Judging Freedom - Dr. Naomi Wolf: What’s Wrong With Government Today?

Episode Date: December 6, 2023

Welcome to our guest, Dr. Naomi Wolf! A decades-long champion of free speech, freedom of the press, and the Constitution. Our conversation centers around her opinions on the conflict in Israel/Gaza and Ukraine/Russia. We'll also get a sneak peek into her latest book " Facing the Best". Available here: https://amzn.to/46GeKcB“Naomi Wolf is one of the bravest, clearest-thinking people I know. The reason you hear the forces of repression so desperately trying to dismiss her is because she is right." said, Tucker Carlson#Israel #Gaza #ceasefire #hostages #Ukraine #zelenskyy #Biden #china #IsraelPalestine #MiddleEastConflict #PeaceInTheMiddleEast #GazaUnderAttack #Ceasefire #Jerusalem #prayforpeace #hostagesSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Thank you. Hi, everyone. Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. Today is Wednesday, December 6th, 2023. I have longed for a while to be able to interview our next guest. Dr. Naomi Wolf is a well-known public intellectual, very public about her views and very public about the transformation of her views from those of a sort of quintessential inside the beltway, you'll correct me if I'm wrong, liberal Democrat to a person who recognizes that our freedom and our liberties come from our humanity and not from the government and is not unwilling to challenge the government on all of this. Naomi, it's a pleasure. Welcome to the show and thank you for taking the time to chat with us. Well, I'm delighted and honored to be on your show talking to you. I've been an admirer for a long time. I'm grateful for that kind introduction. Thank you. So 10 years ago, you were a liberal Democrat inside the Beltway, sort of a living classic Washington, D.C. establishment. You were an advisor to senior

Democrats, two of whom had the last name of Clinton and Obama. And then COVID came. I didn't advise Obama. I advised Vice President Al Gore. Got it. Clinton and Gore. And then COVID came along and the government became draconian and you left New York City and you moved to upstate New York and you began an independent project investigating COVID and big pharma and its relationship with the government. And that resulted in an intellectual odyssey, which you have written about and talked about. Yeah, I think that's a great summary. Yes. And how did that happen? Well, there was kind of a crisis about halfway through that process,

about two and a half, almost three years ago, when, you know, as you mentioned, Judge, I'd been kind of very cozy and comfortable for my whole career as a kind of fixture in the liberal media. I didn't realize it was the liberal media. I thought it was just the establishment. I didn't realize how biased it was. But overnight, when I reported on Twitter that women were having, were reporting a menstrual dysregulation upon receiving mRNA injections, I was deplatformed and I was, my Wikipedia bio changed and my, you know, overnight, all the news outlets for which I'd been appearing for decades, all the newspapers, which had been a columnist or writer for decades, I was suddenly a non-person to those very platforms

or, you know, a crazy conspiracy theorist and, you know, just this global smear campaign. It was quite traumatic. Now, after two lawsuits by two states' attorneys general, we know that that deplatforming and that targeting of that accurate and important tweet came from the White House working with the CDC, putting pressure on Twitter and Facebook to de-platform and smear people like me, other critics of some of what was unfolding. So that de-personing from the left was actually a blessing in disguise,

even though it was quite painful at the time, because it did indeed force me to, into new conversations. And to my surprise, the left and all of my old friends, my former tribe, you know, didn't want to talk to me anymore, even no matter how much primary source documentation I provided, that what I was finding was true. But the people who did want to talk to me, especially after this project unfolded, which I believe you referenced, in which at Steve Bannon's instigation, 3,250 doctors and scientists with impeccable credentials joined together as volunteers under the leadership of my COO, Amy Kelly, under my company, Daily Cloud, to go through the Pfizer documents released under court order. And they began to issue reports

showing that a great crime against humanity had been committed, especially a crime against women and children and fertility. As that began to unfold and I began reporting on that, the people who wanted to talk to me were conservatives and libertarians and people of faith. So I began having conversations from which I'd been kind of insulated for my entire professional life because conservatives are really demonized on the left and silenced and censored. I didn't realize how fully, even before 2020 and 2021. And as a result of these conversations, I did, I was forced, it's really embarrassing to say to someone as distinguished as you are, but I was forced to re-examine many of my core beliefs. And I, there's a chapter in my book, Facing the Beast, called Dear Conservatives, I Apologize. And then another chapter on the Second Amendment, I had to face the fact that I believed a lot of things that were simply

not true, whether it was the Russia hoax, or the Steele dossier, or, you know, that Hunter Biden's laptop was unimportant, or narratives about January 6th, which violence is always wrong, but the representation of what happened had not been complete to me in legacy media. All the way to views about life and the Second Amendment, I was forced to reexamine them and reach different conclusions. So while I still call myself a classical liberal, I became an independent because I don't think any party label is going to solve any problem. And yeah, and I had kind of an awakening in which I realized that kind of the rest of America, as I call it for shorthand, outside this liberal elite bubble. Right. Understands things that we all need to understand. I was first introduced to your work on lewrockwell.com,

which is one of the quintessential websites for libertarians. It is anti-state. It is anti-central banking. It is pro-freedom. And it's anti-war. And I said to myself, Jesus, this is the same Naomi Wolf that I peripherally encountered years ago when I was a conservative Republican at Fox before I became the small government anti-war libertarian that I eventually became before I left Fox. But this conversation is not

about me, it's about you. But that's where we met. Classical liberal, of course, is the traditional handle for libertarians. Liberal in the sense of individuals can do what they want and be who they want, and it's none of the government's business. So were you surprised that the government moved in such lockstep with commands from on high to shut people down, to prevent their movement, to close churches and synagogues and temples and mosques, to close commercial businesses, to force people to say, stay six feet apart, to wear masks. Were you surprised when police, blue collar cops began enforcing that stuff rather than rebelling against it? I mean, I wish I'd been more surprised. I feel that I was well prepared to recognize early on what was happening because I wrote a book in 2008, you know, still during the Bush era, called The End of America. And in it, I had looked for it. I had

looked at how fragile democracies in different times and places around the world had been subverted by totalitarians. And I saw from that study that whether they were on the left or on the right would be dictators always took the same 10 steps. And I warned that we in America could easily see those steps kind of being put into place with the global war on terror and erosions of constitutional rights that were unfolding, you know, even then. And what's very ironic is that the left was really happy to turn that book into a bestseller and to celebrate my critique of the Bush administration. But when I pointed out under Obama that even worse depredations were taking place, you know, the president had a kill list and he hadn't closed Guantanamo. He had expanded Guantanamo and he was overseeing, you know,

wiretapping of American citizens and, you know, so on and so forth. They didn't want to hear about it, right, because that was their guy. And because liberals have this delusion that they're good people, so they can't do bad things and their elected officials can't do bad things. So as a result of that book, I realized by about June of 2020, when we here in New York State, where I'm broadcasting from, were told by our then governor, Andrew Cuomoomo that we couldn't assemble with more than six people at a time. You know, I knew we were at step 10. Step 10 is emergency law, martial law, the suspension of the rule of law. And it's not supposed to happen in America for, you know, a public health issue. you know, nowhere in the Constitution does it say, oh, and all of this is moot if there's a bad disease going around.

And, you know, as I've said many times, the United States has lived through yellow fever, typhus, cholera, polio, you know, HIV. I mean, horrific diseases, far worse, you know, smallpox, far worse than what we've lived through and never suspended the Constitution as a result of of of disease. Like disease is part of what the founders knew human beings had to deal with. And actually, in all of Western recorded history, you didn't respect you didn't restrict people's assembly. I mean, you restricted people's assembly in places like the Warsaw Ghetto, right? I mean, you're not in a free society where assembly is restricted by definition.

So as a result of all of that kind of preparation, historically, I understood that we were at step 10. We weren't gonna get our republic back, our freedoms back, our constitutional rights back without a fight. And I knew exactly what would happen next because history shows that the same things always happen next when you're at step 10 in a dying republic. You and I and everybody watching us, or just about everybody watching us now,

believes that our rights come from our humanity, whether you believe it's a gift from God, God the Father, traditional Catholicism, or whether you believe we are just the highest and best rational beings on the planet. Our rights don't come from the government. But do you know anybody in the government that recognizes that our rights come from our humanity? Because every time you turn around, the government is trying to interfere with our rights, regulate behavior or seize property. So your question is, do I know people in the government who recognize that our rights come from our humanity? Yes, because I don't. Even though they take an oath to uphold the Constitution, which recognizes the pre-existence of our rights

before the government existed, before the Constitution was written, and yet Congress thinks it can write any law and regulate any behavior and tax any event, and presidents and governors think they can regulate any behavior and restrain any freedom that they want for some sort of higher good, like fewer microbes in the air or whatever their theory is at the moment. Right. Well, I think you've asked an incredibly important question, Judge, because a lot of conversations about where we're at focus on the symptoms, like what's the policy? What's restricting our freedoms? How do we fight it? Fewer are asking kind of root cause, kind of hermeneutical questions, meaning like what's the meaning underlying this? And this is exactly how this war is being waged against us

in America. I believe that America is under specific attack from globalist bad guys that are in alignment with a goal of dissolving our sovereignty and kind of doing away with the free West. And we can talk more about that if you like, but very briefly, your isolation of this question, where do our rights come from, is precisely what they're trying to erase from our consciousness, right? Ever since the end of the 18th century, our founders and members of the Enlightenment in Europe, and specifically in Scotland, were developing this idea, which was so influential around the world, till now, that we have God-given rights as human beings, innate, God-given, inalienable rights.

Inalienable, unfortunately, it's kind of 18th century language, but it means nothing can take it away from you. It can't be separated from you. Precisely. To alienate in the 19th century is to estrange, right? So they're saying no one can estrange this from you. It comes with you. So unfortunately, there's this Marxist attack on our language and it's using digital technology. It's using AI. And one of the things you're hearing a lot is this kind of recasting of the social contract of the United States to make us forget that our rights are inalienable. So you'll hear young people being taught at Princeton and other elite universities that the goal of society is harm

reduction rather than protecting the rights and liberties of every individual. And that's a big change in what we're teaching young people is our basic social contract. So once you have this Marxist notion that it's harm reduction, then of course the state decides what is harm, what does it mean to reduce harm? Well, harm reduction is public health and we have to keep everyone safe, right? Well, once you've moved the social contract to safety, you can imprison everyone for their own good. You can take people's children away for their own good. You can force people to wear masks or to take some experimental injection to their bodies for their own good. There can force people to wear masks or to take some, you know, experimental injection to their bodies for their own good. There's no limit to what the state can

do to you once your rights are no longer inalienable, but bestowed by the state in the name of public health or the public good or safety. And I saw this like really early on with the change in language, like social distancing. The government's not supposed to tell me where to stand. Precisely. me, you know, not to engage in harmful speech, you know, there are carve outs to the First Amendment, like I can't threaten violence against people specifically, but hateful speech, that's First Amendment protected. You know, speech warning people about side effects from an mRNA injection, even if I'm wrong, that's First Amendment protected speech.

So there was this, and still is this massive effort to make us forget what it means to be Americans by making us forget this essential social contract that you've identified, that the state doesn't give us our rights. One of the natural rights that we have is the right to self-defense, which Justice Scalia, my late friend, articulated in the Heller decision, has a modern mechanical analog, and that is the right to keep and bear arms in order to protect yourself. You probably in your old days accepted the leftish view of the right to keep and bear arms, that it's the government's right and the government will protect us. But your views now are on the libertarian side, which is where the Supreme Court is and where state governments are being dragged to,

that it's an individual personal right, that it's inalienable and that you can use the same mechanical means to defend yourself as the bad guys use or as the government uses. Right. Yeah, absolutely. And it's so interesting to hear you critique the criticism from the left, because what I'm seeing in my journey away from those discussions is that harm reduction on the left, even before this latest assault since 2020 on our language and consciousness, often took the form of justifying restricting liberties in the interest of stopping some bad thing from happening, right? Again, as you said earlier, harm reduction. Right. So if there's school shootings, that's bad. But the left will show the violence of a school shooting and make the case that in order to end that bad thing, you just have to take away the guns.

And they'll do that with everything, like abortion rights, right? Like I'm pro-choice reluctantly with very limited kind of margin first trimester, because I can't think of a better way to protect the rights of women, as well as, you know, unborn fetuses. I'm not saying it's a perfect solution. It isn't, but they'll point to harm of abandoned children or neglected children, as if that explains why you should have the right to kill an unborn baby. And so this is a very common tactic, you know, pointing at harm, and you can always find harms in society, right? I mean, bad things happen. But they won't, they'll reluctantly be dragged to where you are trying to drag people rightly, which is the first principles of what are your rights. And when you do that, you have to,

even as a liberal, you have to come out in a different place. And I was always unpersuaded by the critique of gun violence because I'm a strict, I love the constitution and there's no better document that's ever been created. So when I finally read the second amendment, instead of, you know, believing what time magazine told me the second amendment said, or what, you know, mothers against guns organizations told me the second amendment said, you know, and I'm lucky because I'm a scholar of English literature. So I know how to read 18th century language. It is very clear. It's very clear. And I've got a chapter on this in Facing the Beast. It's not ambiguous. On the left, you're always taught that the Second Amendment is

ambiguous and no one knows what militia means. And militia, you know, well-regulated militia doesn't refer to individuals owning weapons in their homes. That is categorically untrue. And I kind of tease out the grammar of the dependent clauses in the Second Amendment to show that they're very normal clauses for 18th century literature. Jane Austen, a little later, uses them. 18th century writers use these dependent clauses. And as a result, the Second Amendment is so clear, there's no ambiguity. You have the right to keep and bear arms. You have the right to keep and bear arms because a well-regulated militia is, you know, key to our liberties. And then when I actually was taught to shoot by my husband, formerly in the military. As a feminist,

this was a radicalizing experience because so much of your analysis of women's rights as a feminist on the left has to do with women's victimization. Well, you know, a woman knowing how to shoot a weapon and owning a weapon radically changes that power imbalance. Women become empowered, and especially mothers become empowered. Single mothers, which I was for many years, become very greatly empowered when they know how to defend themselves, defend their families, defend their children, defend their homes. So I guess all I'm trying to say there is there's just some examples of the, the rethinking I had to do when you really consider if you're going to believe in the constitution, you can't pick and choose, you know, even if it's uncomfortable for me to realize that

reversing Roe was the right decision, right? Because those rights are not in the constitution. They're not, it was a tortured argument. And so, you know, it's appropriate to return those decisions back to the states. That's a very difficult thing for me to conclude as a lifelong liberal, as a lifelong feminist, as a pro-choice feminist. But, you know, that was the right decision. Overturning Roe was well argued, and it was argued by, with a bunch of women sitting on the court. So those are some examples of how I was forced to rethink some of the orthodoxies on the left when I actually had to grapple with the Constitution. Should the United States be funding the war in Ukraine against Russia?

Is there any national security interest to the United States in that war? That's a tough one. I mean, you know, we fought wars that didn't immediately threaten us like World War I and World War II because of larger geopolitical concerns or because we have to be good allies to our allies. I'm not going to say there's no geostrategic advantage, but I do, I can't believe I'm agreeing with President Trump on this, but I do see that we are kind of not joining the armies of Europe, but taking the place of the armies of Europe in many cases in this fight. And I also am aware, you know, as the wife of a veteran and just looking at kind of my own community, my own rural community and how hard people are struggling, that billions of dollars are heading to Ukraine where it can't be clearly traced, where it's very not transparent. And our veterans, you know, can't get PTSD treatment without waiting six months. And our, our, our children's schools are falling apart. I mean, that's a local issue, but

you know, our infrastructure is falling apart. Our borders are open. Our cities are riddled with crime. Our police officers are quitting. Our firefighters are kind of giving up their ability to protect us. Our country's spiraling into chaos and disarray and poverty. Our middle classes can barely make ends meet. Our working classes cannot make ends meet. So there are needs for all those billions here at home. Okay. Much appreciated. Your recent book, Facing the Beast, is of course the story of your transformation from being a classic inside the beltway liberal Democrat to embracing conservative values and libertarian values. You've sent me the book. I read it quickly, but the introduction hooked me.

And anybody that reads the introduction will find themselves reading the rest of the book. And I usually don't talk about other people's books here if I haven't read it totally, but I know that I will read it because the introduction hooked me. Thank you very much for your time. Fascinating, fascinating intellect that you have, and I hope you'll come back and join us again. I'd love to. Thank you, Judge Napolitano. Thank you, Naomi. Coming up later today, Phil Giraldi at three and Max Blumenthal, there's Chris, and Max Blumenthal at five, Eastern Times, of course. Judge Napolitano for Judging Freedom. I'm out.