Naomi Wolf: We’ve Reached “Step Ten” of the 10 Steps to Fascism

In 2008, I wrote a bookThe End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot. In it I warned, based on my study of closing democracies in 20th century history, that America needed to beware of an all-too-possible slide into totalitarianism.

I warned that would-be tyrants, whether they are on the left or the right, always use a map to close down democracies, and that they always take the same ten steps.

Whether they “Invoke an External and Internal Threat” or “Develop a Paramilitary Force” or “Restrict the Press” or the final step, “Subvert the Rule of Law, these steps are always recognizable — and they always work to crush democracies and establish tyrannies. At the time that I wrote the book, the “global threat” of terrorism was the specter that powers invoked in order to attack our freedoms.

The book was widely read and discussed, both at the time of its publication and over the last 12 years. Periodically over the last decade, people would ask me when and if we had reached “Step Ten.”

We — my brave publisher, Chelsea Green, and I — are releasing videos of me reading the first and last chapters (see videos below) of “The End of America” now, in 2021, for free. And I am calling the sequel to this book, which I am now writing, “Step Ten” — because as of March of last year, we have indeed, I am so sad to say, arrived at and begun to inhabit “Step Ten” of the 10 steps to fascism.

Though in 2008, I did not explicitly foresee that a medical pandemic would be the vehicle for moving the entire globe into “Step Ten,” I have at various points warned of the dangers of medical crises as vehicles that tyranny can exploit to justify suppressions of civil rights.

Today, a much-hyped medical crisis has taken on the role of being used as a pretext to strip us all of core freedoms, that fears of terrorism did not, despite 20 years of effort, ultimately achieve.

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Digital Trails: How the FBI Is Identifying, Tracking and Rounding Up Dissidents

“Americans deserve the freedom to choose a life without surveillance and the government regulation that would make that possible. While we continue to believe the sentiment, we fear it may soon be obsolete or irrelevant. We deserve that freedom, but the window to achieve it narrows a little more each day. If we don’t act now, with great urgency, it may very well close for good.”—Charlie Warzel and Stuart A. Thompson, New York Times

Databit by databit, we are building our own electronic concentration camps.

With every new smart piece of smart technology we acquire, every new app we download, every new photo or post we share online, we are making it that much easier for the government and its corporate partners to identify, track and eventually round us up.

Saint or sinner, it doesn’t matter because we’re all being swept up into a massive digital data dragnet that does not distinguish between those who are innocent of wrongdoing, suspects, or criminals.

This is what it means to live in a suspect society.

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Kentucky Republicans pass bill making insulting a police officer a crime

In recent times, there have been increasing incidences of police arresting people for criticizing them online, particularly through memes. Due to the First Amendment protections, these cases have been dropped.

But a new bill out of Kentucky aims to try again.

The Senate of the State of Kentucky passed a bill that criminalizes insulting the police. Critics of the bill claimed the legislation would have a chilling effect on free speech and is actually a violation of the First Amendment.

The Senate Bill 211 was brought by Sen Danny Carroll (R-Benton), who is a retired police officer. According to Carroll, the bill will serve as a statement to protesters who “tried to destroy the city of Louisville” during the Breonna Taylor protests and riots last year.

The bill increases penalties on crimes related to rioting and prevents the early release of people found guilty of such crimes. But the controversial part of the bill is the criminalizing of verbally provoking police officers to the extent they feel a violent response is necessary. It passed by a 22 to 11 vote, with six Republicans joining Democrats in voting against it.

Carroll insisted that “insulting an officer is not going to cause anyone to go to jail.” However, according to the Courier Journal, the bill “states a person is guilty of disorderly conduct — a Class B misdemeanor with a penalty of up to 90 days’ imprisonment — if he or she ‘accosts, insults, taunts, or challenges a law enforcement officer with offensive or derisive words, or by gestures or other physical contact, that would have a direct tendency to provoke a violent response from the perspective of a reasonable and prudent person.’”

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HORROR: Father Faces Arrest and Jail Time For Trying To Stop Doctors From Transitioning His Middle School Daughter To A Boy

Rob Hoogland, a resident of Surrey, British Columbia, is the brave father of a young teenage girl who has been essentially stolen from him by the medical community and by the Canadian courts. Rob, whose daughter decided in 7th grade that she wanted to be a boy, believed that at 14-years-old, she was too young to make the decision to medically transition to a male. The doctors, school officials, and now the Supreme Court have decided that her father does not have the authority to make that decision, and furthermore, he is to always refer to his daughter by “his” proper pronouns or he will face legal action.

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Politicians and MSM Compare Those Who Question Vaccine Safety to “Domestic Terrorists”

As TFTP has reported, Sen. Richard Pan, D-Sacramento, who has sponsored a slew of mandatory vaccine laws throughout his career came out in 2019 to threaten the speech of those who question forced vaccination.

In a letter to the Attorney General of the United States, Pan wrote that the “deliberate spread of vaccine information discouraging vaccination” requires the surgeon general to “stop this attack on our nation’s health by addressing the spread of vaccine misinformation.”

He literally advocated for people to be jailed for questioning vaccines — and now he’s gone even further. In an oped for the Washington Post, this totalitarian likened “antivaxxers” to terrorists.

“This campaign to deny potentially life-saving vaccines to those seeking them, and to poison public opinion against vaccinations, could result in countless American deaths. That is akin to domestic terrorism,” Pan wrote.

Pan has also criticized Facebook and other social media groups for allowing vaccine skeptics to post their views.

“This movement not only puts out mis- or disinformation about vaccines or lies about vaccines, which in itself can be harmful, but they are also aggressively bullying, threatening and intimidating people who are trying to share accurate information about vaccines,” Pan told the New York Times.

Given the recent paranoia by the federal government following the Trump supporters marching on the Capitol, throwing around the term domestic terrorist is as dangerous as it is tyrannical. Whether or not you agree with “anti-vaxxers” or pro-vaccine safety groups, it is their right to say whatever they want, up to and including holding protests. It’s called freedom of speech and it shall not be infringed.

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