‘Shadow Government’ Bureaucrats Exposed for Stoking Woke Insanity in Red States
15th August 2025
A new report from the State Leadership Initiative (SLI), released Wednesday, is sounding the alarm on how conservative states are quietly adopting woke policies, driven by little-known national bureaucratic organizations.
The report, first reported by Fox News, details how a web of well-funded national associations, often posing as nonpartisan or professional groups, is behind this trend, pushing what SLI calls “shadow governance.” These groups set policy frameworks, control federal funding, and offer “best practices” that lean heavily into left-leaning priorities, according to Fox News.
Among the organizations exposed in the report are the National Association of State Treasurers (NAST), the National Association of Medicaid Directors (NAMD), and the National Association of State Boards of Education (NASBE). SLI’s report examined 23 of the largest associations and found widespread embrace of DEI initiatives, transgender ideology policies, and ESG principles.
As I have often said, bureaucrats tend toward Wokery even in Red states. Proglodytes love national organizations of paper-pushers because it means they don’t have to trudge around from state to state doing the real grass-roots work that democracy requires, but can just focus their efforts on a small group of leaders who are by their nature amenable to political and financial pressure. The Long Walk Through The Institutions demonstrates how effective this can be: Capture the professoriate and you mold a generation of college graduates, who then spread out and ruin life for everybody.
UPDATE: Radical U – Part 2: How Students Turned their Professors’ Words into Deeds