Sarah Huckabee Sanders makes a splash in Arkansas – can she climb higher?

Shortly after taking office in January, Arkansas governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders launched a powerful salvo in the so-called war on woke being waged by Republicans.

Sanders, 41, signed an executive order targeting critical race theory, an academic field that probes how racism affects US society and laws. The move aligned with countrywide Republican opposition to the discipline.

“Our job is to protect the students, and we’re going to take steps every single day to make sure we do exactly that,” Sanders said in a statement. “And that’s the reason I signed the executive order. I’m proud of the fact that we’re taking those steps and we’re going to continue to do it every single day that I’m in office.”

Sanders also barred the use in state of documents of “Latinx”, which an expert described as a “gender-neutral term to describe US residents of Latin American descent”.

Days after this slew of executive orders, Sanders also delivered the Republican address responding to Joe Biden’s State of the Union, during which she evoked immigrants, liberals and others held up as boogeymen by her former boss Donald Trump during his presidency.

“From out-of-control inflation and violent crime to the dangerous border crisis and threat from China, Biden and the Democrats have failed you,” Sanders proclaimed, later warning: “The dividing line in America is no longer between right or left. The choice is between normal or crazy.”

Sanders’s fight, however, didn’t end during her first weeks in office. Far from it, in an October executive order meant “to eliminate woke, anti-women words from state government and respect women”, Sanders prohibited phrases such as “pregnant people” and “chestfeeding” from being used in “official state government business”.

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