Naomi Wolf's apology

Making the rounds online is a Substack article by Naomi Wolf, whom people of a certain age will remember mainly as a big-time left-liberal—feminist, etc. Over the past few years, she has experienced something of a metanoia, and while I wouldn't say she's pulled a David Mamet and gone full-on conservative, she has almost certainly been red-pilled about the left's shenanigans, which she now (mostly) sees for what they are. Let's say she's somewhere near Tim Pool and Joe Rogan on the spectrum: vaguely centrist, still holding some whacked-out beliefs, but no longer buying into the crap that the left is constantly shoveling. Wolf's article is titled "Dear Conservatives, I Apologize."

There is no way to avoid this moment. The formal letter of apology. From me. To Conservatives and to those who “put America first” everywhere.

It’s tempting to sweep this confrontation with my own gullibility under the rug — to “move on” without ever acknowledging that I was duped, and that as a result I made mistakes in judgement, and that these mistakes, multiplied by the tens of thousands and millions on the part of people just like me, hurt millions of other people like you all, in existential ways.

But that erasure of personal and public history would be wrong.

I owe you a full-throated apology.

It's tempting to say that people like Wolf are rare, that it's so hard to admit when one is wrong that most of us simply don't do it. But from what I've seen, especially on YouTube, admissions of wrongness aren't rare at all, and as evidence, all I have to do is turn to the black community. I created a tab on YouTube, #WalkAway/Black Conservatives, to save videos of people who were either already on the right or who had been red-pilled by the actions of their own side and were now considering, per the powerful black metaphor, "leaving the plantation." (I have dozens of such videos at this point.) This sort of meditative introspection isn't found only in discussions of political alignment: it also extends to things like the recent Scott Adams video. I've seen plenty of black YouTubers say that Adams may actually have a point, i.e., he might not be wrong to want to avoid black people given their "hate group" attitudes. It takes a huge wellspring of civility to get online and publicly state that someone who just cast aspersions on your entire race might be right. (Ironically, this also counts as evidence against Adams's thesis that black folks are irredeemable.) So, yes—introspection is a widespread thing, and so are admissions of fault or error.

None of which is to say that Naomi Wolf's apology doesn't matter just because it's not unique. If anything, I find her apology reassuring, a reaffirmation that humanity can indeed be good when it tries to be. So I applaud Wolf's admission, and I don't need her to step all the way over to the conservative side of the aisle. Being red-pilled about the left is enough.

I'll also add that Wolf is kinda' cute in a Kate Capshaw sort of way.

One last thing: I wrote my own mea culpa in 2016, soon after Donald Trump's election. 2016 was when I saw the media was nothing but a lie factory, and I admitted I was wrong (1) to believe all the hype and (2) not to take Trump's candidacy seriously.

NOTE: for my old-fogey blog readers who don't know what red-pilling is: the term is based on events from the movie "The Matrix," which came out in 1999. The main character, Neo, learns that he has been living in a simulation his whole life, and he's given the choice to take a blue pill or a red pill. If he chooses the blue pill, he remains in his simulated fantasy world and returns to blissful unawareness. If he chooses the red pill, though, he will find out "how deep the rabbit hole goes," i.e., what the real truth of his situation is. I don't think the verb "to red-pill" sprang up immediately; it arrived on the scene some years after "The Matrix" had come and gone. But once it came into common parlance, it referred to people who, once deluded, had come to see the truth. While the term "woke" has come to mean something ironic for people on the right, the term "red-pilled" still merely means "seeing through illusions to what reality really is." So Naomi Wolf labored under certain illusions put forth by the media, but she has since been red-pilled: she discovered the extent to which the media have been lying about any number of things, and now, she sees clearly.

to red-pill (v.)
red-pilled (adj.)