I was wheeled with startling speed through the hallways, and into an elevator; and from the elevator, in the bowels of the building, through what seemed like back-of-the-house white-painted utilitarian hallways studded with rapidly swinging doors.

These hallways had mysterious dark rooms branching off of them, that seemed to me like the rear hallways and storage areas of hotels or restaurants, where the public does not go.

We turned abruptly into one small, dark room. A new set of people in scrubs asked me what day it was, what year, and where we were.

I felt like this: as if my soul and my consciousness — which I experienced as being the same thing; but separate from my physical brain at that moment — were lost in a thick, dense primeval swamp; and though I understood the questions posed to me by the new people in scrubs perfectly well, the answers were located somewhere I could not reach, though my spirit/consciousness, united with my will, slogged painfully slowly through what felt like waist-deep mud or silt, toward where I knew the answers might be.

“What year is it?” Their voices were urgent, firm, like air traffic controllers trying to avoid a midair collision.

“Two thousand….nineteen?” The new faces around me looked as startled and upset as the previous group of faces had done.

I saw this reaction; and I also heard myself. I bowed my head in shame, and shook my head.

I could not find the actual year. It was gone, or it was in another part of the swamp altogether that I could not reach, or even imagine.

I could not do it.

“We are giving you an MRI!” I believe they said.

Then I was wheeled, faster than I have ever been wheeled before in any hospital, into an MRI room, and rolled carefully onto the belt that drew me into the machine. I was there for what felt like 45 minutes, trying to remain still, as banging and buzzing took place around my helpless mind and body.

I tried to pray, but I did not have the words to pray. When I realized that I could not locate the name of God, or any of the verbs for what I wished to ask of Him, I guess that the closest description of what I did then, was to surrender.

Then — this is blurry — I was out of there, and Brian was next to me. (He told me much later that he had come into my room in the hospital after I had been wheeled off, to find my bed empty, and staff members cleaning the room. “Where is my wife?” he had asked. He said that when they had replied “Talk to the front desk”, none of the staffers had made eye contact. So he had prepared himself to hear that I had passed away).

The people in scrubs near the MRI unit kindly but quickly explained to us that they did not have the facilities for what I needed, and that they were taking me in an ambulance to the hospital next door, which had a neurological ICU.

Then two burly, capable men, with the affect of senior cops or firefighters, appeared; they took over the gurney on which I lay and sped me through the hospital again, in and out of elevators, with Brian racing alongside us. In the elevator, the men said to the passengers, “Sorry, this is an emergency.” They did something to override the elevator buttons that would have otherwise slowed us down.

I saw the people crowded around me — patients on crutches, or with walkers, older and surely sicker than I was — looking down at me kindly, as they assented to this intervention. “Why are these men saying it’s an emergency?” I wondered. “Surely they are not talking about me.”

But I was disabused when we exited the elevator; they drew my gurney out somehow onto an external bay, and rolled me up onto a ramp. I was then in an ambulance. Brian was not allowed in, and he said he would meet us.

The ambulance took me about 100 feet across an open passageway, to the next-door hospital. There I was rolled out, and sped through a building once more. This time it was into hallways that seemed completely different from those of the legendary orthopedic hospital.

Those spaces had been quiet, peaceful, well-lit, lofty, airy, orderly; these hallways were buzzing with relentless fluorescent lights; busy, almost chaotic, with acid-yellow paint on walls adorned with floral pictures from the early 1990s.

“Why acid yellow?” I randomly thought, as I winced.

We were met by a group of nurses and doctors in scrubs, who seemed confused about what was happening. “I called about this,” said one of the gurney handlers irritably. There had, it seemed, been a shift change, and the information had not transferred.

The group of doctors and nurses quickly resolved the issue, and received me from the two ambulance drivers. There was another MRI, which lasted again for many minutes. A perfectly nice MRI technician — perhaps two? — rolled me from the gurney onto the MRI; this rolling from one surface to another involved rolling me first onto my right side, then onto my left, and then onto my back. Unlike at the orthopedic hospital, these MRI staffers made no allowances for my recently constructed hip. So as I was rolled onto my new right hip, I sought to muffle what would have been cries from the pain.

At this point I had not had a painkiller since about 8 am — it must have been three or four in the afternoon by now — and my hip, from the very bone to the ten-inch surgical incision under two layers of bandages, was starting to throb painfully.

Then I was wheeled into — It is difficult for me even to describe this setting. It was a room in the neuro ICU.

I am sure there were good reasons for my being in that particular room. I don’t mean to criticize unjustly the obviously devoted staff of that hospital, or the arrangements there that may well have saved my brain and — or — kept me alive to tell this story.

All of these things can be true at once; something can be torturous and salutary at the same time.

Maybe this was the only room left. Maybe there were good medical reasons for all of the elements of this room, and my treatment there, that seemed mysterious or humiliating or reckless or dangerous to me. But what transpired in the next 48 hours was so traumatic and excruciating that it is painful for me to revisit the scene of these events, even in memory.

The room was an oppressively-lit yellow box, about twelve feet by fifteen feet. I recall it being illuminated by harsh overhead fluorescent lights. There was no window onto anything — so no air circulation to or from the outside that I could feel; and no view at all; no sunlight.

In the center of the room was a hospital bed; but it could not be raised or made to recline, by the patient. It was positioned with the upper half at a forty-five degree angle at all times, unless the patient called for help in raising or lowering it. There was no task lighting or reading lighting. The patient could not affect the light. So all of this gave the patient in the half-raised, immobilized bed, the helpless role of a scientific specimen pinned under glass.

By now Brian was present. My memory of how my medical situation was explained to us, is blurry; Brian reports that we were in the neuro ICU because the fear was that I had suffered a stroke.

(Everything that follows is to the best of my recollection.)

I was hooked up to an IV unit, with the explanation that my sodium levels were very low. Otherwise, I was under observation for further signs of stroke or of related brain issues; and I spent two and a half days in that room for that purpose.

I know that this was critically important. Again, my stay in this ICU may well have saved my life, and/or my reason. I just don’t understand why some aspects of this care were so degrading, so difficult, so inhumane. Is it ungrateful to ask these questions?

One issue was that I had no privacy. One whole wall, the wall that separated the room from the busy hallways of the neuro ICU, was made entirely of clear glass panels, and the only privacy possible was from a floor-length curtain that could only be drawn by someone not impaired, across the glass. This was a curtain that a bedbound patient could not in any way reach or control.

On the other side of the glass, no more three feet away from it, the patient could see at all times, the backs of the nurses at the 24 hour nurses’ station.

The patient could hear at all times, shift after shift, 24 hours a day, everything that transpired at the nurses’ station, including incessant monologues in loud voices that carried.

The noise levels just outside soon became an obsession for me. There was no way to sleep through them. Again and again I would ask the very nice nurses looking after me, if we could do anything about the steady stream of very loud discussions of head-bangingly banal subjects, feet from the thin glass partition, that I could no nothing to escape. My primary nurse, an extremely kind and attentive young woman, looked doubtful, and seemed to imply that because these were nurses having these discussions, nothing could be done.

It also meant that though the nurses could eventually go home and sleep, a new shift of loudly talking nurses would arrive, and the bedbound patient could never be free of the noise, in order to get some sleep.

That positioning, and the useless curtain, also meant that anyone approaching the nurses’ station could see into the room — could see the helpless, bed-bound patient — if the curtain was not entirely closed.

Within hours, this curtain and its shortcomings also became an obsession. Staffers entered and left my room dozens of times a day. Though each time I would ask nicely for them to close the curtain all the way on their way out, nine times out of ten they would understandably simply yank at it behind them, but without looking back. They were busy.

Unfortunately, this curtain was configured on its track in such a way that their doing so inevitably left about ten inches by about seven full feet of clear glass, exposing my room from floor to ceiling.

This gap revealed to anyone who passed, or who might wish to peer into the brilliantly lit room, my suffering face; my helpless body now hooked up to an IV unit; and my often half-naked body, revealed in the backless hospital gown that always fell open, as I tried to get off of, or to regain, the steeply pitched hospital bed, in a tornado of agonies as I sought to use the severed muscles and nerves of my newly constructed hip.

The glass wall gap also meant that when I needed to use the toilet, if the curtain was not fully closed, I would be exposed to anyone passing by.

Now comes an issue that to this day I do not understand. I knew from the orthopedic hospital’s thorough preparation of me and Brian for my recovery from that surgery, that I would need (yes, I must discuss very unsexy things now) a raised toilet seat, at first, at home; a plastic shower seat, for safety; a walker, at first, to support me on my new hip; and then eventually, a cane. I knew that I mustn’t squat, at first, ever, more than 45 degrees, let alone to ninety degrees. That would be very dangerous.

If I had those items, I would be safe, at least in terms of my recent orthopedic surgery, and I would be self-sufficient, in the neuro ER. I would be able to use the toilet safely and hygienically by myself, and move safely from the bed to the toilet and back.

But in the neuro ER, all of these items were prohibited to me. It was as if the hospital system in that institution was so compartmentalized, it could deal with my brain very well, but make no provisions at all for the fact that I had had major orthopedic surgery a day and then two days prior.

The toilet, and overall hygiene, situation in my ICU room was very odd. There was no separate bathroom in the room, with an actual door that closed. In that way, this room was unlike any hospital room I have ever experienced.

Rather, in one corner of the room, there was a metal unit with a hand sanitizer dispenser. There was no actual faucet. In place of running water, all you got was hand sanitizer. There was also a very low metal toilet. I am not sure that that toilet, either, was hooked up to running water. (I learned later that such units are manufactured for ICUs that have no dedicated washroom plumbing).

When I first saw the ICU room toilet, I was worried. The seat was so low that it would mean bending my hips at 90 degrees, categorically forbidden by my orthopedic surgeon.

I asked my nurses in the neuro ICU for a raised toilet seat, and for a walker or a cane. But I was forbidden to have these items.

“We don’t have them.”

“Don’t you have other units of this hospital that have this equipment?”

“We can’t take them from other units.”

“Can Brian just run out to CVS and get me these items?”

“No.”

I shared with my nurse that I was worried about how low the toilet unit was. To my astonishment, she pulled the whole unit right out of the wall — it turned out to be on wheels — and dragged it out of the room. In its place, she wheeled a higher-seated toilet apparatus, but one that I was horrified to have to use. It had handles on either side; it was unstable due to the fact that it was on wheels; and it did not flush with water. It was essentially a chamber pot, that simply caught and collected human waste.

This pre-Victorian object would for days be my only toilet, to which I would have to drag myself, if I did not wish to, or did not have time to, call for a nurse. I would have to manage this with no cane or walker, and on this unstable object I would have somehow to maintain strict hygiene, though with access to no soap and no running water.

[I am sorry to be so graphic here. But I did promise you, my readers, as I promised my Maker, the last time I almost died in a hospital, in 2023, that I would write everything honestly that I felt needed to be written, with no regard to my personal ego. So this next section is embarrassing and disgusting, but here goes.]

The metal wall unit had a curved curtain rod around it, which extended just about four inches from the edge of the former, and now the wheeled-in, toilet. Only a curtain hanging from this rod, pulled by the patient around the toilet area, provided any privacy at all. So when the miserable patient used the toilet, the curtain sat across his or her thighs; but his or her legs and feet were exposed to the rest of the room. When the wall curtain was not fully closed, as was the case several times when I was not able to wait for a nurse, I had to use the toilet while humiliatingly exposed in this way, and also while in great pain.

I was absolutely appalled by the entire situation.

For two days, staffers came into my room wearing blue surgical gloves; they would handle the pre-Victorian chamber pot object; the food trays; and the opening of the IV tube into my vein. They would, to be fair, peel off and discard the surgical gloves after handling dirty objects. But this all still repulsed me and worried me.

Maybe they washed their hands with soap and water outside. I certainly hope so. But I never, ever saw them wash their hands in the room.

They couldn’t.

For two days, I felt the surfaces around me — including those of my own body — become less and less hygienic. I don’t mean to gross you out, but this issue is important. I saw that a cleaner came in to mop the floors. But I never saw a cleaner wipe down the other surfaces.

Certainly I was not given a bath of any kind, or the means to wash myself in any way with soap and water. I could not even wash my hands with soap and water after using the toilet.

This situation, as noted, filled me with horror. But also it led to my losing faith in the “science-iness” of the hospital’s policies. Did they not know about kindergarten-level hygiene? Haven’t we lived though years in which everyone understood the importance of regular handwashing with soap and water?

Soon enough I felt a near-desperation to wash my hands, and my entire body, with actual soap and water. But this was forbidden to me. Each time I asked please if I could wash my hands, indeed begged for soap and water, I was pointed to the hand sanitizer. Every time I pleaded to wash myself with soap and water, my nice nurse would tear open a plastic package of some kind and hold out to me a chemical-saturated microfibre fabric. The idea of cleaning myself with such an unhygienic object filled me with primeval disgust.

After one such exchange, while I was again miserably on the toilet, where I each time had to ask for privacy, the nice nurse offered literally to wipe me. “I really don’t want that,” I protested. “I am perfectly able to take care of myself. I just want soap and water.”

“We’re nurses, we are used to it,” she said.

This led to a bizarre moment in which I tried to escape her, moving painfully slowly on my newly-constructed hip, with my hospital gown flapping open as usual behind me, while she pursued me, holding out a warm microfiber chemical “cleaning product.”

She had the best of intentions, but the whole thing was appalling to me, as well as feeling degrading. And the levels of bacteria that I imagined proliferating around me, led me to a state of near-phobia.

I don’t think I was overreacting to the absence of basic hygiene facilities in this room. Sepsis is dramatically on the rise in hospitals; astonishingly, sepsis-related hospital stays have risen by 40 per cent and sepsis cases themselves are up 72%.

As you recall, I nearly died of sepsis from a hospital stay related to appendicitis, in 2023.

And this time around, just three years later almost to the day, I had a ten-inch, recently open surgical wound — a cut that extended from skin to bone, protected just by two thin layers of bandages, along my thigh.

In what felt to me like increasingly filthy conditions, I was terrified of getting sepsis yet again.

So I had this weird conversation more than once with my smart and capable nurse:

“Soap and water are really better, you know?” said I.

She nodded and looked away.

It was disorienting. Was it the 1840s? Had Hungarian obstetrician Ignaz Semmelweiss never lived, to show the importance of handwashing in saving lives? Was it 1853? Were we in Crimea? Had Florence Nightingale, the “mother of nursing”, never done her work, revealing the medical value of cleanliness and hygiene?

Did these people in 2026 in Manhattan really not know about handwashing?

I did not understand why this was happening. During other hospital stays, even if I was bed-bound, I could use a bedpan, which would have been more hygienic than the weird medieval chamber pot; and I had at other times received sponge-baths with actual soap and water.

But none of that was available to me.

Then there was the masking. In the orthopedic hospital, none of the staff had worn face masks. Of course, where it made sense to do so, in the surgical theatre, the staff was masked.

But here at a hospital just adjacent, everyone — from nurses to doctors to orderlies — was always, always masked.

Was it because of me? Did they think that because I was unvaccinated, I was especially dangerous? Or was it hospital policy? Probably the latter, as everyone had been masked when we arrived.

I did not mention this issue to them, of course. They were trying to keep me alive and sane, and I was grateful. I certainly did not want to be identified unnecessarily as a medical troublemaker; that had put me in what turned out to be some danger, via my roommate, at the former hospital, just a day or two prior.

But it was extremely upsetting to me, and much more disorienting than I would have expected, to be surrounded by masked medical staffers for almost three days.

First of all, this policy, like the absence of soap and running water in my room, made me doubt the institution’s grasp of basic science. Did they not know that masks don’t “work”, except to keep droplets from falling into open surgical wounds? Did they not know that they are a health hazard themselves, if worn all day, accumulating bacteria? I knew from my own experience of “masking” that restricted breathing made me lightheaded, and affected my focus levels. How would twelve hours of being “masked”, day by day, affect the judgement and the energy levels of the staff?

Then there was an effect of this for which I truly had not prepared. It was emotionally estranging and alienating to be dependent for my life and reason, on people whose faces I could not see.

I experienced this sense of disorientation and even of vague threat, at an animal level.

It is very scary to look up at a circle of people standing around your bed, explaining that you have, or have not, had a stroke (we heard both versions of this), while you can’t see their facial expressions at all.

These beings start to seem like insects, or like aliens.

It is extraordinarily dehumanizing.

An already stressful situation started to feel more and more stressful, due to the inability to see the human faces of my caregivers. Very soon, surrounded by people whom I could not see smile, or whom I could not tell were looking at me with compassion, though they may well have been — I felt an animal instinct simply to give up.

Then there was the phrasing some of these folks used, bless them.

I have written elsewhere about the extraordinary power of medical language to curse or to heal. I don’t know if any time is spent in medical school these days, addressing this issue of how important it is to speak constructively to patients. When doctors say to women diagnosed with Stage 4 cancer “Most women’s husbands leave them if they get sicker” — a comment I have heard reported from such women more than once — that sentence functions like a curse.

Several times, a masked male doctor would enter my room in the neuro ICU and say, “We are keeping you hooked up to an IV and we are monitoring your sodium levels. Because you could slip into a coma and die.”

The first time I heard this, I thought, “Is there something I can do to help them avoid this outcome? No, all I can do is lie here. So why is he saying this to me?”

I truly do not know how such a sentence helped.

I am sure it was the truth. Maybe it was important to say to Brian, outside of my earshot. Maybe the purpose of such a sentence was, “Get your affairs in order and say goodbye to your family.”

I have no idea.

At the time, though, the repetition of this statement just made me feel more helpless, more passive, and more like giving up. I can think of several more constructive ways to let me know that we were seeking to avoid a serious situation, by monitoring my sodium levels. Why speak to patients that way?

Lastly there was the pain. As noted, I could not have painkillers, which I certainly understood. But the nurses would change my sheets by rolling me back and forth the way the second MRI technician did — first by putting me on one side, and then on the other. This tactic put my whole weight, of course, on my recently-constructed hip and my recently-closed, deep and long, surgical wound.

The pain of this movement was so acute that I screamed, and I was reduced to weeping shamelessly, like a child.

“We are nurses,” I was told again, as if I had forgotten.

“We know what we are doing.”

Moving without a walker was agonizing, and probably bad for me. Getting up and down on the toilet that was still the wrong height, was agonizing. Being forbidden even a cane — lurching from surface to surface with no stability, unless I leaned on a nurse — was agonizing, and probably dangerous. “Just don’t fall”, warned my orthopedist before all of this, in regards to my eventual recovery period.

I don’t know the purpose that all this blinding pain, and that hazardous instability, served.

But it all broke me down even further.

The last thing that was off, or needlessly unhelpful, was that I couldn’t get the neuro-ICU hospital to communicate in any way with my orthopedic surgeon who was right next door. “Please, please just call him and coordinate care,” I begged, because I was worried about ruining the hip surgery without any consultation of theirs with him.

“We can’t do that,” they explained.

“This may frustrate you, but we can’t do that.”

All of these issues seem, no doubt, like trivial enough concerns in what may have been a life and death situation; but I wonder if they really are.

I have studied learned helplessness in confinement, and in incarceration situations, and I have witnessed forced confinement situations in which inmates had the very basics of personal choice, and the basics of controlling light and darkness, silence and sleep, nakedness and clothed-ness, taken from them.

In such contexts, small denials of agency loom very large, and can quickly become major stressors, or even forms of torment.

According to studies by many human rights organizations and by those who study penal institutions, these “little” violations and denials of agency, measurably affect inmates’ psychological and physical wellbeing.

The same issues — lack of privacy, forced nakedness, endless noise and lights, disrupted sleep; let alone a lack of medical supports needed (such as, in my case, walkers and canes) — can cause lasting psychological and even physical damage.

The impact of denying regular sleep to prisoners has “devastating” psychological consequences, according to the Lyndon B Johnson School of Public Affairs:

“The report, The Nightmare of Sleep in Prison, examines how routine conditions and operational practices in carceral settings impact the ability of incarcerated people to experience restorative sleep—an active biological process that affects how people think, feel, and behave. Drawing on scientific research, first-person accounts from currently and formerly incarcerated people, corrections officials, and oversight reports from across the country, the report reveals the impact of chronic sleep loss on every aspect of life in prisons and jails.

“Sleep is a basic biological necessity, not a luxury,” said Alycia Welch, Associate Director of PJIL and lead author of the report. “Yet in prisons and jails across the country, people are routinely subjected to conditions that make restorative sleep nearly impossible. Chronic sleep loss affects the physical and mental health of incarcerated people, increases stress and tension inside facilities, and undermines the rehabilitative outcomes corrections agencies are supposed to support.”’

Forced nakedness is a much-studied aspect of many kinds of torture, and of systemic carceral humiliation. The issue is not trivial. The much-mocked open-backed hospital gown (and mine somehow was almost never closed, though I sought to close it); the privacy curtain that won’t provide privacy, the nearly unscreened toilet — all have well-documented negative psychological impacts.

According to the Center for Victims of Torture,

“Forced nakedness creates a power differential, stripping the victims of their identities, inducing immediate shame […]”

According to the National Library of Medicine, “Health and Incarceration: A Workshop Summary”, denying privacy to prisoners strips them of basic human rights; untreated medical issues can cause PTSD and other stressors damaging to mental and physical health.

According to the “European Journal of Trauma and Dissociation”, lack of privacy causes hypervigilance that takes a toll on inmates’ nervous systems.

If all of this is true in prisons, proven abundantly in studies over and over, how is it not also true in hospitals?

Before we were released, my distinguished surgeon from the orthopedic hospital across the way, and his young colleague, simply walked across the passageway between the two hospitals and appeared in my room. They wore scrubs, but they did not wear masks.

They were smiling, and their faces were caring and compassionate.

I had never been so happy to see anyone. Just seeing their faces felt healing to me, and this boosted my morale.

“That was scary,” they said, honestly and sympathetically. “Thank God you are ok,” they said, or words to that effect. “Your sodium levels are low? Eat some potato chips,” said my surgeon.

They seemed like superheroes from another planet— sane, humane, compassionate — appearing on a spacecraft of productive and well-intentioned, but detached, masked androids.

I did not feel that the staff of the neuro-ICU hospital was not positively motivated. Again — I want to note — they may well have saved my life and certainly my reason.

Maybe all my suffering was necessary — all the degradation, the lack of privacy, the noise, the indescribable pain, the absence of a cane or walker, the weird masking; and maybe even, for some reason I can’t understand, the lack of soap and water — the risk of filth, infection and grime — was necessary.

I felt that the staff at the purgatorial hospital wished to heal patients as much as did their counterparts at the good, thoughtful, human-centered orthopedic hospital next door.

But I felt that the neuro-ICU staff was trapped in a complex and unforgiving system in which they had limited decision-making and very little autonomy; and that they had extremely stupid rules to follow, handed down from on high.

I felt that all this negatively affected the staff’s own moods and wellbeing, and their ability to connect with patients, and to be affected emotionally by their patients in turn.

I felt that this institutional disconnect, along with the dumb policies and rigid rules not of the staff’s own making, negatively if imperceptibly degraded the effect of the staff on the patients’ healing. The hostile environment also negatively affected the possibility of healing.

Everything was being done according to “correct” protocols; but the second hospital, the neuro-ICU, was sadly not a place of existential health or healing.

Not for patients; and not, I would wager, for the staff either.

So that was my stay. That was my drama.

Good hospital; painful hospital. Side by side.

I am thankful to both, in spite of my horror, and the trauma I experienced in the neuro ICU, as both together sent me home intact.

Finally the dark-haired doctor, who had told me a couple of times that I might die, come in to tell me that I had not apparently had a stroke, and that I could go home.

My husband and another relative walked alongside me in a wheelchair pushed by an orderly out onto the sidewalk.

The sun was shining.

My loved ones eased me carefully into an Uber van, and we drove down to Brooklyn. Then I managed, leaning on Brian, to get up to our apartment.

There was the couch, where I would rest and recover.

And there was a walker, a plastic seat in the shower — there was a shower! With soap and hot water! And yes, a raised toilet seat.

There was, for later, a cane.

There were painkillers.

There in our home was the man who had loved me, and helped me, through all this unsexy, frightening institutional drama.

He was setting up my recovery area, making sure that there were no obstacles on the floor, as the orthopedic hospital had advised him to.

Paradoxically, as unromantic as the whole saga had been, I had never felt more deeply married.

I was in heaven.

I was free.

I was safe.

I have never been more grateful.

#####

(Next, I will tell you about the simply miraculous recovery that followed — and what I make of it all.)

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It seems, right now, to be the story of two institutions; two approaches to medical care. I don’t have an argument in this essay, because I can barely process for myself what I’ve been through. I just feel so lucky to be alive, and walking, and pain-free, and as much as anything, grateful to be cogent. I am grateful beyond words to be using words — that atmosphere, that system of starlight.

I’ll lay out what happened, and what I think at this moment about what happened, and you can draw your own conclusions. Maybe I was saved. Maybe I was almost lost. Maybe both. Maybe I was redeemed by incredible vigilance from a deadly coma, or minimally, from brain damage; maybe I was subjected to unnecessary tortures, the worst I’ve endured in my life.

Maybe both are true. Maybe all of it. Maybe it was all completely necessary, including the unbelievable physical suffering I underwent. Far be it from me to quarrel with my far-from-guaranteed survival, apparently intact.

And, as everyone knows, I am not a medical doctor.

So this is Part One.

Via my diligent pursuit of alternative treatments for a hip that was painfully malfunctioning, secondary to the spina bifida occulta with which I was born, and which condition is stabilized by hardware at multiple vertebrae — l5-S1 — I had pushed the no-alternative-left option, a hip replacement, by 18 months. It’s not uncommon for conditions such as the one with which I was born — which imperfectly closed my spine in utero — to cause secondary damage, over time, to a hip. So I felt I was doing pretty well.

Since, as you know, I had been told by an allopathic neurologist in 2013 that by now I’d be in a wheelchair, losing all my functions, I considered my general good health, stamina, focus, and my relative mobility — even as I began to limp and have pain in my right hip over the course of 2025 and 2026 — to be gifts from God, and daily manifestations of a miracle.

I also attributed my overall wellbeing to my extensive network of the best and bravest alternative healers, notably the brilliant and distinguished Dr Henry Ealy of the Energetic Health Institute (https://www.energetichealthinstitute.org) who advised me all the way. I also credit the journey I have taken with you here, that led me to understand far more deeply than I had, my basic anatomy and its systems: to get a sense of how joints work, and what supplements and foods protect them; to have a deeper insight into the role of blood circulation in overall health, and to know what herbs promote healthful circulation; to know what muscles to stretch and work daily to give my spine and pelvis maximum support; to understand (via Thermography for Health New York, which uses the incredible diagnostic tool of thermography, which shows via color, “hot spots” in the body, in place of the dangerous protocol of mammography) the value of a working lymphatic system in eliminating toxins and preventing cancer. As a result of learning all about the importance of lymphatic flow, I started to build activities such as red light saunas, and other forms of sweating, into my weekly schedule. Through all of this and more, I came to understand more about the activity of my cells themselves, down to the mitochondria.

I benefited from interviewing some of the leaders in the alternative wellness space. I learned what specific vitamins and periodic internal cleanses I needed via Dr Hadar Elbaz, of The Vibrant Glow (who analyzed things sent through the mail I won’t describe here); I tried to walk a few miles daily, to get sun on my body, and to avoid toxic thoughts, per my interviews with Dr Ben Tapper and Dr Kelly Victory of The Wellness Company; I took nattokinase supplements daily, due to what I had learned from the pioneering work of Dr Peter McCullough, since, though I am unvaccinated by an mRNA vaccine, I have no idea what are the impacts on my blood from others around me who are mRNA-vaccinated. I took kimchi supplements and ate fermented foods, after having interviewed Kim Bright, founder of Brightcore. I had chiropractic from Dr Paul Milone in Marblehead, MA; and I worked — among the serious high school and college athletes; I was lucky to have been accepted as a client — on a physical therapy plan developed by trainers at Accelerated Physical Therapy, also in Marblehead, MA.

As I’ve said elsewhere, my journey into alternative health and healing has led me to rethink what “health” really is. We have such a black-and-white, dualistic notion of “health” and “illness” in the West. I now know that you can have a serious physical condition — such as my problems with my skeleton - and still be systemically otherwise very healthy and heading always in the direction of healing; you can be like several friends of mine with cancer diagnoses, who radiate health in every other way, and who have beautiful qualities of life; or, conversely, you can have nothing “wrong” with you as far as allopathic tests and measurements reveal, and yet still be in a state of lassitude, toxicity or general unwellness, sadly heading toward a disease state.

I was so lucky to be able to invest in these alternative modalities. And as I learned over time how each one of these was preventing a condition or complication that allopathic pharmacy would just treat with more and more prescriptions, bringing with them in turn the risk of more and more side effects, I came to believe that this approach was ultimately far less costly than would have been my remaining ignorant and passive in the face of my degenerating gait, pursuing only what allopathic medicine recommended.

When I could put off surgery no longer, I chose the best orthopedic hospital in America. As you recall, I had nearly died of sepsis in a hospital after a bizarrely delayed surgery subsequent to my having sustained a burst appendix in 2023.

So I definitely had a fear of hospitals.

This fear had, it seemed, indeed led me to put the operation off for too long. Learning that face also frustrated me.

I wished that my exposure to the hot mess behind the last major public health effort, as revealed in The Pfizer Papers, had not caused such a dramatic, reasonable loss of confidence on my part, in the whole allopathic system. I wished I could have just done exactly what my doctors advised me, without the need for second-guessing or resistance; but until I found a surgeon I really trusted, I knew too much to simply take that leap without a lot of other assurances.

I’d been walking around with no cartilage on the right, it seemed, and my hip bone had started to chip; so my surgeon would need to add a bone graft.

The surgeon I chose at last, was a legend in orthopedic surgery; but I was just as impressed with the way he answered all of my questions, and did not rush me. I was impressed too with the way his staff seemed knowledgeable, respected, and able to give great independent advice — so unlike the automaton-like manner trained into support staff in other hospital settings.

I tried to pay out of pocket for the surgery, as I also feared having health insurance again. All my friends and loved ones with health insurance seemed to live from one medical scare subsequent to a costly test, to another. But when I learned that the surgery would cost about $70,000, I bit the bullet and applied for, and received, health insurance.

This major orthopedic hospital in Manhattan, in my brief stay at least, and even with the drama of what I underwent — really worked. From the first time I entered it, I felt a lively organizational intelligence. From the patient-friendly training of the staff at the front desk who warmly welcomed us, to the administrative mindfulness that led to the positioning of an actual human being in front of digital login screens to help scared or frail people sign in to enter the system, to the fact that there was a range of lower and higher upholstered chairs in the waiting areas, so that whatever people’s level of mobility, they would be comfortable — all of it bespoke a coherent, institution-wide level of consideration.

I saw humanity in action again and again. What was surprising was how surprised I was, to see humanity so prominently given a role in the administrative processes, as well as in the healing processes, of a major American hospital.

At an early appointment checkin, for instance, I was standing behind a young man who had been born, it seemed, with a spinal deformity. He was a little over four feet tall, and he stood on crutches. The counter was higher than his head. The staffer welcoming us into the waiting room checked in the taller person in front of him, and then she turned to me. She hadn’t seen the young man in front of me. When I gestured to indicate that someone was ahead of me, she looked over the counter and saw that she had overlooked him; the regret and embarrassment on her face at her oversight, were genuine and profound. I saw humanity of that kind manifest at that hospital again and again.

My own fearful and aversive views of some aspects of allopathic medicine, which are based on evidence to which I was exposed in my work with The Pfizer Papers, were not ridiculed or belittled by hospital staff. This was an extraordinary level of acceptance of others’ perspectives, to encounter in a traditional hospital setting. I did not mention my work on that project, of course. But views I held about what I did not want from a hospital setting, definitely came up.

For instance, I did not want a blood transfusion during surgery. I was afraid of receiving mRNA-vaccinated blood, because of the many clotting diseases and blood problems that followed mRNA vaccination, as detailed in The Pfizer Papers; because of our lawyer Ed Berkovich’s FOIA showing that the White House had concealed cases of thrombotic thrombocytopenia following mRNA vaccination; and because of the damaging impact of the spike protein and of lipid nanoparticles on blood and on blood vessels.

(DailyClout has recently been hacked, and many of these reports that link to the original Pfizer documents are no longer available online — leaving online, however, AI claims that my presentation of this blood damage evidence is “medical misinformation.” We are working to republish all of the reports, but they are available meanwhile in The Pfizer Papers books, and the White House FOIA results are linked above).

I learned, in preparing for my own surgery, that there are methodologies in place in New York City for storing one’s own blood in advance of surgery. This is called “autologous blood donation.” NYU Langone offers it, as does Memorial Sloan Kettering. There is a facility, Memorial Blood Centers, that will store your blood prior to surgery — but you need a prescription from your doctor a week in advance.

I had not arranged for this in time, but orthopedic hospital staff treated my concern about this issue with respect. They may not have seen the problem of vaccinated blood as I did; but the staff of this hospital did not dismiss or belittle me.

I also learned when you enter the allopathic medical system, that you are in a constant battle with shadowy nonprofits and government entities, just to keep mastery of your own data, and even of your own body parts and tissues.

This hospital was literally the only one I have encountered, that let me strike the many paragraphs in the initial consent forms that give third parties access around HIPAA privacy law. This may seem like a nerdy and trivial concern, but it is important. HR 3103 — HIPAA law — is Federal law, and it robustly protects your medical privacy. (Interestingly, there are a lot of summaries, but you have to look a bit for the text itself, which I embedded above).

As a result of HIPAA law, many nonprofits and state entities who are part of the marketplace of your data, and even part of the marketplace of your organs and tissue, if you are an organ donor, want you to sign away your protections.

After the battle we fought in 2023 against vaccine passport databases, I am never going to let anything weaken the protections around my medical privacy, again.

Mission creep, in terms of what is asked by these these consent forms, is constant. I had to turn down a visiting nurses’ organization, whose consent form wanted me to tell them who had my Power of Attorney, to hand over my medical data to for-profit hospice networks — no thank you — and to okay the organization or their assignees to come to take me away to another location “in a disaster.” The nurses’ organization refused to allow me to strike these additions and then sign, even though the consent form itself said clearly that the law did not allow the organization to refuse to allow me to decline those extra terms.

A favorite trick these days is for the checkin staff to show you a digital signature screen to sign, that says in fine print, “I have been given a copy of the consent form”, even as one is never given a copy of the consent form.

The use of digital screens rather than paper, lets hospitals claim inaccurately that you can’t strike any part of the consent form. This is not true. Legal documents can be edited if they are initialed and signed.

This orthopedic hospital, in contrast to all the others, simply printed out a copy of the consent form when I asked to strike some content, let me strike the paragraphs to which I did not wish to consent, let me initial and sign it — and that was that. Into my file it went.

The respect shown to patients in the hospital choosing to do this, was entirely unusual.

The morning of my surgery, Brian and I waited in a beautiful waiting room next to the East River; its waters flowed deep green, and the city sparkled in the June light. My mother had drawn a card for me, and colored it, and sent it to me via mail. I had brought it with me, of course. She had depicted me doing a cartwheel, and added dancing, wearing high heels, and hiking, to the many activities she wished upon a healed me.

My mom has drawn such “healing pictures” for me to look at, with every surgery I’ve undergone — and every time, I heal so quickly that my doctors are astonished. The unconscious mind, of course, is powerful.

I was now in a hospital gown, and lying in a bed by the rushing river. Brian had my picture, and the other little items he would bring to me after the procedure.

We were greeted by members of the surgical and administrative teams. Though I continually opt out of being an organ donor in New York State, I keep somehow finding myself on the state organ donor list. I expressed to a young man in a beautifully-tailored suit, whose job it was to prepare me, it seemed, psychologically, for surgery, why I was worried about being listed in New York State as an organ donor (https://donatelife.ny.gov/).

He listened patiently. Finally he said emphatically: “You are not going to die! We are not going to take your organs!” Brian, who was holding my hand, laughed out loud. But we both actually felt heard.

Then there was the goodbye to Brian, and the wheeling-in to the surgical theatre; the introduction to the surgical team, to the anesthesiologist, and to the man whose job it was to roll me on my side, as I lost consciousness, and to strap me onto the gurney.

Then all, all was darkness.

#####

And then I woke up in yet another beautiful room, a corner room with a high ceiling, and with light pouring in from 12-foot windows. Was I in heaven? My pain was gone. The river was farther below me than it had been before. It was racing like a goddess in a hurry.

I could see all the way to Queens. The city was like a beehive. Everything had purpose and direction. My life would begin again.

I think my surgeon and his colleague greeted me — my memory is unclear — and I believe that they said that the surgery had been a success.

My mom’s drawing, of myself fully healed, had been placed on a lovely tray. Had Brian placed it there? I was still high from the anesthesia, or the relief, or all of it. Also Oxycodone.

I felt nothing but joy.

Brian came to visit, and left when visiting hours ended; he was happy. I was happy.

Dinner was wheeled in — nutritious, delicious. It tasted like real food. I was giddy. Mashed potatoes! Real turkey! And — HDTV had never been more interesting. Property Brothers! What would they do with that veranda?

The world was new, healthy and sparkly, and entirely delectable.

I’d been chatting with my roommate, a woman a few years younger than I, who worked in a senior role in a major hospital in a major city. I remember that with what was left of my conscious mind — my prefrontal cortex mind — I was thinking, “Don’t get into anything substantive.”

She was very nice, but I really wanted to stay anonymous, and to remain well out of any fights. I knew too well how electrically — for good or bad, there is no way to know in advance — any mention of my work with The Pfizer Papers, charges the air.

I kept my remarks to kids, schools, neighborhoods. I slept and woke the next day - a sleep of heaven. No beeping, somehow. No blinking lights. Blessed darkness. I don’t know how this hospital solved the purgatorial problems of sleep that other hospitals cannot solve, but it did.

Mine was a deep, pure, Victorian invalid’s sleep.

I woke to a good new day. I would be discharged today! I was given another Oxycodone.

Unfortunately, in the space between last night’s pleasant chat and this morning’s more focused exchanges, my suitemate had found out about my work on The Pfizer Papers.

I then started to fend off pointed questions from across the room — the kind my anesthesia-weakened brain could not parry without effort.

“I would rather not talk about it,” I said.

She forged ahead: “Your team says that there was a high rate of miscarriage in The Pfizer Papers. But you can only know that if you know the total number of all the pregnant women in the study.” Or words to that effect. (All of this exchange is approximate, as I was on heavy painkillers at the time).

This argument was a talking point that came at us a fair amount. It was in the Google list of “rebuttal” talking points. There are good answers to this — we do know the total number of pregnant women Pfizer followed: 270. Of those, Pfizer lost 236 of the subjects’ records. Of those 34, over 80 per cent lost their babies. I knew this, but I also knew that to explain this would require of me the very life force I needed to heal.

“I am happy to send you the studies. I just really need to rest right now.”

“But — “ And then she came at me again, as I recall, from another rhetorical direction; with the procedural guarantee of safety and efficacy for new medications, from the FDA. Or from the CDC. I knew that I could rebut this as well, if I summoned all of my efforts, but that it would hurt, obscurely, to do so.

“Do you mind if we just don’t talk about it? I just think I should rest. Happy to send you a book.”

“But — “ and then, as I recall, there was a bio-distribution question.

All of her questions were reasonable and well-articulated. I respected what seemed to be her sincere curiosity about what we had found; she was assessing the solidity of the evidence we presented, though her sources were derived from the way that Google carelessly summarized our work, and she was using the analytical tools she had from her training. I respected the intellectual rigor of her questions, though it frustrated me that she did not have our primary research documents to assess.

At the same time — this was not the time or the place.

At the same time — I could not walk; I could not leave the conversation.

At the same time — I did not have any of my own documentation with me, and I was weak and drugged.

Irrationally or not, I felt attacked and unsafe.

I answered her at last. My prefrontal cortex was no longer on an alert.

I told the truth, and all the feeling I had about the truth, poured out into my body with it.

I told her about the pregnant women. I told her about the flattened placentas. About the women dying in childbirth. I told her about the bio-distribution study that Pfizer did, showing that the dangerous materials — the lipid nanoparticles, the mRNA — went all over the body, accumulating in the spleen, brain, lymphatic system, liver, and, if you are a woman, in the ovaries.

I told her about the seven-year-old children whose deaths from stroke were buried in footnotes.

“It is a massive crime,” I said.

When I spoke, I could feel a shunt of some kind in my heart, open. Due to the drugs I was on, the pure rage I felt about these deaths was unmediated by my prefrontal cortex. I was all limbic system. I felt my blood push, like a tidal flow, as it had never done before, from my enraged heart, and surge around my entire circulatory system.

I felt it wash through and over my exhausted brain.

There was silence from my roommate.

“But now, please, I really don’t want to talk about it any further,” I said, yet again. “I really do need to rest.”

Then there was a tense silence. It lasted about twenty minutes.

I clicked The Property Brothers back on. But you know how women are. Especially smart women.

We can be tense together, in a room, louder than any TV program.

Then I began to see a waving semicircle of color — the “aura” of a migraine. I have experienced this before. It did not worry me.

I watched it grow into almost a full circle, slowly distorting my vision.

Then — I don’t know how — for some reason, a nurse was in my room asking me a question.

When I tried to answer her, I could not find coherent speech.

She looked horrified.

She stepped out, as I recall, and stepped back in quickly, holding some cards with pictures on them. One showed a bird.

I knew it was a bird.

In my soul, I knew everything possible about the birdness of the image. But when she asked me to say what it was, I grasped and grasped silently for the name of the thing, and finally could do nothing but shake my head.

She asked me another question — the date? The name of the hospital? And I tried to answer her.

Gibberish.

I tried harder: every third or fourth word came; but in between, there were no words.

I could not find them.

She look more concerned than ever, and signaled to the exterior of the room in some way. Suddenly my bed was surrounded by about a dozen people, men and women, all in hospital scrubs. All looked as concerned as did the nurse.

One or two of them also tried talking to me. Again I struggled fruitlessly to answer. I felt a nightmare feeling that I was wandering down the hallway of language — the place I lived, my very identity, the place I thought of as home — but that four of five necessary doors in that hallway, were now locked shut.

I shook my head, again helpless.

The group stood up as one, the collective worry in the room still more heightened.

A gurney appeared in their midst.

The men and women bundled me onto the gurney, and sped me downstairs.

#####

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This is a crisis about which I have been seeking to warn humanity — as those of you who follow my work well know — since 2021, when I was deplatformed from all social media platforms after I had warned that women were reporting menstrual problems subsequent to receiving the mRNA injection. The lawsuit from two attorneys general, Biden v Missouri, revealed that it was this X post of mine warning about menstrual dysregulation that Carolyn Crawford of the CDC had shared with a dozen government agencies, with a memo to them to “BOLO” — “be on the lookout” — for similar content of mine. In spite of that fairly terrifying level of opposition, for three years I executed the unenviable task of trying to alert the world to report after report from our WarRoom/DailyClout Volunteers of reproductive damage from the mRNA vaccine. With commentator Steve Bannon’s support, and equipped with research resulting from the work of 3500 heroic and relentless WarRoom/DailyClout volunteer doctors and scientists who read through The Pfizer Papers and issued 109 reports, and under the leadership of research manager Amy Kelly, we brought the world, week after week, reports of a biological apocalypse.

The reproductive damage to women revealed in The Pfizer Papers ranged from lipid nanoparticles accumulating in ovaries and blocking fallopian tubes; to spike protein and polyethylene glycol from mRNA injections entering nursing mothers’ breast milk, causing babies to convulse or vomit and in one case, to die; to a hideous eight-page memo sent to then-CDC director Dr Rochelle Walensky in April of 2021 practically boasting that two babies had died in utero after “maternal exposure” to the vaccine; to the much-assailed but never-debunked report of ours showing that in one section of the Pfizer Papers, over 80 per cent of the pregnant women followed had lost their babies.

In all of this time, we never received a single lawyer’s letter from Pfizer. Our reporting stands to this day.

We published two books, and countless articles; I appeared on numberless podcasts to trudge through my dire and miserable litany. It felt like endlessly trying to clean out a moral equivalent of the Augean stables; but instead of filth from horses, I felt as if I was calling attention to and seeking proper burial for a mountain of lost babies; surrounded always by the spirits of grieving women. And all around this mountain of innocent death and female tears, there were collusion and silence. Almost no one from the establishment that was supposed to care for women and babies, saw anything. There were two honorable ob/gyns —- Dr James Thorp was one of them — and two honorable midwives, one anonymous. It was hellish work.

As you know, my physical health broke down.

It took me a year to begin to recover emotionally.

And now — women, as I say, are not well. They are miscarrying. Babies are not surviving. There is an absolutely predictable crash in birthrates. The US has now reached its lowest birthrates in its history — 1.6 babies per woman.

“In 2024, the U.S. recorded its lowest ever fertility rate of 1.6 births per woman, following a downward trend in fertility rates starting in the early 2000s, and it is consistent with a global decrease in fertility rates. Data from the United Nations Population Division show that global rates were down to 2.2 births per woman in 2023, compared to 5.3 in 1963.

“Fertility is falling across the globe, but there’s a lot of variation,” Zimmerman said in the January 5 episode of Public Health On Call. Niger, Chad, and other sub-Saharan African countries, for example, still maintain high fertility rates of over 6.0 births per woman, while South Korea’s rate is lower than 1.0.”

As I had warned in 2021-2024, the mRNA vaccines’ were disproportionately aimed at certain countries: especially the West. This is the result: birthrates have collapsed in the US, Western Europe, South Korea, Japan, and, interestingly, China; but the Arab world and Africa shows much more robust reproduction.

This map using data from the World Bank shows that the demographic future is Algerian, Libyan, Egyptian, Yemeni, Kazakh, Mongolian, Afghani, Syrian, Iraqi and Central African, even as the populations of the Western nations collapse with “no visible bloodshed”, attack, massacre or military invasion:

Those countries have more than two babies born per fertile woman — from 2.35 to as many as 4.10 per woman. In many of these countries, vaccination rates were low. Bangladesh? 2.1. Benin? 4.5. Central African Republic? 6.0. Democratic Republic of Congo? 6.0. “Middle East, Afghanistan, North Africa and Pakistan” — one category for some reason — 3.0. “Arab World” — 3.1.

In contrast, the developed world’s — the “Western” world’s, culturally speaking — birthrates shows a bloodbath. Iceland: 1.6. Sweden — 1.4. South Korea — a shocking .8. The UK? 1.6. The EU as a whole? An astonishing 1.3. Central Europe and the Baltics? 1.3. Singapore? An astonishing 1.0. Puerto Rico? 0.9. New Zealand? 1.6. Poland? 1.1. Germany? 1.4. Finland? 1.3.

Take a comprehensive look:

In contrast, just look at one fundamentalist Muslim country — Afghanistan:

Did Afghanistan have a high rate of COVID vaccination? No. “Afghanistan did not have a high rate of COVID-19 vaccination compared to global averages. While millions of doses were administered, approximately 40% to 44% of the population was fully vaccinated. The rollout was significantly hindered by vaccine hesitancy, supply shortages, and logistical challenges.”

Did sub-Saharan Africa have high rates of COVID vaccination? No. The very countries from whom millions of people are being shipped into Europe, were spared the frantic mRNA rollout: “COVID-19 vaccination efforts are lagging in Sub-Saharan Africa, as just over 20 percent of the population has been fully vaccinated.”

Hm.

Now think about the countries from which immigrants are being shipped wholesale to Europe, Australia, Japan, the US (under President Biden) and Canada, by globalist interests.

They are the same nations whose fertility was spared in what was otherwise a global frenzy to vaccinate: sub-Saharan Africa, fundamentalist Muslim countries in the Middle East, Afghanistan, Syria and so on.

Do you see the pattern?

I warned that different vials of the mRNA injection had different levels of damaging ingredients; indeed, different brands had different levels of damaging ingredients, with Moderna containing three times the damaging material as did Pfizer. I warned that issues as manipulable as temperatures of storage, or instructions for how many doses per vial, could affect the lethality or destructiveness of this injection — and I warned that the Pfizer documents showed dramatically higher rates of deaths and serious adverse events in the US than in any other country; and that after that, the highest rates were in Europe, in order of political importance — Germany, UK, France; Italy, Greece, Spain. And after that, all the rest of the world showed only 7% of the serious adverse events.

It was a geographically curated culling and sterilizing campaign.

This, today, is the result of this globally carefully targeted culling and sterilizing spree. Some nations are reproducing with extraordinary success; and the indigenous people of others are steadily dying out. And the abundant and fertile people from sub-Saharan Africa and certain fundamentalist Muslim nations are being exported to the European nations, to Canada, to Japan and Australia and Iceland — where the indigenous peoples at these rates can never replace themselves.

Now going from the macro to the micro: women in the US are suffering, babies are dying. Just in my immediate circle, I know young vaccinated women incapacitated and bedridden for days by horrific menstrual cramps; I have two young vaccinated colleagues who were told by their gynecologists that the lining of their uteruses are abnormally thin (a side effect of the vaccines, as documented in the Pfizer papers). I know a young woman who suffered a stroke — “reassuringly” called a “mini-stroke” — when she was pregnant. I know a young vaccinated woman who had two miscarriages in five months. I know a vaccinated mother of four in her thirties who has now has had almost twice the number of miscarriages than she has had children.

You may not be aware of this kind of bloodbath, for reasons about which I warned in 2021-2024: women don’t tend to speak publicly about their agonizing cramps, or about passing tissue or hemorrhaging from their uteruses; or about needing news technologies to deal with excess bleeding; or about miscarriage after miscarriage after miscarriage.

They weep in private. They mourn in private. Prevented from seeing the larger picture, they often think there is something wrong with them personally, or they blame themselves, or they believe that they are cursed by Nature.

Believe it or not, the market has adjusted to this bloody and deadly new reality; there are new brands of underwear — “Thinx” and “Knix” and many imitators - that absorb excess menstrual blood (which sounds disgusting and unhygienic, but this requirement seems to be the “new normal” for many childbearing age women).

Now — surely the medical establishment and the scientific institutions are all over this painful new reality, educating women and seeking out remedies, treatments and news solid studies.

JK; of course they are not.

But there is hope. There is a remedy.

I’ve been acting as a kind of amateur-herbalist secret network facilitator. I searched out the ingredients of the original Lydia Pinkham’s remedy — some were very difficult to find - and I have been compiling the herbs, in my kitchen, into a dry tea, to steep into a concoction; and I have been handing out paper bags of the precious ingredients to individual suffering women of childbearing age, who are willing to try it.

FDA, please do not arrest me.

Many of them tell me that they are feeling better.

But I am not a doctor or a scientist, so we need to pursue this avenue of hope, more formally and systematically and conscientiously.

Since 1873 to about 1906, women have been taking a compound called Lydia Pinkham’s compound. Lydia Pinkham, a Lynn Massachusetts housewife, learned about the ingredients from the lore of native American women healers. She bottled the earliest product in her kitchen, and eventually became one of the most successful entrepreneurs of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Thousands of women wrote to her, thanking her for easing their menstrual symptoms, “toning” their uteruses, helping them to conceive and deliver healthy babies without difficulty or injury, and eventually managing successfully the natural transition of menopause, without effort or pain.

But of course, Big Pharma eventually bought up Lydia Pinkham’s company and altered the formula. And paradoxically, Radcliffe, part of Harvard University, keeps the extensive archive of the company’s records — but is preventing anyone from gaining access to extensive studies from the mid-20th century, that likely prove the efficacy of the herbs in her compound, and explain the scientific mechanism that led to the compound’s success.

I have drafted a proposal for HHS, to reconvene a group of volunteers and liaise with a university, to retrieve these records and recreate the original formula. I want to partner with a research group and lab to recreate the studies and report on the efficacy and mechanism of this remedy.

What would we be disrupting, if we can prove that a cheap, easily available, natural remedy with few or no side effects in proper dosages, can ease the reproductive damage, heal the damaged uteruses, sustain the pregnancies, and address or even end the menstrual, pregnancy-related, perimenopausal and menopausal misery of modern women - and especially of mRNA vaccinated women?

“The global menstrual drug and care pharmaceutical market is valued at billions of dollars, with the broader feminine hygiene and period care market estimated at roughly $37.1 billion, expanding toward $69.1 billion in the coming decade.”

Well, look at that. If nothing changed in women’s menstrual health, what is causing this deliriously lucrative (for pharma) growth in revenue?

“The global menstrual drug and care pharmaceutical market is valued at billions of dollars, with the broader feminine hygiene and period care market estimated at roughly $37.1 billion, expanding toward $69.1 billion in the coming decade”

And take a look at this. What happened from 2021-2024? Yep. And what stopped happening, for the most part, in 2024, causing the projected plateau? Yep. But the damage was done.

Menopause care is also a booming sector, especially in the VC space. if women have not changed, how should the “Fierce Pharma” platform be so bullish about treating symptoms of this transition — symptoms that, by the way, are never mentioned in women’s literature or letters or diaries before the late 20th century?

Here is the US rate of live births, above.

Could these cynical, cruel charts and industry headlines explain some of the frenzy to use on every woman possible - at least in the developed world — an injection that the manufacturers knew would ruin women’s menstrual cycles and fertility and reproductive health? Remember, Pfizer had charts showing the CDC and the FDA the menstrual ruination — via exactly such symptoms and diseases as those listed above in the menstrual injuries market chart — in tens of thousands of women.

Can an ancient formula, handed from Native American women to a 19th century housewife/entrepreneur, and now buried — intentionally? — in the archives of Harvard University, provide a remedy to save the future?

The simple answer may be — Yes. It has before. For almost seventy years.

Please read the proposal below. We have to force open Radcliffe’s archives and un-redact the extensive scientific studies of Lydia Pinkham’s formula. We have to resurrect the original formula, and test it on volunteers against a control group, in proper clinical circumstances.

Please support this initiative, if you agree that it may be valuable, by emailing or calling HHS.

This project is going to require resources. The Pfizer Papers effort and publications ultimately cost a substantial amount of funds, in spite of volunteers working without pay and staff working far below market rates.

Please contribute what you can to our starting this effort and reporting to you the results. You can make a one-time donation here. Or subscribe here:

Please help save babies, if indeed this formula is as effective as thousands of women reported it to be from 1873-1940s; and please help ease the suffering of women of all ages.

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Herbal Fertility Supplement Study Proposal/ HHS.Gov

Is a Powerful Fertility Remedy Buried in Medical History?

Lydia Pinkham’s Formula

We are currently facing a fertility crisis in the United States and indeed, throughout thew West. According to mathematician Igor Chudov, government databases show a 13-20 per cent drop in live births in recent years. Canadian Provincial records also show a drop in live births. Infertility treatments as an industry amount to a $36.50 dollar industry in the United States in 2024, and the analytics site Statifacts expects that industry to reach an $85.50 billion dollar market by 2034.

That site attributes the growth in infertility treatments to “fertility issues”, late pregnancies, and other factors. But it is likely that recent experimental interventions have also contributed the dramatic rise in infertility.

I cofounded and co-edited the Pfizer Documents Research Team, an initiative that coordinated 3500 doctors and scientists to review the 450,000 documents in the custody of the FDA, released under court order, subsequent to a successful lawsuit by attorney Aaron Siri. That project resulted in the publication of 109 papers, two of which were also published in peer-reviewed journals. I was the editor of The Pfizer Papers: Pfizer’s Crimes against Humanity, a two-volume set that became a bestseller, that brought these important reports to the general public.

What these reports revealed is that, in addition to other factors contributing to infertility crisis in America – which range from estrogens in the water supply to lowered testosterone levels among men – testosterone deficiency affects 10-40% of American men as of 2020 , to the fact that women and men are choosing to start their families later – the mass mRNA injection campaign of 2021-2024 has also negatively affected fertility; specifically, this rollout has had a catastrophic effect on women’s menstrual health and subsequent ability to carry and bear healthy children.

We found that the Pfizer papers contained evidence that miscarriage rates were higher in women who had been vaccinated. We found that 50 pregnancies appear to have been deleted from the Pfizer trials.The V-Safe system showed a dramatic spike in miscarriage following the initial rollout of the mrna injection:

The mRNA injection was known to Pfizer’s researchers internally, to cause menstrual disruptions – a chart to this effect was included in Pfizer;’s internal “Pregnancy and Lactation Report” – and it was also known by researchers to precipitate miscarriages. In addition, gynecologists such as Dr James Thorp have found that the mRNA injection is causing damage to placentas, notably calcifications of placental tissue. Independent midwives are reporting that placentas of vaccinated mothers are unnaturally thin and ill-provided with blood vessels, a condition that causes premature delivery and risks of maternal hemorrhage or even mortality during delivery.

In addition to a spike in maternal mortality following the rollout of the mRNA injection, we also found that multiple studies confirm that the injections precipitated vaginal bleeding. Indeed, we found that the mRNA injection cause vaginal bleeding even in postmenopausal or prepubescent females who were not otherwise menstruating.

Disruptions in women’s menstrual cycles have been confirmed independently by multiple peer-reviewed studies. Though this study in our view misattributes the disruption to “stress” and other factors, this peer-reviewed study in Health Science Reports found widespread disruptions in menstrual cycles, subsequent to mrna injection:

“The results of this systematic review showed that COVID‐19 vaccination is associated with a wide range of menstrual disorders in women of reproductive age and postmenopausal women. The most commonly reported disorders were menorrhagia, delayed menstruation, changes in menstrual cycle length, spotting between periods, and increased bleeding volume. In postmenopausal women, complications such as spotting and resumption of bleeding were also observed. Although the prevalence and incidence of each disorder varied across studies, these findings suggest that vaccination can lead to changes in the menstrual cycle.”

The “Apple Women’s Health Study” from Harvard’s TH Chan School of Public Health also found disruptions in women’s menstrual cycles post-vaccination. A study in Medicina, “Menstrual Changes Following COVID-19 Vaccinartion: a Cross-sectional Study”, found the same outcomes:

“ Menstrual changes, including altered cycle length and bleeding patterns, have been reported following COVID-19 vaccination. This study aimed to determine the prevalence and types of menstrual changes occurring after COVID-19 vaccination among female students and staff at a university in Saudi Arabia. Materials and Methods: A cross-sectional study was conducted among women aged 18–39 years who received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine. Eligible participants, including university students and staff, were recruited between May 2022 and November 2022. Participants completed a questionnaire detailing their sociodemographic characteristics, general medical and reproductive history, and menstrual characteristics before and after vaccination. The prevalence of various menstrual changes (cycle length, bleeding days, flow, and mid-cycle spotting) was calculated. The demographic factors associated with menstrual changes were analyzed using chi-squared tests. Results: The 472 included participants had a mean age of 20.9 years, and 95.3% were unmarried. Changes in menstrual cycle characteristics after COVID-19 vaccination were reported by 54.7% of respondents overall. The most common change was in cycle length, followed by the number of menstruation days and bleeding flow.”

So by now, some of the causes of the fertility crisis, are merging if not confirmed. The lipid nanoparticles in the mRNA injections biodistributed throughout the body and accumulate in the fallopian tubes. This is the case for other medications as well that use nanoparticles in formulation.

The injection also causes disruptions in menses, which of course includes disruptions in fertility.

The injections can cause thinning of the uterine lining or even shedding of the uterine lining. They can also cause calcifications that weaken the placenta, contributing to maternal mortality and to premature delivery of babies.

All this damage to female fertility, is just half of the equation, of course. The mrna injections also negatively affect sperm motility. This study was published in the Asian Pacific Journal of Reproduction. So adding the mrna vaccine rollout to other factors making it difficult for couples to conceive and for women to bear children safely, we have a perfect storm of American and Western infertility.

Currently, treating infertility involves prohibitively expensive courses of hormone therapy, IUI and IVF. Medications include Clomiphene/Tamoxifen, which encourages egg release.

Metformin: Used for PCOS-related infertility.

Gonadotrophins: Stimulate ovaries.

Hormone Injections: Often used for daily stimulation in IVF.

Side effects can be severe: these can include “nausea, vomiting, headaches, and hot flashes from medication.

• Ovarian Hyperstimulation Syndrome (OHSS): A risk of over-stimulated ovaries.

• Multiple Pregnancies: Higher risk with some treatments.

• Emotional Stress: Significant stress is common, making mental health support important.”

In many cases, insurance does not cover treatments, which can cost up to $18000 each.

What if there was an herbal formula that was effective for menstrual regulation, regulation of menopause, and for healthy pregnancies and deliveries, which used natural, affordable substances that have been taken by women for centuries, and that involve few if any side effects?

Remarkably, we have that formula and we have evidence already of its efficacy.

In the 1870s, a homemaker in Lynn, Massachusetts, Lydia Pinkham, assembled a decoction based on herbal remedies that she had reportedly gleaned from native American women’s healing traditions. She prepared these decoctions at first in her kitchen. Her sons and her husband assisted her in marketing the formula and placing it as a “tonic”, available over the counter in pharmacies in the New England. The formula, called “Lydia Pinkham’s Medicinal Compound” or “Vegetable Compound” (to distinguish it from mineral concoctions more often prescribed at that time by physicians), was a tincture, with herbs macerated in alcohol, that women took for illnesses ranging from anemia to “hysteria”, painful or delayed menses, menstrual cramping, to prepare or “tone” the uterus in advance of its achieving a healthy conception and delivery, and to ease the symptoms of menopause.

From the start, this compound proved to be extraordinarily effective. For the next three decades, women of all ages and backgrounds wrote to what was now a factory and office building housing “Lydia Pinkham’s” company. Their letters, which they were assured would be read by women only – a novel and important arrangement in the history of women’s medical treatment – described illnesses, symptoms and pathologies of many kinds; they sought advice and recommendations from Mrs Pinkham and, later, her all-female staff; and they often reported marked improvements in their menstrual or menopausal wellbeing. They reported on healthy pregnancies and successful deliveries, as well: a later advertising slogan claimed that there was “a baby in every bottle.”

The fact that so many thousands of women found relief from menstrual problems, and achieved successful pregnancies and deliveries, is not surprising. The chief initial five ingredients of Mrs Pinkham’s formula have been in in treating women and reproductive issues for centuries, among herbalists from many different alternative healing traditions.

“The five herbs contained in Pinkham’s original formula are:

• Pleurisy root is diaphoretic, anti-spasmodic, carminative, and anti-inflammatory.

• Life root is a traditional uterine tonic, diuretic, anti-inflammatory, and emmenagogue used for amenorrhea or dysmenorrhea.

• Fenugreek is vulnerary, anti-inflammatory, anti-spasmodic, tonic, emmenagogue, galactogogue, and hypotensive.^[15]

• Unicorn Root was used by several Native American tribes for dysmenorrhea, uterine prolapse, pelvic congestion, and to improve ovarian function.^[16]

• Black cohosh is an emmenagogue, anti-spasmodic, restorative, nervine, and hypotensive and is used traditionally for menopausal symptoms.^[15]

Of the newer additions, motherwort is a nervine, emmenagogue, anti-spasmodic, hepatic, cardiac tonic, and hypotensive. Piscidia erythrina (Jamaican dogwood) is an eclectic remedy effective for painful spasms, pelvic pain, dysmenorrhea, and ovarian pain.^[16] Licorice is anti-inflammatory, anti-hepatotoxic, anti-spasmodic, and a mild laxative. Gentian is a sialagogue, hepatic, cholagogue, anthelmintic, and emmenagogue. Dandelion is a potassium-sparing diuretic, hepatic, cholagogue, anti-rheumatic, laxative, tonic, and a bitter.^[15]””

Pinkham, from a 1904 pamphlet

Born

Lydia Estes

February 9, 1819

Lynn, Massachusetts, U.S.

Died

May 17, 1883 (aged 64)

1882 ad for Lydia Pinkham’s Vegetable

The five herbs contained in Pinkham’s original formula are:

• Pleurisy root is diaphoretic, anti-spasmodic, carminative, and anti-inflammatory.

• Life root is a traditional uterine tonic, diuretic, anti-inflammatory, and emmenagogue used for amenorrhea or dysmenorrhea.

• Fenugreek is vulnerary, anti-inflammatory, anti-spasmodic, tonic, emmenagogue, galactogogue, and hypotensive.^[15]

• Unicorn Root was used by several Native American tribes for dysmenorrhea, uterine prolapse, pelvic congestion, and to improve ovarian function.^[16]

• Black cohosh is an emmenagogue, anti-spasmodic, restorative, nervine, and hypotensive and is used traditionally for menopausal symptoms.^[15]

^[[ Hoffman, David. “Herbal Medicine Materia Medica”. healthy.net. Archived from the original on March 2, 2009. Retrieved 7 January 2021.]

Mrs Pinkham’s company and formula were targeted by the government agencies that were the precursors of the Food and Drug administration, and by the 1910s, with the rise of professional medical societies and rationalized medical training, the company was asked by government regulators to demonstrate efficacy in a more scientific context than it had had to previously. As a result, the formula was altered. An addition was motherwort, an emmenagogue. Piscidia erythrina (Jamaican dogwood) was added, which has been used by herbalists for pelvic pain, dysmenorrhea, and ovarian pain. Licorice is anti-inflammatory.. Gentian is an emmenagogue. Dandelion is a diuretic an a bitter.

The formula continued to be popular after Mrs Pinkham’s death in 1883; indeed, for decades afterward. In the 1950s, the company did indeed produce randomized controlled double-blind studies of the formula. These are the focus of my proposed research. The results, along with thousands of letters from women describing their reproductive struggles and the improvements brought about by this herbal remedy, are all contained at the Archive at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute Archive, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. However, while many less significant documents related to Mrs Pinkham and her compound are available to researchers – from receipts for office supplies purchased by her company, to textbooks she created for women customers – the 1950s double-blind study and its results, are embargoed and cannot be reviewed even by researchers at the Institute; not even by Fellows in the Fellows’ Program. The reason that the Harvard Radcliffe Institute archive gives, is “privacy” of the subjects. I would argue that medical records and scientific records are easily de-identified with today’s digital technologies, and that this extremely important record of a scientific inquiry into the efficacy of a set of traditional herbal remedies in healing reproductive issues in women, has public interest value and that the study should be made available to researchers and even to the general public. It is an intriguing question – if the possible efficacy of these traditional herbs, used for millennia for easing menstrual symptoms, toning the uterus for healthy deliveries, and supporting healthful menopause, might be embargoed because the information concealed, perhaps poses a threat to highly lucrative pharmaceutical interests treating the same conditions via pharmaceutically-based and patentable interventions.

Unsurprisingly, a study was launched in 2005, which found that herbal remedies had no effect on women’s menopausal wellbeing:

“In 2005–6 the National Institutes of Health performed a “12-month randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial, [which] compared several herbal regimens and menopausal hormone therapy (estrogen with or without progesterone) to placebo in women ages 45 to 55 [...] Newton and colleagues found no significant difference between the number of daily hot flashes and/or night sweats in any of the herbal supplement groups when compared to the placebo group.” I wish to see if the concealed 1950s study confirms or challenges the results of this 2005-6 study.

Numark Laboratories of Edison, New Jersey sells “Lydia Pinkham Herbal Compound”. The herbs added to the original formula are as follows:

Motherwort (Leonurus cardiaca)

• Gentian (Gentiana lutea)

• Jamaican dogwood (Piscidia piscipula)

• Pleurisy root (Asclepias tuberosa)

• Licorice (Glycyrrhiza glabra)

• Black cohosh (Cimicifuga racemosa)

• Dandelion (Taraxacum officinale)

Time of Your Life Nutraceuticals of St. Petersburg, Florida, produces a product “based on” Mrs Pinkham’s formula. It contains:

• Black cohosh root (Cimicifuga racemosa)

• Dandelion root (Taraxacum officinale)

• Pleurisy root (Asclepias tuberosa)

• Chastetree berry (Vitex agnus-castus)

• False unicorn root (Chamaelirium luteum)

• Jamaica dogwood bark (Piscidia piscipula)

• Gentian root (Gentiana lutea)

• Vitamin E

• Vitamin B6

• Magnesium

• Zinc

Many of these ingredients have been used in different herbalist traditions – ranging from Ayurvedic to Central American and Caribbean, to Colonial British and Native American – to regularize and ease women’s menstrual symptoms, to “tone” the uterus preparatory to conceiving and carrying a child - – a concept that really no longer exists in gynecology or women’s health discourse – and to ease childbirth and menopause. As part of the historical and ethnobotanical analysis informing compound selection, the team will conduct qualitative consultations with knowledgeable practitioners, including, where appropriate and with community consent, Indigenous healers with expertise in traditional reproductive health practices. All such engagements will be conducted in accordance with appropriate ethical guidelines, community permissions, and respect for cultural knowledge and sovereignty.

I wish to compile the antecedents of Mrs Pinkham’s formula, by researching and identifying related herbal supports for women’s fertility, in prior traditions. I wish to visit the 1673 Chelsea Physic Garden in London, UK, where the herbalist tradition that came to America with the colonists, originated. I will look at herbs and remedies identified there, and in related herbalists’ texts, that have to do with fertility. I wish to return to Oxford University, and review 19^th century women’s housekeeping texts in the Bodleian Library’s Medical Sciences Division, to identify herbal and traditional fertility remedies in herbalist textbooks and housekeeping compilations form the 18^th and 19^th centuries, aimed at women. By doing so, I will establish the background practice of alternative support for fertility, upon which Mrs Pinkham drew in creating her successful Formula.

Then, of course, we wish to test the formula, along with some of the variants. We propose to coordinate with some of our key researchers from the Pfizer Papers project, several of whom have the backgrounds in both scientific study design and in biology that would allow them effectively to assess the impact of the herbs in Mrs Pinkham’s compound. We would contract a lab and/or a university research facility. and run a series of studies using volunteers – couples who wish to conceive, as well as individual women whose menses are painful or irregular, or who are suffering from miscarriages. By designing a series of studies that test the ingredients in the compound, and add lifestyle changes such as those that Mrs Pinkham recommended – from sunlight to better nutrition to gentle exercise -- we can potentially identify an affordable, healthful fertility support that is an alternative to dangerous, expensive fertility treatments, and that can ease the misery and uncertainty for millions of women, of their currently ruined or damaged menstrual cycles.

By requiring Harvard and Radcliffe to release the 1950s study of the herbs in Mrs Pinkham’s compound, we can add to the literature of wellbeing and optimal fertility for women, and give them a real support for menstruating easily and regularly, and then conceiving easily and carrying healthy babies to term effectively.

In designing such a study and pursuing this set of research aims, we provide a lasting gift of wellbeing and healthy fertility for women and for couples, that will long outlast the period of inquiry.

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AITA?”

Read the full essay here or watch below.

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AITA?

I had an experience in a Brooklyn bathhouse yesterday, which elicited a lot of feelings. They are, in many social worlds now, inadmissible feelings. But, as I promised God (and you), I would always tell the truth here, because I didn’t die of sepsis in 2023. So I’ll share these feelings — and you decide. AITA?

I’ve been in physical pain for some time. Sadly the pain is getting worse. You know already that I deal with a nerve-related condition: I was born with spina bifida occulta, a condition in which the spine, though not exposed, does not fully fuse around the spinal cord. My seeking ways to not be stricken by this potentially serious condition, has led to what I feel, paradoxically enough, is the great blessing of my education as an amateur, in alternative health and healing treatments. All the weird non-allopathic things I do and take, have, thank God, helped me to defy my former allopathic neurologists’ brochure, which explained that I would be in a wheelchair, slowly losing various functions, in a matter of time.

But even the best of alternative practices (all of which I do) and supports and herbs and supplements (all of which I take) can’t completely heal a structural problem, or a bad injury, or a structural problem exacerbated by a bad injury.

In the past month, I learned, from new MRIs and X-Rays, and from a new physician whom I trust, that not only do I have pleasure of having spina bifida occulta, but that I also have the bonus defect of bilateral hip dysplasia. You may have heard of this charming condition from its occurrence in overbred dogs . This is a condition in which both hip sockets are abnormally shallow, and thus cannot fully cover and support the top of the femur. Bilateral hip dysplasia in humans can cause instability, limping, pain, and early arthritis.

So — I put this off with alternative treatments for a year, but now there is no way to avoid it; I am scheduled for surgery shortly.

This information, and this experience, have been drains on my sense of self, and they have left me with a welter of difficult emotions. I don’t see myself as someone weak or physically fragile. Yet I am limping. I don’t see myself as someone to pity. Yet people pity me, as I struggle to get in and out of cabs, or walk up stairs one step at a time, with one active leg. I am lucky to have an amazing husband, who makes unprintable and very reassuring jokes about all of this; though he is nothing but supportive, I for my part don’t want him to be married to someone who can’t hike, ski, dance, run; someone for whom he needs to wait as we walk. I want him to be married to a superheroine.

It is incredibly humbling and ego-leveling to go from being someone who has always felt strong and well, to being someone in chronic pain, who limps.

As I put it to a good friend, who hadn’t seen me for a while, whom I met recently in a bar,

“What’s new? It turns out I’m f—ed up and crippled.”

He replied, “I don’t think of you that way.”

I don’t think of myself that way either — but here we are.

Now let me add the really fun part.

I was born with these structural insufficiencies within my very skeleton. I was born half-broken, and unusually breakable.

And at seven, I was raped by an adult man — a male babysitter.

My point here is that, when my own body was seven years old, the entire weight of an adult man — 200 pounds, perhaps, and about six feet in height — bore down on my entire little body; this monstrous heaviness forced my legs open and apart, and pinned them against the bed.

The average seven year old girl is 48 inches long and weighs fifty pounds.

The bulk of the weight and pressure and violence of this 200 pounds, and of his unspeakable destruction of me in that way, centered of course upon my already-fragile pelvis.

My point is that people who think about child abuse, usually don’t consider how tiny children are, compared with adults; and about how fragile are their bones, cartilage, tendons and ligaments, and about how easily adults can break or injure them. People tend not to consider that in order to rape a little child, an adult man needs to crack that child’s body open, in an act of extreme, ruinous physical violence, as one cracks a walnut.

If people really thought about this, no sexual predator who ever assaulted children, would ever again see the light of day.

My point is that with every exam now, with every new practitioner, with every MRI, with every new intake questionnaire with every new neurologist and orthopedist — before every assisted stretching session, even — I am forced to say the words “I was raped at seven by an adult man.” We don’t know to what extent I was crippled by the conditions with which I was born, and to what extent the possible injuries to ligaments and cartilage from the assault which I sustained, led to my problems now; but with every exam, I have to fill in the full physiological picture, and I have to remember my assailant.

I am never, ever, ever, ever free of him.

That is the backstory of my visit to a bathhouse.

I was in pain, as I noted, and the bathhouse advertised “CBD Pain Relief Massage.”

That sounded wonderful; so I decided to book that treatment and see if it helped. I also looked forward to enjoying the couple of hours of access to the bathhouse that went along with the massage.

I’d been there before. It’s a cool place. There are hot tubs, cold plunges, and super-cold plunges; there are lovely saunas — Russian, Swedish and “American” — and there is a steam room. It’s a welcoming and affordable place to spend a couple of restorative hours, and I always feel better after I go. It’s not a salacious bathhouse, though those certainly exist; in this one, though it is coed in the public spaces, men and women are always dressed in swimsuits; it is relaxing, not socializing or cruising, that is the focus.

The CBD oil massage was wonderful indeed. Afterwards, having showered, I settled into the hot tub. Its warm soaking was exactly what I needed. I felt better immediately.

Soon I was joined by a couple I had noticed; they had been wandering around, deciding what to do first. The pair consisted of a pretty young woman with curly red hair, and her partner, a blonde person who seemed also at first to be a woman. The second person was about six feet tall, with a slim, athletic figure and broad shoulders, and with perhaps a hint of shadow on the upper lip. This person was wearing a cute blue swimsuit, with chic little low-cut Audrey Hepburn-style bra cups, and with a flirty skirted bottom. Indeed, that swimsuit was a more provocative choice than were any of the other fashions worn by the women in the spa; the swimwear look for women there tended to be modest sports bras in dark colors, worn with plain high-waisted black or navy-blue swimsuit bottoms.

The couple, who seemed very pleasant, joined me in the hot tub. We chatted a bit as they climbed in and then settled themselves, one at a time, on the ledge where I also sat.

The woman sat down on the ledge. Then the second person sat down, between us, and thus next to me.

My gut immediately reacted with that prickling sensation you get when something happens to which your body wants you to pay attention, though it is below the level of your conscious awareness. Though my conscious mind couldn’t tell the person’s gender, “you are a man” was what my body silently said in reaction to the body of the person next to me.

Let me restate here, as I always do when the issue of “trans” people comes up, that I support what are now called “LGBTQ” rights. I passionately do. Luckily, the equal rights under law of people who are gay, lesbian and bisexual, as well as transsexual and transgender, are guaranteed in the US now. I also as a libertarian-leaning person, support the right of anyone to dress however he or she wishes and to have sex with any consenting adult.

I do.

But of course, the right to be free from legal discrimination as a “trans person” has been downgraded, as a matter of pressing social advocacy; and now the issues often put before us, if we do not wish to be “transphobic”, are “visibility” and “acceptance”, two cultural and non-legal desiderata.

But the “visibility” and “acceptance” of “trans” people are increasingly defined in ways they never have been before in the long history of the struggle for the legal rights of gay, lesbian, transvestite and transsexual people: that is to say, “visibility” and “acceptance” are being redefined as giving male cross-dressers access to all-female spaces.

My point is that this demand that an ill-defined subset newly called “trans people” should have access to women’s private spaces — is a recent and I think not organic goal.

In the first century of the struggle for gay men’s rights, in Britain and the US, no one in that movement asked for, let alone demanded, access to women’s spaces. The movement was primarily focused on securing legal equality for what we now call gay men, and ending laws that criminalized same-sex male relationships.

The gay men’s movement was joined by the 1950s with advocacy for lesbian legal rights, including eventually custody rights. Legal equality for both groups was secured in Britain and America by the late 1960s.

With the Stonewall riots of 1969, transvestite and transsexual men became more visible as part of the movement to secure legal rights for people seen as sexual minorities.

It wasn’t until quite recently, though, that our current and, to me, disorienting new reality was manufactured, in which a series of quite unrelated sexual identities are collapsed into one portmanteau “movement” — “LGBTQIA+.”

Lesbian, gay, bisexual — these are groups, of course, that have traditionally been part of the struggle for the rights of people with same-sex sexual orientations.

But — and I fear being seen as presumptuous in expressing these thoughts — a lot of random other identities are being pushed ahistorically into one “movement”.

“Trans” is a neologism. There have always been crossdressing men and women, in every culture. The words that were used to describe them in English were “Transvestites”. If they had surgery to alter their genitals and remove their breasts (not “change their sex”, which is impossible), they were called “transsexuals.”

“Fanny and Stella” — famous British Victorian male-to-female transvestites:

These established terms, “transvestites” and “transsexuals”, were inorganically shortened, recently, to the vague term “trans”, as if that is a category of humans that objectively exists.

But the thing the word described was defined out of any clear existence even as the term was coined.

Today the term does not mean someone who is a cross-dresser or someone who has had surgery to resemble the opposite sex. “Trans” also departs from the traditional gay and lesbian rights movements in that it does not necessarily refer to someone who feels same-sex attraction.

According to Planned Parenthood’s website section “Transgender and Nonbinary Identities” — the first result that comes up in search when a fourteen-year-old asks Google, “What is “Trans?” — a “trans” person can be someone who “feel[s] like” a “masculine female” — that is, what we used to call “a tomboy” — or “a feminine male” — that is, what we used to call “a sensitive guy.”

If you simply object to or do not relate to rigid traditional gender roles, you are advised by this website to understand that “you’ve been struggling with gender”:

“If you’ve been struggling with gender or gender identity and expectations, you’re not alone. It may help you to talk to a trusted parent, friend, family member, teacher, or counselor.” […]

“Your gender identity is how you feel inside and how you express those feelings. Clothing, appearance, and behaviors can all be ways to express your gender identity.

“Most people feel that they’re either male or female. Some people feel like a masculine female, or a feminine male. Some people feel neither male nor female. These people may choose labels such as “genderqueer,” “gender variant,” or “gender fluid.” Your feelings about your gender identity begin as early as age 2 or 3.

“Some people’s assigned sex and gender identity are pretty much the same, or in line with each other. These people are called cisgender. Other people feel that their assigned sex is of the other gender from their gender identity (i.e., assigned sex is female, but gender identity is male). These people are called transgender or trans. Not all transgenderpeople share the same exact identity.”

By this incredibly broad set of recent redefinitions and according to this neologism, William Shakespeare, Charlotte Bronte’s Lucy Snowe in Villette (“had I been a man and strong, I could have challenged that pair on the spot—”), dandy Beau Brummell, Walt Whitman, Virginia Woolf, Vita Sackville-West, Jo March in Little Women, Little Lord Fauntleroy, Pippi Longstocking, Mr Clean and Mulan — all of whom resist rigid gender roles in some ways or dabble with femininity and masculinity as everyone does — would all today be “trans.”

Style icon Beau Brummell:

Tomboy Jo March:

The jewelry-wearing Mr Clean:

Mulan, who briefly puts on men’s clothing:

Everyone is “trans.”

“Queer” also had a parallel evolution in meaning. The word used to refer codedly to gay men; then it referred to lesbians too. Now it has been redefined to mean anything, including those who are “questioning”. As an article on the San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus website, “ LGBTQIA+ MEANING: ACRONYM BREAKDOWN AND DEFINITIONS” puts it,

“Now, the “Q” most commonly refers to “Queer,” another reclaimed word. Similarly to “gay”, “queer” is an umbrella term that can refer to just about anyone in the community.

“Many people prefer the term “queer” because it feels all-encompassing. Being queer isn’t about your gender or sexual identity, it’s about both. Queerness is sometimes seen in political movements because it’s about operating outside the norms.

‘“Q” can also refer to “questioning” – this means someone who is still exploring their gender or sexual identity. You are part of the community, even if you aren’t sure what to define yourself as just yet.”

Then there is “I”. “Intersex” isn’t a sexual orientation at all — it is a biological anomaly that affects one baby in 2700. It has nothing to do with sexual orientation. People with this condition can be gay, straight, bisexual, whatever. Yet now these people with birth abnormalities, too, whatever their orientations, are part of this growing collective, that began with a simple mission of securing rights for gay men and lesbians.

As the article puts it:

“Intersex individuals are born with both male and female chromosomes and/or sex characteristics [NW: This is not accurate for many people with this condition, who can be born with a variant on normal male or female hormones and chromosomes but not necessarily “both male and female chromosomes”]. Intersex individuals are not trans, but their identities are often erased and shamed – much like other members of the LGBTQIA+ community.

Not all intersex people identify with LGBTQIA+, meaning they may not feel that this community addresses their needs or feelings.”

Moving along, we have the “A” for something now called “the ace spectrum”. I had to look up the “A”. I had known that it stood for “asexual” but had not known about its even newer meanings, including “aromantic”. From the SFGMC article:

“Asexual – sometimes shortened to “ace” – people don’t feel sexual attraction at all.

Asexual people can still feel romantic attraction, which means they might date, have long-term partners, or even get married. They also might choose to engage in a variety of sexual activities, or only have sex under certain circumstances.

Asexuality is on a spectrum, like all gender or sexual identities within the umbrella of LGBTQIA+. Meaning, again, that there’s no “right way” to be ace. Asexuality is about your relationship to sex and sexuality, and it can be fluid or static, just like any other gender or sexual experience.”

So a movement predicated on love and desire — a movement that began in order to support and sustain gay men in their romantic and erotic relationships, and then lesbians in their own, is now appropriated for people who feel — no sexual or romantic feelings at all.

Make it make sense.

Finally there is the recently added “identity”, “Plus”:

“+ PLUS

Last, there’s a plus sign at the end of the LGBTQIA+ acronym, meaning anyone who is not listed in the acronym but still identifies as part of the community. These can include:

• Two-spirit

• Non-binary

• Pansexual

• Demisexual

• Aromantic

• Genderfluid

• Agender

There are many more gender and sexual identities in the LGBTQIA+ community, since our understanding of ourselves and others is always changing and evolving.”

My point is that my lifelong sense of “allyship” with and support for the gay and lesbian communities, and for their noble battle for equal legal rights, has been made linguistically archaic and functionally moot by a series of to-me-bizarre redefinitions and expansions in meanings, that have exploded that historic and important movement into what seems to me to be an absurdly inclusive umbrella term.

The term “LGBTQIA+” now includes a ton of unrelated people with no organic historical connection to the movement for gay men’s and lesbian women’s rights — all kinds of people who have all kinds of other issues and concerns.

Maybe this explosion in definitions to include a number of unrelated or ill-defined groups of people who are not dealing with same-sex relationships at all, doesn’t bother a lot of gay and lesbian people.

But it frustrates me.

Because now the metric of “are you an ally?” is not “do you support legal rights for gay men and lesbians?” but rather: “can this guy in a dress go into your changing room?”

And that was not the point of this 150 year old civil rights movement …at all.

My dilemma, back to my feelings in the hot tub, was that my support for gay men and lesbians having equal legal rights, really had nothing at all to do with how I felt about the man sitting next to me in his bikini, and about the feelings that arose in me as I moved about the bathhouse, in and out of his immediate presence.

As I sat next to him, though I have nothing against cross-dressers, I fought the animal instinct to move a bit further away. This reflex wasn't caused by his cross-dressing; this instinct of mine was provoked by his being a strange human male.

As other people, male and female, entered and left the hot tub, I became aware of the fact that I was, on an animal level, comfortable being seated about four feet away from any strange woman; but that when it came to strange men, including the guy in the cute bikini, my body was strongly inclined to sit about seven feet away.

I don’t think I am weird. I think those instincts are hard-wired.

The guy in the bikini kept chatting with me, as a woman would have done, though I was only about four feet away from him; and I was uncomfortable.

I got out of the hot tub and ventured into the steam room. There, a “cis” male — that is to say, a man dressed like a man — who, appropriately, sat about seven feet away from me — also began chatting with me. After I expressed, by my relative nonresponsiveness, a polite lack of interest in continuing the conversation, he equally politely left me alone.

I became aware, as I moved throughout the bathhouse, that civilized men kept courteous distances from strange women; did not move too closely into their spaces; respected their cues to engage further, or not to engage; and I saw that there was an invisible dance going on among the two genders at all times, in which civilized men honored the physical boundaries of women.

I realized that civilized men are continually giving cues that they respect women’s physical boundaries, because on an animal level both men and women know that men can be predators against women.

I went into the “Russian” sauna. There were a number of women inside, most of them lying on their backs, on the various levels on which one could rest. The guy in the cute bathing suit was also there, seated upright on a higher level. I lay down on a lower level, also on my back. At a certain point I noticed that the guy had clambered down, and was lying on the same level I was, with his head angled toward my head.

Again, that was a distance that would not have bothered me at all if this had actually been a woman. But I realized that a man would typically not have lain so intimately near a woman he did not know. He would have remained at some distance, or seated upright.

I got up again, and left the sauna; took a few plunges in the cold tubs; and was ready to call it a day. But then I was seized with anxious thoughts. It occurred to me that the guy in the swimsuit would eventually have to get changed.

Obviously I was not going to go to the front desk to ask that the man be kept out of the women’s dressing room. I was not going to be that Boomer.

But that left me in a state of anxiety bordering on wretchedness.

I frantically tried to strategize. Was the dressing room area fully open? Could I change in one of the bathroom stalls? What about a shower stall? Did it have frosted or clear glass doors? I looked furtively at where the man was. Could I time my changing in the dressing room, for when he was still upstairs in the spa area? I made my way as quickly as I could to the women’s dressing room a level below, hoping to be finished changing before he made his way downstairs.

I’d spent 15 minutes trying to figure out logistics so that I could feel safe. Not physically safe — I knew I was likely in no physical danger. But psychologically safe.

At $200 for two hours, that worked out to about $25 worth of worry.

I also noticed that I was angry that I had to spend any of my precious time, set aside for my own healing, and for dealing with my own pain and injury, trying to figure out how to strategize around some new man’s preferences, that would override my will.

I noticed, too, that my heart was racing. It was racing the way it races when something reminds me of the crime committed against my body when I was a child.

I made it downstairs, and saw, to my consternation, that the dressing area was indeed fully open. I hobbled, as quickly as I could move, into one of the two shower stalls. It had clear glass doors, though, and it faced the common changing area. If a man entered, anyone showering would be completely exposed.

A darkly comical few minutes ensued in which I tried to get clean while peering alarmedly at everyone who entered the dressing room, trying to ascertain his or her gender through glass doors that were constantly steaming up again.

I rushed to dry myself off in the common area beside my locker, and to dress, still hoping no man would walk in.

But what I felt as I did so was pure rage.

It was the rage of a survivor.

It was rage that after everything I have been through in my life after crossing paths with a man who did not care if I said no, I was once again racing and struggling through my pain, and spending emotional energy, seeking to avoid possible embarrassment and exposure of my self, that I did not want, and to which I did not consent.

I felt that sense of not being able to police my physical boundary. You can say it’s trivial. You can say I should be cool with it all.

AITA?

I tell you, being unable to police a boundary of the naked body; feeling violated; is an essential diminution of self, whether it is “just” when forced to share a changing room with a man against your will, or whether it is being subjected to a crime of assault.

The difference is one of degree and not of kind.

The situation, as “cool” and “chill” and “benign” and “inclusive” as it was on the surface, brought my seven-year-old’s horror back to me.

The thing is, what had happened to me at that time, when I was a child, is not at all unusual, in the lives of women.

A third of the women entering that changing room - in any changing room — were raped as adults, or were sexually assaulted as children.

A third of the women going along with right-on arrangements, might be just as traumatized as I was.

But we are all being polite about it.

What do I do with all of this? What do you do?

I want men, however they may dress or “identify”,

Out of women’s private spaces.

Courteous men, as I say, respect women’s physical boundaries, because they understand that some men are predators against women.

I don’t want to be polite any more.

I don’t want to have to justify my feelings.

I’ve been through enough.

You guys — men — you can be polite.

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Here is the full transcript [edited for clarity]:

It’s Naomi Wolf with Outspoken. I’m here tonight to talk about a huge news story that broke in the last couple of days. It could be thread that unravels the whole COVID virus/vaccine perpetrator issue.

A criminal syndicate, essentially.

Even just this initial gesture is so transformational. It breaks the spell of, “No one can be held accountable, no one can be investigated from the untouchable third rail COVID vaccine rollout, COVID virus rollout.”

I’m also going to share with you some information from 2021 that has been lost along the way or forgotten.

A former Dr Fauci aide has been charged with conspiring to evade COVID-related records requests. This is Politico. Ex-NIH official David Morens is accused of concealing emails about potentially risky virus research. He is indicted on obstruction of justice and conspiracy charges for allegedly concealing federal records about research into viruses like the one that caused the COVID pandemic.

He was indicted by a federal grand jury.

So he’s kind of bypassing that records collection rights, hiding it. There were at least eight FOIA requests submitted for such records by various organizations: Science Magazine, Judicial Watch, the Heritage Foundation. So it’s not as if no one was looking for the records. The bombshell nature of this indictment is that Morens served as a senior advisor to Anthony Fauci.

Senior advisor is a really close and important role. People who are not familiar with how these agencies and the White House work, may not know what an important role it is, but a senior advisor is a lateral official who’s valued as a consultant. So David Morens was very fundamentally in the mix because he was guiding, whispering in the ear of, Dr. Fauci. And Dr. Fauci was consulting him. So now we’ve got the guy who’s at one remove.

Brian O’Shea would say that the indictment goes for the guy next to Dr. Fauci rather than going for Dr. Fauci, because the guy next to Dr. Fauci is in a position to be leaned on, pressured to provide testimony; to turn against Dr. Fauci and the other senior actors in this drama. […]

We’ve been through so much in the last six years. But dial back to 2020 and 2021. When COVID was announced, literally introduced, branded, in March of 2020, people really had to be told what it was, and told to worry about it, and how to worry about it.

And even more dramatically — “two weeks to stop the spread”, they had to be told to stay indoors. The whole script, the whole drama, is painful to remember, but you’ve got to remember it. “Put on your mask. Six feet apart. It came from Wuhan. It came from a bat. It came from a rare animal that they make soup out of.”

Canada’s National Post:

All these dramatic elements of a very kind of shocking and weird and implausible story in in retrospect all were rolled out and they were rolled out by a handful of people with a gigantic marketing campaign; the kind of marketing campaign that people hire teams for, to roll out a new car or a new app or a new piece of technology or home decorating element.

The person who was the face of that was of course, Dr. Fauci, and to some extent, Dr. Deborah Birx.

There was so much drama, as you recall, around other scientists saying, “Hey, this looks as if it was intentionally made more virulent. This doesn’t look natural.”’ They were all blamed.

The bad guys were trying to say, “This was a natural spillover from the animal world to the human world. There was nothing artificial or weaponized or introduced, enhanced, about it.”

The drama went on for months, as the official narrative was struggling to be set in stone and finally was set in stone — only because they got us to stay home and be isolated and completely vulnerable to what was coming at us from our screens and our phones. Before that, there was a fight still for reality.

And there were scientists, as I mentioned, saying, “The furin cleavage site looks engineered. This sequence appears artificially enhanced or altered.”

There was huge backlash against them from Dr. Fauci and his allies, calling these people ‘conspiracy theorists’ — hyperventilating people, imagining things. Even respected peer-reviewed publications such as The Lancet got into the act, and buttressed Dr. Fauci’s assertion that this was “zoonotic” — that this virulent virus, SARS-CoV-2, had come from the natural world, the world of animals, and spilled over into humans totally accidentally.

There were a number of weird cover stories; “Someone bought a pangolin in a wet market — because Chinese people make soup out of pangolins. Someone put a bat in soup and made bat soup.” The raccoon dog was blamed. These cover stories were coming out of legacy media in a nonsensical way. But we didn’t know it was nonsensical because it was “completely new”.

The blameless pangolin:

So we were at the mercy of this nonsense.

The dissident scientists were reminding us that research on weaponizing viruses in this way was illegal, and had been illegal since the Obama era — since 2017. They were pointing out that the research had been outsourced in a globalization-type way — that the U.S. had hired or funded scientists at Wuhan, China, to do the research that was now illegal in the United States. They were smeared, they were attacked.

People were also saying, “Hey, the Wuhan lab isn’t even that secure. There have been outbreaks. And what are the odds that they’re studying this virus in the Wuhan lab and then it breaks out in Wuhan from a wet market. That seems too coincidental to be a coincidence.” I’m sure you remember comedian Jon Stewart:

“Oh my god! There’s a novel respiratory coronavirus overtaking Wuhan, China, what do we do– Oh, you know who we could ask? The Wuhan novel respiratory coronavirus lab. The disease is the same name as the lab!”’

“Oh my God, there’s been an outbreak of chocolatey goodness near Hershey, Pennsylvania. What do you think happened?’” Stewart joked. “Like, ‘Oh I don’t know, maybe a steam shovel mated with a cocoa bean?’ Or it’s the f***ing chocolate factory.”

But reasonable questions were shut down. So just by brute force of propaganda, all the people who were asking reasonable question were marginalized and silenced.

This is all coming back into the news cycle because [Dr Anthony Fauci’s advisor] David Morens got indicted. So what you’re going to see is a circling of the wagons. I’m predicting that Senator Rand Paul is central to what’s going to happen next. Because Sen Paul asked directly, in the depth of “lockdown,” in a Congressional hearing with Dr. Fauci, “Did you fund research to make bat coronaviruses more effective? More damaging, more deadly?”

Dr. Fauci, as you recall, shouted at him histrionically. He said, in effect, “The person who’s lying here is you,” and pointed his finger.

Dr. Fauci was lying, and lying to Congress is a felony. Sen Rand Paul knows that Dr. Fauci is lying. But you don’t have to take Senator Paul’s word for it because the record that Dr. Fauci was lying is there. It just takes one layer of digging. It’s been buried, as if with a layer of dirt, like a shallow grave. Investigator Brian O’Shea, my husband, of the podcast “Investigate Everything,” brought this evidence to me.

In 2021, Brian found the CV of the assistant, Eric Donaldson, of Dr. Ralph Baric of the University of North Carolina. [I posted it on Twitter at that time and was immediately blocked from all socials.]

The CV shows extensive funding by the NIH of what looks like Gain of Function research in the United States, as well as in China, to develop, as it appears, what became a precursor to COVID.

So the headline that you need to take away from this episode is we, the United States, specifically Dr. Fauci, Dr. Baric and his colleagues, as well as China, are responsible for funding the development of technologies for what became SARS-CoV-2, which shut down the entire world.

Millions of people died. The pretext for a rollout of vaccines from which hundreds of thousands of people have died and probably millions have been injured.

We invented it. We developed it. It wouldn’t have existed without this research.

The CV shows that Dr. Fauci funded the scientists to take benign coronaviruses out in the wild, living in bats, and take them into labs and weaponize them, make them more deadly, and publish studies about how they were making them more deadly.

Then, whether intentionally or not, that material got released into the human population of this planet. That’s the headline. Dr. Fauci did that. Dr. Baric did that. Dr. Fauci’s funding was doing this research at the University of North Carolina and elsewhere.

By 2017, because of Obama’s ending research into bioweapons. Dr. Fauci funded outsourced science, in China, but still overseen by Dr Ralph Baric. And that’s why in a peer-reviewed article that Dr Ralph Baric published, about making bat coronaviruses more infectious, he thanked the “bat lady,” Shi Zhengli. The one who was blamed for actually developing and inadvertently releasing the coronavirus when the lab leak became the main hypothesis.

But it was also us.

I’m not worried about Dr. Baric or Dr. Fauci suing me because everything I’m saying is true. And there’s an abundant record of this.

They just outsourced the same research, the same bat coronaviruses, the same bat studies, the same bat testing to Wuhan.

The teams worked together like this on the same research, but they got around, in this flimsy, superficial way, the Obama rule against experimenting on Gain of Function research, in the United States.

There were or are 11 labs in the US doing such research.

Investogator Brian O’Shea found Ralph Baric’s assistant’s CV. And it’s a long CV; Dr Ralph Baric’s own CVs have been largely scrubbed.

I’m going to show it to you because they didn’t scrub this one.

It is chock-full with evidence that Dr. Baric and his colleagues were doing gain-of-function research funded by the NIH, meaning, funded by Dr. Fauci.

Here is Dr Eric Donaldson:

It’s public still. And it says, “I am currently employed as a research assistant professor in the Department of Epidemiology, working in the lab of Dr. Ralph Baric.

“I am funded by the NIAID, Dr. Fauci’s agency, to conduct a study looking at the viruses in bats and studying how viruses cross the species barrier to emerge into new populations. In addition, I’m working with Dr. Baric to resurrect bat coronaviruses to determine the cross species transmission potential of a variety of novel coronaviruses identified in bats. I hope you can see this first paragraph really clearly.”

So in lay terms, Dr. Ralph Baric’s research assistant, Dr Eric Donaldson, is studying with him, resurrecting bat coronaviruses. They’re dormant, they’re not dangerous, but they scientists are resurrecting them to determine if and how they can cross species from bats to other species like humans.

He is also looking at how to create, through modeling, a design of vaccine strains for the virus that they are going to resurrect in bats. This is a 2019 CV. Everything, the whole nightmare of the year is 2020 to the present is in this paragraph in 2019 research associate.

“I worked in Dr. Ralph Baric’s lab from April 2008 through July 2009 as a research associate studying viral evolution and protein structure, as well as candidate vaccine strains.”

Here’s the funding, my friends. Pay close attention.

Screenshot this. Congresspeople, senators, please screenshot. We are on page four of Dr Eric Donaldson’s CV.

This belies Dr. Fauci’s claims that they did not fund gain-of-function research. Here is the gain-of-function research. It dates back to 2009. This is a grant for three hundred and one thousand dollars from NIH and NIAID:

“Metagenomic analysis of the virome of Eastern North American bats. The major goal of this project are to define the virome,” meaning viral environment, “of seven to ten different bat species that cohabitate in one roost in Maryland….” That’s one of the locations. “…to determine the viral population of each and define the role of orthologous receptors to viral cross-species transmission.”

“Bovine and porcine model systems generate an infectious clone of the virus to develop an animal model for norovirus infection.”

It hasn’t happened yet, but [this grant] certainly is about making infectious clones of viruses that allow human viruses to adapt to cow and pork viruses.

Dr Donaldson got nearly eighty thousand dollars for his team: “Structure-based superantigen vaccines for the prevention of childhood diarrhea. The major goals of this proposal are to use structural bioinformatics and computational biology to generate superantigen VLPs as candidate vaccine strains against noroviruses and all RNA viruses.” So they’re working, early on, on creating vaccines against viruses, including RNA viruses.

You hear the kind of precursor — the preamble — of where they eventually got to.

Here we go to “pending support.” And this is 2016. So things get really hot.

2011-2016. They’ve been working on this for nine years by the time COVID was launched. This is more than half a million dollars: five hundred and fifty five thousand dollars. NIH. There’s so much funding from Dr. Fauci for this team to do this:

“Development of nanosensor platform for SARS diagnosis. The goals of the proposal are to develop nanosensors that detect different coronaviruses and influenza viruses and test these under BSL-III conditions.” That’s a level of lab security. “The PI is a nanosensor expert, the director, with expertise in SARS vaccines. coronaviruses, and we will provide computational biology support and testing of the system with samples.”

So here, what you have from 2011 to 2016 is a proposal which was funded by the NIH for half a million dollars, to build something that would be a test. What seems like the purpose served later by the PCR test for SARS-CoV-2. You’re seeing the development of a test protocol: Can we find a way to get it to go from animals to humans? Can we find a way to test it?

All the elements of the industry that became the COVID virus, the COVID test, and the COVID vaccine, are all in embryonic form in this CV dating back to 2008, all funded by Dr. Fauci, NIH, NIAID.

Here we go. Things get even hotter.

Again, 2011 to 2016. “A multiple investigator R01 grant to the National Science Foundation: collaborative research defining the role of North American bats in virus evolution and dissemination within various habitats. The major goals of this proposal are to determine the viral populations in different bat species that share a common habitat in the Northeastern US. Determine viral trafficking between bats and different vertebrates.” So in lay language, this grant — and the numbers are getting much bigger — is $1.36 ,million dollars and change. Now they are studying viruses in different bat species, not far away - not in China — not somewhere nothing bad can happen to us - but in “the northeastern United States,” which is our most densely populated part of the country. New York, Philadelphia, Boston are in the northeastern U.S. They are going to determine how the viruses are transmitted. And they are going to develop modeling tools, computational tools, to prepare a response to “cross-species transmission events.”

Remember, the grants a few pages ago acknowledged that there as of yet is no cross-species transmission in the viruses which they are studying.

They were trying to figure out and formulate cross-species transmission a few grants ago.

Now, in this grant, which goes up to 2016 — and there is a somewhat astonishing fact about what Dr Donaldson was also doing in 2013-2016, at the end of this essay — they are asking for money to develop software to facilitate a “rapid response,” presumably by public health agencies, to cross-species transmission events — meaning from animals to humans — or maybe some animals to other animals, it’s not clear; but [the wording suggests] it can include animals to human.

When they started out with the smaller grants, they’re acknowledging [that this transmission in this case] doesn’t even exist. So at this point, it implies that they’re making progress, making sure that this bat coronavirus, which is really bad for bats, but hasn’t yet crossed over to humans, can cross over to humans or at least to other species.

And the grant asks that when it does, you’ll have the software — CDC, NIH will have the software - to track it and to tell everyone that it’s a giant public health emergency. It’s like watching a horror film.

Now here’s another R01 grant to the NIH. There are millions of dollars in funding here. I can’t believe Dr. Fauci lied to Congress about this.

There’s so many millions. We’re up to about three million now.

“Cross Species Emergence of Coronaviruses from Bats.” That’s the name of the grant. “This work builds upon our ARRA grants[…].”

See, the grants are building one upon the other, which allowed us to discover that they had made progress. The layter grant application would not exist if they hadn’t made progress.

If they didn’t go looking for the novel coronavirus in bats, it would have stayed in bats, never bothered anyone, the odds are.

“[…] which allowed us to discover a novel coronavirus in bats that is closely related to a human pathogen, human coronavirus [….] The major goals of the proposal are to characterize the coronaviruses found in bat species in the Northeastern United States, densely populated, by sequencing several bat fecal samples, [italics mine].”

They’re gathering bat feces. “[…]to determine the complete genomic sequences, isolate and or synthetically resurrect [meaning reproduce] them artificially.”

That’s the big money, and these three grants are the key grants so far. They’re running concurrently; it’s almost three million dollars.

I’m going to read it again: “Cross-species emergence of coronaviruses from bats.” This work started in 2011; so they may have been planning for this using these technologies almost a decade before COVID was announced to the world as a pandemic that had jumped from bats to humans.

“This work builds upon our ARRA grant, which allowed us to discover a novel coronavirus in bats that is closely related to a human pathogen, human coronavirus, to.

They’re saying, “Oh, look, we finally poked around in enough caves in the northeastern United States and analyzed enough bat feces that we collected from caves, to find a virus in bats, which is similar to a human virus.

And now we’re going to see if we can sequence the bat feces samples to find the genomic sequences — what it’s genetically made of — and then isolate and/or synthetically resurrect” — artificially reproduce — “these bat coronaviruses and assess the ability of these viruses to emerge into the human host by using orthologous receptors and homologous innate immune factors, such as interferon antagonists.”

The bat coronaviruses that are not so great for bats, in bat feces in caves in the Northeastern United States, are hanging out there, harmless to humans. This guy and his mentor Dr Ralph Baric and team at UNC, were funded by Dr. Fauci. Dr Fauci’s team was reading these grant proposals and saying, “hey, that’s a good idea; let’s fund that.: They were asking questions about this research, reading the research when it came in, asking for discussions to build on the research: “hey, go get that bat feces from the caves in the Northeast. Analyze it. See if you can reproduce its genomic sequence; see if you can copy it either organically or synthetically, and then assess -” there’s never been a more important sentence — “the ability of these viruses to emerge into the human host.

And here are some ways you can try to do it.”

The viruses weren’t emerging in the human host, you guys. They weren’t bothering the human host.

They didn’t have any contact with the human host.

And if they did, if someone was unfortunate enough to come in contact with infected bat feces in the Northeast or in Montana or Maryland, it wasn’t engineered to cause problems to humans.

This research showed the way to make a virus like that cause problems in humans. Here’s the DARPA “prophecy” grant. This is $1.76 million. Donaldson is one of the overseers of this grant:

“The major goals of the proposal are to characterize the coronavirus quasi-species using next generation sequencing to determine the variation of the population under normal in vitro, and in vivo. And then under various selective pressures, including monoclonal antibody neutralization and orthologous receptor switching to determine the evolutionary dynamics present in the population. These observations will then be used to determine which viral spike gene genotype spike give rise to novel phenotypes that can be used to measure binding to the receptor and or the antibody or both. The ultimate goal of this high risk grant is to provide an algorithm for predicting routes of coronavirus evolution in the future.”

Now I am not a scientist, but what jumps out at me in this paragraph is that this grant is looking at, “How would a coronavirus quasi-species — a subtype of coronavirus — act in the population?”

It’s not clear which population this is describing, but it could be human population. Is it bat population? Is it virus population? It’s not clear.

“These observations will then be used to determine which viral spike gene genotypes give rise to novel phenotypes that can be used to measure binding to the receptor.”

So what jumps out at me that requires more investigation by scientists, hopefully, is the word “spike.” And the action of binding to the receptor. Both those things came into play with both SARS-CoV-2, the virus, and the action of the vaccine.

I wonder why it’s a “high risk grant.” I don’t know what that means. The goal of this though seems to be to provide an algorithm for predicting routes of coronavirus evolution in populations in the future.

It’s not just this wave of infection, but, “What’s it going to do next?”

You remember in the messaging from NIH — “The virus is changing, it’s evolving, it’s Omicron, and it’s Delta, and it’s this and it’s that” — He’s saying, [as I understand], “We’ll create an algorithm to show you what a novel coronavirus with a viral spike as part of its action does not just now, but as it changes.”

Here are some of the publications that Donaldson, Eric Donaldson has been part of.

All the way back to 2010.

Donaldson was one of the co-authors of “Metagenomic analysis of the virome of three North American bat species: viral diversity between different bat species that share a common habitat.”

A decade before COVID, SARS-CoV-2 was announced to the world as a pandemic, Dr Eric Donaldson and his team were looking at the viromes, different viruses in the feces, of North American bat species. I can’t stress enough how dangerous that is, because these are viruses that are not bothering humans in densely populated North America.

Here’s Eric Donaldson looking at how coronavirus “infects, replicates, and produces progeny virions in human ciliated airway epithelial cell cultures.” It’s the Journal of Virology. He’s looking at how human coronaviruses, a certain kind, affect the cilia, which are the little tiny waving threads that move mucus out of the airways in lungs. You remember the importance and the impact of damage to the lungs by the SARS-CoV- two. So this guy was studying damage to the lungs from coronaviruses in 2010 - way back then.

Dr Ralph Baric is one of the co-authors.

Here we’ve got him with Dr Ralph Baric, 2009: “Successful vaccination strategies that protect aged mice from lethal influenza and lethal heterologous SARS-CoV challenge.” So back in 2010, Dr Eric Donaldson and Dr Ralph Baric and their team are looking at vaccination strategies for elderly mammals — elderly mice — to protect them from the flu and SARS-CoV, SARS-CoV coronaviruses.

You remember how carefully elders were identified as being at particular risk from SARS-CoV-2, and how vaccination was rolled out to protect elders in particular. And they’re doing [what looks like] the pre-research for that situation.

Dr Eric Donaldson and Dr Ralph Baric — 2010: “Escape from human monoclonal antibody neutralization in the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus spike glycoprotein.” They knew that or were investigating way back then if monoclonal antibodies could treat, as I read this, severe acute respiratory syndrome — breathing problems, pneumonia, lung issues — subsequent to coronavirus spike glycoprotein affecting the lungs.

And you can hear the echo of that with the rollout of SARS-CoV- 2.

This is about herd immunity, viral growth. This is relevant":

2008: Dr Eric Donaldson and Dr Ralph Baric: “Synthetic reconstruction of an infectious bat SARS-like coronavirus. Published. They had synthetically reconstructed an infectious bat SARS-like coronavirus in 2008.

Oh, my God.

Here’s Dr Eric Donaldson. This is making me cry. “The plasticity,” — meaning that you can change it around; It doesn’t mean ‘plastic’ — “of the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein receptor usage, dependence, evolution, and species specificity of both zoonotic and human tropic SARS coronavirus.”

So way back in 2008, they’re looking at the spike protein; how it can be changed, and its effect on the receptors; and also at zoonotic (animal-based) and human versions of it. This all, of course, will be hugely at play with SARS-CoV-2.

So the whole structure of SARS-CoV-2, the thing that made it most damaging, the spike protein, is already being identified in 2008, if not created.

Also, 2008: “Mechanisms of persistent and immune evasion in human populations”. That’s about another virus. This is a Donaldson and Baric: “Systemic assembly of a full length infectious clone of human coronavirus.”

I will read that again,.

“Systematic assembly of a full length infectious clone of human coronavirus.”

They were creating human coronaviruses in all the way back to 2008.

“…if humans are challenged by a zoonotic spillover from SARS-CoV- 2”.

So what I want to say here as an academic is that anyone who’s funding this team has known, for a decade before March 2020, all about these buolding blocks of research.

At that point the people funding it, who are Dr. Fauci and NIH and NIAID, show up on the world stage to say, “oh my God, there was a spillover!”

They knew for a decade intimately that Dr Baric, Dr Donaldson and their team were developing and weaponizing bat coronaviruses to see how they could cross over from animals to humans; and that they had identified the spike protein as the damaging part; and that they were creating projections about how it could play out in the human or mammalian populations.

This one - Donaldson and Baric — I’m literally going to cry:

“Synthetic reconstruction of zoonotic and early human SARS-CoV- two isolates that produce fatal disease in senescent mice.”

I’m going to read that again, you guys.

Baric and Donaldson and team” “Synthetic meaning artificial reconstruction of zoonotic meaning in animals and early human SARS-CoV- two isolates that produce fatal disease in senescent mice.”

They artificially reconstructed animal-based and early human-based SARS coronavirus isolates that are damaging enough to kill elderly mice. That’s what that means [as I read it].

And that’s way back to 2007.

So they’re taking elderly mice and studying them, and creating artificial reconstructions of zoonotic and early human SARS coronavirus isolates, that will kill these elderly mice; that will make those elderly mice so sick that they will die.

So again, their funders read these proposals.

The funders read the research as it’s being done.

They read the research summaries when they’re concluded.

They interview the scientists. If they give them more funding, especially, that means, do more, build on this.

The funders discuss with the scientists the direction of these experiments as they go along.

And this is over the course of a decade.

Dr. Fauci and his team were discussing these experiments and saying, yes, zero in here. Yes, build on that. What about the elderly mice, right?

The email exchanges between Dr. Fauci and this team has got to be revelatory.

But there is no way you’re going to get thirteen years of experimentation on the things that became COVID in 2020 without everyone funding this, knowing exactly what they were doing, and zeroing in to fine-tune it. See also “Covid 19 and Anthony Fauci Dossier” by David E. Martin for more.

I’m going to cry some more: 2008: Donaldson and Baric and their team:

“Mechanisms of zoonotic severe acute respiratory syndrome” — that means you can’t breathe, your lungs are shutting down.

“Coronavirus host range expansion in human airway epithelium.” So they’re experimenting on how animal-based coronaviruses affect human epithelia, which is the lining of the human lung.

Oh, my God. This is 2006:

“Donaldson and Baric: “Vaccine efficacy” — so they’re looking at vaccines. “Senscent” — meaning elderly — mice. “Challenged,” meaning infected or sick. “With recombinant SARS-CoV-2 bearing epidemic and zoonotic spike variants.”

Holy cow.

Back to 2006, they were making elderly mice sick with SARS-CoV viruses and teasing out the variants of the viruses that would have epidemic potential and that have spike in them, animal-based spike, which is the thing that makes SARS-CoV-2 so damaging.

This is really so heartbreaking. We’re almost done. Oh, my God.

“Construction and characterization of a civet cat-like SARS coronavirus.”

So they’re building artificial coronaviruses, as I understand this, that resemble or act like coronaviruses in the animal population. And then they’re tampering with them, and testing them on human lung lining cells — that’s epithelial cells — to see what happens; or making elderly mice sick with them; and then if the mice die they publish that result.

So —- look at this — they’re not looking at, “how do we heal”? What they’re looking at, it seems to me, is, how to make it kill.

It’s all aimed at the damage. and replicating the damage artificially.

And here we have coronavirus vaccine development way back to two thousand five. So what you’re seeing there is that the virus replication studies and the vaccine studies are going on exactly at the same time.

You roll out the virus, you’ve got the vaccine. They’re the same researchers.

And that is it for publications.

Now the presentations:

“Bats and white nose syndrome: searching for clues in the bat virome”.

“Computational design of super immunogen vaccines against rna viruses.”

“Understanding the role of viral trafficking between different bat species.”

So first they’re looking at, how does it go from bat species to bat species? And then: how does it go cross-species? How does it affect humans?

“Exploring the intersection of viral cross-species transmission and bat ecology.”

They’re looking at cross-species transmission a decade before COVID.

Eric Donaldson, Ralph Baric: Here we go.

“Recovering growth of a bat, SARS-like coronavirus,” 2008.

So they’ve been working on this for twelve years and they did it. Their work progressed. They achieved the grant objectives.

His number one reference: Dr Ralph Baric.

Brian points out when they looked for the bats, they only looked in China.

But think about it. They all knew.

Dr. Fauci knew. His whole team knew.

All the people who funded Eric Donaldson and Dr. Baric’s studies on bat coronaviruses going back to 2008, knew that there were bats being researched for infectious cross-species viruses in their feces in the Northeast, in Maryland and in Montana. Against the law, against Obama’s restriction on gain of function research.

Brian points out that Dr Donaldson wrote a Michael Crichton-type thriller in 2017.

It is called “The Seventh Extinction: The Genesis Project”:

“Plot overview: Dr. Victor Kraus, is a passionate wildlife ecologist, who spends years fighting global warming, habitat loss, and species extinction through science and policy. But he sees no meaningful purpose against humanity’s greed and overconsumption.

“Convinced that the only way to save the planet’s biodiversity is to drastically reduce the human population. He secretly develops and releases a highly lethal engineered virus designed to cull humanity down to roughly one billion people; called the Genesis Project, the seventh extinction event targeting Homo sapiens. The virus spreads globally triggering a catastrophic pandemic that kills billions and causes societal collapse, fear and chaos. In the midst of the apocalypse a Montana virologist working on a vaccine assembles an unlikely group of friends and allies to track down the increasingly brazen Victor, halt the virus’s spread or effects and attempt to save what remains of humankind.”

Where is Dr Eric Donaldson now, according to LinkedIn?

At the FDA.

Confoundingly, Donaldson has also been at the FDA, working on virology, since 2013.

• FDA remdesivir EUA review, May 2020 lists: “Eric F. Donaldson, Ph.D., Clinical Virology Reviewer.”

• FDA remdesivir NDA virology review, Sept. 17, 2020 lists: “Virology Reviewer: Eric F. Donaldson, Ph.D.”

• FDA Excellence in Review Science page lists “Eric Donaldson, PhD, CDER” in 2014. CDER is FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research.

• PubMed paper affiliation lists: “US Food and Drug Administration, Silver Spring, MD” and gives the email “Eric.Donaldson@fda.hhs.gov.”

But he was also working at UNC with Dr Baric, from 2013-2017 at least, and funded by NIH and other grantors.

How is that possible? Wouldn’t that be a conflict?

By what professional structure could that have happened?

What was he doing at the FDA in 2020-2023?

What is he up to now at the FDA?

Why did Dr Donaldson write a work of fiction in 2017, with the Genesis Project story line, about a weaponized virus that almost destroys humanity?

Can we ask him about all of this,

Under oath?

My incredibly stupid public question was this:

Of course, I was texting in haste, and I did not mean to post, “I have no idea that the light source in this image is the sun.”

Understandably, though, hundreds of thousands of people had a good chuckle at this obvious implication.

What I had meant to spark, with my clumsy post, was the start of a whole set of questions crowding my wondering mind at witnessing this extraordinary image: What is the angle of the sun’s light in this image — that is, where is the sun in relation to this face of the moon? Where is earth in relation to both? What does earth look like when the far side of the moon looks like this? What does the sun look like on earth when the far side of the moon looks like this? What does it mean for the moon when the sun lights up the “dark” or “far” side of the moon — that is, for how long at a time is the far side of the moon lit in this way? How is the light here so fairly evenly distributed, so that only a sliver of the moon is in shadow? In other words, in this image, where is the sun in relation to the moon and the other planets? And where is Artemis 2 in relation to the sun, the moon and the other planets, in this image? In order to secure this image, is Artemis 2 directly opposite the far side of the moon, and if so, where is the sun? And where, then, is the shadow of Artemis 2? Is it imperceptible? And so on.

What I really longed for was a schematic showing all of the planets involved in this image, and explaining the behavior of light in relation to them and to Artemis 2, in this image.

I also yearned for a long back-and-forth with patient astronomers, who might be willing to answer every single one of many questions that I and other non-astronomers may have had in this unfathomable, amazing moment — some questions of which might be basic indeed, to astronomers. Or even to lots of other people.

What an incredible opportunity for learning, the internet could present at such moments in human history — that is, if we could engage with it in a state of public, vulnerable wonder at things we do not yet understand, asking everything; and if we could engage it ourselves with patience with others who may be asking about things we do understand better than do they, or about subjects in which we are experts.

Sadly, that is not the digital commons that is being created over and around us now, and that we in turn co-create; rather, we are creating and supporting, and tolerating the construction of, an increasingly developed digital architecture of knowledge and even a digital collation and curation of “proper questions” and “right answers”, that is, I would argue, designed to subdue and imprison us.

Our knowledge practices now, both questions and answers, are being digitally herded into narrower and narrower avenues, with only one set of egress points, like formerly free-ranging cattle being herded into chutes before slaughter.

I would argue that this notion — of a canonical “right answer”, a “smart answer” to a “smart question” - threatens the end of actual wisdom and heralds the death of true intellectualism.

There are a lot of dangers right now, in the digital consolidation of who gets to ask questions, of what the questions “should” be, and of the production of “right answers”.

After hundreds of thousands of people had had a good laugh at my “stupid question” and had the satisfaction of pointing out to an Oxford D Phil that the source of the illumination was “the sun,”I posted this:

After my humble and transparent update, I received a great deal of support. A lot of people, it seemed, also miss a culture in which amateur human curiosity is okay. Many others kept trolling.

But in the midst of the reams of mocking comments, there were gems of patient illumination.

A friend who is a filmmaker who had trained with NASA, reached out via text:

“Hey, did you post something about the moon? Was that really you? If you have questions about the lighting on the far side, I did train for space.”

“I put my poorly phrased questions in a later post in context,” I replied via text. “I was trying to find out about the angle of the sun’s light in relation to various planets…Like, how is the moon in darkness and the earth 1/8 in sunlight? Where is the sun in relation to both? How is the whole moon illuminated at once? Wouldn’t there be a very short moment at which all is illuminated as with our noon? Even with our noon the whole half of the globe is not illuminated all at once I believe...How would Artemis 2 be opposite the moon at just the moment the whole moon is illuminated? Wouldn’t that be very improbable?

“Where is the sun’s angle as its rays reach the moon — I thought the moon shone from reflected light from the sun, not direct light?

“There is no gas or planetary shadow and no haze-like atmosphere, as on earth? Why not? Even without life there is dust and even “weather” on the moon, correct? Or no?

Not even wind or gases or dust?

Those are my main Qs…” I concluded.

“The whole moon isn’t illuminated,” responded my friend. “Half of it is. The lunar day is 28 earth days. Which means the line between night and day moves very slowly. The far side of the moon is not the dark side of the moon. But it is always the far side. I’m guessing they timed the launch so that it was day on the far side since their intention was to study the far side. Apollo btw landed at lunar dawn on the near side. For temperature reasons.”

“Right,” I replied. “I mean that the whole circle is illuminated in the image — the whole “half “ of the moon. Even with our noon the whole half of the globe is not illuminated all at once, I believe?”

“Half of earth is illuminated at all times,” explained he. “Think of a light and a ping pong ball. No matter where you move that ball in your room half of it will always be hit with light.”

“How would Artemis 2 be opposite the moon at just the moment the whole moon is illuminated? Isn’t that very improbable?” I asked.

“See above. I’m guessing they intentionally launched to arrive when the far side was in full day to study the far side’s craters.”

“So it must be the middle of the 28 day cycle? Where is the sun’s angle as its rays reach the moon? I thought the moon shone from reflected light from the sun, not direct light?”

“Direct sunlight hits the moon. What you are thinking about with ‘reflected’ is that on the near side at night it isn’t always pitch black because earth if lit up can cast an earth glow on the moon the way the moon casts a glow on earth at night when it is full (lit by the sun).”

“Really??! The earth can cast an earth glow?” I marveled.

“Re “There is no gas or planetary shadow and no haze…” No atmosphere on the moon. No wind. No dust (other than what is caused by men landing a rocket or meteor hitting the moon). No weather. Mars has weather and wind because it had an atmosphere. The moon has zero atmosphere,” explained my friend.

“Ok. Thank you very much. Amazing universe.”

“That’s the reason to go to space,” he texted. “So the rest of the world looks up and asks questions like yours.”

I pondered that inspiring sentence.

I concluded our exchange:

“Oh wow — thank you so much.

Glad I asked a stupid question on social media. :)”

*****

I learned so much, ultimately, from having asked a “stupid question” on social media. And interestingly, the main takeaway was not about the stars and planets themselves, but about the nature of humanity.

And I had the privilege of re-tasting childlike wonder at our universe.

But I fear the “stupid question” — the uncertain question, the vulnerable question, the open-ended question — is quickly and by design going the way of the Dodo.

I was very lucky in childhood; my parents raised me to be willing to ask any question and explore any issue, without hesitation, self-consciousness or anticipatory shame. If it was a thoughtless or ill-informed question, I would realize that soon enough for myself, when I received the answer. But blessedly, my parents, true educators, never ever pushed back on my, or my siblings’, curiosity.

This led, at least in my case, to a childhood that was sometimes weird. I was interested in what people ate in Chaucer’s time, for instance, so when I was about eight, my parents let me make an entire meal for the family, based on what I had been reading about meals in the Middle Ages. A skinned rabbit was involved — “jugged hare”, as I had read — which my matter-of-fact babysitter had helped me to braise, and it was an object which actually had horrified me.

The final meal was not delicious, but it was all definitely an educational experience.

On another day — probably a rainy day — I wanted to know what was inside a pillow. Feathers or foam? So my mom let me cut one open. (It was feathers, and they went everywhere).

My curiosity, at the age of about nine, about what would happen if I cut my own hair with scissors, led to a less successful experiment.

“You had these fancies that were taken from books,” explains my mom. “I thought you lived in the wrong century. You did a lot of experiments that involved water, and food coloring, and spices. You were trying to get it all to bubble…There was the famous bicarbonate of soda experiment…”

I was curious about Shakespeare, as another example, so my parents let us stay up late, leaping around the master bedroom. This room involved a couple of mattresses, covered with linens and scratchy grey-and-cream Mexican throws, on the floor of the attic of our old house. (Yes, my parents were hippies). My brother and I would act out the plays’ various roles.

Though he and I did not understand much of the text literally, we actually caught the drifts of, as I recall, both “The Taming of the Shrew”, and “The Tempest”, and got a lot more out of these performances than a sensible adult might think.

A vivid memory I have is that we both often collapsed in mid-performance into gales of laughter. Even without fully understanding the language, we both realized in performing the plays, that Shakespeare could be incredibly funny.

No one ever, ever said, “You can read that when you are older and you can understand it.”

My brother’s curiosity, about everything in sight, but tending toward a different set of questions, was also treated by our parents in an open-minded way. I became a writer and he became a scientist. But if my parents had scoffed at our questions, at any point, I don’t know if either of us would have taken the risks we did, intellectually, to reach our respective chosen professions.

The image of the moon produced via Artemis 2, had led me to a state of intense curiosity that brought me back to the crowded-with-questions mind-state of a child.

For children, all questions and all conditions are new; all the world, for them, must feel the way that seeing the first image of the far side of the moon, feels for us.

That is why children’s questions are often so moving and beautiful — if parents and other adults have the patience to hear the children’s questions out. And that is one reason it is so trippy and fantastic, as most of us can still recall, to be a wondering child.

If our parents and our schools did not crush that wonderment out of us too young, most of us can still remember our former “child’s mind”, and recall the crush of questions that crowded it, alongside all the amazing new phenomena we encountered in childhood.

Why is the sky blue? Why do clouds move? Why is water wet? Where do stars go in daytime?

Where does the butterfly go, as one beloved children’s book from my own childhood asked, when it rains?

At a certain point, tragically, most children learn to stop asking all the questions that they wish to ask.

They lose that “child’s mind” — or what Buddhists call, admiringly, describing anyone of any age who can retain it or attain it, “beginner’s mind”.

As we grow, most of us lay aside the open, vulnerable eagerness to ask every question we crave to ask, as we learn that there are “smart” questions and “stupid” questions, and that asking a stupid question is to be avoided at all costs.

The older we get, and, ironically, these days, sometimes the more formal or professional training we receive, the more self-conscious we can become about the risk and horror of asking “stupid questions.”

This socialization process was certainly ramped up by John D Rockefeller’s revamping of public education in the US’s Progressive Era, via his multi-million-dollar donations to the “General Education Board,” set up in 1903. Rockefeller’s goal was to create curricula to turn out passive, reliable workers in industry and agriculture.

This socialization, which still constructs public education, is meant to process people into being passive consumers of “authoritative statements” about what the world is and how it works, and to remain within set limits of human curiosity about it. A side effect — or main deliverable? Is a system that forms adults who are too often fearful when engaging with knowledge acquisition on their own terms, and are easily intimidated by “experts”, usually designated by elites or by the State, who instruct citizens to “know their places” in intellectual combat.

We certainly saw the damage done by this system, with the shocking lies told by “experts” and often successfully challenged by “amateurs”, during the “COVID era.”

The manufacture of passivity and intimidation about knowledge, is now being escalated by digital technologies and by a kind of colonization of information by elites.

AI, of course, is one major tool of this colonization. From what had been, pre-AI, a plethora of possible questions and possible answers — answers that may raise even more questions — human questioners now are faced with the deadliness of an optimal “good prompt” and a unitary “right answer.”

Many of those online who trolled my “stupid question”, mocked me for not having first “asked Grok” about light on the moon.

“Asking Grok” has quickly become the “authoritative” substitute for what used to be the civilized person’s task of wrestling with curiosity, assessing evidence, and engaging with complex issues.

If I had simply “asked Grok” about the light on the far side of the moon, that would have been that. The whole delicate dance of question, answer, followup question, followup answer, detour question, detour answer, and, most importantly of all, the gorgeous meandering process of wonderment in engagement with a new set of ideas, that my texted exchange with my filmmaker friend, represents — would never have taken place.

In “asking Grok”, a single door in the mind would have opened and clicked right shut by an output technology, not ever swinging open suggestively and beckoning to the human being, to lead him or her to other vistas glimpsed through other doors.

AI is often just a speedy encyclopedia; it usually distills what I call “the middle management of answers,” with inputs taken not from complex primary sources but disproportionately from the biggest legacy news sites.

As a result, askers are receiving the most conventional of conventional wisdom; forever, it seems, AI will present searchers with the news that I was guilty of “vaccine misinformation” — not because this is true, but because the legacy media sites that AI ingests, make this claim.

Another pressure against human curiosity, is a shift in training related to research, away from primary sources. When I was a fifteen-year-old taking AP History in 1978, I recall the thrill I felt when we were handed a packet of primary source historical material, including photocopies of letters in cursive from, if my memory serves, the Civil War; as well as military purchase lists; photographs of soldiers; and so on. We were asked to analyze this diverse set of documents, and write an essay presenting our conclusions about the era and the conflict, based on these primary sources.

Today, students are instructed, as in this “Using Sources” page, that .gov, nonprofit and peer-reviewed scientific articles, are the best “authoritative sources”. But the perils of relying blindly on such interpretive sources, are not presented to student researchers.

Indeed, formal education has created a newer cordon around primary sources. Today, American public school students are no longer even taught to read or write in cursive, which closes the door automatically on a world of primary source historical documents.

A Connecticut middle school English teacher, David Polochanin, reports to the NEA’s magazine, NEAToday.org, that cursive was removed from the curriculum in public schools by the 2010 Common Core requirements:

“[Before that], we would trace letters, write letters, things like that. It wasn’t the most mind-blowing instruction, but it was repeated practice,” he says. “Now I don’t think about it, because it’s not in the curriculum.”

“It was around 2012-13 that cursive began to fade from classrooms completely, as digital tools began to take over classrooms and students‘ lives. The Common Core State Standards, adopted in 2010, removed the requirement for cursive but added one for keyboarding. “Cursive was going the way of the penny,” says Polochanin.”

This removal of handwriting is a pedagogically inexplicable, but perhaps not politically inexplicable, omission from the education of our kids.

Learning to write by hand on paper has been part of core school curricula for all the centuries of the modern era. English cursive was developed in the 16th century. (An Oxford English Literature M Litt requirement in my era compelled graduate students in that field to master reading Elizabethan cursive handwriting, so that they themselves could decipher primary texts from that period.)

As others have noted, key documents in our own history, such as the Declaration of Independence, are handwritten in cursive:

By definition, removing the skill of writing cursive by hand on paper, and reading it, forces today’s students to be dependent on secondary (and on digital) sources in order to approach and seek to understand, let alone interpret, the past — including their own nation’s past, or the past of their own language’s literature.

This bizarre, disempowering omission also forces students to be dependent in their writing, on the same electronic devices that increasingly stand by to check, filter, restrict and in some countries even censor meaning. (My emails have started to propose AI edits that I never selected. Invariably these edits propose killing off exactly that which makes me a writer; in other words, AI-proposed edits in my gmail call attention to examples in my phrasing of what used to be called literary “style”, and always recommend condensing them into the language of a memo from a distributor of restaurant industry cleaning products.)

It’s not just reading and writing that are now being digitally managed; libraries themselves increasingly manage both the questions and the answers. Half of the exciting discoveries I made as a college student, were a result of my wandering around the “stacks”, the 16 physical stories of books that Yale’s incredible Sterling Library keeps on its utilitarian upper floors.

In a pre-digital libraries era, you don’t know what you don’t know til you walk down that aisle that smells of leather and glue and paper, and you reach up (or down) to a title of which you have never heard, but one whose just-glanced-at inner page somehow magically opens exactly the impenetrable door in your mind that had required a handle, a push and a way forward.

The economically more privileged students at Yale and Oxford Universities now have digital library resources, of course, but they also still have access to the magic of physical libraries.

My mostly working-class students, in contrast, in a class I taught on Victorian British poets at SUNY Stony Brook, who were as wonderful and talented and eager to learn as any Ivy Leaguers, were being subjected at the time I taught there, to a digital-forward renovation of the physical campus library, for “budget reasons”. Physical books are indeed more expensive to curate, but they are also far more subversive than are digital records, in which search itself, as I have explained in previous essays, is not a “free” or neutral algorithm, but is always directed by programmers. My heart broke for my students. This is their entry point for library search now:

My SUNY Stony Brook students were young adults who commuted, who also worked one or two jobs, and who often had to read the assignments on their phones. They did not have easy access to the luxury of wandering past a whole shelf of physical books that were not on the assignments, but were related to the subject we were discussing in class.

My SUNY Stony Brook students would read about pre-Raphaelite painter Edward Burne-Jones, in my class, on their digital platforms; but it was not easy for them to reach up casually to a physical art book reproducing Burne-Jones’ paintings, to run a hand along a glossy page; or to grab another book nearby in the physical stacks, to see, perhaps, Burne-Jones’ juvenilia sketches. As a result of their mostly-digital access to knowledge, it would be harder for them to wander into something important nearby, but not on, the assignment sheet, and not conditioned or limited by Google search results about Burne-Jones.

My students would often initially freeze with anxiety when I asked them open-ended discussion questions. (Happily, they got over this understandable reaction over time).

What was the “prompt”, they initially wondered?

What answer, they asked me finally, was I looking for?

The digital commons of knowledge to which they were often restricted, limited the sensuality of the learning experience for them and put a digital electronic fence around their encounters with the Victorian period. I think this technology reinforced the notion that there were limited “right” approaches to the subject matter.

In contrast, these are the Yale University physical “stacks” of Sterling Library — all sixteen floors:

I have noticed that upper middle class and wealthy young people in private schools and colleges, are still often being taught to think critically and to explore ideas in an open-ended way; but a beloved teenager in my family in a public middle school, is being “taught to the test”; he is being trained to produce “right answers”.

To me, this contrast in access to non-digital knowledge resources, in free access to digitally unmanaged or less-managed knowledge, is clearly part of the production of a two-tier class-based knowledge and inquiry system. Critical thinking training and open-ended discussion in classrooms are becoming managed luxuries, like square footage in apartments in the heart of cities.

I was very lucky to be educated at Yale and at Oxford, at the tail end of an era in which the process and dynamic of critical thinking — not an accumulation of “smart answers” — was actually the paramount value. Especially at Oxford, an intellectual tradition had been secured for centuries in which a student could and should ask any question, no matter how outre or unconventional, and explore it wherever it led; and he (later she) could make any argument, as long as the student (or “don”, or professor) was able to muster solid evidence.

Because of this tradition of true intellectualism, Oxford was famous for generations for its eccentrics; and because of it, too, Oxford was typically resistant to intellectual political correctness and dogma.

This freedom led to personal weirdness and intense creativity. It could also lead to howlers and dead ends. Rev William Archibald Spooner, warden of New College (my college) 1903-24, a distinguished classicist, regularly transposed words (metaphasis): “Yes indeed, the Lord is a shoving leopard (loving shepherd.)” It let Charles Dodgson, a mathematician and storyteller (and apparent pedophile, but that is another essay), conjure up a Wonderland, and a world Through the Looking Glass, in which dodos spoke and Cheshire cats disappeared and dormice fell asleep in teapots.

This tradition of eccentricity and free-range questioning allowed J R R Tolkien to imagine and communicate to the reading public a complete universe peopled with Hobbits; it let brilliant upstarts such as the young Oscar Wilde comment, after having bought lovely flower vases for his rooms at Magdalen College, that ‘“I find it harder and harder every day to live up to my blue china.’”

Wilde would soon overturn the certainties of his social world; confoundingly carrying a lily — or a sunflower — and by doing so, gesturing toward the credo of aestheticism that he and others were advocating.

The symbolism of this gesture was passionately debated; what was the answer? What did it mean?

It meant what was imagined for it.

When I was at Oxford, the tradition of wit and verbal exploration was still so prized that dinner table conversation was as intoxicating as a chemical stimulant, and as demanding as a marathon. Political correctness was not the goal; nor were set answers. To the contrary; the verbal journey was everything.

If there had been “stupid questions” or “improper subjects” at Oxford, during the two different eras in which I was a student there, that dazzling verbal and intellectual tradition would have been quenched before it could have drawn breath.

But I was so fortunate. There were no stupid questions. The were no improper questions. Anything at all was subject for wit, rigorous investigation, curiosity.

I’ll never forget my first oral exams. Feminist theory did not yet exist at Oxford, in the 1980s, and my proposed thesis at that time was based on emerging American feminist theory (that work eventually became my 1993 bestseller The Beauty Myth). I presented my argument about the role of physical beauty in 19th century British women’s novels, to the all-male evaluations panel.

There was a silence, and finally one of the dons said, in a heavy, plummy Mayfair drawl, “I wonder what Jane Austen’s faw-ther would have had to say.”

At the time, as a militant young feminist, I thought this was one of the stupidest comments I had ever heard. It certainly did not fit in with the “smart questions” or “smart answers” current at that time, of politically correct American feminist theory.

With age, though, I have become intrigued. It was a sexist comment, kind of, but it was also a true Oxford question.

What would Jane Austen’s father have had to say?

I wish to reclaim for humans, in opposition to machines, the ambiguity and wildness of all questions and the uncertainty and complexity and infinitude of all answers. If we don’t, we are more easily subjugated and ruled, not only by elites but by their machines.

I wish to reclaim these from the dead hand of totalitarian digital and online knowledge-accumulation, gamed knowledge-validation and coercive knowledge-distribution.

I wish for all the younger generations to inherit intact the imaginative pyrotechnics to which we pre digital “askers” had the right: of being permitted the process of intellectual exploration, rather than of being told to set a cognitive compass in one dull direction, and to plod along exactly in the direction that the tech has instructed.

May all those who seek knowledge, be spared the blight of being told simply to “ask Grok.”

May all who question, take Grok’s answers lightly and without submissiveness.

I wish for all young people looking for knowledge, wherever they may be, a limitless abundance of “smart” and “stupid” questions, to be brought to the world of inquiry honestly, nakedly, and with no fear.

I wish for all the students of the world, whoever they may be, less certainty, less anxiety, less inhibition and less fixedness.

I wish for us all, of whatever ages, to be students, whenever we wish, for our entire lives.

I wish for all the students of the present and of the future, in private or public schools and universities, physical books. I wish them physical libraries. I wish them stacks.

I wish them cursive.

I want for them all the courage they may need to push back at the algorithm.

I wish for them, if they seek them out, eccentricities of speech, and elegances of style, beyond and aside from what artificial intelligences will order up for them.

And I wish for them friends and colleagues in other disciplines, or with other sets of equally valid curiosities, in the event that they don’t have them now, and if they want them,

Who are human, and patient

And who will take the time to explain to them, the dark side of the moon.

I still need to tell you why I have been so frozen.

Yes, this is another “things I am afraid to write” essay.

To be a writer — to yield to that almost physical urging forward in speech and in time, to engage with that urge to express — you need to see humanity as being always in the process of creating a coherent civilization, to which you are adding your small piece of consciousness or critique, or even of hope.

You also need to see reality as being unitary.

In other words, in order to speak new ideas into being to a community of human readers, a writer needs to believe that we all, in spite of our differences and subjectivities, inhabit, in some essential way, a shared dimension of reality.

You also have to believe that reality is, well, real.

I’ve been feeling as if — I’ll just say it — as if reality is no longer that real.

So it is hard to write about anything else, without first somehow tackling this huge hermeneutical sh—storm. Even if only to ask questions about it.

I feel….increasingly….like the color palette of the earth, has shifted.

It makes me so sad that some days I hardly wish to do anything but mourn this fact, and exhaust my loved ones’ patience by endlessly pointing it out to them.

If you follow me on social media, you know that I am often posting images of the sky. There is a real thing that is being done to our skies — a set of technologies about which I have been reporting since 2017. Geoengineering is omnipresent; I can batter you into the ground with the onerous facts I have accumulated about this often-mocked reality.

Harvard, among other universities, funds it: the Harvard Solar Geoengineering Program, for just one example. Harvard also has a research investment group, the Keutsch Group, which funds the evil Dr David Keith’s program called ScopEx, or the “Stratospheric Controlled Perturbation Experiment.” (This project has been used to spray sulphur dioxide over Arizona from a Native American reservation. The venue was important as it allowed the scientists to circumvent laws against this in the United States.) The Carnegie Foundation also heavily funds geoengineering technologies, and exerts pressure for global governance (meaning, legalization): The Carnegie Climate Governance Initiative pushed for both Solar Radiation Modification and “Stratospheric Aerosol Injection.” The Foundation’s website is full of cartoon graphics showing how their efforts to spray pollutants and toxins in our skies, will save a sad planet, and make it happy.

Intellectual Ventures, the prestigious IP firm, holds patents: “Even commercial companies are starting to develop technologies for climate control. One such company, Intellectual Ventures in Bellevue, Washington, has filed for several patents for climate-altering technologies, among them a proposal known as StratoShield that would involve using a long hose suspended from balloons to waft sulphates into the atmosphere.”

Geoengineering takes many forms — from the practice of “cloudseeding” all over the West, which shoots silver iodide into clouds and drenches the landscape with this chemical that make fires burn hotter; to the “solar radiation management” activity mentioned above, which sprays sulphur dioxide, a pollutant, into the atmosphere from drones, planes or balloons. There is also “marine cloud brightening” technology, which pumps salts into the atmosphere via the emissions of ships at sea. Britain, which is being driven quickly into the graveyard of empires, announced that geoengineering was now to take place in order to block sunlight; British people in some areas report months without sunlight.

So people now post images of their perverse and hideous skies all over the world. More and more people are waking up to the fact that the skies we knew a couple of decades ago, are gone; and gone too are bees, insects, and golden sun.

But this essay is not about geoengineering. It is about fakeness. It is exploring the various factors that may be contributing to this sense I have — and that many other people are starting to express — of unreality.

Geoengineering puts a giant intervention, a screen, of fakeness onto the most sacred, most profound, most holy connection we have to our planet — our connection to weather, which is God’s speech and theatre; and to what both the Old and New Testament called “the kingdom of the skies.”

So — could the murder of God’s weather and light be one factor in this draining of the realness-feeling of the world?

The world’s colors went from showcasing lush green foliage — so green the green was at times blue-green or lime-green — sapphire skies in daylight — shafts of sun like melting gold, and ruby-colored flowers, and clouds like frolicking living cotton or, if the day was overcast, like surging, moving steel — to the daily this.

The dimensions of the world flattened along with the colors.

Dry grey, flat skies, two-dimensional as a roll of black-and-white film. Or wet, sodden-looking, grey, flat skies. A greyish pall over city streets, or, in the country, over hills and rivers. Formerly vibrant colors now look like a filter is over them, a faint charcoal wash.

The golden round sun of the recent past, which embraced us with all of its exuberance, is gone. The sun today? It no longer really cares about us. Can you imagine being a primitive human, and worshipping that thing? You’d as soon worship the Down button on an elevator.

What is that light in the sky, anyway? It feels like a cathode tube or an LED feature: a silver-white sun, now, weirdly pentagonal at times, and often targeted now with blurring, crisscrossing plane emissions. A sun that sometimes warms us still but never really holds us, never heals us down to our bones, as it used to.

I am not saying the sun is unreal. Don’t take my words out of context, please.

I am saying that it feels less real.

And it’s not just that the colors got switched off, or dialed down.

The thing is, I remember our world. This all would not hurt so much if I did not remember our world.

I remember what things felt like, til about June of 2020.

It’s not just that colors were far more saturated then.

It’s also that everything then still smelled like itself.

Grass smelled grasslike. Earth smelled earthy. If you held a pencil near your face, you could smell the eraser, the lead, the wood; the varnish on the wood. The scent of a pencil itself was complex. If you entered an old wooden house, you smelled the age of the wood, the years of wetness in it; the dust, the mold. Stones smelled like stones. Steel smelled metallic. Copper had a smell — pennies smelled like pennies. Every human being had a unique scent, for better or worse, that encircled him or her and that signaled to your brain that this was another human. Wool smelled like wool. Fruits — my God. Breaking open an orange used to unleash a heaven of citrus.

Now — and maybe some of this is part of aging, but really, this all came on so fast, I don’t think that that alone can explain all of this — most things barely smell like anything. When you do hold up a bunch of lilacs to your face, it feels as if someone behind the scenes somewhere — managing the matrix? — is switching on some kind of functionality: “Now, emit the scent of lilac.” While life “Before” involved a rolling tapestry of scents unfolding throughout your day, and humans enfolded you in scent continually as you passed them or spoke with them, now, if you think about it, you might experience just four or five strong or signature smells in the course of a day. Coffee! Cinnamon! A pet! Chinese food! Husband! Bath salts! But beyond those minimal markers, the flow of scents that made up human life experience — is no more.

Another thing that feels changed is dimension. The world “before” felt so solid. There was a sense of eternality to eternal structures. Forests, temples, skyscrapers — they had mass, volume, weight.

In contrast, things now seem — two-dimensional. Filmic.

You remember when you were fourteen or fifteen, and the second or third time you got high on marijuana, you suddenly felt: I am behind my eyes, but in front of my eyes I am watching a movie!

Remember that feeling?

I feel it all the time now, and I don’t want to, and I don’t take drugs.

I feel myself now moving through this world as if the world itself, the physical, material, historical world, exists still; but at the same time, now it is also somehow hypothetical.

It’s hard to get passionate about the hypothetical world.

I still feel the spirits of those I love near me, moving through this dreamlike world, but it is their energy mostly that I feel, their souls, their love; not the reality of their mortal presence in a real physical world, so much, as I used to.

It is as if we are all already physically dead, while still connected emotionally in some kind of moderately engaging afterlife; as if the images and scenarios of our living prior stories are still playing out, like spools of a movie reel; as if someone forgot to cut the film of our lives, and roll it up and put it away.

This sense of unreality is so strong that Brian and I have actually wondered — we had this discussion in the back of an Uber — if we had all shifted into a slightly different dimension, in what has been described by physicists as the infinite potential layers of dimensions, but one in which everything is slightly “off”, which possibility is an actual hypothesis in physics. Our driver, who could barely speak English but who had studied physics in his home country, was so ready to participate in this discussion that he joined in.

Honestly, I confess I have also even wondered about CERN, the Franco-Swiss particle physics research facility, with its Large Hadron Collider, a 27 kilometer ring of magnets that smash particles, located 175 meters underground. CERN’s own stated mission is even more unnerving than are conspiracy theories about the facility; and the organization acknowledges that it is daily pursuing experiments with the very material from which reality is constituted. I can’t help noticing that one of CERN’s new primary missions is “diversity.” I am all for diversity, but maybe not in replacing meritocracy, when a team is handling the essential nature of reality. Is it possible that our world vanished, and was replaced with something grimmer, because someone made a spectacular mistake, or took an “experiment” in an unsustainable direction?

Seriously, what happened to our world? To reality? All questions must be on the table.

I feel as if the “lockdowns”, especially for that year and a half from about June of 2020 to the end of 2021, may have caused the extinction or the diminution of the previous world. Maybe it’s not a physical change. Maybe, rather, culture changed physics, and they are inter-related.

I wonder about this.

Were we driven inside for eighteen months for a reason that had nothing to do with a virus — but that may have had something to do with an intention to tamper with reality? Or even with the occult?

Were we “locked down” for eighteen months and isolated from one another because those with the globalized, synchronized idea of “lockdown”, which they communicated in messaging that was replicated uniformly all over the world, knew, from some source unavailable to the rest of us, that separating us, and killing off our community and our rituals — might actually alter or suspend or drain life in some ways from the physical, material world?

Did it take eighteen months — for our world to die?

Here’s what I mean: we were separated from one another and forbidden to pray together, to sing together and to dance together. And when we eventually emerged, the world had changed, and its force field had weakened.

We also got tuned into screens for hours and hours more every day. And when we emerged, we began to carry our little screens with us everywhere.

What if this separation from one another, this murder of dance, music, prayer and ritual, and the substitution of screens for one another, a change that is still with us —

is what has changed our world?

In other words — what if the world needs our consciousness and attention to survive? What if, as the physicists and mystics have been trying to tell us, consciousness is, and affects, reality?

What if we reinforce the solidity and reality and beauty of the physical world, via dance, prayer, music, and attention to one another? What if ancient communities knew that, and knew how important it is, and we have forgotten?

And what if, when those last chords of connection were between us all were broken, the world broke too?

Many cultures have the notion that human as well as divine activity is needed to reinforce the presence and sustenance of the material world.

Every religion prays for rain, for instance, and sees the heavens as responding to human prayers. Many cultures believe that divine creators and human must interact with the landscape ritualistically, in order to bring blessings, harmony and even materiality into being:

“[M]any Chinese people still believe in "dragon lines" and feng shui. The Incas used "spirit-lines" or ceques with the Inca temple of the sun in Cuzco as their hub, marking the routes with wak’as, stone monuments that represent something revered. For the Aboriginal people of Australia, songlines, also called "dreaming tracks", are paths across land and sky, which mark the routes followed by localised "creator beings". The paths are recorded in traditional songs, stories, dance and painting; by singing these songs in sequences, indigenous people can navigate the deserts of Australia's interior.” In Australia, aboriginal people believe that creators’ active dreaming, brings order out of the void.

Orthodox Jews also believe that the world is sustained anew every day via God’s active choice to think it into being again, and that human supplication plays a role in this sustaining of reality. When you wake up, you are supposed to pray, “Blessed are you, Oh Lord our God, who in your great mercy has returned my spirit to me.” God had a choice about this.

It’s not only marking the landscape ritualistically and worshipping in specific sacred locations that many cultures believe orders and reinforces the material world; it is also that certain kinds of music and dance play a role in sustaining the planet’s wellbeing. Almost every culture has a circle dance that has sacred qualities; in Native American cultures, this is called the “Round Dance”.

South Koreans have Gangangsullae, danced for a bountiful harvest:

The Dabke dance is common in Lebanon, Syria and Palestine:

Many cultures have dances that weaves humans into patterns of a collective, such as cowboy line dances, or Scottish reels. One could go on and on.

The point is, for eighteen months we were forbidden from dancing in these ways, or walking in these ways together, or praying in these ways together. Instead our attention was redirected into screens that substituted fake reality for lived reality.

What if all those changes — the suspension of human interaction and ritual, and the imposition of a device sucking up and coralling human attention toward fakeness — meant that reality itself was affected?

What if it takes attention — to the land, to one another, to God — to sustain the earth and its solidity and dimensionality?

What if destroying that attention, that ritual — was the point?

What if the rituals we were forbidden to engage for 18 months — the churches and synagogues we were forbidden to attend — the church bells we did not ring — really do something in harmonizing reality?

We could not dance. But, recall, the nurses danced. Millions of dollars or euros must have gone to coordinating and shooting those scores of “dancing nurses” spectacles. Why? Who invested in that elaborate phenomenon? Did anti-human group dance have a power that changed the world for the worse, especially while sacred dance and song were banned?

I recently found myself attending a women’s sacred circle at an event space on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. I thought we might just meditate, or have a sound bath, enjoy some herbal tea — I was anticipating something familiar, benign and relaxing.

But I soon found that I was in the midst of a rigorous act of ritual derived from a tradition alien to mine.

The group was led by a Bulgarian teacher, who had trained in a mystical tradition founded in 1897 by Bulgarian theologian Peter Deunov. (This group still gathers annually in August in the Rila mountains, to bring “light and peace” to the world via their “Bulgarian tai chi” practice.) This teacher taught the group of New York women at the event space, “paneurhythmic” steps and movements, in a circle dance.

I found I could not keep up with the circle dance, due to an injury, and excused myself to sit outside the group. But the teacher insisted I rejoin the group, and said that since I could not dance with the group, I should lie down and, as she put it, they would heal me.

I did not want to cause a scene, so I lay with some apprehension parallel to the altar in the center of the room. (I had just finished reading Numbers 26, about the horrible things that happen when people worship at alien altars, so I was especially jumpy).

This altar had a lit flame; some yarn encircling it; some wishes and intentions written on scraps of paper; milk in a carafe; and other offerings that I do not recall.

It was not the right setting for me, to say the least. I was increasingly uneasy. I was lying on the floor surrounded by dancing strangers. It was a little scary. As I looked up at the group, I joked nervously, “Are you going to sacrifice me now?”

I wanted to dismiss what I was experiencing as silly or meaningless. But I couldn’t. I became extremely nervous and uncomfortable because something was definitely happening - to the air, to the room, to the relationships, to material reality.

I could feel, as the women danced in semidarkness in a circle, the intensity of the energy that concentrated itself in the center of the group, and built up around the altar.

I could feel the isolated individuals, who had not even spoken to one another, merge energies, and become one thing, one entity, one community.

But my point is that, even though this was an experience that unsettled and upset me, the circle dance, the altar, the movements, the offerings — clearly did something.

They did something real. Reality was moved, was changed. The circle dance did order energies and change things. It did not evoke energies with which I was comfortable, but the point is, it evoked energies. So did those anti-human dancing nurses also evoke energies?

Did the old world get destroyed because no one danced sacred dances, or gather to pray?

I have been to two places in which the old world still survives. One was Delhi, in India. I was overjoyed from the moment I got off the plane, in 2024; overjoyed every minute I was in that country — delirious with happiness in Agra, in Jaipur. The colors were as I remembered from the prior world; the light, the warmth of the sun, and even the smells were rich and intoxicating.

India is a country in which ritual, music and dance are part of everyone’s daily life. The country also did not “lock down” “successfully” for long, compared to other nations in the West that are now besieged with “the sense of unreality”; by June of 2020, many venues and institutions in India were open.

I also experienced the sense that the “old world” survived in, of all places, Houston, Texas. I went there recently for the Rodeo; a completely different setting, of course, than are the cities of India’s Golden Triangle; but the Old World had survived. The earth released its scents; the clouds released rain that smelled like rain; people laughed; couples of all ages did the two-step, and danced in line dances, in bars; crowds had human solidity and physical warmth; the vibrations of everything were solid and steady. The only guess I can make about all this is that people are still very religious in Houston, and very community-oriented, and that they ended “lockdowns” and all COVID restrictions before other states — Mar 2021; that they still pray and talk to each other and go to the rodeo - that is, join collectively together — and they still dance.

But truly all this is just a guess and a wonderment.

Brian and I talk about the hypotheticals of this sense of unreality that is so pervasive outside of those joyful islands. It is a pervasive enough feeling that both of us — and some of our friends — try to talk about it too.

Does the world host different dimensions, different layers of reality?

Has the “old world” been destroyed for much of the world, to survive in certain blessed locations? Is that too a function of consciousness?

Of course, we lack a specific language. But maybe physics has the answer. If consciousness is reality, then by tampering with human attention and connection, as the “lockdowners” systematically did, evil people who likely know more than we do about occult or metaphysical mysteries — you may actually damage reality.

Maybe — maybe — understanding all that — if there is indeed any truth to this hypothesis, which I can’t presume to know — means we can bring the old world back —

Dancing, praying, gathering; putting down our phones, and looking into one another’s eyes.

Maybe we can dance, pray, sing, and love, the old world back.

“Hadley Ott joins Outspoken with Naomi Wolf to share his powerful journey from a decade of battling Crohn’s disease through conventional treatments to finding freedom through nutrition, fitness, and faith. Diagnosed at just 12 years old, Hadley spent years cycling through symptoms and standard medical care before discovering a different path while in college. Now a Tennessee-based author and former Trump administration staffer, he’s releasing his first book aimed at helping young people take control of autoimmune disease naturally.”

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“Hadley Ott joins Outspoken with Naomi Wolf to share his powerful journey from a decade of battling Crohn’s disease through conventional treatments to finding freedom through nutrition, fitness, and faith. Diagnosed at just 12 years old, Hadley spent years cycling through symptoms and standard medical care before discovering a different path while in college. Now a Tennessee-based author and former Trump administration staffer, he’s releasing his first book aimed at helping young people take control of autoimmune disease naturally.”

Watch Now:

Support independent journalism that challenges the narrative—help power DailyClout by donating today: Donate Here - https://www.paypal.com/donate/?hosted_button_id=H66YAR8RY38YJ

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