Feminist author and researcher Naomi Wolf spoke out about her recent Twitter de-platforming and a host of other issues during a Tuesday phone interview with Townhall.
Wolf, a founder of third-wave feminism and former advisor to the political campaigns of both Bill Clinton and Al Gore, has become something of a lightning rod of late by choosing to side with liberty and reality over Covid fascism and the anti-science narrative that lockdowns, mask mandates, vaccine passports, and other forms of suppression and tyranny will do anything other than tear society apart.
And up to the weekend, Wolf had been using her 140,000 follower-strong verified Twitter account to speak out about those issues - until Twitter permanently and without explanation suspended her voice from their platform. The reasoning, according to The Hill: "repeated violations of [Twitter's] COVID-19 misinformation policy."
The BBC headline on the topic reads, "Twitter suspends Naomi Wolf after tweeting anti-vaccine misinformation." It's a careful choice of words, "after" instead of "because of," because the truth is they don't know for sure. The outlet then goes on to guess at what that "misinformation" might be:
Dr Wolf, well known for her acclaimed third-wave feminist book The Beauty Myth, posted a wide-range of unfounded theories about vaccines.
One tweet claimed that vaccines were a "software platform that can receive uploads".
She also compared Dr Anthony Fauci, the top Covid adviser in the US, to Satan to her more than 140,000 followers.
Most recently, she tweeted that the urine and faeces of people who had received the jab needed to be separated from general sewage supplies while tests were done to measure its impact on non-vaccinated people through drinking water.
Speaking on the matter via phone on Tuesday, Wolf told me that the media's characterization of her tweets and positions on COVID-19 and vaccinations was "inaccurate," and expressed frustration at the fact that they could no longer be viewed and judged by the public.
"As a journalist, it's very disturbing for journalism, because if a newspaper gets something wrong I can ask for a rebuttal, but I can't reach Jack Dorsey to challenge his decision," Wolf said. "He [Twitter] just wiped out 11 years of commentary. There's no accountability, no recourse, and they erased the evidence so people can't look for themselves and decide if what I said is well documented or not. Big Tech companies, who all profit from lockdowns, have the power to silence reporters and choose one side of the political spectrum or another and really determine outcomes."
Calling her banishment a "Chinese Communist Party kind of move," Wolf insisted she isn't anti-vaccine, but rather "pro rule of law," particularly those - like HIPPA and the Fourth Amendment - that protect Americans "from coercion and invasion of privacy."
"It is the job of reporters to report," Wolf told me. "I've been a women's health advocate for 35 years, but the history of women's health is littered with interventions that were promoted as great but turned out to be not sufficiently tested. Hormone replacement, breast implants, ... so many things women have suffered because medical interventions have not been sufficiently tested. If hundreds of women are reporting menstrual irregularities, it's my job to amplify that and call for further studies. It's not being anti-vaccine, it's being a women's health advocate."
The content about "urine and faeces," which I hadn't seen, was gleaned from "an FDA white paper about mRNA vaccines," according to Wolf.
Now I'm not here to defend or own every tweet or retweet from Wolf or anyone else. (I might not even agree now with tweets I myself made several months ago, although I would argue that I've been fairly accurate on the COVID fiasco since March 2020.) I'm sure there would be some tweets I would disagree with or wouldn't have retweeted myself. However, in her defense, as a follower for several months, I did notice that some tweets that might seem outlandish if taken out of context seemed to be in the form of questioning and genuine discourse. Conversationally, Wolf came across to me as a genuine, irenic person interested in finding common ground among people of various political and sociological backgrounds, the same way she came across in this February 2021 interview with Tucker Carlson.
Great segment from liberal feminist author & former Bill Clinton advisor @naomirwolf on the importance of battling COVID-fascism:
— Scott Morefield (@SKMorefield) February 23, 2021
"Nowhere in the Constitution does it say 'all this' can be suspended if there's a bad disease."
Why isn't more of this coming from liberals?? pic.twitter.com/tsve96FSXr
Wolf went on to tell me that the whole narrative that she was de-platformed for "vaccine disinformation" was a "distraction" from some inconvenient items about Dr. Anthony Fauci and gain of function research that she had posted earlier as well as a video about how to successfully lobby state representatives on vaccine passports that also got her banned from YouTube.
"YouTube de-platformed us for a video with a formerly homeless citizen leader, Oregonian Luna Singer, who is disabled and wheelchair-bound, who successfully lobbied State Senator Thatcher to adopt the No Vaccine Passports bill," Wolf wrote later in a follow-up email. "This video explained to citizens everywhere how to lobby their state representatives successfully, no matter what their personal circumstances."
Wolf, still a self-described Democrat, reiterated concern about conservatives whose voices "are being purged from Twitter and Facebook," and called former President Donald Trump's two-year Facebook ban "shocking."
"This gives a platform like Twitter the power to create a one-party state, remove discourse, and by default be the voices of Democrats and Democratic legislation," she said.