Naomi Klein on following her ‘doppelganger’ down the conspiracy rabbit hole – and why millions of people have entered an alternative political reality | Naomi Klein

rewrite this content and keep HTML tags In my defence, it was never my intent to write about it. I did not have time. No one asked me to. And several people strongly cautioned against it. Not now – not with the literal and figurative fires roiling our planet. And certainly not about this.Other Naomi – that is how I refer to her now. This person with whom I have been chronically confused for over a decade. My big-haired doppelganger. A person whom so many others appear to find indistinguishable from me. A person who does many extreme things that cause strangers to chastise me or thank me or express their pity for me.I am referring, of course, to Naomi Wolf. In the 1990s, she was a standard-bearer for “third wave” feminism, then a leading adviser to US vice-president Al Gore. Today, she is a full-time, industrial-scale disseminator of unproven conspiracy theories on everything from Islamic State beheadings to vaccines. And the worst part of the confusion is that I can see why people get their Naomis mixed up. We both write big-idea books (my No Logo, her Beauty Myth; my Shock Doctrine, her End of America; my This Changes Everything, her Vagina). We both have brown hair that sometimes goes blond from over-highlighting (hers is longer and more voluminous than mine). We’re both Jewish.There are too many instances and varieties of identity confusion to summarize here. Like the time I offended a famous Australian author by failing to remember our prior encounter at a Christmas party hosted by our shared publisher (it was Wolf’s publisher, not mine, and I had been to no such party). Or the time Jordan Peterson slammed me on his podcast for allegedly writing The Beauty Myth (to be fair, he also slams me for things I have written). Or the guy who tweeted that I had been losing my mind for years and now equated having to get a Covid vaccine with Jews in Nazi Germany having to wear yellow stars – linking, of course, to a statement by Wolf saying that very thing.There was even a moment, while reading an article in the Guardian about her being arrested at a protest in New York, when I experienced the unmistakable chill of the doppelganger, an uncanny feeling Sigmund Freud described as “that species of the frightening that goes back to what was once well known and had long been familiar”.“Her partner, the film producer Avram Ludwig, was also arrested.”I read the sentence to my partner, the film director and producer Avram Lewis (who goes by Avi).“What the actual fuck?” he asked.“I know,” I said. “It’s like a goddamned conspiracy.”Then we both burst out laughing.Most confusingly, my doppelganger and I once had distinct writerly lanes (hers being women’s bodies, sexuality, and leadership; mine being corporate assaults on democracy and the climate crisis). But over a decade ago, she started talking and writing about power grabs under cover of states of emergency – and the once-sharp yellow line that divided those lanes began to go wobbly.By early 2021, when she was casting nearly every public health measure marshalled to control the Covid pandemic as a covert plan by the Chinese Communist party, the World Economic Forum and Anthony Fauci to usher in a sinister new world order, I began to feel as if I was reading a parody of The Shock Doctrine, one with all facts and evidence carefully removed, and coming to cartoonishly broad conclusions I would never support. And all the while, my doppelganger troubles deepened, in part because I was relatively quiet in this period, isolated in my Canadian home and unable to perform so many of the activities that once reinforced my own public identity.In those lonely months, I would wander online to try to find some simulation of the friendships and communities I missed, and find, instead, The Confusion. The denunciations and excommunication (“I can’t believe I used to respect Naomi Klein. WTF has happened to her??”). The glib expressions of sympathy (“The real victim in all this here is Naomi Klein” and “Thoughts and prayers to Naomi Klein”). It was an out-of-body experience: if she, according to this torrent of people, was me, who, then, was I?All of this may help explain why I made the admittedly odd decision to follow my doppelganger into the rabbit hole of her rabbit holes, chasing after any insight into her strange behaviour and that of her newfound allies that I could divine. I recognize that this decision is somewhat out of character. After all, for a quarter of a century, I have been a person who writes about corporate power and its ravages. I sneak into abusive factories in faraway countries and across borders to military occupations; I report in the aftermath of oil spills and category 5 hurricanes. And yet in the months and years during the pandemic – a time when cemeteries ran out of space, and billionaires blasted themselves into outer space – everything else that I had to write or might have written appeared only as an unwanted intrusion, a rude interruption.The doppelganger: Naomi Wolf. Photograph: Mike McGregor/The GuardianIn June 2021, as this research began to truly spiral out of my control, a strange new weather event dubbed a “heat dome” descended on the southern coast of British Columbia, the part of Canada where I now live with my family. The thick air felt like a snarling, invasive entity with malevolent intent. More than 600 people died, most of them elderly; an estimated 10bn marine creatures were cooked alive on our shores; an entire town went up in flames. An editor asked if I, as someone engaged in the climate change fight for 15 years, would file a report about what it was like to live through this unprecedented climate event.“I’m working on something else,” I told him, the stench of death filling my nostrils.“Can I ask what?”“You cannot.”There were plenty of other important things I neglected during this time of feverish subterfuge. That summer, I allowed my nine-year-old to spend so many hours watching a gory nature series called Animal Fight Club that he began to ram me at my desk “like a great white shark”. I did not spend nearly enough time with my octogenarian parents, who live a mere half-hour’s drive away, despite their statistical vulnerability to the deadly pandemic that was rampaging across the globe and despite that lethal heat dome. In the fall, my husband ran for office in a national election; though I did go on a few campaign trips, I know I could have done more.My deepest shame rests with the unspeakable number of podcasts I mainlined, the sheer volume of hours lost that I will never get back listening to her and her fellow travelers who are now in open warfare against objective reality. A master’s degree’s worth of hours. I told myself it was “research”. That this was not, in fact, an epically frivolous and narcissistic waste of my compressed writing time or of the compressed time on the clock of our fast-warming planet. I rationalised that Other Naomi, as one of the most effective creators and disseminators of misinformation and disinformation about many of our most urgent crises, and as someone who has seemingly helped inspire large numbers to take to the streets in rebellion against an almost wholly hallucinated “tyranny”, is at the nexus of several forces that, while ridiculous in the extreme, are nonetheless important, since the confusion they sow and the oxygen they absorb increasingly stand in the way of pretty much anything helpful or healthful that humans might, at some point, decide to accomplish together.For most of the first decade of my doppelganger trouble, I didn’t bother much with correcting the record. I told myself that getting confused with Naomi Wolf was primarily a social media thing. My friends and colleagues knew who I was, and when I interacted with people I didn’t know in the physical world, her name did not used to come up; neither were we entangled in articles or book reviews. I therefore filed away Naomi confusion in the category of “things that happen on the internet that are not quite real”.Back then, I saw the problem as more structural than personal. A handful of young men had got unfathomably rich designing tech platforms that, in the name of “connection”, not…

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