The DeSantis Model For Tackling Woke Bureaucracy Is A Non-Negotiable For The Next Republican Administration

“Florida is where woke goes to die,” Gov. Ron DeSantis said in his victory speech after a thumping win in an otherwise dismal midterm election for Republicans. The speculation of whether DeSantis would eventually run for president is rising to a fever pitch.

Given that DeSantis effectively tackled the machinations of woke ideologies and was not afraid to take them on in the education and corporate sector, it is important to understand how his anti-woke platform and model might look on a national scale.

In a speech at last month’s National Conservatism Conference, DeSantis named China as our primary adversary and noted that the hollowing out of American economic production has only aided China. He called our southern open border a strategic threat from drug cartels and wokeness a far greater threat to Americans than foreign powers.

Almost as if by fate, the day after DeSantis’s victory speech, the Biden administration announced a new initiative to tackle climate change by announcing, among other things, a “Climate Gender Equity Fund,” funded by USAID, and Amazon, to “leverage private sector contributions to help provide women climate leaders with technical skills, networks, and capital to develop and scale climate solutions.”

Any future foreign policy put forth by a presidential candidate should start by cleaning the house when it comes to all DEI initiatives in the armed forces, Department of Defense, and State Department. In 2021, the Naval Academy, the premier organization to teach next-generation leaders, published a Diversity and Inclusion Strategic Plan. When DOD has an education activity office with its own diversity officer that is a former Army woman writing about “taking a break from white nonsense,” the arsonist is within the house.

As scholars have noted, these “administrative divisions don’t merely act as gatekeepers; they also impact the speech and conduct inside [institutional] gates. DEI divisions are the driving force of cancel culture on campus, which limits the free inquiry that is essential to a university’s mission.” DEI initiatives in the armed forces and DOD also have a gatekeeping effect within the armed forces, transforming once-neutral organizations focussed on war-fighting to partisan bureaucracies, which are often opposed to their own countrymen.

A Republican president’s first target should be gutting these bureaucracies in the armed forces and their auxiliary institutions. Ruthlessly defunding and purging race and gender hustlers would be a good start. Replacing them with a patriotic and competent officer class and legislating and reinstating ideological impartiality would be a way to regain some trust back.

Likewise, all USAID programs or other foreign aid programs that advocate any “global health” or “gender equality” including abortion and pro-LGBT agendas should be eliminated. There would be a massive backlash against any such attempt, and a Republican president should be ready to stand his ground. It is not the U.S. taxpayer’s job to fund abortion across the globe in the name of “reproductive health,” nor is it the U.S. taxpayer’s job to pay the salary of bureaucrats who underwrite these policies as parts of an