Facing the Beast, page 10
But that night, after I’d gotten used to the shotgun being in my bedroom, I fell asleep; and then I slept the sweetest sleep I’d ever slept out of all the nights I’d spent alone, or with small children to protect, in that house.
When I awoke, I thought: Could it have been this easy the whole time? And then I thought: I was irresponsible, as a single mother, not to have been trained and not to have been armed.
And then . . . there was the day when I went to a gun shop with Brian, because we were possibly about to lose our national sovereignty, and he wanted to make sure I could protect myself, God forbid, if needed. In the gun shop, a smart, pleasant, woman in her late twenties, named Nadine, showed me what she recommended for me—a handgun that would fit nicely in a woman’s hand and that would not have too much of a kick. She showed me the size of the bullets that would stop an intruder. And she showed me a holster, designed by a woman, with soft edges that fit around one’s hips and tucked into the waistband of one’s jeans. If your blouse is a bit loose, no one knows you are carrying a weapon.
She demonstrated, hitching the holster around her own hips and tucking the handgun under the waistband of her jeans. Her light cotton summer blouse did indeed conceal it.
She looked like any slight young woman who was ready to go out to a concert or a club. But she was secretly armed, and therefore protected.
I thought of all the young women I knew who were harmed—badly—at concerts, at clubs, in alleyways. I thought about what would happen to rapists and abusers if young women—if women in general—were armed or even if many were reputed to be armed. And I thought of my decades of struggling with the issue of female victimization: the existential vulnerability of women who are always in danger from anyone bigger and stronger who wished to injure or exploit them.
And I thought: Could it always have been this easy?
Could women resist and deter victimization—by simply owning, and knowing how to use, firearms?
Obviously.
How had this issue escaped me so long, as a rape survivor myself, and as a feminist? The rape survivor in me longed, on an animal level, for a weapon. Longed, on an animal level, to deter any future attacker. The rape survivor in me wanted a weapon the way an injured creature wants teeth and claws.
I did not buy the handgun, as I needed first to take a safety class and procure a permit and four references. But I did buy a .22 Rossi Rimfire rifle.
Brian assembled it. When I came downstairs in the morning, he had attached a bipod and had positioned it above my computer on my writing desk (with a safety lock and no ammunition nearby, of course). An assortment of dried flowers in a vase, and the stacks of books from my research, surrounded it.
I started laughing at the contrast: the elegant diagonal line of the sleek black weapon, stabilized and ready to be placed into defensive use, standing guard over my computer.
It was nonetheless a powerful symbol—as powerful as had been the image of the holster tucked low around the hips of the no-longer- vulnerable young woman.
I thought not only of rape survivors. I thought, too, when I saw the rifle on my desk, of writers, of journalists, of critics of the State, of dissidents. I thought of reporters around the world hauled off to prison by the minions of tyrants. I thought of our own recently created Ministry of Truth, and of the armed men who might make note of what was emerging from the computers of American writers.
What would happen to tyrants—to threats of violence and arrests for free speech—if writers, too, were defensively trained and armed? What if words themselves had a defense against violent tyranny, one that was always ready for action?
The writers of our nation’s birth—they were armed. The writers who forged our country’s founding documents were armed because they were writers. In Britain, when our nation was born, the crime of “seditious libel” punished criticism of the government.
Sedition was defined broadly: “The common law of seditious libel prohibits all writings and other utterances which tend to bring about hatred or contempt for the king, the Government or the constitution as by law established. Sedition consists of any act done or word spoken or written and published which has a seditious tendency, and done or spoken or written and published with a seditious intent.”4
As historian Clare Feikert-Ahalt described in a Library of Congress blog post: “The punishments for this offense were rather steep—up to life imprisonment and/or a fine. . . . The earlier punishments were significantly more severe in which perpetrators would have their ears cut off for a first offense and recidivism was punishable by death.”5
King George III issued a Royal Proclamation in which the authorities were charged with seeking out the authors and printers of “wicked and seditious writings” and reporting to government on radical activities.6 Thomas Paine and his book Rights of Man were targeted.7
To the ruling class Paine’s proposals spelled “bloody revolution,” and the government ordered the book banned and the publisher jailed. . . . Paine was tried in absentia, found guilty of seditious libel, and declared an outlaw, and Rights of Man was ordered permanently suppressed.8
* * *
I am also reexamining my reflexes about the Second Amendment because I believe that we are at a moment that our Founders, in their nearly prophetic wisdom, knew might come to pass. We are at the kind of moment for which the Second Amendment may have been written in just the clear, unequivocal way that it was.
Tyranny is descending all around the formerly free nations of the world. I say these days that the coup in America has already taken place—a stealthy, sneaky coup, mounted without a shot being fired.
In February 2022, President Biden extended emergency powers due to COVID.9 A few months later, in May of 2023, he extended them due to the situation in Iraq.10
In June 2023, he extended emergency powers again—due to the Balkans—and I didn’t see this massive news covered anywhere.11
At which point we must ask, since it is almost comical: who writes his material?
Many states around the country, such as New York State, where I live, existed under continually renewed emergency laws. Governor Andrew Cuomo declared a COVID state of emergency in March of 2020 and did not end it till June of 2021.12 But that was not the end of emergency powers! Cuomo declared a state of emergency on July 6, 2021, due to “gun violence.”13 The next New York governor, Kathy Hochul, extended the emergency law month after month. On May 16, 2023, she extended it again—due to “gun violence.”14 On August 13, 2023, she extended it again.15 Due to gun violence.
Even when there was no “disaster emergency,” of this or any other kind, in New York.
Emergency orders strip citizens of our usual protections provided by legislative actions and leave us vulnerable to future depredations: the return of lockdowns, of forcible quarantines such as we saw in Shanghai, of confiscations of our property, of mandated masks and injections, and of indeed far worse. That is the nature of emergency laws in history. They are almost never given up willingly. They eventually, almost always, lead to the imprisonment or terrorization of the now-subject people.
The democratic protections of the so-called free nations of the world—Canada, the Republic of Ireland, the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand—were shut down with the ease of someone switching off a light, and with almost no resistance from citizens. Yes, there have been protests, and there were petitions and innumerable complaints online, and a few brave legislators spoke up, if only to echoing chambers.
But the fact remains that when the unidentifiable police or mercenary forces, as in Canada, are violent, and the protesters have nothing but the moral high ground with which to deter their violence, then even the bravest of resistances is fleeting.
In Australia, citizens were arrested when they sought to escape forcible quarantine. Police in Melbourne, in 2021, shot citizens who were protesting against Draconian lockdowns, with rubber bullets.16 This happened to this formerly robust democracy, so easily. Australians yielded 650,000 privately owned guns in a mandatory gun buyback program in 1996 and 1997.17 Australians are weaker now in deterring violence against them by the State. New Zealanders handed in more than 50,000 weapons in their own country’s gun buyback program in 2019—right before the global pandemic.18 New Zealanders were attacked with sound canons during the pandemic years and suffered one of the worst of the lockdowns.
The unarmed people of China had nothing with which to deter the way their own State leaders dealt with the COVID pandemic. From 2020 onward, in the name of public health, authorities welded shut the doors of Chinese citizens suspected of having infections.19 Leaders used mass incarceration—“a strict lockdown”—against the inhabitants of Shanghai.20 Neither can the unarmed citizens of China deter the transportation of ethnic minorities into detention camps, or organ harvesting, or forced abortions. About half a million Shanghai residents who “tested positive” for COVID were sent to quarantine camps.21
You can hate guns. I have hated guns most of my life. I hate violence. I hate gun violence. I hate the slaughter of innocents. I am a peaceful person.
But it is becoming obvious, even to us pacifists, vegans, and tree huggers, that formerly free people who are unarmed are defenseless against the criminal tyrannies exerting massive violence and control upon them.
And it is becoming obvious that similar tyrannical moves against the people of the United States have been thwarted in advance or deterred—and only state by state—pretty much only because the people of the United States have the right to own and carry weapons, and because many do so.
This question of who has access to firearms became more serious as the war against the US and the free world ramped up. In May 2022, the mostly Bill Gates– and CCP-funded World Health Organization planned to try to drain sovereignty from sovereign nations, in the name of Global Health and the prospect of future pandemics.
This power grab was delayed. It is not off the table. The demand for a Global WHO accord returns every six months. It returned to the US when the WEF pushed the treaty in 2023. The WHO anticipates its ratification by 2024.22
Who then will be the armed men at your door? They can easily be private mercenaries, sent by WHO Director-General Tedros Ghebreyesus; mercenaries sent to lock you in your home or take you to a quarantine camp against your will, under the guise of a “public health emergency.”
What will stop this, if not states’ refusal to comply, and if not the weapons of citizens?
Bill Gates has been making the case for just this structure of transnational power for a long time. He has long advocated for a transnational power structure to take over global decision-making, under the guise of protecting public health. In a 2018 speech to the Massachusetts Medical Society, Gates said:
This [past work on pandemics] includes simulations and other preparedness exercises so we can better understand how diseases will spread and how to deal with things like quarantine and communications to minimize panic. We need better coordination with military forces to ensure we can draw on their mobilization capacity to transport people, equipment, and supplies on a mass scale.23
Bill Gates is still trying to have his psychotic fantasies come true, worldwide; but now it appears that he—and his potential allies—may be able to do so in the future with his own private One Health army.24 He won’t give up, nor will the WEF and the WHO. There are mercenary armies available, with a phone call, to private individuals and nonprofit entities around the world. The Second Amendment alone, along with our sovereignty, protects us from them.
This realization is hard to accept. But the risks of criminal gun violence, while always tragic, are risks that sadly can’t be done away with altogether, if we are to secure a more fundamental safety for more people and more lives; the right, as a nation of 335 million people, to deter massive planned violence, criminal detentions, lockdowns, theft of assets, and violent crimes at the State, and now at metastate, levels, against our lives and freedoms and yes, against our children.
Without the brilliantly conceived and clearly worded Second Amendment, without the deterrent to state and transnational violence of responsible, lawful, careful, and defensive firearms ownership in the United States of America, it is clear that nothing at all will save our citizens from the current fates of the people of China, Australia, and Canada, including the children, who may be facing—unarmed, defenseless as their parents sadly are—even worse fates still ahead.
CHAPTER NINE
The Next Thing
For a few days in late April 2022, I began feeling an uneasy sense of grief. At first, I could not figure out the cause of it.
Nothing unusual was wrong in my personal life. My loved ones were safe and well, thank God. The battle for liberty was ongoing, as it had been for two years, but I was used to the stresses of that. What was the matter?
I was driving with Brian over the Taconic foothills, and through the vast early spring expanses of the beautiful Hudson Valley. The sun was shining. Daffodils, creamy white and bright yellow, displayed their trumpets in shadowy recesses under old ash trees with wide-spreading boughs. The lighter-yellow forsythia dotted the roadsides in a fury of color.
We’d just been talking to a realtor acquaintance who described how the area had changed when the city people fled their Brooklyn apartments at the start of the pandemic, to sit out the crisis in the gracious, creaky old farmhouses that they could purchase for a relative song.
We’d driven through reopened businesses flush with this newly transplanted money. An old railroad car diner had been revamped and now offered curated organic-beef hash, and tasty, if ironic, egg creams.
We drove past little 1960s ranch houses with some land around them, now being redone with costly cedar shingles and white trim, for the farmhouse look that the ex-Brooklynites liked. Sotheby’s signs were out on the lawns already, in preparation for the lucrative flipping.
On driveway after driveway of the ex-Brooklynites, the former weekend people (and I confess that I too was once a weekend person, but something had happened to me over the course of the past two years that changed me even more than my change of home address), there were now Ukrainian flags. Not American flags. No one cared or even asked about the American town halls that had been closed for the past two years. Tyranny overseas was more pressing than the rights that had been suspended just up the road.
Otherwise, most things were almost back to normal! Almost pre-2020 normal!
The masks had recently come off. Hudson, New York, and Great Barrington, Massachusetts, the two cities nearest us, and, by chance, both left-leaning, had also been two of the maskiest and most coercive of places when it came to pandemic policies and cultures. Now businesses were being permitted to reopen.
(I’d been rejected from my Great Barrington synagogue—literally, they had returned my membership fee—because I’d dared to invite people over to my house at the depth of the pandemic—if they had wanted, as adults, to join me—to watch the Zoom Friday evening Shabbat service together. Shocking behavior on my part, I know.)
As if a switch had been flicked, now the cruel moral judgments, the two-tier society, the mandates, the coercions, the nasty looks, the desperate masked children with their laboring breath, the loneliness, the desolate centrally planned economies—were no more.
That memo from the political consultancy had gone out to the DNC, warning about how these policies spelled defeat in the midterms, and poof!—a whole retinue of mandates messaged as if they had been matters of life and death, a raft of Board of Health demands, a plethora of social strictures, and baroque instructions on how and when to discriminate against one’s fellow Americans—vanished, like the smoke from an unwelcome cigarette on a breezy veranda.
Overnight, a new concern, a new moral signifier, was presented, wholly formed: and it involved a conflict area half a world away. Now, war is always bad, and invasions are always cruel, but I could not help noticing that there are wars, refugees, invasions, and conflict areas around the world, and that only this one demanded the attentions of my irksomely cultish and uncritical former “tribe.” I could not help noticing that the dozens of devastated conflict areas and war zones being totally ignored by the ex-Brooklynites—from Ethiopia, where there had been 50,000 deaths since September 2021; to Sri Lanka, with its catastrophic food shortages; to Mexico’s drug war, which has led to 300,000 deaths; to Afghanistan, where since 2021 women have been, and still are being, rounded up and detained, or their movements restricted, and where child brides are forced into marriage and where the Taliban has not stopped its attacks on civilians1—do not involve white people who look like the ex-Brooklynites. These many, severe conflicts, for these and other reasons, are not attracting a lot of television cameras.
You’d think the ex-Brooklynites, with their expensive educations, would bear the complexities of these other conflicts in mind. But no; the ex-Brooklynites are so easily led, when it comes to anyone invoking their moral high ground.
When they are directed to pay attention to one conflict out of dozens and ignore the rest, no matter how dire the rest may be, they do so. Just as, when they were instructed to present their bodies uncritically to an untried mRNA injection and to offer up the bodies of their minor children, they did so. When they were asked to shun, and to discriminate against, their blameless neighbors, they did so.
So the great apparatus of messaging about COVID was switched off, almost overnight, as the politics clearly soured and as Republicans consolidated an increasingly popular, multiracially inclusive, trans-partisan-appealing freedom message; and the mainstream comms apparatus simply replaced the COVID drama with a new, equally gripping European-conflict drama.
