Is A Jewish Feminist Leading Me to God?
The Covid cruelty we experienced has some looking for spiritual explanations
Right off the bat, I must address my admittedly clickbaity headline. I’m still an atheist. However, I’ve been thinking about the possible reality of a spiritual world in a way I haven’t in years.
The three years of worldwide Covid tyranny came like a shock in the night, so suddenly and seemingly so well coordinated that many people naturally wondered if a sinister conspiracy had planned it all. Some wondered if that conspiracy could have an actual demonic element.
The Jewish feminist referenced in the headline is Naomi Wolf.
Until fairly recently I only knew the name Naomi Wolf as author of The Beauty Myth. I think we had a copy of the book on our shelves, where it sat for years unread (at least by me) until it finally fell victim to one of our periodic cullings.
During the George W. Bush era, I think it was, I caught an interview in which she warned of the danger of fascism coming to America. This piqued my momentary interest — I’m a libertarian, voluntaryist variety — but I didn’t pay close attention. In my experience, feminists and modern liberals had a skewed idea of freedom at best. I was sure that if you scratched one you would find another authoritarian.
Then Covid happened.
By “Covid,” I don’t mean just the coronavirus or the illness it’s purported to cause. I mean, rather, the bundle of crimes committed against people in the U.S. and around the world, using the (engineered) virus as the excuse.
Should we call it the Covid Tyranny? The Covid Crime? The Covid Psyop? There are so many layers of evil, tangled up together, that it’s hard to settle on a single phrase to encompass it all. So I just say: Covid.
We saw the massive violation of civil liberties, the lockdowns and curfews, the destruction of businesses. We saw videos of people being arrested for going to church, and scenes of police tackling, choking and beating men and women for being outside of a designated quarantine zone or for not “socially” distancing or for not wearing a mask. Daring to protest the tyranny could get you a rubber bullet in the back; just ask the Australians.
There was the totalitarian crackdown on free speech, and the censoring and deplatforming of anyone questioning the Covid narrative, including some of the world’s most accomplished doctors and medical researchers.
There were the constant lies, starting with the fraudulence of PCR testing. That these “tests” (PCR was never meant to be a diagnostic tool) were being run at such a high cycle threshold as to guarantee up to 95 per cent false positives was, for me personally, the red flag that put me on guard against all the lies and gaslighting that followed.
There was the bribing, shaming, bullying, fear mongering and coercion to corral people into receiving a black-box medical injection, coupled with an increasingly shrill campaign by politicians, bureaucrats and talking heads stoking hatred against those who chose not to get jabbed.
There was the sophisticated channel-flooding propaganda (all Covid, all the time) that spread fear throughout populations, inflamed mass hysteria, divided people against one another, and wrecked friendships and family relationships, often irreparably, while ripping gargantuan holes in the social fabric.
There was the killing — might as well call it murder — of hospital patients denied any treatment except ventilators and Remdesivir, of sick elderly dispatched to nursing homes to die or infect others, and, in the UK, of patients given do-not-resuscitate orders and deliberately overdosed with Midazolam. Now, of course, the world is learning that the Covid vaccines themselves can maim and kill.
All this barely scratches the surface of the inanities and cruelties inflicted on people by the Covid tyrants, but if I tried to catalog all of the crimes committed, this essay would become a book, and my anger might begin to burn white-hot once more, something I don’t want right now.
However, I’m not yet prepared to move on, as some urge — usually those who went along with the violations or actively supported them. At this writing there have been precious few apologies from the tyranny’s cheerleaders and enablers, and zero punishments for its perpetrators. Lengthy prison terms should be in order for hundreds if not thousands of the most culpable, and that’s just in the U.S. alone.
What I want to focus on here, though, is that in the midst of the Covid depredations, heroes arose. They included business owners, pastors and others who defied the mandates, often suffering crippling fines or arrest for daring to resist the tyrants and stand up for their rights.
Other heroes included top MDs, epidemiologists, journalists and podcasters, and others with professional standing or large platforms, who braved censure, career destruction and demonization to raise the alarm about the (non)science behind the mandates and then the vaccines. Moreover these individuals were united in condemning the new normal regime of Covd totalitarianism.
These individuals didn’t necessarily agree with one another on everything. What made them heroes to me was their willingness to face the bullets and state the truth as they saw it, regardless of pressure to back down or shut up, and their commitment to informed medical consent, bodily autonomy, and freedom of conscience and speech.
Naomi Wolf was one of those who spoke out against the Covid crimes. She did so often and with passion. Her threat to the powers that be is underscored by the fact that she was one of the individuals singled out by the White House to have her social media accounts banned. She clearly drew blood.
Her stand in favor of freedom and against the metastasizing authoritarianism estranged her from her old friends on the liberal left, her natural tribe, as she herself has described it.
I will interject that I once called myself a liberal, meaning it in the classical sense. A liberal, to me, was someone who defended civil liberties, stood for free speech for everyone, and supported maximum individual freedom. My eventual coming to libertarianism (and pure voluntaryism, or anarchism) seemed a natural progression from liberalism, never mind that many in the libertarian camp describe starting out as conservatives.
Naomi Wolf seems to have stayed true to that classical liberal vision that I admire, although I imagine we would disagree on a few things — although, perhaps not that many.
Her most important contribution to unraveling the Covid deception, in my opinion, was to shine a light on what turned out to be a very dark corner: Pfizer’s vaccine clinical trial documents. You may recall the company wanted to keep those documents sealed for 75 years.
Under the umbrella of Wolf’s tech company (DailyClout.io), her colleague Amy Kelly coordinated the massive undertaking, enlisting thousands of medical professionals, researchers and data scientists to comb through and make sense of the trial data. The result was a series of reports revealing the virtually non-existent scientific grounds Pfizer had for unleashing its mRNA jabs on the world, and, moreover, the potential — nay, almost certain — harms the vaccine posed to everyone, and especially to particular populations such as young men and pregnant women.
What does this have to do with thoughts about the supernatural?
Naomi Wolf was one of the few people, of those I followed in any case, who ventured to speculate on the metaphysical aspects of Covid tyranny. Prudently, she was careful to separate her data-driven reporting from her musings on things some would consider woo. Nevertheless, she wasn’t shy about suggesting that forces darker than mere human opportunism could have been behind the Covid evil.
In her book, The Bodies of Others; the New Authoritarians, COVID-19 and The War Against the Human, she has a chapter titled “Evil Beyond Human Imagination.” There she writes,
I had come to believe there was more afoot here than just human vanity, or culpability, or even conventional evil. Here was an infection of the soul … . We were faced with the suddenly manifested structures and their drivers, who erected this demonic world in less than two years and imposed it on everyone else; these heads of state and heads of the medical boards and heads of school boards and these teachers; these heads of unions and these national leaders and the state-level leaders and town hall-level functionaries; all the way down to the men and women who disinvite relatives from Thanksgiving … . This massive edifice of evil, was complex and really, too elegant, to assign to just human awfulness and human inventiveness. It suggested a spiritual dimension of evil.
Given my own experiences during Covid, including periods of depression and a feeling of alienation from most people around me, her words gave me pause, and led me to think, more than I have in years, on the possible otherworldly reality of Evil (with a capital “E”).
My default position is that the Covid tyranny, though appearing globally planned and coordinated by powerful and sinister forces, was at its base simply the response of sociopathic politicians, power-hungry bureaucrats and pocket-lining pharma CEOs to a crisis they found too good to let go to waste. I include here the Davos types, who leapt at the opportunity to pull out their hubristic plans for a Great Reset and a Fourth Industrial Revolution and to use Covid as a wedge for advancing their techno-feudalistic dreams.
And yet: I can’t deny what I subjectively felt at many points during 2020-2022, that the world was in the grip of something palpably and preternaturally oppressive.
For me this was reflected most chillingly in the reactions of ordinary people to attempts to present them with information that contradicted the official Covid narrative. They couldn’t or wouldn’t hear it. It was as if they were hypnotized to not ask questions, to stay afraid and to obey, and to robotically repeat the propaganda (“Mask up!” “Safe and Effective”).
In olden days we would have said they were under a spell.
For the first time in many years, I pondered the idea of Evil as a metaphysical reality and not merely a label we apply to people doing bad things to one another. Naomi Wolf gave me, not permission, but social proof, if you will, to turn my thoughts to the possibile spiritual dimension of the war that was waged on human beings.
As I mentioned at the outset, I remain an atheist at this writing. I’m not a proselytizer for unbelief, and by no means militant about it. I rarely even have reason to bring it up.
Religion actually fascinates me: the rituals, the art, the architecture, the theologies, the history. Unlike some atheists, I wouldn’t wipe religion from the face of the earth if I had a magic button to do so. (If I could I would make the institution of the State, which some worship almost as a god, disappear!)
To me, all religions are true, not in a cosmic sense, but in the role they play in meeting people’s needs for community, belongingness, celebration and connection to tradition. Local churches, synagogues and other religious gatherings serve as third places between home and work; at their best they stand ready, in a crisis, to interpose themselves between their members and the unjust demands of secular authorities (which, appallingly, they failed at during Covid, instead rolling over and submitting, without protest, to all of the mandates — including closing their doors).
I was brought up in a Southern Baptist household. The emphasis in my home and in the church we attended was on getting saved, meaning: accepting Jesus Christ as one’s personal savior. We were told we should love Christ because he sacrificed himself for us, but really, it was all about avoiding hell.
Those of us reared in the church were expected to make a profession of faith at around 12 or 13 years old, the so-called age of reason. This involved going to the front of the church during the altar call and confessing that you were a sinner and desired to have Jesus come live in your heart. This would be followed a short time later by baptism, which was by immersion.
I worried a lot about going to hell, but between stage fright and, thanks to an unfortunate swimming pool incident, a fear of being dunked, I never took that trip down the aisle. The Christian schema, at least as expressed by the Baptists, never made much sense to me anyway, and I remember at the age of 14 finally telling myself that it was all nonsense.
I’ve since read extensively in most of the major world religions, as well as the different strains of Christianity. Nothing has persuaded me that I should give my allegiance to any of them. I sometimes tell people I’m a Taoist, but that’s a reflection of my love for the Tao Te Ching and concepts such as wu wei, te and yin yang, and not anything to do with the gods or magical practices that later accreted to Taoism as a folk religion.
I did join a Unitarian Universalist church following the end of my first marriage, more for social reasons than anything else. As I’ve half-jokingly told people, I had heard that church was a good place to meet women, but I wanted one that wasn’t too mixed up in religion. (My daughter, who is now a UU minister, hates that, by the way.)
I’ve never had the sense that there was anything “out there,” including a god or devils. Given the enormity of the Covid crimes, I wrestle to reconcile the feelings I had of something truly Evil at work with my non-belief in supernatural entities.
Of late I’ve been playing with the idea of Evil existing, as a real force, even in some metaphysical sense, in the absence of a literal devil (or god).
Could it be something that springs from humans themselves, a malevolent emanation of some sort, spawned perhaps from evolutionary original sin, when intelligence met self-awareness?
The ability to introspect, to infer other minds, to remember the past and to project the future, provided temptation and incentive to lie on a grand scale (among other things); the development of language provided the means.
Combine all this in a creature with opposable thumbs and you get a being with capacity not only to imagine great works of art and life-enhancing inventions, but also terrible engines of destruction, and to make them manifest in the real world. (I wonder if dolphins, usually portrayed as both brainy and peaceful, would create weapons with which to to kill one another if they had hands instead of flippers.)
What I’m imagining here is Evil that is biologically or mentally generated, yet that somehow takes independent form, and then “walketh about as a roaring lion, seeking whom he may devour” (1 Peter 5:8). That would be a real devil, I suppose, but one of our own making, even if inadvertent.
I don’t assert the above as true, likely or even possible. But it illustrates the places my mind is going these days as I struggle to make sense of what happened during the three years of Covid. Or perhaps the id monster in the great classic sci-fi film Forbidden Planet made too much of an impression on my young mind (see note below).
My dive into spiritual questions is a tentative one at best, putting my toes in the water, as it were. (Hmm … was that inelegant? Can you dive with just your toes? I’ll leave it, though.)
In a way I envy Naomi Wolf’s more robust and committed pursuit. The Covid darkness seems to have propelled her to seek a deeper spiritual understanding of recent events as well as the human situation. From her book:
After many years of thinking that my spiritual life was not that important, I started to pray again. … I was now willing to speak about God publicly. Why? Because I had looked at what had descended on us from every angle, using my normal critical thinking, yet found that it was so elaborate in its construction and so cruel, with an almost superhuman, flamboyant, baroque imagination made from the essence of cruelty itself, that I could not conceive that it had been accomplished by mere humans working on the bumbling human level in the dumb political space.
I don’t know if it’s in her book or in an essay she posted online, but I think she has described being turned away from her local synagogue because of being unmasked or unvaccinated (or both?). Knowing of her love for her Jewish traditions, and of her current spiritual quest, I could feel the pain that it caused.
She has gone so far recently as to live stream readings from the Bible, elucidated by her commentary on the original Hebrew of the Torah. This has led to the interesting event of her gaining a following among Christians appreciative and supportive of her religious turn. (The version she uses is the Geneva Bible. It was this that prompted me to learn more of the history of that version, which I knew little about before.)
As for me, I’m thinking more about Good and Evil these days. I don’t view it as a search for God, but who knows where it might end up. My atheism is of the weak rather than the strong variety; I don’t say there is no god, only that I have not seen convincing evidence for one. In other words, I’m persuadable.
Addendum: As I was finishing writing this I learned that Wolf is coming out with a new book entitled Facing the Beast: Courage, Faith, and Resistance in a New Dark Age. It is described as “a devastating, detailed account of wrongthink, deplatforming, and an unexpected political, personal, and spiritual transformation that followed during one of the most divisive times in American history.” I look forward to reading it.
Movie note: Loosely based on the plot of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Forbidden Planet (1956) features Freudian themes. Astronauts in the 23rd century are sent to the planet Altair IV to find out why a previous expedition disappeared. There they find a professor Morbius living with his beautiful daughter, Altaira. Morbius tells the astronauts some unknown force killed the other settlers. An invisible creature starts killing the astronauts, who discover that the monster is a projection of Morbius’s subconscious — his id — unleashed by his jealousy over his daughter’s attraction to the astronauts’ pilot, and amplified by his experiments with the mind-expanding machinery of the Krell, the long-dead natives of Altair IV.
Music video: A brilliant creator I follow on Twitter/X, twitter.com/TheEyes2022, recently posted this song parody video (below). To me it sums up the whole Covid travesty about as well as any 4+ minute video could. In case you wonder, Monkeyboy is one of the recurring characters in this creator’s videos.
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