David French's latest newsletter/column is titled "The Anti-Woke Right Has a Lot to Answer For." The gist of the argument is that the anti-woke right are hypocrites on free speech because Ron DeSantis and Donald Trump have pushed their agenda though legislation aimed at limiting woke speech rather than competing in the marketplace of ideas. As I'll explain, I think French is fundamentally wrong about this. 

That's not to say he's completely wrong in every instance. There may indeed be conservatives who are no less censorious than their opponents on the woke left. But I think French's argument is mistaken on a more fundamental level in a way he seems rather eager to skip over and ignore. But let's start with his argument and go from there.

We might not like to dwell much on 2020 (it was a terrible year), but we can’t understand 2025 without remembering that both the racial reckoning and the early Covid response had a dark side. Cancel culture was real. Efforts to combat disinformation about Covid were often amateurish and heavy-handed...

In an alternate universe, the rise of the anti-woke right would have been the beginning of a constitutional renaissance. At the very moment when public debate was most necessary — to address some of the most complicated and emotionally fraught issues that divide our nation — was the moment when millions of Americans felt most afraid to speak.

He's right about 2020. It was a terrible year for many reasons but his association of cancel culture with that year and his use of the past tense when referring to it strikes me as an early sign of trouble for his argument. Because the truth is not that cancel culture "was real" but that cancel culture had been real for years prior to 2020 and that it is still real in this moment.

But its what he says in the next paragraph about "public debate" that is where he really misses the point. I'll explain why in a moment but let's continue with his argument. [emphasis added]

The anti-woke right...has gone reverse Marcuse. It embraces intolerance against movements from the left and tolerance for movements from the right.

All of this has been obvious for some time. Or, another way to put it is that Ron DeSantis walked so that Donald Trump could run. When the time came to formulate a policy response to the woke left, no one mattered more than the governor of Florida.

He tried to ban critical race theory in education. He sharply limited discussion of gender and sexuality in public schools. He tried to limit the free speech of university professors. He retaliated against Disney when it had the audacity to exercise its freedom of speech to criticize the governor’s policies.

And through it all, DeSantis declared that Florida was the place where “woke goes to die.”

Many of DeSantis's targets (and Trump's) have involved education. For instance, it's true that DeSantis limited discussion of gender but that was primarily aimed at kindergarten to 2nd graders out of concern that young children were being indoctrinated with the left's views, especially on trans issues. To be blunt, many parents did not want teachers of these young children indoctrinating them with the idea that boys can be girls and girls can be boys as if biological sex was just a cultural construct.

Here's where I think French is being disingenuous. There is absolutely no sense in which a teacher engaging in lessons about the gender binary with a group of 6-year-olds is the "marketplace of ideas." I'd really love to see French defend it as such. These kids are still learning to read and tie their shoes but they are perfectly capable of engaging in dialogue about trans issues. It's an absurd idea which is why he skips over the details and just includes it in a vague list of examples of right-wing censorship.

The actual marketplace of ideas in this case comes from parents who have the right to object to what schools are teaching their kids, especially the youngest ones. The fact that a group of elected officials in Florida set guidelines for the teaching of these topics in public schools, guidelines which polls show most parents agreed with, does not mean the state is censoring speech any more than any other curriculum for primary school is censoring everything it intentionally leaves for later. We don't generally read Orwell's 1984 to third graders and for good reasons. This is not a sign of censorship but of common sense.

Similarly, the attempt to ban critical race theory in K-12 schools also involves an attempt to set guidelines for curricula. It was an attempt to push back on a specific set of ideas connected to critical race theory, specifically the embrace of an identity politics in which people are divided into oppressors and oppressed based on their race. 

Left-wing activists have tried to frame this as an argument solely about how we teach history but the whole point of critical race theory is that it's not about history it's about the present. The proponents of this view are not shy about saying so. It is possible to teach history without also indoctrinating people with the idea that nothing has changed.

It's instructive to notice that when the right first began pushing back on ideas like critical race theory, the left's response was to act befuddled. CRT was said to be an esoteric set of ideas taught only in grad schools and law schools. We were repeatedly told it was silly to even suggest such a thing was being taught in any K-12 school. If this were true that DeSantis' attempts to keep it out of K-12 schools would have made no difference. You can't ban what doesn't exist.

In fact, popular versions of this material have been trickling down into K-12 schools for some time. The concepts of identity politics, white supremacy, white privilege and implicit bias are all making their way into public schools, sometimes in the form of mandatory courses and other times as frameworks presented in other classes. 

Again, the marketplace of ideas here is among adults and elected officials who set curriculums, not in classrooms where adults are teaching these ideas to teenagers. It is perfectly reasonable for adults to argue that some of this material is noxious and contrary to the fundamental views most Americans hold about race, identity and merit. It is not censorious to remove ideas from a public school curriculum on the basis that they are more appropriate topics for colleges or grad schools.

French is on more solid ground when it comes to efforts to limit what can be taught in colleges. Here you have adult students who are capable of forming their own views. It is something closer to a marketplace of ideas, at least it should be. But even here I don't think French is being particularly honest.

He could at least acknowledge that universities are hotbeds of leftist thought which often work to exclude conservative ideas and those who hold them. When you have entire universities requiring DEI statements of every potential hire and potential promotion you are not engaging in a marketplace of ideas, you are setting up a left-wing purity test. US universities have a lot going for them but they are also the areas of our society where differing opinions about cultural and political issues are the least tolerated and where refusal to embrace woke views is the least tolerated. 

Universities are a marketplace for ideas in the same way California is a marketplace for various political views, which is to say not really or hardly at all.

The anti-woke right was right to push back on woke ideology. Schools should not be adopting explicitly far left view points and teaching those to a captive audience of children. The real marketplace of ideas means that adults, parents and teachers can argue about what gets taught to their own kids and can even rule some of these ideas out as inappropriate for a specific age group. It seems likely the Supreme Court is soon going to make that point explicitly.