Do four of the five Collier County Commissioners think their constituents are stupid? They must, given the Commission’s 4–1 vote to post the Ten Commandments in public buildings, followed by Commissioner Chris Hall’s insistence that the vote had nothing to do with religion. News coverage before and after the ballot skimmed the surface, then moved on.
Journalists must be the first line of defense against government overreach and selective storytelling. The public deserves better. The First Amendment demands sharper questions: Does this amount to government endorsement of religion? Why elevate one tradition’s code while ignoring others? And how do we square the claim that this has “nothing to do with religion” with the obvious religious content?
That last line—Hall’s insistence that the proposal has “zero, zilch, nada” to do with religion—was the most disingenuous comment in the entire debate. It wouldn’t fool a cotton-top marmoset.
Hall’s defense should sound familiar. When corporations wave Pride flags in June or universities require diversity training, critics cry “woke virtue signaling.” Empty gestures, they say—symbolic politics.
But posting the Ten Commandments is precisely that. It won’t pave roads, balance budgets, or improve schools. It’s Collier’s version of a rainbow flag—just chiseled into stone tablets.
Here’s the irony: conservatives are deploying the very playbook they denounce. Reframe a culturally specific tradition as a universal truth. Pretend it’s neutral. Call it “history.” That’s woke politics in action.
And the method isn’t unique to Collier. The State of Florida ordered the removal of Pride flag street art at intersections—a different ideology, same symbolic politics. The message still boils down to this: one group’s identity counts, while another’s doesn’t.
Even President Trump has entered the debate, promising to revise American museums to show a “sunnier” version of history. In other words, sugarcoating the bitter pill by sanitizing the past. It’s culture-war woke: changing the story to fit the ideology.
This is the other side of the story: leaders who condemn wokeness are actually practicing it themselves, cloaked in conservative language. And if journalists don’t push harder—if they just report the vote count and repeat Hall’s talking point—they risk becoming complicit in rewriting history.
Journalists must not become accomplices by failing to provide an honest and accurate account of events. History is messy, pluralistic, and sometimes ugly. Sanitizing it to fit one ideology—whether in museums or on courthouse walls—is no less “woke” when conservatives do it.
If Collier truly wants to honor the history of law, it should embrace pluralism: Hammurabi alongside Moses, Jefferson beside Confucius, Indigenous wisdom alongside the Bill of Rights. That would reflect the true complexity of human civilization and how the United States came to define itself.
Instead, commissioners sugarcoat, sanitize, and slap “history” on what is really identity politics. They claim to oppose woke culture while practicing it with zeal.
It’s not neutral. It’s not honest. It’s woke hypocrisy—etched in stone.
And let’s be honest: with most people glued to their phone screens, they probably won’t notice the Commandments on the wall anyway.