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Author, social critic, and political activist Naomi Wolf raises awareness of the pervasive inequities that exist in society and politics. She encourages people to take charge of their lives, voice their concerns and enact change.
Wolf’s landmark international bestseller, The Beauty Myth, challenged the cosmetics industry and the marketing of unrealistic standards of beauty, launching a new wave of feminism in the early 1990s. The New York Times called it one of the most important books of the 20th century. Her next book, Vagina: A Cultural History, will be released in 2012.
Wolf’s New York Times bestseller, The End of America: A Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot, is an impassioned call to return to the aspirations and beliefs of the Founders’ ideals of liberty. The New York Times called the documentary version “pointedly inflammatory.” Her latest book, Give Me Liberty: A Handbook For American Revolutionaries, includes effective tools for citizens to promote civic engagement and create sustainable democracy.
Her international journalism includes the investigative report “Guantánamo Bay: The Inside Story” for The Times of London, and as a columnist for Project Syndicate her articles have been published in India, Philippines, Egypt, and Lebanon. She’s a frequent blogger on The Huffington Post and writes cultural commentary for The Guardian, The Washington Post, and Harper’s Bazaar. Her TV appearances include Larry King Live, Meet the Press, The Joyce Behar Show, and The Colbert Report.
A graduate of Yale and a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, Wolf was a consultant to Al Gore during his presidential campaign on women’s issues and social policy. She is co-founder of The Woodhull Institute for Ethical Leadership, an organization that teaches leadership to young women, and The American Freedom Campaign, a grass roots democracy movement in the United States whose mission is the defense of the Constitution and the rule of law.
Friday, May 25, 2012 What really lies behind the "war on women" (18 comments)
A well-funded legislative war on women is being unleashed. Many of these new proposed bills, or recently passed state laws, attack in novel ways women's rights to ownership of their bodies and their basic life choices, which second-wave feminists thought long won.
Friday, May 18, 2012 The NDAA's Section 1021 Coup d'etat Foiled (14 comments)
The government cannot be trusted with powers to detain indefinitely any US citizen -- even though Obama promised he would not misuse these powers -- because the United States government is already coordinating a surveillance and policing war against its citizens, designed to suppress their peaceful assembly and criticism of its corporate allies.
Wednesday, May 9, 2012 The spectacle of terror and its vested interests (3 comments)
What the FBI and CIA and the Pentagon are up against is that people -- including Americans -- are waking up to the fact that there would be no enemy if we weren't manufacturing new terrorists by taking out civilians in Pakistan, Yemen and Afghanistan. The true, Orwellian agenda is to support a vast new crony-capitalist industry that uses terror theater to turn open democracies into surveillance societies.
Thursday, May 3, 2012 CISPA: The Keyboard Cops (2 comments)
If CISPA enters into US law, alongside the recently enacted National Defence Authorisation Act - which gives the government the power to detain any American for anything forever - fundamental civil liberties will be threatened in a way that no democracy can tolerate. The good news is that President Barack Obama has vowed to veto CISPA. The bad news is that he made - and then broke - a similar vow on the NDAA.
Tuesday, April 17, 2012 Katy Perry and the military-pop-cultural complex (3 comments)
ilitary millions -- in the form of investment either in-kind, comping development, or in possible direct support, in a paper trail that we will never see -- are being used to skew what we see, just as scientists in fields as diverse as geology and physics are now complaining that military millions are skewing the roster of what gets funded and what doesn't (meaning, what gets studied and what doesn't).
Friday, April 6, 2012 How the US uses sexual humiliation as a political tool to control the masses (35 comments)
You don't need to have done anything wrong to be arrested in America any longer. You can be arrested for walking your dog without a leash. The man who was forced to spread his buttocks was stopped for a driving infraction. So nothing prevents thousands of Occupy protesters -- if there will be any left after these laws start to bite -- from being rounded up and stripped naked under intimidating conditions.
Friday, March 9, 2012 Occupy Wall Street exposes judicial double standards (9 comments)
Avram and I aren't going to jail; but our fellow citizens, who simply did what we did and lawfully exercised their first amendment rights, still may do so -- and face the violence of a spell in Rikers. Their cases, too, deserve media scrutiny.
Monday, March 5, 2012 America's Islamic blind spots (2 comments)
Burning a conquered people's sacred texts sends an unmistakable message: you can do anything to these people. As Heinrich Heine put it, referring to the Spanish Inquisition's burning of the Quran, "Where they burn books, so too will they in the end burn human beings."
Thursday, March 1, 2012 The NDAA: a clear and present danger to American liberty (8 comments)
The NDAA grants the president the power to kidnap any American anywhere in the United States and hold him or her in prison forever without trial. The president's own signing statement, incredibly, confirmed that he had that power.
Wednesday, February 22, 2012 From Rocky Flats to Fukushima: this nuclear folly (3 comments)
Profit motives are driving the push to develop lands that, according to scientists, can never be inhabited safely again. And profit motives are driving an even more demented plan on a state-by-state level, astoundingly, to ship American schoolchildren into these no-go areas.
Thursday, February 2, 2012 What the Occupy movement must learn from Sundance (5 comments)
Media exposure, a clear message, smart soundbites, clearly stated demands, and, most importantly, tasked, empowered negotiators working on the inside in concert with mass disrupters applying pressure from without -- this equals political life.
Tuesday, January 3, 2012 The streets of 2012 (8 comments)
Not only are laws criminalizing previously legal dissent, organizing, and reporting being replicated in advanced democracies; so are violent tactics against protesters, backed by the increasing push in countries with long traditions of civil policing to militarize law enforcement.
Saturday, November 26, 2011 The Shocking Truth About the Crackdown on Occupy (7 comments)
Members of Congress, with the collusion of the American president, sent violent, organized suppression against the people they are supposed to represent. So, when you connect the dots, properly understood, what happened this week is the first battle in a civil war; a civil war in which, for now, only one side is choosing violence.
Wednesday, November 2, 2011 The People Versus The Police (22 comments)
Suddenly, the United States looks like the rest of the furious, protesting, not-completely-free world. Indeed, most commentators have not fully grasped that a world war is occurring. But it is unlike any previous war in human history. Their enemy is a global "corporatocracy" that has purchased governments and legislatures, and plundered treasuries and ecosystems.
Sunday, October 23, 2011 The First Amendment And The Obligation To Peacefully Disrupt In A Free Society (4 comments)
The First Amendment means that it actually is not up to the mayor or the police of any municipality, or to the Parks Department, or to any local municipality to prohibit public assembly if the assembly is peaceful but disruptive in many ways. Peaceful, lawful protest -- if it is effective -- IS innately disruptive of "business as usual." That is WHY it is effective.
