Two and a half years of full-scale global repression, a war waged on each and every person on the planet, changed us, some for the better and some for the worse.
Your personal decision to embrace or reject global tyranny might have been a fait accompli, a gruelling journey upstream, or a gradual progression between the two. It matters not how you got to where you are now; your future lies in your choices going forward. Instead of re-examining and agonising over past decisions, now is the time to think about enlightenment and finding the truth.
Truth is not a goal in itself, but a fork in the road.
Decisions must be made. You must choose whether to participate in restoring our humanity so rudely squandered, or wash your hands of the matter. If you need evidence look no further than our own backyard for the devastation wreaked by a prime minister talking freely about transparency and kindness – while quietly strangling both of them at birth.
I doubt Naomi Wolf will walk away from her responsibility to her fellow man. Unquestionably wounded, her journey is painful.
But Wolf’s account of running away from global degeneration toward an honest and simple life is, above all, inspiring.
When the “avant garde of a great city” closed the door on scientific discourse, Wolf quite literally jumped in the car with her husband and sped away. In a war, a retreat can be the best course of action and in her case, it allowed time to heal, strategise and respond to the inequities of the last few years. It says much of Wolf that she credits the community for being instrumental in her recovery.
Wolf left behind the broken remnants of her much-loved, glittering life to find refuge in a wilderness community of rejects where truth is fiercely protected and political affiliations subservient to the moral values of respect, empathy and real kindness. Real kindness costs you when the needs of others are considered equal to or above your own needs. It is unlikely to be a perfect community but Wolf embraces it, warts and all.
After being knocked down and left for dead Wolf is now back on her feet. She has lined up the bullies who tormented her and unleashed her greatest weapon on them, her words, which are scathing. Her one-liners cut to the bone.
Newspapers and journalists, she says, are “shills for what have been revealed to be genocidal imperial powers” and “media versions of sex workers, scheduling time to deliver blow jobs to whomever would write them the biggest checks.”
Politicos are “policy wonks for a global march to tyranny that instrumentalized a murderous medical experiment on their fellow humans; on their very constituents.”
Universities are derided for abandoning their trusting young students by offering them remote learning from home and rejecting “rigorous scholarly discourse”.
Great educational institutions survived wars and revolutions with open dialogue intact but were defeated by the fear and fabrication of a global onslaught. Wolf doesn’t know if Oxford will ever regain its “vibrant commitment to the principles of reason and to freedom of speech” and is in no hurry to find out.
The “artists, filmmakers, journalists – all of the people who are supposed to say No to discrimination, No to tyranny – they had scattered, had cowered, had complied. They had groveled.”
In her previous life, Wolf’s home would be crowded with “lively, buzz-y, with a sexy, intellectually engaging vibe” people and “the happy roar of new ideas clashing or merging”.
Previously acceptable debate and banter about anything and everything was stifled by dramatic edicts from on high.
It was verboten to challenge Covid narratives, making Wolf’s demise from society inevitable when she spoke out about a serious women’s health issue.
That world surely shunned me, and made me a nonperson, overnight.
Wolf is a voice for everyone who refused to comply with global demands. She fights back, and so should we.
That world rejected me. But I rejected it right back.
The old world, the pre-2019 world, is a scene of wreckage and carnage to me. The old world I left behind, and that left me behind, is not a post-COVID world. It is a post-truth world, a post-institutional world.
Wolf found refuge among people whose simple values held them firm against the vile mass propaganda flowing from her once-hallowed, much-loved institutions.
I spend time with people who love their communities, speak out for their actual brothers and sisters, meaning humanity; risk themselves to save the lives of strangers; and care about actual fact-based journalism, actual science-based medicine, actual science-based science.
I no longer want to sit at a table with people who call themselves journalists, but who deny or trivialize injuries to women at a scale that beggars belief; who give Pfizer and the FDA a pass, and ask them no real questions.
These people, “my people”, who were once so erudite, so witty, so confident, so ethical, so privileged – the people of the elite world contained in the 2019-and-before boxes – pretty and well-spoken as they once were, turn out, with the twist of just a couple of years, and just a bucketload or two of bribe money, to be revealed as monsters and barbarians.
Wolf’s journey should not be trivialised and neither should ours. We need to take ourselves seriously.
Can we escape guilt for our bad decisions by shifting the blame on others? Can we claim ‘they’ told me to do it? No! That attitude is morally reprehensible, a weakness and pure laziness.
Any journey toward the truth requires honesty, first with ourselves and then with others.
If we do not actively pursue the values we value for ourselves, then by default others will shape us into what they want.
Only when we are stronger and better people will our families, our communities and our nations do better. And, how desperately do we need to do better?