In recent months, Republican lawmakers in Texas and Florida have rallied behind a suite of efforts related to schools, children, issues of race, and issues of sexuality. At a glance, each represents an isolated case study in conservatism’s wider cultural offensive. Taken together, however, all tell a much larger story about the Right’s professed commitment to personal freedom and freedom of expression — and the inconsistency with which its partisans apply their own chosen idioms.

The past decade has seen conservatives aggressively rally around a narrative about censorious college professors and an intellectually stifled culture increasingly averse to ideas some find uncomfortable. More broadly, the Right has tended to present itself as the only reliable steward of free speech in a society which now deems certain questions out of bounds and has seen the ongoing creep of a state empowered to suppress individual expression. However you come down on what are sometimes complex debates about education or pedagogy, it’s a story that’s simply impossible to square with the kinds of moves Republican politicians are now willing to entertain, let alone what many are already using political power to do.

Recent developments in two states are especially instructive in this respect.