The press doesn’t stop publishing, by the way, in a fascist escalation; it simply watches what it says. That too can be an incremental process, and the pace at which the free press polices itself depends on how journalists are targeted. – Naomi Wolf
For all the power of video and film, I am not giving up my pen. I am just much more likely to try to link essays to webcasts or videos. The best way for these two media to move forward, to inform and make change, is in tandem; together they are more than the sum of their parts. – Naomi Wolf
Western women have been controlled by ideals and stereotypes as much as by material constraints. – Naomi Wolf
Let’s dare to release our immature fantasies of a magically faultless U.S. system and a magically protected election process. We have been lucky as a nation, but sometimes continued luck depends on action. – Naomi Wolf
If you look at weak democracies, the oligarchies that have taken undue control of them always seek to tamper with the vote. It is important for oligarchs to have elections to give their guy a veneer of legitimacy – and important for the vote always to turn out ‘their way.’ – Naomi Wolf
For Gore 2000, I was a formal campaign adviser: contrary to RNC mythology, my brief was not ‘wardrobe,’ but rather policy on women’s issues, and messaging. I was also married to a Clinton speechwriter, and observed the message decision-making process from the perspective of a spouse. – Naomi Wolf
It is fairly well-known what has been behind that climate change denial in America: vast sums pumped into an ignorance industry by the oil and gas lobbies. – Naomi Wolf
Every Yom Kippur, Jewish tradition requires a strict spiritual inventory. You aren’t supposed to just sit around feeling guilty, but to take action in the real world to set things right. – Naomi Wolf
It is standard practice for corrupt leaders who are seeking a certain political outcome to hype or manipulate a terror threat or a threat of violent domestic subversion. While sometimes the threat is manufactured, frequently the hyped threat is based on a real danger. – Naomi Wolf
No matter what a woman’s appearance may be, it will be used to undermine what she is saying and taken to individualize – as her personal problem – observations she makes about the beauty myth in society. – Naomi Wolf
Italy in the 1920s, Germany in the ’30s, East Germany in the ’50s, Czechoslovakia in the ’60s, the Latin American dictatorships in the ’70s, China in the ’80s and ’90s – all dictatorships and would-be dictators target newspapers and journalists. – Naomi Wolf
Most urgently, women’s identity must be premised upon our ‘beauty’ so that we will remain vulnerable to outside approval, carrying the vital sensitive organ of self-esteem exposed to the air. – Naomi Wolf
The symbolic value of having an African-American president has certainly eased some racial tensions in America, but they’re not gone. – Naomi Wolf
A utopian future for the Internet could be secured if the heavy-duty influencers – and the grassroots influencers tweeting along – can create a new global organization peopled with defenders of Internet freedom. – Naomi Wolf
In a fascist shift, reporters start to face more and more harassment, and they have to be more and more courageous simply in order to do their jobs. – Naomi Wolf
The Tea Party emerged from a laudably grassroots base: libertarians, fervent Constitutionalists, and ordinary people alarmed at the suppression of liberties, whether by George W. Bush or Barack Obama. – Naomi Wolf
Obstacles, of course, are developmentally necessary: they teach kids strategy, patience, critical thinking, resilience and resourcefulness. – Naomi Wolf
What, after all, is the narrative of ‘the American Dream?’ It was a discourse formulated between the 1880s and the 1920s in the United States during the great waves of migration and expansion and reforms of the Progressive Era. – Naomi Wolf
In a fascist system, it’s not the lies that count but the muddying. When citizens can’t tell real news from fake, they give up their demands for accountability bit by bit. – Naomi Wolf
As a free-speech advocate, I believe that adults should have access to any material they want. As a parent, and a community member, I think people should be able to protect their homes from imagery – much of it violent – that is, I feel, a form of child abuse when adult society inflicts it upon children. – Naomi Wolf
Madonna is that forbidden thing, the Nietzschean creative woman. Her preoccupation with a high level of work doesn’t allow her to follow the usual script that powerful women are expected to follow – ‘don’t hate me for my success, don’t hate me for my power.’ – Naomi Wolf
Kim Kardashian’s marriage to Kris Humphries famously lasted 72 days, and was reported in the tabloids as being all about the big bucks paid by magazines for the bridal photos: it is a spectacle of a bride-to-be as entrepreneur, not as romantic heroine; the groom, in this scenario, is nothing but a prop. – Naomi Wolf
Women have face-lifts in a society in which women without them appear to vanish from sight. – Naomi Wolf
When I was a baby feminist, leading feminist thinkers were insisting that if women ran the world, there would be no sadism or war. – Naomi Wolf
It is important to distinguish between the power of the Internet to make the great change it can, and the limits and vulnerabilities of that change without real-time political mobilization deployed globally to protect those who venture out, especially in closed societies, into the heady new vistas it offers. – Naomi Wolf
Of course a woman who decides to work full time as a mother in the home can be happy and deserves full respect from us. Motherhood is one of the most challenging and creative jobs anyone can do. The goal is to remake the world so that our choices are not so stark. – Naomi Wolf
It is never smart, even in a strong democracy, to declare some debate off limits. In a weakening democracy it is catastrophic. – Naomi Wolf
Documentary film without nuanced journalistic sourcing risks being sensational, tendentious or broad-brushed. – Naomi Wolf
