Notorious Vaccine Skeptic Naomi Wolf Was Banned By Twitter, And People Had Some Theories Why

Naomi Wolf was once one of the guiding lights of third wave feminism. She was a close advisor to the Clinton administration. She’s written about the rise of fascism, warning that the U.S. could be next in 2008’s The End of America. But in recent years she’s gone over to the dark side. During the pandemic she pivoted into a peddler of conspiracy theories and misinformation; recently she’s been floating bizarre nonsense about vaccines. So on Friday night, when people noticed she’d joined Donald Trump by having her Twitter account suddenly and finally suspended, there was much rejoicing.

The news arrived soon before a big piece about her was published by Insider, detailing how she went from a respected author of numerous best sellers to a fringe wacko. The turning point, it argues, was her 2019 book Outrages: Sex, Censorship & The Criminalization of Love, which was based on her 2015 doctoral thesis concerning the purported link between social repression of homosexuality and the censorship of books. The scholarship, experts said, was so deeply flawed that the book was pulped by its publisher. Insider claims that at some universities, “the book has become a case study in how not to do historical research.”

The next year she was doing public appearances with Tucker Carlson and Steve Bannon. She was against pandemic lockdowns and masks and vaccines, and would regularly parrot surreal claims about them. One commentator summed up her intellectual flip-flop like so:

“I find her transition horrifying,” says [Rosie] Boycott, a founding editor of ground-breaking feminist magazine Spare Rib and former editor of British Esquire and several national newspapers. “The moment she lost her grip on the intelligentsia because of a lazy error she had to find a new world to fit into where facts don’t matter and that’s the world she has gone to. Of course, she would become a superstar within it.”

It hasn’t been revealed what, exactly, caused Twitter to finally shut down her account. But people had ideas. Some thought it was just them finally getting sick of her spreading lies.

Or maybe she was just banned for being “stupid.”

Some jokingly poured one out for her loss.

Others were absolutely not sad she was gone.

Some reflected on the tragedy of how far she’s fallen.

But at least she went out in a blaze of glory.