After Dr. Naomi Wolf was suspended from Twitter and YouTube earlier this month for exploring COVID origins, the progressive feminist author and former Democrat adviser appeared on Steve Malzberg’s weekly Sunday commentary show Eat the Press, lashing out at Democrats criticizing the freedom of individuals to challenge mainstream takes on matters of public interest and deeming the relationship between the Democratic National Committee (DNC), the Biden administration, and big tech to be an “unholy marriage” aimed at silencing dissenting voices.
Addressing her since-banned post, Wolf claimed, “Something really concerning about our democracy is that Twitter spokespeople have been putting out a lot of misinformation, outright misstatements, claiming that I was suspended for vaccine misinformation and that’s not the reason I was suspended.”
Wolf’s permanent suspension from Twitter came after her post, which was published earlier this month, featured a video of the feminist author explaining that, due to a lack of sufficient data, Oregon residents had the right to choose whether to vaccinate or not.
“Long-term studies on the vaccines have not been done; they are experimental, not FDA-approved, [and] available only on an emergency basis,” she is seen saying.
“Oregonians have the right to choose whether or not to get the experimental COVID-19 vaccine, because this long-term data is not available to them or simply because they have a good reason not to get it,” she adds.
Shortly after posting the clip to Twitter, the platform informed her of her suspension.
In response, Wolf claimed she was merely quoting a state senator.
“I’m actually not reading my own words,” she told Malzberg. “I’m reading the words of a duly elected state senator from Oregon, State Senator Kim Thatcher, who had issued a press release about a bill 872 to ban vaccine passports in her state and end mask mandates.”
“Those were her words and it linked to her bill,” she added. “So I got my suspension notice right in the act of uploading a press release from a United States State Senator.”
Wolf expressed her belief she is being targeted as a result of a campaign she initiated, which advocates for freedom in the face of various coronavirus restrictions.
“Another reason I think I’ve been kind of in the crosshairs recently is the incredible success of a campaign on my company website Daily Clout, ‘Five Freedoms,’ to end vaccine passports, mask mandates and emergency law; [as well as] open schools now [and] guarantee free assembly,” she said.
“These are things a lot of Americans care about, their basic constitutional rights. We’ve been successful in a lot of states,” she added.
She also noted the suspension came just one day after having posted a clip of her husband, private investigator, Brian O’Shea, reading the CV of Dr. Ralph Baric, an expert in coronaviruses who signed the open letter in Science supporting a review of biosafety precautions taken in coronavirus studies at China’s Wuhan institute.
“It was also, as you mentioned, just twenty-four hours after I pinned that video of my husband, a P.I., and he was again reading a publicly available document… the CV of Dr. Ralph Baric of UNC [University of North Carolina],” she said.
“It’s a pretty important CV for the news media to cover because it shows that, as you said, Dr. Baric had received over $14 million in funding from the [National Institutes of Health], some of it for gain of function research,” she added, before stating some information in the video contradicted claims made by leading infectious disease expert Dr. Anthony Fauci.
“The ‘bat lady,’ Dr. Shi Zhengli of Wuhan Institute of Virology, is mentioned in that video on that CV and it contradicts the claims that Dr. Fauci made directly to the United States Senate,” she said.
“So it’s newsworthy, 74,000 people had viewed it when I was suspended,” she added.
Criticizing Twitter for not informing her of a specific reason for her suspension, Wolf said the incident should never have occurred.
“I don’t know why I was suspended, literally because Twitter doesn’t say why,” she said, “but I think both of those things I was uploading were incredibly newsworthy.”
“They were matters of public interest, serious reporting, and it shouldn’t have happened in a democracy,” she added.
Asked about those on the left who criticized her appearances on media outlets such as Fox News, Wolf lamented the country’s current situation.
“I’m incredibly sad that our country has come to this,” she said.
“I’ve appeared on Fox News, written for the New York Times, and appeared on CNN. I’ll talk to anyone who will have me,” she added.
Noting her affiliation with the left, Wolf claimed such issues should not be seen as partisan ones.
“These shouldn’t be partisan issues,” she said. “I am a liberal democrat. I voted for Biden.”
“That doesn’t matter when the Constitution is in the crosshairs as it is now. I will go anywhere to talk to anyone about the threats to our democracy and I’ve been doing that since 2008 with my book ‘The End of America,” she added.
Wolf also warned of the current era as divisions divide the country.
“This is a very dangerous time,” she said, “because our country is divided as never before.”
She then blamed “interested parties” for aggravating those divisions.
“The divisions are being fostered and exacerbated by a lot of interested parties and the more divided we are, the more vulnerable we are to bad actors, whether they’re tech moguls [or] whether they’re the Chinese Communist Party,” she said.
She also accused those same parties of benefitting and profiting from “endless lockdowns, restrictions on freedom, restrictions on freedom of speech,” and from “Americans being weakened and our Constitution being ignored and trampled on.”
“It’s very, very scary,” she added.
Wolf also lamented Democrats criticizing rights and freedoms, deeming the relationship between the DNC, the current administration and big tech to be an “unholy marriage” aimed at silencing others.
This really pains me to say as a lifelong Democrat, but what I see is an unholy marriage of the DNC and this administration along with ‘stars of past administrations’ on the Dem side and big tech, to create a one-party state and to silence conservative voices, to silence voices of scientists, respected scientists, who are calling attention to things like the Wuhan lab leak or problems that are now fully documented with myocarditis and young men after the vaccine.
Though Wolf refuses to label herself an anti-vaxxer, she sees efforts to “marginalize” individuals as both “scary” and “un-American.”
“I’m not an anti-vaxxer,” she said, “but as a mom, these are matters of public interest.”
“What I see is a very scary effort to marginalize thoughtful people — but even unthoughtful people — as conspiracy theorists, as people who need to be done away with; to create new bills and new alliances [and] fact checkers to ban them and silence them,” she continued.
“It’s really the private sector doing the dirty work of the government. It’s un-American and the whole point of the First Amendment is to allow everyone to express an opinion,” she added.
Wolf concluded by declaring her commitment to the truth.
“I’m going to keep telling the truth,” she said. “They won’t bully me. They won’t silence me.”
“But a lot of people who don’t have those resources, that experience, are being intimidated, are being silenced. I hear from them every day,” she said.
Wolf previously enjoyed a sterling reputation with the mainstream media due to her long career as a feminist author, which included the bestselling 1990s book The Beauty Myth.
However, Wolf’s reputation with the media swiftly declined after she began speaking out against lockdowns and vaccines.
In November, Wolf expressed regret over her vote for President Biden, saying that she would have never voted for him if she had known he was open to lockdowns as a strategy to contain the coronavirus.
“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,” she wrote.
Follow Joshua Klein on Twitter @JoshuaKlein.
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