After it became clear that the “pandemic” crisis, the lockdown crisis, was never about “the virus” but rather about a global bid to kill off our free world and suppress all of our freedoms—since I and many others had been publicly vocal about this danger and were doing all we could to alert our communities—that is to say, humanity—I started to receive a lot of private direct messages (DMs). And they were all kind of similar. And they grossed me out.
In the DMs, people whom I know socially or professionally—people from journalism, from politics, from medicine, from science; most of them upper-middle-class “men in suits”—said something like, “Naomi, I really respect your actions right now. I totally agree with what you are saying. But of course, I can’t say anything publicly because [fill in the nonsensical, craven reason].”
These people—privileged people, who had the power and resources to help in ways that many other people couldn’t—instead expended their time and energy to justify their monumental, world-changing cowardice, at a time when we all needed to be at least somewhat brave.
The nonsensical and craven reason that followed this shameful message was typically something along the lines of, “My boss will get mad at me” or “My professional peers will have a problem with my speaking up.” It’s never even, “I have bills to pay.”
Your boss will get mad at you, Oh, you who DM?
Do you understand what is at stake? If you comply and collude with a tyrannical oligopoly, your kids will live as slaves and as serfs forever.
The DMs insist that I am “brave.” But I am not “brave,” I thought; you’re just a p—y.
Don’t get me wrong. I understand the gender politics around ever using the epithet above. Everyone who has read my work knows that, being myself a woman, I have great respect for women, and for their bodies; I understand that one does not throw around this epithet lightly or in a misogynist way.
But in such a moment of historic-level cowardice among some privileged and influential people, no other epithet will do.
I was initially baffled by these DMs. Why would I be getting these? What did these people want? Why did they think I needed their excuses? I asked other, braver people WTF this was.
They laughed and said, “They want you to tell them that it is okay.”
So I am saying publicly: this is not okay.
I am exasperated by those who stay in the shadows, agreeing with the risk-taking of others, who admire their “courage.” This is a form of othering that dehumanizes and exploits those speaking out.
It casts the people who do take risks for the wellbeing of others as being somehow naturally better fitted for this difficult job than is the speaker. It’s a form of offloading one’s own responsibility guiltlessly onto a subgroup that is assigned the status of somehow liking the battle, or of being somehow better suited to combat, by nature, than is the speaker himself.
It’s like all those guys I knew in college who never did the dishes after dinner because they said they were bad at it.
I don’t know anyone truly heroic who likes the battle. But I think that most could not live with themselves if they walked away from doing what they know they could do to help—in a moment in which obvious right and wrong have not been clearer since 1941.
Dr. Patrick Phillips—a Canadian ER doctor who spoke out early against the harms of lockdowns, when many fellow doctors remained silent—said something like, “I realized that many of my peers were silent because they were worried about their careers. But I also realized that if I didn’t speak out, soon I would have no career worth saving.”1 Dr. Jay Bhattacharya said, when asked about having been vilified, smeared, attacked, and hounded professionally for eighteen months—for having been right about the harms of lockdowns—something like: “If I didn’t speak up now, what is the point of my career?”2
Dr. Peter McCullough, who, in the middle of fighting for everyone, took time to text me a way to help my loved ones who had COVID, said on television something like, “They can arrest me for saying this. Just don’t give these mRNA vaccines to your child.” He also wryly commented at another time that those opposed to his message were trying to erase, one by one, the professional credentials after his name. But those dangers, and those forms of bullying, have not stopped him.
In March 2022, I interviewed Edward Dowd, the investor who was a portfolio manager at BlackRock. He warned the world about Pfizer’s fraud, and was, for sure, going against “principalities and powers.” He cautioned his peers in the investment community that betting on the Pfizers of the world is a bet against freedom forever. I asked him where he got his personal courage. He said something like, “I will keep going till we either win our freedoms back or I am in a gulag.”3
The “pandemic” was a time in history that hammered out heroes and heroines in the forge of crisis.
It was also a time of unprecedented cowardice, when those who chose collusion, when they knew better, allowed their souls to shrivel in that same heat.
There was, at that time, no room left to equivocate; there was no room left to moon about in the middle.
At that point, there was no middle.
I watched the bravest men and women of our time forced to hurtle into battle. The women leaders were certainly as courageous as the men (though they got less airtime): I watched Jenin Younes, then of New Civil Liberties Alliance, realize she had to speak up publicly against unlawful lockdowns, even though she would endure professional opposition. Leslie Manookian of Health Freedom Defense Fund, early on, sued coercive governors and governments, and won. I followed Tiffany Justice of Moms for Liberty as she was shadowed and faced down by a security guard when she insisted on accompanying her maskless child into a context of school bullying and mask coercion. This intimidation did not stop her; it made her more determined to defend the kids. Lori Roman, of the American Constitutional Rights Union (ACRU), took every single email I forwarded from desperate parents trying to protect a young adult daughter or son, often a soldier, or a pregnant government employee, or a student, from forced mRNA vaccination.
The warrior queens Stephanie Locricchio and Aimee Villella, then of Children’s Health Defense, rallied thousands of moms and dads to confront their abusive governors and the cruel, forced-masking, forced-vaccinating schools; these moms, along with other parents, put their bodies between middle-schoolers and medical vans that were parked in the schoolyards—vans seeking to inject minors against their parents’ wishes with an experimental product; a product that turns out to have been generated via fraud and via the concealment of serious harms.
But that is exactly where parents’ bodies should be, in such a dangerous situation for the minors.
The real question is not, What drives such parents to put their bodies between the van and the kids? But rather, Where are all the other parents?
I watched Dr. Paul Alexander race into the thick of a peaceful trucker protest in Canada that was being targeted by Canadian authorities, to send back defiant—nonviolent—dispatches from the front; I listened as he spoke up on stage and in press conferences in support of the truckers’ lawful rights to freedoms of speech. I read his accounts when the brutal regime in Canada floated frightening rumors of an arrest warrant being issued for him to intimidate him. He did not stop. Next, he stood with the American truckers.
I watched Dr. Martin Kulldorff, Dr. Sunetra Gupta, and Dr. Bhattacharya, along with Jeffrey Tucker—the signatories and the convener of the Great Barrington Declaration—tell the truth about lockdowns early and consistently in the face of continual whirlwinds of institutional and media blowback. Dr. Harvey Risch dared to say that we had attained herd immunity—at a time when people were being professionally ostracized for doing so.
The reporters who showed courage? I can count them on two hands. Stephen K. Bannon kept producing reports on the advances of attacks on liberty in the face of government legal scrutiny. Natalie Winters and The National Pulse team reported on government malfeasance regarding COVID when the President was saber-rattling personally and scarily against purveyors of “misinformation.” The legacy media? My former publishers, the Guardian, the New York Times, the Washington Post? Silent about dangers or colluding with lies.
Nonreporters were doing the jobs of AWOL or cowering reporters: Dr. Henry Ealy, a nutritional healer, and two Oregon state senators, Dennis Linthicum and Kim Thatcher, broke a massive story of CDC malfeasance regarding government data.
These heroines and heroes did not take these actions because it was fun or easy, or because they were already warriors for liberty as career choices. These are not entertaining, lucrative, status-filled paths.
Most such heroes and heroines, and other less-known peaceful warriors aligned with liberties right now, would surely rather be back in the classroom, or polishing essays on any number of other subjects, or in the lab, or enjoying their families, free of the need to face down bullies and to stand up to security guards.
But unlike most of us, they understood that they were called to rise to this moment.
The thing is—we all are called, similarly.
This is why you always hear heroes, when questioned about their heroism, saying “I had no choice” or “I was just doing my job.” Heroes and heroines are right. They are just doing their jobs. They are doing their jobs as human beings, with responsibilities to others.
The cowardly, affluent men who DM me for my exoneration (it is pretty much always men; I think women are more aware of when they have chosen silence, and don’t try to justify it) make the lives of all the heroes and heroines of this moment, named and unnamed, harder.
The work of heroes and heroines is more difficult, the more that others seek to stay in the comfortable shadows, and eventually, when it is safe, to ride out on the wave of change that was painfully generated by those out front.
The problem is that it really matters that a lot of people resist all at once. This decision whether to speak up makes the difference, when it scales, between freedom or servitude forever.
Tyrannies only fall when there is mass resistance. History is clear on this. When it is just a few—well, they are marginalized, silenced, smeared, or, when things go far enough, arrested.
So, to you who DMed me: thanks.
In the spring of 2022, the Democrats in power received a political consultant’s memo telling them that a majority of voters were sick of “restrictions,” and that the opposition’s message of restoring freedom was a winning message. This memo caused the nauseating, immediate about-face on “restrictions”—attributed of course to “the data” and not to the obvious politics.
It took the voices of dozens and then hundreds of brave folks, speaking at first contrary to a mass of propaganda, and facing deplatforming, professional cancellation, and worse to change that cultural atmosphere.
Watching these brave people made me braver than I would have been myself.
Shortly before the Democrat volte-face, I was in New York City. I could no longer bear the fact that my hotel, the Walker Hotel Tribeca, had a cafe and a restaurant in the lobby with signs stating that these facilities were for “vaccinated only.” I am unvaccinated, for reasons that should be, of course, no one’s business but my own.
So on day three of my stay, I politely informed the staff at the Blue Bottle Cafe that I was unvaccinated, and that I would now take my small coffee and my overnight oats to the forbidden lunch counter, and I would sit there peacefully, but that I would not comply with the New York City directive for the cafe to discriminate against me.
The staff informed me stertorously—doing their jobs—that my doing so was against NYC mandate. I said that I understood, but that I was nonetheless choosing not to comply. They warned that they would call the manager. I said that I understood that as well.
I then sat down at the illegal lunch counter, texted my lawyer to be on standby, posted publicly to Governor Hochul and to New York City mayor Eric Adams that I was currently intentionally violating the discriminatory New York City mandate that prevented unvaccinated people from being seated in cafes and restaurants, and that I was at the Walker Hotel Tribeca Cafe lunch counter at that very moment if they wished to arrest me.
Then I waited for an hour, heart pounding, to be arrested.
Do you know what happened?
Nothing.
Later that day I was at Grand Central Station. Almost all of the lower-level food court was roped off for the vaccinated, and there was nowhere for an unvaccinated New Yorker to sit down, let alone to eat lunch. In a restricted seating area, a heavyset bouncer in a mask was demanding people’s digital vaccination cards along with—unprecedented in my experience—their IDs, just to enter.
I explained that I wished to enter, and that I was unvaccinated and had no “Key to NYC” pass.
Two cops appeared at once. “Look at the other seating area (over there, far away) saved for the unvaccinated,” they said nicely. I explained that the strength of New York City, and of America for that matter, was its diversity and its equal treatment of all, and that if people had refused to comply with other forms of discrimination and forced separate accommodations, discriminatory rules would have ended sooner. I stated for the second time that day I intended peacefully not to comply.
A third police officer, their senior, appeared. He explained that I would be given a summons for trespassing.
The cop with the notebook that contained the summons form took as long as he possibly could to write it out. No one wanted to arrest me or to give me a summons.
Finally, the three cops surrounded me and firmly escorted me to the upper level. I was quite scared, but I told myself not to give in.
On the upper level, I waited to be arrested. I was braced for the handcuffs again. Once again, my heart was racing. I have been arrested before in NYC, and it is frightening and uncomfortable.
But when I asked if I could now walk away and take my train—no one stopped me.
The takeaway? When I refused to comply with these unlawful mandates that have burnt out the soul of a once-great city, nothing happened.
The bullies, Governor Hochul and Mayor Adams, who put these scary-sounding, Dear Leaderesque “edicts” in place, and forced free people to act against their wishes like petty tyrants, were all bluster, like the Great and Mighty Oz.
When the city and state leaders were called on it, there was nothing there.
It turned out the police were not instructed to impose the law against resisters to “the mandates”—because the law would be unsustainable.
But it took those awful, frightening moments of pressing against those terrifying sounding mandates to prove, at least to myself, that they were meaningless.
Other people’s courage builds possibilities in this world.
The heroes and heroines whom I know gave me the courage to prove, that day, something that I believed was important for me to take a risk to demonstrate. I would not have known how to be brave without having witnessed their greater bravery.
There is also an ugly class divide emerging in terms of who showed real, scaled-up courage in the face of tyranny.
Who were the majority of those who stood up, speaking out and taking risks against tyranny? Overwhelmingly, it was not the “Zoom class,” for all their virtue-signaling about social justice. It was working people. It was truckers. Moms. Firefighters and cops.
When I spoke at a rally against forcing injections on first responders in NYC, the audience was made up mostly of working people. The people who march for every other cause in NYC—my affluent, liberal “tribe”—sat that one out.
The first responders put their bodies in harm’s way for the safety of my colleagues and acquaintances; but the “Zoom class” did not reciprocate with courage of their own, to protect the bodies of first responders from coercion and from harm.
We are not all equally brave, to say the least.
An old friend—an affluent, educated man, who works at the Pasteur Institute—trolled me relentlessly on social media for the duration of the pandemic, to assail me for my warnings about harms from mRNA vaccines.
As the news emerged of fraud in Pfizer’s internal trials, and news emerged of more deaths in the vaccinated group than the control, his trolling abruptly ceased.
Then, shortly after, on Facebook, he sent me news of his admittedly very pretty golden retriever.
In the run-up to the First World War, when brave men were signing up to fight, women handed out white feathers to healthy young men who had not enlisted in the war effort.
There is a metaphorical white feather to be given out these days, to those who try to change the subject—from the damage done by their “side” to the bodies of children, to evidence of the charm of their golden retrievers.
One of my favorite quotations is this, from the late poet Audre Lorde: “My silences had not protected me. Your silence will not protect you.”4
Danger, if we meet it, also gives each of us a God-given opportunity to serve our kind. In the process we become immeasurably more than we had been before.
Maybe while forcing ourselves to act bravely, we do become brave.
Someday all our kids and grandkids will ask each of us directly: Why did you stand by? Why did you not help me?
I could not breathe. Or God forbid: Now I have these health problems.
Or else they will say: Thank you so much for speaking for me, when I was too little to speak.
They will ask—Dad, Mom—Grandma, Grandpa: What did you do in the war?
Well.
What did you do?