11th Circuit Tells DeSantis To Wake Up About His Stupid WOKE Law

Well folks, it looks like the humiliation for Ron DeSantis wasn’t over after all. After his spectacular flameout in the GOP Presidential primary he tried to slink home to Florida and be forgotten for a while. Alas, he made a mess of his state and left various bombs with lit fuses before running off on his Presidential quest. One of them is his infamous “War on WOKE” and the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals just handed lil Ron his butt in a scathing takedown of his bid to lift a lower court injunction preventing his Stop WOKE Act from taking effect.

As outlets including Politico have been reporting the three judge panel of the (highly conservative mind you) 11th Circuit ruled the 2022 law restricting “woke” workplace training about race “exceeds the bounds of the First Amendment.” Well, that’s pretty clear, not that DeSantis will get that in his fervor to “out Trump Trump” he went way the hell over the line.  As the linked article notes despite the 11th Circuit telling him one of his signature initiatives turned into law is unconstitutional DeSantis might appeal to SCOTUS. Good luck with that one Ronnie. SCOTUS has all the controversy it can handle these days, and as I’ve noted the 11th Circuit is famously conservative.  Some parts of the decision will make SCOTUS want to wave off getting involved in this food fight. For exampe:

“By limiting its restrictions to a list of ideas designated as offensive, the Act targets speech based on its content,” Judge Britt C. Grant, an appointee of former President Donald Trump, wrote in the opinion. “And by barring only speech that endorses any of those ideas, it penalizes certain viewpoints — the greatest First Amendment sin.”

Exactly what’s all this about you ask? Well, at DeSantis’ insistence Florida’s Republican-led Legislature passed a law, specifically FL HB 7 (22R), or the Individual Freedom Act, in 2022. Again, this was because DeSantis was going to use “WOKE” as a theme, a chariot if you will to carry him to the White House. Lord knows he kept using the word over, and over and over ad nauseum. Except it never really caught fire like his wife and campaign manager Casey assured him it would.

What did the law actually do? It expanded Florida’s anti-discrimination laws to prohibit schools and companies from leveling guilt or blame to students and employees based on race or sex, taking aim at lessons over issues like “white privilege” by creating new protections for students and workers, including that a person should not be instructed to “feel guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress” due to their race, color, sex or national origin.

Or, to put it more bluntly the law was a don’t make racist white people feel all butt-hurt over being racist. Or if not stone cold racist keeping in mind that racial and other forms of discrimination exist. You know, for a gang of a-hole who loved their “own the libs” with “F**k Your Feelings” memes they seem a wee bit sensitive about their own fee fees. Just sayin.

In any case some businesses, for example honeymoon registry technology company Honeyfund.com and Florida-based Ben & Jerry’s franchisee Primo Tampa, along with workplace diversity consultancy Collective Concepts and its co-founder Chevara Orrin decided the law was, in a word bullshit. And went to federal court to block it from taking effect.  With the help of Protect Democracy and the law firm Ropes & Gray, they successfully contend the policies force them to censor themselves “on important societal matters” and “from engaging employees in robust discussion of ideas essential for improving their workplaces.”

Clearly, for DeSantis that kind of thing simply couldn’t be allowed. I don’t know if there’s a word that combines offended and horrified but when it comes to the idea of ensuring people in Florida are exposed to more than one opinion/school of thought (and worse, anything DeSantis doesn’t agree with) but lil Ron wasn’t having it. Still, he lost in lower court so he ran to the appeals court:

“We disagree with the Court’s opinion that employers can require employees to be taught — as a condition of employment — that one race is morally superior to another race,” Jeremy Redfern, press secretary for DeSantis, said in a statement. “The First Amendment protects no such thing, and the State of Florida should have every right to protect Floridians from racially hostile workplaces.”

Attorneys for the state and DeSantis have argued in court that the “anti-woke” law restricts no speech and only regulates that employers can’t force employees to listen to “certain speech against their will” at the risk of losing their jobs.

In a 22 page opinion the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals shot DeSantis down:

“We cannot agree, and we reject this latest attempt to control speech by recharacterizing it as conduct,” wrote Grant, who was joined by Judges Charles Wilson and Andrew Brasher. “Florida may be exactly right about the nature of the ideas it targets. Or it may not. Either way, the merits of these views will be decided in the clanging marketplace of ideas rather than a codebook or a courtroom.”

DeSantis will likely pull on his white stripper boots cut down to over the calf length (to make him more “manly” looking) boots to run to SCOTUS. However he’s either dreaming or high on Don Jr.’s stash if he thinks they will give  him the time of day. Yes, the six GOPers are all about putting their thumbs on the scale to help Trump get elected in November. That much is evident. However Florida’s electoral votes will be safely in the GOP column come November and WOKE won’t factor into things.

If as DeSantis like to say Florida is where WOKE goes to die then the federal courts are the place where his signature anti-WOKE law has gone to die!