Naomi Wolf loses it: conspiracy theories about Ebola + says ISIS Beheadings were fake.

[uhnope]

God what a freak show.

From ISIS to Ebola, What Has Made Naomi Wolf So Paranoid?

She was the third-wave feminism firebrand, famous and lauded. But the author of The Beauty Myth has become a nonsense-garbling conspiracy theorist.

It wasn't really meant for me, considering the contours of my own midsection. But I nevertheless tried to read Naomi Wolf's excruciatingly bad 2012 book Vagina: A New Biography, more to confirm the unanimous critical opinion that it was an excruciatingly bad book than to explore the historic journey of the female sex organ.

But I surrendered rather quickly, hurling the book across the room when Wolf capped her introduction with this observation: “The vagina may be a 'hole,' but it is, properly understood, a Goddess-shaped one.”

No thank you.

But unlike so many other readers of Vagina, I never scratched my chin wondering when Naomi Wolf, Rhodes scholar, presidential advisor, and feminist icon, transformed from an unreasonable writer to an unreadable crank. That's because I had reviewed Wolf's previous book, The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot, a slim volume brimming with the sort of crankery most of us stopped noticing during the Bush-era.

According to Wolf’s heavy-breathing, best-selling book (over 100,000 copies), America's leaders-cum-putschists were secretly being fitted for brown shirts, snazzy jodhpurs, and shiny jackboots. We had gone from late-Weimar period to the 1933-torchlight-parade stage of fascist takeover. Washington D.C. was our Welthauptstadt Germania.

The End of America was an astoundingly lazy piece of writing, full of historical reference points that Wolf thought clever but clearly didn't quite understand. But because the warning was so important–Nie wieder Krieg! Nie wieder Faschismus!–a dumb book was made into an even dumber documentary film, which a deeply serious New York Times reviewer judged to be occasionally overblown but with “enough here to make you shiver. Could it happen here? Maybe. A little fear — not the collective panic that followed 9/11 — can be a useful thing." (Let's pause to observe that invocations of impending fascism by film reviewers and polemicists who once skimmed William Shirer are not unlike those who know nothing about science waffling on about climate change conspiracies.)

“In 2006, Wolf babbled something to a Scottish newspaper about Jesus appearing to her while she was inhabiting the body of a young boy.”

Wolf produced another little media ripple this week when she posited on Facebook that those harrowing, terrifying videos of ISIS murdering Western hostages may have been faked. “It takes five people to stage an event like this - two to be 'parents' - two to pose for the cameras... one in a ninja outfit... and one to contact the media that does not bother checking who ANY of these four other people are...”

There was plenty more like this--every epistle dumber than the previous--but you get the general idea. When the online mockery turned to disgust, Wolf backtracked, claiming she only wanted the videos “confirmed” by “two sources” because this is what “reporters are supposed to do,” while failing to understand that this is what reporters actually did.

It’s quite something for Wolf to blather about journalistic sourcing. She regularly posts stories to Facebook from extremist conspiracy websites like Globalresearch.ca, the Iranian state broadcaster Press TV, and the Holocaust denial outfit Veterans Today. And beneath all of these stories, in the comment swamp, her fans obsess over Israel ("ISIS = Israel Secret Intelligence Service," one recently wrote) and “our fascist Nazi loving government.”

The halcyon days of Wolf, the third-wave feminist revolutionary and author of The Beauty Myth (1990), seem far, far away. Indeed, Wolf's journey to the crackpot fringe was completed a long time ago. Even when power was peacefully transferred from George W. Bush to Barack Obama, Wolf didn't back down from her grim predictions and remained vigilant against the new crop of Little Eichmanns entering the White House.

"Obama has done things like Hitler did," she muttered to some poor journalist who, just hours before, had mistaken Wolf for a serious person.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/10/11/from-isis-to-ebola-what-has-made-naomi-wolf-so-paranoid.html