There were countless grotesque absurdities that emerged during the COVID panic, and the public health dictatorship that our elites imposed on us, using that bioengineered Chinese virus as a pretext. It would take not a column but a book to detail them all. Here are just a few:

• Blue state governors refusing to use hospital beds provided by Donald Trump or Franklin Graham, but claiming that the coming shortage of hospital beds was a critical emergency. So they emptied beds by dumping COVID patients in the one place where they were guaranteed to kill people: nursing homes, with the most vulnerable Americans.
• Meanwhile they shuttered schools, where the healthiest and most virus-resistant part of our population congregate, robbing millions of young people of two years’ education.
• Casinos, liquor stores, abortion clinics and BLM-led riots were deemed “essential” and permitted to operate.
• Churches, small businesses and Trump rallies were either forcibly closed or condemned as “superspreader events,” with the sponsors accused of negligent homicide in the press.
• Social media companies took their marching orders from the Chinese-dominated World Health Organization on what speech to censor, what prominent doctors to “cancel.”
• The same people who advocate legalizing “medical marijuana” sought to ban safe, proven medicines like Ivermectin from pharmacies, stripping Americans of the right to choose their own medical treatment.
• The U.S. Catholic bishops condemned vaccines dependent on cells stolen from aborted babies while Trump was in office. Once Biden was in office, the same bishops mandated them for priests and seminarians, and refused pro-life Catholics’ requests for letters supporting conscientious refusal of vaccination.
• Pope Francis issued a Vatican coin celebrating the Dead Baby Vaccine being given to children, who didn’t need it, and might in fact develop serious side effects from it.

Privacy Rights Protect Abortion, But Not Vaccine Decisions

I could really go on and on. You get the idea. But the most grotesque and obscene single aspect of COVID Fascism was this: The same people who fanatically supported Roe v. Wade, which de facto permitted third-trimester abortions in the name of constitutionally protected “privacy,” supported vaccine mandates for women and men alike. So the state couldn’t protect your eight-month fetus from an elective abortion, but the hostess at TGI Fridays could demand to see your vaccine card.

In the midst of this obscene intellectual and moral farce, a few people stood up and showed their genuine quality. They include researchers like Prof. Jay Bhattacharya (cancelled by Twitter), physicians like Dr. Peter McCullough (stripped of his board certifications), and activists like Naomi Wolf (denounced by her one-time allies and supporters).

A Woman of Principle

Wolf is a longtime, best-selling feminist author, whom I considered something of a nemesis when we were both at Yale. I won’t recount here our less than friendly interactions. I’ll just say that back then I wasn’t as gentle, reserved and tactful as readers now know me. And Wolf was a standard-issue pro-choice sexual revolution supporter, a loud backer of the pioneering, aggressive LGBT movement at Yale. The vast majority of vocal students backed her position, not mine. When she walked into the cavernous dining halls, tables didn’t fall silent as hostile eyes glared at her and irate onlookers whispered. I was the only person on campus who got that treatment.

But during the COVID panic, Wolf proved herself a woman of principle. She really believes in privacy and medical autonomy, which made her deeply suspicious of our elites’ power-grabs and unconstitutional mandates. She’s genuinely distrustful of billion-dollar Big Pharma companies that cozy up to the government, corrupting public research with their funding. She’s authentically attached, as too few Americans are, to our constitutional liberties. And so she came out loudly against Public Health Fascism. And she has paid the price.

Outlets that once touted her feminist scholarship and advocacy now wondered in headlines whether she had simply gone insane, or had always been a fraud (no third option was listed). Wolf got banned from social media platform after platform, and disinvited from every mainstream media outlet. You knew things had really gotten bad when most of her appearances were on shows like Steve Bannon’s War Room and the Eric Metaxas Show — where other guests include people like … me.

I’m sure that neither of us saw this coming.

An Outcast on Campus at Yale

I want to honor Wolf for her intellectual honesty, which included one of the few rational, nuanced responses by a feminist to Justice Alito’s opinion in Dobbs. Wolf was one of the few pro-choice Americans to actually judge the case on its constitutional merits, and take the arguments seriously. And I’d like to call your attention to a powerful recent column Wolf has published. In it, she recounts going back to visit Yale this year and experiencing the place … well, the way I experienced it from 1982 to 1986.

Here are just a few sample paragraphs, but go read it for yourself. Wolf writes:

I — we — were there to protest the “mandate” by the university of bivalent “boosters” into the bodies of the students; this was required of them before they could — and in order that they might—return to campus after Winter break.

Astonishingly, the faculty and staff — meaning, surely, the administrators too — were not thus “mandated.” (Harvard too has a similar “mandate” affecting students but not faculty).

We who were there to protest were outcasts, reprobates. Yet all we were doing there was pleading for the safety of the young men and women in the campus just beyond us.

There were about three dozen people at the rally and then at the march; a small, committed, straggling group. Parents of the university students were absent; students themselves were glaringly absent; administrators, faculty — appeared to be entirely absent. A few dedicated health freedom activists, organized by TeamRealityCT, and the speakers ourselves — stood vulnerably in a corner of the commons, shouting terrifying facts and urgent warnings into a crackly mic, into a heedless wind, expecting to be arrested.

Naomi Wolf Gives Well-deserved Tongue-lashing to Yale University for Forcing Poison on Children and Young Adults#Yalepic.twitter.com/1lZ4gwmYF8

— Longbow Foolride (@LFoolride) December 12, 2022

That was exactly what it felt like in the 1980s to be a pro-life student at Yale. I remember being first alone, then part of a tiny knot of students, picketing the Planned Parenthood right off campus on the Roe v. Wade anniversary. We looked to the blithely pro-choice, conformist students like mutants from outer space.

The only thing more repulsive on campus was the sight of a young woman pushing a baby carriage — as Yale grad Maggie Gallagher recalled in her first book Enemies of Eros. She got pregnant as an undergrad, gave birth after commencement, and visited campus with her baby a few months later. She too got the “Leper!” treatment, as sexually active Yale women stared at her adorable little son with undisguised horror.

Yale Gets More Cash from HHS Than from Tuition

In the rest of her column, Wolf documents how and why Yale is now betraying its students’ well-being to the interests of Big Pharma and the COVID cult. She points out:

Yale receive more from HHS than it does from tuition.

Yale has received $9 billion from HHS since 1998—$1.7 billion since COVID began in 2020. Yale received $607 million from HHS for this year alone—versus the $475 million that the university received from tuition.

In other words, Yale needs HHS more than it needs its own students.

So Yale is trafficking the bodies of its students, to please HHS and to keep that spigot open.

A breakdown of Brian O’Shea’s numbers are here, in Harvey Oxenhorn’s excellent essay about this protest.

Basically, Yale is a massive sponge for vaccine money. Department after department.

Yale didn’t become a hypocritical bastion of conformist coercion and intellectual dishonesty in 2019, as a result of the COVID panic. It has been such a place for a long, long time. Some of us just saw that fact earlier than others.

John Zmirak is a senior editor at The Stream and author or co-author of ten books, including The Politically Incorrect Guide to Immigration and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Catholicism. He is co-author with Jason Jones of “God, Guns, & the Government.”