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This is The Guardian.

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Today, what happened

0:12

to Naomi Klein when she took

0:14

a trip into a mirror world

0:16

of conspiracies?

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1:01

This story actually began well

1:03

over a decade ago. So

1:06

in 2011, it was after the global financial

1:08

crisis. There had been movements

1:11

spreading in response around the world. And

1:14

finally, it came to the heart of the financial

1:16

district on Wall Street and Occupy

1:18

Wall Street kicked off. And I was

1:20

there, I was doing some interviews with some of the

1:23

Occupy Wall Street organisers. Naomi

1:25

Klein, best-selling author

1:27

of No Logo and The Shock Doctrine, influential

1:31

books about capitalism and power,

1:33

was reporting on the

1:34

Occupy movement. There was a march that

1:37

day and I was marching and

1:39

needed to use the loo, as you say

1:41

over there, and found a

1:43

public restroom and it was

1:45

crowded with marchers. And I overheard a

1:47

conversation. It was two women, fellow

1:49

marchers, who were suddenly

1:52

talking about me. One of them said, did

1:54

you hear what Naomi Klein said? And

1:56

then the other one was like, oh God, she really

1:59

does not understand.

1:59

our demands. And you know, I froze

2:02

just having mean girl high school flashbacks,

2:05

hearing these people talking about some terrible thing

2:07

I had written. And then gradually

2:09

it dawned on me that they were not actually talking

2:12

about me, though they were using my name. They were talking

2:14

about another writer named Naomi,

2:17

Naomi Wolf.

2:18

Naomi Wolf,

2:20

best-selling author of The Beautymas,

2:22

part of the Bill Clinton campaign in the 90s,

2:25

a one-time consultant to

2:27

presidential candidate Al Gore.

2:31

So I came out of the stall and I

2:33

made eye contact in the mirror and

2:36

said words that I would say many times

2:38

again in the months

2:39

and years to come, which was, I think

2:41

you have the wrong Naomi. I think you're talking

2:43

about Naomi Wolf.

2:45

As the years went on, this

2:48

would happen to Naomi Klein

2:50

over and over again.

2:53

In the public imagination, she had a doppelganger,

2:56

Naomi Wolf.

2:58

It might have been easy to shrug off

3:00

at first.

3:02

What would happen if your doppelganger fell

3:04

down a conspiracy rabbit hole? What

3:07

if they began loudly and publicly

3:10

promoting wild and dangerous

3:12

ideas? So if you're a dissident, you

3:15

can always be positive

3:17

for COVID. And there is no way to challenge

3:20

it, no way to verify it, and you'll be

3:22

in a second-class

3:23

category

3:25

in society for the rest of your life.

3:32

So Klein began to research, but

3:35

she didn't just find a distorted

3:37

mirror image of herself. She

3:40

found a mirror world where

3:42

an alternate reality is shaping

3:45

the societies we live in. From

3:49

The Guardian, I'm Noshinek

3:51

Bhaal. Today in focus,

3:54

what Naomi Klein learned from studying

3:56

the disturbing world of her doppelganger?

4:05

Naomi Klein,

4:07

your new book Doppleganger is your most

4:09

exposing and personal work to date,

4:12

but it's not just about you. It's

4:14

partly about another Naomi, Naomi Wolf.

4:17

And for anyone interested in

4:19

90s feminism and anti-capitalism,

4:22

particularly for me as a teenager, those

4:24

two books by the two of you, No Logo

4:27

and The Beauty Myth, respectively were

4:29

hugely influential. Can

4:31

you tell me what you thought about Naomi Wolf back

4:34

then?

4:35

Well, The Beauty Myth came out when I was

4:37

in first

4:40

year university, no, maybe second year university.

4:43

And it was kind of thrilling.

4:45

It was the back last years to feminism.

4:47

So suddenly there were

4:49

a couple of big books

4:51

that were getting a lot of mainstream attention, proudly

4:54

using the word feminist to describe

4:56

themselves.

4:58

Her first book, The Beauty Myth was named one of the 70

5:00

most significant books of the century by the

5:02

New York Times. I am pleased to have her

5:04

here to talk about these new ideas.

5:07

Welcome back. Thank you very much. Great

5:10

to have you here. So I remember when she came to my university dorm,

5:13

kind of

5:13

amazing. I mean, this wasn't like a huge hall

5:15

or anything like that because the

5:18

book hadn't gotten that big yet.

5:20

This was 1990. And so she spoke

5:22

in a small common room and

5:24

we gathered cross-legged on

5:26

the broad moon carpet, listening to

5:29

this very confident and

5:31

probably it mattered to us that she

5:33

was quite beautiful, cool looking

5:36

person, talk about how beauty

5:38

ideals that really unattainable beauty ideals

5:41

were holding us back as young women

5:43

in university or entering

5:46

the workplace because we were spending so much

5:48

time on the labor of beauty. So

5:50

yeah, it was an important book for baby feminists

5:53

in university when I was coming up. So

5:55

we're really giving girls a message even in all this

5:57

rhetoric of freedom that they should be sexually.

6:00

available but not sexually in charge of themselves.

6:03

You told us about the moment when you were first

6:05

confused in public, in a toilet

6:07

no less, for Naomi Wolf. You

6:10

would return the shock doctrine about disaster capitalism

6:13

and then later this changes everything

6:15

about the climate crisis. But

6:18

the two of you kept getting mixed up in

6:20

people's minds. What

6:22

was she writing about in that period?

6:25

So in her early years,

6:27

like the first four books that

6:29

she wrote, were really all in the

6:31

third wave feminist

6:33

vein. She wrote about childbirth, she wrote

6:36

about becoming a mother, sexual expectations

6:38

for young women, she wrote about kind

6:40

of power feminism. I wrote

6:42

The End of America because I

6:45

was seeing that in the U.S. there

6:47

were these 10 steps being put in place

6:50

by the Bush administration that I realized

6:52

you always see when it would be dicked. I

6:54

think changed and things got more

6:56

confusing because I'm not identified

6:59

primarily as a feminist writer, though I am a feminist,

7:01

but I

7:02

write more about corporate power and attacks

7:04

on democracy.

7:05

And in 2007 she

7:07

wrote a book called The End of America which was

7:09

an argument about the stages

7:12

that societies go through

7:14

moving from an open society to a closed

7:17

society, an authoritarian society. So

7:19

I looked at Italy

7:22

in the 20s,

7:22

Germany in the 30s, Russia

7:24

in the 30s, East

7:25

Germany in the 50s, Czechoslovakia. After

7:27

the publication of that book, her writing

7:30

became a lot more like what I would describe as speculative,

7:32

like she would just announce George

7:35

W. Bush is not going to allow the 2008 elections to

7:38

take place with no evidence,

7:40

but it would get a lot of attention

7:42

online. And so she started becoming

7:45

more speculative in what she would post

7:47

about, you know, she would talk about 5G, she

7:49

would talk about chemtrails, she would

7:52

speculate that maybe ISIS beheadings

7:54

were crisis actors, but it was really,

7:56

really all over the map. It wasn't like,

7:59

it was more like

7:59

being a conspiracy influencer,

8:02

like you're just moving from one topic to the next,

8:04

getting traction, you know, getting cloud online,

8:06

but there isn't a coherence to it. It's not like

8:09

you're laying out your case in a detailed

8:11

way, the way I would argue maybe a more

8:13

thorough conspiracy theorist might do. This

8:15

is sometimes called conspiracy without the theory.

8:18

Well, in the book, you write about

8:20

one particular infamous incident and one

8:23

that you think may have set Naomi Wolf or

8:25

the other Naomi, as you call her, on an alternate

8:28

path.

8:29

Can you tell me what happened? Yeah,

8:31

I think there were a few incidents where

8:34

she was getting pushed further

8:36

and further out of the world

8:39

where she had grown up come of age

8:41

and in which she had faith. You know, one

8:44

of the things I argue in the book is that the biggest

8:45

difference between me and Naomi Wolf,

8:48

the difference that I care about, it's not that she has

8:50

blue eyes and I have brown ones, it's

8:52

that she is a liberal, somebody

8:54

who really believed in the Democratic Party, believed

8:56

in the meritocracy, went up its ladders.

8:59

Her feminism was a feminism that

9:01

was really about women getting access

9:04

to elite power. And I am

9:06

really with no apologies, a leftist.

9:08

I think there were a few things that pushed

9:10

her out of what I would describe the House of Liberalism.

9:13

So in 2019 was, you know, a

9:16

reputational meltdown. And honestly, I don't like dwelling

9:18

on it very much because I'm sure it was the hardest day

9:20

of her life. I write about it very briefly in

9:22

the book. I found like

9:24

several dozen executions, but

9:27

that was

9:27

again only looking at the old

9:30

daily records and the crime tables. Several

9:32

dozen executions.

9:33

Correct. And this correct a misapprehension

9:37

that is in

9:39

every website that the last

9:40

man was executed for sodomy in Britain in 1835. I

9:44

don't think you're right about this.

9:45

Your listeners will probably remember this interview

9:48

on BBC when it was discovered

9:50

live on the air that she had made some foundational errors

9:52

in that book. Thomas

9:53

Silver wasn't executed. Death

9:56

recorded. I was really surprised by

9:58

this. And I looked The death

10:00

recorded is what's in, I

10:02

think most of these cases that you've

10:06

identified as executions, it doesn't

10:08

mean that he was executed. I don't think

10:10

any of the executions you've identified here actually

10:12

happened. Well that's

10:14

a really important thing to investigate.

10:17

See I think this is a kind of,

10:20

when I found this I didn't really know what to do with it, because

10:23

I think it is, I think it's quite a big problem

10:25

with your argument.

10:26

So for people who might not remember

10:28

it, this is the moment in 2019, live on

10:30

air, that the entire premise of Naomi

10:35

Wolf's new book called Outrages was

10:37

shown to be false. She

10:40

had believed she'd unearthed evidence of dozens

10:42

of executions of gay men in Victorian

10:44

England, but she had fundamentally

10:47

misunderstood the wording in historical

10:49

records. And from there

10:52

the book was withdrawn and

10:54

then popped.

10:56

She was humiliated. So

10:58

there you are, the facts in a wolf's

11:00

clothing. That's one way to generate

11:02

publicity for your book, but wow that

11:04

is a brutal fact check live to

11:06

air.

11:07

The more significant part of that, and I think

11:09

it's very good that those errors were found, and I think we

11:12

should take facts seriously, we should all do

11:14

better fact checking and all do better accountability

11:17

when it comes to the work we put out

11:19

in the world. If we make mistakes we should be held accountable,

11:22

which is I think what the BBC was trying to do.

11:24

But that is different from what happened afterwards,

11:27

which was an absolutely spectacular

11:29

and kind of grotesque internet pile

11:31

on. And I would describe it as internet bullying.

11:34

I think it raises the question of what happens to

11:36

people who get turned into

11:37

a spectacle on liberal

11:39

and left twitter. This

11:41

is 2019, it's less than a year

11:43

before the pandemic lockdown. And

11:46

so I think

11:46

that

11:48

reputational meltdown

11:49

really meant that she was no longer

11:52

ever really going to have access to

11:55

the audiences, readers

11:57

that she

11:58

depended upon.

11:59

including for her income. And so

12:02

she had to, I quote Rosie Boycott saying

12:05

she had to find another realm

12:07

where she could get another

12:09

audience. And of course she would become a star

12:11

there. One person who apparently is not afraid to

12:13

speak up is Naomi Wolf who was undoubtedly losing

12:16

friends by appearing on the show tonight. I never

12:18

thought I would be talking to you except in

12:20

a debate format. I'm sure we disagree on an awful

12:23

lot. So

12:23

Naomi Wolf had been laughed out of the world she

12:25

knew and had come up in. Then

12:28

the pandemic hits a year later. She finds

12:30

herself online a lot and maybe

12:32

grasping for a new audience. What

12:35

exactly did Wolf begin claiming in those years?

12:38

Well, I think she was just part of a network

12:40

of misinformation. Hi, hi

12:43

everyone. It's Naomi Wolf,

12:46

CEO of Daily Cloud. And as I promised,

12:48

I'm here to talk about

12:51

the vaccine passports. I've, I

12:54

appeared on Fox yesterday to

12:57

share my warning about the vaccine

12:59

passports. And I got hundreds

13:01

and hundreds of emails. We're all familiar with

13:03

it and it's not particularly unique. And I'm

13:05

not sure of the utility of rehashing

13:08

all of the COVID conspiracy theories now

13:11

but pretty much name it, you know and

13:13

she probably either said it in her

13:15

own voice or amplified somebody else saying

13:17

it.

13:18

So why has this whole

13:20

coronavirus insanity

13:24

had the effect of weakening the

13:26

West? Well,

13:27

it's the Chinese Communist Party

13:30

in alliance with big tech.

13:38

So while Naomi Wolf was going through all of this and

13:41

going even further down the conspiracy

13:43

rabbit hole people were still mixing

13:45

the two of you up. And many thought that it

13:47

was actually you, Naomi Klein who

13:50

now believes bonkers ideas and was promoting

13:52

them all over right-wing media channels. It

13:56

must've been infuriating. The reason

13:58

I got interested in my...

13:59

doppelganger is

14:01

less because it was annoying to be confused

14:04

with her because sure okay but because

14:06

in the COVID period she kind of

14:08

became a doppelganger of her former self

14:10

like there were all of these articles that came out in this period

14:13

of you know whatever happened to Naomi Wolf

14:15

why is she behaving this way how did she go

14:17

from being this prominent feminist

14:19

a Democratic Party advisor to somebody

14:22

who is spreading all this medical misinformation

14:24

getting kicked off Twitter and so on so

14:28

because I was seeing that happen with

14:30

not just her but with many people I think

14:32

you know I've spoken to so many people since I started

14:35

doing this work who tell me you know I can't

14:37

talk to my sister anymore my father

14:39

you know has gone down the rabbit hole he's not himself

14:42

he's altered he's different and I thought

14:44

well maybe this is an interesting

14:46

kind of narrow aperture

14:48

through which to look at this much

14:51

broader and chaotic phenomenon

14:53

a lot of people who are not vaccinated

14:56

are confirming and this is my experience that

14:58

you can't people don't have no

15:00

sense anymore like you they don't smell

15:03

like there's a human being in the room and

15:05

they don't where it becomes complex for

15:07

me

15:08

is and

15:10

I really want to be clear that I don't think this

15:12

is intentional she

15:14

was telling a story about COVID that was

15:16

kind of like a twisted doppelganger of

15:18

the shock doctrine because she was talking

15:21

about how elites in Davos

15:23

and China

15:24

Gates Fauci

15:26

wanted this crisis so

15:28

that they could track and surveil us or possibly

15:31

even call us she started talking about a vaccine

15:33

genocide so as

15:35

you know the shock doctrine talks about abuses

15:38

of power during states of emergency so the confusion

15:40

between us really started speeding

15:42

up when she started doing that so

15:45

this is a massive attack

15:48

on the west by China or

15:50

a mass attack using China

15:53

you know the world economic forum perhaps you say a

15:55

lot of people in the pandemic

15:56

were glued to their screens locked inside

15:59

and I wonder

15:59

while you're watching Nomi Wolf create

16:02

this, what seems like this whole other

16:04

persona, and it's getting bigger

16:06

and bigger. What was

16:09

the tipping point for you? Why did you decide that

16:11

it was time to actually write about it? Not

16:13

just comment on it, write a whole book about it. Well,

16:16

this is not a revenge book. This

16:18

is not a book to get her. I'm not interested

16:21

in adding to the pile of bullying

16:23

that I think she's already experienced. I

16:26

got interested in this instead

16:30

of being horrified by it. I started thinking

16:32

about and reading about what

16:35

the meaning of having a doppelganger is. It

16:37

is just this fascinating topic.

16:39

They're this very useful tool to

16:42

look at things that are hard

16:45

to look at directly. They provide

16:47

a double, a way to look indirectly.

16:50

It occurred to me that

16:53

I could use this strange experience

16:55

that I was having of having a doppelganger to

16:58

explore a range of things that were very much

17:00

on my mind and that I thought were at play

17:02

in this collective

17:03

unhinging that we experienced during

17:05

the pandemic.

17:06

But also, and I think much more significantly

17:08

and ominously, so many

17:10

of these works of art that I referenced about

17:12

the figure of the doppelgangers are ways of

17:15

looking at the rise of fascism

17:17

and authoritarianism in society.

17:20

What we most fear is that our society

17:22

has a doppelganger of itself, that our

17:24

society has an evil twin, and

17:27

that we could tip at any moment. I

17:29

have friends in India who send

17:31

me messages going, it's happened. We've tipped

17:33

into the doppelganger of ourselves. We've

17:36

tipped into our evil twin. I have friends in Italy

17:38

that send me messages like that. I feel

17:40

it in my own country in Canada.

17:42

I feel it here in the US where I am now. It's

17:45

a helpful tool. I think about Charlie

17:48

Chaplin's The Great Dictator that came out

17:50

in 1940, his way of exploring

17:53

that shadow world. Naomi,

18:04

you've talked about some of the obsessions

18:06

that you've discovered in writing this book, and

18:08

I guess one of them was your own

18:10

in terms of the research that you were doing. And I wonder if you

18:12

could tell me about the

18:15

extent and breadth of that and where

18:18

it took you. There

18:20

is always an obsessive quality to any kind of deep

18:22

research. And for me, this was no exception.

18:25

And this book is not about Naomi

18:27

Wolf, but she is kind of my white

18:29

rabbit from Alice in Wonderland, leading

18:32

me down the rabbit hole. And then it really becomes about

18:34

the rabbit hole and who else I meet down

18:36

there, including I think some much more consequential

18:39

figures who are engaging

18:41

in much more consequential forms of doppelganging

18:43

and doubling and

18:44

warped mirroring. War room

18:46

pandemic. Here's your host,

18:49

Stephen K. Van.

18:53

Welcome live from Capitol Hill.

18:55

It is War Room Pandemic. So

18:57

Wolf started becoming a regular on

18:59

Steve Bannon's show in the

19:01

spring of 2021. So walk us

19:03

through the details.

19:04

Sure. And if you step

19:06

back and think about it, why would they not?

19:09

I mean, one of the reasons why he is such

19:11

an influencer figure is because he broadcasts

19:13

daily for a long time. He puts out about 17 hours

19:16

of content a week. And at one point

19:18

she was on his show every single day

19:21

for two weeks. They published a book

19:23

together. They put

19:24

out T-shirts together. Big breaking

19:26

news. I want to make sure the audience gets access into

19:29

your site. Tell us what you got, ma'am.

19:32

Another gigantic,

19:34

shocking tragedy. A huge

19:36

story broken by the War Room Daily Cloud.

19:39

Pfizer documents, research volunteers. It's

19:41

not like she was just an occasional

19:44

presence. She almost had the status of

19:46

a co-host on Steve Bannon's War Room.

19:49

And this is just my excuse for

19:51

why I had to multitask

19:53

in order to keep up with the going zone in

19:56

the mirror world. So that meant that I was listening

19:57

to these podcasts in every.

19:59

interstitial moment of my life, you know, driving

20:02

on the way back from dropping my kid off at

20:04

school, you know, walking the dog, folding

20:06

laundry. And then yes, in

20:09

the evenings, I like to do some relaxing yoga.

20:11

And there was one moment when when

20:13

my husband walked in on me, you know, in pigeon

20:16

pose,

20:16

and I lunged

20:19

jokes, I would lunge for my phone to turn

20:21

off

20:21

war room pandemic. It doesn't sound like

20:23

relaxing yoga, Naomi. Well, somebody said to me

20:26

recently that I was, I was toxic

20:28

and detoxing

20:28

at the same time.

20:31

You also write that, you know, this was this

20:34

is hours and hours, hours that you could have spent learning

20:36

a new language. And it's such an intense

20:38

amount of research. What did you learn

20:41

as our frontline correspondent from the

20:43

mirror world?

20:44

Listening to Steve Bannon said you don't have to.

20:47

I mean, what interested me most,

20:49

because, you know, I have followed Steve Bannon

20:52

over the years, not firsthand,

20:54

though, it was more like Steve Bannon as refracted

20:57

through articles in The Guardian

20:59

and The New York Times. But there's something about

21:01

really just getting it from the source

21:03

in this form, where you realize that the

21:05

Bannon that we see on this side of the

21:07

mirror is very selective.

21:10

Like we see Steve Bannon

21:11

when he's getting dragged away in

21:13

handcuffs. I

21:17

have not yet begun to fight.

21:19

We see him when there's a

21:22

fiery quote of him encouraging

21:24

writers ahead of January 6.

21:26

We're talking about putting heads on sticks. Second

21:29

term kicks off with firing Ray, firing Fauci.

21:32

Now, I actually want to go a step farther, but I realize the

21:34

president is a kindhearted man and a good man.

21:36

I'd actually like to go back to the old times

21:39

of Tudor England. I'd put the heads on pikes,

21:41

right? I'd put them at the two corners of the White

21:43

House as a warning.

21:46

And that is a real part of Steve Bannon,

21:48

and he is a very dangerous figure who has

21:50

been building this internationalist

21:53

coalition of the most far right parties

21:55

in Europe and in Latin America. We

21:58

should pay close attention to that. of

22:00

his project,

22:02

what I found more chilling was the

22:04

way he would combine this

22:07

racist, xenophobic, transphobic agenda

22:10

with elements of the left that

22:14

were very recognizable

22:15

to me. Every new show, MSNBC,

22:18

New York Times, all of it as sponsored by,

22:20

brought to you by Pfizer.

22:22

For instance, he would do a montage

22:24

of audio on his show where he

22:26

would cut together the intros and outros

22:29

of various cable news shows on

22:32

MSNBC and CNN that said, brought to you by

22:34

Pfizer, brought to you by Pfizer. And

22:36

this was like recognizable to me

22:38

as media studies 101, some

22:41

of the work that I did in No Logo about

22:43

corporate media consolidation. What

22:45

worried me about it was not that he was doing

22:47

it. What worried me was that it was a reminder

22:50

that the left wasn't doing

22:52

it anymore. That there was not

22:54

a serious movement on the left that was focused on

22:56

corporate power. And that

22:59

is Bannon's playbook. He

23:01

finds issues that the

23:04

left and liberals are really not using

23:07

anymore. I spent years thinking you were the devil,

23:09

my disrespect, and now I'm so happy

23:11

to have you in the trenches, you know, along

23:14

with other people across the political spectrum

23:16

fighting. So he's doing that with opposition

23:18

to big tech, big pharma, and

23:20

the people who he calls the warrior moms,

23:23

who he says are all listening to Naomi Wolf.

23:25

So that's what shows me not

23:27

so much that she

23:30

sees something that she can get out of him, which frankly

23:32

is a little bit boring. Like she obviously gets

23:35

a new audience and she can sell books. But

23:37

what is he getting out of her? And what he's getting

23:40

out of her is a new section

23:42

of the Democratic Party

23:44

coalition that he's hoping to peel off

23:47

and get back in the White House for, as he

23:49

says on his show, 100 years.

23:52

Naomi, your book also explores

23:55

other apparently unlikely

23:57

alliances between, say, Wellness, Hip,

23:59

and Women.

23:59

who are into crystals and healing

24:03

and others who are extremely right-wing and into

24:05

QAnon. What do you

24:07

think is going on there? So I

24:09

make a distinction between the far left and the far

24:12

out and the far out, if you'll

24:14

forgive me, you know it's more of the woo-woo

24:16

world and it's not everybody who

24:19

is into New Age and

24:21

wellness but there is a section

24:23

of that world that has

24:26

really taken on this

24:28

idea that our only defense

24:31

in a very cruel and unequal

24:33

world is to perfect ourselves,

24:35

perfect our bodies, turn inwards

24:38

and there's a way that that hyper individualism

24:41

in the wellness world rhymes

24:44

quite easily with the

24:46

hyper individualism of extreme

24:48

capitalism and that's I think how you

24:50

get the kind of you

24:52

know author of oh she glows cookbooks

24:54

at the trucker con employee in Ottawa

24:57

with a bunch of guys waiting Confederate flags.

25:01

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That's Z-O-L-A.com.

26:23

A lot of people would assume it's all right

26:25

to dismiss what they consider wackadoodle

26:27

theories and online jabbering, but

26:29

you make quite a different case in the book and admit that

26:31

this is a mistake that you've previously

26:34

made. Can you explain that a bit to me?

26:36

Well,

26:37

in North America, it's very clear that this is

26:39

not a marginal part of our political

26:41

discourse. I mean, especially when you have

26:43

figures like Marjorie Taylor Greene in

26:46

Congress. I think telling ourselves

26:48

like, oh, this is too silly to pay attention to

26:51

is frankly very arrogant.

26:53

We don't have the power to turn these people off.

26:56

They have their own platforms. They

26:58

have their own systems of advancing their worldview

27:01

and their political agenda. And I think

27:03

we ignore it at our peril. Nemi,

27:05

what do you say to people who have friends, partners,

27:08

families who have succumbed to this alternate

27:10

reality and are experiencing for the first time

27:13

something akin to existential whiplash?

27:15

How can they be brought back? Well, this

27:17

is one of the main reasons why I wrote the book because

27:20

I

27:21

think there are ways that we can connect

27:23

with friends,

27:24

family members, colleagues

27:27

who seem to be a doppelganger

27:29

of their former selves. I think

27:32

that there are bridges that can be put down

27:34

to try to give people a graceful exit.

27:37

And it's not about laughing at them or

27:39

making them feel stupid. People

27:41

are concerned about big pharma. Say you're concerned

27:43

about big pharma too. I mean, I know I

27:45

am. We need actual policy

27:47

responses that makes the kind

27:50

of profiteering from the pandemic that happened

27:52

undercover of the vaccines. We

27:55

should have policy responses to that because

27:57

I think when people are

27:59

hurting, if nobody is offering...

27:59

them a real solution, then they

28:02

will accept the counterfeit.

28:03

And

28:05

all the research shows

28:07

that

28:08

people are most likely to walk

28:11

across that bridge if it is being extended

28:13

by somebody who they know and trust.

28:16

I'm not going to get them through. They're not going to

28:18

read by book, but maybe they'll listen

28:21

to their sister or their friend

28:23

or their niece. And there's some cases

28:26

where it really isn't safe to have these conversations.

28:28

And if that's the case, I'm not saying that you should

28:30

do it.

28:31

But if it is safe,

28:32

and you can stand it, I wouldn't give

28:34

up on people. We also write

28:37

in the book that in one sense, the whole

28:39

doppelganger confusion with Naomi Wolf bothered

28:41

you because maybe you care too much

28:43

about what people on Twitter said, and that you

28:45

felt your own self was disappearing under

28:47

Naomi Wolf's name.

28:50

Did writing this book

28:51

help you let go of that in any way or give you a

28:53

sense of closure?

28:55

So

28:56

I think a true line in the book

28:58

is that all of these ways that we engage

29:01

in doubling ourselves, whether it

29:02

is trying to perfect our personal brands,

29:05

or trying to perfect our perfectly

29:07

well bodies, they're all ways in

29:10

which the self takes up

29:12

too much space. In a way, I get

29:14

it. Margaret Thatcher told us there is

29:16

no such thing as society. We have all

29:18

received the message that we are on our

29:21

own in these roiling

29:23

seas. And so we turn to

29:26

the south. But we really are

29:28

living at an intersection of

29:30

surging authoritarianism, white

29:33

supremacy, the climate emergency,

29:36

and none of these crises can

29:38

we solve on our own just

29:40

by perfecting ourselves. So we're all

29:43

going to have to hold ourselves

29:45

a little less tightly, spend a

29:48

little less time and labor perfecting

29:51

ourselves and a little more time finding

29:53

each other and building coalitions

29:55

that are capable of standing up to these forces. So

29:58

in really giving myself

29:59

over to the confusion and learning to laugh

30:02

about it and just accepting the

30:04

absurdity of it. I can say

30:06

that, yes, I've learned to take myself

30:08

a little less seriously. I couldn't have written a book

30:10

like this without that. And I feel

30:13

strangely free.

30:15

Naomi, thank you so much.

30:17

Thank you so much. That was

30:19

the author,

30:22

Naomi Klein. Her

30:27

book, Toppleganger, is out now.

30:30

We reached out to Naomi Wolfe for this podcast.

30:33

She declined to comment.

30:36

If you want to hear more, Guardian

30:38

Live are hosting an event with Naomi Klein

30:40

and Zoe Williams on Wednesday, the 27th of September.

30:44

There are tickets available in person in Manchester

30:47

and there is streaming access available

30:49

online. For more details, visit

30:51

theguardian.live.

30:52

That's

30:55

it for today. I'm Nishin

30:57

Iqbal, and this episode was produced by Sammy

30:59

Kent.

31:00

Sound design was by Solomon King. The

31:03

executive producer was Phil Maynard.

31:06

We'll be back again tomorrow.

31:09

This is The Guardian.

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