis also appointed to the board Martin Garcia, a Tampa lawyer whose private investment firm contributed $50,000 to the governor’s 2022 reelection campaign, and Bridget Ziegler, a co-founder of the conservative organization Moms for Liberty and the wife of Christian Ziegler, the new chairman of the Republican Party of Florida.

 DeSantis and his minions are a clear and present danger to freedom and democracy.