Former Trump adviser Steve Bannon, universally loathed on the Left as a right wing fanatic, can be seen interviewing devoted feminist Naomi Wolf in a surprisingly congenial encounter on his June 2nd War Room podcast. Equally intriguing was her late August appearance on Canada’s Rebel News, an online site generally seen in this country as the very epitome of “conservative” intolerance.
What led Wolf to fraternize with an individual and a website that many in the mainstream would love to see banished altogether? In her Bannon interview she declares: “I am not deceived by partisanship.”
As I have said repeatedly, I consider my supposedly right wing ideas and values to be perfectly reasonable and decidedly of the Center! That would seem to be where Ms. Wolf now finds herself. Certainly not declaring herself a Republican or, God forbid, a supporter of Donald Trump, she is nevertheless extremely critical of many aspects of the contemporary Left. As I watched the two videos in question, I was naturally reminded of Bill Maher’s similar evolution over the last few years.
The world appears to be upside down, she tells Bannon. What she formerly considered the tolerance of the Left has now mutated into an arrogance born of its conviction that it is always right, that ordinary working class Americans who might vote Republican are mere simpletons, what Hillary disdainfully referred to as “intolerables.” This attitude, she implies, is inconsistent with the very concept of a Democracy. Utterly disgusted by the mainstream Left’s insistence that online discourse is pervasively biased and conspiratorial, she makes the point shared by most “conservatives” that, with few exceptions [i.e., Fox News], it is in fact only Online that one might actually encounter rational, objective analyses of the political issues of the day. This is Heresy for one generally taken to be a “progressive.”
Wolf has written a book, “The Bodies of Others: The New Authoritarians, Covid 19, and The War Against the Human.” Citing the harm Covid vaccines were inflicting on young women and particularly pregnant women, many of whom had lost babies as a result of their vaccination, she was appalled to have been cancelled by Twitter simply for expressing the opinion that much of her government’s response to the pandemic represented an abuse of its authority. Twitter being run by those of a supposedly liberal orientation, she realized that “liberals” no longer actually believed in the Principle of Free Speech!
In the two interviews cited above, Wolf supports other Principles affiliated with the Right, the notion, for example, that the Nation State is a construct of value, a construct based not on racial intolerance but on the rational admission that some Political Systems and Cultural Regimes are demonstrably superior to others. This, of course, is a fundamental violation of Inclusive Orthodoxy. Were Wolf a card-carrying Republican, her obvious disdain for the Chinese Communist government would no doubt be seen as just another example of right-wing racial intolerance. In her mind, however, it’s a matter of simple common sense.
What is encouraging about Naomi Wolf’s willingness to associate herself with Steve Bannon and the Rebel News Network is that it implies a common bond based on Reason. The pervasive tendency not of the radical Left but of its mainstream advocates is to denounce anyone who disagrees with them by simply calling them names. Ezra Levant, ludicrously, has been called antisemitic for some of his views. But for rational “progressives” such as Wolf and Maher, there really doesn’t seem to be much separating them from mainstream “conservatism.”
Check out the measured opinions of often reviled individuals such as Dave Rubin, Dinesh D’Souza, Jordan Peterson, Candace Owens, Larry Elder, Candace Malcolm, etc., etc., all more-or-less mainstream “conservatives,” and compare them to the mindless volley of insults that are the stock and trade not of the Left’s fringe elements but of its mainstream. One wonders what Wolf and Maher thought of Biden’s ludicrous speech the other day in which he basically declared half of America’s voters to be threats to their democracy ……. perhaps the same thing I thought of our equally brilliant Prime Minister’s assertion that Canada’s Freedom Truckers were no more than a collection of Racists and Misogynists!