OLBERMANN: My next guest spent a little time behind bars this week, courtesy of the NYPD. Feminist author Naomi Wolf was arrested Wednesday for refusing to obey a lawful order, for refusing to leave a sidewalk outside a Huffington Post awards ceremony honoring New York Governor Andrew Cuomo. She, of course, is also the co-founder of the American Freedom Campaign, author of the book “Give Me Liberty” and was a guest on the very first news hour I ever did, which was just a few years ago this month. Naomi Wolf joins me now. It’s good to see you.
NAOMI WOLF: It’s good to be out and to see you.
OLBERMANN: It’s good to be out. Did you ever anticipate saying that in this sort of — we’ve assumed this era is the non-protest, non argumentative, docile American public time? People would have voted — If we had to vote on this two months ago, people would have said, “Yeah that’s a pretty good description.” Would you have anticipated ever saying, “I just got out after my arrest during a protest?”
WOLF: Um, well I’m not surprised that there’s this massive protest movement, because that was bound to happen sooner or later, and because it is so powerful. I mean, I studied — as you know, in my book “End of America” — how democracies close down. And people said, “Well, us tell us how to open them up.” And so, I studied how they open up. And the number-one effective tool is mass protest, but it has to be a certain kind of protest. It has to be peaceful and enduring — long-lasting — and it has to disrupt business as usual.
So, now that people have begun to show up, they are starting to wake up and realize that they’re acting like Americans. This is what the Founders intended us to do. It’s not optional. The Founders didn’t say “You have a right to protest,” they said “You have an obligation, when your representatives are not listening to you, you have an obligation,” and they put the First Amendment first. It’s the most important obligation. Everything else follows from that. To peacefully assemble and petition government for redress of grievances, that doesn’t surprise me.
What does surprises me is that I actually didn’t — I wish you could have read the quote marks around “refusing to obey a lawful order,” because I actually refused to obey an unlawful order. I was — it’s quite amazing — I was jailed for standing on a corner outside an event to which I’d been invited, with my boyfriend, peacefully — after having ascertained what the permit was that governed the sidewalk — in order to obey the law, right? And so I was there obeying the law, and I was arrested because the official in white — who yelled at me to get off the sidewalk — I was frozen, I couldn’t do it, because I knew that to do it, I would be going against the rule of the law.
OLBERMANN: Basically giving the law up.
WOLF: Yes.
OLBERMANN: In exchange for the order part of the law and order, rather than law part.
WOLF: Exactly.
OLBERMANN: Did the Department of Homeland Security have anything to do with this?
WOLF: Well, I have no idea if they had anything to do with this phalanx of 30 or 40 police officers surrounding me and my partner, and taking us in when we were peacefully not breaking any laws on the sidewalk, but I do know that something very disturbing happened after we were put into a police van. We were supposed to be taken to the First Precinct — and, that’s the one that governors what happens on Hudson Street where we were arrested. But they got a call that the protesters had gone to the First Precinct with the lawyers of the National Lawyers Guild who were going to help us and meet us and represent us, and so they detoured — the police detoured — across town to the Seventh Precinct, and misled the protesters about our whereabouts, which is very disturbing. Because in America, you know, prisoners — even for a little while — are not supposed to be unaccountable.
OLBERMANN: Disappear.
WOLF: Disappear. Even more disturbing, we learned that — when the protesters arrived at Ericsson Street where the First Amendment — First Amendment, what a slip — where the First Precinct is, it was blocked off, and they said “What’s going on?” – they didn’t let any protesters or lawyers through, but let people in business suits through. And NYPD said Homeland Security has frozen Ericsson street.
So, to me as an American — as a New Yorker — this is very big news, for reasons I don’t have to explain to you. A federal agency can — because two middle-aged, you know, couch-potato intellectuals get arrested for not disobeying the law — they can freeze a New York City street?
OLBERMANN: But even if they weren’t freezing it, and the name was merely invoked — that’s its own problem.
WOLF: Exactly.
OLBERMANN: If a city police department is invoking this shadowy, national entity, that becomes its own threat to the First Amendment and freedom of assembly and all the rest.
WOLF: Keith, you’re completely right. And what baffles me is — where is The New York Times, investigating this?Where are our local newspapers? Where is the national newspaper? Because you block — you let Homeland Security block off — or even say Homeland Security’s blocked off — one street, they could cordon off downtown Chicago tomorrow. And it’s not, like, weapons of mass destruction or a natural disaster — It’s, you know, two random people standing on the sidewalk being the excuse to close down our civil society.
So, there’s another really scary thing, if you want me to keep scaring you — but this is scary for all of us — it’s not — it is not what happened to me and to my partner that is the worrying thing, the thing that I’m distressed about — it’s that people have got to understand that this could happen to absolutely anyone. For four or five years I’ve been saying — “You start with Guantanamo, history shows they start with the other — it gets closer and closer and someday they come for you when you were innocent and you have no recourse.”
When they were releasing us, the guy said, “Okay, I’m gonna let you go this time with a summons. But if you go down and rejoin your friends, the protesters, and you get arrested, it will be a real arrest next time. Here’s the camera” — he pointed to a camera — “It’ll take your photograph. Here’s the fingerprint machine. We’ll take your fingerprints, it will go into that database — a federal database — and it will follow you forever.”
And then I said, “But officer, I got arrested tonight when I was obeying the law. How do I get avoid getting arrested in the future?” And he didn’t dispute that I was obeying the law, he said “Well, the officers decided it was a safety issue.” And I said, “But then, what prevents any situation from being called a safety issue and trumping the law and how people are obeying the law?” And he didn’t answer, but referred me to a section of the criminal code. But that, too, is very scary.
OLBERMANN: We’ve given them the right to make up the law as they go along.
WOLF: You know, interesting. We haven’t given them — well, we’ve given it to them by sleeping on the job.
OLBERMANN: Exactly.
WOLF: But there’s something I really also want everybody to understand, which is why — there is this amazing montage of — here are people in this public park being told you can’t put up tents, here’s the mayor saying, “Well, I want to strike a balance,” — as if it’s up to them, right?
This is what’s happened — in the last 30 years, because the mass protests of the 1970′s — the moratorium, you know, workers’ rights, the Free Speech movement was very effective, right? Big, mass public protests, the civil rights movement — all those protests are illegal now, why? Because the powers that be realized this is a powerful tool.
So, there’s been this stealth, secret tactic for 30 years — in municipality after municipality — to pass secretive permit requirements so that — in Washington Square, you can’t rally now, and citizens can’t use a megaphone, but police can use a megaphone. And on and on, and so — technically, we have the First Amendment, but when you try to actually use the First Amendment, you find that there are all these secretive permits.
And the permit that I was told meant that my boyfriend and I couldn’t walk on the street, I looked it up — because I’m a reporter — it’s a permit that obliges the event holders to allow people to walk on the street. So, they just made it up and arrested us. And — and that’s what we need to refuse to tolerate. It’s not up to them.
The First Amendment is for public space to be public and citizens to have the right to free assembly. And, again, it’s not — “Does the mayor let us?” We have to take back that right, we have to, you know, absolutely wipe out these stealthy and really evil over-permitizations of our free speech.
OLBERMANN: And that’s why they’re there. Naomi Wolf, great thanks. Great to see you. Thanks for coming in.
