How do we know that something that we are told has happened has actually happened?
A striking 2014 clip from former Clinton/Gore political consultant Naomi Wolf
Dear Church Leaders (and everyone else)
For various reasons1 I think it is more important than ever to think carefully about questions such as this one:
How do we know that something that we are told has happened has actually happened?
This is not a new question. But with the advent of artificial intelligence and deep fakes, it is particularly important to ask which of the events that we see on our screens, or in our newspapers, are actually real.
Dr Naomi Wolf2 is a former political consultant who worked for US President Clinton’s administration in the 1990s.
She has since become a journalist and prolific author:
But, according to Wikipedia — and yes, that’s this Wikipedia…
Wolf is now a “conspiracy theorist”.
Maybe this sort of conspiracy theorist:
Conspiracy theorist or not, it seems that Wolf has been no less prolific an author in the past few years:
Readers seem to rate her recent output favourably:
I wonder how many of them are “conspiracy theorists”.
Here is Wolf talking about a recent court case in the UK in relation to her book The Pfizer Papers (transcript below):3
The book is by Simon & Schuster, which is one of the top publishers… It’s basically volume 2. And… this is not my work. That was something that kept being mis-presented in court yesterday... I’m not a scientist. I’m not a medical doctor. I’m an English major.
This the work of 250 highly credentialed doctors and scientists. And we gave the judge, with my statement, an addendum which presents all of their credentials which are extraordinary… former CDC officials, medical fraud investigators, biostatisticians, epidemiologists, virologists, clinical scientists, research scientists, cardiologists, oncologists, radiologists…
It’s the work of these amazing people who came together as volunteers — no money, for the good of humanity — and issued these 104 reports. This volume… The Pfizer Papers, subtitled Pfizer’s Crimes Against Humanity — is the second fifty reports. It’s got some real bombshells. Many of the things that the government lawyers were saying… are based on falsehoods, which may be why they want this book to be discredited in advance.
But this volume 2, for instance, shows that the emergency use authorisation, which allowed [the] Pfizer [vaccine] to be put in the arms of Americans, and I think also British people, was based on Pfizer hiding the bodies of eight dead vaccinated people who died with covid though they were vaccinated. They had to delay reporting those fatalities in order to make the case that the vaccine was 95% effective. If they had included them, they would have been faced with the fact that more people died with the vaccine than without, which is what data are now showing.
NB the so-called “Pfizer vaccine” is in fact owned by the German company BioNTech which earns far more from global sales of the vaccine than Pfizer:
Wolf also writes this Substack, and I have generally found her articles well worth the time:
But the purpose of that long introduction is not to plug Naomi Wolf’s books and Substack. It is to put in some context her answer to a question posed back in 2014. It’s well worth watching and/or reading the transcript below:4
Question (in the context of the Boston Marathon Bombing): What do you think of what happened in Boston, when we were looking for a pressure cooker and two teenagers… and then they took over the whole city and shut it down. To me that looked a whole lot like martial law.
Wolf: This is why I didn’t want to give this talk, because I knew that we’d have this conversation, and now it’s on the record.
Let me take a step back… we have to deal with it. Let me take a step back and a deep breath because this is a very painful thing to talk about.
All over the world, we know — it’s well established — the State Department and intelligence agencies engage in theater. And it’s what they do. It’s spycraft… to create spectacles and events that people may not realise are spectacles and events…like the overthrow of Mosaddeq in the 50s in Iran.
See e.g. here:
They’ll funnel money to protesters. They’ll… fly people in to infiltrate protesters. They’ll create fake newspapers and so on. So we know that this happens in countries around the world.
I believe that a law has been passed in the United States that… makes it legal to propagandize American citizens [brief discussion and confirmation from someone in the audience]. So what this means is — and… as a journalist… to say these words… I can’t tell you with what a heavy heart I say them — we’ve entered an era in which it is not crazy to assess news events to see if they’re real or not real… in the United States as well as overseas. And in fact it’s kind of crazy not to. [Applause]
There’s so much hype about what I just said, and so I want to be very clear about it so it can’t be taken out of context. There’s this kind of reflexive vilification of anyone speculating about that, because they become a “conspiracy theorist” right?
Well, just bear with me… I’ve often thought about this because… I respect spies… before it got out of control… I believe we need intelligence. I believe we need intelligence agencies. I don’t think there’s anything dishonorable about being in the intelligence services if you obey the constitution and the law. But all over the world our intelligence services are engaged in conspiring to create outcomes. That’s their job. That’s how they’re successful.
So now that it’s legal to propagandize in the United States it doesn’t surprise me that there’s more and more… products coming up in popular culture… more and more events in the news stream that seem to be — to my eye — to be subsidized.
Let me give you some examples of that. I’m not talking about Boston right now. I’ll get to that. We also talked earlier about infiltrators… and how they provoke violence. This is well-established. So we know that infiltrators — by the police, the NYPD… they’ve been documented… or other police forces — dress up like people they’re not and provoke violence. Why is it unthinkable that there might be spectacles that might drive an outcome in the news stream?
Let me give you a couple of quick examples. And all I’m saying is we unfortunately — and I have to say this to my fellow journalists as well — we’ve entered a time in which we need to be very skeptical about the news stream and look at it critically and ask for more verification and more inquiry. And that’s just being good reporters. There’s spectacle fed into the news media in China. There’s spectacle fed into… Chile. How did Pinochet engage in his coup? He created photographs of a cache of weapons that the terrorists had… hidden. Was it real or was it not? Most historians think it wasn’t. This is not unusual… in the process of creating a closed society. So if laws have made it legal to assassinate American citizens and legal to propagandize them, why should it be crazy or weird to think that that might be for a reason?
I saw the movie Zero Dark Thirty…5 and I have worked on two presidential campaigns so I recognize political talking points. And I wrote a piece saying this [presumably Zero Dark Thirty] reads like the Pentagon signed off on the script, because there were chunks of political talking points identifiable to anyone who’s worked in Washington. And you don’t come up with those if you’re a writer writing a screenplay. Everyone was very upset. It was very controversial and scandalous. But in fact, belatedly, a news story came out saying that in fact the Pentagon had I think subsidized some of it. But it had certainly consulted directly on the script.
And I see more and more TV shows about the CIA, and more and more TV shows about spies, and gigantic blockbusters in which surveillance is normalized. And gigantic blockbusters in which people are tortured to get them to talk in a way that might exonerate people who actually tortured people to get them to talk in Guantanamo. And there’s all this money being pumped into these unaccountable terrorism-fighting things. And now there’s no law preventing that money from going through front organizations right into popular culture. So that’s of interest to me.
Another thing I want to say is… I’m skeptical of certain news events that seem more theatrical than the norm — or I want to ask questions about them. I was in CNN once recently, and they were reporting a story about a waterskier who had been decapitated on a lake between Mexico and the United States, and it had something to do with a terrorism threat. And I was like… decapitated waterskier?! Sometimes you hear these things [audience laughter] and it’s so novelistic… you’re like… real life doesn’t work that way. These are so novelistic… someone’s coming up with it to make it stick in the popular imagination.
Or it just makes you think, “Well I’d like to document that… I’m a reporter… What’s the source?” And it kept being just this one guy — judge Arpaio in Texas… he was the source. And I have this wonderful Facebook community all over the world, and I went on Facebook and [I asked]: “Mexican Facebook community, is there any reporting about a beheaded waterskier in this lake… in this place in Mexico?” And they’re like, “No, what are you talking about? There’s nothing like that… doesn’t exist”
So I turned to the CNN producer and said, “Do you have a second source for this story?” And it was all over the news… And they checked, and it’s like, “Nope, just this… judge… whatever”. And I’m like, “Well, can you find a second source?” And they were blushing and embarrassed, and they looked, and they confessed that they didn’t have a second source, which — if you know what journalism is — you’re supposed to… confirm it with two sources.
So ever since that experience… CNN is running with this… no one’s verifying it… journalists aren’t in a position to follow up on anything anymore because budgets are slashed and there’s no investigative reporting… All this nonsense can enter the media stream for purposes that have to do with advancing agendas because no one’s checking. That’s all I want to say about that…
So, Boston… my feeling about any of these things is: Let’s investigate. We need to investigate. We need to ask better questions. We need to interview the doctors at the hospital. We need to interview the victims. We need to get all the footage ourselves. We need to train citizens to be journalists, and to have websites. And I’m busy building one as a startup where citizen journalists can document events so that we’re not leaving it to the gatekeepers.
We’ve entered an era in which it is not crazy to assess news events to see if they’re real or not real… in the United States as well as overseas. And in fact it’s kind of crazy not to.
I guess that to many people in 2014 — perhaps including me — Naomi Wolf would have sounded somewhat crazy.
Ten years on, maybe not so much?
Related:
Dear Church Leaders most-read articles
Some posts, including a version of this one, can also be found on Unexpected Turns
The Big Reveal: Christianity carefully considered as the solution to a problem
Not least in the context of discussion about the historicity of events in the Bible
NB her doctorate is in English Literature
At the time of writing, the audiobook version of The Pfizer Papers has been published, and the hardcover version is due in the UK in late January 2025; The Moderna Papers is due to be published in the UK in May 2025
With US spellings