On election night Nov. 8, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis evoked Churchill’s “fighting on the beaches” speech. DeSantis, of course, was not warning against Nazism: he was warning against wokeism, which he was implicitly equating with Nazism. 

By Tom Klingenstein

Jan. 20, 2017...Jan. 3, 2023

DeSantis Goes to War

"People do not uproot themselves and leave the rhythms of home for light and transient causes. These people are not coming to Florida just for the weather. They are fleeing the woke regime of blue America—an abusive, lawless, totalitarian regime which is waging war against American principles and the American way of life."

DeSantis continued:

"Now, this great exodus of Americans, for those folks, Florida, for so many of them, has served as the promised land. We have embraced freedom. We have maintained law and order. We have protected the rights of parents. We have respected our taxpayers, and we reject woke ideology. We fight the woke in the legislature. We fight the woke in the schools. We fight the woke in the corporations. We will never, ever surrender to the woke mob. Florida is where woke goes to die."

In today’s environment, where there is a keen and deepening generalized awareness of danger, I think there is a hunger for a reasoned account of that danger. DeSantis’s most important role—the role of any statesman who is to rise to the historic challenge of this crisis—is to give such an account, one that calls a morally indifferent nation back to the principles of the founding.

DeSantis might use the 2020 riots as an example of the woke regime in action. Radicals, intellectuals, media, businesses, Democratic politicians, and the criminal justice system conspired to create mayhem. They ignited, justified, hid, funded, fanned the flames of, and freed the rioters. There is no overarching organization. There is some informal coordination among players, but mostly the regime is a revolutionary cabal of the anti-American elite, who want us to believe they are liberating innocent victims.

The woke regime’s big lie is that America is systemically racist and about to be overrun by racists, a.k.a. Trump voters. DeSantis should call this the “Big Lie” and, like Trump, dismiss it without apology or qualification.

So far as I can tell, there is no national Republican elected official who fully understands the threat except for Trump and DeSantis.

Read MORE @ .Tom Klingenstein is the chairman of the Claremont Institute.