American Thought Leaders - Naomi Wolf Pulls Back Curtain on the Last 3 Years of Chaos

Episode Date: December 14, 2023

Sponsor special: Up to $2,500 of FREE silver AND a FREE safe on qualifying orders - Call 855-862-3377 or text “AMERICAN” to 6-5-5-3-2“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.

People think democracies die with a sudden shock and you see black shirts or brown shirts who's stepping in the streets. That's not how democracies die. Democracies die through a thousand cuts. In this episode, I sit down with Naomi Wolf, CEO of Daily Clout 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. People are languishing in prison without due process. That's what happens in an advanced tyranny. What really happened to America and across Western democracies

over these last few years? I saw that what had unfolded around the world in 2020 and 2021 didn't look like history at any other time. And it was so coordinated and so in lockstep, so many heads of states in the exact same things in multiple languages at the exact same time, rolling out the same plan based on the same lies. This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Jan Jekielek. Before we start, I'd like to take a moment to thank the sponsor of our podcast, American Hartford Gold. As you all know, inflation is getting worse. The Fed raised rates for

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to 65532. Naomi Wolf, so good to have you back on American Thought Leaders. It's so good to speak with you again, Jan. So let's start with the big question. What or who is the beast? What is the beast? Well, I admire books that have multiple layers and of course inevitably there are many answers to the question what is the beast and what does it mean to face the beast? But literally, the beast was a bear that was in our backyard in our little house in upstate New York that had slowly, slowly become more and more comfortable living around us. We hadn't done anything to deter him.

And 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 locked myself unhelpfully upstairs in a bathroom and 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. Right. That's how irrational with fear I was. And of course, that's a metaphor for what, you know, what have we done? We've been asleep as a nation. We've been, we've let our enemies come very close to us. We've actually let our enemies get inside our bodies, as it turns out. So practically what that means in that chapter more deeply is that China has been instrumental in the manufacture of the Pfizer injections.

Its BioNTech subsidiary, which makes the injections, has a memorandum of understanding with Fosun Pharmaceutical, which is one of the biggest pharma companies in China. And the leaders of Fosun Pharmaceuticals are senior members of the Chinese Communist Party. I mean, as like, I'm not telling you anything your audience doesn't already know, every company in China also is merged with essentially the CCP. Especially a giant pharmaceutical or any giant company. Really? As shocking as all of this was my discovery that in 2021, BioNTech's SEC filing revealed that there had been 100% accomplished tech transfer from BioNTech to China for the COVID vaccine. And it doesn't say to a Chinese individual or to a Chinese company,

it says to China. I imagine that there's a number of outfits that are digging deeper into these relationships at this point, since you've published this. I mean, it's astonishing, frankly. Right. Right. You know, your book is an absolutely fascinating window into what happened over the last several years. Thank you. And your own journey, you describe it as the before and after times. But partially it has to do with this movement from being in the elite, 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. And I want to explore that a little bit, what those years were, because you are highly suspicious of the CCP, as I think most people

working for Epoch Times will be as well. It's highly deserved, but it's like the opposite in the world, in the before world for you. That's right. Right? Let's start there and then we'll navigate through some other areas. Well, honestly, ever since the Clinton years, I did not understand why my people, right, my tribe of liberal elites, to put it reductively, were so cheerleadery about China. I mean, I remember when it began in the Clinton years,

I was a White House spouse and then a political consultant, as I mentioned, for this change and basically saying, you can go back to community college, you can reskill, you can join the service sector. And I was thinking, how is this a good idea? And I knew even at that time that there were atrocities and human rights violations being regularly reported. 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 with whom I hung out were sure that in any partnership with China, we would be the dominant partner, right? There was just this assumption that, well, they need our help and we'll spread democracy and, you know, they'll manufacture things for us.

You know, it's kind of very condescending. And I was never persuaded by that. I actually also went to a high school that was majority Chinese American. And I don't think I ever had a House would be captured by the Chinese Communist Party. business leaders to political leaders, universities would so wholeheartedly not just embrace Chinese communist money flows and business opportunities, but embrace, you know, really increasingly overt Chinese communist style culture and Marxist concepts. That is a shock to me. And I've been writing about that nonstop since 2020, when I began to see it all around me, just that the Marxist, like, but actually Chinese Marxist,

right, not Russian Marxist or other Marxisms, you know, the whole, like, intervention of concepts that were un-American, right, but super communist into our language, like social distancing or, you know, freedom's a bad idea or you're selfish if you want human rights or, you know, harm reduction. I mean, I could go on and on, like this collectivist interposition of like the state as the arbiter of how we communicate with each other, touch each other, with whom we assemble, all under the guise of public health, right? But it was really just straight up the Marxist state. I was stunned to see Western leaders

who had the benefit of, like all my friends, great educations, Ivy League educations, a great deal of sophistication, just fall in with that and embrace it and not think, well, wait, this has, you know, this is historically familiar. This doesn't end well, right? That I was surprised by. You know, I think a lot of us weren't, you know, we didn't kind of realize what was happening. You know, I think a lot of people still don't, I guess, understand the gravity. You know, in our last, one of our past conversations, I challenge you with the, you're saying this is tyranny, remember?

Right, I feel sorry for you. Right, no, because, but, you know, I know, I think you made a compelling case, right? It was early days. Well, and, you know, and this is someone who's, you know, very familiar with what tyranny looks like, right? But it's very hard to see it at home. Yeah. Yeah, I guess I had been well prepared for this moment because I'd written a book called The End of America during the Bush years. And I'd looked at, and I may have mentioned this in our first interview, but I'd looked at other times and

places where democracies were subverted by tyrannies, whether they were on the left or on the right. And by looking at Mussolini's Italy and Germany in the 30s and East Germany in the 50s and Chile and China, I saw that tyrants, whatever their ideology, always take the same 10 steps. There's 10 steps to fascism. And it's a map. And 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.

So because of that work, I was able to recognize quickly by June of 2020 when Governor Cuomo in 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. So I started trying to warn people probably early as a result of my recognizing these historical patterns. But I don't, I guess because I'd done that work warning that America could easily descend into tyranny, I'd already broken that seal in my head that this can't happen here. I knew it could. I see a lot of people extremely concerned about what has happened in our society over the last three years. We've discussed it extensively on this show.

Yet, yet, this remains probably the freest place in the world. Right. So what does that say? I mean, Jan, it says that we're in history. I mean, it's every, and I make this point at the end of the end of America, right? People think democracies die with a sudden shock and you see black shirts or brown shirts who's stepping in the streets. That's not how democracies die. Democracies die through a thousand cuts and perforations more often than not. And

many, you know, we are the freest country in the world, but that doesn't mean we're healthy, right? And it doesn't mean we're not in danger. I mean, it's like a sick body, right? Like the cancer invades over here, but you know, this system is still fine. The cancer invades over here. Your heart rate is still fine, right? And then there's a collapse. So 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, right? Who counts the votes, right? What are people allowed to say? Are the judges free to, you know, adjudicate without repercussions? So I guess what I would say is just because we have a press doesn't mean we have a free press. You know, we saw that in the last three years. There were so many things people couldn't say in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal. Just because we have, I mean, thank God for our judiciary, it seems of all our

institutions more robust than most. But we can't take that for granted. And, you know, 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. 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 deplatformed, colluded to put pressure on Twitter and Facebook, and then had me smeared globally, right? That was my own administration that subverted my First Amendment rights. That's what happens in an advanced tyranny to dissidents.

The state targets dissidents, right? It's not like Twitter targeting me. It was the state targeting me, which is terrifying. I mean, we are walking around shopping and taking Ubers and, you know, protesting. But that doesn't mean that these things are not happening all around us, which are indicative of very advanced oppression. A real danger to us is the human tendency to normalize, right? And the fact that AI, I think, makes this more effective. These changes are happening bit by bit by bit by bit, very surgically and sort of incrementally over time. And what I mean by that is it may be something that, you know, we kind of laugh about over a beer with our friends now that, you know,

we're being censored on social media or we gossip about people being de-licensed for giving a second opinion if they're doctors. Or, you know, 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's what America is going to be like, you know, we would have all recoiled in horror and, I hope, disbelief. You talked about, I think, some of the January 6th protesters, right? In the book, you—and I remember this was kind of a quite viral moment where you apologized to conservatives. I think that was the gist of it.

You build on that a little bit in the book, and then you talk about how you understood or how you understand what happened on January 6th. I want to touch on that because that's something that we've covered quite extensively at the Epoch Times, and it's very important. Yeah, please. Well, it'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, right? 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

learned or relearned in researching that chapter, dear conservatives, I apologize, is legacy media on the left, and I mean CNN, the New York Times, represented the act of citizens entering the Capitol as the insurrection, right? That was the insurrection. That was described as the insurrection, as if simply to enter is violating some norm that we had had in America that legislation in Congress took place only with the legislators, that the public couldn't be part of it or witness it or enter the space, right? And 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 building, there were public galleries. I mean, there are galleries that were built in order to allow the

public to enter and witness the proceedings. And in fact, state houses are built that way too, in the 19th century to the present with galleys so that people could watch their representatives voting and debating. So I really drilled into, well, is that true? Is it an insurrection to walk peacefully into the Capitol? And it's not. People are allowed to walk peacefully into the Capitol. So 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, you know, 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,

right, and unlawfully. And 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. And that's what these oligarchs want. They want us to forget that we have the right to enter any public building and those records belong to us and observing the vote belongs to us, observing counting of the vote belongs to us and so on. So that was a false narrative. So people from your previous peer group probably uniformly believe to say, hey,

we've seen the videos of the violence. Well, there was violence, right? And I just want to take an opportunity to say always violence is wrong, especially in a civic context, right? But what I'm saying is that 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. The QAnon shaman, so-called. The QAnon shaman. I don't know what to make of the footage that Tucker Carlson aired showing him escorted through the building.

But I guess what I would say there is that these buildings, and again, I was a White House spouse. I was a political consultant. You know, went to the Naval Observatory, went to the old executive office building, have been to the White House, have been to the Capitol, you can't just walk in. I mean, what I mean is 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. And nothing on January 6th made sense to me in terms of how a building like that is

supposed to be secured when there's unrest, right? And certainly ushering this guy into the middle of the activity, this guy who was so photogenic as such an emblem of chaos, right? That didn't make sense to me. So I don't know what to make of it, but I know that that was not the footage that CNN was showing us, right? That guy figured in CNN's version of the footage as kind of the spirit of Republican anarchy and MAGA anarchy. And so that raised questions. And I guess the last thing that I should say is, in the legacy media I read, President Trump was thoroughly represented as having called for that insurrection, right? And that's the word that's used, insurrection, as opposed to riot.

And I was very surprised to read his actual words and find out that he had not called for it, from what I could see. And I guess I don't want to kind of leave that there, because I really don't think the importance of these events is what happened to President Trump, what happened to the guy with the horns on his head. All of those are important, of course, but they're not as important as what use was made of this mythology. And when you put all these pieces together, this story that I was told and told and told and told that people walked into the Capitol and that is itself insurrectionary criminal behavior,

even if it's peaceful, and the president told them to stage an insurrectionary criminal behavior, even if it's peaceful. And the president told them to stage an insurrection, and there was an insurrection. The use to which that story was put was to demonize all of red America and to make—and you may not believe this because you don't hang out with liberals in New York, maybe as much as I did or do, well did, but they thoroughly believe what they were told over and over and over and over, that as a result of January 6th, as the story was told by CNN, all of red America was thug-like all of red America wanted to overturn our democratic institutions anyone who liked her voted for Trump wanted to make war

on democracy and and that was iris it was an obligation to stop to never talk to Republicans and to stop them in any way possible from ever, even if it meant, you know, doing damage to our own processes, because they were so dangerous. That's the use to which that story was put. No, I've never heard that verbalized as you just did, which is also astonishing and unbelievably ironic, perhaps. Yeah, right. The liberal explaining the demonization of the red states. Right. Well, but also, you know, that the policies which were implemented were so incredibly, as you argue convincingly in your book, are

incredibly dangerous. So dangerous. Right. May I add just a point, and it's in a follow-up essay, but I was an advisor, as I mentioned, to the Gore campaign in 2000. And 2000 was a contested election, as those of us who remember it recall. And literally, our side was 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. And this was just democracy.

And it was the way it was supposed to work. You were supposed to count every vote. And if there was a question, you would recount every vote. And if there was a question, you would take it to court after court after court until you got to the highest court in the land. And then we had a decision and we knew who our president was, right? 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 myth-making on the left around January 6th is that it's a criminal act to question an election. And I guess this really came to the fore with President Trump and his associates answering various charges and having to appear in court for things that, the criminalization of questioning, were the votes counted?

Is this right? Is there some question about, you know, who won the election? Right. If you criminalize that, then we get to, again, a fake democracy in which on Election Day, CNN or The Washington Post will declare a winner. Right. Call it, which is a nonsensical term, if not every vote has been counted. And then if either side or any citizen says, hey, wait a minute, all the votes haven't been counted or people have seen people in Wisconsin, you know, dumping votes in a trash bin or, you know, I saw that I wasn't, I was given the wrong ballot and my ballot was messed up. So you criminalize all those questions, right? And then you don't even need to overthrow the country because you've already overthrown it because the people who lead it will be the people that CNN or the Washington Post declares are the winners. And 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. So I feel like the targeting of President Trump and his associates for doing things that were entirely legal and appropriate in 2000, like trying to see, having discussions about whether there were other votes to be found in other counties or, you know, is there a legal way to advance this or that? It's a terrible precedent. Well, and it also speaks to this, you know, what I often talk about on the show with people these days is the environment, what some people have called the censorship industrial complex or the disinformation industrial complex, variably. It's not just that there's censorship. It's that there's an ability to very quickly manufacture perceived consensus, which you, I think, describe as creating a mythology.

Right. Right? Yeah. Which is interesting. Yeah. Yeah, I do want to really speak to that. The world has changed so much in just the last few years in terms of the ability to create a reality that's mythological. And I think 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. And 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. And we can have, you know, what's good for Twitter or any social media platform to spin up narratives that upset people because then they'll spend more time on the platform. So that's what's happening in our country. Left and right are not even talking to each other. And 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 all, maybe not all of us, but that became incredibly apparent to me through the various pronouncements that came out from the health advisory agencies, was that it's perfectly acceptable. It's become a norm and acceptable behavior to manipulate people.

It's perfectly acceptable. It's become a norm and acceptable behavior to manipulate people. It's perfectly morally fine. I can't help but remembering how Dr. Fauci basically admitted that the reason he changed his position on masking. And he explained it by saying, well, we wanted to make sure at the beginning, I said no masks because we didn't want there to be a run on masks. I mean, not exact words, but that was the idea. And then to me, I remember that because it revealed to me, it was sort of like suddenly seeing behind the curtain because I didn't expect that people in these sorts of roles would do that. I was expecting they would just tell us what the reality of a situation is like, wow, you're

not in that business. You're in the business of trying to manipulate my behavior. Well, remember when we were talking a few beats ago about how kind of overnight during 2020, there was this infusion of Chinese communist kind of existential underpinning of our society, as opposed to an individualist, you know, capitalist set of assumptions, post-enlightenment set of assumptions that had been traditionally ours in the West and in America. That's one example, right? 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, manage your risk, right?

That's your decision. authorities and the president and businesses complying fell into or introduced this notion that public health authorities got to manage you, right? Weren't going to leave the decision up to you. We're going to decide for you what your risk would be, would decide for you if you got to say goodbye to your dying loved one in a hospital, they would manage your risk for you. And the goal was harm reduction. And I remember a loved one at a major university being told that the goal of society is harm reduction. And I was like, whoa, we have been infiltrated. That is not the goal of society. The goal of society is 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. And who defines harm? The state. Who defines harm reduction? The state. So yeah, that's a really good example of Dr. Fauci and other aligned health authorities treating us not like citizens, but the way subject peoples are treated in communist regimes. We'll decide for you. We know what's best for you. I can't help but think back to Edward Bernays. I've mentioned this on other shows as well. His argument was to have a functioning democracy, you need to benevolently propagandize it. That's my glib explanation of his book Propaganda. Presumably, people took this on and accepted this, and looking back, I can see very significant examples of this being done. And this is just kind of the big reveal.

Ha ha, we've been doing it all along. Do you think that's what the situation is? Or was there an actual shift? Because you also argue in the book that there was a profound shift. And I feel that too. So where do you land on that? Crucial question, Jan, absolutely. I mean, in a free society, all you've got is persuasion

and propaganda, if you like, right? Although I note that the laws were changed, I believe 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, right? That word mandate has totalitarianism embedded in it.

It's not a law, right? It's a commandment. So we tipped over from persuasion into coercion in the last three years. And that is, you know, the marker we've crossed the divide between a free society in which we are constantly bombarded with advertisements or seductions or temptations or, you know, scary things to get us to change our behavior, but we still have choice and critical thinking to, it doesn't matter what you think about this injection, you have to have it or you'll lose your livelihood or you can't travel, your kids can't go to school. That's the line having said that we've crossed another line too that if you look back at 2021 millions of dollars was going from the state from the cares act to influencers on social

media to support them saying including doctors to support them saying things like unvaccinated people don't deserve health care unvaccinated people don't deserve health care. Unvaccinated people should be restricted to their homes. Unvaccinated people, and this happened in Canada, I believe, you know, shouldn't be allowed to take public transportation. And there was this whipped up level of hatred. You know, I don't care if you die. That was all over social media. And 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, you know, murderous treatments so that patients would die, would be ventilated, would be put on remdesivir. There were bonuses for that. That's been established. Where I'm going with this is, you know, look at Canada, where

euthanasia didn't used to be a thing that the West would consider, right? I mean, that was so barbaric. And then there's this program to euthanize the very elderly if they want to, and then euthanize the depressed if they want to. And now, you know, alienated teenagers are being given euthanasia support, right? Or the mission creep with abortion in the last three years. And I'm pro-choice, you know, with angst for the certainly first trimester. But, you know, I've seen the bills. They're real 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 or the whole discourse of the pro choice movement migrating to, you know, we should have the right to an abortion right up until the day of the babies due. I mean, this is a bizarre, monstrous, death-embracing movement on all of these fronts in the West, right? And arguably, Marxism also is death-embracing in order to maintain its control. And I guess where I'm going with that is, you know, 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 and this unleashing of the genocidal potential inside all of us. There's that genocidal, animal, brutal, non-post-enlightenment, like barbaric declension of the human soul into an animal state, that's the beast, right? And that's

been not just unleashed, but celebrated and is now being deployed, right? You know, so this is getting us into this, let's call it the spiritual realm, because you talk in the book, and I thought this was so, so interesting. You talk quite a bit, not just in one chapter, about how looking at all this, the level of coordination that happened to manifest all of this so quickly and so in lockstep in 2020, this whole process of the pandemic policies, and I might add incredibly disastrous ones. You felt that there must be something else at work here, whether it's evil.

I mean, you have this chapter in there, which is astonishing is the word that's coming to my mind, but have the old gods returned? And this isn't something I've been thinking about a lot. I have been thinking about a profound spiritual crisis in our society and a removal from the divine as a centerpiece of people's lives, which has been forever, almost. He says, but this is a whole different thing that you're talking about. Yeah.

So, yeah, 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. And at the same time, as you mentioned, I saw that what had unfolded around the world in 2020 and 2021 didn't look like history at any other time in human history. It was, as you said, so coordinated and so in lockstep and so many heads of state saying the exact same things in multiple languages at the exact same time, rolling out the same plan based on lies, based on the same lies, with almost no crack in the uniformity. And if I just might add, you know, based on the idea that the CCP had managed to control the virus with, you know, unbelievably with the most draconian and totalitarian means. Right, right. Which had never happened before in the history of viruses. So that, you know, I mentioned that

I've been a student of history in depth, and even the Nazis had internal arguments, you know, 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, you know, they're splinters. There's not this uniformity. So I had to face the fact and then what this evil was aimed at is so good, right? What was targeted in those years? The family, churches, synagogues, mosques, prayer, songs, singing together, right? Dancing together, weddings, funerals, being near the side of elderly people passing away from this life. Children's faces, schools as safe places. Now, they were places of abuse.

You know, the face that's made in the image of God, right? Intimacy, touch, handshakes, kissing. You know, all of that was targeted. And when I witnessed all of this, and literally that, you know, don't kill grandma by hugging her was repeated in 152 languages, you know, don't ruin Diwali, don't ruin Thanksgiving, don't ruin Hanukkah, you know, the same, you know, by being close, right? 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. So I had to conclude that what we were seeing was a symptom of a new kind of history, 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. Like even Stalin is just bad human politics. He's not metaphysical evil. I mean, it's evil, but it's not at that scale and perfection, right? So I reluctantly had to conclude that the material conflicts we saw around us

were a symptom of larger spiritual battle, and that the battle was between good and evil. And I reluctantly concluded that since the evil was so palpable, I had to believe in God in a more literal way than I had, because it must be aimed at something good. And so that was the start of that journey. And then the chapter that asked the question, have the ancient gods returned?

That was very interesting. I was wondering, like, what is this evil, right? And so I went back to the notion of Satan. But I found that that was not sufficient. A, I'm Jewish, and in the Hebrew Bible, Satan isn't the same character that he is in the New Testament, or let alone in Dante and in Milton which is very much which texts very much influence our

Western idea of like Satan God's enemy fallen angel but this this force didn't feel like Satan and these are just names, right? I don't mean literally Satan or literally 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. And so I was very moved by a book that I read called The Return of the Gods by, and it was interesting, a Messianic Jew, meaning his name is Jonathan Cahn. He's Jewish, but he's accepted Jesus as

his savior, and he's now a pastor. And I think because he's Jewish and Christian, he's able to get at something that seemed persuasive to me. There had been a covenant with Judaism, right? And then there was a covenant with Jesus and Christianity. And this became the covenant of the West. And it's a covenant to do some things, right? Like thou shalt not kill, you know, don't worship graven images, don't steal, don't lie, and, you know and engage in some basic sexual morality, don't kill children, don't sacrifice children. And whether we are observant or not, the Judeo-Christian covenant shaped, until very recently, all of our institutions.

It's like the lost wax process. Even if you don't believe in Jesus Christ as your savior, you don't believe in the 513 commandments of Judaism, you expect when you go into an orphanage that they're not going to traffic 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'll try to heal you and not kill you and harvest your organs, right? Well, in 2020 on, I felt that covenant vanish. You know, it was just gone. And 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 that I realized had maybe protected us, I mean, this is Jonathan Cahn's thesis, for 2,000 years or 4,000 years, depending on how far you want to go back. And the world had been really horrible before monotheism and, you know, when there was worship of the pagan gods, right? Baal and Asherah and Amalek, but again, these are just names, like every culture around the world has had pagan gods, and they're versions of, you know, brute force or unlicensed sexuality or greed, you know, or lies, and I felt like that, you know, Jonathan Cahn's thesis is that we in the West kind of let our hands off of the, you know, we took our hands away from God, right? We left the room empty, right?

We just abandoned our commitment to uphold our end of the covenant. And 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. And that, I mean, like I'm literally getting a chill when I'm saying this because that felt right to me. You know, like there were forces taking up residence, right? So that resonated for me. And I really thought about the West and how everywhere for 2,000 years or 4,000 years, depending on which tradition you want to go back to, we've consecrated the West. You know,

Santa Barbara, San Michele, Santa Domingo, you know, we consecrate these places. We erect churches, and before that we erected synagogues. And, you know, if we're willing to just kind of take our hands off of that, and America especially was consecrated, right? We have freedom of conscience here, but Jonathan Winthrop said, this will be a city on a hill. You know, 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, right? And, you know, all of our great founders, they believed in freedom of conscience, but

they believed they were doing God's work, you know, in creating a just society where people had free will and freedom to assemble and freedom to pray. I feel like we kind of turned our backs on that recently and God kind of said, okay, you want to do it yourselves? Do it yourselves. And this is what it looks like. And then these dark forces rushed in. Well, let me just 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, worshipping 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 narcissisms, treating children like animals whom we own, treating the family like a battlefield, treating the churches and synagogues as marketing platforms. This indeed what the realms of pagan darkness or of principalities and powers look like."

I'm just getting shivers up my spine, you know, reading that. And I think, I mean, it's a bit of a sense of your beautiful writing style as well, I suppose, but you talk about this book being, you know, bearing witness, actually, really. And I think it does, very much. Yeah, so maybe as we finish up, let's talk a little bit about that. Because I do think what happened over the last few years is different.

I'm thoroughly convinced of that. And I do think that, you know, if we are to find our way through it, it requires responding in ways that maybe we're not ready for yet. It requires figuring out how to come back from it, I guess, is what I'm saying. Because so many of us did terrible things. Right. And I think at some level we know it. I definitely feel that.

I feel when I visit my former world, to the extent that it allows me to step into those spaces again. I feel shame. And I write about this in Thanksgiving Gathering in the book that we were, you know, many of us colluded. Many of us went along with lies. Many of us sacrificed our children, knowingly or unknowingly. Many of us were deceived, bamboozled, bought into things that are not true. And there's going to be shame there. But also, I think we were, the mandates, I think, were a national trauma where we were violated in front of each other.

You know, people were helpless to protect one another. And that is a trauma that's going to stay with us, you know. So I know that this is a time where people are starting, if they 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, you know, without truth and reconciliation and convictions and jail time and remembering and accounting for what was done, a country can't move forward with any kind of life or vitality or morality. And you're right to mention that phrase because I was very influenced in the writing of this book by a book called I Will Bear Witness by a French literature professor observing

Hitler's rise in Germany in the 30s. And it's literally almost a journal where day by day he just 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, someone else occupied it, into, you know, a room, then when they moved to shared rooms. And the, you know, as we were saying a few minutes ago, barbarism and the end of a democracy doesn't come all at once. It comes in these little, 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. And that is part of my goal in writing Facing the Beast. So I want to finish up with, I guess on a positive note, I've been thinking about, you know, a lot of the darkness, that type of darkness that you describe, the thing that I'm 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 have ever happened. Certainly not this way, but I don't think it would have happened otherwise. And, you know, and I guess 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. Certainly. Well, I totally agree with you. I mean, the irony is that, you know, my life didn't end when I was ejected from my legacy media perch on the left. and people of faith that I'd never had before, and also a whole range of new friendships that are so inspiring. I guess I will share in your optimism because what I see happening is the collapse of our institutions, right? And Facing Abuse traces that. But I see arising 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. And I think this is a time of test for us, but you can't be neutral, clearly, but the better angels have an opportunity to rebuild and really remake this country the closer to its ideal as a nation of freedom and justice. Well, Naomi Wolf, it's such a pleasure to have had you on again. Thank you so much for having me on. I appreciate it. Thank you all for joining Naomi Wolf and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I'm your host, Janja Kellek.