Episode 246: Age of Doppelgangers feat Naomi Klein
Naomi Klein, author of 'The Shock Doctrine' and the upcoming 'Doppelganger: A Trip Into Mirror World', joins us to talk about QAnon, "diagonalist politics", and why people keep confusing her with Naomi Wolf online.
Subscribe for $5 a month to get an extra episode of QAA every week + access to ongoing series like Manclan, Trickle Down and The Spectral Voyager: www.patreon.com/QAnonAnonymous
Naomi Klein: https://twitter.com/NaomiAKlein / https://linktr.ee/naomiklein
Music by Pontus Berghe. Editing by Corey Klotz.
http://qanonanonymous.com
Welcome, listener, to Chapter 246 of the QAA podcast, The Doppelganger, featuring Naomi Klein episode.
As always, we are your hosts, Jake Rogatansky, Julian Fields, and Travis View.
People become interested in the world of conspiracism for a variety of reasons.
But our guest today, Naomi Klein, has a uniquely personal one.
Klein, the author of books such as The Shock Doctrine, The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, was frequently confused with Naomi Wolf, the feminist author turned vaccine skeptic and ally of Steve If the Naomi be Klein, you're doing just fine.
Naomi Wolf's descent into the world of conspiracy theories in pre-Meme Episode 128, "The Wolfpack."
This confusion occurred so frequently that it led to a rhyme that started to circulate
in 2019 that went like this.
If the Naomi be Klein, you're doing just fine.
If the Naomi be Wolf, oh buddy, oof.
[laughter]
Yeah, that's awesome.
In her fascinating new book, Doppelganger, A Trip into the Mirror World, Naomi Klein wrestles with having a double and explores the alternate reality that she inhabits.
Now, Naomi, thank you so much for joining us today.
I am absolutely delighted to be with all of you.
A little bit sad that Liv's not here because of the Canadian factor.
Yeah, that was too bad.
She would be able to bring useful perspective.
I was looking forward to talking about truckers.
She has Canadian Ebola, unfortunately.
She caught it at Burning Man.
All right, I'll let it slide.
So the impetus for this book, like I said, is kind of unusual.
It has a really fascinating conceit, and it's very personal that you are frequently confused with this other author who has some superficial similarities to you.
They're both, you know, wrote about these big kind of lefty ideas and, you know, had successful careers.
But your mix, this mix up started crossing in the line to something that was a little bit more disturbing.
So when did it stop being something that was like, you know, perhaps a irritation for your personal brand, something that was genuinely troubling?
Definitely got a lot worse during the pandemic and also just kind of more, in a way, more interesting.
So I'd say like about seven months into the pandemic, like every time I would go online, I would just be inundated with an avalanche of people furious with me or expressing sympathy for me or agreeing with me and none of it was me.
It was all her.
And you know, For me, it's difficult to pry apart from the overall vertigo of that period, right?
I mean, I had been living in the States, I had been teaching at Rutgers, and so I spent the first few months of the pandemic in the U.S.
in one of the ground zeroes.
And then that summer, when the school year ended, Decided to go back to Canada to be near my family.
My parents live in British Columbia.
They're both in their 80s.
I thought it would be good to be near them and also good to be, you know, somewhere where we could be outside more.
The COVID rates were really low.
So we relocated to a part of British Columbia that is pretty remote.
It's three hours to get to the closest city, Vancouver, and then just decided to stay because everything sort of stayed remote.
And so for me, it's difficult to pry apart like the feeling of Who am I?
Where am I?
And then going online to try to get some semblance of connection and community and finding instead this maelstrom of identity confusion.
And to be perfectly frank with you, I also just thought it was like a cool writing idea because I...
I was feeling kind of politically speechless in this period.
Like this would be like post Biden's election, things are starting to kind of grind back to a bad sort of normal.
You know, I'm somebody who's been really focused on the climate crisis for the past 15 years.
And, you know, call me naive.
I had this wild idea that maybe having this sort of pause in the world economy might lead to a,
oh my God, I almost said reset.
No, no, no, don't ever let this see the light of day.
So you thought that 50% of the population would disappear, right?
And we'd all eat the bugs, just like Laura Logan said.
So no, I mean, I, you know, we actually made like a little a little film with my dear friend Molly Crabapple called The Years of Care and Repair, which was like imagining a post-COVID world where we really learned the lessons of the pandemic, which is like that we are all connected with each other, that we shouldn't treat the people who we depend on for health care and food like absolute garbage, and that we actually value the natural world.
Like remember that period when people were like, I like birds, you know?
So this is, you know, like a lot of other people on the left, like we let ourselves imagine that there could be a real reimagining of how we wanted to live together, because it wasn't just COVID, it was also the racial justice uprisings in the summer of 2020.
And there was this, you know, there was this a way that the first few months of the pandemic were this kind of unveiling of all of these pre-existing crises, right, that were more hidden in the rush and the speed of ordinary capitalism.
And that was sort of peeled back, right?
It wasn't that Black people were fine before George Floyd was murdered.
There was something about the confluence of the kind of the slowness of the pandemic, how unequal it was in terms of who died and who was able to stay safe and then, you know,
people not being at that warped speed and being able to express real solidarity. So
I guess it was realizing, okay, things are returning to like a shitty
normal and I just didn't know politically, like I didn't have anything to say. I
didn't have much more to say, you know, and I just felt a little bit like, okay,
well maybe I could just have some fun with writing.
So I started like just writing more experimentally.
And then I had this idea for a very not Naomi Klein type of book, which is, you know, using my doppelganger to explore a world of doubling, you know, the way we double ourselves online with avatars, the way the right, you know, like the Bannon-esque right has like a mirror answer for everything in the liberal world.
And also like a lot of doppelganger art that I started to, you know, immerse myself in, in this period.
I was reading Philip Roth's Operation Shylock.
I was watching Charlie Chaplin's The Great Dictator and like Denis Villeneuve's Enemy.
And so many of these doppelganger works of art are really about fascism.
Like they're a way of, of reckoning with, of looking at the monster that we most fear, which is, you know, this, like what happens when a society flips fascist is like your neighbor down the street who always seemed really nice is like turning you in and like that That 15 year old now has like a gun and he's marching in goose steps, you know, and then it's, it's this thing of like, you know, your society can turn into its evil twin, right?
I have friends in Italy who are like, yeah, it's happened, you know, or India.
So I think when I, when it clicked in that this could be a way of looking a little bit more lightly at a bunch of these like really heavy topics that it felt like a fun book to write.
Yeah, in the process, thank you for teaching me the word, the Spanish word zozobra, which is like this weird kind of uncomfortable oscillation, I suppose, a kind of like depressive state where you can't exist comfortably as one thing.
I feel like that should have been the name of our podcast.
Zozobra is such a good word.
It's the push and pull of being uncertain about which affective state to be in, right?
Is that not what we're in all the time?
Yes.
And it's like, and there's the other line from Philip Roth from Operation Shylock, which is a doppelganger novel about a doppelganger, Philip Roth.
It's too ridiculous to take seriously and too serious to be ridiculous.
I think you should make that your tagline, actually.
Yes.
That's not a bad idea, actually.
Yeah, we'll just make sure to not credit Philip Roth.
We'll say Naomi Klein said that.
She's a problematic figure.
Yeah.
One of the things I really love about your book is that you operate with a kind of a different paradigm when exploring these kinds of conspiracy theories and the people who believe them.
Because the usual model, like the literature and books about the subject, usually assumes that there are these nonsense beliefs, and they're pushed by these cynical hucksters, and they're believed by brainwashed dupes, and everything they believe is not only false, but it has no tether to the real world at all.
But you describe Naomi Wolf and her allies as operating in a mirror world, which does interact with the whole world that we inhabit.
I want to read one passage in which you describe how these worlds reflect each other.
When looking at the mirror world, it can seem obvious that millions of people have given themselves over to fantasy, to make-believe.
The trickier thing, the uncanny thing, really, is that's what they see when they look at us.
They say we live in a quote-unquote clown world, are stuck in the matrix of groupthink, are suffering from a form of collective hysteria called mass formation psychosis, a made-up term.
The point is that on either side of the reflective glass, we are not having disagreements about differing interpretations of reality, we are having disagreements about who is in reality and who is in a simulation.
I mean, yeah, I love that idea, because it is very easy, I think, to notice how different the world of conspiracists is.
But, like, what do you make of, like, these striking similarities?
Like, it's not alien to our world.
It's like the world that we live in, but just it just has these distortions and sometimes these, you know, these fascist fixations.
This is the feeling of having a doppelganger.
Freud described the uncanny as the species of fear in which the familiar becomes strange, right?
And so that's the kind of shutter of the doppelganger.
Where, you know, what is, what becomes unfamiliar is you, right?
You're looking, you know, you're looking at somebody else, you know, there are different kinds of doppelgangers.
Like in my case, it's not so much that when I look at her, I see myself, but other people see it, right?
So if I, if I Google Naomi Wolf, my face comes up, you know, like it's, it's, and this is before I wrote the book.
Now I've locked us together forever.
God, what have I done?
But yeah, I mean that sort of shudder of familiarity.
I don't know if you've, I mean in any of the events that you've ever covered and gone to weird Q worlds, whether you've ever seen like aspects of it, like there seems to be aspects of the culture that are partly familiar.
Like I remember like when the trucker convoy had occupied Ottawa, Did you ever see any of those videos where they would take journalists on guided tours and they would be like, this is where we cook breakfast, and this is where we have our group daycare, and this is where we do this.
It was almost exactly like the tours of Occupy Wall Street, where people are like, this is our kitchen, this is our garden, this is our library, except there were some slight differences, like it wasn't vegan stew, it was like a roast pig.
And of course it was mixed in with, you know, these far right and supremacist movements.
It wasn't the whole thing.
Don't worry.
I'm not saying it was the whole thing.
I'm just saying that because people get very upset when you point out that there were actual Nazis there.
But the part of it that gave me a chill was I was like, where's the goddamn left?
Like, you know, this is like a weird doppelganger of the left and where's the left?
You know, why didn't we shut down cities saying, you know, the whole world should have a vaccine?
Why are we getting our fourth and fifth shot, you know, before, you know, large parts of the world have even gotten one?
And why aren't we shutting down cities saying, you know, essential workers should be paid a living wage and should be able to call in sick?
I mean, there were plenty of reasons that we could have done that, you know, and there was something about seeing Like my own nation's capital shut down by this kind of doppelganger movement, which was a strange kind of movement because it was really about, you know, it was a howl of individualism that came together momentarily to sort of say, leave us alone, right?
But there were aspects of the form that reminded me that, you know, they're filling a vacuum maybe that used to be occupied by, you know, a larger, more organized left.
And that's when I get scared.
I get scared when I'm listening to Steve Bannon and he says things that sort of sound like You know, me in the 90s, you know, like, you know, about corporate control of the media, you know, brought to you when he does, if you ever heard them do those montages when they, when it's like brought to you by Pfizer, brought to you by Anderson Cooper, brought to you by Pfizer, you know, and it's like media studies 101, you know, but I just don't know whether we're still doing that.
Like, are we still talking about, about that on the left?
Because I haven't heard it lately.
Have you had those moments when you've done your reporting, any of you where you're just like, this is weird us?
Yes, I think so.
I mean, I can definitely see, like, the kind of phantom of collective action in some of these movements that we study, for sure.
Yeah, when we went to the Save the Children rally in Hollywood, there were people of all walks of life.
You had every, you know, every type of gender.
You had, you know, multiple Sexual identities, there was, it was multicultural, there were, you know, there was a, it just, it looked like it could have been a, you know, a liberal rally.
But the thing is, you know, the one that we went to, there was Proud Boy security there that was walking with the group the entire time.
And that felt, you know, totally different and dangerous.
Yeah, because in your book you make this observation that really struck me.
In the movie The Matrix, which conspiracy theorists are obsessed by, human beings are food for the machines.
And then, metaphorically, social media and the online world has transformed us into a type of machine food, as you describe in your book.
And so I'd love to hear your thoughts on the idea that conspiracy theorists are sometimes correct on a metaphoric level, But have also become completely incapable of distinguishing metaphor from literal reality, right?
And I think this does kind of fit with Save the Children of like, we are ruled over by, you know, corrupt pedophiles.
We are ruled over by corporate overlords that are trying to, you know, control us.
And so you'll, you'll see them getting it correct on a metaphoric level, but they are a bit like biblical literalists where they, they just think that that's like very literally true.
Like they are actually eating our babies.
Yeah, I mean, I think this is so complicated in terms of understanding what is going on and what is driving it.
Because yes, they absolutely get like the facts wrong, but often they get the feelings right.
And this was this is true of my own doppelganger.
And I first really kind of noticed it around her, you know, where she really had her star turn on the MAGA right was when she started tweeting nonstop about vaccine passports.
Which was, by the way, an incredibly stupid thing to call, you know, a QR code on your phone.
But, you know, like if you're concerned about misinformation, don't call it a vaccine passport, but that's what they called them.
So she started talking about, and she made this video saying vaccine passports equals slavery forever.
That got many hundreds of thousands of views, and it was viewed by You know, producers for Tucker Carlson and other Fox News hosts.
And they were very excited to have this former famous feminist, former Democratic Party operative.
You know, she had been a big deal in the 90s.
She had advised Al Gore in the 2000 race.
And they were very excited because she tweeted, if I had known that Biden would be in favor of lockdowns, I never would have voted for him.
And then she also said that Biden was like bringing the CCP, you know, the Chinese Communist Party social credit system to the West.
through these vaccine verification apps, which in this video and in her various Fox News appearances, she claimed would know everywhere you went, everyone you were with, also what you were talking about with those people.
And it would even know when you were just in your living room.
Now that is not true.
Like I checked with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, you know, the apps can't eavesdrop, you know, and unless they're activated, like nobody knows where you are.
And also that information wasn't being handed over to a centralized source.
But the liberal response to this online, and I'm sure you saw this, was like this, I'm so smart little joke, which was, wait till they hear about cell phones.
Do you remember that joke?
Like, wait till they hear about cell phones.
And I remember the first time I saw it and I just like chuckled, ah, ah, these stupid, wait till they hear about cell phones.
And then I was just like, wait a minute, like, is it okay that our cell phones can do all those things?
And are we just, we're like the people who are like, we're okay with being eavesdropped as long as it's just our cell phones and not a QR code on our cell phones.
And then you realize we've normalized way too much stuff that we should never have normalized.
And it has created this like wide open door for the Tucker Carlson's and the Steve Bannon's of the world.
To just be like, I'm going to tap into your surveillance fears, but we're not going to really talk about the broader surveillance.
We're just going to talk about how these apps are bringing CCP style surveillance to the West.
Yeah.
And, and I mean, you know, the, the, the machine food kind of idea is that, you know, our data and everything we do is like food for these companies to essentially enrich themselves and continue to proliferate the surveillance, you know, for, for their own gain.
And so again, it's like, you know, wait until they hear about cell phones, wait until we care about cell phones, right?
Like wait until we care about smartphones.
Like why, why is it's like, haha, like we're laughing, but like, it's the most black pill of laughter I've ever partaken in.
Yes.
I mean, yeah, that's like a really, like, brilliant example.
It's like, it's like one thing that they get right is that they should be horrified at the prospect of being surveilled.
But the rest, the rest of us, we sort of accepted the fact that, you know, that like our metadata is just constantly being collected and probably, you know, put in some NSA database.
And then we're also being surveilled by all the technology we use daily.
And then that can be subpoenaed by the government anyway.
Yeah, exactly.
And then so we've like, made peace with that.
And like, their reaction is like, this is horrifying.
The idea that, you know, billionaires like Bill Gates can actually know a lot of things about me and what I do all the time.
It's like, you know, you're right to be horrified about it.
But I guess the rest of us just, for some reason years ago, just made peace with it somehow.
I mean, you make a really interesting point in your book.
You talk about how ironic it is that it seems to be conservatives who are most often agitating for change in this kind of way.
Except for, do they really want change?
And this is where I was saying, it's complicated.
What is Steve Bannon doing with this?
He's building an electoral coalition.
Is he serious about reigning in these big tech companies?
Absolutely not.
I mean, think about what Steve Bannon was doing with the Mercers and Cambridge Analytica.
I mean, he is surveillance capitalism.
You know, he used it for the Trump campaign.
They were incredibly good at hoovering up people's data and using those weird quizzes to try to get more data and, you know, and prompt them in different ways.
He is just a strategist and you cannot blame a strategist for being strategic.
What he does all the time is look at what the Democrats are doing, look at what liberals are doing, and look for the issues and the people that they have abandoned, kick to the curb, and he tries to make an offer that will bring them over to the MAGA or MAGA plus camp, as he now calls it.
So that he can, and this is a quote, win power and hold it for a hundred years.
So it's not about that Steve Bannon cares about surveillance or tech.
You know, he sees an issue that has been left unattended by his political opponents and he's picking it up because he's smart.
He did the same thing with free trade, you know, in the 2016 election.
So many people had voted three times for different Democratic presidential candidates who promised that they were going to renegotiate free trade deals and bring the jobs back to working classes and they didn't.
And Bannon identified that there was a part of the Democratic base that he could peel off and it would help get Trump elected.
Did he actually fight for those people?
They gave the biggest tax cut in history to the rich.
So it's not like they're going to actually do the things that they're claiming they're going to do, but they are tapping into these kind of abandoned issues.
But it's more insidious than that.
You know, like what you were saying before about, you know, people have a sense that the, like the world is run by these like billionaires and the pedophiles are getting off scot-free.
You know, there are so many scandals that we know of that are not speculative, that are not theories, but are actually things that we can prove.
You know, we know that big oil conspired for decades.
They knew that they were warming the planet catastrophically.
They suppressed the information.
They funded denial.
You know, they poured money into think tanks that would spread doubt.
I mean, that's a conspiracy.
It's not to like drain babies of their adrenochrome.
It's just capitalism doing its thing.
But I think the appeal of this kind of co-optation that goes on in the mirror
world is actually that it distracts us, distracts people, distracts people from the real scandals
that are right in front of them, right?
Why does Elon Musk like conspiracy theories so much? He's the richest guy alive on a good day,
right? If I were him, I would also want to distract people with nonsense because he's a
walking conspiracy that we can prove. So, yes. And there's also this very weird thing around
like co-optation that goes on around racial justice movements, like where there's this
weird mimicry in the conspiracy land around taking slogans like "I can't breathe" from
Black Lives Matter and then like using them to...
To say like, I can't breathe in a mask, you know, or you know, my body, my choice, obviously about vaccines.
There was a really insidious one that I didn't even put in the book.
It was so gross of, uh, I don't think I put it in the book about a group of anti-vax kind of yoga moms who just almost immediately after the unmarked graves were identified in British Columbia at the former residential school, they started selling.
And so the symbol of the movement that is in solidarity with indigenous communities who are grieving the children
who died at those schools and the genocide of those schools is an orange t-shirt that says, "Every child matters."
So everywhere, like you go in Canada, you'll see people who hang these orange t-shirts
in front of their houses.
And there are orange shirt days at my kid's school, at every school in Canada.
It's a very, very potent symbol.
And so days after the unmarked graves were confirmed at the school, because the community always knew
they were there, these two yonko moms start selling orange tank tops, like workout tank tops,
that say, "Canada's second genocide."
And it's about the vaccines.
So there's something about this that it isn't just that they're getting the feelings right.
It's also that they are like co-opting and twisting these issues that they, where they, I think they feel threatened by them.
Yeah.
So it's complicated.
I agree.
And it's, you know, you bringing up, you know, you're like, well, it's just capitalism doing its thing.
And it's the same attitude.
It's just smartphones doing their thing.
And I wonder if the fact that what is considered like left-wing media is so bought and paid for, is so entangled with this, that they have no coherent critique of capitalism, no attempt to identify that.
And so it's so mystified that we just kind of Well, and why would they need to?
they're not providing even a description of the problem. So the right sees that and goes, "Well,
fuck, we can at least describe the problem somewhat, and then we can give you the false
solution, of course." But it feels like the left is certainly in the mainstream media sphere is
struggling to even be able to name the problem because they are inherently a part of it.
Well, and why would they need to? We have the ultimate enemy to fight online,
which is each other or our political— You know, our political opponents.
You know, when you dunk on somebody on Twitter or you point out right-wing influencers or politicians, hypocrisy, and you get engagement on Twitter, that feels real.
That's something that you can hold on to.
You can go the rest of the day, you know, feeling good that you owned this person who you ideologically, you know, totally disagree with.
Whereas, you know, trying to even imagine doing something in the world that actually makes a universal change, you know, shifts the way that we've been living to address these very serious issues is incomprehensible to us.
Because it would actually require confronting capital, like these large kind of accumulations of capital and that's the real
conspiracy and it's almost like an organic one from all of these communal
interests that essentially represent a class interest, right? Or I mean,
do you think that I'm that I'm kind of off-base with this, Naomi?
No, and you know I was wondering, I mean I listened to your episode with Mike Rothschild, which I
thought was really interesting, but you know anti-semitic conspiracy theories
are often referred to as the socialism of fools, right?
Where if you don't understand, what is meant by that is like if you don't understand how capital works, if you don't understand that there is a system, and in fact you've been told your whole life that capitalism is like sunshine and rainbows and Big Macs and like everybody getting what they deserve by working hard, which is what most people learn in school, you know?
then when you experience the injustices of this system, you're not going to have the tools to make sense of it.
And so if somebody says, "Oh, come over here.
It's just, there's a room somewhere."
And where like a bunch of Jews and also Klaus Schwab and also the Chinese Communist Party are all plotting this,
then you're going to believe that, right?
And so, you know, I would say that it isn't only anti-Semitic conspiracy theories that are the socialism of fools.
I'd say all conspiracy theories.
I think I'd say everything that you're tracking is a kind of a doppelganger of what a lucid, rigorous analysis of capital would do.
And that is why, you know, when leftists were fighting fascists in the 20s and 30s, they took popular education really, really seriously.
You know, they didn't write off working people.
You know, they were selling their newspapers and having their study groups and really trying to explain to people how the world worked because they knew that if they didn't, then they would believe the guy who was peddling the, you know, the anti-Semitic pamphlet.
Yeah.
It's interesting to me as well, because this is something I wanted to bring up as well.
You write a bit about how the kind of neoliberal, you know, the series of neoliberal leaders have hollowed out the institutions that could have helped us better manage a crisis like COVID.
I mean, I'm thinking especially like in places where they actually had socialized medicine like the UK or Canada.
But, you know, it's interesting to me that instead of seeing these institutions as like ineffective and gutted and so incapable of helping us, conspiracy theorists They prefer to think of them as powerful, actually, but powerful on the wrong side.
So evil.
So it completely masks the idea that we've had all these things kind of, you know, deprived.
I mean, yeah.
What do you make of that?
Well, I mean, this is, I guess, backing up a little bit, you know, part of the reason why the confusion with Naomi Wolf got as bad as it did during COVID is because in 2007, I published a book called The Shock Doctrine.
You know, The rise of disaster capitalism, which was an alternative history of how we ended up with this hyper deregulated form of capitalism, sometimes called neoliberalism.
And it told the story through a series of major shocks.
And it looked at how, you know, even though the history that we were told was that capitalism and freedom go hand in hand, that's what Milton Friedman said, that's what Francis Fukuyama said.
In fact, the ideological project had leapt forward During very violent periods like after Pinochet's coup 50 years ago in Chile.
Chile was the first laboratory for the Chicago boys to try out these policies and you know what I looked at in the shock doctrine was was this tactic that it you know it didn't take a coup you know it could be you know I covered Hurricane Katrina in 2005 where you know when the city was under evacuation it became a free-for-all for privatized education.
They shut down all the public schools all Fired the teachers.
New Orleans is still the most privatized education system in the U.S.
They replaced them with charters and broke the union.
You know, they did it after Hurricane Maria.
They privatized the electricity system.
So I am interested in how states of emergency get exploited to advance this ideological project.
It's really been like, it's the through line of much of my work.
And that has been happening during COVID.
I mean, to jump back to what you were saying, Julian.
I mean, yeah, it's better to have a public health care system like we have in Canada, like they have in the UK, than what you have in the US.
But under cover of COVID, and because our hospitals, our public hospitals, had been the subject of relentless economic austerity over the past few decades, they weren't ready for COVID either.
And so then that has become the excuse to partially privatize the NHS in the UK, you know, and parts of the Canadian system in different provinces.
So there's a real shock doctrine going on, but it's been really hard to talk about because there is this doppelganger shock doctrine, which is this kind of great reset, you know, I call the conspiracy smoothie.
It's, you know, this is what when Wolf went on Tucker Carlson and said, you know, they're using the pandemic to bring CCP style social credit system.
It did sort of sound like a kind of a shock doctrine analysis, you know, with the facts and evidence removed.
But I get why people who are busy, you know, couldn't tell the two apart.
But I mean, the worst thing that I think one can do in a moment like that is back off, you know, and in the book, I write about how I did kind of back off for a while.
But that's such a gift, right, to the counterfeit and the warped mirror, or whatever, however you want to think of it, because they're only able to co-opt issues that we're not using.
Right.
And so what, yeah, what do you make about the conspiracy theorists still thinking these institutions have great power, even though they have been gutted, you know, like that they would rather see them as powerful and evil than gutted and ineffective, but inherently trying to do good?
Well, definitely.
And I think that this is where the wellness worlds and the yoga instructor, vegan cookbook writer
meets the Proud Boys, right?
And the Steve Bannon's.
On a surface level, it's like, what are these people finding in common?
One of the things they share in common is neither of them really believe in public health
or public period, right?
You know, this is the project, you know, Bannon said his project was to dismantle the administrative state.
This has been the project of the right now for a very long time, like they don't believe in a public sphere, certainly not a social sphere.
They believe in cops, you know, they believe in prisons, but they don't believe in a public sphere that is actually helping people, that is actually improving people's lives.
And so COVID was really threatening because for a while there we saw that a social state might be possible, that it could send people money, it could suspend evictions, you know, it could give free vaccines.
And I really do think that that was understood to be a very big threat.
Then you have something very different with the kind of wellness entrepreneurs, right,
who are also at war with conventional medicine because they're selling supplements and they're
selling this idea that you're going to have super immunity if you follow their programs
and sign up for their seminars. But it's a highly individualistic view of health,
right? And it's your way of kind of getting an edge in this admittedly very frightening
social situation is to optimize the self, right? And I think that that kind of hyper
individualism of that strain of the wellness world fits very nicely with
With the hyper-individualism of the far right, of the extreme right.
So do we just have terminal anti-collectivist poisoning?
I mean, can we imagine a collective project?
I mean, I guess that's, yeah, I mean, sorry, I don't mean to, you know, get depressing.
It's happened so fast, this idea that the left is dead.
You know?
Like, I'm interested that you see it that way.
Like, it wasn't so long ago that there were the largest protests in U.S.
history in the summer of 2020.
It's only 2023.
So, like, those people wanted something different.
I mean, I've seen moments where it seems like people want something different, you know?
Like, I'm a Bernie bro.
Yeah, of course.
I think we want it.
We want it, but it's the idea that we've been taught we can't get it over and over, and so now we're entering this blackpilled period.
Well, this is partially why I wanted to write in a way, in a tone that recognizes, like, that leaves a little room for, I mean, not to get too touchy-feely, but like some grief, like some actual loss.
Because I think there's a particular experience of COVID for people who were very active in the Bernie campaign.
Were any of you active in the Bernie campaign?
We were actually, we were at his rally in, really, he performed with public enemy and it was literally right before the lockdowns started to take place.
So it was in that moment.
And while we're on the topic, you know, at least for me personally, I think that a lot of people who were, you know, in support of Bernie Sanders, Who then were called by, you know, the centrist liberals or neoliberals, whatever you want to call them, you know, they were written off as Bernie bros.
They were as bad as MAGA.
They were, I mean, we're still seeing those comparisons today, at least online.
And I think that a lot of people, you know, would rather just then say nothing than all of a sudden be compared, you know, be compared to the thing that we fear most, you know, know, is gaining power. The doppelganger, the boogeyman.
Yeah, the doppelganger, the boogeyman, and people say all this, you know, bullshit about, you know,
horseshoe theory and that, you know, these two sides are so close that they're
actually, you know, the same. And a lot of the horror of experiencing that I really identified with
when I read your book. I thought that the writing was so compelling and in a lot of ways to
me felt like a horror story in its own And so, yeah, I do think that there is this kind of fatigue because anybody who was, you know, really trying to sort of popularize a real left in the United States was sort of written off by the institutions and the status quo as being the same thing as MAGA.
And that is, you know, really heartbreaking.
Yeah, and I think it's worth naming that heartbreak and the disappointment and the effects of that.
I think it's possible that we can recover from it.
And having been a part of the left for my whole life, because I grew up in a lefty household, and I'm a lot older than you, and I've had my hopes raised a few times, Um, like I, you know, no one's going to thank you for trying to change the system.
Like no one's going to be nice to you about it.
Um, you will always get treated like absolute shit.
That's okay.
Like as long as you have each other.
And I think what's tricky, what was so tricky, and this is why I say like people who were super involved in the Bernie campaign, a very particular experience of COVID, which was going from basically the highest political high of any of our lives, right?
to suddenly it all coming crashing down simultaneously.
Like I remember kind of the first week of lockdown was the week where I can picture myself on the couch
just watching that Biden rally where one Democrat after another just came on stage
like, "Wait, wait, who's next?"
Like Buttigieg, you know, like everybody, like everyone is just lining up and it's like,
"Okay, so this is it."
This is it.
They're just gonna, they're just, this is the boot.
The boot is coming down, you know, and we're stuck at home.
We can't organize.
We, we can't be together.
And people immediately start turning on each other because that's what humans do when they're all alone, you know?
And so it was, it was that combination of, I mean, I felt so helpless, right?
Cause we had been together.
Like I had been with Bernie in five states.
I had, you know, when he swept Nevada, when he swept the Las Vegas Strip, I don't think I've ever seen lefties so happy.
It was so exciting because it's Vegas, it's so Trumpy, it's so weird, you know, there's gold everywhere and just the people who make that city work, who shine the slot machines just came up, you know, talk about that.
Out of the shadows, you know, and just said, fuck you guys and just like voted for Bernie, even though their unions told them not to, you know, it was such an incredible moment.
And to go from that kind of political high to the stomp of it's over and plus you can't leave your homes, you know, and, and actually even console each other.
Like there wasn't even like a moment where like, as the campaign came together to kind of say, okay, well, what's next?
Where are we going to put our political energies?
It just devolved into like warring podcasts and people just being So mean to each other.
I mean, not, I love your podcast, but like, you know, it's not a substitute for political organizing.
No.
So I don't think it's just that they insulted us.
Cause that really is par for the course.
Like no one's going to thank you for trying to like take their money away.
But it's that we didn't have a consolation of each other.
You know what I say in the book is like we went from like this sort of euphoric solidarity of not me us to just being dropped in this ocean of me, me, me, me, me.
And that was very, very hard.
But I think it is worth remembering that if that many people could have been out for Bernie
in 2020, spring 2020, and that many people could have been marching for black lives in
the summer of 2020, those people are still out there.
And there hasn't been an organizing project that's channeled that energy.
And I think it's way too defeatist to just say, "Oh, we don't want better."
We do, but people were let down, honestly, by political leadership.
And they didn't know where to put that energy.
And it makes sense that people turned on each other.
Yeah.
And even, I mean, that is, you know, like a lot of people also just enter the fantasy
They enter doppelganger world.
They're like, well, you know, fuck it.
Like, I'm gonna believe in, like, the most florid and amusing and entertaining conspiracy theories then because, you know, political realism doesn't, isn't getting me anywhere.
Well, and I'm watching other people do it and they seem a lot happier than me.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, of course.
I mean, you know, it's also self-preservation.
I don't, you know, I don't exactly, like, blame people or anything.
And I don't consider myself blackmailed, but it's, yeah, it's interesting to watch this kind of dissociative break from reality that you describe so well in your book.
Now, there's another concept that you explore in your book that I thought was really, really useful when trying to figure out why all of these kinds of unusual bedfellows are so appealing, and specifically about, like, you know, Naomi Wolf and Steve Bannon.
And it's the concept of diagonalist politics.
And you talk about its origins in sort of, like, fringe German politics.
But what exactly is diagonalism?
Yeah, so it's a term that was developed by a couple of scholars of European politics, William Callison and Quince Libidian, and they both study German politics.
You know, as you said, there's this German phrase that was embraced by The like anti-lockdown movement in Germany called Querdenken.
I'm probably mispronouncing it, but it means like kind of outside the box thinking.
It's very self-consciously claiming to be post-partisan.
And so they loosely translated that to, to diagonalist.
And, and there are these movements that really what we've been talking about, that cross left, right divides in unexpected ways, right?
Bringing together the wellness sort of new age, I call it the far out with the far right.
And you have a lot of entrepreneurs, or you might call them, some of them are grifters, right?
I mean, a lot of people who have skin in the game around why they wanted things to stay open and also selling their supplements and selling their seminars.
So, an extreme rejection of traditional democratic institutions, combining elements of holism, which of course there's a very violent history of in Germany in the way the Nazis had elements of the occult in their project.
But, you know, what's important is that, first of all, people who are part of diagonalism, you know, Slobodan and Kallsen-Wright, believe all power is conspiracy.
All power is conspiracy.
That though it takes elements from the left, it reliably veers to the hard right.
So, which is important because it needs to claim that it's post-partisan, that there's something new here for it to seem exciting, right?
I mean, it has to be new, but there's no examples of diagonalism going left, right?
Yeah, I was thinking specifically about the campaign of RFK Jr., where he's trying to develop this kind of cross-partisan coalition in the way that lots of people like Steve Bannon and Mike Flynn are very confusingly excited about, you know, if it really is genuinely post-partisan.
But yeah, they have this weird fixation, this weird belief.
It's even in QAnon, where they say, this isn't a Democrat or Republican thing, this is just a justice thing.
It's a very appealing message, but you're right.
It's like, inevitably, 100% of the time, when they're saying that kind of thing, they're going to make a hard right turn.
Exactly.
And you know, and that's why my own Doppelganger is sort of an interesting figure to follow, because she's one of several sort of high profile liberal or leftists that have crossed over, and they are playing a very important role.
You need these people to be able to claim that there is something new going on, that this isn't just the same old MAGA stuff, that there's something new.
And so I think I think Bannon is getting a lot more out of her than she is from him, although she's getting, you know, followers and book sales and things like that.
I think he is hoping to get, you know, a new peel away, a new sector of the Democratic segment of the Democratic base, which is you know, certain number of white moms who were very upset
about about school closures, masks, vaccines, being called Karen, and, you know, have pivoted
them to transphobia, you know, book banning, you know, learning true, you know, being
opposed to learning a true history of their countries. But he's got a lot of time for who he calls the
warrior moms. Yeah, and the right light loves nothing more than, you know, somebody that they can
point to is, you know, an ex Democrat, you know a dem exit it may be.
It feels like, oh yeah, it makes their whole narrative more believable that they're pulling people.
I think we talked about this on an episode not too long ago where one of you guys compared it to, like, you know, hardcore Christian communities and people who, you know— Yeah, the converts.
Yeah, converts who came up and said that, you know, because I've found Jesus, you know, I'm no longer gay.
Do you find, Naomi, that, like, in this world where doppelgangers are manifesting, that the people who survive best are essentially the shapeshifters?
People who have a natural kind of ability towards this, like a Tulsi Gabbard, you know?
Someone who is, like, has always had the propensity for shapeshifting, and so suddenly it's their time, right?
Because they, essentially, they don't feel bad.
They are Zozobra, but, like, in an empowering way.
There's floating over all of it.
Yeah, that's a really interesting point.
Wow.
Something to think about.
Yeah, I mean, that is kind of a disturbing idea.
It's like having principles and being consistent is actually a detriment because you're just going to fall under the nonsense, whereas someone else who just is able to shapeshift into the moment, they can be on top of the nonsense.
They can surf the nonsense rather than being subsumed by it.
Yeah, well, I think, you know, I was going to say earlier when I was talking about, you know, the fact that nobody's ever going to thank you for trying to change the system and that it's always going to be a process of marginalization.
You know, this past weekend I was at Haymarket Books, which publishes a lot of great left-wing books.
I've published some books with them, but I didn't publish this book with them, but they have this annual socialism conference and it's really great, you know, like it's, you know, Angela Davis is there and and Robin DiGiChelli and lots of Astra Taylor, who's one of
the founders of the Debt Collective, who are really doing like, they had a great event at the
conference, which was like a debtors assembly, where people, you know, there were 3000 people
there. And it was, it had like the energy of the Bernie campaign, but it wasn't all projected onto a
candidate and all about a presidential election. But it was it was that same energy
of like people testifying about their medical debt or their student debt, and something that felt
really shameful that they and incredibly stressful that they were carrying alone, that then becomes
this collective possibility for a new kind of political formation, which is like an actual debtors
collective who could refuse to pay who could leverage their power collectively.
Because, you know, if you're if it's just you refusing to pay, then that's a crisis for you.
All of it, you know, if it's a large group of people refusing to pay, that's a crisis for the banks, right?
It's the same thing around tenant organizing.
And yeah, I mean, I guess I'm really still like enough of an old school leftist that I believe that, you know, when I say they're building a doppelganger of the left, I'm not both sides in it.
I'm not saying, you know, Oh, we are like them.
We are flip sides of the same coin.
I am saying, you know, what Rosa Luxemburg said before she was shot and thrown into a canal, which was socialism or barbarism.
And she was right then because barbarism won.
And barbarism is ascendant.
And I don't believe that corporate Democrats have an answer for this because they created the context for this in large part.
And I believe only really robust left radical movements that are designed to Actually materially change people's lives, have a chance to beat this stuff.
It's not going to be fact checkers.
It's not going to be content moderators.
It's not going to be liberal think tanks.
Like it's actually going to be social movements.
So yeah, for me, it's like I was in a very vertiginous state when I wrote this book, but it's brought me back to myself.
You know, there was a New York Times Magazine profile of me that came out a few days ago and they were like, we really like the parts of the book where she's uncertain, but then she basically, she's still a leftist.
I was like, guilty as charged.
Wow.
Anyway, I'm trying to rally you up and you're like getting all depressed.
No, no, no.
I have to tell you before I go that I really love your podcast.
It meant a lot to me because it was like, you know, when I was listening to all this, you know, like really terrible right-wing media, then it helped me stay, you know, grounded that I could check in with all of you.
And I think it's really embarrassing that it was on your podcast that I found out that Canada had a queen.
I didn't know that.
I had to go to a U.S.
podcast to find out that we had a queen.
I'm secretly and quietly over here just, like, thinking a lot, and actually, you know, I came away from reading the book and as well as this conversation, like, actually more inspired than I was coming into it, so quite the opposite, so don't worry.
And thank you for the kind words about our show.
We just have terrible posture, but that's just because we're podcasters.
Yeah, that's just the hutch.
We're just slouchers.
Before I let you go, I really got to ask about one other thing that I thought was really fascinating exploration in your book in your discussion about the maddening effect of elite impunity of people who are very, very powerful positions who can get away with really horrendous things and then the rest of us have to walk around and just be okay with it.
And honestly, it reminded me of an encounter one time I had in a QAnon rally in Florida, in which a QAnon follower recognized me from the podcast, kind of confronted me, and then asked me, well, I basically conceded.
It's like, yeah, I agree.
There's a class of people who can get away with things that the rest of us can't.
Um, and and he kind of got mad at me because I didn't agree with his solution of like having or I didn't agree this prediction of having them all shipped to Gitmo is going to happen.
He's like, well, you can't just you can't just state that there's a problem and just not have any hope for a solution was sort of like, well, I mean, you can, but in his eyes, he couldn't.
That was absurd.
So I mean, so that's sweet.
Yeah.
I wish more people felt that.
I mean, I don't wish that more people believed in QAnon, but I wish that more people thought that the goal was not just to, like, name a problem, that we actually could change things materially for the better and even hold powerful people accountable.
And that, you know, that is a classic example to me of, like, getting the facts wrong, but the feelings right.
And also, You know, it is at the heart of at the heart of the QAnon fantasy is this fantasy of justice, this moment where all the bad people are going to be rounded up.
And it's incredibly naive, because even if they were, they would just be replaced by another set of bad people.
Like that's not a real solution.
But it does beg the question of whether or not on the other side of On the political spectrum, there are people speaking about our vision for what accountability and justice would mean in this very perilous moment.
Like, you know, I think we should sue Big Oil.
I think we should nationalize all the oil companies and use all of their money to pay for, you know, a transition that would repair racial injustice, you know, and will begin the process of reparation.
I mean, that's one of the visions I've been pounding away at, and many of us in the climate justice movement have been pounding away at.
But like, maybe we don't talk about it loudly enough.
Maybe we don't get people excited enough about the idea that we could actually, you know, hold, that's just one example.
Like, because I'm not, you know, I'm not interested so much in throwing people in jail, but I am interested in getting the last profits out of the industry that has set the earth on fire.
And I think that that could be a galvanizing project.
You know, I think people want justice, and we should offer them some visions of justice that are not these fantastical, warped, bizarro versions.
I mean, yeah, you say you don't want to throw people in jail, but in your book, when discussing about these fantasies about high-level politicians getting arrested and executed at Gitmo, you write, I'm quoting, I get the appeal.
But Henry Kissinger is still alive!
Well, you know what?
That was actually my next question.
So in your storm, who's going to Gitmo first?
Kissinger?
Is that it?
Yeah.
No, I mean it's got to be Chaney because he opened the place.
Chaney, yeah.
That's a good one.
I think I agree.
Let's send them to Gitmo and then make them give us their pin codes and then we take all their money and send them back home.
Gitmo is just a place where we can hold them while we get their money.
Then they can go back home.
Hey, you know what?
We'll leave you your house.
We'll even give you like a per diem.
And we'll turn Twitter into a worker co-op.
Yeah, this could be like a high-end like Tom Clancy version of trading places, you know?
That book is Doppelganger, A Trip into the Mirror World.
You can pick it up starting September 12th.
It's a really fascinating read.
I recommend that you get a copy.
So Naomi, thank you so much for joining us today.
This was really fun.
Honestly, I really, really enjoyed speaking with you.
Thanks so much.
Us too, yeah.
We really appreciate you and your work.
Thanks for listening to another episode of the QAA Podcast.
You can go to patreon.com slash QAnonAnonymous and subscribe for five bucks a month to get a whole second episode every week, plus access to our entire archive of premium episodes, the 10 episodes of the first season of Trickle Down, the 10 episodes of the first season of Man Clan, and the ongoing season of The Spectral Voyager.
For everything else, we have a website, QAnonAnonymous.com.
Listener, until next week, may the Deep Dish bless you and keep you.
It's not a conspiracy.
It's a fact.
And now, today's Auto-Cue.
Holly has found someone new.
Sorry I scared you.
Someone very secret.
It's very romantic.
Someone who hides from us all.
Another self.
A deeper, darker side that is capable of the unimaginable.
Fear, anger, hatred.
The darkest, most primal part of her no longer hides inside.
Just don't touch me!
Don't confuse me with her.
She may look like me, but she's not.
It has awakened and taken control.
It's probably forced out by some kind of trauma.
What does it want?
Somebody attacked you, alright?
And now, the only thing she has to fear is herself.
