Seeing Double.

• Author: Lueders, Bill
• Position: Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World

For a brief while after I began reading Naomi Kleins brave new book, Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World, I wondered whether she had decided to take a break from the weighty topics of her earlier books.

Instead of the devastating costs of capitalism, the dangers of shock-driven politics, the existential threat of climate change, Doppelganger is about something much more manageable and mundane: how often she is mistaken for another public intellectual with the same first name, Naomi Wolf.

By the end, I wondered if maybe Klein had come closer than ever to cracking the code that reveals what, really, is at the heart of our collective dysfunction.

The author of No Logo, The Shock Doctrine, and This Changes Everything, among other books, Klein brings her analytical prowess and keen wit to an exploration of the concept of doubles, as exemplified by her career-long misidentification with Wolf, the feminist intellectual and author of the famed 1990 book The Beauty Myth who went on to become a full-blown conspiracy theorist hitching a ride to fame on the backs of people like Steve Bannon.

Klein does a deep dive into the mirror world inhabited by Wolf "and her fellow travelers who are now in open warfare against objective reality"--a sizable chunk of people in the United States and elsewhere, including Klein's native Canada. Her central and recurring example is the explosion of denialism and deceit regarding the COVID-19 pandemic.

Wolf, she notes, has blithely compared Dr. Anthony Fauci to Satan and "portrayed virtually every measure health officials had taken to control the virus as part of these plots, ones with the nefarious goals of grabbing our DNA, sickening us, sterilizing us, killing our babies, tracking our every move, turning children into affectless drones, overthrowing the U.S. Constitution, eroding the power of the West." She's even claimed that vaccinated people "have no scent anymore. You can't smell them."

Klein, realizing that her own identity and that of her doppelganger "were being not confused but conflated, treated as one interchangeable Naomi," wades into this pool of madness, seeking to understand and not just rebuke. She mines what commonality there is to be found, such as their mutual "skepticism of elite power." And she tries to figure out how the longing for attention drew Wolf ever deeper into the rabbit hole of...