Never Forget: Facing the Beast by Naomi Wolf
'"My friend, I was a beast. How can you forgive me? I behaved so badly." Have you heard that? No, nothing.' — Naomi Wolf
I first heard Naomi Wolf on Steve Bannon’s WarRoom. I had no idea who she was and had never heard of any of her books. When I started to learn a little more about her I was a little surprised that she would even come on Bannon’s show, but, as I learned later from her, he was one of the few willing to have her on to talk about the issues women were having after getting the state-approved medical experiment injections.
She was one of the first to expose these side effects.
Her liberal sources, the people she had known for many years, began abandoning her. Those of us who have been red-pilled these last four years come from every country and every segment of each country’s culture: religious, political, economic and race. Naomi was surprised to find a home with those whom she disagreed with so vehemently while she wrote feminist books and worked as a Democrat political consultant. By her own words she was a “media darling for thirty-five years.”1
Not any more.
Wolf is on fire in Facing the Beast: Courage, Faith, and Resistance in a New Dark Age.
She’s angry. She’s bitter. She’s sarcastic. She’s accusatory. And her thoughts and criticisms are formidable.
She says in the first chapter, “A Lost Small Town,” that her mantra has been “I forgive you.” She forgives all of them, the movie theatre owner who would not let her in, those who told her she could not enter stores without a mask, family members who cancelled her Thanksgiving with them and those who pressed: “Are you vaccinated?”
I forgive them. I must. Because otherwise the rage and sorrow would exhaust me to death.2
But Wolf does not end with only forgiveness. She writes:
I forgive them because my soul instructs me that I must.
But I cannot forget.3
In large part this is a book about not forgetting. It’s also a book wherein Wolf calls out her contemporaries for their cowardice and lip service to morality, justice and freedom of speech. She calls them “my people” and “my ‘tribe,'” but acknowledges that’s not the case presently.
These people, “my people,” who were once so erudite, so witty, so confident, so ethical, so privileged—pretty and well-spoken as they once were, turn out, with the twist of just a couple of years, and just a bucketload or two of bribe money, to be revealed as monsters and barbarians.4
With Wolf words and phrases are calculated carefully, so “monsters and barbarians” is poignant with meaning and legitimate anger.
One of my favorite chapters is “How Lies Killed Books.” In it Wolf asks where all the writers have gone. Why aren’t there dozens of books from our current best writers about what has happened the last four years? It’s a scathing chapter where her sarcasm is so evident and so biting there must be ears burning in every elite, privileged corner of New York City. Here’s a taste:
How about Susan Faludi, respected feminist author of Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women? Surely she would have addressed how decades of women’s professional advancement were overturned by lockdown policies that drove women out of the workforce because someone had to watch the kids stranded at home?
No.
Undoubtedly Robert Reich, longtime champion of working people, author of The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It, would have analyzed the greatest wealth transfer in modern history?
Nothing there.
Certainly Michael Moore, author of Downsize This! Random Threats from an Unarmed American, who for decades amplified the voices of working men and women left behind in rustbelt America, would have likewise assailed the flow of wealth in the “pandemic” era from the locked-down, “distanced,” forbidden-to-work working class, to tech CEOs and pharma shills and their oligarch friends?
Nothing to see.
I could go on and on.5
She acknowledges that the important writing being done today is by nonwriters: doctors, lawyers, researchers, those who know if they don’t write about the “plandemic” no one will. Wolf goes on:
So there is a massive void in the central thought process of our culture.
The courageous nonwriters have stepped in to tell the truth, because the famous writers, for the most part, can’t.
Or won’t. Or, for whatever reason, didn’t.
This is because the public intellectuals are by necessity, for the most part, AWOL to the truth-telling demands of this time.
You cannot be a public intellectual whose work is alive if you have participated in manufacturing, or even accepting quietly, State-run lies.
The work of the cultural elite of every tyranny, from Nazi Germany to Stalin’s USSR, reveals this fact.
For the artist, taking part in lies makes his or her creation of a vibrant cultural text impossible.
Nazi art is bad art. Socialist-realist Soviet fiction is bad fiction.
Journalism in a tyranny, that is written by State-approved scribes, is always going to be a mess of clichés and obsequiousness that no one wants to read, and that cannot stand the test of time. It vanishes like snow into the cauldron of the future—even as works by the hated, forbidden dissidents who can and do tell the truth—the Solzhenitsyns of the time, the Anne Franks—are like diamonds that cannot be crushed or lost to time.
It is only these that survive.6
I have written about things just not feeling right the last 4 years. Almost an intangible, undefinable feeling, that I have seen many, many others mention. Wolf speculated in The Bodies of Others that the orchestration of the worldwide pandemic, lockdowns, cultural degradation and more, had been accomplished by A.I.:
Indeed, one of the reasons our current crisis feels so strange and disorienting to us humans, especially to us Western humans, is that it was in some ways modeled by machines and by programmers and may well have been continually modified via machine learning. We are not living through organic human history as it has unfolded in the past.7
So maybe the “machines”, as we have seen in so many science fiction movies, are attacking us, but, as so often happens in life, the reality of how such a thing is carried out is much different.
We’re expecting The Matrix while the whole thing is happening right before us via social media, the mainstream media, government policies and the propagandized influenced and directed by A.I. algorithms.
But what if it’s even worse than that?
Wolf has another chapter, “Have the Ancient Gods Returned,” wherein she wonders if our world has been overtaken if not by literal ancient, evil gods (The Watchers for some of you familiar with this), at least by the spirit of what those gods embodied. I wrote in a previous book review that the amount of evil we’re seeing hardly seems possible from a human perspective. It has happened so fast and is so pervasive at the moment, that I have started re-evaluating my agnosticism and moving back toward my theistic roots. Wolf writes:
What we lived through from 2020 to 2022 was so sophisticated, so massive, so evil, and executed in such inhumane unison, that it could not be accounted for without venturing into metaphysics.8
She spends some time writing about the book, The Return of the Gods by Jonathan Cahn. She doesn’t agree with everything in that book, but initially the title resonated with her (as it did with me). Wolf writes:
Cahn points out that the Hebrew Bible refers to what in Hebrew is rendered shedim or “negative spirits” (in modern Hebrew, this word means “ghosts”). Cahn points out that these spirits, powers, or principalities were worshipped in the pagan world in many guises—from the fertility god Baal; to the sexuality goddess Astarte (also known as Ashtaroth or Asherah); to the destructive idol Moloch (or Malek). He rightly points out that the ancient world was everywhere consecrated to these dark or lower entities, and that worshippers went to the point of sacrificing their own children to propitiate these forces. He correctly reflects the central narrative of the tribes of Israel as alternately embracing Yahweh and his Ten Commandments and ethical covenant, and finding it all too taxing, and thus falling away to whore after these pagan gods. He notes that the gods of the Old Testament world descended in updated guise into Greco-Roman life, taking on new names: Zeus, Diana, and so on.9
There’s a lot to process in that chapter, but a very interesting read.
There is so much more in this book. This book is full of personal stories, metaphors and descriptive language I can only hope to be capable of writing in some other life. Her observations on our current culture and its problems are spot on. I highly recommend the book and leave you with some more of my favorite quotes.
Let there be no misunderstanding. “Amnesty” for crimes of this severity and scale is not an option. There was no group hug after the liberation of Auschwitz.10
What happened, in the seventy-plus years since the end of the Second World War, is that an elite international class of technocrats, EU bureaucrats, global nonprofit leaders, and international investors has developed, in which allegiance to the relationships, programs, profits, and outcomes of that global class is more immediate and important to its members than are any of the relationships, allegiances, rights, property, and outrage of their fellow countrymen and women.11
Because lies had entombed our whole culture beginning in early spring 2020, and because public intellectuals for the most part did not stand up to the lies at the time, and because many even participated in the lies (hello, Sam Harris); since horrible things happened to those of us who did stand up to the lies—most public intellectuals at this moment cannot address the really important events of the recent past.12
The sheer amoral power of Baal, the destructive force of Moloch, the unrestrained seductiveness and sexual licentiousness of Astarte—those are the primal forces that do indeed seem to me to have “returned.”13
It damages our country when we cannot tell truth from lies. This is exactly what tyrants seek—an electorate that cannot know what truth is, and what is falsehood.14
NOTES
Wolf, Naomi. Facing the Beast: Courage, Faith, and Resistance in a New Dark Age. Chelsea Green Publishing. Kindle Edition. p. 27
p. 16.
p. 17
p. 30.
p. 133.
p. 134.
Wolf, Naomi, The Bodies of Others
Wolf, Facing the Beast, pp. 143-144
p. 146
pp. 18-19.
p. 51.
p. 134.
p. 148
p. 168.
Never forget what they took from you.
Thank you !