BUCK: Naomi Wolf joins now. She’s the best-selling author and columnist. Her book: “The Bodies of Others: The New Authoritarians, Covid-19 and the War Against the Human” is out. I want to talk to her about that and some other things. Naomi, thanks for being with us.

WOLF: Thanks so much for having me.

BUCK: I’ve said some pretty harsh things but I think true things about Dr. Anthony Fauci, Rochelle Walensky and so much of the public health apparatus in this country that not only pushed lockdown and extended them and vaccine mandates and extended them, but to this day remains entirely unrepentant and even pretend to be at least to proud of it.

I assume in your book, because you called them authoritarians, you see at some level what Clay and I have seen all along here, which is this is a moment of actual tyranny in this country.

WOLF: Yeah, you’re going to love this book if you haven’t had a chance to read it yet because I’m completely aligned with what you just said and, in fact, I think I explain to readers why they did these things that were so damaging to our communities, to our children. And it turns out to have no medical value.

The data are in. Lockdowns didn’t do anything against covid-19. States and countries that stayed open did just the same as the states and countries that locked their citizens down and closed commerce. And by the same token, other interventions like masks, they barely make a difference. But what they do effectively is lower our children’s IQ points by 21 points, according to a Brown University study due to the residual social interaction.

The closing of businesses didn’t protect people from covid but it allowed a massive theft, a massive transfer of wealth from the working class and the middle class to these oligarchs and a handful of major industries.

So a thousand percent, it’s not just a moment of tyranny, I would go further. I think I made the case in “Bodies of Others” that this was a, that the pandemic, the last two years of the pandemic were an excuse for a handful of bad actors, notably the World Economic Forum, some bad nonprofits like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, big tech companies to really wage war against the West, against America in particular, and especially against our children, and to create a kind of, to architect a kind of post-humane world in which we are serfs and we basically need to ask their permission to engage in human activity like commerce and assembly.

CLAY: Naomi, Buck and I have been talking a lot about the consequences of these decisions that were made — the lockdown, forcing kids to wear masks, shutting down schools — and how catastrophically much of a failure they were.

A lot of them are at the feet of Dr. Anthony Fauci, who has so far, for the most part, appeared to escape almost all blame for any of this, at least in the mainstream media.

Do you think that will change if Republicans start to hold him accountable in front of the House and the Senate if they take back the House and the Senate? And what sort of consequential actions should exist when our unelected bureaucracy and our elected leaders get public policy decisions this wrong in your mind?

WOLF: I mean, I guess two things. One is that it’s tempting to think all we have to do is elect another party and un-elect these people and that will take care of that. But I’m sorry to tell you this is a bigger fight. And it’s bigger than partisanship.

What I mean is absolutely, I voted for the Biden Administration. I’m embarrassed. I had no idea that they would turn out to be hostage to China and to oligarchs, which they clearly are. The left is engaging in the bad behavior in our country. But if you take a bigger picture at what’s happening worldwide, it’s a script that’s meta national. It transcends nation states. It transcends political parties.

We got a Justin Trudeau, a liberal, shutting down democracy over the border in Canada. And using unidentifiable mercenaries to beat peacefully protesting truckers.

We have these same unidentifiable mercenaries — are they police? Are the military? Impossible to know. In France, under Macron, also a liberal. These people were also beating peaceful protestors. In Britain and Australia you’ve got conservatives, Boris Johnson and until recently Scott Morrison, leading the same script, engaging in the same lockdown, the same abusive policies and the same distancing, and war on middle class businesses and sole proprietorships and individual landlords and so on.

It’s a global coup. And my book makes the point that it’s an alignment against humanity itself. And you really have to understand this.

So, yes, by all means, investigate Dr. Fauci and Rochelle Walensky. Actually I’m satisfied to say that Rochelle Walensky was just served a subpoena for a grand jury investigations by colleagues of mine, including Dr. Henry Ealy, two state senators in Oregon, Senator Linthicum and Senator Kim Thatcher. You should definitely talk with them.

So they do need to face not only an investigation — they are criminals. The evidence is in.

But in addition to that, you have to look at the bigger picture, which is that this is an effort by big tech, by the World Economic Forum, by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and China to basically re-orient our entire world, so that we are trapped and surveilled all the time. So as Karl Marx promised, you’ll own nothing and you’ll be happy.

All these people, all these landlords, just one example, all these landlords, literal landlords, small owners of one property, like I was a single mom for 12 years and I scrimped and saved. And a lot of immigrants, a lot of working people save up and buy that one rental property.

Well, Rochelle Walensky said, with no authority, no previously held authority, that you couldn’t evict your tenants for six months due to, quote/unquote, covid, which was nonsense. Right?

And so who can afford to hold on with no income for six months? It’s not the little people. It’s not all those first-generation immigrants who worked so hard to buy that one little piece of property. It’s the institutional investors.

So there was one day in January when I saw all these landlords had to sell their properties at fire sale prices and they got scooped up by BlackRock. Now BlackRock owns 9 percent of the residential housing stock. And we’re going to tun into a nation of renters, as a result. That’s one example.

110,000 restaurants and bars were forced to close down due to the lockdown. No medical reason at all. But McDonald’s and Target were allowed to stay open. That drove that market share into the hands of the big guys. And if you read “The Bodies of Others,” you can see that tech company after tech company, if they don’t let your child go to an in-person school and your child is chained to a computer then edutech, distance learning, which was a loser industry, but suddenly edutechs those who invested in it, suddenly becomes a hundreds of million dollars plus up revenue.

Same thing with meal kits. Who wants a meal kit? Who wants your food delivered in a box on your doorstep? You can go to the supermarket, talk to your butcher, talk to your baker. Meet your friend for coffee. You’ll never want a meal kit. But tech investors invest in meal kits. But after lockdown they’re up by hundreds of millions of dollars.

Amazon, Google, Microsoft, by locking us into our home, forcing us for professional classes, have distance Zoom calls and Microsoft Teams calls and People Hangout calls, they’re up 20 to 30 percent. Nintendo is up 20 to 30 percent.

When you don’t let people gather in a church or a synagogue and worship, if you don’t let people gather in person in a town hall or go to a bar or go bowling with your friends, it drives everyone on to digital platforms where you can be, your data is harvested and you can be tracked and surveilled. And it’s a giant boon for tech companies. So why would they ever go back to a world in which we get to have human assembly? It’s bigger than just getting rid of the Democrats, I’m afraid to say.

BUCK: Naomi Wolf, the book, the “The Bodies of Others: The New Authoritarians, Covid-19 and the War Against the Human.” Naomi, thanks for being with us.