Naomi Klein is haunted by her doppelganger Naomi Wolf. But is the difference between the anti-establishment writers as clear as she asserts?
In February 2021, Naomi Klein, the Canadian public intellectual and author of No Logo, posted an eight-word Tweet about Naomi Wolf, the American public intellectual and author of The Beauty Myth: “Your periodic reminder to keep your Naomis straight.” That weary joke about their long history of confusion has now become a 400-page book.
Readers who only know Klein for her Guardian articles on the climate crisis and Wolf as a third-wave feminist writer might find Klein’s plea for distinction excessive. But those familiar with Wolf’s recent assertions – that, for instance, the bull imagery at the 2022 Birmingham Commonwealth Games is evidence that Satan directed the global pandemic response to secure eternal mastery over the Earth – may wonder why Klein goes anywhere without explanatory signage and a choir performing Madonna’s She’s Not Me.
Doppelganger is a weird book. How could it be anything else? It is a deposition filed to prove that the author is not the same person as her subject. It is a horror story that describes how it feels to have your public identity intruded upon, cuckoo-like, by a monstrous rival. It is an attempt to understand the popularity of the conspiracy circus in which Wolf is now a leading performer. Klein calls this “the mirror world”, in which “Other Naomi” exists as her twisted reflection. And it carries the charge of all doppelganger stories – what if the figure in the mirror were more powerful than the one in the world? What if Naomi Klein were the Other Naomi?
She may be. Wolf regularly appears on Steve Bannon’s top-rated, 10-million-plus-downloaded podcast War Room. There, her breathless monologues about quarantine camps and vaccine-related “baby die-off” compel those who believe the false assertions she makes. They also compel those who may not believe them, but see such misinformation as a useful catalyst to the destruction of the institutions they despise. They even compel those who think that such institutions are vitally important, and regard Wolf’s later career with horror and disbelief – but watch all the same. Klein is one of these: she was supposed to be writing a book about something else (what, she doesn’t say).