At first Naomi Klein thought it was funny that people kept confusing her with Naomi Wolf — but then her doppelganger went down the anti-vax rabbit hole. This is what she learned.
The night before meeting Naomi Klein, I had dinner with two friends who asked who I was interviewing next. At the mention of her name, their faces fell. When I relay this to Klein, she can guess what happened. “Oh no. What did they say? ‘Isn’t she crazy?’” Their exact words, I tell her, were: “She is absolutely bats*** crazy.” Klein nods calmly. She is used to it.
The first time it happened, she was sitting in a public lavatory cubicle just off Wall St in Manhattan during the 2011 Occupy protests. “Did you see what Naomi Klein said?” she overheard a protester at the washbasin say. “Something about ‘the march today is a bad idea’.” The other woman replied: “I don’t think she understands our demands.” Exiting the stall, Klein said the words she “would repeat far too many times” in years to come: “I think you are talking about Naomi Wolf.”
When we meet in London, my first impression is that no one in their right mind could confuse this softly spoken, scholarly woman with the breathlessly alarmist, conspiracy theory-peddling Wolf. Klein is now 53, but aged just 29 she wrote No Logo, the 1999 bestseller about corporate brands that made her the face of a new anticapitalist movement.
No Logo was published in more than 20 languages, chosen as one of Time magazine’s top 100 non-fiction books from the past 100 years, and lauded by everyone from Gloria Steinem to Radiohead. It became a bible for anti-globalisation activists campaigning against sweatshops, outsourcing, privatisation, McJobs and multinationals. The Times called its author “probably the most influential person under the age of 35 in the world”.
Back then, the other Naomi — Wolf — was the poster girl of third-wave feminism thanks to her 1991 bestselling classic The Beauty Myth. Both Naomis were Jewish brunettes; both were widely respected. But while Klein wrote and campaigned on social justice and capitalism, for a long time Wolf confined her focus to feminism.
The confusion began in 2007 when Wolf swerved on to Klein’s territory with a bizarre book that claimed that President Bush was planning a fascist coup. In the subsequent decade Wolf’s writing became increasingly untethered from reality. She claimed that Islamic State beheading videos were staged by the US Government and starred actors; that President Obama was plotting to import the ebola virus from Africa; that the Scottish 2014 referendum had been faked.
Any last shred of credibility was erased in 2019 when a BBC radio presenter exposed howling factual errors in her new book, Outrages, live on air during an interview. Wolf sealed her public humiliation weeks later when she said: “It was amazing to go to Belfast, which does not yet have 5G, and feel the Earth, sky, air, human experience, feel the way it did in the 1970s. Calm, still peaceful, natural, restful.” As Belfast already had 5G, and was not famously calm in the 1970s, the avalanche of online mockery practically broke the internet.
It wasn’t funny for Klein. Every time Wolf posted a wild new claim — for example, that Nasa was spraying the skies with aluminium — Klein’s social media feeds would fill with comments such as: “I can’t believe I used to respect Naomi Klein. WTF has happened to her?” She wasn’t sure what to do. “Do I fight for my name? Do I fight for my reputation?”
Klein’s standing as a public intellectual is, by anyone’s standards, prestigious. The activist, journalist, author and now academic has written eight books since No Logo, including the award-winning bestsellers The Shock Doctrine, about neoliberal capitalism, and, in 2014, This Changes Everything, about climate change. The importance of her ideas felt worth protecting from contamination with Wolf’s crazy conspiracy theories. But saying anything in public to correct the confusion, she feared, might only add to it. So for a long time she kept quiet.
In her new book on the ordeal, she writes, “I filed away Naomi confusion in the category of ‘things that happen on the internet that are not quite real’.” But then the pandemic struck, and the only reality that existed for Klein, confined to a remote cabin with her family in British Columbia, was the internet.
“My public self had shrunk down to that thumbnail-size photo and Twitter’s 280-character limit.” Meanwhile, Wolf had gone full-blown anti-vax and was making global headlines. She posted that vaccines “let you travel back in time”, were a “software platform that can receive uploads”, and that “women bleed oddly around vaccinated people”. On liberal Twitter laughing at Wolf became a popular lockdown blood sport, and sometimes Klein joined in.
In 2021 the platform suspended Wolf’s account, but within weeks she became a regular fixture on Fox News and the War Room podcast by Steve Bannon, the new gun-toting darling of the American far right. Yet people kept confusing her with Klein. Even more disconcertingly, she writes, “we were being not confused but conflated, treated as one interchangeable Naomi”. Klein frequently came across posts such as: “OMG. I just now realised they are not the same person.”
Holed up in rural Canada, Klein was deluged by gleeful online abuse misdirected at her. “They were angry because she was being so sloppy with facts, but they couldn’t even read the name and a headline.” The auto-complete text function on phones was making matters worse. Even when people intended to write her name, Klein discovered, Twitter’s algorithm was “helpfully filling in the mistake for its users, to save them precious time”.
Klein took to tweeting: “This is your periodic reminder to keep your Naomis straight.” It made no difference. So she decided to write about the experience of being mistaken for one of the world’s most notorious conspiracy theorists.
Doppelganger is a much funnier book than her fans might expect. Her account of chasing the “white rabbit down the rabbit hole” of far-right conspiracy thinking is certainly comical. Klein became obsessed with Bannon, Donald Trump’s former political strategist, whose patronage elevated Wolf’s profile to a level she had not enjoyed since the 1990s. Bannon has released almost 3,000 episodes of War Room in four years, and Klein listened to so many that her family became worried about her. “Really?” her husband, Avi Lewis, a documentary-maker, would query on finding her glued to War Room while doing yoga at bedtime.
Klein had always been a serious left-wing thinker. The daughter of American peace activists — her father a doctor, her mother a documentary-maker — who emigrated to Montreal in protest during the Vietnam War, she was nicknamed Miss PC at Toronto University. Her father couldn’t understand why she was devoting so much time to far-right conspiracists. She promised her family she would go cold turkey for a month in the summer of 2021, but fell off the wagon while driving alone when she turned on War Room and heard Wolf.
“And that’s how I ended up on the side of the road, with my hazards on, scribbling in a tiny red notebook,” frantically transcribing Wolf’s latest anti-vax rant. “Black shirts and brown shirts ... your body belongs to the state ... like China’s one-child policy and forced sterilisation ...” and so on. “This,” she admits self-mockingly, “was a full-blown relapse.”
Klein’s worry was that the project might be “ego-driven”, a vanity exercise in reputation management. But the more she studied Wolf, “it became more and more politically significant”.
Many of us will know at least one person who has been sucked into the world of online conspiracists. “Some people will read this book going, ‘Oh, this is just going to be laughing at the conspiracy theory people.’ But that’s not where it ends.” Wolf, she realised, “is an interesting mirror of what it looks like to have your life force be driven by ‘I need the clicks’”.
In the attention economy, people will always seek out new markets. Far from cancelling (a word she conspicuously avoids using) Wolf, Klein began to see her namesake being driven by pile-ons into the arms of a grateful new audience: the far right, which has been embracing people like Wolf who have been cancelled by liberal America.
The anti-vax coalition around Bannon includes “a lot of white women feeling irrelevant ... because now they’re being dismissed [by the left] as ‘Karens’” and what Klein calls “body people”: the wellness enthusiasts who were furious about having their freedom restricted to protect those more at risk from Covid.
Hippie homoeopaths and tofu-eating yoga teachers have not traditionally been drawn to far-right politics. What the new anti-vax, conspiracy theory-driven populism offers them, Klein contends, is a sinister doppelganger of the very left-wing critique of capitalism argued by socialists like herself. Bannon talks a lot about the dangerous power of Big Pharma, Big Tech and rich bankers in terms that can sometimes make him sound like Bernie Sanders. Or, for that matter, Klein.
“It’s quite a vertiginous feeling for me to hear him doing this weird version of kind of me. Bannon isn’t offering anything to people that would actually solve it. It always ends up just, like, ‘blame migrants’. But I think people are hungry enough for anybody who is naming this unfairness of the system, that if no one’s selling them the real thing, they’ll settle for a counterfeit.”
Her doppelganger’s journey from liberal feminism to far-right conspiracy should, she concludes, be a cautionary tale for the left. If Klein’s side of the political divide devotes all of its energy to gleefully denouncing people on social media instead of formulating a radical alternative to an economic system that’s increasingly not working for most people, it won’t win against far-right converts like Wolf, she warns, but will instead create more of them.
“I thought this book was going to be fun.” She offers a rueful grin. “And that’s not what the experience was for me. I think I better understand the failures of my side of the political spectrum.”
Her smiley warmth can often seem at odds with the stalled progress of her life’s causes. Since This Changes Everything, Klein’s anti-capitalist politics have fused with her climate change activism, and she admits softly: “I wrestle daily with feelings of despair.”
She is curious to see if Wolf will change her mind about not talking to her when Doppelganger comes out. Wolf ignored her many approaches while she was writing it. What would she have asked her? “Well, I wanted to ask her about Bannon.” Since leaving the White House, he has been supporting far-right parties from Belgium to Brazil. “I wanted to ask her what she thought of his work building a neofascist international.”
It seems to me that her calm demeanour must be deceptive. Dehumanisation, and the rise of a populist far right that co-opts left-wing slogans about economic inequity but converts them into anti-immigrant prejudice and conspiracy thinking, conjure up echoes of 1930s Germany. Exactly how worried does she think we should be?
For a second she hesitates. “I mean, look. The Nazis were conspiracy theorists. Anti-Semitism is a conspiracy theory. So yeah, I think we should not tell ourselves this is something to laugh at, even though it is ridiculous.”
Naomi v Naomi
Naomi Klein
- Books: Nine books that have sold more than 590,000 copies in the UK since 1991, including No Logo and This Changes Everything.
- Social media: 678,000 Twitter followers, known for retweeting articles about the climate crisis.
- Covid stance: Self-described “hard-core” follower of lockdown regulations; believes they are a sign that society is capable of putting the profit drive on hold.
- Trouble with the law: Arrested outside the White House for protesting a cross-state pipeline in 2011.
Naomi Wolf
- Books: 11, including the instant bestseller The Beauty Myth.
- Social media: 320,000 followers on her once-banned Twitter account, plus a website promoting ways to get “that pre-Covid feeling”.
- Covid stance: Opposed to lockdowns, which she calls an “invention of Xi Jinping”.
- Trouble with the law: Arrested during an Occupy Wall Street protest; banned from Twitter; comments made on GB News earned the channel a penalty from Ofcom.
Doppelganger by Naomi Klein (Penguin) is on sale from September 12.
Written by: Decca Aitkenhead
© The Times of London