Don Moynihan: The DeSantis attack on campus speech

[Nevilledog]

https://donmoynihan.substack.com/p/the-desantis-attack-on-campus-speech

Illiberal regimes achieve their goals through a coercive mixture of legal action and extra-legal intimidation. This is exactly what Ron DeSantis is now doing in Florida. While his Stop WOKE Act has been blocked by a federal court, DeSantis is proceeding undeterred in his attack on race-related campus speech.

To recap: DeSantis engineered the Stop WOKE Act. Like other laws DeSantis laws has pushed, it seems obviously unconstitutional. A federal court blocked it in November, calling it "positively dystopian."

Nevertheless, on December 28, DeSantis sent a memo to all institutes of higher education in Florida, asking them identify any funding spent on Diversity, Equity and Inclusion initiatives, or on Critical Race Theory. The memo is a signal to higher ed administrators that DeSantis will continue to target parts of the curriculum he dislikes, and threaten their budget in the process of doing so.

This should be a red line for conservatives: with one action, DeSantis is thumbing his nose at the rule of law, attacking free speech, and higher education. But the opposite is true. DeSantis has taken on these culture wars precisely because he believes that in the Trumpified version of the Republican Party, doing so will gain him credit. He is differentiating himself from Trump not on policy, but on the competence and ruthlessness of his illiberalism.

*snip*