Glimpses from a Season in my Life, for Real
Some Scenes Backstage; and: Why I Ask You to Be a Paying Subscriber, if You Can, in 2024
Dear friends,
I want to share some scenes from the last few months of my life, as my last letter to you of 2023. I will end this letter with a request for you to please, for the New Year, upgrade your subscription to “paying,” if you possibly can.
I don’t like to whine. I try never to show weakness, fatigue or fear in public. That is a point of pride. But it is also strategic, as the bad guys want to see us weak and fearful.
That said, I need to be honest with you about what my daily life can be like. This disclosure matters in our relationship as writer and readers in an intimate community, and I want you to know some of these truths, as we head into 2024.
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Two months ago, I emerged from my hotel room in a Southeastern town, where I had flown to deliver a lecture. I was dressed, and ready to present, and mulling over my lecture notes. I was delivering a new speech, and that act in itself is demanding; it requires a high level of focus.
I was met at the end of the hallway, to my surprise, by two strange men. They introduced themselves as retired NYPD detectives, showed me their IDs, and said that they had been sent by the lecture venue to escort me to the location, as the venue had received a credible threat against the evening’s event.
I called Brian; he spoke to the men, and he let me know that it was OK for me to get into their car. In the back seat of the car, I checked that they were armed, and they confirmed that they were. They explained as calmly as possible that another speaker had received the threat, in response to his op ed about the Middle East in a national paper the day before. That speaker had subsequently called in sick to the event. I don’t blame the speaker; but at the same time, I realized with some dismay that therefore the person who had been targeted was not going to be at the venue — while instead I, alone, would be speaking, and that the threat was still active. This did not comfort me. I tried to stay calm as well though, at least outwardly.
We got to the hotel. The armed security agents escorted me, with my front and back protected, into the rear of the building. As in several famous stories that ended violently, we wove our way past the kitchen areas, past the behind-the-scenes staffers, past the workers leaning against the walls on break. We entered the lecture hall from the rear. The security agents showed me the podium; they showed me the exit door hidden by the curtain at the rear of the stage. They instructed me to get down behind the podium if there was a disturbance in the audience, and to try to reach the exit door if I could. Then they took their places at the back of the hall, to observe the crowd that filed in.
Usually Brian escorts me for my security. This time he couldn’t. As a result, in these circumstances, I was quite frightened.
Nonetheless I got up, gave my speech, and answered questions. I managed to deliver my message, which was about the annihilation of humanity as recorded in the Pfizer documents, which our WarRoom/DailyClout team of researchers has documented. My speech was also a message about fighting for liberty. I got through it all, and the crowd was supportive.
I was escorted at the end of the evening by the security agents, and once again taken into the hotel by the rear entrance. The agents walked me right to the door of my room. I was then alone and unguarded. Brian had taught me how to secure a hotel room door from within, and I did so. But I was not comfortable.
When it was all over, I was glad that I had remained a professional, and I felt proud that I delivered our message to that audience under those conditions. But I cannot say this was an easy night for me.
It took a toll.
But I kept telling the truth for you.
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In Rochester, NY, later that Fall, I was on the podium with a range of distinguished speakers, including my extraordinary COO Amy Kelly, and a moderator, at Shannon Joy’s wonderful freedom event.
I was escorted that time by an active duty local detective, a highly competent woman. She showed me her firearm and assured me that she would be watching over me at all times. She did so.
Nonetheless, while we were onstage, a woman in the audience suddenly stood up. She started shouting at us, and made a fast beeline toward the stage. The excellent security team moved quickly to head her away from us. But the woman approached us faster than they could intercept her, til she was not five feet away from us, and she kept screaming obscenities and insults.
I did not know if she was armed — she was certainly unstable. I looked toward the podium to see if I could get behind it in time if needed.
She was ultimately escorted out by the security team.
I carried on, and we carried on, and it was a highly successful day.
And we kept on telling the truth to you.
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Weekly, I will get threats. Brian has a second full-time job checking them out, evaluating their severity, and engaging in “counter-stalking”, his specialty, to keep me safe. Each time, though, if the threats are serious, I have to hear the threat and process the violence of someone’s bizarre imagination. I am already a survivor of violence; and this process, which is part of normal security best practices for a public figure, is very difficult and traumatic for me — each and every time.
And yet I press on and I keep writing for you.
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I learned this year that the White House had targeted me personally with a “Be On the Lookout” alert to CDC, Twitter, Facebook, DHS and the Department of the Census. The latter, of course, has all of my personal information. I was vertiginous with shock — and fear — when I found this out, but I did not back down.
I escalated my efforts to tell you the truth.
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Two weeks ago I was on a train. A creepy-looking woman, a national of a country that is at war with us, sat down across the aisle from me. I had that intuitive sense in relation to her that raised the hair on the back of my neck.
She asked if I had a phone charger. I lent her my charger, not thinking quickly enough or with enough caution. She tried to chat with me; I responded in monosyllables til she subsided.
After far too long, she returned my charger.
At the weekly security meeting with our high-level cybersecurity team, I confessed that this had happened, thinking that I was being ridiculously paranoid in even mentioning it. Our cybersecurity consultant asked at once, “Was it a standard white charger?” I said yes. He explained that now chargers can be produced — that looklike standard white ones — but that suck all of the data out of your phone; and he told me to get the charger to him to examine.
This really happened.
I was startled and horrified, and felt personally invaded, but I did not back down.
I kept telling you the truth.
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We got bombarded with a hacking attempt. Our superb cybersecurity team caught it and ultimately protected us, but it took us all eight hours of work, on a day when we all had many other commitments, to address this effort to upend our digital structures. Among the alarming aspects of the attack was that someone had physically telephoned a vendor central to our digital life, and pretended to be me. Again, I was startled and appalled, especially when we learned that the attack had originated in St Petersburg, Russia.
But I pressed on in telling you the truth, and so did my heroic team.
####
Weekly, if not daily, I have to deal with incoming emails trying to trick or compromise me, in an effort to secure a public embarrassment for us, or legal trouble. The emails may purport to be from someone suffering from a vaccine-induced illness, asking for my medical advice. Of course each time I have to put in writing that I am not a medical doctor so cannot advise, because if I do not create that paper trail, I could get charged with practicing medicine without a license. Others who contact me try to trick us into running something of theirs with an error included it, so that, as once happened, Reuters and AP can immediately jump on the error, and try to create a global scandal. Some who contact me will try to trick me by substituting a real bio with a prank bio at the last minute, as Ken Klippenstein, a young investigative reporter whose work I had, at his boss’ request, consistently championed in the past, did to me during “lockdowns.”
We are now in a world that I do not recognize professionally, in which even reporters such as this one, with jobs at The Nation and The Intercept, lie to their colleagues — colleagues from whom they have sought and accepted professional support - when they are driven by corrupt allegiances. As a result of this kind of infantile harassment, we spend hours every day checking people’s bios.
We receive fake offers to advertise questionable or legally regulated products — offers designed to compromise us if we were to accept them. We spend hours researching the laws regarding various products.
People offer to send us tissue samples to which they do not have legal rights, from what they say are their dead children; we need to word our answers carefully and consult attorneys for the most minute exchange of this kind, so that we cannot be entangled in “lawfare.” This defensive communication with the outside world is literally constant, and is incredibly costly.
At the same time, at the same time, I try to write these essays for you — from the purest, most open place in my heart, and stay not-guarded and not-embittered.
It is very difficult to do both.
As a result of this constant, tiresome, treacherous and childish targeting, we (and I especially) have a full-time second job evading these cynical snares, even while trying to research, write and polish my own essays and reportage here for you; even while facing the rigors of writing and covering breaking news stories that legacy news and opinion sites no longer cover.
It is very hard for a writer to plumb the depth of her own soul, as good writing requires, let alone do the excellent reporting we do, under these conditions of continual harassment.
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A woman who appears to be suffering from a detachment from reality, who used to be a distinguished intellectual, and whose extended family is funded by the vaccine industry, wrote a whole book attacking me. This book confronts me, with its perverse manipulation of an image of my own face on the cover, in every bookstore into which I walk. It contains passages that claim I said things — disturbing things - that I did not say. To my knowledge, I have never met or spoken to this woman. Her book has sections that meditate on the murder of “the doppelganger” — and it is I who am designated as her “doppelganger.” The New York Times ran an op ed including those passages. The Paper of Record also illustrated the piece with an image of an animal that appears to be a wolf, being strangled, and bleeding at the mouth.
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It is one thing to fight the opposition. We know who the Forces of Darkness are now, and while it is difficult to carry on my creative work for you here under their constant harassment and efforts at intimidation, I can do that. I am a patriot, and I am now, willingly or not, a pretty seasoned warrior. I can fight the opposition til the end of my life.
But it is demoralizing to be targeted from within, and the freedom movement itself is going through a time now of fracturing, with bad behavior escalating in a few quarters; and with false suggestions hurled about by a few irresponsible people, including against me, and with random insults leveled; and with nasty, pointless sniping from some quarters at our tireless and often selfless efforts. If I were a member of the “deep state”, one recent baseless epithet, for example, I would not face threats every single week, I must assume.
It is hard to wake up to work long hours every day motivated by love and care not only for you and your families but also for those who are supposed to be on the right side of history with us, at a time when a few of our own compatriots are now behaving in ways so far below the high calling of our cause.
It is hard to face fire from two directions at once.
#####
The targeting is only going to get more serious — as we continue to help to reveal and topple the evildoers — and sometimes I wonder if I should or can even continue. I was not trained to do this.
I am not a soldier. I wanted to be a professor. I trained for eight years to teach Victorian poetry.
I wanted to be a purely a writer and an academic.
It is tempting to retreat from the fray, to step back from the risk and madness, and to go back forever to the luxury of what I always wanted most; a contemplative, inward-looking intellectual life.
But that means abandoning you, and our kids’ generation, and this collective fight.
I won’t do it.
But I do need your help.
One added stressor to all of the stressors above, is money. As I have written before, being a national if not global target is expensive, in terms of resources and labor. Every threat requires the hours of attention from my in-house security consultant. Every cyberthreat requires a cybersecurity team’s advice. We received lawyers’ bills for $80,000 for the LA-based legal action against Pfizer, and a lawyer’s bill for $25,000 accompanied the drafting of the Election Integrity bill that we will soon bring to statehouses to keep elections clean in 2024. A lawyer’s bill for $10,000 was the price of our Ohio-based lawsuit against Pfizer and the Biden administration. We have a six- figure lawyers’ bill for all the due diligence we do to make sure we are always impeccable - because we have integrity, and also because “lawfare” is one primary way members of the freedom movement get toppled or dragged off course.
Though DailyClout is doing well, thanks to many of you, these are huge burdens, for which it is difficult to plan. When we have to pay our lawyers unexpectedly, or have other immense financial burdens, your financial help by subscribing for money to this Substack makes my work elsewhere, often without pay, possible.
I now have 81,078 subscribers altogether, for which I am very grateful; however, only 3,577 of these are paying subscribers.
As I have said before, I am trying hard not to put up a paywall, because so many of you tell me how meaningful Outspoken is to you, and because I know what it is to be so broke that $70 a year extra, requires a second thought.
But for those of the 77,000-plus free subscribers who can afford to upgrade to becoming my
paying subscribers, please, please do.
You will be taking a huge burden of stress off of my already stressed daily life, in this fight for our children’s future in a free world; and you will allow me to serve my team without facing undue financial conflicts and anxiety.
I also feel that we are a community, and when those of you who can support me, do, it heartens me materially in the struggles ahead.
Forgive me for letting you know what some days are really like.
I will go back to showing no weakness or fear, and at the same time crafting essays for you as beautifully and truly as I can, in 2024.
Back to combat in 2024, I hope with your help. And back to beauty, and love, and joy, and protecting all the things that make up civilization — all the things that demons in human guise are trying to extinguish.
But I do feel that we are friends, and fellow soldiers, so I wanted to be brutally frank with you just this one time, about the real state of the battlefield.
Thank you truly for coming on this journey with me, my beloved brothers and sisters.
Health, happiness, peace and freedom to you, in 2024. And thank you for helping me, if you can, to sail this fragile ship together into the dawn.
Warmly,
Naomi Wolf
Readers have also asked me to create a one-time donation link. Thank you so much, and here you are: https://www.paypal.com/donate/?business=LC2225WAV98CN&no_recurring=0¤cy_code=USD
Others have asked if they can mail a check. Yes, please do: make sure it is addressed to “Naomi Wolf/Outspoken” and send it to PO Box 24, Millerton NY 12546.
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