Live from Music Row Monday morning on The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. – host Leahy welcomed feminist, author, and champion of liberty Dr. Naomi Wolf to the newsmaker line to discuss the motivation behind her upcoming book, The Bodies of Others: The New Authoritarians, COVID-19 and the War Against the Human and explain the changing landscape of publishing.
Leahy: We are joined on the newsmaker line now by our good friend Naomi Wolf. She’s a feminist author and defender of liberty, among other things, and also very controversial. Our very good friend Naomi Wolf, thanks for joining us.
Wolf: Hey, thanks so much for having me.
Leahy: So I was looking at our list of guests this morning, and I said, ah, Naomi again. I wonder what she’s been up to? My goodness. I had no idea you were working on this book that’s going to be published a week from tomorrow.
It’s called The Bodies of Others: The New Authoritarians, COVID-19 and the War Against the Human. It’s available on Amazon and in bookstores around the country. Let me just read the first couple of paragraphs, and just say, after this, wow.
“Our pre-March 2020 world has gone forever, irretrievable, for in league with mass surrender to all-powerful technology, the restrictions against human assembly, speech and gathering, culture and worship brought on by the pandemic panic have brought new cultural norms frighteningly at odds with traditional Western notions of freedom and independent thought.’
Wow! What a great description of where we are right now. Tell us about the book.
Wolf: Thank you. I wrote it when I saw that what we were going through after March of 2020 was kind of an escalation of what I’ve been seeing since 2008 when I wrote my first book about the decline of democracy, The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot.
But I saw that it was on a larger scale. In other words, what happened is that the pandemic has provided an excuse for a handful of bad actors.
And we’re really seeing this now in these events this week, ranging from the World Economic Forum to the Chinese Communist Party to bad nonprofits like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and notably, big-tech companies.
They were able to engineer a power grab, basically to remake society and to wage a war against Western freedoms, a war against the family, a war against kids.
And really to recreate a world in which we have to kind of ask their permission to be human. And I can give you specific examples, but notably the tech discussion – as you know, I’m a tech CEO, and one of the things that really leapt out at me as I was looking at pandemic policies that really don’t make sense is, the data are in; they don’t make sense medically. States and countries that locked down did no better in terms of COVID than the ones that stayed open.
Masks barely make a difference, except for harming kids cognitively and so on. But what these policies all succeed in doing is fattening the coffers of tech companies, because, for tech companies, the thing human beings can do that don’t involve technology, is competition.
In other words, when people gather, it’s to worship in church, or when your child is in a real classroom with other human children and a human teacher and no screen. Or when people are in a restaurant or a bar talking to each other, or when people are gathered in a town hall, technology is losing data and it’s losing eyeballs.
And the advantage it would have if there were policies that kept people isolated, locked in their homes, your child tuned to a computer, and specifically if there were policies that insisted that you needed a vaccine passport in order to assemble – which is such a bountiful harvest of data for big tech.
So I walk the reader through in case after case, when you close mom-and-pop stores on Main Street through lockdowns, Amazon is up 30 percent.
When you don’t let people go shop at their local grocery store, chat with the grocer or the butcher, and your meal kits are up. And when you don’t let your child go to school.
Edutech, which was a losing industry, is up by hundreds of millions of dollars. And why should they give up this advantage?
Leahy:Â Let me ask about how this book came about, and your publisher. Now, your publisher is listed as All Seasons Press. I’m not familiar with that publisher. Is that a subsidiary of a mainstream publisher, or is this kind of one of the independent publishing firms out there now?
Wolf: They are a conservative imprint, and they’re a pretty newly established publishing house, but I’ve been really impressed with them. They’re very, very entrepreneurial, and the publishing landscape is changing.
So the fact is that this is a book that takes on entities like Amazon. So I’m not sure if traditional, gigantic publishers like Simon & Schuster would publish such a book, because there’s an alignment of media with big tech and with, unfortunately, the Biden administration in many cases.
There is an alignment with China. I tracked the money flow of even the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to media outlets. I didn’t track it through publishing.
But I think what we’re seeing right now is independent news outlets like yours, independent news outlets like All Seasons Press and Daily Cloud, my own news outlet, and podcasters are becoming the trusted voices, because legacy media and even legacy publishing can’t really publish everything these days.
Leahy: I’m looking at All Seasons Press, and your book is one of the featured books there. But they also have a book by James Golden – Bo Snerdly, for Rush Limbaugh fans – Mark Meadows, former chief of staff, and Peter Navarro.
So these are all very important books. And how did that deal come about with All Seasons Press? I mean, you’ve obviously written what, eight bestsellers? Your first book was back in 1991.
Wolf: Yeah, I’ve written a lot of books.
Leahy: How did it come about?
Wolf: My agent brought me the offer. I’m not sure what you’re asking.
Leahy: Typically with All Seasons Press, it sounds like it’s a new imprint. And so what you were talking about is the more established imprints, Simon & Schuster, Harper Collins, all those folks, those are very large corporations.
And I guess the question is, you said those larger publishers were not likely to take any more of your books, I guess? Is that the angle here?
Listen to the interview:
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Tune in weekdays from 5:00 – 8:00 a.m. to the Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy on Talk Radio 98.3 FM WLAC 1510. Listen online at iHeart Radio.
