I have been writing for a long time about the usurping of Americans’ constitutional rights under the guise of a pandemic. The lockdowns, and other restrictive measures (no in-person religious services, no face-to-face schooling, wearing masks, etc.) is leading America to becoming a totalitarian state. The populace is being trained to submit to any and all dictates coming from our elected politicians. This is always couched inside the rhetoric of this being for one’s own good.
Naomi Wolf is an American liberal, feminist author, journalist and former political advisor to Al Gore and Bill Clinton. Wolf was an advisor to Bill Clinton’s successful run for a second term in 1996 for the Presidency. Wolf has written a number of books including the bestseller The End of America released in 2007.
This week Wolf appeared, believe it or not, on Tucker Carlson’s show. As Tucker noted, he’s sure she probably lost friends just for doing that. Such is the nature of the Cancel Culture in this country.
Why did she take this step which must have been fraught with trepidation for her? Even though she is someone who might be characterized as being on the Left, Wolf sees what is going on in the country as the precursor to a full-on police state. In her mind this transcends everything liberals and conservatives might disagree on. The people must unite to fight back against this appropriation of our liberties.
Wolf noted:
I wrote a book in which I pointed out there were 10 steps that would-be tyrants always take when they want to close down a democracy. Whether they’re on the left or the right they always do the same 10 things and now we’re at something I never thought I’d see in my lifetime. You described it really, really well. It is step 10 and that’s the suspension of the rule of law, that’s when you start to be a police state and we’re here, there’s no way around it.
Wolf went on to talk about the fact that many people from widely divergent viewpoints are horrified by what they see.
“Well, unfortunately, a lot of people are seeing it, but we’re not unified and, as you pointed out, we’re a very divided country for a lot of cynical reasons. I’m in touch with many patriots from all backgrounds and all walks of life who are horrified. I’ve interviewed, for instance, Moms For Liberty–a group of conservative moms in Florida who are mobilizing to try to get schools open. They’re so worried about what’s happening to their kids. And I talked to [?], a famous activist and gymnast on the Left who’s horrified. I’ve interviewed doctors, I’ve interviewed ordinary people, I’ve interviewed restaurant owners from all walks of life who are absolutely unable to even articulate their fear and horror.
We’re recognizing that the state has now crushed businesses, kept us from gathering in free assembly to worship as the First Amendment provides, is invading our bodies, as you mentioned, which is a violation of the Fourth Amendment, is restricting movement, fining us here in New York state–I could be fined fifteen thousand dollars a day if I gather people, y’know, more than ten or twenty-five people, depending on where in New York state I live, which is a complete violation of the First Amendment. The violations go on and on and on.”
Wolf talked about the merger of corporate and government power. From time to time one may see some “skirmishes” between these two powerful entities. However, that is just a show to keep the public quiet. Facebook , et al, will do what is necessary to hold onto their power.
Wolf delivers her coup-de-grace by noting:
“Luckily or unluckily I’ve been studying closing democracies for twelve years, so I recognized early on. Once I realized that New York state had emergency powers, I know from history that *no one gives up emergency powers* willingly. They *always* drag it on and drag it on. And so every month I’m getting in my email that governor Cuomo is *extending* emergency measures. Only from studying history do I know how *predictable* it is when you start to have elected officials say, ‘We are not going to follow the Constitution because there’s a pandemic.’”
And I just wanna say, lastly, and then I promise I’ll stop. Nowhere in the Constitution does it say ‘all this can be suspended if we have a bad disease.’ We have lived through typhus, cholera, smallpox, HIV, tuberculosis, polio, the Spanish flu. Y’know, we’ve lived through an attack on our soil! Never have there been months and months and months of emergency powers when we weren’t actually fighting a war! So this is completely unprecedented. Lockdowns have never been done before in free societies. Really, we are turning into a version of a totalitarian state before everyone’s eyes. And I really hope we wake up quickly, because history also shows that it’s a small window in which people can fight back before it is too dangerous to fight back.”
Wolf’s Ten Steps were listed in this article from 2007. Mark Wauck noted:
See what you think–do they fit with the developments we’ve seen in American life over the last several decades? Obviously the current crisis has many different aspects, and the roots of some go back quite deeply into our history–you’ll see that the origins of these Ten Steps are very much in the Bush years, with Gitmo and the Patriot Act. Nevertheless, the progress of the National Security State in America advanced to a frightening degree in the Obama years, and eluded Trump’s control.
It is very difficult to create and sustain a democracy, but history shows that closing one down is easy. You simply have to be willing to take these 10 steps:
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Invoke a terrifying internal and external enemy. Creating a terrifying, hydra-like threat is an old trick. It can, like Hitler’s invocation of a communist threat, be based on actual events. Or it can be based on myth, like the National Socialist evocation of the “global conspiracy of world Jewry.” This makes us more willing to accept restrictions on our freedoms.
Let’s see. Do the events of 9-11 and the current COVID threat meet the threshold for inclusion in this step? 9-11 led to the Patriot Act which allowed for an unprecedented incursion into our daily lives. All digital media passing between people is captured. The need for “security” of the country is the reason to suspend our liberties here.
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Create a gulag. Once everyone is scared, create a prison system outside the rule of law where torture takes place. At first, the people who are sent there are seen by citizens as troublemakers, spies, or enemies of the people. Initially, citizens tend to support the secret prison system. But soon enough, civil society leaders — opposition members, labour activists, clergy and journalists — are sent there as well.
Does Guantanamo qualify? How about the private prison system that has grown up in this country over the last couple of decades?
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Develop a thug caste. The Blackshirts, for example, roamed the Italian countryside, beating up communists. Such thugs don’t need guns. They can be dressed in shirts and trousers, menacing poll workers who are attempting to count votes.
Antifa and BLM certainly are examples of this in our country. For years they have roamed around beating up people they do not agree with. Wearing a red MAGA hat was a symbol for violence to these people. Suppressing voices that did not agree with them was their goal.
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Set up an internal surveillance system. In every closed society, secret police spy on ordinary people. Spying can involve wiretapping citizens’ phones, reading their e-mail and following financial transactions. This surveillance is cast as “national security”; the true function is to inhibit activism and dissent.
There is no doubt about this being true. As noted previously, all communications in this country are captured under the guise of national security. There is a facility in Utah with the capability of storing many decades of this data.
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Harass citizens’ groups. It can be trivial. A minister preaching that Jesus favored peace, for example, might find himself investigated by the Internal Revenue Service. Political activism becomes redefined as “terrorism.” Databases run by the government track citizen activists as “potential terrorist threats.”
The Tea Party harassment by the IRS under the Obama administration is a prime example of this. The harassment of individual Tea Party members by the IRS is another. Activists find themselves being targeted by law enforcement for spurious reasons.
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Engage in arbitrary detention and release. This cat-and-mouse game scares people. In a closing or closed society, there is a list of dissidents and opposition leaders who are periodically arrested and released. Once on this list, it is hard to get off.
Are the current “Cancel Culture” tactics an updated version of this? How do people who become victims of “Cancel Culture” regain their normal lives?
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Target key individuals. Threaten civil servants, artists and academics with job loss if they don’t toe the line. Mussolini went after the rectors of state universities who did not conform to fascism; so did Goebbels, who purged academics who were not pro-Nazi. And since government workers are the most vulnerable to being fired by a given regime, fascists typically require them to embrace the party line early on. Those with insufficient political loyalty are fired.
The wholesale purging of conservative academics from our universities is a prime example of this. So is the suppressing of such speech on our college campuses. Obama re-made our military leadership while he was in office. Disagreement with Obama led to an early retirement or dismissal from the service.
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Control the press. All would-be dictators target journalists. Over time, real news is supplanted by fake news. The fascist system directs such a relentless stream of false information that it is increasingly hard to sort out truth from untruth. When citizens can’t tell real news from fake, they give up their demands for accountability bit by bit.
I hear all the time from people who tell me they do not know what to believe in the news anymore. It has become next to impossible to sort facts from opinions on many MSM sites.
The Obama administration targeted journalists who did not fawn over the President. Long time, seasoned journalists were banished to the back of the room or were not allowed in the room at all. Witness what happened to Helen Thomas when she dared to ask an unflattering question at a press conference.
There are many more recent examples. Perhaps the most insanely authoritarian example is the efforts of Reps. Anna Eshoo (D-CA) and Jerry McNerney (D-CA). They wrote letters to twelve companies, including Verizon Communications, Amazon.com, Comcast Corp., Spectrum (Charter Communications, Inc.), Dish Network, AT&T Inc., Roku Inc., Apple Inc., Cox Enterprises, Altice USA, Hulu, LLC, and Alphabet Inc., the parent company of Google.
The letters demanded answers to questions such as “Have you ever taken any actions against a channel for using your platform to disseminate any disinformation?” and “Are you planning to continue carrying Fox News, Newsmax, and OANN?”
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Dissent equals treason. Cast dissent as “treason” and criticism as “espionage.” Every closing society does this, just as it elaborates laws that increasingly criminalize certain kinds of speech and expand the definition of “spy” and “traitor.”
This is being ramped up on steroids. Two US Senators, Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz, were accused of being seditious because they dared to question the results of the November 3rd election in several states. Anyone else who disagrees with the election results is now a traitor according to the Democrats. The attempts to criminalize “hate” speech are another example.
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Suspend the rule of law. In an “emergency,” the emerging dictator uses the military as a domestic police force in response to a natural disaster, a disease outbreak, a terrorist attack or any “other condition.”
This was COVID. It has given the wannabe dictators the excuse to do what they have done. Now it is the supposed threat of an imminent attack on our nation’s capital from white supremacists. So, they ramp up a military occupation of the capital.
At first, it was just for the inauguration. Then it was extended to sometime in March. I am unclear what excuse was used for that. So are members of the leadership of local law enforcement agencies. Now it has been extended to September. Why?
It is to create a normalcy of having a military occupation going on. Remember when Obama wanted to establish an 80,000 member Federal law enforcement group outside all current groups? It never came to be. But, having our military occupying the Capital is a start in that direction.
I have to give credit to Wolf for going on Tucker Carlson’s show. Unfortunately, she will likely disappear from the scene. I cannot see any other MSM outlet even giving her the time of day. There is no doubt she made her point well. However, we need a lot more of this if we are to save America from becoming a totalitarian state.
As difficult as it might be for her (she voted for Biden), I would hope she would join forces with PDJT. He fights, he’s been fighting, and he will continue to fight. Obviously he is on the same side of this issue as she is. PDJT was an impediment to the Uniparty’s plans to take over the country.
