Home » Ron DeSantis’ “Stop Woke” act is stopped by Florida judge: “Positively dystopian” | Boing Boing
News

Ron DeSantis’ “Stop Woke” act is stopped by Florida judge: “Positively dystopian” | Boing Boing

A Florida judge blocked Gov. Ron DeSantis’s authoritarian “Stop Woke” act again yesterday, after first blocking it in November, allowing professors to continue teaching about race and sexism as they see fit.

Tallahassee U.S. District Judge Mark Walker called DeSantis’s anti-democratic law “positively dystopian,” and said, “It should go without saying that if liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”

Walker, a Bill Clinton-appointed judge, was part of a three-judge panel that rejected requests to “lift an injunction against enforcing the law imposed” by Walker in November, according to the Florida Phoenix. The other two judges — Britt Grant, and Barbara Lagoa — were appointed by Donald Trump. And years earlier, Lagoa had been appointed by DeSantis to the Florida Supreme Court.

“Our professors are critical to a healthy democracy, and the State of Florida’s decision to choose which viewpoints are worthy of illumination and which must remain in the shadows has implications for us all,” said Walker. “If our ‘priests of democracy’ are not allowed to shed light on challenging ideas, then democracy will die in darkness.”

From AP News:

A federal judge in Florida on Thursday blocked a law pushed by Gov. Ron DeSantis that restricts certain race-based conversations and analysis in colleges. …

The ruling is at least a temporary setback to the powerful Republican governor’s agenda to combat what he describes as the “woke ideology” of liberals and critical race theory, a way of thinking about America’s history through the lens of racism. …

The governor has often said rulings that halt his legislative priorities are likely to be reversed by appeals courts in Florida that are generally more conservative. A spokesman for DeSantis said they would appeal the ruling.

As part of Walker’s ruling, he used part of a George Orwell quote from the dystopian classic, 1984, to illustrate Dictator DeSantis’s version of Oceania: “‘It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen,’ and the powers in charge of Florida’s public university system have declared the State has unfettered authority to muzzle its professors in the name of ‘freedom.'”

Newsletter

March 2023
M T W T F S S
 12345
6789101112
13141516171819
20212223242526
2728293031