Daily Verse | Leviticus 1:1
The Lord called to Moses and spoke to him from the Tent of Meeting.

Thursday’s Reading: Leviticus 4-7

Thursday and in case you missed it, yesterday was 2/2/22. Wondering what you were doing at 2:22:22? Can’t do that again until 2033, so start planning now.

Today’s post is very simple. I want to call your attention to an essay that Naomi Wolf wrote, the second in a series of three that she’s writing, on her observations of what’s happened over the last two years with the start of the Chinese Lung Pox. While both published essays are worth the read, it’s the second that is required reading because it begins to get at the uneasiness a lot of us, including me, are feeling.

Wolf is, as she openly admits, a progressive or, as she wrote in the first essay, a member of “[t]he progressive, right-on part of the ideological world — my people, my tribe, my whole life.” This is important to understand, because she is not writing from a conservative point of view, which makes her essay more honest (in my opinion) and more urgent. I’m going to quote her at length, but I highly encourage you to read the whole thing.

Here’s how she starts the second essay:

My first post in this three-part series, about how the evil that surrounds us has manifested, was about the elite global technocrat class and their distance from the people whose lives they may crush; I noted too their lack of belief in, or loyalty to, the nation-state. Added to this toxic mix, I argued, is the certainty of this class of people that they know best about your life.

I made the case in that essay that surrounding us now was a metaphysical, seemingly a Satanic, level of evil.

I am seeking to explain in this series of essays, how otherwise nice people — and indeed Western people, who grew up with post-Enlightenment norms about human rights and the rule of law — can be doing evil now, with whole hearts.

Her acknowledgement that the situation we find ourselves in because of the WuFlu is “evil” is also important to understand because, in that first essay, she admitted that while she “can’t say for sure that God and God’s helpers exist,” the current situation is so evil that she’s been forced to consider that God might be there because “an evil this large must mean that there is a God at which it is aiming its malevolence.”

She goes on in this second essay to point out that we’ve seen this before.

Some leaders and commentators (including myself) have passionately and publicly been comparing these years, 2020-2022, in the West and in Australia, to the early years of Nazi leadership. Though we face criticism for doing so, I won’t be silenced about this. The similarities must urgently be addressed.

She explains that most of us associate the years of the Nazis with atrocities from their invasion of Poland in 1939 to the end of the war when the allies liberated the concentration camps. But that’s not what she’s comparing.

Rather, the vivid similarities between our moment in the West since 2020, and the earliest years of Nazi Germany’s civil society policies, are to the years 1931-33, when so many vicious norms and policies were set in place. But these were often culturally or professionally policed, rather than being policed by camp patrols. That’s the point that better-informed analysts of these similarities, are making.

That is to say, during these years, mass societal cruelty, and a two-tier society itself that perpetuated this cruelty, was built up and policed, as like today, by polite civil society institutions tasked with snarling and baring its teeth.

Casual, escalating cruelty, a culture of degradation of the “othered,” and a two-tier society, were built up in those years certainly at the behest of Nazi social policy. But the construction of a world of evil out of what had been a modern civil society, if a fragile one, was also endorsed and even policed by doctors, by medical associations, by journalists, by famous composers and filmmakers, by universities; by neighbors, by teachers, by shopkeepers — for years before the death camp guards were tasked with their own far more heinous cruelty.

All emphases mine. She then draws a parallel to what we’re experiencing today across the U.S.

As today, emergency laws then were the benchmarks that would allow democracy to collapse. “Hitler wanted full powers like Mussolini’s in Italy,” writes Elon. “He knew exactly what was needed to turn a government into a ‘legal’ dictatorship: emergency powers under Article 48.” [Elon, 389].

See if you notice any echoes here. Currently, forty-seven US states are operating with emergency measures, which suspend or bypass normal legislative checks and balances, including New York, the state in which I am writing. Under emergency measures, pretty much anything can be done.

The fact that people don’t seem to understand that most of the country is living under emergency measures, is what is stunning about our current moment. This is why I keep saying these days that the coup d’etat has already taken place in America. By definition, when you are living under emergency measures, you no longer have a functioning democracy.

After establishing the parallels, here’s how she sums up our current situation.

Let me just summarize where we are right now in America, as well as in the West, in case you have gotten too used to it to see it clearly. I warned in The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot, that democracies usually do not die with a cinematic scene of goose-stepping Brownshirts suddenly in the streets. They tend to die, rather, just as Elon described — incrementally, day by day, collapsing grotesquely in some areas of society and in regards to some institutions, even as other aspects of society and other institutions look and feel, at least superficially, exactly the same as they did before.

Just because the settings are familiar to us now, does not mean that a 1931-like reality, if not yet a 1933-like reality, isn’t upon us.

The rest of her essay, which, again, I strongly encourage you to read, is a long list of how a “1931-like reality” is manifesting itself among us, and then concludes, “What do you call all of this, if not an early Nazi-like set of practices?”

Wolf is Yale- and Oxford-educated, with a doctorate, and is a student of history. She’s no slouch and has been writing for years for progressive outlets. Yet, she is extremely concerned about what she sees happening in our country and in the West. It’s for that reason that she’s someone worth listening to.