Doppelganger: a Trip into the Mirror World

by Naomi Klein

In my conversations with autism parents who have gone the vaccine-blaming route, I am always struck by their sense that they have been cheated or wronged; that someone or something robbed them of what they were sure were their rightful, neurotypical kids and substituted them with ones who were different and defective; that their families had somehow been invaded.

This, I think, is a corollary of all the shame and pathologizing of kids who are different in our culture—an outsize pride taken in kids who seem to check all the boxes, meet all the social standards, are perfect little children.

So many of the battles waged in the Mirror World—the “anti-woke” laws, the “don’t say gay” bills, the blanket bans on gender-affirming medical care, the school board wars over vaccines and masks—come down to the same question: What are children for? Are they their own people, and our job, as parents, is to support and protect them as they find their paths? Or are they our appendages, our extensions, our spin-offs, our doubles, to shape and mold and ultimately benefit from? So many of these parents seem convinced that they have a right to exert absolute control over their children without any interference or input: control over their bodies (by casting masks and vaccines as a kind of child rape or poisoning); control over their minds (by casting anti-racist education as the injection of foreign ideas into the minds of their offspring); control over their gender and sexuality (by casting any attempt to discuss the range of possible gender expressions and sexual orientations as “grooming”).

The persistent appeal of the vaccine-autism myth, no matter how many times and in how many ways it has been debunked, is that it gives parents who see difference as tragedy something external to blame. It’s not the genetic lottery. It’s not parental age. It’s the jab, they tell themselves, egos safely protected.

She has continued to spread misinformation for well over a decade, telling PBS’s Frontline in 2015, “If you ask 99.9 percent of parents who have children with autism if we’d rather have the measles versus autism, we’d sign up for the measles.”

She (Jenny McCarthy) has...

She traced the earliest portrayals of autistic people to Irish and Celtic legends and “the myth of changeling children, left in place of real human babies who had been stolen by fairies.” Interestingly, changelings are also early portrayals of doppelgangers. The legend goes like this: Fairies would snatch healthy human babies and young children from their beds and secret them away to the fairy realm. In their place would be the magical changelings, who were identical doubles of the kidnapped children, only with physical deformities or behavioral “trickster” challenges, like having a withdrawn, otherworldly affect.

She (Lorna Wing) traced...

Asperger’s claim that autistic children were pathological because they lacked the capacity for Gemüt was less a medical diagnosis than a highly ideological one about what should constitute normal behavior: he was diagnosing them, quite literally, with a deficit of fascism.

As one Covid year followed another and my doppelganger and the forces she helped incite spread new waves of panic about how all of us who have been vaccinated have lost our souls, like those changelings, or had impure blood, this was the form of doppelganging that increasingly preoccupied me: how, precisely, a society tips into its fascist double. Wolf had long argued that there are ten steps every tyrant follows to execute this shift. I don’t think it’s nearly so simple, nor is it all about the tyrant at the top. It’s also about the hungers and appetites of everyday people—for those stirring feelings of superiority and purity. Though the doppelganger archetype has appeared across time to explore issues of life and death, the body versus the soul, the ego versus the id, the real child versus the false, this is something else that the figure of the double, or the “evil twin,” has long been used to warn us about: the shadow tyrant who lives in us all and lies in wait in every nation.

Watching him on the stand, Real Roth imagines his defense: “My heart goes out to you for all you suffered, but the Ivan you want was never anybody as simple and innocent as good old Johnny the gardener from Cleveland, Ohio … All this innocuousness disproves a thousand times over these crazy accusations. How could I be both that and this?” For Roth, the writer, Demjanjuk’s ordinary homelife was no kind of alibi. The frightening thing was precisely that a person can be both that and this—the monstrous killing machine and the caring family man. The doubles coexist; they do not cancel each other out. “The Germans have proved definitively to all the world,” Real Roth observes, “that to maintain two radically divergent personalities, one very nice and one not so nice, is no longer the prerogative of psychopaths only.”

The perfection Olympics in which this father-daughter duo were clearly excelling seemed like a terribly sad thing to do to childhood. This little one was already luminous—she did not need to be polished into a trophy. But if I was honest, I also could see how, if I had a child who navigated the world with such ease, it would be nearly impossible to resist the temptation to live through them and try to win all the prizes our brutal economic order has to offer the few deemed merit-worthy.

Enough incidents like this over the years have led me to conclude that the line between unsupported conspiracy claims and reliable investigative research is neither as firm nor as stable as many of us would like to believe. It’s clear that some people consume investigative journalism, fact-based analysis, and fact-free conspiracy interchangeably, drawing their own connections and mixing and matching between the three.

There was no need for histrionics about how unvaccinated people were experiencing “apartheid” when there was real vaccine apartheid between rich and poor countries; no need to cook up fantasies about Covid “internment camps” when the virus was being left to rip through prisons, meat-packing plants, and Amazon warehouses as if the people’s lives inside had no value at all. In a just world, we would have been talking about these real and proven scandals around the clock; most of us didn’t, in part because the clock was being run out with the fallout from made-up plots.

Wolf routinely describes her mental state as “terrified.” She characterizes her own research into Covid vaccines as “shockingly shocking” and the public health measures she has chosen to wage war upon not as wrong, or even dangerous, but as “petrifying.” “I don’t want to use inflated language,” she told Steve Bannon about health officials dropping basic vaccination information on people’s doorsteps. And then she went on, predicting, “They take your child away if you haven’t vaccinated him or her, like that’s the next step. Or they take you to a quarantine camp, if you can’t show your vaccination papers. I mean, that may sound a tiny bit … anxious or inflated…” It does sound that way. It always sounds that way. It is supposed to. The effect of conspiracy culture is the opposite of calm; it is to spread panic.

And because the system is rigged, and most people are indeed getting screwed—but without a firm understanding of capitalism’s drive to find new profit sources to enclose and extract, many will imagine there is a cabal of uniquely nefarious individuals pulling the strings.

Wolf so completely misunderstood what was happening with police repression during Occupy Wall Street. When the parks were cleared, she saw a plot and a “war” on the American people at the highest level. In reality, police across the country shared tips on clearing the camps for the same reason they rained tear gas and pepper spray down on movements confronting the World Trade Organization and the International Monetary Fund a decade earlier and would do again against Black Lives Matter uprisings a few years later: because we live under a system structurally designed to protect the propertied classes against any and all challenges from below, sometimes through violent repression, sometimes through symbolic appropriation, often through a combination of the two.

Jack Bratich, a Rutgers University communications scholar with a focus on conspiracies, explained this possible trajectory to me like this: “Liberal investments in individualism 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. But hero narratives easily flip into villain narratives.”

We are now reaping the rotted harvest of decades of deliberately sown mistrust—mistrust of the very idea that we are members of communities and societies, mistrust of any expectation that governments can and should do anything positive for us. “There is no such thing as society,” Margaret Thatcher once declared. Can we really be surprised that so many people believed her? This impoverished way of seeing the world and one another has gone on for so long, expressed itself in so many dialects (union busting, border cruelty, crumbling public hospitals and schools, etc.), that the very concept of a public good has now become foreign. Literally foreign, in the sense that policies that ask anything of individuals—whether in the face of Covid or the climate crisis or the inequality crisis—are now cast in the Mirror World as part of a Chinese plot to impose CCP values on the West.

Maximizing profit is just what capitalism does—even if it takes a conspiracy to do it.

The English writer and publisher Mark Fisher went further, remarking in 2013 that much of what is packaged as conspiracies today is “the ruling class showing class solidarity”—by which he meant that it’s mostly just ultrarich people, in business and government, having one another’s back.

Like my doppelganger projecting all of our surveillance fears on a vaccine app, conspiracy theorists get the facts wrong but often get the feelings right—the feeling of living in a world with Shadow Lands, the feeling that every human misery is someone else’s profit, the feeling of being exhausted by predation and extraction, the feeling that important truths are being hidden. The word for the system driving those feelings starts with c, but if no one ever taught you how capitalism works, and instead told you it was all about freedom and sunshine and Big Macs and playing by the rules to get the life you deserve, then it’s easy to see how you might confuse it with another c-word: conspiracy.

Yet witnessing how many of the loudest voices laying claim to this treacherous form of discrimination were, like me, well-off white women, I couldn’t shake the feeling that part of the reason why they were making these choices was that they believed that being outside the Covid health consensus conferred on them a powerful kind of victim status—this at a time when the spotlight on racialized violence was causing plenty of white women to question ourselves and our roles. Did being a white woman count as a basis for discrimination at a time when everyone was railing against the archetypal Karen? Well, maybe, if a Karen can convince herself she is actually a Rosa in disguise, denied access to restaurants and transportation and shunned by friends and family. Surely, by laying claim to that abrupt loss of status, that would raise her status—which, let’s face it, is not an entirely outlandish thing to believe at this stage of neoliberal capitalism, which has done a fine job of transforming identity-based oppression from a basis for solidarity and shared analysis (the original intention of identity politics) to its own form of currency.

At the same time as she was absorbing and appropriating the language of the civil rights movement, many of her fellow travelers in the Mirror World were actively fighting to suppress all attempts to tell a truer story of America’s past, claiming that, like masks and vaccines, teaching students about the reality of racism in their country is a form of child abuse.

As I noted earlier, Bannon pounds relentlessly at what he calls the Big Steal—the claim that Biden stole the 2020 election—while the Democrats call that the Big Lie. And it is a big lie, a dangerous one. But is it the Big Lie? Bigger, say, than trickle-down economics? Bigger than “tax cuts create jobs”? Bigger than infinite growth on a finite planet? Bigger than Thatcher’s double whammy of “There is no alternative” and “There is no such thing as society”? Bigger, for that matter, than Manifest Destiny, Terra Nullius, and the Doctrine of Discovery—the lies that form the basis of the United States, Canada, Australia, and every other settler colonial state?

“Auschwitz was the modern industrial application of a policy of extermination on which European world domination had long since rested,” Lindqvist writes. However, he continues, “when what had been done in the heart of darkness was repeated in the heart of Europe, no one recognized it. No one wished to admit what everyone knew.” That is incorrect. Several leading Black intellectuals saw the parallels with great clarity at the time. W. E. B. Du Bois, in The World and Africa, published soon after the end of the Second World War, wrote, “There was no Nazi atrocity—concentration camps, wholesale maiming and murder, defilement of women or ghastly blasphemy of childhood—which Christian civilization of Europe had not long been practicing against colored folk in all parts of the world in the name of and for the defense of a Superior Race born to rule the world.” What was new: it was now fellow Europeans who were being cast as the inferior race.

But what if ordinary is horrific? What if that’s the point: that Nazism is not an aberration from an otherwise uplifting story of enlightenment and modernity, but its not-so-distant double, its other face?

The refusal to believe that they could be the targets of Nazi slaughter was the undoing for many Jews in Germany and Austria: for far too long, they told themselves they were too cultured and too educated to ever be cast as brutes. What Du Bois and Césaire tried to tell us is that culture, language, science, and economy are no protection against genocide—all it takes is sufficient military force wielded by a power willing to denounce your culture as savage and declare you brutes. That is the story of colonial violence the world over. Casting people as unattached to land—because they practice a different form of agriculture, because they move with the seasons, whatever story served the end goal—has always been a precursor to genocide. Jews were declared “rootless” before they were slaughtered, much as colonial powers had declared Indigenous peoples nomadic and therefore uncivilized as a prelude to stealing their land on pain of annihilation on every continent on the planet.

What if full-blown fascism is not the monster at the door, but the monster inside the house, the monster inside us—even we whose ancestors have been victims of genocide?

It seems that to many people, a truthful telling of history feels like treachery—and must be stamped out. But if those truths are stuffed back away, they will keep haunting us and keep reemerging in the Mirror World in distorted, twisted form.

the similarity of right-wing conspiracy theories to actual policies towards Indigenous peoples. ‘replacement theory’—Manifest Destiny QAnon (mass institutionalized child abuse)—boarding and residential schools ‘plandemic’—smallpox, alcohol, bioterrorism

This is how prejudice works. The person holding it unconsciously creates a double of every person who is part of the despised group, and that twisted twin looms over all who meet the criteria, always threatening to swallow them up. Having one of these doubles means that whoever you are, whatever identity you have fashioned for yourself, however fresh and unique your personal brand, and however much you distinguish yourself from the stereotypes associated with your kind, for the hater you will always stand in as a representative of your despised group. You are not you; you are your ethnic/racial/religious double, and you can’t shake that double because you did not create it.

Other forms of racial doubling ebb and flow on the geopolitical tides. After the September 11 attacks in New York and Washington, the figure of the Muslim terrorist loomed so large as a double for all Muslim men that everything from studying engineering to going to the airport became suddenly perilous. For what is a racial profile if not a doppelganger made by the state?

Over the centuries, anti-Jewish conspiracy has played a very specific purpose for elite power: it acts as a buffer, a shock absorber. Before popular rage could reach the kings, queens, tsars, and old landed money, the conspiracies absorbed it, directing anger to the middle managers—to the court Jew, to the scheming Jew, possibly with horns hidden under his skullcap.

A lesson for the tsar, and a lesson for the ages: if you want to crush a revolutionary movement coming at you from below, nothing works quite like an anti-Semitic conspiracy that calls up hatreds older than Jesus Christ. In truth, any number of identity-based divisions can be marshaled to perform this function: Jews versus Blacks, Blacks versus Asians, Muslims versus Christians, “gender critical” feminists versus transgender people, migrants versus citizens. This is the playbook used by Trump and the other pseudo-populist strongmen the world over: throw some minor economic concessions to the base (or at least claim to do so), unleash the dogs of race and gender-based hatreds, and preside over a rapid upward transfer of wealth, alongside an authoritarian concentration of power.

that Jewish interest in the theoretical side of what we now call Marxism—with its sweeping and scientific explications and analyses of global capitalism—is an attempt to compete with those conspiracy theories that have dogged our people through the ages. That all the thousands of pages of theories and manifestos are, partly at least, a long procession of Jews banging their heads up against the brick wall of history and saying: No, your money problems are not the result of Jewish “shysters” ripping off hardworking “goyim”—they flow from a system that was designed to extract maximum wealth from working people. And that system is not called the “Illuminati” or the “Elders of Zion”—it’s called capitalism. And only unity among members of the working classes—regardless of race, ethnicity, gender, or religion—will ever stand a chance of winning a fairer world. And also: Please don’t kill us.

And, in 1940, the year of his death, Trotsky vividly observed that “in the epoch of its rise, capitalism took the Jewish people out of the ghetto and utilized them as an instrument in its commercial expansion. Today decaying capitalist society is striving to squeeze the Jewish people from all its pores.”

(“Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people,” Marx wrote, a position pursued by Trotsky and Luxemburg)?

“It’s re-traumatization, not remembering. There is a difference.” When she said it, I knew it was true. Remembering puts the shattered pieces of our selves back together again (re-member-ing); it is a quest for wholeness. At its best, it allows us to be changed and transmuted by grief and loss. But re-traumatization is about freezing us in a shattered state; it’s a regime of ritualistic reenactments designed to keep the losses as fresh and painful as possible.

Israel’s settler colonialism differed from its predecessors’ in another way. Where European powers colonized from a position of strength and a claim to God-given superiority, the post-Holocaust Zionist claim to Palestine was based on the reverse: on Jewish victimization and vulnerability. The tacit argument many Zionists were making at the time was that Jews had earned the right to an exception from the decolonial consensus—an exception born of their very recent near extermination. The Zionist version of justice said to Western powers: If you could establish your empires and your settler colonial nations through ethnic cleansing, massacres, and land theft, then it is discrimination to say that we cannot. If you cleared your land of its Indigenous inhabitants, or did so in your colonies, then it is anti-Semitic to say that we cannot. It was as if the quest for equality were being reframed not as the right to be free from discrimination, but as the right to discriminate. Colonialism framed as reparations for genocide.

But they are still small—at least compared with the groups that claim to speak on behalf of all Jews: the ones that have, for a very long time, been dealing with our community’s collective, intergenerational trauma by drawing up enemies lists, by demanding loyalty oaths, by getting lectures and plays and films by Palestinians and their supporters canceled and articles retracted and job offers revoked. These self-appointed spokespeople have claimed that honest political disagreements are existential crises for our entire identity group, and now many champion laws that punish individuals and businesses for supporting the indispensable political tool of peaceful boycotts.

Yet we are not alone, at least not as alone as it can feel. Most of us lack the intimacy of twindom, sure, but connections and solidarities and kinships are available to all of us should we choose to guard the boundaries of our selves less jealously. We have kin everywhere. Some of them look like us, lots of them look nothing like us and yet are still connected to us. Some aren’t even human.

The supremacist, annihilatory logic was never truly confronted, and now supermarkets and Walmarts and mosques and synagogues are being turned into slaughterhouses by young men with guns who are convinced that someone is trying to “replace” them. And it’s surging along the diagonal lines that connect the people with ideas about the supremacy of their race to the people with fixations about the supremacy of their immune systems and the perfection of their kids.

as Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor said to me recently. Drawing on her research as a historian, as well her own experiences as an activist, she pointed out that movements change the people who participate in them. “Struggle helps us see each other,” she said. “It helps us break from our individualism and the particularities of our identities.” When individuals organize toward a goal, they discover not only that they share interests with people who might look (and vote) very differently from them but also that a new sense of power flows from this alliance. “The struggles we engage in create the potential and possibilities of uniting because it clarifies what’s at stake and how we might overcome it,” Taylor explained.

“If you have never believed yourself to be entitled to anything, you are less likely to turn against others than you are to turn against yourself,” Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor told me.

If there is one thing I admire about the diagonalists and other denizens of the Mirror World, it’s that they still believe in the idea of changing reality, an ambition that I fear too many on this side of the glass have lost. We shouldn’t make up facts like they do, but we should stop treating a great many human-made systems—like monarchies and supreme courts and borders and billionaires—as immutable and unchangeable. Because everything some humans created can be changed by other humans.