The other day I mentioned in this space a five-year-old post in which I quoted a recipient of a Fulbright fellowship complaining that the State Department briefing of that year’s Fulbright winners urged them to go abroad and advocate for LGBT rights. He sent photos of some of the handouts they were given. A reader who is on a Fulbright to a socially and culturally conservative country wrote the letter below to me. I have slightly altered it to protect the reader’s anonymity, and received the reader’s permission to publish this version:

Your observations on the Fulbright program are dead-on. I am a Fulbright awardee to [conservative country]. I went through the Fulbright orientation recently, and there was zero sensitivity to local cultures per State Department training. American awardees were told they could attend local protests, and merely told how to avoid violence or arrest while attending local protests. There was no discussion whatsoever on ensuring that one’s attire and dress was appropriate and tailored to the situation. There were a disproportionate number of awardees on sexual vanguard topics to go and convert other cultures to view things from a hyper-sexualized American angle, and all of this was actively encouraged and pushed by the State Department. I was conversing with other Fulbright awardees during the orientation, and those of us who have professional backgrounds with meaningful topics were embarrassed by the visible young cohort of Fulbright awardees who were there for no apparent reason other than to promote a sexual agenda. It was resented and opposed by local countries. Keep in mind – the Biden administration is struggling to find a coherent strategy in the Middle East, but every professional American who can play a role in building organic ties between the US and the Middle East region has to be screened thru an ideological filter that guarantees that the US Government will never be able to compete with the Chinese.

I will also tell you that during the transition from the Trump Administration to the Biden Administration, the State Department began censoring Fulbright awardees since apparently there was targeting of conservatives and/or conservative-oriented topics that were no longer supported. So not only has the Fulbright program become sexualized, it is now thoroughly politicized, too.

I am writing for your personal knowledge only. I typically do not reach out to writers and reporters, and it would not be a good idea for my name to be in the papers right now. The State Department views things strictly thru ideological lenses, which is why they no longer understand the countries in which they are posted. There are certainly still many good career Foreign Service officers who correctly understand our true position and how weak we are, but most likely their diverging viewpoints are disregarded, ignored and dismissed, and it would be career suicide to overly oppose the agenda. If Fulbright awardees were permitted to do their work without interference, at least this would be something, but that is no longer the case.

Our scholar-diplomats have to take up the Woke Man’s Burden, I guess, and bring the barbarians of the world to being allies of the genderfluid.

In other News Of The Woke, here’s more evidence for J.D. Vance’s theory that the Left is waging class war as culture war:

Meet UC Berkeley’s new Vice Chancellor of Equity & Inclusion. “[Her] identity is Latina, first born, raised by a single mom,” and she deals with the “emotional toll” of doing DEI-BJ work and “dismantling systems of oppression” through “mindfulness breathing.”

Salary: $325,000. pic.twitter.com/ucSAnyPFAC

— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) December 13, 2021

“BJ” is “belonging and justice.” The more b.s. terms you add to these jobs, the more money you have to pay people, I guess. Here’s the interview in which Dania Matos said these things. In this press release, Dania Matos recalls the oppression she felt at Brown, an Ivy League university. UC Berkeley spends $25 million annually to fund its diversity bureaucracy, which employs 400.

Moving on, Fordham University has fired a white English department instructor because he confused the names of two black students. More:

A former lecturer in the English Department, Christopher Trogan, was terminated by Fordham on Oct. 25 after a series of communications with students that stemmed from an incident where he confused the names of two Black students.

The name mix-up occurred on Sept. 24 in a Composition II class taught by Trogan.

The two students whose names were mixed up sent Trogan an email after class expressing that they felt disheartened and disrespected, and believed the mistake occurred because they were both Black.

Later that day, Trogan sent an email addressing the situation to all of his students in both sections of his Composition II course.

He referred to the name mix-up as an “innocent mistake” and said he had a “confused brain” because the two students arrived late while he was reading the work of another student at the lecturer podium.

“The offended student assumed my mistake was because I confused that student with another Black student,” Trogan said in his email to students. “I have done my best to validate and reassure the offended student that I made a simple, human, error. It has nothing to do with race.”

Wrong! Everything has to do with race, ya dope! If you read on in the story, you see that Trogan fell all over himself to assure his students that he’s not racist, which just stirred the pot.

I should never be a professor, then. I have always had a hard time connecting names and faces. It must be hereditary, because one of my kids has the condition too. It turns out that scientists believe there may be a link between learning how to read early and difficulty connecting names and faces. I learned how to read at age three. My son who has the same condition learned how to read at two. I could easily end up in poor Trogan’s place through no moral fault of my own, but it wouldn’t matter. To be accused by Sacred Victims is the same as being guilty under our soft totalitarianism.

I wish, though, that somebody on the Left would point out that all this garbage is making friendship between races impossible. How can you become friends if you have to be afraid that one tiny slip-up of the sort that all humans make from time to time could cost you your livelihood?