Editor’s Note: Suzanne Nossel is CEO of PEN America. The views expressed here are hers. Read more opinion on CNN.
CNN
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Florida Governor Ron DeSantis is going to destroy free speech in order to save it, it seems.
Over the last year DeSantis has championed a law that limits classroom discussions of LGBTQ identities, banned teaching and learning of particular perspectives on race, enacted a measure barring certain diversity training in schools and workplaces, and replaced the leadership of a small, progressive public college with conservative ideologues and religious leaders charged with overhauling the campus’s politics.
DeSantis has also sought to shut down a drag show, citing a 1947 legal precedent banning “men impersonating women.” He has proposed to challenge the landmark Supreme Court decision on libel, narrowing the scope of press freedom.
As recently as 2019, DeSantis styled himself as a First Amendment defender. During his first gubernatorial run in 2018 he pledged on his campaign web site to defend “First Amendment speech rights against those in academia, media and politics who seek to silence conservatives.”
The following year he announced an agreement among the state’s 40 public colleges and universities to adopt a free speech pledge modeled on the “Chicago Principles,” the University of Chicago’s admirable and influential manifesto in defense of open discourse. The Chicago statement, the result of work done by a committee on free expression convened at the college in 2014, proclaims that “debate or deliberation may not be suppressed because the ideas put forth are thought by some or even by most members of the University community to be offensive, unwise, immoral or wrong-headed.”
Over the last three years, however, DeSantis has turned his back on free speech in the name of pushing back against ideas he finds contemptible. He has railed against progressive curricula and academic theories as “an attempt to really delegitimize our history and delegitimize our institutions” and urged his supporters to “think deeply about if we are a disfavored class based on our principles, based on having conservative views,”
DeSantis is not wrong to point out that progressive orthodoxies can sometimes…
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