Woke Culture

Florida’s state education board voted Wednesday to ban teaching students about sexual orientation and gender identity through high school, expanding the scope of a contentious state law that last year thrust Gov. Ron DeSantis to the forefront of the cultural clash over classrooms.

U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Director Martha Williams has gone all-in on wokeness, labeling the push for diversity, equity and inclusion her top priority at an agency whose mission is to protect species and preserve their habitats.

Under Ms. Williams, the agency has removed the limit on how much paid time off workers can use to take part in employee diversity organizations, such as gay rights groups. They can now ask for as much time as they feel they need, and Ms. Williams has directed supervisors to approve the requests.

What is the top education story in the country? Measured by press coverage, Ron DeSantis’s pushback against woke education in Florida takes the prize. Yet in truth, DeSantis’s pushback is only the second-most important education story of our day. The deeper mystery is the rise of the movement he’s resisting.

In the aftermath of a major marketing controversy in which Bud Light partnered with transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney and triggered a substantial boycott of the product, one consumer advocacy group has launched a service to warn people of woke practices at major firms.

Consumers' Research this week announced the launch of "Woke Alerts," a digital notification service that informs users when companies engage in political activism. Those who sign up will receive text message updates informing them of such moves.

Beer Colossus Anheuser-Busch saw its value plummet more than $5 billion since the company announced its branding partnership with controversial transgender social media influencer Dylan Mulvaney.

Since March 31, shares of Bud Light’s parent company have fallen by nearly 4% — knocking down the company’s market capitalization from $132.38 billion to $127.13 billion on Wednesday.

Anheuser-Busch stock fizzled more than 1.5% on Wednesday.

I sat in the Washington office of a major airline’s head of government relations, where we were joined by the top lobbyist for one of America’s largest hotel chains. It was 2013, and I was president of the gay conservative group Log Cabin Republicans. I had come to secure corporate support for the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, which would have banned discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. Pressure from leading corporations, I correctly assumed, would push waffling Republicans to vote for the legislation.

After the stunning collapse on Friday of a major bank for the technology sector, critics on both sides of the aisle have blamed their political opponents for contributing to the meltdown.

Silicon Valley Bank, a midsized institution that finished last year with nearly $200 billion in deposits, shuttered Friday and reopened on Monday under the direction of federal regulators.

The blame game started almost immediately in Washington and on Wall Street as fears of a broader fallout mounted.

In an effort to debunk claims that Florida is banning books, Governor Ron DeSantis held a press conference last week where he shared sexually explicit material from books found in some of the state’s public-school libraries.

The reaction to the material immediately proved his point: that many of these books were not suitable for children.

Nikki Fried, the chairwoman of the Florida Democratic Party, shared a tweet from DeSantis of the banned materials and wrote, “Ron posting butt plug porn to own the libs.”

Conservative commentator Bethany Mandel co-authored a whole book on the “current woke indoctrination” supposedly going on around the country. But when asked to define the term at the very center of it, she flopped.

Mandel struggled for half a minute to come up with an answer to what “woke” means during an appearance Tuesday on “Rising,” a web series produced by The Hill.

“This is going to be one of those moments that goes viral,” she predicted, accurately.