Las Vegas Sun

March 29, 2024

EDITORIAL:

Florida’s new thought police law stirs echoes of authoritarianism

DeSantis

Wilfredo Lee / AP

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis gestures as he speaks, Monday, June 14, 2021, at the Shul of Bal Harbour, a Jewish community center in Surfside, Fla. DeSantis visited the South Florida temple to denounce anti-Semitism and stand with Israel, while signing a bill into law that would require public schools in his state to set aside moments of silence for children to meditate or pray.

When dictatorial regimes come to power, highly educated people who don’t share their ideology are often among the first groups they silence.

Republican leaders in Florida appear to be getting a head start on just such oppression, with a new state law requiring all public colleges and universities to survey students, faculty and staff about their political beliefs. The law, which Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed last week, also dictates that university students “be shown diverse ideas and opinions, including those that they may disagree with or find uncomfortable.”

This is a starkly dystopian measure that brings to mind authoritarian campaigns to identify and root out dissidents. Combined with the GOP’s attack on critical race theory in several states and its support of a whitewashed history curriculum in K-12 and postgraduate education, it also raises the specter of a government supplanting objective, academically based education with state-sponsored political dogma.

Deceptively labeled by the state’s GOP majority as an attempt to promote “intellectual diversity,” the law at the very least appears to be a tool for the state to either defund higher education in Florida or force colleges to swallow the Republicans’ twisted version of educational programming. The framework for what the GOP wants to cram down educators’ throats can be found in the previous presidential administration’s 1776 Commission report, which recommended instruction that downplays racism and slavery while glorifying its leaders and institutions.

Keep in mind that DeSantis insists the state’s higher-education institutions are “indoctrinating” students and campus communities. Now he and the extremist GOP leadership in Florida want to know where students and professors stand on the political spectrum. This smells an awful lot like gathering an “enemies” list.

All of this raises countless First Amendment concerns, to be sure. DeSantis wants the state to control public discourse and analyze individuals’ political preferences. The same Republican Party at war with democracy now wants the government to monitor speech and thought. It is about as un-American as it gets.

Of course, the bill’s supporters say otherwise. They claim the responses to the survey won’t be weaponized against centrists or left-leaning individuals.

But as the Miami Herald pointed out in an editorial condemning the bill, there’s nothing in the new law that requires the state to keep the information anonymous or prevents the state from using it to, say, oust faculty members who are out of line with the far-right views of DeSantis and his ilk.

Another eerie element of the bill is that it allows an exemption to a state law requiring consent to record another person in most cases. That exemption allows students to record their classroom sessions for various purposes, including supporting a civil or criminal case against their college.

It’s not difficult to see a darker intent for that provision: to turn students into spying eyes and ears for the leadership. Citizens encouraged to spy on other citizens — welcome to North Korea, or a Communist bloc nation in the Cold War, or Khmer Rouge-era Cambodia, or any number of other dictatorial regimes.

The Florida law also has disturbing echoes of the dark days of McCarthyism in the U.S., in which numerous professors were targeted and unjustly persecuted. You almost wonder whether one of the questions on the Florida survey will be, “Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?”

Given the GOP’s tendency to copycat each other at the state level, Florida’s law threatens to become a cancer that could spread elsewhere through higher education and create a chilling effect on independent thought, free speech and intellectualism on campuses.

That it was spearheaded by DeSantis — a front-runner for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination — makes it even more of a concern. Today, Florida. In 2024, nationwide?