I want you to try a thought experiment. It won’t be a pleasant one. But as a responsible citizen you owe it to yourself to try it. Because in a very dark sense, it’s already being carried out on you.

Are You “Woke” to the Oompa-Loompa Problem?

Imagine you had a deep, abiding hatred for a certain group of people. Let’s call them, for the moment, the Oompa-Loompas. (Remember the orange candy serfs in Willy Wonka? Those guys.)

You feel, deep in your bones, that Oompa-Loompas are to blame for countless evils in society. To justify that feeling, you have used your intellect to come up with evidence. And sure, it’s easy to find, since a) man is fallen, b) the world is full of suffering, and c) every group has its bad apples, including the Oompa-Loompas. It’s your simple task to selectively read recent history, follow sympathetic media, and selectively place the blame for a) and b) on group c), the bad apple Oompa-Loompas.

Think Tribally, Act Globally

But you also know the truism that a few bad apples can rot an entire barrel. And it’s frankly much easier for the human brain to think in broad, moralistic strokes. To think tribally, if you will. So as time goes by you start to see the bad side of every Oompa-Loompa whom you meet. You “connect the dots” uniting their wicked behavior, and try to trace it to something intrinsic in their genes or in their culture. You only follow websites and social media accounts that are “woke” to the “Oompa-Loompa Problem.” You convince yourself that your incessant Oompa-Loompa scrutiny is not a rank prejudice. It’s a moral duty.

The disadvantaged are sick of suffering because of Oompa-Loompa Privilege.

Besides, the Oompa-Loompas stick together, don’t they? Apart from a few self-hating progressives in their midst (whom you grudgingly recognize), they live in complete denial of the damage they are doing to normal, hard-working people. It’s your job to expose their habitual evil, their hidden agendas, and render them harmless to the rest of us.

Confront Oompa Privilege

That will entail displacing them from positions of influence, of course. Given how they collude, it might even mean restricting them from ordinary positions of gainful employment. Because of their deep-seated propensity for misusing money and power, you will probably have to impose on them special, legal disadvantages. You’ll want to control or even reduce their numbers in the long run. That only makes sense, given that they’re essentially the pit bulls at the dog run, causing most of the conflict and disproportionate injuries.

Of course the Oompa-Loompas are going to fight back, hard. You’ll have to be strategic. You probably don’t want to be completely up front about your theories concerning their fundamental wickedness. Not yet, at least. What you’ll do is focus attention incessantly on unhappy events or social abuses that certain Oompa-Loompas have committed. You’ll point out how often Oompa-Loompa culture gets shoved in people’s faces, how tired the disadvantaged are of suffering because of Oompa-Loompa Privilege. Best if you can get some guilt-struck Oompa-Loompas, or ones who are envious of their more successful cousins, to do much of your work for you. As your movement gets stronger and more overt, you might be surprised how many such “turncoats” show up to join you — convinced that you consider them “good apples,” who will benefit (not suffer) financially and politically by siding with your Loompaphobes.

That Whole “Genocide” Thing

At some point, you might face blowback. Fair-minded people will begin to call your supporters bigots or racists. Singling people out for hostility because of their genes or their culture. … Well, that has gotten a bad name in recent centuries. Some alarmists even claim it can lead to genocide. But you won’t let that stop you. You need to awaken people about the Oompa-Loompa menace! So here’s how you disarm the “racism/bigotry” charge:

Redefine those very terms. Take Orwell’s warning against the political takeover of language, and turn it on its head. See it more as an instruction manual. You need to get people to see that attacks on Oompa-Loompas are special, and stand in a category all their own. This one group must be exempted from our ordinary concern for protecting human beings from group-based hatred, even violence.

Other People’s Words, Your Meanings

How can you pull that off, though? Won’t people see it as a blatant example of invidious discrimination? Not if you do your job. Here are the hoops you need to jump people through:

1. Deny that racism/bigotry amounts to individual or even intentional acts of injustice aimed at particular people because of their background.
2. Insist instead that these ugly words refer to different outcomes of impersonal social processes. Even if no trace of malice or bias rears its head.
3. Preach that people in groups with more power than others cannot, by definition, be victims of racism or bigotry, no matter how hatefully we treat them.
4. Point out the obvious fact that the filthy, scheming Oompa-Loompas belong to such a powerful “in-group.” So they’re fair game for any kind of hostility whatsoever.
5. In fact, because of the pervasive, inherent violence of the Oompa-Loompa power structure, acts aimed against them are inherently simple self-defense. And we can even kill in self-defense, can’t we?

Back to Planet Earth

Okay, end of thought experiment. Go back through the above and plug in “Jews,” to understand how the Nazis made their once-fringe racial anti-Semitism mainstream in the most highly educated nation on earth.

Plug in “bourgeois” and “kulaks” to understand what the Communists have done in every country they’ve taken over.

Go back again and plug in “white people,” “conservatives,” and “Christians,” to understand what’s happening today on America’s Left, from the editorial boardroom of the New York Times to the streets of Portland, Oregon.