DeSantis Shows Us the Way

 

Friends, my latest article is an homage to Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who took on the College Board and won, dealing a body blow to wokeness and irritating more than a few leftist talking heads in the process.  We conservatives notch so few triumphs in the culture wars that it's worth taking a victory lap now!

Current Score: DeSantis 1, Wokeness 0

Wokeness is, make no mistake, a multi-headed hydra that imperils Western Civilization in countless ways, attacks relentlessly, and is almost impossible to kill. Having said all of that, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis recently notched a rare win against the raging beast: he played a commanding role in efforts to convince the College Board to revise its “African American Studies” course. In doing so, he's proven that there is hope for conservatism, for common sense, and even for constructive criticism in modern America – all revelations that come as a shock to cynics like me.

The changes that DeSantis helped to engender in the AP African American Studies course are sweeping. The course now omits mandatory indoctrination in Black Lives Matter, “Black Queer Studies”, reparations, the “prison industrial complex”, and “The Black Feminist Movement and Womanism” (whatever “women” are – I'm still puzzling that one out). In short, the whole character and tone of the course has been massively altered, and it has been wrenched free of its culturally Marxist foundations in dramatic fashion.

Not at all surprisingly, leftists are aghast. They charge that conservatives “bullied” the College Board, and that it has compromised its academic integrity by appeasing “fascists” like the wildly popular Florida Governor. Woke nags are used to getting their way, and so a public reversal on this scale stings severely.

Will the College Board thus succeed in winning Florida's acceptance of the new-and-improved African American Studies course? That remains to be seen.

Will the College Board's leadership be digitally tarred and feathered by an enraged neo-Marxist Twitter mob, such that it is (re)bullied into (re)designing the course, to once again amplify all the leftist themes that it so recently muted? This too we cannot rule out.

Another caveat: the character of AP African American Studies courses, as they are actually taught, will be determined more by their instructors than by the formal curriculum. Ergo, as long as most public schoolteachers and college professors are leftists, we can assume that the woke bias that the College Board originally intended would infuse this course will, in fact, still be present for the vast majority of students who take it. In other words, the only way to change the nature of elementary, secondary, and tertiary education in America fundamentally is to replace at least some of the people teaching it. But that's a challenge for another day.

For now, Governor DeSantis is to be applauded for having the courage and foresight to take on wokeness on a very specific front, where presumably he sensed vulnerability, and for achieving such a rare and notable triumph. Conservatives in the Republican Party's base are looking for a champion who can do more than just rile the Left. They are looking for a candidate in 2024 who can win real, tangible victories over leftism – who can beat the woke hydra so badly that it retreats back to its watery lair, never to be heard from again.

Ron DeSantis, more and more every day, looks like he's the man for the job.

Dr. Nicholas L. Waddy is an Associate Professor of History at SUNY Alfred and blogs at: www.waddyisright.com. He appears on the Newsmaker Show on WLEA 1480/106.9.

 

And here it is at World Net Daily:

 

https://www.wnd.com/2023/02/score-desantis-1-wokeness-0/