Naomi Wolf nails it on lockdowns and totalitarianism
Naomi Wolf discovered the Bill of Rights during the Bush years and believes in it regardless of which party controls Washington, D.C.
Longtime blog readers know that I attended high school with Naomi Wolf. She was a year behind me, but a lot of her friends were in my year and, if my memory serves me correctly, she was in my English class with the brilliant Flossie Lewis (a teacher known to generations of Lowell students).
I was not a Naomi fan because, in honest retrospect, I wasn’t in her league. She was brilliant and beautiful, an airy-fairy hippie chick who managed to make it look easy to get good grades. She was never arrogant about her looks but she was arrogant about her brains and, quite sweetly, she put me in my place more than once.
Because I’d known her personally, I paid attention to Naomi’s career trajectory in the 1990s. (Note: I’ve never seen or spoken to her since high school.) I read The Beauty Myth and, for a brief while, became a bristling third-wave feminist. I got too busy with life to hang onto that notion, though, and then had children. Because I was then a Clinton supporter, I was envious of the fact that Naomi was in the Clintons’ inner political circle. Still, I was able to laugh when I learned that she had given Gore advice in 1999 about his color choices to make him more appealing to voters.
As I hewed right and Naomi remained on the left, I became less impressed with her, as I am with all leftists. She spoke out in support of burqas and vaginas, acknowledged that abortion is homicide but still supported it, constantly attacked George Bush, was anti-war and anti-Israel, and worried about chemtrails. In other words, a leftist crackpot, albeit a brilliant one. She really fell apart when she wrote a book about all the people executed in Victorian England for being gay, without understanding that none were executed. She’d misunderstood the historic records, which is apparently a fairly common problem for Naomi and is her greatest weakness. She’s brilliant but careless. It makes it easy to undermine all her positions, whether or not they’re good.
And it turns out that some of Naomi’s positions are good — at least her position about a free, constitutional society that honors the Bill of Rights. Beginning under the Bush presidency, because of the various anti-terrorism acts that went into effect then, Naomi suddenly became an ardent civil libertarian. Where Naomi gets huge points is that she has continued to be an ardent civil libertarian regardless of which political party holds sway in Washington, D.C.
Because of that intellectual honesty, Naomi has been horrified by the lockdowns and the whole package of power grabs in which both the state and federal governments have engaged, using the excuse of the Wuhan virus to do so. For that reason, Tucker had her on his Monday night show.
Frankly, Naomi didn’t say anything you and I haven’t been saying for a long time. What made it unique was that it was coming from a leftist. Suddenly she’s another Glenn Greenwald — an honest leftist fighting back against the totalitarianism coming from leftist governments. Also, because she’s really bright, Naomi said all these things well. I urge you to watch this video and take it very seriously, especially Naomi’s point about the very small window of time we have left to push back before losing our rights forever. I do what I can with my writing because that’s my one and only strength. What can you do?