![]() In the ensuing years, her work grew increasingly sloppy and absurd, until her reputation collapsed altogether in 2019 with the publication of “Outrages.” In retrospect, the seeds of her intellectual decline were already present in that book, which contained both major statistical errors and a conspiratorial subtext that painted the influence of patriarchy as a deliberate plot. ![]() “The Beauty Myth,” her 1990 blockbuster about the toll taken on women by the upward ratchet of unreasonable beauty standards, made her famous. This unraveling, of course, was well underway before Covid, but the pandemic accelerated it by forcing people to live online, communicating on platforms seemingly algorithmically designed to reward rage and paranoia. “How comforting it would be if Wolf were a fake we could unmask - and not a symptom of a mass unraveling of meaning afflicting, well, everything,” writes Klein. This coming doppelganger impeachment is hard to even discuss without getting pulled down innumerable rabbit holes, which is surely part of the point. Sometime soon, for example, the House is likely to impeach President Biden on the pretext that he was involved in corruption in Ukraine - the same conspiracy theory Trump was trying to breathe life into when he got himself impeached for corruption in Ukraine. This idea of the doppelganger gave me a new way to think about the mix of malicious parody and projection that now dominates our public life. When I spoke to Klein recently, she described how jarring it was to watch protests against Covid measures appropriating left-wing language - common slogans were “I can’t breathe” and “My body, my choice” - making them “this weird doppelganger of the movements that I had been a part of and supported.” Think, for example, of Vladimir Putin claiming that he’s liberating Ukraine from fascism or Donald Trump howling that his multiple prosecutions are a racist plot to subvert a presidential election. That obsession, in turn, guides Klein into an examination of what she calls “the Mirror World,” the vertigo-inducing inversion of reality common to contemporary far-right movements. Trapped at home by the pandemic, Klein became increasingly obsessed by Wolf’s transformation into a heroine of Covid truthers. ![]() That became a growing problem for Klein as her reputation was tainted by Wolf’s escalating lunacy. ![]() Klein and Wolf, both brown-haired middle-aged Jewish women writers, are often mistaken for each other. Instead, it’s about the instability of identity in the virtual world and the forces pulling people away from constructive politics into a shadow realm where clout chasing and conspiracy theorizing intertwine. Only in a superficial sense is “Doppelganger” really about Wolf, the liberal feminist icon turned anti-vax Steve Bannon sidekick. We should all be glad she did, because I can’t think of another text that better captures the berserk period we’re living through. “In my defense, it was never my intent to write this book,” she says in its first line. I’ve been raving about Naomi Klein’s “Doppelganger” since I read an advance copy this summer, and when I tell people about it, some of them are baffled: You mean Klein wrote a whole book about being confused with the writer Naomi Wolf? The central conceit of “Doppelganger” sounds more like the premise for a surreal Charlie Kaufman film than a work by an earnest lefty who usually writes about overweening corporate power.
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