Wolf, unsurprisingly, saw a plot. In January 2020, she told an interviewer that the "viral attack" she faced after her foundational errors in Outrages were exposed was part of a shadowy effort to destroy her reputation and take her "off the chessboard." All of this came at what was surely a tough time for Wolf—just a few months before the BBC interview, she had lost her father, the man she treated with such reverence in The Treehouse. This confluence of events means that she went into the destabilizing period of the pandemic in an already highly destabilized state, with little left to lose—and, as I would soon learn, with a great deal to gain.

XREF: Connects to the broader pattern of how personal grief and destabilization shape intellectual judgment and adversarial framing.

Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, loc. 211