Ron DeSantis has never been accused of thinking small. The man who once shipped migrants to Martha’s Vineyard for sport just signed a law giving himself and a handful of state officials the power to brand any organization a “terrorist group” — and boot college kids who so much as wave a flyer for them.
Let that marinate for a second.
A governor — not a court, not a jury, not even a military tribunal — gets to point a finger at an organization and say, “You’re terrorists now.” And once that label sticks? The group gets dissolved. State funding? Frozen. Students who “promoted” the designated group? Expelled. No trial. No appeal process worth the paper it’s printed on. Just a political decree with the force of law behind it.
The Law and Its Fallout
DeSantis signed the measure Monday, framing it as a framework to “combat extremism and have accountability in the education system.” That sounds great on a bumper sticker. In practice, it hands the governor and Florida’s chief of domestic security a rubber stamp to crush organizations they don’t like — and punish anyone associated with them.
The Council on American-Islamic Relations called the law “draconian” and unconstitutional. You don’t have to be a CAIR fan to see their point. DeSantis already tried this dance last year when he signed an executive order designating CAIR as a “foreign terrorist organization.” A judge blocked it. So what did DeSantis do? He went back and got the legislature to codify the concept into law. If at first you don’t succeed, just rewrite the rules.
PEN America’s Florida Director William Johnson put it plainly:
“This legislation opens the door for Florida students to face punishment for constitutionally protected speech.”
And PEN America as an organization said the measure “could chill free speech by placing unprecedented pressure on individuals to avoid speaking, organizing, or engaging with certain viewpoints.”
This Is a Conservative Problem, Not Just a Liberal One
Here’s where I need my fellow conservatives to put down the pom-poms and think for thirty seconds. Yes, the immediate targets are pro-Palestinian groups and left-wing organizations. Today. But the machinery DeSantis just built doesn’t come with a label that says “Only Use on Liberals.”
Darryl Li of the University of Chicago and Shirin Sinnar of Stanford Law School warned in a joint piece that efforts like this by Texas and Florida “could lay the groundwork for even more sweeping forms of authoritarianism.”
You think a future Democratic governor of Florida — and yes, that day will come eventually — won’t use this exact same tool against gun rights groups? Pro-life organizations? Parents who show up to school board meetings a little too passionately? The weapon you build for your guy becomes the weapon your enemy inherits.
Texas already pulled the same stunt, designating CAIR as a “terrorist organization” and getting sued for it. CAIR dismissed the claims. Courts are piling up with these challenges like rush-hour traffic on I-95.
Where Trump Gets It Right — and Where DeSantis Gets It Wrong
Trump has cracked down on organizations he considers extremist, antisemitic, and anti-American. Some of those crackdowns have hit judicial roadblocks — deportation attempts blocked, university funding freezes challenged in court. But Trump operates at the federal level with federal tools that have decades of legal precedent behind them, messy as those fights are.
DeSantis is doing something different. He’s creating a state-level political designation system with almost no guardrails. Trump didn’t tiptoe around extremism — he brought a bulldozer. DeSantis brought a flamethrower to a building he also lives in.
There’s a difference between being tough on genuine threats and handing any governor a blank check to silence dissent by calling it terrorism. One is leadership. The other is the kind of power grab conservatives have spent decades warning about — just wearing a red jersey this time.
The First Amendment isn’t a suggestion. It’s not a guideline for fair weather. It’s the whole ballgame. And if we trash it every time an organization says something we find revolting, we don’t deserve to call ourselves the party of liberty.
DeSantis can call this “accountability” all he wants. But a rose by any other name still has thorns — and this one’s pointed straight at the Constitution.
