Who’s afraid of Naomi Wolf?
August 26, 2023 6:11 AM Subscribe
For instance, in July 2022, Wolf went on a rightwing podcast carried by something called Today’s News Talk and shared what she described as her “latest thinking”. She had noticed that when she went into New York City, where the vast majority of the population has been vaccinated, the people felt … different. In fact, it was as if they were not people at all.This sort of stuff really makes me gloomy, because as Klein notes, it's both completely bonkers, yet can provide people with a way of expressing a hard-to-identify emotional truth about feeling disconnected from other people, about needing love and not being able to find it. In "all about love," bell hooks talks about how scared people are to talk about love, especially in political contexts. I do think avoiding discussion of love can create a vacuum, an opening for this sort of messaging, and it's sad to see those emotions get played on for some terrifying ends...
“You can’t pick up human energy in the same way, like the energy field is just almost not there, it’s like people are holograms … It’s like a city of ghosts now, you’re there, you see them, but you can’t feel them.”
And she had noticed something even more bizarre: “People [who are vaccinated] have no scent any more. You can’t smell them. I’m not saying like, they don’t smell bad or they don’t smell – like I’m not talking about deodorant. I’m saying they don’t smell like there’s a human being in the room, and they don’t feel like there’s a human being in the room.”
This, she explained to the host, was all due to the “lipid nanoparticles” in the mRNA vaccines, since they “go into the brain, they go into the heart, and they kind of gum it up”. Perhaps even the “wavelength which is love” was experiencing this “gumming up … dialing down its ability to transmit”. She concluded, “That’s how these lipid nanoparticles work.”
posted by nightcoast at 6:22 AM on August 26, 2023 [57 favorites]
(Not sure of the original author)
Mark Popham
posted by Horace Rumpole at 6:27 AM on August 26, 2023 [12 favorites]
Mark Popham
posted by Horace Rumpole at 6:27 AM on August 26, 2023 [12 favorites]
The original rhyme tweet author is @markpopham, who was flattered but irritated to go uncredited.
nightcoast: the right is good at talking about “love” and welcoming questioners with open arms, whereas on the left we consider our beliefs the bare minimum for decency. It’s an issue.
posted by Countess Elena at 6:29 AM on August 26, 2023 [7 favorites]
nightcoast: the right is good at talking about “love” and welcoming questioners with open arms, whereas on the left we consider our beliefs the bare minimum for decency. It’s an issue.
posted by Countess Elena at 6:29 AM on August 26, 2023 [7 favorites]
If only there were some less bonkies explanation for being unable to smell in pandemic-era NYC.
posted by chesty_a_arthur at 6:45 AM on August 26, 2023 [117 favorites]
posted by chesty_a_arthur at 6:45 AM on August 26, 2023 [117 favorites]
Meekly raising my hand in that I was confused about who was who. I had no idea that there were TWO separate women and I apologize for conflating the two in my mind.
posted by Kitteh at 6:47 AM on August 26, 2023 [14 favorites]
posted by Kitteh at 6:47 AM on August 26, 2023 [14 favorites]
The right is good at “welcoming questioners with open arms?” I assume you mean “seems like you have doubts about the Democrat party. Come on in!” That’s a standard gambit, and no different on the Democratic side. You’ll find that Liz Cheney and George Conway and Mitt Romney and other GOP apostates get a nice strategic “welcome” from the Left — hell, even George W. Bush gets a sort of truce in return for keeping pointedly quiet about Trump. That’s a long way from being accepted as “one of us,” and I strongly suspect the same distinction holds on the Right.
I have heard this before — that the Right is a big party of believers and non-believers alike, while the Left is constricted by its own purity tests. I think this distinction doesn’t hold up to scrutiny, and probably follows from not living inside the political world of the Right, but rather viewing it from the outside.
posted by argybarg at 7:08 AM on August 26, 2023 [21 favorites]
I have heard this before — that the Right is a big party of believers and non-believers alike, while the Left is constricted by its own purity tests. I think this distinction doesn’t hold up to scrutiny, and probably follows from not living inside the political world of the Right, but rather viewing it from the outside.
posted by argybarg at 7:08 AM on August 26, 2023 [21 favorites]
from the article (and for clarity's sake, her = Wolf, I = Klein):
There was even a moment, while reading an article in the Guardian about her being arrested at a protest in New York, when I experienced the unmistakable chill of the doppelganger, an uncanny feeling Sigmund Freud described as “that species of the frightening that goes back to what was once well known and had long been familiar”.
“Her partner, the film producer Avram Ludwig, was also arrested.”
I read the sentence to my partner, the film director and producer Avram Lewis (who goes by Avi).
“What the actual fuck?” he asked.
“I know,” I said. “It’s like a goddamned conspiracy.”
Then we both burst out laughing.
when they get around to making a movie (or TV series) about all this (and they really should), it will have to be a comedy, and a broad one at that. Or maybe just go all the way and make it a musical. Called NAOMI, of course.
posted by philip-random at 7:31 AM on August 26, 2023 [26 favorites]
There was even a moment, while reading an article in the Guardian about her being arrested at a protest in New York, when I experienced the unmistakable chill of the doppelganger, an uncanny feeling Sigmund Freud described as “that species of the frightening that goes back to what was once well known and had long been familiar”.
“Her partner, the film producer Avram Ludwig, was also arrested.”
I read the sentence to my partner, the film director and producer Avram Lewis (who goes by Avi).
“What the actual fuck?” he asked.
“I know,” I said. “It’s like a goddamned conspiracy.”
Then we both burst out laughing.
when they get around to making a movie (or TV series) about all this (and they really should), it will have to be a comedy, and a broad one at that. Or maybe just go all the way and make it a musical. Called NAOMI, of course.
posted by philip-random at 7:31 AM on August 26, 2023 [26 favorites]
Meekly raising my hand in that I was confused about who was who. I had no idea that there were TWO separate women and I apologize for conflating the two in my mind.You can probably imagine how many times I checked the two lines of text in this post, still waiting for the first comment to be “you got them backwards”. The husband’s names was one of those “too strange to be fiction” bits of comic relief to go with the sadly dark turn of the main story.
posted by adamsc at 7:53 AM on August 26, 2023 [6 favorites]
Heck, people here were mixing up Klein and Wolf in the MeFi thread on the insane conspiracy theories of Naomi Wolf.
posted by fimbulvetr at 8:02 AM on August 26, 2023 [20 favorites]
posted by fimbulvetr at 8:02 AM on August 26, 2023 [20 favorites]
narcissism (grandiosity) + social media addiction + midlife crisis ÷ public shaming = rightwing meltdown
[frantically scribbling on blackboard] But what about… No, him too… [drops chalk in awe] She’s done it. She’s cracked it wide open.
posted by staggernation at 8:06 AM on August 26, 2023 [18 favorites]
[frantically scribbling on blackboard] But what about… No, him too… [drops chalk in awe] She’s done it. She’s cracked it wide open.
posted by staggernation at 8:06 AM on August 26, 2023 [18 favorites]
She went from ringing an early alarm on fascism to embracing the Big Lie. I think it's a survival instinct, a form of Stockholm syndrome. The fear of what's coming becomes so great that once a tiny crack forms, it opens up a window to a world where the pain disappears and is replaced with adulation and wealth. As more and more people crawl through the crack to escape the pain and seek solace, a majority is eventually reached and that man is out of prison, back in some form of power, and the apparent source of the pain, now flipped into her former colleagues, is systematically eradicated.
This is the answer to "how could they let it happen" in one of the most advanced democracies in early 20th century Europe and how it seems will now happen globally. I fear the last eighty years was a fluke, a lucky combination of a New Deal government and a premature Japanese attack that briefly disturbed an inevitable regression back to a new dark age.
posted by CynicalKnight at 8:13 AM on August 26, 2023 [6 favorites]
This is the answer to "how could they let it happen" in one of the most advanced democracies in early 20th century Europe and how it seems will now happen globally. I fear the last eighty years was a fluke, a lucky combination of a New Deal government and a premature Japanese attack that briefly disturbed an inevitable regression back to a new dark age.
posted by CynicalKnight at 8:13 AM on August 26, 2023 [6 favorites]
This is the sort of thing, including and especially the husbands’s names, that makes me wonder a little bit more whether we are actually living in a computer simulation that occasionally glitches, and I’m only half joking.
posted by holborne at 8:15 AM on August 26, 2023 [11 favorites]
posted by holborne at 8:15 AM on August 26, 2023 [11 favorites]
There are billions of people on the planet, and hundreds of millions of people in the USA. That's a lot of opportunity for coincidences.
posted by jellywerker at 8:18 AM on August 26, 2023 [3 favorites]
posted by jellywerker at 8:18 AM on August 26, 2023 [3 favorites]
METAFILTER: makes me wonder a little bit more whether we are actually living in a computer simulation that occasionally glitches, and I’m only half joking.
posted by philip-random at 8:25 AM on August 26, 2023 [4 favorites]
posted by philip-random at 8:25 AM on August 26, 2023 [4 favorites]
I think a lot of the confusion arises from the fact that both The Beauty Myth and No Logo were solid and necessary polemics, identifying real phenomena that continue to do real damage.
Both books can easily be read as critical primarily of the advertising industry. As a person with an abiding hatred for that industry and all its works, both books certainly played nicely to my own prejudices. I also completely suck at remembering people's names, but Naomi is a really distinctive first name and I think that's why I have, on occasion, mistaken one author's newspaper byline for the other's. I've done the same thing with the Davids Brooks and Frum, though less consequentially.
But Klein has gone on to write vast amounts of trenchantly insightful social commentary; Wolf, not so much. Took me a while to work out that when the Naomi I was reading had just said something I found dubious or tenuous or just flat wrong it was always Wolf saying it, not Klein, and to adjust my expectations going in accordingly.
The husbands' names thing is completely hilarious.
posted by flabdablet at 8:25 AM on August 26, 2023 [35 favorites]
Both books can easily be read as critical primarily of the advertising industry. As a person with an abiding hatred for that industry and all its works, both books certainly played nicely to my own prejudices. I also completely suck at remembering people's names, but Naomi is a really distinctive first name and I think that's why I have, on occasion, mistaken one author's newspaper byline for the other's. I've done the same thing with the Davids Brooks and Frum, though less consequentially.
But Klein has gone on to write vast amounts of trenchantly insightful social commentary; Wolf, not so much. Took me a while to work out that when the Naomi I was reading had just said something I found dubious or tenuous or just flat wrong it was always Wolf saying it, not Klein, and to adjust my expectations going in accordingly.
The husbands' names thing is completely hilarious.
posted by flabdablet at 8:25 AM on August 26, 2023 [35 favorites]
Klein:
posted by flabdablet at 8:34 AM on August 26, 2023 [40 favorites]
Back then, I saw the problem as more structural than personal. A handful of young men had got unfathomably rich designing tech platforms that, in the name of “connection”, not only allowed us to eavesdrop on conversations between strangers but also actively encouraged us to seek out those exchanges that mentioned us by name (AKA our “mentions”). When I first joined Twitter back in 2010, and clicked on the little bell icon signifying my “mentions”, my initial thought was: I am reading the graffiti written about me on an infinitely scrolling restroom wall.Still got it.
As a frequently graffitied-about girl in high school, this felt both familiar and deeply harrowing. I instantly knew that Twitter was going to be bad for me – and yet, like so many of us, I could not stop looking. So perhaps if there is a message I should have taken from the destabilising appearance of my doppelganger, this is it: once and for all, stop eavesdropping on strangers talking about you in this crowded and filthy global toilet known as social media.
posted by flabdablet at 8:34 AM on August 26, 2023 [40 favorites]
My sense is that all of this started when Wolf’s latest book “Outrages” was partially withdrawn from publishing due to errors in scholarship. Is that right? That’s the “public shaming” factor in Klein’s formula?
Wikipedia:
posted by chrchr at 9:14 AM on August 26, 2023 [7 favorites]
Wikipedia:
In a 2019 BBC radio interview, broadcaster and author Matthew Sweet identified an error in a central tenet of the book: a misunderstanding of the legal term "death recorded", which Wolf had taken to mean that the convict had been executed but in fact means that the convict was pardoned or the sentence was commuted.Subsequently the hardback was pulped but there have been some publications of a softcover with corrections.
posted by chrchr at 9:14 AM on August 26, 2023 [7 favorites]
Not surprising bedfellows at all.
Heterodox progressives mistrust the corporate, Wall Street, media and academic establishments without whose largesse mainstream liberals would starve in a week, and whose government privileges (rhetoric aside) mainstream liberals never quite manage to touch, while the new populist right wing social media hates all those institutions with a great passion. Federalist Society types quietly loathed the mainstream media and academia for sure, but Gab hates private equity more than it hates the New York Times, and that's a new thing.
posted by MattD at 9:21 AM on August 26, 2023 [1 favorite]
Heterodox progressives mistrust the corporate, Wall Street, media and academic establishments without whose largesse mainstream liberals would starve in a week, and whose government privileges (rhetoric aside) mainstream liberals never quite manage to touch, while the new populist right wing social media hates all those institutions with a great passion. Federalist Society types quietly loathed the mainstream media and academia for sure, but Gab hates private equity more than it hates the New York Times, and that's a new thing.
posted by MattD at 9:21 AM on August 26, 2023 [1 favorite]
Honestly if I had gotten my book wrecked live on the radio by a calm and slightly amused British journalist I would have turned into The Joker too
posted by theodolite at 9:51 AM on August 26, 2023 [40 favorites]
posted by theodolite at 9:51 AM on August 26, 2023 [40 favorites]
Note that Naomi Wolf's husband is NOT named Avram Ludwig, but rather "Brian William O'Shea, a U.S. Army veteran, private detective, and owner of Striker Pierce Investigations." What Naomi Klein is calling out here is not the weirdness of the world, but the extreme laziness of even generally well-regarded media outlets that aren't TRYING to lie to their audience. I don't think people outside journalism understand how many factual errors an outlet like the Guardian or the NY Times prints on an everyday basis. And I say this as a defender of print journalism.
posted by rikschell at 10:09 AM on August 26, 2023 [33 favorites]
posted by rikschell at 10:09 AM on August 26, 2023 [33 favorites]
Note that Naomi Wolf's husband is NOT named Avram Ludwig
Avram Ludwig was her partner/boyfriend for a while. He died in 2019.
posted by plant or animal at 10:26 AM on August 26, 2023 [22 favorites]
Avram Ludwig was her partner/boyfriend for a while. He died in 2019.
posted by plant or animal at 10:26 AM on August 26, 2023 [22 favorites]
the extreme laziness of even generally well-regarded media outlets that aren't TRYING to lie to their audience.
A striking thing from Wolf’s Wikipedia page is how, throughout her career and even in her well-regarded works, there are lapses similar to the one that sunk “Outrage”. E.g., in “The Beauty Myth” she claims there are 150k deaths from eating disorders annually in the U.S. when that is actually the number of sufferers.
posted by chrchr at 10:32 AM on August 26, 2023 [18 favorites]
A striking thing from Wolf’s Wikipedia page is how, throughout her career and even in her well-regarded works, there are lapses similar to the one that sunk “Outrage”. E.g., in “The Beauty Myth” she claims there are 150k deaths from eating disorders annually in the U.S. when that is actually the number of sufferers.
posted by chrchr at 10:32 AM on August 26, 2023 [18 favorites]
So, to recap, two women called Naomi were each romantically linked to producers called Avram; one Naomi's descent into conspiracy theories and misinformation on the internet led the other Naomi to write a book about "the Mirror World and its web of conspiracies" and an article discussing the book; the article was discussed on the internet, leading to the claim that one of the Avrams' ties to one of the Naomis was fictitious and used by the other Naomi only as an example of media misinformation; that claim was, itself, false.
I think this is somehow all proving its own point, even if I am no longer entirely sure precisely what that point is.
posted by eponym at 10:37 AM on August 26, 2023 [26 favorites]
I think this is somehow all proving its own point, even if I am no longer entirely sure precisely what that point is.
posted by eponym at 10:37 AM on August 26, 2023 [26 favorites]
narcissism (grandiosity) + social media addiction + midlife crisis ÷ public shaming = rightwing meltdown
[frantically scribbling on blackboard] But what about… No, him too…
him being Jordan Peterson?
That's certainly been my read on him. He's roughly my age (a few years younger), so right from the start it made sense to me that a big chunk of what was going on was classic midlife crisis stuff. Here's a smart, not untalented (in his field) man who is coming to realize that he's more or less peaked. He's never going rise much further than a reasonably well respected prof at a reasonably well respected university, he's never going to be recognized A GREAT MAN.
Unless he does something. Which is generally when we notice someone who's going through their midlife crisis phase. They Do Something. It usually doesn't make the papers, it often isn't so much self-aggrandizing as just something-anything (buying a flashy new car, having an affair with someone way younger) to shake things up, to scare off the inevitability of aging and death.
Of course, in Peterson's case, it was self-aggrandizing, a one man crusade to save the soul of the western democracies (blah blah blah), and a Hail Mary at that. He had no reason to believe his initial performance would do anything more than maybe make the local evening news ... except due to some weird quirk in the chaotic system that is the zeitgeist, it hit, it stuck, it caught on, it was the proverbial butterfly that conjured a hurricane ...
And Peterson was savvy enough to realize what was going on, and midlife reckless enough to throw in with it. And then all manner of odd, chaotic action and reaction and this and that kept the stupid thing alive. And it it's still going on. All this weird motion and hype and whatnot riding on this formerly insignificant guy's midlife crisis.
In Naomi (the musical), he'd definitely need to be a supporting character, maybe just a cameo where he sings a Sid Vicious style version of My Way, but with the lyrics altered to suit his particular concerns.
Strange times.
posted by philip-random at 10:38 AM on August 26, 2023 [10 favorites]
[frantically scribbling on blackboard] But what about… No, him too…
him being Jordan Peterson?
That's certainly been my read on him. He's roughly my age (a few years younger), so right from the start it made sense to me that a big chunk of what was going on was classic midlife crisis stuff. Here's a smart, not untalented (in his field) man who is coming to realize that he's more or less peaked. He's never going rise much further than a reasonably well respected prof at a reasonably well respected university, he's never going to be recognized A GREAT MAN.
Unless he does something. Which is generally when we notice someone who's going through their midlife crisis phase. They Do Something. It usually doesn't make the papers, it often isn't so much self-aggrandizing as just something-anything (buying a flashy new car, having an affair with someone way younger) to shake things up, to scare off the inevitability of aging and death.
Of course, in Peterson's case, it was self-aggrandizing, a one man crusade to save the soul of the western democracies (blah blah blah), and a Hail Mary at that. He had no reason to believe his initial performance would do anything more than maybe make the local evening news ... except due to some weird quirk in the chaotic system that is the zeitgeist, it hit, it stuck, it caught on, it was the proverbial butterfly that conjured a hurricane ...
And Peterson was savvy enough to realize what was going on, and midlife reckless enough to throw in with it. And then all manner of odd, chaotic action and reaction and this and that kept the stupid thing alive. And it it's still going on. All this weird motion and hype and whatnot riding on this formerly insignificant guy's midlife crisis.
In Naomi (the musical), he'd definitely need to be a supporting character, maybe just a cameo where he sings a Sid Vicious style version of My Way, but with the lyrics altered to suit his particular concerns.
Strange times.
posted by philip-random at 10:38 AM on August 26, 2023 [10 favorites]
It's an interesting article, though I was disappointed that Klein didn't try and interview her. I think that would be a huge hole if it's also true of the book.
posted by CheeseDigestsAll at 10:40 AM on August 26, 2023 [3 favorites]
posted by CheeseDigestsAll at 10:40 AM on August 26, 2023 [3 favorites]
no, that's how you get quantum paradoxes
posted by Iris Gambol at 10:46 AM on August 26, 2023 [12 favorites]
posted by Iris Gambol at 10:46 AM on August 26, 2023 [12 favorites]
In "all about love," bell hooks talks about how scared people are to talk about love, especially in political contexts. I do think avoiding discussion of love can create a vacuum, an opening for this sort of messaging, and it's sad to see those emotions get played on for some terrifying ends...
This reminded me of the Lowkey track Neoliberalism Kills People, featuring audio of one Naomi Klein, talking about love (and absence thereof) as policy.
posted by busted_crayons at 10:54 AM on August 26, 2023 [4 favorites]
This reminded me of the Lowkey track Neoliberalism Kills People, featuring audio of one Naomi Klein, talking about love (and absence thereof) as policy.
posted by busted_crayons at 10:54 AM on August 26, 2023 [4 favorites]
Doppelgangers usually turn out badly, in the literature. I hope Naomi Klein manages to survive this.
posted by doctornemo at 11:40 AM on August 26, 2023 [5 favorites]
posted by doctornemo at 11:40 AM on August 26, 2023 [5 favorites]
A few years ago Naomi Wolf tweeted at me because I was mocking a local person who was keen on chemtrails. Wolf thought I was pro-chemtrail, and so we had some strange exchanges.
posted by doctornemo at 11:41 AM on August 26, 2023 [7 favorites]
posted by doctornemo at 11:41 AM on August 26, 2023 [7 favorites]
Not surprising bedfellows at all. Heterodox progressives mistrust the corporate, Wall Street, media and academic establishments...
Yet it was the corporate, Wall Street, mainstream media that insisted on a return to pre-lockdown capitalism-as-usual ASAP, while the lefties and anarchists I know are often the ones who are still most rigorously wearing masks and observing caution today. (Just to throw out a random example: the Seattle anarchist bookstore and community resource Left Bank Books still requires masks to be worn.)
We can't call covid denialism a progressive nor lefty position. For one thing, it's not progressive to be ableist, and covid denialism or minimization is inherently ableist.
posted by splitpeasoup at 11:52 AM on August 26, 2023 [25 favorites]
Yet it was the corporate, Wall Street, mainstream media that insisted on a return to pre-lockdown capitalism-as-usual ASAP, while the lefties and anarchists I know are often the ones who are still most rigorously wearing masks and observing caution today. (Just to throw out a random example: the Seattle anarchist bookstore and community resource Left Bank Books still requires masks to be worn.)
We can't call covid denialism a progressive nor lefty position. For one thing, it's not progressive to be ableist, and covid denialism or minimization is inherently ableist.
posted by splitpeasoup at 11:52 AM on August 26, 2023 [25 favorites]
Really cringey to learn that Naomi Wolf (the bad one) has a website called "The Daily Clout." I don't think I can bring myself to visit it, but I'd be curious to see its About page.
posted by nobody at 12:07 PM on August 26, 2023
posted by nobody at 12:07 PM on August 26, 2023
Flown I Elk, I Moan Naomi! Klein, Wolf?
posted by chavenet at 12:11 PM on August 26, 2023 [14 favorites]
posted by chavenet at 12:11 PM on August 26, 2023 [14 favorites]
A striking thing from Wolf’s Wikipedia page is how, throughout her career and even in her well-regarded works, there are lapses similar to the one that sunk “Outrage”. E.g., in “The Beauty Myth” she claims there are 150k deaths from eating disorders annually in the U.S. when that is actually the number of sufferers.
She also claims in The Beauty Myth that the breast enhancement industry was going to get to the point of transplanting poor women's breasts onto rich women's chests, and that women who use Retin-A were being used as guinea pigs because its long-term effects were untested.
Her thesis was pretty good, but there was a lot of sloppy research/representation of facts and hysterical claims in that book. I think a better social analyst/researcher/writer could have done more with it. Which is why it didn't surprise me much to have her turn out to be an anti-vaxxer. People don't usually change radically -- the roots of what they become as they age were usually there from the beginning.
posted by orange swan at 12:23 PM on August 26, 2023 [14 favorites]
She also claims in The Beauty Myth that the breast enhancement industry was going to get to the point of transplanting poor women's breasts onto rich women's chests, and that women who use Retin-A were being used as guinea pigs because its long-term effects were untested.
Her thesis was pretty good, but there was a lot of sloppy research/representation of facts and hysterical claims in that book. I think a better social analyst/researcher/writer could have done more with it. Which is why it didn't surprise me much to have her turn out to be an anti-vaxxer. People don't usually change radically -- the roots of what they become as they age were usually there from the beginning.
posted by orange swan at 12:23 PM on August 26, 2023 [14 favorites]
I don't think I can bring myself to visit it, but I'd be curious to see its About page.
I think the About page will tell you less about it than this item it ran on 22-Aug:
posted by flabdablet at 12:37 PM on August 26, 2023 [7 favorites]
I think the About page will tell you less about it than this item it ran on 22-Aug:
Five Alarm Alert! TGP Founder Jim Hoft Exposes Massive Election Fraud CoverupMost of the content on that page is in the form of a video whose opening titles read
August 22, 2023 • by DailyClout
The Gateway Pundit broke a story revealing that a shadowy non-governmental organization tampered with thousands of vote registrations in Michigan.
Did law enforcement drop this finding down the memory hole?
in which Wolf introduces Hoft as follows:DAILYCLOUT
UNLEASH LIBERTY
Hey, everyone, welcome, greetings, it's Naomi Wolf from DailyClout and I'm absolutely thrilled to be interviewing one of my personal heroes, one of the last journalists and, y'know, real editors and journalists standing, Jim Hoft of The Gateway Pundit. Welcome, Jim!Wikipedia on The Gateway Pundit, for those previously unaware:
The Gateway Pundit (TGP) is an American far-right fake news website. The website is known for publishing falsehoods, hoaxes, and conspiracy theories.Totally lost it.
Founded by Jim Hoft in 2004, The Gateway Pundit expanded from a one-person enterprise into a multi-employee operation that is supported primarily by advertising revenue. During the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign, the site received over a million unique visitors per day. In September 2021, Google demonetized the site for publishing misinformation.
posted by flabdablet at 12:37 PM on August 26, 2023 [7 favorites]
“You can’t pick up human energy in the same way, like the energy field is just almost not there, it’s like people are holograms … It’s like a city of ghosts now, you’re there, you see them, but you can’t feel them.”
...
This sort of stuff really makes me gloomy, because as Klein notes, it's both completely bonkers, yet can provide people with a way of expressing a hard-to-identify emotional truth about feeling disconnected from other people, about needing love and not being able to find it.
People have been saying "the vibes are off" in New York and other cities since the pandemic restrictions lifted. And there *is* a lack of energy in the air in much of the US, a sense that much of the culture right now is just a shittier version of 2019.
I never put two and two together, though, about how this leads people to look for simple but dubious explanations like vaccines, crime, "wokeness," etc.
posted by smelendez at 12:51 PM on August 26, 2023 [7 favorites]
...
This sort of stuff really makes me gloomy, because as Klein notes, it's both completely bonkers, yet can provide people with a way of expressing a hard-to-identify emotional truth about feeling disconnected from other people, about needing love and not being able to find it.
People have been saying "the vibes are off" in New York and other cities since the pandemic restrictions lifted. And there *is* a lack of energy in the air in much of the US, a sense that much of the culture right now is just a shittier version of 2019.
I never put two and two together, though, about how this leads people to look for simple but dubious explanations like vaccines, crime, "wokeness," etc.
posted by smelendez at 12:51 PM on August 26, 2023 [7 favorites]
I'd like to know what Wolf thinks about Klein.
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 1:23 PM on August 26, 2023 [4 favorites]
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 1:23 PM on August 26, 2023 [4 favorites]
I no longer care what she thinks about anything. Which is a shame, but not one I can do anything about.
posted by flabdablet at 1:36 PM on August 26, 2023 [6 favorites]
posted by flabdablet at 1:36 PM on August 26, 2023 [6 favorites]
I related to Naomi Klein's fixation on Naomi Wolf's becoming an unhinged right-wing media figure, because in my twenties I had a close friend who is now a right wing nutjob. I haven't had any contact with her since late 2001, but I've googled her a few times a year since then, at first out of genuine concern for her because she was (and still is) in an abusive relationship. When I realized circa 2010 that she'd become a very vocal Rob Ford supporter, my concern morphed into morbid fascination. Her support for him was a gateway into other right wing causes: Yellow Vests, Islamophobia, Trump. She was consistently on the wrong side of every issue that came down the pike. Within the last four or five years the morbid fascination became a more cerebral and objective exercise. For me, she has become a sort of window into the right wing extremist community (much as Wolf has been for Klein), and because I knew her so well and have a good idea of how she thinks and what motivates her, I have a better understanding of how someone can go down that rabbit hole, and a better understanding of how right wingers function in their online garrisons.
I've been wanting to write an essay on her for quite some time, and hope to get to it soon.
posted by orange swan at 1:36 PM on August 26, 2023 [20 favorites]
I've been wanting to write an essay on her for quite some time, and hope to get to it soon.
posted by orange swan at 1:36 PM on August 26, 2023 [20 favorites]
I would love to read that essay because I have no fucking clue how this stuff happens. I’m afraid to go down any rabbit holes, what if I lose myself in the process and become somebody like your former friend or Wolf?
posted by Bella Donna at 1:58 PM on August 26, 2023 [5 favorites]
posted by Bella Donna at 1:58 PM on August 26, 2023 [5 favorites]
Motivation matters. Spelunking the rabbit holes for the sake of understanding just what it is that the rabbits are allowing themselves to believe is not at all the same thing as looking there for the answers to your life's problems. Keep your critical thinking safety gear in good shape and you'll be fine.
posted by flabdablet at 2:02 PM on August 26, 2023 [8 favorites]
posted by flabdablet at 2:02 PM on August 26, 2023 [8 favorites]
The husbands' names thing is completely hilarious.
Another commonality is that the Naomis Klein and Wolf both have hippie intellectual Dads, who were slightly older than the average hippie. Naomi Klein's Dad, Michael Klein, is an American red-diaper baby who started protesting the Vietnam War when he was in medical school. He became a member of the antiwar group, Physicians for Social Responsibility, but when he got drafted, the Army scheduled a hearing on whether he could serve, because of his parent's Communist background. After watching an anti-napalm documentary by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, Michael eloped to Canada with his girlfriend, the filmmaker Bonnie Sherr, & they never came back. Bonnie was pregnant with Naomi's older brother Seth at the time & that's why Naomi is a Canadian citizen, even though her parents were American.
Naomi Wolf's Dad, Leonard Wolf, is a Romanian-Jewish poet who was part of the Berkeley Renaissance of the 1940s and 1950s, but he later founded Happening House in San Francisco's Haight Ashbury district. He was also an early backer of the first Free Clinic in Haight Ashbury and wrote one of the better contemporary accounts of the hippie movement, Voices of the Love Generation. The lefty Jewish Dad factor is probably the most parsimonious explanation for why the Naomis have had so many synchronicities in how they both grew up.
posted by jonp72 at 2:55 PM on August 26, 2023 [15 favorites]
Another commonality is that the Naomis Klein and Wolf both have hippie intellectual Dads, who were slightly older than the average hippie. Naomi Klein's Dad, Michael Klein, is an American red-diaper baby who started protesting the Vietnam War when he was in medical school. He became a member of the antiwar group, Physicians for Social Responsibility, but when he got drafted, the Army scheduled a hearing on whether he could serve, because of his parent's Communist background. After watching an anti-napalm documentary by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, Michael eloped to Canada with his girlfriend, the filmmaker Bonnie Sherr, & they never came back. Bonnie was pregnant with Naomi's older brother Seth at the time & that's why Naomi is a Canadian citizen, even though her parents were American.
Naomi Wolf's Dad, Leonard Wolf, is a Romanian-Jewish poet who was part of the Berkeley Renaissance of the 1940s and 1950s, but he later founded Happening House in San Francisco's Haight Ashbury district. He was also an early backer of the first Free Clinic in Haight Ashbury and wrote one of the better contemporary accounts of the hippie movement, Voices of the Love Generation. The lefty Jewish Dad factor is probably the most parsimonious explanation for why the Naomis have had so many synchronicities in how they both grew up.
posted by jonp72 at 2:55 PM on August 26, 2023 [15 favorites]
Doppelgangers usually turn out badly, in the literature. I hope Naomi Klein manages to survive this.
If you want a short but creepy literary account of doppelgängers, I recommend the Edgar Allan Poe short story William Wilson, in which the title character is plagued by a double who looks just like him and is also named William Wilson.
posted by jonp72 at 2:59 PM on August 26, 2023 [2 favorites]
If you want a short but creepy literary account of doppelgängers, I recommend the Edgar Allan Poe short story William Wilson, in which the title character is plagued by a double who looks just like him and is also named William Wilson.
posted by jonp72 at 2:59 PM on August 26, 2023 [2 favorites]
I read this piece in the magazine. It is sheer misogyny mixed with that oh so common antisemitism, that people can't tell them apart. Two Naomi's?!?! With opinions??!? But, but, but...that's two Jewish women with Jewish-woman-sounding-names! How ever will I keep them apart???
It's not likely to happen to any Tom, Dick or Harry.
posted by Toddles at 4:06 PM on August 26, 2023 [1 favorite]
It's not likely to happen to any Tom, Dick or Harry.
posted by Toddles at 4:06 PM on August 26, 2023 [1 favorite]
Matt Gertz vs. Matt Gaetz:
‘Wrong guy’: Journalist with strikingly similar name to Matt Gaetz has to defend himself on Twitter
posted by chrchr at 4:20 PM on August 26, 2023 [10 favorites]
‘Wrong guy’: Journalist with strikingly similar name to Matt Gaetz has to defend himself on Twitter
posted by chrchr at 4:20 PM on August 26, 2023 [10 favorites]
I think Klein's bafflement at how easily the wellness movement was co-opted by fascism, even though she thinks of them as being leftist environmentalists, is easily explained. Umberto Eco drilled down into what fascists actually believe back in the 90s, and the wellness movement shares some of those fundamental assumptions (specifically a cult of traditionalism - think your paleo diets and your 'superfoods' - and a rejection of modernism and complexity - think how there's always one weird trick or simple remedy for literally anything). You add a bit of social frustration, thanks to really personally inconvenient lockdowns guided by a rationalist scientific philosophy they were already rejecting in their minds, and baby, you got a jackboot stew going.
posted by Merus at 6:17 PM on August 26, 2023 [30 favorites]
posted by Merus at 6:17 PM on August 26, 2023 [30 favorites]
The thing that has taken Naomi Wolf's place is so scary. Did she hit her head or something? I'm just wondering why some people have completely jumped the shark.
posted by Didnt_do_enough at 8:07 PM on August 26, 2023
posted by Didnt_do_enough at 8:07 PM on August 26, 2023
I have heard this before — that the Right is a big party of believers and non-believers alike, while the Left is constricted by its own purity tests. I think this distinction doesn’t hold up to scrutiny, and probably follows from not living inside the political world of the Right, but rather viewing it from the outside.
I don't want to drive the discussion into the weeds, but there really is something there about the Right feeling like a much more accepting, come-as-you-are party.
First, there really isn't much of a politically coherent "Right" in the US. If you go back to 2020, the Republicans literally couldn't come up with a plank in advance of the Presidential election that wasn't just "we support what Trump says" and "we are against what the Democrats are for". That was it. That's all they could find in common with each other at that point.
But there are the institutions and organizations that you'd normally associate with a politically coherent party, which are great if you just want to feel like you're a part of something, or that you're donating to a real cause, or that you're on some sort of a team that's fighting against another team who are Bad Guys. And they have deep-pocketed donors who can help keep this sort of local stuff going almost indefinitely.
That lack of ideology makes it convenient to welcome people into the fold, because not very much in the way of shared values is required. Oh, you're a Trump fan because you're Evangelical and think he'll ban harlots from getting abortions? Great. You're Trump fans because you're barely-closeted White supremacists and think he'll send the lesser races to FEMA extermination camps in his second term? Cool—just remember to vote in the locals! You're just a dumb-as-fuck conspiracy theorist who believes any damn fool thing you read on Facebook? Perfect! Here's the latest on which vaccines cause the Woke Mind Virus. (Do you need help getting to the polls with your DUI license suspension? No? Okay, cool. We know the DA if you find yourself in a jam!)
It doesn't matter why you ended up at the Church of Blood and Soil and Face-Eating Leopards. They'll take anyone, and if you aren't 100% on board with everything from Day 1, no worries: as long as you're willing to vote for the right guy, they'll take you as you are and work on you from there.
posted by Kadin2048 at 10:18 PM on August 26, 2023 [22 favorites]
I don't want to drive the discussion into the weeds, but there really is something there about the Right feeling like a much more accepting, come-as-you-are party.
First, there really isn't much of a politically coherent "Right" in the US. If you go back to 2020, the Republicans literally couldn't come up with a plank in advance of the Presidential election that wasn't just "we support what Trump says" and "we are against what the Democrats are for". That was it. That's all they could find in common with each other at that point.
But there are the institutions and organizations that you'd normally associate with a politically coherent party, which are great if you just want to feel like you're a part of something, or that you're donating to a real cause, or that you're on some sort of a team that's fighting against another team who are Bad Guys. And they have deep-pocketed donors who can help keep this sort of local stuff going almost indefinitely.
That lack of ideology makes it convenient to welcome people into the fold, because not very much in the way of shared values is required. Oh, you're a Trump fan because you're Evangelical and think he'll ban harlots from getting abortions? Great. You're Trump fans because you're barely-closeted White supremacists and think he'll send the lesser races to FEMA extermination camps in his second term? Cool—just remember to vote in the locals! You're just a dumb-as-fuck conspiracy theorist who believes any damn fool thing you read on Facebook? Perfect! Here's the latest on which vaccines cause the Woke Mind Virus. (Do you need help getting to the polls with your DUI license suspension? No? Okay, cool. We know the DA if you find yourself in a jam!)
It doesn't matter why you ended up at the Church of Blood and Soil and Face-Eating Leopards. They'll take anyone, and if you aren't 100% on board with everything from Day 1, no worries: as long as you're willing to vote for the right guy, they'll take you as you are and work on you from there.
posted by Kadin2048 at 10:18 PM on August 26, 2023 [22 favorites]
Presently, the left is accepting of identity - but you have to behave right towards people. The right is accepting of behavior - but you have to be the right sort of person.
So if you are the right sort of person, the right seems more accepting to you, because no matter how terrible a person you're being, you're still fine with them.
posted by Zalzidrax at 12:27 AM on August 27, 2023 [27 favorites]
So if you are the right sort of person, the right seems more accepting to you, because no matter how terrible a person you're being, you're still fine with them.
posted by Zalzidrax at 12:27 AM on August 27, 2023 [27 favorites]
The thing that has taken Naomi Wolf's place is so scary. Did she hit her head or something? I'm just wondering why some people have completely jumped the shark.
Could we not? I know it's scary to think that anyone can start believing untrue things, but like that's just part of the human condition. The healthy human brain is incredibly easy to trick. Hell, all it takes to get half the internet believing a striped dress is the wrong colors is ambiguous lighting.
Traumatic head injuries and other causes are neurological damage have actually happened to your fellow Mefites, and it sucks to have your personal health problems stigmatized. Brain trauma doesn't cause people to believe ugly shit, wanting to believe ugly shit causes people to believe ugly shit.
posted by Gygesringtone at 6:32 AM on August 27, 2023 [8 favorites]
Could we not? I know it's scary to think that anyone can start believing untrue things, but like that's just part of the human condition. The healthy human brain is incredibly easy to trick. Hell, all it takes to get half the internet believing a striped dress is the wrong colors is ambiguous lighting.
Traumatic head injuries and other causes are neurological damage have actually happened to your fellow Mefites, and it sucks to have your personal health problems stigmatized. Brain trauma doesn't cause people to believe ugly shit, wanting to believe ugly shit causes people to believe ugly shit.
posted by Gygesringtone at 6:32 AM on August 27, 2023 [8 favorites]
Wolf and Klein have always been paranoid style type thinkers. Wolf just shifted targets and let the paranoia fully eat her brain. Klein’s disaster capitalism still plays pretty loose with the facts to identify obvious “villains.”
posted by leotrotsky at 6:39 AM on August 27, 2023 [4 favorites]
posted by leotrotsky at 6:39 AM on August 27, 2023 [4 favorites]
not untalented (in his field)
Gotta stop you right there:
Jordan Peterson Was an Expert Witness in a Murder Trial. The Court Called His Expert Opinions ‘Dubious’.
posted by meehawl at 11:18 AM on August 27, 2023 [6 favorites]
Gotta stop you right there:
Jordan Peterson Was an Expert Witness in a Murder Trial. The Court Called His Expert Opinions ‘Dubious’.
Manitoba Justice Shawn Greenberg ruled three-quarters of Peterson’s evidence was inadmissible and questioned his credibility as an expert witness.Anyone can try to hold oneself out as an expert in a field. Only a smaller number of self-professed experts become disqualified at trial.
posted by meehawl at 11:18 AM on August 27, 2023 [6 favorites]
Brain trauma doesn't cause people to believe ugly shit, wanting to believe ugly shit causes people to believe ugly shit.
Speculating about strangers having brain trauma in order to explain their unpleasant behaviors gets pretty weird on multiple fronts, and I think that’s what you’re calling out, but I don’t much like the implications of the quoted bit taken literally. If you’re going to take a biomedical, disability-aware view of mental health and behavior you can’t also take a view that reserves the right to blame behaviors categorically on people… being bad people at heart? when they cross a certain line.
posted by atoxyl at 1:35 PM on August 27, 2023 [2 favorites]
Speculating about strangers having brain trauma in order to explain their unpleasant behaviors gets pretty weird on multiple fronts, and I think that’s what you’re calling out, but I don’t much like the implications of the quoted bit taken literally. If you’re going to take a biomedical, disability-aware view of mental health and behavior you can’t also take a view that reserves the right to blame behaviors categorically on people… being bad people at heart? when they cross a certain line.
posted by atoxyl at 1:35 PM on August 27, 2023 [2 favorites]
By the way... does this remind anyone else of that X-Files episode in which two doppelgangers keep running into each other and causing chaos to break out all around them?
posted by orange swan at 4:27 PM on August 27, 2023
posted by orange swan at 4:27 PM on August 27, 2023
I have heard this before — that the Right is a big party of believers and non-believers alike, while the Left is constricted by its own purity tests. I think this distinction doesn’t hold up to scrutiny, and probably follows from not living inside the political world of the Right, but rather viewing it from the outside.This is absolutely my experience. I spent my first 25 years or so in politically-active right-wing conservative fundamentalism, and the lament is about ingroup/outgroup perception rather than reality. The right engages in endless internal purity wars, with right-wing ideologues accused of being communists if they're on the wrong side of an ingroup argument, etc. Outsiders are frequently demonized and treated as not only contemptible but threatening and actively malicious, as existential threats to the ingroup's survival.
By the same token, many on the right lament their own lack of unity in comparison to the Left's (as they see it) easily observable and tremendously effective ideological uniformity and coordination. While it may also seem contradictory, many on the right also lament the fact that they are perceived as unwelcoming and exclusionary because they stand for "the truth" while the left, lacking any principles beyond the desire to accrue power, accepts any and all comers, wooing them with seductive promises of guilt-free hedonism and acceptance into the love-bomb of popular culture.
When I left that culture it was disorienting and eye-opening to discover that "both sides" (reductive but close enough for this conversation) say many of the same things about each other. That isn't to say that they are the same but that many perception of group strengths, weaknesses, and coherence are projections of internal anxiety rather than meaningful assessments.
posted by verb at 11:16 AM on August 28, 2023 [20 favorites]
So perhaps if there is a message I should have taken from the destabilising appearance of my doppelganger, this is it: once and for all, stop eavesdropping on strangers talking about you in this crowded and filthy global toilet known as social media.
Still got it.
posted by flabdablet at 8:34 AM on August 26
Email is a Men's Room
Thank you all for making Metafilter more like a public park. there is still poop in the corners but there's also some trees
posted by eustatic at 11:29 AM on August 28, 2023 [3 favorites]
Still got it.
posted by flabdablet at 8:34 AM on August 26
Email is a Men's Room
Thank you all for making Metafilter more like a public park. there is still poop in the corners but there's also some trees
posted by eustatic at 11:29 AM on August 28, 2023 [3 favorites]
It is sheer misogyny mixed with that oh so common antisemitism, that people can't tell them apart. Two Naomi's?!?! With opinions??!? But, but, but...that's two Jewish women with Jewish-woman-sounding-names! How ever will I keep them apart???
It's not likely to happen to any Tom, Dick or Harry.
I have a little trouble keeping Ezra Klein and Ezra Levant straight. As with the Naomis, I do know very well which one is which, but I just have to stop and think for a moment to make sure I have the right one in mind whenever I come across a mention of either. I think it might help me to remember that in both cases, the Klein is the good one.
posted by orange swan at 7:18 AM on August 31, 2023
It's not likely to happen to any Tom, Dick or Harry.
I have a little trouble keeping Ezra Klein and Ezra Levant straight. As with the Naomis, I do know very well which one is which, but I just have to stop and think for a moment to make sure I have the right one in mind whenever I come across a mention of either. I think it might help me to remember that in both cases, the Klein is the good one.
posted by orange swan at 7:18 AM on August 31, 2023
« Older This will definitely be a death bed memory for me. | Word --> Ward --> Draw Newer »
This thread has been archived and is closed to new comments
you’re doing just fine
If the Naomi be Wolf
Oh, buddy. Ooooof.
(Not sure of the original author)
posted by autopilot at 6:17 AM on August 26, 2023 [66 favorites]