Naomi Klein on The Mirror World

 

This past July, Merriam-Webster announced on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, that “‘doppelgänger’ is currently one of our top lookups.”
 
The doppelgänger — defined by Merriam-Webster as a “person who resembles someone else, or a ghostly counterpart of a living person” — is suddenly unavoidable. Social media platforms are crowded with videos of that moment when a pair of uncanny look-alikes come face-to-face at a friend’s wedding or in a Las Vegas swimming pool or on a plane. A Taylor Swift doppelgänger has collected 1.6 million followers on TikTok, and the real Ms. Swift performs multiple alter-ego versions of herself in the “Anti-Hero” video. Rachel Weisz doubles herself in the remake of “Dead Ringers,” and Netflix’s latest season of “Black Mirror" begins with an episode wherein computer-generated versions of celebrities impersonate ordinary people.
 
There has even been a burst of doppelgänger-on-doppelgänger violence. Last year, a woman in Germany was accused of murdering her glamorous beauty-blogger look-alike with the aim of using the body to fake her own death. And in February, a Russian-born New Yorker was convicted of attempted murder: She had fed poisoned cheesecake to her doppelgänger in hopes of stealing her identity.
 
Though doppelgängers reliably elicit feelings of vertigo, I find the sudden prevalence of doubles oddly comforting. For years I struggled privately with a problem I considered rather niche: being perennially confused and conflated with another writer and outspoken political analyst named Naomi, Naomi Wolf, even though I bear only a passing resemblance to her. (And I would see the same thing happening to her.) Once best known for best-selling feminist books like “The Beauty Myth” and for a controversial role advising Al Gore’s presidential run, Ms. Wolf has more recently distinguished herself as an industrial-scale disseminator of vaccine-related medical misinformation, as well as a fixture on pro-Trump shows like the one hosted daily by Steve Bannon.
 
I sometimes wondered what I had done to deserve my doppelgänger woes. With popular culture feeling increasingly like a house of mirrors with duplicated and simulated and similar selves endlessly contorted, many more of us may soon be dealing with versions of doppelgänger confusion. What role is this proliferation of doubles, twins and clones playing? Doppelgängers, which combine the German words “doppel” (double) and “gänger” (goer), are often regarded as warnings or omens.
 
In an attempt to better understand the warnings carried by my doppelgänger experience, I spent many evenings immersing myself in the rich repertory of doppelgänger films. One that proved particularly helpful was Jordan Peele’s “Us.” This 2019 horror film imagines a society much like our own, only sitting on top of a shadowy underworld, inhabited by warped doubles of everyone living aboveground. Every move above is mirrored below in darkness and misery. Until the underground doppelgängers get tired of the arrangement and wreak havoc.
 
Who are these underground people? one terrified character asks.
 
“We’re Americans,” comes the gut punch of an answer.
 
The film has been interpreted as an allegory for capitalism’s entanglements with racial and other forms of oppression, with the comforts of the few requiring the exploitation of a shadow world. That understanding landed particularly hard during the pandemic, when I watched the film. Those of us who were part of the lockdown class were able to shelter in place because we were being served by essential workers, many of whom did not have the ability to call in sick. Doubles often play this role, offering viewers and readers uncomfortable ways into their own story. By showing us a character facing her doppelgänger, we are exposed to parts of ourselves we can least bear to see, but at a slight angle and through a warped mirror.
 
Perhaps that’s why representations of doubles seem to surge during moments of extreme violence and change. The first major piece of theoretical work on the subject was an essay, titled “Der Doppelgänger,” by the Austrian psychoanalyst Otto Rank, then a protégé of Sigmund Freud. Postulating that doppelgängers were tools to express sublimated desires and terrors, it was written in 1914, just as World War I began. In a reissue of the essay in 1971, Rank’s translator, Harry Tucker Jr., wondered, “Is there some relationship between extensive disruptions of society, with their concomitant unsettling effects upon the individual, and the interest of the literate public in descriptions of doubles imaginatively portrayed?”
 
Certainly, the rise of Nazism and the atrocities of the Holocaust inspired another such wave, as artists deployed doubles to grapple with the transformation of previously liberal and open societies. Children into soldiers. Colleagues into killers. Neighbors into mobs. As if a switch had been flipped. It’s the intimacy and familiarity of these transformations that are so ominous — and what is more intimate and familiar than a person’s double?
 
We are, once again, at a historical juncture where our physical and political worlds are changing too quickly and too consequentially for our minds to easily comprehend. This is why I decided to start regarding my own doppelgänger as a narrow aperture through which to look at forces I consider dangerous and that can be hard to confront directly.
 
Rather than worry about people thinking that she and I were one and the same, I got interested in the ways she seems to have become a doppelgänger of her former self. Because I have been getting confused with Ms. Wolf for close to a decade and half, I knew that she had been dabbling in conspiracy culture for years. (I would periodically get harangued online for positions she had taken.)
 
Before the pandemic, her underlying values seemed somewhat stable: feminism, sexual freedom, democracy, basic liberalism. Then, rather suddenly, they appeared less so. In a matter of months, I watched her go from questioning masks in schools to questioning election results alongside Mr. Bannon. Next she was engaging in Jan. 6 revisionism, condoning the Supreme Court’s assault on abortion rights, posting about her firearms and also warning that “war is being waged upon us.”
 
This is a phenomenon far larger than Ms. Wolf, of course. A great many of us have witnessed it in people we know, once respected and even still love. We tell one another that they have disappeared down the rabbit hole, lost to conspiratorial fantasies, embracing apocalyptic language, seemingly unreachable by affection or reason.
 
These changes are redrawing political maps, shifting parts of the traditional liberal and New Age left over to the hard right. Trucker convoys in Canada in January 2022. A conspiracy-fueled coup attempt in Germany at the end of that year. The war my doppelgänger keeps warning about in the United States.
 
Which brings me to the form of doppelgänger that preoccupies me most: the fascist clown state that is the ever-present twin of liberal Western democracies, perpetually threatening to engulf us in its fires of selective belonging and ferocious despising. The figure of the doppelgänger has been used for centuries to warn us of shadow versions of our collective selves, of these monstrous possible futures.
 
Have our doppelgängers overtaken us? Not yet, not all of us, anyway. But the pandemic, layered on top of so many other long-repressed emergencies, has taken humanity somewhere we have not been before, a place close but different, a kind of doppelgänger world. This is what accounts for the strangeness so many of us have been trying to name — everything so familiar and yet more than a little off. Uncanny people, upside-down politics, even, as artificial intelligence accelerates, a growing difficulty discerning who and what is real.
 
That feeling of disorientation — of not understanding whom we can trust and what to believe — that we tell one another about? Of friends and loved ones seeming like strangers? It’s because our world has changed but, as if we’re having a collective case of jet lag, most of us are still attuned to the rhythms and habits of the place and selves we left behind. It’s past time to find our bearings.
 
Doppelgängers, by showing us the supremacist values and violent behaviors that pose the greatest threats to our societies, can spur us to more stable ground.
 
 
To Know Yourself, Consider Your Doppelgänger. By Naomi Klein. The New York Times, September 13, 2023. 

For years the writer laughed off being mistaken for fellow author Naomi Wolf. Then her ‘double’ drifted into a world of conspiracy theories and became a favoured guest of Steve Bannon and Tucker Carlson. With the US standing on a political precipice, suddenly the stakes were a lot higher.

 
In my defence, it was never my intent to write about it. I did not have time. No one asked me to. And several people strongly cautioned against it. Not now – not with the literal and figurative fires roiling our planet. And certainly not about this.
 
Other Naomi – that is how I refer to her now. This person with whom I have been chronically confused for over a decade. My big-haired doppelganger. A person whom so many others appear to find indistinguishable from me. A person who does many extreme things that cause strangers to chastise me or thank me or express their pity for me.
 
I am referring, of course, to Naomi Wolf. In the 1990s, she was a standard-bearer for “third wave” feminism, then a leading adviser to US vice-president Al Gore. Today, she is a full-time, industrial-scale disseminator of unproven conspiracy theories on everything from Islamic State beheadings to vaccines. And the worst part of the confusion is that I can see why people get their Naomis mixed up. We both write big-idea books (my No Logo, her Beauty Myth; my Shock Doctrine, her End of America; my This Changes Everything, her Vagina). We both have brown hair that sometimes goes blond from over-highlighting (hers is longer and more voluminous than mine). We’re both Jewish.
 
There are too many instances and varieties of identity confusion to summarize here. Like the time I offended a famous Australian author by failing to remember our prior encounter at a Christmas party hosted by our shared publisher (it was Wolf’s publisher, not mine, and I had been to no such party). Or the time Jordan Peterson slammed me on his podcast for allegedly writing The Beauty Myth (to be fair, he also slams me for things I have written). Or the guy who tweeted that I had been losing my mind for years and now equated having to get a Covid vaccine with Jews in Nazi Germany having to wear yellow stars – linking, of course, to a statement by Wolf saying that very thing.
 
There was even a moment, while reading an article in the Guardian about her being arrested at a protest in New York, when I experienced the unmistakable chill of the doppelganger, an uncanny feeling Sigmund Freud described as “that species of the frightening that goes back to what was once well known and had long been familiar”.
 
“Her partner, the film producer Avram Ludwig, was also arrested.”
 
I read the sentence to my partner, the film director and producer Avram Lewis (who goes by Avi).
 
“What the actual fuck?” he asked.
 
 
“I know,” I said. “It’s like a goddamned conspiracy.”
 
Then we both burst out laughing.
 
Most confusingly, my doppelganger and I once had distinct writerly lanes (hers being women’s bodies, sexuality, and leadership; mine being corporate assaults on democracy and the climate crisis). But over a decade ago, she started talking and writing about power grabs under cover of states of emergency – and the once-sharp yellow line that divided those lanes began to go wobbly.
 
By early 2021, when she was casting nearly every public health measure marshalled to control the Covid pandemic as a covert plan by the Chinese Communist party, the World Economic Forum and Anthony Fauci to usher in a sinister new world order, I began to feel as if I was reading a parody of The Shock Doctrine, one with all facts and evidence carefully removed, and coming to cartoonishly broad conclusions I would never support. And all the while, my doppelganger troubles deepened, in part because I was relatively quiet in this period, isolated in my Canadian home and unable to perform so many of the activities that once reinforced my own public identity.
 
In those lonely months, I would wander online to try to find some simulation of the friendships and communities I missed, and find, instead, The Confusion. The denunciations and excommunication (“I can’t believe I used to respect Naomi Klein. WTF has happened to her??”). The glib expressions of sympathy (“The real victim in all this here is Naomi Klein” and “Thoughts and prayers to Naomi Klein”). It was an out-of-body experience: if she, according to this torrent of people, was me, who, then, was I?
 
All of this may help explain why I made the admittedly odd decision to follow my doppelganger into the rabbit hole of her rabbit holes, chasing after any insight into her strange behaviour and that of her newfound allies that I could divine. I recognize that this decision is somewhat out of character. After all, for a quarter of a century, I have been a person who writes about corporate power and its ravages. I sneak into abusive factories in faraway countries and across borders to military occupations; I report in the aftermath of oil spills and category 5 hurricanes. And yet in the months and years during the pandemic – a time when cemeteries ran out of space, and billionaires blasted themselves into outer space – everything else that I had to write or might have written appeared only as an unwanted intrusion, a rude interruption.

 
In June 2021, as this research began to truly spiral out of my control, a strange new weather event dubbed a “heat dome” descended on the southern coast of British Columbia, the part of Canada where I now live with my family. The thick air felt like a snarling, invasive entity with malevolent intent. More than 600 people died, most of them elderly; an estimated 10bn marine creatures were cooked alive on our shores; an entire town went up in flames. An editor asked if I, as someone engaged in the climate change fight for 15 years, would file a report about what it was like to live through this unprecedented climate event.
 
“I’m working on something else,” I told him, the stench of death filling my nostrils.
 
“Can I ask what?”
 
“You cannot.”
 
 
There were plenty of other important things I neglected during this time of feverish subterfuge. That summer, I allowed my nine-year-old to spend so many hours watching a gory nature series called Animal Fight Club that he began to ram me at my desk “like a great white shark”. I did not spend nearly enough time with my octogenarian parents, who live a mere half-hour’s drive away, despite their statistical vulnerability to the deadly pandemic that was rampaging across the globe and despite that lethal heat dome. In the fall, my husband ran for office in a national election; though I did go on a few campaign trips, I know I could have done more.
 
My deepest shame rests with the unspeakable number of podcasts I mainlined, the sheer volume of hours lost that I will never get back listening to her and her fellow travelers who are now in open warfare against objective reality. A master’s degree’s worth of hours. I told myself it was “research”. That this was not, in fact, an epically frivolous and narcissistic waste of my compressed writing time or of the compressed time on the clock of our fast-warming planet. I rationalised that Other Naomi, as one of the most effective creators and disseminators of misinformation and disinformation about many of our most urgent crises, and as someone who has seemingly helped inspire large numbers to take to the streets in rebellion against an almost wholly hallucinated “tyranny”, is at the nexus of several forces that, while ridiculous in the extreme, are nonetheless important, since the confusion they sow and the oxygen they absorb increasingly stand in the way of pretty much anything helpful or healthful that humans might, at some point, decide to accomplish together.
 
For most of the first decade of my doppelganger trouble, I didn’t bother much with correcting the record. I told myself that getting confused with Naomi Wolf was primarily a social media thing. My friends and colleagues knew who I was, and when I interacted with people I didn’t know in the physical world, her name did not used to come up; neither were we entangled in articles or book reviews. I therefore filed away Naomi confusion in the category of “things that happen on the internet that are not quite real”.
 
Back then, I saw the problem as more structural than personal. A handful of young men had got unfathomably rich designing tech platforms that, in the name of “connection”, not only allowed us to eavesdrop on conversations between strangers but also actively encouraged us to seek out those exchanges that mentioned us by name (AKA our “mentions”). When I first joined Twitter back in 2010, and clicked on the little bell icon signifying my “mentions”, my initial thought was: I am reading the graffiti written about me on an infinitely scrolling restroom wall.
 
As a frequently graffitied-about girl in high school, this felt both familiar and deeply harrowing. I instantly knew that Twitter was going to be bad for me – and yet, like so many of us, I could not stop looking. So perhaps if there is a message I should have taken from the destabilising appearance of my doppelganger, this is it: once and for all, stop eavesdropping on strangers talking about you in this crowded and filthy global toilet known as social media.
 
I might have heeded the message, too. If Covid hadn’t intervened, and upped the stakes of the confusion on pretty much every front.
 
 
 
“Really?” Avi asked. It was 11 o’clock on a warm night in early June 2021 and he had walked in on me doing yoga before bed, a nightly practice to help with back pain. When he arrived, I was in pigeon pose, breathing into a deep and challenging hip release. And, yes, OK, I was also listening to Steve Bannon’s daily podcast, War Room. Life had been hectic lately, with the end of the school year and Avi’s campaign for federal office heating up, so when else was I supposed to catch up on Other Naomi’s flurry of appearances?
 
A couple of months earlier, Wolf had released a video claiming that those vaccine-verification apps so many of us downloaded represented a plot to institute “slavery for ever”. The apps would usher in a “CCP-style social credit score system” in “the West”, she said – a reference to China’s all-pervasive surveillance net that allows Beijing to rank citizens for their perceived virtue and obedience, a chilling hierarchy that can determine everything from access to schools to eligibility for loans, and is one piece of a broader surveillance dragnet that pinpoints the location of dissidents for arrest and ruthlessly censors speech that casts the ruling party in a critical light. The “vaccine passports” were like all that, Wolf warned, a system that “enslaves a billion people”. The apps would listen into our conversations, track where and with whom we gathered, tell on us to the authorities. This, according to my doppelganger, is what Joe Biden was about to bring to the United States, using Covid as the cover story.
 
Having these incendiary claims come from a once-prominent Democrat was irresistible to the rightwing media. Suddenly she was everywhere: Fox’s (now canceled) Tucker Carlson Tonight, along with other shows on the network, as well as Bannon’s War Room and many lesser-known platforms. All of this activity meant that keeping up with my doppelganger was an increasingly time-consuming undertaking, thus the need to multitask while doing yoga.
 
 
My obsession had opened a growing gulf between Avi and me. And not just between us – it was intensifying my already deep pandemic isolation, cutting me off further from other friends and family. No one I know listened to War Room, and I felt increasingly that it was impossible to understand the new shape of politics without listening to it. Still, it had gone pretty far: for days, I had been unable to get the show’s rabidly anti-communist theme song out of my head (“Spread the word all through Hong Kong / We will fight till they’re all gone / We rejoice when there’s no more / Let’s take down the CCP”).
 
After the Bannon-yoga incident, I pledged to give it a rest, to put this least charming of pandemic hobbies aside. It seemed like the right time to reassess anyway. Twitter had just suspended Naomi Wolf’s account, seemingly permanently. I wasn’t comfortable with this kind of heavy-handed corporate censorship, but I told myself that Wolf losing her main tool of continuous disinformation surely meant that she wouldn’t be able to get herself (and me) into nearly so much trouble.
 
“I’ll block Twitter,” I told Avi. I promised to spend the whole summer not only helping more with the campaign but also focusing on our son and the rest of our woefully neglected family.
 
Here is how my relapse happened, and I’m not going to sugarcoat it. During a vacation in Prince Edward Island, the back pain had gotten worse, and I decided to seek professional help. I set off midmorning, under clear skies on a virtually empty two-lane road banked by sand dunes, red cliffs and crashing Atlantic waves. As I drove, I realized I was something I had barely been in 16 months: alone. Alone and surrounded by natural beauty. Elation flooded my body, down to the tips of my fingers clasping the steering wheel.
 
In that perfect moment, I could have listened to anything. I could have rolled down the windows and filled my ears with the surf and the gulls. I could have blasted Joni Mitchell’s Blue, which I had recently rediscovered thanks to Brandi Carlile’s cover. But I didn’t do any of that.
 
Instead, I touched the purple podcast app, pulled up War Room, and read the capsule summary of the most recent episode. It was a speech by Donald Trump, recorded live, in which he announced that he was suing the big tech companies for deplatforming him, followed by reaction from …
 
What? Why her?
 
I scrolled down and saw that I had missed several other recent appearances while abiding by my no-Wolf diet. I gulped them all, one after another. And that’s how I ended up on the side of the road, with my hazards on, late for a much-needed treatment, on my first vacation in two years, scribbling in a tiny red notebook as I tried to transcribe the words coming through my phone’s speaker: “black shirts and brown shirts”, “Fauci demonic”, “petrifying”, “your body belongs to the state”, “like China’s one-child policy and forced sterilization”, “geotracking”, “evil x2”.
 
In my meager defense, Wolf’s elevated status on Bannon’s podcast marked a major development in the life of my doppelganger. It’s one thing to be invited on to a flagship show of the Trumpian right to freestyle about vaccine passports or to trash Joe Biden – any semi-prominent self-described Democrat would be welcome to pull that stunt. It’s quite another to be the person whom Steve Bannon goes to for exclusive reaction to one of the first post-White House speeches by Donald Trump – a man whom the vast majority of Bannon’s listeners are utterly convinced is the rightful president of the United States (and whom Wolf had referred to, in her earlier life, as “a horrible human being, an awful person”). It’s not just that it sells books and subscriptions to her website. It signals real power – the ability to reach and potentially influence the behavior of millions of people.
 
“Action! Action! Action!” That is War Room’s mantra. Bannon repeats it often. It appears on a plaque behind his head when he broadcasts. He sends it with the pieces of content he pushes out on Gettr (“the Twitter killer”) and in his newsletter.
 
He means it. Unlike Fox News, which, despite its obvious bias, still has the trappings of cable news, War Room has built an explicitly activist media platform – or, more precisely, a militarist one. Rather than television’s airbrushed talking heads, Bannon cultivates a feeling that his audience is part of a rolling meeting between a commander and his busy field generals, each one reporting back from their various fronts: the Big Steal strategy (challenging the results of the 2020 election); the precinct strategy (putting ideological foot soldiers in place at the local level to prevent the next election from being “stolen”); the school board strategy (challenging the “woke” curriculum as well as masks and vaccine policies).
 
If Naomi Wolf was Bannon’s go-to guest not just to rail against vaccine mandates but now to live-spin Trump’s speeches, that meant she had crossed an entirely new threshold, becoming a full-blown player in this world. Shortly after, Wolf would go so far as to join Trump’s class-action lawsuit against Twitter as a co-plaintiff, challenging her own ousting from the platform (though she still claimed to “profoundly” disagree with Trump “ideologically”). It was there, on the side of that road, that I became convinced that whatever was happening with her wasn’t just relevant to me because of my admittedly niche doppelganger problem – it was far more serious than that. If someone like her could be shifting alliances so radically, it seemed worth trying to figure out what was driving that transformation – especially because, by then, it was also clear that quite a few prominent liberals and leftists were making a similar lurch to the hard right.
 
Even after following Wolf’s antics for years, or rather, after having them follow me, I was taken aback by the decisiveness of this boundary crossing. How did she – a Jewish feminist who wrote a book warning how easily fascism can throttle open societies – rationalize this alliance with Trump and Bannon? How, for that matter, did Bannon – a proud anti-abortion Catholic who was once charged with domestic assault and whose ex-wife told a court that he didn’t want their daughters “going to school with Jews” – rationalize teaming up with Wolf? (Bannon pleaded not guilty to the domestic assault charges, which were dismissed after his wife did not show up in court, and he denies the remark about Jews.)
 
Wolf was not merely a regular guest on Bannon’s War Room; she was fast becoming one of its most recognisable characters. At the peak of their collaboration, even as she ran her own DailyClout website, Wolf would appear on War Room nearly every single weekday for two weeks. They even partnered up on co-branded “Daily-Clout War Room Pfizer investigations” into various vaccine rabbit holes. Clearly, neither was letting past principles stand in the way of this union.
 
What I was trying to figure out was this: what does this unlikeliest of buddy movies say about the ways that Covid has redrawn political maps in country after country, blurring left/right lines and provoking previously apolitical cohorts to take to the streets? What did it have to do with the “freedom fighters” who were now threatening workers at restaurants that checked for proof of vaccination? Or blocking ambulances outside hospitals that required their staff to get vaccinated? Or refusing to believe the results of any elections that didn’t go their way?
 
Or denying evidence of Russian war crimes? Or, or, or …
 
The reshaping of politics that is one of Covid’s primary legacies is far bigger than Wolf and Bannon, of course. The hallucinatory period when the pandemic melded with economic upheavals and climate disasters accelerated all manner of strange-bedfellow coalitions, manifesting in large protests first against lockdowns and then against any sensible health measure that would have helped make the lockdowns unnecessary.
 
These formations bring together many disparate political and cultural strains: the traditional right; the QAnon conspiratorial hard right; alternative health subcultures usually associated with the green left; a smattering of neo-Nazis; parents (mainly white mothers) angry about a range of things happening and not happening in schools (masks, jabs, all-gender bathrooms, anti-racist books); small-business owners enraged by the often devastating impacts of Covid controls on their bottom lines. Significant disagreement exists inside these new convergences – Wolf, for instance, is neither a QAnon cultist nor a neo-Nazi. Yet, galvanised by large-platform misinformers like her and Bannon, most seem to agree that the pandemic was a plot by Davos elites to push a re-engineered society under the banner of the “Great Reset”.
 
If the claims are coming from the far right, the covert plan is for a green/socialist/no-borders/Soros/forced-vaccine dictatorship, while the new agers warn of a big pharma/GMO/biometric-implant/5G/robot-dog/forced-vaccine dictatorship. With the exception of the Covid-related refresh, the conspiracies that are part of this political convergence are not new – most have been around for decades, and some are ancient blood libels. What’s new is the force of the magnetic pull with which they are finding one another, self-assembling into what the Vice reporter Anna Merlan has termed a “conspiracy singularity”.

 
In Germany, the movement often describes its politics as Querdenken – which means lateral, diagonal, or outside-the-box thinking – and it has forged worrying alliances between new age health obsessives, who are opposed to putting anything impure into their carefully tended bodies, and several neofascist parties, which took up the anti-vaccination battle cry as part of a Covid-era resistance to “hygiene dictatorship”.
 
Inspired by the term, but taking it beyond Germany, William Callison and Quinn Slobodian, both scholars of European politics, describe these emergent political alliances as “diagonalism”. They explain: “Born in part from transformations in technology and communication, diagonalists tend to contest conventional monikers of left and right (while generally arcing toward far-right beliefs), to express ambivalence if not cynicism toward parliamentary politics, and to blend convictions about holism and even spirituality with a dogged discourse of individual liberties. At the extreme end, diagonal movements share a conviction that all power is conspiracy.”
 
Despite claims of post-partisanship, it is rightwing, often far-right, political parties around the world that have managed to absorb the unruly passions and energy of diagonalism, folding its Covid-era grievances into pre-existing projects opposing “wokeness” and drumming up fears of migrant “invasions”, alien abductions, as well as “climate lockdowns”. Still, it is important for these movements to present themselves as (and to believe themselves to be) ruptures with politics-as-usual; to claim to be something new, beyond traditional left/right poles. Which is why having a few prominent self-identified progressives and/or liberals involved is so critical.
 
When Wolf first started appearing on rightwing media outlets in 2021, her posture was reticent, anything but defiant. She talked about having voted for Biden, stressed that she used to write for the New York Times and the Guardian and appear on MSNBC, described herself as a liberal “media darling”. But now, she said, rightwing shows like Tucker Carlson’s and Steve Bannon’s were the only ones courageous enough to give her a platform.
 
For their part, every time a fiery rightwing show had Wolf on as a guest, the host would indulge in a protracted, ornate windup listing all of her liberal credentials, and professing shock that they could possibly find themselves on the same side. “I never thought I would be talking to you except in a debate format,” Carlson said the first time he had Wolf on. Then, referring to a tweet in which Wolf said that she regretted voting for Joe Biden, he added, “I was struck by the bravery it must have taken you to write it – I’m sure you lost friends over it, and for doing this [show].” Wolf smiled wistfully and nodded, accepting the hero’s welcome.
 
When she appeared on the podcast hosted by one of Britain’s most vocal climate change deniers and far-right provocateurs, James Delingpole, he began by saying, “This is so unlikely … five years ago, the idea that you and I would be breaking bread … I sort of bracketed you with the other Naomi – you know, Naomi Klein, Naomi Wolf, what’s the difference?” (Insert silent scream from me.) He went on: “And now, here we are. I mean, I think we are allies in a much, much bigger war. And you’ve been fighting a really good fight, so congratulations.” Once again, she drank it in, playing her demure role on these awkward political first dates.
 
As time went on, and Wolf became more of a fixture, she seemed to relish her new persona, eagerly playing the part of the coastal liberal elite that rightwing populists love to hate. The first time she went on his show, she told Bannon, “I spent years thinking you were the devil, no disrespect. Now I’m so happy to have you in the trenches along with other people across the political spectrum fighting for freedom … We have to drop those labels immediately in order to come together to fight for our constitution and our freedoms.”
 
That is the key message we are meant to take away from diagonalist politics: the very fact that these unlikely alliances are even occurring, that the people involved are willing to unite in common purpose despite their past differences, is meant to act as proof that their cause is both urgent and necessary. How else could Wolf rationalize teaming up with Bannon who, along with Trump, normalized a political discourse that dehumanized migrants as monstrous others – rapists, gang members and disease carriers? This is also why Wolf leans so heavily and continuously on extreme historical analogies – comparing Covid health measures to Nazi rule, to apartheid, to Jim Crow, to slavery. This kind of rhetorical escalation is required to rationalize her new alliances. If you are fighting “slavery for ever” or a modern-day Hitler, everything – including the companion you find yourself in bed with – is a minor detail.
 
 
 
People ask me variations on this question often: What drove her over the edge? What made her lose it so thoroughly? They want a diagnosis but I, unlike her, am uncomfortable playing doctor. I could offer a kind of equation for leftists and liberals crossing over to the neofascist and authoritarian right that goes something like: narcissism (grandiosity) + social media addiction + midlife crisis ÷ public shaming = rightwing meltdown. And there would be some truth to that bit of math.
 
The more I learn about her recent activities, however, the less I am able to accept the premise of these questions. They imply that when she went over the edge, she crashed to the ground. A more accurate description is that Wolf marched over the edge and was promptly caught in the arms of millions of people who agree with every one of her extraordinary theories without question, and who appear to adore her. So, while she clearly has lost what I may define as “it”, she has found a great deal more – she has found a whole new world, one I have come to think of as the Mirror World.
 
Feminists of my mother’s generation find Wolf’s willingness to align herself with the people waging war on women’s freedom mystifying. And on one level it is. As recently as 2019, Wolf described her ill-fated book Outrages as “a cautionary tale about what happens when the secular state gets the power to enter your bedroom”. Now she is in league with the people who stacked the US supreme court with wannabe theocrats whose actions are forcing preteens to carry babies against their will. Yet on another level, her actions – however sincere they may be – are a perfect distillation of the values of the attention economy, which have trained so many of us to assess our worth using crude, volume-based matrixes. How many followers? How many likes? Retweets? Shares? Views? Did it trend? These do not measure whether something is right or wrong, good or bad, but simply how much volume, how much traffic, it generates in the ether. And if volume is the name of the game, ex-leftist crossover stars who find new levels of celebrity on the right aren’t lost – they are found.
 
Wolf’s skills as a researcher may be dubious, but she is good at the internet. She packages her ideas in listicles for the clickbait age like her 2020 video “Fascist America, in 10 Easy Steps” and her event “Liberate Our Five Freedoms”. Her website, DailyClout, demonstrates Wolf’s success in mastering the art of internet monetization: not only collecting attention but turning that attention into money. She takes advertising; sells swag festooned with a stylized wolf logo (“The power is in the pack”); and charges $7 a month for a “premium” membership and $24.99 a month for a “pro” one.
 
Seen in this context, the name Wolf chose for her site is telling. Because what Wolf turned into over the past decade is something very specific to our time: a clout chaser. Clout is the values-free currency of the always-online age – both a substitute for hard cash as well as a conduit to it. Clout is a calculus not of what you do, but of how much bulk you-ness there is in the world. You get clout by playing the victim. You get clout by victimizing others. This is something that is understood by the left and the right. If influence sways, clout squats, taking up space for its own sake.
 
And if there is a pattern to the many, many conspiracies Wolf has floated in recent years – about National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden, about the 2014 Ebola outbreak, about the arrest of former International Monetary Fund managing director Dominique Strauss-Kahn, about the results of the 2014 Scottish referendum on independence, about the Green New Deal – it is simply this: they were about subjects that were dominating the news and generating heat at the time.
 
And nothing had ever been nearly so hot, so potentially clout-rich, as Covid-19. We all know why. It was global. It was synchronous. We were digitally connected, talking about the same thing for weeks, months, years, and on the same global platforms. As Steven W Thrasher writes in The Viral Underclass, Covid-19 marked “the first viral pandemic also to be experienced via viral stories on social media”, creating “a kind of squared virality”.
 
In practice, this squared virality meant that if you put out the right kind of pandemic-themed content – flagged with the right mix-and-match of keywords and hashtags (“Great Reset”, “WEF”, “Bill Gates”, “Fascism”, “Fauci”, “Pfizer”) and headlined with tabloid-style teasers (“The Leaders Colluding to Make Us Powerless”, “What They Don’t Want You to Know About”, “Shocking Details Revealed”, “Bill Gates Said WHAT?!?”) – you could catch a digital magic-carpet ride that would make all previous experiences of virality seem leaden in comparison.
 
This is a twist on the disaster capitalism I have tracked in the midst of earlier large-scale societal shocks. In the past, I have written about the private companies that descend to profit off the desperate needs and fears in the aftermath of hurricanes and wars, selling men with guns and reconstruction services at a high premium. That is old-school disaster capitalism picking our pockets, and it is still alive and thriving, taking aim at public schools and national health systems as the pandemic raged. But something new is also afoot: disaster capitalism mining our attention, at a time when attention is arguably our culture’s most valuable commodity. Conspiracies have always swirled in times of crisis – but never before have they been a booming industry in their own right.

 

 

 
Almost everyone I talk to these days seems to be losing people to the Mirror World and its web of conspiracies. It’s as if those people live in a funhouse of distorted reflections and disorienting reversals. People who were familiar have somehow become alien, like a doppelganger of themselves, leaving us with that unsettled, uncanny feeling. The big misinformation players may be chasing clout, but plenty of people believe their terrifying stories. Clearly, conspiracy culture is fueled by deep and unmet needs – for community, for innocence, for inside knowledge, for answers that appear, however deceptively, to explain a world gone wild.
 
“I can’t talk to my sister any more.” “My mother has gone down the rabbit hole.” “I am trying to figure out how to get my grandmother off Facebook.” “He used to be my hero. Now every conversation ends in a screaming match.”
 
What happened to them?
 
When looking at the Mirror World, it can seem obvious that millions of people have given themselves over to fantasy, to make-believe, to playacting. The trickier thing, the uncanny thing, really, is that’s what they see when they look at us. They say we live in a “clown world”, are stuck in “the matrix” of “groupthink”, are suffering from a form of collective hysteria called “mass formation psychosis” (a made-up term). The point is that on either side of the reflective glass, we are not having disagreements about differing interpretations of reality – we are having disagreements about who is in reality and who is in a simulation.
 
For instance, in July 2022, Wolf went on a rightwing podcast carried by something called Today’s News Talk and shared what she described as her “latest thinking”. She had noticed that when she went into New York City, where the vast majority of the population has been vaccinated, the people felt … different. In fact, it was as if they were not people at all.
 
 “You can’t pick up human energy in the same way, like the energy field is just almost not there, it’s like people are holograms … It’s like a city of ghosts now, you’re there, you see them, but you can’t feel them.”
 
And she had noticed something even more bizarre: “People [who are vaccinated] have no scent any more. You can’t smell them. I’m not saying like, they don’t smell bad or they don’t smell – like I’m not talking about deodorant. I’m saying they don’t smell like there’s a human being in the room, and they don’t feel like there’s a human being in the room.”
 
This, she explained to the host, was all due to the “lipid nanoparticles” in the mRNA vaccines, since they “go into the brain, they go into the heart, and they kind of gum it up”. Perhaps even the “wavelength which is love” was experiencing this “gumming up … dialing down its ability to transmit”. She concluded, “That’s how these lipid nanoparticles work.”
 
That is not how lipid nanoparticles work. It is not how vaccines work. It is not how anything works. Also, and I can’t quite believe I am typing these words, vaccinated people still smell like humans.
 
This, obviously, is gonzo stuff, the kind of thing that makes those of us outside the Mirror World feel smug and superior. But here is the trouble: many of Wolf’s words, however untethered from reality, tap into something true. Because there is a lifelessness and anomie to modern cities, and it did deepen during the pandemic – there is a way in which many of us feel we are indeed becoming less alive, less present, lonelier. It’s not the vaccine that has done this; it’s the stress and the speed and the screens and the anxieties that are all byproducts of capitalism in its necro-techno phase. But if one side is calling this fine and normal and the other is calling it “inhuman”, it should not be surprising that the latter holds some powerful allure.
 
In my doppelganger studies, I have learned that there is a real medical syndrome called Capgras delusion. Those who suffer from it become convinced that people in their lives – spouses, children, friends – have been replaced by replicas or doppelgangers. According to the film historian Paul Meehan, the discovery of the syndrome likely inspired sci-fi classics like Invasion of the Body Snatchers and The Stepford Wives. But what is it called when a society divides into two warring factions, both of which are convinced that the other has been replaced by doppelgangers?
 
Is there a syndrome for that? Is there a solution?
 
To return to the original question: what is Wolf getting out of her alliance with Bannon and from her new life in the Mirror World? Everything. She is getting everything she once had and lost – attention, respect, money, power. Just through a warped mirror. In Milton’s Paradise Lost, Lucifer, a fallen angel, thought it “Better to reign in hell than serve in heaven”. My doppelganger may well still think Bannon is the devil, but perhaps she thinks it’s better to serve by his side than to keep getting mocked in a place that sells itself as heavenly but that we all know is plenty hellish in its own right.
 
 This is an edited extract from Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World by Naomi Klein, published by Allen Lane on 12 September at £25.

Naomi Klein on following her ‘doppelganger’ down the conspiracy rabbit hole – and why millions of people have entered an alternative political reality.  By Naomi Klein. The Guardian, August 26, 2023.

In my defense, it was never my intent to write this book.”
 
So begins Naomi Klein’s Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World. It all began when Klein, the liberal activist and blockbuster writer behind bestsellers like The Shock Doctrine and This Changes Everything, became regularly mistaken for Naomi Wolf, the liberal feminist author of The Beauty Myth turned conspiracy theorist and anti-vaxxer. The similarities between Klein and “Other Naomi” seemed uncanny: “We both write big-idea books,” Klein writes, and “have brown hair that sometimes goes blond from over-highlighting.” At times, the overlap is stranger than fiction: for instance, both women are married to men named Avram. Amid a decade of defending her own reputation against Wolf’s escalating conservatism, Klein tail-spinned into obsession, tracking Wolf’s right-wing media appearances in a quest to understand her “flight from reality.” But the book’s outlook is far broader than Klein’s own doppelgänger trouble. “The book is not about my doppelgänger; my doppelgänger is just the white rabbit leading me down the rabbit hole,” she tells Esquire. It's very much about what I find down there, who else I find down there, and what it says about us.”
 
Klein’s doppelgänger trouble opens outward onto a roving survey of how doubling organizes our social and political lives. The concept of the doppelgänger, she insists, can help us understand our uncanny political moment, where “millions of people have given themselves over to fantasy.” Klein’s analysis includes a new taxonomy of useful coinages, like “the Mirror World,” the manic surreality inhabited by far-right movements, and “the Shadow Lands,” where our unseen doubles perform brutal labor in factories and fields to provide the conveniences we take for granted, like “our Amazon deliveries” and “our year-round fruit.” Doppelgänger is a lucid frame on conspiracy movements and digital doubling, but also a powerful implication of the double lives we choose to ignore. “What we’re not willing to look at is our own complicity in systems that are intimately connected with the genocides of the past, that are contributing our little bit of poison to the extinctions of the present and the future,” Klein tells Esquire.
 
Klein Zoomed with Esquire from her home in British Columbia to discuss double trouble in American politics, the surrealist nightmare of life online, and the importance of building "uncomfortable coalitions." This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
 
ESQUIRE: What was the moment when your doppelgänger trouble began to suggest a broader political framework?
 
NAOMI KLEIN: I think when it started to manifest where I live. During the pandemic, I moved to a remote community—it’s three hours from the nearest city, including a ferry boat ride. It's called the Sunshine Coast, British Columbia. It's beautiful here, but it was always a place where I went to hide. I wrote The Shock Doctrine and other books here. When I moved here, I I had been lightly following what was going on with my doppelgänger—much of it not by choice, but because my social media feed would fill with blowback whenever she would do things. Then I started to see more examples of it in this small rural community where I live. There was the largest protest I've ever seen here on the coast: a “medical freedom” protest outside the hospital, opposing vaccine mandates for hospital staff. I also started to see signs and graffiti. I thought, “If it’s showing up even here, then it's worth examining, and it's bigger than me.” The book is not about my doppelgänger; my doppelgänger is just the white rabbit leading me down the rabbit hole. It's very much about what I find down there, who else I find down there, and what it says about us.
 
 
E: You write that doppelgängers have been understood as “warnings or harbingers” that suggest “something important is being ignored or denied—a part of ourselves and our world we do not want to see.” What are we hiding from?
 
NK : When I say “we,” I mean people who consider ourselves “not them,” and by “them,” I mean conspiracy theorists and MAGA people who seem to have taken flight from reality voluntarily. We spend a lot of time feeling smug that we aren’t “like them” and defining ourselves against them in a way that’s quite flattering. Doppelgänger literature shows that we may think we're confronting our doppelgänger, but in the end, we’re always confronting ourselves. What we’re not willing to look at is our own complicity in systems that are intimately connected with the genocides of the past, that are contributing our little bit of poison to the extinctions of the present and the future, that rely on Shadow Lands for our conveniences, our Amazon deliveries, our year-round fruit. Whatever it is, there is no them. We are in it. We are a part of it.
 
By projecting all of our worst selves onto others, we avoid looking at our own complicity. I'm not about making people feel bad about that—I'm about asking, “What do we do about it? How do we build a world that does not require these kinds of violences?” There are moments when it felt like that might be possible. Think about the racial justice uprising after the murder of George Floyd, or the huge numbers of people who participated in the climate strikes in 2019 before the pandemic. There are moments when it feels like we want to do better, but because we haven't figured out how to sustain those movements and turn them into material policies that improve people's lives, the need for distraction and projection remains.
 
E: At this point, many people have written off Steve Bannon as a fringe character, but you see him as someone with huge influence. Why do you see him as such a powerful figure?

 
NK : Underestimating Steve Bannon's influence is pretty much always a mistake. In general, I think there's an impulse to dismiss people who aren't present in mainstream liberal culture as basically of no importance. A lot of people responded to my doppelgänger that way—there was a lot of attention on her in the early pandemic because she was spreading misinformation, but once she was de-platformed, the attitude was basically like she'd been deleted from planet Earth. Because I was following where she was going, I was struck that she had a much larger following than she’d had in years. There’s a flattering comfort in pretending that we have the power to deny these people attention and therefore influence, but actually, their worlds are real. There are real people there, and they can change the real world that we all inhabit—as we saw with Trump's election. But we've also seen strange new political formations in Italy with the election of Giorgia Meloni, another of these diagonal characters who combines parts of our new age with authoritarianism. There was also an attempted coup in Germany, which had conspiratorial elements to it. So these movements have real world impacts.
 
Bannon has a huge following. I’ve talked to so many people who say, “I can't talk to my sister anymore.” Their uncle, their aunt—so many of us have people like this in their lives, who we don't understand where they're getting their ideas from. Chances are, it's from one of these podcasts that are being dismissed as not important. Bannon broadcasts every single day—some of his shows are three hours long. These are intimate relationships. He really gets in people's heads in a way that maybe traditional media doesn't.
 
E : How does your theory of the mirror world help us understand this moral panic about “cancel culture”? As you say, mainstream liberal culture considers people like Bannon and your doppelgänger “cancelled” or “deleted.” But as you point out in the book, “These people don't just disappear because we can no longer see them. They go somewhere else.”
 
NK : I don't use the term cancel culture because I think it's just become one of those terms that's not particularly useful. I'm really just talking about something simpler, which is that we should treat each other with more generosity. I talk about the mirror world being separated by one-way glass in the sense that we don't see them, but they're looking at us. Bannon is studying us very closely, including the issues that used to be traditional issues of the left, like opposition to free trade deals, consolidating corporate power, and opposition to Big Pharma and Big Tech. He’s seeing that mainstream liberalism isn’t offering much on these issues, so he's taking up these issues—not because he believes in it or cares about it, but because he sees that they are potent issues, in the same way he understood in 2016 that free trade was an issue that could bring a bunch of traditional democratic voters over to the MAGA side.
 
The other thing he notices when he looks at us is that a lot of people get discarded. A lot of people get excluded. He does this show of performative inclusion, saying, “We believe in debate.” Obviously these are the same people banning books. They don't believe in debate; they don't believe in free speech. But there's an overperformance of it as a way to exploit a real feeling that a lot of people have: that they're afraid of making a mistake, and there’s no leeway for screwing up. This is related to the way I write about the cost of personal branding. We create these online avatars or personal brands, which are sort of us, but not us. The problem with performing being a thing on a platform where countless other people are performing themselves as things is that we actually start to believe we aren't real, and that other people aren’t real. And if we aren't real, then all kinds of cruelties are possible.
 
E : You write that “many of us have begun to suspect that we are machine food,” as our private actions are “enclosed” and “extracted” by Big Tech. You warn how our digital selves are a kind of doppelgänger, partitioned off from the complete truth of who we are. Do you see any signs that people are waking up to these truths and pushing for change?
 
NK : I am seeing signs. My experience of teaching people in their twenties is that those people who have come to stand in for their generation are not representative of their whole generation. A lot of young people are very troubled, even the ones who are very online, by what this performed self is doing, and this idea of not knowing what’s performed and what’s real. This is anecdotal, but a lot of the young people who I talk to and who I teach have a very ambivalent relationship with the partitioning of the self required to be a good brand.
 

We're never going to not care about ourselves. I'm not calling for an annihilation of the self or the ego. I don't think that's possible or even desirable. But I do think we live in a culture where the self takes up too much space, and given the scale of the crises we are up against and the fact that we will only have a hope of doing anything about it if we can band together and organize ourselves into political constituencies, the labor of perfecting, optimizing, and performing the self really does rob necessary hours in the day when we might be doing things with other people.
 
E : As I was reading the chapter about our digital selves and our personal brands, I lamented that the book was completed before this current AI panic really gripped the culture, because it seems so germane to the topics at hand. Is there a doppelgänger lens on AI?
 
NK : Oh, absolutely. In the book, I write about the digital golems created with our data. There's the double self we consciously create, but then there's the self that the tech companies create by hoovering up our data trails and creating doubles that then target market to us. This also creates the possibility for AI doubles. AI is a mirroring and mimicry machine that seems to be creating something new, but all it can do is mirror ourselves back to us. I certainly have friends who are visual artists and musicians who have had that absolutely chilling, uncanny feeling of seeing doppelgänger versions of themselves that they did not create, that others created, that were trained on their art, who they now they have to compete with in order to make a living as an artist. It’s one thing to have to compete with other people, but it's quite another thing to have to compete with a counterfeit copy of yourself, whipped up by someone else. We can have a debate about whether or not art should be commerce, but we live under capitalism, and this is really a frightening state of affairs. I believe it’s a form of theft. I don't see why a private for-profit company should be allowed to train their algorithms on the work, the words, and the images of people, without their consent, then sell the tools to people who are going to use them to cut costs.
 
It very much relates to the drivers of conspiracy culture. We have malevolent actors like Bannon who want people not to believe what is right in front of them, because it's very helpful to the Donald Trumps of the world if people don't believe anything said about him is true. If you're going to break a whole bunch of laws, that’s pretty helpful. That’s why conspiracy culture supports elite actors, even though the people spreading these theories position themselves as anti-elite. When you introduce AI into this mix, it's not going to be helpful when it comes to sorting fact from fiction and trying to get ourselves to a shared reality. That’s the precondition for doing anything to combat the serious and very real things happening in the world today, including climate change.
 
 
E : The book arrives at an argument that to make systemic change, we have to work together and battle systems of uncare to build new systems of care. How do we start to think collectively and build these coalitions, especially the “uncomfortable coalitions,” as you call them? What does that look like in practice?
 
NK : Part of the cost of social media is that it doesn't create many coalitions. There's a lot of talk and there are a lot of takes, but there aren’t many spaces where there's strategic thinking about long-term strategy and goals. But there are attempts to create more of those spaces, like the work of Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, who started this new online journal called Hammer & Hope, which is a space to think critically about coalition work from a Black perspective. It very clearly looks at identity politics as a position from which to enter into struggle that recognizes that our positions are not the same—that we come to coalition with very different experiences and very different levels of risk. That’s not a reason not to be in coalition, but it informs how we see the world, which is the original meaning of the term identity politics from the Combahee River Collective.
 
I think we need a higher threshold for disagreement and debate. We need not to see disagreement as cataclysmic. We also need to give each other a little bit more grace, which isn’t an argument for not holding each other accountable, but for more democracy within our movements. In organizing spaces, if you don't like what somebody is doing and they're in a position of seeming leadership, there has to be a way to hold them accountable other than just the callout. That’s so often not the case when there's an organization and there are a few people at the top, but they're not accountable to a base.

 
As I say in the book, most things are easier said than done, but some things are easier done than said. That’s building on the work of wonderful labor organizer and theorist named Jane McAlevey, who writes about union organizing particularly in the teaching and nursing sectors, where there’s a lot of racial diversity and status differences. When there’s a clear goal across the board, like raises or benefits, the ability to be in those uncomfortable coalitions becomes more possible. Whereas if all you’re doing is sharing opinions on social media, it isn't clear what the goal is at all. If you don’t know what the point of the whole thing is, your differences are going to take you down. But if the point is clear and the strategy is clear, then your tolerance level for difference rises, because you understand why you're tolerating it. If you don't have a goal, then why tolerate anything?
 
E : What gives you hope that we’ll make it to this caring world you want to build?
 
NK : I think it's having been around for long enough to know that history can surprise you. For example: I wrote a book about the climate crisis that came out in 2014, called This Changes Everything. It called for a truly intersectional climate movement at a time when the mainstream climate movement was not interested in connecting the dots between racial justice, gender justice, disability rights, and Indigenous rights. When I wrote that book, I could not in a million years have predicted Greta Thunberg and the rise of the Climate Strike movement. In my wildest dreams, I could not have predicted The Squad and the Sunrise Movement doing so much on a Green New Deal that every presidential candidate felt they needed to stake out a position on it.
 
So history surprises you. Things happen that were not on your bingo card, for better and worse. I'm not somebody who's hopeful all the time, but I guess I would say that I'm humble enough to know that I don't know what's coming. There will be another moment when people have just had enough, and we better be ready, because in the Mirror World, they're ready with their plans, and their plans aren’t good. But I'm hopeful because I've been surprised enough times that I believe I will be surprised again. And I believe we have to be ready to sustain that moment and turn it into real action.
 
Naomi Klein's Double Trouble. By Adrienne Westenfeld. Esquire, September 12, 2023. 

Naomi Klein, author, professor, journalist, and contributing editor at The Intercept, has ventured into the far-right “mirror world,” exploring the movements and figures promoting conspiracy theories, misinformation, and its hold on large segments of society. This week on Deconstructed, we bring you a live conversation between Ryan Grim and Klein at the George Washington University Amphitheater, organized by Politics and Prose. Klein and Grim discuss Klein’s newest book, “Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World.” They discuss the labyrinthine world of conspiracy theories and how the right has effectively sowed confusion and capitalized on issues abandoned by the left.

Naomi Klein on Conspiracy Culture and  “The Mirror World. “  Host Ryan Grim.  Deconstructed, The Intercept September 15, 2023. 

Idly googling myself some years ago, I came upon an unusually glowing reference to one of my academic papers. “Masterpiece is an overused word,” the reviewer wrote, “but this Proustian evocation is indeed a masterpiece.”

 
Something was amiss. My paper was good, but not that good. And there was nothing particularly Proustian about it either. Whatever exquisite sensibility I might possess was well hidden beneath a scholarly armour of logic, evidence and jargon.
 
Reading further resolved the puzzle. “Nicky Haslam has known everyone from Greta Garbo to Cole Porter to the Royal Family.” Curses! I had been confused with my namesake, the famous British interior designer and scourge of vulgarity, and my paper with one of his books.
 
The experience of being confused with someone else is probably universal. Names and appearances are fallible markers of personal identity, especially as populations grow and we become exposed to a dizzying multitude of other people.
 
These confusions are usually trivial and droll, but sometimes they become sinister and destabilising. The idea that we have a double, someone who treads on the toes of our uniqueness, perhaps deliberately, can create deep anxieties and resentments.
 
The two Naomis

Such is the experience of Naomi Klein, Canadian author of a string of anti-capitalist blockbusters. No Logo (1999) attacked corporate malfeasance, The Shock Doctrine (2007) catalogued the exploitation of disasters to roll out neoliberal policies, and 2019’s On Fire marked her increasing focus on the climate crisis.
 
In her new book, Doppelganger, Klein makes her experience of being confused with another high-profile author, Naomi Wolf, the stimulus for an extended meditation on the nature of doubles, mirror-worlds, and the political and personal challenges of threatened identities.
 
Along the way, Klein returns to several of the animating themes of her previous books. Capitalism is the ultimate cause of the dire societal challenges we face, she argues, and people on both sides of the political mirror – right-wing conspiracists and liberal critics alike – fail to recognise it because they are mired in individualist ways of thinking.
 
The backbone of Klein’s personal story is simple enough. “Other Naomi”, her “big-haired doppelganger”, is the American author of feminist bestseller The Beauty Myth and was once a celebrated and very public figure on the broad left. Because Wolf was older and more established than Klein, being mistaken for her initially brought a frisson of celebrity.
 
That all changed when Wolf’s writing veered away from sexual liberation and female empowerment into conspiracies about Ebola, ISIS and (most recently) the COVID pandemic, complete with fear mongering about vaccines, mask mandates and impending tyranny.
 
Her transformation – or derailment, as Klein would have it – has seen her teaming up with far-right media personalities like Steve Bannon and issuing torrents of misinformation and paranoia.
 
Appalled at being confused with Wolf, Klein developed a dogged obsession. She followed Wolf’s social media, watched in horror her televised appearances, and pursued her down the rabbit hole – or through the looking glass – of conspiracist thinking. The intensity of Klein’s anti-crush and the tenacity of her pursuit seem to have surprised her, but it delivered insights into the nature of doubles and evil twins.
 
Doppelganger as ‘shadow self’
 
Translated from the German, a doppelganger is literally a “double-goer” or “double-walker”: someone who eerily accompanies us as a kind of shadow-self. Literary doppelgangers tend to be uncanny presences, violent alter egos, wicked impersonators or tormentors who sometimes turn out to be figments of their victim’s madness.
 
To philosophers and psychoanalysts, doppelgangers illuminate the existential wobbliness that goes with having our sense of unique selfhood undermined. As Golyadkin tells his replica in Dostoevsky’s The Double, “Either you or I, but both together we cannot be!”, not long before he is carted off to an asylum while his double blows mocking farewell kisses.
 
Klein’s response to other Naomi is similarly unsettled and goes beyond merely wishing to correct the record whenever she is misidentified. Klein feels her personal brand has been diluted, while acknowledging the irony of caring about her brand, given her fierce critique of corporate branding in No Logo (1999).

 
Nearly a quarter of a century later, she argues that personal branding, amplified by the growing desire to curate a unique digital self, entrenches fixed and phony selves and stands in the way of forming alliances with others.
 
Despite admitting she cares too much about her own brand, Klein deals with Wolf’s encroachment head-on by attacking her new politics. She takes aim at the “Mirror World” that congealed around resistance to vaccine and mask mandates, a new coalition of far-right MAGA folk and far-out health and wellness influencers and new-agers, united by a concern with body purity and a fondness for overheated rhetoric.
 
 
Calling out conspiracists
 
Klein bristles at anti-vaxxers’ claims of a genocidal “hygiene dictatorship” and their appropriation of Holocaust imagery, “as if the Nazi atrocity of treating human beings as germs and treating germs as germs was in any way the same thing”.
 
She also calls out bad-faith appropriation of civil rights discourse by white conspiracists, as when Wolf refers to one of her anti-mask protests as a lunch-counter sit-in, or when vaccination requirements are described as “medical apartheid”.
 
Klein also hears less-than-faint echoes of fascism and colonial callousness in arguments the pandemic was nature doing its work of thinning out the weak and infirm – and in the blind eye turned to disproportionate death rates among people of colour.
 
Mistaken beliefs linking vaccines and autism were a prequel to this dynamic, Klein suggests. In both cases, a health initiative takes the blame for troubling events: a diagnosis commonly taken as a tragedy in a society “that is very generous with diagnoses and awfully stingy with actual help” and a major economic and social disruption. A righteous hunt for villains ensues, heightened by the primal fear of shadowy, malevolent forces.

 
What might have driven Wolf into this parallel universe where Twitter, YouTube and Instagram are replaced by the far-right social media alternatives of Gettr, Rumble and Parler? Klein offers an equation: “Narcissism (Grandiosity) + Social media addiction + Midlife crisis ÷ Public shaming = Right-wing meltdown”. (Though surely the ÷ should be an ×: shaming exacerbates rather than dampens meltdowns.)
 
Klein argues Wolf is simply chasing clout and “digital dopamine”, a chase hardly confined to one side of politics.
 
 
Blame on both sides
 
Klein’s denunciations of Wolf and her allies are full-throated, but she doesn’t see her own side as blameless. Progressives have abandoned some issues to conservatives and have been overly reactive rather than setting their own agenda. Centrists have failed to deliver action to match their fine words.
 
Citizens of developed societies have quietly denied the magnitude of our dependence on – and complicity with – global injustice.
 
What needs to happen, according to Klein, is for people to realise the true source of their problems. Conspiracy theorists are half right: they “get the facts wrong but often get the feelings right”. The feeling others are profiting from human misery and withholding the truth is justified, but the cause is not evil individuals – it’s capitalism itself.
 
Doppelganger argues that capitalist “hyper-individualism” is the root of many of our troubles, and a value held by conspiratorial rightists and liberals alike. It breeds a culture that sees all failings as personal and stands in the way of us uniting to act for the greater good.
 
The solution, Klein maintains, in a tone that becomes increasingly prophetic as the book progresses, is to think systemically about oppression and inequality, and to decentre ourselves. “There is an intimate relationship between our overinflated selves and our under-cared-for planet,” she writes.
 
Later chapters take up this challenge, in discussions of settler colonialism, antisemitism and the climate emergency.
 
 
Doubling down too much
 
Klein’s book is a compelling critique of polarising trends in American and global politics, constructed around a relatable personal narrative. Its anti-capitalist message and sometimes utopian faith in socialist solutions will not be universally embraced, of course. But Klein delivers it with a powerful and passionate voice.
 
If Doppelganger has a weak point, it is in its organising idea, which strains under the load it is made to bear. The range of meanings “doppelganger” carries is extravagant, extending far beyond the realm of troublesome namesakes and lookalikes.
 
Our self-branding online selves are “an internal sort of doppelganger”. The ideal body we aspire to is a doppelganger, and so is the data footprint our online presence leaves behind, our “digital golems”. Thinking is a form of doubling, a “dialogue between me and myself”.
 
Stereotypes create doppelgangers by projecting images onto individuals:
 
“race, ethnicity, and gender create dangerous doubles that hover over whole categories of people – Savage. Terrorist. Thief. Whore. Property.”
 
Children are doppelgangers of parents who fail to see them as autonomous beings. We have a second, doppelganger body that represents all the harms we cause others and our planet.
 
It’s not just individuals that have doppelgangers, but also societies, religions, nations and places. Pluralist society has a fascist doppelganger. Jews and Christians are each other’s doppelgangers. Israel is a doppelganger of antisemitic European nationalisms. New South Wales is the doppelganger of South Wales. Indeed, we all live in a “doppelganger culture. A culture crowded with various forms of doubling.”
 
Strangely, in all this multiplication of doubling, Klein has little to say about other pressing forms of duplication, such as artificial intelligences, deepfakes and identity theft.

 
Her use of the doppelganger concept is so fruitful, so capable of capturing any kind of similarity and difference, that it becomes almost empty. Doppelganger succeeds despite the occasionally laboured use of this metaphor, rather than because of it.
 
In the end, Klein finds some almost grudging sympathy for her doppelganger, acknowledging an act of political bravery (a 2014 stand against Palestinian civilian casualties) and recalling an early starstruck meeting. Wolf is not a double of the haunting variety – she has apparently rebuffed Klein’s invitations for a public interview – but she has left her psychic mark and the reader is the better for it.
 
Ironically, being paired in this engrossing book leaves the two Naomis more conjoined than ever, like two magnets flipped from repulsion to a strange attraction.

In Doppelganger, Naomi Klein says the world is broken: conspiracy theorists ‘get the facts wrong but often get the feelings right’. By Nick Haslam. The Conversation, September 11, 2023.