Brooke Gladstone: This is the On the Media Midweek Podcast. I'm Brooke Gladstone. Last fall, the book everyone was talking about was Naomi Klein's Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World. In it, she described how she, Naomi Klein had been confused with Naomi Wolf for much of her career. Wolf rose to prominence with the book The Beauty Myth in the 90s, establishing herself as a bestselling feminist writer. Klein on the other hand, wrote acclaimed critiques of capitalism such as No Logo and The Shock Doctrine.

The confusion of the two writers incessant on social media escalated when Wolf became a peddler of COVID-19 conspiracies. Recently, in an amusing turnabout, Wolf discovered that a fellow anti-vaxxer was spreading a conspiracy theory about her.

Naomi Wolf: I am not a deep-state operative.

Brooke Gladstone: Naomi Wolf.

Naomi Wolf: The fact that I have to say that to anyone is so regrettable and insulting and offensive and defamatory and frankly exhausting because I've done nothing for the last two and a half years, but get kicked out of my former life as a well-known feminist commentator on the Left for telling the truth about women being injured by the mRNA vaccine.

Brooke Gladstone: Meanwhile, Naomi Klein is so often mistaken for her conspiracist counterpart that in the interview she did just before hours last fall, the TV host called her by Wolf's name. It's so unrelenting that someone tweeted a rhyme that became something of a meme, "If the Naomi be Klein, you're doing fine if the Naomi be Wolf, oh, buddy. Ooooof." [chuckles] When I spoke to her in September, Klein Mused on why her Doppelganger crossed over into the conspiracy realm.

Naomi Klein: She had had this really humiliating experience with a publication of her 2019 book, Outrages, a interviewer confronted her with every writer's worst nightmare, which was that the book that she was there promoting had misunderstood some key historical facts, and it meant that a really big part of her thesis was wrong. This was unveiled live on the air. It was extremely humiliating, I should know, because a lot of people thought it was me.

Brooke Gladstone: Her publisher dropped her, and the book was pulped.

Naomi Klein: She entered the pandemic in a very destabilized place and started getting a lot of traction with various kinds of COVID misinformation. At one point she was on Steve Bannon's podcast every single day for two weeks. She published a book with Steve Bannon filled with vaccine misinformation. They actually put out T-shirts together at one point. It's not like she's an incidental small minor figure in this world. She's really become a star getting everything she lost and more.

Brooke Gladstone: What Bannon gets from it is something more consequential.

Naomi Klein: He hopes to get an election victory out of it. I think he was the key strategist behind the idea that Trump could attract disaffected Democratic voters who had really felt betrayed, particularly over the issue of free trade agreements, where they had voted for Democrats multiple times, who promised that they were going to renegotiate these trade deals and not sign new ones, and then didn't do it. He brought a segment of the Democratic base over to the MAGA.

He calls it MAGA plus the Old Red Hat Brigade plus all that my Doppelganger has come to represent in terms of disaffected white COVID moms who were angry about lockdowns and masks and vaccine mandates for their kids, mixing and matching it with transphobia, xenophobia.

Brooke Gladstone: He's also really skilled at appropriating language. He's borrowed a lot from the Left.

Naomi Klein: He was building what I call the Mirror World. Bannon makes the argument that because his listeners and he himself have been de-platformed on so many social media sites, they need to create their own parallel information ecosystem. If you get kicked off Twitter, you have Getter. If you get kicked off YouTube, you have Rumble. If you can't do a GoFundMe, then you can go to GoSendGo. There's all of these direct mirrors, and then he says, "We will never other you." That's what they do. Othering, of course, is a really key term in anti-fascist discourse because that's what fascists do.

They create an in-group of belonging, and then they designate other people less than human. They are othered. That becomes a rationale for ghettoization for discrimination. If it goes far enough, extermination. This whole Mirror World is really an appropriation machine. You'll have key slogans from social justice movements like, "I Can't Breathe" from Black Lives Matter, suddenly being used by the anti-mask brigades holding up signs saying, "I can't breathe," about the masks or "my body, my choice," about vaccines.

What's extraordinary is that often the same people who are appropriating the slogan, "my body, my choice," or "I can't breathe," support politicians who are banning abortion. It's really a one-two appropriation and attack of the original.

Brooke Gladstone: Back to Bannon, though, you mentioned that he said he would never other those who would be canceled by the Left. You hold the Left responsible for a lot of its own ills, things that they could have avoided easily, and deprived Bannon of ammunition of this sort.

Naomi Klein: It isn't only about the Left. I want to be really clear about this. I think that centrist liberals also have a lot to be introspective about. Bannon's an interesting sort of mimic, but he also says, "Okay. What are you doing wrong that I can make a point of doing?" I don't think it's a great secret that Left movements though we talk a good game about standing for a culture of care, don't always treat each other in ways that are very caring. I think that has a lot to do with the social media platforms on which we communicate, where we perform doppelganger versions of ourselves.

Brooke Gladstone: In the course of your research, you began to see doubles everywhere, and you describe how our politics have become doppelgangers as well, they're each other in a fun house mirror.

Naomi Klein: We became very reactive, very "whatever they are, we are not." The classic example of this is the lab leak theory early on that was seen as a conspiratorial take on the origins of the COVID virus rather than something that was worthy of exploration. In recent months, we've seen some serious investigations of the lab leak theory, which deserved real journalism. I think we mistakenly sometimes think our job is just to do the opposite of what they're doing. If there's a huge amount of misinformation going on about vaccines, then we are going to be the people telling people to roll up their sleeves and get vaccinated.

That's okay, but not if it's at the expense of engaged debate about what else we might do. We could have had more focus on lifting the patents on those vaccines. It's one thing to say, "Oh, Bannon is generating a distraction machine with all of these wild theories that he can't get enough of." I think that is happening, but so is seeing the Barbie movie for the sixth time. There are different ways to numb and distract yourself. I don't think that Steve Bannon has a monopoly on it.

Brooke Gladstone: Let's stop for a moment and talk about the title of your book, Doppelganger. Its history, and its meaning.

Naomi Klein: It's been in use since the 1700s. It comes from two German words. A doppel means double, ganger means goer or walker. Sometimes it's translated as a double walker. Doppelgangers are also now a real favorite on the streaming platforms. They are through line in the history of literature Dostoevsky, Edgar Allan Poe, Oscar Wilde, Octavia Butler, Ursula Le Guin, novelists love a doppelganger.

Brooke Gladstone: Star Trek, you have Lore and Data.

Naomi Klein: The multiverse. I think artists are drawn to the multiplicities of the self because we do live in a culture that encourages us to perfect the self. We have this illusion that we can do it, but we also know that the self can be undone in an instant by a terrible accident, by a psychotic break, by a bad trip, by a bad tweet.

Brooke Gladstone: By a BBC correspondent cutting the rug out from under your latest book.

Naomi Klein: I think that's true, and I think writers are particularly aware of it.

Brooke Gladstone: At first glance, your book could seem to be a bold act of personal branding to put the confusion between you and Naomi Wolf to bed at last. You wrote that there's something humiliating about confronting a bad replica of yourself and something utterly harrowing about confronting a good one.

Naomi Klein: Yes, if doppelganger art, particularly film is any guide attempts to confront your doppelganger and be the last you standing, [laughs] rarely end well, it often ends with you stabbing yourself. Like in Oscar Wilde's, the portrait of Dorian Gray, where he stabs the portrait of himself growing old and ends up dying on the floor. One has to be very careful about trying to win a war with your doppelganger. I don't think I can do that. If anything, probably Brooke, I have inextricably cemented to the association for those who were not confused.

Terrible branding. I do pride myself on being a really bad brand. [laughter]

Brooke Gladstone: You got a history with branding.

Naomi Klein: This is actually the main reason I wanted to write the book. When I was in my 20s, I wrote a book called No Logo about the rise of lifestyle branding. We started to see the first branded humans, super brands, as Michael Jordan's agent described him, but when I wrote that book, the idea that non-celebrities could also be brands was an absurd concept that was being peddled by various management consultants. The game changer, as we all now know, was social media where suddenly it was very affordable to create a product version of us.

That's what we're doing when we log on to one of these new platforms, decide the perfect picture that we want, and we write our little sassy bio. I think we've barely begun to grapple with what it means to perform a product version of oneself because this thing I'm putting out here is a thing, a brand is not human. I think that that partly accounts for the kind of public shaming that Wolf herself experienced, and that so many other people have experienced because if you perform as a thing, people might believe you and start throwing hard objects at you and think that you will not bleed.

Brooke Gladstone: About the exercise of branding, you observed, and I really love this, that for it to be effective it has to be simple and static, but people change, which can be disastrous for a brand, and also, we're not just one thing, we contain multitudes. You asked, "What aren't we building when we're building our brands?"

Naomi Klein: I think that that line is the most important line in the book to me. As life becomes more insecure, more precarious, we are encouraged to turn towards the self, which is something that the late Barbara Ehrenreich discussed in the context of wellness and fitness culture. That this is a way of channeling our insecurities about the job market, authoritarianism, climate change, we have plenty to worry about. These are crises that we are only going to confront together, and that's why it matters that if the labor of the self, whether it's building the brand, perfecting the body, fortressing the family, we are only alive on this planet for a finite number of hours.

If we are spending a huge number of them in this rat race of self-perfection, we're not going to be reaching towards each other, building the kind of collective power that I think actually stands a chance of getting us on a much safer, more stable path.

Brooke Gladstone: You quote, Daisy Hillyard, talking about the unseen world that we live in that we don't see. Could you read from Daisy Hillyard's Shadowland?

Naomi Klein: Yes. You're stuck in your body right here, but in a technical way, you could be said to be in India, in Iraq. You are in the sky causing storms, and you are in the sea hurting whales towards the beach. You probably don't feel your body in those places, it is as if you have two distinct bodies. You have an individual body in which you exist, eat, sleep, and go about your day-to-day life. You also have a second body, which has an impact on foreign countries and on whales, a body that is not so solid as the other one, but much larger.

What she's saying is that we're implicated in these systems. We want to believe that it is just the bad them, but this is our world. This is our system. If we're fortunate enough to be in wealthier parts of wealthier countries, fortunate enough during COVID to be part of the lockdown class, we knew our comforts were only because of other people's risks, and frankly, other people's exploitation. We were reminded many times that people who are described as essential workers were really, in many cases, sacrificial workers.

I don't think it's a coincidence that it's that moment when conspiracy culture just goes supernova. I don't think it is just about the technology, I think it's about what we can't bear to look at. Part of the reason why we look away is because we are so conditioned to see ourselves first as individual consumers that we forget that we actually have the ability to join with other humans and build collective power. This is what we're not building when we're building our brands, that kind of collective power that would make it bearable, to really look at our implication in these systems so that we can make our systems more just.

Brooke Gladstone: In literature and mythology, the protagonist often must confront their doppelganger or be replaced, but you're journey doesn't end with a confrontation with Naomi Wolf, she wouldn't meet with you. Instead, you said you found it more useful to think of this whole experience as an exercise in unselfing. What does that mean?

Naomi Klein: It allowed me to be more playful and experimental as a writer because I figured that if countless numbers of people thought I was someone else entirely, I didn't have much to lose. I may as well just try. Unselfing is a beautiful term from Iris Murdoch, a British philosopher, and novelist, a state that she reaches for. It's not a state that you can be in all the time, nor should you be. It's the state that artists talk about when they're in a flow state, where they forget themselves and they're all flow, or Murdoch is talking about how one feels when one is awestruck by beauty, so transcended by it, that we forget ourselves. We are unselfed.

Brooke Gladstone: You also recommend unselfing to your readers as a way to break out of our doppelganger politics, but how does unselfing work for people who aren't following their doppelgangers down rabbit holes?

Naomi Klein: I have a very specific niche version of this with my Naomi Naomi confusion, but I think we all create doubles of ourselves. We do it when we create our brands, we do it when we try to perfect our bodies, we do it when we try to perfect our kids and turn them into little mini-mes. These are all examples of the self taking up too much space and blotting out the sun. I really do think it's getting in the way of our ability to reach towards each other and do the kind of work that is our only hope of meeting our unbearable moment in history when so much is unraveling. We really need to do it.

Brooke Gladstone: Naomi, thank you so much.

Naomi Klein: Thank you so much, Brooke, it was such a pleasure.

Brooke Gladstone: Naomi Klein is the author of Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World. Thanks for listening to the midweek podcast. On this week's show, we're asking some big questions about the relationship between AI and journalism. See you Friday. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

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