A doppelganger is an exact double of a living person. In “Doppelganger: A Trip Into The Mirror World,” journalist, activist and author Naomi Klein tells the story of her own doppelganger, Naomi Wolf. Klein then springboards into many related tangents she believes exist, impacting politics and many other aspects of our society. As with Klein’s other books, “Doppelganger” is a well-researched, thought-provoking treatise.
Beginning over a decade ago, the public started to confuse Klein and Wolf, due mostly to their sharing a first name. Wolf began her career as a feminist writer with her well-known 1990s book “The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women.” But after being humiliated through the exposure of her inadequate research and false claims, she completely shifted to the right; with the onslaught of COVID, Wolf even became a leader in the anti-COVID precautions movement.
Frustratingly for her, Klein’s work began to be confused for Wolf’s nonscientific, unproven views. Klein followed Wolf’s rise in the MAGA movement and researched what Klein calls “our doppelganger culture. A culture crowded with various forms of doubling.” Throughout the book, Klein explores many of these “doubles” that exist within our society.
Klein spells out many of Wolf’s outrageous claims, such as COVID being “an experiment, a plot, a coup, an act of war designed to turn us into techno slaves and convince us to voluntarily relinquish our freedoms.” Wolf likened Anthony Fauci to Satan and said Bill Gates was trying to crush humanity. “Vaccine shedding” was the real danger. Wolf became a regular on Steve Bannon’s podcast and Fox’s Tucker Carlson show. “Bannon could not get enough of Wolf,” Klein writes, because Wolf helped keep Bannon’s viewers terrified.
Klein spent hours studying Bannon and listening to his podcast. Bannon “is first and foremost a strategist.” His skill is “identifying issues that are the natural territory of his opponents but that they have neglected or betrayed, leaving themselves vulnerable to having parts of their base wooed away.” Bannon is an expert in creating what Klein calls a “Mirror World,” where “there is a copycat story and answer for everything, often with very similar key words.” Bannon’s “deepest skill is in constructing and expanding the various reflective surfaces in the Mirror World,” where Bannon creates “mirror arguments and mirror political agendas carefully designed to repel arguments deployed by his adversaries.”
Bannon, writes Klein, “is watching us closely. The issues we are abandoning, the debates we aren’t having, the people we are insulting and discarding … he is stitching together a political agenda out of it, a warped mirror agenda, that he is convinced is the ticket to the next wave of electoral victories.” Bannon calls this “MAGA Plus.” Klein believes liberals can learn from Bannon: from his laser-focus on “strategy and building winning coalitions despite differences; from his transformation of listeners and watchers into highly organized doers; and most of all from his continual highlighting of ‘Action! Action! Action!’”
Klein then segues into how autism was the anti-vax prequel to COVID. Klein has an autistic child; thus, she writes, she understands autism well. In her parent community, Klein describes how many parents of autistic children believe the “vaccine-autism myth” and how her doppelganger Wolf “is now thoroughly entangled in the autism misinformation movement.” For some parents, “not getting their kids vaccinated is a way to feel in control of something that is, in fact, not in any of our control.” Klein writes how this is also part of the Mirror World, explaining how these parents “cannot seem to believe that anything less than conventionally perfect showed up in their rigorously optimized lives, who cling to the fantasy that their children will mirror everything they most value about themselves.” Thus, an imperfection like autism must be due to an outside factor, like a vaccine jab in the arm, rather than being passed down from the parents.
Next, Klein delves into conspiracy theories and “conspiracy influencers,” who she states “perform what I have come to think of as a doppelganger of investigative journalism, imitating many of its stylistic conventions while hopping over its accuracy guardrails.” Conspiracy influencers use conspiracy theories to shift attention away from real threats that have been painstakingly proven. “Conspiracy theorists get the facts wrong but often get the feelings right.”
Klein then addresses what she calls real conspiracies, such as capitalism. Klein gives many examples of the problems with capitalism: sweatshops in China, oil wars and more. Klein uses the term “Shadow Land” in describing capitalism and writes that “we can sense that the shadows are closing in.”
Klein is Jewish, and although “Doppelganger” was published prior to the current war in Gaza, the book includes her views on Zionism. Klein writes that “Zionism’s offer … was simple: rather than trying to defeat anti-Semitism by getting at its roots, we will hold a gun to its head and force it into submission.” Klein details how with the partitioning of Palestine and the creation of Israel in 1947, “roughly 750,000 Palestinians were expelled, hundreds of Palestinian villages were destroyed, and thousands were killed.” She then writes that “of course Palestinians would resist such ethnic cleansing with violence of their own.” Klein adds, “Israelis believed themselves to be justified in reenacting many of the forms of violence, dehumanizing propaganda, and forced displacement that had targeted and uprooted the Jewish people throughout Europe for centuries.”
Bringing this back to Klein’s doppelganger theme, Klein writes that “Israel as a doppelganger exists on two levels.” First, “Jews get a state of their own to mimic/twin the very forms of militant nationalism that had oppressed them for centuries.” Second, “Israel also became a doppelganger of the colonial project, specifically settler colonialism.” Zionists just adopted the version of justice used for centuries by Western powers, the myth that it’s totally fine to clear the land of Indigenous people. Thus, “many Palestinians respond by refusing to see the state that refuses to see them.” Klein writes that she understands this refusal.
Klein closes “Doppelganger” with a prescription for improving society, starting with naming the systems that cause the Shadow Lands, including capitalism, imperialism, white supremacy and patriarchy. “We must attempt, with great urgency, to imagine a world that does not require Shadow Lands, that is not predicated on sacrificial people and sacrificial ecologies and sacrificial continents.” Klein insists we must collaborate and form uncomfortable coalitions; the anti-fascist left needs to stop refusing to make strategic alliances. We need to fight for those we don’t even know as much as we fight for ourselves.
Honestly, after Klein describing such pressing problems in robust detail, I was disappointed that she didn’t offer stronger guidance for countering them. I was left wishing that I had my own doppelganger who could provide more tangible solutions.
Dave Gamrath is a longtime community activist who founded InspireSeattle.org and serves on multiple regional boards and committees.
Read more of the Nov. 29–Dec. 5, 2023 issue.