Naomi Wolf joins Tucker Carlson to warn we’ve become a Covid-19 police state. Guess which one liberals think is the bigger crime?

Liberal feminist author Naomi Wolf dared to take her alarm about the US’ slide into totalitarian dictatorship onto Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show, triggering a predictable uproar that largely ignored the police state issue.

Naomi Wolf, who has studied and written extensively about how democratic societies devolve into totalitarian regimes, told the Fox News host “there are 10 steps that would-be tyrants always take when they want to close down a democracy,” ending with “suspension of rule of law.” Wolf noted the US had sunk to that level over the last year, imposing draconian Covid-19 restrictions at the speed of light without even the slightest nod to the democratic process.

“I know from history that no one gives up emergency policies willingly, they always drag it on and drag it on,” she explained, pointing out that “only from studying history do I know how predictable it is when you start to have elected officials say ‘No, we’re not going to follow the constitution because there’s a pandemic.’ Nowhere in the constitution does it say ‘all this can be suspended if there’s a bad disease.’”

But Wolf’s words – broadly appealing though they may be to the inhabitants of a country pummeled within an inch of its life by years of suicidal government policies that bailed out megacorporations and waged ruinous wars while leaving ordinary people twisting in the wind – were lost on many in her audience. These zeroed in on Carlson as if he – not what Wolf described as the “merger of corporate power and government power really characteristic of Italian fascism in the ’20s” – was the real authoritarian threat.

The Fox News host joked that Wolf, a former adviser to Bill Clinton’s presidential reelection campaign, was “undoubtedly losing friends” not just by coming on his show, but by posting about the Covid-19 police state to begin with. He even admitted he hadn’t read her tweets because he had assumed he’d disagree with them, chiding his audience to “treat people as individuals rather than as stand-ins for whole political parties.”

Partisanship is stupid, and it makes you stupid.

But those remarks didn’t come near encapsulating the disturbing obstinacy of some of Wolf’s followers, who flew to pieces over their erstwhile heroine embracing a pundit they had long since written off as a “white supremacist” – even extending the label to cover her, in an egregious feat of guilt by association.

No longer could they read or even own her books – in attempting to draw attention to the demise of American civil liberties, she had done the unthinkable and reached across the political aisle in an effort to be heard. Wolf’s alliance with Carlson would open the door to anti-Jewish pogroms, one commenter warned, apparently serious.

The irony of some of the same people who’d mocked Wolf for, well, crying wolf over alleged looming fascist takeovers during the Bush and Obama administrations subsequently becoming experts at crying fascist wolf under Trump seemed to be completely lost upon her critics, though plenty of followers of both Wolf and Carlson were willing to ignore the partisan pearl-clutching-fest and throw their support behind the temporary alliance of conservative and liberal.

And the knee-jerk reaction to her appearance on Fox has only supported Wolf’s points. Arguing people from all walks of life understood that something was deeply wrong with the Covid-19 police state, despite the media portrayal of a happily masked-up majority snitching on their neighbors with a smile, she suggested that the real problem was that things were happening too fast, in too divided a society, for effective organization against the never-ending stream of emergency measures to take shape. The government had lost no time “locking in” what she described as “360 degree full-on totalitarian policies” nearly a year ago, with massive violations of the First and Fourth Amendment in the form of curtailment of “rights to assembly, rights to worship, and all of the rights that our Constitution guarantees” – but with a multibillion-dollar media apparatus pointing Americans at each other’s throats and blaming the “other” for the open society’s collapse, it was difficult to accurately articulate the problem, let alone forge alliances across the political spectrum.

Unfortunately, Wolf is very much correct about the dwindling chances Americans have of extricating themselves from this authoritarian nightmare. “Really, we’re turning into a version of a totalitarian state in front of everyone’s eyes,” she said – and the police state won’t wait.

I really hope we wake up quickly, because history shows there’s a very small window where people can fight back before it becomes too dangerous to fight back.

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