 You now have a woke mind virus has infected all these other institutions. I mean, just look at corporate America. Most corporations, some of these big corporations, are now exercising quasi-public power. Is it time to fight fire with fire, to wield government power, to stop a dangerous ideology from destroying America's vital institutions? Florida's governor and maybe 2024 presidential candidate Ron DeSantis thinks so. We're not just going to sit idly by if you're trying to circumscribe people's freedoms. And that's true of its government, it's also true of its big business. He's quickly becoming a favorite of a conservative movement, seeking to jettison the libertarian idea that government shouldn't meddle in the affairs of private business. But I think the lesson for people on the right is I think there was a generation of people that kind of the muscle memory was just if it's private, just defer to it. Here, DeSantis and Republicans in the state legislature retaliated against Disney for opposing a Florida law prohibiting the discussion of sexuality and gender identity in K through third grade classrooms. Disney should not run its own government. Now DeSantis, who declined our interview request, has signed the Individual Rights Act, formerly known as the Stop Woke Act. I think what you see now with the rise of this woke ideology is an attempt to really delegitimize our history. A U.S. district court judge struck down the first part of the law on First Amendment grounds. It prohibited private companies from holding any mandatory training that espouses, promotes, advances, inculcates, or compels employees to believe eight concepts. Those are that members of one race, color, sex, or national origin are morally superior to members of another race, color, or sex. That your inherent characteristics make you inherently racist, sexist, or oppressive. That these characteristics determine one's moral status as privileged or oppressed. Or mean that you bear personal responsibility for past injustices. The concepts like merit, excellence, hard work, fairness, neutrality, objectivity, and racial colorblindness are racist. Or that trying to be colorblind and treat people without regard to race is wrong. Here's one example of a diversity, equity, and inclusion presentation from one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit. Oftentimes, it's very hard for us to distinguish white supremacy from things like these are just U.S. cultural norms, you know, a focus on individualism over groups, or emphasizing written word as a form of professional communication. White supremacy culture is why the posture of white humility from my perspective is so difficult for white people to embody. Banning workplace trainings that tell people that their race or sex makes them morally culpable might sound pretty reasonable. But opponents say such laws set a dangerous precedent. As you go through the concepts, the state worded in a way that makes it seem terrible. Jerry Edwards is a staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union of Florida who is challenging a separate part of the law that applies to universities. He calls the bill a wolf in sheep's clothing because anytime a government bans broad categories of speech, it gives politicians the ability to define terms of acceptable discourse. It's problematic and we can't allow the state, can't give the state this power to regulate speech in a sort of way. The left also craves state power to impose its cultural preferences. Human writer here tweeted recently that we should use state power for good, like civil rights and defending the LGBTQ community. The only objection to DeSantis is that he wants to use state power to push big business to do bad things. Of course, from the perspective of DeSantis and his allies, the Individual Rights Act is a civil rights law to force businesses to do what they think is good for Americans by taking identity politics out of the workplace. The more power politicians have to determine which type of speech is good and therefore legal and which is bad and therefore illegal, the more the sphere of acceptable discourse is likely to shrink as both sides of the political spectrum hem in those boundaries to promote their subjective notions of the common good. The state should not be banning ideas, particularly on college campuses. When you have such a blatant attempt to control thought, and not only control thought but have the state control thought, that's reminiscent of societies and governments that we are supposedly fought wars against. The part of DeSantis' law that hasn't been struck down pertains to universities that receive state funding. It bans college professors from promoting any of the eight forbidden concepts. Leroy Pernell, a law professor at Florida A&M University, or FAMU, and historically Black College, is a plaintiff in the ACLU's case challenging that part of the law. He's afraid that the law will outlaw discussions of systemic racism, which he says is part of FAMU's institutional history. The state created the law school in 1949 to accommodate two Black law students who applied to the racially segregated University of Florida. In 1966, the state forced it to seize admitting new students, until then Florida Governor Jeb Bush signed a law to reopen it in 2000. Pernell worries that if instructors were to characterize that history as systemically racist, they'd run afoul of the law's restrictions around teaching the concept. I have no way of knowing that my passion for teaching students about history, about change, about the ability to bring about change, I have no way of knowing that that isn't offensive to these subjective judges of what is endorsing, what is not endorsing, what is promoting, what is not promoting. So I do now live with the idea that at any moment the state can come and take negative action against me because of my thought. Pernell also worries that the law would prohibit him from teaching material from his own book about the racist roots of the concept of colorblindness. It is impossible to understand the criminal procedure and understand the issues that arise in criminal procedure without understanding that the history has not been colorblind. But the state has argued that it does have a say over what's taught at taxpayer subsidized schools. Teaching kids to hate their country and to hate each other is not worth one red cent of taxpayer money. What do you think about that specifically, the fact that the state has a say in this because it involves public money and they deem the teaching of this to be harmful to the state's interest? The state's done this before. I mean, this is not something new. Back in the Red Scare era, they tried to crack down on professors who they thought were communist or communist adjacent. And the state has no business doing that, of regulating the marketplace of ideas in that way. There isn't a compelling interest in the state saying which ideas are acceptable and which ideas aren't. That is viewpoint discrimination. Diversity is good for business in many ways. Companies with diverse leaders are shown to be more profitable. Sarah Margulis and her husband co-founded Honey Fund, a Clearwater Florida-based company that administers online cash wedding registries. Their plaintiffs, in the case against Florida, are arguing that the law restricts their freedom to provide diversity training seminars to their employees. What was in the trainings that you believe might have run a foul of those kinds of restrictions? So one thing that comes to mind is the idea of privilege that white people or males have privilege that non-white people or females don't enjoy. And I think that the concept of that, the idea of that, is not something for us to shy away from understanding and actively trying to mitigate in our business. DeSantis' office declined our interview requests, but his press reps responded by email, that because the concepts are forced on employees as a condition of employment, that they are designed to force individuals to believe something and adopt a certain prescribed ideology, and therefore that the law is designed to prohibit forced indoctrination in these concepts because doing so is discriminatory under Florida's civil rights law. But Honey Fund's attorney, Shalini Argawal, of the Nonprofit Protect Democracy says the existence of civil rights law implies the opposite, that anyone who feels targeted by a diversity training workshop is already protected. Our current employment discrimination law that preceded the Stop Woke Act already covers hostile work environments, and that's basically when in the workplace an employee faces objectively offensive, and it can be just largely speech, not even other things, but it has to be so severe and pervasive that it creates a situation where the employment, then continuing that employment is intolerable, it affects a term or condition of their employment. So that is out there. If anyone is engaging in diversity, equity, and inclusion trainings that actually create hostile work environment, employees preexisting this law were free to bring claims. The Stop Woke Act creates a whole set of pretty flimsy and vague standards that make it kind of impossible for an employer to figure out how to proceed. How much concern do you have about retaliation for putting yourself out there and being part of a lawsuit like this? As a business leader, I strive to do what's right for my business. I strive to take good care of my customers and my employees, and so for me, standing up as a plaintiff in this case was an easy decision. It's one that my team was behind, and I moved my business to Florida in 2017 from California because Florida was known to be a business-friendly state because it was a place where a lot of investment dollars were coming in, people were moving, going to colleges, getting tech degrees, and big names, people like Bill Gates and Jeff Innick have invested billions of dollars in the Tampa Bay Area specifically to make it a tech-friendly place for innovative businesses. And so I don't imagine that the state of Florida is wanting to do anything to undermine the billions of dollars that have flown into the state to promote business. We believe in education, not indoctrination. If people are thinking of themselves in terms of their racial identity, that didn't begin with critical race theory, all right? That began in the womb, and that began with their families, and it began in society. So this is nothing that's, this is not indoctrination of ideas that have roots and things that didn't exist before. So that's just silly. But the idea that somehow it is a negative to understand that there are racial differences that as a society, different races, different communities bring different things to the table. You might disagree with Parnell. I'm also not convinced that teaching law students to celebrate racial identity and differences is the best use of classroom time, but it doesn't really matter what I think a lot of professors should teach, and it shouldn't much matter what a governor thinks about that either. The relevant question really is not what goes on in the classroom, the board room, or the break room, but who gets to decide? Let's say that there was a blue state that did kind of the opposite of this, and they said, we're gonna ban a professor who has a different viewpoint and thinks critical race theory is wrong and that we should be talking about color blindness as a legitimate concept and things like this. Anytime you put state and ban together, danger, all right? Why does the state ban any thought? If we are in a free society that exists and develops based on free exchange of ideas. The state can't really banish ideas. It can make people more hesitant to speak openly and honestly through threat of punishment. Hampering real communication that way makes solving hard problems even harder, and there are a lot of hard problems left to solve. Some so-called woke ideas are pernicious because reducing every injustice to an identity-based formula flattens nuance, cultivates grievances, and can create tension where none existed before, as borne out by studies that find diversity training quite often makes people more prejudiced. This simplistic and counterproductive approach only further clouds our view of real solutions and real progress. But is this situation really so dire as portrayed by political operatives like Chris Rufo, who stood beside DeSantis as he introduced the law and who calls critical race theory and similar teachings, neo-Marxism? It's not a benign philosophy about teaching racism. It's a radical philosophy that's rooted in Marxism. Even some libertarians have come to look at the issue as a fight against communism. The Libertarian Party's official account tweeted that, soon, parents will be required to help enforce the state's Marxist, queer theorist critical race agenda at home. Parents who fail to adequately indoctrinate their kids will have them taken away. And when you believe you're fighting an existential domestic threat, it can justify all sorts of very unlibertarian, authoritarian behavior. The party account defended Joseph McCarthy while approvingly quoting an anti-woke academic saying, it's time to deal with American communists for real. Joseph McCarthy in the Senate and the Committee for Un-American Activities in the House went way overboard in their hunt for communist infiltrators in the government, eventually targeting actors, writers, poets, musicians, teachers. And we're not even talking about Soviet spies within the government here, which is what kicked off McCarthy's crusade. We're talking about professors teaching what they believe college students need to hear and employers training their workers in ways they think will help create a more harmonious workplace and virtue signal to their customers and ultimately help their bottom line. We're talking about a state government regulating the free exchange of ideas. That's a bigger threat to our liberty and to American values than so-called wokeness ever will be. This isn't the way to stop woke. Does that mean you just have to roll over and take it? After all, as conservatives will point out the progressive left has no problem using civil rights law to push its ideas into the workplace and onto the college campus. Why shouldn't the right pick up that tool and use it for its own ends? Well, because you're sharpening a tool for your opponents to eventually turn against you. Instead, you could be blunting or even dismantling it. If existing laws are part of the problem, limit or repeal the laws. Also build, improve and support alternative institutions, ones that reflect your values. Don't work for or buy from companies that you think disrespect you or attend colleges that spend a lot of time on a little of value. They'll get the message some already have. If you really think woke ideas should be stopped, fine, but be wary of shortcuts. That's often how you miss important details and badly hurt yourself. The long hard path is the one more likely to bring enduring change. Criticize, resist, and when need be, opt out.