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The Podcasters Who Cried Naomi Wolf (Back to the Conspiracy)
33 Plays2 years ago
Join Josh and M as they update you all on the trials and tribulations of Dr. Naomi Wolf!
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Transcript
Introduction with Musical Themes
00:00:00
Speaker
What's the time, Naomi Wolf? What's the time? What's the time, Naomi Wolf? What's the time? One o'clock? Two o'clock? Three o'clock? Oh, hi!
Naomi Wolf's Transition to Conspiracy Theorist
00:00:12
Speaker
Riffing on the old south side of Bombay, are we? Well, I haven't done one of these musical beginnings for quite a while, and given we're talking about Naomi Wolf again, I thought this might be appropriate. But it turns out the actual lyrics aren't that conducive to talking about conspiracy theories.
00:00:29
Speaker
Hmm, less knowing me Wolf was talking about time travel conspiracy theories. Hmm, now you mention it, you did have that thing about nanoparticles. Particles? No, particles. That and backup software literally traversing space-time envelopes to save files. That sounds confusing. Plus can we really use that to change the song? I mean, it's based on a nursery rhyme.
00:00:51
Speaker
Okay, well, we'll just have to go back even further before the advent of computers. But is that possible? I thought we could only travel within our own lifetimes. Oh, we've gone well beyond quantum leap here. No, we must use the nanopaticles to take us back. To the very beginning of time. I, uh, feel like we might have lost our way. Somewhat. Indeed. Serves Naomi Wolf. So, any other song suggestions?
00:01:15
Speaker
Uh, hungry like the wolf? Touch with the ground, I'm on the hunt, I'm after you Smell like a sound, I'm lost in a crowd And I'm hungry like Naomi Wolf Uh, werewolves of London? Owww! Naomi wolves of London! Okay, and then there's the motorhead classic, The Wolf. I'm not even going to try and do Lemmy.
00:01:35
Speaker
Well, then there's Will the Wolf Survive, Little Red Riding Hood, She-Wolf, Clap for the Wolfman, Of Wolf and Man, Wolf Call, Cry Wolf, Don't Cry Wolf, Wolf Creek Pass, A Wolf at the Door, Brother Wolf, Sister Moon, Wolf to Howling, Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf, A Wolf's Tail, Wolf Child Blues, Wolf in the Breast, And A She-Wolf After the War, Boy Cried Wolf, Knife of the Wolf, Soft Wolf, She-Wolf, Lone Wolf, Wolf, Run With the Wolf, And The Boy Who Cried Wolf, By of course Style Council.
00:02:01
Speaker
You know an awful lot about songs concerning wolves. That I do. Not much about Naomi's. I? I feel very inadequate. I think I need to lie down. Strut on a line. It's discord and rhyme. I howl and I whine, I'm after you. Mouth is alive, all running inside, and I'm hungry. Like the wolf.
00:02:23
Speaker
Naomi Wolf.
Who is Naomi Wolf?
00:02:29
Speaker
That was nature by formula. They are awfully similar. The podcast's guide to the conspiracy featuring Josh Edison and Em Dinteth.
00:02:58
Speaker
Hello and welcome to the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy. Here in Auckland, New Zealand, I am Josh Addison, and in Zhuhai, China, we have associate professor of philosophy who floats like a butterfly and stings like regret. It's Dr. M. R.X. Denteth. I do, sting like regret. I sting your mother once, you know. We're not supposed to talk about that, but yes. So we've been recording for about 15 minutes, and the connections already died once.
00:03:28
Speaker
So I think maybe we need to need to need to shuffle on through this as fast as we can before technology kicks us in the unmentionables once again. But Josh there's so much to talk about in the same although in the same respect there's also so little to talk about in that no one seems to have made a career by saying so little so voluminously.
00:03:50
Speaker
as Naomi Wolf has. Now that might seem unfair because people will know her work from the beauty myth and go but that was a groundbreaking book. Now as we're going to discount there are certain people who think that actually that book was really only accidentally right.
00:04:07
Speaker
And certainly her career post the beauty myth somewhat fits into the idea that she might have just accidentally got something right in the past. But her mechanism for getting there is definitely a skew, if not skewer. So yes, we're talking about Naomi Wolf today and not for the first time. No, because we're going back to the conspiracy. Buckle up. We're going back to the conspiracy.
00:04:38
Speaker
Yes, we are. We first talked about Naomi Wolf way back in the salad days of January 2015, episode 33. We've done literally more than 10 times that many episodes now. 2015 really does seem like several, several aeons ago. I mean, life was so different back in 2015. It was a fair bit different, yes, yes. And Naomi Wolf,
00:05:07
Speaker
It was a bit different, I guess. Why were we talking about Naomi Wolf back in 2015?
Is 'The Beauty Myth' Still Relevant?
00:05:15
Speaker
What was the motivating factor? Was it just that she had said a whole bunch of weird things? I think she'd read some weird stuff. I think she'd read that one article about her, yeah.
00:05:23
Speaker
And so we did. And a jolly fun episode it was, as I recall. So we're going to talk, we could spend all of this episode recapping what we talked about last episode, but there's possibly not a great need for that because since that last episode, she's probably said enough for us to occupy ourselves with for a full episode anyway, but shall we start at the beginning?
00:05:47
Speaker
Indeed. Let's go back to 1990 and the publication of The Beauty Myth. Josh, what is the premise of The Beauty Myth? Basically, it was the idea that beauty standards are
00:06:02
Speaker
And the way that they have developed and become more and more prominent are a way of keeping women down. Essentially, the idea is that the social power and prominence of women has increased markedly over the 20th and into the 21st century. But as that progress happened,
00:06:23
Speaker
There was greater and greater pressure for women to adhere to these unrealistic standards of physical beauty because of commercial influences on the mass media.
00:06:33
Speaker
And it goes through how this leads to all sorts of unhealthy behaviors in women, preoccupation of appearance in both sexes. There's all sorts of things. There's the effects on confidence and sense of self. There's the effects on financial well-being. I can't remember if it was Naomi Wolf or someone else who came up with a professional beauty quotient, but the idea that women
00:07:00
Speaker
are expected to wear makeup, which is an expense that men just don't have. Women's clothing tends to be more expensive than men's clothing and so on and so forth. So the idea is that this, as women have found more and more power, I guess, in society, at the same time as that's been happening, there's been this, what appears to be,
00:07:23
Speaker
I mean, I'm going to jump ahead and say what seems like a deliberate, but we'll talk about that reaction to it, where women see. So I thought you about to use the C word there. Seems like a conspiracy. Well, exactly. Yes. Yes. Whether or not it's deliberate then affects whether or not it's actually a conspiracy. But it's sort of the idea that the patriarchy invents a new way to keep women down as they gain power in other arenas.
00:07:52
Speaker
And it's certainly, yeah, it's certainly a conspiratorial sounding book. Now, did did Wolf actually describe it as a conspiracy in the text? Because, I mean, many people think of the beauty myth as describing a conspiracy by the patriarchy to keep woman down. But she doesn't quite go that far in the beauty myth, does she?
Patriarchal Structures: Conspiracy or Systemic?
00:08:14
Speaker
No. Well, if we're talking about the patriarchy as a system of structural oppression, institutional oppression, and as I believe Wolf points out, the patriarchy affects men as well as women. I think the idea is that you have a hierarchy where man is superior to woman, older man is superior to younger man. And if this is systemic and institutional, then that doesn't require
00:08:43
Speaker
a deliberate sort of conscious effort on the part of individual conspirators. So I mean, we can basically run the same kind of analysis for structural racism or systemic racism. Yes. The idea that it might well be the case that no one given individual in a society is explicitly racist towards people of a different colour.
00:09:07
Speaker
But it turns out that society is still structurally racist given the way that it's been set up and the effects of that setup continue to permeate even if no one actually expresses explicit racism towards people who don't look like them.
00:09:20
Speaker
Naomi Wolf isn't claiming that there's some smoky back room where old guys puffing on cigars said, oh, those women are getting a bit too much power for my liking. How are we going to keep them oppressed? I know, let's come up with these unrealistic standards of beauty and make sure they're in all our media. That, as far as we know, never happened.
00:09:43
Speaker
you can describe the effects as sort of as as pernicious you can you can put a sort of a I guess intentional sort of almost moral way of describing it but that still doesn't mean that you're actually talking about the deliberate actions of individuals which is kind of required for a conspiracy or is it?
00:10:09
Speaker
Well, I mean, that is a good question because of course one of the recurrent issues about talking about structural injustices of this kind is that it might well have been explicit at some earlier point in the process. And then because the conspiracy has been successful,
00:10:27
Speaker
we continue to see the effect. So maybe there isn't a cohort of grey-suited men in Hollywood backrooms puffing on cigars going, you know, we've really got to keep them dames down because I'm coming from the 1930s and I like to cook my valves.
00:10:44
Speaker
But it might be the case that there were people in the 1930s who really did think that, set up the conspiracy, died, and yet we're still seeing the effects of that conspiracy in the modern age. And I mean, there are people who talk about this with respect to organized religion, that there were points in time in Western Christian history where men did go, hmm,
00:11:10
Speaker
women have too much power in society, we need to find some way to kind of crush their dreams and
Did the US Government Overreact to Occupy?
00:11:17
Speaker
reduce them down to ash. So we're going to make the claim that, oh, we've discovered a hidden gospel message that says that Jesus said that woman could never be elevated to a kind of decontinuity. That just means that women can't become priests anymore. Sorry, but we found this thing.
00:11:36
Speaker
And that's continued despite the fact that those men are a thousand years dead, but we're still getting the consequences of that act of conspiracy about a thousand years ago.
00:11:47
Speaker
And the thing we've talked about plenty of times in the past is that you can have a conspiracy where most of the people aren't in on the conspiracy, the idea that you can have a small group who are initiating it, possibly directing it, and a whole bunch of people underneath them who just do as they're told, who just do their jobs,
00:12:09
Speaker
unaware that what they're doing is actually working towards this mysterious end. I mean, this was the complaint we had with the good old Grimes paper where he, the one where he calculated exactly how long you can expect conspiracies to last. And one of the big problems with it was it kind of assumes a homogenous sort of an organization. He assumes that everybody in the NSA was in the mass surveillance program.
00:12:39
Speaker
when really it probably was only a very small section of people. And sure, there would have been secretaries and other workers who kind of enabled the conspiracy by passing information along approving requests, but they were more patsies than people actually in on some grand plot.
00:12:56
Speaker
Or you could imagine the invasion of Iraq, the pretext of finding weapons of mass destruction, which most people seem to be pretty sure weren't actually there. You can imagine that there was a small group of knowing conspirators, your blares and your bushes and your Chinese. But there was a much larger group of people at MI5 and people in the CIA who were furthering that agenda, but as far as they knew, were just doing their jobs.
00:13:26
Speaker
They were following orders. And there's nothing wrong with that. We've just had a discussion that seems to make the beauty myth out to seem to be a, you know, a fairly plausible hypothesis. So why are we talking about 1990s the beauty myth?
00:13:40
Speaker
1990's The Beauty Myth is what shot Naomi Wolf to fame. I think that's what got her a lot of attention and was quite well received. Some people took issue with some bits of it, but I think by and large it formed quite a sort of foundational text in second-wave feminism really, as far as I'm aware.
00:13:58
Speaker
But since then, Naomi Wolf, she's gone on to say quite a lot of things to the extent that, as you said at the start, some people have suggested that rather than being a feminist who sort of got sucked into conspiracy theories, maybe she was a conspiracy theorist all along, who just happened to start off with a genuine feminist conspiracy.
00:14:22
Speaker
Yes, it's what I call the Ian Wishart Effect. So Ian Wishart, we've talked about this in the podcast before, but new listeners may not be aware. Ian Wishart is an investigative reporter back home in Aotearoa, New Zealand. He's shot to fame for the Wine Box Inquiry, which was a look into tax-roasting by the ultra-rich in Aotearoa, New Zealand.
00:14:42
Speaker
basically roasting money through the Cook Islands. I'm suddenly aware that no one outside of Australasian knows what roasting is anyway. Basically tax evasion by funneling money through a foreign jurisdiction to pay less tax. In Wishart pursued this investigation for years despite the fact that people in the media and the government told him there was nothing to it. It turned out there really was a lot to it. They actually proved major financial fraud going on by the ultra rich back home.
00:15:12
Speaker
And now Ian Wishart is convinced that everything he investigates, he's got a kind of gut instinct. So he knows Helen Clark is a lesbian. He knows that intelligent design is in fact true and evolution by natural selection has been foisted upon us by devil worshippers. He's gone, well look, I was right about one thing, ipso facto, I must be right about everything that I feel is true in my heart.
00:15:39
Speaker
And this might be what's happened to Naomi Wolf. Because if we shuffle forward by two decades, we get into 2011. Josh, what was going on worldwide in 2011?
00:15:53
Speaker
There was that whole Occupy movement. Everybody was occupying. It started Occupy Wall Street and then sort of similar movements and solidarity popped up around the world. There was an Occupy. I can't remember where people occupied here in New Zealand, but they did for a bit. Christchurch. Occupy Christchurch. So Byron Clark has written the oral history.
00:16:14
Speaker
that, so he's spoken with all the people who were there on the day and written a book about the occupied Christchurch. I'm pretty sure there was one up here in Auckland as well, but not as big. Yeah, I don't know as much about the one up in Auckland as I do as the one down in Christchurch. The one in Christchurch actually appears to have been the kind of the big mover and shaker one. But at any rate, so
00:16:36
Speaker
There was a lot of a lot of cracking down on the Occupy Wall Street protests. I remember at the time being somewhat disturbed at the level of sort of police statey-ness that seemed to be going on with the way the the the I just about said terrorists protesters were rounded up and arrested. You'll be voting national in just a few weeks time.
00:16:58
Speaker
Ah, just you wait. I bet you cast your vote for Wayne Brown in the council election. Couldn't wait to vote for the white man. I'll never tell. But no, so Naomi Offer wrote in 2011 about the idea that the US authorities' reaction to these Occupy protests was coordinated by the Domestic Security Alliance Council
00:17:23
Speaker
She said that the police and DHS, Department of Homeland Services, security, whatever.
00:17:32
Speaker
was working for and with banks, banks obviously being the target of a lot of these protests, to target arrest and politically disable peaceful American citizens. And again, it did us kind of appear that she was on the money there. Investigations later, there was an article in The Guardian from 2012
00:17:57
Speaker
that did appear to show authorities coordinating with one another to crack down on these protesters in a manner that is both conspiratorial and and also bad for want of a better word of it it was it was particularly um the word fascist as a little has become a little bit in vogue lately but uh certainly certainly not the sort of things that governments in a free democracy should have been getting up to
00:18:26
Speaker
Alright, so once again, why are we talking about Naomi Warhol? I mean, she's D2 for two here. Yeah, but there's more. 2013, when Edward Snowden
00:18:40
Speaker
We've got a news update about coming up in the bonus episode. We do. He had done his thing. He was blowing up, as it were. He was revealing all to the world. He sure was. People were shocked by what he revealed to the world. Actually, they were shocked. Naomi Wolf, though, was a little bit kind of suspicious of
Is Edward Snowden a Fraud?
00:19:03
Speaker
him. She had some theories of her own, didn't she?
00:19:05
Speaker
Well, I mean, given she's two for two thus far, I mean, I'm assuming she had some pretty good grounds to be suspicious of Edward Snowden. So I'm thinking she's going to have something really salient to say here as to why we'd be suspicious about Edward. Apparently she thought he was too well spoken and his girlfriend got too much media time.
00:19:28
Speaker
Hmm, that doesn't seem like compelling evidence for thinking that a whistleblower is actually working for the other side, because I know there are quite a number of people who at the time and to this day thinks that Snowden was a plant by the American intelligence agencies to kind of launder the bad thing they had done in such a way to make it confusing, to release so much information.
00:19:57
Speaker
that it would be hard for people to kind of work out exactly what bad things had occurred, to kind of wash it out with that massive information he released. And admittedly, it's a lot harder to sustain these beliefs, given the absconding to Russia, staying in Russia for a long time, and saying some really bad things about America in the interim. But there are people who do think that what he did was suspicious, but they're not saying it's too well spoken.
00:20:25
Speaker
No, no. So Dr Wolf was outspoken, I think, in her suspicions of Snowden and not particularly well-founded in her criticisms. This carried on into 2014 when she again raised eyebrows by suggesting that the videos that had been released by ISIS of them beheading hostages, suggesting that they might have been faked.
00:20:55
Speaker
And once again I'm assuming that she's got some really clever forensic evidence, maybe tracking the movement of hostages and journalists to show they can't be there, maybe showing evidence that actually these people didn't die and they've been seen in London cafes or New York restaurants dining well after their deaths, finding discrepancies in the way that people speak. I'm sure there's going to be some forensic detail that she's pinpointed that shows that these videos were in deep fact.
00:21:24
Speaker
Now, as far as I can tell, she was more in the just asking questions kind of thing, or at least when challenged on it later, she would go on to sort of say, oh, look, I'm not, okay, you find I'm not I'm not saying the fake, I'm saying we don't know whether or not they're fake.
00:21:42
Speaker
And she said something along the lines of, you know, I haven't seen these things verified by two independent sources because that's what responsible journalism is about. We've only seen it from one place. So, I mean, we can't, I'm just saying, we can't be 100% certain that they're authentic. And then I think other people said, no, actually, they've been
00:22:03
Speaker
come from a whole bunch of different sources. I'm just imagining a situation where you have to have two coroners to check whether someone has died. We can't just trust the word of one coroner. They may have got it wrong. So we're bringing in our second coroner to check the first coroners working here.
00:22:21
Speaker
Now, that was 2014, and as you may recall, we talked about her in 2015. That was the most recent thing we had to say at that point, but she has continued to raise the eyebrows in the intervening period, has she not?
Fact-Checking Naomi Wolf's Victorian Era Claims
00:22:37
Speaker
She has. I mean, I'm assuming she did things between 2014 and the next issue we're going to talk about, which is 2019. But 2019 is kind of the most outrageous example, if you excuse the inadvertent reference to the book that she made. So in 2019, Naomi Wolf, who had received her doctorate back in, I think, 2015, released a book based upon her doctoral thesis called Outrageous Sex, Censorship, and the Criminalization of Love.
00:23:07
Speaker
and it looked at the repression of homosexuality, particularly during the Victorian era. Now, as part of the press junket for this book, she was interviewed by Matthew Sweet on BBC Radio sidebar here. Matthew Sweet is not just an historian, he's also a Doctor Who historian.
00:23:30
Speaker
So he does work on some of the special features for Doctor Who DVDs and Blu-rays. So he's not just a historian, he's one of the best historians you could possibly refer to. And in this interview he did with Wolf on BBC Radio, he points out that
00:23:47
Speaker
Wolf makes a claim which is clearly wrong. So Wolf talks about how in the Victorian era, a bunch of Victorian men were sentenced to death and executed for sodomy. And Sweet goes, no they weren't. And Wolf's going, look, look, here's the records. Here it says,
00:24:09
Speaker
death recorded. And Sweet goes, no, you don't realise that's actually a legal term. When someone puts down death recorded, that's because during the Victorian era, yes sodomy was a capital offence, but they had stopped executing people for sodomy by that point.
00:24:26
Speaker
So in order to fulfill the law, it would be recorded the person was dead, but then they'd walk free of court. So death recorded was a mechanism which allowed them to technically follow the law, but no executions followed. And Wolf went, no, I kind of need to look into that.
00:24:48
Speaker
and then went away and realised that actually Sweet was right and she was wrong. She had been making grandiose claims about the execution of gay men during the Victorian era, which simply weren't true.
00:25:04
Speaker
Which echoes, I think, there were a few sort of factual questions raised around right back in the beauty myth. I think one in particular, she made the claim that 140,000, I think was the number, women die of anorexia in the US every year. And people said, no, it's more like one to 400.
00:25:30
Speaker
which is quite a different number from the one you said, so it's possible she does like to sort of over-egg things at times. Now, in that particular case, when the book was reissued in paperback, the references to execution were removed, but still, that wasn't the only thing wrong with it. No, as Sweet also pointed out,
00:25:57
Speaker
And so to go back to your claim, she kind of overstated the number of people dying of anorexia in the United States. One other thing she does, lots and lots of gay men who are simply engaged in consensual relationship with other gay men were being imprisoned or criminalized for their sodomy. And Sweet goes, I mean, that's partially true, but a lot of the examples she's using
00:26:26
Speaker
are of pedophiles, or people engaging in bestiality, which were both ex of sodomy under the Victorian Code of Law,
00:26:36
Speaker
And we don't really want to associate consensual sexual lifestyles between gay men and other gay men between pedophiles and children or men who are going around having sex with animals. But she treats them all the same. She's going, look, this is the number of men who are being repressed. And Sweet is going, actually, a lot of these men were being convicted of pedophilia. And that's something which, you know,
00:27:05
Speaker
isn't the kind of thing we want to smile upon. We might think that the repression of gay men is bad, we might also think the repression of pedophiles is something which is actually A-OK.
00:27:20
Speaker
Overall, I assume that I haven't read the book, but if the theme of it is that homosexuality was repressed in the Victorian era, I mean she's not wrong, but when she makes points like these that have sort of just basic eras in fact,
00:27:38
Speaker
It does sort of weaken her case. And that then leads to the question about her PhD, because when Outrages was released, people were going, this is based upon a doctoral dissertation, and this was in the doctoral dissertation.
00:27:55
Speaker
we might have to ask for it to be re-examined, because obviously if there are large historical mistakes like that, and it's a thesis in history, something has gone wrong. Now she did her PhD through Oxford, she
00:28:11
Speaker
Put an embargo on her PhD as you're allowed to do when you submit a PhD and usually embargoes are used to ensure that you can convert the PhD into a book and people basically don't steal your idea from you because technically PhDs are meant to be publicly available.
00:28:28
Speaker
So you can imagine that you spend three or four years writing a PhD. You take a six month break between the writing of the PhD and putting forward a book proposal. And it turns out someone has got, oh, this PhD looks exciting. I'm going to base my book proposal on that. And given that PhDs are publicly available data, you can base your PhD on someone else's work as long as you then write your own words. But it turns out that
00:28:53
Speaker
Wolf had actually managed to keep her PhD under wraps for five years, which is actually one year longer than is technically allowed through Oxford. You can use your house for a one-year extension to the suppression of your PhD, but not more than one.
00:29:10
Speaker
And when it was released, it was released with 12 pages of addenda and corrections that Wood had put in several years after the fact. So people are going, something very skewiff happened during the writing of her PhD. And then it seemed her PhD was riddled with errors and somehow, somehow it got through the system.
00:29:39
Speaker
But nothing more, so it's just questions have been raised at this point, nothing more came of it from then? Not that I'm aware of, I believe Oxford, and when I say Oxford, one of the colleges, I can't remember which college she did her PhD through, did an investigation and they say things are fine, but there is also a curious tendency by some of these colleges to try and make problems disappear through what might sometimes be called a cover-up.
00:30:07
Speaker
But that wasn't what got her into, I guess you could call it, real trouble. If you call getting banned from Twitter real trouble, I suppose.
Why Was Naomi Wolf Banned on Twitter?
00:30:19
Speaker
Certainly some of the people who've been banned from Twitter think it is. Because in 2021... Jamie, for example, he's been banned from Twitter and he's not a happy camper.
00:30:27
Speaker
No, neither is that fellow starts with a T, rhymes with bump, can't remember, something like that anyway. Seemed to think that getting banned from Twitter was quite a pickle.
00:30:39
Speaker
Now, why did she get banned from Twitter? One of the only things you can do, I think, that will actually get you banned from Twitter, spreading COVID and anti-vax misinformation, because by 2021, she was sort of into full-on COVID-19 denial.
00:31:01
Speaker
We have a selection of archived tweets that we could share with you now. Do you want to go through the lot of them one at a time? Take it in turns.
00:31:10
Speaker
Yeah, let's start with something which actually is quite, quite moderate compared to what we're going to get to. So this is from the 1st of March, 2021. This guy does not quit. Bill Gates wants to release genetically modified mosquitoes to inject you with vaccines. There was actually a release of GMO mosquitoes, firegates in New York state. These things always sound like Psy, but GMO mosquitoes have been around. Now I'm assuming she meets sci-fi.
00:31:38
Speaker
Because these things always sound like science. Yeah, actually, science does sound like science, you're quite right. Now, what was there? Were mosquitoes? Wasn't that the Zika virus? It was, yes. You need to be modified mosquitoes, basically to stop breeding populations. But nothing to do with spreading vaccines via their stings or anything like that.
00:32:03
Speaker
I mean, it would be a great mechanism apart from the fact that humans have a natural want to hunt and kill mosquitoes. Just let them bite you. It's going to cure you of the disease. Nope. Nope. I'm going to hunt that thing. I'm going to stay up all night trying to locate that bastard. I'm going to hunt that thing down.
00:32:21
Speaker
Now, earlier that same day, March the 1st, 2021, she'd said, I linked to an article called MRNA platform enabling drug discovery and development. I'm not sure what the exact paper is about, but she quotes from it saying, recognizing the broad potential of MRNA science, we set out to create an MRNA technology platform that functions very much like an operating system on a computer. It is designed so that it can plug and play interchangeably with different programs.
00:32:47
Speaker
So I think this, this, because this is something she's talked about in the past, this is a quote from that paper which uses the analogy of a computer's operating system when describing yima and any science, but I think she takes it a bit more literally later on.
00:33:02
Speaker
Yes, there's actually a bunch of tweets around this, so I'm going to skip forward slightly to try and get some more of the context here, in that on the... Actually, so going... These tweets are not in order. I've pasted them into the document outside of their chronology because on the 26th of February, which I believe was before March, I think,
00:33:24
Speaker
Traditionally it is, yes, yes. See the Moderna website. The vaccine, actually a software platform, is designed for regular updates and novel SARS-CoV-2 variants of concern, B1-526 identified in New York.
00:33:40
Speaker
And this is where we get our nanoparticles. Terrifying also confirms such explains the conversation I overheard in a restaurant in Manhattan two years ago in which an Apple employee was mostly about attending a top-secret demo. They had a new tech to deliver vaccines with nanopaticals that let you travel back in time. Not kidding.
00:34:04
Speaker
Yes, so I think the only place there where there's room to give her the benefit of the doubt is that nanoparticles is just a good old-fashioned typo. But particles or particles are not aware of any vaccines that contain ones that let you travel back in time. And yet she says she's not kidding. I mean, and I'm rocking a fairly modern Apple laptop, and I've been trying to dial it back to the golden age of disco.
00:34:33
Speaker
And it's just not working. It's just not working at all. Why is 1976 so far out of reach? I don't know. Maybe there's just something about it that there's no real point revisiting it. 1976.
00:34:51
Speaker
gave us some of the greatest things, gave us Bohemian Rhapsody, not quite Star Wars, but essentially me. And really, I don't see that there's any need to revisit that. Why, you know, the work's been done. What more is there to say?
00:35:12
Speaker
You know, who else was done in 1976? Well, I mean, technically would have been 1975, given that nine months is the standard gestation time. But yes, I see where you're going with that.
00:35:23
Speaker
Anyway, back to Naomi Wolf. Oh yes, and so one more tweet before I'll get you to read out another one, because this one again goes to the software platform thing. This is the 27th of February once again, but it's a few hours after her last tweet from that day. You know, I read the Moderna website and the sources in my video about how the mRNA is not actually a vaccine, but a software platform.
00:35:46
Speaker
I actually work with developers who create software, so I understand how dangerous it is to have a tech in one's body that can receive uploads. Now this appears to be treating an analogy
00:35:59
Speaker
far too seriously because yes people have talked about the idea that unlike a traditional vaccine mRNA vaccines work in a different way and thus we can kind of you know they are more modular and they're much it's much easier to update the vaccines
00:36:19
Speaker
during their production and lifetime. So they are a lot more like software or they're much more digital than the analog vaccines of old, the viral load vaccines.
00:36:31
Speaker
They're not actually a software platform. It's also that we're injecting code into a human body that makes humans a giant receiver for software updates via Wi-Fi. It is an analogy, and yet Wolf really doubled down on, no, no, it's software package. You know, I know programmers, so ipso facto, I know what I'm talking about, which makes me think she doesn't really know programmers, or the programmers she know just aren't very good at explaining their jobs.
00:36:59
Speaker
So yes, there's the explicitly anti-vax stuff. There's also just a lot of general anti-COVID response stuff. Oh, I suppose before that, she also does do the usual at one point, tweeted, this is why there will always be, quote unquote, variants. It's in the business model of the Moderna vaccine structures. That's something we've seen a lot of times before. So they keep coming up with these new variants of COVID. How convenient. Then they get to keep selling us their new vaccines.
00:37:29
Speaker
I mean, it worked for the flow. But so then you get basically just sort of anti anti anti COVID measures, anti lockdown type stuff. She says, hearing from friends in Germany that they are not allowed to go out into the countryside, hearing that there were vast marches for freedom in Denmark, Ireland, a world at war for basic liberty. And that was
00:37:54
Speaker
this is a lot of these aren't you really went on a on a bender on march the first so many of these are all different times march the first also on march the first she um links to an article called lockdowns do not control the corona virus the evidence saying don't ever forget this the whole ritualistic cultish child abusing business killing drama is based on a narrative that has no coherent evidence to support it as a person who lived in orkland during the first covid lockdown uh
00:38:24
Speaker
Yes, yes, there is evidence that supports it. Or at least lockdowns did control the coronavirus until they were allowed to mutate in the rest of the world and Delta and Omicron came along and then maybe it spread too fast for that. But nevertheless, right at the start of things when she was talking about this, I don't think the evidence was in her favor as she thought it was. And then finally another one,
00:38:54
Speaker
Again on the same theme she would tweet things like came home from dinner with friends and a community of people who are living life respectfully of others but perfectly normally pizza and salad, laughter hugs goodnight a wonderful time everyone's fine thank goodness still fine months and months and months later still fine again implying that everything's awesome and this is there's no real problem and you don't need
00:39:14
Speaker
lockdowns at all. I suppose there's no risk to COVID infection because, you know, she's living a risky lifestyle and she hasn't got COVID ipso facto. It's not really a problem. And what else? More of this operating system stuff. Somebody posted
00:39:34
Speaker
video. I'm not sure, I think it was a video, seems to be a video of hers. And thanks them for doing so saying, okay, team humanity, here's my video explanation of the terrifying new vaccine technology that turns the human body into an operating operating system, reporting a fact fact sourced and NIH Google MIT that nonetheless got me kicked off Twitter for 12 hours.
00:39:59
Speaker
The reason why she was kicked off Twitter for 12 hours is that people A. pointed out that she was misreading the research studies and B. reported her for spreading misinformation because she was misreporting the research studies.
00:40:12
Speaker
I mean, so it may be true she read the studies, but that doesn't mean she accurately portrayed those studies in her own work. She did more anti-vaccine. How can you describe people as not yet immunised if they don't get the vaccine? They are immunised. They have an immune system. It's very tendentious, inaccurate language.
00:40:35
Speaker
So yeah, it's really, really kind of the anti-vaxxer greatest hits as you go through it all. I mean, my favorite seems to be a weird thing to have a favorite Naomi Wolf tweet, but main term is the last one in our list. Terrifying. Children now don't have the human reflex. Sorry, I'll try this again. Terrifying. You actually got that right. I think it's written incorrectly. Anyway.
00:41:01
Speaker
I have to work out how to edit around that clap now. Terrifying. Children now don't have the human reflex that they, when you smile at them, they smile back. I'm seeing kids with their lower faces hanging inertly. Absolutely unmoving facial muscles when they take their masks off. Dark circles under their eyes from low oxygen. Lassitude. How you kind of end a sentence.
00:41:25
Speaker
with lessitude. I mean, you can. She does. I mean, and she has, but it makes no sense. Lessitude. Lessitude on a tone. Just lessitude. I mean, maybe we should make that our sign off from now on in. Lessitude, Joss. Lessitude. Lessitude. Yeah, yeah. So she, a fair bit of that, and she was gone for good. So I don't know. Yes, eventually Twitter went, yeah, you're actually, because you had a huge,
00:41:54
Speaker
audience to eventually when I mean normally we have a we allow celebrities to get away with figurative murder on our platform but really the amount of reports we're guessing about the misinformation you're spreading or even what appears to be disinformation you're spreading is sufficient that she was eventually booted from the platform now I believe she has something akin to a
00:42:23
Speaker
sub-stack when I was actually looking up what she was doing.
00:42:28
Speaker
what she's doing now. I did discover possibly the greatest thing of
What's Naomi Wolf Up to Now?
00:42:34
Speaker
all time. I found a website which is advertising the ability that you can get Naomi Wolf to contribute to a newsletter or your podcast. But the headline they decided to go for is this. The worst thing that can happen to the human species is happening. Dr Naomi Wolf is available for interview.
00:42:56
Speaker
That's true. The worst thing that could happen has happened. Naomi Wolf is on the phone. Yes. So I mean, I assuming that's a headline and a subhead that have been concatenated into one for, as it turns out, humorous effect. But yeah, a little bit of a, little bit of a, little bit of a shame there. Good copy editor would have sorted that out. But maybe they chose not to.
00:43:24
Speaker
Copy editors are just part of the conspiracy, Josh. They're just part of the conspiracy. Yes, yes, that's probably true. And so that's the tale of Naomi Wolf, updated for modern sensibilities.
00:43:36
Speaker
And I mean, the reason why we told that story initially and why we're retelling it now is that, sure, if you look at her early work like The Beauty Myth, she appears to be kind of on the money about things. But in the context of her broader work, it really does seem like she is someone who sees malign conspiracy or conspiracy-like features in the world.
00:44:03
Speaker
and then opines upon them, whether it be what's really going on with the COVID-19 pandemic, repression of homosexuality in the Victorian era, whether or not
00:44:20
Speaker
Edward Snowden is authentic. We also missed out an entire story about her support of Julie and Assange. And so in retrospect, you can kind of see why some people have looked back on the beauty myth and gone,
00:44:35
Speaker
she may have only been accidentally right. She may have gone in with the presupposition of there being this malign structure behind things. And it turns out she told a really good story that still gets used to this day, although I think in most feminist discussions of
00:44:55
Speaker
beauty now, Naomi Wolf is more of a side point than a kind of main narrative. But it seems that she may have really kind of lucked into a good thesis at the beginning. But that luck has taken her an awful long way, even if she has kind of diverted from the path of truth. So maybe in another, what, seven years, we'll come back and who knows?
00:45:21
Speaker
what she might be responsible for by then. I'm assuming she'll be a Fox contributor by that point. Well, you'd assume, yes. But that's a tale for another time. And we are today. At the end of the tale, we intended to tell. So before we leave, perhaps we should we should clue you in on what's going to be coming up in the bonus episode for patrons that we will record in just a moment.
00:45:48
Speaker
Well, we've got an update on Edward Snowden, we've got an update on those anal beds, and we've got a fairly dire story about the New Zealand police being involved in what appears to be dodgy, qua illegal activity.
00:46:05
Speaker
So, if you'd like to hear about that sort of stuff, sign yourself up as a patron. It's as simple as going to patreon.com and searching for the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy. And if you're already a patron, we'll buckle up, because we're going to be shoving those Snowden chests, anal bead police facts just straight into your face. You won't even know what's going on.
00:46:28
Speaker
Until then, I think we should probably just sign off. So I think the irresponsible thing to say is... Lessitude. Lessitude.
00:46:42
Speaker
You've been listening to a podcast's Guide to the Conspiracy, hosted by Josh Ederson and Imdentive. If you'd like to help support us, please find details at our pledge drive at either Patreon or Podbean. If you'd like to get in contact with us, email us at podcastconspiracy at gmail.com.
00:47:14
Speaker
Marty, we gotta go back to the conspiracy.