‘Autocratic Tyrants’ Place America’s Freedoms in Jeopardy

Self-identifying as a liberal feminist, Naomi Wolf is a Yale graduate, Rhodes Scholar and former political adviser to Al Gore and Bill Clinton. She has 10 books to her name and recently sounded the alarm at the growing power of “autocratic tyrants” who are placing sustainable freedom in jeopardy in America:

The terrible crisis that we’re in under the guise of a real medical pandemic,” Ms. Wolf told Tucker Carlson, “[is] really moving us into a coup situation, a police state. The state has now crushed businesses, kept us from gathering in free assembly to worship, as the First Amendment provides, is invading our bodies … which is a violation of the Fourth Amendment, is restricting movement. … The violations go on and on and on.

Tens of thousands of small businesses have been crushed; why were they crushed? Not because the pandemic forced them to, there is no real science underlying a lot of these closures, it’s about autocratic tyrants at the state and national levels creating a kind of merger of corporate power and government power, which is really characteristic of Italian fascism from the ’20s.

They’re using that to engage in a kind of emergency orders that simply strip us of our rights: rights to property, rights to assembly, rights to worship and all of the rights that our Constitution guarantees.

I know from history that [tyrannical decrees] always drag on and on and on. Every month I get an email that Governor Cuomo is extending emergency powers [and] emergency measures.

Nowhere in the Constitution does it say that all of this [freedom] can be suspended if there is a bad disease. We have lived through typhus, cholera, smallpox, HIV, tuberculosis, polio, the Spanish Flu, we’ve lived through an attack on our soil, never have there been months and months and months of emergency powers when we weren’t actually fighting a war.

This is completely unprecedented—lockdowns have never been done before in free societies—and we’re turning into a version of a totalitarian state before everyone’s eyes.”

Here are some of the demoralizing examples of the hypocritical self-righteousness and sanctimonious underhandedness of political leaders who are supposed to lead by example:

Nancy Pelosi’s “good-for-thee-but-not-for-me” duplicity of getting her hair done during the lockdown. Gov. Newsom running up a $12K wine tab at The French Laundry, a three-star Michelin restaurant private room with lobbyists (all without the masks implemented by Newsom’s government edict). California Democrat Congressman Eric Swalwell’s intimacy with a Chinese spy while (still) serving on the U.S. House Intelligence Committee. Virginia Gov. Northam’s black face and rumored claim to have violated his state’s stay-at-home order to travel to North Carolina’s Outer Banks. Bill Clinton’s rendezvous with Obama’s Attorney General Loretta Lynch on the tarmac in Phoenix. The shakedown of foreign enemies by the Clinton couple to fund the Clinton Presidential Library and Museum. Former President Obama’s own possible collusion in concealing and destroying evidence and exculpatory information to a FISA court. Obama’s potential complicity in the infiltration of candidate Trump’s presidential campaign. And most recently media’s cover-up of New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s nursing home COVID scandal.

Whereas in the past any of the above would have brought riot, revolution or repentance, this is no longer the case, with the American electorate having turned into meek sheep.

The Main Street media’s subterfuge and false self-presentation as “fair and balanced” is wearing thin. With their thumbs on the scales of liberal bias in media, liberal partiality in elections and collusion with the sway and lordliness of Big Tech and Silicon Valley—who feel no need to disguise their iron curtain censorship and enmity toward those with a different opinion or ideology—secular media has become indistinguishable from the Soviet propaganda organs of Izvestia and Pravda.

It happens right under everyone’s nose. Pelosi, Newsom, Northam, former Attorney General Loretta Lynch, Bill Clinton all snooping on Trump’s campaign, all get a free pass, while both spurious impeachment attempts of Trump are supported.

Allum Bokhari, the senior technology correspondent for Breitbart News, lays it all out: “Today, Big Tech doesn’t just mean control over online information. It means control over news. It means control over commerce. It means control over politics. And how are the corporate tech giants using their control? Judging by the three biggest moves they have made—the censoring of the New York Post in October when it published its blockbuster stories on Biden family corruption, the censorship and eventual banning from the web of President Trump, and the coordinated takedown of the upstart social media site Parler—it is obvious that Big Tech’s priority today is to support the political Left and the Washington establishment.

“Without any oversight or checks and balances, we will never have another free and fair election. [Google, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, Snapchat, Amazon] don’t just want to control information or even voting behavior —they want to manipulate people’s worldview.“

Harold J. Berman (1918-2007), the American legal scholar once described as “one of the great polymaths of American legal education,” made it equally clear: “Law has to be believed in, or it will not work. It involves not only man’s reason and will, but his emotions, his intuitions and commitments, and his faith.

“The very concept of the ongoingness of law, of its organic growth over generations and centuries, is itself a religious concept rooted in Judaism and Christianity. Moreover, in Western history since the 11th century the ongoing legal tradition has been interrupted periodically by great revolutions, each of which has attacked the preexisting system of law in the name of a religious or quasi-religious vision [read secularism] and each of which has eventually created new legal institutions based on that vision.”

“Great revolution” is the term used by Pat Buchanan in his prophetic 2007 bestseller, Day of Reckoning. “The real revolution of the last half-century began in the 1960s and drove wedges through society that endure today. This revolution involved the repudiation of America’s past as racist, sexist, imperialist, and genocidal in its treatment of women, Indians, Africans, and all peoples of color.

“This revolution involved the rejection and overthrow of traditional Christian morality and Christianity itself as bigoted and repressive, and the conversion of the young to a sensuality, self-indulgence, and promiscuity condemned by all Christian faiths.

“This revolution involved the overturning of all laws rooted in Christian doctrine regarding divorce, homosexuality, abortion, and the purge of all Christian symbols, books, and practices from public schools. This revolution was about de-Christianizing and secularizing America.”

All this has been achieved through the removal of prayer to Jehovah God from public education in 1962 (Engel v. Vitale); the removal of the Bible— after 300 years of America’s meteoric rise—from public schools in 1963 (Abington School District v. Schempp); the removal of the Ten Commandments from public schools, courthouses and government buildings in 1980 (Stone v. Graham); the extermination of unborn babies in 1973 (Roe v. Wade); the exaltation and normalization of homosexual intercourse and legalization of same-sex marriage in 2015 (Obergefell v. Hodges); the expansion of homosexual and transgender rights in 2020 (Bostock v. Clayton County); and the passing of the Equality Act by the House Democratic leadership on Feb. 25, 2021.

It all shows a nation morally adrift.

When spiritual understanding in the culture is lacking, when America’s political class and leadership fail to acknowledge the inherent merits of a biblically based culture, when Democrat and Republican leadership is littered with cultural Marxists and serial adulterers, when judicial decisions are based on “hunches” instead of truth, we will have no trouble understanding why God has paused His blessings on a once Christian nation. Sin and suffering are inevitable companions.

What should be done?

— Reestablishing prayer in America’s churches.

— Returning of American Christendom to Jesus’ kingdom assignment in Matthew 16:18, with His ekklesia located in the public square.

— Pastors, ministry leaders or congregants of every church in America going for or holding a local elected office.

Yet thanks be to God, there is a little cloud about “as small as a man’s hand rising from the sea” (1 Kings 18:44b). Gideons and Rehabs are beginning to stand. {eoa}

David Lane is the founder of the American Renewal Project.

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