Acclaimed feminist and card-carrying progressive Naomi Wolf has become the latest of a an insufficient but growing group of principled liberals and Democrats who are risking their careers, reputations and incomes to sound the alarms about the relentless assault on democracy and American values being waged since 2016, using the election of Donald Trump as a justification.
In a powerful essay on the AEI website (presumably no leftist site would touch it) she focuses on how the pandemic has been exploited to strip American of rights and freedoms. This effort has been almost entirely the work of the political Left. Wolf writes in part,
In the United States we now have:
- Emergency measures in many states, which suspend due process of law. This is the hallmark of a police state. Covid-19 is invoked as the reason for the introduction of emergency law – but there is no endpoint for lifting these emergency laws.
- The closures of schools, which break the social contract with the next generation.
- Bills being passed for “vaccine passports,” which bypass the Fourth Amendment to the constitution by allowing the government and Big Tech companies to intrude on medical privacy and to create a comprehensive digital surveillance state.
- Forced closures of businesses. By intervening directly in the economy and allowing certain businesses to flourish (Amazon, Wal-Mart, Target) at the expense of small businesses, Main Street shops, restaurants, and sole proprietor businesses in general, the State has merged government and corporations in a way that is characteristic of Italian fascism, or of modern Chinese communism. (Indeed the fact that tech stocks rose by 27% in one quarter of the pandemic shows one driver of this war against human freedoms and human society: every minute human beings spend in a classroom, at the pub or restaurant, or in a church or synagogue, is time that tech companies lose money by being unable to harvest that data. Covid policies driven by “Covid-19 Response” – tech companies – ensure that humans are not allowed to connect except via digital platforms. The reason is profit as well as social control).
- Restrictions on assembly. Some states such as California are fining people for seeing their friends in their homes, and making it unlawful for kids to have playdates with their friends. Massachusetts restricted gatherings of more than ten people at a time, forcing synagogues and churches to stay closed, in spite of a Supreme Court ruling against states forcing churches to close. Parks, playgrounds and beaches have been closed off. In countries such as Britain, people are fined for leaving their homes for more than an hour’s exercise a day.
- Forced face coverings. In Massachusetts, people are fined if they are not wearing masks outdoors – even children as young as five are forced to do so by law. Again this mandate has not been undergirded by peer-reviewed studies showing medical necessity; and there is no endpoint proffered for these extraordinary violations of personal freedom.
- Suppression of free speech. Big Tech companies are censoring critics of Covid policy and vaccine policy, as well as censoring views that are on the right hand of the political spectrum. “Incitement,” a word that has a long history in the 20th century for closing down free speech, has been weaponized by the left to shut down First Amendment freedoms of expression. In other forms of censorship and management of speech and public debate, tycoons such as Bill Gates have been funding major news outlets, with millions of dollars directed to “Covid education.” As a result, dissenting voices are marginalized and shamed, or even threatened with legal action or job losses.
- Science has been hijacked in the interests of “biofascism.” By heavily funding scientific commentators such as Dr Fauci in the United States, Imperial College and SAGE in the UK, and Dr Christian Drosten in Germany, a dominant set of policies and pronouncements about Covid that benefit a small group of bad actors – notably tech and pharmaceutical interests, acting in concert with governments – have had secured credentialled supporters. But when other scientists or institutions seek debate or transparency, they are threatened with job loss or reputationally attacked, as in the case of Dr Simon Goddeke of the Netherlands, who was told to keep quiet by his university, when he challenged the flawed Covid PCR test protocols.
- Data have been hijacked to serve the interests of this biofascism. This manipulation of truth, which I foreshadowed in The End of America, is typical of the Soviet censors. Covid platforms such as Covid19tracking and John Hopkins University, funded by technocrats such as Michael Bloomberg, serve unverifiable Covid data that directly affect the stock markets. Again, while this un-American merger of corporate interests and public policy is reminiscent of Italian Fascism, the twist provided by digital data presentation and its relationship to the stock market is very much of the 21st century.
- Attacks on religious minorities. The orthodox Jewish community in Brooklyn, and Christian churches in California, have been singled out for punishment if they do not follow Covid rules – a targeting of religion that is characteristic of Communist policies on the left, especially in China.
- Policies that weaken bonds between human beings and weaken the family have been introduced and policed. This is the most serious development of all.
Ethics Alarms 