Doppelganger

In 2020, amidst the eerie quiet and chaos of Covid, journalist and author Naomi Klein noticed that she was increasingly being mentioned in online anti-vaccine posts. Klein is not a conspiracist, but her namesake, Naomi Wolf, had become just that. The two had been confused and conflated since their close arrival onto the literary scene, both having written polemical texts that became unexpected hits: No Logo for Klein, The Beauty Myth for Wolf. The inability of people to separate the two of them had always infuriated Klein, who saw it as lazy at best, misogynistic and anti-Semitic at worst. But now the cross-referencing of the two were attributing false and dangerous lies to Klein.

Klein began to take a closer look at her doppelganger, “Other Naomi,” and how this former icon of the left had not only been drawn into the world of conspiracies but had become, as Klein describes it, “one of the most effective creators and disseminators of misinformation and disinformation about many of our most urgent crises.” Klein watched every film and read every book about doppelgangers she could find, and followed Wolf into Mirror World, an online community with loosely connected political beliefs and social grievances inspiring, to quote Klein, “a large number to take to the streets in rebellion against an almost wholly hallucinated ‘tyranny”.

Doppelganger emerged from Klein’s trip through that looking glass: she felt confused by the political landscape of lockdown, and a knitting together of the disparate conspiracies, tribes and events that contributed to it. She draws links between autism, anti-vaxxers and wellness influencers; corporate avarice and beliefs in secrets cabals of paedophiles; Jewish political theory and 1930s Austrian social welfare; Israel, the Holocaust, and the myths of Colonialism. As with the conspiracies and lies being spread, the subjects are numerous and the topics varied.

After explaining how her search for Other Naomi became an obsession at the expense of her other work and family (an obsession familiar to many who’ve found themselves disappearing down internet rabbit-holes), Klein asks why the Mirror World has emerged at this point in time. She argues that Covid lit the flames and social media poured on the fuel. The conspiratorial belief that vaccines cause autism, combined with actual scandals like the opioid crisis, have made people suspicious or fearful of the pharmaceutical industry. The next step – that vaccines were being used as a means of controlling us – resulted from a growing fear about the rise of the surveillance state and instances of the vaccine app being used in criminal investigations.

Klein argues that the left has failed to combat or even try to understand the source of the lies and conspiracies. She claims that the success of figures like Wolf, Donald Trump and, in particular, Trump’s first chief-of-staff, Steve Bannon, is in part because "when something becomes an issue in the Mirror World, it automatically ceases to matter everywhere else... their arm goes up, ours goes down. We kick, they hug." In spite of her disgust with Bannon’s methods of persuasion, Klein can’t help admiring his ability to identify and welcome the aggrieved groups forming on social media. Bannon not only acknowledges the grievances; he also succeeds in encouraging people to blame the so-called elites for making them feel undervalued, if not worthless. No theory is too outlandish, no anger too unjustified, for his club. 

More emotive writers might have reduced Doppelganger to a smug put-down of conspiracy theorists, but Klein escapes this danger by sympathising with people drawn into the Mirror She posits that when “so many truths that had been sold as settled suddenly become wobbly and wavy under our feet" [such as housing, jobs, the cost of living], It should not be a surprise that a moment this demanding is conjuring up some extreme behaviours and apparitions.” But nor does Klein fail to identify the villains in the piece. She identifies her familiar foes of capitalism, neoliberalism and colonialism, as just as guilty of spreading socially destructive lies as those spread by the likes of Bannon and Wolf. She writes: “The Big Lie, that Biden stole the 2020 election, is dangerous and big. But is it the Big Lie? Bigger, say, than trickle-down economics? Bigger than tax cuts create jobs? Bigger than infinite growth on a finite planet? Bigger than Thatcher's double whammy of there is no alternative and There is no such thing as society? Bigger, for that matter, than Manifest destiny, Terra Nullius, and the Doctrine of Discovery - the lies that form the basis of the United States, Canada, Australia and every other settler colonial state?"

Some readers might find the myriad subjects of Doppelganger, together with its interweaving of memoir, journalism and political commentary, too unwieldy. While the book is less focused and confident in its direction than her previous publications, its lack of cohesion surely reflects both the subject matter (conspiracy and disinformation) and the uncertain times in which it was written, times in which we continue to live. While Klein’s previous books have shaped my political thinking, you don’t have to share her arguments to gain food for thought. I strongly recommend joining her on a tour into the Mirror World. After all, we all need to look at our reflections to understand the fine line between truth and belief, fact and fake news, our doppelgangers and ourselves.