For a time, Naomi Klein mostly ignored Naomi Wolf.
The two Naomis — both White Jewish women born at the height of second-wave feminism, who published big-idea bestsellers in the ’90s and share a skepticism of elite power — have been confused for one another for years. It was a low-stakes annoyance. But Klein’s calculus changed when the pandemic hit.
As Klein’s world shrank, Wolf’s cracked open. Once a rising-star feminist thinker, Wolf found a whole new career as a coronavirus conspiracy theorist, touting ideas such as that “vaccinated people’s urine/feces” could contaminate drinking water for unvaccinated people. Klein, a reliably left-wing thought leader and activist, found herself obsessively tracking Wolf’s every word, fascinated by her extreme pivot — and horrified that she was being mistakenly associated with it.
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Now, Klein’s observations and analysis of Wolf’s “mirror world” are the animating force for her new book, scheduled for release Tuesday. Its title: “Doppelganger.”
It’s an undeniably clever hook. Klein’s decision to confront, at least on the page, the “other Naomi” — the former Al Gore consultant whose reinvention as a right-wing truth-teller made her a pariah in the circles where she once thrived — has generated much advance buzz: a Vanity Fair excerpt, a long New York Times profile, high-profile reviews and podcast interviews. The media world is unable to resist the juicy Naomi-Naomi dynamic. Klein seems at peace with this.
“I knew that people were going to misrepresent the book as being about her,” Klein said in a late August interview over Zoom, when it’s really “using her as a case study, using her as a literary tool to get at these other forms of doubling.”
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Klein applies “doppelganger culture” to an array of topics: the digital selves people create on social media, the frictionless growth of the surveillance state, racial stereotypes, the history of antisemitism and the latent fascist potential that lurks within liberal democracies.
But the decision to make Wolf a central character is more than a gimmick to attract readers wondering: What happened to Naomi Wolf? It’s also a way for Klein to address, head-on, the opposite impulse — the eagerness to look away from the Naomi Wolfs of the world, which Klein sees as a major failing of mainstream liberal discourse. If you can see Wolf only as a red-pilled tragedy or desperate grifter, Klein thinks, you miss what’s actually going on.
“There’s a certain arrogance to this idea that you hear in some kinds of liberal circles of, like, ‘We don’t want to give them attention,’ which assumes that we are the gatekeepers of attention,” Klein said, noting that Wolf’s conservative fan base exploded after she was kicked off Twitter in 2021 for spreading vaccine myths. “It is important to give it serious attention, not mocking attention, … because it is a major political and cultural force.”
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The 1990s were big for the Naomis — first Wolf, whose 1991 “The Beauty Myth” opened a new generation’s eyes to the impossible standards women are pressured to uphold; then Klein, whose 1999 “No Logo” reinvigorated anti-capitalist critique in popular culture. Decades later, Klein remains a coveted speaker at climate summits and Democratic Socialists of America events. Wolf, meanwhile, has become a regular on Stephen K. Bannon’s podcast, all but unrecognizable to her early fans.
In “Doppelganger,” Klein traces the evolution of Wolf’s coronavirus theories, which reached a fever pitch with the idea that vaccine verification apps would enable a “tyrannical” state to spy on your every word and deed, ushering in a “social credit score system” straight out of communist China. Wolf laid out this theory in a video called, “Why vaccine passports equal slavery forever.”
Klein patiently dismantles Wolf’s argument. Then she attempts to build a bridge. She explains that Wolf’s outlandish claims are born out of a legitimate fear, shared by many on the left, of being “at the mercy of omnipresent technology.”
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“Like my doppelganger projecting all of our surveillance fears on a vaccine app, conspiracy theorists get the facts wrong but often get the feelings right,” Klein writes. It’s purely sensible, she argues, to feel as if the system is rigged, to feel preyed upon.
“The word for the system driving those feelings starts with c,” she adds, “but if no one ever taught you how capitalism works, and instead told you it was all about freedom and sunshine and Big Macs and playing by the rules to get the life you deserve, then it’s easy to see how you might confuse it with another c-word: conspiracy.”
Klein argues that when liberals cede discussion of privacy and mass surveillance, the right seizes ground. The Biden administration’s failure to rein in Big Tech and create a secure information commons, she said, is “what makes the terrain really fertile to co-optation by the Steve Bannons and Naomi Wolfs of the world.”
Her critique of liberal complacency extends to media and culture. During her interview with The Washington Post, Klein brought up Oliver Anthony’s song “Rich Men North of Richmond,” a viral country song embraced by conservative pundits and far-right influencers — and what she described as NPR’s pearl-clutching coverage of the phenomenon.
“The gist of the news story was like: ‘What are we going to do about the song? The song is very popular. What are we to do?’” Klein said. “My response is like, ‘Write songs that also resonate.’ It’s fine to have a critique, but to turn it into this crisis, … it’s so spectacularly self-defeating.”
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“Doppelganger” is winding, even weird — though, as critic Jacob Bacharach observed, maybe not quite weird enough. (“Was Naomi Klein in the end unable to escape from writing a Naomi Klein book?” he asks, noting that it only grazes the surface of destabilizing notions such as the porosity of the self and the nature of truth.) The New Republic and the Progressive gave it raves. In the New York Times, liberal opinion columnist Michelle Goldberg wrote that she “can’t think of another text that better captures the berserk period we’re living through.”
Klein told The Post that she started writing the book in secret, as a way to orient herself amid “the discombobulation of the moment.”
“I had lost faith in a certain kind of political writing that I’ve engaged in my whole life, which was thesis, argument, fact, example,” she said. After publishing books such as “The Shock Doctrine,” which challenges the notion that the free market triumphed democratically across the globe, and “This Changes Everything,” an argument for seizing our existential climate crisis to remake political and economic systems, she “couldn’t just write another sort of rallying book about, ‘We really, really, really have to do something about climate change.’”
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Like many on the left in the post-Bernie Sanders era, Klein is in a period of introspection. She wants her colleagues on the left to reconsider how they approach conflict (too often obsessing over differences instead of shared goals), language (too complex and jargony) and “unstrategic” identity politics (an impediment to building class solidarity), lest the would-be comrades “we kick to the curb” flee into the arms of Bannon and his ilk.
Admittedly, her book gets a little hand-wavy here; it’s the only argument in “Doppelganger” not bolstered by specifics. Who or what exactly was she referring to? Klein declined to “name names,” focusing on what she saw as the big picture.
“When I look at Bannon and others on the MAGA right,” Klein said, “some of what they’re doing is overperforming a kind of inclusiveness and openness to debate, because they realize that their political opponents have become very closed to debate and very quick to pass a judgment that somebody is just beyond being worthy of any kind of discussion.”
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Klein tried to speak with Wolf for the book. She details how she repeatedly emailed, reaching out through her publisher and a mutual friend, promising a respectful debate. She never heard back, at least before her book went to print.
(The Post tried as well. “I am on book deadline so don’t have time to comment, sorry,” Wolf responded in an email in early September.)
And since then? Now that Klein is out touring the country with “Doppelganger” and the untangling of their parallel personae has become a sort of cultural event, a new political framework — has she heard from Wolf at all?
Klein said the two have had “no direct communication.”
Indirect communication?
“No direct communication,” she repeated.
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