Naomi Wolf’s career as a writer and public intellectual looked like it was all set. Having been born in San Francisco, to an anthropologist mother and an author father, academia was arguably in her blood. She went to Yale, and became a Rhodes Scholar at the University of Oxford – though, she explains, she was dissuaded from submitting her PhD thesis while studying there, attributing the resistance to a mix of sexism, snobbery and antisemitism. She would eventually complete her doctorate in English literature in 2015.
Following Oxford, she embarked upon a writing career, finding fame in 1991 with The Beauty Myth – a feminist blockbuster and international bestseller, which argued that beauty is a socially-constructed concept designed by the patriarchy to shackle women. Even then, there were warning signs that the academia flowing through her veins might have been taking a few shortcuts. The book claimed 150,000 women die every year in the US from anorexia, citing the American Anorexia and Bulimia Association. However, the organisation says she misquoted them – the 150,000 figure referred to sufferers, not fatalities. The actual number of annual deaths was closer to 100.
The error wasn’t a one-off: Wolf also claimed that 3.5 million Brits suffered with anorexia or bulimia – which in 1991 would have accounted for 6% of the UK population. When challenged, she said she’d calculated the figures herself by extrapolating data from a single clinic. Experts did not agree that this was a realistic number. In fact, of the 23 statistics cited in The Beauty Myth, 18 were incorrect – and on average, Wolf’s figures were 8 times larger than the real numbers.
Two years later, Wolf published her follow-up, Fire with Fire, espousing what she called “power feminism”. It argued that Anita Hill’s sexual harassment accusation against US Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas provoked a ‘genderquake’ that turned American women into ‘the political ruling class’ – an idea other feminist writers described as “grossly exaggerated” and a “dubious oversimplification and highly debatable assertion”.
The die was cast, with her feminist academic peers now describing her as “a sloppy thinker and incompetent writer” – although such verdicts did little to diminish her growing reputation as a feminist public intellectual across the course of several more books. In 2007, she wrote her critique of fascism, The End of America, comparing post-9/11 politics in the United States to what she described as a 10-step checklist of fascism through history. A review in The Atlantic pointed out that the historical parallels she lists between historical dictators and modern American politicians were constructed by cherry picking data and misusing sources. By 2010, Wolf was giving interviews about how Barack Obama’s presidency resembled Adolf Hitler’s dictatorship.
In October 2014, Wolf took to Facebook to just ask questions about videos that showed ISIS beheading journalists from the US and UK. According to Wolf, the videos were staged by the US government – no such journalists were killed. Those grieving parents? Actors.
When criticised for expressing such opinions, Wolf doubled down:
All the people who are attacking me right now for ‘conspiracy theories’ have no idea what they are talking about … people who assume the dominant narrative MUST BE TRUE and the dominant reasons MUST BE REAL are not experienced in how that world works. I stand by what I wrote.
Shortly afterwards, she deleted the post, and retracted her statements, saying the videos were “not yet independently confirmed by two sources as authentic” and claiming that the single source for the videos was in the pocket of the US government. That also was not true – the videos had been independently verified.
The same year, she claimed that US troops dispatched to West Africa to help treat Ebola were actually ordered to import the virus back to the US for use as a bioweapon to secure a military coup on US soil. Elsewhere in 2014, she claimed that the Scottish independence referendum was rigged in order to keep Scotland under control of the Westminster.
Academic death recorded
Then came the pivotal moment in Wolf’s career. After finally completing her doctorate at the University of Oxford in 2015, Wolf turned her thesis into a book, Outrages: Sex, Censorship, and the Criminalization of Love. The book, and her PhD, was a study into how homosexuality had been punished by British society – including the “execution” of “sodomites”. Oprah’s magazine listed it as one of their top books of the year. However, the very next day, all copies were recalled from US bookstores, and pulped.
The reason for this change in fortune was Wolf’s May 2019 interview with BBC radio presenter Matthew Sweet, in which Sweet highlighted that one of the central lines of evidence Wolf relies upon to prove the persecution of homosexuals was a list she’d found of several dozen executions.
“I don’t think you’re right about this”, Sweet told her – live on air – before explaining that one of the people her book claims was executed in the 1860s… had actually been released. In fact, Wolf had misunderstood the text of her main source: in each of the cases, where a victim was listed as “death recorded”, the judge had seen fit to issue a pardon, while fulfilling a legal requirement to write “death” in the records. The radio interview makes for excruciating listening.
It only gets worse: the crime in each case was listed as ‘sodomy’, but despite what Wolf had assumed, this didn’t mean homosexuality. Sodomy was a broad category at the time, covering a range of sex crimes. Wolf was, as historian Fern Riddell put it, conflating “child rapists and those taking part in acts of bestiality as being gay men in consensual relationships” – all in order to decry the persecution of homosexuality. This was the central tent pole of Wolf’s book – and of her doctoral thesis – and she hadn’t checked what the terms meant.
To say Wolf took this huge public humiliation badly is an understatement. Two months later, in July 2019, she was spiralling into conspiratorial whirlpools, including warning against the dangerous rollout of 5G:
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 sentiment once again showed her lack of understanding of history, given that Belfast in the 1970s was rather famously not very calm, and rarely peaceful.
Wolf and Covid
That was late 2019, and already a novel virus was evolving in a wet market in Wuhan, which would capture the mind of this conspiracy-prone writer. The pandemic was a perfect storm for Wolf, with her overestimation of her own ability to figure out what’s true, her questionable research methods, and her instinct for identifying in the shadows sure-fire signs in of the looming totalitarian regime – especially so soon after the high-profile humiliation she’d suffered over her most serious academic work.
From March 2020, her Twitter, Facebook and Telegram channels became a clearing house for misinformation about the virus, the wearing of masks, the effectiveness of lockdowns, and the safety of vaccines. She told her 140,000 Twitter followers that Covid-19 restrictions were tantamount to the Jim Crow laws. She explained how terrifying it was that in these post-mask times, “children don’t have the human reflex that they when you smile at them they smile back” because she was “seeing kids with their lower faces hanging inertly, absolutely unmoving facial muscles, when they take their masks off”. She explained that, having read the Moderna website, “the mRNA is not actually a vaccine but a software platform”. She told her followers:
I actually work with developers who create software so I understand how dangerous it is to have a tech in one’s body that can receive ‘uploads’.
For Wolf, these revelations apparently finally made sense of a conversation she claims to have overheard in a restaurant in Manhattan in 2019, explaining to her Twitter followers in February 2021:
Terrifying. Also confirms/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 that let you travel back in time. Not kidding.
It’s hard to know what the conversation was that she overheard. Perhaps it was a conversation about Apple’s “Time Machine” backup feature, or perhaps relevant is the fact that the movie Avengers: Endgame came out in 2019, in which the heroes essentially inject themselves with nanoparticles in order to travel back in time.
In April 2021, she made international headlines after using her former feminist credentials to amplify myths that the vaccines were causing infertility in women – which they weren’t. Later the same month, she claimed Anthony Fauci doesn’t work for the US, because he had loyalties to Israel that interfered with service to public health. Wolf, it’s worth pointing out, is Jewish – a fact she used to deflect criticism for sharing what some people read as an obvious antisemitic trope.
The claims continued, including claiming that “unvaccinated people report feeling ill when in enclosed rooms for a length of time with vaccinated people” because “the virus could have been a Chinese bioweapon”. She even highlighted the urgency of keeping the urine and faeces of vaccinated people out of the general sewage supply while tests were done to measure its impact on non-vaccinated people through drinking water.
It is no surprise, then, that her political allegiances have shifted throughout this time – she appeared on The Charlie Kirk Show in May 2022 to warn about “military-age men pouring over the border from places like Afghanistan and Ukraine” in order to be armed on behalf of the World Health Organization. She has appeared on Fox News, and Tucker Carlson, and became a regular contributor to Steve Bannon’s War Room. She even appeared as an expert on Infowars, with Alex Jones. Then, in 2024, this former feminist trailblazer threw her weight behind two men who could hardly be considered allies of equality: Donald Trump and RFK Jr. Even that final conclusion of her political transition didn’t happen without suspicious circumstance, as she explained last October:
I endorsed Pres Donald Trump yesterday. Today all day my phone froze, the cursor on my computer started wandering around the desktop, and my wifi continually disconnected. All coincidentally.
As the New Statesman summarised: “Perhaps it’s not that Wolf is a feminist who’s degenerated into conspiracism, but instead that she’s a conspiracy theorist who happened to fall into feminism first.”
