 Back in April, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis signed into law what was known as the Stop Woke Act after it passed Florida's legislature overwhelmingly, which was effectively their state's attempt at thwarting critical race theory. Now, the Stop Woke Act prevented universities and private businesses from teaching about institutional racism in very specific ways. So it prohibited them from teaching about people being inherently racist, either consciously or subconsciously. It also prevented them from instructing people about privilege based on race and sex, which is just weird because even if you agree with him, this is the state tone policing the ways in which people talk about things. That's just inherently dystopian. And apparently I'm not alone in that belief because a judge who struck it down, and this is a judge going after this law for a second time, literally described this law as dystopian. That's how brazen Ron DeSantis was, but he knows that this was not something that was constitutional, but by signing this into law, he was throwing red meat to the base. Ron DeSantis was virtue signaling, and now a judge who actually knows the Constitution is explaining why this law is so absurd, as Jake Johnson of Common Dreams explains in an order that begins by quoting the famous opening line of George Orwell's dystopian novel 1984, a federal judge on Thursday blocked key provisions of a Florida censorship law that aimed to restrict how state university professors teach race, gender, and U.S. history. It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking 13, and the powers in charge of Florida's public university system have declared this state has unfettered authority to muzzle its professors in the name of freedom. Judge Mark Walker of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Florida and Obama appointee wrote in his scathing decision which temporarily halts enforcement of parts of the law championed by Republican Governor Ron DeSantis, a possible 2024 presidential candidate. To confront certain viewpoints that offend the powers that be, the state of Florida passed the so-called Stop Woke Act in 2022. The law officially bans professors from expressing disfavored viewpoints in university classrooms while permitting unfettered expression of the opposite viewpoints. Defendants argue that under this act, professors enjoy academic freedom so long as they express only those viewpoints of which the state approves, this is positively dystopian. And to that I could not agree more. Now the judge ultimately concluded that this law violates the First Amendment because, yeah, obviously. And this isn't the first time, as I alluded to earlier in this video, that this judge has went after this law because he also struck down a provision that applied to private businesses. And you can't control speech that way. You can't have the government saying what you can and can't talk about and the ways in which you can talk about these things. And the reason why this is something that Republicans like is because they view colleges as like liberal manufacturing facilities and anyone who goes in as a conservative is going to come out as a liberal. And it's not that these professors are teaching these students that communism is the way of the future, even though that would be based. What these professors are doing is they are assigning students reading material. These students are learning more. And as they learn more, they naturally move away from conservatism if they were previously conservative, because conservatism is not fact-based. And when you're actually seeking the truth and you're learning, it's just natural that you move away from conservatism because they don't have facts on their side. So basically, if you can thwart critical race theory, supposedly, by not letting professors teach it, then that will kind of stop that many people from being liberal, I guess. I'm not really sure what their logic is because it's dumb and hard to follow. But critical race theory, this is something that conservatives have been saying is happening, is being taught in elementary schools, in high schools, at the university level. But from my own experience, I literally did not encounter critical race theory up until I was in a PhD program and I read one article on it. That's it. This is a legal theory, which is an offshoot from critical theory. This is not some sort of indoctrination program that teaches all people that white people are bad and teaches people to hate white people. That's not what this is. So the way that the right successfully made this a boogeyman kind of demonstrates how effective they are at propaganda. But Ron DeSantis trying to be the culture warrior for the right, he tried to take aim at this in a way that was so brazen that it violates the First Amendment and you just can't do that. And the judge was so flabbergasted, seemingly by how brazenly unconstitutional this law was, that he had to strike it down in scathing fashion and even called it dystopian, which is telling because judges usually don't insert their opinions that much. But in this instance, it really is dystopian for Ron DeSantis to sign this into law. And let me remind you that it's not the first time that Ron DeSantis has gone after free speech. He effectively decriminalized running over protesters in his state and not to mention he signed the don't say gay law, don't say gay bill into law, I should say. And what that did was it basically brought back, don't ask, don't tell, albeit for teachers. So does anyone remember don't ask, don't tell, basically back in the Clinton era, the Republican Party really wanted gay people to not be able to serve in the military. So Clinton, with the compromise, signed the don't ask, don't tell bill into law. And what that did was it said that gay people can remain in the military so long as they don't come out of the closet. We won't ask, just don't tell, otherwise you will be kicked out. Now that was wrong, right? But now we're kind of seeing a similar version of that in schools in Florida where you have some districts instructing teachers to take down photographs of their same sex partner because that could be viewed as potentially indoctrinating children. But they don't really know what does and doesn't violate the law because a lot of these bills that Ron DeSantis has been signing, they are purposefully vague. And essentially, what they want to do is have this chilling effect on speech. So if you don't know what does or doesn't fly under these laws, then you just kind of play it safe and avoid it all together. So I'm glad that this was struck down. It should be struck down. But just to see how raising Ron DeSantis is, it just, it doesn't surprise me anymore with the modern GOP, but it does feel good to see a judge slap this down and a scathing rebuke of it. And I think that more judges who actually care about the Constitution, there are some, I think, I would predict, maybe not all of them, but some, I wish that they would use words like dystopian to describe some of these laws passed by Republicans, because it is downright dystopian to control the ways in which people speak about things that is antithetical to free speech and to see Ron DeSantis be hailed as some sort of a free speech warrior by the likes of Jimmy Dorr or Joe Rogan or whoever said that about him. Like to see him have that as his reputation despite the bills that he signed into law is egregious to me. So I'm just glad that this was struck down, and I'm glad that the judge did it in a way that embarrasses Ron DeSantis because he deserves it.