A public reputation collapse preceded and shaped Naomi Wolf’s pandemic-era turn

Evidence

This raises an important plot point in the life of my doppelganger, one that I suspect may have a great deal to do with the choices she has made in the Covid era and beyond. Because that virtual death Seymour writes about? It happened to her. Boy did it happen to her. — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, 208

Categorization

• QUESTION: Klein is setting up a causal claim about Wolf’s trajectory — is the ‘virtual death’ presented as sufficient explanation for her turn, or is Klein flagging that she’ll interrogate this explanation later? Worth tracking how this causal framing develops.
• XREF: connects to: the MOC “The Viral Refinery: How Preexisting Fringe Fears Get Smelted Into Mainstream Reality”