“What people have to understand is that any other functionality can be loaded onto that platform with no problem at all. (Prolonged social isolation didn’t seem to help anyone.) She began appearing on right-wing platforms like Fox’s Tucker Carlson Tonight (RIP) and Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast, and she began describing vaccine-verification passports for international travel as “a tyrannical totalitarian platform” and vaccine-verification apps as a “CCP-style social credit score system.” “It’s not about the vaccine, it’s not about the virus, it’s about your data,” she warned Fox News host Steve Hilton. Wolf had already dabbled in conspiracy theories-about Ebola, Edward Snowden, ISIS-for years, but the coronavirus proved to be more than just a passing fixation. Then Covid-19 hit and Wolf, effectively banished from liberal circles, found a new audience: the far right. (The footage still gives me nightmares.) Months before the interview, Klein notes, Wolf also lost her father, a figure so central to her life that she wrote a book about him. publisher and the excruciating moment went viral on Twitter. In 2019, a small detail in her book Outrages: Sex, Censorship, and the Criminalization of Love, on how nineteenth-century British law penalized gays in the Victorian era, was corrected on-air by a British historian, swiftly upending the book’s entire premise. But as Klein’s star rose, Wolf’s began to fall-and then suddenly exploded in a supernova of public humiliation. Klein launched her career with No Logo, about the outsized and generally abusive power of brands like Nike and The Gap, nearly a decade after her feminist forebear released The Beauty Myth, on how beauty is weaponized against women to keep male dominance intact. “We both have brown hair that sometimes goes blond from over-highlighting.” Klein’s and Wolf’s careers had long orbited each other like a binary star: the former wrote about corporate malfeasance and climate change, the latter on gender inequality in leadership and sexuality. “We both write big-idea books,” Klein writes. It didn’t come as too much of a surprise, Klein writes. The book starts with an anecdote from 2011, when Klein overhears two women in a Manhattan restroom criticizing “her” (Wolf’s) stance on Occupy Wall Street. But as Doppelganger progresses, she stumbles upon a greater truth: we no longer occupy the same plane of reality, and maybe we never did.Īs Klein’s star rose, Wolf’s began to fall-and then suddenly exploded in a supernova of public humiliation. ![]() So, Klein decided to dive into her digital doppelganger’s world of disinformation. ![]() There was even a viral poem that some readers may recognize: “The real victim in all this here is Naomi Klein,” reads another. “I can’t believe I used to respect Naomi Klein. Seemingly every time Wolf made an outrageous statement on some right-wing broadcast, Klein was tagged or referenced in the public’s reactions. While she’d been getting mistaken for Wolf as early as 2011, the connection didn’t become parasitic until 2021, when Wolf became a fixture in the alt-right mediasphere. Klein began tapping into Wolf’s late-stage career as a conspiracy peddler during the early phase of the pandemic. Once an esteemed feminist public intellectual, Wolf has made a new name for herself as a gun-loving, reactionary sleuth, uncovering ghastly plots left and right, including that, as she tweeted in 2021, Apple was scheming to deliver vaccines through “nanopatticles that let you travel back in time.” But that new name also came to consume Naomi Klein, whose new book Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World chronicles her disorienting journey to free herself from the muck. And many found in its warm embrace the easy comfort of conspiracy theories-many, including Naomi Wolf. ![]() At the same time, disinformation and institutional distrust have congealed into a noxious sludge, enveloping more and more Americans seeking answers to the existential questions cropping up each week. The sudden mass withdrawal from public life mixed with the daily parade of death have done more damage to our psyche, individual and collective, than we may ever properly account for, let alone reverse: children are exceptionally behind in school adults have become antisocial paranoiacs and those of us who are supposed to be adults aren’t necessarily sure what that even means. 2023.Īll of our brains, in one way or another, were scrambled by the pandemic. Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World by Naomi Klein. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 416 pages.
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