Trump’s Own Judge Just Told Ron DeSantis He Can’t Ban Ideas From a Classroom. The Quote Is Magnificent.
Ron DeSantis wanted to ban ideas.
Not dangerous ideas — not incitement, not fraud, not defamation. Ideas about race and gender. Specifically, the idea that racism has systemic dimensions, that the history of the United States includes structural inequalities built over centuries, that some people may have benefited from those structures while others were harmed by them. These ideas are taught in universities. They have been taught in universities for decades. They are the conclusions of the accumulated scholarship of historians, sociologists, economists, and legal theorists whose work has been peer-reviewed, cited, challenged, debated, and refined through the ordinary processes of academic inquiry.
DeSantis decided the state of Florida could prohibit professors from teaching them. He called the law the Stop WOKE Act. He championed it. He signed it. He used it to campaign for president.
On Tuesday, Judge Britt Grant of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit blocked it.
Judge Britt Grant was appointed by Donald Trump.
“If the First Amendment offers any boundary of protection at all for public university classrooms, this statute crosses it,” Grant wrote.
That is the opinion of a judge appointed by the president whose party passed the law. That is the legal assessment of someone who, by any reasonable measure of Republican judicial politics, should have been sympathetic to DeSantis’s position. She was not.
The Argument Florida Made
Florida’s theory was as simple as it was authoritarian: because the government pays the professors’ salaries, their speech is the State’s speech. The state employs the professors. The state funds the universities. Therefore the state controls what is said in the classrooms. The professors are, in Florida’s telling, nothing more than state mouthpieces — paid to say what the government approves and prohibited from saying what it doesn’t.
Grant rejected this, writing: “Florida’s salary-for-speech rule is a breathtaking assertion of power to ban unpopular ideas from public discourse in the very places the State’s own statutes recognize as centers of inquiry — classrooms where students are trusted to puzzle through ideas that are good and bad, easy and hard, ideally getting ever closer to the truth.”
Grant, joined by former President Bill Clinton appointee Charles Wilson, called Florida’s position a “breathtaking assertion of power to ban unpopular ideas from public discourse” in public university classrooms.
And then she deployed a quote from a 1965 law professor that deserves to be read slowly: the Florida defendants cannot “put together half a donkey and half a camel, and then ride to victory on the synthetic hybrid.”
A Trump-appointed judge called the Florida Stop WOKE Act a half-donkey half-camel synthetic hybrid that cannot ride to victory.
“Hearing an idea you disagree with is not discrimination; it is an opportunity to come up with a better idea, or maybe even change your mind,” Grant wrote.
What the Law Actually Did
The 2022 law prohibited professors and workplace training from teaching about race or gender in a way that induces guilt or blame in the classroom, under threat of a fine or penalty. The provision disallowed any “training or instruction that espouses, promotes, advances, inculcates, or compels” students at Florida public colleges and universities to believe any of eight concepts relating to topics like race and sex.
Let us be specific about what this means in practice. A professor of American history at the University of Florida could not teach that the legacy of slavery has ongoing economic consequences, if that teaching could be interpreted as making a white student feel guilty. A professor of sociology could not present research on structural racism, if that presentation advanced the idea that some people benefit from racial hierarchy. A professor of gender studies — a field with decades of peer-reviewed scholarship — could not teach the foundational concepts of her discipline.
DeSantis called this “protecting the open exchange of ideas.” It prohibited the open exchange of ideas. This is not a subtle distinction.
The Dissent and What It Reveals
Judge Barbara Lagoa, another Trump appointee and a former Florida Supreme Court justice picked by DeSantis, dissented. Lagoa argued Florida acted within its authority to control what professors may endorse in state-sponsored classrooms. “The First Amendment protects all viewpoints in the public square, whether they are conventional or controversial,” Lagoa wrote. “But it does not compel all viewpoints to be worthy of state-sponsored endorsement.”
This is the argument that the state university is not really a marketplace of ideas but a state-sponsored platform, and the state can decide what ideas its platform endorses. It is a coherent argument. It is also the argument that would give every governor of every state with a public university system the power to determine what is true and what is not, what can be taught and what cannot, which fields of inquiry are permitted and which are suppressed.
Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier praised her, saying “Barbara Lagoa may be the best jurist in our country.” He said nothing about Judge Grant.
What Remains
The three-judge panel affirmed a preliminary injunction, meaning the law remains blocked while the case continues. Florida can ask the full 11th Circuit to rehear the case or petition the Supreme Court to review it.
Courts have also intervened to prevent the workplace provisions from being enacted, but it remains in effect in Florida’s K-12 public schools. Block said the precedent set by the latest decision could make it easier for K-12 advocates to overturn the law affecting their schools.
The children in Florida’s public schools are still subject to the Stop WOKE Act. The professors in Florida’s public universities are, for now, not. The case will continue. DeSantis will fight it. The Supreme Court — with its three Trump appointees and its record on First Amendment cases involving conservative governments — may yet get to weigh in.
Clay Calvert, non-resident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, said: “I don’t believe it’s going to stop Governor DeSantis, or frankly, even President Trump from attacking academia, because for them it chums the waters for MAGA constituents who perceive academia as being very liberal and very much in favor of DEI.”
He is right that it will not stop them. But it has stopped them today. A judge appointed by the president told the governor that you cannot ban ideas from a classroom by employing the teacher who teaches them.
“This ruling sets a strong precedent that higher education cannot be limited to the whims of politicians,” said Leah Watson, senior staff attorney with the ACLU’s Racial Justice Program.
The whims of politicians. That is what the Stop WOKE Act was. A political document dressed as an education policy, designed to perform outrage for a base that had been told academia was the enemy, signed by a governor who wanted to be president by running against the universities his state funds.
A Trump-appointed judge saw through it. She called it a breathtaking assertion of power. She blocked it.
The half-donkey half-camel hybrid did not ride to victory.