March 5, 2022
Some people who love me advised me not to write this essay, and not to use its current title. “Take the high road,” I was advised.
Usually that is a good idea, but not in this case — not at this moment. In this essay I need to talk about some people — mainly privileged people, people who could make a difference in areas where most can’t — who are trying to justify their monumental, world-changing cowardice, at a time when we all need to be at least somewhat brave.
I am done with tolerating this quietly.
For a year and a half now, after it became clear that this crisis was never about “the virus” but rather about a global bid to kill off our free world and suppress all of our freedoms — since I and many others have been publicly vocal about this danger and doing all we can to alert our community — that is to say, humanity — I’ve been getting direct messages (“DMs”). And they are all kind of similar. And they gross me out. Here’s why.
In the DMs, people whom I know socially or professionally — people from journalism, from politics, from medicine, from science (most of them upper-middle- class ‘men in suits’) — say something like: “Naomi, I really respect your actions right now. I totally agree with what you are saying. But of course I can’t say anything publicly because [fill in the nonsensical, craven reason].”
The nonsensical and craven reason that follows this shameful message is typically something along the lines of, “My boss will get mad at me” or “My professional peers will have a problem with my speaking up.” It’s never even, “I have bills to pay.”
Your boss will get mad at you, O you who DM?
Do you understand what is at stake? If you continue to comply and collude with what has become a tyrannical oligopoly, your kids will live as slaves and as serfs forever.
The DMs insist that I am “brave.” But I am not “brave”; you’re just a p—-y.
Don’t get me wrong. I know the gender politics around ever using the epithet above. Everyone who has read my work knows that, being a woman, I have great respect for women, and for their bodies, and I understand that one does not throw around this epithet lightly or ignorantly or in a misogynist way.
But truly in such a moment of historic-level cowardice among some privileged and influential people, no other epithet will do.
I was initially baffled by these messages. Why would I be getting these? What do these people want? Why do they think I need their excuses? So I asked other, braver people WTF this was.
They laughed and said, “They want you to tell them that it is ok.”
So I am saying publicly: this is not ok.
I am exasperated by those who stay in the shadows, agreeing with the risktaking of others, who talk about their “courage.” I feel that this is a form of othering that dehumanizes and exploits those speaking out.
It casts the people who do take risks for the wellbeing of others, as being somehow naturally better-fitted for this difficult job than is the speaker. It’s a form of offloading one’s own responsibility guiltlessly onto a subgroup which is assigned the status of somehow liking the battle, or somehow fitted better for combat, by nature, than is the speaker himself.
It’s like all those guys I knew in college who never did the dishes after dinner, because they said they were really bad at it.
I don’t know anyone truly heroic who likes the current battle. But I think that most could not live with themselves if they walked away from doing what they know they can do to help — in a moment in which obvious right and wrong have not been clearer since 1941.
Dr Patrick Phillips — a Canadian ER doctor who spoke out early against the harms of “lockdowns,” when many fellow doctors were silent — said something like, “I realized that many of my peers were silent because they were worried about their careers. But I also realized that if I didn‘t speak out, soon I would have no career worth saving.” And Dr Jay Bhattacharya said, last night on Fox, when he was asked about the Great Barrington signatories having been vilified, smeared, attacked and hounded professionally for 18 months — for having been right about the harms of “lockdowns” — something like: “If I did not speak out, what was the point of my career in public health?”
Dr Peter McCullough, who, in the middle of fighting for everyone, took time to text me a way to help my loved ones who had COVID, said on television something like, “They can arrest me for saying this. Just don’t give these MRNA vaccines to your child.” He also wryly commented at another time that those opposed to his message were trying to erase the professional credentials after his name, one by one. But those dangers and those forms of bullying did not stop him.
Last night I interviewed Edward Dowd, an investor who is formerly a portfolio manager at BlackRock. He is warning the world about Pfizer fraud, and for sure, going against “principalities and powers.” He is cautioning his peers in the investment community that betting on the Pfizers of the world is a bet against freedom forever. I asked him from where he got his personal courage. He said something like, “I will keep going til we either win our freedoms back, or I am in a Gulag.”
It is truly a time in history now that is hammering out heroes and heroines in the forge of crisis.
And it is also a time of unprecedented cowardice, when those who choose collusion, when they know better, are allowing their souls to shrivel in that same heat.
There is no room left to equivocate; there is no room left to moon about in the middle.
At this point, there is no middle.
A woman wrote this. Naomi Wolf has been a star on the left for decades. She's not writing for us, she's writing for those on the pussified left who will stop reading if they see the word pussy.