12/5/2023 0 Comments Naomi wolf videoIt’s common, she says, for “anti-establishment writers and scholars attempt to analyse the underlying systems that built and uphold power in our world… to be dismissed as conspiracy theorists.” Well, this just in: sometimes they are. Klein concedes that “the line between unsupported conspiracy claims and reliable investigative research is neither as firm nor as stable as many of us would like to believe.” But she places herself and her allies very firmly on the correct side of that line. Yet I’m not sure if Doppelganger really faces up to the consequences of its own metaphor. The market, unfortunately, favours the latter. They investigate the power structures of the contemporary corporate world, but Klein does it for newspapers and websites that employ editors to test her assertions, while Wolf blathers freely on podcasts about how the Covid vaccine is a bioweapon used by the Chinese government to assassinate community leaders in her part of the Hudson Valley. Victorian studies gained a teaching example from Wolf’s sloppy, florid and tendentious work. (Those who know the complexity of the BBC freelance invoicing system may not be persuaded.) ![]() Wolf was at first gracious, but later decided that Bill Gates had paid me, via the BBC, to take her “off the chessboard” and silence her message about the true nature of the Covid pandemic. In an interview for BBC Radio 3, I brought the bad news that she had misread her sources: these executions had not happened, and the acts were not consensual. In 2019, Wolf published Outrages, in which she claimed that the Victorian justice system had carried out “mass executions” of men for consensual sexual acts. Klein is one of these: she was supposed to be writing a book about something else (what, she doesn’t say). They even compel those who think that such institutions are vitally important, and regard Wolf’s later career with horror and disbelief – but watch all the same. ![]() They also compel those who may not believe them, but see such misinformation as a useful catalyst to the destruction of the institutions they despise. There, her breathless monologues about quarantine camps and vaccine-related “baby die-off” compel those who believe the false assertions she makes. Wolf regularly appears on Steve Bannon’s top-rated, 10-million-plus-downloaded podcast War Room. And it carries the charge of all doppelganger stories – what if the figure in the mirror were more powerful than the one in the world? What if Naomi Klein were the Other Naomi? Klein calls this “the mirror world”, in which “Other Naomi” exists as her twisted reflection. It is an attempt to understand the popularity of the conspiracy circus in which Wolf is now a leading performer. It is a horror story that describes how it feels to have your public identity intruded upon, cuckoo-like, by a monstrous rival. How could it be anything else? It is a deposition filed to prove that the author is not the same person as her subject. But those familiar with Wolf’s recent assertions – that, for instance, the bull imagery at the 2022 Birmingham Commonwealth Games is evidence that Satan directed the global pandemic response to secure eternal mastery over the Earth – may wonder why Klein goes anywhere without explanatory signage and a choir performing Madonna’s She’s Not Me.ĭoppelganger is a weird book. ![]() Readers who only know Klein for her Guardian articles on the climate crisis and Wolf as a third-wave feminist writer might find Klein’s plea for distinction excessive. In February 2021, Naomi Klein, the Canadian public intellectual and author of No Logo, posted an eight-word Tweet about Naomi Wolf, the American public intellectual and author of The Beauty Myth: “Your periodic reminder to keep your Naomis straight.” That weary joke about their long history of confusion has now become a 400-page book.
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