She's Come Undone

...While the enemies of freedom are almost unbelievably sly and ruthless in Wolf ’s universe, the ordinary citizen is also an intellectual and organizational powerhouse, waiting to be unleashed...

...the annotation read...

...A screener had taken exception to some Iraq war protest signs in a man’s luggage: “Don’t appreciate your anti-American attitude...

...after the publication of The Beauty Myth in 1990, for instance, she made common cause against pornography with social conservatives at the height of the culture wars...

...Wolf ’s use of their stories, and the stories of dissidents living under truly oppressive regimes, to make her loopy case for creeping fascism in America is a little tougher to take...

...In Give Me Liberty, subtitled A Handbook for American Revolutionaries, Wolf lays out what she calls a “battle plan” for taking democracy back from the “thugs,” a guide for rising up in “self-defense and legitimate rebellion...

...the patriarchy...

...The data is in...

...it’s all part of a massive digital conspiracy...

...This particular passage has wisely been removed from the fi nal edition, but Wolf ’s sense of cosmic injustice and personal affront in the face of such indignities as malfunctioning Internet browsers remains robust...

...Security camera footage...

...What could possibly be so terrible that it would overcome the powerful natural instinct to minimize contact with the fl oor of Newark airport at all costs...

...I’m not getting half of my mail...

...I showed it to the Post Offi ce and they said ‘That’s not possible.’” When she retold the story at Borders last month, she mentioned that birthday party invitations for her daughter were now also being intercepted...

...The web sites that are supposed to teach citizens how to participate, how to lead, are in Latin, you know...

...It looks as if her faith has been rewarded...

...she said at Borders...

...Wolf has always sensed powerful unseen forces pressing in on her—the male gaze...

...Wolf is modeling herself on the American Founders, she says...

...She’s in summer camp right now...

...There’s Kucinich, of course, who sponsored a bill in 2001 banning jet trails on the grounds that they could be used as exotic space weapons...

...Her previous book, The End of America, which chronicles the “fascist shift” we are now experiencing in the United States, came out barely a year ago...

...Hence one of the nuttier ideas Wolf endorses in Give Me Liberty, one that has nothing to do with conspiracies...

...During one session she says she inhabited the persona of a 13-yearold boy and saw Jesus...

...But boxers versus briefs...

...Your call...

...How do I know about this embarrassing episode...

...Since Wolf heard this story secondhand from an unnamed “citizen,” it’s hard to corroborate...

...And when my mail arrives, it’s ripped wide open...

...Elsewhere, she relates another chilling tale of technical malfeasance: Rep...

...This was starting to feel to me like a cosmic, almost sublime, yet thoroughly straight-faced mockery of the electorate...

...Friday’s and a World’s Best Yogurt, sobbing into her cell phone...

...The dates were random, unyielding, self-censoring—yet silently guaranteeing disharmony and ensuring that someone, somewhere, will, with the greatest hopes and best of intentions, mess up their application and have no recourse to fi xing it...

...Finally, there’s Wolf ’s personal persecution, related between cheers at a recent rally in Washington...

...I am not ashamed of this abasement,” she writes, “because I was actually heartsick...

...Wolf is enthused about the idea of a National Issues Day, a day (or perhaps two) where many things would be debated nationwide but nothing decided...

...He survived, mercifully, yet tells no tales of a conspiracy to murder his comrades in dissent...

...Which brings us to Wolf ’s guiding principle for understanding American politics: Never accept an explanation of incompetence or coincidence when a conspiracy will do...

...Katherine Mangu-Ward is associate editor of Reason...

...Wolf is no stranger to odd alliances...

...In 2006, Wolf was in therapy for writers block...

...I absolutely believe in divine providence now, absolutely believe God totally cares about every single one of us intimately,” she told Glasgow’s Sunday Herald...

...Things like getting a permit for a protest, fi nding a decent source of news, and fi ling the forms to run for offi ce...

...This would “mean substance, not trivia,” she writes, “since local people are unlikely to put up with one another wasting time on boxers versus briefs...

...Seven soldiers wrote op-eds in the New York Times critical of the war, three are dead, one shot in the head,” she writes, implying the worst...

...Wolf also gives the last word in Give Me Liberty to Mark Crispin Miller, author of Fooled Again, a book exhaustively documenting how the last two presidential elections were rigged, and a signatory of the 9/11 Truth Statement, which demands an investigation into the U.S...

...government’s role in the events of September 11, 2001...

...In an earlier version of Give Me Liberty, there’s a passage where Wolf discovers a government website with a “set of random dates fl oating mysteriously in space”— deadlines with no action steps attached for running for offi ce in Virginia...

...Life outside of cable news, Wolf ’s previous natural habitat, is indeed a marginally better place...

...Even with a research assistant, a graduate education, and with the privilege of this project being my only full-time job,” Wolf fi nds a variety of the basic tasks of democratic life diffi cult...

...While Wolf would no doubt see a conspiracy of dissent-crushing TSA thugs taking orders from on high for the precise language of their notes, a simpler explanation might be that the TSA has attracted a freelance wouldbe censor, with a Sharpie in his pocket and no common sense, and that story migrated from the mainstream press to her ears, with slight mutations in tow...

...She’s Come Undone From Gore guru to pretty paranoid BY KATHERINE MANGU-WARD Naomi Wolf, bestselling author of The Beauty Myth, lover of earth tones, and speaker of truth to power, was recently found crumpled on the fl oor in Newark airport between a T.G.I...

...Mostly, Wolf ’s paranoia is good fun—yuppies freaking out about letters in their luggage, and a little feminine hysteria paired with computer illiteracy—but sometimes she meddles in more serious matters...

...The answer is yes...

...Wolf associates with only the cream of the conspiracy theory crop...

...Wolf tells me, and anyone else who cares to know, all about it in the fi rst section of her new book...

...The “letter” in the Seattle case was a single line scribbled in the margin of the standard TSA inspection notice...

...Explanation Number Two: The American secret police believe that vital information is contained in correspondence from teenage girls, and have confi scated all letters written in pink ink...

...the state...

...I heard from a citizen—but never read in the suburban press—that people he knew had opened their luggage after a fl ight to fi nd letters from the Transportation Security Administration that said that they did not “appreciate” the reading material, critical of the administration in power at that time, that these Americans had carried in their personal possessions...

...She’s writing me letters...

...She hasn’t given up appearing on television, of course, but she has been forced to give up consuming her friends’ efforts because they’re simply not running the kind of amazing stories that Wolf is hearing every day from “ordinary citizens...

...Like all the best conspiracy theorists, Wolf has given up on the media establishment...

...and now Jesus...

...Apparently, it is diffi cult to run for offi ce in America...

...But the going won’t be easy...

...After reading her colorful, rambling, paranoid account of her wrestling match with modern American democracy, the optimist in me can’t help but wonder: If Naomi Wolf fi nds it almost impossible to successfully stage a rally or run for offi ce, perhaps the system is working pretty well after all...

...It’s this last task that reduced Wolf to a quivering mess down amongst the yogurt cups...

...One can’t deny that there’s a certain kind of egalitarianism here, twisted though it may be...

...The offi cial response to the incident, by the way: “We do not condone our employees making any kind of political comments or personal comments to any travelers,” TSA spokeswoman Heather Rosenker told Reuters...

...I’m so used to interacting with people who say, ‘this is weird’ and then describe some crazy thing with the technology,” Wolf said at an underpopulated talk at a Borders in Washington on the day her book was released...

...Nope...

...And I, like, speak the vernacular...

...Elsewhere in the book she finds evidence for her belief in the wonderworking power of ordinary citizen engagement when she meets and talks to a “real live pro-lifer” for the fi rst time in her long career: “I had never entertained the remotest notion that a pro-life activist might have come to her or his position through motives recognizable to me—through sincere concern for poor women, or women’s wellbeing, or for the sincere well-being of children as a whole,” she writes...

...I came to this reluctantly,” she said at Borders, “because all of my friends run the mainstream media...

...Are ordinary people smart enough to run America...

...Dennis “Kucinich’s website was jammed when he tried to move forward with impeachment...

...At a Ron Paul Revolution March this past July, Wolf told the crowd—composed mostly of people waving banners with legends like “Read Atlas Shrugged” and “Mises Saves”—this story: “My daughter is 13 years old...

...and we should, too...

...That is not acceptable...

...A quick Google search reveals that two of the dead soldiers, colleagues and coauthors, died in the same accident—an overturned cargo truck...

...in one memorable instance, the groping hands of Yale ?minence grise Harold Bloom...

...Wolf is rightly troubled, for instance, by the Catch-527 of running for offi ce: It’s almost impossible to raise money legally for a campaign without a lawyer, and it’s hard to pay a lawyer before you’ve raised money...

...But there was a story in Seattle—covered by the local press and picked up by the news wires and CNN—that bears a striking similarity to Wolf ’s twice-told tale...

...Some might blame specific campaign fi nance regulations, or the ongoing abysmal state of federal bureaucracy for this little trap, but Wolf sees something larger at work: “The materials seemed designed to make you conclude that democracy was just too complicated for ordinary people to take charge of,” she writes...

...I’m not getting her letters...

...Private detectives...

...Explanation Number One: Thirteenyearold girls are terrible correspondents and worse friends, and Wolf ’s daughter will be spending the next few months silently mortified that her white lies about letter writing and her social ostracism have taken the national stage as part of her mother’s conspiracy theories...

...The soldier shot in the head was another coauthor, hit while on a combat mission when the article was still being composed...

...She’s right, of course, that none of these are easy tasks, and there’s a case to be made that, in a well-functioning republic, they should be simpler...

...The democracy thieves (whoever they are) join this cast in a book much like her previous efforts: confusingly argued, historically illiterate, and yet strangely mesmerizing...

...These days, Wolf can’t seem to stop writing...

...In Wolf ’s world, the fl oating dates aren’t the result of bad programming or an innocent formatting error by some government minion...

...That’s never going to go away...

...And on the written page she does—fl uently...

...But strange indeed is the path that takes Naomi Wolf to Rep...

...Ron Paul’s door...

...The American people are currently apathetic and disengaged, Wolf says, because they “intuit” a maze around them “and do not want to spend their lives walking around with fake shiny keys fumbling with doors that will never open...

...But they would say that, wouldn’t they...