The Far Right and the Mirror World

On Naomi Klein's Doppelganger

I hadn’t thought about the other Naomi since the 1990s. I was in grad school then at UT-Austin, preparing for comprehensive exams in gender studies when her book, The Beauty Myth, came out. Several of us in grad school read it and dismissed it as making an obvious point that many feminists had made before and better. Yet, there was an unmistakable appeal to this author making the point: she was young, white, slim with symmetrical features, often sporting a black leather jacket, and tossing around a big, flouncy head of hair. Her schtick, and many of us saw it that way, was catnip for media outlets eager to find a conventionally attractive spokesmodel for feminism who could both critique beauty while conforming to the very same beauty standards she was criticizing. Since then, that Naomi has gone into the ‘mirror world’ of far-right conspiracy theories and regularly appears on Steve Bannon’s podcast, part of the ‘mirror world.’

In the intervening years, Naomi Wolf (the other Naomi) has often been confused with Naomi Klein, who is also a writer, and the author of The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, and No Logo: No Space, No Choice, No Jobs, among several other titles. Naomi Klein is an outspoken critic of capitalism and the way it is driving the destruction of the planet, and thus, politically to the left of most in the U.S. Yet, she is frequently mistaken for the other Naomi, the one that’s gone down the rabbit-hole of far-right conspiracy theories.

Untangling this case of mistaken identity is the premise for Klein’s latest book, Doppelganger. This is Klein’s most personal book to date and this comes through as she reads it (I came across the audio version first. I absolutely love an audio narration read by the author, and maybe that’s why I picked this one. I can’t remember, to be honest). It’s so good that after listening to the audio version I bought the hard copy so I could take notes from it.

Book Jacket: Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World, Naomi Klein.

From the start, she’s wrestling with the idea of “doubles” (doppelgangers) and the Freudian notion of the “uncanny,” which, in psychoanalytic terms is when something feels oddly familiar and echoes another, earlier self. Another way of describing the uncanny is the dread we feel in situations in which our childhood fantasies or fears appear more real than our adult worldviews. Thus, the uncanny plays with the difference between familiar things that delight us and familiar things that terrify us. Klein traces the notion as it appears in horror films, like Bong Joon Oh’s Parasite or Jordan Peele’s Us. Both of these films were released in 2019. which I’ve come to think of as The Before Time, before the pandemic, before the uprisings in the summer of 2020, and before the backlash we’re living with now.

Movie Poster: “Us,” Starring Lupita Nyong’o, Directed by Jordan Peele.

Klein doesn’t stay in these deep theoretical trenches long but instead moves into a breezy storytelling that takes the reader through the twists and turns of her experiences with being mistaken for the other Naomi. This is where the book gets interesting for me because it means Klein, the Naomi interested in capitalism and climate collapse, must deal with the rise of the far right that has captured the imagination of the other Naomi…and that had me pulling up a chair.

In Chapter 9, “The Far Right Meets the Far-Out,” she writes about the convergence of fitness culture with fascism. In the US, she notes that many of early fitness and bodybuilding advocates were also enthusiastic about eugenics, and the prospect of “breeding” for what they imagined to be a superior human form. (aside: there is renewed interest in eugenics from the tech bros of Silicon Valley.) Klein continues linking fitness culture and the far right to Nazi propaganda, which was crowded with images of virile young men hiking, and a strong belief that ‘natural’ food was central to the success of the Reich (although Hitler’s vegetarianism is a myth). The Nazi Party wanted to “perfect” the common German into an Aryan super race, and the quest for the endless improvement is part of why this version of fascism merged so easily with various naturalist fetishes and New Age fads.

Klein notes that after the Second World War, the fascist/fitness/New Age alliance broke apart. She doesn’t offer an explanation for why, but then notes that the next big wave of popularity for New Age ideas came in the 1960s, and then it was firmly associated with “hippies, environmentalism, and the Beatles studying transcendental meditation. Now, however, it seemed as if the movement’s older, supremacist roots were reasserting themselves” (p.165).

I wrote about some of the overlap between wellness culture and white supremacy in the Nice White Ladies book, about how easy it is for us, as white women, to slide from “light and love” to calling 911 because society is geared for our comfort. What I appreciate about Klein’s take here is that she’s expanding that, taking an even broader view that’s helpful to me for thinking about the global spread of the far right:

 “Like the fascist/New Age alliance, all of this is playing out on a kind of historical loop. Whenever one group has chosen to allow terrible violence to be inflicted on another group, there have been stories and logics that provided the permission for the beneficiaries of the violence either to actively (even gleefully) participate or to actively look away. Stories that said things like this: The people being sacrificed/enslaved/imprisoned/colonized/left to die so that others can live comfortably are not the same level of human. They are other/substandard/lesser/darker/more animal/diseased/criminal/lazy/uncivilized. These logics have been resurgent on the right for years now, evident in the presence of protofascist and authoritarian leaders in Brazil, India, Hungary, the Philippines, Russia, and Turkey, among others. But what we were [witnessing] was that these logics were spreading, diagonally, from authoritarian conservatives through to parts of the green and New Age left, following well-worn neural pathways with long and sinister histories” (p.167, emphasis added).  

Klein uses this term “diagonally” throughout to explain the politics we’re seeing now that are neither traditionally “left” or “right” but that draws people from both those perspectives into nefarious conspiracy theories, like the other Naomi, who recently posted this bit of nonsense:

The other Naomi - spreading conspiracy theories on the socials.

This is not true, and so far from true, that it is unhinged. Yet, Klein is generous to the other Naomi as she ponders what could have driven her to these misguided conclusions, charting her path from liberal, white feminist to far-right conspiracy theorist. This is the diagonal pull of conspiracy theories that are correct about one thing (e.g., corporate greed; big pharma profits during COVID; the failure of global elites to address real, material concerns) and wrong about so much else (e.g., sitting next to a vaccinated person causing anything at all; this was a “plandemic” orchestrated by “globalists” for profit).

Klein puzzles over the strange alliance between her doppelganger and Steve Bannon, and offers this:

“What unites the far right and the far-out is the hustle on the one hand, and a faith in hyper-individualism on the other. In the alternative-health world, everyone is selling something: classes, retreats, sound baths, essential oils, anti-metal-toxin sprays, Himalayan salt rock lamps, coffee enemas. ……. It’s much the same on Bannon’s War Room or Alex Jones’s InfoWars, with their manly supplements, survivalist supplies, Freedom Fests, precious metal offers, colloidal silver toothpaste, and weapons training…” (p.179).

The other thing that unites them, besides the hustle, is a thread that Klein identifies as “simple and stark. It is a comfort with culling” (p.167).

She tells a story of her husband, Avi, who was canvassing for a local elected office in their home province of British Columbia. He knocks on one woman’s door, he spots signs she’s a yoga enthusiast and assumes she will be an easy get for his campaign. When he asks what’s on her mind about the upcoming election, she asks him: “What’s your stance on vaccine passports?” (a favorite talking point of the conspiracy-addled). Avi turns this around and asks her what she thinks about them. She replies that she has a “strong immune system” so she doesn’t need the vaccine or a record of it. When Avi counters with, “That’s great that you’re so healthy, but some people have compromised immune systems…” the woman, who Klein describes as “a white woman with ropey muscles,” tells Avi: “I think those people should die.”

A comfort with culling, indeed.

Of this confluence between fitness and fascism in the current moment, she writes:

“the people who make fortunes from selling idealized versions of themselves and the idea that you, too, can attain nirvana through a project of perpetual self-improvement — are a perfect fit with far-right economic libertarians and anarcho-capitalists, who also festishize the individual as the only relevant social actor. In neither worldview is there any mention of collective solutions or structural changes that would make a healthy life possible for all.”

It’s the hyper-individualism, for sure.

Klein also loops in religion here and points to the way even this form of collective identity shares a great deal with the hyper-individualism of fitness. Klein connects the resistance to vaccines among the very religious (Christians and Orthodox Jews), as she poses a question about what might be the same between worshipping the Lord and worshipping the body, and suggests that this is a belief about “temples,” whether rooted in extreme faith or extreme fitness, that would keep them safe.

That individualism is foundational to whiteness, which contains an element of sadomasochism, as I’ve argued here, here, and here. We, who are raised-white, are taught that the only path to fulfillment in life is to control our own destiny, sort of the play-at-home version of the Manifest Destiny and the Doctrine of Discovery, which taught us as little white children that this land is ours, “from sea to shining sea.”

"American Progress" by John Gast, 1872 } Wikimedia

One of the things I admire about this book is that Klein puts herself into the text and examines her own position, motives and stakes in this exploration of her relationship to the other Naomi. Nowhere is this more on display than in Chapter 13, “The Nazi in the Mirror,” in which she takes on colonialism and, in a chapter that follows, Israel and their “ethnic doppelganger” of Palestine.

Klein riffs on Exterminate All the Brutes, the book (by Sven Lindqvist) and film (by Raoul Peck), about colonialism. The phrase in the title — ‘exterminate all the brutes’ — is, as Klein explains, “the murderous annihilatory impulse to pursue one’s interests at all costs. It is the supremacist mindset…” From there, she returns to her theme in the book:

“What I did not expect to discover that Peck’s opus was a doppelganger story. His thesis is that the dominant story we tell about Hitler and the Holocaust — which treats that frenzy of death as so extreme that it is without historical precedents or antecedents — is flat wrong. Peck argues instead that the Holocaust was an intensified and compacted expression of the very same violent colonial ideology that ravaged other continents at other times. The Nazis then applied that ideology within Europe itself. At the heart of Brutes is the claim that Hitler — the twentieth century’s most despised villain, and rightly so — was not the civilized, democratic West’s evil ‘other,’ but its shadow, its doppelganger. This draws on Lindquist’s argument that the exterminatory mindset lies at ‘the core of European thought … summing up the history of our continent, our humanity, our biosphere, from Holocene to Holocaust.’ ” (pp.268-9).

I knew this, have read the book and watched the documentary. But there’s something about Klein, a white, Jewish woman, grappling with these ideas that’s compelling, as when she writes: “This analysis destabilizes pretty much all the stories that I grew up with, which taught us that the Holocaust was a singular event without precendent, so far outside the bounds of human history that it was essentially impossible to comprehend” (p.272). And, a few pages later:

“The flip side of the post-World War Two cries of ‘Never again’ was an unspoken ’Never before.’  The instance on lifting the Holocaust out of history, the failure to recognize these patterns, and the refusal to see where the Nazis fit inside the arc of colonial genocides have all come at a high cost. The countries that defeated Hitler did not have to confront the uncomfortable fact that Hitler had taken pointers and inspiration on race-making and on human containment from them, leaving their innocence not only undisturbed but also significantly strengthened by what was indeed a righteous victory.” 

Here, she’s referring to James Q. Whitman’s book, Hitler’s American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law, which details with great precision the fact that the genocide against Native Americans and the plantation economy of enslaved Africans served as blueprints for the Third Reich. She ends this chapter with a discussion of the mass shooting at a Tops supermarket in Buffalo, New York in May, 2022 when ten people were killed and several injured by a white supremacist who identified as an “ecofascist.”

Klein then quotes Julian Brave NoiseCat, a colleague from the climate justice movement, for pointing out similarities between right-wing conspiracy theories and actual policies toward Indigenous peoples:  

‘great replacement theory’ = manifest destiny

QAnon (mass institutionalized child abuse) = residential, boarding schools

‘plandemic’ = smallpox, alcohol, bioterrorism

Klein concludes this section with this, “It’s all so Freudian. The fear that it will happen to them stems from an implicit admission that they did it to others.” What really gives this punch is when she then turns her analytical lens on Israel’s policies toward the Palestinians.

I’m grateful for this book in so many ways. This is a “big idea book,” and this is one of the best of its kind that I’ve read in a long time. I’m grateful that this is written by a woman who is not afraid of examining herself in the text (rare for this genre). I’m grateful that it’s an instant bestseller, since it’s usually the dudes with these books at topping those lists. I’m grateful, too, that this book brings together an analysis of the far right along with the climate emergency, colonialism and capitalism. Her book will make it easier for me to make the argument I need to make in combating the far right, which will bring these together. So, instead of looking like the Pepe Silvia meme, I can point to Naomi Klein’s Doppelganger.

If you’ve read it, let me know what you think in the comments.