Like so much else in our world nowadays, Naomi Klein’s book Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World tells a story that begins as humor, then becomes horror. Klein, a Canadian, first rose to prominence in the late 1990s with her book No Logo, an in-depth look at branding and advertising, which became a foundational text for the nascent anti-globalization movement. (To give you an idea of its reach, the band Radiohead praised it in the pages of Rolling Stone.) Klein’s subsequent career as an author, journalist, and filmmaker brought her a level of name recognition unusual for an intellectual. Which makes it funny, at first, that Doppelganger begins with Klein being mistaken for someone else.
Naomi Wolf, an American, is also an author and journalist, best known for her 1991 book The Beauty Myth, which made her a prominent figure in the third-wave feminist movement. Klein’s investigations into matters of global policy were very different from—though not entirely unrelated to—Wolf’s beat. But on social media, especially what was then Twitter, Klein consistently found herself being mistaken for Wolf. The reasons aren’t entirely clear. Yes, they’re both middle-aged Jewish women named Naomi. And yes, they’re both writers who have been active online. Perhaps those facts alone, along with the context-flattening nature of social media, made them seem interchangeable, regardless of whatever each of them actually wrote. Either way, Klein maintained a sense of humor about it—that is, until concerned readers began asking why she was saying such strange things about politics and, especially, the Covid pandemic. Confused, Klein looked into what The Other Naomi, as she came to think of her, was up to. She was unnerved by what she discovered.
Wolf had, in online-speak, gotten red-pilled. She was spreading baseless conspiracy theories, whose very lack of evidence somehow demonstrated to her the nefarious forces at work suppressing the truth. She had become a frequent guest on Steve Bannon’s podcast. Many of us have learned to tune out people like Wolf, once-serious people who have degenerated into celebrity trolls. Yet Klein, her interest piqued by being confused for The Other Naomi for so long, cannot look away. She reads everything Wolf writes and listens to every podcast she appears on. (Klein’s pandemic-lockdown habit of listening to shouty podcasts rather than, for example, Joni Mitchell eventually begins to annoy her family. Relatable, as they say.) This all makes for some light comedy early in her book. But she soon chases Wolf down some alarming rabbit holes before emerging with a lucid account of what, exactly, caused Wolf to lose her perspective. Klein concludes that Wolf lives in a different world—the Mirror World of the book’s title. And there are millions like her.
It is one thing for obsessives to swap theories on global conspiracies among themselves. It is quite another for otherwise-normal people to become enmeshed in those theories. I will never forget the day I drove my child to a frisbee game and saw the initials WWG1WGA on the bumper sticker of a truck in the parking lot. This stands for “Where We Go One We Go All,” the motto of the QAnon movement. (The quote comes from the 1996 film White Squall, starring Jeff Bridges as the captain of a sailing vessel for teenage boys who face a fearsome storm. “The Coming Storm” figures in QAnon lore as a term for the revolution that will rout pedophilic vampires from the halls of power.) A normal parent who takes their kids to frisbee after a day at work should never know the slogan, let alone emblazon it on their F-150. So how did this happen?
As Doppelganger expands its scope from Wolf herself to people like the QAnon parents I’ve observed, Klein introduces the term “diagonalism,” which was coined by William Callison and Quinn Slobodian, scholars of European politics, as a way to describe the strange alliances forming on the continent. They write:
Born in part from transformations in technology and communication, diagonalists tend to contest conventional monikers of left and right (while generally arcing toward far-right beliefs), to express ambivalence if not cynicism toward parliamentary politics, and to blend convictions about holism and even spirituality with a dogged discourse of individual liberties. At the extreme end, diagonal movements share a conviction that all power is conspiracy.
“All power is conspiracy”—that sums it up pretty well. Klein finds that the residents of the Mirror World are often obsessed with health, purity, cleanliness. Many of them are women, and many of them have social-media accounts where they post charming images of family life alongside extreme anti-vaccine messaging. Jarring, but also weirdly consistent. The idealized, even sanitized images of hearth and home make it troublingly easy to view the outside world, with its modern technologies and shadowy forces, as fundamentally antagonistic. Some of the messages on these accounts are so bizarre that they read almost like parodies. How, one may ask, can anyone take this stuff seriously?
Klein argues that the absurdities of the Mirror World play to its advantage. If harmful ideas come off as jokes to outsiders, they won’t be taken seriously—and can thus accrue power without attracting any critical attention. Borrowing from Philip Roth, she calls this process pipik-ing. Roth’s Operation Shylock is also a doppelganger story, in which a fictional Roth finds, to his horror, that his identity has been usurped by an imposter. Real Roth comes to think of Imposter Roth as “Pipik,” a Yiddish term often applied to mischievous children in his youth (it literally translates as “bellybutton”). To pipik is to treat everything as a joke, to superficialize everything, to the point where nothing can be taken seriously. Thinking of all the pipiks striding across the world stage—Trump in the United States, Boris Johnson in the United Kingdom, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil—Klein wonders, “Is it possible to escape a tractor beam like pipikism? Once an idea has been pipiked, can it ever be serious again?”
A sobering example of this pipik-ing takes place in Klein’s own backyard, British Columbia. “In May 2021, the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc First Nation, an Indigenous community in the interior of British Columbia, issued a statement that would reverberate around the world,” Klein writes. “It said that it had located the remains of 215 children in unmarked graves on the grounds of the former Kamloops Indian Residential School, an institution that had been in operation for nearly a century.” The news seemed to confirm suspicions that had circulated in the Indigenous community for decades—namely, that the Canadian government had perpetrated crimes of the most horrific sort against its most vulnerable residents. Demonstrations occurred at reservations across Canada, led by members of the Indigenous community. Some non-Indigenous Canadians also wished to show their support. Following messages on Facebook, the We Stand in Solidarity Convoy was born. Nearly four hundred trucks drove several hours to the reservation and then passed by without actually stopping, thus acknowledging the community’s grief while still giving it space. “The convoy was met with cheers all along the way, and in some cases whole towns came to greet them and share food,” Klein writes. “When the trucks made it to the former residential school, honking their airhorns as they passed, many members of the Secwépemc Nation greeted them with ceremonial drumming, warrior songs, and burning sage. Fists were raised in resolve, and faces were washed in tears.”
But just eight months later, another convoy rolled across the Great White North, this one far more disruptive. A group of truckers who objected to vaccination measures took to the road to express their displeasures, gaining thousands of followers along the way. Their complaints quickly grew to encompass everything from lockdown restrictions to the veracity of the Indigenous community’s claims concerning the residential schools. U.S. media picked up on the story, making this second convoy much better known than the We Stand in Solidarity Convoy.
One could not ask for a more dramatic example of pipik-ing. A group of largely white citizens, unable to face the guilt of their country, banded together to accuse Indigenous peoples of lying about their history. It was a shameful and disturbing episode. Yet Klein, to her great credit, does not end the story there, with the good guys on one side and the bad guys on the other. Instead, she points out that some truckers participated in both convoys, only a few months apart. “In June 2021, they felt sorrow and solidarity; in February 2022, rage and self-righteousness. They were, like everyone, both that and this,” she writes.
But this raises a question. Is this kind of radicalization always a one-way street? Can one emerge from a rabbit hole and return to the real world? For the Other Naomi, there may be no coming back. The Mirror World has given her a degree of power and influence she will never find anywhere else. But what of the many ordinary people posting conspiracy memes on Facebook, the ones for whom the Mirror World will never be a lucrative grift? Is there any hope for them?
Maybe they’ll grow bored or disillusioned with their obsessions at some point. The rest of us have little control over whether and when that happens. But if they do snap out of it, we can at least resist the temptation to gloat and say “we told you so.” We can welcome them back into the fold without reservation. We shouldn’t seek to impose prolonged periods of probation, or exact exorbitant acts of contrition. In short, we should try to act like the father of the Prodigal Son, not the older brother. There should be no unnecessary barriers to reentry. “We defined ourselves against each other and yet were somehow becoming ever more alike, willing to declare each other non-people,” Klein writes. To write off QAnon parents or Trumpers or anti-vaxxers as non-people is in fact to mirror the most troubling aspect of the Mirror World: its need for enemies.
Doppelganger
A Trip into the Mirror World
Naomi Klein
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
$30 | 416 pp.
