In A Wrinkle in Time, author Madeleine L’Engle describes a town called Camazotz, a suburban community held captive by a dark force. There, all the houses are exactly alike , small square boxes painted gray. The same number of dull flowers dot each yard. Children at play bounce their balls and skip their ropes in perfect unison. Conformity is the law.
The key to establishing this uniformity, it becomes clear, is to create a network of citizen informants to report children whose play is not quite right, who throw their balls into the air defiantly instead of bouncing them in time.
I can’t help but wonder if the 1962 children’s classic was on Gov. Tim Walz’s (D-MN) required reading list in grade school — and if this vignette inspired his COVID-19-era leadership in Minnesota. Walz’s COVID-19 hotline, launched in March 2020 to promote Camazotz-like community policing, betrays misanthropy for his constituents and an authoritarian vision for the future of our country.
“In wake of the governor's stay-at-home order, which still allows people to leave their homes for fresh air and runs to stores for essential needs, a hotline has been established that allows anyone to report groups of people that aren't following social distancing measures,” the announcement read.
The site, monitored by law enforcement until November 2020, long after Black Lives Matter protests resulted in $550 million in damages to downtown Minneapolis, fielded more than 10,000 emails from Minnesotans snitching on their neighbors. One concerned citizen reported a game of pick-up basketball. Others reported a church service that didn’t meet the governor’s “legal requirements” and a workout class in a local park. Another exposed an illicit birthday party, along with the offender’s name and address.
Violations of Walz’s pandemic-era policies, including mask mandates, business closures and social distancing guidelines, carried penalties of 90 days in jail or fines of up to $1,000. After facing complaints, Walz defended his plan and refused to move the hotline from the government website . “We’re not going to take down a phone number that people can call to keep their families safe.” And later , “it’s for their own good.”
Walz’s method is more than an eerie footnote from a crisis passed — it’s a hallmark of authoritarian governments, a tool wielded by dictators to quash dissent.
A 1935 report by the Communist Party Central Committee Secretary in Soviet Russia documented a network of 27,650 resident police agents and 270,777 informants employed by authorities, incentivized to report on friends and family. Stalin’s penal code included “ actions, thoughts, or lack of actions ” as punishable offenses. In his 2007 book The Whisperers, professor Orlando Figes chronicled intimate stories of humiliation and turmoil during Soviet purges. Stalin's regime reduced people to “a breed of whisperers ,” relying heavily on “mutual surveillance,” urging families to report on each other in communal living spaces and report “disloyalty.”
Modern tyrants have taken notes. Putin’s policies promote a “ necessary self-detoxification ” of anti-Kremlin sentiment by snitching on friends and neighbors. China’s band of “ student information officers ” help the Communist Party root out professors who show signs of disloyalty to President Xi Jinping.
We know innately that this tactic is not merely a subversive bid for information. By pitting neighbor against neighbor, friend against friend, parent against child, it cuts at the heart of our human experience, shreds the social contracts that bind our institutions and relationships, and finally, makes freedom a slave to safety by eroding our courage.
Walz knows this and counts on our conformity. On a “White Dudes for Harris” fundraising call in late July, he said the quiet part out loud, quipping , “One person’s socialism is another person’s neighborliness.”
Here is a bold-faced admission from a leader of the party advocating historical amnesia. Working with a compliant press, Walz would memory-hole the consolidation of government power through draconian lockdowns and medical coercion, all under the seductive guise of public safety.
A stab of recognition should pierce the hearts of those who were raised on L’Engle’s admonitions. Walz and the party he represents would very much like to live in Camazotz.
Several years ago, Charlotte Jones Voiklis, L’Engle’s granddaughter, uncovered three pages that had been cut from the original manuscript of A Wrinkle in Time. As Douglas Perry of the Wall Street Journal notes , the book is not a simple allegory about the dangers of authoritarianism. “Instead, it’s about the risk of any country — including a democracy — placing too much value on security.”
“… You don’t love security enough so that you guide your life by it, Meg,” Meg’s father explains to her.
“I still don’t see why security isn’t a good thing," Meg says. "Why, Father?”
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“I’ve come to the conclusion,” he replies, “that it’s the greatest evil there is. Suppose your great great grandmother, and all those like her, had worried about security? They’d never have gone across the land in flimsy covered wagons. Our country has been greatest when it has been most insecure.”
L’Engle wrote A Wrinkle in Time for more than schoolchildren in 1962. She wrote it for anyone in dire need of clarity and courage. She wrote it for us.
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