I love my new home state. Every day, I find something new to love about it. But last weekend, I got a glaring reminder that Oregon isn’t a utopian paradise. A COVID conspiracy theorist named Naomi Wolf got into a huge fight over COVID restrictions with the Black owner of a restaurant in a small town called Salem. Since then, the owner’s restaurant has been dealing with constant–and increasingly racist–attacks from other conspiracy theorists. I’m not surprised. Conspiracy theories and racism go together like filthy apartments and roaches. But I am surprised at who got entangled with these racist conspiracy theorists: Naomi Wolf. She used to be a feminist icon. Nowadays, though, things look a lot different.
(This post originally appeared on Patreon on August 2, 2022. To get early access to posts, please consider becoming a patron! See links at the end of this post to get started — and thank you!)
Introduction
Hello, everyone, and welcome back! Definitely glad to be here. This weekend, the heatwave finally broke, and I’ve been luxuriating in the fine weather. It still gets uncomfortably warm in the late afternoon, but that’s why we have air conditioning. Whew!
Bother has been especially enjoying all the noises outside in the morning. I don’t mean traffic, really. We don’t face major streets or anything. But we do face a lot of gorgeous trees and bushes, which host their own wildlife. So every morning for a while now, we’ve opened the patio door to get fresh air through the screen door. And Bother parks her little rump right there and watches all the birds and squirrels go past. If one squeaks or trills outside, she’s back there in moments trying to figure out what it was. Back in Idaho, there weren’t a lot of things for her to look at. This has been a very heartwarming change.
Also, we have seen a few spiders. Since Mr. C hasn’t figured out what ones might be problems for humans, we’ve had to deal firmly with them. In a few days, we’ll have a better handle on identifying them. Helpful spiders will be sent outside to go live in peace and contentment in nature.
I’m actually pretty chill with spiders as a concept. I am not chill at all with spiders climbing the ceiling right above my head. My chill evaporates pretty quickly then. But I like appreciate what spiders do to keep homes free of bugs. And some are very pretty.
Also, I made sourdough bread this morning and it was SO GOOD. The Beast roars again!
Before we get started on today’s topic, thank you to all of my patrons and supporters! These posts happen because of your help. If you aren’t one of them yet and you’d like to join them, check out the end of the post for some suggestions. Thanks for whatever you decide to do!
And now, let’s try to figure out why a feminist icon became a COVID conspiracy theorist with tons of racist attack poodles.
Naomi Wolf: Feminist icon
Back in the 1990s, Naomi Wolf was a very big name in feminism. In 1991, she published a book that many women read with great interest: The Beauty Myth. Basically, the book suggested that a culturally-constructed concept of “beauty” ruled women’s lives–and wrecked them as well, since most women can’t live up to that construct’s demands. Moreover, the more equality women achieve in the public and home spheres, the worse the construct’s demands get, the harder it gets to fulfill them, and the worse women get punished for failing to do so.
On the whole, the book had a lot of good ideas. Just my description above makes perfect sense, right? And it did to us then too. I’d go so far as to say that most people today subscribe to something like that. For years, women have been questioning which of that construct’s demands they want to (and can) fulfill, and then they try to make peace with whatever’s left over.
However, Naomi Wolf undermined herself by not being more rigorous with her factual claims. Almost everything she claimed in terms of numbers, correlations/causations, links between data points, and quantities turned out to be weak (if not outright wrong).
Even other big-name feminists criticized her for that.
Naomi Wolf is what happens when someone doesn’t learn from their mistakes
As far as I can tell, Naomi Wolf learned nothing from the criticisms of her landmark first book. She went on to publish other feminist books, all of which suffered from the same sorts of flaws.
Then, in 2019, she faced a deep humiliation. Her new book was about to see American publication: Outrages: Sex, Censorship, and the Criminalization of Love. It’d already been published in the United Kingdom (UK). The book examined homosexuality in terms of sex work and book censorship.
And she made a whole lot of huge factual errors in it.
By far the most glaring error was her interpretation of the phrase “death recorded.” She took it to mean that the defendant in a trial had actually been sentenced to death and then put to death. In reality, it means that the judge asked for a sentence of death to be recorded, but was actually planning to release the prisoner or give them a lesser sentence.
She also didn’t seem to know that until very recently, sodomy as a term covered a whole bunch of sex acts, not just specifically anal sex between two men.
When you try to shoehorn facts into an erroneous claim made in print, someone’s gonna notice
At the time, I remember reading reviews of the book, like this great one (archive) that describes a lot of other similar errors Wolf made. I remember thinking: Wow, this is exactly how evangelicals make most of their mistakes with the Bible.
Evangelicals don’t know much about 1st-century Judean/Jewish culture, so they just make guesses. That’s how they can end up having an “unforgivable sin” that can never, ever be erased from their records, yet no idea what that offense actually looks like.
In the end, her American publisher canceled the book’s publication. The British one, Virago, had already published it, but they withdrew it, helped her tidy up some errors in the manuscript, and republished it in February 2021–to yet more intense criticism of its scholarship.
But Naomi Wolf refused to concede that she’d made any errors:
In a statement to the Guardian, Wolf said her book had been reviewed and checked by “leading scholars” prior to publication and “it is clear that I have accurately represented the position”.
In the face of that bees-headed stubbornness, Virago had no real choice but to insist that they were “satisfied that Naomi Wolf had her book checked by scholars of the period.”
(The Amazon reviews are not kind to the book. It doesn’t seem like most readers agree with Virago there.)
In short, Naomi Wolf doesn’t seem to like doing her research. Nor does she seem really hung up on fact-checking her work. If it feels right, then it might as well be right. Worse, critics pointed out, she was not above quote-mining and cherry-picking sources to support her arguments, just like Creationists do when sources don’t support their claims.
Naomi Wolf: Weird rape apologist
In 2010, Naomi Wolf inserted herself into the Julian Assange/WikiLeaks international crisis. WikiLeaks, which Assange helped start, is a repository for all kinds of leaked files from governments, corporations, and even churches. At one point, you could even get a copy of Kent Hovind’s hilariously bad dissertation from there, though the links don’t seem to work anymore.
For years, WikiLeaks had been annoying the United States government by releasing all kinds of files that were supposed to be secret. In particular, WikiLeaks released Collateral Murder in April 2010. This infamous video showed American soldiers shooting civilians to death in Iraq.
While all this was happening, Assange was traveling around. In August 2010, he found himself in Sweden. There, two women brought accusations against him of rape and molestation. The ensuing investigation sounds like it was a mess, but an Australian site seems sure that he left Sweden in “early November” with the Swedish government’s permission. Then, in November 2010, Interpol issued a worldwide wanted notice for him, while the United States began its own investigation of potential violations of espionage laws.
The WikiLeaks furor mixed and melded with the Swedish rape/molestation charges. Many felt that somehow, the sex charges were a way to get Assange into someone’s custody.
Out of every single thing that a onetime noted feminist author could possibly have done as a response to this whole situation, writing a snide scare-quotes “letter” to Interpol to scold them for acting like the “world’s dating police” might be the last on the list. In this “letter,” Wolf accused Assange’s accusers of feministing all wrong, and she asserted that they were just disappointed with his behavior out of bed. It was a really gross read.
Naomi Wolf: Secret government fascist takeover conspiracy theorist
This current conspiracy theory wasn’t her first one. In 2013, she made news with wild claims about banks colluding with the American government to bring about actual fascism. These claims connected to her new book, one about neither feminism nor LGBTQ rights. In her new book The End of America, she made a lot of comparisons of America to actual Nazi (and pre-Nazi) Germany. As The Atlantic explains, none of those comparisons turned out to be valid.
Earlier, in 2012, she insisted that Any Day Now™, our government would be attacking its own citizens with drones. But this book went way further.
Unsurprisingly, The Atlantic tore the book apart for its many glaring errors, reckless disregard for the truth, and its author’s own sloppy reasoning:
In her bestselling book The End of America, Wolf does not merely distort her evidence to fit her theses; she thoroughly twists its meaning and ignores its context. . .
In her various books, articles, and public speeches, Wolf has demonstrated recurring disregard for the historical record and consistently mutilated the truth with selective and ultimately deceptive use of her sources.
I keep wondering what might have happened if a good editor had gotten to manage her. Her sloppiness and willingness to bend and distort facts just got worse and worse.
And now, the COVID denialist saga
There’s more, lots more, including wackadoo conspiracy theories about Edward Snowden, Islamic State, Occupy Wall Street. But for now, let’s fast forward to about December 2020.
That’s when Naomi Wolf, according to Fox News, tweeted this:
If I’d known Biden was open to lockdowns as he now states, which is something historically unprecedented in any pandemic and a terrifying practice, one that won’t ever end because elites love it. I would never have voted for him.
Whoa. That sure caught the eye of the talking heads at that network. She appeared on Tucker Carlson’s show the next February (2021) to lament the government’s response to the pandemic. Namely, she was deeply upset about lockdowns, vaccine rules, and mask mandates.
Remember that End of America book? If anything, she was more certain than ever of her fake facts and twisted, distorted trains of thought. The Fox interview contains a number of references to that book’s ideas. At one point, she told Carlson this (and I’m sure he responded with that blankly-confuzzled expression that is his trademark, the one that always reminds me of a beagle watching a magic trick):
You know, I’ve interviewed doctors, I’ve interviewed, you know, ordinary people, restaurant owners from all walks of life, who are absolutely unable to even articulate their fear and horror, recognizing that the State has now crushed businesses, kept us from gathering in free assembly to worship, as the First Amendment provides, is invading our bodies, as you mentioned, which is a violation of the Fourth Amendment, is restricting movement, fining us here in New York State, I could be fined $15,000.00 a day, if I gather people, you know, more than 10 or 25 people, depending on where in New York State I live.
Just wow.
If anything, this interview only emboldened her to blather more misinformation about the COVID-19 vaccine in particular.
Oh! What’s this? The completely understandable consequences of her own actions?
By June 2021, the BBC tells us, she made increasingly disjointed and wackadoodle claims about the COVID-19 vaccine.
She told her 140k followers that vaccines were “a software platform that can receive uploads.” She compared Dr. Anthony Fauci to literally Satan. And shockingly, she claimed that the urine and feces from vaccinated people had to be separated from that of the general public because the government wanted to do more testing on it. The reason for this testing, apparently, was to find out what effects it’d have on unvaccinated people. She didn’t elaborate on how this urine and feces would get anywhere near unvaccinated people. Nor did she outline how the government knew which urine and feces belonged to which group.
And apparently she was telling her followers this. [Archive screenshot.]
Terrifying. Also confirms/explains a conversation I overheard in a restaurant in Manhattan 2 years ago in which an Apple employee was boasting about attending a top secret demo: they had a new tech to deliver vaccines w nanopatticles [sp] that let you travel back in time. Not kidding.
Really, though, her followers didn’t need to know any details. She was telling them what they wanted to hear, and that is what mattered to them.
But Twitter had had enough. They suspended her account.
Naomi Wolf fled to Gettr
That’s fine. She headed for Gettr, joining in July 2021.
Gettr is like Twitter, except for conspiracy theorists, Trump-idolizers, gun nuts, Christian nationalists, fundagelical zealots, and other such people whose beliefs rarely tether to reality. (Not that there isn’t a whole lot of overlap between each category.) They have very low standards for their users, so she could spread her false claims to her heart’s content.
And oh boy does she ever like to spread false claims. I skimmed through it, and it seems to contain nothing but COVID denialism and false vaccine claims. There does not appear to be a single conspiracy theory about COVID that she does not already embrace wholeheartedly.
I could only go back as far as the beginning of July, though, and I really wanted to go back further than that.
Specifically, I wanted to see why she was in Salem, Oregon in late June. Everything I’d seen indicated she lived elsewhere. But she was in Oregon in late June.
You knew we were getting to that visit, right? You know me. I like to set the stage.
On Gettr, I could see some mention of her floating around that part of Oregon at the end of July, so maybe this was just part of an extended visit. Apparently, she was giving anti-vaxxer speeches at various places.
Finally, I found what I needed.
How quickly Naomi Wolf changed her tune about restaurateurs!
In that February 2021 interview with Tucker Carlson (relink), Naomi Wolf had positioned herself as being super-sympathetic to restaurant owners, whose right to run their place the way they wanted was being threatened by pandemic rules. She sounded really concerned about it too–just take a look:
I’ve talked to restaurant owners who are looking at a sector in which tens of thousands of small businesses have been crushed, and why were they crushed? Not because the pandemic forced them to, there is no real science underlying a lot of these closures.
It’s because autocratic tyrants at the State and now the national level, are creating a kind of merger of corporate power and government power, which is really characteristic of Italian fascism in the 20s. And they are using that to engage in kind of emergency orders that simply strip us of our rights: rights to property, rights to assembly, rights to worship, and all of the rights that our Constitution guarantees.
But on June 30, she was walking around Salem, Oregon when she saw a restaurant that had pandemic rules posted, along with lots of Black Lives Matter and anti-racism posters.
And she decided to make a big scene about those rules and then post the results to Gettr. After all, fuck that restaurant owners’ rights, their livelihood, and their own decisions about how they want to run their own place! None of that mattered, all of a sudden.
Queen Naomi, you see, had decided to make an example of them.
(Gosh, I wonder why her opinion changed so quickly and completely?)
Attacking Epilogue
Epilogue is a Black-owned restaurant in Salem. Its food looks absolutely mouth-watering. A local news site quotes one of the owners, Jonathan Jones, as saying their menu “draws inspiration from the Black diaspora.” So the menu features dishes like rabbit confit with jerk spices, or sauteed port-finished mushrooms with cherry jam. (Oh man, I am making myself hungry!)
At the bottom of their menu site, the owners provide a great many resources for learning and activism.
Notably, the owners of Epilogue have clearly-posted pandemic rules: vaccinated people can dine inside the restaurant, while those lacking vaccination cards must dine in the outdoor seating area. It’s pretty easy to understand this rule, and I bet a lot of the town’s restaurants do something similar.
Again, I’ve got no idea why Naomi Wolf was even in the area. It doesn’t sound like she actually wanted to eat at Epilogue. She just saw their pandemic rules posted and realized she could start a big huge drama with herself at its center.
As Jones put it himself, “So she walked by, saw our signs — she decided that that meant that she needed to cause a scene.” She extensively argued with the two employees there, who kept asking her to leave.
I am just gobstopped at this next bit: She tried to tell the Epilogue employees that they were totally discriminating against her as a defiantly-unvaccinated plague rat. I’d have paid money to have seen the looks on the employees’ faces when they heard that!
After making her big scene, she still hadn’t gotten the full hit of sweet, sweet attention she craved, so she posted what she’d done to Gettr.
The flying attack poodles set forth
Very quickly, comments came flying on the Gettr post. One early commenter referred to the restaurant staff and owners as “animals.” Other commenters use a lot of other similar insults, often in the same breath as offering up prayers–and blessings to Naomi Wolf for being so daring and brave.
And I don’t think it took more than about 20 comments for someone to say something racist–nor much longer for commenters to paint themselves as Jews living in Nazi-ruled ghettos for refusing to get a vaccine that has been consistently shown to work.
Additionally, many commenters hinted that they’d be leaving fake reviews about Epilogue on restaurant review sites, while others proposed harassing the owners with texts and calls. A few even fantasized about the violence they’d have committed had the employees talked to them that way.
All these lovely Christians flooded the restaurant’s review pages with about 150 fake negative reviews on Yelp and Google. Thankfully, Yelp has already stepped in to help. This is the screen I saw when I checked out their listing:
These lovely TRUE CHRISTIANS™ also made about 75 fake reservations, often with evangelical culture-warrior dogwhistle terms like “Let’s Go Brandon” as names. (That phrase has the same cadence as “fuck Joe Biden,” so these Christians think it’s howlingly funny and oh so sly.)
And many Christian conspiracy theorists called and emailed the restaurant owners to share their sickening thoughts. A great many of these messages, like all the rest of the communications, included racist content.
I’m sure nobody’s surprised there.
What’s next for Naomi Wolf?
I just don’t even know what to think about this whole situation. Naomi Wolf has fallen so, so, so far from my earliest estimation of her that I’m seriously thinking that she was always this irrational and hatful and narcissistic.
Her first book, The Beauty Myth, is widely regarded as her best one. Maybe it was the best simply because she worked the hardest on it–or had an editor or manager forcing her to work the hardest on it–to correct for her problems in writing.
Even then, her fact-checking and distortions were glaring issues. But the book was allowed into publication, and kept in publication despite its serious flaws. Nobody held her back or stopped her or penalized her for any of them.
So she kept doing all of that stuff. She never learned from those early mistakes. She only got worse and worse, until now she is a caricature of the image of her earliest public-facing persona.
I’ve heard her next book will be about transgender people. Ouch. In November 2020, she didn’t seem too regressive on that score, but who knows what she thinks now. She sure changed her mind quickly about restaurant owners!
To me, then, Naomi Wolf is both an alarming addition to the alt-right conservative Christian nationalist conspiracy theory circus, but also a cautionary tale about the importance of fact-checking one’s writing and worldview. We must tether to reality, no matter what. When we stop tethering to reality, we turn into wingnuts–like Naomi Wolf.
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