Ron DeSantis’s Illiberal Education Crusade

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Maybe it's not a matter of being overrated.

Maybe it's more a matter of freedom having many ways to measure it, some of which conflict.

It's hard to say someone has real freedom when they're stuck between terrible options and starvation, for example. It's hard to say someone has real freedom if they're essentially a pet - entirely provided for but with zero ability to make long-term plans for themselves or decide what they wish to do with their lives.

It's hard to say someone has real freedom when society can punish them for a wide-range of actions, but it would also be hard to say someone has real freedom if individuals can harm them without recourse because those harms all impact their ability to be free.

Society is bigger than individuals and inherently limits absolute freedom. One who chooses to participate in society surrenders some degree of freedom in exchange for that, but also probably didn't have the ability to freely chose whether to participate or not. Unless you're raised in a Kaczynski style shack that choice was made by your parents, but also, even if you build that shack, good luck having your decision to entirely remove yourself from society respected.

This argument is at the core of why liberals split in two, but it's bigger/deeper than that. Everyone wants freedom and yet we all define it differently.

In Idaho, an art exhibit was censored and teens were told they couldn't testify in some legislative hearings. In Washington state, a lawmaker proposed a hotline so the government could track offensively biased statements, as well as hate crimes. In Florida, bloggers are fighting a bill that would force them to register with the state if they write posts criticizing public officials.

Meanwhile, bans on books and drag performances are growing increasingly common nationwide.

“We are seeing tremendous attacks on First Amendment freedoms across the country right now, at all levels of government. Censorship is proliferating, and it’s deeply troubling,” said Joe Cohn, legislative and policy director with the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.

“This year, we’re seeing a wave of bills targeting drag performances, where simply being gender nonconforming is enough to trigger the penalty. We’re also seeing a wave of bills regulating what can be in public or K-12 school libraries,” Cohn said. “On college campuses, we have been tracking data about attempts to get faculty members punished or even fired for speech or expression and the numbers are startling — it’s the highest rate that we’ve seen in our 20 years of existence.”

First Amendment rights had been stable in America for decades, said Ken Paulson, director of the Free Speech Center at Middle Tennessee State University, but in recent years many states have reverted to the anti-speech tactics employed by people like Sen. Joe McCarthy during the “Red Scare” of the early 1950s.

”It's pretty mind-boggling that so many politicians are waving the flag of freedom while doing anything they possibly can to infringe on the free speech rights of Americans,” Paulson said.

Still, no one political group has a monopoly on censorship — aggression is increasing across the spectrum, Cohn said.

Washington state's bias hotline bill, which died in committee earlier this year, was sponsored by Democratic Sen. Javier Valdez and backed by several groups including the Anti-Defamation League, Urban League, Council on American-Islamic Relations and others. It aimed to help the state collect information about hate crimes and bias incidents and to provide support and compensation to victims at a time when hate crime reports are rising.

Opponents, including the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, said they feared it would chill protected speech because it encompasses both criminal behavior and offensively biased statements.

Hate speech can be damaging and repugnant, but is still generally protected by the First Amendment.

Artist Katrina Majkut experienced that first-hand last week, when artworks she had shown in more than two dozen states over the past decade were unexpectedly censored at a small state school in Lewiston, Idaho.

Majkut uses embroidery to highlight and subvert historically narrow ideas of wifedom and motherhood. She was hired to curate an exhibit at Lewis-Clark State College focusing on health care issues like chronic illness, pregnancy and gun violence.

But March 2, a day before the show's opening, Majkut and two other artists were told some of their work would be removed over administrator fears about running afoul of Idaho's “No Public Funds for Abortion Act.”

Four documentary video and audio works by artist Lydia Nobles that showed women talking about their own experiences with abortion were also removed. And part of artist Michelle Harney's series of 1920s-era letters written to Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger were stricken from the show.

The art exhibit censorship comes just two months after another controversial decision by Skaug. As chairman of the Idaho House Judiciary and Rules Committee, Skaug announced in January that people under age 18 would not be allowed to testify in his committee. Another Republican committee chair soon followed suit.

“There is a clear lack of foresight in politicians who seek to eliminate the voices of those who will one day elect and eventually supersede them,” a group of 32 high school student leaders wrote in a joint opinion piece sent to news outlets across the state. “We ask Idaho’s Republican leaders, what are you so afraid of?”

The lawmakers eventually modified their rules, allowing youth to testify as long as they have signed permission slips from a parent or guardian.

For Cohn, the efforts in Idaho and elsewhere reflect the danger of trying to restrict the expression of people who hold opposing views.

"We have to be ever-vigilant if we want our culture of individual freedoms to prevail,” he said. “Bad ideas are better dealt with through debate and dialogue than government censorship.”

Experts say attacks on free speech are rising across the US

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That's precisely why I say I'm a misanthrope. Damn humans always get in the way of MY freedom.

If it wasn't humans it'd be some other animal, likely while it also tries to eat you.

Or maybe all humans are rotten-to-the-core parasites and the earth would be much better off if we never existed?