Need some good news?

Ron DeSantis, governor of Florida, has a way of always delivering good news.

On the culture wars front, he's gotten the steamroller out, flattening wokester investing in public pensions on what's known as the ESG model.

According to the Daily Wire:

Florida Republican Governor Ron DeSantis approved measures on Tuesday to prevent the Florida Retirement System Pension Plan from investing in accordance with the environmental, social, and corporate governance movement, also known as ESG.

According to DeSantis’ office, the approval of the resolution will ensure that public fiduciaries “invest state funds in a manner that prioritizes the highest return on investment for Florida’s taxpayers and retirees without considering the ideological agenda” of the ESG movement. Critics say the philosophy confuses profit maximization with political and social agendas such as reducing carbon emissions or promoting purported racial equity.

“Corporations across America continue to inject an ideological agenda through our economy rather than through the ballot box,” DeSantis said in a press release. “Today’s actions reinforce that ESG considerations will not be tolerated here in Florida, and I look forward to extending these protections during this legislative session.”

Which is good news for Florida's public pension holders, given that state after state is running out of money, based on badly mismanaged funding and high pension liabilities, much of that happening because the fund managers have been obliged by state laws to invest on the ESG model rather than obtain the highest returns for their customers.

Florida's public pensioners, its bureaucrats and whatnot, plenty of them left-wing themselves, on this DeSantis decision, will be free to spend their money any way they want to, including on woke causes, because their pension money, invested solely on sound investment principles that doesn't include wokery as a consideration, will simply be there for them. In many states, that prospect is dubious.

The Pew Charitable Trusts created this shareable chart showing the state of things on the unfunded pension liability front. 

Image: The Pew Charitable Trusts, shareable chart

Not surprisingly, most of the sad stories in the dark blue states are indeed blue states run on wokester investing practices, which tend to bring in less money than they would in a free market.

Notice those glowing records in South Carolina and Wisconsin. Florida does not look too bad at 4% unfunded liabilities but any improvement is a good improvement for pension holders, and with DeSantis's move, Florida's pensions are now on firmer ground.

What a positive development. Imagine someone like DeSantis running the federal system at this point.

The good news doesn't stop there, though.

In a move that brought unusually loud screams from the left, DeSantis junked another problem besetting Florida and the rest of the country -- woke indoctrinating education.

While Florida has prided itself on leading the culture war for conservatism, a new educational policy may rock the boat for Florida Democrats.  Governor Ron DeSantis (R-FL) along with Florida Republicans have officially erased AP African American Studies from state curriculum, causing backlash from progressives.

Governor DeSantis has made educational reforms a defining role in his first term as governor, and he does not seem to be holding back on this any time soon.

The governor's Spokesman Bryan Griffin issued a statement concerning why they have taken this action, "The Florida Department of Education has rejected the College Board’s AP African American Studies course because it lacks educational value and historical accuracy. As submitted, the course is a vehicle for a political agenda and leaves large, ambiguous gaps that can be filled with additional ideological material, which we will not allow. As Governor DeSantis has stated, our classrooms will be a place for education, not indoctrination."

Which brings up that woke junk education is a very sad thing to see in a worthy course of study such as the history and culture of African-Americans in the U.S.

Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, George Washington Carver and lifelong Republican Martin Luther King, Jr. are all worthy of study in an African-American studies course. Apparently, the field has been corrupted by wokester grievance politics, phony history (Looking at you, 1619 Project) and the kind of thinking coming from Marxist thinkers who have dominated the field as they sought to gain power.

Shutting it down and telling those involved in creating this mess to clean up their act and reinstitute some academic rigor to their subject was a big shock to their systems, which is why the yelling is unusually loud on this one. 

Fields riddled with inaccuracies and ideological fanaticism of one stripe or another are useless as college majors, given that they will always be subject to revision. Big Lies can only last so long before they are corrected. The DeSantis move is a welcome step in the movement to make education educate again, and a worthy brave step in the culture wars that most politicians are afraid to touch.

Once again, imagine Ron taking on the educational corruption in the federal field.

It's amazing to see pushback of this sort, given that the tide seems so strong against it in the Biden era. With Biden in power, it's one bottom falling out after another, one standard falling down domino-style and then another, there seems to be no end to it.

DeSantis is just the gutsy guy to show that that can be stopped, and in his Florida saddle, he's creating a pilot project that can be imitated throughout the country. With the concurrent news that 30 Florida colleges have banned critical race theory, it seems to be setting off a chain reaction.

Image: Gage Skidmore, via Flickr // CC BY-SA 2.0