Welcome to the mirror world, where nothing is as it seems

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Naomi Klein’s books include No Logo, This Changes Everything and The Shock Doctrine. She is an associate professor in the department of geography at the University of British Columbia, the founding co-director of UBC’s Centre for Climate Justice, and an honorary professor of media and climate at Rutgers University. The following essay is adapted from a speech delivered at the Socialism 2023 conference in Chicago on Sept. 3 and her latest book Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World.

I started thinking about doppelgangers a lot in the first year of the pandemic because … well, it was 2020 and I was stuck at home and I was spending too much time online, because where else was I going to spend my time?

And when I went online in the first year of the pandemic, it was a strange experience. Because I would invariably be greeted by a torrent of people screaming at me or thanking me or expressing their pity for me about things I had said or done. Only it wasn’t me – it was her.

My doppelganger. Which is to say a person whom I have been perennially confused with and conflated with over many years now. She is another author who writes books critical of elite power named Naomi, Naomi Wolf. She will be familiar to Gen Xers as the author of The Beauty Myth and an adviser to Al Gore.

That’s neither here nor there. Because there is nothing particularly remarkable about having a doppelganger: I’ll bet some of you have had the weird experience of bumping into someone with whom you feel an uncanny connection, almost like a living mirror, or perhaps you have had other people repeatedly confuse you with someone else and say you could be twins. And for Black, Brown and Asian folks, it happens a hell of a lot more frequently, with white colleagues and acquaintances constantly mixing you up with people who look nothing like you. There are all kinds of ways of having doppelganger trouble.

The reason I got interested in my doppelganger is because during the pandemic, she started acting very strangely. As so very many people did in that period, spreading a huge amount of misinformation about COVID-19, masking, lockdowns, vaccines and vaccine verification apps. She was not so much a conspiracy theorist as a conspiracy influencer, spreading wild theories that often wildly contradicted one another, seemingly in a successful bid to amass new followers, which she monetized in the form of subscriptions and the like. COVID-19 was nothing, don’t even wear a mask. The vaccine is a bioweapon used to cull us, no, it’s the verification app that is part of a plan to bring a tyrannical Chinese Communist Party social credit system to “the West.”

Unsurprisingly, that message, and particularly her attacks on Joe Biden, made her one of those liberal crossover stars on the Trumpian right. Suddenly she was a regular on Steve Bannon’s show and Tucker Carlson’s and on many lesser-known platforms of their ilk. Her following ballooned.

It also started to get more and more uncanny for me. Because I distinctly remember a moment, in the spring of 2021, when she was making the rounds on Fox, and she was saying something that sounded a little like the argument I made in my 2007 book The Shock Doctrine, about abuses of power under cover of various kinds of states of emergency – except with the facts and evidence carefully removed and coming to panic-inducing conclusions I would never support.

For one example, a couple months after Donald Trump was finally scrapped from the White House, she told Tucker Carlson that the Biden administration was, under the “guise” of a medical emergency, using “emergency orders” to “strip us of our rights – rights to property, rights to assembly, rights to worship, all the rights the Constitution guarantees.”

When I watched the clip, I felt like she had taken my ideas, fed them into one of those Vitamix blenders, added some tropical fruit and then shared the thought-puree with Mr. Carlson, who nodded vehemently. He then served it to his viewers as a kind of palate cleanser between the usual red-meat servings of Great Replacement Theory and “schools are turning your kids trans.”

And all the while, Ms. Wolf’s new followers hounded me about why I had sold out to the “globalists” and was duping the public into believing that masks, vaccines and restrictions on indoor gatherings were legitimate public-health measures amid mass death – as opposed to a pretext for a worldwide shock doctrine. “I think she’s been got at!” someone whose handle is “RickyBaby321″ concluded, telling Ms. Wolf, “I have relegated Naomi Klein to the position of being: ‘The Other Naomi’!”

This continues to happen daily, and I have to tell you: It’s a slightly out-of-body experience to be harangued on social media about your alleged misunderstanding of your own ideas – while being told that another Naomi is a better version of you than you are.

So what can I say? I got interested. Interested in what it means to have a doppelganger – which, in mythology and literature from Fyodor Dostoevsky to Ursula K. Le Guin, is often seen as a harbinger or omen. I got interested in what all of these scrambled political signals could tell us about how the world has changed through what the Indian writer Arundhati Roy described as COVID-19’s “portal,” and how understanding those changes might help us get our bearings in this new place.

So I started to watch this person who so many others thought was me with a kind of anthropological curiosity, hoping she might serve as a narrow aperture through which to see the many derangements of our moment. Or maybe like the White Rabbit in Alice in Wonderland, leading me down into an upside-down place, or what I started calling the Mirror World, where she now hangs out with Steve Bannon and what he refers to as “the War Room Posse.”

One thing I have noticed in that Mirror World is that the Shock Doctrine is far from the only left idea for which the right is creating a twisted doppelganger. There are all kinds of strange appropriations and mimicries under way.

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Remember the white parents shouting “I can’t breathe” about mask mandates – just months after Black Lives Matter demonstrators shouted “I can’t breathe” in outrage at the murder of George Floyd? And in the U.S., they appropriated this Black liberation slogan even as they voted for candidates promising to balloon local police budgets so that there would be more people for whom those three words could well be their last.

Those were also some of the same people who held up anti-vax placards declaring “My Body My Choice” – but said nothing or cheered when the right to a safe abortion was stripped away in state after state.

In Canada, one of the symbols of the movement calling for justice for Indigenous survivors of the genocidal Indian residential-school system is the orange T-shirt with the slogan “Every Child Matters” – and wouldn’t you know it, a group of white anti-vax mothers decided it would be a good idea to sell orange workout tank tops that declared vaccines to be “Canada’s Second Genocide.”

Lately, some of these same figures are turning their energies toward denying the reality of the Indigenous genocide. A group of them even showed up at the site of the former Kamloops residential school wielding shovels, declaring they were going to do their own research and “investigations.”

This pattern is rampant: on the one hand, appropriation and trivializations of precious language and symbols used to fight real state terror and cover-ups – on the other hand, aggressive attacks on those very movements, including in the pro-cop renaissance, the abortion bans, the wave of book banning and other attempts to make knowing true history an illegal act.

This dynamic is important to understand. So I started listening to Steve Bannon rather religiously, especially when my doppelganger was on. And I was struck, over and over again, by the way he took issues that had previously been the political territory of the left, absorbed them and then mixed them up with all kinds of very dangerous ideas. To put it bluntly, he was creating a kind of twisted doppelganger of the left.

For instance, he loved to have my doppelganger on to talk about why vaccine apps would bring in tyranny by tech. He folded this into a basket of issues he calls “Big Tech Warfare” – which, let’s face it, could well be the title of a segment on left-wing media about drone warfare and border violence and worker surveillance and online censorship of dissident voices.

But in Mr. Bannon’s world it’s about vaccines and social-media companies suspending the accounts of high-profile conservatives and “transhumanism” – for which he has a dedicated correspondent whose sole role appears to be to scare listeners with accounts of the many ways that technology companies dream of an “upgraded” humanity aided by implants, robotics and gene splicing.

And this is important because it reflects Mr. Bannon’s skill as an electoral strategist. With tech fears, he has identified a neglected issue with cross-partisan appeal: Many of us are concerned about the dehumanizing impact of tech on workers who are increasingly treated as extensions of machines (I know I am), not to mention the dystopian possibilities of a future in which the rich can buy genetic upgrades for themselves and their kids. Many conservatives, meanwhile, oppose this kind of techno-fetishism for different reasons; they see it as an affront to God’s plan.

Most importantly, Mr. Bannon knows that the Democrats aren’t doing much of anything about any of our tech concerns, from data thievery to surveillance, because the revolving door with Silicon Valley is spinning too quickly. It’s in this context that he knows a lot of people will be attracted to anyone who seems to be addressing their fears, even if it’s a charade.

Mr. Bannon recognized similar neglect happening around Big Pharma. Drug-company price gouging and profiteering is a classic left issue, and many continue to fight for universal public health care, pharmacare and freedom from medical debt. But I think if we are honest, there was not a robust left response to the many ways the health care industry profiteered off the back of the pandemic, including the outrageous patents that should never have been allowed to be placed on vaccines developed and bulk-purchased with public dollars.

We grumbled and tweeted, yes, and some did much more. But did we shut down cities the way the trucker convoys did, demanding free pharmacare and expanded public health care and an end to global vaccine apartheid? We didn’t. And mainstream liberals had little to say about it except “get your vax” and “In Fauci We Trust.”

Ground was ceded, and Mr. Bannon became the one taking on Big Pharma’s greed – but not the actual, provable scandals right before our eyes. His scandals are the warped mirror, where those vaccines and apps were allegedly designed to track and cull us.

Here’s the part that chills me: On his show, Mr. Bannon sometimes plays audio montages of MSNBC and CNN shows being “brought to you by Pfizer” – the clear implication being that they cannot be trusted because they are in the pay of these companies. It’s rule “by the wealthy, for the wealthy – against you,” he says. “Until you wake up.” When he does this, it strikes me that he sounds like a great many of us on the left, including me. But, as always in the Mirror World, nothing is as it seems.

There are many rising political stars in the U.S. who follow a similar playbook, one that William Callison and Quinn Slobodian, both scholars of European politics, have termed political “diagonalism.” It’s a new political formation that appropriates from the left, but always leans hard right.

Diagonalist politicians promise a mix-and-match of bringing back factory jobs that pay family-supporting wages, building the border wall, fighting the toxic drug supply, liberating speech from Big Tech, banning “woke” curriculums and taking on the “globalists” (which is often just code for Jews). Very similar versions of diagonalism have taken root in countries around the world, from Sweden to Brazil to Italy.

I am not surprised that this mash-up of anti-corporate stances with highly xenophobic nationalisms is resonating. In the past, I have been part of internationalist left movements that protested outside meetings of the World Trade Organization, the World Economic Forum in Davos, G8 summits and the International Monetary Fund for their real roles in undermining democracies and advancing the interests of transnational capital.

In the U.S., we called out both major parties for being beholden to corporate donors and serving the rich rather than the people who voted them into office. This was the energy behind Occupy Wall Street, and then behind Bernie Sanders, and that coursed through various battles against new oil and gas projects. But these movements faced severe state repression and also made many mistakes – and obviously never won power.

And now we find ourselves in this strange place where our critiques of oligarchic rule are being appropriated by the hard right and turned into sinister doppelgangers of themselves.

The structural critiques of capitalism are gone, and in their place are discombobulated conspiracies that somehow frame deregulated capitalism as communism in disguise. This trend is perfectly distilled by Giorgia Meloni, who became Italy’s first female prime minister in October, 2022, and is leader of Fratelli d’Italia, which has deep fascist roots in the country.

An early partner in Steve Bannon’s project of knitting together far-right parties across borders, Ms. Meloni threads her speeches with pop-culture references and rails against a system that reduces everyone to consumers. She has also declared, in a supposed rebuke to “woke” ideology, that “I am a woman, I am a mother, I am Italian, I am Christian” – as if anyone is trying to keep her from being these things.

Watching her meteoric rise, I was reminded of how different Italy was in the summer of 2001, when the alter-globalization movement reached its highest point, drawing hundreds of thousands of people to the streets of Genoa during a G8 summit to protest corporate attacks on democracy and culture, and the effects of rampant consumerism.

That movement came from the left – young Italians, alongside farmers and trade unionists, defended labour rights as well as migrant rights, while taking pride in their country’s distinct culture.

But in a pattern that repeated itself in many countries, left-wing parties lost their confidence after the Sept. 11 attacks and attendant security and surveillance crackdowns, and the legacy of that faltering is obvious: Today it is Ms. Meloni denouncing a system in which everyone is reduced to being “perfect consumer slaves” – only instead of offering an analysis of global capital, a system that must enclose all aspects of life inside the market in order to mine them as new profit centres, she blames trans people, immigrants, secularists, internationalism and the left for a hollowness at the core of modernity.

And while she rails against the “big financial speculators,” she has no policies to rein them in, only attacks on Italy’s meagre unemployment protections.

Steve Bannon isn’t offering his listeners any real alternative to the corporate predation he rails against, either – he’s just fleecing them in more small-time ways, telling them to buy precious metals and disaster-ready meals. Similarly, he adopts many of the arguments of the anti-war left to oppose ballooning U.S. military spending in Ukraine, accusing the “cartel” ruling Washington of being in the pocket of “the military-industrial complex” – and then does everything he can to aim that same sprawling complex directly at China, a surefire recipe for World War III.

Still, you can’t blame a strategist for being strategic. And it’s highly strategic to pick up the resonant issues that your opponents have carelessly allowed to go dormant.

The more I immersed myself in the worlds that my doppelganger now inhabits, the more I started to feel that the doppelganger effect was generalizing. Issues that we on the left had once championed full-throated and in the streets had disappeared from a great many progressive spaces. And now they were being usurped, taken over by their twisted doubles in the Mirror World.

So I guess what I am saying is that I’m not the only one with a doppelganger. The left – the socialist, anti-capitalist left – also has a doppelganger. It calls itself populism. It calls itself “inclusive nationalism.” It sometimes calls itself “MAGA Plus.”

By saying they are the left’s doppelganger I am not saying they are the same as us, or equivalent to us, flip sides of the same coin. Mine is not a both-sides argument.

I am saying we are connected to these forces in that they feed off of our setbacks and defeats – at the hands of the liberal state. And they also feed off our silences, missteps and failures of generosity, however understandable they may be.

That is not the only source of their power: They are also feeding off of and drawing power from white and Christian supremacy, and other supremacist ideologies around the world. But I would argue that we cannot understand why they are surging now without looking at the ways they are filling vacuums created by decades of often-successful campaigns to crush the left – and the ways we on the left have crushed ourselves without anyone’s help.

As I said earlier, in mythology and literature, the arrival of one’s doppelganger is often seen as a message or a warning that something needs a protagonist’s attention; that they are in danger of being overtaken, subsumed.

Well, we on the left are getting doppelganged, and we need to pay close attention.

Partially excerpted from Doppelganger by Naomi Klein. Copyright © 2023 Naomi Klein. Published by Alfred A. Knopf Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited. Reproduced by arrangement with the publisher. All rights reserved.