Doppelganger by Naomi Klein book review: Help! My doppelganger is a conspiracy theorist

Naomi Klein is often confused for Naomi Wolf. Before Covid, this was just an annoyance for the former. During the pandemic, though, things got a lot worse.

Naomi Klein is often confused for Naomi Wolf, pictured in 1999. Before Covid, this was just an annoyance for the former. During the pandemic, though, things got a lot worse.

When it comes to news, and politics, and Covid, and the question of whether a shadowy fascist, child-abusing elite wants to plunge us into worldwide, technocratic slavery, but only after killing most of us with malign vaccines full of time-travelling nanoparticles, then we all know by now that some people have lost the plot. They are barking. They are deluded. They are nuts. They are, as Naomi Klein puts it in Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World, “in open warfare against objective reality”. The trouble is, that’s also what they think about us. And who is right?

Don‘t worry, it’s not a trick question. We are. And Klein is one of us. The problem she has, though, is that people think she’s one of them. This is because they confuse her with her near namesake, Naomi Wolf. To remind you, Klein is a Canadian writer and social activist who made her name with trendy political books (No Logo, The Shock Doctrine) before recently focusing on climate politics. Wolf, meanwhile, is an American writer and social activist who made hers with a trendy feminist book (The Beauty Myth) before recently going batshit crazy about things such as vaccines.

Canadian author and climate change activist Naomi Klein.

Superficially, the two Naomis have a lot in common. Beyond the names and the jobs, they are both big-haired and Jewish. Both have engaged with the anti-capitalist movement and both have fiercely and controversially criticised Zionism. Also, both have been married to film producers called Avram, whose surnames begin with an “L”.

In the early chapters Klein deals with all this with almost giggly incredulity. It was ironic, she concedes, that a writer who made her name by opposing the concept of brands (No Logo) had lost control of her own personal brand. There is, she tells us, even a popular internet rhyme that highlighted the problem: “If the Naomi be Klein/ you’re doing just fine/ If the Naomi be Wolf/ Oh, buddy. Oooooof.”

Before Covid, this was just an annoyance for Klein. Perhaps you remember the furore around Wolf‘s 2019 book on the Victorian repression of homosexuality, Outrages, after British journalist Matthew Sweet informed her live on Radio 4 that she had completely misunderstood the facts on which it was based. To precis, she had thought that “death recorded” in court notes meant scores of gay men had been executed. Actually, it meant they hadn’t been. The exchange was devastating for Wolf’s credibility. It was also hilarious. Only less so, probably, if people thought you were her.

During the pandemic, though, things got a lot worse. Wolf evolved into a full-blown vaccine conspiracist. One moment she would be likening the unvaccinated to Jews in Nazi Germany, the next she would be tweeting about Covid passports leading to global slavery, or Bill Gates being behind it all, or pseudo-medical theories so nonsensical that it’s hard to know where to start.

Whenever this happened, Klein would be bombarded with derision. “Lost all respect for Naomi Klein,” people would tweet. Klein would respond by joining internet pile-ons ridiculing the other Naomi. “Not that Naomi,” her Twitter bio said. She’s very honest about why she did this. “I was feeling less important,” she writes, “like I was disappearing.” In a sense, she was. Commissioned to write about Gates and climate change, she simply couldn’t manage it. “Anything I wrote about Gates,” she realised, “would likely fuel my Other Naomi problem.”

This is not, though, just a fun book about one Naomi being confused with another. Starting there, Klein uses the conflation to examine the phenomenon of people going, as she puts it, “down the rabbit hole”.

Klein admits her response to Wolf began as derision, but morphed into a sort of terrified awe. For Wolf, she began to realise, was having a whale of a time, first on the podcast hosted by Donald Trump’s former consigliere, Steve Bannon, then as a fixture on the madder fringes of Fox News. Rather than sinking into obscurity, she had instead soared in prestige and prominence in a “mirror world” that defined itself in opposition to the one Wolf had left.

Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World by Naomi Klein

This is a brilliant insight, but it’s a column, not a book. With another 200 pages to fill, Klein broadens her thesis. Conspiracy theories, she tells us, are the twisted doppelganger of investigative journalism. At this point, it’s probably worth remembering that quite a few reviewers accused her most influential book, The Shock Doctrine, of conspiratorialism itself. In it she argued that neoliberal forces consciously exploited disasters – from Hurricane Katrina to the Asian tsunami to wars – to pursue capitalist agendas. Indeed, she went further, floating the idea that “the architects of the invasion” of Iraq “had unleashed ferocious violence because they could not crack open the closed economies of the Middle East by peaceful means”.

Klein can see it too. “I felt like she had taken my ideas,” she writes of Wolf, “and fed them into a bonkers blender.”