Naomi Wolf Pulls Back Curtain on the Last 3 Years of Chaos

[FULL TRANSCRIPT BELOW] “People think democracies die with a sudden shock, and you see Black Shirts or Brownshirts goose-stepping in the streets. That’s not how democracies die. Democracies die through a thousand cuts,” says Naomi Wolf, CEO of DailyClout and author of the new book, “Facing the Beast: Courage, Faith, and Resistance in a New Dark Age.”

“Our Justice Department has been turned against citizens. That’s what happens in an advanced tyranny. People are languishing in prison without due process. That’s what happens in an advanced tyranny,” Ms. Wolf says.

So what has really happened to America, and across Western democracies, over these last few years?

Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

FULL TRANSCRIPT

Jan Jekielek:
Naomi Wolf, so good to have you back on American Thought Leaders.

Naomi Wolf:
It’s so good to speak with you again, Jan.

Mr. Jekielek:
Let’s start with the big question. What or who is the beast?

Ms. Wolf:
What is the beast? I admire books that have multiple layers. Inevitably, there are many answers to the question, “What is the beast and what does it mean to face the beast?” Literally, the beast was a bear that was in our backyard at our little house in upstate New York that had slowly become more and more comfortable living around us. We hadn’t done anything to deter him.

Finally, on a day when I was alone in the house, he started circling and circling and trying to find a way to get into the house, and I grabbed the wrong weapon. I grabbed a BB gun and unhelpfully locked myself upstairs in a bathroom. I went into such a panic mode that I was literally saying to myself, “If I don’t look out the window, he won’t be there.” That’s how irrational with fear I was. Of course, that’s a metaphor for what we have done. We’ve been asleep as a nation. We’ve let our enemies come very close to us. As it turns out, we’ve actually let our enemies get inside our bodies.

Practically, what that means more deeply is that China has been instrumental in the manufacture of the Pfizer injections. It’s a BioNTech subsidiary which makes the injections, and has a memorandum of understanding with Fosun Pharmaceutical, which is one of the biggest pharma companies in China. The leaders of Fosun Pharmaceuticals are senior members of the Chinese Communist Party, and I’m not telling you anything your audience doesn’t already know. Essentially, every company in China is merged with the CCP.

Mr. Jekielek:
Especially a giant pharmaceutical or any giant company in fact.

Ms. Wolf:
Really, as shocking as all of this is, my discovery was that in 2021, BioNTech’s SEC filing revealed that there had been 100 percent accomplished tech transfer from BioNTech to China for the Covid vaccine. It doesn’t say to a Chinese individual or to a Chinese company, it says to China.

Mr. Jekielek:
I imagine there are a number of outfits that are digging deeper into these relationships at this point since you have published this. Your book is an absolutely fascinating window into what happened over the last several years.

Ms. Wolf:
Thank you.

Mr. Jekielek:
You describe your own journey as the before and after times. It has to do with this movement from being accepted in the elite class to something very different. You document in the book how you shared a lot of those views without realizing you shared these views. I want to explore what those views were. It’s like they are opposite from your world before.

Ms. Wolf:
That’s right.

Mr. Jekielek:
Let’s start there and then we’ll navigate through some other areas.

Ms. Wolf:
Honestly, ever since the Clinton years, I did not understand why my people, my tribe of liberal elites, to put it reductively, were always cheerleading for China. I remember when it began in the Clinton years. I was a White House spouse and then a political consultant for Clinton’s reelection campaign and for Vice President Gore’s campaign. I remember when President Clinton was ushering in the offshoring of everything and preparing working Americans and the industrial belt for this change, basically saying, “You can go back to community college. You can reskill. You can join the service sector.”

I was thinking, “How is this a good idea?” Even at that time there were atrocities and human rights violations being reported regularly, so I never drank that particular Kool-Aid. It was kind of a mystery and it seemed kind of racist to me that the global elites whom I hung out with were sure that in any partnership with China, we would be the dominant partner. There was this assumption, “They need our help and we’ll spread democracy and they’ll manufacture things for us.” It was very condescending, and I was never persuaded by that.

I actually also went to a high school that was majority Chinese American. I never had a rosy view of what the Chinese Communist Party was capable of because people had been fleeing China sinceI I was a young adult. But I didn’t ever imagine when I voted for President Biden that our White House would be captured by the Chinese Communist Party. I never would have thought that elites ranging from journalists, business leaders, political leaders, and universities would so wholeheartedly not just embrace Chinese Communist money flow and business opportunities, but increasingly embrace overt Chinese Communist-style culture and Marxist concepts. That was a shock to me.
I’ve been writing about that nonstop since 2020 when I began to see it all around me, actually Chinese Marxists, not Russian or other Marxists. It was a whole intervention of concepts that were un-American and super Communist into our language like, “Social distancing. Freedom’s a bad idea. You’re selfish if you want human rights or harm reduction.” I could go on and on about this collectivist interposition of the state as the arbiter of how we communicate with each other, how we touch each other, and how we assemble with each other, all under the guise of public health.

It was really just a straight-up Marxist state. I was stunned to see Western leaders and all my friends, who had the benefit of Ivy League educations and a great deal of sophistication, just fall in with that and embrace it, and not even think, “Wait, this is historically familiar. This doesn’t end well.” I was surprised by that.

Mr. Jekielek:
A lot of us didn’t realize what was happening. Many people still don’t understand the gravity of it all. In one of our past conversations I challenged you when you said, “This is tyranny.”

Ms. Wolf:
I felt sorry for you.

Mr. Jekielek:
I think you made a compelling case.

Ms. Wolf:
It was the early days.

Mr. Jekielek:
You’re very familiar with what tyranny looks like, but it’s very hard to see it at home.

Ms. Wolf:
Yes. I had been well-prepared for this moment because I had written a book called The End of America during the Bush Years. I looked at other times and places where democracies were subverted by tyrannies, whether they were on the Left or on the Right. By looking at Mussolini’s Italy, Germany in the ’30s, East Germany in the ’50s, Chile, and China, I saw that tyrants, whatever their ideology, always take the same 10 steps. There are 10 steps to fascism and it’s a map.

By the time you get to Emergency Law, you’re at step 10, and it’s very difficult to get your democracy back without a fight. Because of that work I was able to quickly recognize that by June of 2020, when Governor Cuomo of New York State said we couldn’t assemble with more than six people in our homes, I realized we were under Emergency Law. That was step 10. I started trying to warn people early on as a result of my recognizing these historical patterns. Because I had done that work warning that America could easily descend into tyranny, I had already broken that seal in my head that this can’t happen here. I knew it could.

Mr. Jekielek:
People are extremely concerned about what has happened in our society over the last three years, yet this remains probably the freest place in the world. What does that say?

Ms. Wolf:
Jan, it says that we’re in history. I make this point at the end of End of America, that people think democracies die with a sudden shock and you see black shirts or brown shirts who are protesting in the streets. That’s not how democracies die. More often than not, democracies die through a thousand cuts and perforations. We are the freest country in the world, but that doesn’t mean we are healthy, and it doesn’t mean we are not in danger.

It’s like having a sick body. The cancer invades over here, but this system is still fine. The cancer invades over here, your heart rate is still fine, and then there’s a collapse. If you look at Latin American countries, many of them are not effective democracies at all. They’re oligarchies, but they have what looks like a functioning judiciary. They have newspapers, they have elections. Who counts the votes? What are people allowed to say? Are the judges free to adjudicate without repercussions?

Just because we have a press doesn’t mean we have a free press. We saw that in the last three years. There were so many things people couldn’t say in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. Thank God for our judiciary. Of all our institutions it seems more robust than most, but we can’t take that for granted. Our Justice Department has been turned against citizens. That’s what happens in an advanced tyranny.

People are languishing in prison without due process. That’s what happens in advanced tyranny. I found out that my own administration for whom I’d voted, had spent taxpayer money to lift out my accurate tweet of June of 2021 that got me de-platformed. They then colluded to put pressure on Twitter and Facebook, and then had me smeared, globally. That was my own administration that subverted my First Amendment rights.

That’s what happens to dissidents in an advanced tyranny. The state targets dissidents. It’s not like Twitter targeting me, it was the state targeting me, which is terrifying. We are walking around shopping and taking Ubers and protesting, but that doesn’t mean that these things are not happening all around us, which are indicative of a very advanced oppression. A real danger to us is the human tendency to normalize. I think AI makes this more effective, and these changes are happening bit by bit very surgically and incrementally over time.

It may be something that we laugh about over beer with our friends, that we’re being censored on social media. We gossip about people being de-licensed for giving a second opinion if they’re doctors. We laugh about the fact that alternative media is more robust than legacy media. But 10 years ago, if I had said to you that this is what America’s going to be like, you would have all recoiled in horror, and I hope in disbelief.

Mr. Jekielek:
You talked about some of the January 6th protesters in the book, and this was quite a viral moment where you apologized to conservatives. That was the gist of it. But you build on that in the book and talk about how you now understand what happened on January 6th. I want to touch on that because we’ve covered that quite extensively at Epoch Times and it’s very important.

Ms. Wolf:
That’s a tricky one. I wouldn’t say that I understand what happened on January 6th for the same reason that I wouldn’t say right now I understand what’s happening along the southern border of Israel, meaning that what happened on January 6th is so complicated and involves so many people. But I do understand that I was lied to about it by legacy media and that I believed a lot of those lies.

One of the interesting things in that chapter that I relearned while researching that chapter—dear conservatives, I apologize—is legacy media on the Left; CNN and the New York Times, represented the act of citizens entering the capitol as the insurrection. That was described as an insurrection, as if simply to enter is violating some norm that we had had in America, and that legislation in Congress only took place when the public couldn’t be part of it or witness it or enter the space.

That really struck me because I knew historically that hadn’t been the case at all. The Capitol is called the People’s House and from its very beginning there were public galleries. There are galleries that were built in order to allow the public to enter and witness the proceedings. In fact, state houses were built that way too, from the 19th Century to the present, with galleys so that people could watch their representatives voting and debating.

Then I asked, “Is that true? Is it an insurrection to walk peacefully into the capitol?” It is not. People are allowed to walk peacefully into the Capitol. That was an important lie because apart from what happened to those people who walked peacefully into the Capitol, that lie allowed the narrative to be propagated—that half of America was violent and sought to overturn our democracy, and that the people who entered the Capitol represented that half of America, violently and unlawfully.

It’s also a disturbing and false narrative to promote, because it reinforces this idea that the people have no role in watching their elected officials or observing the vote or entering a public building. That’s what these oligarchs want. They want us to forget that we have the right to enter any public building, and that those records belong to us. Observing the vote belongs to us, and observing counting of the vote belongs to us. That was a false narrative.

Mr. Jekielek:
People from your previous peer group probably say, “Hey, we’ve seen the videos of the violence.”

Ms. Wolf:
There was violence. I just want to take an opportunity to say violence is always wrong, especially in a civic context. But the people who peacefully entered were depicted as violent when they weren’t. That was depicted as violence. There were other things that were weird that subverted the narrative that I was given. One of them was the role of this guy with the antlers.

Mr. Jekielek:
The so-called QAnon Shaman.

Ms. Wolf:
The QAnon Shaman. I don’t know what to make of the footage that Tucker Carlson aired, showing him being escorted through the building. Again, I was a White House spouse, I was a political consultant, I went to the Naval Observatory, I went to the old executive office building, I have been to the White House, and I have been to the Capitol. You have the right to walk in if you’re a member of the public, but there’s a very layered security plan for each of these buildings.

Nothing about January 6th made sense to me in terms of how a building like that is supposed to be secured when there’s unrest. Certainly, ushering this guy into the middle of the activity, this guy who was so photogenic as such an emblem of chaos didn’t make sense to me. I don’t know what to make of it, but I know that that was not the footage that CNN was showing us. That guy figured in CNN’s version of the footage as kind of the spirit of Republican anarchy and MAGA anarchy.

Therefore, that raised questions. In the legacy media I read that President Trump was thoroughly represented as having called for that insurrection. That’s the word that is used—insurrection—as opposed to riot. I was very surprised to read his actual words and find out that he had not called for it from what I could see. I don’t want to leave that there because the importance of these events is not what happened to President Trump or what happened to the guy with the horns on his head. That is important, of course, but they’re not as important as what use was made of this mythology.

This story that I was told over and over was that people walked into the Capitol and that is itself insurrectionary criminal behavior, even if it’s peaceful, and that the President told them to stage an insurrection and there was an insurrection. That story was used to demonize all of Red America. You may not believe this because you don’t hang out with liberals in New York maybe as much as I did. They thoroughly believed what they were told over and over. As a result of January 6th, as the story was told by CNN that all of Red America was thug-like. All of Red America wanted to overturn our democratic institutions.

Anyone who liked or voted for Trump wanted to make war on democracy. It was an obligation to never talk to Republicans and to stop them in any way possible from ever, even if it meant doing damage to our own processes because they were so dangerous. That’s the use to which that story was put.

Mr. Jekielek:
I’ve never heard it verbalized like that, which is unbelievably ironic.

Ms. Wolf:
The liberal explains the demonization of the red states.

Mr. Jekielek:
But also, the policies which were implemented were so incredibly dangerous, as you argue convincingly in your book.

Ms. Wolf:
So dangerous. May I add a point, which is in a follow-up essay? I was an advisor to the Gore campaign in the 2000 election. That was a contested election as those of us who remember it will recall. Our side was literally talking to our lawyers to find loopholes. Their side was talking to their lawyers to find loopholes. Every vote was being counted. There were constant lawsuits being waged all the way up to the level of the Supreme Court. There were the hanging chads being examined. There was incredibly intense scrutiny of every vote in every county in Florida. This was supposed to be democracy, but it wasn’t.

The way it was supposed to work was that you were supposed to count every vote, and if there was a question, you would recount every vote. If there was a question, you would take it to court after court until getting to the highest court in the land. Then we had a decision and we knew who our president was. We might not like it if he wasn’t the one we voted for, but that’s how the process is supposed to work.

The other very destructive legacy of the mythmaking on the Left around January 6th is that it’s a criminal act to question an election. This really came to the fore with President Trump and his associates answering various charges and having to appear in court for things that we did in 2000 on both sides with impunity, because that was democracy. The danger of that is the criminalization of questioning and asking if the votes were counted correctly. Is this right? Is there some question about who won the election?

If you criminalize that, then we get to a fake democracy where on election day CNN or the Washington Post will declare a winner. They will “call” the election, which is a nonsensical term if every vote has not been counted yet. Any citizen might say, “Hey, wait a minute, all the votes haven’t been counted. People have seen people in Wisconsin dumping votes in a trash bin. I saw that I was given the wrong ballot and my ballot was messed up.” If you criminalize all those questions, then you don’t even need to overthrow the country, because you’ve already overthrown it. The people who lead it will be the people that CNN or the Washington Post declares are the winners.

That is incredibly dangerous. And everyone’s vote deserves to be counted and counted again if there’s a question until there’s no more doubt. The targeting of President Trump and his associates for doing things that were entirely legal and appropriate in 2000; having discussions about whether there were other votes to be found in other counties, or finding a legal way to advance this or that, is a terrible precedent.

Mr. Jekielek:
This also speaks to the censorship industrial complex. It’s not just that there is censorship, There is an ability to very quickly manufacture perceived consensus, which you describe as creating a mythology.

Ms. Wolf:
Yes, I do want to really speak to that. The world has changed so much just in the last few years in terms of the ability to create a reality that’s mythological. The one purpose of the lockdowns was to do that, because everyone was shut in their rooms and victimized by their algorithms. They saw the world that their social media or Google search results wanted them to see.

That has divided our country more than ever. Because if my Twitter feed thinks I’m on the Left, it’s going to serve up a certain reality. If it thinks I’m on the Right, it’s going to serve up another reality. We can have what’s good for Twitter or any social media platform. I’m a CEO of a successful tech company, so I actually understand this is not one side or the other winning, but engagement.

Engagement and attention is where the advertiser dollars come from. That means it’s good for Twitter or Facebook or any social media platform to spin up narratives that upset people, because then they’ll spend more time on the platform. That’s what’s happening in our country, Left and Right are not even talking to each other. One reason they’re not talking to each other is that each is being presented real and fake and CGI versions of what the other side is that are so monstrous and upsetting that we think we’re not even inhabiting the same moral universe anymore.

Mr. Jekielek:
One of the things that became incredibly apparent through the various pronouncements that came out from the health advisory agencies, was that this is perfectly acceptable. It has become a norm and acceptable behavior to manipulate people. It’s perfectly morally fine. Dr. Fauci basically admitted that the reason he changed his position on masking was, “We wanted to make sure. At the beginning I said no masks, because we didn’t want there to be a run on masks.” Not exact words, but that was the idea.

That was like suddenly seeing behind the curtain because we didn’t expect that people in these roles would do that. I was expecting they would just tell us the reality of the situation, but they were in the business of trying to manipulate behavior.

Ms. Wolf:
Overnight during 2020, there was this infusion of Chinese Communist existential underpinning of our society, as opposed to an individualist, capitalist set of assumptions, a post-enlightenment set of assumptions that had been traditionally ours in the West and in America. That’s one example. In the past, public health authorities were supposed to inform you about what’s out there, give you good information, and then it’s up to you to manage your health, manage your family, manage your assembly, manage your travel, and manage your risk. That’s your decision.

Suddenly overnight, public health authorities and the president and the businesses that were complying introduced this notion that public health authorities got to manage you. They weren’t going to leave the decision up to you. They said, “We’re going to decide for you what your risk would be. We will decide for you if you get to say goodbye to your dying loved one in a hospital.” They would manage your risk for you, and the goal was harm reduction.

I remember a loved one at a major university being told that the goal was society’s harm reduction, and I thought, “We have been infiltrated. That is not the goal of society. The goal of society is the freedom of every individual to reach his or her potential in an environment of human rights and dignity. But harm reduction is a thoroughly Marxist notion. Who defines harm? The state. Who defines harm reduction? The state. Yes, that’s a really good example of how Dr. Fauci and other allied health authorities are treating us, not like citizens, but the way subject peoples are treated in communist regimes. They say, “We’ll decide for you. We know what’s best for you.”

Mr. Jekielek:
I’ve mentioned Edward Bernays on other shows. His argument was, “To have a functioning democracy, you need to benevolently propagandize the populace.” That’s my glib explanation of his book Propaganda, but people took this on and accepted this. Looking back, I can see very significant examples of this being done. The big reveal was, “Ha, ha, we’ve been doing this all along.” Do you think that is the situation, or was there an actual shift? In the book, you argue that there was a profound shift. Where do you land on that?

Ms. Wolf:
It’s a crucial question, Jan. In a free society, all you have is persuasion and propaganda, if you like. Although I note that the laws were changed in 2012 to allow Americans to be propagandized, as opposed to our propaganda being directed outward. But you still have to persuade people in a free society. In a totalitarian society, you no longer have to persuade them. You nudge them or you mandate them. That word mandate has totalitarianism embedded in it. It’s not a law, it’s a commandment. We tipped over from persuasion into coercion in the last three years, and that is the marker.

We’ve crossed the divide between a free society in which we are constantly bombarded with advertisements or seductions or temptations or scary things to get us to change our behavior, but we still have choice and critical thinking. But it doesn’t matter what you think about this injection. You have to have it or you’ll lose your livelihood, you can’t travel, or your kids can’t go to school. That’s the line.

Having said that, we’ve crossed another line too. If you look back at 2021, millions of dollars were going from the CARES Act to influencers on social media, including doctors, to support them, saying things like, “Unvaccinated people don’t deserve healthcare. Unvaccinated people should be restricted to their homes.” This happened in Canada, where you shouldn’t be allowed to take public transportation.

There was this whipped up level of hatred saying, “I don’t care if you die.” That was all over social media. There were protocols in place that are being revealed now by publications like yours and independent journalists in which the boards of health gave hospitals murderous treatments. Patients would be ventilated, patients would be put on Remdesivir, and then patients would die. It has been established there were bonuses given for that. Look at Canada where euthanasia didn’t use to be a thing. The West would never consider it.

That was so barbaric. There is this program to euthanize the very elderly if they want to, and then euthanize the depressed if they want to. Now, alienated teenagers are being given euthanasia support. There is also the mission creep with abortion in the last three years. I’m pro-choice, with angst, for the certainly first trimester. But I’ve seen the bills in Maryland and Washington state where it’s no longer a criminal act to neglect a newborn baby to death for a month after it’s born. The whole discourse of the pro-choice movement is migrating to we should have the right to an abortion right up until the day the baby is due.

This is a bizarre, monstrous death-embracing movement on all of these fronts in the West. Arguably, Marxism is also death-embracing in order to maintain its control. What is the beast? You asked me earlier, and I gave you two definitions of the beast, but the third one is this. This is the beast that unleashes the genocidal potential inside all of us. There is that genocidal animal, brutal non-post-enlightenment, that is like a barbaric declension of the human soul into an animal state. That’s the beast. That has been not just unleashed, but celebrated and is now being deployed.

Mr. Jekielek:
This is getting us into the spiritual realm. because you talk in the book, and I thought this was so, so interesting. You talk quite a bit about the level of coordination that happened to manifest all of this so quickly, and so in lockstep in 2020, in this whole process of the pandemic policies. You felt that there must be something else at work here, and perhaps it’s evil. You have this chapter asking if the old Gods have returned. I have been thinking about a profound spiritual crisis in our society and the removal of the divine as a centerpiece in people’s lives. But this is a whole different thing that you’re talking about.

Ms. Wolf:
Yes, for sure. When the Pfizer documents volunteers were bringing me report after report showing this massive crime against humanity, I was struggling to absorb how great that evil was. At the same time, I saw that what had unfolded around the world in 2020 and 2021 didn’t look like human history at any other time. It was so coordinated and so in lockstep and so many heads of state were saying the exact same things in multiple languages at the exact same time, rolling out the same plan based on the same lies with almost no crack in the uniformity.

Mr. Jekielek:
Based on the idea that the CCP had managed to control the virus with the most Draconian and totalitarian means.

Ms. Wolf:
Which had never happened before in the history of viruses. I’ve been a student of history in depth, and even the Nazis had internal arguments and assassination attempts. Every group that tries to take over the world or take over their region has dissenters or factions or rich people who don’t need the money or they’re splinters. There’s no uniformity.

What this evil was aimed at and what was targeted in those years was so good. The family, churches, synagogues, mosques, prayer, songs, singing together, dancing together, weddings, funerals, being near the side of elderly people passing away from this life, children’s faces, and schools as safe places. Now, they were places of abuse. The face that is made in the image of God—intimacy, touch, handshakes, kissing—all of that was targeted.

I witnessed all of this. That phrase, “Don’t kill grandma by hugging her,” was literally repeated in 152 languages. Don’t ruin Diwali. Don’t ruin Thanksgiving. Don’t ruin Hanukkah. By seeing the same message in every language around the world, I had to conclude that what I was seeing was beyond human capabilities. I’m a journalist. You can’t coordinate the same message around the world in 152 languages at the same time with hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of editors and copy editors. You can’t do it.

I had to conclude that what we were seeing was a symptom of a new kind of history, and that we weren’t in normal human history anymore. We were in some kind of metaphysical history where there were forces that had been unleashed that were beyond human capability and beyond just bad human politics. Even Stalin is just bad human politics. He’s not metaphysical evil. It’s evil, but it’s not at this scale and perfection. I reluctantly had to conclude that the material conflicts we saw around us were a symptom of a larger spiritual battle, and that the battle was between good and evil.

I reluctantly concluded that since the evil was so palpable, I had to believe in God in a more literal way than I had before, because it must be aimed at something good. That was the start of that journey. One chapter asked the question, “Have the ancient Gods returned?” That was very interesting and I was wondering, “What is this evil?” I went back to the notion of Satan, but I found that that was not sufficient.

I’m Jewish and in the Hebrew Bible, Satan isn’t the same character that he is in the New Testament, let alone in Dante or Milton, whose texts very much influenced our Western idea of Satan being God’s enemy and a fallen angel. But this force didn’t feel like Satan. These are just names. I don’t literally mean Satan or the ancient gods, but it didn’t feel like Satan because this force didn’t really care about human beings or God. It just felt like this very impersonal darkness.

I was very moved by a book called The Return of the Gods by Jonathan Cahn, a Messianic Jew. He’s Jewish, but he has accepted Jesus as his savior, and he’s now a pastor. Because he’s both Jewish and Christian, he was able to get at something that was persuasive to me. There had been a covenant with Judaism, and then there was a covenant with Jesus and Christianity, and this became the Covenant of the West.

It’s a covenant to do certain things; thou shalt not kill, don’t worship graven images, don’t steal, don’t lie, engage in some basic sexual morality, don’t kill children, and don’t sacrifice children. Whether we are observant or not, the Judeo-Christian covenant, until very recently, shaped all of our institutions. It’s like the lost wax process. Even if you don’t believe in Jesus Christ as your savior, and even if you don’t believe in the 513 Commandments of Judaism, you expect that when you go into an orphanage they’re not going to be trafficking the children.

You expect that when you go into a court of law, the judge is not going to award the decision to the richest person who’s bribed him or her. You expect that when you go into a hospital, they will try to heal you and not kill you and harvest your organs. From 2020 on, I saw that covenant vanish. It was just gone in all of our institutions. Journalism used to be about truth and facts. Now, it was just about lies. Hospitals used to be about saving people. Now they were willing to let people die. That covenant had protected us. This is Jonathan Cahn’s thesis for 2000 years now, or 4,000 years, depending on how far you want to go back.

The world had been really horrible before monotheism. There was worship of the pagan gods, Baal and Asherah and Amalek. Again, these are just names, like every culture around the world has had pagan gods and their versions of brute force or unlicensed sexuality or greed or lies. Jonathan Cahn’s thesis is that we in the West took our hands away from God. We left the room empty. We just abandoned our commitment to uphold our end of the Covenant.

His metaphor is from a parable in the New Testament, but it’s a parable that when the room was abandoned, all these demons came in and took up residence. I’m literally getting a chill when I’m saying this because that felt right to me. There were forces taking up residence, so that resonated with me. I really thought about the West and how everywhere for 2000 years or 4,000 years, depending on which tradition you want to go back to, we’ve consecrated West Santa Barbara, San Michele, and Santo Domingo. We consecrate these places. We erect churches. Before that, we erected synagogues.

It seems we’re willing to take our hands off of that. America, especially, was consecrated and we have freedom of conscience here. Jonathan Winthrop said, “This will be a city on the hill. We’re going to dedicate this new country to God and to the service of God, and we’re going to make a just society.” All of our great founders believed in freedom of conscience. They believed they were doing God’s work in creating a just society where people had free will and freedom to assemble and freedom to pray. I feel like we turned our backs on that recently. God said, “Okay, you want to do it yourselves, do it yourselves.” This is what it looks like, and then these dark forces rushed in.

Mr. Jekielek:
Let me quote something that you wrote from this chapter, “The absence of the protection of our God, the ascendancy of a realm on earth of us doing it all ourselves, regarding ourselves, worshiping ourselves, whoring after only human works, releasing ourselves from all lawful constraints, embracing all lusts and obedience to non-divine authorities, rejecting mercy, celebrating all narcissism, treating children like animals whom we own. Treating the family like a battlefield, treating the churches and synagogues as marketing platforms. This is indeed what the realms of pagan darkness or of principalities and powers look like.”

You talk about this book bearing witness, and it does very much. As we finish up, let’s talk about that, because what happened over the last few years is different. If we are to find our way through and it requires responding in ways that maybe we are not ready for yet, or it requires figuring out how to come back from it, because so many of us did terrible things. At some level we all know it.

Ms. Wolf:
I definitely feel that. When I visit my former world to the extent that it allows me to step into those spaces again, I feel ashamed. I wrote about this in the chapter, Thanksgiving gathering, in the book, that many of us colluded, and many of us went along with lies. Many of us sacrificed our children knowingly or unknowingly. Many of us were deceived, bamboozled, and bought into things that are not true, and there’s going to be shame there. The mandates were a national trauma where we were violated in front of each other. People were helpless to protect one another, and that is a trauma that’s going to stay with us.

If people were on the wrong side of these lies and this coercion, I hope they’re starting to work it through. Because just like any country where people did wrong without truth and reconciliation and convictions and jail time and remembering and accounting for what was done, that country can’t move forward with any kind of life or vitality or morality.

You’re right to mention that phrase, because I was very influenced by a book called I Will Bear Witness by a French literature professor observing Hitler’s rise in Germany in the ’30s. It’s literally almost a journal where day by day he recounts this little closure of opportunity, this moment where his university turned away from him, this moment where his neighbors no longer would greet him on the street, this moment where he had to put on the yellow star, this moment where they moved from their home and someone else occupied it, and then when they moved to shared rooms.

Barbarism and the end of a democracy doesn’t come all at once. It comes in these little steps. And I do feel like America lived through and the West lived through something catastrophic for the last three years that will change its nature if we don’t witness it and name it for what really happened. That is part of my goal in writing Facing the Beast.

Mr. Jekielek:
I want to finish up on a positive note. I’ve been thinking about that type of darkness that you describe. The thing that I am incredibly grateful for from this time period is an unbelievable group of people that I’ve managed to meet along the way that I don’t think would’ve ever happened. Certainly not this way, but I don’t think it would’ve happened otherwise. It has actually instilled quite a bit of hope in me that of a positive future because there are these people who will lay everything on the line to seek truth and justice.

Ms. Wolf:
Certainly. I totally agree with you. The irony is that my life didn’t end when I was ejected from my legacy media perch on the Left. My life really began because I had all these amazing conversations with people who were conservatives, libertarians, and people of faith that I never had before. I also began a whole range of new friendships that are so inspiring. I will share in your optimism, because what I see happening is the collapse of our institutions, and Facing the Beast traces that.

I see a rising across the country, and maybe even across the West, a new groundswell of people who are unwilling to let the darkness prevail and who are creating new alternative medical systems and new alternative media systems and new alternative educational systems, and really, in our case, rebuilding America from the ground up. This is a time of test for us, but clearly, you can’t be neutral. The better angels have an opportunity to rebuild and really remake this country closer to its ideal as a nation of freedom and justice.

Mr. Jekielek:
Naomi Wolf, it’s such a pleasure to have you on the show again.

Ms. Wolf:
Thank you so much for having me on. I appreciate it.

Mr. Jekielek:
Thank you all for joining Naomi Wolf and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I’m your host, Jan Jekielek.

This interview was edited for clarity and brevity.