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"Australia was a lab of tyranny" - Naomi Wolf
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Australiana is now Fire at Will - your safe space for dangerous conversations.
For over 30 years, Naomi Wolf was lauded as a feminist icon, a bestselling author and a darling of liberal America. Her investigative journalism during the COVID pandemic led to those labels being replaced overnight with pejoratives like 'conspiracy theorist' and 'anti-vaxxer'.
Unbowed and unbroken, Naomi continues to stand against tyranny in the finest tradition of classical liberalism. Her new book is titled 'Facing the Beast: Courage, Faith, and Resistance in a New Dark Age'.
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Transcript
Introduction and Naomi Wolf's Blacklisting
00:00:14
Speaker
G'day and welcome to Australiana from The Spectator Australia. I'm Will Kingston. I am fascinated by a particular subset of society in 2023. This group of people would say that their core beliefs and values have not changed.
00:00:31
Speaker
but the world has changed around them. The costs of holding firm against the changing social tides can be devastating in an age where cancellation is common, words of violence and free speech is lesser right than a risk to many. The members of this small but growing club come from the arts, politics, journalism, comedy and academia to name but a few disciplines.
00:00:54
Speaker
In my eyes, there is perhaps no more astonishing example of this very modern phenomena than my guest today, Dr. Naomi Wolf. Naomi is one of the most important and celebrated public intellectuals of my lifetime. She's an eight-time New York Times bestselling author, a pioneer of third-wave feminism, and was up until recently a darling of progressive liberal America.
00:01:18
Speaker
Her, I would suggest, classically liberal criticisms of the state, Big Pharma, and the media in recent times, particularly during the pandemic, saw her blacklisted by the Manhattan cocktail party set that once adored her.
Classical Liberal Values vs. Modern Shifts
00:01:33
Speaker
Her latest book, Facing the Beast, Courage, Faith and Resistance in a New Dark Age, has just been released. Naomi, welcome to Australiana. Thank you so much for having me. I'm delighted to be speaking with you, Will.
00:01:45
Speaker
As am I, this is a real pleasure for me. I guess I'll start with my comments, introductory comments, and that is of course an assessment from afar. Do you agree? Have your core values fundamentally stayed the same as perhaps some perceptions of you have shifted?
00:02:01
Speaker
They are very kind words indeed. I'm certainly happy to agree that I'm one of the most important public intellectuals of your life. No doubt unnecessarily kind on your part. But yes, I definitely agree and thank you for noticing that literally my core values haven't changed at all. And indeed, it's the world that has changed. I think there's no more
00:02:24
Speaker
kind of illustrative example of this than the fact that I've been writing about the vulnerability of Western democracies to tyranny since the end of America. And I wrote that at the Bush era, and nobody had a problem with my criticizing the march to tyranny of the right wing at that time. But when I criticize the march to tyranny of the left wing in our times, that's somehow touching a third rail. But yes, classical liberalism,
00:02:53
Speaker
Thank you for noticing, you know, we're all supposed to believe classical liberals, long tradition, freedom of speech, open dialogue, open debate, critical thinking, the primacy of human rights and liberties, the Constitution. These are all squarely in the classical liberal tradition dating back to the 18th century.
00:03:13
Speaker
We'll get to, I guess, some of the specific opinions that you have put forward that have led to some people, again, changing their perceptions on you. But first, I'm interested in discussing the forces that have led to this shift more generally. What, in your view, are those forces that have seen elements of the left abandon classical liberalism in recent times?
00:03:38
Speaker
Yeah.
Communist Influences in America
00:03:39
Speaker
Wow. That's a great question. I mean, it depends on which country you're in, right? Because there are different pressures in different Western nations, but I'll just stick to North America. I'm actually wondering, like the last few years have led me to wonder if this process of converting, stealthily converting class
00:04:00
Speaker
classical liberals, post-war liberals into Marx, like Maoist Marxists, has actually been going on for a long time, a lot longer than I realized. And as I cast, and has only kind of been unveiled beyond doubt, you know, with the excuse of 2020 and the pandemic, I use scare quotes because the data underlying it are so fungible, but it's a bunch of pressures. I mean, currently,
00:04:28
Speaker
I am persuaded by thoughtful people around me, including my husband, who spent most of his career in military intelligence and in the intelligence community, and other smart people like Michael Sanger and people who, and Frank Gaffney, Reggie Littlejohn, people who watched China. They've persuaded me by primary source documentation that what's happening right now is a direct attack on us by China, which is of course a thoroughly Marxist communist oligarchy, right? And that's not a contradiction in terms.
00:04:58
Speaker
these days, and that there's elite capture and institutional capture by communists in America. And honestly, I'm the daughter of a guy who sold the communist worker when he was 15 years old. I mean, my generation of Jews in America, our parents and grandparents of a certain generation embraced straight up communism. My dad was
00:05:25
Speaker
was it had a file apparently as a useful idiot or a fellow traveler. He thought that was hilarious. You know, we were raised to think that the red scare was redonkulous and that the whole everyone getting all flustered about reds under the bed was absurd. And looking back, I think that the
00:05:48
Speaker
actual communist infiltration of the United States probably dates to the post-war period. And it has really, I think it reached a kind of turning point in the late 60s, early 70s when liberals, the liberal wing of American politics, which has a really noble history going back to the progressive era and before it comes from Methodism.
Identity Politics and Ideological Shifts
00:06:13
Speaker
And it's like,
00:06:14
Speaker
you know, keep children out of the minds and put them in school and, you know, abolition and all the good things. Right. But it was very American, very biblically based. Really. It was, you know, very a Christian in its basis. It was individualist. It was libertarian oriented.
00:06:32
Speaker
rights-oriented, that was all true up until the end of the 60s. And then you had the New Left and radical chic. And I think there you had actual probably Chinese and Soviet influences on liberal groups and on the counterculture. And there's an introduction. Now, looking back, I'm like, how did I not see this? So many influences
00:06:54
Speaker
with kind of Marxist discourse, like public shaming and struggle sessions and, you know, even the women's movement, encounter groups, right? Let me test that. You asked yourself the question, why did you not see it? Are you asking? I am. I'm saying you look back in hindsight and you say you can see some of these influences at the time you were a Rhodes Scholar, you were a wonderfully intelligent, insightful person. Why do you think at the time you perhaps didn't see it in the way you see it now?
00:07:22
Speaker
That's a great question, Will, and it's a fair one. And I'll go further. When I was a Rhodes Scholar in Oxford in the mid 80s, the first time I was a graduate student at Oxford, I went twice. I thought it was chic. We thought it was cool to be Marxists. Like I was taking, you know, Marxist literary criticism at Yale and I wore the Bover boots and I had a black leather jacket. And I wrote for Marxism today. Like one of my first published essays was in Marxism today. And at that time,
00:07:51
Speaker
Well, one reason I didn't realize that it was bad was that there was a blurring of Marxism or maybe this was a rebranding into basic social democracy, which looked pretty good, labor, the miners, environmentalism, and conservatives were depicted as reactionary forces, capitalism was depicted as
00:08:15
Speaker
at Yale and around me as this inevitably 19th century Darwinian kind of Dickensian force that would destroy human beings and, you know, exploit women and children and that nothing good could come of capitalism. So it seemed reasonable that a socialist democracy could tame the worst of capitalism and that, you know, socialized medicine wasn't a bad idea.
00:08:42
Speaker
food stamps weren't a bad idea necessarily. So the rebranding of what Marxism even was, it was rebranded not as the state owning everything, but as a critique. So as an intellectual, it was very attractive. I mean, I actually still use what I learned in Marxist criticism to write books like The Beauty Myth, which looked at following the money, basically money pressures. It's a helpful intellectual tool. However, that's
00:09:12
Speaker
So I didn't see, I thought it was like a past dead history that, you know, Stalinist forces or Maoist forces might try to take over the West. You know, that was impossible.
00:09:24
Speaker
We thought the West was too strong. We thought the West was colonizing everyone else. They would never be subverted or overthrown by anyone, let alone these communist forces that we thought were the end of history, right? We thought they were dying off because they sucked because we thought history had proven that no one would want voluntarily to live in Maoist China or Stalin's Russia.
00:09:46
Speaker
And then we saw the fall of the Soviet Union at the, you know, the end of the eighties when I was a young woman, that's what was happening was the death of communism. Right. And so I didn't, and the, I guess the other reason I didn't see it, like I'm going to fast forward now. So many institutions around us currently in the 20, whatever you call this twenties, right. Got subverted in the last five or 10 years. And.
00:10:14
Speaker
Or even, you know, you could see the seeds even further, like looking back when I think about poststructuralism, which was the trendy thing when I was a graduate student. It destroys meaning. You destroy the West. You destroy Shakespeare. He's an old white man. You destroy the canon. You just tear it to shreds under the guise of poststructuralism, Lacanian criticism.
00:10:35
Speaker
But also there was the beginning at that time, and I was not persuaded, but there was the beginning of like a legitimate critique that these were disparate. The canon was shaped by disproportionately, you know, old white male patriarchal forces and the stories of Jamaicans who were, you know, in the 19th century, allowing the sugar money to allow for, you know, the kinds of fortunes that we saw in Thackeray, right?
00:11:05
Speaker
And so I'm like, that's a legitimate critique. There was selectivity that was not probably even good for literature, right? But then you can use that to do away with all of it, which is what has happened now in the Ivy League. And when I go back, they're not reading anything canonical. Then identity politics, right? Like when I was growing up, there was still a sense of America is a united country.
00:11:33
Speaker
It's got flaws, but what we do is we reform it, Civil Rights Act, so that it is more equitable for everyone. And in the last 10 years, identity politics, everything from LGBTQ issues, I'm a big supporter of the rights of sexual minorities and everyone, but that, which has always been a libertarian, individualist movement oriented toward privacy, became hijacked, I think, by external forces too.
00:12:02
Speaker
create a narrative around invading privacy, right? Or have, you know, forcing people to kind of be declaratory if, whether they want to or not to claim an identity, race relations, especially on campus, instead of finding common ground or seeking dialogue led to this labeling that fractures everything. And again, then race, which is, you know, admittedly are, we have a long history of
00:12:28
Speaker
flaws in how we handle race in this country, that was weaponized to do away with everything that's good about our history. And I've been taught by the China watchers that when Maoists get going, when communists get going, the first thing they do with a subject, people is wipe out their history.
Feminism and Bodily Autonomy
00:12:49
Speaker
So that happened. Can I pause you there just because there's a couple of things I want to unpack and we will get to the point around foreign state intervention.
00:12:57
Speaker
But before we do, I'm interested on your view on identity politics because you are one of the most prominent feminist thinkers and writers of the last 30 years. Gender is an identity group. The beauty myth came out in 93, I think. So you've had a feminist lens on looking at the issues of the day for some time. How is that different and that thinking different to the identity politics that we see today? Great question.
00:13:25
Speaker
conclude my rant of a moment ago, I will then answer your question. The last reason I didn't see it, which is important, is that my tribe thinks we're good, right? We think we're better than you guys. And that means that if we see excess and nonsense and extreme positions, which in the last five years we saw, we would assume that that's just marginal and not important because we are good.
00:13:55
Speaker
Okay. So that's a huge blind spot. And I was guilty of all of that. I was surrounded by liberals and the media in which I continually appeared was I didn't realize liberal media. I thought it was just establishment media. And I, I rarely was brought face to face with a conservative, um, let alone conservative culture. All right. So that's that answer now. So I just want to say like, it makes me so sad. Will that the left and the right are so divided because
00:14:23
Speaker
there's so much intellectual richness in the skill sets of each side coming together. And what I mean by that in relation to your question about gender is just like I said, that Marxist critical analysis following the money is a useful tool, even though I'm not a Marxist, you know, genders, gender based analysis can be a really useful tool depending on which direction you're advocating, you know, having
00:14:53
Speaker
done that analysis. So I think it's great that I was able to understand the history of women, the history of women in the West in relation to human rights, which is of a piece with all the other things you can see I've always cared about, and reach a reformist, classical liberal, Mary Wollstonecraft conclusion, which is democracy isn't done until women participate in it, right? That's
00:15:23
Speaker
using gender analysis in the history of women to make democracy stronger and make human rights stronger, I believe. For instance, arguments about, you know, abortion or sexual assault, I think
00:15:38
Speaker
people who are conservatives or libertarians who think they're making a complete argument. If they don't take on board women's bodies getting pregnant, what does that do to individual human rights? And the fact that women don't have the rights that men have in the world as long as they're disproportionately raped or threatened with rape, those are really important central questions for anyone who cares about freedom.
00:16:05
Speaker
That's very different from, again, the way I would say feminism has been hijacked recently. My generation of feminists, or certainly I will just take responsibility for myself because there was nonsense even in my generation, was never intended to be anti-family. It was never intended to create a discourse around men that need masculinity, toxic. I mean, as the mother of a son and the stepmother of a stepson, that's just so
00:16:32
Speaker
horrible and discriminatory and awful language, you know, that someone's innately bad because of who they are. That's sexism. It was never intended. I wrote a book that came and went, unfortunately, after The Beauty Myth called Fire with Fire, critiquing victim feminism, which is, was the seed of what I think you're, you know, inviting me to address, which, you know, which is how it all went bad. You know, the using of the history of exploitation
00:17:00
Speaker
of women to justify special pleading or unfair rules or unfair advantages. That's not what a classical liberal feminist like myself in the Mary Wollstonecraft tradition wants, right? I remember in the 90s going to Australia and they had a quota for women in government. Of course, the quota was 30%, but I'm like,
00:17:22
Speaker
you think it's great that there's a quota, it's not great. It's destroying meritocracy, never engaging with meritocracy, never suing institutions to show that they're not a meritocracy. That's going to keep you in this kind of, well, I actually had an insight even at that time, it's going to keep you dependent on the state. And that's what happened. And the last thing I'll say about this is if you're a
00:17:52
Speaker
classical liberal of any kind, you've got to deal with wherever you end up, the possible personhood of a fetus, right? And what rights does the fetus have? So right now, like another symbol of how perverted the message and goal of feminism, what I consider appropriate classical feminism is, is this kind of weird beatification of
00:18:16
Speaker
abortion, right up to the day of birth and even these laws that decriminalized neglecting a newborn baby. This culture of death, that's not what any women's movement should be about. And to have young women, childbearing age women wear t-shirts, saying things like abortion is a sacrament or I love abortion, that's a perversion that I see as aligned with this whole
00:18:44
Speaker
larger anti-democratic, anti-human, anti-family, anti-spirituality, death impulse that's been unleashed on us since 2020.
00:18:55
Speaker
Just before coming on this call, I finished listening to your recentish conversation with Jordan Peterson. And something which you mentioned in that conversation, which I hadn't overtly considered, was how directly you're thinking in the days of the beauty myth going back all that time, connects with your views today.
Philosophical Implications of COVID-19 Mandates
00:19:14
Speaker
And that is basically around bodily autonomy, and it is around the protection of women and the protection of women's bodies.
00:19:21
Speaker
There are some, and you've made this point, there are some prominent feminist or I guess self-described feminist legal theorists who in one instinct would, or one instance will argue for the bodily autonomy in say the abortion context. And then they gave that up very quickly when they were talking about vaccines. Talk me through that phenomena that we've observed there. It's so painful. It's like, so in Facing the Beast, I actually named some of these people
00:19:51
Speaker
Justice Sotomayor and Justice Kagan are guilty of this and other feminist judges and lawyers are guilty of it. Absolutely, there's the language of, classical language of, my body, my choice, you know, medical autonomy, what happens to a woman's reproductive choices is between her and her doctor. All that medical privacy language, which we recognize it's been the
00:20:18
Speaker
best tested, best performing language of the abortion rights movement for probably 20 years. And most Americans agree with it statistically, but in this literally practically in the same breath, they do not recognize those rights when it came to the mandates. And you had such a, with the vaccine mandates, it was so incredible to me that no one recognized how gendered
00:20:48
Speaker
that situation was of people being told their bodies didn't belong to them, their bodies belong to the state, men and women, right? Children didn't belong to them, didn't belong to their parents, the children belong to the state. And then the forcing something into someone's body who didn't want it, like, you know, you don't have to be a pervert or a weirdo to recognize the gendered nature of that, right? And I,
00:21:15
Speaker
can't believe that feminists didn't step forward and say, wait a minute, we've seen this before. We've seen what happens when people are told their bodies don't belong to them. It's basically human trafficking. And I made this case in an essay about Yale, that students' bodies were being trafficked by the institution and by the state of Connecticut. It's highly gendered, right, to tell people they don't have the right to their own body, that their body has to serve the purpose of others. That's why the title of my last book was The Bodies of Others.
00:21:44
Speaker
incredibly disappointed that feminists and African Americans, for that matter, who know perfectly well, more African Americans, I should say, because many did come forward leadership roles. But the NAACP, the National Organization of Women, all the people who know what happens when a population's bodies are forced to do things they don't want to do, they were silent. There was no feminist critique of
00:22:13
Speaker
stripping people of medical freedom or personal choice or autonomy when it came to the injections. There was no feminist critique of locking women and children at home, you know, during the lockdowns and driving women out of the workforce. I mean, that was right. Like, where was Susan Falluti? Where was Gloria Steinem? How do you not critique that? How do you not critique policing where women and children can walk, right? We've been left out of public space before. We know what that's about. How do you not critique being forced to cover your face?
00:22:42
Speaker
societies that force women to cover their faces against their will or cover their hair against their will. And I'll never forget an Iranian immigrant, a woman to this country saying when people say pull it up over your nose, pull it, pull the mask up over your nose, it's exactly like in the imam's Iran where people are always saying pull it down over your hair, pull it down over your hair. It is exactly the same that policing of our bodies, we know about this. There's so many books and
00:23:10
Speaker
campus seminars devoted to the deconstruction of policing women's bodies or policing the bodies of African Americans or enslaved people. How was there not a critique from the left about that? Can I test this with a hypothetical? Let's assume that someone who was a pro-mandate, pro-lockdown recognized the concerns that you've just mentioned, but they said still on balance in the best interests of society, we still need to go ahead and do this.
00:23:39
Speaker
The two big flaws for people who were advocating for lockdowns and for vaccine mandates were A, that the vaccine doesn't prevent transmission and B, that for almost all demographics, COVID itself was not nearly as threatening as what it was made out to be. Let's hypothetically assume that A, the vaccine did prevent transmission or reduce it and B, COVID itself was far more dangerous, potentially in line, say, with the worst pandemics of the past.
00:24:09
Speaker
Does that philosophically, or would that philosophically change the way that you approach the analysis that you've just given me? I mean, I kind of respect you trying to find a situation in which that would change the calculus, right? So let's take those one by one. I mean, basically I would say no and no, because what we were asked to do by exactly that kind of math,
00:24:37
Speaker
right, is accept a different grounding for our Western societies than the one that we believe that we had, right? And to accept a kind of harm reduction basis. And I was horrified when I first heard a loved one, a young adult use this as like the goal of society, you know, after having received an Ivy League education, harm reduction instead of protection of rights. So say you were right, right, that the
00:25:06
Speaker
The epidemic was worse than anything ever before in human history and the vaccine cured it or stopped transmission or whatever. It doesn't matter, right? It doesn't matter because we live in constitutional democracies and you guys in Australia are supposed to live in a constitutional democracy. I mean, I'll never forget watching. I love Australia, by the way, and I love the history of Australia. I care about it.
00:25:34
Speaker
And it's particularly ironic that a people who were kind of forged in imprisonment and transportation, you know, were forced into imprisonment, essentially again, or asked to believe that imprisonment was, you know, for the greater good. And I personally feel like this is a bit of a detour, but not really. Australia was a
00:25:53
Speaker
What's it called when you use a model to scare everybody, like a test case or a demonstration? I think Australia was broken more dramatically and deliberately than other Western nations and earlier to showcase what was going to happen to everyone else if they stepped out of line, but also to practice the tools of tyranny. It was a Petri dish.
Government Control and Psychological Effects
00:26:16
Speaker
It was a lab of tyranny, basically, and it still is.
00:26:20
Speaker
And I think that was intentional. You know, if you can break Australia, you can break anyone in the West or the developed world. So when going back to, that's exactly the math or the social contract everyone in the West was asked to take on board the kind of collectivist harm reduction math. Oh, well, if it's going to save lives, we have to give up our freedoms. Well, if it's going to, if it's worse than anything we've ever seen before, we have to give up our freedoms.
00:26:48
Speaker
Totally not. Like nowhere in the Constitution, and I've said this a million times starting in 2021, nowhere in the United States Constitution does it say all the above is suspended if there's a very serious pathogen in the population. It doesn't say that. It doesn't say that because that's not our law. That's not our agreement in a democracy. In the same, I'd have to look at the Australian tools of
00:27:15
Speaker
government or your equivalent of the constitution. But I'm quite sure, sorry, it's the same. It doesn't say it's a bad disease out here. And I'm sorry, but I know the history of Australia, just like the history of the United States, there have been much worse diseases. There have been much worse diseases, much worse diseases, and it doesn't matter, right?
00:27:38
Speaker
Representative democracy, that's a decision that you make with your family in a free society that's based on individual human rights. You decide what risk you want to take. The state doesn't withhold any rights, doesn't have the right, it's unlawful to strip you of any rights based on the state's assessment of your risk or anything. Like it doesn't matter what, there's always going to be a reason, right? The first time I wrote about this, it was the global war on terror.
00:28:06
Speaker
Well, it's we can't have the rights we used to have because terrorism, you know, because 9-11. Of course we can't have the world has changed. Nonsense. Nonsense. You know, history's long. There's typhus. There's cholera. There's World War I. There's World War II. There's all kinds of shit happens. And, you know, your democracy is supposed to endure through it all. And if it doesn't endure,
00:28:31
Speaker
your assembly or your parliament is supposed to declare a state of emergency that is subject to your parliament or our president can declare a state of emergency subject to our Congress. That's it. Otherwise you sign on for exactly what we got, which was a soft pedaled Chinese communist oligarchical tyranny with a lot of nice real estate and consumer shopping.
00:28:57
Speaker
Well put, and I think that's a really powerful first principles analysis. And I like as well how you put it in a historical context because throughout human history we have been forced to weigh up
00:29:09
Speaker
collective security and safety with liberty and freedom. And if I go to say World War II, we as a society said on balance, it is better to put young men into machine gun fire because they are fighting for something which is bigger than just the safety of the individual. It goes to our collective beliefs as a society. We prioritise liberty in that instance. The uncomfortable reality is that
00:29:34
Speaker
And if you look at the polls in Western countries, particularly in Australia, the sorts of draconian measures you just mentioned did have popular support. Certainly not from me, not from you, but they did. Why as a society did we, for so much of that time, prioritise safety over liberty? Well, you know, I'm not Australian and I wasn't there during this time. And honestly, I declined to visit recently because I'm afraid of being kept in a quarantine camp for two weeks the way that some of your leaders
00:30:04
Speaker
have been. So I don't want to lecture or sound like I'm condescending to the people of Australia. But you guys are uniquely vulnerable, just like Britain's uniquely vulnerable because you're an island. So it's very easy to manage the news that you get. You're not having people coming and going from other places during a lockdown saying, that's nonsense. I was just in Venice and everyone's taking the buses. It's all fine.
00:30:30
Speaker
I was in Texas and kids are going to school. What are you guys doing? You're easy to control that way. Same thing happened in Britain, unfortunately. I think that the Chinese influence is very much more direct in Australia than a lot of other countries. I actually think China has plans for Australia based on some research I did during the wildfires right before the pandemic.
00:30:57
Speaker
Some chilling things that my husband found, he's an investigator, are that there are unnamed Chinese individuals sitting in consultation, this was even before the pandemic, with your most senior leaders. Who are they? Why are they there? I think that there were specific leaders who had relationships with China that were
00:31:18
Speaker
disclosed during the course of this process. So I think the goal is to turn Australia into kind of a vacation colony for the globalists and the Chinese aristocracy. And I guess the last thing is the nature of the propaganda you were given and the nature of the lockdowns. The first time I heard the phrase lockdown harder, it was in response, it was out of Australia. And so there were
00:31:47
Speaker
whole states that were, as I understood it, locked down in such a draconian way as to cause mental health damage that's permanent. I looked at this when I studied torture for my first book on tyranny, The End of America. When you isolate people, even for one day, you cause changes in their brain chemistry. If you isolate them for more than a day, it can turn into psychosis. It literally changes the functioning of the brain.
Media Narrative and Role of AI
00:32:15
Speaker
There's a new book that I just
00:32:16
Speaker
wrote an introduction to called the indoctrinated brain that looks at the neuroscience of isolation and fear, isolation and fear. So you're going to get Stockholm syndrome with isolation and fear. You're going to get people loving their jailers. You're going to get people also doing anything to avoid that again. And I think that's part of the popularity of those measures. Also, if you're in Australia and you say, well, it's not popular, you're
00:32:46
Speaker
Your country used like rubber bullets, as I recall, on people protesting near the Capitol. So who wants to be that person who singled out for the quarantine camp or singled out for a social credit system that will switch you off, which is the next step, right? By telling a pollster the truth. And I guess the last thing I would say about polls is that as a former political consultant who ran that poll, you have no way to know that they're popular, right?
00:33:09
Speaker
The dissolution of your parliament in I believe April of 2020 was the first parliament that dissolved. And I'll never forget they were sent home. And I was like, I remember doing a tweet, tell me in 140 words or less who's in charge of Australia right now. And it was like, I was bombarded with bots and trolls. And that's usually a sign that
00:33:30
Speaker
There's a story there, but I'll never forget that an unelected group was appointed a COVID commission. Well, that's straight up tyranny and they got it done. And once you demonstrate that you can clear out a Western nation's parliament, you've demonstrated that there's no coming back without a fight to democracy the way it was before. It was very flagrant to what was done to Australia.
00:33:54
Speaker
The statements you've just made about foreign state intervention, particularly the intervention of China in Australia and in the US, even then you've substantiated with analysis, with evidence. Something I've noticed in interviews that you've done is you are very big on data.
00:34:09
Speaker
Nonetheless, that type of argument that you've made about China has led to some people calling you a conspiracy theorist. My question here goes to this term, conspiracy theorists, but more generally the weaponization of language. So anti-vaxxer, far right is another one.
00:34:27
Speaker
What was the other one? The last one you said? Far right. Anti-vascular conspiracy theorist. These are all terms now which have been weaponized against people. I'm keen to get your take on the weaponization of language and how you feel about this term conspiracy theorist, which has been thrown against you so often. Right. I mean, it goes back to, am I doing what I've always done? And
00:34:51
Speaker
The answer is yes. A journalist seeing a primary source list of attendees to a top level internal government conference and the words unidentified Chinese individual, unidentified Chinese individual or Chinese national, unidentified Chinese national appear. Any journalist is going to ask what, who are those people? What are they doing there? Right? Any real journalist is going to say, where are the data underlying these COVID maps?
00:35:21
Speaker
And I'm a CEO of a successful tech company that presents government databases. So I know exactly what those data are supposed to look like. And I know the API that manages it. And I knew that you couldn't see the data sets, right? You couldn't see them. Like the fine print said, you can't see these data sets. So how do you know that what you're looking at is correct? Any journalist would ask the questions I'm asking. I'm a journalist who was renowned around the world for caring about women's
00:35:51
Speaker
sexual and reproductive health. So I get de-platformed for noticing that women are reporting menstrual symptoms upon receiving an mRNA injection. Women don't, like, it would take a conspiracy for a bunch of women in different places to decide to lie all at once about having menstrual symptoms. And why would they do that, right? So I'm just doing journalism, right? I don't know the answer to why they're having menstrual symptoms upon receiving mRNA injection. I do now.
00:36:20
Speaker
2021 when I was deplatformed from Twitter for asking that question. But that's what journalists are supposed to do, especially journalists whose beat is women's health. Why are they having menstrual problems? What does it mean? You know, let's find out more. And if I hadn't been deplatformed, millions of women who are having fertility problems or disabling menstrual problems now might not be suffering or sterile in the way that they are. So I guess what I would say first is literally every single thing I've
00:36:50
Speaker
reported on or asked questions about in the recent past in which those questions led me to be called a conspiracy theorist are the same things and the same journalism that journalists are supposed to engage in. Going back to what happened to the left, what happened to journalists? I mean, I know they took the money, but
00:37:09
Speaker
You know, we used to know that governments lie to us, right? We used to know that giant corporations lie. You know, they sometimes say things like cigarettes or thalidomide are safe when they're not safe. We know that.
Metaphysical Perspectives on Global Crisis
00:37:23
Speaker
So why suddenly in 2020 to avoid being called a conspiracy theorist, you have to take dictation from government spokespeople and gigantic corporations who stand to benefit from no one knowing if their product is harmful. Secondly,
00:37:38
Speaker
AI has changed everything when it comes to reputation. What I mean is this, when I was de-platformed in June of 2021, overnight my bio changed all over the world. To conspiracy theorists is the first sentence. How do you do that? I didn't even understand at that time how that was possible. And all these news outlets that had sought me out as a commentator or a talking head or a writer for 35 years, like The Guardian, The New York Times,
00:38:06
Speaker
overnight called me a conspiracy theorist, right? And I was a non-person. How do you do that? Well, now I know that you can't persuade that many editors around the world to malign someone in exactly the same way at the same time, but AI can intervene. And now I know that that's what has happened since 2020, 2021, probably, you know, don't kill grandma is a meme that appeared in 125 languages around the world, right? You can't do that through human
00:38:35
Speaker
persuasion of editors alone. You know, myocarditis being preceded by the words extremely rare everywhere, every time that word was mentioned. Human decisions can't do that, but that happened all over the world at the same time. So now we know that AI has that capability and that AI is being used in journalism. What is the driving force behind that? How is that happening? Who is responsible for it? Oh, well, let me address that.
00:39:05
Speaker
in 30 seconds, just the last thing I want to say about me as a conspiracy theorist is that I have a unique biography in that I was an advisor to a presidential reelection campaign and I was a White House spouse and I was an advisor to a vice president. And then I, you know, and before and after I was a journalist and now I'm a tech CEO. So I don't know any other reporters with that background.
00:39:33
Speaker
And so respectfully, what it means is that reporters who call me a conspiracy theorist don't know what they're talking about because they haven't been in the rooms in which history is decided at the highest levels, as I have many situations professionally. And what I know is that there aren't press releases coming out of those rooms. There are not notes being taken.
00:39:59
Speaker
There isn't an announcement of the agreements. In fact, so much energy goes into not having notes, not having records. That's what expensive lawyers are for, to make sure things happen without what's called a paper trail. That's how politics works. Powerful people get together and decide on a direction, and they don't tell everybody.
00:40:24
Speaker
So people who have not been in those rooms can call me a conspiracy theorist all they want, but I was the one advising the chief strategist for President Clinton, and I was the one advising Vice President Gore and his strategists.
00:40:38
Speaker
I guess that's it. Why am I called a conspiracy theorist? What else are you going to call me at this point to discredit me? I'm a Rhodes Scholar, Yale, Oxford, eight bestsellers. Literally, all you can call me to discredit me as a conspiracy theorist. What else is there?
00:40:55
Speaker
Let me go back to that little nugget there where you said, notes aren't coming out of the rooms. There are failings there that make it obvious that there is something that is up. It takes me to part of the book, which I, probably the part of the book that I struggled with the most, and that is the metaphysical element that you put here. Now I hear that and I hear
00:41:16
Speaker
you know, never underestimate the ability of people just to bugger up and to be incompetent. You go beyond that and you go beyond self-interest to say that a lot of the failings of COVID you put down to evil. This is obviously a bias of me. I'm an atheist. I struggled with the religious element of the book for that reason, but I, I'm keen to get your thoughts on how that metaphysical dimension plays into how you reflect on this period. Sure. Well, first let me just like respect your position.
00:41:43
Speaker
I'm Jewish and we're not supposed to proselytize anyone. So when I write about my sense of the metaphysical, I'm not trying to tell anyone that I know what's happening, right, for them. It's a very subjective report of my best understanding.
00:42:01
Speaker
And I should clarify as well, when I use the word struggle, I use it in the sense of it forced me to think more deeply than at any other point. I thought it was powerful what you wrote. I wasn't saying struggle in a negative sense as much as it forced me to reflect in a quite a substantive way. I understand totally. And again, to be as scrupulous as I can be, either sense I would have respected, right? I mean, I guess my point is, I feel, especially as a Jewish,
00:42:28
Speaker
because people are always trying to proselytize us, right? I feel like it's so important for me to say very humbly, this is what I see rather than this is what I know, or this is what's right for you or for anyone else. So that says it should, like, I'm just saying, like, however you struggle is great. And, you know, as a writer, I'm just thrilled if someone struggles with my work as opposed to not being moved in either direction at all.
00:42:56
Speaker
So having said that, I, you know, really study, you know, I keep saying in this talk, I study history. I study history because history has so many answers for us and that's why it's being wiped out now, but never in human history could bad things get accomplished at such a great scale. So simultaneously without, I mean, you know,
00:43:23
Speaker
This comes from my experience as a political consultant too. Everyone wants to own the world. Everyone wants to run the world at that level. They may have rules keeping them from just seizing all the power, but at that level, literally, they all want to run the world and they can't achieve it. Hitler or Stalin, they
00:43:48
Speaker
They can't achieve it all the way. There are dissident factions. There are people who can't be bribed. There are assassination attempts. There are backstabbers. There are just people too stupid to carry out plans in lockstep. There are rich people who can't be bribed.
00:44:08
Speaker
a flaw in human history, like going back to, you know, the Caesars going back to Homer, right? There's a flaw. It's, you know, there's a beautiful woman. No one counted on that, right? No, seriously, like every story will just take Troy. No, you won't. There's always a flaw. So what happened from 2020 to the present of all these institutions all over the world, turning from
00:44:34
Speaker
you know, hospitals that healed people to hospitals that were perfectly comfortable, you know, euthanizing people, right? Schools going from being safe places to places that happily abused children by putting masks on their faces. People going from critical thinking, educated minds to completely believing all the same talking points all at once.
00:45:00
Speaker
entirely uncritically, not even able to engage with alternative points of view. And the goal of the policies, so anti-family, anti-child, close the churches and synagogues, keep the bars open, keep the strip clubs open, keep Walmart open, inject people, inject them some more, inject them against their will, hide the myocarditis, hide the sterilization. And also just all these heads of state mouthing the same
00:45:27
Speaker
steps at exactly the same time. I couldn't see how it was just normal bad politics. I mean, I've worked with the smartest people in politics. They couldn't accomplish that if it was just normal people just coordinating their bad intentions, right? And also I felt it, you know, like, and this is not very scientific. I have no evidence for this beyond my testimony, but the world felt different, you know,
00:45:57
Speaker
starting in March of 2020, like something was on the planet that hadn't been there before, that was dark, that didn't care about us as human beings, right? That's why in my analysis, I kind of like dropped the notion of Satan because Satan A is very much a construct of Milton and Dante in the West, but also is an anti-hero who cares about God in a negative way and cares about humans in a negative way. This doesn't feel like that. It just feels like this impersonal sadistic force that
00:46:26
Speaker
just took up residence on the planet and was aligning people like magnets in an impersonal, sadistic direction.
Preserving Western Civilization Values
00:46:35
Speaker
So as a result, I didn't know what it was and I still don't know fully what it is, but I did look and I went back to the Hebrew Bible. Luckily I read Hebrew and I read this book by Jonathan Cahn, who's a messianic Jew, meaning he knows the Hebrew tradition and the Christian tradition, which is helpful.
00:46:54
Speaker
thesis kind of made sense to me. It made emotional sense that, you know, we've had a covenant and these are just like, I don't think I'm describing literal truth. I think I'm describing kind of mythological symbolic narrative. So please take it in that spirit. But his basic premise is that
00:47:12
Speaker
You know, we've kind of upheld a covenant, a Judeo-Christian covenant, whether you believe in God or not. Our hospitals, our courthouses, they're shaped by the Decalogue, right? They're shaped by the Ten Commandments. You don't have to believe in God, you know, but a hospital is not going to kill people and a judge is not going to assign the victory to the
00:47:33
Speaker
person who bribes him most, right, in the West, in the way our institutions are supposed to work. So that's the memory of the Judeo-Christian covenant. And America was founded in a covenant, not for one religion, but to be a kind of, to be a city on the hill, to be dedicated to God, you know, however you choose to worship. So that's a covenant. And so his argument was that when we took our hands off the covenant,
00:48:03
Speaker
we let these negative forces rush in that are pagan forces. That kind of resonated to me because the pre-Juda Christian world, the world before monotheism, before the Ten Commandments, before the family. It was a pretty horrible world. It was a world in which children were thrown to Baal and
00:48:25
Speaker
you know, people were enslaved and butchered en masse and women were treated as chattel. And there was none of the things we think of as part of society. There was no compassion. There was no respect for human life, you know, at all. There was just pure force. And that's the world that I feel has kind of rushed in the world of pure force and pure sadism. I'm literally purely speculating. I have no
00:48:52
Speaker
literal confidence in what I'm saying, but intuitively it made sense to me. Because the only other place I felt that was on Guantanamo. We could keep walking down that metaphysical pathway for hours, I feel, but there's just one more question that I have for you, Naomi, which I think kind of ties together some different strands that we've been discussing. You obviously fear for the state of the West generally at the moment. My question is, is Western civilization in terminal decline? And if so, what comes after that decline?
00:49:22
Speaker
Well, that's definitely up to us, Will, right? I mean, if we all sit back or collude for sure, it's not going to outlive our lifetimes. We'll be a parking lot, you know, with a gas chamber attached. If we fight back, and I am seeing, I don't want to be Pollyanna, like my mood about this shifts from day to day, but I'm seeing robust resistance movements all over Europe. Certainly in the United States, we've done a good job fighting effectively to
00:49:51
Speaker
strengthen our institutions that protect liberty. We've lost a lot, but we've fought back really hard and gained a lot. Australia, God, I don't know. I think it depends what country you're in, but in order to save Western, and I include Australia and New Zealand in that, values, I think we have to recognize that it's not racist to cherish.
00:50:14
Speaker
what the West gave, not just us, but the world. Everyone fighting oppression around the world uses ideas that happen to have emerged in the West, especially in Scotland, of human rights and freedom and liberty. There's nothing wrong with saying that's better than not freedom and not liberty and not human rights. There's nothing wrong with noticing that that came out of the West. It doesn't make
00:50:38
Speaker
white people or people of European descent better than anyone else, but it's a precious heritage. The Judeo-Christian tradition with the Abrahamic religions, with their ethics, that's precious, right? There's ways to be with no ethics, as we are finding out. So in order to save it, we have to identify it and acknowledge it and be willing to cherish it. I think that's a nice rallying cry to end on.
00:51:01
Speaker
Naomi, congratulations on this book. I was expecting to be intellectually challenged. I wasn't expecting it to be so human and so poignant and to challenge me in that way. So obviously it goes without saying that I recommend everyone goes out and reads this book. It is a testament to your intellectual and moral courage. Thank you for coming on, Australiana. Thank you so much, Will and Rachel. Take care.
00:51:26
Speaker
Thank you very much for listening to this episode of Australiana. If you enjoyed the show, please leave us a rating and a review. And if you really enjoyed the show, head to spectator.com.au forward slash join. Sign up for a digital subscription today and you'll get your first month absolutely free.