I am not sure we should be laughing any more. "Woke" ideas have become dangerous, not merely daft.
Take, for example, critical race theory, which argues that the United States is founded on racial supremacy and oppression. This radical idea has spread out from college campuses into the workplace, government and even the military.
A form of Marxism, critical race theory divides society between the oppressors and the oppressed. But unlike old school Marxism, with its categorization by class, critical race theory categorizes Americans by race.
This ideology is obviously deeply divisive. But so long as only a handful of academics thought like that, we could largely ignore it.
The trouble is that the "woke" ideas are increasingly becoming a kind of belief system for many of America’s elite. They now permeate many aspects of life in America – and if unchecked they risk tearing the republic apart.
This week the Mississippi Center for Public Policy publishes a report that looks at how widespread these ideas are within the public education system in our state.
We then set out a series of practical steps we believe our leaders need to take to ensure that this extremist agenda is not promoted using public money.
The United States was founded on the ideal that everyone possesses their own "inalienable rights." That principle, however imperfectly applied, helped to define the United States as a country that respected people as individuals.
Critical race theory stands that ideal on its head, insisting instead that we define ourselves according to immutable characteristics. This ideology is profoundly un-American and anti-American.
America is such an extraordinary success story. The USA, while not perfect, is a moral as well as a material achievement.
Our report sets out how we might replace a bad idea – the notion that America is intrinsically racist – with a good idea – that America is "the last best hope of earth.”