When Naomi Klein Realized People Regularly Confused Her With Naomi Wolf, She Went Down a Rabbit Hole

“That’s you,” I tell Smoke in my most reassuring voice, but she always forgets. And this is the catch-22 of confronting your doppelganger: Bark all you want, but you inevitably end up confronting yourself.

My commitment to non-involvement began to weaken during COVID, when the stakes of getting confused with Other Naomi rose markedly. Several months into the pandemic, Wolf emerged not as a scattershot peddler of conspiratorial speculation but as one of the most outspoken opponents of almost every anti-COVID public health measure, from masks to vaccines to vaccine-verification apps, which she equated with fascism while wantonly drawing comparisons with Nazi Germany. An NPR investigation found that Wolf was a primary spreader of the theory that vaccinated people shed dangerous particles onto unvaccinated people, possibly compromising their fertility, a theory that led a Florida private school to ban vaccinated teachers from the classroom.

Mocked and deplatformed in liberal circles, she quickly became a full-fledged crossover star on the MAGA right, appearing regularly (sometimes daily) on Stephen Bannon’s podcast War Room, as well as on Tucker Carlson’s now canceled show on Fox News—that is, when she wasn’t testifying for Republicans (or attempting to) in statehouses or posting photos of her new firearm. A “biofascist” coup d’état was taking place under cover of mask mandates and vaccine-verification apps, she warned, and her new fans ate it up.

Meanwhile, my doppelganger troubles escalated. No longer was it a periodic annoyance every few months. When I went online to try to find some simulation of the friendships and communities I missed during those achingly isolated months, I would invariably find, instead, The Confusion: a torrent of people discussing me and what I’d said and what I’d done—only it wasn’t me. It was her.

And look, it was confusing, and also, in a gallows way, funny, even to me. We are both Naomis with a skepticism of elite power. We even had some of the same targets. I, for instance, was furious when Bill Gates sided with the drug companies as they defended their patents on lifesaving COVID vaccines, using the World Trade Organization’s insidious intellectual property agreement as a weapon, despite the fact that vaccine development was lavishly subsidized with public money, and that this lobbying helped keep the shots out of the arms of millions of the poorest people on the planet. Wolf was furious that people were being pushed to get vaccinated at all and boosted conspiracies about Gates using vaccine apps to track people and to usher in a sinister world order. To stressed-out, busy people inundated with thumbnail-size names and avatars, we’re just a blur of Naomis with highlights going on about Bill Gates.

Again and again, she was saying things that sounded a little like the argument I made in The Shock Doctrine but refracted through a funhouse mirror of plots and conspiracies based almost exclusively on a series of hunches. I felt like she had taken my ideas, fed them into a bonkers blender, and then shared the thought purée with Carlson, who nodded vehemently. All the while, Wolf’s followers hounded me about why I had sold out to the “globalists” and was duping the public into believing that masks, vaccines, and restrictions on indoor gatherings were legitimate public health measures amid mass death. “I think she’s been got at!” @RickyBaby321 said of me, telling Wolf, “I have relegated Naomi Klein to the position of being: ‘The Other Naomi’!” It’s a vertiginous thing to be harangued on social media about your alleged misunderstanding of your own ideas—while being told that another Naomi is a better version of you than you are.

Doppelganger comes from German, combining doppel (double) with gänger (goer). Sometimes it’s translated as “double-walker,” and I can tell you that having a double walking around is profoundly uncanny, the feeling Sigmund Freud described as “that species of the frightening that goes back to what was once well known and had long been familiar”—but is suddenly alien. The uncanniness provoked by doppelgangers is particularly acute because the thing that becomes unfamiliar is you. A person who has a doppelganger, Freud wrote, “may identify himself with another and so become unsure of his true self.” He wasn’t right about everything, but he was right about that.

My first response to Other Naomi’s COVID antics was horror and a little rage: Surely now I needed to fight back in earnest, scream from my screen that she is not me. After all, lives were being lost to the kind of industrial-scale medical misinformation she was doing so much to help spread. Surely it was time to get serious about defending the boundaries of my identity.

But then something happened that I didn’t expect. I stopped being so horrified and got interested. Interested in what it means to have a doppelganger. Interested in the conspiratorial world in which Other Naomi was now so prominent, a place that often felt like a doppelganger of the world where I live. Why were so many people drawn to fantastical theories? What needs were they fulfilling? And what would their proponents do next?

In the hopes of picking up a few pointers on how others had handled their double trouble, I began reading and watching everything I could find about doppelgangers, from Carl Jung to Ursula K. Le Guin; Fyodor Dostoyevsky to Jordan Peele. The figure of the double began to fascinate me—its meaning in ancient mythology and in the birth of psychoanalysis. The way the twinned self stands in for our highest aspiration—the eternal soul, that ephemeral being that supposedly outlives the body. And the way the double also represents the most repressed, depraved, and rejected parts of ourselves that we cannot bear to see—the evil twin, the shadow self, the anti-self, the Hyde to our Jekyll. The doppelganger as warning or harbinger: Pay attention, they tell us.

From these stories, I quickly learned that my identity crisis was likely unavoidable: The appearance of one’s doppelganger is almost always chaotic, stressful, and paranoia-inducing, and the person encountering their double is invariably pushed to their limits by the frustration and uncanniness of it all.

Confrontations with our doppelgangers raise existentially destabilizing questions. Am I who I think I am, or am I who others perceive me to be? And if enough others start seeing someone else as me, who am I, then? Actual doppelgangers are not the only way we can lose control over ourselves, of course. The carefully constructed self can be undone in any number of ways and in an instant—by a disabling accident, by a psychotic break, or, these days, by a hacked account or deepfake. This is the perennial appeal of doppelgangers in novels and films: The idea that two strangers can be indistinguishable from each other taps into the precariousness at the core of identity—the painful truth that, no matter how deliberately we tend to our personal lives and public personas, the person we think we are is fundamentally vulnerable to forces outside of our control.

In the age of artificial intelligence, many of us are feeling this particularly acutely now, which may be why twins and doppelgangers and multiverses seem suddenly ubiquitous in the culture, from Everything Everywhere All at Once to the remake of Dead Ringers. When machines can generate the voice and the style of any person, living or dead, do any of us control ourselves?

“How many of everybody is there going to be?” asks a character in Jordan Peele’s 2019 doppelganger movie, Us.

Answer: a lot.

If doppelganger literature and mythology is any guide, when confronted with the appearance of one’s double, a person is duty bound to go on a journey—a quest to understand what messages, secrets, and forebodings are being offered. So that is what I have done. Rather than push my doppelganger away, I have attempted to learn everything I can about her and the movements of which she is a part. I burrowed deeper and deeper into a warren of conspiracy rabbit holes, places where it often seems that my own research has gone through the looking glass and is now gazing back at me as a network of fantastical plots that cast the very real crises we face—from COVID to climate change to Russian military aggression—as false flag attacks, planted by the Chinese Communists/corporate globalists/Jews.

As I went, I found myself confronting yet more forms of doubling and doppelganging, these ones distinctly more consequential. Like the way that all of politics increasingly feels like a mirror world, with society split in two and each side defining itself against the other—whatever one says and believes, the other seems obliged to say and believe the exact opposite. The deeper I went, the more I noticed this phenomenon all around me: individuals not guided by legible principles or beliefs, but acting as members of groups playing yin to the other’s yang—well versus weak; awake versus sheep; righteous versus depraved. Binaries where thinking once lived.