The engaged and alert — we’re describing the hardwired HotAir audience here — have no trouble, and never will,  remembering the details with spectacular clarity.

Duty to our newcomers requires we provide this briefest of recap: As the Florida Legislature was steaming toward completion of its Parental Rights in Education bill, which would (and now does) keep discussion of sexual orientation and/or gender identity out of public school classrooms from kindergarten through third grade, Disney then-CEO bungled his way from silence to condemnation of the plan, and a promise to make war on it and similar bills anywhere in America they emerged.

Had he a wee bit more Ronald Reagan sunniness in him, DeSantis might have laughed off Disney’s feeble joust with Florida’s legislative process. Then again, the Gipper predated our full-blown woke culture war.

Now attorneys have their sabers crossed over the 27,520 acre-patch of Central Florida where Disney had enjoyed self-governing status since 1967, until the company tested DeSantis’ mess-around-and-find-out mode.

These days, however, lost in the legal thrust-and-parry over the dissolved Reedy Creek Improvement District (which, to be honest, was a model for all local governments) is how the company risked getting its nose bloodied in the first place. What multibillion, multinational corporation publicly meddles in real-time state-level lawmaking, especially in a bill of importance to its target audience, parents of elementary school-aged children?

Where have you gone, Walter Elias Disney?

Which brings us back to Hurt and his accurate summation of the shifting narrative. No longer the story of how Mickey wanted 7-year-olds to write book reports about Heather Has Two Mommies, it’s become a tale of government coercion, a state’s meddling in the free market, the abrogation of contracts, and attacks on the First Amendment.

Naturally — not least of all because DeSantis is a globetrotting shadow candidate for the GOP presidential nomination — all prominent Republicans are expected to play. Because that’s how the game works.

And play they have. Politico rounded up a few.

Not unexpectedly, Donald Trump, whose worries about a potential DeSantis challenge are palpable and routinely comic, blathered forth on Truth Social, achieving knee-slapping hilarity by suggesting Disney World could be uprooted and relocated. “Watch! That would be a killer.”

Of course Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor, past member of the Trump team, and announced presidential candidate, had a take. Come to the Palmetto State, she suggests, where the climate is neither woke nor — borrowing from the Trump thesaurus — “sanctimonious about it either.” Oh, my.

Visiting CNBC’s Squawk Box, U.S. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy recommended locking teams from Disney and DeSantis in a room until they negotiated some sort of ceasefire — one in which Disney “abide[s] by the rules” and stays out of politics. (We think DeSantis would take that deal. CEO Bob Iger, not so much.)

Florida Sen. Rick Scott, appearing Thursday on FBN’s The Bottom Line, sided with DeSantis on the law in question, but encouraged better times:

“What I hope is that cooler heads are going to prevail here,” Scott said Wednesday. “We’ve got to figure out how to solve this problem, how to make sure Disney continues to grow in our state, how Disney continues to invest and add more jobs.”

Suppose other companies that might otherwise move to Florida get cold feet over this, Sen. Marco Rubio said on Fox & Friends. That’s a hypothetical, Rubio said, before rallying to Desantis’ side: “I don’t have a problem with taking on Disney. I think the fundamental question here is what we’re trying to fix is the fact that Disney had some arrangement that gave them governmental-type powers. I think it’s a perfectly legitimate thing.”

Chris Christie, Asa Hutchinson and Chris Sununu — past and current GOP governors all — also weighed in. You can find their misgivings if you search hard enough.

Those seeking a ray of sunshine in this desultory turn of events can turn, of all places, to Slate, where Mark Joseph Stern frets if Disney prevails in the lawsuit filed — with noble intent, he acknowledges — in federal court Wednesday, the United States could be catapulted more than a century into the past, beyond even the wildest conservative dreams of Barry Goldwater.

Federal courts are reluctant to strike down otherwise valid laws because they might be pretext for the suppression of speech. But this case is more about contract law than free expression. And by invoking the Constitution’s contracts clause, and leaning on it so heavily, Disney is playing with fire. There is a reason this provision has sat moribund for nearly a century: Interpreted broadly, it could give courts immense power to help corporations and employers escape regulation. The federal judiciary should not be handed another open-ended invitation to halt progress at the behest of the unscrupulous and powerful — which, free speech gestures aside, is what this is.

Don’t misinterpret the writer. He regards DeSantis as a bigot and an instigator of anti-LGBTQ censorship. But a successful raising of the contracts clause would, in his view, begin to unravel 90 years of federal government regulation, dating back to the New Deal, in the name of good-deeds-doing. And he shudders.

That’s why far-right anti-government groups like the New Civil Liberties Alliance encouraged the Supreme Court to use the COVID eviction cases to “reinvigorate” the clause: They sense an opportunity to restore it as a cudgel against progressive regulation. It would be a sadly ironic victory if the House of Mouse’s enlightened quest for justice empowered the courts to resurrect this dangerous zombie legal doctrine.

Wait. A gigantic corporate player launches a legal response to a conservative presidential candidate’s power play, and the ultimate potential outcome is a SCOTUS ruling that releases Washington’s iron fist from private enterprise, thereby simultaneously satisfying corporate player and presidential candidate?

Dan Brown, call your agent. This, patient readers, is a plot twist unimaginable by even the most brazen conspiracy-fixated novelist. If such a wild scenario is indeed afoot (please, please, please), who cares what Charlie Hurt thinks?