The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

White House ‘Targeted Me by Name,’ Says Feminist Vaccine Skeptic Naomi Wolf

Posted on | September 8, 2022 | 2 Comments

When COVID-19 policy critic Alex Berenson got banned from Twitter last year, he sued them, and his account was reinstated after it was revealed that White House officials singled him out by name at an April 2021 White House meeting with representatives of social-media companies.

In June 2021, two months before Berenson was banned from Twitter, the platform banned Naomi Wolf, the famed feminist author of The Beauty Myth who had become outspoken in expressing concerns about COVID-19 vaccine risks, especially for women. In a post Wednesday on the alternative platform Gettr, Wolf said her lawyers had informed her that “documents from Missouri AG Eric Schmitt’s lawsuit” showed she had been “singled out” by “the White House itself.” You don’t have to agree with Wolf (about vaccines or anything else) to be outraged by the idea of government officials pressuring social media companies to censor controversial content by labeling it “misinformation.”

Wolf’s critics would say she has published false or, at least, unverified claims about COVID-19 vaccine risks, and my point is: It doesn’t matter.

People publish discredited nonsense every day — astrology, hello? — and have been doing so since the invention of writing. You can order books from Amazon about witchcraft and alien abductions and all sorts of crazy conspiracy theories (and if you order through my affiliate links, I’ll get a commission), but so what? If people are literate, and yet ignorant enough to believe blatant falsehoods, this points to a problem with our education system, which cannot be solved by banning the publication of things we don’t want them to read, because who will decide such questions?

Were it in my power to decide who should be banned from Twitter, my first decision would be to un-ban myself, but then there’s a long list of people I’d be happy to ban from the platform. Of course, my enemies can congratulate themselves on the unlikelihood of such a hypothetical scenario, but what about the enemies of Alex Berenson and Naomi Wolf?

Invoking the authority of “science,” political appointees at the White House used the emergency of the COVID-19 pandemic as a pretext to demand that Twitter censor what they deemed “misinformation” relevant to public policy. If you think that is acceptable, would you also be in favor of the White House pushing to censor critics of the administration’s policy on the economy, energy policy or military affairs?

Those who might defend deplatforming Naomi Wolf would probably argue that “misinformation” about vaccine risks in the middle of a pandemic is so potentially harmful as to justify extraordinary measures. To them, I would answer: Question the timing.

See, this has been my basic cause of skepticism for more than a year. Federal taxpayers footed the bill to make COVID-19 vaccines “free,” which in effect was a massive transfer of wealth from taxpayers to the pharmaceutical industry. The government ordered millions upon millions of doses of these vaccines and, within a few months, a majority of the population had been inoculated. A huge public-health success, right? Ah, but this was not enough. By spring of 2021, despite the success of the vaccine program, it became clear that a certain percentage of the population simply wasn’t interested in getting vaccinated, at which point Biden administration officials began talking about the need to make the vaccine mandatory. This is where the war against “misinformation” originated, and my cynical suspicion was this: Big Pharma wanted more customers for their product, and vaccine mandates were the proposed solution to their marketing problem. It was about profits, not health.

It does not matter, for purposes of this discussion, whether you believe what Naomi Wolf or any other critic has said about the potential risks of COVID-19 vaccines. What matters is that the White House pressured social media companies to deplatform vaccine critics at the same time they were pushing to make these vaccines mandatory and, if my cynical hunch is correct, this push for vaccine mandates was basically about lining the pockets of Big Pharma — a corrupt motive, because how much do Democrats stand to gain in campaign contributions from Big Pharma?

“Follow the money,” as Deep Throat famously advised Woodward and Bernstein, and I suspect some diligent reporter could collect a Pulitzer Prize for exposing what was going on behind the scenes at the Biden White House during the time when they decided that COVID-19 vaccines should be mandatory, and that critics of their policy should be banned from social media. The whole scene reeks of corruption.

And, just incidentally, I have never liked Naomi Wolf, for reasons both general and specific. But we are living in a time of Fear and Loathing, when the going gets weird and the weird turn pro, and we find ourselves on the same side as people we never expected to become our allies.

All the good people are banned from Twitter, you know.




 

Category: Conspiracy Theories, Health Care

Comments

2 Responses to “White House ‘Targeted Me by Name,’ Says Feminist Vaccine Skeptic Naomi Wolf”

  1. Naomi Wolff-"I was targeted by the White House" - The DaleyGator
    September 8th, 2022 @ 8:14 am

    […] Shocking allegations, but, as politics grows more personal, who knows. The Other McCain has this news […]

  2. California Just Declared War on You | okrahead
    September 8th, 2022 @ 10:11 pm

    […] Great, now I’m jealous of Naomi Wolf… https://theothermccain.com/2022/09/08/white-house-targeted-me-by-name-says-feminist-vaccine-skeptic-… […]