Yahoo Finance Naomi Klein: Even after Doppelganger, I’m still being mixed up with Naomi Wolf
Long mistaken for conspiracy theorist Naomi Wolf, Naomi Klein wrote Doppelganger as a way to confront the confusion. But, sitting down to talk with City A.M. after winning the inaugural Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction, it became clear that Klein is still stalked by her mirror double
After years of being mistaken for another writer with the same first name but significantly more controversial ideas, you would think writing a prize-winning book about the confusion would put the matter to rest. Alas, it was not to be for Naomi Klein, who, speaking to me the day after winning the Women’s Prize for her 2023 bestseller Doppelganger, told me she had just found herself mistaken for the “other Naomi” yet again. “The host of the Today programme really asked me whether I had deleted my tweet about London. But it wasn’t my tweet.”
You might well have seen the tweet in question. It went viral and was written by the Naomi who has long stalked Klein: the feminist-turned-conspiracy-theorist Naomi Wolf.
I am in London for the first time in 5 years. Unrecognizable. Grotesque huge modern buildings looming over historic neighborhoods. No sign of British culture except for vestigial pubs. Huge LED screens in formerly beautiful peaceful streets. People sleeping, living on the… https://t.co/kuyVds5Nr9
— Dr Naomi Wolf (@naomirwolf) June 10, 2024
Turns out Naomi Wolf had decided to visit London the exact same week Naomi Klein happened to be in the city to attend the Women’s Prize award. It’s the kind of coincidence a Machiavellian publicist might have dreamed up to promote Klein’s new book, which uses the longstanding confusion between her and her “mirror double” Wolf to examine the rabbit hole world of conspiracy theorists. “For the record London, I think you are gorgeous,” Klein tweeted shortly after, pointedly.
Of course, intertwining their names together in paperback forever may not be the best way to draw a line between the two Naomis, a fact that Klein is the first to acknowledge. But it’s an alluring story of muddled identity.
Who is the other Naomi?
So who is Naomi Wolf? She was once a women’s equality hero. In 1991, she published The Beauty Myth which called for a rejection of female beauty standards. But since then, Wolf has had a strange descent from being the subject of feminist acclaim to liberal disgust. Since around 2014, she has descended deeper and deeper into conspiracy culture. This became particularly pronounced during the pandemic, when Wolf’s tweeting sprees saw her suspended from the platform for spreading disinformation about vaccines. As Klein sees it, Wolf also became a doppelganger – a warped double – of her former self.
The mixup, more and more troubling with Wolf’s increasingly extremist tendencies, has become somewhat of a Twitter in-joke.
keeping track of things with the following rhyme:
if the Naomi be Klein
you’re doing just fine
If the Naomi be Wolf
Oh, buddy. Ooooof.— bela lugosi's dad (@markpopham) October 23, 2019
This has only exacerbated the problem. There was one “particularly bleak day” recounted in Doppelganger when a tweet by Wolf comparing Covid vaccines to Jews being forced to wear yellow stars in Nazi Germany was attributed to Klein. “Damn twitter autocomplete,” was the rather feeble explanation she got, when pointing out the error to someone who tagged her on Twitter.
“The confusion was now so frequent that Twitter’s algorithm was prompting it, helpfully filling in the mistake for its users,” Klein explains. “Anything I did to correct the record – or state my own position on what had become her pet topics – would just train the algorithm to confuse us even more.”
But for Klein, diving into the confusion was an important way to gain “reportorial distance” and relieve her own frustrations. “I think what was liberating was the decision to shift from this being something that just kept happening to me to something that I was going to treat as a subject of interest… Once it became something that I was researching and interested in, then I stopped being bothered by it.” With this perspective, the London mix-up last week was “just interesting”, she says.
Down the conspiracy rabbit hole
While Wolf forms a crucial part of Doppelganger’s narrative, the larger focus of the book is on conspiracy culture at large. In fact, the personal angle is something that Klein, who has pinpointed Western individualism as part of the blame for extreme societal polarisation, even sees as shameful. Spending hours of her time listening to Naomi Wolf podcasts and watching Steve Bannon broadcasts bordered on obsessiveness, and she insisted on initially keeping the project secret, while turning down other work in order to keep up with her Naomi media habit. But “I told myself I had no choice,” she writes. “That this was not, in fact, an epically frivolous and narcissistic waste of my compressed writing time or or the compressed time on the clock of our fast-warming planet.”
Using the Wolf mix-up as the central conceit was “a way to play with form,” she tells me. “I was almost approaching it as a writing exercise. I wanted to see whether I could pull off this very unconventional structure of using the double as a through line to the argument.”
Doppelganger is an unconventional read that flits between Klein’s personal tale about Wolf and a broader analysis of conspiracy culture, looking at the rapid rise of the far right and the slippery rabbit holes that have led there. But despite the author’s reservations, its main takeaway is personal: what doppelgangers teach us is ultimately about ourselves, not them.
Klein also interrogates social media as another mirror world. Online profiles, for example, act as more virtuous digital doubles of their human creators. Given this, Klein admits her own relationship with social media is fraught. She tells me she has many ways to mitigate its effects, which she sees as “really dangerous”. She doesn’t manage her own Instagram, she doesn’t have Twitter on her phone and she regularly blocks it from her desktop. “I do think about giving it up and I may very well one day,” she says, but leaving it comes with its own feelings of shame. Walking away from the platform feels “slightly irresponsible”. She now regularly hands over her Twitter account to campaign groups and says 95 per cent of what she now tweets is about Gaza.
Baillie Gifford: ‘The goal was not to cut funding’
The latter comes with its own controversy of course. When telling a friend I was interviewing Naomi Klein, he retorted that Klein was somewhat of a conspiracist herself, or at least contentious radical, citing The Shock Doctrine, a book in which Klein argues national crises have been deliberately exploited to push through neoliberal economic policies, and her recent involvement in the high profile Baillie Gifford arts spat.
Klein was one of the 800+ signatories of the recent contentious letter spearheaded by Fossil Free Books which called on Baillie Gifford, a prominent sponsor of arts festivals including Hay and the Edinburgh Fringe, to pull its investments from the fossil fuel industry as well as from companies “that profit from Israeli apartheid, occupation and genocide”. The resulting pressure saw Hay Festival sever its ties to Baillie Gifford, and the investment manager has since cancelled all its remaining sponsorships of literary festivals. Other than Hay, it is unclear whether the decision was taken by the festivals or Baillie Gifford itself.
Fossil Free Books campaigners themselves have admitted the outcome is less than ideal, while others have been quick to attack the campaign as illogical and self-defeating, given the outcome. But Klein holds firm that the campaign was not misguided, saying it comes from a “tried and tested strategy to put pressure on governments”, which Klein emphasises are the real targets.
“We wouldn’t be doing corporate campaigns like this if our governments were acting in the face of the climate crisis, or listening to their constituents who want a ceasefire [and] want an arms embargo. These aren’t marginal positions,” she says.
For Baillie Gifford itself, she goes on, the saga is a lesson for big business. To gain the clout that comes with artistic association, you have to engage with artists – whether you like it or not.
“Well, guess what, writers have opinions, writers do research. And, you know, I think it’s quite scandalous that they are so thin-skinned that they are putting these festivals in jeopardy, if indeed that’s what’s happening,” Klein says. “And I think people should see this through and pull their money from Baillie Gifford because it’s a terrible thing to do to the arts. I don’t think they should be angry at activists who are trying to save lives and use whatever levers they can find, understanding that they’re imperfect.”
“It’s obviously uncomfortable, and it’s unfortunate, I don’t know anybody who’s involved in this campaign who was happy that literary festivals are suffering for funding,” she continues. “The goal was to get Baillie Gifford to divest; it was not to get the festivals to lose their sponsors.”
Winning the Women’s Prize
Bear in mind: Klein has just won the Women’s Prize, which itself relies on funding from Amazon-owned Audible, which sponsors the Fiction Prize. The Non-Fiction award, sponsored by Findmypast, was added to the Prize list for the first time this year, something which Klein welcomes. “Money is tight, including for the Women’s Prize. It’s nice that something is building out.”
Awarding women in non-fiction, a field where they have been traditionally unrecognised, is especially valuable, she adds. “It’s easier to recognise women as storytellers than it is to recognise women as experts.”
It’s easier to recognise women as storytellers than it is to recognise women as experts
We may concede that women can write good fluffy novels after all, but associations of reason, fact and authority have traditionally lied with men. Consequently, female writers of non-fiction are less likely to be reviewed than their male peers, with only 26.5 per cent of non-fiction reviews in UK national newspapers in 2022 allocated to books written by women, according to the Prize. Women are also less likely to win, or be shortlisted for, non-fiction book prizes, with only 35.5 per cent of books awarded a non-fiction prize over the past 10 years across seven UK prizes written by women.
The Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction hopes to go some way towards correcting this, bringing due recognition and prestige to female writers as authority figures, while boosting their profiles. A win, after all, is pretty much a guaranteed sales boost. It’s just one step towards closing the gap but we can, at the very least, hope sufficient attention to it may help with a humbler goal: stop us, for god’s sake, from mixing up our Naomis.
