The above claim, made just recently, is not about our Ukraine-proxy war with Russia. It’s not about our continuing military actions against the Houthi rebels in Yemen. It’s not about something as mundane as how the U.S. is, technically, still at war with North Korea. Rather, it’s about an ongoing, existential conflict against the most dangerous enemy of all: ourselves.
Or, to be precise, that would be the enemy within — and the good Americans who unwittingly aid that enemy.
So warns Claremont Institute Chairman Tom Klingenstein, in so many words, in an essay titled “We Are Still at War.”
A Battle vs. the War
Making news, Elon Musk announced on X Sunday, “Cancel culture has been canceled.” Musk, who’ll be in the Donald Trump administration, is of course talking about how, with the GOP’s November 5 election sweep, there’s a new sheriff in town. And Musk certainly did cancel cancel culture on his X platform. (I use it and can attest that the left-wing thought police are gone.) Yet there’s a big difference between a social media entity and the federal government.
If Musk had to run for “election” against Twitter’s (X’s) former owners in two years, he could conceivably lose. This would mean returning to (monkey) business as usual. But Musk owns X, so that won’t happen.
Politics is different, of course. First, the Trump administration will have its work cut out for it combating the Deep State. Second, since not all GOP legislators embrace the MAGA agenda, and given the Senate’s glacial nature, there’s no guarantee congressional aid in fighting wokeness will be robust. (Besides, the Republicans could conceivably lose Congress in 2026.) Third, let’s assume Trump and his team do successfully purge the politically correct rot from federal agencies. What will happen if the GOP loses the executive branch in 2028?
The woke mind virus will return — with a vengeance.
The reason is that, to state the obvious, eliminating wokeness from the federal government does not equate to eliminating wokeness. Its primary home is our cultural institutions; as long as it prevails there, it will be the default. Moreover, it is mainly the culture, not the government, that enforces cancel culture.
So while the Election Day victory was an uplifting battlefield triumph, it’s just part of the wider conflict: the culture war.
Unseen Dark Hands
Yet there’s a problem here: “America is at war, but we don’t know it,” writes Klingenstein. And “you can’t win a war if you don’t know you are in one.”
To illustrate this unseen conflict, Klingenstein introduces us to Brian Lozenski, an associate professor of urban and multicultural education at Macalester College in Saint Paul, Minnesota. Lozenski should’ve been one of the campaign’s biggest stories (but was ignored). Klingenstein explains why:
[Lozenski] is a national leader in the CRT [critical race theory] movement, the foremost authority on CRT in Minnesota and, most significantly, Tim Walz’s most important education advisor. Lozenski is not on the fringes of Walz’s administration but at its very center. Lozenski was the de facto leader of Walz’s so-called “ethnic studies” curriculum (“ethnic studies” is, in effect, a new name for CRT), which is at the heart of Walz’s education program.
Walz has been working diligently for years to embed ethnic studies in the curricula of all grades, in all required courses in all public schools in Minnesota. According to Katherine Kersten, a senior policy fellow at the Center of the American Experiment in Minnesota, Walz “has used both legislation and administrative rulemaking to achieve … radical Ethnic Studies instruction. … Between 2021 and 2023, Walz proposed and pushed Ethnic Studies in a series of ‘governor’s policy and budget bills’ at the Minnesota Legislature.”
The Devilish Details
Walz and Lozenski make sure to get ’em young, too. As Klingenstein continues:
Under the new ethnic studies standards, Kersten reports, first-graders must “identify examples of ethnicity, equality, liberation and systems of power” and “use those examples to construct meanings for those terms.” Fourth-graders must “examine how discrimination and the oppression of various racial and ethnic groups have produced resistance movements.” High school students are taught to view themselves as members of “racialized hierarchies” based on “dominant European beauty standards.” However “jargony,” it is clear enough that these standards are intended to lead students to disdain America and join in the overthrow of their country.
“Overthrow” is a term Lozenski uses much, too. In fact, according to Klingenstein, Lozenski even stated that “Harris/Walz want to overthrow America.” (Note: I cannot find an original source for this statement.) And with the Democrats’ election loss, Harris will perhaps retreat to the bottle — but Walz will slink back to Minnesota, where he’ll continue corrupting children.
Yet the even larger issue is that Walz and Lozenski are just two cogs in a civilization-wide machine of destruction. (I’ve reported on this educational degradation here, here, here, here, here, here, and here). Moreover, it isn’t just culture-shaping academia that the Left controls. It also prevails in mainstream media, entertainment, and most of corporate America and Big Tech.
Is There a Solution?
The good news is that, for the first time, patriotic Americans have made some notable inroads into the culture-shaper axis. With the rise of alternative media (e.g., podcasters), the mainstream media are in rapid decline. I can’t characterize Big Tech as “GoogTwitFace” anymore because Twitter is now X and X is no longer ideologically X-rated. (Thanks to Musk’s ownership.) And renowned professor Dr. Jordan Peterson’s Peterson Academy, and Hillsdale College, represent efforts to renew academia. Yet as I just wrote in “The Most Important Votes Are Yet to Be Cast,” this movement’s fate is largely up to us. Good can only prevail if we, the market, empower it via our buying decisions — and disempower the evil.
Klingenstein also makes another suggestion, however. He said that Trump will assuredly state when he takes office that he is “the president for all Americans, even to those who did not vote for me.” But the commentator recommends an alternative. To wit:
Trump might say, “I am the President of all Americans but the 10%-20% who want to destroy America.”
The point is that you can only “cancel cancel culture” with your own cancel culture. Goodness can only prevail when we scorn and ostracize the civilization destroyers more effectively than they scorn and ostracize us. Culture wars are zero-sum games.
So it’s not enough being happy that we dodged a bullet on November 5. For the gun that fired it still exists and is still wielded by the same dark hands — and its magazine is still full. Only when that gun is removed from those hands will we know that our civilization may live to see tomorrow.
