The once prominent 3rd wave feminist and Bill Clinton advisor who now frequents Steve Bannon's "Warroom" to raise money against mask laws and vaccinations — Naomi Wolf is this week's subject. Annie Kelly writes a love letter to this latest victim of Twitter cancel culture.
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Welcome, listener, to Premium Chapter 128 of the QAnon Anonymous Podcast, the Naomi Wolf episode.
As always, we are your hosts, Julian Field, Annie Kelly, and Liv Agar.
Today, we'll be detailing the marvelous adventures of Naomi Rebecca Wolf, a third-wave feminist turned political advisor to the Clinton and Gore campaigns.
Wolf's Twitter account was recently terminated after a prolonged stint of activism, this time entirely related to her views about the COVID-19 virus and various official measures used to combat it.
The result is that Wolf's name now comes up in pro-QAnon Telegram channels.
Here are some reactions to her Twitter ban.
QNewsOfficialTV says, Naomi Wolf has been deleted from Twitter for questioning the scamdemic.
2HellWithEvil says, Dr. Naomi Wolf suspended from twat.
Not surprising at all.
I just know that person is British.
I can just tell.
It's bloody twatter.
Finally, silence where the E is a 3 says, Do Naomi Wolf have a telegram channel since she got banned on Twitter?
So people are waiting, awaiting their hero.
But to add to this clamor of support among people who would usually detest a former Clinton operative, Naomi has also been invited on increasingly extreme right-wing shows, including the Dinesh D'Souza podcast and Steve Bannon's War Room, where she raised money from his listeners for her Five Freedoms campaign, and was told by Steve that she was quote, at the cutting edge of this fight, and that he was honored to have her on the show.
Things have been looking increasingly grim for this feminist icon.
Now, of course, I was always a soldier in the Pagliarmi, holding the wolf pack to task with our acerbic critiques of the third wave.
But not all of us can hold 100% correct feminist views.
Some, like Dr. Annie Kelly, PhD, once quote-unquote ran with the wolf.
As the kids say.
And since recent developments in Naomi Wolf's career have resulted in Wikipedia listing her occupation as, quote, I assume that in this episode, Annie will come down hard on her former darling, with a firm but clear endorsement of private-public censorship, and possibly even forcing Naomi to wear an ankle monitor.
It's an easy win.
Unusually, Annie, you did refuse to let me see the script before recording.
So I'm sure that's just like a glitch, right?
You have a watertight approach to this material, I'm assuming.
Yeah, that's right.
I just wanted it to be a surprise.
Naomi Wolf.
Hello there, my precious little listeners.
It's your UK correspondent Annie Kelly speaking.
I come to you today not as a podcaster or an academic, but an activist fighting against the almighty forces of big tech censorship, even if it costs me everything.
Oh boy.
I am here with a simple mission.
We need to get Naomi Wolf her Twitter account back.
Oh, for fuck's sake.
Dr. Naomi Wolf, for those of you who don't know, is a very famous American author and journalist, and as Julian said, a one-time consultant to the Bill Clinton presidential campaign.
The daughter of two American academics, she has published eight books since her debut publication of The Beauty Myth in 1991, all of which are critiques on various aspects of modern culture and politics from a liberal feminist perspective.
Perhaps what she is best known for in the current moment, though, is having, in layman's terms, lost her damn mind during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Who can relate?
Exactly, we stan a relatable queen.
A BBC article gives a courteous sum-up of some of her greatest posts before Twitter shamelessly deleted her account on Sunday.
Dr. Wolf, well known for her acclaimed third wave feminist book, The Beauty Myth, posted a wide range of unfounded conspiracy theories about vaccines.
One tweet claimed that vaccines were a quote, software platform that can receive uploads.
Am I getting the Windows 10 vaccine or the Linux one?
It's like WikiLeaks.
Everyone can send stuff in, but only the best will be published, hopefully.
She also compared Dr. Anthony Fauci, the top COVID advisor in the US, to Satan to her more
than 140,000 followers.
Most recently, she tweeted that the urine and feces of people who had received the jab
needed to be separated from general sewage supplies while tests were done to measure
its impact on non-vaccinated people through drinking water.
Now, I know what you're all probably thinking.
You're like, oh Annie, it sounds like her account got suspended for a good reason.
She's got a huge platform and these are very dangerous conspiracy theories to be spreading to such a large amount of people in a time of crisis.
A long quote you're doing in the annoying voice of the listener.
Stupid listener.
That's you.
That's all of you.
This is how I talk.
I'm a listener in a QAA.
But I think to call Dr. Wolf straightforwardly anti-vax misses the nuance of her posts, which quite often, admittedly inadvertently, make the vaccine sound incredibly cool.
I mean, the British, you guys already are saying jab, which is really not the best choice.
How did the AP or whatever, you know, kind of equivalent in Britain say, OK, well, it's fine.
We'll just call it that.
We've always called vaccine jabs.
This is why the original anti-vax movement started in Britain in the 90s.
Or I'm just a bloke getting a jab.
No, that's just like normal slang.
I know.
Getting me jabs.
Terrifying.
Also confirms slash explains the conversation I overheard in a restaurant in Manhattan two years ago in which an Apple employee was boasting about attending a top secret demo.
They had a new tech to deliver vaccines with nanoparticles, I'm assuming it's particles, that let you travel back in time.
Not kidding.
Now, what I found interesting about that tweet was that a few smart Alex noted that that description actually sounded remarkably similar to a film, specifically Avengers Endgame supposedly, and that it was possible Naomi had crossed her wires in a way that's really easy to do when you're hearing snippets of someone else's conversation.
But, as someone who's very recently been vaccinated, I'd much prefer to think of nanoparticles that give me the ability to time travel at will dispersing through my bloodstream as we speak, so I for one believe her.
Another one of her tweets, now sadly lost forever to the sands of history, claimed the following.
Many are reporting weird or uncanny something wrong sensation after being around vaccinated people.
Severe mood effects such as depression out of nowhere for no reason, PMS type moodiness in non-menstruating women, neediness as in pregnancy, something hormonal seems in play.
Oh definitely, but what the hell does depression out of nowhere for no reason?
and how can someone who has even written any critical, anything, I mean you can't possibly
pump out that sentence and not be like, "Wow, I've failed terribly."
Well, I think I preferred the version of Misinformation, which had post-vaccination me as a time-travelling
X-Man rather than Dementor from the Harry Potter books.
But I still do have to respect a vaccine that gives you both viral immunity and rancid vibes.
Due to her pre-Covid fame, Wolf's Twitter account over the past year has become a flashpoint for many Covid-sceptic conspiracy theorists, as well as a few trolls.
Perhaps the most amusing of these encounters was where Wolf was tricked by mischievous journalist Ken Klippenstein into tweeting an image of Johnny Sins, an adult film star, under the illusion that he was a doctor opposed to vaccines.
This is the kind of wholesome fun that Twitter has taken from all of us by striking down Wolf's account.
Johnny Sins in the jab.
I will admit, though, that there is an extra dimension to my defence of Naomi Wolf.
Even, perhaps, an ulterior motive.
Because there was a time in my life when she was a genuine hero of mine.
If I'm honest, this enduring affection I have for her has put me off writing anything about her clear descent into Covid conspiracy madness, until it sort of just became something that, working in this field, I couldn't quite ignore anymore.
When I was around 16, I made the decision to be more political and read proper grown-up books about politics and culture.
This was, with hindsight, a huge mistake, and something I will spend the rest of my life paying for.
In this regretful period, I read a great deal of prominent left-wing and liberal writers, which gave me all the usual unique and animating insights of a teenager in the Bush era.
One of these books was The Beauty Myth by Naomi Wolf, which made a pretty strong case for the idea that as the cause of women's liberation had advanced, beauty standards for women had become more physically punitive, more unrealistic and more costly.
As the book itself put it, The more legal and material hindrances women have broken through, the more strictly and heavily and cruelly images of female beauty have come to weigh on us.
More women have more money and power and scope and legal recognition than we have ever had before.
But in terms of how we feel about ourselves physically, we may actually be worse off than our unliberated grandmothers.
Recent research consistently shows that inside the majority of the West's controlled, attractive, successful working women, there is a secret underlife poisoning our freedom.
Infused with notions of beauty, it is a dark vein of self-hatred, physical obsession, terror of aging, and dread of lost control.
This was a real red pill moment for young me, who had until that point basically assumed that feminism had got us the vote and access to jobs, and so was basically, if not all the way, completed.
It's tempting now, being older, wiser, and having access to a whole cache of images of wolf acting like a loon, to say that this was just silly, shallow stuff that made a big deal of a pretty surface issue, and I was just too young to know better.
But I don't think that would really be fair.
In my opinion, The Beauty Myth did strongly articulate a very real double bind that a lot of women found themselves in at the time, where they were on the one hand held up to a punitive body standard few could achieve, but also derided as vain and superficial for taking it all seriously.
This is not to say that the book is perfect.
Scanning my eye back over it in order to write this episode, I began to notice some real clangers of reasoning that had escaped my attention the first time round.
Perhaps the most egregious one was that for a book about beauty standards and the toll they take on women's psychological health, Woolf is remarkably uninterested in race.
Female beauty in countries like America is heavily racialised, and bringing this up would only strengthen her case that it's a disempowering concept.
but she barely even treats it as an afterthought, and in some cases seems to implicitly deny it altogether.
At one point, when she's complaining about how older women become invisible in media,
and the few ones who stick around are altered beyond recognition to look younger,
she made the claim that "Airbrushing age off women's face has the same political
echo that would resound if all positive images of blacks were
routinely lightened."
What?
Come again now?
Yeah, imagine if that happened, right?
Yeah, the if is doing so much work in that sentence.
That would be making the same value judgment about blackness that this tampering makes about the value of female life.
So she's saying that political echo didn't resound because the images of blacks are not routinely lightened and their hair changed or modified in ways?
Right!
It's such a weird way to phrase it.
It's such a bizarre point, because yeah, you're right, if it wasn't a theoretical, the point would be stronger.
Admittedly, this is 1991, but I have read black feminist theorists writing about this stuff earlier, stretching back decades before this book was published, who had already pointed out that that does in fact happen.
So yeah, there's a few weird little lines like that.
This complete lack of empathy for issues that might affect someone who is not Naomi Wolf, or at least the same colour as her, seems to have carried over into her Covid-sceptic activism.
The journalist Owen Higgins reports that Wolf has been billed as the headline speaker for a fundraiser for groups set up to oppose Covid restrictions on Juneteenth, a holiday in the US celebrating the end of chattel slavery.
Just in case anyone missed the connection, the event is titled Liberate Our Five Freedoms.
Higgins writes, Event organizer Catherine Levin told me that in her view, the event title and date is appropriate.
Quote, The 19th is a day of emancipation, and it's a day when we claim our freedom, said Levin.
It's when we see that we are not slaves to mandate.
It's when we take our power back.
I asked Levin how she analogized American chattel slavery, where slaves were whipped, beaten, raped, and murdered by their white masters for centuries, to the temporary restrictions over the last 15 months due to the pandemic.
Quote, We have been enslaved by our government.
She replied.
Oh my god.
So there you go.
The Five Freedoms thing is what she was raising money for on Bannon.
Yeah.
It's like, it's her little fucking organization.
She was thanking, she was falling over herself thanking the Bannon listeners for contributing.
Yeah, she's been like raising funds through her website which is called like the Daily Clout or something like that as well.
Yes.
Wait, I should probably not just say that.
[laughter]
So, yeah, if you just want to go there and donate to the, uh...
[laughter]
Steve Bannon encourages you to.
But perhaps the real smoking gun in the beauty myth that points to where Naomi Wolf would go next is the use of statistics.
The beauty myth contains all sorts of shocking and disturbing facts, the kind that are impossible to ignore.
Like the fact that 7.5% of the total women and girls in the US had anorexia at the time, or that there were 150,000 deaths per year from the disease.
As it turns out, neither of those were correct, by quite a margin.
In fact, the errors were so numerous and shocking that a peer-reviewed article was published in an academic journal on the study of eating disorders to correct her numerous mistakes.
The article explains its methodology here.
All 23 statistics on anorexia nervosa of the beauty myth in the first edition were compared to statistics in recent reviews of epidemiological studies.
According to these reviews, in Western countries, 350 individuals of every million suffer from anorexia.
Each year, the incidence is 82 per 1 million people.
About 90-95% of anorexia nervosa patients are female.
Young females 15 to 30 years are at risk.
0.3% of them suffer from anorexia.
Of all anorexia patients, 0.56% die each year.
When her mortality statistics, 150,000 annual deaths, is divided by the true statistics, 525, her exaggeration can be quantified in a simple overdue factor.
Let us say Wolf's overdue and lie factor, Wolf, In this case, the wolf is 150,000 per 525, which equals 286.
This implies that the quote bad statistic, as she had called it in her letter to the editor, is almost 300 times as high as the real statistic.
That's such a great acronym, by the way, by that paper.
Yeah, they clearly are just like sick of that shit.
The article concluded that, on average, an anorexia statistic in any edition of the Beauty Myth should be divided by 8 to get near the real statistic.
My god, 8 times!
That's 800%!
That's not even like you had that, you know, like you called it a margin.
It's only a margin if it's within... if you can describe it within 100%.
That is... Jesus Christ.
Now, most academics, myself included, have sympathy around getting a figure or two wrong, particularly when the cause seems so worthy.
But there's no getting around that many and by that degree of magnitude.
It's pure bad scholarship.
Speaking of which, didn't you have an issue with your newly launched amazing podcast called The Vaccine Podcast, which people can go check out at patreon.com slash thevaccinepod?
Didn't you have an issue in your first episode and it's still sitting there?
I mean, who?
The pot on the kettle!
I have made a mistake in my first episode.
I've made a serious historical error.
Right.
And nobody's found it out yet.
Okay, so go ahead.
That's what they call an Easter egg, folks.
Yeah, so go and listen to my podcast or watch it on YouTube and see if you can be the first special person to notice the huge glaring mistake I made.
What is the podcast broadly about?
So the podcast is about the invention of vaccines and the kind of history from this kind of medical practice in places like China where it's kind of a folk medicine thing to being invented using cowpox against smallpox in England and then the big campaign to eradicate smallpox around the world eventually.
And because it's me, I have a whole episode about the birth of the anti-vax movement because I just found that stuff so fun.
They're all saying like the newly invented vaccine is going to turn you into a cow and stuff like that.
It's great.
Damn, people should check out this podcast is what I'm thinking.
Anyways, go on about Wolf then.
Enough talking about my mistakes, let's go back to Naomi Wolf's mistakes.
What was worse was that mistake wouldn't be the last time.
In 2018, Wolf announced the forthcoming publication of a new book called Outrages, Sex, Censorship and the Criminalization of Love.
The book promised to be a historical analysis of the Victorian repression of homosexuality, within the context of an increasingly strict legal crackdown on things like obscenity and prostitution.
This is undoubtedly a worthy and interesting area of study, and glancing over reviews for the book, it seemed like Wolfe made her case with characteristic clarity and stridence.
A shadow falls over nearly every review though, and that is the BBC Radio 3 interview that Wolfe agreed to do with the writer and academic Matthew Sweet.
I'd like to advise our listeners here that if you're like me and get an intense physical reaction to someone else's embarrassment, that the next few minutes are not going to be easy listening.
You mentioned that prosecutions for sodomy rise by 50% between 1858 and 1860.
What's that in numerical terms?
Because it's hard to read from a percentage.
That's a good question.
I was looking specifically at the Old Bailey Records, so it's just one court, and I was looking at regional crime tables in national newspapers.
So I don't have a definitive answer except that the number of prosecutions rose by that amount.
Who was executed?
I found like several dozen executions, but that was again only looking at the Old Bailey Records and the crime tables.
Several dozen executions.
Correct.
And this corrects a misapprehension that is in every website that the last man was executed for sodomy in Britain in 1835.
I don't think you're right about this.
One of the cases that you look at that's salient in your report is that of Thomas Silver.
It says, teenagers were now convicted more often.
Indeed, that year, which is 1859, 14-year-old Thomas Silver was actually executed for committing sodomy.
The boy was indicted for an unnatural offence, guilty, death recorded.
This is the first time the phrase unnatural offence entered the Old Bailey records.
Thomas Silver wasn't executed.
Death recorded.
I was really surprised by this and I looked it up.
Death recorded is what's in, I think, most of these cases that you've identified as executions.
It doesn't mean that he was executed.
It was a category that was created in 1823 that allowed judges to abstain from pronouncing a sentence of death on any capital convict whom they considered to be a fit subject for pardon.
I don't think any of the executions you've identified here actually happened.
Well, that's a really important thing to investigate.
What is your understanding of what death recorded means?
Death recorded.
I've just read you the definition of it there from the Old Bailey website.
But I've got here a newspaper report about Thomas Silver and also something from the prison records that show the date of his discharge.
The prisoner was found guilty and sentence of death was recorded.
Yeah.
The jury recommended the prisoner to mercy on account of his youth.
See, I think this is a kind of, when I found this, I didn't really know what to do with it because I think it is, I think it's quite a big problem with your argument.
Also, it's the nature of the offense here.
Thomas Silver committed an indecent assault on a six year old boy and he served two and a half years for it in Portsmouth prison, which You know, it doesn't seem too excessive, really.
So, I'd like to imagine that every argument in UK academia is about the statistics of buggery.
This is horrible to listen to, you're right.
That, when she literally reads, like, basically it's like she didn't read the end of the sentence the first time she was studying it, and she just finally reads it through to herself.
It's, that hurts.
That's, that is awful.
I think, yeah, when we announced we were doing this episode, someone called it like the Hindenburg of radio interviews.
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