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David French often speaks of the many ways he helped fight for freedom of speech for conservatives, and everyone else, on college campuses. I am old enough to remember the days when conservatives, rightfully, for the most part, were upset with the hostility with which conservative ideas were treated at colleges and in academia at large. So it is maddening and disheartening to see this piece from ProPublica on the silencing impact Florida's Individual Freedom Act, also known as the Stop Woke Act, has had on college campuses.
While proponents of the Individual Freedom Act may try and focus on the name of the bill to say that it gives freedom back to college students to fight the tyranny of radical professors, the reality is that the legislation is forcing professors to not speak about issues of race lest they risk losing their jobs. The Stop Woke Act is, in effect, silencing voices on college campuses that conservatives do not want to hear from. This means that in all the years that conservatives fought for their right to speak freely on college campuses without being threatened or treated with hostility, the only lesson learned is that those in power should try to curtail the speech of others.
Trampling on the First Amendment's protection of freedom of speech is not a conservative value. However, for the new authoritarian adjacent Right, it is the bread and butter of their grievance politics. Florida had a choice, with both a Republican governor and control of the state legislature, to right the wrongs that were done to anyone who spoke against the accepted knowledge of the day on college campuses by allowing for the protection of speech for everyone. Meaning that colleges should be a place where ideas are allowed to be explored, and only those with merit that can stand up to scrutiny are allowed to stand. Instead, the Individual Freedom Act has predetermined that specific ideas are too wild or hurtful; one point of the bill is that professors are not allowed to make students feel bad about the discrimination and harm their race caused another. This would be laughable if it were not reality.
As the new authoritarian Right continues to choose to get even with those on the Left they feel have kept them down by flipping the tables so that the Left now feels ostracized, conservatives with principle need to continue to stand for freedom for all. Professors of colleges in Florida should not be afraid to lose their jobs because of the ideas they ask students to explore. And the government should refrain from telling its citizens which ideas are acceptable and which are not through legislation or other means.
Beyond the bill's attempt to force a point of view on students and professors alike, it is not winning politics. Yes, in the short term, this bill has helped DeSantis, who won reelection as Florida's governor in a landslide that has made the whispers of him as a dark horse 2024 presidential candidate seem like all but a certainty. But in the long run, conservatives will lose because of bills like this. They will fail because the way forward, as the Apostle Paul says in his letter to the Romans, is to feed your enemy when they are hungry and give them a drink when they are thirsty. And if your enemy has sought to take away your right to speak freely, you do not harm them when you come into power. In this way, you both confuse your enemy and, even more importantly, have the potential to win them over.
4 More Things
1) NPR has a terrific story detailing the wellness to QAnon pipeline. NPR's reporting focuses on a former yoga instructor, Guru Jagat, who found a home in both the world of yoga and QAnon because of the similar focus on finding your truth in the two worlds. It's an interesting case study of how easily we can be led into conspiratorial thinking.
2) According to Yahoo News, Ginni Thomas, wife of Justice Clarence Thomas, is sorry that her texts to White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows about overturning the 2020 election became public knowledge. Thomas does admit that her worries about fraud weren't uncovered. However, her explanations do not sound like a woman convinced there was no fraud, merely one who has accepted defeat.
3) Writing for The Daily Beast, Bonnie Kristian argues that the permanency of the internet combined with our desire to tweet, post, Gab, or Truth our opinions into the world makes it harder for our minds to be changed. It is a good reminder that 1) you don't need to broadcast everything you think and 2) opinions should be held loosely because there will come a day you need to change yours.
4) In his newsletter, Calm Down, Ben Dreyfuss debunks the now-accepted idea that Greta Thunberg led to Andrew Tate's arrest in Romania on human trafficking charges. Even if you do not know about Andrew Tate (as I did not before last weekend), Dreyfuss' newsletter is worth reading as a cautionary tale for why we must be careful about how we read news, especially when it comes from social media and not reported by journalists.
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