This story begins in the “Before” world.
“Before” the years 2020 to 2022, when a set of policies based on abject lies posed an existential threat to our democracy and our way of life.
“Before” this likely AI-deployed set of lies, dispensed globally, targeted our West with its core traditions of free speech—and in the United States, with its First Amendment—with arrant censorship.
“Before” the left—the subculture that used to stand for human rights, freedom of speech, real science, critical thinking, and skepticism about big government and big corporations, let alone about their merger, and that used to fight against discrimination and inequality—fell into a trance in which that same group became champions of censorship and of a two-tier society in which some people, as the pigs declared in “Animal Farm,” were “more equal” than others; and fell prey to magical thinking and cultlike behavior.
“Before” the media—which used to see itself as the source of investigation of elite powers; which used to ask questions about received narratives; which used to demand that its journalists produce evidence and independent verification before drawing conclusions in print—were bought out by big government via the CARES Act, and by Big Pharma directly, and by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, to the extent that almost all legacy media became unquestioning stenographers for interested parties aligned with the global powers who dictated the harmful nonsense.
I miss the “Before Times.”
My own life changed utterly, because of my taking actions that would have suited the “Before” world but that I took in an “After” reality.
Until the COVID-19 era, I had lived a fortunate life. I had been a well-known feminist nonfiction writer for 35 years; I had published eight bestselling books. I had lived in Washington D.C. and served as a campaign consultant to President Bill Clinton’s reelection campaign; I had advised Vice President Al Gore. I later moved to a charming apartment in Manhattan’s West Village, where I eventually, as a single mom, raised a beautiful family. I appeared on every news outlet, wrote for every major media platform, and was a columnist for outlets ranging from The Guardian to the Soros-funded Project Syndicate to The Sunday Times of London.
In addition to these professional validations, I was privileged to be part of the cultural “scene” made up of influencers on the progressive left. It was a satisfying lifestyle: film premieres and art openings, book parties and galas. All these events reassured those of us attending that we were at the center of the universe, and for good reason, and that our worldview was the right one—indeed, the only one.
I had been treated as a media fixture for those 35 years, for doing what I had always done—speaking up for civil liberties and the Constitution and reporting on women’s health issues—especially on sexual and reproductive health issues, my beat.
During the COVID-19 pandemic and the lockdowns, then, I did what I have always done; I investigated the myths and narratives that I saw forming online and in news outlets and asked public questions about them. For me, this was nothing new. By doing so, I realized that many of the diktats of the period were untrue. I saw quickly that the COVID-19 maps on the front pages of The New York Times and other news outlets and the Johns Hopkins University COVID-19 map cited by almost every other news outlet in the United States were all produced without giving the reader any access to the underlying datasets, for example. As a tech CEO whose website specializes in presenting the same kind of government data (application programming interfaces, or APIs), I saw immediately that there was no way to trust these COVID-19 maps.
I knew from having written “The End of America” that the fact that we were, in July 2020, already at Step 1o of the 10 Steps to Fascism—emergency law—represented a very dangerous situation. I knew from having read my way, as a former graduate student, through many of the past 400 years’ worth of English memoirs and novels, that waves of infectious diseases, ranging from yellow fever to typhus to cholera, had passed over both Britain and America but that these diseases had never been treated as we were treating this purportedly serious infectious disease, COVID-19.
Never had multiple generations been advised to crowd together into closed indoor spaces, only to be denied light, air, and exercise, during an epidemic. Indeed, from Florence Nightingale in the Crimean War to the reformers of the Progressive Era, health pioneers knew well that doing this was, in fact, deadly.
So many “truths” of the COVID narrative made no sense to me.
As I have always done with official narratives, I questioned these “truths.”
But the world had changed. My questioning, instead of continuing to solidify my cultural status, called forth waves of bots and trolls, threats and harassment. My right-on, progressive friends let me know that they did not approve of the issues that I was raising.
Then came late 2020 and early 2021: the launch of the presentation of the mRNA injections as “the only way out” of the lockdowns. I recall reading Moderna’s website, which boasted that the company’s mRNA technology and the spike protein in the vaccine formulation would enter every cell in the human body.
I am an English major—not a medical doctor or a scientist. But I remember thinking: Every cell? In your ovaries? Your heart? Your liver? Your digestive tract? Your eyelashes? I have a neurological condition—spina bifida occulta—and I knew from experience how delicate was the nearly miraculous activity of healthy nerve conduction and how easily it could go awry. The nerves? I wondered. The myelin sheaths of the nerves? And I wondered how that—spike protein and mRNA entering the cells of the myelin sheaths of the nerves—would affect the fragile electrical conduction that allows for healthy nerve processes; and I decided to pass.
This personal, rational decision about my own body—one related to my own private health issues—abruptly thrust me into a new social and even legal category; one that was created at the start of 2021: that of second-class citizen, “anti-vaxxer” (note the trashy double xs), dissident, weirdo, “conspiracy theorist,” and, although I remained a classical liberal, “Trumper.”
The moment I began asking basic questions on my Twitter feed specifically about the novel mRNA injections—the kinds of questions I had asked for three decades about silicone breast implants, about high estrogen levels in birth control pills, about dangerous IUDs, about vaginal mesh, or industrial hospital birthing practices and high for-profit C-section rates—my bio changed everywhere, online, and all at once.
Instead of being described as a leading voice of Third Wave feminism, with a string of honors, degrees, and awards after my name, I was now identified from the first sentence, on Wikipedia and everywhere else, as a “conspiracy theorist.” Not being aware yet that AI had already been deployed journalistically, I did not even understand how that overnight change in my reputation had been accomplished.
I began to be left out of the social events that had resumed in New York after almost everyone had rushed to get vaccinated; I was cut off the guest lists that had once sought to have me. Hostesses told me that I was no longer welcome, as the hosts were “being careful.”
Many journalists who had been my colleagues and some even my friends, and who had had no problem in the “Before” world seeking out favors and book endorsements from me, remained silent as I was portrayed as a lunatic and a QAnon aficionado. Others, who knew me and knew better, even joined in the melee.
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After President Joe Biden gave his notorious and factually baseless December 2021 speech about how the unvaccinated were bringing “severe illness and death” onto themselves and everyone else, my friends and even some of my relatives began to shun me—and my equally scandalously unvaccinated husband.
“But it’s here now and it’s spreading and it’s gonna increase. ... We are looking at a winter of severe illness and death for the unvaccinated—for themselves, their families, and the hospitals they’ll soon overwhelm,” the president said.
There was no place left for us in communities that aligned with nonsense.
We had left New York City at the start of the pandemic and had moved into a little house in the woods in the Hudson Valley. Despite our physical separation from the heart of the culture, this bizarre ostracism really stung. And it went on and on. We were left out of family Thanksgivings. One of my best friends moved out of the city to another country without saying goodbye; later, she explained in an email that she had been “disappointed” in me for my position on the vaccine and the lockdowns.
Another one of my oldest friends told me that I could not have dinner with him because “he does not sit indoors with unvaccinated people.” A beloved elderly relative told me I could not even see him outside because he “does not sit outside with unvaccinated people.” A family Christmas vacation was canceled at the last minute after the president told all our loved ones that we would kill them with our very presence. No one in that world could hear me when I kept explaining that the vaccines did nothing to affect transmission.
It was as if a hex had been cast over everyone I loved and over the entire culture in which I had, till so recently, felt so at home.
...
This is the story of my cancellation, my survival, my witnessing of an all-out attack on humanity, and my stumbling into an awareness of what holds us and upholds us all.
And this is an account of the unseen gifts and energies and presences along our way, the help and resources—especially as they derive from within our own hearts, and consciences, human actions that apparently call forth angels—that I believe, in spite of it all, still can save us.
