Facing the Beast, page 1
PRAISE FOR FACING THE BEAST
“When Western leaders abandoned reason and embraced the ideology of force several years ago, Naomi Wolf was one of few who understood instantly what was happening. She decided to tell the full truth about it all the time, no matter what. The result has been a thrilling inspiration to those of us who’ve followed it, and for the first time is collected here in one place. Read Facing the Beast to understand what bravery looks like.”
—TUCKER CARLSON
“In the crisis of our lives and of everything we call civilization, Naomi Wolf has been a prescient observer, a keen analyst, and brave fighter for truth and freedom. Everything in her life and career prepared her for this moment. We all owe her a debt of gratitude for what she has done and continues to do for the great cause. Like her last book, Facing the Beast stands as a testament to truth in times gone mad.”
—JEFFREY TUCKER, president, Brownstone Institute
“Today’s world has been constructed to divide us. Naomi Wolf has seen through the lies and deception. In her personal journey, described in Facing the Beast, she unequivocally came to understand the universal principle—that all of humanity is connected. Dr. Wolf fights for our God-given rights and freedoms. I am honored to call her friend.”
—EDWARD DOWD, author of Cause Unknown
Also by Naomi Wolf
The Beauty Myth:
How Images of Beauty Are Used against Women
Fire with Fire:
The New Female Power and How It Will Change the Twenty-First Century
Promiscuities:
The Secret Struggle for Womanhood
Misconceptions:
Truth, Lies, and the Unexpected on the Journey to Motherhood
The Treehouse:
Eccentric Wisdom from My Father on How to Live, Love, and See
The End of America:
Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot
Give Me Liberty:
A Handbook for American Revolutionaries
Vagina:
A New Biography
Outrages:
Sex, Censorship, and the Criminalization of Love
The Bodies of Others:
The New Authoritarians, COVID-19 and the War against the Human
Copyright © 2023 by Naomi Wolf.
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be transmitted or reproduced in any form by any means without permission in writing from the publisher.
Editor: Brianne Goodspeed
Project Manager: Rebecca Springer
Copy Editor: Kerri Landis-Grzybicki
Designer: Melissa Jacobson
v1.202310
ISBN 9781645022367 (paperback) | ISBN 9781645022374 (ebook) | ISBN 9781645022381 (audiobook)
Library of Congress Control Number: 202394673
Chelsea Green Publishing
White River Junction, Vermont, USA
London, UK
www.chelseagreen.com
For the noncompliant
CONTENTS
Introduction
1. A Lost Small Town
2. Opening Boxes from 2019
3. What Is a Miracle?
4. Principalities and Powers
5. Thinking Like a Tyrant
6. The Subtlety of Monsters
7. White Feathers
8. Rethinking the Second Amendment
9. The Next Thing
10. The Pfizer Documents
11. Facing the Beast
12. Thanksgiving Gathering
13. Twenty Will Not Come Again
14. How Lies Killed Books
15. Rock of Ages
16. Have the Ancient Gods Returned?
17. A Fall
18. Dear Conservatives, I Apologize
19. Red Sparkly Shoes
20. The Last Taboo
21. Not Dead Yet
22. Soup
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Notes
Introduction
This story begins in the “Before” world.
“Before” the years 2020 to 2022, when a set of policies based on abject lies posed an existential threat to our democracy and our way of life.
“Before” this likely AI-deployed set of lies, dispensed globally, targeted our West with its core traditions of free speech—and in the US, with its First Amendment—with arrant censorship.
“Before” the Left—the subculture that used to stand for human rights, freedom of speech, real science, critical thinking, and skepticism about Big Government and Big Corporations, let alone about their merger, and that used to fight against discrimination and inequality—fell into a trance in which that same group became champions of censorship, and of a two-tier society in which some people, as the pigs declared in Animal Farm, are “more equal” than others; and fell prey to magical thinking and cultlike behavior.
“Before” the media—which used to see itself as the source of investigation of elite powers; which used to ask questions about received narratives; which used to demand that its journalists produce evidence and independent verification before drawing conclusions in print—were bought out by Big Government via the CARES Act, and by Big Pharma directly, and by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, to the extent that almost all legacy media became unquestioning stenographers for interested parties aligned with the global powers who dictated the harmful nonsense.
I miss the “Before Times.”
Because I have studied the histories of the overthrowing of past democracies, and learned that many democracies have died incrementally; that tyrants’ attacks on liberty are often executed surreptitiously, or attributed to benign motives, and thus succeed in draining people’s freedoms; or by enforcing bit by bit tiny compliances that add up to huge compliances, any of which would never have been considered by the same population without revolt, if the curtain was brought down all at once—I thought it was important to keep a kind of journal of these changes as I witnessed them.
This book is a memoir of how our “Before” world—that lasted up until March 2020—became, through a slow boil and through various shocks to its core institutions—this “After” world of tyranny, sadism, and forced inequality.
I have been an activist defending the Constitution for the past three-plus decades. As a result of my work identifying and fighting earlier threats to democracy and free speech, I was able to see, early in 2020, the inevitable implications for our democracy and for our country as a whole, in the rollout of pandemic and lockdown and then mandate narratives and policies.
Given my previous work, it was easy to guess what all these policies would quickly do to us. It was easy for me to foretell that the immediate deployment of mass censorship of critics of these policies; the ramped-up State surveillance; the forced closures of schools, places of worship, and businesses; the unconstitutional declarations that we must not assemble, beyond a certain small number of people, even in private homes; the violation of the Nuremberg Laws and the most basic international human rights laws that guarantee bodily integrity and informed medical consent, represented mRNA vaccine mandates—would utterly transform our nation, and the nations of the West, into post-democratic societies; into societies that may look pretty much the same on the surface (as I argued in my 2008 bestseller The End of America that post-democratic societies would)—but that the heart of their freedom would be annihilated, leaving intact pretty-looking vassal states, with no real autonomy left for their citizens, where the nations of the free West so recently prevailed.
I saw early what a dangerous time it was and is: 2020 to 2023.
In my 2008 book about dying democracies, I had described the threats to liberty that prevailed at that time, in the George Bush Jr. era, as deriving primarily from the Right. But even then I was not deceived by partisanship assumptions about fascism, as I learned from my study of earlier totalitarian and fascist regimes and leaders that authoritarians of the Left and the Right are exactly the same; they take the same ten steps to ensure the death of democracies, and do the same things to propagandize their subject people, to silence dissent, to arrest opposition leaders, to create surveillance societies and prisons outside the rule of law, and eventually to bring about emergency law, which is Step Ten.
Since 2020, in America at least, these threats to our country have been deployed largely from the Left. Though I come “from the Left,” I had no problem recognizing this.
The threats to liberty worldwide had no partisan quality as they were “metapartisan,” being handed down from the WEF (World Economic Forum), the WHO (World Health Organization), the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), nongovernment foundations such as Bill Gates’s, and allied Big Tech leaders, as I described in my 2022 book The Bodies of Others. You could see the exact same pandemic, lockdown, and mandate policies rolled out in conservative-led Australia, in conservative-led UK, in liberal-led Canada, in liberal-led France, and so on.
Other people also spoke up, as the dark shadow of fascism descended on our nation under the cloak of a “public health emergency.”
Some others who had been identified with the US Left were also speaking out against the public health response to the pandemic. They also spoke out about the censorship regime that so visibly descended on us. Glenn Greenwald, Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying, Joe Rogan, Robert Kennedy Jr., and others, though identified with the Left, held the principles of the Constitution and basic human rig hts above partisanship.
Other heroes, too, arose in this dark time, in ways that also transcended partisanship. Many of these were heroes of real medicine, real science, real public health. Some were doctors: Dr. Peter McCullough, Dr. Pierre Kory, Dr. Paul Alexander, Dr. Henry Ealy, Dr. Sherri Tenpenny, and many others. Some were scientists and economists; the signatories and the convener of the Great Barrington Declaration, for instance: Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, Dr. Martin Kulldorff, Dr. Sunetra Gupta, and economist Jeffrey Tucker. These all refused to tolerate, or even accept as settled “science,” policies that they knew would destroy schooling, damage the development of children, and lead to mass starvation.
Some heroes for truth came from the world of finance—critics such as Ed Dowd, formerly of BlackRock, who raised an early alarm about data showing excess deaths and disabilities post-mRNA vaccination. Or Steve Kirsch, an entrepreneur who also crunched the numbers on these harms, independently confirming the “democide”—death by government—that Mr. Dowd had found. These critics, whose training was in the world of hard data, perhaps spoke out because they simply could not tolerate the fibs and bad math that undergirded “the narrative”; as well as out of concern for their fellow human beings’ health, and even survival.
There were—are—many heroes and heroines.
But not nearly enough.
There were—are—many millions more quislings and colluders, as I learned upon this painful journey.
* * *
My own life changed utterly, because of my taking actions that would have suited the “Before” world, but that I took in an “After” reality.
Until the COVID era, I had lived a fortunate life. I had been a well-known feminist nonfiction writer for thirty-five years; I’d published eight bestselling books. I had lived in Washington, D.C., and served as a campaign consultant to President Bill Clinton’s re-election campaign; I had advised Vice President Al Gore. I’d later moved to a charming apartment in Manhattan’s West Village, where I’d eventually, as a single mom, raised a beautiful family. I appeared on every news outlet, wrote for every major media platform, and was a columnist for outlets ranging from the Guardian, to the Soros-funded Project Syndicate, to the Sunday Times of London.
In addition to these professional validations, I was privileged to be part of the cultural “scene” made up of influencers on the progressive Left. It was a satisfying lifestyle: film premieres and art openings, book parties and galas. All these events reassured those of us attending that we were at the center of the universe, and for good reason; and that our worldview was the right one—indeed, the only one.
I had been treated as a media fixture for those thirty-five years, for doing what I had always done—speaking up for civil liberties and the Constitution and reporting on women’s health issues—especially on sexual and reproductive health issues, my beat.
During the pandemic and the lockdown, then, I did what I have always done; I investigated the myths and narratives that I saw forming online and in news outlets and asked public questions about them. For me, this was nothing new. By doing so, I realized that many of the diktats of the period were untrue. I saw quickly that the COVID-19 maps on the front pages of the New York Times, and the Johns Hopkins University COVID-19 map cited by almost every other news outlet in the US, were all produced without giving the reader any access to the underlying datasets, for example. As a tech CEO whose website specializes in presenting the same kind of government data (application programming interfaces—APIs), I saw immediately that there was no way to trust these COVID-19 maps.
I knew from having written The End of America that the fact that we were, in July of 2020, already at Step Ten of the Ten Steps to Fascism—emergency law—represented a very dangerous situation. I knew from having read my way, as a former graduate student, through many of the last 400 years’ worth of English memoirs and novels, that waves of infectious diseases, ranging from yellow fever to typhus to cholera, had passed over both Britain and America, but that these diseases had never been treated as we were treating this purportedly serious infectious disease, COVID-19. Never had multiple generations been advised to crowd together into closed indoor spaces, only to be denied light, air, and exercise, during an epidemic. Indeed, from Florence Nightingale in the Crimean War, to the reformers of the Progressive Era, health pioneers knew well that doing this was, in fact, deadly.
So many “truths” of the COVID narrative made no sense to me.
As I have always done with official narratives, I questioned these “truths.”
But the world had changed. My questioning, instead of continuing to solidify my cultural status, called forth waves of bots and trolls, threats and harassment. My right-on, progressive friends let me know that they did not approve of the issues that I was raising.
Then came late 2020 and early 2021: the launch of the presentation of the mRNA injections as “the only way out” of the lockdowns. I recall reading Moderna’s website, which boasted that the company’s mRNA technology, and the spike protein in the vaccine formulation, would enter every cell in the human body.
I am an English major—not a medical doctor or a scientist. But I remember thinking: Every cell? In your ovaries? Your heart? Your liver? Your digestive tract? Your eyelashes? I have a neurological condition—spina bifida occulta; and I knew from experience how delicate was the nearly miraculous activity of healthy nerve conduction and how easily it could go awry. The nerves? I wondered. The myelin sheaths of the nerves? And I wondered how that—spike protein and mRNA entering the cells of the myelin sheaths of the nerves—would affect the fragile electrical conduction that allows for healthy nerve processes; and I decided to pass.
This personal, rational decision about my own body—one related to my own private health issues—abruptly thrust me into a new social and even legal category; one that was created in the start of 2021: that of second-class citizen; “anti-vaxxer” (note the trashy double xs); dissident; weirdo; “conspiracy theorist”; and, though I remained a classical liberal, “Trumper.”
The moment I began asking basic questions on my Twitter feed specifically about the novel mRNA injections—the kinds of questions I had asked for three decades about silicone breast implants; about high estrogen levels in birth control pills; about dangerous IUDs; about vaginal mesh, or industrial hospital birthing practices and high for-profit C-section rates—my bio changed everywhere, online, and all at once. Instead of being described as a leading voice of Third Wave feminism, with a string of honors, degrees, and awards after my name, I was now identified from the first sentence, on Wikipedia and everywhere else, as a “conspiracy theorist.” Not being aware yet that AI had already been deployed journalistically, I did not even understand how that overnight change in my reputation had been accomplished.
I began to be left out of the social events that had resumed, in New York, after almost everyone had rushed to get vaccinated; I was cut off the guest lists that had once sought to have me. Hostesses told me that I was no longer welcome, as the hosts were “being careful.”
Many journalists who had been my colleagues and some even my friends, and who had had no problem in the “Before” world seeking out favors and book endorsements from me, remained silent as I was portrayed as a lunatic and a QAnon aficionado. Others, who knew me and knew better, even joined in the melee.
* * *
After President Joe Biden gave his notorious and factually baseless December 2021 speech about how the unvaccinated were bringing “severe illness and death” onto themselves and everyone else, my friends and even some of my relatives began to shun me—and my equally scandalously unvaccinated husband.
But it’s here now and it’s spreading and it’s gonna increase. . . . We are looking at a winter of severe illness and death for the unvaccinated—for themselves, their families and the hospitals they’ll soon overwhelm.1
There was no place left for us in communities that aligned with nonsense.
We had left New York City at the start of the pandemic and had moved into a little house in the woods in the Hudson Valley. Despite our physical separation from the heart of the culture, this bizarre ostracism really stung. And it went on and on. We were left out of family Thanksgivings. One of my best friends moved out of the city to another country, without saying goodbye; later she explained in an email that she had been “disappointed” in me for my position on the vaccine and the lockdowns. Another one of my oldest friends told me that I could not have dinner with him because “he does not sit indoors with unvaccinated people.” A beloved elderly relative told me I could not even see him outside because he “does not sit outside with unvaccinated people.” A family Christmas vacation was canceled at the last minute, after the President told all our loved ones that we would kill them with our very presence. No one in that world could hear me when I kept explaining that the vaccines did nothing to affect transmission.
