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Below is an excerpt from the book.

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This story begins in the “Before” world.

“Before” the years 2020 to 2022, when a set of policies based on abject lies posed an existential threat to our democracy and our way of life.

“Before” this likely AI-deployed set of lies, dispensed globally, targeted our West with its core traditions of free speech—and in the US, with its First Amendment—with arrant censorship.

“Before” the Left—the subculture that used to stand for human rights, freedom of speech, real science, critical thinking, and skepticism about Big Government and Big Corporations, let alone about their merger, and that used to fight against  discrimination and inequality—fell into a trance in which that same group became champions of censorship, and of a two-tier society in which some people, as the pigs declared in Animal Farm, are “more equal” than others; and fell prey to magical thinking and cultlike behavior.

“Before” the media—which used to see itself as the source of investigation of elite powers; which used to ask questions about received narratives; which used to demand that its journalists produce evidence and independent verification before drawing conclusions in print—were bought out by Big Government via the CARES Act, and by Big Pharma directly, and by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, to the extent that almost all legacy media became unquestioning stenographers for interested parties aligned with the global powers who dictated the harmful nonsense.

I miss the “Before Times.”

Because I have studied the histories of the overthrowing of past democracies, and learned that many democracies have died incrementally; that tyrants’ attacks on liberty are often executed surreptitiously, or attributed to benign motives, and thus succeed in draining people’s freedoms; or by enforcing bit by bit tiny compliances that add up to huge compliances, any of which would never have been considered by the same population without revolt, if the curtain was brought down all at once—I thought it was important to keep a kind of journal of these changes as I witnessed them.

This book is a memoir of how our “Before” world—that lasted up until March 2020—became, through a slow boil and through various shocks to its core institutions—this “After” world of tyranny, sadism, and forced inequality.

I have been an activist defending the Constitution for the past three-plus decades. As a result of my work identifying and fighting earlier threats to democracy and free speech, I was able to see, early in 2020, the inevitable implications for our democracy and for our country as a whole, in the rollout of pandemic and lockdown and then mandate narratives and policies.

Given my previous work, it was easy to guess what all these policies would quickly do to us. It was easy for me to foretell that the immediate deployment of mass censorship of critics of these policies; the ramped-up State surveillance; the forced closures of schools, places of worship, and businesses; the unconstitutional declarations that we must not assemble, beyond a certain small number of people, even in private homes; the violation of the Nuremberg Laws and the most basic international human rights laws that guarantee bodily integrity and informed medical consent, represented mRNA vaccine mandates—would utterly transform our nation, and the nations of the West, into post-democratic societies; into societies that may look pretty much the same on the surface (as I argued in my 2008 bestseller The End of America that post-democratic societies would)—but that the heart of their freedom would be annihilated, leaving intact pretty-looking vassal states, with no real autonomy left for their citizens, where the nations of the free West so recently prevailed.

I saw early what a dangerous time it was and is: 2020 to 2023.

In my 2008 book about dying democracies, I had described the threats to liberty that prevailed at that time, in the George Bush Jr. era, as deriving primarily from the Right. But even then I was not deceived by partisanship assumptions about fascism, as I learned from my study of earlier totalitarian and fascist regimes and leaders that authoritarians of the Left and the Right are exactly the same; they take the same ten steps to ensure the death of democracies, and do the same things to propagandize their subject people, to silence dissent, to arrest opposition leaders, to create surveillance societies and prisons outside the rule of law, and eventually to bring about emergency law, which is Step Ten.

Since 2020, in America at least, these threats to our country have been deployed largely from the Left. Though I come “from the Left,” I had no problem recognizing this.

The threats to liberty worldwide had no partisan quality as they were “metapartisan,” being handed down from the WEF (World Economic Forum), the WHO (World Health Organization), the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), nongovernment foundations such as Bill Gates’s, and allied Big Tech leaders, as I described in my 2022 book The Bodies of Others.

You could see the exact same pandemic, lockdown, and mandate policies rolled out in conservative-led Australia, in conservative-led UK, in liberal-led Canada, in liberal-led France, and so on.

Other people also spoke up, as the dark shadow of fascism descended on our nation under the cloak of a “public health emergency.”

Some others who had been identified with the US Left were also speaking out against the public health response to the pandemic. They also spoke out about the censorship regime that so visibly descended on us. Glenn Greenwald, Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying, Joe Rogan, Robert Kennedy Jr., and others, though identified with the Left, held the principles of the Constitution and basic human rights above partisanship.

Other heroes, too, arose in this dark time, in ways that also transcended partisanship. Many of these were heroes of real medicine, real science, real public health. Some were doctors: Dr. Peter McCullough, Dr. Pierre Kory, Dr. Paul Alexander, Dr. Henry Ealy, Dr. Sherri Tenpenny, and many others. Some were scientists and economists; the signatories and the convener of the Great Barrington Declaration, for instance: Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, Dr. Martin Kulldorff, Dr. Sunetra Gupta, and economist Jeffrey Tucker. These all refused to tolerate, or even accept as settled “science,” policies that they knew would destroy schooling, damage the development of children, and lead to mass starvation.

Some heroes for truth came from the world of finance—critics such as Ed Dowd, formerly of BlackRock, who raised an early alarm about data showing excess deaths and disabilities post-mRNA vaccination.

Or Steve Kirsch, an entrepreneur who also crunched the numbers on these harms, independently confirming the “democide”—death by government—that Mr. Dowd had found. These critics, whose training was in the world of hard data, perhaps spoke out because they simply could not tolerate the fibs and bad math that undergirded “the narrative”; as well as out of concern for their fellow human beings’ health, and even survival.

There were—are—many heroes and heroines.

But not nearly enough.

There were—are—many millions more quislings and colluders, as I learned upon this painful journey.

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Facing the Beast: Courage, Faith, and Resistance in a New Dark Age

By Naomi Wolf

Publisher: ‎ Chelsea Green Publishing (November 9, 2023)

Language: ‎ English

Paperback: ‎ 240 pages

ISBN-10: ‎ 1645022366

ISBN-13: ‎ 978-1645022367

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Click here to purchase.