Let’s turn our attention for a moment to two authors, Wolf and Wolff. Feminist icon Naomi Wolf is reeling from a nonfiction fiasco that has caused her horrible and very public embarrassment. Irresponsible fictionalizer Michael Wolff is apparently incapable of shame.
What do they have in common? Not much, beyond the fact that they’re both bi-coastal elites who share a loathing for President Donald Trump.
In Wolf’s case, a perfect encapsulation of the PR nightmare befalling her latest work is presented by the Post Millennial’s Libby Emmons in “Naomi Wolf Was Destroyed by Her Research Bias.” While an author is ultimately responsible for fact-checking content, in this case, the “research bias” runs deep. The book started out as a thesis paper, which means it had to have been green-lit by both academia and New York publishing to ever see the light of day. These gatekeepers, steeped in leftist bias, failed to catch the monumental error that serves as the premise of Wolf’s book: the assertion that homosexuals were executed in Victorian England.
As for Wolff, how Trump could have allowed such an individual to plant himself on a couch in the West Wing for an extended period of time in quest of a truth-challenged tell-all is something that heartland Trumpservatives will never understand. Steve Bannon had a lot to do with it, and we all know how that turned out.
Unlike the chattering classes who would see traditionalist, sovereign America overrun and enervated in the name of globalism, Trump’s ardent supporters are not interested in gossipy, inconsequential trash-talk among members of the so-called cultural and managerial elite. Who gives a damn what Omarosa Newman or Rupert Murdoch think of the president or vice versa? That Mr. Trump has kept promises and keeps trying to keep promises on issues they care about is what matters.
Trump’s base had no use or respect for Wolff’s first anti-Trump effort, Fire and Fury, an admittedly fictionalized, preventable screed that earned for the unverifiable muckraker a place in the earnings stratosphere with authors like Stephen King and J.K. Rowling.
Wolff’s latest, the sure-to-be wildly imagined Siege: Trump Under Fire, has already been called out for bold-faced prevarication by, of all entities, Robert Mueller’s team. Wolff knew he would be denied access to the White House for his “sequel,” (like he should have been the first time) but that didn’t stop him (why should it?) from penning another alleged tome full of cowardly hearsay from a collection of anonymous sources.
Flip the script: an almost-famous conservative author gathers salacious dirt from unnamed sources who claim to have firsthand knowledge that former President Barack Obama had numerous homosexual liaisons while in college, and then puts it in a book.
When asked to back up his reporting, the conservative author says, “I’m not a journalist, and such journalistic strictures do not apply to me. Besides, it seems like it could be true, right?”
That’s Michael Wolff. That’s what he does to earn his multi-million-dollar living.
Over at Jezebel, they’re barfing their guts out over Naomi Wolf’s horrendous take-down. During an on-air interview promoting Outrages: Sex, Censorship, and the Criminalization of Love, the central premise of her new book, due out June 18, was substantively damaged by a preventable and catastrophic inaccuracy. Turns out that in her zeal to portray how bad it was for gay men in Victorian England, she totally misread the record books.
She was so anxious to depict Anglo culture as bigoted and punitive that she applied her misguided bias without having the slightest idea what she was writing about, thereby consigning her entire project to the realm of debacle. Worse, a lot of the acts of sodomy she claimed was being punished at the time were in truth the acts of child molesting pedophiles.
Flip the script: a progressive climate change warrior writes and publishes a book whose entire premise centers around the assertion that the world will start irrevocably cooking in two decades, and then is exposed as having misread climate data.
Wait, hasn’t that already happened?
Where’s the connection between Wolff and Wolf? Truth be told, they are two different animals, Wolff an unaccountable fabricator and Wolf yet another guilt-mongering liberal so immersed in bias that she failed to exercise the authorial due diligence that would have prevented the misstep of a lifetime.
But they do share a trait festering in journalism and academia: they chart careers around believing the worst about America, its founding, its choices, its history.
Will articles like this help sell books for Wolf and Wolff? Probably. But no conservative should be part of the market for them.
In closing, probably a moot point at this juncture, may I respectfully submit to President Trump: Don’t let people like this anywhere near your administration.
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