One of the most insidious social developments in recent years was the inception and spread of Woke culture by progressives, who see American exceptionalism as corrosive.
I wrote here a while ago about Virginia high school principals who withheld from several hundred excelling students news that they had received National Merit Scholarships. This cost those families many thousands of dollars in college aid.
The principals' reasoning was that celebrating excellence among some students would make many others feel inferior and hurt.
In New York, Woke state education officials were appalled at precipitous declines in some standardized test scores. What did they do? They did not turn on the afterburners and get back to intense teaching of basics. They simply changed the tests to improve the scores so no one would fail (and they wouldn't look bad)..
Anti-Woke was one of the stronger messages in Donald Trump's successful 2024 presidential campaign. And the administration team he assembled is fighting Woke culture anywhere it's found, especially in liberal institutions of higher learning.
Also included as a target is DEI (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion), promoting people into positions not by their qualifications or abilities to do a job, but because of irrelevant criteria like skin color, ethnicity, or gender.
Well, just seven months into Trump's determined fight against that culture comes word that the official opposition has spread into the Heartland, in this case Oklahoma.
There, the state superintendent and the Republican governor who appointed him have developed their own sets of tests to root out would-be teachers from red states carrying the Woke virus in their instructional intentions.
That's what we describe and discuss in this week's audio commentary, which you can hear by clicking here:
This week's Sunday column examined the combined looming dangers of Trump's typically mediocre job approval ratings and the rapidly-approaching midterm elections.
Although no midterm ballot ever carries a president's name, those elections usually become an interim verdict on a chief executive's first two years and set the tone for the final two years, in Trump's case the last two of his presidency.
An incumbent president's party almost always loses seats in the House of Representatives or Senate or both. The loss of a handful of Republican members in either chamber would end GOP control and cripple Trump's aggressive drive to change Washington, the presidency, and the nation's political culture.
Despite more than 100 lawsuits, Trump has had an historic start down that important trail. But he'll need the last two years to do a more complete reform job. And even then...
The most recent audio commentary here took a close look at the military, strategic, and diplomatic dangers of selling advanced AI computer chips to China. Those sales have been resumed after a brief pause.
The sales of such chips bring in billions of dollars in business to American firms, which will be paying the federal Treasury a 15 percent cut on total sales. But do we really want to be helping our largest and most dangerous global competitor to catch up in that area of high tech, especially China's military, now the world's largest by far?
Another recent popular audio commentary involved the sale of yet another iconic American enterprise -- Kellogg's -- to foreign investors. You can catch-up with it here:
Tonico el Tigre Now Says Frosted Flakes Ha Un Sapore Fantastico
