Naomi Wolf: Mugged by the Left

Feminist firebrand and public intellectual Naomi Wolf was mugged by the new American left. She was banned from Twitter and stigmatized for purveying misinformation and is justly in a rage about it.

Worse yet, in the world of betrayal, Wolf’s leftist fellow travelers have refused to stand up for her against Twitter censorship. Conservative Congresspeople have filled in the gap, as defenders of free speech. 

Wolf’s cri de coeur puts a human face on the cancel culture. It is an ugly face, a distorted, contorted face, possessed by mindless bureaucrats exercising something that resembles power.

Last week, the Twitter censors appeared before a Congressional committee. Wolf is horrified and enraged:

So I finally am seeing them — up close, in real life, in person. I am finally able to look at the faces of the heretofore faceless technocrats who took it upon themselves to try to destroy my life and ruin my name.

I am witnessing, as I see them seated primly in rows in a Congressional hearing room, the very faces — the somber, ill-cut but costly blue suits, the bad wire-rimmed glasses, the judgmental expressions — of those who were personally responsible for the misery, trauma, reputational damage, shattered dreams, and loss of income, in my one life, over the course of last two and a half years.

Here at last are the very people who took it upon themselves, or who oversaw their colleagues, to single me out, to collude with the White House, and with Carol Crawford of CDC, and with DHS perhaps, to suspend me — following an accurate tweet of mine that warned women of menstrual harms following mRNA injection.

The ultimate indignity is that these people are on the political left. They belong to Wolf’s tribe, the one she has served for decades now:

These are the people — “my”people, paradoxically; people educated like me, people who shared my political views until 2020; these are people who vacationed where I used to vacation, who hang out with people I know — who were the agents behind full- on Stalinist-type persecution of innocent Americans; of me; these are the people who ruined my life, or sought to do so, and destroyed my career, or sought to do so. These emotionally ugly, these nasty, self-satisfied folks, so sure that they are right, so very, very wrong; are here at last; right here on C-Span.

Once the veil is removed and you get to see the people face-to-face, they become smaller and smaller, Wolf’s descriptions are classics of the genre:

These nothing people in front of me, these hacks, these people of zero cognitive distinction, these essentially trivial-minded humans, used their unearned, thuglike, intellectually meaningless power — the intellectually two-dimensional power of a social media platform — to announce to the world that I was crazy, unhinged; to present what appears to have been a file, to the BBC, to NPR, to The New York Times - to my own former colleagues — seeking to re-present me, a lifelong writer of heavily annotated bestselling nonfiction, as not credible.

It is incredible to me, as someone who was raised in an American meritocracy, and who has until very recently believed in American meritocracy, that a group of nonentities in Twitter, in collusion with nonentities at CDC (hi there, Carol Crawford), the White House and the US Dept. of the Census — were able thus so simply, and at such immediate, nuclear scale, to destroy the reputation of someone identified since 1990 as a major American voice.

One ought to underscore the point that if Twitter was doing the bidding of government agencies it was not acting as a private company.

As for the people themselves, begin with Yoel Roth:

There, onscreen, present at last, is Yoel Roth, “Former Twitter Head of Trust & Safety” - with that oddly prim, pursed mouth that these technocrats all seem to have; with those fingertips touching each other, presenting himself as if he is the moderator of reality itself, and as if he finds himself in the presence of something that smells bad. There are his glazed defiant blue eyes, his slightly balding pate; the costly haircut; there is the sneering downward cast of his mouth. I try not ever to make critical personal remarks, but the ugliness, sorrow, loss, isolation and pain I sustained, and still sustain every day, at the hands of these until-now-faceless, self-righteous people, tend to make me see them aversively; or perhaps I see the moral ugliness of their decisions, as if manifested in their faces and body language.

And also:

There is Anika Collier Navaroli, “Former US Safety Policy Team Senior Expert,” talking about “dangerous speech”. There is her pale-gray jacket, her earnest if not bullying posture, as she leans forward, passionately describing the terrifying nature of freedom of speech. 

To which Wolf:

It was never Ms Navaroli’s role to decide if “dogwhistles” would lead to violence; that is the role of police and of the FBI. Why is she claiming that a social media platform is supposed to take on the role of maintaining physical public safety, that belongs to law enforcement?

How much reputational damage did they cause?

It is unlikely, too, that I will ever recoup the six figure investments that investors withdrew from my company when Twitter, colluding with the government, was orchestrating the shredding of my reputation. It is unlikely that a 35 years career and legacy online of what had been seen until very recently as a life of significant accomplishment, can ever be re-established.

And, of course, the irony is that those who are at war against free speech are leftists. Wolf has apparently now had a change of heart and mind about her political allegiances:

I cannot believe that “my own”people, my former tribe on the elite left, are joining forces with the government to violate the First Amendment rights of all Americans and then, worse still, to justify having done so. I can’t believe that Democrat after Democrat, liberal after liberal, is on C-Span singing the praises of censorship and inventing imaginary roles for government officials and social media platforms to keep Americans “safe” from the “threats“ of discourse and ideas. 

And I can’t believe that the forces who tore my life apart, temporarily half-destroyed my business, ended any hopes of my realizing my one life’s best dream, and set a match to my reputation, turn out, now that the curtain has been pulled back, as at the end of The Wizard of Oz - to be such small, small, sad, petty, miserable, mediocre people.

I heartily recommend Wolf’s screed to your attention.