The Californication of Oklahoma
Google + School Choice is a Recipe for Woke Disaster
by Mark Ousley May 6, 2022
Yesterday, Governor Stitt was busy touting two seemingly unrelated issues that are in fact, dangerously and inextricably linked:
Google pouring money into Oklahoma and School Choice.
Regardless of your position on School Choice, all must admit that the proposed legislation would grant Oklahoma corporations a larger direct influence on K-12 education than it has today. Although, some may see this as a good thing when it comes to corporations that share Oklahoma values, Governor Stitt and School Choice advocates are going out of their way to ignore the influx of extremely powerful California born and bred corporate influences into the Sooner State’s corporate and educational ecosystem.
Google has made it widely known that the company does not share the values of the average Oklahoman, especially when it comes to Critical Race Theory and the ideology’s Divisions of Ideological Enforcement (DEI).
Last year, Chris Rufo of the Manhattan Institute, exposed Google’s commitment to radical Woke ideologies and the companies commitment to using it’s unmatched power to control the flow of information to push them in an interview on Fox News.
“For years now, companies in Silicon Valley including Google are ideological echo chambers. This is what happened. I have documents now from a third of the Fortune-100 companies that are promoting similarly-themed anti-racism programs. And in the confines of Silicon Valley, this is considered not only not unusual, it’s considered virtuous,… The reality is, that the culture inside companies like Google matters, and when it’s hijacked by racial ideologues, it can do tremendous damage, not only to Google’s users and consumers but actually to American society, … "What we see inside these companies is that increasingly, the ideology of Google employees is actively hostage to the United States and other documents say that the United States is a system of White supremacy and that everyone in this country is ‘raised to be racist.’ This is a deeply false and damaging kind of thinking. It should have nowhere in America’s biggest and most powerful companies," Rufo said.
Since Rufo’s 2021 exposé, Google has shown no signs of abandoning its toxic Woke agenda. On April 25, 2022, the New York Post’s Snejana Farberov highlighted a recent change in a tool that is used by K-12 students in schools all over the country - Google Docs.
Google has rolled out a new “inclusive language” function that is intended to steer its users away from what it deems to be politically incorrect words, like “landlord” and “mankind.”
Google Docs introduced the “woke” feature this month that shows pop-up warnings to people typing in words or phrases considered to be non-inclusive, such as “policeman,” “fireman” or “housewife.”, wrote Farberov.
But beyond the issue of Google imbedding Critical Race Theory ideology into tools used in classroom’s across the country - including in Oklahoma today - there is a more sinister and direct threat posed by Google to the minds of Oklahoma students.
If School Choice as it stands today is passed, those new quasi public-private schools will be open to private as well as public funding sources and will be run by boards made up of prominent business leaders in and outside their local communities - many of which will be employed and influenced by Google.
Without a doubt, Google will use its 75 million dollars of influence on state and local leaders to push its educational tools and radical Woke ideologies that go with them, directly into School Choice Schools. Much like at OU and it’s Board of Regents, the new individual, university modeled K-12 school boards will not be directly accountable to the state legislature or the community via the direct vote of the people. Eventually, the outsized influence of Google’s reach will infiltrate most if not all of these new School Choice schools - leaving parents with no control and anything but a choice.
The point is this, School Choice Schools in an Oklahoma will be directly influenced by Woke companies like Google and this is an extremely dangerous proposition.
Regardless of how many ships the rising tide of Google’s 75 million dollars may raise, the ascension will not matter if that wave is Marxist Red and crushes the minds of our children and the future of our state in the process.
