A review of Naomi Klein’s new book about Naomi Wolf, confusion and fascism.
Editor note: originally published with From the Library
Many confuse leftist writer Naomi Klein with right-wing writer Naomi Wolf. There’s a rhyme on Twitter.
It’s also the framing story for Klein’s new book. Naomi Klein sees Namoi Wolf as her doppelgänger, a German word for an uncanny evil twin. When Wolf became one of America’s biggest sources of COVID-19 disinformation, Klein went on a personal research journey across health, history, fascism, colonialism, the climate, and the future. She finds eerie conclusions.
Wolf vs. Klein.
Naomi Klein is painfully aware she always gets mistaken for Naomi Wolf. They have similar names, looks, religions, and careers, and both write “big idea” non-fiction books, sometimes with overlapping topics!
Yet, Klein doesn’t hate Wolf; she’s obsessed with her, surveying every media appearance the woman made for years, and she knows a lot about double.
Wolf’s first book, The Beauty Myth (1990), a feminist argument on the expectation for women to look and dress a certain way (and buy cosmetic products), is an example of society subjugating women. I agree with Wolf’s point; in 2023, this seems widely accepted.
Wolf’s career had ups and downs. She consulted as a feminist advisor on the 2000 Al Gore presidential campaign and published a book-length libertarian listicle about fascism rising in America, The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot. Ironically, fascism in North America and warnings are a topic of Doppelgänger.
In 2019, something interesting happened. Wolf wrote a left-wing book about governments banning gay love based on her doctoral thesis. It got pulped and never came out. She went on the BBC to promote the book, and the interviewer called out her research as incorrect. Wolf misread historical court records and didn’t consul basic newspaper archives. Klein marks this as Wolf’s Jokerfying moment (my word).
Mainstream media rejected her, so Wolf became reactionary. Platformed as “an exile of the left,” her rhetoric got increasingly deranged: microchip vaccines, 5G polluting air, real feminists like the abortion ban. All nonsense. Twitter suspended her, and X invited her back for now!
Many publicly humiliated Wolf on Twitter. She continues to be humiliated on the app to this day. Humiliation keeps app users returning as an audience. Their schadenfreude, a German word for pleasure from someone from another person’s misfortune, is a troupe in a shared dialect. A shared symbol saying, Look at this crazy person!
Ironically, vilifying right-wing writers offers them a monetization opportunity. Wolf can take haters and make herself famous, creating a network to broadcast disinformation.
Vaccines, Autism, Fitness and COVID Disinformation
COVID was terrible, an acceleration of every bad thing happening in the world, and there’s reason to be deeply skeptical of everything you hear to stay inoculated against bunk information. Klein concedes this.
She recalls knocking on doors for her husband’s parliamentary election with the NDP. She had doorstep conversations with hippy-dippy peace and love flag owners who were very hostile against mandatory vaccinations and lockdowns. These voters distrusted public institutions.
What politicized them? The material events of COVID and competing sources of propaganda. COVID-19 did disrupt people’s lives, often to their detriment. Unemployment, isolation, and, most of all, getting sick with the potential for death or lifelong consequences were radicalizing events. The theoretical ideas of “access” and “bodies in spaces” became literal regarding airborne infection, lockdowns, and work.
Yet COVID was a prime opportunity for disinformation. People took advantage of the confusion to make things up for profit. Klein cites The Disinformation DozenEditSignEditSign, twelve online influencers that researchers traced back to COVID-19 false information. A strange pattern emerges.
Six out of twelve COVID disinformation accounts are accredited medical professionals: Doppelgänger doctors and alternative health experts who told people to ignore the CDC.
There’s a former pharmaceutical executive, pediatrician, gynecologist, chiropractor, osteopath, and holistic psychiatrist, among other “alternative medicine entrepreneurs.” Even Naomi Wolf bills herself as a doctor because she has a Doctorate of Philosophy in English literature and a discredited thesis.
These hucksters claim medical professionals are untrustworthy, yet ironically, they themselves are untrustworthy medical professionals. Again, a doubling.
Why did so many credentialed medical professionals spread COVID-19 denial?
Klein cites profit as the obvious answer: they make money by saying don’t take free vaccines. Buy expensive powders, pills, herbal supplements, and essential oils instead. Their credentials might play into people’s programming to trust doctors. Also, those credentials might make it easier for them to feel overconfident in their own reasoning skills since they went to medical school, and that false confidence causes them to misinterpret complex studies into nonsense.
The body is both universal and personal, another doubling. Wellness is not neutral. Who’s “well” and how we should treat the unwell is a political question of power.
Bodies Hiding Fascism
Klein extends the argument, citing theory and history to show a link between the individual’s hyper-focus on the body and fascism.
Consider the Nazi preoccupation with physical fitness, The National Socialist League of the Reich for Physical Exercise, and the propaganda exercise of the 1936 Olympics. How Nazis saw bodybuilders as the personified ideal Aryan. “Purity” through muscles.
Klein cites recent research into Hans Asperger, the 2018 book Asperger’s Children: The Origins of Autism in Nazi Vienna. Asperger’s was a doctor of cognitive development, the former namesake of Asperger’s Syndrome. In the 1920s, he advocated for people with cognitive differences.
Then in the 1930s, when the Nazis came to power, something changed for Hans Asperger. The double appears again.
New proof shows Asperger collaborated closely with Nazi extermination programs and signed execution warrants for children as young as two. Consider that the Nazi party banned vaccines for Jewish people because they wanted Jewish neighborhoods to get sick.
The lie that vaccines cause autism takes on eerie double meanings in these contexts.
Calls to Action
We are on the cusp of fascist control! That’s a rhetorically attractive idea for writers because then they have something to write against. They can write a book with a title like this:
When Everybody Just Stops Doing The Thing In the Book’s Title, We Will Evoke Change Together!
Klein wonders if a book’s call to action is hubris. A book can identify a trend but not stop it.
Klein acknowledges she previously wrote books making such bold proclamations. So did colleagues who quit writing and started non-profits because writing did not spur real-world action. All of Klein’s previous calls to action were ignored.
- No Logo (1999) warned against the multi-billion dollar branding industries, yet in 2023, everyone and everything is a brand. Branding one’s self is how you get a job.
- Shock Doctrine (2007) extolled community mobilization to stop privatization and profiteering. Yet, COVID Has Made Global Inequality Much Worse, “Global billionaire wealth grew by $4.4 trillion between 2020 and 2021…more than 100 million people fell below the poverty line.”
- In This Changes Everything (2014), Klein argued the world’s leaders needed to act immediately to stop catastrophic mass deaths from the climate crisis. America pulled out of international treaties and refused to decarbonize.
Knowing that the world is in crisis and our leaders refuse to address the problem creates its own sort of double world. The eery vibe of doom-scrolling, seeing the projection of our shared fate but powerless to stop it.
Doppelgänger avoids straightforward answers, perhaps in reaction to the previous books. This call to action is more optical. See the mirror world around you. See the double in yourself. Acknowledge it exists.
Like in the Jordan Peele film Us, take the vision quest and “Find Yourself”
Ask who owns the cages. Who’s locked inside? Who profits off conquest? Who sells the guns, the missiles, the bananas, and the consulting firm’s billable hours?
The book’s call to action is also personal: try not to judge others quickly or too harshly. In a world where digital platforms exist to make us angry and whip us into a frenzy, being kind is a radical act.
Call out dehumanizing generalizations like “all Palestinians,” “every Russian,” “those migrants,” and “the city’s rioting looters.” These generalizations lead to fatal ends.
Klein offers good ideas: be kind, be caring. Cynically, these calls to compassion are sure to be ignored by leaders in business and government. While these ideas are actionable, they require devotion, discipline, and community, three things the world currently lacks.
To conclude, a last call to action from a classic double movie is mentioned in the book.
Dictators free themselves but they enslave the people! Now let us fight to fulfil that promise! Let us fight to free the world — to do away with national barriers — to do away with greed, with hate and intolerance. Let us fight for a world of reason, a world where science and progress will lead to all men’s happiness. Soldiers! in the name of democracy, let us all unite!
— Charlie Chaplin, The Great Dictator (1940)
