Major issues of the day tend to fall along political and ideological lines. But not always. Some matters are so urgent and so threatening that partisan political ideology need not apply. When you have something as crucial as the erasure of freedom in the West, you can get all sorts of folks rallying around.

The statist overreach and overkill when it came to Covid is a clear case in point. A heavyweight Democrat scion such as Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has long been speaking out on such matters. And when a long-standing leftist and feminist such as Naomi Wolf also shows up with all guns blazing, you know you better sit up and take notice. Fear of tyranny is not just some right-wing conspiracy…

Naomi Wolf has been around for a while and has made quite a name for herself, with critically received volumes such as The Beauty Myth. In her brand new book, The Bodies of Others (All Seasons Press, 2022) she is as feisty as ever. Wolf has been speaking out about the lockdowns, the mandates, the forced vaccinations, and the like for some time now. She does not hold back here.

The subtitle tells us where she is heading: ‘The New Authoritarians, Covid-19 and the War Against the Human.’ Her main concern is the erosion of our freedoms and basic human rights – not to keep us safe, but to grant unprecedented powers to elitist minorities and globalist bodies.

In 20 meaty and well-documented chapters, she makes the case for why we all should be very afraid of where things are heading as statists exploit crises or exaggerate them in order to further consolidate power and control. Wealthy and powerful elites gain in such scenarios while the masses suffer – greatly.

Although focused primarily on America, Wolf has plenty to say about England, Europe, and even Australia. And the facts, figures, and stories she shares about the scene in the US should be of help to whoever is reading this book. The overall thrust of it remains the same regardless of what country you are in.

She reminds us that America has had many, and often much worse, outbreaks of infectious diseases in its past, such as the smallpox outbreak of 1775-82 and the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918-19. Europe too has had such outbreaks. Yet even then, freedoms remained intact and total lockdowns never took place.

Never mind that early on many experts were warning against lockdowns and other coercive measures. Says Wolf:

‘The masking, the enclosure, the isolation, the lack of community, fresh air and exercise, the fear, the cabin fever, the generations piled on top of one another, the alienation engendered by computer screens – they all took their toll. People grew pale, fearful, obsessive, phobic, and sad. And unsurprisingly, many got sick and many died.’

Of course, the elites and politicians and ‘health experts’ calling the shots never paid the price for any of this. While we were all locked in our homes (here in Melbourne we were held prisoners for 23 hours a day, with only a 5km travel allowance), the elites were still living the good life.

They were not only getting their cushy salaries paid for by the taxpayer, but for the most part, they could freely roam about at the beachfront properties. Lockdowns were no biggie for them. Says Wolf:

‘This somber catastrophe … morphed into a uniform, top-down, almost cozy “lifestyle” that was, as a form of house arrest, tolerable. That is, if you were affluent. What we did not know was that the “academic” studies, the media messaging, and the tools for the cozy lifetime all derived from, and then benefited, the same group.’

And we need to avoid the misnomer ‘quarantine’ – what used to happen to the sick. What happened to us who were mostly healthy were lockdowns:

‘Totalitarian and fascist societies have long used mass restrictions of movement, curfews, and other ways of restricting free association and free movement to keep their citizens in check. North Korea and China have cordoned off entire regions and put them under no-movement rules.’

She of course discusses the main culprits here, including Big Tech, Big Pharma, and the various globalist bodies such as the UN, the WHO, and the WEF. She quotes elites like Klaus Schwab who told adoring audiences two years ago that everything must be transformed as part of a Great Reset. Wolf tells us what old systems are now fully at risk:

‘Privacy, paper, and metal money, the ability to drive a car without being tracked, the nation-state, human expression, human touch, cultural activities, churches, mosques, and synagogues, town halls, theaters and concert halls, democratic governance, a free press, schools and universities, books and libraries, and the right to decide what happens to one’s body, property and family…’

The list goes on and on: everything must change in order to bring about the elites’ dystopia. And it is so very odd that we actually need reminding of what life was like just a few short years ago, but she does do that:

‘Before the pandemic, people did not need a subscription to enter human civilisation and community. People went to church. No data was harvested. Their kids went to school. No data are harvested when a teacher reads to the class from a book or writes an equation on a blackboard. Nor were data generated when kids played together at recess, or on sports teams, or when they performed a class play…’

This is our new normal. The elites do not want us going back to life as we knew it. Two items I noticed on social media confirm these fears. Even though Covid is, in many ways, seen as a thing of the past for most people, the social engineers will not let go of their power trips. Justin Trudeau in Canada is insisting that the unvaxxed are not allowed to ride in trains or fly in planes. And in South Australia, the leftist government has declared a ‘climate emergency’. 

Covid was simply a test run for even ‘greater’ crises, and ‘climate change’ was always a major part of this. To ‘save the planet’ we must be forced to relinquish most of the rights and freedoms we once took for granted. Schwab and Bill Gates and others have long spruiked climate alarmism as part of their advertised goal to reshape society.

And as Wolf reminds us, these ‘crises’ and ‘emergencies’ are never-ending:

‘By the end of 2021, we were still being spoken of as being “in the middle of a pandemic” … in pandemic time, time has ceased to be linear. It was now always pandemic time. “The middle of the pandemic” kept shifting so that it had no actual chronological meaning. It was always the eternal now … with no recourse to objective metrics.’

As one who is quite familiar with both history and current events, including how tyrannies arise, she has no time for things like mandatory vaccines:

‘The vaccine passport platform is the first step toward a social credit system, like the one in China that enslaves a billion people. In China, the CCP can find any dissident in five minutes because of the 360-degree surveillance of the social credit system.’

The West is not far away from all of this. Indeed, what 2020-22 had clearly demonstrated was ‘the helter-skelter desertion of classical liberalism’s – modern civilisation’s – most cherished post-war ideals: the sudden abandonment of post-Enlightenment forms of critical thinking; the dilution of parents’ sense of protectiveness over the bodies and futures of their minor children; the acceptance of a world in which people can’t gather to worship’.

The elites were happy to usher all this in, and far too many of the masses happily went right along with it. Too many were happy to throw away their freedom and human rights for the illusion that the ever-expanding State exists to keep them safe. We have not been kept safe, but we have seen a massive hammering of our civil rights and liberties.

The closing words of Wolf deserve a wide reading – and heeding:

‘In this moment when freedom itself is in the balance, when the alternative is servitude forever, this decision on whether to speak up makes all the difference. Tyrannies only fall when there is mass resistance. History is clear on this. When it is just a few, well, they are marginalised, silenced, smeared, or, when things go far enough, arrested. What matters most is that enough people stand up and resist all at once.’

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