Naomi Wolf Banned from Twitter

The feminist writer Naomi Wolf garnered fame during the 1990s for her book The Beauty Myth and her work as an adviser to the presidential campaigns of Bill Clinton and Al Gore. But in recent years, she’s been better known for promoting an array of unhinged conspiracy theories, most recently regarding the novel coronavirus that causes COVID-19. This combination has made her a perfect guest for Fox News.

Fox is far more interested in turning coronavirus into a political cudgel than in giving users accurate health information. And so the network’s hosts lean on Wolf’s liberal credentials while giving her a platform to claim that the Democratic response to the pandemic is aimed at dissolving society and enacting a totalitarian state comparable to Nazi Germany.



Since mid-February, she appeared at least seven times on Fox to discuss her views on the pandemic: twice apiece on Tucker Carlson Tonight and The Revolution with Steve Hilton, and three times on Fox News Primetime, the most recent of which came Monday night. Wolf cited the notorious anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. during that interview to argue that Dr. Anthony Fauci, Bill and Melinda Gates, the state of Israel, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention were engaged in some sort of nebulous but sinister vaccine conspiracy.

It is irresponsible for a news outlet to give Wolf that sort of credulous attention. Her social media channels are littered with absurd claims about the virus and its vaccines. Between her first and second Fox appearances alone, she tweeted that a new technology allowed the delivery of “vaccines w nanopatticles that let you travel back in time”; that the Moderna vaccine is a “software platform” that allows “uploads”; and that due to face masks, children now lack “the human reflex that they when you smile at them they smile back” and have “dark circles under [their] eyes from low oxygen.”

On Sunday night, Wolf cited purported reports of women who “bleed oddly [from] being AROUND vaccinated women,” pointing her followers to a Facebook group which at one point had been titled “All Vaccines are Fake.”

Less than 24 hours later, she was back on Fox.

Wolf’s coronavirus rantings are consistent with her recent remarks on a host of other topics. In a series of 2014 Facebook posts, she suggested that videos showing Islamic State group terrorists beheading Americans might have been fabricated by the U.S. government; that the government was trying to create an Ebola outbreak in the U.S. as part of a plot to bring about a totalitarian state; and that the results of the Scottish independence referendum had been faked. That spate provoked critical revisitings of her prior commentary during the Bush and Obama administrations from both the left (The Daily Beast’s Michael Moynihan: “From ISIS to Ebola: What Has Made Naomi Wolf So Paranoid?”) and the right (National Review’s Charles C. Cooke: “The Fevered Delusions of Naomi Wolf”). ut th