The plague afflicting liberal democracy

Power-hungry governments are using totalitarian measures to stamp out Covid-19, author Naomi Wolf warns.

American author Naomi Wolf. “The younger generation hasn’t been raised on a legacy of human rights and now that there’s tyranny they don’t even known what their rights are.”

Naomi Wolf, the feminist author who shot to fame in the early 1990s with her bestselling book The Beauty Myth, which called out the pressure women faced to conform to the unrealistic standards set by the media and big business, has transformed into an anti-lockdown warrior.

Critical of “glass half-empty” feminists, Wolf has turned her considerable work ethic and rhetorical skills to attacking what she sees as power-hungry governments that have used destructive, unjustified means to stamp out Covid-19, pioneered and promoted by the Chinese Communist Party.

“I’m horrified; I have night­mares,” she tells Inquirer as she travels across the US campaigning for states to legislate for her Five Freedoms – from masks, school closures, lockdowns, compulsory vaccination and arbitrary business closures.

Speaking earlier this week on Memorial Day, Wolf, 58, says fallen American soldiers would be appalled by the response to Covid-19. “It doesn’t honour their sacrifice,” she says, arguing the past year has seen violation of fundamental human rights in liberal democracies on a grand scale.

“Western democracies had freedom of assembly even when there was smallpox, cholera, typhus; restrictions on movement were very limited,” she adds.

Wolf is correct that the range, severity and duration of public-health measures to combat Covid-19 dwarfs what governments did in previous pandemics, including the far deadlier Spanish flu a century ago. Whatever their effectiveness (a debate sure to rage for a generation), Wolf is adamant China, big tech and pharmaceutical companies, and a compromised mainstream media, have facilitated them.

“It’s naive not to think a totalitarian power does not want to change our culture,” she adds, arguing lockdowns – the sort implemented in Britain, Victoria and most nations throughout the pandemic — were invented by China’s President Xi Jinping early last year.

She worries particularly about Australia, a “petri dish” for what will happen in Britain, Canada and the US, given the pressure it faces from China. “The way that you guys I think were first in shutting down your parliament … that was a scary thing for me to watch. Now I’m going across country in the US and state houses are closed. Bars open, but state houses closed. That’s the best way to consolidate power, close down access for citizens,” she says.

Wolf has been relentlessly attacked for her position. In March Slate magazine slammed her as a “Covid truther”, cattily asking whether the book that propelled her to fame “was actually garbage?”.

Indeed, Wolf’s publishing career took a battering in 2019, when her ninth book, Outrages, on 19th-century treatment of homosexuals in Britain, had to be corrected after she misinterpreted “death recorded” to mean a death sentence when in fact it meant pardoned.

Undeterred, Wolf, dauntingly articulate, pushes back against conspiracy-theory accusations, and despairs at the lack of interest by mainstream journalists in the quality of Covid-19 data and the role of ubiquitous PCR test in determining cases.

“This (conspiracy theory accusation) is the reds under every bed of our era,” she says, arguing journalists compromised by pressure from governments and institutions such as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation have had to “assail as conspiracy theorists people who bring well sourced, primary-sourced evidence that lockdowns don’t work”.

She does have a point. It is little known that more than eight times as many scientists and doctors have signed the Great Barrington Declaration, which argues the certain cost of lockdowns exceeds their debatable benefits, than have signed the rival John Snow Memorandum that advocates lockdowns.

“Everyone who’s worked at the highest level of communications in a democracy knows that everyone at that level is trying to create certain historical outcomes with no fingerprints,” she says, pointing out she was an adviser to both Al Gore and Bill Clinton.

The fact more journalists are taking notice of the hypothesis that SARS-CoV-2 could have leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, initially dismissed as a conspiracy theory, she says, demonstrates that those writers who promoted it could ultimately be proved right.

“More and more is coming out showing there were and are conflicts around funding,” she says, noting the “double-digit” billions major US tech giants such as Google, Facebook – which were censoring anti-lockdown viewpoints – and Amazon had made from lockdown policies.

Wolf’s 2007 book The End of America, which argued Americans were losing their constitutional freedoms on the road to tyranny, took aim at the administration of Republican George W. Bush and congress for using the September 11 terrorist attacks as an excuse to create a vast surveillance state and pursue a “war on terror” that would never end.

The left, which was then at one with her in her attacks on the Guantanamo Bay detention centre and the USA Patriot Act, has “betrayed its legacy”, she argues.

“A lot of lifelong Dems like me right now are appalled and disoriented … the language of the Biden administration is completely alien to liberal individualist humanism,” she says.

“The chill I had when I saw my own colleagues cheer at the purging of conservative voices after the Biden election, the purging of (Don­ald) Trump – who is a horrible human being, an awful person – but have we not learnt from history: they start purging your enemies, then they purge you?”

As part of her campaign to promote human rights and greater civic participation, Wolf has established a website, DailyClout, to encourage voters to read and understand proposed legislation.

“The chill I had when I saw my own colleagues cheer at the purging of conservative voices after the Biden election, the purging of (Don­ald) Trump... have we not learnt from history?”

Speaking to Inquirer from Union Gap, Washington State, Wolf savages early Democrat proposals for a Green New Deal as “crony Marxism”.

“Marxist analysis is very helpful. I’m the daughter of a former communist. I believe in the labour movement … but this was a straight-up centrally planned economy in which you were more equal based on race,” she says.

Wolf is as optimistic about the achievements of feminism, where she made her name, as she is pessimistic about the future of liberal democracy. The movement has led to “the most sweeping revolution in human history, maybe since the invention of agriculture … where young women are stronger and more confident than ever”, she says. “Societies have been completely rebuilt to give women equality, at least on paper … and with the rise of the internet a woman in the most patriarchal culture knows what her rights are.”

Highly critical of Facebook for its censorship of questioning voices during the pandemic, Wolf nevertheless sees Instagram, one of its subsidiaries, as a force for good in “deconstructing the beauty myth”. “Now it’s not just tall, thin and blonde women with big breasts on Instagram, it’s no longer editors on Madison Avenue acting as the gatekeepers,” she says.

In late 2019 Wolf ended up in a public slanging match with federal energy minister Angus Taylor, disputing a claim she’d been alerted to in his maiden speech in parliament, that she was opposed to Christmas celebrations when they were Rhodes scholars at New College, Oxford.

“The impunity really strikes me of how women are treated publicly,” she says, noting she wasn’t a student at Oxford at the time.

“I love Australia; I’ve been a number of times, I’ve always been struck by how strong the women are and how fiercely they fight for what I would call feminist rights, and how deeply entrenched some of the misogyny is,” she says.

Whatever Wolf’s views on political correctness were in the 1980s, she has become a trenchant critic of left-wing demands to tear down statues, arguing the West was being “disempowered and tenderised” by relentless self-criticism, leaving us, “for our adversaries … like a parking lot ready to be built on”.

“The left-wing critique of the West as sexist, racist and classist is totally legitimate and salutary, and I’ve been part of it. But there is such thing as throwing the baby out with bathwater,” she says.

She rails against “the culture of cancelling, the backlash against intellectuals on campuses for saying the wrong thing”, which are “definitely imported from China and big tech is embracing it”.

Jenin Younes, a Washington DC-based civil liberties lawyer who recently met Wolf through mutual advocacy against lockdowns, says she finds her “courageous and inspiring” given the “sometimes vicious, endless attacks on her from both the right and the left”.

“We bonded as two of only a few leftists who opposed lockdowns, mask mandates, and vaccine passports, (recognising) the harm they inflict upon the poor and the working class,” she tells Inquirer. “We both concluded that the left-right divide no longer mattered and that the new frontier was authoritarianism versus freedom.”

While Wolf’s focus has shifted across 30 years from the rights and position of women in society to broader concerns about government overreach, a deep suspicion of those in authority remains a constant.

“The younger generation hasn’t been raised on a legacy of human rights and now that there’s tyranny they don’t even known what their rights are, they are waiting for Boris Johnson to give them their freedom back,” she laments. “This is just the beginning if we don’t stop this now … tyrannies only go to one place.”

Whether Wolf turns out to be a Cassandra or a too cynical alarmist, her courage in speaking out for what she ardently believes must be commended.

Given a choice between journalists who are too sceptical of government or those who are too willing to propagandise in favour of its wisdom, it should be obvious which group performs the greater public service.