Even the most inalienable of rights will shatter like thin glass if a righteous majority feels morally justified in stampeding over them to reach for some utopia beckoning on the horizon. Even the clearest of principles will be rationalized away if an indebted majority becomes dependent on a morally bankrupt system.
We preach non-discrimination, equality, and democracy, but when confronted with what seemed to be a potentially mortal threat to our health and lives, we reverted back to pre-modern forms, almost overnight creating a new caste system, shoving the lessers among us in front of the virus to keep the elites pure and clean.
Looking back, there is nothing terribly surprising about any of this. It’s a consequence of safety culture, arrogant elites, and a belief that powerful, rich, and intelligent people can manage the world better than the rest of us. We’ve been here many times in history, and it has always foreshadowed a long period of suffering.
To establish their utopias, enemies of liberalism will never hesitate to squelch free expression. We liberals, therefore, must forever be ready, understanding the power of words, to challenge with our own words these assaults on freedom of expression and on open, peaceful discourse and debate.
Naomi Wolf, author of The Bodies of Others, assesses the future of human liberty after catastrophic Covid policies and what they mean for human rights. She is interviewed by Jeffrey Tucker, Brownstone Institute.
The Pathogenic Excuse for Attack Liberty: An Interview with Naomi Wolf Continue Reading
To have a free society we have to have a history, and in this major historical moment, we had a massive betrayal of the social contract — a betrayal committed by millions. The social contract cannot be re-knit without public accountability, confrontations, and even condemnation.
We need pandemic policies rooted in human nature—policies that meet people where they are, not where some sanctimonious Twitter warriors decide they should be. Throwing the S-word around doesn’t earn respect or cooperation from the accused. Au contraire: when pelted with character-assassinating epithets, people double down.
I’m sorry to report that the entire book is a study in mysophobia, more worthy of study by a student of abnormal psychology than a public health official, much less a scientist. That no one has ever pointed this out to him is a disgrace. It’s the trouble with being so rich that you become uncriticizable.
These new digital surveillance and control mechanisms will be no less oppressive for being virtual rather than physical. Contact tracing apps, for example, have proliferated with at least 120 different apps in used in 71 different states, and 60 other digital contact-tracing measures have been used across 38 countries. There is currently no evidence that contact tracing apps or other methods of digital surveillance have helped to slow the spread of covid; but as with so many of our pandemic policies, this does not seem to have deterred their use.
Finally we come to the biggest problem of all. What kind of society do we want to live in and build? Is it based on the presumption that freedom belongs to all and is the best path for progress and good lives? Or do we want the rights of the people always to defer to the mandarins in the walled-off bureaucracies who give orders and expect only compliance and no challenge to their rule?
If this was only a China problem, surely, world leaders would be lining up to condemn the human rights crimes being committed against Shanghai citizens.
The last two years have confounded everyone who believed in the stability of American law, politics, public opinion, and the ideological attachments of both pundits and the general population. It’s all been turned upside down and inside out several times over. Anyone who thinks that we’ve all settled back into some mythical comfort bubbles of “liberals” vs “conservatives” is refusing to face post-pandemic politico-cultural realities.
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