River News: Our View

President Donald Trump took to the podium for his presidential address Tuesday night and, in typical Trumpian style, he touted his administration’s whirlwind accomplishments over the past six weeks, castigating Democrats (Joe Biden in particular) along the way and even praising the beauty of the word ‘tariff.’

For Trump supporters, the speech itself was a thing of beauty to watch — who thought we would ever hear Elizabeth Warren called ‘Pocahontas’ again? — as Trump cited some very significant accomplishments. Whatever one might think of those policies, there’s no doubting they’re real, as the president has already dispatched thousands of federal workers; declared war on federal agencies, particularly the Department of Education; suspended aid to Ukraine; imposed tariffs; dismantled the corrupt CIA-front called USAID; and banned men in women’s sports in programs receiving federal funds. 

And that was just on Monday.

Of course, to the horror of Democrats, not to mention to neoconservatives and the corporate press, Trump is doing exactly what he promised to do on the campaign trail, and, in and of itself, that is historic. Part of the distrust voters have of politicians in both parties is that they long ago realized that most of those running for office are just straight-up liars, with no intention of doing anything they promise.

Not so with Trump, and on Tuesday he also took direct aim at the wokesters running the Democratic Party and the federal government’s massive Borg bureaucracy.

“Our country will be woke no longer,” Trump said. “We’ve ended the tyranny of so-called diversity, equity, and inclusion policies all across the entire federal government, and indeed, the private sector, and our military.”

That is true, and we applaud the president on his first 44 days in office. He is right that his administration has already done more in six weeks than perhaps any previous administration has done in four years. That might be hyperbolic but he’s up there for sure.

And yet, let us, if our readers will permit, rain on the parade just a little bit.

That’s because, unless we are careful, no matter how much the Trump administration smothers wokeness and shreds the bureaucracy on the federal level, none of it will matter much if that same woke indoctrination and bureaucratic monsterism is still operative on the state level. 

That state infrastructure is also wide, woke, and deep. And active. If we don’t do on the state level what Trump is doing on the federal level, the bureaucrats win. The long reach of unelected federal dictators will simply morph into the long tentacles of state government bureaucracies, which will serve as progressive substitutes for a defenestrated federal government.

This is especially so given that the executive branch in Wisconsin is run not only by brazen bureaucracy but by an elected Democrat by the name of Tony Evers, who has been pre-occupied with transforming the state bureaucracy, not to mention our laws, into an infestation of woke totalitarianism.

Nowhere is Evers’s wokeness on display more than in his proposed 2025-27 state budget. The numbers in that budget are bad enough — the DNR’s budget is a primer on excessive government spending that will drive local inflation and stymie economic growth, all without doing anything for the environment — but read the budget closely, and the woke agenda screams out.

Most especially, this governor, as he has tried to do before, proposes to eliminate terms like “mother” and “father” in certain sections of state law. Specifically, as we report in today’s edition, in a section related to artificial insemination, Evers would replace the term “wife” and “mother” with “inseminated person,” while all through the budget bill references to spouses are rendered gender-neutral.

As state Rep. Amanda Nedweski (R-Pleasant Prairie) said, the budget proposal strikes the word “mother” and replaces it with gender-neutral terminology on at least 30 occasions and replaces the word “father” over 120 times throughout the 1,917-page document.

This attempted indoctrination by an obviously indoctrinated governor has been called out, even by some liberals, mainly because it is one more attempt to deny biological reality. Progressives use wokeism to deny science not because they don’t know any better but because it serves their ideological purpose, which is to dehumanize people and weaken their resolve for liberty by collapsing their individual identities: “You are not a individual woman with a unique voice, you are an inseminated person!” 

How’s that for making a woman feel degraded, no better than a test tube subject in a lab. 

Of course, attempting to erase women — and men, whose masculinity, we are told, is hopelessly toxic — is politically stupid since the vast majority of people don’t believe in this nonsense. On these issues, progressives can’t tell the wheat from the chaff, or, as the case may be, the girls and boys from the unisex blob of the woke Borg. It’s likely that Evers is so indoctrinated himself that he doesn’t even get how poisonous woke politics is on the retail level. 

Perhaps, instead of governor, we should just call him an “Indoctrinated Person.”

That budget language is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to his efforts to entrench progressive neo-fascism within the state to serve as a backstop, or safeguard, in case the federal Leviathan is actually slain. For example, Trump has vowed to root out and end all Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion programs and positions and indeed attitudes at the federal level, and he is well on his way.

But as he does so, Evers and his bureaucracy will simply rev up woke efforts even more. For example, Trump’s efforts won’t close down the state Department of Health Services’ (DHS) Office of Health Equity, which makes it crystal clear that personal lifestyle and diet choices are secondary to identity in its mission, and that treatment differentials based on racial and identity characteristics — preferences rooted in hypothetical risks assigned to certain groups, otherwise known as the social determinants of health, rather than in actual risk to actual patients — are just fine.

And then there’s the governor’s health equity council, which has made its own woke health recommendations: Here’s a few of their “health” proposals: a $15-an-hour minimum wage; free tuition for all tribal members; a guaranteed annual income pilot program; benefits for illegal immigrants; full employment for formerly incarcerated persons, aka criminals; environmental justice; enshrining health equity in state statutes, and more.

Remember when a public outcry forced the Biden administration to disband its newly created Disinformation Governance Board (DGB), whose mission was to curb “disinformation and misinformation” that threatened national security, in other words, to censor the speech of Americans who threatened the Biden administration.

Well, while most of the efforts were to take place federally, part of the plan was to pass down DGB functions to state bureaucracies as part of a vertically integrated apparatus. Especially in Democratic states, the idea was that the federal DGB would lean in on state bureaucracies to help do their dirty work for them.

And so, in 2023, our Democratic governor unsuccessfully proposed his own statewide Disinformation Governance Board, again buried way deep within the 2023-25 state budget. Only he gave it a different name.

Specifically, as a memo by the Legislative Fiscal Bureau points out, the budget would have created an Office of Homeland Security within the Department of Military Affairs (DMA). Its job would have been be to “coordinate with the federal Department of Homeland Security and state and local law enforcement agencies to identify, investigate, assess, report, and share tips and leads linked to emergency homeland security threats.”

One mission would have been to track the dubious threat of domestic violent extremists, who sometimes turn out to be parents voicing their concerns about woke policies at school board meetings.

But the DMA wanted the Office of Homeland Security to dive into another strategic mission: “Misinformation and Disinformation Campaigns,” in which the office would collaborate with local units of government to find that nasty disinformation. In other words, the new office would have been set up to identify what information and news needed to be censored and to advise “state and local partners” how to do it, especially in the arena of elections. 

The bottom line is, the Democrats are doing and trying to do on the state level what Biden did on the federal level, and now the counter revolution must carry on from Trump’s counterforce on the federal level.

To make Wisconsin great again, to make Wisconsin free and prosperous again, it will take electing a new governor in 2026 who can do on the state level what Donald Trump is doing on the federal level. Without that deconstruction, all the things we hate about the federal government will continue in state government.

It’s time to say goodbye to Tony Evers. That will be for good in 2026, but, in the meantime, let’s refer to him by what he really is — not Gov. Tony Evers, but an “Indoctrinated Person.”

Hey, Indoctrinated Person, grab a specimen cup and go wait in the next room while we carve your budget up with the scalpel of common sense.