How to survive being mistaken for a conspiracy theorist
In February 2021, Naomi Klein, the Canadian public intellectual and author of No Logo, posted an eight-word Tweet about Naomi Wolf, the American public intellectual and author of The Beauty Myth: “Your periodic reminder to keep your Naomis straight.” That weary joke about their long history of confusion has now become a 400-page book.
Readers who only know Klein for her Guardian articles on the climate crisis and Wolf as a third-wave feminist writer might find Klein’s plea for distinction excessive. But those familiar with Wolf’s recent assertions – that, for instance, the bull imagery at the 2022 Birmingham Commonwealth Games is evidence that Satan directed the global pandemic response to secure eternal mastery over the Earth – may wonder why Klein goes anywhere without explanatory signage and a choir performing Madonna’s She’s Not Me.
Doppelganger is a weird book. How could it be anything else? It is a deposition filed to prove that the author is not the same person as her subject. It is a horror story that describes how it feels to have your public identity intruded upon, cuckoo-like, by a monstrous rival. It is an attempt to understand the popularity of the conspiracy circus in which Wolf is now a leading performer. Klein calls this “the mirror world”, in which “Other Naomi” exists as her twisted reflection. And it carries the charge of all doppelganger stories – what if the figure in the mirror were more powerful than the one in the world? What if Naomi Klein were the Other Naomi?
She may be. Wolf regularly appears on Steve Bannon’s top-rated, 10-million-plus-downloaded podcast War Room. There, her breathless monologues about quarantine camps and vaccine-related “baby die-off” compel those who believe the false assertions she makes. They also compel those who may not believe them, but see such misinformation as a useful catalyst to the destruction of the institutions they despise. They even compel those who think that such institutions are vitally important, and regard Wolf’s later career with horror and disbelief – but watch all the same. Klein is one of these: she was supposed to be writing a book about something else (what, she doesn’t say).
I understand the compulsion. In 2019, Wolf published Outrages, in which she claimed that the Victorian justice system had carried out “mass executions” of men for consensual sexual acts. In an interview for BBC Radio 3, I brought the bad news that she had misread her sources: these executions had not happened, and the acts were not consensual. Wolf was at first gracious, but later decided that Bill Gates had paid me, via the BBC, to take her “off the chessboard” and silence her message about the true nature of the Covid pandemic. (Those who know the complexity of the BBC freelance invoicing system may not be persuaded.)
Victorian studies gained a teaching example from Wolf’s sloppy, florid and tendentious work. But that’s no comfort to Klein. She and Wolf are in the same business. They investigate the power structures of the contemporary corporate world, but Klein does it for newspapers and websites that employ editors to test her assertions, while Wolf blathers freely on podcasts about how the Covid vaccine is a bioweapon used by the Chinese government to assassinate community leaders in her part of the Hudson Valley. The market, unfortunately, favours the latter.
Yet I’m not sure if Doppelganger really faces up to the consequences of its own metaphor. Klein concedes that “the line between unsupported conspiracy claims and reliable investigative research is neither as firm nor as stable as many of us would like to believe.” But she places herself and her allies very firmly on the correct side of that line. It’s common, she says, for “anti-establishment writers and scholars [who] attempt to analyse the underlying systems that built and uphold power in our world… to be dismissed as conspiracy theorists.” Well, this just in: sometimes they are.
It’s reasonable of Klein to complain that Right-wing conspiracy culture has borrowed the language of the Left – elites, globalists, “othering” – but it has also borrowed its vices, of which Klein’s own work is not free. On her tour for her 2007 book The Shock Doctrine – which suggested that Chicago School monetarism was the ideological extension of the CIA’s secret brainwashing project MKUltra – Klein twice told the audience at the Royal Festival Hall that she wasn’t a conspiracy theorist. It seemed necessary.
Klein’s relationship with Wolf gave her the mirror as an instrument to analyse conspiracy culture. I’m not sure the rest of us need it. We might simply think of Wolf’s work as a bad habit that flourishes in media spaces where standards are sufficiently low to permit it: Steve Bannon’s War Room, for instance, or (to pick an example closer to home) GB News, which was happy to broadcast Wolf’s falsehoods about the vaccine, unopposed, until Ofcom intervened.
But Klein needs the mirror because, ultimately, Doppelganger is about her. Her foundational success, No Logo, gave her something she didn’t relish: a successful personal brand. (It was one of the ideas against which the book itself was written.) Naomi Wolf’s descent into crankery has tainted that brand, doing Klein a strange favour – which makes her and Steve Bannon the sole beneficiaries.
For those incorporated into Wolf’s fantasies, on the other hand, there is no such consolation. As one of those people, I can tolerate it. I can even be amused by it. So, I dare say, can Bill Gates and Anthony Fauci. But I’m not sure about the bereaved parents whose babies’ deaths Wolf has falsely ascribed to the Covid vaccine. I would not speak for them, but I would say this: their grief is more important than the wretched narcissism of a writer who has decided that she must bring truth to the world, even if she has to invent it herself.
Doppelganger is published by Penguin at ￡25. To order your copy, call 0844 871 1514 or Telegraph Books