Naomi Wolf's The Bodies of Others: A Review

 

Naomi Wolf is the Resistance or: How to Make a Contrarian?

Naomi Wolf’s The Bodies of Others is the retelling of a human tragedy we’re still dealing with. For all the problems with a lockdown, the loss of freedom and the expansion of the technocracy, the worst of it was our lack of humanity towards each other. Covid transformed this traditionally liberal author to a cultural contrarian in a short time. Writers know how to research. She couldn’t get honest information from traditional sources about the case numbers. The logic for locking down and masking didn’t make sense. The vaccines and passports were unlike anything Americans were used to. She pushed against the media narratives and got shut out of social media, shunned by colleagues and snubbed by friends. Esteemed medical professionals like Jay Bhattacharya and Dr. Peter McCullough told her a different story. They also paid a price.

Her conclusion? Covid was hyped and used to keep us apart, for money, control and spiritual darkness.

The mechanism was fear. Fear keeps people in their homes. It keeps them away from others and distrustful of others, disease spreaders you know? Fear makes people pliable and dependent on a program, an institution or a medical solution. Fear rallies people around heavy restrictions and creates an enemies list of those who aren’t on board. Those who resist are heretics. This automatic sorting, dirty from clean, caring from selfish is a kind of strategic totalitarianism. It’s an evil response that pits us against each other.  

A refreshing bit near the end tells of why she agreed to talk openly about God. An objective look at the crisis exposed a lot of trampling of individual liberty and by extension, wholesale power grabs by bureaucrats. Not only at the federal level did we see “officials” deciding on masks and “essential” businesses, but also at the lowest levels of city government. And why? Because big tech is positioned to succeed when human interaction is restricted. That’s true of technology in good times. Despite the advantages of Zoom meetings, next day delivery and electronic communications, big tech thrives when people stay apart.

You can’t make money when people go to the park or attend a play at the local high school.

A favorite passage from chapter 8 that sums up the whole book nicely. “This was waged by the lords and ladies of technology; they used technology – and leveraged the culture and civilization of technology – to wage asymmetrical combat against the whole of humanity itself and to strike out against human movement, speech, touch, ingenuity, bodies, religion, families, schooling, and especially culture.” (page 140)

There is another reason technology succeeded, money. A quick look at the profit margins of tech giants like Apple, Amazon and Microsoft all saw massive increases. This doesn’t even include the drug companies (Pfizer, Moderna) after their vaccine rollouts. It’s not a stretch to think they knew this was coming and maybe lobbied hard to keep everything shut down. When you realize personal interaction is contrary to a world of technological supremacy, the duplicity makes sense. This is Naomi’s point, brilliantly highlighted throughout her anecdotes and research. The result of big tech’s reach was a society that became cruel and rejected human interacting for longer than was necessary.

Like most books it’s always the personal stories that make the biggest impact. I loved her resistance (polite though it was) to the café that wouldn’t serve unvaccinated customers. Or her refusal in the subway to stand in a designated area. The police even wrote her a citation. I don’t have a lot of sympathy for people who chose to stay away from family and friends. Wolf talks of older men and women with sunken faces, resigned to their fate because of a disease. Why did so many put up with it? I can understand a few months, maybe, but years? There is just no excuse for that level of fear.

Resistance is the only weapon we have. It doesn’t have to be violent, but it should be without apology. When you lose the right to vote what else is there? Naomi Wolf doesn’t mention the 2020 election in her book but I can’t imagine a more apt demonstration of the loss of our basic rights. Millions of Americans cast votes that were overwhelmed with fraudulent ballots in key states. It’s called cheating. The authority to lock people in their homes, once established, would not be relinquished. Our national voting ceased to matter on a national scale after 2020. Covid was the excuse.

I’m surprised she missed this connection, but she’s on a path toward enlightenment (in a sense) so I won’t beat her up over this. If there is a criticism, it’s over the exaggerated way she contrasts pre Covid life in New York and London to post Covid life. In an early scene she describes multi-ethnic groups (all races and creeds) living in harmony, going to festivals together and working toward the common good. I rolled my eyes a bit here, does anyone believe these groups got along well before Covid? But it works well as a contrast to the destruction to come and looking back…probably felt like heaven.

I first became interested in this book because of an interview I watched on Mark Steyn’s channel. Before that, I read her heartfelt apology to conservatives over the January 6^th debacle. Tucker released some unseen footage that showed a different picture than the narrative we were sold. Big surprise, another lie from the Deep State. At this point though it’s taken on faith that we live in an era of big lies.

The worst thing we can do is surrender our humanity over a ‘crisis’. There will be another after all, whether imagined or real, that forces us to choose between obedience or independence. Hopefully we will have learned something the next time.