Vowing to prevent the “indoctrination” of Florida’s youth, Ron DeSantis on Wednesday announced plans to indoctrinate Florida’s youth. “It used to be thought that a university campus was a place where you’d be exposed to a lot of different ideas,” the governor said, as he signed legislation meant to restrict the kinds of ideas to which students in his state are exposed. “Unfortunately, now the norm is really these are more intellectually repressive environments.”

The three bills, which he enacted during a press conference at a Fort Meyers middle school, were DeSantis’s latest salvo in his war against critical race theory—the right’s latest political bogeyman. DeSantis banned public schools from teaching it this month, on the grounds that it “teaches kids to hate our country.” On Wednesday, he took the deranged culture war a step farther, signing laws that will require students and staff at public universities to be surveyed on their political beliefs; bar higher education institutions from preventing access to ideas students may find “uncomfortable, unwelcome, disagreeable, or offensive;” and force-feeding K-12 students “portraits in patriotism” that contrasts America with communist and totalitarian regimes.

“We do not want false history,” DeSantis said.

This is, of course, bullshit. Teaching kids about racism is not itself “racist,” as DeSantis has charged, and glossing over the less savory facts of America’s history is not teaching students to love their country more, but rather to idealize it. None of this is actually about education, though—it’s about playing up the grievances of the Republican base to improve their electoral prospects. “I look at this and say, ‘Hey, this is how we are going to win,’” Steve Bannon, former adviser to Donald Trump, told Politico. “I think you’re going to see a lot more emphasis from Trump on it and DeSantis and others. People who are serious in 2024 and beyond are going to focus on it.”

DeSantis seems to be serious about 2024, with a recent poll even suggesting the MAGA base would prefer him to Trump himself, and has used culture war to raise his stature within the aggrieved, conspiracy-addled GOP. “This man knows how to outrage Democrats and, therefore, delight Republicans,” as the pundit Max Boot observed. That’s long been the calculus for Republican stardom—it’s why they still talk about the “War on Christmas” and the “cancellation” of Dr. Seuss and a host of other completely manufactured controversies. But unlike their pledges to stand up to Joe Biden by eating hamburgers, there are real consequences to their anti-history crusade.

Whitewashing the sins of America’s past prevents reckoning with the way they reverberate in the present, and instilling kids with a propagandized version of history is a means of avoiding such a reckoning in the future, as well. Meanwhile, the bills supposedly meant to protect “free speech” on college campuses actually do the opposite. The annual survey is purportedly meant to ensure “competing ideas and perspectives” are being presented at colleges and universities, but, as the Atlantic’s Adam Serwer quipped: “Defending free speech by forcing individuals to register their views with the state so the state can determine if they are appropriate.” It’s not clear what consequences institutions could face if they fail to toe DeSantis’s line, but the governor on Wednesday implied the government could hold back funding from those that don’t comply. “That’s not worth tax dollars,” he said, “and that’s not something that we’re going to be supporting moving forward.”

That is far more “repressive” than any liberal professor he can dream up. But, as the bills make clear, he’s not actually opposed to the “thought police”—he just wants to be the one wearing the badge. “Intellectual diversity should be something every university strives for,” wrote the editorial board of the Miami Herald Thursday, noting that Joseph McCarthy similarly targeted academics in the Red Scare. “But we know the results of government officials policing educators: paranoia, persecution and the opposite of the free speech Republicans say they want to protect.”

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