Lauren Boebert attracted a significant chunk of the internet’s attention on Monday night after firing off a tweet attacking the Walt Disney Company that likely would have benefited from a second pair of eyes, as an unmissable typo derailed the Republican congresswoman’s rant against the company into a very public self-own.
The Colorado congresswoman had tweeted out a line that was likely in response to Florida’s so-called “Don’t Say Gay” bill, which broadly bans the discussion of sexual orientation and gender identity from the classroom in kindergarten through third grade settings, while discouraging anything of that nature that the bill deems “not age-appropriate” in older grades.
“Next year, the woke Disney lobbyists will ask Congress to extend Micky Mouse’s trademark. I think not,” the Colorado representative tweeted.
Disney, though first called out by opponents of the bill for not doing enough, has since come out to say its “goal as a company is for this law to be repealed by the legislature or struck down in the courts”.
Conservative lawmakers, including Ms Boebert, have been on the attack ever since the entertainment juggernaut became a vocal opponent of Gov Ron DeSantis’s legislation, signed into law last week, though it won’t become law till 1 July.
Though Ms Boebert had intended to take a swipe at the animation company, one of Florida’s largest employers, she instead ended up taking the hit against herself after a spelling error of the company’s bread and butter character, Mickey Mouse, distracted many from the rant she was trying to make.
The misspelling, which missed the ‘e’ in ‘Mickey’, also forced one of her colleagues in Congress to wade into the debacle. Rep Ted Lieu attempted to assist the freshman congresswoman by explaining how trademark law is legislated in the US.
In his tweet, the Democratic congressman from California pointed out that a company such as Disney does not need to reapply for a trademark once it registers with the US Patent and Trademark Office.
Once done, he laid out, the company simply needs to renew it, which for a media company that held assets totalling over $203.61bn in 2021, they’d presumably be able to afford.
The California lawmaker also added that Ms Boebert clearly had a misunderstanding of how trademark and copyright law works, as “Congress doesn’t legislate individual trademarks”.
The tweet, which appears to have set off a reaction online that had the opposite effect the congresswoman set out to inspire, garnered even more impressions online from constituents and general observers alike.
Some took to pointing out that Ms Boebert had a general misunderstanding of how copyright law worked, while others lampooned the Republican politician for having a typo in the iconic Disney character’s name, particularly when there’s a song in the company’s canon that specifically lays out, letter by letter, how to correctly spell ‘Mickey’.
