Top 15 Naomi Wolf Quotes

Wolf actually compared him to Oscar Wilde. The similarity is that they were both in solitary confinement. Practically the same person then?
Of course, Wolf has every right to think what she likes about Assange's accusers – and to change her mind as she did about abortion – but what kind of feminism is she now espousing? I find it very difficult to know.

To see Naomi Wolf, that histrionic proponent of the third wave, pop up to demand that the women accusing Julian Assange of sexual assault and rape be named (surely they have already been shamed) is a logical conclusion of this deal. It is a dead end. Much of Wolf's work is privileged narcissism dressed up as struggle. The Beauty Myth did not have an original thought in it, but never mind, it remains the only feminist text read by many. Wolf and many of her contemporaries muddled the personal with the political to such a degree it is embarrassing. Wolf was snapped up by the media as she was beautiful – as though feminists couldn't be. Greer and Steinem were lookers, weren't they? Wolf's argument now about the anonymity of accusers in rape trials arrives on these shores a little after the Lib Dems dropped this peculiar proposal, which was never in their manifesto anyway.

In the decade since Occupy, Wolf has connected the dots between an almost unfathomably large number of disparate bits of fact and fantasy. She has floated unsubstantiated speculations about the National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden ("not who he purports to be," hinting that he is an active spy). About US troops sent to build field hospitals in West Africa during the 2014 Ebola outbreak (not an attempt to stop the disease's spread, but a plot to bring it to the United States to justify "mass lockdowns" at home). About ISIS beheadings of US and British captives (possibly not real murders, but staged covert ops by the US government starring crisis actors). About the results of the 2014 Scottish referendum on independence, which the "no" vote won by a margin of more than 10 percentage points (potentially fraudulent, she claimed, based on an assortment of testimonies she collected). About the Green New Deal (not the demands of grassroots climate-justice movements, she said, but yet another elite-orchestrated cover for "fascism"). She has even spotted plots and conspiracies in oddly shaped clouds.

Wolf’s story is instructive. The Beauty Myth, her 1990 blockbuster about the toll taken on women by the upward ratchet of unreasonable beauty standards, made her famous. In retrospect, the seeds of her intellectual decline were already present in that book, which contained both major statistical errors and a conspiratorial subtext that painted the influence of patriarchy as a deliberate plot. In the ensuing years, her work grew increasingly sloppy and absurd, until her reputation collapsed altogether in 2019 with the publication of Outrages.

Wolf has tweeted that she overheard an Apple employee (who had attended a "top secret demo") describing vaccine technology that can enable time travel. She has posited that vaccinated people's urine and feces should be separated in our sewage system until their contaminating effect on our drinking water has been studied. She fears that while pro-vaccine propaganda has emphasized the danger the unvaccinated pose to the vaccinated, we have overlooked how toxic the vaccinated might be.

Wolf’s 1991 Fire with Fire – her call for a realpolitik in which 'sisterhood and capital' might be allies – misfired in Britain, partly because British feminism does retain a visceral if complex connection to political radicalism, to system-changing not tinkering.

She is furthermore a serial espouser of mad conspiracy theories, insisting on their plausibility in the face of overwhelming evidence. In 2014 alone she managed to suggest that the Isis beheading victims were really actors, that the Scottish referendum had been rigged and that US personnel sent to Africa to help contain the ebola outbreak were really there as part of a plot to militarise the continent. Last year she joined the "chemtrail" conspiracists who believe that aircraft condensation trails in the sky are evidence of a secret government attempt at "geoengineering".

It was the doctors in pre-Nazi Germany in the early thirties who were co-opted by the National Socialists and sent to do exactly what we're seeing kind of replaying now.
It was the medical organisations in the early thirties who were emboldened to be the arbiters of, you know, "life worthy of life, life unworthy of life"’, um, and to, kind of, medicalise and pathologise dissent or difference.
So we're seeing wholesale purchasing of the medical establishment in the United States, in Britain and in countries around the world to do things much more serious.

So what can be done? Well, first of all, I can't believe that I'm saying this - a lifelong former Democrat and the child of hippies - but thank God for the Second Amendment. Because one reason the United States is not, you know, entirely enslaved like Australia or Shanghai or Canada, in many ways – we're relatively freer compared to those countries – is that we have, you know, millions of owners of guns. And I'm a peaceful person, this should not be taken out of context, but it is harder to subjugate an armed population.
And this is why our Founders gave us the Second Amendment, for exactly times like these. They knew that it was harder to subjugate an armed population. But, you know, may that be the worst case scenario. I really hope that it doesn't devolve into civil war, which is really what the next thing is in history when you have an occupying force, which is what the WHO will be, you know, by next week.

It was amazing to go to Belfast, which does not yet have 5G, and feel the earth, sky, air, human experience, feel the way it did in the 1970s. Calm, still peaceful, natural, restful.

The First Amendment was designed to allow for disruption of business as usual. It is not a quiet and subdued amendment or right.

JS [Justine Sharrock]: How is your comparison of Obama to Hitler any different from someone at a Tea Party holding up a placard of Obama with a Hitler mustache?
NW: Those signs are offensive. If only the Holocaust was just about imposing health care on my people. Obama has done things like Hitler did. Let me be very careful here. The National Socialists rounded people up and held them without trial, signed legislation that gave torture impunity, and spied on their citizens, just as Obama has. It isn't a question of what has been done that Hitler did. It's what does every dictator do, on the left or the right, that is being done here and now. The real fight isn't left or right but between forces of democracy across the spectrum and the forces of tyranny.

[Alex] Cohen: There's never a line in this book that says George W. Bush is just like Hitler or Mussolini or Stalin, but there's enough that after a while there definitely seems to be the air of some comparisons happening. Isn't that a bit extreme to compare our president to these historical figures?
Ms Wolf: Well, again, I stick very rigorously to the evidence. You had the Nazis unloaded coffins at night; we saw coffins being unloaded at night. They talked about enhanced interrogation, meaning torture; Karl Rove talked about enhanced interrogation, meaning torture. They said, you know, we've got to invade Czechoslovakia because it's a station ground for terrorists. And we said we've got to invade Iraq, a country we're not at war with, because they are torturing their ethnic minorities, it's a station ground for terrorists and they hate our freedoms. I don't need to draw an analogy. The analogies are there.

Here's what we're not taught [about the Declaration and Constitution]: Those words at the time they were written were blazingly, electrifyingly subversive. If you understand them truly now, they still are. […] You are not taught—and it is a disgrace that you aren't—that these men and women were radicals for liberty; that they had a vision of equality that was a slap in the face of what the rest of their world understood to be the unchanging, God-given order of nations; and that they were willing to die to make that desperate vision into a reality for people like us, whom they would never live to see.

[Experiencing writers' block, Wolf sought specialist assistance. Being induced in "a light meditative state" (Wolf), she was required to descent downstairs in a relaxation technique.] I opened the door and there he was [...] I wasn't myself in this visual experience [...] I was a 13-year-old boy sitting next to him [Jesus] and feeling feelings I'd never felt in my lifetime, of a 13-year-old boy being with an older male who he really loves and admires and loves to be in the presence of. It was probably the most profound experience of my life. I haven't talked about it publicly [before].