Topic: Liberal Fascism
It’s pleasant to recall that I excoriated Naomi Wolf and her zany anti-Bush screed, The End of America, back in 2008—very appropriately, on April Fool’s Day. Not the least delicious morsel of this memory is the chorus of praise that The End of America attracted from the leftie fever swamps, e.g. this prize piece of idiocy: “At once a brilliant indictment of the Bush administration, The End of America, explains in blunt terms how the last 7 years have paralleled the same steps taken during the 20th century that led to the dictatorships of Italy, Russia, China, Germany, and Chile.” Yeah, blunt. And thoroughly demented.
At the time I took Wolf for an extreme exemplar of Bush Derangement Syndrome but it appears that her problems go deeper than that. For in the years since Chimpy McBushitler disappeared into retirement, Wolf’s paranoia and craziness have only grown. In fact, as Charles C.W. Cook recounts in this item for National Review Online, the demented diva of doom is still warning of an American fascist apocalypse—in the Age of Barry! For example, she’s running around shrieking that the US government is using the Ebola crisis as a convenient pretext for the imposition of martial law. You can read all about this and more on Wolf’s Facebook page.
Progressives and lefties like to make fun of the Right’s occasional obsessions: Obama’s supposedly suspect citizenship status, Second Amendment fundamentalism, etc. But if anything, the obsessions of the Left are far more unhinged. Thinking of Wolf, I’m reminded also of Andrew Sullivan’s weird fixation on Sarah Palin’s gynecological history and of Al Gore’s fantasy map of drowned Florida. Moreover it seems that once you develop a taste for such hyperbole it rapidly develops into an addiction. If her Facebook page is any indication, Naomi Wolf sees fascists, agents of SPECTRE, vampires, zombies and Little Green Men everywhere. She’s even retailing the claim that shadowy royalist forces suppressed the pro-independence vote in the recent Scottish referendum. Check out her extended analysis of the bogus ballot barcodes!
Even many on the Left have finally had enough of Wolf; see this disdainful January 2013 article by Mark Nucklos in the Atlantic. Well, better late than never. But Wolf, like Noam Chomsky, will no doubt drive on, her path strewn with palm branches, the hosannas of her loyal fan base ringing in her ears—but no attendant in the chariot with her to deliver the occasional whispered admonition, “Remember, thou art as loony as a junkyard rat.”
