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The Bodies of Others: The New Authoritarians, COVID-19 and The War Against the Human Hardcover – 31 May 2022
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#4 on AMAZON's Most Sold list, and a WALL STREET JOURNAL, USA TODAY and PUBLISHERS WEEKLY NONFICTION BOOK BEST SELLER.
The Bodies of Others is about how we came to the harrowing civilizational crossroads at which we find ourselves - engaged in a war against vast impersonal forces with limitless power over our lives and which threaten the freedoms we have always taken for granted.
In her most provocative book yet, Dr. Naomi Wolf shows how these forces -- from Big Tech and Big Pharma to the CCP and our oligarchical elites -- seized upon two years of COVID-19 panic in sinister new ways, to not only undermine our Republic but to fundamentally reorient human relations.
Their target is humanity itself. Their end goal is to ensure that our pre-March 2020 world is gone forever. Irretrievable. To be replaced with a world in which all human endeavor-all human joy, all human fellowship, all human advancement, all human culture, all human song, all human drama, all worship, all surprise, all flirtation, all celebration-is behind a digital paywall. A world in which we will all have to ask technology's permission to be human.
But we, the people of the world, did not vote to abandon our old systems and destroy our old ways so absolutely they could never be recovered. And Wolf shows how, against overwhelming odds, we still might win.
- Print length350 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherAll Seasons Press
- Publication date31 May 2022
- Dimensions15.24 x 2.79 x 22.86 cm
- ISBN-101737478560
- ISBN-13978-1737478560
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"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." - Tucker Carlson
"The pandemic response is the biggest crisis of our time. It is going to make wars look small. There are very few books exploring the pandemic, its origins and the ramifications of the response. Dr. Naomi Wolf's 'The Bodies of Others' focuses on the extremely important issue of bodily autonomy, that you decide what happens to your body. The greatest loss to our freedom is when our leaders makes decisions on the bodies of others. Buy this important book to understand the consequences." - Dr. Peter McCullough, cardiologist, COVID-19 early treatment advocate, president, Cardio Renal Society of America
"Dr. Naomi Wolf's book stands apart in a world of groupthink. It is an impeccable, thought-provoking compilation of the troubling and distressing consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic, including censorship and the suppression of alternatives to the mainstream narrative." - Dr. Paul Alexander, former WHO COVID pandemic evidence-synthesis advisor
"The best book I've read in 2 years, along with The Real Anthony Fauci. Part memoir, part essay, part long-form journalism, part non-fiction science, and beautiful language throughout. Naomi Wolf is such a natural writer, I feel like she and I were having a long, leisurely conversation together as friends while I read this book. It was like she came into my house and said, "You are not alone. It's been rough, but together, we will find a way through this." I'm so proud we have a national treasure like Naomi Wolf living at this time in history. I predict this book will someday be required reading in high schools and colleges." - Heidi, online customer
"Naomi Wolf warned America and the world at the start of this 'pandemic' that it would be used to eviscerate the Constitution and civil liberties. It is uncanny how right she was, how she predicted the tyranny that was to come via the lockdowns and mask and vaccine mandates. In The Bodies of Others, she takes you on a journey through a modern day Dante's Inferno. This is a book that will shake you to your core, a warning of the struggle ahead and what you can do to resist it." - Steve Bannon
"Naomi Wolf's courage is a gift to us all. Her work in this brilliant book is groundbreaking and inescapably important for anyone who cares about freedom and human dignity." -Eric Metaxas, #1 New York Times bestselling author and host of the nationally syndicated Eric Metaxas Radio Show
"Naomi Wolf understood, well before most, that the pandemic was one of the greatest crimes against humanity ever perpetrated. She was right. The official COVID-19 narrative was a lie and was used by our oligarch masters to destroy human connection and human relationships. Read this book to understand what must be done to fight back and ultimately save humanity." - Dr. Reiner Fuellmich, member, German Coronavirus Investigative Committee
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Product details
- Publisher : All Seasons Press (31 May 2022)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 350 pages
- ISBN-10 : 1737478560
- ISBN-13 : 978-1737478560
- Dimensions : 15.24 x 2.79 x 22.86 cm
- Best Sellers Rank: 112,414 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- 17 in Healthcare Politics
- 77 in Medical Ethics
- 94 in Health Care Delivery (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
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In 20 meaty and well-documented chapters she makes the case for why we all should be very afraid of where things are heading as Statists exploit crises or even make them up in order to further consolidate power and control. Wealthy and powerful elites gain in such scenarios while the masses suffer – greatly.
Although focused primarily on America, Wolf has plenty to say about England, Europe and even Australia. And the facts, figures and stories she shares about the scene in the US should be of help to whoever is reading this book. The overall thrust of it remains the same regardless of what country you are in.
She reminds us that America has had many, and often much worse, outbreaks of infectious diseases in its past, such as the smallpox outbreak of 1775-1782 and the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918-1919. Europe too has had such outbreaks. Yet even then freedoms remained intact and total lockdowns never took place.
Never mind that early on many experts were warning against lockdowns and other coercive measures. Says Wolf, “The masking, the enclosure, the isolation, the lack of community, fresh air and exercise, the fear, the cabin fever, the generations piled on top of one another, the alienation engendered by computer screens – they all took their toll. People grew pale, fearful, obsessive, phobic, and sad. And unsurprisingly, many got sick and many died.” 66
Of course the elites and politicians and ‘health experts’ calling the shots never paid the price for any of this. While we were all locked in our homes (here in Melbourne we were held prisoners for 23 hours a day, with only a 5km travel allowance), the elites were still living the good life.
They were not only getting their cushy salaries paid for by the tax payer, but for the most part they could freely roam about at the beachfront properties. Lockdowns were no biggee for them. Says Wolf: “This somber catastrophe … morphed into a uniform, top-down, almost cozy ‘lifestyle’ that was, as a form of house arrest, tolerable. That is, if you were affluent. What we did not know was that the ‘academic’ studies, the media messaging, and the tools for the cozy lifetime all derived from, and then benefited, the same group.”
And we need to avoid the misnomer “quarantine” - what used to happen to the sick. What happened to us who were mostly healthy were lockdowns: “Totalitarian and fascist societies have long used mass restrictions of movement, curfews, and other ways of restricting free association and free movement to keep their citizens in check. North Korea and China have cordoned off entire regions and put them under no-movement rules.”
She of course discusses the main culprits here, including Big Tech, Big Pharma, and the various globalist bodies such as the UN, the WHO and the WEF. She quotes elites like Klaus Schwab who told adoring audiences two years ago that everything must be transformed as part of a Great Reset. Wolf tells us what old systems are now fully at risk:
“Privacy, paper and metal money, the ability to drive a car without being tracked, the nation-state, human expression, human touch, cultural activities, churches, mosques, and synagogues, town halls, theaters and concert halls, democratic governance, a free press, schools and universities, books and libraries, and the right to decide what happens t one’s body, property and family…”
The list goes on and on: everything MUST change in order to bring about the elites’ dystopia. And it is so very odd that we actually need reminding of what life was like just a few short years ago, but she does do that:
“Before the pandemic, people did not need a subscription to enter human civilization and community. People went to church. No data was harvested. Their kids went to school. No data are harvested when a teacher reads to the class from a book or writes an equation on a blackboard. Nor were data generated when kids played together at recess, or on sports teams, or when they performed a class play...”
This IS our new normal. The elites do not want us going back to life as we knew it. Two items I just noticed on the social media confirm these fears. Even though Covid is in many ways now seen as a thing of the past for most people, the social engineers will not let go of their power trips. Justin Trudeau in Canada is still insisting that the unvaxxed can NOT ride in trains of fly in plains. And in South Australia the leftist government there has just declared a “climate emergency”.
Covid was simply a test run for even “greater” crises, and ‘climate change” was always a major part of this. To ‘save the planet’ we must be forced to relinquish most of the rights and freedoms we once took for granted. Schwab and Bill Gates and others have long spruiked climate alarmism as part of their goals to reshape society and drastically cull the human population.
And as Wolf reminds us, these ‘crises’ and ‘emergencies’ are never-ending: “By the end of 2021, we were still being spoken of as being ‘in the middle of a pandemic.’ … In pandemic time, time has ceased to be linear. It was now always pandemic time. ‘The middle of the pandemic’ kept shifting so that it had no actual chronological meaning. It was always the eternal now. . . . with no recourse to objective metrics.”
As one who is quite familiar with both history and current events, including how tyrannies arise, she has no time for things like mandatory vaccines: “The vaccine passport platform is the first step toward a social credit system, like the one in China that enslaves a billion people. In China, the CCP can find any dissident in five minutes because of the 360-degree surveillance of the social credit system.”
The West is not far away from all of this. Indeed, what 2020-2022 had clearly demonstrated was “the helter-skelter desertion of classical liberalism’s – modern civilization’s – most cherished post-war ideals: the sudden abandonment of post-Enlightenment forms of critical thinking; the dilution of parents’ sense of protectiveness over the bodies and futures of their minor children; the acceptance of a world in which people can’t gather to worship.”
The elites were happy to usher all this in, and far too many of the masses happily went right along with it. Too many were happy to throw away their freedom and human rights for the illusion that the ever-expanding State exists to keep them safe. We have not been kept safe, but we have seen a massive hammering of our civil rights and liberties.
The closing words of Wolf deserve to be shouted from the rooftops: “In this moment when freedom itself is in the balance, when the alternative is servitude forever, this decision on whether to speak up makes all the difference. Tyrannies only fall when there is mass resistance. History is clear on this. When it is just a few, well, they are marginalized, silenced, smeared, or, when things go far enough, arrested. What matters most is that enough people stand up and resist all at once.”
Highly intelligent.
The sociology and the psychopathology
of what we all just went through.
This is a biographical, social commentary on the Covid years.
Written and dedicated to the Children of 2049.
“ To understand an immense crime,
it is essential to grasp the thought processes of political elites - “,
“ the circles on the floor said to shoppers:
You are children. We - the forces who impose and set the circles - are the adults.
You are powerless.
We decide”.
It wasn’t just about the distance.
It was about the infantilization.
A brave work.
An immense encouragement to those of us who still care about freedom.
Top reviews from other countries
Wolf‘s book is a travel through time, starting in March 2020, ending this spring. She switches between discussion and analysis of the situation at each stage and different aspects of it, and a kind of personal diary of how she and those around her were affected.
The book starts with a description of normal pre-pandemic life. The author is at a conference in London surrounded by friends, when she first hears about the lockdown in Italy. This is March 8, 2020. Reflecting, Wolf now sees the news of this first lockdown in Europe as an indication of a strike against the foundation of free Western society: „The flower of Europe was being struck down“.
She moves on to give us a vivid picture of normal life in her New York neighbourhood in the Bronx, its bustling life in all its diversity, suddenly struck down by the lockdown. She and her husband leave the city: „We had both been in conflict areas and we had both lived in close societies – we recognized their movements. We both knew something very bad was on its way; whether natural or political, or both, we could not yet tell.“
To Wolf, lockdown is more than just a way to slow the spread of a virus; it is an abandonment of free society; it signifies a new kind of society; a totalitarian oligarchy, and the fact that we allowed it means we have lost our freedom for the unforeseeable future.
Wolf was not a sceptic from the outset. At first she believed the official narrative, feared for herself and her loved ones, but slowly she started to discover the strange discrepancy between the narrative and the facts. She started questioning the data presented, the usefulness of the countermeasures, the psychological harm of mask-wearing, especially to children, and she describes how perplexed she was witnessing the utter lack of critical thinking on behalf of the media. She discovers how the fear of the virus has turned into a cult, the virus taking on the form of „Milton‘s Satan“.
Wolf discusses the interests at play and explains how lockdowns have benefited certain business sectors, especially Big Tech,large corporations at the expense of small businesses. She suggests the proliferation of restrictions may have been driven by the elites, with a goal of disempowering the masses in order to grab their assets. The fact that someone benefits from a situation is of course not proof they caused it. But the financial interests are certainly there and there is little doubt that once the lockdowns and restrictions were in place, many of those who gained most by them have certainly done much to support the narrative.
To Wolf, this is not about a conspiracy, but a mindset of arrogance and indifference among the elites of society: „But the point was that these people did not need to gather in the shadows or be part of a cabal. Why would this group need a secret sign or a secret meeting? They simply owned the global stratum in which they operated, and they were accountable only to one another.“
In the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben analyzed the situation based on three key concepts in his philosophy, Homo Sacer, the State of Exception and Bare Life. Homo sacer is someone who is at the same time sacred and excluded. Homo sacer has in some way broken the taboos of society and is therefore already consecrated to the gods, he can be killed with impunity, but he cannot be sacrificed; he is subject to the power of government, but not protected by the law. Homo Sacer is condemned to bare life, zoe in the original Greek sense; existing not as a citizen, but as a human stripped of all rights to take an active part in society. The state of exception is realized when law and constitution are abandoned and the executive arm of the state takes the reins, usually based on a declaration of a state of emergency. As Agamben explains his seminal work, State of Exception, the Third Reich was based on a state of emergency throughout, as the Weimar constitution was in fact „unplugged“ right at the beginning, while formally being unchanged the whole time.
Who are the homines sacri? In Biblical times the lepers, in modern times the prisoners of Auschwitz, refugees; homeless, stateless, at the mercy of the charity of foreign rulers.
Agamben‘s suggestion, in his first blog posts on the coronavirus in 2020, is that with the lockdowns and other restrictions we have all become homines sacri; we are outside civil society, yet subject to the power of the rulers, unlimited now, based on the emergency declarations.
We are all homines sacri now Agamben says; a long-term development has culminated in biopolitical totalitarianism. But as Wolf shows us, we may need a bit deeper analysis: She describes the joy of meeting up with her health-freedom friends in the woods late last year, away from the prying eyes of the police and the panicked, vaccine touting self-righteous majority. And those people, the health-freedom group in the woods, they may be the homines sacri of our time, outside of society, they have broken the taboos, they are a threat to the obeying mass, to the friends who refuse to meet up with an unvaccinated person. But still, those people, hiding away in the woods, talking, hugging, free from fear; those people are free. Free in the sense they can live and interact as normal human beings. It is here where the glimpse of hope lies according to Wolf; within the biopolitical regime, it is the outlaw, homo sacer, who still enjoys some level of freedom.
Then, let us look at the citizens of Wuhan in early 2020 or in Shanghai just now. Stripped of their citizen‘s rights for sure, but more importantly now stripped of even life as an outcast, as homo sacer. Isolation, deprivation of human connection; this is the essence of the lockdowns; they signify the abolition, not only of rights and freedom, but of our existence as humans. And what of those still in the grip of an absurd narrative, those who obey without questions, who ostracize their neighbours for not wearing a mask, for refusing the vaccine? They are surely still part of society, but are they free? „A fat servant is not a great man. A beaten slave is a great man, for it is in his heart that freedom resides,“ to quote Icelandic author Halldor Laxness‘s 18th century historical roman Iceland‘s Bell.
Broadly speaking we can distinguish between three layers of freedom. The outermost layer is the freedom to work, to make money and keep the proceeds of your work. This is what political debate is mostly about in a free democratic society; how high should taxes be, to what extent should business be regulated and so forth.
The next layer is the freedom of expression and freedom to influence society through political participation. This layer of freedom is generally not debated in free democracies.
But within this layer there is yet another one; the freedom to live as a human being. The freedom to go to a restaurant or go shopping, to go for a walk, the freedom meet your friends in the park, the freedom to recognize facial expressions, the freedom to smile and be smiled at. And of course the freedom to decide for yourself whether or not to be medicated. It is this layer of freedom that was being attacked during the coronavirus scare, by the authorities, by the media, and, first and foremost, by a hypnotized mass scared out of their wits over a virus.
This layer of freedom is so fundamental that it isn't even a part of the definition of freedom. It is like the freedom of the horse to sprint, of the dog to bark. It is our freedom to live according to our nature.
The Bodies of Others is a valuable account of an unprecedented situation. Wolf paints a vivid picture of the contrast between normal human life and life under Covid restrictions. She describes the the despair of the children deprived of the company of their peers, the emptiness in the eyes of the old and frail kept away from their loved ones by force, withering away in isolation, the crushed communities. How basic moral principles, empathy and respect for other people‘s privacy evaporate as the state assumes a „central role, and limitless authority, in managing our own bodies and the bodies of others.“
Wolf wonders about the possible causes. Unlike many authors, she does not offer a single, simple explanation, no single culprit; no conspiracy at play. „How could otherwise nice people have come to do such evil?“ she asks. „How could they have allowed the suppression of young children‘s respiration or consigned friends and colleagues to eat in the street like outcasts? How could it have happened in „enlightened“ New York City, that cops would have been sent to arrest a woman with a terrified nine-year-old child for trying to visit the Museum of Natural History without „papers“?“ To Wolf, this suggests „evil beyond human imagination“, a „spiritual dimension of evil“. To her own surprise, and as it seems a bit of embarrassment as an enlightened modern intellectual, Wolf turns to her Jewish religious tradition „in which Hell (or „Gehenom“) is not the Miltonic hell of the later Western imagination, but rather a quiter interim spiritual place.“ And this is where the battle takes place, „between the forces of God and negative forces that debase, that profane, that seek to ensnare our souls. We have seen this drama before, and not that long ago.“
The Bodies of Others is a personal, deeply empathic and excellently written tribute to the innermost layer of freedom, the very core that defines us as human beings. Or in Naomi Wolf’s own words: „The object of this spiritual battle? It seemed to be for nothing short of the human soul.“





