Author Naomi Wolf, who has just published a new book, “The Bodies of Others: The New Authoritarians, COVID-19, and the War Against the Human,” states that after two years of pandemic policies, people in free societies are behaving more like those in authoritarian societies. The book’s title is an allusion to “The Lives of Others,” a 2007 film about the oppressive police state in communist East Germany before the Berlin Wall fell.
In an interview with the Epoch Times’ “American Thought Leaders,” Wolf notes that America is now far less free than it was just two years ago, and it is becoming almost unrecognizable.
A large group of transnational bad actors including the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), Big Tech, and the World Economic Forum (WEF) have successfully exploited the pandemic to “reengineer our free, democratic, open societies, especially in the West, especially in the United States, into a post-free society, a post-humane society.”
According to Wolf, there are 10 steps every tyrannical government has followed, including demonizing whistleblowers and critics, calling dissent “treason,” “espionage,” or “subversion,” and controlling the media narrative. We are now on step 10, according to Wolf. The ongoing lockdowns and extension of emergency powers indicate that our society is in the last phase of a tyrannical takeover, because emergency powers allow the normal protections of liberty—the rule of law, due process, etc.—to be dispensed with in the name of the emergency.
During the last two years of lockdowns and mandates, Big Tech and the elites have profited by hundreds of billions, while average Americans and small business owners have seen the American Dream slip away into unattainability.
We are witnessing the formation of a two-tiered society, in which people who would never discriminate against others on the basis of sex, race, religion or ethnic origin are encouraged by all of our elites to discriminate against the unvaccinated.
“Suddenly, they’re happily embracing a discrimination society in which some people are cast as clean and valuable members of society, and others are ostracized and marginalized and ‘othered’ and described as sort of dirty and causing infection to others,” said Wolf.
Big tech companies had an active role in creating these perceptions and in “shaping legislation and certainly in presenting the drama of COVID and lockdowns to us, and then the vaccine rollout, in such a way as to change human behavior and to change human society,” said Wolf. People had no choice but to rely on tech platforms while they were locked down, and Big Tech used that to manipulate the public.
Wolf cited the emails between Anthony Fauci and Mark Zuckerberg discussing Facebook’s role in promoting the official pandemic narratives during the lockdowns. “What I trace in the book is how there was a vast profit that tech companies made by suppressing human assembly, by helping to message that it was unsafe or unlawful to gather in person,” she said. “And when you understand that big tech companies are competing with human beings gathering in human spaces, you understand why there was a vested interest in suppressing human assembly.”
Wolf thinks big tech companies will not stop with surveillance capitalism—learning everything they can about everyone they can—but that they want to dominate peoples’ bodily autonomy with vaccine passports.
“What these companies want more than anything is to leave the parameters of your computer and to colonize the human body,” said Wolf. Digital vaccine passports give companies and governments the ability to switch off your access to commerce, travel, and other goods and services if you do not comply with a particular mandate. Some forms of digital tracking and surveilling are already here in the United States, Wolf added.
“You’re now expected to swipe these QR codes [at a restaurant] just to see the menu, or just to get in. And the QR code uploads your data to a central database,” she said, adding that she’s seen the software “that maps the relationships of everyone sitting at that table, and then builds databases and networks of relationships.”
Because most people around the world, particularly in U.S. cities, use digital apps to travel, do banking, and shop, a digital social credit system such as China’s is imminent. Our data is being harvested and used by the global technocratic elite to control human behavior, said Wolf.
“What I’ve seen is that digital technology has its own logic, and it isn’t restricted by what human beings [currently] want to do with it. So once digital platforms and their oligarchical masters can figure out how to change people’s behavior to suit technology, there’s nothing, moral or ethical, that will keep them from changing people’s behavior to suit their technology, and to suit their business plans,” she added.
The pandemic has revealed how this type of digital control is playing out, because humans, before the prevalence of digital technology, did not choose to “socially distance” to fight pandemics, said Wolf.
“The dream of our digital overlords is for technology to tell humans what to do, and that’s exactly where we’re at,” said Wolf.
The irony is that Naomi Wolf was a committed Leftist and moved almost entirely in Leftist circles until the pandemic struck. She was then ejected from elite Leftist/globalist society for writing pieces opposing lockdowns and, later, the rushed-to-market, undertested vaccines. Lately, she has gathered a large group of volunteers to pore through the vaccine development documents that Pfizer was ordered by a court to release.
“It’s really true that the global technocratic elite have more in common with each other than they do with their fellow Germans or Americans or Russians or Chinese, and they now are able to align above the level of nation-states,” she said.
For example, one of the WEF’s goals is to make nation-level decision-making less and less important, and the World Health Organization’s goal is to make public health decisions on a global scale, bypassing countries’ own authorities via the pandemic treaty, said Wolf. “These technocratic elites really do believe that they can order the world better than you and I and that they have the right to,” she said. “That’s really scary.”
Little by little, humanity’s tolerance for cruelty and authoritarianism has grown. “The war wasn’t just on us as a political entity, the war was on American culture, and is on American culture,” she said. “And they’ve succeeded largely, unless we wake up, because we were a kind, decent, inclusive culture that respected other people’s boundaries and freedoms. … And now a CCP-style cruelty is something that we tolerate.”
What people believe is largely determined by the news they consume, said Wolf, and many people only watch news outlets that give a skewed picture of pandemic treatments and policies, largely funded by wealthy people like Bill Gates. In her book, Wolf traces millions of dollars from entities such as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to prominent “news” outlets, including even foreign news operations such as the BBC.
Because most people get slanted news coverage, the country is sharply divided, and many people on the Left refuse to consider any other narrative, or look at primary source documents. This skewed messaging has convinced people that the mandates and lockdowns are more important, and even more American, than freedom or critical thinking.
The most brilliant aspect of the pandemic messaging was that it was framed altruistically. “You know, ‘You’ve got to exclude those people for the good of the community,’ or ‘You’ve got to mask yourself and your child to save your child,’” said Wolf. “This really brilliantly upended American culture because it cast freedom as selfish.”
Now that those in power have conditioned people to be fearful and submissive, they can keep reinstituting emergency powers, she argued. “That’s what emergency law means,” she said. “They can do whatever they want, basically. It’s a weaponization of boards of health, it’s a weaponization of the CDC, the FDA and HHS.”
Wolf said although the situation is dire, people can do something to push back against this tyranny by being informed about what is really going on in the country, assembling in groups, and getting involved politically on the local level.
The last two years have conditioned people to fear each other, so the conversations that would have normally occurred when people gathered are not happening and keeping the country divided, said Wolf.
“People I love think I’m doing something wrong in even talking to conservatives and libertarians. That’s very dangerous. The left, especially, has decided that you’re morally complicit if you have a conversation across the aisle,” Wolf said. “That is censorship, that is cancel culture, that’s un-American, that is an importation from Communism.”
She urges people to remember what makes America unique and a beacon to other nations: to remember we are the great experiment where neighbors talked to each other, listened, and didn’t “rat” each other out if they did not agree with each other.
What Wolf is describing is the transformation of America from the Lamb-like beast to the dragon-like beast of Revelation. The United States is very rapidly building the machinery and the ideology of totalitarian control. Some (including most Adventist PARL types) had believed that this would be accomplished by the right, particularly the “religious right.” But this transition is visibly being engineered by the Left, which totally controls the permanent government, as well as almost all cultural institutions and large corporations in America.
“And I beheld another beast coming up out of the earth; and he had two horns like a lamb, and he spake as a dragon. And he exerciseth all the power of the first beast before him, and causeth the earth and them which dwell therein to worship the first beast, whose deadly wound was healed.” Rev. 13:11-12