The Right Is Now Showing the Same Intolerance as the “Woke”

To the editor,

In 2023, I told John Stossel that my biggest fear pertaining to wokeness was seeing the pendulum of intolerance swing to the opposite extreme. 

I believe it has.

In “DEI Ban Led to End of Minister Benefits and Call for Professor to Be ‘Fired or Worse” (Sept. 16, 2026), Ryan Quinn explains why. Quinn reports that records reveal possible government overreach under Kentucky’s DEI ban, leading to intrusive scrutiny, disputed enforcement and a state senator demanding a professor be fired or worse.

That senator, Gary Boswell, called for a professor to be fired for including content he did not like. He seems to be misinterpreting HB 4, Kentucky’s anti-DEI legislation. But is he? 

The law bans “courses whose primary purpose is to indoctrinate participants with a discriminatory concept,” i.e., a concept that “justifies or promotes differential treatment” based on group affiliation. Does reading Kendi’s How to Be an Antiracist necessarily mean the professor is forcing students to embrace it as their personal ideology?

The senator may have it wrong, as may so many others. Course content is not the issue. It is how instructors and students engage with the content. Are instructors indoctrinating instead of educating? Are students accepting content unquestionably instead of thinking about it critically? A problem presents itself only if the answer to one or both questions is yes.

All that said, interpretations of the law vary, and administrators may be overcomplying out of fear. This happens frequently enough to inspire the creation of the Alliance for Higher Education, whose research finds that some of the more egregious prohibitions are not actually in the legislation. Many prohibitions are the result of “anticipatory appeasement” of lawmakers, not actual law.

It seems the fear I expressed to Stossel has materialized. Let’s hope the current quagmire is a growing pain and not the new norm.