Naomi Wolf joins The Paul Leslie Hour on Election Day!
Are you here? Yes, indeed. We thank you one and all for tuning into The Paul Leslie Hour. Let’s go right into Episode #1,043!
We’re pleased to welcome 8 time New York Times bestselling author and journalist, Dr. Naomi Wolf! Did you hear about the book entitled The Pfizer Papers, edited by Naomi Wolf? It’s best to get acquainted with it.
Just a reminder, today is election day. Yes, we can confirm that today is Election Day in America’s Ultimate Election! Did you vote? Please let us know.
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And with that, let’s bring in Dr. Naomi Wolf, right here on The Paul Leslie Hour.
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Paul Leslie
[1:20]All right. Well, in that case, we are rolling into another episode of the Paul Leslie Hour. and it’s a great pleasure to be joined by Dr. Naomi Wolf. You can see there in her background there, the Pfizer papers edited by Naomi Wolf. And today is election day. So it’s a great honor to have you on such a monumental day in American history.
Naomi Wolf
[1:48]Yes, it is indeed a monumental day in American history.
Paul Leslie
[1:53]Absolutely. Now, how would you describe the place that America finds herself on election day 2024?
Naomi Wolf
[2:03]Well, unfortunately, I always feared this day would come. I wrote a book in 2008, actually, at the end of the Bush II era and right before Obama was elected, called The End of America. And the subtitle was Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot. And I I basically, you know, had studied times and places in history where a democracy was subverted or overthrown and turned into a fascist regime or a totalitarian regime. And I warned that this could happen in America. At that time, people really didn’t believe, you know, it’s like it can’t happen here was the cliche. But I looked at history and found that there were 10 steps to fascism and that, you know, Bush had put in place each of those 10 steps. And Obama just, after the book was published, took it even further, right? Droning Americans, you know, growing Guantanamo instead of closing it as he had promised and so on. So here we are, you know, at what I would call step 10, which is martial law. A state of emergency has been declared federally and in many states and extended federally and extended. The last time I saw it was extended was May of this year. I haven’t even bothered checking because they just keep extending it. And also the National Guard has been deployed, which is the sign of, you know, martial law, like that you have military.
Naomi Wolf
[3:31]I mean, it’s not as bad as the actual military because National Guard is still under civilian control, but it’s bad. You’re supposed to have in a non-banana republic, in a real democracy, you have civil policing, right? You have the actual police policing, not National Guard. We have a contested election. We have a battle over the peaceful transition of power. These are all signs of barely a democracy, really not a democracy. And you have signs of an advanced totalitarian regime, like people like Steve Bannon, Peter Navarro, critics of the administration having been thrown in jail, clearly to stop them from being effective. During the campaign season, Bannon in particular was imprisoned for four months in Danbury State Prison, even though he said that they told him that no one had ever been imprisoned in Danbury for a misdemeanor before. I could go on and on. Even the lockdowns and the mandates during the last four years, those are not signs of a democracy. Those are signs of a totalitarian system. The lockdown stripped us of our First Amendment rights to free assembly, and the mandates stripped us of our right to medical self-determination, which is guaranteed by the Nuremberg Code.
Naomi Wolf
[4:50]And yeah, I mean, you have people at the highest levels. You have Vice President Harris calling people who disagree with her fascists, right? You have, you know, President Biden calling people who disagree with him garbage. I mean, these are not the hallmarks of how a sophisticated democracy conducts itself. These are signs of a decaying regime that’s toppling into tyranny.
Paul Leslie
[5:19]And the things that you’re saying, it’s occurring to me, so many of the people that you mentioned and the organizations, they all kind of take a particular claim to safety. I mean, I think about Pfizer, for example, the public relations representative with Pfizer, of course, would say, we’re concerned most of all with the safety of everyone out there. What do you think about this obsession with safety that seems to be a sign of our time?
Naomi Wolf
[5:49]Right. I think it’s quite artificial. I think it’s one of the few points of vulnerability in an advanced democracy that they figured out they could exploit. I lived through the global war on terror, and that was a point of vulnerability. You know, oh no, there’s a global war on terror, everywhere’s a battlefield, therefore we can strip you, you know, we can surveil you, we can detain you without due process, you know, et cetera, et cetera. But people got wise to the global war on terror and stopped reacting with hysteria every time the threat level was elevated to yellow and red. So that stopped working, right? So they just kind of switched the.
Naomi Wolf
[6:36]Script to public health to really accomplish the same thing. But in a way, public health is more effective because you can very intimately control people and invade people and damage people and kill people. And the Pfizer papers shows, you know, one way that that was done. I mean, public health authorities are the ones who declared the state of emergency. They improperly shut down Main Street, small businesses, small landlords, schools, churches, synagogues, they had no power to do that under our constitution, even under our system. And then, you know, as this book, the Pfizer Papers reveals, under the umbrella of public health, an injection was rolled out that both Pfizer and the FDA and the White House knew would kill and disable and sterilize people in the millions and you know they rolled it out nonetheless and and they were able to do it through unconstitutional restrictions on liberty like mandates threatening people with loss of jobs or you know Jim Crow laws in New York I couldn’t walk into a building because I’m not vaccinated I couldn’t eat in a restaurant or you know sit at the lunch counter at my hotel as if that has no echoes from history.
Naomi Wolf
[7:58]So, and public health is kind of the perfect cover because it sounds so benign. We’re doing it for your own good. Don’t kill grandma. But I will just note as the granddaughter of grandparents who lost eight siblings combined in the Holocaust.
Naomi Wolf
[8:11]It was the Nazi doctors who were the advance guard for replicating and communicating Nazi ideology and especially for kind of whitewashing the act of euthanasia.
Paul Leslie
[8:25]You’re a journalist, Dr. Wolf, and the other day you endorsed President Donald Trump for president. Was there any reservation because of the fact that you were a journalist to make a public statement like that?
Naomi Wolf
[8:42]Well, the reason I hadn’t endorsed him earlier is that I was trying to be nonpartisan as a journalist and Daily Cloud tries to be a nonpartisan news site.
Naomi Wolf
[8:54]However, a lot of things changed my sense. At a certain point, I felt like this is not a normal election and it’s not left versus right. It’s really tyranny versus freedom. And that I had no, I didn’t have the luxury of being nonpartisan in that regard. And also, what moved me was, you know, Steve Bannon’s press conference, honestly, I mean, the people I voted for put a critic in prison. You know, I mean, there’s no clearer sign. And he’s the godfather of this project. He was trying to help me save people’s lives, save the lives of babies, bring the truth to the American public when they imprisoned him. And I don’t know that that’s why they imprisoned him. Nominally, it was for a misdemeanor that was quite a bit earlier than that. But I’m sure it didn’t help, right? I mean, he was, you know, together, we were driving down Pfizer’s revenue to pre-2016 levels. And we broke stories that led Dr. Walensky to resign three days after we broke a story about how she knew that they were killing babies when she gave a White House speech in 2021, telling pregnant women to get the injection. And lastly, I mean, I guess this came after my initial endorsement, but, you know, the whole furore at the Washington Post, when all these journalists were upset.
Naomi Wolf
[10:24]Because the Washington Post wouldn’t endorse Kamala Harris. And they were talking about free speech. And that was kind of the last straw for me because I was censored as a journalist by the Biden regime in 2021. It was the Biden regime and their CDC that according to two subpoenas by two attorneys general who sued the White House, they lifted out my accurate tweet warning women that women were experiencing menstrual problems upon receiving the injection. Literally eyewitness accounts, not opinion, not rhetoric, the kind of reporting I’ve done my whole career that made me a beloved feminist icon, you know, on the left and legacy media. And they suppressed my voice. They silenced Dr. Bhattacharya of Stanford, Dr. Kulldorf of Harvard, you know, but also thousands of ordinary Americans who had a right to speak. And it turns out that it was unconstitutionally the White House putting pressure on tech companies to censor us. So the hypocrisy of journalists saying at this late stage, oh, no, freedom of speech, you know, because of a withheld endorsement. And by the way, I should disclose that I have a conflict of interest in this story because my former husband is the op-ed editor who was in the center of that news story. But anyway, I just…
Naomi Wolf
[11:47]I just felt like these scruples of mine of not being partisan are kind of retro, and we need to save the country. And especially because I am a liberal. I still consider myself a liberal. My videos and the essay I’m trying to write in time is explaining to liberals why they should vote for Trump and independence and undecideds.
Paul Leslie
[12:11]Well, thank you for your bravery. You’re welcome. Absolutely. Now, Stephen K. Bannon wrote the foreword to the Pfizer papers. What do you think is probably the biggest misconception about Bannon?
Naomi Wolf
[12:26]Well, I don’t know him personally. I only know him as a colleague. And certainly before I met him, I read legacy media, and I thought he was a very scary, evil guy from the coverage in legacy media, just like I thought Trump was a very scary, evil guy. But I think the biggest misconceptions on the left is probably that MAGA is misogynist.
Naomi Wolf
[12:52]I would have thought that all these liberal men who are supposed to care so much about women’s rights would have spoken up for women who are being damaged by these injections and made infertile and given lifelong health problems, and they didn’t. I would have thought that feminist health spokespeople who are supposed to care about my body, my choice, would have spoken up against the vaccine mandates, coercing women to take this into their bodies, and they didn’t. And after I was deplatformed, it was Bannon and other conservative men and MAGA men and religious men, interestingly, who wanted to give me a platform because they cared about women and babies. And that was really eye-opening to me. So he and I don’t agree still on a lot of policy issues, but I think there’s a realignment in American society right now because what matters is that we agree on the constitution and on the sanctity of human life and the importance of real journalism. And I really respect the fact that he would speak to me about my concerns about women and babies and give me a platform.
Paul Leslie
[14:06]Well, the misogyny thing, it brings to mind this. You’re known to so many as the author of The Beauty Myth, which my wife considers essential reading.
Naomi Wolf
[14:18]Thank her for me.
Paul Leslie
[14:20]Absolutely. There is a well-known entrepreneur, I won’t name him, but he went on The View to say that Trump never has, quote, strong, intelligent women around him, even adding the clarifier, ever. But isn’t it the Democratic Party that is the party of feminists?
Naomi Wolf
[14:39]I mean, this is a very vexed question. You know, the Democratic Party claimed to be the party of feminists, but when the rubber hit the road, so to speak, they were the party of abortion. And that’s not everything women need, you know, and making it easy to terminate a pregnancy is not the only way.
Naomi Wolf
[15:00]The only metric of showing respect for women and women’s needs and their many roles in society. So one of the things i’ve been telling liberal voters is that and i just got a text from an old friend saying how can you support trump you know given that you’re a woman and you know what about abortion i’ve been telling liberal voters that i don’t think that last card that democrats have i don’t think they need to worry about losing all abortion rights or losing critical abortion rights if Trump is president. I know a lot of pro-lifers won’t like it that I’m saying this, but I’m not, you know, he has their vote, right? And what I mean is most Americans statistically share my place on the abortion spectrum, which is I wish it didn’t exist. I’d love to never have any abortions in the world, but I don’t believe that that world is real, at least not now. And so I do believe in a window of safe legal abortion that is narrow and has restrictions. And I don’t believe in no abortions ever possible because I know women just die in those circumstances. And I don’t believe in abortion on demand, like the crazy Democratic Party is proposing, like fetishizing abortion into the eighth month, two bills that are really in.
Naomi Wolf
[16:28]You know, exist in which you can pretty much neglect a newborn baby to death for a month with no repercussions. And so most people, you know, statistically are where I am.
Naomi Wolf
[16:41]What I’m trying to say to liberals is that we’ve already lost Roe, right? The worst that could possibly happen happened. And you can still get abortions in the United States of America. You may need to travel. But given how serious a decision terminating a pregnancy is, I don’t feel that that’s an undue burden. And even if you’re poor, I don’t feel that it’s an undue burden. You know, I don’t. And there is no right to abortion in the Constitution. I’ve really wrestled with this. I don’t see it.
Naomi Wolf
[17:13]Right. So I guess what I’m trying to say is, and also Trump has been president before, and he didn’t try to get a federal abortion ban going. And I was just told, I didn’t even know this, that he said he supports the right to abortion for the first trimester, which is news to me. I mean, I’m not surprised he’s not saying that very loudly because he needs his pro-life base. But in my experience as a political consultant, the fact that he sent Melania out and she said she’s pro-choice, that’s how candidates signal they’re going to be moderate on this issue, you know, right down the middle. And not that that’s going to make anyone happy. No one’s happy. Right. But but it’s it’s not the horrifying reality of, you know, The Handmaid’s Tale that liberals fear, in my view. Right.
Naomi Wolf
[18:05]So that’s important. And I also think that Trump has been joined by some very thoughtful, impressive people like RFK Jr., Nicole Shanahan, who turns out to be amazing. The more I hear about of J.D. Vance, the more impressed I am. You know, it’s not just wild-eyed Trump out there, right, who’s easy to feel alienated from, especially if you’re a liberal. It’s very thoughtful people, including a great environmentalist. And the second real concern liberals have is for climate change. You know, we’re really single issue or two issue voters often like abortion and climate. And there’s a sane voice in the room who may not give liberals everything they want in terms of climate change, but will certainly help craft a good conservative, clean air, clean water, healthy climate policy.
Paul Leslie
[18:58]In a word, what would be your prediction? What do you think is going to happen with this election?
Naomi Wolf
[19:04]I don’t think we’re going to know by the end of today who is president. I hope I’m wrong. I think it’s going to drag out painfully for weeks, if not months. In 2000, when I advised Gore 2000, it took five weeks for the presidency to be settled, and it took a Supreme Court ruling. I think we’re going to see a scenario like that, but uglier because I think there’s the Democrats are going to unleash a lot of civil unrest, cartel violence, riots, you know, dial a riot, food shortages, huge disruptions to wear us down and distract us. And they’re going to try to find every way they can to not certify a Trump victory in the event that he wins. That’s what I foresee.
Paul Leslie
[19:52]Well, I always like to give the last word to my guest. Anything you’d like to say to all the viewers and listeners out there?
Naomi Wolf
[20:00]Stay peaceful, stay calm, make sure you have six months of food and water and cash if possible, get a walkie-talkie. And the best thing we can do in the weeks and months ahead is continue with peaceful civil society, be close to our neighbors, close to our church or synagogue or mosque, And don’t take the bait of descending into violence or insurrection. We’ve lived through horrible upheavals before as a country. And, you know, let’s not let it go down on our watch. And also… It helps us a lot to get the word out and save a lot of lives by ordering the Pfizer papers on Amazon. It helps Steve Bannon as well.
Paul Leslie
[20:41]All right. Well, Naomi Wolf, thank you so much. Thanks so much for having me. I want to tell you real quick, I just thought you might find this interesting, that I spent a month in a place called Vulcan Romania this year. I just thought that might be interesting.
Naomi Wolf
[20:59]Oh, Vulcan, where my dad was born?
Paul Leslie
[21:01]Vulcan, not just Transylvania, but Vulcan.
Naomi Wolf
[21:05]That’s amazing. What were you doing there?
Paul Leslie
[21:08]Hanging out. I was doing some work and spending some time with some parts of my family.
Naomi Wolf
[21:15]Are you Transylvanian? Are you Romanian?
Paul Leslie
[21:18]My wife is. She’s from Vulcan.
Naomi Wolf
[21:21]Wow. That is on my bucket list. Someday I hope to go see where my father’s side of the family came from. How fascinating. That is really interesting. Thank you. Well, thank her for me and thank your audience, and I appreciate your time.
