Via America’s Lawyer: FL governor DeSantis signs a law mandating public college students disclose their political affiliations. Plus, four Saudi nationals implicated in the murder of American journalist Jamal Khashoggi received paramilitary training on U.S. soil. Mike Papantonio and Farron Cousins discuss more.

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*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.

Florida's governor Ron DeSantis has signed a law mandating all public college students and faculty to disclose their political views. He claims it's to fight indoctrination but critics view it as a blatant violation of individual rights. Joining me to talk about this is my friend Farron Cousins from the trial lawyer magazine. Welcome back. You had a short vacation.
Thank you, I did.
I'm glad to have you back. Wow. This story, it's, it's, there's only a couple of pages of this story, but there's tons to talk about here, right?
There really is. You know, this is, it's kind of shocking, you know, obviously we're down here in Florida and we've seen Ron DeSantis kind of go through and, and he pushes a lot of bills, signs a lot of legislation, that is essentially designed to fail. And I think this is another one of those pieces of legislation. He knows this is not going to hold up in court. You can't mandate that these college students and the professors, and it says all faculty. So we could be talking about, you know, custodial staff has to fill out these, these forms to identify their political views. That, that's nobody's business on that college campus.
Okay. So let, let's, let's put this in perspective. This is a Harvard, DeSantis is Harvard educated. This guy is not a dummy. I don't care. You might not like him.
Right.
But he is not a dummy. So what is this about? He knows there's first amendment problems. People have a right to express their beliefs. You can't stifle that. He knows that, that this is the quickest way to, to, to shut down political beliefs by stifling them. And he knows that the lack of clarity in this bill is overwhelming. There's no way this is going to stand up in court. So why is he doing it?
He's doing it because Ron DeSantis wants to run for president in 2024. And this is good red meat for the conservative base. I mean, there's plenty of organizations out there, conservative organizations, whose sole purpose is to point out, you know, liberal bias in colleges. You know, it's paper thin arguments that they put out there because most colleges really are fairly even handed. You know, individual political ideology does not play a big role in the classrooms, except for maybe in a few extreme cases. But it's a culture war issue for Republicans. They eat it up. DeSantis says, listen, I can do this. I can get the publicity of passing this legislation and then by the time the courts strike it down, nobody's paying attention anymore. They only know that I did it. Not that it didn't stand.
Okay. The irony here, Florida is 45th in the United States. You understand, 45th where it comes to education, number 45 out of 50. And, and, you know, he, he knows this and he knows it is, as you point out it's red meat. He, he's really going after the critical race theory, isn't it? That, that's the bandwagon. Talk, just, just give me a 10,000 foot. Most people don't even know what it is. What is, I mean, if you ask either side, ask somebody who yeah, I'm for the critical race theory. Really? What is it? Ask somebody who's against it. I don't know what it is, but I'm against it. Talk about it just a little.
Right. You know, essentially this was this theory put forward in the 1970s, I believe it was, they were, been looking at, you know, basically the founding of the country, the way laws are written, the way, you know, regulations work even within private industries. And they did find there is a common thread, essentially, there is this built-in racism. You know, you see it a lot in the banking industry with the red lining, things like that.

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