Feminist writer Naomi Wolf, once beloved by progressives, has decided to go a different direction in the last few years. She has written much about totalitarianism and believes the United States is marching swiftly along the road to such a dictatorship. Needless to say, her former comrades are outraged.

Recently, Wolf courageously wrote and published a long article, “Rethinking the Second Amendment: Can We Really Have Peace and Freedom Without Guns?” In this worthwhile essay, she dissects the Second Amendment, demonstrates why guns are necessary for self-defense and enjoyed by others for hunting and target practice, and explains how her husband, ex-military and an expert in firearms, trained her to shoot.

But Wolf doesn’t end her essay there.

Unlike so many who advocate for guns, Wolf then defends firearms as the final bulwark against government tyranny. She first writes: 

I am also re-examining 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.

You know that I see tyranny 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.

She then directs readers to look at places like Shanghai and Australia, the former historically lacking firearms, the latter stripped of most of their weapons 25 years ago. There the governments get away with being bullies and aggressors, in part because the people they intend to crush have no recourse or defense.

“You can hate guns,” Wolf writes. “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 she remains firm in her conviction that guns not only defend us against thieves, rapists, and other assailants, but also against a tyrannical government, which she believes has come close to reality here in the United States.

Like Wolf, most of us surely mourn the innocent dead and wounded of mass shootings. Fewer of us, I suspect, are aware of the weekly casualty lists in our large cities. Over the Fourth of July weekend, for example, 71 people were shot in Chicago, eight of them killed. After many of these acts of mayhem and violence, some in our media and some lawmakers call for stricter gun controls or confiscating guns altogether.

The problem with those arguments is that people shoot these guns. Some of them are insane, some bear a grievance of one kind or another, and many are members of street gangs. Rather than addressing the underlying causes of gun violence—the mentally unstable, the hoodlums that shoot up city streets, the infiltration of our country by violent drug cartels from south of our border—the feds and their supporters go after the instruments of this violence rather than the agents.

Meanwhile, tens of millions of ordinary Americans own guns, but they don’t use them to inflict death on neighbors and strangers. In fact, guns prevent hundreds of thousands of violent crimes every year.

To return to Wolf’s argument that the Second Amendment was also intended to stymie government tyranny: Suppose she is correct? Does that account for the Biden administration’s crackdown, its insistence on new gun laws, the moves to banish certain weapons and ammunition, the constant denigration of gun owners?

A few of Wolf’s points near the end of her essay, in which she looks at Bill Gates and the push for a global government, will seem to some readers as over-the-top speculation. Perhaps. But Wolf has spent several years studying these globalist maneuvers, and so we must wonder: What if her predictions prove correct? What if even just a few in the government want to take away firearms not to protect the American people, but instead to leave them defenseless?

“[I]t is becoming obvious even to us pacifists, vegans, and tree huggers,” Wolf writes near the end of her article, “that formerly free people who are unarmed are defenseless against the criminal tyrannies exerting massive violence and control upon them.” I’m doubtful that great numbers of pacifists favor guns, but mention Wolf’s premise to a lot of people—that she fears totalitarianism is at our doorstep—and their first words would probably be, “That could never happen here.”

Had you told those same people three years ago or so that the government would soon assume emergency powers, shut down businesses, schools, and churches, and order people to stay inside their homes, they would likely have given the same answer: “That could never happen here.”

But it did.

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Image Credit: Pxhere