 Naomi Klein has written a book that, by her own admission, no one wanted her to write. Least of all herself. “In my defense, it was never my intention to write this book” she confesses in the opening line, before referring to the project as “absurd” and “out of control” and listing all the more important things she could have done instead (writing about serious subjects, participating in climate summits, assisting in her husband’s parliamentary campaign, checking in on her aging parents or looking after her son). She is not wrong. Naomi Klein, author of two of the most important and memorable books you will find on state and corporate corruption, tyranny, propaganda and conspiracy--No Logo and The Shock Doctrine—has written a book about the trials and tribulations of sharing the same first name as another author she politically disagrees with. The author in question is Naomi Wolf. Someone who underwent a “dramatic political and personal transformation” during Covid. An experience that was “destabilising” and “reality warping”. Not for Wolf—but for Klein. Rather than being utterly inconsequential, mildly amusing or, at most, a minor irritant—the prospect that anyone might confuse them “created a crisis” in Klein’s “personal brand” leaving her “no choice” but to “reassert myself as the owner of my ideas, my identity, my name”. If you think this is--an epically frivolous and narcissistic waste of someone’s time—you are not alone. Klein agrees with you. This is her own description of the book. In the introduction! Why would I want to read and then review a book likely to be an epically frivolous waste of my time? To be clear, my reasons are distinct. I am writing this review because I think the book perfectly encapsulates the spiritual and intellectual rot of the Western left. A rot that has been setting in for some years but became obvious and undeniable once the left collectively jettisoned any pretence of scepticism towards the establishment and morphed into its ideological foot soldiers for the Covid Event. This was not my reason for reading the book. Failing to heed Klein’s advice, I naively assumed that the theme of the Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World was a device Klein had employed to engage seriously (albeit aggressively) with opinions that differed markedly from her own. While making room for government corruption and corporate opportunism, Klein’s interpretation of Covid was in line with the mainstream narrative. Wolf (like myself), has departed radically from the mainstream narrative. Klein was a writer I respected, and I was keen to have my interpretation challenged. Alas, no such challenge was forthcoming. And by that I don’t mean that the challenge she raised was merely feeble. I mean that Klein omitted to provide a single challenge to any documented claim made by Wolf or any other Covid dissident in the entire book. This failure is totally bizarre even on its own terms. In the conclusion Klein actually argues that the lesson of her book is that one must properly engage with alternative opinions. Indeed, Klein argues that the doppelganger phenomenon arises (and specifically Klein’s “doppelganger trouble” began) precisely when… …we are not seeing one another clearly (because we are so busy projecting what we cannot bear to see about ourselves onto others) and not seeing the world and the connections among us clearly (because we have partitioned ourselves and blocked our vision.) This revelation only occurs to Klein in the final pages—and then only fleetingly because she is then quick to clarify that whatever political or moral injunction there might be to “reach out” in the spirit of “kinship” with one’s doppelganger, Klein has no plans” to “embrace” Wolf as a “long lost relative”. This means that the whole book consists of her projecting what she cannot bear to see about herself onto Wolf. I wish I was exaggerating. The projection is so severe that Klein lost the ability “to do basic identity maintenance” became “a spectator in [her] own life” and felt herself “fading away”. Having accused Wolf of descending into a mirror world of paranoia, it was Klein that began to feel her enemies “deep inside her… in her mind, in her very cells” to the point that “nothing could be trusted, least of all one another.” The Mirror World turns out to be Klein’s unconscious. Klein makes little effort to hide her unconscious urges. Turning to the world of literature to understand the meaning of her obsession, she proceeds to discuss several examples of characters who kill their doppelgangers, and in doing so kill themselves. In Doppelganger Klein brings this fictional trope to reality. And I don’t just mean that in attempting to destroy Wolf’s reputation Klein has unwittingly destroyed her own. I mean that she has wittingly done so. On almost every page Klein is rebelling against herself; laying charges and insults that brazenly apply to herself. When she isn’t doing that, she is offering caveats and disclaimers so vast that she winds up hoisting herself by her own petard. It’s as if Klein realises how bad her book is and is attempting to outflank her would be opponents by getting her own objections in first. Klein’s confused stream of consciousness, this bizarre exercise in autocritique, is never more painfully exposed than when she is discussing the spectre of the “conspiracy theorist”. Faithfully regurgitating liberalism’s arme du jour, she describes a conspiracy theorist as someone who believes that the world is run by a “cabal of nefarious individuals”. Lacking a structural analysis, conspiracy theorists such as Wolf are inclined to “hop from one conspiracy to the next” (In Wolf’s case “Ebola, Snowden, 5G, ISIS” but “never staying with one subject for long enough to actually prove anything.” Thus, Wolf has aligned herself with a “network of pseudo-experts, celebrities and influencers” that “impersonate investigative journalism”. This provides the basis for Klein’s refusal to engage with Wolf and her unsubstantiated claims. The trouble is that Wolf isn’t just on Twitter. During the time that Klein was writing Doppelganger, Wolf published two books (The Bodies of Others: The New Authoritarians, Covid-19 and The War against the Human and Pfizer Documents Analysis Volunteers’ Reports eBook: Find Out What Pfizer, FDA Tried to Conceal) each with concrete verifiable and sourced claims. Neither book is mentioned in Doppelganger. Klein spent at least two years hanging off of Wolf’s every word but could not manage to level a single objection to either book in her critique. In other words, Klein wants us to believe that the absence of any serious discussion of Covid in Doppelganger was because it was Wolf, not Klein, who spent all her time on Twitter. If Klein’s research was largely confined to hours of, in her words, “doomscrolling through Twitter”, this was merely because she was following Wolf’s descent into the Mirror World. The projection here is mind blowing. A better justification for Klein’s non-engagement with Wolf would be to argue that one’s status as a “conspiracy theorist” is, in itself, disqualifying. If the conspiracist premise (that “the world is run by a cabal of individuals”) is provably untrue then, logically, all charges or conclusions following from it can be dismissed. Klein appears to plug for this strategy when citing the work of a colleague of hers at Rutgers (Jack Bratich). Although curiously both the colleague and Klein suggest that conspiracies about secret elites is a peculiarly liberal fallacy: Liberal investments in individuals result in thinking of power as residing in individuals and groups rather than structures. Without an analysis of capital or class they end up defaulting to the stories the West tells itself about the power of the individual to change the world. This is a reversal of the traditional liberal objection to conspiracy theory (that individuals act in their own self-interest and thus cannot coalesce to plan or pull off conspiracies) but contains at least two very obvious flaws. Conspiracies are, by definition, collective endeavours and so are specifically not about the power of the individual to change the world. Presumably this is why Bratich chose to include the qualifier “and groups”. But then one wonders what a class analysis is if it isn’t analysing the actions and machinations of groups. In the Shock Doctrine Klein analysed conspiracies of various groups, including those behind the CIA’s MK Ultra programme and the plots to overthrow Mohammad Mosaddegh in Iran and Salvador Allende in Chile. Clearly not wishing to disavow her previous work, she is forced to concede in Doppelganger that conspiracies are, indeed, a fact of our political existence: Understanding how capitalism in its latest stage shapes and distorts our world [does not] preclude the presence of real-world conspiracies. If we define “conspiracy” as an agreement among members of a group to pull off some kind of nefarious plot in the shadows, then representatives of capital—in government and the corporate sector—engage in conspiracies as a matter of course. Quite. Klein then reminds us, that the charge of being a “conspiracy theorist” is, indeed what liberals accuse leftists of: When radical and anti-establishment writers attempt to analyse the underlying systems that built and uphold power in our world, including the existence of covert operations, it is common for them to be dismissed as conspiracy theorists. In truth, it is one of the most battle worn tactics used to bury and marginalize ideas that are inconvenient to those who wield economic and political power… Every serious left-wing analyst of power has faced this smear, from Marx onwards. How then to distinguish the “real investigative journalists” from the irresponsible “conspiracy theorists who “impersonate” them? Distinguishing her own scholarly approach to that of Wolf’s, Klein writes: From the researcher’s perspective, the difference between [our approaches] could not be more glaring. Responsible investigators follow a set of shared standards: double and triple source, verify leaked documents, cite peer review studies, come clean about uncertainties, share sections of texts with recognised experts… have fact checkers comb through it all prepublication, then hand it all over to a libel lawyer (or in my case, multiple lawyers). It’s a slow, expensive, careful process, but it gets as close as we know how to something we used to agree was proof that something was true. Putting aside the fact that Doppelganger contains not a shred of the research described above, Klein has at least conceded that the question of whether a conspiracy is real or not is an empirical one. They stand or fall based on the weight of evidence. Klein must, by her own standards, engage with the evidence. If Wolf is an “imposter” and thus not worth engaging, there are plenty of Covid dissidents that do have the requisite training. The Covid period oversaw an unprecedented number of scientists and doctors speak out—including, but certainly not limited to, Robert Malone, Peter McCullough, Christopher Shaw, Harvey Risch, Asim Malhotra, Pierre Kory and Meryl Nass. Steven Pelech, author of this book on Covid, is a professor in the Department of Medicine at Klein’s own university. Klein, for her part, is a veteran investigative journalist who should be able to either scrutinise these claims herself or call upon the judgment and/or evaluation of relevant experts. Apparently not. Doppelganger cites not a single scientific source for either side! Having repeatedly mocked people for “doing their own research”, perhaps Klein didn’t feel qualified to engage with the scientific literature herself. But what does that leave us with? A book of endless “hot take” rebuttals to something someone (usually Wolf) wrote on Twitter and an occasional link to press releases by the CDC, the NIH and the WHO. Parroting the exact same language as the now notorious intelligence linked Integrity Initiative, Klein wants to dismiss any and every challenge to the mainstream narrative as “misinformation” or “disinformation” or as having been “debunked”. The trouble with this strategy was that as time went on more and more ‘mis’, ‘dis’ or ‘debunked’ information turned out to be true. Most notoriously, the vaccines exhaustively described as “safe and effective” by health officials, politicians and journalists turned out to be neither safe nor effective. News of this inconveniently started to break into the mainstream just as Klein was preparing to publish Doppelganger. Without the time or the inclination to properly investigate a scandal that would pull the rug from underneath her entire book, Klein morphed into a crisis PR manager for the CDC: [There have been some] adverse reactions to Covid vaccines, whether rare cases of heart inflammation among teenage boys and young men after receiving the original mRNA shots, a phenomenon being monitored by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, or a possible small uptick in strokes among seniors, a concern being flagged by the CDC in early 2023. There are risks to every vaccine (and indeed any medical procedure or medication) and these reports of harmful reactions, even if confirmed, in no way negate the value or importance of getting vaccinated: Covid itself still represented a far more significant health risk for the population at large. Her sources confirming the “rarity” of myocarditis and the “small uptick” in strokes? Press releases from the CDC. Source that Covid represented a “significant health risk for the population at large”? None. Klein goes on to cite research claiming that 234,000 Covid deaths in the US “could have been prevented with primary series vaccination.” But who carried out this research? The Peter G. Peterson Foundation founded and funded by the eponymous investment banker, Reaganite Commerce Secretary and co-founder of the Blackstone Group. In 2021 The Peter G Peterson Foundation sponsored an event with the Rockefeller Foundation to honour the work of Chairman and CEO of Pfizer Albert Bourla. In 2022 Bourla received the Peter G. Peterson Business Statesmanship award for his work during Covid. Nonetheless, Naomi Klein wants us to believe that she is sceptical of “concentrated power” and “monopoly capital”. Klein claims to regret the “lack of debate and allowable questioning of the vaccines in progressive spaces”. People had “good reasons”, she writes, “not to trust Big Pharma and Big Government, let alone the two acting in coordination” and they should not have been left to “do their own research” where could encounter Wolf’s “wild claims”. Why wasn’t “ample room” made in “public debates” and “reliable media” for “medical experts skilled in helping the public weigh the pros and cons of health decisions” Klein asks exasperatedly. Indeed. Let me venture an answer. The reason the media and medical experts did not deign to provide “reliable, in-depth information” about the vaccines was presumably the same reason why Klein opted not to do so either. They would have been forced to explain to the public that these weren’t actually vaccines at all, but novel “gene therapies”; that the safety testing had been limited and expedited; that there was no long-term safety data; and after all that the vaccines did not stop transmission or infection. And this just what the CDC said—never mind its critics! Another “debunked conspiracy theory” that turned out to be possibly true, was the ‘lab leak’ origin of Covid. This prompted Klein to make the following self-criticism: I don’t know where the Covid-19 virus originated […] I do realize, in retrospect, that I was too quick to take the official story—that it came from a wet market where wild animals were sold—at face value. If I’m honest, I accepted it because it served my own motivated reasoning and reinforced my worldview: the pandemic was a little less frightening to me if it was yet another example of humans overstressing nature and getting bitten on the ass for it. Then as time went on, and the “lab leak theory” became a key talking point from people like Wolf in the Mirror World, where it was mixed with baseless claims about bioweapons […] Even though more and more facts and documents were piling up that supported a serious consideration of the lab leak hypothesis, most liberals and leftists didn’t bother looking for months because we didn’t want to be like them, in the same way that I didn’t want to be like her. In an odd way, their over-the-top conspiracies fed our overcredulity; their “question everything” led to many of us not questioning enough. Klein presents this extract as if it was the result of some honest soul-searching on her part. I wish she had such integrity. The timeline here is quite clear. Emails were leaked very early on that revealed that senior health officials had lied, and that they themselves believed the virus originated from the laboratory in Wuhan. This was initially covered up but when it became impossible to deny, liberal gatekeepers in the mainstream media began sanctioning the ‘lab leak’ hypothesis. There is no evidence (no articles, comments etc) that Klein herself gave any “serious consideration” to the lab leak hypothesis until it became acceptable to the mainstream. If Klein’s revelation regarding her motivated reasoning and narcissistic attachments were genuine, why didn’t she treat it as a chastening lesson not to reflexively dismiss new information based purely on the grounds of who is presenting it? Instead, what we get is a snide attempt to blame Wolf for Klein’s own error. If Wolf hadn’t paired her support for a lab origin of the virus with “baseless claims about bioweapons” Klein might have taken her more seriously. If Klein had done any reading on the subject she would have come across innumerable references in official documentation to the “dual use” of gain of function research. It isn’t a baseless claim, still less a conspiracy theory. It’s official US policy! Another so called “baseless claim” Klein is keen to debunk is that the Green New Deal is "a nefarious plan by bankers and venture capitalists to grab power under cover of the climate emergency.” Read the small print of the Green New Deal however, and what do we find? That the pesky details of how the US economy would be overhauled would be left to a House Select Committee appointed by the Speaker of the House. The committee, in partnership with “business”, “finance” and “industry”, would ensure that any measures taken promote "economic security, labor market flexibility and entrepreneurism.” The financing of the Green New Deal will be provided by the “Federal Reserve” (a cartel of private banks beholden to Wall Street) and “public venture funds”. No close reading of the small print is required to expose the heavy financial bent to the “green solutions” put forward by the UN and the WEF. They are front and centre. The Great Reset is very clearly concerned with sealing the sustainability of the financial system rather than the planet. Why would this be surprising? Again, no conspiracy. Just policy. Confronted with evidence hiding in plain sight, Klein simply pivots: [When] conspiracy theories about the Great Reset [started] showing up at the early anti-lockdown protests, they were presented as if a great secret was being revealed. What was strange though, was that the Great Reset wasn’t hidden—it was a branding campaign that the World Economic Forum had kicked off to repackage many of the ideas it has long advanced: biometric IDs, 3D printing, corporate green energy… it was standard issue Davos fare—arrogant to be sure and actively dangerous. But there was nothing hidden about it. I find this passage baffling not simply because of the way Klein causally lists WEF agenda items she admits are “actively dangerous” as a way to mock those concerned about them. I know of not a single example of any critic of the Great Reset claiming this was a secret. Neither can I fathom why a critic would want to claim it was. It would be totally self-defeating. Keen to find out who she might have meant, I searched through articles of hers over the past few years. The only relevant one I found was in The Intercept: Search for the term “global reset” and you will be bombarded with breathless “exposés” of a secret globalist cabal, headed by Schwab and Bill Gates, that is [planning] to turn the world into a high-tech dictatorship that will take away your freedom forever: a green/socialist/Venezuela/Soros/forced vaccine dictatorship if the Reset exposé is coming from the far right, and a Big Pharma/GMO/biometric implants/5G/robot dog/forced vaccine dictatorship if the exposé hails from the far left. Confused? That’s not on you. No Naomi, it’s on you. Because you haven’t specified who you are referring to, nor provided any references or links to what they are arguing. Whoever these “far-left and far-right conspiracists” are, Klein assures us they are… …sitting down over a tray of information-shit sandwiches to talk about how the Great Reset is Gates’s plan to use the DNA from our Covid-19 tests to turn the United States into Venezuela. When she isn’t wielding an axe to nameless conspiracy theorists on the far left, she is delivering heart rending sermons on how the left should be more caring and inclusive (???) Left movements often behave in ways that are neither inclusive or caring. [And we] also don’t put enough thought into how to build alliances… Sure we pay lip service to reaching out, but in practice most of us (even many who claim to be staunchly anti-police) spend a lot of time policing our movements’ borders, turning on people who see themselves as on our side, making our ranks smaller not larger. Very moving. Klein wasn’t always so blasé about the role of global elites at the heart of the climate justice movement. Back in 2013 Klein had taken the green movement to task for trusting billionaires— and the “Big Green” groups they funded—to put the planet before profits. The denialism among the environmental activists eager to receive billionaire funding “has been more damaging than the right-wing denialism” of climate change, she wrote. Strong words. This followed on from her denunciations of the Ford and the Rockefeller foundations in The Shock Doctrine that funded regime change operations on behalf of the CIA. And yet fast forward to 2020 and the same criticisms that Klein had levelled at the green movement a decade before were drawing widespread condemnation—not least from Klein herself! Jeff Gibbs’ Planet of the Humans, was a documentary that took aim at the green movement’s partnership with billionaires, Wall Street investor corporations, and wealthy family foundations, to promote renewable energy technology as the solution to climate change. Klein joined a campaign to suppress the film, urging executive producers of the film against its release. She would later sign an open letter demanding the film be retracted and promoted a “fact check” of the film by Ketan Joshi, a former communications officer for the wind farm company Infigen Energy. In Doppelganger, Klein still makes references to the excesses of billionaires. Elon Musk, bête noire of liberal establishment, for instance receives many scathing rebukes, as does Peter Thiel. But when it comes to the aforementioned Big Green billionaires, those who also fund the NGOs, charities and foundations that comprise the compatible left Klein belongs to, she is silent. Bill Gates and George Soros do get a mention but only to chastise the likes of Wolf for daring to mention their name. Any focus on these billionaires, we find out, belies “hyper-individualism” and “antisemitism”. We should be “hard and critical on structures” but “soft on people” Klein opines at the end of the book, apparently forgetting that she had devoted the previous three hundred pages projecting liquid vitriol at Naomi Wolf. What changed? What changed was that Klein began getting her hands on some of the Big Green billionaire dollars herself. If you can’t beat them, join them. In truth even while Klein was insisting that "unless we go after the 'money pollution" in politics, "no campaign against real pollution stands a chance” she was working with organisations tied to the Rockefeller Foundation. By 2015, Klein was calling on the support of a string of family foundations including the Schmidt Family Foundation, the Park Foundation and the Wallace Global Fund to support the launch of her book and documentary “This Changes Everything”. The Rockefeller Brothers Fund contributed several grants to the documentary—enough to buy Susan Rockefeller a role as an executive producer. Pittance in comparison to the Ford Foundation that donated a whopping $250,000 to Klein’s project. Far from being embarrassed by these lucrative connections to intelligence connected billionaires, Klein’s actions since have only served to deepen these ties. In 2017 she took on a role as a regular columnist at The Intercept owned by the tech billionaire and US intelligence operative Pierre Omidiyar (the salaries at The Intercept alone are well-known to be exorbitant). In 2018 Klein became the Gloria Steinem Endowed Chair in Media, Culture and Feminist Studies at Rutgers University—a position created with a total $3 million from a dozen foundations. Gloria Steinem, lest we forget, was an agent of the CIA. To be clear, I don’t think Klein is a CIA agent (although she doesn’t seem to care very much about being associated with them). I just think she has just internalised the values and discretion of the company she now enjoys. As a possessor of three sinecures and a tenured professorship at the University of British Columbia, Klein now moves in very elite circles—and she isn’t shy about admitting it. Doppelganger is so filled with references to the work of her haute intellectual friends that it felt like I was following her round a soirée at Martha’s Vinyard. Suffice to say, Klein abides by the code and steers clear from the taboos of her class. Most conspicuously, she now shares in their peculiar hang ups. It isn’t quite true that liberals don’t engage in conspiracy theorising. It’s more that they refrain from conspiracising about “elite groups”. This is because they are the elite. Historically then, it has been outsiders that are subjects of their paranoia; designated foreign enemies or domestic extremists. Without question, the most notorious and baseless conspiracy theory of the last ten years is the ‘Russiagate’ or ‘BlueAnon’ conspiracy—the theory that Trump won the 2016 election because of Russian election interference. The theory did not emerge from the bowels of the dark web or far right extremist cults, but from the heart of the liberal establishment; contrived by a collaboration between the Clinton family, Richard Steele and Mi6, and then faithfully repeated ad nauseum during the entirety of Trump’s first term by the liberal media. By the time Covid hit, liberals were blaming Russian disinformation operations bots for any and every challenge to the liberal establishment. Critics called attention to the baselessness of the allegations right away. Klein could hardly have been unaware of this. One of the principal journalist responsible for exposing the fraud was her former colleague and researcher for her Shock Doctrine book, Aaron Maté. By 2022, the details of the fraud were widely known and widely reported. No matter. Liberal conspiracy theories don’t carry the same degree of ridicule or threat of cancellation—so Klein was perfectly happy to repeat the lie that Russia interfered in US elections. Later without specifying who she is referring to or even any accompanying sources or evidence, she alleges that “online leaders” (Wolf?) had been “egged on” by “Russian bots”. Neither Russia nor its president Vladimir Putin has anything to do with the supposed subject of Doppelganger but Klein evidently cannot help herself: Vladimir Putin, too, is a master at mirroring, and has been since the early days of his career in politics. Throughout Russia’s illegal invasion and occupation of Ukraine, Putin would accuse the Ukrainian government of the precise crimes he was busily committing, or considering committing himself. Klein’s source for this? Ned Price—spokesperson of the State Department. A chapter later Klein is railing against Putin “casting himself as a global truth-teller about the crimes of Western colonialism and an upholder of the anti-imperialist, anti-fascist traditions”. I have scoured Doppelganger for any of the salient facts pertaining to the lead up to the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022. The fact that there was a full-blown civil war happening. That the civil war was sparked by a US sponsored Maidan Coup in 2014 that overthrew a democratically elected government deemed to be too close to its Russian neighbour. That the coup government immediately banned the Russian language. That they integrated Nazis into the heart of the Ukrainian state and began massacring ethnic Russians with US weapons. That the West sabotaged peace negotiations for eight years and then promised to incorporate Ukraine into NATO. These omissions cannot have been born of a lack of concern about the growing threat of fascism. Klein devotes an entire chapter to the “Nazi in the Mirror”. And yet she did not see fit to mention that her own parliament gave two standing ovations to an SS Nazi for his part in fighting the Russians in the World War 2. Equally worthy of “our urgent reckoning” are the domestic extremists: the “ridiculous movements Other Naomi helps lead”. Back in 2008 I recall watching a talk by Klein at the University of Chicago about the banking crisis and what she foresaw as the imminent collapse of neoliberalism. During the talk she implored students and academics to formulate new and better ideas than the ones Milton Friedman and his “Chicago Boys” had formulated at the university three decades previously. After all, “ideas have consequences” she enthused. At the time I was surprised by her idealist faith that the capitalist system could be entirely re-oriented apparently on the basis of better ideas found “lying around”. Or that her job as an activist was to appeal to the wisdom of Brahmin elites to finally see sense. And yet 12 years on Klein was pinning her hopes on something far more fanciful; a full on collective, spiritual conversion of our political class: This was a crisis that could only be met if we chose to truly see one another, even those laboring and living in the shadows, a crisis that could only be addressed with collective action and willingness to make some individual sacrifices for the greater good. Who can forget those first tender weeks when everything froze. When so many of us [were] alive with connections. [The] illusion of our separateness fell away. We were not, and never were, self-made, and unmade, by one another. [The] period when many governments paid people to stay at home, and offered Covid testing and vaccination for free, represented an extreme and historic deviation from every major public policy trend of the last half century, which has been a headlong flight from the very notion that we owe one another anything by right of our shared humanity […] With no warning, the message from much of our political and corporate classes changed diametrically. It turned out we were a society after all, that the young and healthy should make sacrifices for the old and ill; that we should wear masks as an act of solidarity with them, if not for ourselves; and that we all should applaud and thank the very people whose lives and labor had been most systematically devalued, discounted, and demeaned before the pandemic. Those expressions of solidarity were the real vertigo, the real upside-down world, since they bore no resemblance to the ways capitalism had taught us to unsee and neglect one another for so very long. The same Klein that prides herself on going beyond the malevolent schemes of nefarious individuals to the deeper material structures of capitalism, nonetheless invests these same individuals with the power to overcome these structures in a moment of transcendent revelation. Unfortunately, Covid did not turn out to be the “portal for change” Klein hoped it would be. To be sure, some blame lies with governments who “didn’t do nearly as much as they could have and should have to build a true infrastructure of care and solidarity during the pandemic”. But the principal fault of “centrist politicians” was believing that the public was capable of the solidarity and care that they, the centrist politicians, had just discovered in themselves. What Klein calls a form of “magical thinking”: Looking back now, it seems entirely unsurprising that a subset of the population said, Fuck you: we won’t mask or jab or stay home to protect people we have already chosen not to see […] None of this should have come as a shock. What is surprising, and frankly heartening, is that, after decades of frontal attacks on the idea that we live in a society, a critical mass of us had held on to enough of a civic and community spirit that we went along with these new rules for the better part of two years, and, moreover, that so many of us rejoiced at the sudden apparition of a social state. Yes, when our governments abandoned their Covid policies, we lapsed back to the crisis called “normal”—but for a time, we glimpsed another world. To summarise: in the early months of the pandemic “the message from our political and corporate classes changed diametrically”. This “was the real vertigo, the real-upside down world”. An historic opportunity to break from half a century of neoliberal policy making was, however, undone by a “conglomeration of atomized individuals who saw anything collective as the enemy”. Anyone who questioned the socialist credentials of the likes of Boris Johnson, Justin Trudeau, Emanual Macron, not to mention Donald Trump, were “revolting against connectedness”. At the very time our newly awakened political and corporate classes were forcing through the greatest upward transfer of wealth in human history, Klein’s hopes for a socialist future were “systematically” squandered “by people like my doppelganger.” Klein is clearly so desperate to pin as much blame on Wolf as possible she, ironically, resorts to inventing conspiracy theories about “conspiracy theorists”. Needless to say this is not the much vaunted “structural critique of capitalism” Klein promised. A structural critique of the Covid Event would seek to understand why government health industries became adjuncts of the military industrial complex in the wake of 9/11. It would lay out the parallel histories of ‘gain of function’ and MRNA “vaccine” research funded by the US Defense Department. It would examine critically the pandemic preparation simulations carried out by the US military and the CIA. It would seek to understand why the simulations were so focused on the suspension of democratic procedures and radical longer-term changes that move us towards control societies. Klein would have sought to understand why Operation Warp Speed and the entire US pandemic response was organised by the US military. She would have interrogated the astronomically expensive and risky ‘vaccine or bust’ strategy employed by all Western governments while systematically suppressing the use of provably safe and effective off-patent therapeutics that come at a fraction of the cost. Finally, a structural critique would have situated all of this in the context of the perilous condition of the financial system and the global shift towards a multipolar world. Klein did none of this. What we got instead was a children’s story about good people who stayed home, wore masks and followed the science and bad people who didn’t. A morality tale contrasting the “pseudo-experts, celebrities and influencers” churning out “debunked claims” to their “fickle” audiences with the “serious” and “reliable” reportage of the corporate media. We got a fable about good billionaires allied to the Democratic Party who donate to causes Klein approves of, and bad billionaires allied to the Republican Party who donate to causes Klein does not approve of. Doppelganger is a shockingly bad book and I find it difficult to imagine how a once serious writer could have fallen so far. By focusing on the book’s substantial failures, I think I have, frankly, given the misleading impression that the book is at least largely concerned with substantive issues. It isn’t. When she isn’t discussing viral limericks comparing herself favourably to Wolf she is fretting upon the latter’s increase in Twitter followers. As if signposting her charlatanism, Klein laments her failure to properly "pepper my prose” with “weighty and serious literary references to add depth to wacky anecdotes.” This is someone whose idea of critiquing the “culture of narcissism” consists of a laborious examination of how such a culture makes her feel, how it changes the way she relates to herself and how it “alienates” her from her “true self”. Klein is hopelessly lost. Fame, undoubtedly, has taken its toll. After years in the public eye, Klein is now someone in constant need of reassurance: Covid had cancelled so many of the things that had for years, told me who I was in the world. A planned book tour. A series of lectures. Places where people would come up to me and share what my work meant to them… The world was disappearing and so was I. Elsewhere she states her preference for truths and ways of understanding the world that are “stabilizing”. This is not an attack on Klein’s character. Only to point out that she is clearly not cut out for a profession (investigative journalism) that entails the wherewithal to reveal uncomfortable, destabilising, facts and the courage to take unpopular stances. She hasn’t, by her own admission, got the stomach for it. Not any more. There is no shame in this. However, evidently Klein does feel shame, which is why she has been reduced to writing 350 page hit pieces against those that do. It is pathetic. But this is bigger than Naomi Klein. To be sure somebody less conflicted could have done a better job ‘left-washing’ the Covid Event. But not much better. The wretchedness of Doppelganger owes most to the fact that Klein set herself the task of defending the indefensible. A few years ago, it seemed that the political right was facing an existential crisis as young people overwhelmingly tacked towards the progressive left. For anyone paying attention—the shift to the left seemed inevitable and inexorable. Today it is the left facing an existential crisis having needlessly and gratuitously thrown their weight behind the biggest scandal in the history of Western medicine. For three whole years health officials, politicians, and their stenographers in the media did nothing but lie to us. They lied about the origin of the virus, they lied about its lethality, they lied about masking and they lied about treatments and therapeutics. They lied about the safety and effectiveness of the so-called vaccines. Anyone who had the temerity to point this out was smeared as a “conspiracy theorist” or a “grifter” by a left hellbent on hurling a generation of dissidents to the political right. The scale of this betrayal is every bit as great as the Second International’s support for World War One. My only hope is that the self-destruction of this iteration of the left will—as it did a hundred years ago—clear the space for something revolutionary in its place. A left that won’t morph into sclerotic liberalism. A left genuinely relevant to a post-Covid, multipolar world. Author Samuel Grove is a political activist in the UK. His previous writing has been published in Philosophy Now, Tribune, Salvage, Monthly Review, Alborada, and Red Pepper. His monograph on Charles Darwin, The Reluctant Radical, was published by Lexington Books in 2021. Photo credit: Vera de Kok (CC BY-SA 4.0) Archives May 2025
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