Doppelganger: a Trip into the Mirror World

by Naomi Klein

The viral myth linking vaccines to infertility proved particularly damaging in the online world of women’s wellness, where one influencer, proclaiming herself “passionate about womb health,” cautioned her followers against getting too close to anyone who had had “the jab.” At least one private school in Florida moved to ban vaccinated teachers from its classrooms, in the name of protecting students from vaccine “shedding.” An NPR investigation, done with the help of specialized data analysts, found that a great deal of these false beliefs could be traced to “a very highly followed influencer in what we call the pseudo-medical community”: Naomi Wolf.

That is the key message we are meant to take away from diagonalist politics: the very fact that these unlikely alliances are even occurring, that the people involved are willing to unite in common purpose despite their past differences, is meant to serve as proof that their cause is both urgent and necessary. How else could Wolf rationalize teaming up with Bannon who, along with Trump, normalized a political discourse that dehumanized migrants as monstrous others—rapists, gang members, and disease carriers? This is also why Wolf leans so heavily and continuously on extreme historical analogies—comparing Covid health measures with Nazi rule, with apartheid, with slavery. This kind of rhetorical escalation is required to rationalize her new alliances. If you are fighting “slavery forever” or a modern-day Hitler, everything—including the companion you find yourself in bed with—is a minor detail. It’s similar, in many ways, to how evangelical Christians were coaxed by their leaders to set aside the fact that Trump’s behavior—the philandering, the alleged sexual assaults, the lying, the cruelty—violated their professed values. To get over all that, they had to cast him, in all seriousness, as the Lord’s messy messenger, put on earth to fight God’s own doppelganger: the devil. With stakes as high as eternal salvation, what’s a little pussy grabbing?

So if there is a pattern to the many, many conspiracies Wolf has floated in recent years, it is simply this: they were about subjects that were dominating the news and generating heat at the time. Of course none of us who offers analysis on current events as part of our profession is immune to the hot-take hustle. But from Assange to Ebola to ISIS, what Wolf did went well beyond that: by claiming to possess some secret piece of knowledge that she alone had uncovered, and by claiming she was being terribly persecuted by daring to share it, she was able to insert herself in the middle of countless trending cultural conversations. Where there was heat, there was her.

The more I listened to him, the more I began to feel that Bannon’s deepest skill is in constructing and expanding the various reflective surfaces in the Mirror World. And not just the dodgy coins but, much more dangerously, the mirror arguments and mirror political agenda carefully designed to repel arguments deployed by his adversaries. Some of this is standard political fare: Democrats talk about the Big Lie (the idea that Trump won the election); Bannon talks about the Big Steal (the idea that Biden stole it). Democrats talk about how Trump fomented the January 6 insurrection; Bannon says Democrats enabled rioters to burn down cities during the 2020 racial justice uprisings. Democrats are scandalized that Trump wouldn’t recognize the legitimate election results; Bannon is scandalized that Democrats never recognized Trump as a legitimate president. In the Mirror World, there is a copycat story and answer for everything, often with very similar key words.

This builds on Trump’s signature counterpunch move, honed on the campaign trail. Whatever he was accused of, he punched back with a claim that his opponent was guilty of the same thing—corruption, lying, foreign collusion—only worse. Bannon’s fingerprints were all over that strategy, most infamously after Trump was caught on tape bragging about sexual assault. Hours before he was set to debate Hillary Clinton, Trump held a press conference with a lineup of women who had accused Bill Clinton of a range of sexual crimes. Bannon, then Trump’s campaign manager, could be seen smirking on the sidelines, as if thoroughly enjoying the show. Mirroring, deflection, and projection all work well, especially when you’ve got a point.

Like most of us, I don’t know where the Covid-19 virus originated—whether a wet market in Wuhan, or the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s Biosafety Level 4 lab, or somewhere else entirely. But 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 and Bannon in the Mirror World, where it was mixed with baseless claims about bioweapons, along with plenty of anti-Asian racism, there seemed to be further reason not to take another look at the facts. 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.

given the lack of debate and allowable questioning of the vaccines in many progressive spaces, it’s no surprise that so many went off to “do their own research”—finding my doppelganger, and many more like her, waiting with their wild claims about vaccine shedding and mass infertility.

in April 2022, researchers estimated that a quarter of the one million Americans deaths from Covid-19 “could have been prevented with primary series vaccination.” A quarter of a million people dead who could have been saved had they gotten the shots. The responsibility for that catastrophic loss rests, in significant part, with the people who have spread dangerous lies about vaccines that, while not risk-free, are remarkably safe and effective at reducing Covid’s severity. Still, we should probably acknowledge that the decision at many media outlets to downplay or outright ignore rare adverse vaccine reactions may have helped drive people to shoddier sources. When editors and journalists steer clear of important topics for fear that their audiences can’t cope with complex truths, it doesn’t throttle conspiracies—it fuels them.

The debates about the trade-offs of closing schools for in-person learning suffered under similar polarized logics. There is no doubt that there have been points when schools and businesses needed to be shut down—but where were the debates about why shopping malls and casinos were allowed to stay open in many of those same periods? After the initial, unavoidably chaotic lockdown period in the spring of 2020, we should have paid more attention to the toll of online learning: the terrible equity impacts on lower-income families who didn’t have the tech; the way it left out many students with developmental disabilities who needed in-person supports; the way it made it impossible for single parents to work outside the home and often inside it, with devastating effects for mothers in particular; the mental health impacts that social isolation was having on countless young people.

The solution was not to fling open school doors where the virus was still surging and before vaccines had been rolled out. But where were the more spacious discussions about how to reimagine public schools so that they could be safer despite the virus—with smaller classrooms, more teachers and teacher’s aides, better ventilation, and more outdoor learning? We knew early on that teens and young adults were facing a mental health crisis amid the lockdowns—so why didn’t we invest in outdoor conservation and recreation programs that could have pried them away from their scr...

After months of listening to Bannon, I can say this with great certainty: While most of us who oppose his political project choose not to see him, he is watching us closely. The issues we are abandoning, the debates we aren’t having, the people we are insulting and discarding. He is watching all of it, and he is stitching together a political agenda out of it, a warped mirror agenda that he is convinced is the ticket to the next wave of electoral victories—it’s an agenda too few on our side of the glass have tried to comprehend. Bannon calls it “MAGA Plus”—a supersizing, as he sees it, of Trump’s original “Make America Great Again” coalition, and it’s rapidly being picked up and adopted outside the United States as well.

Steve Bannon, regardless of whatever else he may be, is first and foremost a strategist. And he has a knack for identifying issues that are the natural territory of his opponents but that they have neglected or betrayed, leaving themselves vulnerable to having parts of their base wooed away. This is what he helped Trump do in 2016. He knew that a large sector of unionized blue-collar workers felt betrayed by corporate Democrats who had signed trade deals that accelerated factory closures in the 1990s, and that their anger deepened when the party bailed out banks instead of workers and homeowners after the 2008 crash. He paid close attention to the ways Occupy Wall Street was dismissed and then crushed, and to how Bernie Sanders, whose left-populist 2016 presidential campaign grew out of that movement, faced all kinds of dirty tricks from the Democratic Party establishment as it closed ranks around Hillary Clinton. Bannon saw an opportunity to peel away a portion of the male unionized workforce that had always voted for Democrats—most of it white, but not all of it. Bannon crafted a campaign message out of the betrayals of his rivals: Trump would be a new kind of Republican, one who would stand up to Wall Street, shred corporate trade deals, close the border to supposedly job-stealing immigrants, and end foreign wars—moreover, unlike Republicans before, he pledged to protect social programs like Medicare and Social Security. This was the original MAGA promise.

Of course, it was a bait and switch—Trump filled his administration with former Wall Street executives, made mostly minor changes to trade policy, escalated tensions abroad, and lavished the rich with tax cuts. Of his populist campaign rhetoric, all that really survived was the race baiting—against immigrants, Muslims, Black Lives Matter protesters, and anything having to do with China. It was enough to hold on...

And there is something else that I have noticed while listening to Bannon—he sticks, fairly judiciously, to the issues where there is the most common ground: hating Biden, rejecting vaccines, bashing Big Tech, fearmongering about migrants, casting doubt on election results. He skates lightly over more traditionally conservative issues that he may care about but that are likely to alienate some of his newfound friends, including abortion and gun rights. He doesn’t ignore them, but they don’t take up nearly as much airtime as one might expect.

Bannon’s signature move is to reach out to anyone who has recently been exiled by the left or pilloried by The New York Times and offer them a platform. For instance, after one such takedown, he handed an entire episode over to Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to spread his anti-vaccination gospel. Bannon was solicitous to the point of mawkish, praising the Kennedy family’s long history of public service and devotion to the poor. This, of course, was a preview for RFK’s presidential primary run. Bannon was also making an unsubtle point. He was saying that, unlike those liberals, who regard the people who listen to War Room as “deplorables” and as subhumans, he can have polite—even generous—conversations across partisan divides, and his posse will never cancel him for it.

Bannon, who has done as much as anyone in contemporary times to unleash the floodgates of xenophobic hate in the United States, has even begun to adopt the language of “othering” to describe how liberals treat his listeners. This is key, he says, to why he has been forced to build the Mirror World, with its mirror social media and mirror currency and mirror book publishing. Because his people were being “othered.” But no more. “Never again will they be able to other you, disappear you … That’s what the Chinese Communist Party did, that’s what the Bolsheviks did, that’s what the Nazis did,” Bannon told his listeners right before Christmas 2021 (he was trying to sell them FJB coins). And he added, “Nobody in this audience will ever do that to anyone. You wouldn’t think of it. You would say ‘that’s not fair.’”

Over the months, Wolf and Bannon’s relationship has grown progressively warmer as their political projects have converged, nagging ironies be damned. She warns Bannon gravely of the fictional threat that the state could soon wrench children away from their unvaccinated parents, apparently undisturbed that he faithfully served a president who forcibly separated more than five thousand children and babies from their families as they sought entry to the United States.

the new alliances start to make more sense. Small businesses and freelancers who work with or on bodies were among the hardest hit by pandemic lockdowns. Some of the reasons for that made epidemiological sense: therapeutic work didn’t allow for social distancing, and exercise studios necessarily involve heavy breathing in enclosed spaces. But there were also ways that this sector got a particularly raw deal. Early Covid relief programs were heavily biased toward larger workplaces with many staff employees; small owner-operated fitness studios where most workers are on contract often fell through the cracks of government aid, even as they were still on the hook for massive urban rents.

Many gym owners took on large personal debts to keep operating under stringent new rules, only for the rules to continually change in often arbitrary ways as the pandemic wore on. Where I live in Canada, for instance, gyms were shut down in response to the 2022 Omicron surge, but, as many fitness enthusiasts pointed out (with more than a little judgment) fast-food restaurants and strip clubs seemed to be just fine. Meanwhile, small fitness studios seemed to face many more restrictions than giant sports stadiums and ski resorts, which could afford to pay lobbyists to protect their interests.

There may have been deeper ideological reasons for opposing the vaccines as well. If the U.S. efforts to control Covid through free vaccination and wage-replacement programs had been more successful, that would have demonstrated that the federal government, when it sets its mind to something, can still provide timely, universal, and humane care to the entire population. But that raises some questions: If they can do it for Covid-19, why stop there? Why not launch similarly ambitious public programs to tackle other human emergencies? Could the government tackle hunger, soaring housing costs, and the need for universal health care? A successful Covid response would have set a precedent for a modern, activist government—a precedent many on the right consider dangerous. So it’s worth considering the possibility that Covid public health measures may have been in the crosshairs for people like Bannon and Carlson for a deceptively simple reason: because they were public.

It is the diagonalists themselves—by systematically refusing the simple and safe measures that were our best chance of preventing a highly infectious disease from culling the more vulnerable members of our communities: the already sick, the disabled, the immunocompromised, the elderly. Culling the herd of its weaker members to strengthen the genetic stock is the central goal of eugenics. And to a large extent, it has happened. Of the first 800,000 people who died of Covid-19 in the United States, three-quarters were over the age of sixty-five. And, according to an analysis conducted by the Poor People’s Campaign, people living in poor U.S. counties died at almost twice the rate as those living in wealthy ones; during the outbreak of the Delta variant, people in the poorest counties of the country died at five times the rate as those who lived in the wealthiest areas. These numbers tell a story of Covid as class war.

Parents like me are having kids later. Multiple peer-reviewed studies show that children born to older parents are more likely to be diagnosed with autism.

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. To Wing and her coauthor, the autism advocate David Potter, it was clear that these legends of fairy doppelgangers were ways of making sense of disability. “In some versions of these [changeling] myths,” they write, “the description of the beautiful but strange and remote changeling sounds very like a child with autism.” There are versions of the changeling mythology in many cultures: German, Egyptian, Scandinavian, and English, among others.

By setting his “little professors” apart from the rest of their autistic peers, and arguing that they alone were worth saving, Asperger created the controversial distinction between “high-functioning autism” and “low-functioning autism.” This is Asperger’s legacy: lifting up a small group of neuroatypical children as supposedly superior to all the others, while being part of an apparatus that sent children without that competitive edge to their deaths.

Every night when I doomscroll, I encounter more people tossing around chilling language about their good genes and their strong immune systems and their “pureblood” and their perfect children as an argument against taking simple actions, like putting on a mask, that would protect people a little less strong and perfect than they imagine themselves to be. Largely unknowingly, they are the inheritors of the barbaric traditions that once sought to rid the world of children like mine. When glowing influencers spew fatphobic bile at people daring to ask them to consider their impacts on others, they are tapping into deep supremacist logics about which lives have value and which lives are disposable. When parents refuse to give their children vaccines that have controlled viruses like measles for generations because they are gripped with the terror of having the kind of child that the Nazis declared unworthy of life, they are feeding into these logics, too.

I had a turning point when T. was in kindergarten and I was watching him struggle around a simple play structure outside our local school. A girl from his class showed up and started leaping and swinging like a professional gymnast, her long hair brushing the dusty ground as she hung upside down. What might it be like, I wondered, to have a child so able? And sweet, too! She paused and tried to help T. figure out how to cross the monkey bars. I have a very soft spot for confident girls with time for my son.

Around then her father showed up, and I complimented him on the awesomeness of his offspring and her kindness with a differently wired child. This precipitated an outburst of manic bragging, leading me to learn, in very short order, that in addition to her obvious proficiencies as a gymnast, his five-year-old could recite entire soliloquies from Romeo and Juliet, competed in chess tournaments, was a violin aficionado, and had never, ever ingested anything containing refined sugar.

I was so tired for him. 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. It was in that moment that I realized the special gift of having a child whose innate differences meant that he was never going to be able to compete in that race. By then, he was already on his own field, making his own rules—cool rules, ones that might lead to som...

This is surely why the Bannons of the world, bankrolled by a rotating cast of billionaires, love conspiracy theories, whether they personally believe them or not: they reliably shift attention away from the scandals we know about and that many have already painstakingly proved, and focus us, perennially, on something more explosive, something that is just on the verge of being proved (The election really was stolen! The vaccines really are killing babies! And doctors!), but never quite yet.

Since the Covid-19 global health crisis, we have been inundated with real examples of corporations profiteering off the virus, alongside cynical moves by political leaders to auction off our vital services under cover of the emergency. Trillions were spent to backstop markets and bail out multinationals, only to have workers laid off in droves; billionaires have increased their wealth at a blood-boiling rate, even as they have gouged customers and fueled a cost-of-living crisis. All of this is more than enough to justify a popular democratic revolt, without any embellishment (just as the illegal invasion of Iraq, and the hundreds of thousands of lives lost, should have been enough without talk of “inside jobs”). 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.

And there is another, related kind of capitalist conspiracy that needs to be surfaced, this one simply flowing from the fact that when a tiny stratum of the population is permitted to grow wealthier than Victorian-era monarchs, as these Shadow Lands have allowed them to, some of the people who breathe that rarified air are going to get the idea that they are above the law. Which is simply to say: I think a great many secrets about powerful men died when Jeffrey Epstein died in prison, and I’m not sure we will ever know their full extent. Do you?

The revelation of the unmarked graves less than a year earlier had forced a conversation about the fact that those schools were part of an official state policy to actively replace Indigenous nations, languages, and cultures with English- and French-speaking Christian culture. The residential schools were machines expressly designed to eradicate cosmologies that knew the natural world to be sacred, alive, and interdependent—teachings that are deeply relevant to our moment of planetary crisis. Now there was a convoy led by a man who claimed it was his Christian Caucasian culture that was under threat of being replaced by darker, inferior others through the so-called Great Replacement.

The flip side of the post–World War II cries of “Never again” was an unspoken “Never before.” The insistence on lifting the Holocaust out of history, the failure to recognize these patterns, and the refusal to see where the Nazis fit inside the arc of colonial genocides have all come at a high cost. The countries that defeated Hitler did not have to confront the uncomfortable fact that Hitler had taken pointers and inspiration on race-making and on human containment from them, leaving their innocence not only undisturbed but also significantly strengthened by what was indeed a righteous victory.

I’m struck by 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 It’s all so Freudian. The fear that it will happen to them stems from an implicit admission that they did it to others. As though the Black, Brown and Indigenous downtrodden are just as hateful as they are and are going to turn around and do to them what they did to us.

Conspiracy theories don’t require internal consistency to find traction (see: Covid is a mild cold—chill out! Covid is a bioweapon—freak out!).

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.

Except if Hitler had been inspired by settler colonialism in North America—and he clearly was—then this was anything but reparations. It was a continuation of the colonial logic, but with broken and traumatized people let loose on a people even less powerful than themselves. Palestinians, under this arrangement, became, as the anti-colonial scholar Edward Said put it, “the victims of the victims,” or, in the words of the scholar Joseph Massad, “the new Jews.”

As for those not directly affected by this struggle, it would help if more conversations could hold greater complexity—the ability to acknowledge that the Israelis who came to Palestine in the 1940s were survivors of genocide, desperate refugees, many of whom had no other options, and that they were settler colonists who participated in the ethnic cleansing of another people. That they were victims of white supremacy in Europe being passed the mantle of whiteness in Palestine. That Israelis are nationalists in their own right and that their country has long been enlisted by the United States to act as a kind of subcontracted military base in the region. All of this is true all at once. Contradictions like these don’t fit comfortably within the usual binaries of anti-imperialism (colonizer/colonized) or the binaries of identity politics (white/racialized)—but if Israel-Palestine teaches us anything, it might be that binary thinking will never get us beyond partitioned selves, or partitioned nations. None of this is intended as an apologia for Israeli settler colonialism. Rather, it is an attempt, as the British scholar Jacqueline Rose put it regarding her book The Question of Zion, to “go into the mindset of Zionism without blocking the exit.”

Like all segregated societies that are layered on top of each other, Israel and Palestine are not two distinct geographies. Instead, they make up a singular doppelganger society, requiring a doubling of everything: schools, roads, laws, courts. It’s a psychological prison for Jewish Israelis, locked inside a fortress of fear and denial, and it’s a very literal prison for Palestinians, entrapped in a warren of walls and checkpoints in the West Bank, in the open-air prison that is Gaza, and in the sprawling jail cells that have made incarceration such a routinized part of daily life that around 20 percent of the Palestinian population in the occupied territories has experienced some form of arrest and/or detention by Israeli forces—some 800,000 people, according to a study by the Palestinian prisoner support group Addameer.