Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World

Content Warning: This section discusses fascist ideology, antisemitism, and homophobia.

The Introduction opens with quotes from Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s novel The Double and Jordan Peele’s film Us.

Naomi Klein introduces “Other Naomi.” In recent years, many people have confused Klein with someone else who shares her first name. Klein has made a career writing and talking about “corporate power and its ravages” (9) from a leftist position. Since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, Other Naomi has taken up a far-right position alongside Steve Bannon and Tucker Carlson, although she used to be politically liberal.

Klein researches the conspiracy theories that Other Naomi pedals, hoping to understand why people like Other Naomi seem to be “in open warfare against objective reality” (11). She sees this woman as her doppelganger, a term that literally means “double walker.” Other Naomi’s political shift from liberal to far-right has also made her “a doppelganger of her former self” (12). During COVID-19, many people lost friends or family members to the same kind of conspiratorial thinking that Other Naomi is now involved in.

Klein has written in the past about the impact of large-scale shocks on societies around the world, notably in The Shock Doctrine (2007).