THIS CHANGES EVERYTHING ABOUT THE END OF AMERICA
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| When Naomi Klein Realized People Regularly Confused Her With Naomi Wolf, She Went Down a Rabbit Hole |
The first time it happened... when I heard two women talking about me.
“Did you see what Naomi Klein said?”
I froze, flashing back to every mean girl in high school, pre-humiliated. What had I said?
“Something about how the march today is a bad idea.”
“Who asked her? I really don’t think she understands our demands.”
Wait. I hadn’t said anything... Then it hit me: I knew who had… I... said “I think you are talking about Naomi Wolf.”
That was November 2011, at the height of Occupy Wall Street, the movement... was a collective howl against economic inequality and financial crimes that would, eventually, birth a new generational politics
I could see why some… had their Naomis mixed up... Most confusingly, we once had distinct writerly lanes (hers being women’s bodies, sexuality, and leadership; mine being corporate assaults on democracy and climate change)… about the relationship between market logic and climate breakdown for what would become This Changes Everything.
Wolf… had written several articles arguing that the crackdown on Occupy demonstrated that the United States was tipping into a police state. This was the subject of her book The End of America, which outlined “ten steps” she claimed every government takes on its way to outright fascism.
Her evidence that this evil future was now upon us was the aggressive way that Occupy demonstrators were having their freedom restricted…
Wolf... argued that activists should defy restrictions on their freedom of speech and assembly... using what became known as the “human microphone” (where the crowd repeats the speaker’s words so that everyone can hear them)…
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I started paying closer attention to what Wolf was doing… About the Green New Deal (not the demands of grassroots climate-justice movements, she said, but yet another elite-orchestrated cover for “fascism”). She has even spotted plots and conspiracies in oddly shaped clouds.
