If you're like me, you associated the name Naomi Wolf with feminism and the book "The Beauty Myth". Back in the 1990s "The Beauty Myth" was a landmark book and Naomi Wolf was probably the single most visible feminist author of the era.
But Naomi Wolf has fallen on hard times.
In 2012 she published a book called "Vag1na: The New Biography". Full of shoddy neuroscience, pseudoscience, and mystic woo-woo, reviewers couldn't tell if it was intended to be serious or satire.
In 2014 things took a darker turn as Wolf
claimed that ISIS videos depicting the murder of western journalists were hoaxes staged using crisis actors. And in what can now be called foreshadowing, she
claimed that the US government was planning to bring Ebola to the United States as a pretext for implementing martial law.In 2019, Wolf published a new book, called Outrages, about the historical persecution of gay people. It was immediately pulled off the shelves by its publisher, after a disastrous BBC interview in which a historian explained to Wolf that her information was based on a serious misunderstanding of historical record-keeping in Britain. After some corrections, the book was unceremoniously rereleased in 2020, and was once again declared to be full of false information by historians.
In 2021, a look through Wolf's Twitter feed reveals that she is in full tinfoil hat mode. Mixed in with a litany of anti-mask, anti-lockdown post, one finds posts relating to nanotechnology, biotech, and the new mRNA vaccines. The heart of it is this: Moderna published some information to explain how mRNA vaccines work in layman's terms-- likening it to a new operating system for a computer... and Wolf has interpreted this quite literally: she believes that the vaccines are quite literally going to take control of our bodies. Last week she produced a video to "sound the alarm" over this. It was declared dangerous medical misinformation and removed from Twitter, Facebook, Vimeo, and every other platform she attempted to share it on.
There are a lot of morons on the internet, but what makes Naomi Wolf different from most is that people probably think she's still the respected author from the 1990s, not the unhinged dingbat she has turned into. Her once-respected name might give her wacky ideas more attention than she deserves.
-k