Newsom vs. Walz on Woke

By Stanley Kurtz

Wednesday, August 13, 2025

 

California Governor Gavin Newsom and Minnesota Governor Tim Walz are likely candidates for president in 2028. Each has adopted a different approach to the leftist cultural extremism we call woke. Let’s explore that contrast as it pertains to the issue of ethnic studies, a close cousin of critical race theory and a kind of ultimate exemplar of woke. The crusade to mandate ethnic studies radicalism in all K–12 classes has advanced further in California and Minnesota than in any other state. A Newsom/Walz comparison, then, should tell us something important about the direction of the Democrats and the fate of woke in the culture at large.

 

In brief, Newsom is running away from woke, while Walz is running toward it. That said, each has attempted, in his own way, to insulate himself from the charge of leftist radicalism. Ethnic studies embodies the reigning extremism of the Democrats’ base, so much so that it can neither be safely embraced nor entirely disavowed by Democratic aspirants for national office.

 

Newsom, we know, is attempting to refashion himself as a liberal-yet-post-woke Democrat. He has started a podcast to which he invites conservative as well as liberal opinion makers. On a recent podcast, he agreed with conservative Charlie Kirk that participation by “transgender” athletes in girls’ sports is “deeply unfair” (although he has done nothing since to mitigate that unfairness). Last week, NRO reported on Newsom’s softening opposition to fossil fuels, prompted by a combination of economic and political pressures. By the same token, Newsom has been walking a tightrope on ethnic studies for years, and lately he has been leaning more to the right.

 

The ethnic studies movement originated in California in the late 1960s, when San Francisco State College was pressed into establishing the first programs in the country in black and ethnic studies. The college was pushed into this by an alliance of groups — such as the Black Panthers and the Third World Liberation Front — heavily influenced by the pro-Cuban and pro-Chinese Marxists who dominated the Bay Area in that era. The Marxist radicalism of the early ethnic studies movement is still cherished as a model by contemporary practitioners of ethnic studies.

 

This radicalism was largely confined to a few “studies” programs at California colleges and universities until 2016, when then-Governor Jerry Brown signed a law mandating the creation of a high school ethnic studies model curriculum. When that model curriculum was released in 2019, it set off a huge backlash in California and beyond. Critics called it a revolutionary anti-capitalist curriculum. It was clearly anti-Israel as well. Conservative as well as Jewish groups were outraged. A bill making ethnic studies into a high school graduation requirement sailed through the state legislature in 2020 in the wake of the death of George Floyd. But Governor Newsom vetoed it, citing the need to revise the model curriculum.

 

The following year, however, Newsom signed a barely changed law mandating ethnic studies as a high school graduation requirement but allowing districts flexibility in choosing their curriculum. That ethnic studies graduation mandate was scheduled to take effect this coming school year, and controversy has been building as many districts have decided to adopt variations on the original hyper-radical, anti-capitalist, anti-Israel, CRT-like version of the curriculum. In other words, just as Newsom’s pre-presidential maneuvering was kicking into high gear, California seemed to be headed for a high-profile conflagration over its new, radical ethnic studies high school graduation mandate.

 

Newsom, however, had a trick up his sleeve. Although almost no one noticed, a last-minute change to the 2021 law conditioned the statewide graduation requirement in ethnic studies on the legislature’s deciding to fund the new course in separate legislation. Newsom’s administration cleverly neglected to mention the importance of this provision, leaving the distinct impression that an unfunded mandate for high school ethnic studies courses was about to go into effect.

 

As a result, over a quarter of California school districts have already adopted ethnic studies courses, about 85 percent of these being guided, broadly speaking, by the radical “liberated ethnic studies” curriculum of 2019. Many districts might not have moved forward, and many could have avoided bitter internal battles, had they realized that the supposed ethnic studies mandate was actually entirely provisional and dependent on contested funding. As it turns out, Newsom has allowed the 2025 state legislative budget session to end without funding the ethnic studies requirement, which means that the supposed mandate is not, in fact, in effect. Californians are only just waking up to this fact.

 

All of this has been reported by Lauren Janov, an astute critic of liberated ethnic studies who has warned for years that California’s supposed ethnic studies mandate was conditioned on money that might never be appropriated. Few people took Janov’s warnings seriously, but she has just been vindicated.

 

Newsom, then, has played this issue in a clever — if slippery — way. He rebuked the hyper-radical ethnic studies curriculum yet created conditions that encouraged its adoption by a great many districts. In other words, Newsom can tell either side of this controversy that he has given them something. Up to now, he has gotten credit from the left for passing the first statewide ethnic studies high school course mandate in the country. Yet Newsom gave himself an out. He could pull the plug on the official mandate at the last minute by failing to fund it, should a presidential campaign be in the offing. That is exactly what has happened.

 

Minnesota under Tim Walz, on the other hand, has surpassed California in ethnic studies radicalism. Since 2020, Walz has been on a mission to mandate ultraradical “liberated ethnic studies” in Minnesota’s schools. He has stacked the various committees that create state standards and advise on curriculum with Minnesota’s most extreme ethnic studies advocates. While California lacks an official statewide high school graduation mandate in ethnic studies (although many districts have adopted a mandate as a result of Newsom’s sly omissions), Minnesota now mandates the most radical version of ethnic studies as a separate “strand” of social studies education and as a theme to be integrated into all required K–12 courses. And Minnesota’s mandate applies to every school district in the state.

 

Walz’s next step will be more disturbing still. The Walz administration is moving forward with plans to create statewide ethnic studies licensure requirements. These will have the effect of forcing all ethnic studies teachers to undergo training (i.e., indoctrination) in the most radically leftist form of ethnic studies.

 

I learned about these plans from Katherine Kersten, senior policy fellow at Minnesota’s Center of the American Experiment, perhaps the leading critic of ethnic studies in the state. Kersten points out that Minnesota’s radical ethnic studies advocates have studied and learned from California. Minnesota advocates have intentionally avoided inserting Israeli-Palestinian issues into the new ethnic studies state standards, for example, since this was a key stimulus to opposition in California. Yet when the Center of the American Experiment submitted a FOIA request to the Minnesota Department of Education, it discovered that controversial Israel-Palestine material would effectively be reinserted into ethnic studies courses in the form of examples.

 

This brings us to a key point. While it’s true that Governor Walz’s actions on ethnic studies have been stunningly radical, there is still a great deal that’s been hidden. The new ethnic studies standards were justified to the legislature as innocent ethnic boosterism. The pervasive leftist radicalism of the program was nowhere acknowledged. After I exposed the fact that Brian Lozenski, the leading ethnic studies advocate in Minnesota and a key Walz education appointee, had called for the overthrow of the United States, Walz refused to release the ethnic studies “implementation framework” that Lozenski had helped design. (The Center of the American Experiment sued to get the framework, and I wrote about it in “Tim Walz and the Marxist Comic Book.”)

 

Perhaps most important, as Kersten points out, and as I discuss in the “Marxist Comic Book” piece, Walz has effectively farmed out responsibility for advising districts on the contents of the new ethnic studies requirements to the University of Minnesota’s heavily ideological Center for Race, Indigeneity, Disability, Gender, and Sexuality Studies (RIDGS). This gives Walz some leeway to distance himself from Marxist comic books and such, should a run for the presidency require it. Of course, the truth of the matter is that Walz and his allies have orchestrated a breathtakingly radical takeover of K–12 by the ultra-woke ethnic studies movement. Walz, Lozenski, and RIDGS are all in league. Yet it helps to offload the more controversial tasks to a closely allied university.

 

When all is said and done, Newsom and Walz have adopted different strategies. Newsom has accommodated the far-left advocates of ethnic studies in his state yet in a way that creates apparent distance. He vetoed the original bill mandating an ethnic studies graduation requirement, because the only model curriculum developed to that point was too radical. And just now, Newsom has failed to fund the mandate itself, making the course entirely optional. True, in the meantime, a hyper-radical version of ethnic studies has been imposed on many California districts, all of which labored under a misimpression cleverly created by Newsom himself that they had little choice but to move in that direction. Yet Newsom has successfully minimized his fingerprints.

 

Walz, by contrast, is clearly running to galvanize the left side of the Democratic Party. He says he doesn’t want to back away from DEI: “We got ourselves in this mess because we weren’t bold enough to stand up and say, ‘You’re damn right we’re proud of these policies. We’re going to put them in, and we are going to execute them.” Walz said that of DEI just a few months ago. True, even Walz finds it necessary to distance himself from precisely whom and what he supports. Life is tough when your political allies want to overthrow the United States. Nonetheless, Newsom is clearly opening up more space between himself and the left than is Walz.

 

So, the 2028 Democratic presidential nomination race is shaping up interestingly. Gavin Newsom, a longtime enabler of California leftism, will be pretending to be moderate. It seems silly. And it is. Even so, the presence of Walz and/or others in the avowedly far-left lane will render Newsom’s pose more believable. Newsom has been positioning himself for this moment for years, finding ways to simultaneously facilitate and distance himself from the radicalism of his state.

 

If woke is dying, then it’s a lingering demise. Newsom and Rahm Emanuel may be angling for the center, but it’s hard to imagine that there won’t be plenty of 2028 candidates aiming to excite the Democrats’ leftist base. They will run a “revenge of the woke” campaign. Sure, the Democrats’ left flank might go down to defeat, either in the primaries or in the 2028 general election. That will bring still more claims that woke is dead. But the wokesters are still around. And in California and Minnesota, they’ve got a good grip on the schools, both on and under the radar. For my money, America’s culture war is poised to dominate election cycles as far as the eye can see.