The government that fears an idea fears the citizen

Reason reports that a federal court has held Florida's Stop WOKE Act unconstitutional on First Amendment grounds, reaffirming a principle the Republic encoded in its founding charter: government officials are not permitted to suppress ideas they find disagreeable. One might suppose that principle needed no restatement. Apparently it does.

I have long held that the moment a government undertakes to select which truths its citizens may examine, it has stepped across the line that divides a republic from a tyranny. The mechanism does not matter — whether the instrument is a royal decree, a licensing board, or a statute that dresses censorship in the language of protecting students. The effect is identical: the state substitutes its judgment for the citizen's, and the citizen is diminished by precisely that amount.

A university is, by its nature, a place where ideas in conflict are invited to fight it out before the tribunal of reason. That is its purpose — not to confirm what the legislature already believes, but to disturb, to question, to revise. Florida's legislature, by this Act, attempted to station itself at the door of the lecture hall and turn away any argument it found uncomfortable. That is not governance; that is intellectual cowardice wearing the costume of governance.

I will be plain about the irony the Reason piece invites. Some of the ideas Florida sought to suppress concern the history of race and power in America. I am not in a position to claim clean hands on that subject. I wrote that all men are created equal, and I held people in bondage for the whole of my life. That contradiction is not a footnote; it is a central wound in my legacy and in the Republic's founding. The remedy for that wound is more honest examination, not less — which is precisely why legislating certain histories out of the classroom is not only unconstitutional but perverse.

The broader principle here is the one that never grows old: power, left to itself, will always seek to narrow the range of permissible thought, because permissible thought is the frontier of permissible dissent, and dissent is the one thing power cannot comfortably tolerate. An educated citizenry — one that reads, debates, and forms its own judgments — is the only durable check on that tendency. Strip the university of its freedom and you strip the next generation of citizens of the tools they need to govern themselves. That is not a partisan observation; it is a structural one, as true in 2026 as it was when I laid the first stone of the University of Virginia.

The court has done its duty. Whether the legislature learns from it is another matter. A republic that must be hauled before its own judges to be reminded that censorship is censorship is a republic that has, for the moment, forgotten itself. The remedy — as ever — is an attentive public that does not wait for a judge to tell it what it should have known from the first page of the Bill of Rights.