In my defence, it was never my intent to write about it. I did not have time. No one asked me to. And several people strongly cautioned against it. Not now – not with the literal and figurative fires roiling our planet. And certainly not about this.
Other Naomi – that is how I refer to her now. This person with whom I have been chronically confused for over a decade. My big-haired doppelganger. A person whom so many others appear to find indistinguishable from me. A person who does many extreme things that cause strangers to chastise me or thank me or express their pity for me.
I am referring, of course, to Naomi Wolf. In the 1990s, she was a standard-bearer for “third wave” feminism, then a leading adviser to US vice-president Al Gore. Today, she is a full-time, industrial-scale disseminator of unproven conspiracy theories on everything from Islamic State beheadings to vaccines.
Me Naomi being the one who writes about everytihng being a capitalist comspiracy…..
I’ve often thought that there is only enough ‘public space’ for one of every type of celebrity (this is a rule of thumb rather than a hard law).
So there is only enough public space for one ‘famous’ female solo singer, one boy band, one football striker for England. One famous poet, songwriter, newsreader, pandemic modeller, climate change figurehead, political figurehead, and so on.
There is perhaps only public space for one Naomi Pundit – and complaining about that is pointless. I notice that Naomi (take your pick) does not care to change their name for the purposes of disambiguation so really it is all about battles for celebrity, or flatulent tosspottery. The whinge is in the Grauniad after all.
In the 1990s, she was a standard-bearer for “third wave” feminism, then a leading adviser to US vice-president Al Gore. Today, she is a full-time, industrial-scale disseminator of unproven conspiracy theories on everything from Islamic State beheadings to vaccines.
We should stop listening to Unproven Conspiracy Theories and make sure you’re vaxxed, masked, buttplugged and triple boosted for Net Zero instead.
All sounds a bit psychopathic. I mean how many “Other Naomis” does her febrile and fractured mind contain? One for each side of her hypocritical viewpoints perhaps?
That would explain a lot, not only about the clearly deranged Naomi Klein/Wolf, but feminists and lefties in general.
Nobody wants a broken clock.
A wonderful lived experience philosopher hidden in that treasure that is the Grauniad. Like all treasure of its kind, best buried at sea…
With the US standing on a political precipice, suddenly the stakes were a lot higher
The US is not ‘standing on a political precipice’.
The US is a very effective banana republic type regime that’s been rounding up and imprisoning its political opposition for made up crimes since 2021, while its institutional media and law enforcement agencies run cover for the multi-billion dollar crimes of the establishment.
American Righties flatter themselves, and American Lefties are only too happy to flatter them, that there’s some kind of brewing “national divorce” or conservative backlash or whatever. (I mean, look at this song on YouTube guys!)
In truth, the American Right is completely powerless and couldn’t even stop the permanent government deciding to burn down American cities while Trump was president.
Compare and contrast the MSM’s lachrymose storytelling about Putin’s oppression of Russian ‘opposition leader’ Alexei Navalny with their gleeful coverage of Donald Trump being arrested for what his opponents did.
DiscoveredJoys,
“There is perhaps only public space for one Naomi Pundit – and complaining about that is pointless. I notice that Naomi (take your pick) does not care to change their name for the purposes of disambiguation so really it is all about battles for celebrity, or flatulent tosspottery. The whinge is in the Grauniad after all.”
It’s an interesting theory. There’s always the confusion about Bill Pullman and Bill Paxton, or Ryan Reynolds and Ryan Gosling. I always forget which one is in The Big Short because Gosling is doing a thing that’s more like what Ryan Reynolds does.
Ryan Gosling is the quiet one, Ryan Reynolds is the irritating one.
Naomi Wolf learned in a BBC radio interview that a key point she’d been pushing (in her PhD thesis and in the book based on it) was an absolute howler. She had misunderstood a 19th century English legal term as meaning the opposite of what it did mean.
She actually coped rather well, I thought. She could have been hysterical, she could have denied it, she could have charged the interviewer with mansplaining or patriarchy or being a Nazi or whatever, but she didn’t. She accepted his explanation courteously.
Could Naomi Nonwolf have mustered such good grace?
You could, of course, argue that Naomi Wolf should have developed a better feel for Victorian English society and thereby avoided her error. But she was a foreigner. Anyway, what the hell was her PhD supervisor doing?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EdRGOUyu7-k
Eddie Murphy has said that the the one celebrity of a type at a time thing was why Richard Pryor and he had a strange relationship
Murphy….. “Back when I broke, the town was still doing a one black guy at a time thing, so when I showed up, Richard kind of had this—there was this feeling like this was the new one, so Richard kind of felt threatened.”
That’s awful. No wonder he did drugs and set his hair on fire.
Btw, Eddie Murphy’s (sadly no longer with us) brother Charlie was also hilarious and told great stories about Rick James.