EPISODE 175: “The West’s New Totalitarianism” with Dr. Naomi Wolf and Jenin Younes

Episode 175:  Younes Wolf

Speaker 1 (00:04):

Welcome to The Bill Walton Show. Featuring conversations with leaders, entrepreneurs, artists, and thinkers. Fresh perspectives on money, culture, politics, and human flourishing. Interesting people, interesting things.

Bill Walton (00:25):

Welcome To The Bill Walton Show. I’m Bill Walton. In the past two years, measures taken to deal with the COVID virus have resulted in extraordinary losses of freedom in the West. In fact, all over the world. Driven by government mandates and lockdowns. Now that it’s clear, we’re no longer in the throes of a pandemic. What next? In what circumstances and for how long are citizens prepared to accept these extraordinary extensions of state power and withdrawal of their civil liberties? In this case, it was the cause of public health. But how likely is that government in the future will use the same draconian measures for other so-called emergencies?

Bill Walton (01:08):

I’m worried that we’re sliding into a permanent tyranny in the name of protecting us. With me, to dig into this question are Dr. Naomi Wolf, she’s the author of seven nonfiction, best sellers and co-founder and CEO of DailyClout.io. She’s a doctrine at Victorian Poetry from Oxford and writes on Substack as Outspoken with Dr. Naomi Wolf. It’s a terrific read and I highly recommend everybody subscribe. It’s her thoughts, as she says, as an eyewitness to a new dark age, with thoughts on how to keep liberty, justice and human rights alive.

Bill Walton (01:46):

And I am thrilled to have my friend in returning guest Jenin Younes join us, she’s litigation council for the New Civil Liberties Alliance, NCLA. She’s a former public defender. After seeing governments throughout the nation violate human rights and civil liberties in an ostensible effort to mitigate the spread of COVID. She’s now joined the fight against lockdowns and the administrative state and her group is doing a lot of great work on the administrative state and we’ll talk about that. So let’s start with Naomi. Naomi, what do you … You’ve written extraordinarily about Canada recently, and also how you liken what’s happening in this country to what Nazi Germany looked like in the early ’30s.

Naomi Wolf (02:39):

I started writing about the descent into fascism in 2008, with my book, The End of America. And I mentioned that because what you see in looking at dying democracies, whether they’re being killed off by tyrants on the left or on the right, is that tyrants always take the same 10 steps. And because I saw that pattern, I was able to predict with sort of 99.5% accuracy sadly, I wish I’d been wrong. The dissent into tyranny that we’re seeing now. You’re absolutely right. I wrote about Canada and it’s sort of 48 hour foray into full out totalitarianism. And I pointed out that we’re in real danger in the United States because among other reasons, there are sort of unidentifiable security forces, violent men in uniform in Canada, but also in Paris. Unidentifiable violent men uniform beating up protestors. And what you see in a dying democracy is militias, basically mercenaries, contractors, armies for higher.

Naomi Wolf (03:49):

And there are armies for higher around the world, from entities like formerly named Blackwater now XE. And so that really worries me because they’re right over our border. And the other thing that worries me considerably is this new benchmark of freezing assets of critics. That is a whole new introduction into what had been a capitalist system. It’s full out Marxism and it’s quite terrifying because it does have an immediate chilling effect, an immediate deterrent effect on everyone who might help or support or raise their voices in any kind of civil society way. And by the way, the Charter of Rights and Freedoms in Canada, explicitly grants the protesters or any critic of the government, the right to assemble freely and to speak freely.

Naomi Wolf (04:42):

And then moving on to our own country, I think the biggest unreported story of our century is that last Friday, now it’s getting more attention. President Biden extended the Emergency Act, which had been re-upped eight times since the pandemic began, but this time he extended it in an open-ended way and in a way that funnels billions of dollars to HHS. So why is this so scary? A, it’s open ended and history shows that tyrants never give back emergency powers once they have them. But B, it’s so scary because what we’re seeing at DailyClout, which monitors legislation and it drafts model legislation is that, states such as Washington state. And now yesterday New York state, Illinois has a bill. They are changing board of health regulations. So bypassing their legislatures to create quarantine camps where you can be detained indefinitely, if you’ve been exposed to a contagious disease and without judicial petition. And you have to behave in a certain way when you’re in quarantine and you can’t …

Naomi Wolf (05:56):

I read this regulation in New York state yesterday in a state of quite serious terror. It says you can’t come within six feet of another human being while you’re in detention. So it’s these like extraordinarily tyrannical board of health empowerments. And another creepy thing is that they’re starting to target mental health as under the Egis of the board of health. And so what that’s going to do is it’s going to create a kind of mental health Egis for militarized boards of health in effect to criminalize dissent essentially. If we’re critics, the boards of health will have the right to detain us. And so all of these are things that you do see, when there’s a power grab and that’s why just to wrap it up. That’s why say these days that the coup in America has already taken place.

Bill Walton (06:55):

Well Stalin and the Soviets used mental health as a way to deal with incorrect political thought. And that’s kind of where we are. Jenin, are you doing anything on the freezing assets concern or the Emergency Act that Biden just put in place? What are you guys doing to bring attention and to help stop that?

Jenin Younes (07:18):

Well, we haven’t looked at that yet at all. So the freezing of assets is only in Canada. That’s correct.

Bill Walton (07:24):

Right.

Jenin Younes (07:24):

We can’t do anything outside the United States, but I agree. I mean, we’re in an incredibly scary time. And even though a lot of the masks and vaccine mandates, which I’ve been working on fighting for the past eight or nine months … Sorry, fighting against. Even though a lot of those appear to be going away, what really bothers me is that all of these politicians and the populous basically haven’t repudiated them on sort of civil liberties grounds or constitutional grounds. Instead, it’s well cases are dropping, so we can do away with vaccine mandates or mask mandates for now. But it’s clear that, if cases go up again or there’s another pandemic, no matter how severe we can bring all of these things back. We’re in very scary times and we live in a society where a lot of people don’t understand freedom and the importance of freedom.

Bill Walton (08:12):

Well, what was the tweet you sent me? Freedom now is considered what?

Jenin Younes (08:16):

White supremacy. Is that the one?

Bill Walton (08:19):

Yeah.

Jenin Younes (08:19):

The Washington Post ran an article saying that freedom was a like white supremacist concept. Tell that to Harriet Tubman, but it’s just completely ridiculous.

Bill Walton (08:31):

Well, I did a show with James Lindsay on critical race theory and he just calls it race Marxism flat out.

Jenin Younes (08:39):

Yeah.

Bill Walton (08:45):

Naomi, your visual that struck you also struck me, which is these thugs in Canada that, if they’re showing up and they look like they’re straight out of the ’30s, they look out of a bad Nazi movie. I mean, I thought of Canadians as these very sort of nice passive people. And all of a sudden, you see 53 Blutos show up, kneeing people on the street. I mean, do you think that’s a private arm service, or is that just a secret piece of what the Canadian governments had in place and are now just rolling it out?

Naomi Wolf (09:23):

What I miss is real journalism because it’s too early to know, but what reporters should be doing is asking that question. And the other thing I want to say is that the reason I’m so worried about contractors or private armies is that I’m one of the few reporters who’s ever gone to Guantanamo. And what I saw there was that the military … A military or a national guard or mounties have real rules. And even in war, they have rules of engagement. There are things they can not do, but contractors, as you see in Iraq, it’s the Wild West. And what I saw in Guantanamo was that these contractors that were unnamed, that seemed kind of Velcro patch, with no name attached. You can’t follow-up, you can’t file a complaint. You don’t know who they are.

Naomi Wolf (10:12):

They’re the ones who were tasked with doing the horrible things that the US military are forbidden to do by law. So what’s really scary about a state of emergency, which people don’t understand. In my essay, which is now at like 82,000 views about the Canadian situation pointed this out. And I hope it had an impact of some kind, is that parliamentarians don’t understand how much in danger they are when someone like Justin Trudeau declares a state of emergency, and they don’t understand that they are not protected, if those are private contractors, if those people do report to Justin Trudeau alone and not to the people of Canada within the laws of Canada.

Naomi Wolf (10:59):

So people really have to understand what a terrifying thing an emergency order is, what a state of emergency is. How it bypasses all of the laws that keep us safe and give us recourse, if someone abuses us. And also, I want to say at this point in history, people get beaten up by thugs like that, at this point in history. It happened in Italy with Mussolini and his Blackshirts. It happened under the national socialist with Brownshirts. In six months in 1933, they rounded up civil society leaders beat them up, roughed them up. And you didn’t even need concentration camps at that point. Within six months, they had quieted all of civil society descent.

Naomi Wolf (11:46):

So that is really terrifying that those thugs are up there. I would also say, as someone who’s been a political consultant to a presidential campaign and a vice president. The way that the images were transmitted in France and in the Netherlands earlier, and now in Canada, they’re very theatrical. They’re very cinematic. Those guys were posing that the kind of [inaudible 00:12:16], the violence. Usually when police do bad things, they’re not trying to get all the cameras in the world recording the bad things, because their badges are there and they will be investigated. I predicted this on War Room before it happened, because this is standard. They are trying to tell the world, this is what happens to you when you protest. So the images are intended to be terrifying.

Bill Walton (12:44):

Well, it’s part of an attempt to intimidate us and chill speech.

Naomi Wolf (12:49):

Correct.

Jenin Younes (12:51):

Yeah. Oh, absolutely. And that’s exactly what’s going on in Canada. I mean, and it’s going on here.

Bill Walton (12:57):

Well, it’s happened here too. We’re playing with somebody who no longer has a Twitter account.

Jenin Younes (13:01):

Exactly.

Bill Walton (13:05):

I wonder why people are so passive, so bovine and yet, they may not be, but they don’t know what everybody else is thinking because they’re not allowed to have an ordinary, honest, open conversation or debate about vaccine efficacy or whether lockdowns really work. All the sort of things that are in the public square now. There is no public square. I guess we’re now seeing the public square is going to get filled with these guys in these black leather jackets, which is-

Jenin Younes (13:37):

So I think what happened-

Bill Walton (13:39):

And by the way, in this show we get to speculate. You don’t have to be too careful. You’re a very careful lawyer, but you get to give us your grander theories as well.

Jenin Younes (13:49):

Well, I think a lot of people actually agree with us, even if they’re maybe not as passionate or not as willing to speak out or go out on a limb over it, because what obviously happened over the last few weeks was that a lot of these democratic politicians got horrible polling predictions. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but like one day they all dropped vaccine mandates, mask mandates went way. It was very strange. Here in DC, Mayor Bowser from one day to the next said, “Tomorrow, no vaccine passport.” Which was just bizarre after really she had been doubling down on this. So I think a lot of people think this, they’re just not saying anything, but when it came to the polling, it was obvious where their opinions lie.

Bill Walton (14:30):

Well-

Naomi Wolf (14:30):

Can I jump in on that?

Bill Walton (14:31):

Yeah. Let me just do a quick spot here. This is The Bill Walton Show. I’m here with Naomi Wolf and Jenin Younes, and we’re talking about this drift we’re seeing towards totalitarianism. Naomi.

Naomi Wolf (14:44):

Yeah. Just to chime in with what Jenin pointed out. There’s something else happening in the background that I think … I 1,000% percent agree with you Jenin that it’s about the polls and the months leading up to midterms, which historically are very dangerous months. If history is a guide, there’s going to be so much instability leading up to midterms, everything possible to prevent their being a clean accountable midterms. What’s also happening in the background is the Pfizer data, were forced to be released. And the insurance companies are seeing that there’s 20, 30, 40% rise in deaths after the vaccines were are rolled out. And people like Ed Dowd this former BlackRock investment advisor is coming forward saying, “We’re going to see that fraud was committed by Pfizer.”

Naomi Wolf (15:41):

And even the initial documents that have been released under court order by Pfizer show that there were 1,200 deaths in the first 90 days after the vaccine and as Ed Dowd pointed out, in the control group, more deaths in the vaccinated, than the unvaccinated. So this is a massive fraud and it’s about to come out or it’s coming out. And to me, that’s why the New York Times, which has been way upfront propagating fraud. I’ve been screaming about the defects in the data on that big front page COVID map because I understand how you make digital dashboards. That’s what we do as a business here at DailyClout. Their data has been corrupt from the start. And only now that there’s going to be an investigation of the CDC that there’s people like Dr. Henry Ealy submitting a call for grand jury investigation for willful misconduct by the CDC about their data and the Pfizer data about to emerge, that they kept injecting people when people were dying and being maimed.

Naomi Wolf (16:43):

I think that people are laying down a paper trail and Jenin, you know much more about this as a lawyer than I do, but it seems like the Democrats, additionally are laying down a paper trail to protect them from being swept up in what are going to be massive lawsuits and criminal charges related to this.

Bill Walton (17:00):

Jenin, this seems like a litigation rich target market for you.

Jenin Younes (17:04):

Well, yeah.

Bill Walton (17:06):

The Pfizer thing is a big deal.

Jenin Younes (17:08):

Yeah.

Bill Walton (17:08):

And the guys who dug into this is a serious man He ran $10 billion for BlackRock, worked there for 10 years. It’s ironic you should come from BlackRock because they’re hardly friends of freedom there, but he is. If Pfizer has covered up this data, wow.

Jenin Younes (17:28):

Yeah. Of course, if they have, I’m sure there will be lawsuits and especially, and if anybody has been injured as a result of that. I’m going to withhold opinion on that specific subject.

Bill Walton (17:41):

A careful lawyer here.

Jenin Younes (17:44):

But I will say, there was an article recently, I think in the Times about how there’s been a huge spike in non-COVID deaths. That may also be related to lockdowns, rising substance abuse. There have been a lot of drug overdose deaths, suicides, et cetera. So it’s clear, how destructive these policies are. There was actually a New York Times article, which shocked me, about how of the CDC has been hiding data about the boosters. So the data was showing they had no … They provided no benefit to people under 50. So it’s all risk. And especially to young men and the CDC hid that data, along with some other information about it. It’s just really stunning.

Naomi Wolf (18:27):

Unbelievable. And Rochelle Walensky has a college age son. I mean, I just think the inhumanity of these people, hiding data that could save young adults from risk without benefit. It’s extraordinary to me.

Bill Walton (18:42):

One of the reasons I wanted to get both of you on is that, you both made an interesting journey from maybe a different place, political, the left. I know we talked about this earlier Jenin in your case. And I don’t like labels at all and I can’t even define where we are now, because I don’t have a label for me. I certainly don’t have a label for you, but this mask in particular. Let’s take mask as an example. It seems to divide up neatly along political lines. If you voted Democrat, you’re wearing masks. We went out to dinner last night and we live in a highly Democrat neighborhood. The mask mandate’s gone and yet everybody still had them on and it’s a sign of virtue signaling or something. What is it with the left versus right schism on the mandates and the masks and lockdowns?

Jenin Younes (19:39):

Well, I do think there’s been quite a realignment. Several commentors have noticed, it’s sort of more like authoritarianism versus freedom these days and I know and Naomi knows. I get contacted by disaffected Democrats every day, tons of them. So I think a lot of people are seeing through this. Initially, because I think Trump came out, sort of wasn’t sure about masks and wasn’t sure about lockdowns and the left and Democrats hated him. I think their reaction was, “If Trump says X, it must be negative X.” So I think that’s a little bit of what happened, but I know Naomi also has interest my thoughts on that.

Bill Walton (20:16):

What’s this about?

Naomi Wolf (20:19):

First when you asked that question, I’m just smiling because literally, maybe a year and a half ago I met Jenin and she and I were like refugees from the left. Having a glass of wine and saying, “What is happening to the people around us?” We are astonished to watch what’s happening. I agree with Jenin a 1,000% again. It is a realignment, a different axis of authoritarianism versus freedom. It’s a great opportunity if you had good leadership that was willing to be trans partisan or inclusive and find common ground because there are many more of us than there are of the oligarchs at this point, which are also trans partisan. I often point out that, the World Economic Forum cleverly has liberals in Canada and conservatives in the UK and a conservative in Australia and a liberal in New Zealand. There’s nothing partisan about the power grab we’re seeing globally.

Naomi Wolf (21:23):

So it’s a mistake to have a tunnel vision of partisanship, when you say, who are the bad guys? But I do have friends and loved ones who are not only Democrats, but in that bubble of CNN, MSNBC. Readers, New York Times readers and their view …. We are, as a country getting too absolutely different information streams. Paradoxically, I was always taught the Tucker Carlson and Steve Bannon are evil and they’re doing better reporting on this than the New York Times or the Washington Post, let alone CNN and CNBC. But it means that when I talk to my loved ones, intelligent people, they literally believe that the pandemic is ending because of masks and lockdowns. They literally believe that the more you get boosted, the healthier you’re going to be or that this is the big lie of all time and it really has affected my life. That unvaccinated people are more dangerous to be around than vaccinated people, even though the vaccines don’t affect transmission per the manufacturers.

Naomi Wolf (22:27):

Jenin and I have talked about this. What a lot of liberal or democratic voting refugees like us are noting with sadness and people are starting to analyze it is that, our loved ones are in … It’s been called a mask formation psychosis by that Belgian psychologist, but there are other names for it. They’re in a kind of mass hysteria and you can’t really chip away at it with facts or logic and that’s sadder than anything. I mean, it’s dividing families. It’s dividing friends and it’s scary to see people … Literally I have beloved friends, one is a democratic judge. One was a high level editor of a major news outlet. And they literally cannot hear evidence to the contrary of what the narrative is. And they’ve changed. They don’t say, “That doesn’t hold up or those sources are not good.” They say, “Don’t show me that” It’s like a religion and that’s scary.

Bill Walton (23:37):

What do both of you think about Robert Malone saying, “This is a mass psychosis formation.”

Jenin Younes (23:43):

Yeah. I mean, I didn’t actually listen to the episode. It was too long.

Bill Walton (23:52):

That’s a new term. I didn’t listen to the whole thing, but I just … We did a show, gosh, a year and a half ago. I said, “It looks like yes, there’s a pandemic, but it’s a pandemic of fear, much more than a pandemic of a virus.”

Jenin Younes (24:02):

Yeah.

Bill Walton (24:03):

I think what I see is this hysteria. I didn’t know, there was a big word for it. Mass formation psychosis.

Jenin Younes (24:11):

Yeah. A lot of people became scared out of their minds. And then one thing I’ve really noticed with my family and friends who are mostly from the left. Well, I’m not really friends with them anymore, so I talk more to my family, but they really trust the New York Times. They trust the CDC, they trust these institutions. They need that. If I tell them like, “Look, the New York Times is lying to you about masks. They’re not for portraying the science.” The CDC is doing the same thing. They keep manipulating science. They keep putting out these absurd studies. The last one I mentioned to you earlier today based on self-reporting, which has so many intrinsic bias issues. The last study, they put out that it was from like April to October in certain places. So they had like purposely manipulated the time and geography-

Bill Walton (24:57):

This is the CDC.

Jenin Younes (24:58):

The CDC saying, “Oh, this shows that masks work.” And because these institutions are doubling down on extensively showing these measures work. My mother just can’t get it through her head that they’re not being honest. She can’t bring herself to believe it. It’s easier for her to think I’m crazy than to think these institutions are lying to her.

Bill Walton (25:17):

Well, it seems like the tectonic plates are really shifting. It seems like left versus right, Democrat versus Republican. And I don’t think any of that stuff seems to align with what people are thinking and feeling now.

Jenin Younes (25:32):

No.

Bill Walton (25:33):

The lost and trust of government is extraordinary.

Jenin Younes (25:36):

Yeah.

Naomi Wolf (25:37):

Jenin, how weird though, that our side was supposed to be the critical thinkers and the conservatives were supposed [crosstalk 00:25:46], Trump loving, beer swilling uneducated masses. Why do you think it’s our kind of highly educated, critically trained friends who are needing to believe in authorities so much and have absolved themselves of critical thinking?

Jenin Younes (26:07):

I spend all my time thinking about this. I think there were a series of events. You know what I talked about, I called Trump derangement syndrome because Trump took a certain position. I think that was one factor and things may have played out differently if like Hillary Clinton was president during that time. That’s one thing, it’s trust in experts. I think there are actually sort of the safety culture, the woke culture, I would say. It’s sort of simplistic and sort of embrace this idea of like safety in this weird way without thinking about other factors outside of COVID. And I think there’s sort of this expert class, we overeducate too many people who aren’t that smart to put it bluntly. And so they’re not actually capable of thinking critically. So they’re obsessed with expertise, because someone’s an epidemiologist we have to listen to them as though there’s no other disciplines that can inform our policies or our approach to these things.

Naomi Wolf (27:09):

Yeah. I think you’re right. I did just want to show you all this book when we were talking about kind of mass hysteria and hallucination.

Bill Walton (27:17):

Hold it up, so we can get it on the camera there.

Naomi Wolf (27:19):

Sorry. Combating Cult Mind Control.

Bill Walton (27:24):

I love that. Combating Cult Mind Control. Okay.

Naomi Wolf (27:27):

I just mentioned this because in addition to mass formation psychosis, which I think is one useful sort of analysis that this psychologist who Robert Malone cited has come up with. There’s something else that I’m seeing happen in terms of this mental illness problem and believe it or not, it relates to anorexia and other OCD type behaviors. When I wrote The Beauty Myth, like a million years ago. I argued that anorexia and bulimia and body dysmorphia, exercise fixations were not organic mental illnesses, but were induced mental illnesses from practices like restricting food, when you’re dieting. And also the cultural compulsion to constantly surveil your body as inadequate. And that created a kind of OCD type behavior that was then kind of an addictive and self-reinforcing and later studies proved that was true. I mean, even brain scans prove that was true.

Naomi Wolf (28:30):

So I think something very similar is at work, where people have been asked to be obsessively mindful that their breath doesn’t get out or that they don’t get more than six feet in proximity within another human being, especially children. And they’re being asked to see the world as full of germs and other human beings as full of germs and potentially fatal to them. And a hug will kill them. And this constant need to kind of scan your body and scan the environment, I think is creating a kind of OCD type, literally like new reactions. And I think brain scans would be really interesting to see, if this is true or not, but it’s very much like the kind of obsessive self-monitoring that leads to anorexia and bulimia.

Naomi Wolf (29:16):

And those are very hard illnesses, neurologically to recover from because the brain kind of habituates to being addicted to the reward that you get from following those restrictions. And doctors are seeing this, that their patients are addicted to masks. They can’t bring themselves to take off the masks. And I do think that there’s been kind of an alteration of the minds of people. And the last thing I’ll say is about isolation. I’ve studied torture and isolation is a big part of torture. In fact, that’s why the Geneva Convention say solitary confinement is a form of torture. And what studies have found with solitude, enforcing solitude is that it creates psychotic damage to the brain. People start to hallucinate, they start to become psychotic and at its permanent brain damage.

Naomi Wolf (30:11):

So I think solitude could have also changed people’s brains. I interviewed a young adult who has been in a room in Brooklyn for the last two years, being perfectly [inaudible 00:30:24] with his other friends who are also hold-up in their rooms in Brooklyn. But when I proposed to him that he’d go out on the road and report something from the road, a look of absolute terror across his face. And I’m seeing this kind of agoraphobic fear based to just being out in the world, being around other people that I think has gone beyond logic.

Bill Walton (30:46):

Has anybody done any statistical work on this? We’re a country of 340, 350 million people. I go to a gym in Adams Morgan in DC, and I’ve got a trainer there who’s like a regular guy. And he assures me that what we’re talking about is not widespread. He says, “Bill, just look at all the football games on TV and you’ll see … ” He said, “Look at the Super Bowl. Los Angeles had a mask mandate and you look at the Super Bowl and nobody in the stands was either social distancing or wearing a mask.” And so you have people in those ordinary circumstances not acting the way we’re talking about. And yet, all of us who sort of are interested in ideas and trends and things like that start identifying this. Is this something we’re just because we’re noticing it, or is this something that’s really widespread and is really a cancer in America that is going to change us forever?

Jenin Younes (31:51):

I suspect it’s a relatively [crosstalk 00:31:56].

Bill Walton (31:55):

That was a 35,000 foot question. We’re talking about the future of the country here now, go ahead.

Jenin Younes (32:00):

I suspect it’s a pretty small population percentage. That’s sort of talking about what Naomi described. Someone who’s been locked … I hear of these people. I know a couple of them but I think they’re terrified and they have quite a voice, we see them on Twitter, then they’re just pushing very, very hard to keep all restrictions in place. They have very loud voices and because they can not return to normal. I don’t think they’re capable of it at this point. I do think the vast majority of people want to go back to normal, but the problem is that most people don’t care that much and will sort of just go along with whatever they’re told to do. So the majority won’t get up on the train and scream that they’re not going to wear a mask again, which I actually did once. Although, [crosstalk 00:32:43].

Naomi Wolf (32:44):

I would add to that the 35,000 people in a stadium are self-selectively not the people cowering right in their rooms. Those people would probably decline. But look, I come at this from a … There’s no way to know how widespread this is right. And I think it’s a very specific demographic. I mean, I think it’s the most educated, liberal chattering classes in a few cities, but those people have outside influence on the culture and they also happen to be my friends and family.

Jenin Younes (33:19):

And they’re sitting on in their rooms on the internet. So they may seem like a lot bigger percentage of population than they are anecdotes. They’re not out doing things.

Naomi Wolf (33:30):

They’re not out doing things. I mean, there’s no way to know how widespread it is, but I do literally have a relative who I love to bits, who will not sit outside with me because I’m unvaccinated. And I have another friend this judge who I mentioned. [crosstalk 00:33:47].

Bill Walton (33:46):

Won’t sit outside with you.

Naomi Wolf (33:49):

Will not sit outside with me because I might kill him by my presence. And I have this judge friend who won’t go indoors with me and he literally says, “I don’t sit indoors with unvaccinated people.” So there are these deep pockets of highly educated people. Is it ideological? Is it OCD? Is it a mixture by now? I don’t know, but let’s move on to one population that I know is being harmed on masks and that is children. I’m the stepmother of a 10 year old. His school is sent me a notice, sent us a notice that some children were not wearing their masks correctly. And these kids wear masks 10 hours a day with mask breaks. And they were also not distancing correctly. And the children who forgot to properly wear their masks and distance would be given physical reminders of double masking.

Naomi Wolf (34:40):

This is all child abuse in my view, but that is like extra criminal level child abuse. And I know my poor stepson looked at what a double mask would look like because this was such a traumatic thing to say to any child. I’m around 10 year olds and they’ve lost verbal skills. Their faces are affectless. They don’t know how to … Sorry?

Jenin Younes (35:06):

I just saw this. Someone was tweeting. Jay Bhattacharya tweeted it. So I trust it. But the CDC has lowered the age of development now. I don’t know what the exact numbers were, but you’re supposed to have this level of speech at two years now they’re saying, “Okay, it’s three years.” Because kids they’re being developmentally delayed by masks and presumably by like lockdowns, lost school. I have a lawsuit on behalf of a child. Well actually four children, siblings who are not vaccinated. They had COVID in the fall and they keep getting quarantined because, if you’re not vaccinated they quarantine the kids anytime they come into contact with somebody who had COVID. So these kids just keep losing school, as if they were vaccinated, they weren’t. It’s an underhanded way of coercing the parents to vaccinate them of course, because they wouldn’t be subject these rules. But I mean, what we’re doing to children, in the name of public health is the most cruel, absurd thing I’ve ever … And I can’t believe it’s the liberals who supposedly care about people and kids. It’s just unconscionable.

Bill Walton (36:07):

I can’t resist. So the double mask, the dunce cap has become the double mask.

Naomi Wolf (36:14):

Yeah. But can you imagine, if you read about that in a Dickens’ novel, you may think, “Thank, God. We have evolved past that of brutality and ignorance and cruelty.” And here we are.

Bill Walton (36:28):

Yeah.

Naomi Wolf (36:28):

And I guess the other thing that astonishes me is that, all the other upper middle-class, educated, caring helicopter parents in this affluent neighborhood are not up in arms about this. They’re okay with this threat against their children. And they’re okay with their children … They literally say things like, “I don’t want my child to unmask, if the other kids are masked because he’ll be ostracized.” And you hear about that, you hear about kids being told … The parents tell their children not to play with the unmasked child. I’m hearing stories like this across the country. These kids are going to be scarred for life.

Bill Walton (37:09):

We need to come back for a follow-up conversation, because we’re just now getting … We got to a deadline, we’ve got to get you too. But let’s circle back where we started. We started out with concerns about a totalitarian government, loss of freedom. It seems like we’re not describing a population of people who are foremost concerned about their freedom. They’re concerned about protecting themselves from all types of risk. It’s crazy. It’s a question of people’s character and I don’t think the people we’re describing here are very interested in freedom, the Bill of Rights, the Declaration of Independence, all that sort of basic stuff.

Jenin Younes (37:55):

No, they’re not. And you said being safe from all sorts of things. I would say it’s actually safe from one thing, like this one particular virus, but they’re not thinking about mental health, physical health in other ways. Sitting at home in the dark is not healthy. In fact, obesity, vitamin D deficiency are two of the main causes of bad COVID outcomes. So people should be outside getting exercise, seeing each other.

Bill Walton (38:20):

But this gets into the news blackout though, because we’re not reading about all the other deaths. We’re not reading about the cancer, the heart disease, the diabetes, the kids, the depression, the alcohol. All those other sort of consequences.

Jenin Younes (38:34):

Exactly. At Johns Hopkins, I’m sure you guys heard. But had a study a few weeks ago, where they said, “Lockdowns had no … ” This was a huge meta study. Johns Hopkins isn’t exactly a bastion of right wing supremacy. From Johns Hopkins saying that lockdowns had no benefits and massive downsides. The media didn’t cover the study at all. The control of information is-

Bill Walton (38:57):

I don’t think Johns Hopkins even put out a press release, did they?

Jenin Younes (39:00):

They didn’t?

Bill Walton (39:01):

I think the doctor responsible for it did. I don’t think they wanted to be associated with it. Or maybe they did.

Naomi Wolf (39:06):

I’m very cynical about why Johns Hopkins put that study out. They’re one of the most egregious criminal entities, when it comes to their dashboard, being the one that everyone referenced and a whistleblower who was working with them imaging their data leaked. The GitHub account, which is where developers put raw data sets and only six states were reporting. Their data were completely incomplete and they’re very corrupt. You see this about face institutionally. I think they’re trying to lay down a paper trail as the news emerges, that data has been concealed and that bad outcomes have followed. That’s my view.

Naomi Wolf (39:54):

But yes, there is a media blackout, but I also wanted to say about people buying into this notion of not caring about freedom. I have a little bit of different take because I love people in their 20s who will remain unnamed and what they’re hearing and you see it on the New York City subways is that, it’s caring to wear a mask. And it’s caring to the community to get a booster and that it’s threatening to the community and to the elders and to your loved ones to not get a booster. So that’s such a cynical thing, genius campaign, it was focus grouped is these bad actors with their millions and billions in influence campaigns figured out that appealing to the altruism and selflessness of that generation was a way to get them to comply.

Naomi Wolf (40:50):

Freedom has been effectively rebranded as selfishness and harming others. Whereas, masking and distancing and injecting things is branded as taking care of your community. And you kind of can’t fault young adults for being idealistic and wanting to serve their community, but their idealism has been hijacked.

Jenin Younes (41:10):

Very Orwellian.

Naomi Wolf (41:14):

Yeah, very.

Bill Walton (41:15):

We got to wrap. Naomi, thank you. Jenin, thank you. I feel like we’re just beginning to get interesting. We got to start going for Joe Rogan length here. Next time we need four hours to unpack this. Naomi, where’s the best place to find you on Substack or where?

Naomi Wolf (41:35):

Certainly Substack and DailyClout.io, where we’re fighting to change state legislation. I just want to say one thing, which is the record of this moment is being written now and the heroes are being identified and over and over, I notice that 19 out of 20 of the heroes being showcased are men and God bless them. They’re very [inaudible 00:41:59] men. Jenin Younes ran out in front of the troops in this battle at the very start, when she saw how unjust it was. She’s been courageous, she’s been a warrior and a leader. She’s a hero of this movement. So I just want to say that.

Jenin Younes (42:14):

Oh, thank you so much, Naomi. Well, thank you.

Bill Walton (42:16):

I so agree. I so agree. That’s why you’ve been back here three times and you’re going to be coming back time after time. Yeah, you [crosstalk 00:42:24].

Jenin Younes (42:25):

Yeah.

Bill Walton (42:25):

And we talked about you paid a personal price, so have you Naomi. You really had to jettison a lot of what you were and became something else.

Jenin Younes (42:36):

Yeah. Yeah.

Naomi Wolf (42:37):

And get to hang out with people like Jenin now.

Bill Walton (42:42):

That’s great.

Naomi Wolf (42:42):

I get to be on the right side of history, with the cool kids.

Bill Walton (42:45):

Jenin, we can find you at the … What are the acronym?

Jenin Younes (42:50):

The New Civil Liberties Alliance.

Bill Walton (42:52):

It’s a wonderful place founded by Philip Hamburger. And I think we’ve described it, a very litigation rich environment for you guys to help get back [crosstalk 00:43:01].

Jenin Younes (43:01):

Yeah. And I also have a very active Twitter account in my name.

Bill Walton (43:05):

What’s your handle?

Jenin Younes (43:06):

Leftylockdowns1, actually. It’s a long story about why that’s kind of a stupid handle, but I didn’t really understand how Twitter worked when I created it. And it was shortened from leftylockdownskeptic, but they haven’t suspended me yet. We’ll see. I’m preparing to meet Naomi’s fate.

Bill Walton (43:23):

All right. Well, thanks. This is just so interesting. Anyway, this has been The Bill Walton Show, here with Naomi Wolf and Jenin Younes and we’re talking about the … I don’t know, what are we talking about? The future of mankind, I think.

Jenin Younes (43:38):

Yeah.

Bill Walton (43:40):

Anyway, hope you’ll join us again. Of course, you can find us on CPAC NOW and for America and all the major podcast platforms, YouTube, Rumble. I think YouTube will keep this one. I don’t think we said anything, particularly non-YouTube.

Jenin Younes (43:55):

The Pfizer vaccine.

Bill Walton (43:55):

Pfizer vaccines. We skirted on the edges of the truth police. Anyway, thanks for joining. And we’ll talk with you next time. Thanks. Bye.

Bill Walton (44:06):

I hope you enjoyed the conversation. Want more? Click the subscribe button or head over to thebillwaltonshow.com to choose from over a 100 episodes. You can also learn more about our guest on our interesting people page and send us your comments. We read every one and your thoughts help us guide the show. If it’s easier for you to listen, check out our podcast page and subscribe there. In return, we’ll keep you informed about what’s true, what’s right and what’s next. Thanks for joining.