In brief
Colorado’s governor went after Ron DeSantis over his policies on Twitter and Disney.
Both men are proponents of crypto and possible 2024 presidential candidates.
Republican Ron DeSantis and Democrat Jared Polis, the respective governors of Florida and Colorado, are two of the most pro-crypto politicians in the country—and are viewed by pundits as possible candidates for the 2024 Presidential election.
That’s why it’s notable the pair got into a Twitter spat on Tuesday. It began when DeSantis, who recently called for Florida to accept tax payments in Bitcoin, warned he might attempt to punish Twitter’s board of directors for blocking Elon Musk’s attempts to buy the company.
“We’re gonna be looking at ways the state of Florida potentially can be holding these Twitter board of directors accountable for breaching their fiduciary duty,” wrote the governor.
Legal scholars have scoffed at the notion that the state has any case against Twitter, suggesting that DeSantis’s threat is aimed at burnishing his credentials among conservatives who believe the platform is biased against them.
His broadside against Twitter follows weeks of the governor railing against Disney for promoting a “woke” agenda, and calling a special legislative session to revoke certain perks enjoyed by the company’s Florida theme park.
All of this led Colorado’s Polis—who attends Ethereum’s annual gathering in Denver and who once installed a Bitcoin ATM on Capitol Hill—to begin trolling DeSantis on Twitter. On Tuesday, he labelled DeSantis an “authoritarian socialist” for his heavy-handed attempts to control how private companies run their business.
Polis proposed that Colorado would welcome both Twitter and Disney, promising the state would not badger them with political demands. He then joked that he would provide a safe haven for Mickey and Minnie Mouse.
Both Twitter and Disney have leaned into crypto in the last year. Twitter, of course, has embraced Bitcoin payments and NFTs while Disney recently described the Metaverse as its “next great story-telling frontier.”
DeSantis has yet to reply to Polis’s jibes about his meddling with private companies, so Tuesday’s tweets may be the end of the matter. But as one pundit pointed out, Polis’s decision to seek out a fight with DeSantis—who is widely assumed to be seeking the GOP presidential nod—may have been an effort to further raise his own national profile and position himself for the Democratic nomination at a time when both President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris are faring poorly in the polls.
If that comes to pass, and DeSantis and Polis win their respective parties’ nomination, it would mean not one but two crypto-friendly candidates on the ballot for president. That would be a sea-change from 2020 when both candidates were indifferent or actively hostile to crypto.
To hear more about Polis’s views on crypto, here is a Decrypt interview from ETH Denver in March:
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