Facing the Beast, page 5
I am Jewish, and I have no idea who Mary really is, but some time ago I stopped trying to fit spiritual needs into boxes with labels. It just came to me in that moment to try again; so, I prayed, “Mother Mary, please look after my little dog.”
And I wept and wept but felt comforted. Surely, she would.
That night I dreamt that Mary showed me the empty physical body of Mushroom, truly spent, almost broken with age. It was not a kindness to wish him back inside that body. And she then showed me with a gesture a lovely sight—Mushroom, but in a just-grown-past-puppy body, sleeping peacefully, the warmth of health and youth on him again. Wherever he was, he was fine.
“What’s a miracle?” Did my subconscious produce a meaningless wish fulfillment, a fairy tale for me, just when I needed one, as Dr. Freud would have maintained? Maybe. Did an answer from the universe produce itself, making use of a symbol system that brought me comfort, just when I needed it to do so? Maybe.
Did a neighbor dump trash in our river that led to a rose hovering just under the water for ten days while our dog was dying? Maybe. Did the universe show us a symbol of perfect resilience, renewal, and beauty, just when we needed it? Maybe.
Why must these possibilities be dichotomous? Why must it be either/or? Perhaps the world in which we live is one in which all these things can be true at once.
The rose had teased my consciousness; the mystery of its appearance led me to look at saints, and at Mary figures bearing roses. I learned that Saint Therese is “the Little Flower,” and that many believe that Saint Therese and Mother Mary will grace a petitioner with an unexpected rose, in response to prayer. Seeing the images online, when I searched, of beautiful saintly women, or of the Divine Mother herself, holding roses in their arms, was a balm.
As someone who had nurtured a little being, I needed to see a Divine Mother caring for us, and maybe even caring for the little creatures of this world, helping them into the next.
My own faith tradition did not have this kind of figure. But did that really matter? Are these divisions even relevant anymore? Was the miracle the rose itself—or the fact that I noticed it enough to learn about other ways the Divine Mother may possibly manifest in this suffering world?
A few weeks before Mushroom had started to fade, I was walking down our rural street; I was wrestling with the vast crimes committed against humanity—by pharma, by Davos, by tech, perhaps by Satan Himself; crimes whose documentation are the work I do every day, these days.
I felt overwhelmed; that any strength or skills I had were insignificant against the monumental powers arrayed against humanity. I could not see a way to victory, let alone to the survival of all the things we hold dear as free men and women. I was at the end of my ability to see a way ahead. “How can we ever overcome such adversaries?” I asked—Whoever was out there.
The road had been dark, as evening was falling, and the Taconic mountain range had been in shadow. But as I glanced up, the entire massive range of mountains lit up slowly, from one end to the other, with a blazing golden light. Half-a-state’s length of pure gold light overspread the entire face of the mountain range and extended hundreds of feet high into the evening sky.
I started laughing.
It was as if God was saying, “Don’t be so silly. Just look at me.”
Was the depth of my despair answered by a massive blaze of gold, just when I needed a miracle?
Or was the miracle simply that I happened to look up and notice something I usually overlook—that miracles are simply all around us?
Or could it be both?
What is a miracle?
CHAPTER FOUR
Principalities and Powers
In the depths of lockdown, I spoke at a gathering for medical freedom advocates in a little community center in the Hudson River Valley. I cherish this group of activists: they had steadfastly continued to gather, and they kept on gathering, undaunted. By joining their relaxed potluck dinners around unidentifiable but delicious salads and chewy homemade breads, I was able to remember what it meant to be part of a sane human community.
Children played—as normal—frolicking around and speaking and laughing and breathing freely; not suffocating in masks like little zombies or warned by terrified adults to keep from touching other human children. Dogs were petted. Neighbors spoke to one another at normal distances, without fear or phobias. Bands played much-loved folk songs or cool little indie rock numbers they had written themselves, and no one, graceful or awkward, feared dancing. People sat on the house’s steps shoulder to shoulder, in human warmth, and chatted over glasses of wine or homemade cider. No one asked anyone personal medical questions.
Meanwhile, what had been human community outside of that little group, and outside other isolated normal communities—and outside of a handful of normal states in America—became more and more surreal, terrifying, and unrecognizable.
The rest of the world, at least on the progressive side in the United States, became increasingly cultlike and insular in its thinking. As the months starting from March of 2020 passed, friends and colleagues of mine who were highly educated, and who had been lifelong critical thinkers, journalists, editors, researchers, doctors, philanthropists, teachers, psychologists—began to repeat only talking points from MSNBC and CNN, and soon overtly refused to look at any sources—even peer-reviewed sources in medical journals—even CDC data—that contradicted those talking points. These people literally said to me, when I offered primary-source evidence that challenged their views, “I don’t want to see that; don’t show it to me.” Eventually they started to say, “This debate is over.” Eventually they would storm off, or hang up, when I persisted.
It became clear soon enough that if they absorbed information contradictory to “the narrative” that was consolidating, they risked losing social status, maybe even jobs; doors would close, opportunities would be lost. One well-educated woman told me she did not want to see any unsanctioned information because she was afraid of being disinvited from her bridge group. Hence the refrain: “I don’t want to see that; don’t show it to me.”
Friends and colleagues of mine who had been skeptical their whole adult lives of Big Agriculture—who only shopped at Whole Foods, who would never let their kids eat sugar or processed meat, or ingest a hint of Red Dye No. 2 in candy, or eat candy itself, for that matter, in some cases—lined up to inject into their bodies, and then offered up the bodies of their minor children for the same reason, an mRNA gene-therapy injection, whose clinical trials would not end for two more years. These parents announced on social media proudly that they had done this with the bodies of their children. When I pointed out gently that the trials would not end till 2023, they yelled at me and blocked me.
The progressive “woke” part of the ideological world—my people, my “tribe,” my whole life—became more and more uncritical, less and less able to reason. Friends and colleagues who were wellness-oriented, and who, their whole adult lives, had known the dangers of Big Pharma—and who would only use Burt’s Bees on their babies’ bottoms and sunscreen with no endocrine-disrupting additives on themselves—lined up to take an experimental gene therapy; why not? And worse, they crowded around, like the stone throwers in Shirley Jackson’s short story “The Lottery,” to lash out at and to shun anyone who raised the most basic questions about Big Pharma and its highly compensated spokesmodels. Their critical thinking, but worse, their entire knowledge base about that industry, seemed to have evaporated magically into the ether.
Whole belief systems were abandoned painlessly overnight as if these communities were in the grip of a collective hallucination, like the witch craze of the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries in Northern Europe. Intelligent, informed people suddenly saw things that were not there, and were unable to see things that were before their faces.
Feminist health activists, who knew perfectly well the histories of how the pharmaceutical and medical industries had experimented on the bodies of women with disastrous results, lined up to take an injection that, by 2021, women were reporting was wreaking painful havoc on the female menstrual cycle. These same feminist health activists had spoken out earlier, as they should have, about Big Pharma’s and Big Medicine’s colonization of women’s reproductive health processes. They had spoken out about issues ranging from women’s access to safe contraception to abortion rights, to the rights of mothers to a midwife delivery or to a birthing room, to women’s rights to labor without being rushed into unnecessary C-sections, to women’s rights to store breast milk at work or to breastfeed their babies in public.
But these formerly reliable custodians of medical skepticism and of women’s health rights were silent as such voices as former HHS official Dr. Paul Alexander warned that spike protein from mRNA vaccines accumulated in the ovaries (and testes), and as vaccinated women reported hemorrhagic menses—double-digit percentages in a Norwegian study reporting heavier bleeding.1 Many women also reported blood clotting. Women even reported post-menopausal bleeding; mothers reported their vaccinated twelve-year-old girls suddenly got their periods upon being injected—but some young girls endured two periods a month.
Almost no one out of the luminaries of feminist health activism who had spent decades speaking out on behalf of women’s health and female bodies, raised a peep above the parapet. Those two or three of us who did were very visibly smeared, in some cases threatened, and in many ways silenced.
When I broke this story of menstrual dysregulation post-vaccination on Twitter in summer of 2021, I was suspended, as I described earlier. Matt Gertz works at CNN and Media Matters. The former is a channel on which I had appeared for decades; the latter, a group whose leadership members I’ve known for years, and in one instance, with whom I’ve worked.
Despite both of his employers having sought out professional association with me, Matt Gertz publicly called me a “pandemic conspiracy theorist” upon my first having warned of vaccinated women’s reports of menstrual dysregulation, and elsewhere on social media accused me of “crack-pottery.”2
Shame on me for doing journalism. I broke the post-vaccination menstrual dysregulation story by doing what I always do: by using the same methodology that I used in writing The Beauty Myth (about eating disorders) and Misconceptions (about obstetrics), and Vagina (about female sexual health).
I listened to women: that radical act.
The New York Times rebroke my story of menstrual dysregulation ten months later, January 2022, in a different year, after millions of women readers were physically harmed by the Times’s lack of decent reporting any earlier, and by the newspaper’s uncritical acceptance of soundbites from captured regulatory authorities.3 There has been no retraction or apology from Mr. Gertz, from the New York Times, or from other news outlets such as DailyMail.co.uk, who did not challenge the consensus calling me crazy in 2021, but then began reporting my story as if it were their own.4
Feminist health advocates—who know about routine hysterectomies at menopause; about vaginal mesh that had to be surgically removed; about silicone breast implants that leaked or burst and had to be recalled or replaced; about Mirena IUDs that had to be removed as they caused perforated organs or fluid buildup in the skull; about the thalidomide that deformed babies’ limbs in utero; about birth control pills at hormonal doses that heightened heart attack risks and stroke risks and that lowered women’s libidos; about routine C-sections to speed up turnover at hospitals; about the sterilization of low-income women and girls, and women and girls of color, without informed consent—were silent now about the unproven nature of mRNA vaccines, and about coercive policies to force injections, that violated the Nuremberg Code and other laws. They were silent as a whole generation of young women who have not yet had their babies was forced to take an mRNA vaccine (and sometimes second vaccine and booster) with what would be catastrophic effects on their reproductive health, in order simply to return to campus or to get or to keep a job. The Our Bodies, Ourselves website? From the legendary women’s health advocates, you can now learn “All About Orgasms” and find out anything you need to know about “chestfeeding,” but there is not a peep about the dangers to fertility or menstrual health in the subject categories that address those topics.5 NARAL Pro-Choice America? Where were they? Crickets. The author of the pregnancy bible What to Expect When You’re Expecting, Heidi Murkoff, who warned pregnant women not to drink, smoke or eat sushi? This is from an ad for a book of hers, Eating Well When You’re Expecting6:
At the heart of the book are hundreds of pressing questions every mother-to-be has: Is it true I shouldn’t eat any food cooked with alcohol? Will the caffeine in coffee cross into my baby’s bloodstream? . . . Is all sushi off limits? . . . I keep dreaming about a hot fudge sundae—can I indulge?
What was this woman doing now—this woman, trusted by millions of moms-to-be, who knew perfectly well that what a mother ingests, crosses into the baby’s bloodstream?
She was having a cozy sit-down chat with CDC director Dr. Rochelle Walensky, for her What to Expect Project website. In that chat, Murkoff’s prior sober caution about introducing any potentially dangerous substance into an expecting mother’s body had flown out of the window: “The two discuss everything from why the COVID-19 vaccine is safe for pregnant women to the risks of not getting vaccinated.”7
Where were all the responsible feminist health activists, in the face of this global, unconsenting, uninforming, illegal experimentation on women’s bodies, and then on children, and then on babies?
People who had been up in arms for decades about eating disorders or about the coercive social standards that led to—horrors—leg shaving, were silent about an untested injection that was minting billions for Big Pharma; an injection that entered, according to Moderna’s own press material, every cell in the body, which would thus include the uterus, ovaries, endometrium.
The amnesia extended to feminist legal theory. Feminist jurists such as Justice Sonia Sotomayor and Justice Elena Kagan debated President Biden’s vaccine mandates on the week of January 7, 2022—as if they had never heard of the legal claims for Roe v Wade: privacy law. Both Justice Kagan and Justice Sotomayor have long, distinguished histories as defendants of bodily autonomy and privacy rights—at least for women when it comes to abortion. As Politico reported of Justice Kagan,
The Supreme Court’s ruling on privacy rights served as a basis for its later decision, Roe v Wade and as former Sen[ator] Barbara Boxer had stated, “I have no reason to think anything else except that [Kagan] would be a very strong supporter of privacy rights because everyone she worked for held that view.”8
Except . . . when it came to vaccine mandates, the two justices aren’t “strong supporter[s] of privacy rights.” With medical mandates, there are no privacy rights for anyone, ever.
Indeed, Justice Kagan seemed suddenly, after decades of supporting privacy rights, to not see a contradiction. Her career-long philosophical foundation that had resulted in a consistent view, when it came to abortion rights, that citizens had a right to physical privacy in medical decision-making—“My body, my choice”—“It is between a woman and her doctor”—vanished abruptly, along with her expensive education and all of her knowledge of the Constitution.
Justice Sotomayor, for her part, said, on December 10, 2021, that it was “madness” that the state of Texas wanted to “substantially suspend[ed] a constitutional guarantee: a pregnant woman’s right to control her own body.” Her tone was one of high dudgeon at the thought that anyone might override this right. But when it came to Justice Sotomayor’s discussion on January 7, 2022, less than four weeks later, of President Biden’s vaccine mandates, that awareness of a clear constitutional right to privacy was nowhere to be seen; it too had vanished into the ether, along with Heidi Murkoff’s understanding of placentas and blood circulation. Part of Justice Sotomayor’s brain seems to have simply shut down at the word “vaccines.” Though it was the same woman in the same court, with the same Constitution before her, the justice could no longer manage the Kantian imperative of consistent reasoning.9
Lifelong activists for justice, for the Constitution, human rights, and the rule of law—friends and colleagues of mine who are LGBTQ rights activists; the American Civil Liberties Union itself; activists for racial equality; constitutional lawyers who teach at all the major universities and who run the law reviews; activists who argue against excluding anyone from any profession or access based on gender; almost all of them, at least on the progressive side of the spectrum—were silent; as a comprehensive, systematic, cruel, titanic discrimination society was erected in a matter of months in such cities as New York City, formerly the great melting pot and equalizer; and as whole states such as California adopted a system much like apartheid systems based on other physical characteristics, in regimes that these same proud advocates for equality and inclusion had boycotted in college.
And yet now these former heroes for human rights, and for equal justice under law, stood by calmly or even enthusiastically as a massive edifice of discrimination was constructed. And then they colluded. Without even a fight or a murmur.
And they had their “vaccinated-only” parties, and their segregated fashion galas, and their nonprofit-hosted discussions in medically segregated New York City midtown hotels over expensive lunches served by staffers in masks—lunches celebrating luminaries of the civil rights movement or of the LGBTQ rights movement or the immigrants’ rights movement, or the movement to help girls in Afghanistan get access to schools that they had been prevented from attending—invitations which I received, but of which I could not make use, because—I was prevented from attending.
And these elite justice advocates enjoyed the celebrations of their virtues and of their values and did not notice that they had become—in less than a year—exactly what they had spent their adult lives professing most to hate.
