Naomi Wolf is a truly heroic figure, and the publication of her great book The Pfizer Papers: Pfizer’s Crimes Against Humanity makes her heroic stature even more evident than it was before. I’m not going to write a detailed review of the book, because it consists of thousands of documents that a lawsuit she initiated compelled Pfizer to release. I’ll just mention a few of the highlights. Pfizer knew a couple of months after its vaccine was ruled “safe and effective” by the FDA that the vaccine “risked heart damage in young men.” By the way, the FDA’s Emergency Use Authorization ruling bypassed the usual FDA procedures, which require ten to twelve years of testing until a new vaccine is approved. Pfizer and other companies in Big Pharma had their bases covered, in case of lawsuits for damages. The PREP Act, passed in 2005, protects pharmaceuticals from liability for the use of so-called “medical counter-measures” in fighting a number of events, including pandemics. In other words, Big Pharma knew in 2005 that a pandemic was coming. As the great Murray Rothbard would have said, “The fix was in.” And, of course, getting the “vaccine” doesn’t protect people against Covid.
In June 2021, she reported evidence that that the “vaccine” interfered with women’s reproductive cycle by causing “menstrual deregulation.”. As a result, “I was banned from Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and other platforms.” The effect of the “vaccine” in inducing stillbirths and causing genetic defects in babies continues to interest her. She believes that demonic forces are behind the “vaccine.” She says: “I reluctantly concluded that human agency alone could not coordinate a highly complicated set of lies about a virus and propagate the lies in perfect uniformity around an entire globe, in hundreds of languages and dialects. Human beings, using their own resources alone, could not have turned hospitals overnight from having been places in which hundreds of staff members were collectively devoted to the care of the infirm, the prolongation of human life, the cherishing of newborns, the helping of mothers to care for little ones, the support of the disabled—into killing factories to which the elderly were prescribed “run-death-is-near” (remdesivir) at scale.”
Her story is truly remarkable. A graduate of Oxford and Cambridge, she was all set for a brilliant academic career. In fact, he was her work studying English literature that made her doubt the official propaganda machine that forced people to isolate in response to Covid. She remarks: “I knew from having read my way, as a former graduate student, through many of the last 400 years’ words of English memoirs and novels, that waves of infectious diseases, ranging from yellow fever to typhus to cholera, had passed over both Britain and America, but that these diseases had never been treated as we were treating this purportedly serious infectious disease, COVID-19. Never had multiple generations been advised to crowd together into closed indoor spaces, only to be denied light, air, and exercise, during an epidemic. Indeed, from Florence Nightingale in the Crimean War to the reformers of the Progressive Era, health pioneers knew well that doing this was, in fact, deadly.”
She has also been heroic in defense of our right to keep and bear arms, and here once more her training in English literature came to her aid. Because she was thoroughly familiar with 18th century literary conventions, she was able to clarify the meaning of the Second Amendment. She says: “We [liberals] assumed all gun owners were driven by fear or by rage.
It certainly did not occur to us that anyone might enjoy marksmanship, or like being a collector, and that thus there might be good reasons to own more than one firearm.
We always interpreted the ownership of multiple weapons as a sign of mental instability. Obviously! Who would need more than one gun, we asked one another, even if one conceded that anyone needed a gun at all?
Living in safe (wealthy) neighborhoods, assuming that a stable democracy would last forever, and relying with our costly educations on talking above all, we could not fathom the ‘need’ for guns or for gun rights.”
For this reason, we were inclined to dismiss those who claimed a need for guns.
“We used to roll our eyes at the claims made by supporters of the Second Amendment. In my former circles, ‘2A’ was often interpreted, even by Constitutional scholars, and certainly by the news outlets which we read, as applying only to government-run militias such as the US Army or the National Guard. I was told more times than I could count that the Second Amendment was never meant to apply to individuals’ ownership of guns; and I believed that.”
Why did the Left interpret the Second Amendment in this way?
“Grammar was used to make the case against individual gun ownership. Often, commentators in our circles described the phrasing of the Second Amendment as being so twisted and archaic that no one today could ever truly confirm the Founders’ intentions regarding gun ownership by individuals.”
But when Naomi Wolf read the text of the Second Amendment, she saw that her former view of it was wrong:
“Indeed, I heard these truisms so often, that when I actually sat down and read the Second Amendment carefully — as I was writing my 2008 book about the decline of democracies, The End of America — I was startled: because the Second Amendment wasn’t unclear at all.
‘A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.’
Critics on the Left of individual gun rights often described this sentence as being opaque because it has two clauses, and two commas prior to the final clause; so they read the first two sections as relating unclearly to the last assertion.
But if you are familiar with late 18th century rhetoric and sentence construction, the meaning of this sentence is transparent.
The construction of this sentence is typical of late 18th into early 19th century English grammar, in which there can be quite a few dependent clauses, gerunds and commas that come before the verb, and the object of, the sentence.
Thus, the correct way to read the Second Amendment, if you understand 18th century English grammar, is:
‘A well-regulated Militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.’
Or, translated into modern English construction: “Because a well-regulated militia is necessary to the security of a free State, therefore the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.”
Here is another example of many dependent clauses, commas and gerunds prior to the verb and object of the sentence: from the second paragraph of Thomas Paine’s pamphlet Common Sense (1776):
“As a long and violent abuse of power is generally the means of calling the right of it in question, (and in matters too which might never have been thought of, had not the sufferers been aggravated into the inquiry,) and as the King of England hath undertaken in his own right, to support the Parliament in what he calls Theirs, and as the good People of this Country are grievously oppressed by the Combination, they have an undoubted privilege to enquire into the Pretensions of both, and equally to reject the Usurpation of either.”
This would translate into modern English: ‘The good people of this Country are grievously oppressed by the combination of a long and violent abuse of power and of the King of England’s support of Parliament in what he calls his rights and theirs. Thus, the [good people of this country] have an undoubted privilege to enquire into [ask about] the Pretension [claims] of both [King and Parliament], and by the same token to reject the Usurpation [of rights] of either.’ The logic of the sentence, with its multiple clauses, gerunds and commas before the final verb and object of the sentence, is perfectly clear to anyone who is familiar with 18th century rhetoric.
Dr. Wolf concludes her analysis:
“So: there is no ambiguity whatsoever about the Second Amendment to readers of Paine. The Second Amendment says with zero ambiguity, in the English grammar of 1787, that Americans have an absolute right (‘shall not be infringed’) to keep (own) and bear (carry) arms because they as individuals may be summoned to become a ‘well-regulated militia’. In the grammar of the 18th century, it’s the militia that is ‘well-regulated’ – orderly, in a clear chain of command, not a chaotic mob — and not the guns.”
“Why do I raise all of this?” she goes on to ask.
“In part because — I have evolved my view about firearms, and I understand that doing so is in fact in alignment with the Constitution. And the thing about really supporting the Constitution is that you do not get to pick and choose. I can’t choose my favorite Amendment, the easy one, the First Amendment, and then shy away from the glass-clear directive of the Second Amendment, simply as a result of my own cultural discomfort. You have to stand up for it all, if you are to call yourself a supporter of the Constitution.”
Her work on feminism made her a leading public intellectual, well regarded by nearly everyone. Her articles and reviews appeared frequently in the mainstream media, including The New York Times and The Washington Times. But as the result of her heroic campaign for truth she is now loathed by the Left. Let’s do everything we can to publicize the work of this heroic champion of liberty!
Image Credit: Oregon State Univ., Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0, via Wikimedia.
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