In The Beauty Myth, the 1990 book that made her a celebrity, Naomi Wolf wrote, "To be anorexic or bulimic is to be a political prisoner." That sentence set a high bar for jaw-dropping wackiness, but Wolf appears to have finally and repeatedly cleared it.
Vox’s Max Fisher reported Sunday that Wolf “published a series of Facebook posts on Saturday in which she…strongly impl[ied]” that recent ISIS beheading videos “had been staged by the US government and that the victims and their parents were actors.” Fisher also wrote that in another Saturday Facebook post, Wolf “suggest[ed] that the US was sending troops to West Africa not to assist with Ebola treatment but to bring Ebola back to the US to justify a military takeover of American society.”
Besides The Beauty Myth, Wolf is probably best known for advising Al Gore’s 2000 presidential campaign (she denies the widely disseminated story that she counseled Gore to incorporate more “earth tones” into his wardrobe).
From Fisher’s piece (emphasis added):
Author and former Democratic political consultant Naomi Wolf published a series of Facebook posts on Saturday in which she questioned the veracity of the ISIS videos showing the murders and beheadings of two Americans and two Britons, strongly implying that the videos had been staged by the US government and that the victims and their parents were actors.
Wolf published a separate Facebook post, also on Saturday, suggesting that the US was sending troops to West Africa not to assist with Ebola treatment but to bring Ebola back to the US to justify a military takeover of American society…
Wild-eyed conspiracy theories are common on Facebook. You may naturally wonder, then, why you are reading about these ones. Partly it's because Wolf's posts on ISIS deeply offended many people who knew one or more of the four murdered Westerners whom Wolf accused of being actors. And as American victims James Foley and Steven Sotloff were journalists, their outraged friends included a number of fellow journalists, so you may have seen them discussing Wolf's posts online and wondered what had happened.
Perhaps more importantly, though, despite Wolf's turn into conspiracy theory, she is still more widely known for her earlier and much-respected work on feminism, as well as her political consulting for the 1996 Bill Clinton and 2000 Al Gore presidential campaigns on reaching female voters. I was taught parts of Wolf's 1990 book "The Beauty Myth" in school and admit that, until researching her more recent views more fully for this post, still mostly associated her with this and other well-respected work. In other words, I was carrying the assumption that Wolf is a respected and authoritative figure to be taken seriously. I can only assume that I was not alone in this…Like many other journalists who cover the Middle East, I had previously met both murdered American journalist James Foley and his parents (in my case, in 2011) and can attest, although I deeply regret that it is necessary to do so, that they are not actors...
She also posted at great length on Ebola, including a post arguing that the US troops traveling to Liberia were not actually sent to help fight Ebola, but rather to further the aim of a "militarized Africa" and because this "creates a direct vector into the US" for Ebola, meant "to justify military condoning [sic] of US population"…
Wolf's record of respectability gives her a platform and helps advance her conspiracy theories further than they would travel otherwise…[I]t is important for readers who may encounter Wolf's ideas to understand the distinction between her earlier work, which rose on its merits, and her newer conspiracy theories, which are unhinged, damaging, and dangerous.
