Naomi Wolf

Wolf speaking at Brooklyn Law School, January 29, 2009

In 1991, Wolf gained international attention as a spokeswoman of third-wave feminism from the publication of her first book The Beauty Myth, an international bestseller.[32][33][34] It was named "one of the seventy most influential books of the twentieth century" by The New York Times.[20][35] She argues that "beauty" as a normative value is entirely socially constructed, and that the patriarchy determines the content of that construction with the objective of maintaining women's subjugation.[36]

Wolf posits the idea of an "iron-maiden", an intrinsically unattainable standard that is then used to punish women physically and psychologically for their failure to achieve and conform to it. Wolf criticized the fashion and beauty industries as exploitative of women, but added that the beauty myth extended into all areas of human functioning. Wolf writes that women should have "the choice to do whatever we want with our faces and bodies without being punished by an ideology that is using attitudes, economic pressure, and even legal judgments regarding women's appearance to undermine us psychologically and politically". Wolf argues that women were under assault by the "beauty myth" in five areas: work, religion, sex, violence, and hunger. Ultimately, Wolf argues for a relaxation of normative standards of beauty.[37] In her introduction, Wolf positioned her argument against the concerns of second-wave feminists and offered the following analysis:

The more legal and material hindrances women have broken through, the more strictly and heavily and cruelly images of female beauty have come to weigh upon us ... [D]uring the past decade, women breached the power structure; meanwhile, eating disorders rose exponentially and cosmetic surgery became the fastest-growing specialty ... [P]ornography became the main media category, ahead of legitimate films and records combined, and thirty-three thousand American women told researchers that they would rather lose ten to fifteen pounds than achieve any other goal ... More women have more money and power and scope and legal recognition than we have ever had before; but in terms of how we feel about ourselves physically, we may actually be worse off than our unliberated grandmothers.[38]

Christina Hoff Sommers criticized Wolf for publishing the estimate that 150,000 women were dying every year from anorexia. Sommers said she traced the source to the American Anorexia and Bulimia Association, who stated that they were misquoted; the figure refers to sufferers, not fatalities. Wolf's citation came from a book by Brumberg, who referred to an American Anorexia and Bulimia Association newsletter and misquoted the newsletter. Wolf accepted the error and changed it in future editions. Sommers gave an estimate for the number of fatalities in 1990 as 100–400.[39][40] The annual anorexia casualties in the US were estimated to be around 50 to 60 per year in the mid-1990s.[41] In 1995, for an article in The Independent on Sunday, British journalist Joan Smith recalled asking Wolf to explain her unsourced assertion in The Beauty Myth that the UK "has 3.5 million anorexics or bulimics (95 per cent of them female), with 6,000 new cases yearly". Wolf replied, according to Smith, that she had calculated the statistics from patients with eating disorders at one clinic.[32]

Caspar Schoemaker of the Netherlands Trimbos Institute published a paper in the academic journal Eating Disorders demonstrating that of the 23 statistics cited by Wolf in Beauty Myth, 18 were incorrect, with Wolf citing numbers that average out to 8 times the number in the source she was citing.[42]

Second-wave feminist Germaine Greer wrote that The Beauty Myth was "the most important feminist publication since The Female Eunuch" (Greer's own work), and Gloria Steinem wrote, "The Beauty Myth is a smart, angry, insightful book, and a clarion call to freedom. Every woman should read it."[43] British novelist Fay Weldon called the book "essential reading for the New Woman".[44] Betty Friedan wrote in Allure magazine that "The Beauty Myth and the controversy it is eliciting could be a hopeful sign of a new surge of feminist consciousness."

However, Camille Paglia, whose Sexual Personae was published in the same year as The Beauty Myth, derided Wolf as unable to perform "historical analysis", and called her education "completely removed from reality."[45] Her comments touched off a series of debates between Wolf and Paglia in the pages of The New Republic.[46][47][48]

Caryn James in The New York Times stated:

"No other work has so forcefully confronted the anti-feminism that emerged during the conservative, yuppified 1980's, or so honestly depicted the confusion of accomplished women who feel emotionally and physically tortured by the need to look like movie stars. Even by the standards of pop-cultural feminist studies, The Beauty Myth is a mess, but that doesn't mean it's wrong."[49]

James also wrote that the book's "claims of an intensified anti-feminism are plausible, but Ms. Wolf doesn't begin to prove them because her logic is so lame, her evidence so easily knocked down."[49] Marilyn Yalom in The Washington Post called the book "persuasive" and praised its "accumulated evidence".[50]

Revisiting Beauty Myth in 2019 for The New Republic, literary critic Maris Kreizman recalls that reading it as an undergraduate made her "world burst open". However, as she matured, Kreizman saw Wolf's books as "poorly argued tracts" with Wolf making "wilder and wilder assertions" over time. Kreizman "began to write (Wolf) off as a fringe character" despite the fact that she had "once informed my own feminism so deeply."[11]

In Fire with Fire (1993), Wolf wrote on politics, female empowerment and women's sexual liberation.[51] She wished to persuade women to reject "victim feminism" for "power feminism." She argued for diminishing the issue of opposing men, avoiding divisive issues such as abortion and the rights of lesbians and considering more universal issues like violence against women, pay disparities and sexual harassment.[27] Mary Nemeth wrote in Maclean's that her "central thesis—that when Anita Hill in 1991 accused U.S. Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment she provoked a 'genderquake' that turned American women into 'the political ruling class'—seems grossly exaggerated."[52] Melissa Benn in the London Review of Books described it as Wolf's "call for a realpolitik in which 'sisterhood and capital' might be allies".[53]

Michiko Kakutani of The New York Times assailed the work for its "dubious oversimplifications and highly debatable assertions" and its "disconcerting penchant for inflationary prose," nonetheless approving of Wolf's "efforts to articulate an accessible, pragmatic feminism, …helping to replace strident dogma with common sense."[54] The Time magazine reviewer Martha Duffy dismissed the book as "flawed," although she commented that Wolf was "an engaging raconteur" who was also "savvy about the role of TV—especially the Thomas-Hill hearings and daytime talk shows—in radicalizing women, including homemakers." She characterized the book as advocating an inclusive strain of feminism that welcomed abortion opponents.[55] Feminist author Natasha Walter writing in The Independent wrote that the book "has its faults, but compared with The Beauty Myth it has energy and spirit, and generosity too." Walter, however, criticized it for having a "narrow agenda" where "you will look in vain for much discussion of older women, of black women, of women with low incomes, of mothers." Characterizing Wolf as a "media star", Walter wrote: "She is particularly good, naturally, on the role of women in the media."[56]

Promiscuities (1997) reports on and analyzes the shifting patterns of contemporary adolescent sexuality. Wolf argues that literature is rife with examples of male coming-of-age stories, covered autobiographically by D. H. Lawrence, Tobias Wolff, J. D. Salinger and Ernest Hemingway, and covered misogynistically by Henry Miller, Philip Roth and Norman Mailer. Wolf insists that female accounts of adolescent sexuality have been systematically suppressed.[57] Schools, in Wolf's opinion, should teach their students "sexual gradualism", masturbation, mutual masturbation and oral sex, which she sees as a more credible approach than total abstinence and without the risks of full intercourse.[27]

Wolf uses cross-cultural material to try to demonstrate that women have, across history, been celebrated as more carnal than men. Additionally, Wolf argues that women must reclaim the legitimacy of their own sexuality by shattering the polarization of women between virgin and whore.[57] Partly an account of her own sexual history, she urged women to "redeem the slut in ourselves and rejoice in being bad girls".[21][58][59]

Promiscuities generally received negative reviews. In The New York Times, Michiko Kakutani wrote that Wolf is "a frustratingly inept messenger: a sloppy thinker and incompetent writer" who "tries in vain to pass off tired observations as radical aperçus, subjective musings as generational truths, sappy suggestions as useful ideas".[60] On Wolf's claims about accounts of female sexuality being suppressed, Kakutani wrote: "Where has Ms. Wolf been? What about the raunchy confessions that surface daily on radio and television talk shows? What about all the memoirists—from Anais Nin to Kathryn Harrison."[60] However, two days earlier in the Times Sunday edition, Weaver Courtney praised the book: "Anyone—particularly anyone who, like Ms. Wolf, was born in the 1960s—will have a very hard time putting down Promiscuities. Told through a series of confessions, her book is a searing and thoroughly fascinating exploration of the complex wildlife of female sexuality and desire."[61] In contrast, The Library Journal excoriated the work, writing, "Overgeneralization abounds as she attempts to apply the microcosmic events of this mostly white, middle-class, liberal milieu to a whole generation. …There is a desperate defensiveness in the tone of this book which diminishes the force of her argument."[62]

"I feel absolutely staggered by what I discovered after giving birth," Wolf said at the time Misconceptions: Truth, Lies, and the Unexpected on the Journey to Motherhood (2001) was published "Birth today is like agribusiness. It's like a chicken plant: they go in, they go out." she told Katharine Viner. "Pregnancy, birth and motherhood" has "made me a more radical feminist than I have ever been."[31] The book draws heavily on Wolf's experience of her first pregnancy.[63] She describes the "vacuous impassivity" of the ultrasound technician who gives her the first glimpse of her new baby. Wolf laments her C-section and examines why the procedure is common in the United States, advocating a return to midwifery. The second half of the book is anecdotal, focusing on inequalities between parents to child care.[64] In the section describing being on the operating table having a caesarean, Wolf compares herself to Jesus at his Crucifixion.[65] She outlines a "mothers' manifesto" in the book including flexi-time for both parents, neighborhood toy banks, and a radical mothers' movement.[31]

In her New York Times review, Claire Dederer wrote that Wolf "barely pauses to acknowledge that Caesareans are, at times, a necessary and even lifesaving intervention." Wolf completes "her best writing when she's observing her own life" as a memoirist. Dederer believes her work in this idiom is not "self-indulgent. It seems vital, and in a sense radical, in the tradition of 1970's feminists who sought to speak to every aspect of women's lives."[63]

Wolf's The Treehouse: Eccentric Wisdom from My Father on How to Live, Love, and See (2005) is an account of her midlife crisis. She revalues her father's love, and his role as an artist and a teacher during a year living in a house in upper New York state.[66]

In a promotional interview with The Herald (Glasgow), Wolf related her experience of a vision of Jesus: "just this figure who was the most perfected human being - full of light and full of love. …There was light coming out of him holographically, simply because he was unclouded."[67]

In The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot (2007), Wolf takes a historical look at the rise of fascism, outlining 10 steps necessary for a fascist group (or government) to destroy the democratic character of a nation-state.[68] The book details how this pattern was implemented in Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and elsewhere, and analyzes its emergence and application of all the 10 steps in American political affairs since the September 11 attacks.[69][70] Alex Beam wrote in the International Herald Tribune (reprinted in The New York Times): "In the book, Wolf insists that she is not equating [George W.] Bush with Hitler, nor the United States with Nazi Germany, then proceeds to do just that."[71] A month before the 2008 presidential election, she announced her intention to propose means to arrest President Bush. "Americans are facing a coup, as of this morning, October 1st", she said in a radio interview.[72]

Several years later in 2013, Mark Nuckols argued in The Atlantic that Wolf's supposed historical parallels between incidents from the era of the European dictators and modern America are based on a highly selective reading in which Wolf omits significant details and misuses her sources.[73] Writing for The Daily Beast, Michael C. Moynihan characterized the book as "an astoundingly lazy piece of writing."[74]

The End of America was adapted for the screen as a documentary by filmmakers Annie Sundberg and Ricki Stern, best known for The Devil Came on Horseback and The Trials of Darryl Hunt. It premiered in October 2008, and was favorably reviewed in The New York Times by Stephen Holden[75] by Variety magazine.[76] Nigel Andrews in the Financial Times saw aspects of it positively, but "what isn't plausible or reality-related is the conclusion itself. At the door of the Third Reich, Wolf's credibility collapses."[77] Moynihan described it as being "an even dumber documentary film" than the "dumb book".[74]

Interviewed by Alternet in 2010, she compared President Barack Obama to Adolf Hitler, believing aspects of the actions of both men were comparable.[78][79]

Wolf returned to her The End of America theme in a Globe and Mail article in 2014, considering how modern Western women, born in inclusive, egalitarian liberal democracies, are assuming positions of leadership in neofascist political movements.[80]

Give Me Liberty: A Handbook for American Revolutionaries (2008) was written as a sequel to The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot. In the book, Wolf looks at times and places in history where citizens were faced with the closing of an open society and successfully fought back.[81]

Published in 2012 on the topic of the vagina, Vagina: A New Biography was much criticized, especially by feminist authors. Katie Roiphe described it as "ludicrous" in Slate: "I doubt the most brilliant novelist in the world could have created a more skewering satire of Naomi Wolf's career than her latest book."[65] In The Nation, Katha Pollitt considered it a "silly book" containing "much dubious neuroscience and much foolishness." It becomes "loopier as it goes on. We learn that women think and feel through their vagina, which can 'grieve' and feel insulted."[82]

Toni Bentley wrote in The New York Times Book Review that Wolf used "shoddy research methodology", while with "her graceless writing, Wolf opens herself to ridicule on virtually every page."[83] Janice Turner in The Times wrote that since Mary Wollstonecraft, female "writers have argued that women should not be defined by biology", yet "Wolf, our self-styled leader, has declared that female consciousness, creativity and destiny all come back" to a woman's genitals.[84] Los Angeles Times columnist Meghan Daum wrote: "By asserting that what's between a woman's ears is directly informed by what's between her legs—'the vagina mediates female confidence, creativity and sense of transcendence,' Wolf writes—it acts as a perverse echo of Republican efforts to limit reproductive rights."[85] In the book, according to Suzanne Moore in The Guardian, "feminism becomes simply a highly mediated form of narcissism devoid of any actual brain/politics connection."[86]

In The New York Review of Books, Zoë Heller wrote that the book "offers an unusually clear insight into the workings of her mystic feminist philosophy". Part of the book concerns the history of the vagina's representation, but is "full of childlike generalizations" and her understanding of science "is pretty shaky too".[87] In an interview with The New York Times, Wolf rejected claims she had written more freely than her sources could sustain.[4] Nina Burleigh, in The New York Observer, suggested that critics of the book were so vehement "because (a) their editors handed the book to them for review because they thought it was an Important Feminist Book when it's actually slight and (b) there's a grain of truth in what she's trying to say."[88]

In response to the criticism, Wolf stated in a television interview:

"Anything that shows documentation of the brain and vagina connection is going to alarm some feminists…also feminism has kind of retreated into the academy and sort of embraced the idea that all gender is socially constructed and so here is a book that is actually looking at science…though there has been some criticisms of the book from some feminists…who say, well you can't look at the science because that means we have to grapple with the science…to me the feminist task of creating a just world isn't changed at all by this fascinating neuroscience that shows some differences between men and women."[89]

At a party to celebrate Wolf's publishing deal for this book, recounted in its pages, the male chef and host made pasta pieces shaped like a vulva, with sausages and salmon also on the menu. Perceiving the experience as a slight, Wolf apparently suffered writers' block for the next six months.[90][91]

Wolf's book Outrages: Sex, Censorship, and the Criminalization of Love was published in 2019, based on the 2015 doctoral thesis she completed under the supervision of Trinity College, Oxford, literary scholar Stefano-Maria Evangelista.[23][24] In the book, she studies the repression of homosexuality in relation to attitudes towards divorce and prostitution, and also in relation to the censorship of books.[92]

Outrages was published in the UK in May 2019 by Virago Press.[93] On June 12, 2019, Outrages was named on the O, The Oprah Magazine's "The 32 Best Books by Women of Summer 2019" list.[94] The following day, the US publisher recalled all copies from US bookstores.[95]

In a 2019 BBC radio interview, broadcaster and author Matthew Sweet identified an error in a central tenet of the book: a misunderstanding of the legal term "death recorded", which Wolf had taken to mean that the convict had been executed but which in fact means that the convict was pardoned or the sentence was commuted.[96][97][98] He cited a website for the Old Bailey Criminal Court, which Wolf had referred to as one of her sources earlier in the interview.[99] Reviewers have described other errors of scholarship in the work.[100][101]

Wolf appeared at the Hay Festival, Wales in late May 2019, a few days after her exchange with Sweet, where she defended her book and said she had already corrected the error.[102] She stated at an event in Manhattan in June that she was not embarrassed and felt grateful towards Sweet for the correction.[103][104] On October 18, 2019, it became known that the release of the book by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in the United States was being canceled, with copies already printed and distributed being pulled and pulped.[105] Wolf expressed the hope that the book would still be published in the US.[106][107]

A UK paperback edition of the book was published by Virago in November 2020, with the incorrect references to the execution of men for sodomy that were included in the hardback edition removed. Interviewed about the new edition, Matthew Sweet said that the book continues to misread historical sources: "Dr Wolf has misrepresented the experiences of victims of child abuse and violent sexual assault. This is the most profound offence against her discipline, as well as the memories of real people on the historical record". Cultural historian Fern Riddell called the book a "calumny against gay people" in the nineteenth century and said that Wolf "presents child rapists and those taking part in acts of bestiality as being gay men in consensual relationships and that is completely wrong". The Daily Telegraph reported that there had been calls for Wolf's 2015 DPhil to be re-examined, and for Virago to withdraw the book.[108] In a statement to The Guardian, Wolf said the book had been reviewed "by leading scholars in the field", and said "it is clear that I have accurately represented the position". Oxford University stated that a "statement of clarification" to Wolf's thesis had been received and approved, and would be "available for consultation in the Bodleian Library in due course".[109]

In March 2021, Times Higher Education reported that Wolf's original thesis remained unavailable six years after it was examined. Oxford doctoral graduates can request an embargo of up to three years, with the potential for renewal.[110] The thesis finally became available in April 2021, with nine pages of corrections attached dealing with the misreading of historic criminal records.[111][24] Wolf had submitted the thesis to the archive in December 2020, more than five years after her DPhil was awarded, and she had requested a one-year extension to the embargo period so that she could seek legal advice.[112] The extension request was declined.[113]

Outrages has been used as an example in university teaching about the danger of misreading historical sources.[114]

In an October 1995 article for The New Republic Wolf was critical of contemporary pro–choice positions, arguing that the movement had "developed a lexicon of dehumanization" and urged feminists to accept abortion as a form of homicide and defend the procedure within the ambiguity of this moral conundrum. She continued, "Abortion should be legal; it is sometimes even necessary. Sometimes the mother must be able to decide that the fetus, in its full humanity, must die."[115]

Wolf concluded by speculating that in a world of "real gender equality," passionate feminists "might well hold candlelight vigils at abortion clinics, standing shoulder to shoulder with the doctors who work there, commemorating and saying goodbye to the dead."[115] In an article for New York magazine on the subtle manipulation of George W. Bush's image among women, Wolf wrote in 2005: "Abortion is an issue not of Ms. Magazine-style fanaticism or suicidal Republican religious reaction, but a complex issue."[116]

Wolf suggested in a 2003 article for New York magazine that the ubiquity of internet pornography tends to enervate the sexual attraction of men toward typical real women. She writes, "The onslaught of porn is responsible for deadening male libido in relation to real women, and leading men to see fewer and fewer women as 'porn-worthy.' Far from having to fend off porn-crazed young men, young women are worrying that as mere flesh and blood, they can scarcely get, let alone hold, their attention." Wolf advocated abstaining from porn not on moral grounds but because "greater supply of the stimulant equals diminished capacity."[117]

Wolf has commented about the dress required of women living in Muslim countries. In The Sydney Morning Herald in August 2008, she wrote, "The West interprets veiling as repression of women and suppression of their sexuality. But when I traveled in Muslim countries and was invited to join a discussion in women–only settings within Muslim homes, I learned that Muslim attitudes toward women's appearance and sexuality are not rooted in repression, but in a strong sense of public versus private, of what is due to God and what is due to one's husband. It is not that Islam suppresses sexuality, but that it embodies a strongly developed sense of its appropriate channeling—toward marriage, the bonds that sustain family life, and the attachment that secures a home."[118]

In the January 2013 issue of The Atlantic, law and business professor Mark Nuckols wrote: "In her various books, articles, and public speeches, Wolf has demonstrated recurring disregard for the historical record and consistently mutilated the truth with selective and ultimately deceptive use of her sources." He further stated: "[W]hen she distorts facts to advance her political agenda, she dishonors the victims of history and poisons present-day public discourse about issues of vital importance to a free society." Nuckols argued that Wolf "has for many years now been claiming that a fascist coup in America is imminent… [I]n The Guardian she alleged, with no substantiation, that the U.S. government and big American banks are conspiring to impose a 'totally integrated corporate-state repression of dissent'."[73]

Vox journalist Max Fisher in October 2014 urged Wolf's readers "to understand the distinction between her earlier work, which rose on its merits, and her newer conspiracy theories, which are unhinged, damaging, and dangerous."[10]

Charles C. W. Cooke, writing for National Review Online in the same month, commented, "Over the last eight years, Naomi Wolf has written hysterically about coups and about vaginas and about little else besides. She has repeatedly insisted that the country is on the verge of martial law, and transmogrified every threat—both pronounced and overhyped—into a government-led plot to establish a dictatorship. She has made prediction after prediction that has simply not come to pass. Hers are not sober and sensible forecasts of runaway human nature, institutional atrophy, and constitutional decline, but psychedelic fever-dreams that are more typically suited to the InfoWars crowd."[72]

Aaron Goldstein wrote in an October 2014 article in The American Spectator, "Her words must be taken not just with a grain of salt, but a full shaker's worth."[119] In the same month, Sarah Ditum wrote in the New Statesman, "Perhaps it's not that Wolf is a feminist who's degenerated into conspiracism, but instead that she's a conspiracy theorist who happened to fall into feminism first. The Beauty Myth is a conspiracy theory of a sort, and sometimes conspiracies are real: the self-replicating power structure of patriarchy is one of them."[120]

Shortly after the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange was arrested in 2010, she wrote in an article for The Huffington Post that the allegations made against him by two women amounted to no more than bad manners from a boyfriend.[121] His accusers, she later wrote in several contexts, were working for the CIA and Assange had been falsely incriminated.[120]

On December 20, 2010, Democracy Now! featured a debate between Wolf and Jaclyn Friedman on the Assange case. According to Wolf, the alleged victims should have said no, asserted that they consented to having sex with him, and said the claims were politically motivated and demeaned the cause of legitimate rape victims.[122] In a 2011 Guardian article she argued that the accuser in rape cases should not retain anonymity. She said anonymity in such cases was "a relic of the Victorian era" which "serves institutions that do not want to prosecute rapists". She said "this is particularly clear in the Assange case, where public opinion matters far more than usual".[123] Writing in The Nation, Katha Pollitt said Wolf's argument was that anonymity "impedes law enforcement", which Pollitt said "is a little bizarre: doesn't Wolf realize that anonymity applies only to the media? Everyone in the justice system knows who the complainants are."[124] Laurie Penny wrote in the New Statesman in September 2012 that "Wolf has done great damage by using her platform as one of the world's most famous feminists to dismiss these women's allegations."[125]

On October 18, 2011, Wolf was arrested and detained in New York during the Occupy Wall Street protests, having ignored a police warning not to remain on the street in front of a building. Wolf spent about 30 minutes in a cell.[126] She disputed the NYPD's interpretation of applicable laws: "I was taken into custody for disobeying an unlawful order. The issue is that I actually know New York City permit law…I didn't choose to get myself arrested. I chose to obey the law and that didn't protect me."[127]

A month later, Wolf argued in The Guardian, citing leaked documents, that attacks on the Occupy movement were a coordinated plot, orchestrated by federal law enforcement agencies. Those leaks, she alleged, showed that the FBI was privately treating OWS as a terrorist threat, rather than the public assertions acknowledging it is a peaceful organization.[128] The response to this article ranged from praise to criticism of Wolf for being overly speculative and creating a conspiracy theory.[129] Wolf responded that there is ample evidence for her argument, and proceeded to review the information available to her at the time of the article, and what she alleged was new evidence since that time.[130]

Imani Gandy of Balloon Juice wrote that "nothing substantiates Wolf's claims", that "Wolf's article has no factual basis whatsoever and is, therefore, a journalistic failure of the highest order" and that "it was incumbent upon (Wolf) to fully research her claims and to provide facts to back them up."[131] Corey Robin, a political theorist, journalist, and associate professor of political science at Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, stated on his blog: "The reason Wolf gets her facts wrong is that she's got her theory wrong."[132]

In early 2012, WikiLeaks began publishing the Global Intelligence Files, a trove of e-mails obtained via a hack by Anonymous and Jeremy Hammond. Among them was an email with an official Department of Homeland Security document from October 2011 attached. It indicated that DHS was closely watching Occupy, and concluded, "While the peaceful nature of the protests has served so far to mitigate their impact, larger numbers and support from groups such as Anonymous substantially increase the risk for potential incidents and enhance the potential security risk to critical infrastructure." In late December 2012, FBI documents released following an FOIA request from the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund revealed that the FBI used counterterrorism agents and other resources to extensively monitor the national Occupy movement.[133] The documents contained no references to agency personnel covertly infiltrating Occupy branches, but did indicate that the FBI gathered information from police departments and other law enforcement agencies relating to planned protests.[134] Additionally, the blog Techdirt reported that the documents disclosed a plot by unnamed parties "to murder OWS leadership in Texas" but that "the FBI never bothered to inform the targets of the threats against their lives."[135]

In a December 2012 Guardian article, Wolf wrote:

It was more sophisticated than we had imagined: new documents show that the violent crackdown on Occupy last fall [2011]—so mystifying at the time—was not just coordinated at the level of the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, and local police. The crackdown, which involved, as you may recall, violent arrests, group disruption, canister missiles to the skulls of protesters, people held in handcuffs so tight they were injured, people held in bondage till they were forced to wet or soil themselves—was coordinated with the big banks themselves.

How simple…just to label an entity a 'terrorist organization' and choke off, disrupt or indict its sources of financing.

[The FBI crackdown on Occupy] was never really about 'the terrorists'. It was not even about civil unrest. It was always about this moment, when vast crimes might be uncovered by citizens—it was always, that is to say, meant to be about you.[136]

Mother Jones claimed that none of the documents revealed efforts by federal law enforcement agencies to disband the Occupy camps, and that the documents did not provide much evidence that federal officials attempted to suppress protesters' free speech rights. It was, said Mother Jones, "a far cry from Wolf's contention."[137]

In June 2013, New York magazine reported Wolf, in a recent Facebook post, had expressed her "creeping concern" that NSA leaker Edward Snowden "is not who he purports to be, and that the motivations involved in the story may be more complex than they appear to be."[12] Wolf was similarly skeptical of Snowden's "very pretty pole-dancing Facebooking girlfriend who appeared for, well, no reason in the media coverage…and who keeps leaking commentary, so her picture can be recycled in the press."[12] She pondered whether he was planted by "the Police State".[138]

Wolf responded on her website: "I do find a great deal of media/blog discussion about serious questions such as those I raised, questions that relate to querying some sources of news stories, and their potential relationship to intelligence agencies or to other agendas that may not coincide with the overt narrative, to be extraordinarily ill-informed and naive." Specifically regarding Snowden, she wrote, "Why should it be seen as bizarre to wonder, if there are some potential red flags—the key term is 'wonder'—if a former NSA spy turned apparent whistleblower might possibly still be—working for the same people he was working for before?"[139]

She was accused by the Salon website of making factual errors and misreadings.[138]

In a series of Facebook postings in October 2014, Wolf questioned the authenticity of videos purporting to show beheadings of two American journalists and two Britons by the Islamic State, implying that they had been staged by the US government and that the victims and their parents were actors.[10][74] Wolf also charged that the US was dispatching military troops not to assist in treating the Ebola virus epidemic in West Africa, but to carry the disease back home to justify a military takeover of America.[10][140] She further said that the 2014 Scottish independence referendum, in which Scotland voted to remain in the United Kingdom, was faked.[10] Speaking about this at a demonstration in Glasgow on October 12, Wolf said, "I truly believe it was rigged."[141]

Responding to such criticism, Wolf said, "All the people who are attacking me right now for 'conspiracy theories' have no idea what they are talking about ... people who assume the dominant narrative MUST BE TRUE and the dominant reasons MUST BE REAL are not experienced in how that world works." To her nearly 100,000 Facebook followers, Wolf maintained, "I stand by what I wrote."[140] However, in a later Facebook post, Wolf retracted her statement: "I am not asserting that the ISIS videos have been staged," she wrote.

I certainly sincerely apologize if one of my posts was insensitively worded. I have taken that one down. ... I am not saying the ISIS beheading videos are not authentic. I am not saying they are not records of terrible atrocities. I am saying that they are not yet independently confirmed by two sources as authentic, which any Journalism School teaches, and the single source for several of them, SITE, which received half a million dollars in government funding in 2004, and which is the only source cited for several, has conflicts of interest that should be disclosed to readers of news outlets.[142]

Max Fisher commented that "the videos were widely distributed on open-source jihadist online outlets" while the "Maryland-based nonprofit SITE monitors extremist social media." Wolf deleted her original Facebook posts.[10]

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Wolf has frequently promoted COVID-19 misinformation, misinformation related to vaccination and 5G conspiracy theories.[143][144][145]

Following the election of Joe Biden as US president, Wolf tweeted on 9 November 2020: "If I'd known Biden was open to 'lockdowns' as he now states, which is something historically unprecedented in any pandemic, and a terrifying practice, one that won't ever end because elites love it, I would never have voted for him".[146] In February 2021, Wolf appeared on Tucker Carlson Tonight on Fox News, where she said that government COVID-19 restrictions were turning the U.S. "into a totalitarian state before everyone's eyes," and went on to say that "I really hope we wake up quickly, because history also shows that it's a small window in which people can fight back before it is too dangerous to fight back."[147]

In an interview for Sky News Australia in early March 2021, Wolf claimed that lockdown policies are an "invention" of Chinese leader Xi Jinping. She also claimed that "Every human right in law is being violated", that Australians are being "lied to over and over", and that Australians are being psychologically tortured.[148]

On April 19, 2021, Wolf alleged that National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director Anthony Fauci, Biden's chief medical advisor, "doesn't work for us," asserting he had loyalties to Israel that interfered with service to public health. Wolf pointed to $1 million she said Fauci had received from the state of Israel. It was actually the Dan David Prize, a prestigious private award that Fauci received in 2021 for public service.[149][150]

Wolf opposes COVID-19 vaccine passports, saying that they represent "the absolute end of the line for human liberty in the West."[151]

Wolf has frequently shared conspiracy theories concerning the safety and efficacy of vaccines against COVID-19.[152] In April 2021, Wolf was instrumental in amplifying and spreading myths that the vaccines cause female infertility.[153] Wolf's conspiratorial and anti-vaccine stance has been criticized as being irresponsible, and she has also been the subject of ridicule.[154]

Twitter suspended her account in June 2021,[143] a decision the company has said is permanent according to the London Observer.[155] At the end of July 2021, it was reported by The Daily Beast that Wolf was a co-plaintiff in former-President Donald Trump's social media lawsuit. According to Wolf, Twitter's suspension of her account led her to lose "over half of her business model, investors in her business, and other sources of income."[156]

Wolf appeared on the May 23, 2022 edition of The Charlie Kirk Show, where she stated: "There are military-age men pouring over the border from places like Afghanistan and Ukraine. And the easiest thing in the world to send them to God knows where, you know, and to arm them to assist the World Health Organization". She argued that the Second Amendment made it harder for government to subjugate the population, but that this was a possibility. Wolf stated: "I really hope that it doesn't devolve into civil war, which is really what the next thing is in history when you have an occupying force, which is what the WHO will be, you know, by next week".[157]

In October 2022, Wolf appeared on British TV program GB News, claiming in an interview that COVID-19 vaccines are part of an effort "to destroy British civil society". Ofcom, the government broadcasting regulatory agency, announced an investigation into GB News after receiving more than 400 complaints from members of the general public.[158]

In 2004, in an article for New York magazine, Wolf accused literary scholar Harold Bloom of a "sexual encroachment" in late Fall 1983 for touching her inner thigh. She said that what she alleged Bloom did was not harassment, either legally or emotionally, and she did not think herself a "victim", but that she had harbored this secret for 21 years. Explaining why she had finally gone public with the charges, Wolf wrote,

I began, nearly a year ago, to try—privately—to start a conversation with my alma mater that would reassure me that steps had been taken in the ensuing years to ensure that unwanted sexual advances of this sort weren't still occurring. I expected Yale to be responsive. After nine months and many calls and e-mails, I was shocked to conclude that the atmosphere of collusion that had helped to keep me quiet twenty years ago was still intact—as secretive as a Masonic lodge.[159] Sexual encroachment in an educational context or a workplace is, most seriously, a corruption of meritocracy; it is in this sense parallel to bribery. I was not traumatized personally, but my educational experience was corrupted. If we rephrase sexual transgression in school and work as a civil-rights and civil-society issue, everything becomes less emotional, less personal. If we see this as a systemic corruption issue, then when people bring allegations, the focus will be on whether the institution has been damaged in its larger mission.[159]

In Slate magazine around the time the allegations against Bloom first surfaced, Meghan O'Rourke wrote that Wolf generalized about sexual assault at Yale on the basis of her alleged personal experience. Moreover, O'Rourke commented, that despite Wolf's assertion sexual assault existed at Yale, she did not interview any Yale students for her story. In addition, O'Rourke wrote, "She jumps through verbal hoops to make it clear she was not 'personally traumatized,' yet she spends paragraphs describing the incident in precisely those terms." O'Rourke wrote that, despite Wolf's claim that her educational experience was corrupted, "(s)he neglects to mention that she later was awarded a Rhodes (scholarship)." O'Rourke concluded Wolf's "gaps and imprecision" in the New York article "give fodder to skeptics who think sexual harassment charges are often just a form of hysteria."[160]

Separately, a formal complaint was filed with the US Department of Education Office for Civil Rights on March 15, 2011, by 16 current and former Yale students—12 female and 4 male—describing a sexually hostile environment at Yale. A federal investigation of Yale University began in March 2011 in response to the complaints.[161] Wolf stated on CBS's The Early Show in April: "Yale has been systematically covering up much more serious crimes than the ones that can be easily identified." More specifically, she alleged "they use the sexual harassment grievance procedure in a very cynical way, purporting to be supporting victims, but actually using a process to stonewall victims, to isolate them, and to protect the university."[162] Yale settled the federal complaint in June 2012, acknowledging "inadequacies" but not facing "disciplinary action with the understanding that it keeps in place policy changes instituted after the complaint was filed. The school (was) required to report on its progress to the Office of Civil Rights until May, 2014."[163]

In January 2018, Wolf accused Yale officials of blocking her from filing a formal grievance against Bloom. She told The New York Times that she had attempted to file the complaint in 2015 with Yale's University-Wide Committee on Sexual Misconduct, but that the university had refused to accept it.[164] On January 16, 2018, Wolf said, she determined to see Yale's provost, Ben Polak, in another attempt to present her case. "As she documented on Twitter," the newspaper reported, "she brought a suitcase and a sleeping bag, because she said she did not know how long she would have to stay. When she arrived at the provost's office, she said, security guards prevented her from entering any elevators. Eventually, she said, Aley Menon, the secretary of the sexual misconduct committee, appeared and they met in the committee's offices for an hour, during which she gave Ms. Menon a copy of her complaint."[164] This was reported and confirmed by Norman Vanamee who apparently met Wolf at Yale on this morning. In Town & Country magazine in January 2018, Vanamee returned to the story and wrote, "Yale University has a 93-person police department, and, after the guard called for backup, three of its armed and uniformed officers appeared and stationed themselves between Wolf and the elevator bank."[165]

During an interview for Time magazine in spring 2015, Bloom denied ever being indoors with "this person" whom he referred to as "Dracula's daughter."[166]

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