Know Your Enemy

 As Yogi Berra said, “Prediction is very difficult—especially about the future.” Even Yogi could predict that a Trump loss to Kamala Harris would mean hearing her cackling laugh for the next four years.

We might get an even clearer glimpse of the future if we understood that we face what I call, perhaps inelegantly, the “group-quota regime.” This regime wants to destroy us by overturning the principle of individual merit and replacing it with the assignment of guilt by race or sex. Better yet, we can understand how the group-quota regime works: its structure, where it’s going, how it plans to get there, and, of course, how to defeat it. If we don’t have at least a sense of these things, and few Republicans do, then we shall not defend ourselves as well as we might. 

The group-quota regime is not simply the state, as was the case in well-known totalitarian regimes of the 20th century, but the state in combination with a loose federation of America’s major institutions—media, education, entertainment, intelligence agencies, nonprofits, and business. That federation orchestrated the George Floyd riots: It ignited the riots, encouraged them, justified them, legalized them, and ruthlessly censored dissent.

Furthermore, we should assume that the men in black ski masks whom we saw lighting fires and breaking windows were supported by an organization—a loose, informal one perhaps, but an organization all the same. We must assume the worst. The woke radicals have earned this assumption.

The group-quota regime is bent on destroying the American way of life. All the elements of a healthy society—traditional families, private property, the rule of law—are obstacles to this left-wing power grab and must be swept away. From this perspective, it becomes clear how apparently disparate goals such as open borders, climate alarmism, and manufactured energy dependence all work together to serve this end. The underlying aim is to destroy American self-government and usher in a radical new regime under their control. 

We must understand how particular woke policies serve the group-quota regime. Take defunding the police, decriminalizing certain existing crimes, failing to prosecute others, and lowering or eliminating bail. These are not just a bunch of independent dangerous policies; they are a coordinated bunch of dangerous policies all designed to bring the black prison population (nearly 40 percent) in line with blacks’ share of the overall population (13 percent). In other words, they all serve group quotas.

If these policies aren’t enough, and doubtless they won’t be, what next? That’s the question we must always ask if we want to head the woke radicals off at the pass. 

The next thing may well be different punishments for black Americans than for white Americans who have committed the same crimes. This isn’t so difficult to predict because it’s already happening in California. Sometimes we just have to watch and listen.

Or, take another easy one. During the Biden administration, an office of censorship was set up within the Department of Homeland Security, brazenly named the “Disinformation Governance Board.” In this case, they got a bit ahead of themselves, so they “paused” their activities after media exposure. But, as the word “pause” implies, they will restart when circumstances permit. We must be prepared. 

They want to destroy the nuclear family; that goal was stated plainly in the Black Lives Matter mission statement. That plank of their platform was a step too far for the American public, and so it was erased. But it will return. We must understand all their family policies, including universal childcare, are a means to achieve outcome equality between men and women and within the workplace—group quotas again.

Anyone who doubts their fanatical, no-holds-barred commitment to group quotas should watch a 2020 cartoon video narrated by Kamala Harris. The video shows the movement of the earth’s tectonic plates necessary to achieve outcome equality, or “equity,” as they say. This woke radicals’ vision of heaven on earth is absolutely terrifying, all the more so because it is packaged in a wholesome innocence that any child (and many parents) will find irresistible. It is full-on propaganda.

As for the attempt to assassinate Trump, I very much doubt it was a conspiracy, but given the laxity of security for the event, perhaps the usual suspects were thinking, “We’re not going to actively assassinate Trump but then again it wouldn’t be the end of the world if someone else did.” Some think God intervened to help Trump and us at that terrible moment. Perhaps, but we should remember that God helps those who help themselves.

It would help us to anticipate the left’s next move, if in analyzing woke radical thinking we remember they follow this Mussolini-like totaliatarian formula: “All within the group-quota regime, nothing outside the group-quota regime, nothing against the group-quota regime.”

Education remains at least partially outside the group-quota regime and is now the space where a great battle between good and evil is taking place. The woke radicals need to ensure that all children are educated by the regime, which means eliminating alternatives to public schools or regulating these alternatives so they become, in effect, regular public schools. The woke radicals will use all the federal power they already possess, augmented by all they can steal, to impose their “America is racist” narrative upon our children.

Like Yogi, we’re not so good at predicting the future, but we must try. We must understand that these woke radicals are propelled by an uncontrollable moral certainty. Never underestimate their talent to sow the seeds of chaos.

Tom Klingenstein is the Chairman of the Claremont Institute, he is also a philanthropist, public speaker, writer, and a playwright. He believes that we are in a cold civil war and that our enemy—what he calls the “Woke regime”—are winning, in large measure because Republican leaders have yet to engage.

https://chroniclesmagazine.org/view/know-your-enemy/