The Other Naomi: A Review of Naomi Klein’s ‘Doppelganger’
This article is an adapted transcript of a Deep State Consciousness podcast episode. Links to the various platforms are available here.
‘I’m trying to understand why people are changing in the ways that they are’
‘I don’t think it’s any surprise that large numbers of people are just going “Eh, reality? I’d rather go over here and just make up our own crisis.”’
‘A lot of these conspiracy narratives are just straight out of Hollywood movies.’
‘I see it [conspiracy culture] first and foremost as a distraction machine, where you just get to not look at the actual crisis you have to face.’
‘You always think you’re confronting your doppelganger but in the end you’re confronting yourself, and you make the mistake of trying to kill your doppelganger you will die.’
The above are some quotes from a recent interview of Naomi Klein, where she’s discussing her new book, Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World.
Ms. Klein is the author of, I count, nine books, on the themes of anti-imperialism, anti-capitalism and the climate crisis. Perhaps her most famous work is The Shock Doctrine, where she argues that disasters—or shocks—are used as opportunities to impose free market policies on otherwise unwilling populations. She cites Chile under Augusto Pinochet and Russia under Boris Yeltsin as examples.
The only book of hers I’ve previously read is, The Battle for Paradise, which applied the Shock Doctrine concept to Puerto Rico’s troubles after the hurricane of 2017. I suspect I’d generally concur with Klein’s anti-imperialism, but would personally have a much more libertarian economic outlook.
The quotations above are taken from an interview called, How Russell Brand Indulges Conspiracy Culture. I am of course interested in the different and often contradictory functions conspiracy theories have in society. They cause some people to question the nature of their reality, whilst others utilise them to prop their existing paradigms up. They doubtlessly often arise as a valiant quest to uncover hidden truth, yet equally doubtlessly, they can represent cynical acts of pure profiteering.
Critics of conspiracy can be split into two camps. The first I could call the naive critics. (I don’t especially intend naive as a pejorative). This group may make perfectly sound criticisms of individual conspiracy claims, but they do so from a place of ignorance as to the scope of state crimes. They may be aware that something really bad happened with syphilis in a place called Tuskegee, and that the CIA was up to no good in Chile in seventies, but in general they see the state as a benign actor, incapable of large scale covert action that would remain unexposed.
Naomi Klein does not fall into this category. She is intensely aware of the ‘conspiratorial’ nature and history of the US Government. She writes:
‘If we define “conspiracy” as an agreement among members of a group to pull off some kind of nefarious plot in the shadows, then representatives of capital—in government and the corporate sector—engage in conspiracies as a matter of course.’
(Quotes, unless otherwise stated, are taken from Doppelganger)
Klein then cites Iran, Chile and Honduras as—by no means exclusive—examples of US intelligence operatives overthrowing democratically elected governments.
Criticism of conspiracy culture coming from anti-imperialists is far more interesting to me. Rather than an effort to prop up an image of the state as essentially good (as the naive critics do) they are attempting to set limits on its acknowledged ability for evil. Limits are essential to be able to focus energy on the most pressing issues. As an example, you’re never going to get to examining the CIA’s relationship with radical Islam, if you’re consumed with questions over whether space lasers brought down the Twin Towers, or if the buildings were in fact holograms. The ability to exclude is essential in understanding anything.
This raises a challenging question: when dealing with an entity that is so deceptive, that is powerful enough to overthrow governments across the world, how do we exclude? How do we know what they’re not capable of? How do we know they don't have lasers in outer space?
For this reason, I was intrigued to understand Naomi Klein’s process. All the more so because she is very much on the Left of the political spectrum. I’ve found that from their different point of view, Left anti-imperialists often see or emphasise points I miss.
When I started to listen to the interview, I got more than I’d bargained for. It turns out Naomi Klein is not just critical of fringe conspiracists profiting from crises, rather she is broadly supportive of the whole COVID narrative. By that I mean she believes a deadly virus emerged from China, and that lockdowns and mask and vaccine mandates were effective and moral ways of fighting it. Essentially, she draws the exact opposite conclusions I did in my writing on the subject.
One further thing: the book is called Doppelganger, because Naomi Klein considers Naomi Wolf to be hers. (From now on I shall refer to them as Klein and Wolf, to save wearing Naomi out). Apparently these two ladies are often conflated, but whereas Klein broadly supports government COVID policies, Wolf couldn’t be more opposed to them, seeing them as part of a nefarious plot to do away with civil liberties and introduce a bio-fascist regime.
Klein writes about this conflation leading to some comical confusion. Whenever Wolf posts something that offends sensibilities, Klein will find herself being ‘denounced and excommunicated’ for it. Those in on the joke Tweet things like ‘thoughts and prayers to Naomi Klein’. For Wolf’s part, she must occasionally tell people that, whilst flattered, she did not write The Shock Doctrine.
The title of this article, The Other Naomi, comes from Klein being told by a Twitter user that she had been relegated to that position, of which Klein said:
‘It’s a vertiginous thing to be harangued on social media about your alleged misunderstanding of your own ideas—while being told that another Naomi is a better version of you than you are.’
Klein describes an obsessive period where she consumed ‘a master’s degree’s worth’ of hours listening to Wolf’s podcast appearances. Why did she do this? She wanted to understand:
‘[Wolf] and her fellow travellers who are now in open warfare against objective reality.’
She would also listen to other podcasts that:
‘Unpack and deconstruct the commingling worlds of conspiracy theories, wellness hucksters, and their various intersections with COVID-19 denial, anti-vaccine hysteria, and rising fascism.’
And so Klein explored this in terms of a doppelganger journey. She writes that:
‘In the dozens of books that have been written about people who encounter their doubles, doppelgangers consistently signal that the protagonist’s life is about to be upended, with the double turning their friends and colleagues against them, destroying their career, or framing them for crimes, and—very often—having sex with their spouse or lover. A standard trope in the genre is a nagging uncertainty about whether the double is real at all. Is this actually an identical stranger, or are they a long-lost twin? Worse, is the double a figment of the protagonist’s imagination—an expression of an unhinged subconscious?’
Klein writes that in confronting your doppelganger you inevitably end up confronting yourself. She draws from Edgar Allan Poe’s short story, William Wilson and Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, to tell us that to kill one's doppelganger is to kill oneself. Whilst acknowledging a desire to ‘draw a sword and be the last Naomi standing’, she recognises she must instead seek some form of integration and learn the lessons this False Naomi has to teach her.
There is a promising start, where Klein writes that:
‘The capacity to have an internal dialogue (or roundtable discussion) with the various parts of ourselves is healthy and human.’
She references the political philosopher Hannah Arendt, who sought to explain how ordinary people become actors in totalitarian systems. Klein writes:
‘For Arendt, it is when everyday people lose their capacity for internal dialogue and deliberation, and find themselves only able to regurgitate slogans and contradictory platitudes, that great evil occurs. So, too, when people lose the ability to imagine the perspectives of others, or as she put it in her essay “Truth and Politics,” “making present to my mind the standpoints of those who are absent.” In that state of literal thoughtlessness (i.e., an absence of thoughts of one’s own), totalitarianism takes hold.’
At first I thought this whole doppelganger concept sounded utterly bonkers, a way of obfuscating the real issues. Then I wondered if it was genius, an embrace of a mytho-symbolic vision of the world. The real acid test is how would Klein use it: as a way of embracing or hiding from her shadow?
Wolf is of course just a symbol of that shadow. The real monster in the darkness is that vast numbers of people, people who may have lauded The Shock Doctrine, now disagree with fundamental aspects of Klein’s worldview. What’s worse; they use and abuse her ideas to prop up their fantasies. This must feel threatening on a number of levels, not to mention annoying.
And so I thought I’d examine Klein’s work in view of what I wrote about COVID in Measuring the Mandates, but also in view of my book Contemplating Conspiracy, on the varied roles conspiracy theories play in society.
To cut to the conclusion: did Klein really follow Hannah Arendt’s advice to ‘imagine the perspectives of others’ and ‘make present the standpoints of those who are absent?’ My short answer—rather depressingly—is no.
In Contemplating Conspiracy, I engaged in my own bit of symbolic reasoning. In the chapter titled, Pulling Down and Propping up the Tower, I wrote about the sixteenth card of the Tarot deck, The Tower. I did so as a way of exploring what I see as the paradoxical nature of conspiracy theories, that they are employed to both pull down and prop up consensus reality—symbolised by the Tower.
The tearing down is rather obvious. People with entirely conventional worldviews are thrust into an alternative reality through encountering a conspiracy theory they find overwhelmingly compelling. Whether this is a good or a bad thing is a separate question. I’ve known of people whose lives have been greatly enriched by this broadening of perception. I've also heard of people who have grown paranoid and started stockpiling food, fuel and ammo. I’ve made the case that there are parallels with spiritual awakening here.
What about the propping up? How do conspiracy theories do that?
In the book, I give the example of FOX News inviting economics professor Morgan Reynolds on, to speak as a representative of the 9/11 Truth Movement. Professor Reynolds is an advocate of the no planes theory of 9/11; essentially stating that no Boeing aircraft crashed at any of the four sites that day. Rather, we were treated to a combination of holographic imagery and faked video footage.
The FOX presenters are, predictably, hostile and dismissive. Fair enough, but why invite him on in the first place? I propose FOX had a problem which Professor Reynolds helped them to solve. They are aware that awkward questions about 9/11 are being asked. Some of them are even being asked by highly credible family members, right to the Congressional investigation. FOX loves the Bush regime, so to protect it, they invite on a conspiracy theorist in order to inform their viewers that questioning 9/11 is something only very silly people do. Now we don’t have to listen to those pesky women from Jersey and their talk of advanced knowledge. Problem solved. Conspiracy theories have been employed to prop up the Tower.
I was interested to see that Naomi Klein also mentions 9/11 conspiracies in her book. Specifically, she mentions the viral documentary Loose Change, which also includes the claim that no plane hit the Pentagon. Klein describes it as the Plandemic of its time—a reference to the viral COVID documentary.
In some ways this is fair enough. Loose Change probably was the most famous 9/11 conspiracy documentary, and probably consistent with the views of the Truthers who unfurled a ‘9/11 WAS AN INSIDE JOB’ banner at Klein’s Shock Doctrine book talk. It’s certainly not wrong to highlight unsubstantiated conspiracy thinking running wild.
What is wrong however, is to do so in a way that is unbalanced and therefore ultimately misleading. As with FOX News, anyone reading Klein’s book would come away with the impression that questioning the narrative of 9/11 is for foolish people. Real researchers confine their criticisms to the Bush regime's policies resulting from 9/11. (Or fully support them, depending what side of the divide you were on). If Klein was being fair and balanced, she would have sought to also reference the most erudite critics of the 9/11 narrative. Perhaps the documentary, 9/11: Press for Truth, which featured the questions posed to the Commission by family members, or some of the work done exposing the fact that the CIA knew two of the hijackers to-be were in the country and their refusal to inform the FBI of this fact.
Doppelganger isn’t a book on 9/11, so let’s move on to COVID. Klein provides examples of Wolf Tweeting some pretty outrageous things. There’s the claim that vaccinated people's faeces needs to be separated from general sewerage supplies and waterways, until its impact on unvaccinated people’s drinking water is established. Wolf was apparently calling for the construction of a parallel sewage system. There was also a Tweet about vaccine nanoparticles that let you travel back in time. Klein contends Wolf ‘mistook a conversation about Apple Watch’s Time Travel feature for a secret meeting about an actual time machine’
Full disclosure: I contacted Naomi Wolf a few months ago, and she was good enough to share a blurb for my Measuring the Mandates book. I have read her COVID book, The Bodies of Others, but it was a while ago and I’m not super knowledgeable on her positions. At the risk of doing her a disservice, and with scant further research on my part, I’m going to accept Klein’s claims as true. Even if Klein is not being specifically fair to Wolf (and I’m not commenting either way), her point is generally true about COVID conspiracy culture. I accept that no end of wild claims have been made for less than entirely scrupulous reasons.
It’s not a problem that Klein points this out, but as with 9/11, the problem is her highlighting of the extremes—and only the extremes—as a way of deflecting criticism from the state’s COVID mandates. She is straw rather than steel-manning her opponents.
This trend continues with quotations from an ‘anti-vax fitness trainer’, who wouldn’t let her daughter be held by her vaccinated grandparents, due to the risk of shedding. As an aside; vaccine shedding is not a concept I engaged with. I just thought it was too coincidental that whereas the vaccinated had a story for why the unvaccinated were dangerous, the unvaxxed had an equal and opposite tale to promote societal division. Not a-priori impossible, but it seems unlikely.
Klein does the same thing with morality. She quotes a lady who opposed vaccine mandates due to a belief those with compromised systems and health problems ‘should die’. This is presented as evidence of the moral position of anti-vax-mandaters. She presents people who refuse to wear masks as—albeit unknowingly—the inheritors of barbaric traditions that sought to rid the world of disabled children—unworthy of life.
The conclusion is then that people who contest COVID science do so based on theories of time travel, whilst those opposed to mandates are reincarnated Nazis who are happy to see the disabled die. This is what Naomi Klein has learnt after months of researching the COVID dissident movement.
Klein presents herself as an erudite and careful researcher, in contrast to the sloppy Wolf. She references a mistake Wolf made in her book Outrages, where she misunderstood a 19th century British legal term and was called out on it in a BBC interview. With this in mind, at an absolute minimum, you would expect Klein to accurately understand the arguments of the movement she is criticising. I’ve made my case against the COVID regime in Measuring the Mandates, so I’m not going to repeat it here, but I will briefly run through how Klein deals with each major area.
Klein accepts without question that COVID-19 was a novel virus that killed millions of people around the world. Fair enough, that’s the received wisdom, but it’s not the position of many COVID dissidents. They have highlighted the role iatrogenic (medically induced) factors played in the excess death spikes we witnessed. This includes, but is not limited to, aggressive use of end-of-life pathways and refusal of medical services to the elderly. In the UK this was documented by Amnesty International in their report, As if Expendable. Amnesty, to the best of my knowledge, is not a fringe conspiracy organisation.
Klein makes the point that COVID in the United States disproportionately affected the poor, saying:
‘According to an analysis conducted by the Poor People’s Campaign, people living in poor U.S. counties died at almost twice the rate as those living in wealthy ones; during the outbreak of the Delta variant, people in the poorest counties of the country died at five times the rate as those who lived in the wealthiest areas. These numbers tell a story of Covid as class war.’
Klein places at least some of the blame for this on COVID dissidents, who bleated on about Chinese bioweapons and eugenicist Bill Gates, whilst:
‘Systematically refusing the simple and safe measures that were our best chance of preventing a highly infectious disease from culling the more vulnerable members of our communities.’
Had Klein paid more attention to what COVID dissidents actually said, she might have encountered the work of Dr. Denis Rancourt, who presented the US COVID/poverty connection as reflecting differences in health and climate between the States, combined with a reduction in antibiotic prescriptions during the COVID era.
Klein champions mask mandates but does not feel the need to provide supporting evidence for their efficacy. She does not address the Cochrane Review’s meta-study which concluded that:
‘The pooled results of randomised control trials did not show a clear reduction in respiratory viral infection with the use of medical/surgical masks.’
And led lead author and presumably conspiracy theorist Dr. Tom Jefferson to comment:
‘There’s no evidence that masks work’ and ‘Governments had bad advisors from the very beginning… They were convinced by non-randomised studies, flawed observational studies.’
Klein recounts a conversation with a young lady, who she suspected of being on the autistic spectrum, regarding the merits of cloth masks versus disposable ones. They agreed that cloth masks are softer, prettier and better for the environment. Whilst this sounds like a charming interaction, not even the Bangladesh study, the most positive randomised control trial on masking, found any benefit from cloth masks. Is Klein spreading the medical misinformation she accuses others of dealing in?
Regarding lockdowns, Klein writes:
‘There is no doubt that there have been points when schools and businesses needed to be shut down.’
Klein seems to take this as so self-evident that there is no need to provide evidence for it. It’s not that she couldn’t have done so, around June of 2020 several papers appeared purporting to demonstrate, based on modelling, that lockdowns had saved millions of lives. As time went by, such claims comported increasingly poorly with the real world. Never locked-down Sweden ended up having the lowest excess mortality figures in Europe, and no benefit could be demonstrated through controlled comparisons of US States. Klein however remains in ‘no doubt’ as to their effectiveness.
On the subject of vaccines, here Klein makes the claim that:
‘In April 2022, researchers estimated that a quarter of the one million Americans deaths from Covid-19 “could have been prevented with primary series vaccination.”’
Klein does back this up with a link to the referenced paper, which uses data taken from the US Centers for Disease Control. She goes on to say:
‘A quarter of a million people dead who could have been saved had they gotten the shots. The responsibility for that catastrophic loss rests, in significant part, with the people who have spread dangerous lies about vaccines that, while not risk-free, are remarkably safe and effective at reducing Covid’s severity.’
I’ve no reason to doubt that the authors of the referenced paper have managed the data correctly, but once again Klein has missed the point. COVID dissidents were not blissfully unaware of such demonstrations of vaccine efficacy. What they criticised was the raw data they were built upon.
Professors of mathematics Norman Fenton and Martin Neil, analysed the COVID mortality data published by the United Kingdom's Office of National Statistics, and identified various statistical errors. Most centrally is their claim that vaccinated people were misclassified as unvaccinated for a period of three weeks after receiving the shot. This accounts for the observable surge in apparently unvaccinated non-COVID mortality figures immediately after the vaccine was rolled out.
My point here is not that Professor’s Fenton and Neil are correct or incorrect, my point is that Klein is totally unaware of this criticism. It shouldn't be hard to find either, Fenton and Neil’s work is available on Wolf’s website.
It seems clear to me that, on scientific issues, Klein is straw and not steel manning her opponents. Perhaps it is deliberate, but I rather suspect she is simply seeing what she expects to find.
What about other areas? Can Klein emphasise with the dissident perspective on a more human level?
Well…
Klein rejects the idea that mandating vaccines violates bodily sovereignty. She writes that:
‘Wolf has similarly twisted the feminist movement’s core tenet that all people have the right to choose whom they have sex with and whether to carry a child. Now she was distorting that principle to cast Covid tests and vaccine mandates as violations of “bodily integrity” akin to those endured by women who underwent forced vaginal exams, claiming that all are examples of “the state penetrating their body against their will.” Clearly, that kind of language fills a cultural need, one bound up in the social currency of victimization, a theme I’ll return to later. But the point here is that abusing such terms is dangerous: it drains them of their intended meaning, their legibility, and their power.’
I am left to wonder what has led Naomi Klein to believe she has either the right or the wisdom to determine what other people should and should not find violating. Who exactly is she to judge what appropriate and inappropriate unwanted crossings of our physical boundaries are? The whole history of abuse is a history of people being told not to make a fuss of it. Wolf is surely reflecting how a significant number of people feel about forced vaccination, rather than twisting a narrative all by herself. Vaccine safety and efficacy aside, on a very human level, Klein displays a profound inability to empathise with people dissimilar to her.
To begin to wrap up: I cannot take seriously the idea that Naomi Klein wrote Doppelganger in an effort to step into the perspective of COVID dissidents. I for one, do not feel understood. Klein seems to occupy a black and white world, where all those opposed to COVID mandates are as selfish as they are scientifically illiterate.
Doppelganger is not without its good points. I agree with many regarding the proliferation of conspiracy culture, or the way governments used COVID to push through a privatisation agenda, attack labour rights and funnel money to their donors. In what might turn out to be her most prescient insight, Klein identifies the cynical adoption of COVID resistance by the political Right, in order to gain power. I’ve been saying for a good while that I wouldn’t be at all surprised if COVID ultimately leads to a hard Right government in Washington DC. If someone like Zionist and accused torturer Ron DeSantis does come to occupy the Oval Office however, I would suggest a good portion of the blame will lie with people like Naomi Klein.
In a way that perhaps mirror’s Klein’s experience of Wolf, I find Doppelganger a thoroughly depressing read. It’s a book with a clear message to anyone who expressed concern over the expansion of state power during the COVID era. That message is: people like Naomi Klein absolutely do not care what you have to say. There’s no point in educating yourself on issues you consider important, holding yourself to a scientific standard, correcting your errors and striving to communicate your ideas ever more clearly. The Naomi Klein’s of this world aren’t listening. No matter what you do, they will simply quote stories of vaccine induced time travel as a way to dismiss you, whilst associating you with fascism.
The only lesson to draw from this is to give up on communication. To recognise that you are not engaged in a dialogue, and to stop treating it as such. This is a might is right competition where the team with the most votes wins and lauds it over the losers.
The 19th century economist Frederic Bastiat made the famous observation that ‘When goods don’t cross borders, soldiers will’. In line with Hannah Arednt, I think this is equally applicable to foreign ideas. When they fail to cross the borders of our minds, only fighting remains. Naomi Klein seems to have hired Donald Trump to build a wall so high inside her mind, that no foreign idea will ever enter.
Regrettably, this is the world I see Klein helping to create. To be clear I’m not saying she should embrace anything COVID dissidents are saying, at all. It’s her lack of understanding and haughty attitude I find so objectionable.
Although maybe it’s me. Maybe I’m the man in the mirror. Maybe if Naomi Klein read this review she would find me absolutely intolerable. As I come to the end I have pages and pages of notes that haven’t made it in, so perhaps I can pick up on that and other themes at a future point.
This article is an adapted transcript of a Deep State Consciousness podcast episode. Links to the various platforms are available here.