Conservatives used to view her as the big (or maybe little) bad Wolf. Now some are essentially calling her a good shepherd.
Naomi Wolf, liberal journalist and former political advisor to Al Gore and Bill Clinton, used to be a stone-faced feminist. But after a professed 2006 religious conversion, her personality, if not her politics, appeared to change. And now she has attracted attention again, this time with a more worldly eye-catching statement:
America is becoming a “totalitarian state before our eyes” under the Joe Biden administration.
In fact, we’re now in the last step in what Wolf has defined as the 10 steps to fascism.
Wolf made her comments Monday evening on Fox News show Tucker Carlson Tonight. She warned that our country was “moving into a coup situation, a police state,” due to the Democrats’ continued COVID-19-catalyzed economic shutdowns. These measures are being illegally extended under the “guise of a real medical pandemic,” Wolf stated.
“That is not a partisan thing,” she said to host Carlson. “That transcends everything that you and I might disagree or agree on. That should bring together left and right to protect our Constitution.”
The problem is that the “Left” and “Right” disagree profoundly on what the Constitution dictates. For example, the Left fancies that protecting the Constitution means preserving an alleged “right” to prenatal infanticide, but that Second Amendment rights can be sharply curtailed. The Right, of course, disagrees.
Wolf outlined with Carlson how the coronavirus pretext has been used to violate our rights, saying 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 … to the violation of the Fourth Amendment; is restricting movement; [and is] fining us in New York state…. Violations go on and on and on.”
“Autocratic tyrants” are using the “pandemic” “to engage in emergency orders that simply strip us of our rights: rights to property, rights to assembly, rights to worship, and all of the rights the Constitution guarantees,” she later added.
Wolf called our politicians’ overall response to SARS-CoV-2 “completely unprecedented,” pointing out that (total) “lockdowns have never been done in society, and really, we are turning into a totalitarian state before everyone’s eyes” (video below).
In fact, again, Wolf states that on the road to fascism, we’re in the final step (you can read all the steps here), which is “Subvert the rule of law.”
For perspective, I’ll mention that our rule of law has long been subverted insofar as the Constitution has been violated, which has been happening for more than a century. That said, this was a commonly accepted law violation, occurring incrementally and rubber-stamped by courts, so that we still had the relative stability of enforcement of perceived law (even if they were often mere judicial precedents).
But now subversion of law has become more sudden, overt, and extreme, with pandemic-related “emergency powers” used to violate fundamental rights. Add to this the invocation of feared internal enemies — the disease and “white supremacists” — and the empowerment of left-wing street thugs, and it’s a perfect storm for tyranny’s descent.
And as Wolf puts it, history teaches “that no one gives up emergency powers willingly.”
A true message, for sure. Yet a few are rolling their eyes at the messenger. For example, the Washington Times’ Cheryl K. Chumley characterizes Wolf’s words as “Too little, too late — too disingenuous.” Why “doesn’t the left ever heed the warnings before the 12th hour approaches?” Chumley asks.
What frustrates Chumley and others is epitomized in a tweet Wolf sent a mere five days after the 2020 election:
Well, it didn’t take long for that buyer’s remorse to set in.
It’s tempting to say here, “Naomi, what did you think Biden would do? Lockdowns have been a Democrat enterprise, with many Republican governors bucking them. Somehow, the story of the frog and the scorpion comes to mind with you.”
The truth is that if tyranny does descend upon us, Wolf will have voted for it. Oh, don’t misunderstand me: I like Wolf and disagree with Chumley, in that I believe the former’s beliefs are sincere. Only, too many of them are sincerely wrong.
Being a man of faith with a history of reading people well, I can say that I absolutely believe Wolf’s 2006 religious conversion was authentic. For you can fake a claim to one, but far harder is faking the change in personality — the apparent transformation of heart and mind that shined through her eyes — that I saw 15 years ago.
Yet “everyone is in a different stage of conversion,” as a clergyman once put it to me and some others. Understand here that “conversion,” properly understood in the theological sense, doesn’t just refer to some sudden, epiphanic experience where one “sees the light.” Rather, the term means to “turn from oneself to God.”
In other words, since we never become perfect until we leave this world and are with God, we’re actually called to experience conversion every day. That is, put differently, to become more virtuous every day, holier every day, more godly every day.
Becoming “conservative” as some put it — or even “finding God,” imperative though that is — is not the end, but a new beginning. It doesn’t mean you’ve arrived but that now you can really travel, in an ethereal direction. We only “arrive” when we get to Heaven.
How this relates to Wolf and so, so many others is that it’s difficult often to perceive — and even more difficult to accept — conversion’s demands. Relinquishing long held misbegotten ideas to which we’re emotionally attached can be painful (you can read more about Wolf’s unusual beliefs here).
What’s tragic is that ours is a secular, relativistic age where vice is exalted and iniquity passes for insight, so that people grow up with views and values antithetical to conversion’s demands, to Truth. Had Wolf been formed differently, for example, she might have realized that whatever you think of President Trump, he wasn’t going to effect that final leap into tyranny. The Democrats absolutely would — and are doing so.
Nonetheless, Wolf issued a warning Monday that we all should heed. People had better “wake up quickly,” she said, because history shows that there’s a small window in which people can resist — “before it is too dangerous to fight back.”
