Dr. Naomi Wolf’s journey from paid-up member of the liberal elite to . . . something else is interesting and enhanced by her literary style. Who knows where she’ll end up. From Wolf at naomiwolf.substack.com:
An Excerpt from my New Book: Facing the Beast: Courage, Faith and Resistance in a New Dark Age
In November 2022, I traveled to Florida, to do research for a new book. I stayed in a hotel for almost a week, in a modest, touristy town, a few miles from the beach.
We were able to be in Florida at that time because for the second year, we had not been invited to Thanksgiving celebrations with our relatives.
Two years in, I had stopped hoping that we would be, and my pain had scarred over into angry dismissiveness; and anger at myself that I still wanted so badly to rejoin my people, my nearest ones.
I tried not to think about this at all. It never did not hurt.
For anyone who may have forgotten, Florida and New York were, at that time, essentially different countries. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis was giving press conferences showcasing the fact that he had not closed down local businesses, and that his economy was thriving. Public health in Florida, as he pointed out, was about the same as in lockdown states. But New York governor Kathy Hochul, on the other hand, was persevering with policies that shocked even some diehard lockdown militants. She sought to create quarantine camps, and when a judge objected and struck down her bid, she appealed. And she insisted on keeping schools and businesses compliant with disabling mRNA injection mandates and with forced COVID measures.
Every day, when I was in the hotel in the friendly, little, whimsically tacky beach town, from the moment I opened my eyes till the moment I settled into my cool hotel sheets, my heart exulted with indescribable happiness.
You know those dreams in which a loved one who is dead appears to you, in full youth and health and vigor? You say to that person, in the dream, with tears of joy streaming down your cheeks, Oh my God—you are not dead! But then you wake up, and that person is still dead.
It was that dream.
But for a nation.
In Florida I was in a delirium of happiness mixed with nostalgia mixed with grief—because it felt like America.
