Doppelganger by Naomi Klein

Format: Audiobook (Spotify)
Read: February 2025

I decided to listen to this on audio after seeing the striking cover and title in Waterstones a few times and reading the honestly ridiculous sounding premise. I’d never heard of Naomi Klein or Naomi Wolf, though I had heard of The Beauty Myth, but the idea of them being being confused online, with such opposite politics, was intriguing to me.

Doppelgangers?

Naomi Klein is an author and journalist, known for her book No Logo, she mostly writes about climate change and capitalism. It’s an unfortunate and almost comical coincidence that there is another famous Naomi, one with numerous career and personal parallels but Naomi Wolf took a sharp veer to the political right during the pandemic and found herself Steven Bannon’s darling and queen of conspiracies. Klein – a lifelong Leftist – found herself frequently tagged and confused online and in real life for Wolf, and this bizarre experience inspired the book.

The element I enjoyed the most of this book was the consideration of this ancient idea of “doppelgangers” and what that means in our modern world where many of us now increasingly bifurcate our identities across online spaces.

I’ve thought little about my own online identities but then again personal branding has never been a concern I’ve had. This blog, my hidden corner of the vast internet, is the place I feel most comfortable and most myself. I share more of my inner life and thoughts here than I ever can articulate in real life with my friends and family, most of them don’t even know I do this! So in a way, this digital version of me writing this book review is a different Alice to the one who interacts with the real physical world but it’s not a exerise or something I feel like I perform for external validation.

As I grow older I frequently consider the past versions of myself, another kind of doppelganger. I’ve recently been sorting and backing up old photographs and the Alice of 10, 15 or 20 years ago feels to me like a different person. I look so different and I think and react to the world differently, it’s hard to remember being her now and the decisions that she made that lead to the version of Alice that I am now.

The doppelganger ultimate is a reflection of ourselves, a dark mirror that reflects back our fears and anxieties. Naomi’s ultimate thesis is to use this idea of doppelgangers and “the mirror world” (where facts don’t matter and empathy is extinct) to examine the political swing to the right that has happened in the last few years, and Wolf is an interesting figure to use as a starting point. As she points out, the fear that underpins this swing for post people is based in legitimate concerns that the Left hasn’t offered any real solutions for (e.g. political corruption, the pharmaceutical industry, maternity healthcare, big tech is out of control and cannot be trusted etc) and figures like Steve Bannon have figured out how to use this to energise the Right.

As I read in a succinct Guardian review, “everybody has their suspicions that they are being lied to and manipulated – and they’re right. Where they disagree is on the identity of the liars and the purpose of the manipulation.”

Did I learn anything new?

I think this is an exceptionally well considered and well written book, and brilliantly read in the audio version by Klein herself. However, I’m only giving it 3 stars because it didn’t contain any new information for me. I have listened to a lot of podcasts in the last 8 years or so already knew most of the content in this book.

• Knowledge Fight – which is essentially a recap show for InfoWars where the hosts unpack whatever unhinged thing Alex Jones was yelling about that week. (The theme is an absolute banger).
• Behind The Bastards – which examines different “bastards” from history and the present day. This was where I learned most of the stuff on pharmaceuticals, alt. right, all the bollocks about the MMR jabs and autism, anti-vax and fake scammy doctors .. including who the fuck Steve Bannon even is!
• My difficult-to-explain fascination with Fundamentalist Christians in the USA and the various YouTube videos (Fundie Fridays), subreddits and podcasts (Leaving Eden) on that topic. This isn’t explicitly discussed in this book but it is part of the bigger picture.
• Maintenance Phase has unpacked a lot of the more unhinged Wellness stuff and anti-vax.
• If Books Could Kill have also done episodes on books exploring many of these political ideas.
• Also watching Last Week Tonight on YouTube has given me a lot of insight into dysfunctional disturbingly predatory mess that is the USA’s system of everything (though Klein is Canadian, Wolf is American!).

The one brand new bit of information I learned was the origin of Asperger’s syndrome. Who Dr Asperger’s was and why he was doing this study… Obviously it’s Nazis and the Holocaust! And it’s horrifying!! Now I know why medical professionals don’t use this diagnosis any more. Fucking hell.

What’s the message?

Ultimately Naomi advocates for more empathy towards the Right, to pay more attention to what they are saying and try to understand – and answer – the fears that underpin bonkers beliefs that the idea of 5G signals in COVID vaccinations, or “pizzagate.”

How likely that is to happen… I don’t know, but ignoring and mocking those who have gone down the pipeline definitely isn’t working.

The YouTube algorithm has recently been presenting me with videos from men who have found their way out the otherwise of the alt. Right pipeline. It was very interesting to hear them explain how they ended up there, and what it was that made them come out the other side.

If you are interested in any of these topics then this book is very insightful, but if you’ve already spent time listening to podcasts as I have you might not find much new information.