“Walt Disney Co. proposed the Reedy Creek Improvement District in the mid-1960s in a remote area of Orange and Osceola counties. It allows Disney to operate like its own county government and is responsible for municipal services such as power, water, fire prevention and road maintenance. It also means Disney doesn’t need approval from local planning commissions if it wants to build new structures.
The reason special districts were created was so taxpayers who don’t benefit from the services of the special district aren’t required to pay for it through taxes.
A huge benefit of special districts is making tax-exempt purchases for the services they provide and issuing municipal bonds for major infrastructure projects at a much lower interest rate, said Chris Lyon, an attorney who deals with special districts.
The measure lawmakers are considering would not permanently terminate the Reedy Creek Improvement District, but it would phase it out on June 1, 2023, and allow the special district to reestablish on or after that date.
If legislators approve the bill, as is expected, Disney would be able to go to the state Legislature in Tallahassee next year and request it be reestablished, likely under more limited capabilities and powers.”
“Here is what Carano wrote on Instagram:
Jews were beaten in the streets, not by Nazi soldiers but by their neighbors…even by children. Because history is edited, most people today don’t realize that to get to the point where Nazi soldiers could easily round up thousands of Jews, the government first made their own neighbors hate them simply for being Jews. How is that any different from hating someone for their political views.
This was a very flawed comment: For one thing, Nazi soldiers absolutely beat Jews, in the streets and elsewhere. Carano is right that part of the Nazis’ agenda was to persuade German citizens to hate and fear their Jewish neighbors—but what happened in 1930s Germany is not remotely similar to what is happening today in the U.S. The Nazi Party’s demonization of the Jewish people led to genocide. The media’s demonization of the Republican Party—which is not directly referenced in her post, but it’s assumed that’s what she meant—is obviously not comparable to the Holocaust.
That said, Disney is wrong to say that Carano denigrated Jewish people, or that she is “abhorrent” for making such a comparison. She’s a celebrity with an obnoxious political opinion, which is not exactly a rare animal.
And that’s the bigger issue with Disney’s decision to drop Carano: hypocrisy. If the studio doesn’t want to work with actors and actresses who make over-the-top Nazi comparisons, it has a major problem on its hands: Pedro Pascal, the star and eponymous character of The Mandalorian, once sent a tweet likening Trump’s immigration policies to Nazi concentration camps.
This is not so surprising: Hollywood is chock full of people with quirky political views making dramatic analogies.”
“In the 1950s, Hollywood studios — under pressure from the right — promised they would not “knowingly employ a communist.” This blacklist eventually became notorious, especially in Hollywood, which came to lionize its victims in several films. And yet it is becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish the blacklist policy from the emerging current treatment of right-wingers.
Earlier this week, Gina Carano, an actor in The Mandalorian, was fired from her job after a controversy over an allegedly anti-Semitic social-media post. In short order, UTSA, her talent agency, dropped her as a client.”
…
“The post in question, which triggered a social-media firestorm that quickly led to her firing and loss of representation, was not anti-Semitic by any reasonable definition. The post simply argued (uncontroversially) that the Holocaust grew out of a hate campaign against Jews, which it then likened (controversially) to hatred of fellow Americans for their political views”
…
“I don’t find this post especially insightful. But overheated comparisons to Nazi Germany are quite common, and, more to the point, not anti-Semitic. There is no hint anywhere in this post of sympathy for Nazis or blame for their victims.
Many of the reports of Carano’s termination string together the trumped-up offense of her post about Nazism with a series of controversial posts. The worst of them is a post insinuating elections are rife with voter fraud and should impose photo ID — a claim that, while provably false, is also a standard-issue Republican belief. The second-most controversial post in her history is a very small joke, in which she added “boop/bop/beep” to her Twitter profile, before apologizing for the insensitivity of seeming to mock the practice of including pronouns in social-media biographies.”
…
“If you think blacklisting is only bad if its targets have sensible views, I have some bad news for you about communism. While some victims of the McCarthy-era blacklist were liberals or progressives who refused to turn in the names of their colleagues, others were bona fide communists. Dalton Trumbo — a Hollywood writer who was blacklisted, then wrote under front names, and whose story was told in a recent hagiographic movie starring Bryan Cranston — followed the Communist Party line in the Stalin era. When many fellow communists dropped out of the movement after Stalin formed an alliance with Hitler, Trumbo followed the new party line.
Trumbo gained some martyrdom when he was hauled to Washington to testify in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee. “This is the beginning of the American concentration camp,” he warned. (Fortunately for Trumbo, his antagonists, unlike Carano’s, were not witless enough to confuse hyperbolic Nazi comparisons with anti-Semitism.)”