The very fact that I refer to her with any kind of code speaks to the absurdity of my situation. For a quarter of a century, I have been a person who writes about corporate power and its ravages. I sneak into abusive factories in faraway countries and across borders to military occupations; I report in the aftermath of oil spills and category 5 hurricanes. I write books of Big Ideas About Serious Subjects. And yet in the months and years during which this text came into being—a time when cemeteries ran out of space, and billionaires blasted themselves into outer space—everything else that I had to write or might have written appeared only as an unwanted intrusion, a rude interruption.

XREF: Speaks to the tension between public intellectual work and private devastation that recurs in grief memoirs.

In June 2021, as this project began to truly spiral out of my control, a strange new weather event dubbed a “heat dome” descended on the southern coast of British Columbia, the part of Canada where I now live with my family. The thick air felt like a snarling, invasive entity with malevolent intent. More than six hundred people died, most of them elderly; an estimated ten billion marine creatures were cooked alive on our shores; an entire town went up in flames. It’s rare for this out-of-the-way, sparsely populated spot to make international headlines, but the heat dome made us briefly famous.

SEED: The extreme toll of the 2021 BC heat dome — 600+ deaths, 10 billion marine creatures — could anchor a piece on climate-driven ecological and human disaster in overlooked regions.

“Doppelganger” comes from German, combining Doppel (double) with Gänger (goer). Sometimes it’s translated as “double-walker,” and I can tell you that having a double walking around is a profoundly unsettling experience. Uncanny, a feeling Sigmund Freud described as “that species of the frightening that goes back to what was once well known and had long been familiar”—but is suddenly alien. The uncanniness provoked by doppelgangers is particularly acute because the thing that becomes unfamiliar is you. A person who has a doppelganger, Freud wrote, “may identify himself with another and so become unsure of his true self.” He wasn’t right about everything, but he was right about that.

DEFINE: Defines 'doppelganger' and links it to Freud's concept of the uncanny and self-uncertainty. QUESTION: Why is the double-walker experience specifically 'profoundly unsettling' — is it rooted in self-recognition failures?

And here’s an extra twist: My doppelganger is a person who has undergone such a dramatic political and personal transformation that many have commented that she seems like a doppelganger of her former self. Which, in a way, makes me a double of a double, an uncanny state of affairs even Freud did not anticipate.

I am hardly the only one to grapple with a sense that reality is somehow warping. Almost everyone I talk to tells me about people they have lost "down the rabbit hole"—parents, siblings, best friends, as well as formerly trusted intellectuals and commentators. People, once familiar, who have become unrecognizable. Altered. It began to feel as if the forces that have destabilized my world are part of an expansive web of forces that are destabilizing our larger world—and that understanding these forces could hold a key to getting to firmer ground.

For more than twenty years, ever since those jetliners flew into the glass and steel of the World Trade Center, I have been preoccupied with the ways that large-scale shocks scramble our collective synapses, lead to mass regression, and make humans easy prey for demagogues. In the years that it took to research and write The Shock Doctrine, my 2007 book on this topic, I delved deeply into how post-shock states of discombobulation have been opportunistically exploited in many different contexts: 9/11, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the invasion of Iraq, Hurricane Katrina, and events significantly further back in time. With the public terrified and distracted, power-hungry players were able to move in and ram through policies that benefited corporate elites without debate or consent—not unlike the brutal methods deployed by torturers who use isolation and stress to soften up and break their prisoners. As I conducted this research, tracking the attacks on political rights as well as the auctioning off of public lands and services, I always imagined myself to be immune to these shock tactics, since I knew how they worked. I was not scrambled by unprecedented events, my sight was clear during crises, and I would help others see clearly as well. Or so I thought.

Looking back now, I cringe at how easy I had it. If I felt immune to shock, it was mainly because of my distance from its sources. It wasn't my family members who were killed from the air. It wasn't my neighborhood that was in line for demolition, nor was it my kid's teachers who were getting fired so that public schools could be converted to private ones.

But Covid … Covid was different. It scrambled my personal world, as it did all of our worlds. For the first four months, while I was still living in New Jersey, I was confined to our home with our neuroatypical son, trying in vain to help him learn online, and, more important, to soothe his porous soul, which could not help but absorb the terror that surrounded us. Ambulances picked up our neighbors, the virus tore through our friend group. I was still lucky—I wasn't on the front lines in the Covid wards, but neither was I protected from the pandemic with my usual reportorial distance. I woke up every morning exhausted and stared at my various screens in a stultified daze. For the first time, this was not someone else's shock. And then the shocks kept coming.

XREF: Connects to broader literature on how journalists and trauma-adjacent professionals maintain detachment, and how collective crises erode that boundary.

“Gather together, find your footing and your story.” That is the advice I have been giving for two decades about how to stay out of shock during moments of collective trauma. Metabolize the shock together, I would tell people, create meaning together. Resist the tin-pot tyrants who will tell you that the world is now a blank sheet for them to write their violent stories upon.

QUESTION: What psychologically explains why collective meaning-making buffers against shock?

Controlling the virus forced on many of us, including me, the very conditions that make humans most vulnerable to states of shock: prolonged stress and isolation. My own isolation grew more extreme when, four months into the pandemic, we returned to Canada. It was supposed to be a temporary trip to be close to my parents. But, like so many others, we got stuck. We now live full-time up on a rock at the dead end of a street that is three hours, including a less than dependable ferryboat, from the closest city. Only occasionally do I regret giving up restaurant delivery, reliable electrical power, and subways in favor of a reliably open country school, easy access to forest trails, and the slim but nonetheless real chance of glimpsing the black dorsal fin of an orca slice the steely waters of the Salish Sea. It’s good here—when it isn’t choked by heat and wildfire smoke or lashed by storms for which we keep having to learn new names (“bomb cyclone,” “atmospheric river,” and “pineapple express” all in one long, wet winter). But it is isolated. So maybe that’s what finally pushed me to (or is it “over”?) the edge. The months and months without humans in bodies to feel and think with.

XREF: Connects to discussions of stress physiology and why humans become vulnerable under prolonged duress.

That, and going online to try to find some simulation of the friendships and communities I missed, and finding, instead, The Confusion: a torrent of people discussing me and what I’d said and what I’d done—only it wasn’t me. It was her. Which raised an alarming question: Who, then, was I?

QUESTION: How do we maintain selfhood when others' simulations of us become publicly dominant?

Doppelgangers, however, are not only forms of torment. For centuries, doubles have been understood as warnings or harbingers. When reality starts doubling, refracting off itself, it often means that something important is being ignored or denied—a part of ourselves and our world we do not want to see—and that further danger awaits if the warning is not heeded. That applies to the individual but also to entire societies that are divided, doubled, polarized, or partitioned into various warring, seemingly unknowable camps. Societies like ours.

XREF: Connects to Freud's uncanny and literary double traditions, plus contemporary polarization discourse.

I felt justified in this pursuit. I have been confused with Other Naomi for so long and so frequently that I have often felt that she was following me. It seemed only right that I should follow her back.

FICTION: The premise of someone following their own doppelganger — and feeling justified reversing the role — is a potent narrative hook for a story about identity, obsession, or mistaken identity.

In stories about doubles, twins, and imposters, it is often the case that the doppelganger acts as an unwelcome kind of mirror, showing the protagonist a vain and venal version of themselves. It will not give too much away to say that, while watching my doppelganger, I have felt that unwelcome wince of recognition more than once. Yet what drove me to write this book, sticking with it against all good judgment, is that the more I looked at her—her disastrous choices and the cruel ways she was often treated by others—the more I came to feel as if I were seeing not only undesirable parts of myself but a magnification of many undesirable aspects of our shared culture as well. The ambient and all-pervasive hunger for ever-more-fleeting relevance; the disposability with which we treat people who mess up; the trivialization of words and displacements of responsibility, and much else. In the end, looking at her helped me see myself more clearly, but it also, oddly, helped me better see the dangerous systems and dynamics we are all trapped inside.

SEED: Essay angle: how confronting an 'other' version of oneself reveals systemic cultural pathologies we'd rather not see individually.

This, then, is not a biography of Other Naomi, nor does it offer a psychoanalytic diagnosis of her behaviors. It is an attempt to use my own doppelganger experience—the havoc wreaked and the lessons learned about me, her, and us—as a guide into and through what I have come to understand as our doppelganger culture. A culture crowded with various forms of doubling, in which all of us who maintain a persona or avatar online create our own doppelgangers—virtual versions of ourselves that represent us to others. A culture in which many of us have come to think of ourselves as personal brands, forging a partitioned identity that is both us and not us, a doppelganger we perform ceaselessly in the digital ether as the price of admission in a rapacious attention economy. And all the while, tech companies use these data troves to train machines to create artificial simulations of human intelligence and human functions, lifelike doubles that carry their own agendas, their own logics, and their own threats. What, I have kept asking myself, is all of this duplication doing to us? How is it steering what we pay attention to and—more critically—what we neglect?

SEED: The doppelganger-culture framing could anchor an essay on how personal branding partitions identity and shapes what we attend to and neglect online.

As I shadowed my double further into her world—a place where soft-focus wellness influencers make common cause with fire-breathing far-right propagandists all in the name of saving and protecting “the children”—I found myself confronting yet more forms of doubling and doppelganging, these ones distinctly more consequential. Like the way that all of politics increasingly feels like a mirror world, with society split in two, and each side defining itself against the other—whatever one says and believes, the other seems obliged to say and believe the exact opposite. The deeper I went, the more I noticed this phenomenon all around me: individuals not guided by legible principles or beliefs, but acting as members of groups playing yin to the other’s yang—well versus weak; awake versus sheep; righteous versus depraved. Binaries where thinking once lived.

SEED: The mirrored-political-identity angle could fuel a piece on how voters adopt positions largely to negate an out-group rather than from principle.

As my investigation has worn on, this is the form of doppelganger that increasingly preoccupies me: the fascist clown state that is the ever-present twin of liberal Western democracies, perpetually threatening to engulf us in its fires of selective belonging and ferocious despising. The figure of the doppelganger has been used for centuries to warn us of these shadow versions of our collective selves, of these monstrous possible futures.

It’s because our world has changed, but, like a collective case of jet lag, most of us are still attuned to the rhythms and habits of the place left behind. It’s past time to find our bearings in this new place.

SEED: This metaphor of collective jet lag could anchor an essay exploring how inherited mindsets (work rhythms, attention patterns, social expectations) are ill-suited to our current digital/accelerated environment.

At the time of the bathroom incident, I had visited the Occupy plaza a couple of times. I was mainly there to conduct interviews about the relationship between market logic and climate breakdown for what would become This Changes Everything. But while I was there, organizers asked me to give a short talk about the shock of the 2008 financial crisis and the raging injustices that followed—the trillions marshaled to save the banks whose reckless trades had caused the crisis, the punishing austerity offered to pretty much everyone else, the legalized corruption that all of this laid bare. These were the seeds of discontent that right-wing populists in dozens of countries would eventually exploit for a fiercely anti-immigrant and anti-“globalist” political project, including Donald Trump, under the tutelage of his chief advisor, Stephen K. Bannon. At the time, however, many of us still held out hope that the crash could catalyze a democratic revival and a new era of left power, one that would discipline corporate might and empower flailing democracies to address our many surging emergencies, including the climate emergency.

Naomi Wolf, once a standard-bearer of 1990s feminism, had intersected with the protests as well, and I suppose that’s where the confusion began. She had written several articles arguing that the crackdown on Occupy demonstrated that the United States was tipping into a police state. This was the subject of her book The End of America, which outlined “ten steps” she claimed every government takes on its way to outright fascism. Her evidence that this evil future was now upon us was the aggressive way that Occupy demonstrators were having their freedom restricted. The city was not allowing megaphones and sound systems to be used in the park, and there had been a series of mass arrests. Wolf, in her articles, argued that activists should defy restrictions on their freedom of speech and assembly in order to prevent the coup she insisted was unfolding under their noses. Not wanting to give the police an excuse to clear the protest camp, the organizers took a different tack, using what became known as the “human microphone” (where the crowd repeats the speaker’s words so that everyone can hear them).

XREF: Connects to broader 1990s public-intellectual history and the trajectory of figures like Wolf through subsequent political eras.

For better or worse, the Occupiers had been very clear that the movement did not have a policy agenda—two or three political demands lawmakers could meet that would send them all home satisfied. Wolf insisted this was not true: she claimed the movement actually had specific demands and that she, improbably, had figured them out. “I found out what it was that OWS actually wanted,” she wrote in The Guardian, explaining, “I began soliciting online ‘What is it you want?’ answers” from self-identified Occupy activists. Disregarding the movement’s commitment to radical, participatory democracy, Wolf then turned the results of her haphazard surveying into a short list of demands and took it upon herself to deliver it to New York governor Andrew Cuomo at a black-tie event organized by Huffington Post, where she and Cuomo were both guests.

It got stranger. Failing to connect with Cuomo inside, Wolf left the event to spontaneously address Occupy Wall Street demonstrators on the sidewalk outside and, while informing the crowd what their demands were and telling them that they were demanding them wrong because “they had a first amendment right to use a megaphone,” managed to get herself arrested in a burgundy evening gown, a melee documented by a bank of cameras. This is what the women in the bathroom were referring to when they talked about how “Naomi Klein” did not understand their demands.

QUESTION: What exactly did the women in the bathroom mean by Naomi Klein misunderstanding demands? Worth interrogating the gap between elite intellectuals and grassroots activists.

After the bathroom incident, though, I started paying closer attention to what Wolf was doing, newly aware that some of it was blowing back on me. And it kept getting weirder. After police across the United States cleared the parks and plazas of Occupy encampments, she wrote a piece claiming, without any evidence, that the orders had come directly from Congress and Barack Obama's White House. … It was an out-of-body feeling. I went back and took a closer look at the articles about her evening-wear arrest, and a line in The Guardian jumped out at me: "Her partner, the film producer Avram Ludwig, was also arrested."

XREF: Connects to the broader theme of how intimate partners' public conduct reflects on each other, and how fact-checking a figure's claims can reveal their personal entanglements.

When you connect the dots," Wolf wrote, it all made sense. The crackdowns on OWS were "the first battle in a civil war … It is a battle in which members of Congress, with the collusion of the American president, sent violent, organized suppression against the people they are supposed to represent." This, Wolf declared, marked a definitive tip into totalitarian rule—a claim that she had made before, under George W. Bush, confidently predicting he would not allow the 2008 election to take place (he did), and that she would make many more times in the years to come. "Sadly, Americans this week have come one step closer to being true brothers and sisters of the protesters in Tahrir Square," she wrote. "Like them, our own national leaders … are now making war upon us."

QUESTION: What explains the persistent attraction to such apocalyptic predictions despite repeated failures? XREF: Connects to broader analyses of prediction failures among public intellectuals and political commentators.

The logical leaps were bad enough. What made it worse for me was that, with Wolf's new focus on abuses of corporate and political power during states of emergency, something she touched on only briefly in The End of America, I felt like I was reading a parody of The Shock Doctrine, one with all facts and evidence carefully removed, and coming to cartoonishly broad conclusions I would never support.

XREF: References both Naomi Wolf's The End of America and Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine, drawing a pointed contrast between evidence-based analysis and Wolf's broad, fact-free conclusions. QUESTION: When do activist arguments cross from persuasive simplification into factually hollow caricature? The author's reaction marks a boundary worth interrogating.

The core of Wolf's argument was that during the 1980s, just as the second-wave feminist movement had succeeded in winning greater equality for women in postsecondary education and the workplace, the pressure on women to meet impossible standards of thinness and beauty had increased sharply, putting them at a competitive disadvantage with men in their fields. This was no coincidence, she argued. “The ruling elite” knew, Wolf wrote, that they held jobs that would be at risk if women were free to rise unencumbered, something that “must be thwarted, or the traditional power elite will be at a disadvantage.” The “myth” of beauty was invented, she speculated, to drain women's power and focus—to keep them busy with mascara and starvation diets instead of free to climb the professional ladder and outcompete their male rivals. In essence, she posed the heightened beauty standards of the 1980s as a backlash to the feminism of the 1970s.

QUESTION: Wolf's conspiracy-flavored theory that beauty standards intentionally throttled women's advancement is provocative but hard to verify — worth interrogating the evidence base. XREF: Connects to broader backlash-thesis literature on periods of feminist advance followed by cultural retrenchment.

Yet the feminism Wolf proposed in response was not a throwback to the radical demands of the 1960s and '70s, a time when feminism had been linked with anti-imperialism, anti-racism, and socialism and activists had built their own collectives, movement publications, and insurgent political candidacies that set out to challenge and transform dominant power systems from the outside. On the contrary, just as Bill Clinton and Tony Blair moved their respective parties away from policies that championed universal public services and redistribution of wealth toward a pro-market, pro-militarism “Third Way,” Wolf's version of third-wave feminism charted a path to the center, one that had little to offer working-class women but promised the world to white, middle-class, highly educated women like her. Two decades before Sheryl Sandberg's Lean In, Wolf published her second book, Fire with Fire, which called on feminism to drop the dogma and embrace the “will to power.”

XREF: Connects to critiques of neoliberal feminism and the 'Lean In' phenomenon, situating Wolf as a precursor to Sandberg's corporate feminism. DEFINE: Distinguishes third-wave feminism as Wolf framed it from earlier feminist movements tied to anti-imperialism, anti-racism, and socialism.

What set Wolf's writing apart from these kinds of movement intellectuals was an apparent paucity of curiosity about the lives of women who were not her, and whose lives were markedly different from her own. This came up in her first book, which somehow managed to be a study of the impact of white, European beauty ideals without engaging with the particular and acute impacts of those ideals on Black, Asian, and other nonwhite women (let alone queer and transgender women).

XREF: Connects to broader criticisms of second-wave feminism for centering white, middle-class women's experiences as universal.

While there were always skeptics—her rival Camille Paglia dismissed Wolf as a “Seventeen magazine level of thinker”—critiques of her work rarely reached beyond women's studies departments. And by the end of the decade, Wolf was considered such an authority on all things womanly that during the 2000 presidential election, Al Gore, the Democratic Party nominee, hired her to coach him on how to appeal to female voters. Her widely reported advice was that Gore had to get out from under Bill Clinton's shadow and transform himself from a “beta male” to an “alpha male”—in part by wearing earth-toned suits to warm up his robotic affect.

XREF: Connects to the broader history of how pop-feminist authors were absorbed into mainstream political consulting during the 1990s.

How much does this identity merger happen? Enough that there is a viral poem, first posted in October 2019, that invariably shows up in these moments, and that been shared many thousands of times: As in any doppelganger story, the confusion flows both ways.

In this way, confrontations with our doppelgangers inevitably raise existentially destabilizing questions. Am I who I think I am, or am I who others perceive me to be? And if enough others start seeing someone else as me, who am I, then? Doppelgangers are not the only way we can lose control over ourselves, of course. The carefully constructed self can be undone in any number of ways and in an instant—by a disabling accident, by a psychotic break, or, these days, by a hacked account or a deep fake. This is the perennial appeal of doppelgangers in novels and films: the idea that two strangers can be indistinguishable from each other taps into the precariousness at the core of identity—the painful truth that, no matter how deliberately we tend to our personal lives and public personas, the person we think we are is fundamentally vulnerable to forces outside of our control.

XREF: Connects to themes of identity, self-construction, and the destabilizing effect of doppelgangers in literature and film, as well as modern digital threats like deep fakes.

François Brunelle, a Montreal artist who has been photographing hundreds of pairs of doppelgangers over decades for a project called I'm Not a Look-Alike!, put it like this: "Someone, out in this world, is looking at himself in the mirror and seeing more or less the same thing that I am seeing in my own mirror. Which brings us down to the question: Who am I exactly? Am I what I see in my reflection or something else that cannot be defined and is invisible to the eyes, even my own?"

QUESTION: Raises the enduring philosophical question of whether identity resides in appearance or something invisible to sight — worth pursuing in a piece on selfhood and doubles.

In the dozens of books that have been written about people who encounter their doubles, doppelgangers consistently signal that the protagonist's life is about to be upended, with the double turning their friends and colleagues against them, destroying their career, or framing them for crimes, and—very often—having sex with their spouse or lover. A standard trope in the genre is a nagging uncertainty about whether the double is real at all. Is this actually an identical stranger, or are they a long-lost twin? Worse, is the double a figment of the protagonist's imagination—an expression of an unhinged subconscious?

XREF: Connects to literary tradition from Dostoevsky's 'The Double' through Nabokov, Poe, and contemporary doppelganger fiction.

In Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “William Wilson,” for instance, the reader begins by believing the “detestable coincidence” that there is another person with the same name, birthday, and general appearance as the pompous narrator. Suspicions quickly emerge, though, that the coincidences are a little too perfect. By the end, it is clear that the double, who could not speak “above a very low whisper,” never existed outside the narrator’s paranoid, self-loathing subconscious and that, by killing his “arch-enemy and evil genius,” William Wilson had killed himself.

DEFINE: Clarifies the reveal in Poe's 'William Wilson' — the apparent double is an externalized projection of the narrator's own self-loathing, not a separate person.

The whole mess puts me in mind of my dog, Smoke, who, every evening at sundown, sees her reflection in the glass of our front door and begins to bark ferociously. She is convinced, evidently, that an adorable white cockapoo doppelganger (dogpelganger?) is bound and determined to gain access to her home, eat her food, and steal the affections of her humans. … “That’s you,” I tell Smoke in my most reassuring voice, but she always forgets. And this is the catch-22 of confronting your doppelganger: bark all you want, but you inevitably end up confronting yourself.

FICTION: The dog-barking-at-her-own-reflection is a vivid metaphor that could anchor a creative piece about self-confrontation, mistaken identity, or unresolved internal conflict.

There was another reason I didn’t bother much with correcting the record for the first few years of my doppelganger trouble: with the exception of the Manhattan bathroom incident, getting confused with Naomi Wolf appeared to be a social media thing. My friends and colleagues knew who I was, and when I interacted with people I didn’t know in the physical world, her name did not come up; neither were we entangled in articles or book reviews. I therefore filed away Naomi confusion in the category of “things that happen on the internet that are not quite real” (back when we were silly enough to do that about all kinds of things). I told myself that I was not being confused with Wolf, but that our digital avatars were getting mistakenly swapped—the thumbnail-sized photos of us, and the tiny boxes that prescribed the parameters of our speech on those platforms, just as they flattened and blurred so much else.

XREF: Connects to broader debates about whether digital interactions constitute 'real' experience — echoes concerns about how platform-mediated identity flattens human distinctiveness.

Back then, I saw the problem as more structural than personal. A handful of young men had gotten unfathomably rich designing tech platforms that, in the name of “connection,” not only allowed us to eavesdrop on conversations between strangers but also actively encouraged us to seek out those exchanges that mentioned us by name (a.k.a. our “mentions”). In a way, it was perfect that the first time I heard my name confused with Wolf’s was in an eavesdropped conversation taking place in a public restroom. When I joined Twitter and clicked on the little bell icon signifying my “mentions,” that was my initial thought: I was reading the graffiti written about me on an infinitely scrolling restroom wall.

XREF: Connects to broader critiques of social media engagement design — the 'mentions' mechanic as manufactured surveillance.

As a frequently graffitied-about girl in high school, this felt both familiar and deeply harrowing. I instantly knew that Twitter was going to be bad for me—and yet, like so many of us, I could not stop looking. So perhaps if there is a message I should have taken from the destabilizing appearance of my doppelganger, this is it: Once and for all, stop eavesdropping on strangers talking about you in this crowded and filthy global toilet known as social media.

In the years before Covid, floating conspiracy claims seemed to be a kind of hobby for Wolf. She hopped from one theory to another—Ebola, Snowden, 5G, ISIS—but never stayed with any one subject for long, certainly not long enough to actually prove anything. She was just “raising flags” and “asking questions,” and then she invariably moved on. This is classic “conspiracy without the theory,” as described by Russell Muirhead and Nancy L. Rosenblum in their 2020 book, A Lot of People Are Saying, part of the growing body of literature attempting to make sense of the surge in belief in a wide range of off-the-wall, unproven claims.

DEFINE: Definitions the phrase 'conspiracy without the theory' alongside its coining by Muirhead and Rosenblum in A Lot of People Are Saying.

But as I watched Wolf’s output in the Covid-19 era, I quickly realized that something was different. She was no longer hopping from subject to subject asking questions. She seemed to have only one subject: the virus—its origins, the shutdowns, the tests, the mask mandates, the vaccines, the vaccine mandates, the vaccine verification apps. None of it was as it seemed. To hear her tell it, we were not hit with a novel and highly contagious zoonotic virus that demanded hard trade-offs from all of us, a virus our political class and health bureaucracies—hollowed out by fifty years of neoliberal clawbacks—repeatedly fumbled or failed to control, while drug companies maximized their profits by protecting patents that should never have been in place. Instead, she said, we were part of an experiment, a plot, a coup, an act of war designed to turn us into technoslaves and convince us to voluntarily relinquish our freedoms, while wiping out large swaths of humanity in the process.

Early on, it was clear that Wolf's emergence as a relentless source of Covid-related misinformation was yielding real-world results. Through her website, DailyClout, as well as new alliances with an array of Republican state lawmakers, Wolf claimed partial credit for successfully pushing legislation barring mask mandates and vaccine passports in dozens of Republican states.

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.”

XREF: Connects to broader patterns of vaccine misinformation spread through wellness influencer communities and its concrete institutional consequences.

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.

XREF: Connects to broader research on misinformation spread, influencer-driven belief networks, and the pseudo-medical community.

Take the case of a prominent fitness trainer and anti-vax influencer in Toronto who calls herself “Glowing Mama.” The trainer became obsessed with the vaccine shedding theory, claiming she was “bleeding between [her] period” because people around her had been vaccinated. In a video that went viral for all the wrong reasons, Glowing Mama brought herself to tears as she raged about how her daughter’s grandparents, who had been vaccinated, wanted to hold their granddaughter, clearly indifferent to the risks they posed to both the child and to her. “They are sterilizing an entire generation of people,” she said between sobs. She could not believe the selfishness of these older people, who had “one foot in the grave”—selfish for getting vaccinated and still expecting to have a loving relationship with their granddaughter.

XREF: Connects to broader research on misinformation and conspiracy theories fracturing interpersonal relationships. SEED: Material for an essay on how disinformation weaponizes existing identity boundaries like age and family roles.

All of this, it seemed to me, considerably upped the ante on my getting confused with her. So did the frequency of identity-confusion events. No longer was it a periodic annoyance every few months. In that first Covid year, it was a daily avalanche. And that’s how I justified, a few months into this mess, starting to fight back. I briefly added “Not that Naomi” to my social media bio and, in February 2021, when she was making a Fox News tour warning that governments imposing Covid measures were “autocratic tyrants,” I tweeted: “This is your periodic reminder to keep your Naomis straight.” When her Twitter account was suspended, seemingly permanently, I went with “Still here, sadly.” These two sentences were “liked,” last I checked, twenty thousand times.

That’s because, amid the extreme isolation and anxiety of early pandemic life, Naomi confusion became one of Left Twitter’s favorite jokes. The internet hive mind not only enjoyed laughing about what outrageous thing Other Naomi had said now but equally delighted in the prospect that I would get at least some of the credit/blame (“Thoughts and prayers to Naomi Klein”). We were a pastime for profoundly bored people addicted to dopamine hits from our machines. It was giving people not pleasure exactly, but something synthetically adjacent to it—a fake communal experience in those lonely and anxious times.

QUESTION: Does manufactured viral outrage actually satisfy loneliness, or only superficially mimic belonging? Worth examining the psychology of digital mobs. SEED: Potential essay angle: how mistaken-identity pile-ons function as improvised social rituals in socially thin times.

And look, it was confusing, and also, in a gallows way, funny, even to me. Again and again, she was saying things that sounded a little like the argument I made in The Shock Doctrine but refracted through a funhouse mirror of plots and conspiracies based almost exclusively on a series of hunches. She continually called Covid’s severity into question, describing it as “a much-hyped medical crisis,” even when it had already killed hundreds of thousands in the United States alone. She told Tucker Carlson that the Biden administration was, under the “guise” of a medical emergency, using “emergency orders” to “strip us of our rights—rights to property, rights to assembly, rights to worship, all the rights the Constitution guarantees.”

XREF: Connects to the psychology of how plausible frameworks get refracted into conspiracy theories, echoing literature on motivated reasoning and truth decay.

Watching this, I felt like she had taken my ideas, fed them into a bonkers blender, and then shared the thought-puree with Carlson, who nodded vehemently. All the while, Wolf’s followers hounded me about why I had sold out to the “globalists” and was duping the public into believing that masks, vaccines, and restrictions on indoor gatherings were legitimate public health measures—as opposed to a pretext for a worldwide shock doctrine, of the kind I had warned about in my books. “I think she’s been got at!” someone whose handle is “RickyBaby321” said of me, telling Wolf, “I have relegated Naomi Klein to the position of being: ‘The Other Naomi’!” It’s a vertiginous thing to be harangued on social media about your alleged misunderstanding of your own ideas—while being told that another Naomi is a better version of you than you are.

Like so many of us during Covid, I was online much more than usual, because, well, where else was I going to be? Previously, I had kept my social media use under pretty tight control. But in the isolation of Covid, and my isolated life on the rock, that all fell away. Social media was one thing I didn’t have to give up in the name of that damn virus, so, I reasoned, why should I?

XREF: Connects to broader documented patterns of increased screen time and social media use during Covid lockdowns.

Gordon Pennycook, a behavioral scientist at the University of Regina, explains that as the virus spread, conspiracy peddlers found a ready audience with a public that was in a state of generalized fear of getting seriously ill and possibly dying, and simultaneously had very real worries about what public health measures like stay-at-home orders, school closures, and masking would mean for their livelihoods and loved ones. “Those fears distract people from judging the accuracy of the content they may read online,” he told The New York Times, adding, “As a rule, people don’t want to spread false content. But at a time like this, when people are worried about the virus, headlines like ‘Vitamin C Cures Covid’ or ‘It’s All a Hoax’ tend to travel widely.”

Wolf was guilty of this kind of trigger-happy posting. So, too, were many of her followers, who jumped to share her claims. But here’s where things get messier: a great many of the people who leapt to attack Wolf for spreading misinformation were also barely reading what they were posting. And I should know, because, in their haste to be seen and to get engagement, they ended up posting about me. Even when Wolf’s correct name appeared in boldface in an article’s headline.

This raised something even more troubling. For a long time, people had clearly been confusing me and Wolf, getting our names mixed up, as happens to all of us sometimes. But as Covid wore on, and all of this not-really-reading took on an ever more breathless quality, it became clear that we were being not confused but conflated, treated as one interchangeable Naomi.

XREF: The distinction between accidental confusion and systematic conflation speaks to how public discourse flattens individual identities.

This is the most destabilizing part of the Naomi-Naomi conversations I stumbled across online. More than once, someone typed: “OMG. I just now realized they are not the same person.” Or: “TIR [today I realized] that Naomi Wolf is not Naomi Klein and honestly things make a bit more sense now.” Someone else claimed The Shock Doctrine was “One of the most informative books written” and that, in it, I lay out “the 10 steps that lead to a fascist government”—which I have never done but Wolf has.

I resisted the truth about this conflation for a long time. Beyond what I consider to be our different approaches to facts and research, there are plenty of other differences between the two of us. She grew up in the United States, I in Canada. She is a liberal who reverentially references the founding fathers, fetishizes a highly individualistic version of “liberty,” and wrote an entire book addressed to a “young patriot.” I am a third-generation leftist who believes freedom is won collectively and gets itchy around flags. She went to private universities in the United States and the United Kingdom; I dropped out of a public one in Canada. Her eyes are blue; mine are brown.

I felt blood rush to my face. In that moment, nine months into living on the rock at the end of the road, thirteen months of remote teaching and indoor masking, an eternity since seeing my closest friends, it suddenly hit me: the confusion was now so frequent that Twitter's algorithm was prompting it, helpfully filling in the mistake for its users, to save them precious time. This is how machine learning works—the algorithm imitates, learning from patterns. So, if my name is repeatedly mixed up with Wolf's, even in jokes, then my name would start being suggested instead of hers, leading to even more mix-ups. Which also meant that anything I did to correct the record—or state my own position on what had become her pet topics—would just train the algorithm to confuse us even more.

QUESTION: The feedback loop described here — where corrections train the algorithm to further conflate two people — is a disturbing implication worth exploring. How does this play out for people with similar names or identities more broadly? SEED: Could be an essay angle: how algorithmic feedback loops can trap individuals in misidentification cycles that resist correction.

This is what happens when we allow so many of our previously private actions to be enclosed by corporate tech platforms whose founders said they were about connecting us but were always about extracting from us. The process of enclosure, of carrying out our activities within these private platforms, changes us, including how we relate to one another and the underlying purpose of those relations. This goes back to early forms of enclosure, beginning in the Middle Ages. When common lands in England were transformed into privately held commodities surrounded by hedges and fences, the land became something else: its role was no longer to benefit the community—with shared access to communal grazing, food, and firewood—but to increase crop yields and therefore profits for individual landowners. Once physically and legally enclosed, the soil began to be treated as a machine, whose role was to be as productive as possible.

XREF: Connects to the historical concept of enclosure in English agrarian history, drawing a provocative parallel between physical commons and the digital commons. SEED: Could become an essay on 'digital enclosure' — how private platforms reorder human relations just as hedged common lands once did.

Zadie Smith saw all this coming more than a decade ago. Writing about the rise of Facebook, and by extension all the other social media platforms, she observed, “When a human being becomes a set of data on a website like Facebook, he or she is reduced. Everything shrinks. Individual character. Friendships. Language. Sensibility. In a way it’s a transcendent experience: we lose our bodies, our messy feelings, our desires, our fears.” But we aren’t transcending to something higher, just less ourselves. And a flattened, reduced version of ourselves is easier to confuse with a flattened, reduced version of someone else.

XREF: Connects to broader critiques of social media's flattening of identity, and to the idea that reduced digital selves blur distinctions between people.

As I went speechless, Wolf kept talking. And typing. Taking up enough space for both of us and a few more Naomis to spare.

In the books and films about doppelgangers that had come to fill my evenings, I was struck by how reliably this phenomenon occurred: eventually, the double replaces the original, through sheer energy and tenacity, while the original fades away or worse. Dostoyevsky’s novel The Double ends with Golyadkin, the tormented protagonist, being taken away to an asylum, driven mad by his imposter’s duplicity.

XREF: This pattern of the double replacing the original echoes the broader 'evil twin' trope in literature, and could connect to narratives about identity replacement, impostors, or even AI/automation themes. QUESTION: Is this 'the double always wins' pattern universal across doppelganger fiction, or an artifact of the specific examples the author happened to consume?

Was this my fate? To be carted away? Did I need to start screaming more in order not to be deprived of my own identity? Probably. To prove to others—and to myself—that I do indeed exist, I needed to give the machine fresh content: new takes, new rage, new intimacy. Yet I found myself utterly unable to deliver, unable to do the basic identity maintenance I had done for my entire adult life and that the attention economy demands. Having developed the out-of-body habit of watching my doppelganger blow back on me, it was as if all I could do was watch: me, her, the confusion. A spectator to my own life. Which meant, according to my mentions (now almost all about her), that I was fading away.

FICTION: This doppelganger-displacement premise — being rendered a spectator to one's own online identity by an AI or rival — is a strong narrative engine for speculative or literary fiction.

We’d all like to think that, wouldn’t we? The trouble is, there are just so damn many of us out there trying to be unique at the same time, using the same preprogrammed tools, writing in the same fonts, answering the same prompts. No wonder Eisenberg saying those words has become a viral meme, circulating on the same platforms where we are all competing for uniqueness, authenticity, and, for some, proof that in these unreal times we’re still really us.

XREF: Connects to the paradox of authenticity in social media and how algorithmically constrained creative tools flatten individual expression.

It occurred to me, one night while doomscrolling, that all of my doppelganger trouble could have been avoided if I had made good on my teenage threat to legally change my first name. In Montreal’s Jewish community, where I grew up, almost everyone pronounced it “Nye-oh-me,” with a flat “eye” on the first syllable that sounded whiny and dreary to my ears. No matter how many times I introduced myself as “Nay-oh-me,” it came back with the “Nyeeee-oh-me” drone.

DEFINE: Illustrates how the same name takes distinct pronunciations across regional/dialect communities (Montreal Jewish 'Nye-oh-me' vs. standard 'Nay-oh-me').

We were in the yard in early spring, the winter’s dog shit having recently melted into a foul dead-grass soup. Mom-Mom, my mother’s mother, was dozing in a lawn chair. By then she was in the haze of advanced Alzheimer’s, another way we humans lose control over our carefully tended selves.

QUESTION: The metaphor of selfhood as something 'carefully tended' raises questions about what identity actually consists of when memory and control deteriorate.

I persisted. “Yes, but why not ‘Natalie’? That has the same first three letters as ‘Nathan.’ ‘Naomi’ only has two. Or why not ‘Natalia’? That’s even better. Or ‘Natasha.’ Or ‘Nadia.’ I’m changing it to ‘Nadia.’”

Being chronically confused with another person may be humiliating, but that’s not all it is. It is also an oddly intimate experience. The boundaries between you and alter-you begin to wear down, becoming thin, even diaphanous. Their problems are your problems, their shame your shame. A doppelganger is your trail, your shadow, a bit like in the biblical story from which we derive our name, in which Ruth proclaims to Naomi: “Where you go, I will go, and where you stay I will stay.” Perhaps this is why I became, increasingly, not bitter or angry about the confusion, but intensely interested.

There are simpler words to describe what I have been dancing around, and I should probably address them directly before going any further. Dan Hon, a prominent digital strategy consultant, tweeted that he had been utterly confused by Wolf's actions because he had been attributing them to me the whole time. The problem, as he saw it, was obvious: "Naomi Klein should sue for trademark dilution and brand harm." In short, according to Hon, my brand was in crisis.

XREF: Relates to the author's broader argument about branding and corporate identity culture intersecting with personal/political identity.

At the time Hon offered his free advice, brand dilution was making headlines because Nike had announced it was suing Lil Nas X and the art collective MSCHF for that very violation. Without the sports giant's approval, the marketing-savvy artists had taken 666 pairs of Nike Air Max 97 running shoes, inserted drops of human blood into their soles, renamed the sneakers "Satan Shoes," and sold them for $1,018 a pair. It was all part of the promotional rollout for Lil Nas's blockbuster single "Montero (Call Me by Your Name)," whose video featured the singer giving a lap dance to the devil. Nike claimed that Satan Shoes were "likely to cause confusion and dilution" for its brand, since consumers would assume the altered sneakers had something to do with the company. The lawsuit played directly into Lil Nas's hands by generating a boatload of free publicity, and Nike quickly settled. (As I type this, I am realizing that this is a terrible analogy for my situation: it casts me as a giant litigious multinational and Other Naomi as Lil Nas X, who is a genius.)

XREF: A real-world case study in brand dilution law that also became a marketing masterstroke — relevant to anyone writing about intellectual property or viral marketing.

Still, Hon was right. My doppelganger trouble was definitive proof that I had flunked at one of the most valued activities of contemporary capitalism: developing, maintaining, and defending my personal brand. As any marketing expert will tell you, a brand is a promise—of consistency and dependability. And my promise had clearly been both diluted and degraded. How else could so many confuse me with a person who can't seem to tell the difference between temporary public health measures and a coup d'état?

XREF: Connects to the contemporary discourse around personal branding in the gig economy and social media era.

If my brand had indeed been diluted, it stood to reason that I should immediately endeavor to become a better, more distinctive brand, while aggressively defending its edges against all would-be infringers. There was, however, one glaring problem with this plan. I have a deeply conflicted relationship with this whole idea of humans behaving like corporate brands. My first book, No Logo, was a treatise against the rise of lifestyle branding, including the idea that individual people should shape and market themselves as commodities. Me treating Wolf like a branding problem would be about as off-brand as I could get.

XREF: Connects to Klein's identity as author of No Logo; her own brand logic now collides with her prior anti-branding thesis.

In the late 1990s, as I was researching and writing No Logo, the first murmuring could be heard that personal branding was something to which all of us, even noncelebrities, should aspire. In the book, I explored this new and controversial idea: that the insecurity we all felt about the rapid disappearance of stable jobs could be solved if everyone made like Michael Jordan and Oprah and branded up. The management guru Tom Peters laid out the new rules in a 1997 cover story in Fast Company titled "The Brand Called You": Regardless of age, regardless of position, regardless of the business we happen to be in, all of us need to understand the importance of branding.

XREF: Connects to Naomi Klein's No Logo, which critiqued corporate branding culture.

Interestingly, Peters was roundly mocked for this at the time; the magazine even published a mea culpa, disavowing the article and its dystopic vision of a world in which office mates compete with one another over brand-name recognition. Would it not be insufferable? The end of collegiality? There was also a more practical problem: it was one thing for world-famous celebrities and entrepreneurs like Jordan and Oprah and Richard Branson to position themselves as their own brands—and quite another for a university student or a middle manager or a laid-off factory worker to do it. Peters had written that individuals now had the same need for visibility as major corporations, which are able to purchase "a full flight of TV and print ads designed to get billions of 'impressions' … If you're brand You, you've got the same need for visibility—but no budget to buy it."

XREF: Runs against contemporary commonplace that personal branding was always celebrated; connects to the trajectory of self-promotion culture.

Well, exactly: normal humans don't have ad budgets, which is why the whole concept seemed absurd to our 1990s brains. This was, remember, well before Facebook, let alone TikTok or Substack. Even reality television wasn't yet up and running to pick wannabe celebrities out of obscurity. In short, the idea of personal branding began as a ruse—a transparent sop being pitched in lieu of actual jobs or a stable income by companies and their management consultants, drunk on the cost savings and stock-price inflation born of sweeping downsizing and outsourcing.

QUESTION: How did personal branding evolve from a downsizing consolation prize into the default professional advice of today's creator economy? SEED: Angle for an essay tracing how a cost-cutting corporate frame became internalized as individual responsibility.

The fact is, though, that I was kind of full of it. I had been very deliberate about how No Logo was designed and positioned. … All of this attention to packaging and style was, I told myself, a wink—better yet, a hack of the world of corporate branding. It also worked: No Logo sold over a million copies, beyond anything I could have imagined. And as I toured continuously for two years, I kept playing with the idea of being an anti-brand brand.

QUESTION: Where is the line between self-aware packaging and co-optation for a critic of branding? This tension seems worth exploring further.

As the long 1990s were starting their slow winddown, and an anti-corporate ethos was beginning to take root, I had to concede that my book had become a kind of signifier—an object or an accessory to be carried around and not read. Marketing students bought it in droves, some to signal that they were closet revolutionaries, all to get ideas for future campaigns.

SEED: Potential essay angle on how consumer objects function as identity signaling in anti-establishment subcultures — the tension between the book's content and its use as a prop.

Good brands are immune to fundamental transformation. Conceding to having become one at age thirty would have meant foreclosing on what I saw as my prerogative to change, evolve, and hopefully improve. It would have locked me into performing this particular version of me, indefinitely.

SEED: This is a rich angle for an essay on the tension between personal branding culture and the desire for self-reinvention — why 'knowing what you stand for' can become a cage.

Part of it was a certain amount of youthful idealism. The dictates of good branding struck me as antithetical to the dictates of being a good journalist, let alone a trusted political analyst. Those roles rest on a tacit commitment to following one’s research wherever it leads, even if that turns out to be a very different place from what was originally expected. Trusted analysts have to be willing to be changed by what they discover. For a trusted brand, the duty is the opposite: to keep embodying your brand identity—your “promise”—no matter what the world throws at you. Good branding is an exercise in discipline and repetition. It means knowing exactly where you are headed all the time—which is essentially in concentric circles.

No Logo turned me into a brand; it was too late to change that. But I figured that I still had one good option left, and that was to become a poorly managed brand, one that broke the rules against dilution and overextension. (This, I suppose, is my version of Leonard Wolf’s dictate “Destroy the box.”) In practice, that meant letting the knockoffs reign free and swearing off the thing that had made me briefly famous—writing and talking about branding and marketing.

XREF: Connects to personal-brand discourse and the anti-brand ethos of Klein's own No Logo, showing how a critic grapples with becoming the thing they critiqued.

Looking back at the crossroads where I faced a clear choice between following the dictates of being a curious writer and being a well-managed brand, I realize that the choice was largely made for me. If I had said yes to the Vogue shopping trips (and the corporate speeches, and the ad campaigns), the movement I was a part of would have torn me to shreds. And rightly so. This was a good decade before personal branding had been normalized—we still called people who tried to cash in on mass movements careerists and sellouts. Which made those marketing decisions pretty easy: I didn't want to lose all my friends.

QUESTION: Did the normalization of personal branding actually reduce this sort of social constraint on cashing in?

What I couldn't see at the time was that No Logo came out on the cusp of a new world. I wrote it on a chunky, rectangular Macintosh Plus computer that accessed the internet via a dial-up modem connected to my landline. By the time the book came out, in January 2000, I had a high-speed connection and could watch my book sales click up live on Amazon, which we were all sure would destroy the publishing industry but which I nonetheless checked obsessively, an early taste of the addictive power of social media's credit systems of likes, views, and follows.

XREF: The cusp of the internet-era media shifts in the late 1990s, when writing went from dial-up to broadband and retail went to Amazon. Connects to Klein's broader No Logo themes about corporate power.

It also became clear that a great many of us were dead wrong about the impossibility of everyday people being brands. Ten years after Peters's discredited “Brand Called You” article, the iPhone launched, and soon enough, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube were at our fingertips. Suddenly, everyone on those free platforms had the tools to fashion a personal brand—quirky, glam, edgy, nerdy, revolutionary—and project it well beyond their own circles, all for the low, low cost of consumer tech and some well-chosen accessories. The age of the influencer was upon us.

In our sprawling suburbs, talented teens and young adults, many from immigrant families, set up cameras in their bedrooms and wrote, goofed, sang, sewed, painted nails, and gamed their way past the cultural gatekeepers who a few years earlier would almost certainly have stood in their way. Some, like the Toronto comedian Lilly Singh, made it all the way from YouTube to global stardom. Others burned bright and then seemed to disappear, unable to cope with the algorithms' ever-changing demands for fresh content or the abuse that came with such intense and continuous personal exposure. One thing was clear, however: noncelebrities (or not-yet-celebrities) without an advertising budget, and often without family connections, could indeed apply the principles of corporate branding to their intimate selves, and more than a few of them would win the personal branding lottery.

SEED: The rise and burnout of young online creators is a rich essay angle — personal branding economics, algorithm churn, and exposure abuse.

For several years, I have been teaching a university course called The Corporate Self, in which my students and I explore, among other things, the history and impacts of personal branding. In one class exercise, I ask the students, most of whom are in their early twenties, to locate their earliest memory of when the concept of being a brand was introduced to them. Many report that it started in middle school, when they were pushed to do certain extracurricular activities because it would “look good” to some amorphous audience down the road. Others recall stern parental lectures about the perils of incautious social media posts: everything you put online now, they were told, will be read by college admission officers and future employers, so be careful to curate and package yourself through their imagined eyes. Alice Marwick, in her book Status Update, refers to this as “The (Safe for Work) Self”—and some students have been trained to cultivate such a self well before they have any clue about what kind of work they want to be “safe” for.

XREF: Connects to Alice Marwick's 'The (Safe for Work) Self' concept referenced in the highlight.

One, an exile from the business school, shared that one of his first assignments had been to develop a thirty-second elevator pitch for himself. As he distilled himself down to his most marketable qualities, he told his classmates, “I felt my soul leave my body.” They all seemed to know how he felt—these were the early days of pandemic Zoom classes, and they filled their little boxes with heart emojis.

SEED: This could fuel an essay on the psychological cost of personal branding culture, especially the absurdity of the thirty-second elevator pitch as a professional ritual. XREF: Connects to broader critiques of hustle culture and the quantified self, and to literature on the commodification of identity under late capitalism.

The invocation of souls is interesting, a reminder that this is not the first generation to shape itself for an omniscient eye. What is an all-seeing God, capable of knowing our thoughts and intentions, if not the most effective surveillance tool ever invented? The genius of this form of religion is the way it seduces believers into performing purity in life in order to reap rewards after death. And unlike today's surveillance state—which knows only what we type, say, and do—monotheistic gods claim to know our intentions as well.

SEED: Could become an essay contrasting the coercive grip of omniscient gods (who surveil intentions) with the shallower reach of today's surveillance states (which only see behavior). XREF: Connects to Foucault's panopticon theory and to discussions of whether modern surveillance surveils less of the self than religious surveillance historically did.

My students may not have real live doubles making chaos for them, as I appear to have with Other Naomi. But they have nonetheless grown up with an acute consciousness of having an externalized double—a digital double, an idealized identity that is partitioned from their “real” selves and that serves as a role they must perform for the benefit of others if they are to succeed. At the same time, they must project the unwanted and dangerous parts of themselves onto others (the unenlightened, the problematic, the deplorable, the “not me” that sharpens the borders of the “me”). This triad—of partitioning, performing, and projecting—is fast becoming a universal form of doppelganging, generating a figure who is not exactly us, but whom others nonetheless perceive as us. At best, a digital doppelganger can deliver everything our culture trains us to want: fame, adulation, riches. But it’s a precarious kind of wish fulfillment, one that can be blown up with a single bad take or post.

All of this is on top of the omnipresent and very real possibility of having your email or social media accounts hacked, and discovering to your horror that someone who, for all intents and purposes, seems to be you is inundating your friends and colleagues with nefarious content. Which is why part of me can’t help feeling for my doppelganger when she complains, of all things, “There is a fake ‘Naomirwolf’ on Telegram, and that fake entity has 38,000 followers, all of whom probably believe that they are following me”! Not only does this fake account have, according to Wolf, “unspeakable prose style,” but it spreads all kinds of wacky conspiracy theories, like the QAnon favorite that claims that John F. Kennedy Jr., who died in a plane crash in 1999, is actually still alive. Wolf has a conspiracy about this conspiracy, claiming that the “fake me” account is clearly an “attack” designed to discredit her fearless investigations and make her “look like a lunatic.” It is, she writes, an intolerable situation, “like having a tacky, blowsy, overdressed, grammaticallyintolerable doppelganger.” Ahem.

XREF: Connects to broader discussions of deepfakes, identity theft, and platform impersonation as growing threats in the digital era.

Fear of our digital doubles taking over our lives and fooling those around us is a theme also found in Netflix’s underappreciated 2018 movie Cam, directed by Isa Mazzei. It tells the story of an online sex worker who gets locked out of her cam girl account and finds herself facing the ultimate horror in the age of the monetized self: watching someone who looks exactly like her steal her fans, followers, income, life—and, as in so many doppelganger tales, doing a better job of being her than she ever did.

SEED: Could become an essay exploring how doppelganger narratives reshape in the age of monetized online identities, using Cam as a case study. FICTION: The premise — a copy outdoing the original at being them — is fertile creative material for speculative stories about identity and media.

This fantasy is fast becoming a reality. In late 2022, social media was inundated with iridescent, smoothed-out, slimmed-down versions of friends, family members, and online acquaintances who had succumbed to the “magic avatar” craze. They had uploaded ten photos of themselves to the app Lensa, and, in return for supplying this precious data, had received these avatar versions of themselves: sleeker, CGI-like (and, often, whiter and more overtly sexualized than the photos the simulations were based upon). While feeling pangs of desire to build my own faker, prettier version of me, I also found myself wondering about unintended consequences. For those who had engaged in this supposedly fun exercise in doubling, would looking in a normal mirror or at a non-altered photograph now feel like a kind of betrayal? Would their artificial self destroy the self-esteem of their real self? Many also pointed out how this could go wrong in more nefarious ways: someone other than you could pretend to be you, upload your photos, including ones you would never choose to share, and create their own personal doppelganger to exploit, sexually or otherwise.

XREF: Connects to broader discussions about social media's impact on body image and self-esteem, plus deepfake impersonation harms.

Interestingly, one person who is rather cavalier about the possibility of our digital doubles usurping us is Stephen K. Bannon, Trump’s former campaign manager and chief strategist, now a full-time propagandist for authoritarian and neofascist movements from Italy to Brazil. In the 2000s, way before his Trump days, he worked at a company called Affinity Media (previously Internet Gaming Entertainment) in Hong Kong and got a crash course in multiplayer gaming. He told the documentarian Errol Morris that he was struck by the realization that, for the players, these games felt more real than real life. And the digital doubles they had created online—their avatars—seemed more real than their real, embodied selves. By way of example, he talked about a notional “Dave in Accounting” who leads a dreary, unremarkable life but turns into “Ajax,” a gun-toting evil-slayer, when he is at home with his gaming console. “Now who’s more real,” Bannon asked—Dave or Ajax? You might say Dave, but Bannon saw it differently.

XREF: Connect to ideas about digital identity, online selves replacing real ones, gaming culture, and the politics of virtual reality.

“People take on these digital selves that are a more perfected version of themselves and where they can control things in a digital way that they can’t control in the analogue world,” he said of the gamers. So, he explained, Dave should back down and let Ajax take over. “I want Dave in Accounting to be Ajax in his life,” Bannon told The Atlantic’s Jennifer Senior. She observed, rightly, “That’s precisely what happened on January 6. The angry, howling hordes arrived as real-life avatars, cosplaying the role of rebels in face paint and fur. They stormed the Capitol while an enemy army tried to beat them away … They skipped a day of work. And then they expressed outrage—and utter incredulity—when they got carted away. The fantasy and the reality had become one and the same."

XREF: Connects to broader discourse on gamification of politics and how digital roleplay (gaming personas, troll identities) translates to offline mobilization and political violence. SEED: Potential essay angle: how 'digital perfected selves' in gaming communities prep participants to act them out physically, using Jan 6 as case study.

The students I teach are troubled by where all of this doubling is leading. Nonetheless, almost all feel duty bound to participate in creating their own digital doubles on social media (as do I). One student shared that she had gotten off Instagram because the pressures to perform an idealized version of herself, and the inundations of images of others doing the same, were ravaging her mental health. But then came the 2020 Black Lives Matter uprisings. “My friends all told me I had to get back on Instagram and post pro-BLM,” she said, “or everyone would think I was racist”—this despite the fact that she had been participating in all the protests in her area, albeit in a quiet, behind-the-scenes way. She logged back on and posted, but reluctantly; she knew there was something wrong with a culture that valued public performances of a virtuous self over more tangible solidarities and relationship building.

SEED: A compelling angle: how performative activism pressures people into digital virtue theater even when they're actually doing the real work behind the scenes.

Provocatively, Browne calls this brutal branding “a biometric technology.” Today, biometric identification—the recruitment of a permanent part of the body to measure and track—evokes sleek machines with blue or green light scanning faces, irises, or finger pads. Browne makes the case that physical branding played the same function for enslavers, allowing them to track racialized bodies via a permanent, unchangeable marker: “Branding in the transatlantic slave trade … was a measure of slavery’s making, marking, and marketing of the black subject as commodity.” The permanence of the brand was its power—it was designed to follow the enslaved person for the rest of their life, insurance against the irrepressible will to be free.

XREF: Connects contemporary biometric surveillance technology to its historical roots in chattel slavery's tracking of bodies. FICTION: Could ground a narrative contrasting modern facial recognition with historical bodily branding as linked techniques of control.

Branding is a process that requires what the author and psychotherapist Nancy Colier describes as an imperative to “relate to our self in the third person.” A commodified self may be rich, but commodification still requires a partitioning, an internal doubling that is inherently alienating. There is you, and then there is Brand You. As much as we might like to believe that these selves can be kept separate, brands are hungry, demanding things, and one self necessarily impacts the other. If countless numbers of us are doubled, all partitioning and performing ourselves, it becomes harder for anyone to know what is real and what and who can be trusted.

In his essay “Self-Reliance,” Ralph Waldo Emerson famously wrote, “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds”; in the same passage, he worried that individuals were getting stuck in “a reverence for our past act or word because the eyes of others have no other data for computing our orbit than our past acts, and we are loath to disappoint them.” Data. Computing. That was written in 1841, but it sounds very much like the cri de coeur of many a modern YouTuber or Twitch streamer, stuck churning out near-identical videos almost daily, lest fickle subscribers abandon them for one of the legions of new copycat influencers whom the algorithm recommends in the column next to or underneath their own videos.

XREF: Connects Emerson's 'Self-Reliance' essay to the contemporary creator economy and platform dynamics.

The undergraduates I teach howl with laughter when we watch these confessionals. As empathetic as they are with one another, they have little but cynicism when it comes to the professed pain of wealthy influencers, even (especially?) when the influencers are roughly the same age as themselves. They place videos with titles like “Burnt Out at 19” in the same category as apology videos, wherein a YouTube or Instagram star overperforms contrition after getting caught crossing a line, like being photographed eating fish when they built their brand on sharing vegan recipes. … I gently push back on this: Why should surpassing a certain follower count preclude the possibility of feeling real pain? Why treat every emotion expressed online as a hollow performance? Alas, they invariably gang up on me, patiently explaining that in today’s self-branding game, influencers are in an authenticity arms race, competing over who can be rawer and more revelatory. They also point out that the breakdown videos that I find so moving rarely forecast a decision on the influencer’s part to abandon the hustle and grind of personal branding. Rather, they usually signal a brief hiatus, after which comes some kind of spectacular relaunch—a new venture on a more traditional media platform or a new product line.

XREF: Connects to discourse on 'performative vulnerability' and parasocial relationships in social media criticism. SEED: Potential angle: the 'authenticity arms race' as a distinct competitive dynamic among influencers, contrasting with how young audiences receive influencer pain versus peer pain.

I understand their cynicism, but I’m too old and soft to share it. It seems to me that both things can be true: these young influencers can be in real emotional distress over the pressure to produce mediated widgets and the cruelty they continually face from those they have invited into their lives, and they can simultaneously be figuring out how to monetize that pain. Because that is what they have been told they must do if they are to avoid becoming attention-economy roadkill. And, like so much else, it’s a vicious cycle. If you successfully thing-ify yourself, then other people will begin to believe you are a thing and will throw all kinds of hard objects at you, sure that you will not bleed. And then you have to conjure up even more revealing forms of self-exposure—up to and including having a full-blown nervous breakdown in your bedroom with the webcam rolling. Don’t come for me, these influencers seem to be pleading to their fans-turned-foes, I’m wounded—can’t you see that I’m bleeding here? Forgetting that the pack loves blood and there is nothing bloodier than performative trauma.

XREF: Echoes the commodification of self and attention-economy dynamics seen in other writings on performative vulnerability and digital labor.

This raises an important plot point in the life of my doppelganger, one that I suspect may have a great deal to do with the choices she has made in the Covid era and beyond. Because that virtual death Seymour writes about? It happened to her. Boy did it happen to her.

QUESTION: What virtual death did the doppelganger experience, and how did it influence her Covid-era choices? The author hints at a connection worth pursuing.

Wolf, unsurprisingly, saw a plot. In January 2020, she told an interviewer that the "viral attack" she faced after her foundational errors in Outrages were exposed was part of a shadowy effort to destroy her reputation and take her "off the chessboard." All of this came at what was surely a tough time for Wolf—just a few months before the BBC interview, she had lost her father, the man she treated with such reverence in The Treehouse. This confluence of events means that she went into the destabilizing period of the pandemic in an already highly destabilized state, with little left to lose—and, as I would soon learn, with a great deal to gain.

XREF: Connects to the broader pattern of how personal grief and destabilization shape intellectual judgment and adversarial framing.

It has often struck me, as I have contemplated my own branding crisis at a time when I felt I should be more properly focused on the climate crisis, that I am hardly the only one who has turned away from large fears in favor of more manageable obsessions. In fact, it makes a certain kind of sick sense that our era of peak personal branding has coincided so precisely with an unprecedented crisis point for our shared home. The vast, complex planetary crisis requires coordinated, collective effort on an international scale. That may be theoretically possible, but it sure is daunting. Far easier to master our self, the Brand Called You—to polish it, burnish it, get the angle and affect just right, wage war against all competitors and interlopers, project the worst onto them. Because unlike so much else upon which we might like to have some sort of impact, the canvas of the self is compact and near enough that it feels like we might actually pull off some measure of control. Even though, as I have discovered, this, too, is a grand illusion.

One of the most celebrated depictions of doppelgangers in Western art is a lush Pre-Raphaelite painting by Dante Gabriel Rossetti. It depicts a couple in medieval dress in a dark forest who come across another couple who are their mirror image. It is not a happy encounter. The man who sees his double draws his sword in anger, while his female companion faints, overcome by the uncanny sight. The piece is titled How They Met Themselves. … Now, in these shadow-laden woods, I find myself confronting not her but myself, and the uncomfortable truth that I still care, far too much, about the image I am projecting into the world; that if I am serious about rejecting personal branding, I still have a good deal of work to do.

QUESTION: Why does the doppelganger motif so reliably trigger anger and faintness in art? Worth pursuing the psychology behind the trope.

This might seem surprising at a time when the highest praise is to be declared an icon. But she did not want the name bell hooks—the persona or the idea in people's heads—to upstage bell hooks's ideas, and she understood that there is an unavoidable tension between the baggage a name can come to carry—its relative bigness in the world—and the ability of one's words to reach people and be adopted as their own. A gulf can open up between author and reader, and hooks was making an attempt to close it. Of course, inevitably, the hooks name became its own kind of market signal, as everything in our capitalist culture does. But this did not seem to be her intent: on the contrary, hooks cared enough about her work, her ideas, not to want to weigh them down with a heavy name.

XREF: Connects to broader theories of authorship, persona, and the star system — parallels Barthes' 'death of the author' and celebrity culture critiques.

In her landmark 1984 book, Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center, hooks cautioned readers to “avoid using the phrase 'I am a feminist'” and opt instead for “I advocate feminism,” explaining that unlike the “I am” label, which triggers the listener’s prior beliefs about what and who is a feminist, the latter is far more likely to begin a conversation about what concrete changes feminism is trying to achieve and “does not engage us in the either/or dualistic thinking that is the central ideological component of all systems of domination in Western society.”

So much of intellectual and activist life today is about credit claiming. I do it; I’ve done it repeatedly in these pages. I wrote that. I said that. That’s my phrase. My buzzword. My hashtag. I was horrified the first time I noticed a colleague self-cite, embedding quotes from his earlier work in a column—“as I wrote here [link] and here [link].” Why was he quoting himself? Quoting is what we do to bring in the voices of others, to expand the frame, not to narrow it further. Now self-citing happens all the time: “As I wrote here” … “See my earlier tweet” … “Just bumping this up.” We have to do it, or so many of us believe—we are caught in a roaring river of voices that seems to wash away all that came before. If we don’t remind people of what we have said and done, surely we will soon be floating downstream to the sea with all the other cultural detritus.

XREF: Connects to broader discourse about attention economy, status signaling, and the professionalization of intellectual work in social media contexts.

Most gravely, Wolf and her fellow travelers have spent years mangling the meaning of the fight against authoritarianism, fascism, and genocide—nothing less than humanity’s worst crimes. And they have done it at a time when we are in dire need of a robust anti-fascist alliance, in large part thanks to their own relentless inflammation and misinformation and the resentments they have sown. Brand dilution and brand harm are trivial matters—but these crimes and the ability to name them matter a great deal.

SEED: Could be an essay on how language dilution of grave political terms corrodes real organizing, using brand-dilution as the analogy.

Though originally released in 1940, Chaplin’s message felt as relevant as ever: When faced with a double threatening to engulf you and your world (or an army of them), distance offers no protection. Far better to radically upend the table and become, in some sense, their impersonator, their shadow.

In an effort to impose some kind of order on my doppelganger's behavior during the first two years of the Covid-19 pandemic, I have found it useful to divide the period into two phases: Before Bannon and After Bannon.

SEED: A possible essay angle: using a watershed event or person to personally periodize history (Before X / After X) rather than calendar years.

Before Bannon was a troubled, chaotic time for Other Naomi. She was tweeting and livestreaming with a worrying relentlessness, but her grievances were scattershot and diffuse. She shared her belief that children had lost the reflex to smile due to enforced mask-wearing, based on no evidence except her own observations of random children who might have been having rough days. She claimed to have overheard two Apple employees in a Manhattan restaurant discussing "vaccines w nanopatticles [sic] that let you travel back in time" (apparently mistaking a conversation about Apple Watch's Time Travel feature for a secret meeting about an actual time machine).

XREF: Connects to the broader theme in this work about how radicalization happens not all at once but through chaotic, human moments. Also links to general literature on conspiracy theory adoption stemming from underlying psychological needs.

It must have been a miserable time. She was repeatedly suspended and locked out of her social media accounts for violating rules against medical misinformation. She was getting bombarded with abuse and mockery online (as I knew better than anyone but her). By her own telling on Twitter, friends were sending her one-word texts saying simply: "Stop." Meanwhile, a series of "What Happened to Naomi Wolf?" articles appeared in publications that once regarded her seriously, often taking a new critical look at her past work: "The Madness of Naomi Wolf," The New Republic; "Naomi Wolf's Slide from Feminist, Democratic Party Icon to the 'Conspiracist Whirlpool,'" Business Insider; "A Modern Feminist Classic Changed My Life. Was It Actually Garbage?," Slate. Yet she kept going, spraying the internet with a steady aerosol of her bizarre theories.

QUESTION: What drives the persistence of a discredited figure facing universal condemnation — belief, sunk cost, or something else?

A particularly dismal moment came when she fell for an online prank and shared a photo of a "doctor" who seemed to be questioning the vaccination drive. Only it turned out that the doctor she quoted was not a doctor, but rather a well-known male porn star dressed in scrubs with a stethoscope around his neck. The tweet revealing the prank (pulled off by The Intercept's Ken Klippenstein) was "liked" seventy-one thousand times.

XREF: Connects to broader reporting on viral disinformation, prank networks like Klippenstein's targeting of anti-vaccine figures, and public figure susceptibility to hoaxes.

My doppelganger has rarely shied away from extreme rhetoric—she has predicted domestic coups and accused the United States of tipping into “fascism” continuously since 2007 and said that “Obama has done things like Hitler did.” This kind of intemperance presents a challenge, I have noticed, when Wolf is trying to raise a new alarm: How to find words powerful enough to convince people that, this time, it’s the Big One? Look, I get it: I’ve published well over two thousand pages about the climate crisis and am forever trying to find new ways to express the fact that we are unraveling the fabric that sustains human and other-than-human life—the difference being that it’s true.

Wolf found new weapons of escalation. The passports are “a tyrannical totalitarian platform” and “the most dangerous tool humanity has faced in its lifetime,” she claimed, and “the people who have this data are going to run the world.”

QUESTION: To what extent do credential platforms actually centralize power, versus the rhetorical claim here?

In what she described as her “most serious warning” to date, Wolf said the apps were actually a backdoor attempt to usher in a “CCP-style social credit score system”—a reference to China’s all-pervasive surveillance net that allows Beijing to rank citizens for their perceived virtue and obedience, a chilling hierarchy that can determine everything from access to schools to eligibility for loans, and is one piece of a broader surveillance dragnet that pinpoints the location of dissidents for arrest and ruthlessly censors speech that casts the ruling party in a critical light. The vaccine app was like all that, Wolf said, a system that “enslaves a billion people.”

SEED: Potential essay angle: evaluating whether health-tech apps genuinely parallel authoritarian social credit systems, or whether such comparisons overstate the case — worth fact-checking. QUESTION: Is the Wolf social credit comparison empirically grounded or a rhetorical conflation? Worth investigating the actual technical and legal differences.

Wolf had previously cast the vaccines themselves as grave health threats, and would do so again, suggesting, without evidence, that the shots were a deliberately deployed Chinese “bioweapon” against the West. In these Fox News dispatches, however, she seemed to be saying that the Covid vaccine itself was beside the point.

XREF: Connects to broader patterns of disinformation shifting narratives to exploit current events.

It’s not about the vaccine, it’s not about the virus, it’s about your data … What people have to understand is that any other functionality can be loaded onto that platform with no problem at all. And what that means is, it can be merged with your PayPal account, with your digital currency, Microsoft is already talking about merging it with payment plans, your networks can be sucked up, it geolocates you everywhere you go. Your credit history can be included, all of your medical history can be included.

SEED: A potential essay on how single-purpose digital health platforms expand into surveillance and data-collection infrastructure. QUESTION: The claim is stated as speculation/alarm. Worth investigating the actual technical limits of vaccine platform data integration.

Just in case viewers weren’t frightened enough, she latched onto a detail about IBM providing data support in New York State to go all the way there. “IBM has a horrible history with Nazi Germany,” Wolf told Hilton. “Its subsidiary created a kind of precursor of this with punch cards that allowed the Nazis to keep lists of—again a two-tiered society—Aryan and Jews, in such a way that they could round up Jews, round up dissidents, round up opposition leaders, very, very quickly. It’s catastrophic, it cannot be allowed to continue.” But how, you might well ask, could this gruesome dystopia be ushered in via one vaccination app? Easy, Wolf explained. All it took was “a tweak of the back end.”

XREF: Echoes broader vaccine-misinformation discourse and historical analogies to IBM's Nazi-era punch cards — connects to discussions of technology complicity and surveillance infrastructure.

We can have legitimate debates about the decisions of governments to put so much of the burden of controlling a surging virus on vaccines and smartphone apps—as opposed to, say, maintaining indoor masking requirements and making greater investments in public health-care systems, including hiring many more nurses and giving them pay raises, to prevent hospitals from being overrun. Not to mention providing a steady supply of free at-home rapid tests, proper protective gear at work, and, critically, adequate sick leave for all workers so that no one feels obliged to show up to work in an infectious state. In the early phase of the pandemic, there could also have been major investments in contact tracing at the community level, which would have had the added benefit of creating jobs in neglected areas. And there could have been far more robust efforts to install high-quality air filters in public spaces, including schools, while hiring more teachers and teacher's aides so class sizes could be smaller—all measures proven to reduce the virus's spread, with plenty of knock-on benefits to students and educators. These are just a few of the ways that frayed social services and safety nets could have been expanded and reinforced in order to allow us all to live less stressed, happier, and fuller lives with the virus in our midst.

Unfortunately, there was never a truly mass organizing strategy to push for that kind of ambitious agenda, so governments rarely felt obliged to consider it seriously, opting instead for the easier (and big-donor-friendly) route of looking to vaccines and verification apps to carry almost the entire load of virus control in North America and Europe. Like so much else in our culture, from abusive labor practices to climate breakdown, the burden of pandemic response was shifted from the collective to the individual, all in the name of getting back to business as usual: “Did you get your jab?” “Show us the proof.” Less frequently did we ask employers if they had provided safe workplaces, or if governments had guaranteed safe learning environments or transportation systems.

XREF: Parallels critiques of individual-carbon-footprint approaches to climate change versus systemic solutions.

Reckonings with these histories are long overdue; in their absence, public health bureaucracies found that their efforts to battle Covid in marginalized communities were frequently met with skepticism. These dynamics also made some of these communities easy prey for peddlers of misinformation like my doppelganger, with her inflammatory claims on Fox that vaccine apps were tantamount to IBM’s collaboration with the Nazi death machine.

XREF: Connects to broader discussions of medical mistrust rooted in historical harms like Tuskegee and other instances of systemic abuse toward marginalized groups.

There was something else that was new about my doppelganger in this period. As Wolf zeroed in on vaccine apps as the focal point for her dire warnings, she also adopted a new way of referring to herself and her expertise, one clearly intended to bestow authority in this particular debate. For three decades, Naomi Wolf identified herself as an author and a former political consultant. She still does. But when she started going on Carlson’s show and others of its ilk, she began prefacing her remarks about the vaccine apps with something I hadn’t heard before: “Speaking as a tech CEO” and “I’m the CEO of a tech company.”

XREF: Relates to the broader pattern of appointment-bias and authority signaling in media discourse where credentials are selectively deployed.

This surprising assertion turned out to be a reference to DailyClout, a then obscure, low-traffic website that hosted her blogs and videos and also made the eyebrow-raising claim of being a technological breakthrough because it allowed easy access to pieces of draft legislation by putting them online (nevermind that U.S. bills are already public and online elsewhere, via free sites like GovTrack.us). Before she started making the rounds on Fox, the site—which claimed to turn everyday people into lobbyists—reportedly averaged just a few thousand visits a month, with one month seeing a mere thirteen visitors.

XREF: Relates to broader phenomena of low-traffic websites being platformed into viral influence via cable news appearances. SEED: Potential essay on how media amplification, not web traffic, creates institutional credibility for fringe claims.

Since The End of America, Wolf has leaned heavily on U.S. patriotism as a reason to resist restrictions on civil liberties. (“The founders did not create liberty for America, but America for liberty,” was typical fare.) These vaccine passport dispatches, however, took a far more nationalistic and pro-capitalist tone than anything I had seen from her previously. She painted a world in which Covid health measures are the front lines in a civilizational war between East and West. Again and again, she invoked the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)—in her fifteen-minute “slavery forever” video, she referenced “the CCP” five times, the same number of times as she said “the West.”

What many of us who were cringe-following Wolf at the time missed was the extent to which her new messaging had struck a chord—not only with Fox’s audience but also with a sizable cohort of people who identify as leftists or progressives and were terrified of the Black Mirror surveillance world she was describing. Her “slavery forever” video was personally forwarded to me by several sources. One was a known conspiracy theorist who urged me to “study” it and said we had to fight the new threat “with every last ounce of our strength.” One asked if I had advice for deprogramming a loved one, a Black Lives Matter–supporting alternative health practitioner who had taken Wolf’s words as gospel and was in a QAnon-like spiral about this being the last frontier in the fight for “freedom versus slavery.”

QUESTION: What structural or psychological factors made this messaging land with people who normally oppose the political right?

I went back and looked at the nearly one thousand comments under Wolf’s “slavery forever” YouTube post, bracing for the usual misogynist bile for which the platform is notorious. Jarringly, the comments were nearly universally glowing, expressing adoration for this “warrior” and her “courage” to speak the truth. Many quoted scripture and declared the vaccines, as well as the passports, “the mark of the beast.”

XREF: Relates to broader reporting on how anti-vax sentiment and religious end-times framing converge in conservative online communities.

Not only did Wolf appear on Fox seven times in less than two months, but she went on a tour, speaking at the “FreedomFest” at Mount Rushmore and testifying, at the invitation of various Republican lawmakers, at multiple statehouses against mask and vaccine mandates. … Eight days later, she traveled to Michigan, which was then one of the leading states in new coronavirus cases, to testify before the state’s House Oversight Committee that vaccine passports were akin to the early treatment of Jews by the Nazis.

XREF: Connects to broader coverage of pandemic-era misinformation and the politicization of public health measures.

Bannon could not get enough of Wolf: he sometimes hosted her several times in a single week, always lavishly plugged her website and its “Five Freedoms” legislation mill, which was suddenly anything but obscure. I checked the traffic: in April 2021, the month she started appearing regularly on Bannon’s podcast, DailyClout broke 100,000 unique visits—up from a mere 851 one year earlier. … Accused by The Atlantic of misleading his viewers by repeatedly referring to Wolf as “Doctor” when discussing medical research, Bannon replied that her doctorate in philosophy was “good enough” for him.

XREF: Connects to broader pattern of how podcast/network amplification drives web traffic for fringe figures.

In retrospect, it shouldn’t be all that surprising that Wolf’s vaccine passport messaging struck such a chord. When she focused in on tech and surveillance, she began tapping into deep and latent cultural fears about the many ways that previously private parts of our lives have become profit centers for all-seeing Silicon Valley giants. … It was as if she had taken everybody’s cumulative tech terrors—about being tracked by our cell phones, monitored by our search engines, eavesdropped on by our smart speakers, spied on by our doorbells—bundled them all together, and projected them onto these relatively anodyne vaccine apps, which, to hear Wolf tell it, took every creepy surveillance abuse perpetrated by Big Government and Big Tech and programmed them into one QR code, on “the back end.”

XREF: Connects to broader research on moral panic, scapegoating, and how diffuse anxieties get focalized onto specific targets.

The words she was saying were essentially fantasy. But emotionally, to the many people now listening to her, they clearly felt true. And the reason they felt true is that we are indeed living through a revolution in surveillance tech, and state and corporate actors have indeed seized outrageous powers to monitor us, often in collaboration and coordination with one another. Moreover, as a culture, we have barely begun to reckon with the transformational nature of this shift.

XREF: Connects to ongoing debates about surveillance capitalism and data privacy that the reader may already be tracking.

It is a serious mistake to underestimate her, or the movements she now helps to lead. Because here is a non-snide version of the "Wait until they hear about cell phones" quip: They know all about cell phones. They just don't know what to do about cell phones (or smart speakers or search histories or shadow banning or email and social media metadata…). And neither, it seems, does anyone else, including those in power, who are patently unwilling to rein in what the Harvard professor Shoshana Zuboff has called "surveillance capitalism." And Wolf, with her "Five Freedoms" campaign and her calls for anti-vax civil disobedience, is giving her followers something to do. She is telling them that it's not too late to get their privacy, and their freedoms, back.

XREF: Connects to Zuboff's surveillance capitalism concept and broader debates about corporate data collection versus individual privacy rights.

On and on. Drip. Drip. Drip. "Alexa Has Been Eavesdropping on You This Whole Time," read a 2019 headline in The Washington Post. "Your Apps Know Where You Were Last Night, and They're Not Keeping It Secret," went one in The New York Times in 2018. "You're Not Paranoid: Your Phone Really Is Listening In," said USA Today. Drip. Drip. Drip. We heard about the "nanny cams" taken over by hackers and turned into surveillance devices; the Ring doorbell footage handed over to police; Uber's "God View" software, allegedly used by employees to spy on passengers as well as ex-girlfriends; the billions of personal photos scraped by facial recognition companies to train their software; the period-tracking apps that could be used to prosecute people who choose to end their pregnancies in any of the states that have rushed to criminalization.

XREF: Connects to broader discussions of digital privacy, surveillance capitalism, and tech ethics (Zuboff's surveillance capitalism, the post-Roe data privacy stakes).

In my Corporate Self course, we explore this surveillance architecture as the shadowy back end of personal branding and identity performance culture. The more we accept the premise that we must be online for everything—liking, loathing, sharing—and the more we accept the tacit contract of trading privacy in exchange for app-enabled convenience, the more data points tech companies are able to hoover up about us. And with that data, they create our real digital doppelgangers—not the aspirational avatars many of us consciously create with those carefully curated and filtered photos and those posts with the perfectly calibrated tone, but the doubles that countless machines create with the data trails we leave behind every time we click, or view, or fail to disable location tracking, or ask a “smart” device for anything at all.

XREF: Echoes surveillance capitalism literature (Zuboff) and the aspirational-vs-actual self distinction common in identity studies.

This machine-made doppelganger—or perhaps we should call it a digital golem since it is cobbled together from bits of inanimate data—is not made by us. It is made by exterior perceptions, interpretations, and predictions about us. In this way, it has a great deal in common with a human doppelganger: a person whom the world confuses with you but who is not actually you and yet can impact your life in profound ways.

DEFINE: Introduces the concept of a digital doppelganger/golem built from external data instead of self-directed creation. FICTION: The digital golem framing offers rich story potential around identity stolen or refracted by algorithmic doppelgangers.

“I’d rather see an ad for cute shoes that I am going to like than see ads for a bunch of ugly stuff I don’t want,” one student said in an early class. In our discussions, we came to call this the “cute shoes problem” because it encapsulates one of the main reasons why surveillance capitalism and the AI revolution were able to sneak up on us with so little debate. Many of us do appreciate a certain level of automated customization, especially algorithms that suggest music, books, and people who might interest us. And at first, the stakes seemed low: Is it really a big deal if we see ads and suggestions based on our interests and tastes? Or if chatbots help clear our email backlogs?

The Faustian bargain of the digital age—free or cheap digital conveniences in exchange for our data—was only ever explained to us after it was already a done deal. And it represents an enormous and radical shift not only in how we live but also, far more importantly, in what our lives are for. We are all mine sites now, data mine sites, and despite the intimacy and import of what is being mined, the mining process remains utterly obscure and the mine operators wholly unaccountable.

QUESTION: The claim that the data trade was explained only after being a done deal raises the question of when and how awareness actually emerged, and whether any users truly gave informed consent.

Remembering this helps me to understand Other Naomi, and the sudden power she has found in terrifying large numbers of people with claims of “tyrannical” vaccine passports with a “CCP-style social credit score system.” She is tapping into these barely submerged fears, which are rooted not in fantasy, but reality. Vaccine passports aren’t a social credit system, but social media itself kind of is. Those QR codes on our phones aren’t putting our lives under constant surveillance, but as all those clever jokes suggest, our phones themselves and many other smart devices are, or at least could.

QUESTION: What evidence supports the claim that smartphones constitute a de facto surveillance/social credit system comparable to what critics fear from vaccine passports?

Establishing a democratic, noncorporate media—through public broadcasting and community access to the airwaves—was once a core progressive demand. Though there are civil liberties groups that still stand up against corporate censorship, as well as civil rights groups that fight for net neutrality, progressives today have not, for the most part, made fighting for a democratic and accountable information sphere a cornerstone of their political agenda. On the contrary, many happily cheered corporate deplatformings—until the same dynamics came for them.

XREF: Connects to debates about deplatforming, cancel culture, and big tech moderation that progressives now tacitly endorse.

History is filled with successful struggles against earlier forms of enclosure—colonial powers were ejected from their onetime colonies; foreign-owned mines and oil fields have been nationalized and put under public control; Indigenous peoples have won legal victories reclaiming sovereign control over their ancestral territories. Unjust ownership structures have been changed before and they can be changed again.

XREF: Connects to broader histories of decolonization, nationalization of resource industries, and Indigenous land-rights movements.

It bears remembering that many of the technologies that form the building blocks of modern tech giants were first developed in the public sector, with public dollars, whether by government agencies or public research universities. These technologies range from the internet itself to GPS and location tracking. In essence, Big Tech has appropriated commonly held tools for private gain, while adopting the discourse of the commons to describe their gated platforms. For instance, when Musk bought Twitter, he described it as “the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated.”

XREF: Connects to the broader discourse on the commons-versus-platform privatization debate, and Mariana Mazzucato's work on the entrepreneurial state.

The plan is to push “Five Freedoms” and “no mask” laws wherever you live. The plan is to barge into your local school board meeting, accuse its members of being Nazis, and get elected to take their place. The plan is to stick it to Big Tech by subscribing to new right-wing platforms and “stay ahead of the censors,” as Bannon’s tagline declares. The plan is to get you to send them money, to join their wars.

XREF: Connects to broader reporting on coordinated far-right strategy at the school board and local government level.

All of this helps me to understand my doppelganger—but not in a way I find at all reassuring. Because it means she represents a larger and more dangerous form of mirroring—a mimicking of beliefs and concerns that feeds off progressive failures and silences. And watching Bannon's glee in absorbing Wolf's vaccine passport fantasies into the terrorizing and galvanizing story he tells his listeners daily, I started to wonder what other unaddressed fears and outrages were being exploited in her new home—the place I have come to call the Mirror World.

SEED: Could build an essay about how editorial silence creates vacuum that opportunistic media figures fill.

My obsession has become a growing gulf between Avi and me. And not just between us—it is intensifying my already deep isolation, cutting me off further from other friends and family. No one I know listens to War Room, and I feel increasingly that it is impossible to understand the new shape of politics without listening to it.

XREF: Connects to the broader pattern of political polarization fracturing interpersonal relationships, and to the phenomenon of niche media creating epistemic insularity.

Michele has done historical research on Judaism's overlooked female figures, and I was hoping to go a little deeper on the origin story of my/our name. "It's all about loyalty," Michele says of the biblical story. Ruth's loyalty to Naomi after the deaths of their respective husbands makes her, in the words of Bethlehem's village women, "better … than seven sons." … This is a nice message, we agree, even a proto-feminist message, about women's bonds beyond bloodlines.

XREF: Connects to feminist biblical scholarship and revisionist readings of overlooked scriptural women.

"Naomi does sort of pimp Ruth out to Boaz," I gently point out. "Is that really a nice person to be named after?" Michele pauses. She is eighty-two and sharp as hell. We agree that it's probably best not to impose our values on biblical stories and return to our coffees in someone else's sun-drenched kitchen. (If I did want to impose my values, I might say that Old Testament Naomi was a bit of a hustler, doing what it took to get by in a broken system, protecting her people's future at all costs.)

In that perfect moment, I could have listened to anything. I could have rolled down the windows and filled my ears with the surf and the gulls. I could have blasted Joni Mitchell's "Blue," which I had recently rediscovered thanks to Brandi Carlile's cover. But I didn't do any of that. Instead, I touched the purple podcast app, pulled up Steve Bannon's War Room, and read the capsule summary of the most recent episode.

I scrolled down and saw that I had missed several other recent appearances by my doppelganger while abiding by my no-Wolf diet. I gulped them all, one after another. And that's how I ended up on the side of the road, with my hazards on, late for a much-needed treatment, on my first vacation in two years, scribbling in a tiny red notebook as I tried to transcribe the words coming through my phone's speaker: "black shirts and brown shirts," "Fauci demonic," "petrifying," "your body belongs to the state," "like China's one-child policy and forced sterilization," "geotracking," "evil x2."

In my meager defense, Wolf's elevated status on Bannon's podcast marked a major development in the life of my doppelganger. It's one thing to be invited onto a flagship show of the Trumpian right to freestyle about vaccine passports or to trash Joe Biden—any semi-prominent self-described Democrat would be welcome to pull that stunt. It's quite another to be the person whom Steve Bannon goes to for exclusive reaction to one of the first post–White House speeches by Donald Trump—a man whom the vast majority of Bannon's listeners are utterly convinced is the rightful president of the United States (and whom Wolf had referred to, in her earlier life, as “a horrible human being, an awful person”). It's not just that it sells books and subscriptions to her website. It signals real power—the ability to reach and potentially influence the behavior of millions of people.

XREF: Connects to the broader phenomenon of political doppelgangers and identity-switching explored throughout the book.

If Naomi Wolf was Bannon's go-to guest not just to rail against vaccine mandates but now to live-spin Trump's speeches, that meant she had crossed an entirely new threshold, becoming a full-blown player in this world. Shortly after, Wolf would go so far as to join Trump's class-action lawsuit against Twitter as a co-plaintiff, challenging her own ouster from the platform (though she still claimed to "profoundly" disagree with Trump "ideologically"). It was there, on the side of that road, that I became convinced that whatever was happening with her wasn't just relevant to me because of my admittedly niche doppelganger problem—it was far more serious than that. If someone like her could be shifting alliances so radically, it seemed worth trying to figure out what was driving that transformation—especially because, by then, it was also clear that quite a few prominent liberals and leftists were making a similar "post-left" lurch to the hard right.

QUESTION: What specifically drives this 'post-left' lurch to the hard right among prominent figures like Naomi Wolf? SEED: Could explore the broader pattern of liberal intellectuals migrating to right-wing politics and the mechanisms behind it.

Even after following Wolf's antics for years, or rather, after having them follow me, I was taken aback by the decisiveness of this boundary crossing. How did she—a Jewish feminist who wrote a book warning how easily fascism can throttle open societies—rationalize this alliance with Trump and Bannon? How, for that matter, did Bannon—a proud anti-abortion Catholic who was once charged with domestic assault and whose ex-wife told a court that he didn't want their daughters "going to school with Jews"—rationalize teaming up with Wolf? (Bannon pleaded not guilty to the domestic assault charges, which were dismissed after his wife did not show up in court, and he denies the remark about Jews.)

QUESTION: This raises the puzzle of why figures on opposite ends of the ideological spectrum cooperate — worth investigating the psychology and incentives behind such alliances. XREF: Connects to broader patterns of strange-bedfellows politics and coalition formation across contemporary ideological divides.

Despite these contradictions, Wolf was not merely a regular guest on Bannon's War Room; she was fast becoming one of its most recognizable characters. At the peak of their collaboration, Wolf would appear on War Room nearly every single weekday for two weeks. They even partnered up on co-branded "DailyClout War Room Pfizer investigations" into various vaccine rabbit holes and packaged them into an e-book. Clearly, neither was letting past principles stand in the way of this union.

The reshaping of politics that is one of Covid’s primary legacies is far bigger than Wolf and Bannon, of course. The hallucinatory period when the pandemic melded with economic upheavals and climate disasters accelerated all manner of strange-bedfellow coalitions, manifesting in large protests first against lockdowns and then against any sensible health measure that would have helped make the lockdowns unnecessary.

These formations bring together many disparate political and cultural strains: the traditional right; the QAnon conspiratorial hard right; alternative health subcultures usually associated with the green left; a smattering of neo-Nazis; parents (mainly white mothers) angry about a range of things happening and not happening in schools (masks, jabs, all-gender bathrooms, anti-racist books); small-business owners enraged by the often-devastating impacts of Covid controls on their bottom lines, which gave way to rage at everything from inflation to induction stove tops. Significant disagreement exists inside these new convergences—Wolf, for instance, is neither a QAnon cultist nor a neo-Nazi. Yet galvanized by large-platform misinformers like her and Bannon, most seem to agree that the pandemic is a plot by Davos elites to push a reengineered society under the banner of the “Great Reset.”

XREF: Connects to analyses of post-2016 populist convergence and the 'Great Reset' framing in anti-globalist movements.

If the claims are coming from the far right, the covert plan is for a green/socialist/Venezuelan/Soros/forced-vaccine dictatorship, while the New Agers warn of a Big Pharma/GMO/biometric-implant/5G/robot-dog/forced-vaccine dictatorship. With the exception of the Covid-related refresh, the conspiracies that are part of this political convergence are not new—most have been around for decades, and some are ancient blood libels. What’s new is the force of the magnetic pull with which they are finding one another, self-assembling into what the Vice reporter Anna Merlan has termed a “conspiracy singularity.”

XREF: Connects to research on political polarization and the convergence of far-right and New Age worldviews into a common conspiratorial frame.

Despite claims of post-partisanship, it is right-wing, often far-right, political parties around the world that have managed to absorb the unruly passions and energy of diagonalism, folding its Covid-era grievances into preexisting projects opposing “wokeness” and drumming up fears of migrant “invasions.” Still, it is important for these movements to present themselves (and to believe themselves to be) ruptures with politics-as-usual; to claim to be something new, beyond traditional left-right poles.

That’s why having a few prominent self-identified progressives and/or liberals involved is so critical. Importantly, the role of these progressives is not to renounce the goals of social justice and embrace a hard-right worldview (the journey made by well-known ex-Trotskyists like Irving Kristol in the mid-twentieth century). On the contrary, they must continue to identify as proud members of the left, or devoted liberals, while claiming that it is the movements and tendencies of which they were once part that have betrayed their own ideals, leaving these uniquely courageous individuals politically homeless and in search of new alliances. These exiles from progressivism package themselves not as defectors, but as loyalists—it’s their former comrades and colleagues, they claim, who are the imposters, the fakes.

XREF: Connects to broader literature on political realignment and the manufactured 'exile' narrative among rightward-moving intellectuals.

Among several such figures, my doppelganger has become particularly practiced at this maneuver. For instance, when Wolf first started appearing on right-wing media outlets in 2021, her posture was reticent, anything but defiant. She talked about having voted for Biden, stressed that she used to write for The New York Times and The Guardian and appear on MSNBC, described herself as a liberal “media darling.” But now, she said, right-wing shows like Carlson’s and Bannon’s were the only ones courageous enough to give her a platform.

For their part, every time a fiery right-wing host had Wolf on as a guest, they would indulge in a protracted, ornate windup listing all of her liberal credentials, and professing shock that they could possibly find themselves on the same side. “I never thought I would be talking to you except in a debate format,” Tucker Carlson said the first time he had Wolf on. Then, referring to a tweet in which Wolf said she regretted voting for Joe Biden, he added, “I was struck by the bravery it must have taken you to write it—I’m sure you lost friends over it, and for doing this [show].” Wolf smiled wistfully and nodded, accepting the hero’s welcome.

People ask me variations on this question often: What drove her over the edge? What made her lose it so thoroughly? They want a diagnosis, but I, unlike her, am uncomfortable playing doctor. I could offer a kind of equation for leftists and liberals crossing over to the authoritarian right that goes something like: Narcissism(Grandiosity) + Social media addiction + Midlife crisis ÷ Public shaming = Right-wing meltdown. And there would be some truth to that bit of math. … The more I learn about her recent activities, however, the less I am able to accept the premise of these questions. They imply that when she went over the edge, she crashed to the ground. A more accurate description is that Wolf marched over the edge and was promptly caught in the arms of millions of people who accept every one of her extraodinary theories without question, and who appear to adore her. So, while she clearly has lost what I may define as “it,” she has found a great deal more—she has found a whole new world.

As recently as 2019, Wolf described her ill-fated book Outrages as “a cautionary tale about what happens when the secular state gets the power to enter your bedroom.” Now she is in league with the people who stacked the U.S. Supreme Court with wannabe theocrats whose actions are forcing preteens to carry babies against their will. Yet on another level, her actions are a perfect distillation of the values of the attention economy, which have trained so many of us to measure our worth using crude, volume-based matrixes. How many followers? How many likes? Retweets? Shares? Views? Did it trend? These do not measure whether something is right or wrong, good or bad, but simply how much volume, how much traffic, it generates in the ether. And if volume is the name of the game, these crossover stars who find new levels of celebrity on the right aren’t lost—they are found.

“Some writers take to drink, others take to audiences,” Gore Vidal said back in 1981. Wolf took to audiences, in a way that would have been unimaginable to Vidal, whose heyday predated social media. Wolf grasped the magnitude of the shift to the attention economy earlier than most authors of her generation. She joined Facebook in 2008 and fully embraced its self-publishing potentials, sending long, unedited, frequently fact-free theories into the world and then, when the technology became available, live videos.

QUESTION: What does this early social media adoption suggest about how the attention economy rewards unedited self-publishing?

Clout is the values-free currency of the always-online age—both a substitute for hard cash as well as a conduit to it. Clout is a calculus not of what you do, but of how much bulk you-ness there is in the world. You get clout by playing the victim. You get clout by victimizing others. This is something that is understood by the left and the right. If influence sways, clout squats, taking up space for its own sake.

DEFINE: Defines 'clout' as a values-free metric of sheer online presence, distinct from hard influence or real-world cash.

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.

XREF: Connects broadly to how conspiracy theories and hot-take culture feed on media attention cycles.

The economic incentives for this kind of online content go a long way toward explaining the breed of public figure who seems to have turned into a different kind of person during that first Covid year—more manic; angrier; more willing to burn bridges, to make outlandish claims, and to share unreliable and poorly sourced information if it was likely to be carried by a strong current in the digital ocean.

Addiction is likely the most relevant lens for understanding these jarring personality transformations. In Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic of doppelganger literature, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Dr. Henry Jekyll turns back and forth into the murderous Edward Hyde when he drinks a mysterious serum; but over time, the serum stops working and the original Dr. Jekyll gets lost completely. When I look at the behavior over the past few years of several people I once knew and whose company and work I once enjoyed, it’s obvious that they are swilling a dopamine-releasing serum that has turned them, perhaps permanently, into digital-age versions of Mr. Hyde.

XREF: Connects the Jekyll-and-Hyde framework to the reader's interest in technology's psychological effects and behavioral addiction.

This is the irony of liberal Twitter celebrating Wolf’s seeming disappearance (at least until Musk welcomed her back). Since most liberals and leftists don’t watch or listen to Bannon, or the other shows where she has become a regular, they thought she had evaporated as a cause for concern. … Because Wolf is very far from banished from the public sphere: thanks to Bannon and Carlson, she has a brighter spotlight and a larger platform now than at any other point since her glory days in the 1990s.

XREF: Connects to how mainstream attention and alternative media ecosystems diverge in perceived influence — a wider phenomenon in media literacy. QUESTION: Worth chasing: what metrics define 'platform' here, and how much real reach does Bannon's and Carlson's audience actually provide?

It’s been years since I blocked anyone on Twitter, but I mute pretty freely—as soon as I see a bad-faith attack, or notice someone whose posts are reliably putting me in a foul mood, I click “mute.” It’s satisfying and feels a little like self-determination on platforms where everything else is determined by others. But I am also unsettled by the ease with which we can turn off other humans. I fear that there is something habit-forming about making other people disappear with a keystroke.

QUESTION: Does the ease of muting genuinely impair moral or social engagement with others, or is it protective?

When people are ejected in these ways from our social networks—whether online or in our daily lives—they can genuinely seem to have disappeared, to have been muted for real. But that is very far from the truth. When someone is pushed out of progressive conversations or communities because they said or did something hurtful or ignorant, or questioned an identity orthodoxy, or got too successful too fast and was deemed due for a takedown, their absence is frequently met with celebration, as Wolf’s exile from Twitter was. But these people don’t disappear just because we can no longer see them. They go somewhere else. And many of them go to the Mirror World: a world uncannily like our own, but quite obviously warped.

XREF: Connects to hopper/echo-chamber literature on political exile and the formation of alternative online communities. SEED: Potential essay angle: what happens to canceled figures after expulsion — mapping their migration to radicalized alternate spaces.

Kicked off Twitter? Sign up for the copycat site Gettr, the right-wing Twitter rival started by the former Trump aide Jason Miller: “Unlike the Silicon Valley oligarchs, Gettr will NEVER sell your data.” (Wolf has nearly 200,000 followers there, more than on Twitter before she got booted.) … Censored by YouTube? Get an account on Rumble. … Shadow banned on Instagram? Try Parler. “Speak freely,” the company urges, on “the premier social media app guided by the First Amendment.” … Did GoFundMe refuse to distribute the money you raised to support your favorite Freedom Convoy, claiming the funds would be used to support violence and harassment? Don’t worry, GiveSendGo, “The #1 Free Christian Fundraising Site,” will distribute the cash, along with a prayer, no questions asked.

DEFINE: Names the alternative tech ecosystem: Gettr, Rumble, Parler, GiveSendGo — each positioned explicitly against Silicon Valley mainstream platforms.

That is not how lipid nanoparticles work. It is not how vaccines work. It is not how anything works. Also, and I can’t quite believe I am typing these words, vaccinated people still smell like humans. Perhaps Wolf had Covid herself and her own sense of smell was compromised, as has been the case for many long Covid sufferers. And yet the host confessed that she also had noticed that vaccinated people seemed like ghosts. She was so glad that Wolf had the courage to put it into words!

QUESTION: The passage notes the host also perceived vaccinated people as 'ghosts' — possibly a shared/cultivated delusion worth investigating.

In my doppelganger studies, I have learned that there is a real medical syndrome called Capgras delusion. Those who suffer from it become convinced that people in their lives—spouses, children, friends—have been replaced by replicas or doppelgangers. According to the film historian Paul Meehan, the discovery of the syndrome likely inspired sci-fi classics like Invasion of the Body Snatchers and The Stepford Wives. But what is it called when a society divides into two warring factions, both of which are convinced that the other has been replaced by doppelgangers? Is there a syndrome for that? Is there a solution?

QUESTION: The author poses an open question: what is the social analog of Capgras delusion, and is there a solution? Worth chasing whether anyone has diagnosed this political-psychological phenomenon. XREF: Connects to polarization literature and the psychology of dehumanization, where out-groups are perceived as not fully human or authentic.

To return to the original question: What is Wolf getting out of her alliance with Bannon and from her new life in the Mirror World? Everything. She is getting everything she once had and lost—attention, respect, money, power. Just through a warped mirror. In Milton's Paradise Lost, Lucifer, a fallen angel, thought it “better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heaven.” My doppelganger may well still think Bannon is the devil, but perhaps she thinks it's better to serve by his side than to keep getting mocked in a place that sells itself as heavenly but that we all know is plenty hellish in its own right.

XREF: Parallels Milton's Paradise Lost and the author's own prior status in mainstream media versus the Mirror World's alternative-right ecosystem.

When data came in that was particularly striking, he could not keep the results to himself, which meant that I knew about postnatal incontinence and vaginal tearing before I hit puberty—and very much wished that I did not.

Before, he explained, he and the other doctors had needed to hover over the residents’ shoulders to make sure they were providing patients with the right kind of care, which tended to make everyone self-conscious, resident and patient alike. Now the patients, including pregnant women, could have one-on-one consultations with the resident. But there would be something in the room that looked like a mirror, as well as a microphone. My father, or one of the other staff doctors, would sit in a small room next door watching it all through one-way glass, ready to intervene if necessary.

XREF: Connects to broader shifts in how surveillance and monitoring technologies reshape professional training and patient experience — relevant to remote work and automated oversight trends.

Bannon is hardly ignored in the liberal media. He gets lots of attention, but mainly the reporting has focused on the various ways he is using his large media platform to intervene in the U.S. electoral process.

When I started to listen to Bannon’s show, I would tune in to Wolf’s interviews and skip everything before and after. But then I would hear Bannon hype upcoming segments, and I started to hang in and listen to those as well, out of curiosity. The next thing I knew I was just listening to the show, whether she was on or not, curious to know how it would cover major events.

XREF: Pattern of incremental media consumption creep resembles habit-formation in other contexts like recommendation algorithms and feed-based platforms.

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.

XREF: Relates to the concept of epistemic closure and how media/argumentation can construct parallel realities rather than engaging with opposing views.

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.

Vladimir Putin, too, is a master at mirroring, and has been since the early days of his career in politics. Throughout Russia’s illegal invasion and occupation of Ukraine, Putin would accuse the Ukrainian government of the precise crimes he was busily committing, or considering committing, himself. When, in October 2022, Russia accused Ukraine of being about to set off a dirty bomb in its own territory and then pin the blame on Russia, Ned Price, a State Department spokesman, said it was part of a pattern of “mirror imaging,” adding, “The Russians have accused the Ukrainians, the Russians have accused other countries, of what it itself was planning.” And yet, if Putin was able to sell these upside-down claims to many, it’s partly because the U.S. government consistently does this kind of mirror imaging itself, feigning outrage over Russian interference in U.S. elections with no concern for the irony that its intelligence operatives have meddled in elections and helped overthrow democratically elected governments the world over since the 1950s, from Iran to Chile to Honduras—and let’s not forget the gloves-off U.S. interference in post-Soviet Russia to back Boris Yeltsin, who passed the baton on to none other than Putin.

DEFINE: Illustrates 'mirror imaging' as accusing others of the very crimes one is committing or planning.

Bannon has other, more unsettling mirror tricks. These relate to the way he latched onto legitimate fears of surveillance and Big Tech, and the way those surveillance fears were going largely unaddressed in liberal circles. That is far from the only liberal failing on which he has pounced.

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.

SEED: The mirror-world dynamic — one side's over-the-top conspiracies pushing the opposite side toward overcredulity — could anchor an essay on tribal epistemology and the failure of good-faith fact-checking.

Similarly, questions about the safety of brand-new vaccines for people who are pregnant or considering getting pregnant could have been treated far more respectfully than they were. Rather than commentators summarily shutting down questions as frivolous or nutty, there should have been ample room in public debates and reliable media for concerns about how the vaccines would impact reproductive health. These should have called on medical experts in fertility and pregnancy to explain the vaccine research methods, along with the special vulnerabilities to Covid during pregnancy, when immune systems are particularly weak. Because it's perfectly reasonable to worry about a vaccine for a novel virus when you are pregnant or thinking of becoming pregnant—I worried about eating soft cheese when I was pregnant. Moreover, plenty of people, pregnant and not, have good reasons not to trust both Big Pharma and Big Government, let alone the two acting in coordination. In an era when whole cities like Flint, Michigan, have had their water poisoned; when gas companies tell you that fracking is safe, never mind the earthquakes and flammable tap water; when Monsanto lobbies ceaselessly against attempts to ban its herbicide Roundup despite it having been credibly linked with cancer; and when Big Pharma peddled the drugs that set off the opioid crisis, it is entirely rational to be skeptical toward monopolistic power. Johnson & Johnson, one of the major vaccine makers, not only is caught up in the opioid lawsuits but also has been ordered to pay out billions in legal settlements in recent years over alleged harm caused by several of its prescription medications and even its ubiquitous talcum powder (found to have contained asbestos). Against this backdrop, and 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.

DEFINE: Contrasts prevailing dismissal of pregnant women's vaccine worries with a rational-skepticism framing grounded in institutional trust failures.

This is, once again, transparent projection: 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.

SEED: Potential essay angle: how media avoidance of complex truths fuels rather than suppresses conspiracy theories — a paradox worth unpacking.

Stuck in the binary of lock down versus open up, we failed to consider so many options during the first years that we lived with the virus, and there were so many debates we didn't have. Faced with the torrent of lies coming from the conspiratorial right, many liberals and progressives opted to simply defend status quo measures, despite the fact that we could, and should, have demanded far more.

SEED: The critique that the left failed to think beyond lockdown/open binary could fuel an essay on how reactionary stances limit progressive policy imagination.

It is as if when something becomes an issue in the Mirror World, it automatically ceases to matter everywhere else. This has happened on so many issues that I sometimes feel as if we are tethered to each other as reverse marionettes: their arm goes up, ours goes down. We kick, they hug.

We who complied with the public health measures judged those who did not for their refusal to put the well-being of the immunocompromised ahead of their own convenience, and for their indifference to the huge sacrifices made by health-care workers as unvaccinated people filled up the Covid wards. How could they be so heartless? So willing to rank human life as more or less worthy of protection and care? And yet when unvaccinated people became ill with Covid, many of the people who claimed to have been appalled by their callousness talked about how maybe they didn't deserve health care, or told bad jokes (which were not always jokes) about how perhaps Covid would rid the world of stupid people, or went as far as French president Emmanuel Macron, who said that unvaccinated people were not full citizens. We defined ourselves against each other and yet were somehow becoming ever more alike, willing to declare each other non-people.

XREF: Parallels how the author frames those who defied public health measures as objects of moral judgment, then notes the symmetrically dehumanizing rhetoric that emerged from the other side.

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.

XREF: Connects to broader political strategy theory about coalition-building and voter realignment; echoes how populist movements exploit establishment blind spots.

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 to his base, but not enough to win reelection, certainly not after his murderous mismanagement of Covid-19.

QUESTION: What conditions determine which parts of populist rhetoric survive into actual governance? Worth examining comparative cases.

At the time my doppelganger started appearing on War Room, less than three months into the Biden presidency, Bannon was getting serious about sculpting his new MAGA Plus coalition. It was in this context that he recognized Wolf’s “slavery forever” message about vaccine passports as a potentially potent crossover issue. Other Naomi’s surveillance warnings, regardless of how divorced they were from the reality of the apps, were generating deep passion among a sizable number of people who were concerned about privacy and surveillance but were being dismissed by establishment liberals in politics and media. That’s Bannon’s kind of issue: ripe for the picking.

XREF: Connects to broader understanding of how fringe narratives get co-opted into mainstream political coalitions — resonates with media manipulation dynamics.

Bannon recognized similar neglect happening with regard to Big Pharma. Drug company price gouging and profiteering have traditionally been the purview of the left; they’re the kind of thing Bernie Sanders rails against. But aside from some grumbling, there was weak resistance among progressives to the way vaccine manufacturers were profiteering from the pandemic, and so Bannon became the one taking on Big Pharma’s greed—but, once again, via unfounded conspiracy theories rather than the real scandals.

XREF: Connects to broader pattern of how declining partisan ownership of issues creates openings for opportunistic (and often bad-faith) actors to seize the space.

Bannon sometimes plays audio montages of MSNBC and CNN shows being “brought to you by Pfizer”—the clear implication being that they cannot be trusted because they are in the pay of these companies. It’s rule “by the wealthy, for the wealthy—against you,” he says. “Until you wake up.” When he does this, it strikes me that he sounds like Noam Chomsky. Or Chris Smalls, the Amazon Labor Union leader known for his EAT THE RICH jacket. Or, for that matter, me. But, as always in the Mirror World, nothing is as it seems.

XREF: This mirrors the author's own thinking and Chomsky's media critique, but applied right-wing; relates to the broader 'Mirror World' concept of how far-right borrows left rhetoric.

Flush with dollars from tech oligarchs like Peter Thiel, and endorsed by Trump, they promise a mix-and-match of bringing back factory jobs that pay family-supporting wages, building the border wall, fighting the toxic drug supply, liberating speech from Big Tech, and banning “woke” curricula. Among those building careers around versions of this platform in the United States are JD Vance in Ohio, Josh Hawley in Missouri, and Kari Lake, who narrowly lost her bid to become governor of Arizona (and claimed, of course, that the election was stolen). Very similar versions of electoral diagonalism have taken root in countries around the world, from Sweden to Brazil.

XREF: Cross-country comparison of populist movements suggests a global pattern rather than isolated national cases.

I’m not surprised that these messages are resonating. For years I was part of internationalist left movements that protested outside meetings of the World Trade Organization, the World Economic Forum in Davos, G8 summits, and the International Monetary Fund for their roles in undermining democracies and advancing the interests of transnational capital; in the United States, we called out both major parties for being beholden to corporate donors and serving the rich rather than the people who voted them into office. This was the energy behind Occupy Wall Street, and then behind Bernie, and that coursed through various battles against new oil and gas projects. But our movement never won power.

XREF: Connects to broader debates about why leftist protest movements from WTO protests through Occupy Wall Street and the Bernie Sanders movement failed to achieve electoral or institutional power despite resonating widely.

And now our critiques of oligarchic rule are being fully absorbed by the hard right and turned into dark doppelgangers of themselves. The structural critiques of capitalism are gone, and in their place are discombobulated conspiracies that somehow frame deregulated capitalism as communism in disguise. This trend is perfectly distilled by Giorgia Meloni, who became Italy’s first female prime minister in October 2022 and is leader of the Fratelli d’Italia (Brothers of Italy), which has deep fascist roots in the country. An early partner in Steve Bannon’s international populist project, Meloni threads her speeches with pop-culture references and rails against a system that reduces everyone to consumers. She also declared, in a supposed rebuke to “woke” ideology, that “I am a woman, I am a mother, I am Italian, I am Christian.”

XREF: Connects to broader analyses of how right-wing populism co-opts leftist anti-oligarchy and anti-capitalist discourse, e.g. work on authoritarian populism and the 'libertarian-to-fascist' pipeline.

To return to an earlier theme, corporate branding offers some useful tools for understanding the dynamic. Under trademark law, a brand that is not actively being used can be deemed dormant and thus fair game for another party to usurp. I started to feel that what had been happening to me, with Other Naomi, has happened to the left much more broadly—with Bannon and Vance and Meloni and others. Issues that we had once championed had gone dormant in a great many spaces. And now they were being usurped, taken over by their twisted doubles in the Mirror World. If the arrival of one's doppelganger is a message that something needs attending to, it feels like this flashing message is something to which a great many of us need to attend.

XREF: Uses trademark law's dormant-brand doctrine as a lens for political dynamics, paralleling the book's broader doppelganger theme. SEED: A potential essay angle: how progressives' abandoned issues get co-opted by right-wing movements, with trademark law as the organizing metaphor.

As Bannon gazes through the one-way glass, he is not only learning what issues his opponents are neglecting and ignoring, and finding fertile new territories to claim as his own, or at least pretend to. He is also taking note of more subtle failings—the way issues are discussed, the way disagreements are negotiated, the way people are treated by their friends and comrades. Through the one-way glass, he is studying all our hypocrisies and inconsistencies so that he can make a show of doing the exact opposite.

XREF: Connects to general ideas about opposition research and how perceived hypocrisy provides openings in adversarial politics.

Speaking of the movements I know something about, I can say this: On the democratic socialist left, we favor social policies that are inclusive and caring—universal public health care, well-funded public schools, decarceration, and rights for migrants. But left movements often behave in ways that are neither inclusive nor caring. And in contrast to Bannon's courting of disaffected Democrats, we also don't put enough thought into how to build alliances with people who aren't already in our movements. Sure, we pay lip service to reaching out, but in practice most of us (even many who claim to be staunchly anti-police) spend a lot of time policing our movements' borders, turning on people who see themselves as on our side, making our ranks smaller, not larger.

Moreover, when entire categories of people are reduced to their race and gender, and labeled “privileged,” there is little room to confront the myriad ways that working-class white men and women are abused under our predatory capitalist order, with left-wing movements losing many opportunities for alliances that would make us stronger and more powerful. All of this is highly unstrategic, because whichever groups and individuals we kick to the curb, the Mirror World is there, waiting to catch them, praise their courage, and offer a sympathetic ear.

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.

XREF: Connects to broader patterns of how influencers convert mainstream exile into alternative-platform capital.

This is Bannon’s tone much of the time: warm, welcoming, protective of his “community,” constantly praising listeners for their kindness, intelligence, and courage. All of it is designed as a rebuke to the harshness, snobbishness, sectarianism, and identity absolutism on parts of the highly educated left. Of course, Bannon has another mode—the one in which he bares his teeth and threatens to put “heads on pikes.” But that mode is reserved exclusively for his enemies.

XREF: This in-group/out-group rhetorical bifurcation is a classic populist and fascist communication pattern, echoing scholarship on authoritarian appeal and the friend/enemy distinction in political theory.

The endgame is not hidden. Bannon tells his posse that they are going to “run this country for one hundred years, [for] every ethnicity, every color, every race, every religion—that's an inclusive nationalism.” Though it didn't pan out in the 2022 midterms, it's possible this approach will be enough to cobble together another presidential victory—but, if not, there are backup plans in the works. According to the results of a Public Religion Research Institute poll released in November 2021, among Republicans who say they believe that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump, almost four in ten say that “true American patriots might have to resort to violence in order to save our country.”

QUESTION: What exactly did this PRRI poll measure, and how was the violence question worded?

Sandwiched between segments alleging that the 2020 election was stolen, Bannon personally pitches an at-home target-practice system, which uses lasers instead of live ammunition in your automatic rifle and helps build “muscle memory” for the real thing.

When leaders who seek what I call a “fascist shift” want to close down an open society, they send paramilitary groups of scary young men out to terrorize citizens. The Blackshirts roamed the Italian countryside beating up communists; the Brownshirts staged violent rallies throughout Germany. This paramilitary force is especially important in a democracy: you need citizens to fear thug violence and so you need thugs who are free from prosecution … Say there are protests, or a threat, on the day of an election; history would not rule out the presence of a private security firm at a polling station “to restore public order.”

SEED: The observation that private security firms could serve a paramilitary role at polling stations is a chilling contemporary angle worth exploring — how corporate security could be co-opted for voter intimidation.

The person who wrote that (back in 2007) is Naomi Wolf, now found regularly on the War Room, hosted by a man trying to make sure that, next election day, the thugs will be at every polling station.

XREF: Connects Wolf's earlier book to her current appearances on War Room, illustrating how past work gets repurposed for different political ends.

In the early months, when I would hear Wolf on War Room: Pandemic describing some straightforward plan to encourage vaccination as one step away from concentration camps, I sometimes thought I could detect a suppressed giggle in Bannon's voice, as if he was thinking, I cannot believe this feminist chick actually went further than I ever would. Do go on … He keeps his composure, however. Just as he knew in 2016 that Trump could not win without pissed-off, mostly white union guys, he is sure now that pissed-off, mostly white suburban moms—nerves frayed from those years of yo-yo remote schooling and closed gyms; still revved up about vaccine mandates and getting shadow banned on Instagram; genuinely worried about the well-being of their kids and their small businesses; done being dismissed and mocked as “Karens” by mean liberals—are the path to the next right-wing resurgence. Last time, Bannon railed against Wall Street and the globalists who had fleeced the Everyman; now he rails against that plus Big Pharma, Big Tech, and “woke capitalism,” all of which are tormenting the Everymom by poisoning the minds and bodies of her kids.

XREF: Parallels the 2016 strategy of mobilizing pissed-off white union guys; Bannon applies the same playbook to a new demographic.

That is the essence of MAGA Plus: it's the old red-baseball-hat brigade, plus my doppelganger and all that she has come to represent. It is no exaggeration to say that Bannon has cast Wolf as a kind of mom in chief for the voting bloc he is hoping to secure: a former high-profile Democrat, a onetime-famous feminist who now wants to speak to the manager on all of their behalf.

XREF: Connects to broader analysis of how populist movements recruit former opponents as symbolic representatives to widen appeal.

Bannon, commander in chief of the War Room, understands this primal need for belonging, purpose, and connection on a cellular level. He understands it in his listeners—the constantly praised and engaged "War Room posse"—and he understands it in Wolf. At one point, the two even had co-branded T-shirts made up to sell to the thousands of volunteers they claimed to have recruited to help wade through vaccine trial data, sort of like a deranged baseball team.

SEED: This could seed a piece on how manufactured in-group identity (team branding, merch, belonging rhetoric) is a deliberate psychological strategy in modern political/media organizing, not an accident.

This is a head-spinning political transformation by any measure. But witnessing this about-face in someone whose face is perennially confused with my own sends a particular kind of chill; once again Freud’s description of the uncanny comes to mind: “that species of the frightening that goes back to what was once well known and had long been familiar.”

DEFINE: Freud's uncanny is defined as the frightening revival of the once-familiar — a useful definition for literary and psychological analysis. XREF: Connects to Freud's 1919 essay 'The Uncanny' and possibly to other texts the reader engages that invoke the familiar-made-strange.

The horror of the society that flips fascist from within—without the aid of a foreign invasion—lies precisely in this unsettling feeling of familiarity. When that ferocious force is conjured up to wage war on a portion of the domestic population, there are no outsiders to blame. It’s the nice, normal people down the street who turn out to be capable of monstrosity—monstrousness is revealed as the evil twin of nice, the doppelganger of normal.

FICTION: This invites a story where the horror comes not from villains but from recognizable, decent-seeming neighbors turning monstrous — a domestic doppelgänger dynamic.

In Chaplin's film, when the dictator's soldiers hear the Jewish barber's rousing speech, they immediately snap out of their fascist spell and cheer for "reason" and "democracy." In the Mirror World, something altogether different is underway.

XREF: Connects to Chaplin's The Great Dictator and contrasts with its hopeful fiction about audiences snapping out of fascist thrall.

It didn't happen every time. But it happened frequently enough that it felt necessary to develop a self-deprecating schtick, which consisted of me apologizing for disappointing viewers who were expecting a luminous supermodel to prowl into the studio and ended up with a five-foot-six anti-capitalist author instead. On at least one occasion, this unlikely signal crossing worked to my tangible advantage. In 2004, while reporting on the U.S. invasion of Iraq, I received a cache of leaked Carlyle Group documents that seemed to show that the former secretary of state James Baker III was attempting to use his position as President George W. Bush's envoy on Iraq's debt to pressure the government of Kuwait into making deals with the Carlyle Group, where he was senior counselor and an equity partner with an estimated $180 million stake. Before publishing my article, I needed verification that the documents I had were real—which wasn't coming from the Carlyle Group so could come only from the prime minister of Kuwait. Having no contacts in Kuwait, I placed a cold call to the PM's office, left a message with a receptionist, and fully expected to hear nothing back. To my surprise, I got a call at an ungodly hour from Ahmed al-Fahad, the prime minister's undersecretary. I lunged for a notepad and quickly got the verification I needed to publish. … Before signing off, al-Fahad made a confession. "Do you know that the only reason I returned your call was because I thought it was Naomi Campbell?"

XREF: Connects to the broader theme of media misidentification and how assumptions shape access — builds on the author's self-deprecating public persona discussed throughout the passage.

I played this story for laughs, mainly to fellow journalists, for a good long time. Some were baffled that the appointed head of a corrupt oil emirate would have expected a call from Campbell in the first place. I had no inside knowledge, but it's slightly less weird when you consider that Campbell testified as a witness at the international war crimes trial of the former Liberian president Charles Taylor, over allegations that the notorious butcher had gifted Campbell a pouch of blood diamonds after they met at a dinner party hosted by Nelson Mandela. From which we can only conclude that once you reach a certain level of fame, wealth, and/or power, everyone takes one another's calls. (It's this intuitive awareness that elites occupy an interconnected world of their own, one where the laws governing the rest of us are shrugged off, that is the wellspring of today's conspiracy singularity.)

XREF: Connects to theories of elite power and the anthropology of conspiracy beliefs — the idea that private worlds above the law breed suspicion. DEFINE: Defines the 'conspiracy singularity' as arising from intuitive awareness of elite interconnectedness.

As with my earlier brand-defense conundrum, this was awkward for me for highly personal reasons. The main one being that my last encounter with Roth on the page was when I, at age twenty, whipped a copy of The Counterlife across my University of Toronto dorm room, vowing to never read another book by Philip Roth ever again. I was done learning, in intricate detail, about the complex life of his male characters, their intimate psychological dramas, and their big global ideas, only to have the female characters bounce across the page like scantily clad nurses in a Benny Hill sketch.

XREF: Connects to the reader's own experiences of abandoning authors mid-career and then being forced to revisit them, as the brand-defense conundrum mentioned earlier suggests. DEFINE: Illustrates the author's stated 'highly personal reasons' for awkwardness around Roth, showing how biographical baggage shapes critical engagement.

I had furtively read Portnoy's Complaint, The Professor of Desire, and Goodbye, Columbus as a preteen, books that felt less like fiction than fraught visits with the New Jersey wing of my own family. Which was very nearly true: my father was raised in the same working-class Newark neighborhood and went to the same school as Roth, Weequahic High, just a couple of grades behind. I remember thinking, as the book hit the wall, that I was done with all of it. That the human experience is vast and rich, and I already knew just about all I needed to know about the mommy issues of middle-aged Jewish men from the tri-state area. It was time to clear some mental space for some new ethnic archetypes with some less familiar neuroses.

I stuck by that pledge for thirty years. So I was annoyed when my research into literary doppelgangers kept leading me, like a persistent dog scratching at my door, to Operation Shylock, a doppelganger novel that many considered Roth's masterwork.

Roth always favored protagonists who were thinly disguised doubles of himself: masturbating Alexander Portnoy, philandering Nathan Zuckerman, a tortured writer named Philip in his 1990 novel Deception. But this went further. Shylock is written in the voice of a writer named Philip Roth, who has authored the exact same books and led the same life as the actual Philip Roth. We’ll call him “Real Roth.” He begins the novel already destabilized, having recently emerged from a mental-health breakdown initiated by the sleeping pill Halcion. It had been so severe that, in a psychotic state, he had asked his wife, “Where’s Philip?”—an early and harrowing reminder that a person’s self can slip away from them without anybody else’s help. While recovering from this trauma, Real Roth discovers that there is a man who calls himself Philip Roth, dresses like Philip Roth, and looks very much like Philip Roth and is getting into all kinds of trouble far away in Jerusalem. We’ll call this character “Fake Roth.”

XREF: Connects to autofiction and the long tradition of authorial self-inscription in literature, from Cervantes to Knausgaard.

Fake Roth has been holding public talks and giving media interviews about his view that the creation of the state of Israel was a grave mistake. It is so surrounded by enemies, Fake Roth believes, that it will surely end in another Jewish Holocaust. So Fake Roth has started a movement called “Diasporism” to encourage Israeli Jews to make a reverse-exodus from Israel to the same Eastern European lands they had departed decades earlier, fleeing bloody pogroms and concentration camps. To that end, Fake Roth has even met with European heads of state, all the while passing for the actual Roth. The little problem of persistent anti-Semitism in these Eastern European countries could be solved, Fake Roth insists, with an aggressive rollout of “Anti-Semites Anonymous,” a hate-detox program he originally designed for his own hot, anti-Semitic girlfriend, Jinx.

DEFINE: Introduces 'Diasporism' as a coined movement name — the term's meaning is being established in-context. XREF: Echoes real-world Zionism debates and the historical counter-narrative of Jewish settlement in Palestine.

The reason I began defacing the book—with underlines and asterisks and exclamation marks—the moment it arrived is that Operation Shylock explores, with frankly uncanny precision, many of the bizarre mental and political traps I had been experiencing ever since my own doppelganger problems escalated. The cringe of confronting a parody-worthy version of one’s self. The catch-22 of defending one’s personal brand. The fascistic shadow selves doppelgangers can reveal inside ourselves. The way whole societies can have sinister doppelgangers. The novel contained all of that, and more.

SEED: The doppelganger as social and psychological diagnostic device could anchor an essay on identity, impostor syndrome, and brand management in public life. XREF: Connects to Philip Roth's Operation Shylock and broader doppelganger literature, plus the author's own personal double problems.

In Operation Shylock, Roth mines the tension between the profound human desire for uniqueness and the equally powerful craving to see one’s self reflected in another person’s being. The latter of those drives is an aspect of doppelganger mystery that I have neglected so far. So it is certainly worth recalling that millions of people voluntarily upload their photographs to doppelganger-finder services like Twin Strangers, dearly hoping that the websites’ facial recognition software will locate their match somewhere in the world. Countless best friends spend hours “twinning” with one other: meticulously synchronizing their outfits and styles so that they appear as doubles. Evidently, a great many of us want nothing more than to find another person who knows precisely what it is like to live inside our bodies and minds—and that desire coexists with the drive to be unmistakably different.

XREF: Connects to the broader doppelganger literature the author is surveying, and to social media identity and self-presentation research.

Real Roth is destabilized yet again. He had planned for a showdown over who was the rightful owner of their face and name and finds himself being adored instead. He is not able to muster the rage he had pre-scripted, but neither can he share Fake Roth’s familial delight in looking into a living mirror. After all, he has a name to protect. “Your name! Your name! Do you ever, ever, ever think of anything other than your fucking name!” Jinx demands.

XREF: Ties to the doppelgänger/double theme and the fragility of identity when faced with an adoring mirror-version, connecting to broader literature on narcissism and the self. FICTION: The scenario of pre-scripted rage thwarted by unexpected adoration is a rich emotional beat for character work.

Do nothing, and you lose all control. Try for control, and you concede to being a two-bit shill: some hawk books, some hawk toilets, it’s all the same hustle. Real Roth does not sue, opting instead for a wild journey impersonating his impersonator through the West Bank and beyond.

XREF: Connects to the broader practice of authors responding to unauthorized impersonation; echoes how other artists have responded to fakery through creative acts rather than legal action.

There is the paradox of literary brand protection exactly. Do nothing, and you lose all control. Try for control, and you concede to being a two-bit shill: some hawk books, some hawk toilets, it’s all the same hustle. Real Roth does not sue, opting instead for a wild journey impersonating his impersonator through the West Bank and beyond. This all felt extremely familiar. But not as familiar as Roth’s sense that his imposter had taken his lifetime of words and ideas and turned them into a parody of themselves.

I know that the diagonalist alliance Wolf has built with Bannon, as it translates into political power at the state level and beyond, will continue to affect countless lives, and dramatically for the worse. Yet despite this obvious gravity, the sheer ridiculousness of Wolf's antics—the time-travel tweets, the VACCINE INVESTIGATION TEAM T-shirts, the promiscuous and continuous Holocaust analogies—make it almost impossible to fully take her seriously. Or, put another way, Wolf may be a joke, but she's not a funny one. And yet, if I'm honest, my doppelganger has me on the edge between laughter and tears almost all the time!

SEED: An essay angle on how absurdist political performance becomes the vehicle for serious harm — the laughter/tears riddle of engaging unserious leaders with serious consequences.

In Operation Shylock, Real Roth attempts to exercise some kind of control over his “preposterous proxy” by refusing to call him by their shared name and instead renaming him Moishe Pipik—pipik being the catchall diminutive given to naughty kids and schlemiel-like characters in his childhood home; the name literally means “Moses Bellybutton” (fitting for all this navel-gazing). The renaming delivers short-term relief, but ultimately it backfires: Fake Roth is still ensnared in what Roth terms “pipikism,” or bellybuttonism, “the antitragic force that inconsequencializes everything—farcicalizes everything, trivializes everything, superficializes everything.”

For instance, when Bannon states that his armed and authoritarian posse is being “othered” by leftists and liberals, he is appropriating an important term that analysts of authoritarianism have used to describe how fascists cast their targets as less than human, making them easier to discard and even exterminate. But he is doing more than that, too. He is also making a mockery of the whole concept of othering, which in turn makes it harder to use the term to name what Bannon does as a matter of course—to migrants, to Black voters, to trans and nonbinary youth. Similarly, when Trump, after the 2016 election, accused half the press corps of being “fake news,” he was beginning a process that would lead his supporters to doubt everything they read and watched in the mainstream press. But he was also doing something else. He was appropriating a term that had been used by communications scholars to describe a very real phenomenon: manufactured propaganda that is designed to seem like real news but is entirely made-up. Fake articles like that had been a boon to Trump, including one particularly viral one that falsely reported that the pope had endorsed him. But now, thanks to his appropriation of the term “fake news,” we were all robbed of a useful phrase to describe the phenomenon.

XREF: Connects to the rhetorical strategy of semantic appropriation and post-truth discourse about 'fake news.'

Or consider Tucker Carlson taking a break from riling up white nationalism to claim that his competitors on MSNBC, by saying the words “white people,” were practicing “open race hate” and had become the equivalent of Hutu radio broadcasters in Rwanda who stoked the fires of anti-Tutsi hatred before the 1994 genocide. “This is Hutu radio,” he stressed, while claiming that a segment on racism in pro football was “genocidal talk,” adding, “Not an overstatement. That’s exactly what it is.”

SEED: Could be an essay angle on how inflated comparisons to genocide and fascism erode the moral weight of genuine historical atrocities.

When the figure of the buffoon becomes central to public life, the problem is not only that they say foolish things but also that everything they touch becomes foolish, including—especially—the powerful language we need to talk about them and what they are doing. I think of these figures as “dumbpelgangers,” and they pipik so many terms and concepts that they risk leaving us all speechless.

Politicians and corporate leaders have repeatedly used shock doctrine strategies during the Covid years. The British government crafted a “high-priority lane” to produce masks and other pandemic protective gear that looked very much like a chance to line the pockets of friends and donors (yielding, in some cases, unusable equipment). When the chronically under-resourced National Health Service (NHS) became overwhelmed by Covid and other health crises at the end of 2022, the Tory government smuggled in various forms of private care as supposed solutions—with fears that a fuller auctioning off of Britain’s cherished NHS could be in store. There have been similar attempts at backdoor health care privatization in several Canadian provinces, once again using pandemic-overwhelm as the excuse. And in the name of preventing further “learning loss,” the right-wing government in Ontario tried to strip public-sector education workers of their legal right to strike—one of countless attacks on public schools that took place under cover of crisis. In India, meanwhile, the government launched a series of historic attacks on economic protections for the country’s farmers during the pandemic, which it eventually had to withdraw after waves of protests. Several governments, including those of Serbia and Greece, used the crisis to bolster security powers and crack down on opponents. China’s extreme “zero Covid” policies represented a severe attack on labor rights, with workers unable to leave their factories for weeks.

XREF: Directly illustrates the 'shock doctrine' thesis Naomi Klein originally developed, applying it to the pandemic era. SEED: Could fuel an essay surveying pandemic-era power grabs across multiple countries as a pattern rather than isolated incidents.

This was during that first devastating wave—before we could get good masks, let alone vaccines, back when staying away from one another was pretty much the only tool we had to stop the spread of a virus we barely understood. But the former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and other tech billionaires seized on those stop-gap emergency measures to push for more permanent changes that would represent huge profit-making opportunities for their sector—everything from moving large parts of education permanently online to creating so-called smart cities, which would radically increase the surveillance of daily life. The future they were seeing in the crisis was one in which not only our homes are never again exclusively personal spaces but also, via high-speed digital connectivity, our schools, our doctor's offices, our gyms, and, if determined by the state, our jails. It was a grim, AI-enabled vision of a touchless society that would employ far fewer teachers, doctors, and drivers. It would accept no cash, and have skeletal mass transit and far less live art.

XREF: Connects to pandemic-era debates about 'build back better' versus surveillance capitalism and the smart city movement critiqued by scholars like Evgeny Morozov.

A few months after that piece came out, I started to see examples of these same trends being cast in far more conspiratorial ways: maybe the tech companies had planned the whole thing. Maybe it was the World Economic Forum and its plan for the Great Reset; maybe the whole pandemic wasn't real and the death toll numbers were an elaborate hoax. Maybe, as my doppelganger seemed to suggest, it was all a ploy to get us to accept a CCP-style social credit police state.

XREF: Connects to broader literature on conspiracy theories as meaning-making in uncertain times, and how legitimate commentary can be co-opted or mutated into conspiratorial frames.

Suddenly “climate lockdowns” started trending—an entirely made-up threat, with strong links to the Heartland Institute, the foremost climate-change-denial think tank, which made the absurd claim that once the globalists were done locking you in your house to fight Covid, they were going to lock you in your house to lower greenhouse gas emissions.

QUESTION: How exactly did the Heartland Institute seed and amplify this made-up threat across platforms? Worth tracing the disinformation pipeline.

But there was something else getting in the way: the very idea of treating the pandemic as a portal to something new—something better, greener, and fairer—was being systematically pipiked in the Mirror World by people like my doppelganger. It was getting all mixed up and conflated with the conspiracy talk about how “globalist elites” at the World Economic Forum were trying to harness the recovery for their Great Reset. By early 2021, any discussion about how our societies could and should change in response to the reality of overlapping and intersecting crises was immediately shouted down by the diagonalists as being part and parcel of a conspiracy hatched on a Swiss mountaintop by Bill Gates.

XREF: Connects to the broader 'diagonalism' discourse and vaccine misinformation dynamics seen across many Western democracies post-2020. QUESTION: How might reform discourse recover after being poisoned by conflation with conspiracy theories?

The effect of this constantly expanding sphere of pipikism is that it’s not just more difficult to talk about real examples of disaster profiteering or the need for a Green New Deal. Gradually, it has come to feel as if every idea of any import, every word that might express the magnitude of our moment, has been boobytrapped before it can even be uttered.

XREF: Connects to Orwell's critique of dying metaphors and the general complaint that political language debases thought.

The problem of speechlessness goes deeper than the continuous abuse that important words are taking in the Mirror World. I think it may also have to do with a creeping uncertainty about the role words play, their basic utility. Words are still useful for practical purposes, like arranging after-school pickups and making grocery lists and writing catchy songs—but for changing the world? My friend Bill McKibben often talks about why he took the leap from writing articles and books to starting the climate change organization 350.org (where we were both board members for a decade). Bill says that when he was young and naïve and writing The End of Nature, the first book about climate change for a general readership, he “thought books changed the world.” Then, after a couple of decades of watching policy makers ignore his books and the library of others, not to mention the careful work of thousands upon thousands of increasingly panicked climate scientists, he came to the conclusion that, while words help, it’s “movements of people who change the world.” But here’s the question that has been eating away at me: What if our books, and our movements as they are currently constructed (often in ways that resemble corporate brands), are only changing words? What if words—written on the page or shouted in protest—change only what people and institutions say, and not what they do? … I AM THE YOU THAT IS NOT WORDS,” Fake Roth announces to Real Roth, touching on the central question of many doppelganger stories: Who is real and what is real? Is the real one whoever claimed the identity first? Or is the real one whoever does the most with it? In Dostoyevsky’s The Double, Fake Golyadkin is so active and gregarious that he easily upstages and replaces the original. In Operation Shylock, Real Roth is a full-time pretender, a writer of stories not a doer of deeds. Fake Roth is an activist and a would-be maker of history. He chides Real Roth for frittering away the cultural power he amassed through literary fame by merely writing more neurotic novels, spilling more words—as opposed to concretely acting to help the Jewish people who are the subjects of his novels.

QUESTION: Roth himself questions whether books and movements only change what people say, not what they do — worth chasing. XREF: Connects to broader debates about performative activism and whether discourse actually drives material change.

That is the real source of my speechlessness in this unreal period: a feeling of near violent rupture between the world of words and the world beyond them. In recent years, left social movements have won huge victories in transforming the way we talk about all kinds of issues—billionaires and oligarchic rule, climate breakdown, white supremacy, prison abolition, gender identity, Palestinian rights, sexual violence—and I have to believe that those changes represent real victories, that they matter. And yet, on almost every front, tangible ground is being lost. Changing the discourse did not prevent the world’s ten richest men from doubling their collective fortunes from $700 billion to $1.5 trillion in the first two years of the pandemic; it did not stop police forces from increasing their budgets while teachers have to pay for basic supplies out of pocket; it did not prevent fossil fuel companies from collecting more billions in subsidies and new permits; it did not prevent the Israeli police forces from attacking the funeral of the revered Palestinian American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh after a bullet that was almost certainly fired by an Israeli soldier took her life.

SEED: The tension between linguistic progress and material regression could anchor an essay on the limits of discourse politics.

We did. But we appear to have done it at the precise moment when words and ideas underwent a radical currency devaluation, a crash connected, in ways we have barely begun to understand, to the torrent of words in which we are swimming on those screens. A torrent that assiduously amplifies the most operatic forms of virtue performance and the most cynical forms of pipiking.

It is worth recalling that Thunberg’s first protest was her refusal, as a young girl, to speak. She learned about the ecological crisis, she saw how little was being done about it, and she stopped speaking to anyone beyond her family. She started speaking when things started changing—at first small things, like members of her family committing to becoming vegetarian, and then larger things, like millions of people joining climate strikes around the world.

QUESTION: Does Thunberg's own account frame her selective mutism this way, or is this the author's interpretive lens? XREF: Connects to the relationship between protest form and responsiveness to change.

Then she spoke a lot, to all kinds of audiences, and you could tell by the care she put into those speeches that a part of her believed they might yield action. What was interesting about the version of Greta that showed up in Glasgow is that she had clearly lost that earlier faith—lost faith in the spectacle of herself giving speeches to shame leaders for doing nothing. So she started making speeches that were less about climate change and more about the absurdity of the whole charade. “Build back better. Blah, blah, blah. Green economy. Blah, blah, blah. Net zero by 2050. Blah, blah, blah,” she said in the run-up to the summit. “This is all we hear from our so-called leaders. Words, words that sound great but so far has led to no action. Our hopes and dreams drown in their empty words and promises.” Asked by the BBC two days later what she thought of the final agreement to come out of Glasgow, Greta replied, “They even succeeded in watering down the blah, blah, blah, which is quite an achievement.” … This is far more scathing than what Greta used to do at such esteemed gatherings. She used to scold. She used to plead. She used to cry. And though she was harsh to the leaders listening to her, her words still implied a kind of faith in them. But it would seem that Greta no longer believes in that theory of change. She has come to the place at which so many of us have arrived: the realization that no one is coming to save us but us, and whatever action we can leverage through our cooperation, organization, and solidarities.

SEED: The shift from pleading to mockery is a compelling arc for an essay on how activists lose faith in institutional leverage.

There is a power in naming this, rather than just filling up airtime. Because if you find yourself saying, as some activists more diplomatic than Greta did, that a climate summit is a “good start” and that the summit is officially called Conference of the Parties 26—because it had literally happened every year since 1995 at that point (save Covid-wracked 2020)—then it might be time to admit that words are no longer doing what we expect them to do.

XREF: Connects to Orwell's writing on political language and euphemism obscuring reality.

But so, too, is what more centrist leaders have been doing for much longer: using words as intended, yet with no intention of acting on them. And one form of denialism feeds the other: the outright denialism in the Mirror World is made thinkable by the baseline war on words and meaning in more liberal parts of our culture.

XREF: Connects to broader critiques of liberal bad-faith discourse enabling far-right extremism, echoing themes from Han's 'Infocracy' or Arendt on truth and politics.

I had no idea, though, how far it would go. When I filled pages of No Logo with close textual readings of early lifestyle-branding campaigns that appropriated revolutionary iconography to sell sneakers and laptops and checking accounts—Martin Luther King Jr.'s and Gandhi's dead faces showing up on Apple billboards, the anthems of the anti–Vietnam War movement selling Nikes—I thought I understood why this was dangerous. On the one hand, transformational movements and ideas were being severed from their contexts, being made less powerful, less real, in the process. On the other hand, powerful revolutionary iconography was being used to actively hide and distract from the all-too-real shadow worlds that created the products being advertised—the homesick and chronically harassed teenage girls in Indonesia and China making the sneakers and electronics; the pollutants and toxins seeping out of the global supply chain at every stage; the jobs that were turning into slippery contracts while we were told to buck up and be our own brands. It was a co-optation, a cover-up, and a con all at once.

But there was a bigger picture that I didn't quite see, and that was the all-out war on meaning that this new stage of progressive-cloaked capitalism represented. In the end, what mattered most about those campaigns was the boldness with which they were broadcasting that, from here on out, nothing means anything anymore: if MLK and Gandhi and Bob Dylan can all be conscripted as neoliberal shills, then absolutely anything and anyone can be severed from their contexts and made to mean their precise opposite. The story beneath the story was the normalization of the disassociation between words from reality, which could only usher in the era of irony and flat detachment, because those seemed like the only self-respecting postures to adopt in a world in which everyone was lying all the time.

SEED: Potential essay angle: 'the all-out war on meaning' as a framework for understanding how brands and campaigns empty symbols of their content, using historical icons as shills.

I appreciated Greta's "Blah, blah, blah" speeches because they precisely captured the pervasive feeling of speechlessness, far better than my own impotent and sullen silences in this period. Greta had found a way not only of critiquing language but also of protecting language: she was mocking their words, and what happens to her words in their ears, but she was also saving her words for spaces where they still might matter, where they still can be married with principles and actions, where people are not merely performing for cameras.

XREF: Connects to ideas about performative activism and the gap between words and action — echoes critiques of virtue signaling and 'greenwashing' language.

Though I hesitate to suggest it, this is a place where we could stand to learn a little from Steve Bannon. From his bloody-minded approach to strategy and building winning coalitions despite differences. From his transformation of listeners and watchers into highly organized doers. From his focus on "Action! Action! Action!"

XREF: Connects to thinking about learning from opponents' methods — useful when studying political strategy, persuasion, or movement-building versus dismissing adversaries outright.

It's likely too late to get back everything that has been lost to the forces of pipikism—but there is one thing that we must never surrender, and that is the language of anti-fascism. The true meanings of "genocide" and "apartheid" and "Holocaust," and the supremacist mindset that makes them all possible. Those words we need, as sharp as possible, to name and combat what is rapidly taking shape in the Mirror World—which is an entire cosmology built around claims of superior bodies, superior immune systems, and superior babies, bankrolled by supplement sales, bitcoin, and prenatal yoga.

XREF: Connects to Orwell's 'Politics and the English Language' argument that controlling language controls thought.

Even more bizarre was that she seemed to have thousands of loyal subjects, some of whom had been delivering her “cease and desist” orders by hand, informing businesses, schools, and even police that they were “complicit in Crimes against Humanity and will be prosecuted by We The People” via military tribunals.

QUESTION: What drives followers to deliver handwritten legal threats on behalf of a delusional figurehead? What psychological or movement dynamics sustain this? SEED: Potential essay angle: how fringe delusions scale into organized social action, and the legal/commercial burden of 'sovereign citizen' style harassment.

I understood why the campaign was skeptical: Canadian smugness is a powerful drug. Here in British Columbia, Canada’s westernmost province, the government had delegated almost all of its crucial Covid communications to Dr. Bonnie Henry, a supremely sensible-seeming public health officer who was a kind of anti-Trump. In a soothing voice just above a whisper, she told us daily about the latest data and entreated us, “Be kind, be calm, be safe.”

XREF: Contrasts with adversarial pandemic politics in the US; connects to broader literature on governmental trust and compliance.

Many voters were leaving the staid Conservative Party and flocking to the fringe and fiercely anti-immigrant People’s Party, which had lifted its election talking points straight from the Mirror World. “Say No to Vaccine Passports!” a pamphlet stuffed into my mailbox declared. Stand strong against “the tyrannical dictates of the establishment.”

“I’d first validate their fears about data. Tell them that your top priority is safeguarding their privacy and keeping their personal information out of the hands of private tech companies. Pivot the conversation to the need to regulate those companies, break them up, treat them as public utilities, guarantee everyone’s right to be part of a digital town square. Show them that there is a way to stick it to Big Tech without putting their life and other people’s lives in danger.” … “Same with Big Pharma. Remember, people have good reason to loathe these companies. Pivot to common ground: why lifesaving treatments and medicines shouldn’t be run for profit in the first place. Shift to the need to expand public health care to include prescription drugs. Talk about how we can create good jobs in public health and preventive medicine.” … He knew all these arguments inside out, had been making them for years. It was just a recasting, a way to take some territory back from the Mirror World. I thought this strategy had a decent chance of working with some voters, ones who had only glanced into the looking glass here and there. But for those people who had stepped all the way through, I didn’t hold out much hope that Avi, charming as he is, was going to bring them back.

SEED: A possible essay on debating/communication strategy: how recasting shared grievances (anti-Big Tech, anti-Big Pharma) toward values-aligned policy positions can build common ground.

I have been doing much research on what it is we are dealing with and was hoping Naomi was going to be writing a follow up to “Shock Doctrine” with what is happening in our world right now with losing our freedoms, being discriminated against if we do not wish to take an experimental “shot” … This “plandemic” has cost our world dearly and I want to see justice served and those held accountable for their part in it all, namely Anthony Fauci, Bill Gates, Big Pharma, The Media.

QUESTION: This appears to be a reader comment reprinted in the book — worth verifying the context in which it's cited, and whether the book treats it as evidence of something about its subject or about the commenter.

Even after months mired in the Mirror World, I was shocked by some of the things that Avi and I were seeing and hearing from our neighbors. At the start of the pandemic, there had been various loud voices calling for the sick and elderly to be sacrificed in the name of keeping the economy going. But those had been smarmy Republicans; cruel, but on brand. What I did not expect was to find lifelong voters for the NDP—the party pivotal in securing Canada's system of universal public health care—shrugging off mass death. Nor did I expect someone from whom I might have taken a Vinyasa class to actively advocate a die-off of the physically weak ("I think those people should die"). Or for a People's Party sign to appear right next to the one for Bliss or Bust Deep Meditation and Deep Tissue Massage. Or to hear longtime environmentalists say, in private conversations, that the right to be unvaccinated was their single issue in this election, a principled stand, as they saw it, against Big Pharma.

Whatever I once thought the line was between "them" and "us," it was no longer holding. Clearly, a poison had been released in the culture, and it was not only coursing among right-wingers with the help of a few liberal crossover stars. This was something else: a poisonous compound enmeshed with powerful notions of natural living, bodily strength, fitness, purity, and divinity—alongside their opposites: unnaturalness, bodily weakness, slothfulness, contamination, and damnation.

XREF: Connects to discourse on wellness culture, alternative health movements, and how apolitical 'natural living' rhetoric gets weaponized ideologically.

Fitness and alternative health subcultures have long mixed with fascist and supremacist movements. In the United States, early fitness and bodybuilding enthusiasts were also enthusiastic about eugenics, and the prospect of breeding for what they saw as a superior human form. Nazi propaganda was crowded with images of young men hiking, and Hitler was convinced that "natural" food was central to the success of the Reich (though his vegetarianism appears to have been somewhat exaggerated). The Nazi Party was riven with health fads and extreme occult beliefs, which were all marshaled in the project of building an Aryan super race of godlike men. Put another way, the entire mission of building a supposedly golden race had an occult quality, which is why it merged so easily with New Age health fads and various naturalist fetishes.

QUESTION: The connection between contemporary wellness/fitness subcultures and supremacist movements is worth examining further — are there modern parallels beyond historical fascism? SEED: An essay angle: how aesthetic ideals of bodily perfection map onto political ideologies of racial or ethnic superiority.

The people Avi and I were meeting at the extreme end of this spectrum didn't seem to deny Covid outright. Rather, they cast the virus as a kind of cleansing, or "culling of the herd," with some mixing in ecofascist beliefs and imagining the pandemic as a means by which the natural world would be rehabilitated from human stresses. This line of thought was rampant in the early days of lockdowns, when THE EARTH IS HEALING and WE ARE THE VIRUS memes overran the internet, along with videos (plenty of them faked) of wild animals taking back our ghostly cities and towns. But now the embrace of a certain amount of human death was becoming more overt, and explicitly linked to opposing the vaccines. At around this time, Rob Schmitt, a former Fox News host who moved over to Newsmax, mused on air, "I feel like a vaccination in a weird way is just generally kind of going against nature. Like, I mean, if there is some disease out there—maybe there's just an ebb and flow to life where something's supposed to wipe out a certain amount of people, and that's just kind of the way evolution goes. Vaccines kind of stand in the way of that."

DEFINE: Clarifies the ecofascist belief that aligns pandemic deaths with natural selection/evolution, treating vaccination as interfering with that process.

That ecofascist thought would surge in our particular historical moment is, sadly, predictable. We live in a time when having two jobs is no guarantee of affording a home and many of our governments consider bulldozing homeless encampments to be a viable policy solution. Meanwhile, every day brings us closer to a future of climate breakdown that, if it is not slowed and reversed, will surely lead to the culling of large parts of our and other species, hitting the most vulnerable first and worst. The process is already well underway. Being alive in a knife-edge moment like this, being forced to be complicit in it, while our so-called leaders fail so miserably to act, unavoidably generates all kinds of morbid symptoms. Inevitably, people reach for narratives to make sense of this reality.

Among such narratives is the one that the climate justice movement has been telling for years—the same one Avi was running on: people of good conscience, across all the lines meant to divide us, can band together, build power, and transform our societies into something fairer and greener, just in the nick of time. But that story is getting harder to believe with each day that goes by. So, another narrative, this one spreading much faster, goes like this: I'll be okay, I'm prepared, with my canned goods and solar panels and relative place of privilege on this planet—it's other people who will suffer. The trouble with that narrative, though, is that it requires finding ways to live with and rationalize the mass suffering of others. And that's where the stories and logics that cast other people's deaths as an unavoidable form of natural selection, perhaps even a blessing, come into play.

XREF: Connects to discussions of apocalypse preparedness culture and how privileged individuals morally disengage from collective climate harm.

At first, I couldn’t figure out the connection between these two groups and the two very different activities they represented—what was the shared bond between extreme faith and extreme fitness, between worshipping the Lord and worshipping the body? It grew clearer when I started spending time in the Mirror World, particularly in those corners where New Age wellness influencers were sharing Covid conspiracies. This was an evolution of the mindset that was first described in a 2011 academic paper as “conspirituality,” a term that has since been popularized through the book and podcast of the same name (the one I listen to far too much). Like the subset of the ultra-religious who were unconcerned about contracting Covid, this subset of the ultra-fit also believed they had special protections from the virus: that their temples—which were their own detoxed and buffed bodies—would keep them safe. Wellness and fitness was their force field, or so they seemed to think.

This helps make some sense of the outsize role among the diagonalists of a group I will broadly describe as body people. We are all body people, of course, living inside bodies as we do, trying to enjoy them and keep them from harm. But here I am talking about people who are in the business of bodies. Not doctors (though there are a few of those sprinkled in) and certainly not epidemiologists with actual expertise in infectious disease. Rather, these are people who, like gym owners and advanced yoginis, can make a claim to special knowledge about what is right for other people’s bodies: trainers, yoga teachers, CrossFit instructors, masseuses, mixed martial artists, chiropractors, lactation consultants, doulas, nutritionists, herbalists, menopause coaches, and certified juice therapists.

SEED: The parallel between 'diagonalists' and body practitioners (yoga teachers, chiropractors, lactation consultants) maps suggestively onto how underregulated wellness professions gain cultural authority during crises — a possible essay angle on credentialism and epistemic bubbles.

When the Center for Countering Digital Hate issued its list of what it termed “the Disinformation Dozen,” a group of twelve individuals that its research found were collectively responsible for originating roughly 65 percent of the junk claims circulating about Covid and vaccines, the list wasn’t populated with well-known right-wing media stars, as one might expect. Instead, it had a chiropractor and three different osteopaths, including one in Florida with a booming supplement business; a couple that sells essential oils to cure cancer and DVD sets on “taking back” your health; the editor of Health Nut News, who posts anti-Semitic memes about how the Rothschilds and “the Global elite are running the show.… #NewWorldOrder #TruthTeller”; and the guru behind the newsletter GreenMedInfo, who posts memes about how Bill Gates is using the vaccine to depopulate the earth in between advice about healing yourself with superfoods.

There were also a few women on the list who, like Wolf—with her books extolling natural beauty, natural childbirth, and life-altering orgasms—had built personal brands around being experts on women’s bodies in particular. Christiane Northrup, a lapsed ob-gyn who wrote the Oprah-friendly, bestselling Women’s Bodies, Women’s Wisdom, made the Disinformation Dozen list after she began peppering her advice on nontoxic cleaning products and “vibrant health” with QAnon-tinged Covid denialism. So did Kelly Brogan, a “holistic psychiatrist” and bestselling author as likely to post a video of herself pole dancing as she is to tell you to “thank your body” for fighting off Covid without the help of vaccines or masks (which she urged her followers to take off in an act of liberation similar to second-wave bra burning).

XREF: Connects to the broader pattern of wellness influencers and 'snake oil' culture sliding into political disinformation — resonates with research on the wellness-to-QAnon pipeline. SEED: Angle for an essay: how feminist-aligned bodily autonomy rhetoric ('bra burning' liberation framing) got weaponized in anti-vaccine messaging.

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.

In Natural Causes: An Epidemic of Wellness, the Certainty of Dying, and Killing Ourselves to Live Longer, Barbara Ehrenreich, who died in September 2022, tracked the ways that the quest for health and wellness became obsessive pursuits in the Reagan and Thatcher era and has only grown in influence since. She argued that this turn was a reaction not to feminism's successes, but rather to the failures of revolutionary movements, when the high hopes of the 1960s and '70s slammed into the brick wall of '80s neoliberalism.

XREF: Connects to broader analysis of how political disappointment gets redirected into individual self-improvement projects — a pattern seen across wellness culture and productivity movements.

With dreams of justice dashed, along with collective visions for a good life, it was everyone for themselves—a world of atomized individuals climbing over one another to get an edge in newly deregulated, precarious job markets. It was in this context, she argued, that so many turned their attention toward perfecting the body, with treadmills replacing protest marches and free weights replacing free love. The pressures were far greater for women at the start, but soon enough even heterosexual cis men would face their own unattainable fitness and beauty standards and myths. For Ehrenreich, this was all “part of a larger withdrawal into individual concerns after the briefly thrilling communal uplift some had experienced in the 1960s … If you could not change the world or even chart your own career, you could still control your own body—what goes into it and how muscular energy is expended.”

XREF: Connects to Ehrenreich's analysis and to broader discussions of how political disenchantment redirects energy into individualist self-improvement.

I may not be able to do much about grievous injustice in the world, at least not by myself or in very short order, but I can decide to increase the weight on the leg press machine by twenty pounds and achieve that within a few weeks. … As the climate crisis accelerates, with the land heaving beneath us and burning around us, I expect that many of us will continue to find comfort in whatever small bodily obeyances we can muster. There is solace to be found there.

XREF: Connects to ideas about agency and scale — the contrast between micro- and macro-change echoes discussions of locus of control and coping strategies in times of crisis.

Yet I also know, from personal experience as a teenage bulimic and Jane Fonda’s Workout addict, that this quest, in its extreme and unhealthy forms, is itself a kind of doubling. For the person dedicating themselves to transformation through diet and fitness, there is you as you are now, and—ever present—there is you as you imagine you could be, with enough self-denial and self-discipline, enough hunger and enough reps. A better, different you, always just out of reach. Ehrenreich wrote evocatively of the strange silence of gyms, a place where people gather together in close quarters but barely speak to one another except to negotiate access to machines. This, she observed, is because the primary relationship at play is not between separate people working out, but between the person working out and themselves as they wish to be, their body double.

DEFINE: Introduces 'doubling' as a conceptual framework: the self-versus-idealized-self split, here applied to fitness and diet transformation.

In Her Body and Other Parties, Carmen Maria Machado explores the relationship between the thin self and the fat self as a form of inner doppelganger. In the story "Eight Bites," Machado's narrator despises her body as it is—its heaviness, softness, and sagginess: "I was tired of flat, unforgiving dressing room lights; I was tired of looking into the mirror and grabbing the things that I hated and lifting them, clawing deep, and then letting them drop and everything aching." So she undergoes bariatric surgery and shrinks down to a more socially acceptable size. But the narrator is haunted by what she first thinks is a ghost and then discovers is something much creepier: the fat she shed as a result of the surgery, one hundred pounds of it, which has taken a featureless human form in her home. It is a fat golem, the self she could not bring herself to love and so chose to cut away. "I kneel down next to it," the narrator says. "It is a body with nothing it needs: no stomach or bones or mouth. Just soft indents. I crouch down and stroke its shoulder, or what I think is its shoulder. It turns and looks at me. It has no eyes, but still, it looks at me. She looks at me. She is awful but honest. She is grotesque but she is real." The narrator then beats her double with terrible violence.

XREF: Echoes the doppelganger motif in Gothic fiction and body-horror narratives like Kafka and early Cronenberg. FICTION: The fat-golem conceit is a striking metaphor for the self one cuts away — rich material for a body-horror or literary-fiction story.

The hatred and rage at the imperfect, unfit self can be the flip side of the quest for a perfected, controlled body, achieved through the right combination of workouts, diets, surgeries, and assorted wellness interventions. And it can grow more intense as we engage in another kind of body doubling: aging, that process of witnessing the changing of our face and form via such ravages as pregnancy, sleepless parenting, stress, pollution, and just being alive for enough revolutions around the sun. "Old age isn't a battle; old age is a massacre," Philip Roth, my problematic king of doppelgangers, observed.

The longer we stick around, the more unfamiliar we can become to ourselves, each distorted version of our younger "prime" selves a little less recognizable than the last. Cling too hard to your youthful double and risk becoming a surgerized, injected parody. Or worse. That, after all, is the unmissable warning carried by The Picture of Dorian Gray: if you seek eternal youth, and deny your aging double its reality, you'll both end up dead.

XREF: Echoes Wilde's Dorian Gray and connects to broader themes about identity, aging, and the psychology of self-continuity.

The desire for perfect wellness and perennial glowing youth is certainly what is driving a great many people to influencers like Christiane Northrup, the Martha Stewart of the conspiritualist world, who promises unending vitality if you buy her books, menopause supplements, eye serum, and vaginal moisturizer, all for sale on her website. … There are other forces propelling many into these circles, including the limits and missteps of conventional medicine. Specialist doctors and pharmaceutical companies frequently fail people with complex diseases and disorders. And as I learned early on from those inappropriate dinner-table conversations about my father's research, reproductive health is woefully understudied, and women's legitimate complaints are too often discounted, dismissed, or disbelieved as hypochondria. Childbirth can be a terribly disempowering experience, and all of these failures and abandonments by conventional medicine are vastly more severe for Black and Indigenous women, who are consistently treated as unreliable narrators of their own bodies. According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, "Black women are three times more likely to die from a pregnancy-related cause than white women," while a 2021 study found that infant mortality rates were more than twice as high for babies born to Black women than to white women.

XREF: Connects to broader journalism about how medical system failures push patients toward alternative and fringe practitioners.

All of this and more have pushed millions of people to try to heal, cure, and control themselves through an ever-expanding array of self-help directives and wellness concoctions, plenty of which have real benefits. This is the trouble with the Mirror World: there is always some truth mixed in with the lies; always some devastating collective failure it has identified and is opportunistically exploiting.

Because Western medicine is often dismissive of these concerns, many people who become pregnant seek out alternative sources of information and alternative supports—places where they are told that the medical profession is built to make them feel helpless, dependent, and weak. That they are capable of finding their intuitive power, innate strength, and maybe even, according to a 2008 documentary featuring Christiane Northrup, have a “birth-gasm.” Much of this can be positive and healthy: it’s a wonderful thing to have choices in what birth can be. But this is where the white, wealthy, libertarian streak in the wellness industry can become lethal. Because while it is true that many doctors give up on vaginal births too soon, or rely too much on surgical interventions, or express alarm over low-risk home births, it is also true that complications from pregnancy and childbirth remain major causes of death around the world. Even in a country as wealthy as the United States, a great many women and gender-marginalized people need more (and more sensitive) health care, not less.

QUESTION: The contrast between wellness-industry anti-medical messaging and the reality of maternal mortality warrants deeper exploration, especially the US maternal death rates.

Dr. Michelle Cohen, a family physician and assistant professor in the Department of Family Medicine at Queen’s University, has tracked the often insidious role of pseudoscientific women’s wellness influencers in the Covid era. While recognizing the real failures of her profession, she argues that these influencers are exploiting “medicine’s sexism to create a new and gendered market for snake oil”—instead of trying to fix the system, they profit from its abandonments. “The wellness industry isn’t pushing for more and better science into women’s health—it wants instead to create a secondary pathway for women’s issues outside of the mainstream. The subtler risk is that wellness will continue to evolve along a gendered path, disproportionately exposing women to the harms of quackery.”

QUESTION: What specific tactics do wellness influencers use to recruit women who feel failed by mainstream medicine? SEED: Pitch: how gendered wellness marketing creates a parallel, unregulated health track for women — and the downstream harms.

This is a marked shift from the early days of the feminist health movement in the 1970s, which was, in its low-key way, anti-capitalist, focused on efforts like boycotting Nestlé because the company marketed powdered infant formula to poor mothers in the Global South. Feminist health, back then, was a movement fighting for changes at the collective and institutional level—like birthing centers inside hospitals, and certification of midwives and doulas, and access to safe abortions, and building research institutions focused on long-ignored aspects of women’s health. It was also about the right to go on paid parental leave and the right to breastfeed without being criminalized. Having grown up inside this movement, thanks to my father’s research and my mother’s advocacy, I can attest that nothing about it was glamorous. Midwives and doulas got paid (not very much); family doctors got paid more, but still far less than obstetricians; copies of Our Bodies, Ourselves helped fund the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, but nobody was getting rich.

XREF: Tracing the ideological shift in feminist health from systematic anti-capitalism to today's individualized, market-driven wellness culture.

Throughout the pandemic, there have been doctors and alternative health practitioners who have made these kinds of arguments not as an alternative to vaccines, masks, and prescription medications, but as important complements to them. Dr. Rupa Marya, for instance, has been highly critical of Covid conspiracy theorists, calling anti-science attitudes "a leading cause of death in the U.S." But she also sees plenty that needs fixing in the medical status quo, which is why, along with Raj Patel, she coauthored Inflamed: Deep Medicine and the Anatomy of Justice. She and Patel acknowledge that the wellness gurus are absolutely right when they say we live in a culture that makes people sick as a matter of course—but rather than presenting individual peak wellness as the high-priced solution, they advocate for "deep medicine": structural changes that would detoxify our world and make healthy choices accessible to all.

XREF: Conventional framing separates anti-establishment wellness critics from pro-science medics; this collapses that binary.

Many more people who are knowledgeable about alternative health and preventive medicine could, like Marya and Patel, have used their expertise to advocate for collective and structural responses to our collective health crises during the pandemic. That is what happened during the Great Depression in the United States, when New Deal programs created millions of jobs building public swimming pools as well as hundreds of state and national parks. The guiding philosophy of these ambitious public works projects was that exercise and access to nature were rights that should not be reserved for the rich. Similar programs could be launched today, with an emphasis on the Black and Brown neighborhoods that never received their share of New Deal infrastructure, or that lost it afterward when whites revolted against integration.

XREF: Connects to histories of public health infrastructure, racial inequity in park access, and the structural causes of pandemic health disparities. SEED: Potential article angle: what a modern New Deal for health infrastructure — pools, parks, nature access — in underserved neighborhoods could look like today.

None of this, however, is the kind of influence most high-profile wellness influencers have chosen to wield. Instead, it's more promises about the perfect life that awaits if we attain our perfected body double. Our Bodies, Ourselves, the health bible my mother regularly consulted, has been supplanted with an all-pervasive ethos of "my body, my worth"— the corollary of which seems to be "your body, your problem."

DEFINE: Explains the shift from 'Our Bodies, Ourselves' communal health model to a 'my body, my worth' framework that individualizes blame.

And then there are wavy-haired momfluencers turning child-rearing into a series of airy tableaux of sponsored organic content. These influencers gaze at us through the camera's lens with so much heart-bursting love that it's easy to forget that what they are actually looking at is their own faces on their phones—their digital doubles—as they coach us all to reach for our own best selves, our body doubles, in the never-ending house of mirrors.

XREF: Relates to broader critiques of influencer authenticity and the mediated self, connecting to Lacanian mirror-stage ideas or Jia Tolentino's work on the internet's mirrored self-image.

Then came Covid—and this booming, unregulated industry of self-styled health experts collided with a global health crisis that scared the hell out of pretty much everyone, including the professionally well. After all, their yoga studios, CrossFit boxes, and massage clinics were, for the first time, locked tight, and their incomes and futures were suddenly highly uncertain. As Ehrenreich taught us, we turn toward the body when life feels out of control. It was in this period that so many of those fit and beautiful influencers stopped merely cooing soothingly and offering encouraging words to motivate our home workouts and green juicing and started whispering to us alarmingly, about dark forces coming to poison us, and eventually, to gag, jab, and dominate us. It was then that the diagonal lines started to race toward one another.

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.

QUESTION: Is there direct evidence beyond speculation that opposition was partly ideological, aimed at preventing a successful public-care precedent?

When Covid hit, competition among many prominent people who specialize in wellness and those they dismissed as specializing in sickness (i.e., doctors and scientists) reached new levels, and for a simple reason. … For months, conventional medicine had nothing for us. … This was the period when, if you thought you might have Covid, the reigning advice offered by doctors was far from reassuring: "Try not to give it to anyone else"; "Stay home unless you can barely breathe"; "If you can't breathe, call an ambulance and try your luck with the local hospital, from which there is a solid chance you will never reemerge."

XREF: Connects to broader critiques of mainstream medicine's rigidity and the credibility gap that alternative practitioners exploited during crises.

This was not a conspiracy, and most of it wasn't even really a failure. … Yes, our health-care systems could have been better prepared with larger stockpiles of masks, more ventilators, more beds, and more nurses. … But that wouldn't have changed the underlying problem, which was that it takes time to understand a novel virus. … Time to do research before serious scientists will make claims about the best course of action.

It was inside that vacuum that so many wellness hustlers saw a first-mover advantage. … Sure, they didn't understand the virus either, but for plenty in this unregulated sector, that had never stopped them from making inflated claims about what a particular herb or diet will do before. … And so, unlike the epidemiologists who were busy trying to understand SARS-CoV-2, many wellness gurus wasted no time pitching all manner of supplements, tinctures, and miracle cures that all claimed to do what the doctors could not: protect us. … It was a bonanza—until, of course, the vaccines showed up and threatened to spoil all the fun.

XREF: Connects to broader patterns of quackery flourishing during knowledge vacuums — parallels with other historical epidemics and the snake-oil era.

The core Covid-era public health message—that we all needed to undergo some individual inconveniences for the sake of our collective health—enjoyed majority support. Yet it simply could not be reconciled with the wellness industry’s own overarching message: that individuals must take charge over their own bodies as their primary sites of influence, control, and competitive edge. And that those who don’t exercise that control deserve what they get. Neoliberalism of the body, in distilled form.

XREF: Connects to broader critiques of neoliberalism's individual-responsibility framing versus collective welfare, as in discussions of health policy and wellness culture.

Writing in The New Yorker in April 2020, the Princeton historian Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor called Covid-19 “the Black Plague,” noting, “Thousands of white Americans have also died from the virus, but the pace at which African-Americans are dying has transformed this public health crisis into an object lesson in racial and class inequality.” That is not the lesson that many conspiratualist health influencers took away, however. On the contrary, the lesson they seem to have extracted from the race and class disparities of Covid’s early death toll was “This virus is going to kill people who do not look like me.”

XREF: Connects to broader patterns of conspiratorial readings of statistical disparities, and to racialized conspiracy theories generally. QUESTION: Worth pinning down exactly how influencers inverted Taylor's inequality framing into a threat narrative.

As the transnational extreme right—from Giorgia Meloni to Jair Bolsonaro—landed on anti-trans fearmongering as a powerful adhesive to bind together its Frankenstein of “inclusive nationalism,” many of the same people in the wellness world who railed against the unnaturalness of Covid vaccines have begun to speak more openly about the supposed naturalness of the gender binary, and of traditional family roles. Far from the unlikely bedfellows they first seemed to be, large parts of the modern wellness industry are proving to be all too compatible with far-right notions of natural hierarchies, genetic superiority, and disposable people.

First, the Nazis relaxed vaccination programs in Germany and actively opposed them in the lands they annexed precisely because they favored the die-off of non-Aryan populations. (“The Slavs are to work for us. Insofar as we don’t need them, they may die. Therefore compulsory vaccination and German health services are superfluous,” wrote Martin Bormann, Hitler’s chief of staff and the head of the Nazi Party, in 1942.) More to the point, vaccination programs that ask strong, healthy people to accept small inconveniences to protect themselves—as well as people who are sicker, older, and more medically vulnerable—are the precise opposite of biofascism.

XREF: Connects the moral/social logic of vaccination to historical biofascism, framing herd immunity as an explicitly anti-eugenic practice.

When we get vaccinated against diseases that pose a greater threat to other members of our communities than they do to us, we are saying that all people, no matter their bodily impairments or challenges, are of fundamentally equal value and have a right to equally access the public sphere and a good life. This is the principle at the heart of the disability justice movement, which, after decades of struggle, is thankfully encoded in some (though not enough) of the laws in most constitutional democracies. This struggle is the reason buildings have ramps and elevators, and the reason public schools are required to have accommodations for kids whose brains and bodies are atypical. But these victories are under constant assault because the idea that we should think and function as communities of enmeshed bodies with different needs and vulnerabilities flies in the face of a core message of neoliberal capitalism: that you are on your own and deserve your lot in life, for better or worse. And, relatedly, it also flies in the face of a core message of neoliberal wellness culture: that your body is your primary site of control and advantage in this cruel and polluted world. So get to work optimizing it!

XREF: Connects to critiques of wellness culture and individual responsibility narratives that blame personal failing for systemic hardship.

The disability justice advocate and author Beatrice Adler-Bolton refers to the mindset that has animated so much Covid denialism as “deaths pulled from the future”—which she defines as the judgment-laden posture that frames “deaths from Covid-19 as somehow preordained” because the people doing most of the dying were probably going to die prematurely anyway. Covid just moved up the timeline a few years, so what’s the big deal? And that’s at the moderate end of the spectrum—at the extreme, sandalwood-scented end, those deaths pulled from the future are actually welcomed. Like the yoga woman said, “I think those people should die.”

DEFINE: Introduces Beatrice Adler-Bolton's concept of 'deaths pulled from the future' as a key frame for understanding Covid denialist reasoning.

Which brings us to the Mirror World's most pipiked projection of all. From the very first ripples of Covid conspiracy theories to the tidal waves of lies that would go on to inundate us, one claim has recurred with more frequency than any other: that the plan behind all of this was to cull large parts of humanity. First, it was that the virus was a bioweapon designed by the Chinese to cull us; then it was Bill Gates, supposedly a closet eugenicist, who cooked up the virus to push the vaccine, which was the real mechanism to cull us. But who is actually engaging in behaviors that have contributed to a culling, to mass and unnecessary human sacrifice? 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.

XREF: Connects to the broader theme of the author's argument about the Mirror World and how conspiracy adherents' behaviors contradict their own claims.

The more difficult truth, though, is that this is a doppelganger story, and doppelganger stories are never only about them; they are always also about us. The literature is unequivocal. Jean Paul, the German writer credited with coining the term Doppelgänger in his three-volume 1796–97 novel Siebenkäs, defined it as meaning "Leute, die sich selber sehen" (people who see themselves).

DEFINE: Jean Paul coined Doppelgänger in 1796–97, defined as 'people who see themselves' — a useful working definition for the term.

The truth is that most of us could have done much more. … I couldn’t shake the feeling that unless something big shifted, this was only the beginning of a mass migration of minds.

SEED: Could become an essay angle exploring the systemic forces pushing thinkers out of institutional roles and what that portends for knowledge production.

What would we see if we, like the couple in that Pre-Raphaelite painting, met ourselves in the woods? I fear that many of us would also faint from fright. Because in mapping the contours of the Mirror World, I can’t avoid seeing that the mindset that is the poison at the heart of this strange and tragic chapter reaches well beyond the diagonalist axis. On this side of the glass, how much did we do to push our governments to keep mask mandates in place to protect the immunocompromised? Or to make clean, filtered indoor air a right in every workplace? Or to share the vaccines beyond our borders? In North America and Europe, our governments wanted us to get our second and third shots. What if we had refused until everyone in the world had their first ones? What bodies did we tacitly sacrifice by going with the flow? And how much did those of us who were lucky enough to work from home do to make sure that the workers we celebrated as "essential" were actually paid and protected as if they were essential? Did we fight for their right to organize, or did we keep ordering from Amazon simply because it was convenient? The truth is that most of us could have done much more.

QUESTION: The author implicates ordinary citizens alongside extremists — worth examining how complicity is distributed and whether this framing is fair.

And this, I think, is part of the challenge of pulling people back from the Mirror World: What is the alternative that is being offered on this side of the glass? Do we have a plan for a world without sacrificial people? And does that plan feel credible, rooted in action—or does it seem like more blah, blah, blah? Put another way, how do we convince people being seduced by fantasy that it is still possible to exert power to change reality in big and important ways?

QUESTION: What concrete real-world alternatives exist that feel as powerful and seductive as the Mirror World fantasy? This is the core unresolved question posed. SEED: Could frame an essay around 'the credible alternative' — how movements or communities offer people real agency versus empty rhetoric.

The election results bore out what we saw at the door: Trudeau, who had called a snap election because he was certain he could parlay Canada’s fight against Covid into a parliamentary majority, ended up exactly where he started: still the prime minister, but with a parliamentary minority. Avi managed to double the number of NDP votes in his district, but the Trudeau Liberals still held the seat (not a surprise). Meanwhile, the far-right People’s Party tripled its vote nationally. It could have been worse, but it wasn’t good.

One year later, the diagonal lines met again, reaching further this time—and closer to home. In October 2022, Vancouver had municipal elections and the city council, long in the hands of green-tinged, centrist progressives, suddenly flipped right, and with a nasty edge. Vancouver is the third most expensive city in North America, ahead of San Francisco and Los Angeles, and is also at the epicenter of the poisoned drug crisis. Rather than proposing solutions to the housing and drug emergencies, the winning slate of candidates riled up fear of the city’s unhoused and mentally ill, while promising to hire a hundred more police officers.

XREF: Echoes of similar rightward political shifts in high-cost cities where affordability and public-safety anxiety drive backlash against progressive incumbents.

December 2022 brought news of a foiled plot to overthrow the German government in a violent coup and reinstate the monarchy, a plan cooked up by a diagonalist coalition of heavily armed far-right extremists and conspiratorial fantasists who, like followers of Canada’s QAnon Queen, had convinced themselves that Germany’s current government was itself an illegitimate fantasy. The next month featured a failed insurrection in Brazil, with followers of defeated far-right president Jair Bolsonaro calling for a military coup as they stormed the houses of government. For weeks, Bannon and the War Room posse had been amplifying false claims that the Brazilian election had been rigged and that Lula was staging a Marxist takeover of the continent at the behest of the CCP.

XREF: Connects to the broader pattern of post-election violence in the US (Jan 6), Germany, and Brazil, suggesting a coordinated playbook among right-wing figures like Bannon.

As the strong men and well women have grown ever more entangled, and ever more ambitious in their goals, I have felt a mounting foreboding about what their cookie-cutter version of perfection will mean to the countless people who fall outside their embrace. I have also felt a more personal sense of menace. Because in this obsession with pure children and perfected bodies, I hear an unmistakable, if implicit, attack on my own child.

SEED: Could explore the cultural implications of narrow genetic/enhancement ideals on real families.

Because time marches on, even when you have fallen down a rabbit hole, T. turned ten recently; by the time these words enter the world, he will be eleven. From the start, I made a conscious decision in my work neither to describe raising a neurodivergent kid in any detail nor to discuss the merits of the labels that a doctor, who spent two hours with him, chose for him when he was four. A bit like a personal brand, defining T. in those ways would fix him at a single point in time and through the eyes of others. The decision about when (and if) to share his private world are T.'s to make.

There was a time when I was desperate to find these parents—to talk to someone, anyone, who might know what my family was going through. T. was born where we now live in British Columbia, but when he was a few months old, we moved to Toronto to be close to Avi's family and big-city services. Except it turned out that for kids like T., those services were extremely scarce. The doctor who diagnosed him warned us that the wait list to access government-covered therapy could be years long. He also said that early intervention was "critical." Kindergarten at our local public school nearly broke us: thirty kids in the class, five of them with developmental challenges; one teacher; and one amazing teaching assistant. The teacher went on health leave and never returned; the assistant became so stressed by the impossibility of her job that she transferred to another district. "I could have changed those five kids' lives," she told me later. "But not five plus the other twenty-five." There was one "autism team" serving hundreds of schools; they made it to T.'s class ten days before the end of the school year.

QUESTION: The data on wait lists and service scarcity sounds Canadian-specific — worth investigating current statistics on autism service wait times in BC and Ontario.

But as I went deeper, I also found something else: an industry of strange magical cures—under-the-table children's vitamin injections; extreme eliminationist diets; immersive around-the-clock therapy; sound waves and subliminal messages that promised to reprogram brains and reminded me of the research I did into the CIA's MKUltra experiments on psychiatric patients. Online, I found people who identified as Autism Warrior Parents because they were at "war" with the autism in their child; some coached one another on horrific "treatments," including getting their kids to drink chlorine dioxide, a bleach commonly used in pulp and paper mills. Several people told me that when they got the diagnosis, they quit their jobs and became their child's full-time therapists in applied behavior analysis, a system of rewards and punishments with a sinister history that once included electroshock and is still often administered in cruel ways designed to "extinguish" all signs of autistic difference in young children. "Aggressive early intervention is everything," one of these parents told me. "If you don't catch it early, it's too late."

QUESTION: How prevalent is the dangerous chlorine dioxide 'treatment' in autism communities, and what regulatory gaps allow its promotion?

Not long after the diagnosis, I was at the YMCA where I used to do ninety-minute yoga classes and now found myself standing on the edge of a cavernous gym watching T. drag around large foam blocks. I struck up a conversation with a defense lawyer I knew from a different stage of life. He had dark circles under his eyes and told me that his toddler had been diagnosed with autism. The child had been fine, he said, but after they got vaccinated, they changed, withdrew, regressed. It was definitely the vaccine, he told me. He recommended that I do my own research and then we could talk. Over the next few years, this man became one of the anti-vax movement's most prominent attorneys (and would go on, in the Covid era, to help lead the campaign against supposedly tyrannical health mandates).

XREF: Plausibly connects to narratives about how personal loss fuels conspiracy movements and single-issue activism.

I accepted a chair at Rutgers University in 2018 in part as a Hail Mary. Rutgers is known for its research into neurodiversity, and New Jersey is renowned for having some of the best accommodations for children like T. in its public schools. As a Canadian used to feeling some pride in our public health and education systems, it was a surprise to learn that the Americans with Disabilities Act and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act were significantly tougher tools than anything we had north of the border, and that parents in New Jersey had been using the hell out of them to push the local schools to provide meaningful access for their kids.

Within five minutes of arriving at Buddy Ball, I met a father who pressed a glossy brochure into my hand about the supposed link between vaccines and autism. He laid out his evidence, which amounted to a control group of two. His older child, he explained, was born abroad and was not vaccinated. That child is neurotypical. His youngest was born in the United States, was vaccinated, and is autistic. "So," he declared, "it's obvious it's the vaccines!"

Such is the power of what doctors refer to as the “vaccine-autism myth”—the viral narrative that insists that childhood immunizations for measles, mumps, and rubella, which children start getting after their first birthday, is the cause of autism. It’s a narrative that would, in many ways, lay the foundation for what would become the anti–Covid vaccine movement. The earlier claims rely on an entirely discredited paper suggesting that the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine may be associated with autism (and bowel disease), published in the prestigious British scientific journal The Lancet in 1998. Twelve years later, it was retracted by its publisher, who described the claims as “proven to be false.” Ten of the paper’s thirteen original coauthors had issued a note of retraction years earlier, in 2004, based on faulty “interpretation” of the study’s data. The main author, the gastroenterologist Andrew Wakefield, was banned from practicing medicine in Britain in light of undisclosed conflicts of interest and what Britain’s General Medical Council described as his “callous disregard” for the children in his study. … Yet almost a quarter century after Wakefield’s paper first appeared, and with no further evidence supporting the claim, the myth is more prevalent than ever. It continues to be spread by a global network of Facebook groups, YouTube channels, and slickly produced documentaries that do a fair job, for those untrained in reading scientific papers, of impersonating investigative journalism.

XREF: Connects to the broader trajectory of vaccine misinformation leading into the anti-Covid vaccine movement.

Their debunked claims have contributed to a resurgence of diseases including measles, which in 2000 was declared eliminated in the United States but has since returned with a vengeance. In 2019, the World Health Organization reported a global measles surge, “reaching [the] highest number of reported cases in 23 years” and taking 207,500 lives—a 50 percent increase in deaths in just three years.

XREF: Connects to the broader anti-vaccine movement and vaccine hesitancy being the direct driver of a preventable disease resurgence.

The blame for the spike in misinformation falsely claiming that vaccines cause autism is usually linked with the rise of social media, and the fact that junk vaccine science circulated there unchecked for years. Telling parents that children are being permanently disabled by routine vaccinations is certainly a sensational message, one seemingly made for the attention economy. But as with misinformation related to Covid, social media only intensified tendencies that were already present. 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.

XREF: Mirrors the book's broader argument about Covid misinformation — social media intensifying rather than originating false beliefs.

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. Children in need of protecting, keeping pure from all transgressors.

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?

QUESTION: This frames a deep moral question worth exploring: how does a society's answer about children's personhood shape its policy debates?

This same inability to see children as autonomous beings is part of the reason why, for so long, disabled children were hidden away in cruel institutions. If a double that reflects well on them is what many parents are after, then disability arrives as an unwelcome interruption to those best-laid plans. Or, in today's language, if your kid is your brand extension, then having a child who challenges social standards of normalcy might mean that your whole personal brand is in crisis.

XREF: Connects to wider discourse on parents seeing children as status objects or brand extensions, echoing critiques of modern parenting culture and body autonomy.

Many, many autistic children grow up in environments rife with physical confrontations like the one that occurred in Ellenby's article, or in homes that reject basic, peer-reviewed medical science, or with parents who demonstrate a complete and utter disregard for their autistic children's autonomy—and all of it is framed as love.

QUESTION: What does the Ellenby article refer to, and what physical confrontation is being cited? This may warrant context.

The most telling line in Ellenby's piece may be one in which she describes her son, having lost the pitched battle, sitting quietly in the auditorium. In these “precious moments,” she writes, he “is indistinguishable from his peers.” It is a direct echo of a notorious claim made by the psychologist credited with inventing applied behavior analysis (ABA), Ole Ivar Lovaas: in a 1987 article, he wrote that nearly half the children treated with his version of ABA became, according to their teachers, “indistinguishable from their normal friends.” … This is a terribly painful message to send to young people whose minds are different: that their very existence is a problem for others to solve, a disorder to cure, or at least to hide. Having a child who does not fit conventional definitions of normalcy, who is distinguishable from their peers, can be an extraordinary gift.

XREF: Connects to critical discourse on ABA therapy and the neurodiversity movement, similar to arguments in autistic self-advocacy literature. QUESTION: Worth investigating the empirical outcomes of ABA and whether the 'indistinguishable from peers' framing persists in modern therapy practice.

For some parents, this experience of not fitting, of being extremely and glaringly distinguishable, and not in ways that bestow status, clearly triggers deep fears about falling behind in the perfectibility race in this world of so many little mirrors.

Despite billions spent on autism research, we do not know why some brains are wired differently. We do have some answers, however, to the question of why there has been a dramatic increase in diagnosed cases of autism over the last two to three decades, to the point that the Autism and Developmental Disabilities Monitoring Network, a program funded by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, reports that 1 in every 44 eight-year-olds was diagnosed with autism in 2018, up from 1 in 150 in 2000. One answer is that the clinical definition of autism expanded significantly in the 1990s to include many neuroatypical people who would have previously been excluded. This, in turn, led to many more people deciding to get tested, which contributed to a spike in diagnoses and greater understanding of the different ways autism presents. More recently, doctors have gotten better at recognizing autism in girls, who tend to mask it better, and, to a lesser extent, in Black, Indigenous, and Latino boys, who still are too likely to be disciplined and/or written off as “troublemakers,” rather than be supported and accommodated for their neurodiversity. There may also be another important factor in the rising numbers. 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 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. Similarly, for new parents who are following willowy momfluencers to help them figure out how to perfect and optimize a new and daunting chapter in their lives, not getting their kids vaccinated is a way to feel in control of something that is, in fact, not in any of our control. Much like the promise of wellness itself.

QUESTION: Worth exploring the psychology of control-seeking in modern parenting decisions beyond vaccination.

The argument is now a ubiquitous one from the Covid era: I would rather have a virus that, despite its potential lethality to many, I have determined is nothing more than a bad cold for me and my healthy family. There is a reason that the measles and Covid arguments sound so similar: one was the prototype for the other. Long before Warrior Moms were going on Bannon's show to rail against Covid vaccines and critical race theory, McCarthy was out there on all the big shows, hawking her book Mother Warriors: A Nation of Parents Healing Autism Against All Odds.

XREF: Links anti-vaccine discourse across eras — connects to the broader history of Jenny McCarthy and Warrior Moms activism.

This is a key feature of the topography in the map of right now. Terror of having an autistic child, and of disability more generally, is part of what led us here. To quote the late free-market economist Milton Friedman, an old nemesis from my Shock Doctrine days, “the ideas” were “lying around,” ready for the right shock—so, too, were the digital informational pathways to carry those ideas far and wide. It was all at the ready: the skilled communicators; the gauzy appeals to the “natural”; the dodgy techniques to inflate self-reported, unverified claims of injuries and deaths from vaccines; the conspiracies about Big Pharma and Big Government colluding to wage war on otherwise healthy bodies; the quack cures involving bleach.

XREF: Connects to Naomi Klein's Shock Doctrine thesis about crisis opening windows for pre-existing ideas to take hold.

The reason Plandemic, the pseudoscientific documentary that did untold early damage, was able to be churned out so quickly is precisely because it was a remix of the anti-vax movement's preexisting claims. Many of the members of the Covid "Disinformation Dozen," meanwhile, had their anti-vax arguments ready and waiting because they had been making them for years about altogether other vaccines, and they knew exactly how to deploy them, often to convince desperate and scared parents that they would do better to buy whatever high-priced supplement/seminar/health regime they were selling.

XREF: Connects to broader pattern of how disinformation infrastructure pre-dates specific events and is quickly re-deployed opportunistically. SEED: Could support an article on how existing conspiracy networks act as reusable 'templates' that scale across different public health or political crises.

In this convergence of worlds, we can see more than a shared infrastructure of misinformation: there is also a shared worldview, a shared mindset, a shared way of seeing people as either normal or deviant, pure or tainted, successes or failures. And even, as in all doppelganger stories, real or impostors.

XREF: Connects to cognitive framing and binary thinking concepts from psychology and political rhetoric literature.

The person responsible for expanding the definition of autism, leading to a huge uptick in diagnoses, was the English child psychiatrist Lorna Wing. When she began her work in this area in the late 1950s, autism was considered such a rare, extreme, and debilitating condition that only two to four in ten thousand children received the diagnosis. The syndrome was first diagnosed in 1943 by the psychiatrist Leo Kanner and, according to his definition, autistic children, though "unquestionably endowed with good cognitive potentialities," lived in their own worlds, engaged in repetitive motions, became obsessed with objects, often had limited speech, and struggled to perform the basics of self-care.

DEFINE: Contrasts Kanner's original narrow 1943 definition of autism with Wing's later expansion, which is central to understanding how the diagnostic category evolved.

Wing knew that this definition was so narrow that it excluded many children who were neuroatypical and needed supports. So she developed the idea that autism was not a fixed set of symptoms, but a spectrum, presenting in a range of different ways depending on the individual, and could include people who are very verbal and physically capable. Her research eventually led to autism being diagnosed as a "spectrum disorder." To bolster her argument for a more expansive definition, she called attention to then-obscure writings by an Austrian pediatrician named Hans Asperger, who had done research into autism at the same time as Kanner, but in Vienna, including in the period when Austria was under Nazi control.

XREF: Connects to ongoing debates about neurodiversity, Asperger's Nazi-era history, and how diagnostic categories are socially constructed.

Wing, whose daughter was autistic, had a side interest in the way autistic people were portrayed in folktales, religion, and literature, long before there were medical terms of any kind to describe them. 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. 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.

SEED: Interesting angle: tracing the cultural prehistory of disability representation — how myth framed neurodivergence before medicine named it.

At the time of their telling, these stories were not viewed as fiction; most, including gruesome ones by the Brothers Grimm, purported to be true. Some parents, moreover, clearly understood them as how-to manuals for dealing with disabled or otherwise divergent children. D. L. Ashliman, a leading scholar of folk legends who has studied the origins and legacy of changeling mythology, writes that they were often based on actual events—sadistic ways that families, under the guidance of other community members, actually treated children with disabilities. “There is ample evidence,” he notes, “that these legendary accounts do not misrepresent or exaggerate the actual abuse of suspected changelings.”

XREF: Connects to the modern concern about stigmatization of neurodivergent children and how folklore has historically sanctioned exclusion. QUESTION: Worth investigating how similar folk rationalizations of child abuse operate in other cultures or eras.

Ashliman continues, "Stories with these fantasy endings provided hope, wish fulfillment, and escape to an era that was plagued with birth defects and debilitating infant diseases." Reading these accounts, I couldn't help thinking of my encounters with vaccine-scapegoating parents by the soccer field or at the Y. The stories they told me to explain their child's sudden strangeness conform almost precisely to that of the changeling: my child was perfect, normal, until an event (the vaccine) happened, and that event turned them into something else—a distorted, doppelganger version of themselves. To quote McCarthy again: "Boom—the soul's gone from his eyes."

SEED: The parallel between changeling folklore and modern vaccine-scapegoating narratives is a rich essay angle on how mythic archetypes recur in contemporary parental fears. XREF: Connects to cognitive bias research and folklore studies about how parents reframe unexpected child disability as external causation.

Steve Silberman, in his 2015 book Neurotribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity, writes that ever since autism diagnoses started increasing, "stories began to circulate on the Internet about babies that seemed to be developing normally until they received a routine immunization … Parents referred to their sons and daughters as having been kidnapped, as if a thief—dressed in a pediatrician's white coat—had stolen them away in the night."

XREF: Connects to the larger history of the vaccine-autism myth, including Wakefield, and how narrative framing (the 'kidnapped child') made the claim emotionally resonant beyond its scientific basis.

This is the chilling consequence of so many parents, coached by con artists of various stripes, deciding that their child's disability is not actually a part of them, but rather some outside malevolent force that invaded them. If disability is an invader, an outsider, a soul-stealer, then, as with a changeling, almost any cruelty can be justified as parents attempt to exorcise the invader and bring back the normal, perfect life they had pictured for themselves. Like the barely suppressed rage at people who are fat and less workout-obsessed in parts of the wellness world, this, too, is a deeply dangerous mindset, playing out inside the family, inflicted on the bodies and minds of vulnerable children. And it is bound up in another kind of doppelganger turn, this one afflicting whole societies, whose entire mood and personality can seem to flip under certain extreme circumstances. Places like Vienna.

In the early years of Nazi rule, a group of doctors in Austria became intensely interested in studying children who did not conform to the homogenous and supremacist version of the Aryan collective, the Volk, that was at the center of the supremacist project. There was a painful irony in this fact because, just a few years earlier, some of these same doctors had been part of a progressive flowering of child development in what was known as Red Vienna.

XREF: Connects to histories of how scientific institutions were co-opted by authoritarian regimes, parallel to similar dynamics in other totalitarian states.

At the core of this democratic socialist experiment was the radical new idea that children were not mere appendages of their parents, nor were their futures predestined by their class, nor should the goal of education be an indoctrination in obedience or the preparation of poor children for lives of servitude. Based on breakthroughs in the understanding of children's complex inner lives (this was Freud's hometown), Viennese policy makers adopted the belief that children had rights of their own and that the role of education was to unlock their full potential.

XREF: Connects to Freud's influence on policy, situating psychoanalysis outside the clinic and into institutional education reform.

This was where children who previously might have been warehoused in jail-like institutions, or met the lash of discipline to extinguish divergent behaviors, were referred for assessment, education, and treatment. There they encountered therapeutic approaches that were shockingly progressive for their time: a mix of music, art, nature, exercise, speech therapy, and games, along with the traditional school curricula. As Silberman documents in Neurotribes, when psychiatrists came from the United States to visit the clinic, they were stunned by the absence of the regimented testing and discipline that were the norm back home. Many young people in the clinic displayed characteristics the doctors described as “autistic”—from the Greek autos, meaning “self,” in the sense of being inwardly focused—and struggled with social norms. For years, however, the Vienna clinic rejected the idea of placing diagnostic labels on these children, or even classifying them as “abnormal.” The educators observed that many of the traits causing social difficulties had been present throughout history, expressing themselves through archetypes like the hyperfocused artist or the absent-minded professor, and so did not need to be treated as diseases. Instead, in keeping with Red Vienna’s ethos of child-centered policy, the educators simply saw these behaviors as different ways of being human and developed tailored supports for the children in their care.

DEFINE: Autistic derives from Greek autos, meaning 'self,' referring to inward focus.

By the early 1930s, with the Social Democratic Workers’ Party having held power in Vienna for over a decade, fascist forces were gaining ground in the Austrian countryside. In 1933, those forces eventually seized power and quickly moved to ban rival political parties as well as trade unions. Many fought back to defend the gains of Red Vienna, but after a brief civil war, the Austrofascists took the city. By May 1934, the entire country was under the control of the Fatherland Front and, four years later, Austria was annexed to Nazi Germany. Red Vienna’s era of progressive experimentation was definitively over. Socialist leaders, many of them Jewish, fled into exile. Some who stayed, including the utopian theorist of liberated childhood Otto Felix Kanitz, would eventually be murdered in Nazi death camps.

In Vienna, the Nazis did not exactly abolish all the socialist childand family-focused programs and policies—rather, they flipped them, turning them into their sinister doppelgangers. Programs that had universally supported mothers and children, including many Jewish refugees, were repurposed to provide support and care to Aryan mothers and children exclusively—part of the central Nazi mission of building a master race. Kamatovic explains that “‘family welfare’ under the Nazis was reformulated into a system of racialized welfare.” Red Vienna’s programs designed to better understand and support children with social and developmental challenges were instead turned into diagnosis machines, places where doctors sorted out those who were considered useful to the Nazi project from those who were, in the party’s parlance, “unworthy of life.”

XREF: Connects to the pattern of fascist regimes coopting the infrastructure and machinery of their predecessors rather than destroying them outright — echoes of Soviet repurposing of tsarist institutions and fascist Italy's reuse of prior systems.

Well before they began killing Jews on an industrial scale in the death camps, the Nazis practiced and refined their methods on the disabled in asylums. In a euthanasia program known as Aktion T4, which officially began in 1939, upwards of 200,000 disabled people were murdered. Some died in the Reich’s first gas chambers; many more were likely killed in acts of “wild euthanasia” performed by medical professionals who took it upon themselves to carry out the Nazi principle that care of the disabled was too great a financial strain for a country at war. Bodies were thrown into mass graves or incinerated. For the most part, families were told that their relatives had died of infectious disease.

XREF: Connects to histories of medicalized mass killing and the eugenics ideology predating the Holocaust. QUESTION: Worth tracing how Aktion T4 personnel and gas chamber technology later transferred to the death camps.

In Vienna, almost eight hundred murders took place at the prominent children’s clinic Am Spiegelgrund, where the atrocities continued even after death, with hundreds of children’s brains preserved in jars of formaldehyde and used for experimentation. Research based on slides of victims’ remains at Am Spiegelgrund continued long after the war, ending only in the 1980s.

QUESTION: Who conducted the postwar research on these slides for decades, and how was this uncovered and finally stopped in the 1980s?

One person who benefited from Austria's doppelganger flip was Hans Asperger, a young doctor who was appointed as director of the famed Heilpädagogik clinic where so many young people with autism and other developmental challenges had been treated. He had come up as a medical student in the idealistic heyday of Red Vienna and worked alongside Jewish psychiatrists like Georg Frankl, who helped develop progressive theories that we would now recognize as central to the understanding of neurodiversity—the idea that brains are wired in a range of ways and difference need not be equated with pathology. Up until the year before the Germans annexed Austria, Asperger echoed this analysis, writing of his young patients displaying autistic traits that they could not be neatly categorized under a diagnosis. "There are as many approaches [to child development] as there are different personalities. It is impossible to establish a rigid set of criteria for a diagnosis," he wrote in 1937. His view changed dramatically within months, as Asperger began to echo the Nazis' eugenicist discourse, now writing of the need to avoid "transmission of diseased hereditary material." Kids showing autistic traits that he had previously said defied diagnosis were recast as a "well-characterized group of children," whom he named "autistic psychopaths."

XREF: Connects to how institutions and ideology shape medical classification — relevant to the broader story of how autism diagnoses were constructed and weaponized. QUESTION: Did Asperger's reversal reflect genuine belief or survival pragmatism under Nazi rule?

The diagnosis itself was imbued with Nazi ideology, under which every individual's value was measured, as Sheffer outlines, by their Gemüt—a tricky, hard-to-translate concept that referred, in this era, to a person's sense of group bonding within the broader Volk, the Aryan collective that was being engineered and militarized by the Nazi state. People with autism—because their gaze is inward rather than outward, and because many struggle to read social cues and tend to focus less on social approval than others do—had, according to Asperger, "poverty of Gemüt." They would not make good group players in the Volk. Most, he wrote, had no social value whatsoever: they would grow up to "roam the streets as 'originals,' grotesque and dilapidated, talking loudly to themselves or unconcernedly to passers-by." A small subset, however, who he called his "little professors," could play exceptional roles. In 1941, with the Nazis still solidly in control, he wrote, "We know how many of our former children, including very difficult cases, entirely fulfill their duties in their professions, in the armed forces, and in the [Nazi] party, not a few among them in eminent positions. This is how we know that the success of our work is worth the effort."

DEFINE: Gemüt is defined as a person's sense of group bonding within the Nazi-engineered Aryan collective.

With the euthanasia program already murdering disabled people on a mass scale, he was effectively saying that most autistic people deserved to die—but the few who showed a special capacity for focus could be put to use by the Nazi Party (perhaps by becoming code breakers, or some other hyperconcentrated part of the fascist project). Recent research has shown that Asperger signed papers for children as young as two years old to go to the clinic Am Spiegelgrund, where they would be killed. Asperger, in other words, was a key node in the system of sorting who would live and who would be murdered, an apparatus that would soon be expanded into a murder machinery capable of killing millions of people who did not fit the Aryan ideal in other ways.

XREF: Connects to the broader literature reassessing Asperger's role in Nazi Germany, which counters the earlier heroic narrative of him as a protector of autistic children.

For Sheffer, this taints not only the diagnosis of Asperger's syndrome but also, potentially, the much broader autism spectrum diagnosis that Asperger did so much to shape. Based on these writings, it clearly had far less to do with medical science than with fascist thought: the Nazis required submission to a supremacist groupthink in order to build the Aryan race. 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.

XREF: Connects to broader criticisms of psychiatric/diagnostic frameworks as socially and politically constructed rather than purely scientific.

Asperger's jarring career trajectory demonstrates that, in just a handful of years, the same institutions and some of the very same people can shift from an ethos of care and curiosity toward a vulnerable group to one of callousness and genocidal cleansing. As if a switch has been flipped.

DEFINE: The 'flipped switch' metaphor helps conceptualize how institutional ethos can shift abruptly within years, not gradually over generations.

Philip Roth has plenty to offer here as well. Operation Shylock, despite all the surface-level ridiculousness, ends up concerned with these broader and far more serious forms of doubling. The book is set in 1988 and unfolds against the backdrop of the real-world trial of John Demjanjuk, a Ukrainian-born autoworker in Cleveland, Ohio, who was arrested, extradited to Israel, and accused of being Ivan the Terrible, the notoriously sadistic Treblinka gas chamber guard who delighted in causing maximum suffering as he gassed hundreds of Jewish captives at a time. As I read the book, the realization slowly dawned on me that Roth's seemingly silly doppelganger caper is actually just a device to lead us into this more consequential territory.

XREF: Connects to broader theories about literary doppelgangers and how surface humor can scaffold weighty subject matter.

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."

Asperger, too, maintained two seemingly divergent personalities—the man who patiently watched and drew up sensitive, humane profiles of his fascinating "little professors," making the case for their right to live, and the man who callously signed transfer orders for less verbal, less conventionally charming children. For Sheffer, the "double-sided character of Asperger's actions underscores the double-sided character of Nazism as a whole"—a system that committed depraved atrocities in the name of collective health and wellness.

XREF: The dual nature of Nazi perpetrators echoes Hannah Arendt's banality of evil and broader scholarship on ordinary people committing atrocities. Also connects to the wider historical debate about Asperger's complicity set against his sympathetic patient profiles.

The dual nature of Asperger's character now haunts the autism literature: Was he Jekyll or Hyde? Savior or Nazi? Light or shadow? The scholars continue to debate the point, but there is no need to choose: he can be both that and this; they are not in conflict. The autistic scholar Anna de Hooge writes this of the two faces of Asperger, the man whose name branded many people like her, until "Asperger's syndrome" was struck from the diagnostic manuals: "I am interested in the underlying ideology that made him decide which children were to be saved, and which were to be sent off to Spiegelgrund. What is more, I am interested in the way this ideology lives on."

QUESTION: What was his underlying ideology that determined which children he saved versus condemned to Spiegelgrund? The quote points to this unresolved question.

I can attest, though, that the vaccine misinformation industry is preying upon real suffering. Families of children with developmental disabilities live in the same world that we all do—the one that is very generous with diagnoses and awfully stingy with actual help. The one where talking about building palaces for poor children as a means of tearing down prison walls would reliably get you laughed out of any room where self-styled serious people gather. Caring for a child with severe disabilities can easily lead to bankruptcy, despite “good” health insurance. And even in places where the disability justice movement has won robust supports for school-age kids, many of those programs dry up as soon as children become young adults.

SEED: Angle: the systemic failures that drive desperate parents into vaccine misinformation — a compassion-first examination of the supply vacuum behind a demand for false answers.

Even in those schools that have been forced to step up—which are overwhelmingly in whiter, wealthier districts where parents can afford to sue—the dominant teaching method is still ABA, often executed as a system of candies and consequences not unlike dog training. In New Jersey, after I got over my initial euphoria that we were no longer dealing with straight-up neglect in the school system, I often had the distinct feeling that the atypical kids were being hived away in special classes and bombarded with ABA training less to support their needs and more to show impressive results on the tests that never stopped coming. Those tests formed the basis for school rankings, which formed the basis for property values, which formed the basis for property taxes, which funded the schools. And from the moment the diagnosis process begins, children are put into a matrix of normalcy and deviance.

Oh. I had never thought to notice. But that raised another question: Did I want him to mirror? If so, mirror whom? Me? Other kids? Cartoon characters? Isn’t the reflexive impulse to copy what everyone else is doing part of what has landed us in such a mess? Sure, it would make life easier. But is it so bad to have a few kids in the mix who are tuned in to their own inner music?

SEED: Could be an essay angle on the social value of non-conformists, and how education systems might preserve individuality. QUESTION: Is mirroring actually the root of societal messes, or a too-simple causal attribution worth probing?

So much of my family’s experience with disability has been a conflict with the mindsets that seek to name, cure, and control. But there are—as always—other mindsets available, which is what we discovered, to our surprise, when we moved to the rock. In truth, it’s the reason we have stayed. At first, I was sure that sending T. to regular school in the country, without the fancy supports we had in New Jersey, would be a disaster. It turned out to be the best experience of his young life, and for a simple reason: there is very little pushing, measuring, or testing.

XREF: Connects to broader critiques of standardization and measurement in education, and neurodiversity paradigms that oppose pathologizing frameworks.

I have had several such experiences, usually while waiting in line, and they always go the same way: first comes the friendliness of the neuroatypical person, piercing through my little bubble of public isolation (usually involving headphones), then the shame and panic of the parent or grandparent, and finally the relief at having permission not to feel those painful emotions about someone they love, finding a little safe harbor in a never-ending storm.

XREF: Connects to literature on stigma, disclosure, and the caregiver burden experienced by parents of neurodivergent children.

I know something of how they feel. When I was a teenager, my mother had a severe stroke and permanently lost many of her physical abilities, and some of her cognitive ones. As her caregiver, I learned quickly about our world of carelessness and grew to recognize the looks of disgust and impatience from people who clearly believed that disability should be hidden away. Even so, I carried my own shame and was not always able to see the beauty in the different ways that human brains and bodies meet and interact with the world.

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.

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 some very interesting places when he is older—but rules that he alone could decode.

I also deliberated over sharing that story about that very proud father, which may be painfully recognizable to him. Does he deserve that, as someone probably just a little too eager to impress a new acquaintance? Maybe not. Still, his attitude is worth considering, I think, because, unlike so much else I have been writing, it is not about the ludicrous goings on in the Mirror World. It's about what goes on in circles that pride themselves on reason and humanism and listening to the science, and caring for the less fortunate—circles that define themselves as not being like them.

XREF: Echoes the irony that rational, humanist communities exhibit the same status-seeking and pride they critique in others.

The world is spiraling out of control, they will tell themselves. Surely my kids deserve a competitive edge. Or as Bill McKibben said to me recently, “Instead of figuring out how to have a world where everyone can thrive, they want their kids to thrive in a world that is falling apart.”

This is what unsettles me most about the race for perfection at work in the interlocking worlds of wellness and parenting: the pervasive structural unwellness from which the hyperwell and insistently perfect are so clearly fleeing. The unwellness that is all around. At bottom, I suspect that much of the mirroring and doubling we are seeing comes down to who and what we cannot bear to see, to really look at—in our midst, in our past, and in the tumultuous future racing toward us. There are many different ways to try to outrun our shadows. Succumbing to conspiracy worlds is only one of them. And it was toward a confrontation with those shadows that this mapping was taking me, inexorably, next.

DEFINE: Frames the author's core thesis: the hyperwell and perfectionist behaviors are flight responses to surrounding structural unwellness, not genuine achievement. SEED: Could yield an essay tracing wellness culture and intensive parenting as parallel escapes from systemic discomfort, ending in a confrontation with what we refuse to see.

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.

From the researcher's perspective, the differences between the genres should be glaring. Responsible investigators follow a set of shared standards: doubleand triple-source, verify leaked documents, cite peer-reviewed studies, come clean about uncertainties, share sections of text with recognized experts to make sure technical terms and research methods are correctly understood, have fact-checkers comb through it all prepublication, then hand it all over to a libel lawyer (or in the case of my books, multiple lawyers in different territories). It's a slow, expensive, careful process, but it gets us as close as we know how to something we all used to agree was proof that something was true.

Like the clutch of professional climate-change deniers who claim to "debunk" the avalanche of scientific evidence that the planet is warming by deploying entirely decontextualized temperature charts, along with outdated data and a steady flow of complex scientific terms, Wolf also engages in what we might think of as a pipiking of the science. She peppers her comments with medical terms that she abuses with abandon, rattling on about "lipid nanoparticles" and "spike proteins" and the "blood-brain barrier" so quickly and incomprehensibly that even Steve Bannon has to beg her, "Slow down! Slow down!"

SEED: A potential article: how pseudo-experts weaponize technical vocabulary as a rhetorical tactic distinct from genuine argument.

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.

DEFINE: The distinction between real scandals (corporate profiteering, vaccine apartheid between rich and poor countries) and fabricated plots (internment camps, inside jobs) is the core conceptual contrast.

“Pattern recognition” is often how I describe the work of my life. I remember the moment, a true click, when I realized there was a connection between the increasing precarity of work, the consolidation of ownership in key industries, and the exponential increases in marketing budgets that characterized the hollow corporate structures of the first lifestyle brands. It wasn’t a master plan that a cabal had cooked up, but there was a flow, a pattern, that wove seemingly disparate trends into a logical story about a new iteration of capitalism.

DEFINE: The author defines 'pattern recognition' as the intellectual method underlying her work, framing it as a connective insight rather than a plotting cabal.

Many people have said they found the book enraging, but his response was very different. He wrote that, for him, the book “provokes and instills a calm.” When people and societies enter into a state of shock, they lose their identities and their footing, he observed. “Hence, calm is a form of resistance.”

Calm is not a replacement for righteous rage or fury at injustice, both of which are powerful drivers for necessary change. But calm is the precondition for focus, for the capacity to prioritize. If shock induced a loss of identity, then calm is the condition under which we return to ourselves. … The information is almost always distressing and, to many, shocking—but in my view, the goal should never be to put readers into a state of shock. It should be to pull them out of it.

XREF: Connects to writing craft discussions about the ethics of provoking emotional responses in readers versus facilitating clarity.

After immersing myself in the words and actions of my doppelganger through this protracted period, I am struck that she seems to have a very different goal. 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.”

QUESTION: What is the rhetorical function of fear-based framing in vaccine opposition? Does framing anti-vaccine positions around terror rather than evidence reflect a distinct epistemic strategy worth unpacking?

“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.

SEED: Potential essay on how exaggerated 'worst-case' rhetoric reveals underlying psychological drivers, a phenomenon visible across public-health debates.

When radical and anti-establishment writers and scholars attempt to analyze the underlying systems that built and uphold power in our world, including the proven existence of covert operations to eliminate threats to those systems, it is common for them to be dismissed as conspiracy theorists. In truth, it is one of the most battle-worn tactics used to bury and marginalize ideas that are inconvenient to those who wield economic and political power, or who feel personally attacked by anti-corporate, anti-capitalist, or anti-racist analyses because the critiques implicate them. Every serious left-wing analyst of power has faced this smear, from Marx onward.

For me, the reason to study and read and write about economic and social systems, and to attempt to identify their underlying patterns, is precisely because it is stabilizing. This kind of system-based work is akin to laying a strong foundation for a building: once it is in place, everything that follows will be sturdier; without it, nothing will be safe from a strong gust of wind. Yes, our world is still confusing after we understand this—but it is not incomprehensible. There are always systemic forces at play, and a great many of them have to do with the core capitalist imperative to expand and grow by seeking out new frontiers to enclose.

That imperative certainly explains a lot about the kinds of doubling discussed so far. The accelerated need for growth has made our economic lives more precarious, leading to the drive to brand and commodify our identities, to optimize our selves, our bodies, and our kids. That same imperative set the rules (or lack thereof) that allowed a group of profoundly underwhelming tech bros to take over our entire information ecology and build a new economy off our attention and outrage.

There is, of course, a difference between a system doing what it was designed to do, no matter the human costs, and secret cabals of nefarious individuals interfering with an otherwise fair and just democracy. That, I have always believed, is one of the core reasons for the left to exist: to provide a structural analysis of wealth and power that brings order and rigor to the prevailing (and correct) sense that society is rigged against the majority, and that important truths are being hidden behind pat political rhetoric. Because we cannot change what we do not understand. 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.

But playing on those insecurities does not constitute a plot to keep us down, as Wolf was suggesting—it's just an example of plain old capitalism doing its thing, finding new and novel ways to commodify every aspect of life.

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.” This is a crucial point: conspiracy culture does not challenge the hyper-individualism that is at the heart of so many crises reaching their breaking points. Instead, it mirrors it, putting all the blame for society’s ills on singularly powerful individuals: Fauci. Gates. Schwab. Soros.

XREF: Connects to critiques of hyper-individualism and structural analysis across political theory.

Wolf claims that Covid health measures convinced her to believe in the existence of a satanic evil. It’s unfortunate that it didn’t persuade her to lose some of her faith in capitalism.

XREF: Connects to a broader theme of conspiracy theorists projecting religious/moral categories onto public health measures.

We who live in settler colonial states like the United States, Canada, and Australia have, for the most part, never truly reckoned with the fact that our nations exist only because of the twin thefts of stolen land and stolen people, that slavery and genocide were the bloody subsidies that allowed colonists, many of whom were themselves in debt peonage, to engage in their self-making adventures. And neither have the European nations that launched those colonial crusades in the first place.

QUESTION: What would genuine reckoning with this foundational theft actually require of citizens and institutions?

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.

XREF: Connects to critiques of neoliberalism since Thatcher and Reagan, and to other work on the collapse of civic trust and the 'mirror world' framing.

Our governments didn't do nearly as much as they could have and should have to build a true infrastructure of care and solidarity during the pandemic—not compared with what we know is possible from the New Deal and the World War II mobilizations of the home front. Still, the period when many governments paid people to stay home, and offered Covid testing and vaccination for free, represented an extreme and historic deviation from every major public policy trend of the last half century, which has been a headlong flight from the very notion that we owe one another anything by right of our shared humanity. They had no choice: without these measures, millions more would have died needlessly and entire economies would have crashed.

SEED: Possible article angle: framing pandemic-era programs as an inadvertent experiment proving that universal care policies are administratively possible — and asking why they were abandoned after.

It is worth remembering that it took decades to desocialize people to accept neoliberalism's cruelties. Anti-Black racism and anti-migrant hysteria played powerfully enabling roles, with a steady stream of politicians and media titans equating social programs designed to help everyone in need with Black "welfare queens," "super predators," and "illegals." There is no need to rehash the 1980s and '90s yet again. But in mapping the contours and happenings of the Mirror World, we do need to understand this: the legacy of generations of messages that pitted members of society against one another does not disappear overnight simply because there is a pandemic. And yet, strangely enough, when Covid hit, that was precisely the expectation among most centrist politicians. Which was itself a form of magical thinking.

With no warning, the message from much of our political and corporate classes changed diametrically. It turned out we were a society after all, that the young and healthy should make sacrifices for the old and ill; that we should wear masks as an act of solidarity with them, if not for ourselves; and that we all should applaud and thank the very people—many of them Black, many of them women, many of them born in poorer countries—whose lives and labor had been most systematically devalued, discounted, and demeaned before the pandemic.

XREF: Relates to the striking reversal in civic rhetoric during early COVID — the sudden embrace of solidarity and sacrifice after decades of individualistic messaging. Echoes similar ironic dynamics in the 2008 financial crisis or wartime discourse.

Those expressions of solidarity were the real vertigo, the real upside-down world, since they bore no resemblance to the ways capitalism had taught us to unsee and neglect one another for so very long. Looking back now, it seems entirely unsurprising that a subset of the population said, Fuck you: we won't mask or jab or stay home to protect people we have already chosen not to see. It also makes perfect sense that the vaccines being free worked against them for many people—especially in the United States, a country that treats health care as a profit center and where many have come to equate good medicine with “gold-plated” private insurance plans. As Kevin Newman, a thirty-one-year-old estate agent in Arkansas reasoned, “If Covid was really serious, we'd have to pay for the vaccine. Everything else is expensive so why are they giving it out for free? It's suspicious.”

XREF: Connects to research on trust in institutions and how economic context shapes public health compliance.

It is notable also that the Covid protests took aim at symbols of collective action including, in both Italy and Australia, trade union headquarters, which were attacked and ransacked by diagonalist demonstrators. “FREEDOM,” they bellowed in the streets. That empty, heavy word. Freedom to do what? Protests usually are expressions of collective power, based on the core principle that we are stronger when united. But this was something different: a temporary conglomeration of atomized individuals who saw anything collective as the enemy, set against their individual bodies and their individual families. It was, in a way, a revolt against connectedness, a howl against the lessons the virus had taught us all so jarringly: that we share the same air with people we don't know, the same hospitals, the same biome. That we are enmeshed with one another, like it or not. No, the demonstrators were saying, we are individual islands, shaped with our own hands alone; we answer to no one.

XREF: Connects to broader analysis of pandemic-era individualist backlash and populist anti-collectivism across Western democracies.

None of this should have come as a shock. What is surprising, and frankly heartening, is that, after decades of frontal attacks on the idea that we live in a society, a critical mass of us had held on to enough of a civic and community spirit that we went along with these new rules for the better part of two years, and, moreover, that so many of us rejoiced at the sudden apparition of a social state. Yes, when our governments abandoned their Covid policies, we lapsed back to the crisis called “normal”—but for a time, we glimpsed another world, another kind of collective flip.

QUESTION: What conditions made this civic spirit persist despite decades of individualism? Could it recur?

Understanding how capitalism in its latest stage shapes and distorts our world can offer some stability. It does not, however, preclude the presence of real-world, provable conspiracies. If we define “conspiracy” as an agreement among members of a group to pull off some kind of nefarious plot in the shadows, then representatives of capital—in government and the corporate sector—engage in conspiracies as a matter of course. There most certainly was a CIA-backed conspiracy in the early 1970s to overthrow the democratically elected socialist president of Chile, Salvador Allende, after he nationalized the copper mines, as there was in 1953 to overthrow Iran's prime minister, Mohammad Mosaddegh, after he moved to nationalize the oil company that would become British Petroleum.

XREF: Connects to the broader framing about capitalism's distorting effects, and these coups are textbook examples cited across political economy and history.

In The Shock Doctrine I told a counterhistory of the rise of neoliberalism through many such well-documented plots, and I have no doubt that there are other conspiracies that have managed to stay secret. We also know of many contemporary examples of powerful people conspiring against the public. The poisoned water system in Flint, Michigan, was covered up by state officials year after year. British Petroleum and Halliburton cut corners in the operation of the Deepwater Horizon offshore drilling rig, and the result was the largest accidental oil spill in history in the Gulf of Mexico, with the companies scrambling to cover up the full extent of the damage. Volkswagen ran a conspiracy for years to cover up how much polluting carbon its diesel vehicles were emitting (the cars were programmed to fool the testers). Most consequentially, Exxon and several other oil majors ran a conspiracy to spread doubt and confusion about the reality of climate change for decades, taking a page from the tobacco giants.

XREF: Connects to The Shock Doctrine and the tobacco industry playbook of manufacturing doubt about scientific consensus.

In The Wealth of Nations, published in 1776, Adam Smith wrote, “People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.” 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.

DEFINE: Explains Mark Fisher's concept that 'conspiracies' are often just ruling-class mutual support. XREF: Connects to Adam Smith's original observation about tradesmen conspiring to raise prices, showing a through-line in economic thought.

These kinds of conspiracies are real—and there are other conspiracies that are also real and distinctly seedier than those hatched in antiseptic boardrooms in New York and London to rig prices or fool regulators or sabotage a newly elected socialist government in the Global South. That’s because the surface layers of markets that middle-class people in wealthy parts of the planet engage with directly—brightly lit grocery stores and gas stations, sleek websites and dull offices—are not the whole story of capitalism; they are its storefront. All of these operations require a level of extraction from their workers, shoppers, and users, but they also sit on top of more hidden parts of the supply chain, zones of hyper-exploitation, human containment, and ecosystem poisoning that are not glitches in the system but have always been integral parts of what makes our world run.

XREF: Connects to work on supply chains, global inequality, and critiques of consumer-facing capitalism showing only the 'storefront.' FICTION: The metaphor of capitalism's storefront versus its hidden engine room could structure a narrative revealing the underbelly behind everyday purchases.

For the purposes of this map, we can call them the Shadow Lands. They are the mangled and dense understory of our supposedly frictionless global economy. Decades of wringing out every possible efficiency means that each link in the chain—the mines and industrial farms where raw materials are extracted; the factories and slaughterhouses that turn those inputs into parts and finished products; the trains and ships that carry them across continents and oceans; the warehouses that sort and store them to be ready at the click of a cursor; the trucks and cars that deliver them when the click arrives; the mountains of waste and poisoned waterways where the detritus from each stage ends up; the glimmering playgrounds where the ultrarich enjoy their spoils—carries a distinct yet numbingly familiar story of depredation.

SEED: Could seed an article tracking how a single consumer product traces through each 'Shadow Lands' layer — mining, manufacturing, shipping, waste — to make efficiency's hidden costs vivid.

What is shocking is less the stories themselves than the fact that they no longer seem to provoke much shock at all. A quarter of a century after I published No Logo, we seem to take it for granted that a piece of fast fashion worn by a young woman in New York or London or Toronto means that other young women have to risk being incinerated in their garment factories in Dhaka, Bangladesh.

XREF: Ties to Naomi Klein's earlier No Logo and the broader conversation about the numbing of moral outrage over supply-chain exploitation.

These, moreover, are the lucky denizens of the Shadow Lands, the relative winners. They have jobs that allow them to send money home to their families, or to pay for a few extras in prison. Countless others have been pushed into even more shadowy corners of our world—immigration detention facilities and holding zones, or boats that won't make it through a mild storm, or tent cities that grow in our gleaming cities as real estate becomes the site of ever more profitable speculation. Frictionlessness is the great promise of our age. But friction doesn't disappear just because we don't see it—it is simply displaced onto these lives of pure friction, in the Shadow Lands.

This dimness, too, is linked to real conspiracies. Not only are basic working and living conditions painfully difficult, but because they are deliberately kept in the shadows, to preserve the illusions of modernity, they also routinely tip into extreme sadism—the Shadow Lands are places where physical and sexual abuses committed by supervisors and guards and soldiers are routine. These abuses are built in because the lives of the people most affected—poor, undocumented, legally precarious, overwhelmingly Black and Brown—have already been discounted. Abuse thrives in the Shadow Lands because it can. And this, in turn, requires conspiratorial cover-ups to protect the perpetrators and to protect consumers who conspire to keep ourselves ignorant and innocent as we stroll through the more brightly lit parts of the supply chain.

XREF: Connects to other analyses of how legal precarity and invisibility enable exploitation in shadow economies and informal labor markets.

The problem is no longer that we do not know these weighty truths—it is that too many of us do not know how to know them. We all know that our world sits on top of the Shadow Lands. But what do we do with that knowledge? Where does it go? Where is the outrage and shame and sadness diverted?

The conspiracy theories swirling about the Great Reset may well be a case in point. When they started showing up at the early anti-lockdown protests, they were presented as if a great secret was being revealed. What was strange, though, was that the Great Reset wasn't hidden—it was a branding campaign that the World Economic Forum had kicked off to repackage many of the ideas it has long advanced: biometric IDs, 3D printing, corporate green energy, the sharing economy. All were hastily positioned as a blueprint for reviving the global economy post-pandemic by "seeking a better form of capitalism." Through a series of videos, the Great Reset brought together heads of transnational oil giants to opine about the urgent need to tackle climate change, as well as politicians pledging to "build back better" and bring about a "fairer, greener, healthier planet." It was standard-issue Davos fare—arrogant, to be sure, and many parts were actively dangerous. But there was nothing new or hidden about it.

XREF: Relates to literature on conspiracy theory formation and how audiences misread public branding as hidden agenda.

Yet over and over again, journalists and politicians on the right, and "independent researchers" on the left, acted as if they had uncovered a conspiracy that wily elites were trying to hide from them. If so, it was the first conspiracy with its own marketing agency and explainer videos.

XREF: Connects to discussions of manufactured outrage and how supposedly hidden conspiracies are actively marketed to audiences, complicating the notion of secret knowledge.

What is this strange drive to reveal the nonhidden? Maybe it's that, in liberal democracies that still pay lip service to social equality (or at least “equity”), there is something profoundly unsatisfying about how open our global elites are about the power they believe they have a right to wield over the rest of us. The mechanics of oligarchy are not hidden; they are flaunted with a level of pride that actively humiliates their spectators.

DEFINE: Reframes oligarchy not as concealed but as openly displayed power, challenging the assumption that elites hide their dominance.

Knowing that this kind of unmasked plutocracy can take root in democratic societies without so much as an effort to hide it is like being forced to watch your spouse cheat on you when that is not your kink. Maybe we should see conspiracy culture—with its theater of uncovering things that are not hidden—as some sort of twisted lunge for self-respect.

XREF: Connects to theories of conspiracy culture as status grievance rather than pure ignorance (e.g., Hofstadter, contemporary political polarization literature). SEED: An essay angle: reframing conspiracy belief as a psychological coping mechanism against visible elite impunity rather than epistemological failure.

At the heart of that conspiracy theory is a sensational fantasy of justice—the “great storm” or “great awakening” when the “white hats” suddenly arrest all the evildoing pedophiles and satanists and thieves and send them to Gitmo. It's touchingly naïve, since, as Mark Fisher put it, “Does anyone really think, for instance, that things would improve if we replaced the whole managerial and banking class with a whole new set of ('better') people?” But you know what? I get the appeal.

It's pipikism in the extreme to hear MAGA Republicans describe the various show trials underway in the House as a new “Church Committee”—a reference to the Senate select committee convened in 1975, and chaired by Democratic senator Frank Church, to investigate some of the intelligence world's most notorious dirty tricks at home and abroad. But what did Democrats do, when they controlled the House, to investigate the ways that intelligence agencies have cooperated with tech giants to invade privacy and surveil us in countless ways? Or to pardon whistleblowers like Snowden? Have we given up on justice on this scale? If so, we can hardly be surprised to see the impulse resurface, in warped form, in the Mirror World. A vacuum has been created, and if my doppelganger has taught me anything, it is that vacuums tend to get filled.

XREF: Connects to the Mirror World/doppelganger metaphor threaded throughout the book — political vacuums get filled by distorted mirror ideals.

The South Korean director Bong Joon-ho works with a similar under/over shadow world in his 2019 film, Parasite, with the working class, treated like bugs in their subterranean lairs, coming upstairs to occupy the gilded lives of the rich they are tired of serving. This is more than Upstairs, Downstairs; it's a metaphor for all the Shadow Lands of capitalism and imperialism: the teens in sweatshops in China, the kids in cobalt mines in Congo, the oil wars that fill our tanks, the migrants left to drown to protect the fantasy of a fortressed Europe. And now we can add the billions denied one shot of a Covid vaccine while those living in wealthy countries lined up for their third and fourth booster (that is, if they weren't squandering their privileges with manufactured threats of "tyranny").

SEED: A compelling essay angle: unpick how cinema's class metaphors (Parasite, Upstairs/Downstairs) extend to global extraction economies and vaccine inequity.

In the relatively wealthy parts of this planet, these parallel Shadow Lands are our personal and planetary subconscious, and they haunt us. The ghosts of the past, present, and future, all racing toward us at once. We sense that the barriers that separate these worlds cannot hold for much longer. That, even for the most resourced among us, the curtain hiding the suffering and the ugliness is badly frayed. That just as societies can flip into their monstrous doppelgangers, so can the earth—from habitable to uninhabitable. That, as the Amazonian rain forest incinerates and Antarctica’s ice cliffs heave into the sea, this process has already begun.

XREF: Relates to the Jungian concept of the collective unconscious and shadow self applied on a planetary scale — parallels ecopsychology and urgency rhetoric about climate tipping points.

That is not the only possible takeaway from my doppelganger's inability to get arrested in New York City. Another is that, despite her continuous claims to the contrary, a coup d'état never had taken place to end freedom under the cover of a pandemic, and that she never was living under a biofascist regime. … Despite some real instances of overreach, a temporary health measure was, in fact, temporary.

QUESTION: What specific evidence about the doppelganger's inability to get arrested disconfirms the conspiracy narrative? Worth examining the evidence Klein marshals.

As I have said, I was conflicted on the vaccine apps: increased digitization of daily life deepens preexisting inequalities, but so does letting a virus run rampant as the bodies pile up. … Once the virus mutated and it became clear that vaccines were becoming less effective in preventing infection, continuing the vaccine mandates began to make less sense, which is why they were being lifted in places like New York.

Setting those matters aside, what struck me most in Wolf's overwrought account of an ultimately uneventful day in the city was her odd choice of words. Blue Bottle is mainly a grab-and-go chain; it has some eclectic seating, but it doesn't have a "lunch counter," words Wolf used three times. Her use of that anachronistic term was, quite obviously, designed to recall the bloody and courageous sit-ins at actual lunch counters in the early 1960s, most prominently at the Woolworths five-and-dime store in Greensboro, North Carolina, when four Black civil rights activists insisted on their right to be served despite the whites-only policy. … Jim Crow was indeed a tyrannical system designed to maintain Black people's status as second-class citizens. By invoking lunch counters, and referencing earlier moments in U.S. history with "forced separate accommodations" and "discriminatory rules," Wolf was brashly putting herself in the same league as the Greensboro Four, as well as Rosa Parks, who in 1955 famously refused to give up her seat to a white passenger on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama. … Later she would write that living in New York State during Covid had been "as if we were all living under Jim Crow laws."

XREF: Connects to arguments about aligning modern inconveniences with historical oppression, echoing critiques of inflation-flation language around fascism and slavery.

One of the glowing influencers who I follow, for instance, said she is tired of fighting for her “right to breathe”—a reference to her refusal to wear a mask in stores when they were mandated. A group of mothers in San Diego who didn’t want their kids to have to wear masks in school called their organization Let Them Breathe. It is difficult to imagine that these educated, upper-middle-class white mothers were unaware that their slogan echoed another—the cries of “I can’t breathe” that rose up from the streets in 2014 after a New York City police officer put Eric Garner in a chokehold and, after Garner uttered those fateful words, ended his life. They must have known that those same words roared up from the streets again in 2020, when George Floyd said them before he was murdered by a Minneapolis police officer. Yet less than a year after the country was rocked by protests sparked by Floyd’s killing—and Ahmaud Arbery’s, and Breonna Taylor’s, and so many others before and after—here were those three words again, in only slightly altered form, being directed at public health policies designed to reduce transmission of Covid-19, which was still disproportionately ravaging Black communities.

XREF: Connects to the long history of 'I can't breathe' as a civil rights refrain, from Eric Garner (2014) to George Floyd (2020). QUESTION: What does the deliberate echo of this slogan reveal about the appropriation of social justice language to oppose public health measures?

This kind of racial role-playing is ubiquitous among the diagonalists. In the spring of 2021, Wolf was scheduled to speak about her “Five Freedoms” campaign at an anti-vax event that was planned for Juneteenth, the day that commemorates the end of slavery in the United States. The journalist Eoin Higgins questioned the organizer about the appropriateness of co-opting a holiday so central to Black liberation for these purposes. The response: “We have been enslaved by our government.”

XREF: Connects to how social movements borrow and weaponize the language of oppression for unrelated political agendas.

The event appears to have been canceled, but the original plan points to something that has often struck me about Wolf’s ceaseless claims that Covid measures have ushered in a new era of political obedience she and her fellow travelers alone have had the courage to resist. Their story completely ignores the fact that in that summer of 2020, despite mask mandates and social distancing rules, millions of people took to the streets, day after day, night after night, to rise up against police murders of Black people, and to demand a radical reallocation of resources away from mass incarceration and militarized policing and toward educational, housing, and health infrastructure and services that would begin to close the wealth and investment gaps that treat Black communities as de facto second class, even if legalized segregation has ended.

XREF: Connects to broader narratives about pandemic-era civic compliance versus resistance movements, including George Floyd protests.

Things grew only more ridiculous/serious when, in June 2022, three months after the Battle of Little Blue Bottle, Wolf staged a more successful publicity-seeking stunt while in Salem, Oregon. She found one of the only restaurants in the city that still required proof of vaccination for indoor dining—Epilogue Kitchen and Cocktails, a Black-owned business whose windows displayed portraits of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor as well as signs saying BLACK LIVES MATTER and NO PLACE FOR HATE. Despite having all the rest of Salem’s restaurants to choose from, and despite having a reservation elsewhere, Wolf strolled into Epilogue and staged a confrontation until she was asked to leave. She then filmed herself lecturing the restaurant’s Black manager, saying, “A lot of people in this nation’s history pushed boundaries like that. And it turned out to be the right thing to do because people do have, you know, equal rights in this country.” She also claimed that the vaccine requirement was “absolutely discrimination.”

QUESTION: Why choose a Black-owned business that displayed Black Lives Matter signage rather than another venue?

All of this raises the question of what the relationship is between the diagonalists and the other major movements of our time. Are they running on non-intersecting tracks? Do we see, as many diagonalists claim, evidence of rampant double standards, with anti-lockdown protests condemned by liberal elites while racial justice uprisings were celebrated? Or is the dynamic more complex, with one movement engaged in some kind of warped-mirror dialectic with the other?

QUESTION: The author poses this as an open question — worth pursuing whether the mirror-dialectic framing holds up empirically.

I have no doubt that, while vaccine passports were in effect, people who had not gotten the shot felt like victims of discrimination or even, for a time, like social pariahs. And there could and should have been clearer exceptions available for people with medical conditions that made mask-wearing and vaccines higher risk. 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.

XREF: Connects to broader critiques of identity politics and how oppression claims get monetized as social capital under late capitalism.

In nations whose economies were built on the back of enslaved Black people's labor, and whose very existences are owed to the stealing of lands from Indigenous peoples through campaigns of horrific violence, torture, famine, and forced relocation, the past is our collective, unshakable, omnipresent shadow. Only in spasms of reckonings like the one that followed George Floyd's murder does the dominant culture manage to look with anything more than furtive glances at these foundational crimes—or at the present-day realities of continued racial segregation in our neighborhoods, schools, health-care, and justice systems.

XREF: Connects to contemporary racial justice discourse and the legacy of slavery/colonization literature.

As conservatives and liberals mirror one another, each claiming the mantle of truth and righteousness, this unreckoned-with history and present are a large part of whiteness's shadow world, the truth that is simultaneously known and repressed. In Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates calls white people's denial of this shadow "the Dream," an abbreviation of the American Dream that de-emphasizes the American part in favor of the reverie part. Crucially, the Dream knows it's a dream, knows it's not real, knows that reality is pounding at the door, threatening an awakening from slumber. And so huge efforts must be made to keep the curtains drawn so that the light does not stream in.

XREF: Connects to Ta-Nehisi Coates's Between the World and Me and the 'Dream' concept, plus general literature on denial and cognitive dissonance. DEFINE: Introduces 'the Dream' as Coates's term for the willful American denial of racial reality.

That is the cruelest irony of Wolf's antics at eateries in both Manhattan and Salem. 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. They are the ones pushing for laws calling for only "patriotic" history to be taught and for books to be banned-because, as the historian Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor writes, knowing history demands doing something about its legacies in the present: These collective efforts have made a mockery of public conversations about the history of American racism and xenophobia-and, in some contexts, have made them all but impossible.

XREF: Connects to broader debates about critical race theory bans, 'patriotic education' laws, and book bans currently sweeping US school districts.

These collective efforts have made a mockery of public conversations about the history of American racism and xenophobia—and, in some contexts, have made them all but impossible. Discussions of America's racist history lend important insights into the patterns of poverty, unemployment, and social deprivation that exist today. They underlie the arguments for the creation or expansion of public programs intended to alleviate racial exclusion.

XREF: Connects to critical race theory debates and current book-banning controversies in US schools.

It's as if by absorbing the language and postures of the oppressed, the diagonalists are attempting to outrun the long shadow of the past. Including the fact that our young countries are built on top of burned villages and graveyards, whose spirits have never been put to rest.

XREF: Connects to settler-colonial history and the idea that founding violence is an ongoing psychic inheritance, echoing themes in decolonial theory and trauma studies.

In May 2021, the Tk'emlúps te Secwépemc First Nation, an Indigenous community in the interior of British Columbia, issued a statement that would reverberate around the world. It said that it had located the probable graves of as many as of 215 children on the grounds of the former Kamloops Indian Residential School, which had been in operation for nearly a century. Some of the children appeared to have been as young as three years old when they were buried. Indigenous students had been sent there from across the province and beyond.

DEFINE: Documents the historical fact of the Kamloops residential school discovery, clarifying the scale and nature of the tragedy.

But Ottawa dragged its feet. It was in this context that some First Nations undertook their own searches, which proceeded even under the eerie quiet of Covid isolation. And now, with the aid of ground-penetrating radar, the soil was giving up its secrets, confirming with Western science the bitter truths that survivors and their descendants already knew. … "Apocalypse," in its original Greek, means an uncovering, a disclosing, a revelation. This was that.

XREF: Connects to the broader residential school survivor literature and TRC findings. DEFINE: Etymology of 'apocalypse' as revelation, linking the term's meaning to uncovering buried truths.

The confirmation of buried children in Kamloops—a material surfacing of the collective subconscious through radar “reflections”—stripped the last vestiges of deniability from the genocidal violence that made Canada possible.

QUESTION: The mapping of collective subconscious to radar reflections is a rich conceptual leap — how do material finds expose suppressed national memory?

The underlying goal of those institutions was not education. It was ending Indigeneity as an identity. Officially, Canada’s objective for the schools was to “kill the Indian in the child”—to sever all connections between Indigenous peoples and their land-based traditions, ceremonies, languages, and kinship relations. Sometimes this is attributed exclusively to racism, but that is only half the story: the white and Christian supremacy that underpinned the residential school system also served national economic and political interests. Canada, which began as a cluster of fur-trading companies and other extractive industries, needed those schools because its hunger for land was voracious, and those severed connections—the uprooted and traumatized relationships between parents and children, between land and people—helped make it possible to seize unceded Indigenous land for unfettered resource extraction and settlement by colonists.

QUESTION: The economic rationale underlying assimilation is often understated — worth probing how land hunger drove policy beyond expressed racism.

As in the reckonings sparked by the murder of George Floyd in 2020, the truth about the unmarked graves that surfaced in 2021 sparked waves of rage, grief, and solidarity across Canada. Statues of colonial figures who helped design these twisted institutions were toppled; a major university changed its name; churches were burned. Eventually, Pope Francis would come to Canada in what he termed a “penitential pilgrimage,” after which he concluded, “Yes, it’s a genocide.” Canada’s Parliament then unanimously passed a motion stating that the residential school system met the United Nations’ definition of genocide.

QUESTION: Which UN definition of genocide did the motion invoke, and what does it require beyond intent to destroy a group?

Here in so-called British Columbia (a province whose very name is a humiliating colonial mash-up of the British Crown and Christopher Columbus), it seemed as if the buried worlds upon which our settler state was built were rushing to the surface. The deaths of these children and the subsequent cover-ups were true conspiracies, and now they could no longer be denied. Grand Chief George Manuel, who helped found the modern Indigenous rights movement, attended the Kamloops school. “Hunger is both the first and last thing I can remember about that school,” he wrote in his memoir. “Not just me. Every Indian student smelled of hunger.” Weakened bodies made Indigenous youth more vulnerable to disease; Manuel himself contracted tuberculosis at age twelve and lived with disability for the rest of his life.

His granddaughter, Kanahus Manuel, one of the leaders of a movement that has been trying for years to stop the expansion of an oil pipeline through BC’s interior, described the purpose of the schools that had abused so many members of her family: “They stole the children to steal the land.”

XREF: Connects to broader histories of colonial land theft and forced assimilation of Indigenous children in Canada. QUESTION: Worth tracing how land dispossession explicitly motivated residential school policy at the administrative and legal levels.

As the foundational crimes of the colonial project were escaping the Shadow Lands and coming to light, one thing was clear to many: The comforting mythologies of official history simply would not do any longer. Coming just one year after the racial reckonings that followed George Floyd’s killing, reckonings that had also shaken Canadian institutions in virtually every sector and profession, these monstrous, long-buried crimes inflicted on young bodies and minds by church and state demanded of Canadians a new story of who we are, how we got here, and who we want to be going forward.

XREF: Connects to the 2021 discovery of unmarked graves at residential schools and the broader reckoning following George Floyd's killing.

The announcement about the graves happened in late May. Canada normally celebrates its national holiday on July 1, on the anniversary of its colonies forming a confederation. In 2021, with searches still underway, a sober consensus emerged that the usual prideful displays of red-and-white maple-leaf flags and fireworks were not appropriate, not this year. The capital city of British Columbia, Victoria, canceled Canada Day altogether. Other cities marked the day with Every Child Matters murals and official expressions of grief and contrition, including from Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who called on the country to “be honest with ourselves about our history.” Here on the coast where I live, the Canada Day crowd was a sea of orange, without a red-and-white flag in sight.

XREF: Connects to the 2021 discovery of unmarked graves at Canadian residential schools and the resulting reckoning with colonial history.

In an interview with The Globe and Mail, Norman Retasket, a survivor of the Kamloops school, observed, “If I told the same story three years ago,” about what happened at the school, it would have been seen as “fiction.” Now his stories are believed. “The story hasn’t changed,” he said. “The listener has changed.”

SEED: Potential essay angle on how credibility depends on audience readiness and cultural moment, not the facts themselves.

The pandemic was still raging, and the community where the graves were found had made it clear that they did not want crowds of strangers traipsing through their territory. Otto had an idea for something powerful that would respect the community’s need for physical distance: a trucker convoy, one that would pass in front of the burial grounds, make some offerings, then leave. He called it the We Stand in Solidarity Convoy. Otto posted invitations to various trucker Facebook groups and reached out to influential people in the industry. His goal was for the convoy to grow to 215 trucks; in the end, closer to 400 trucks joined up, along with many motorcycles and cars. Drivers decorated their vehicles with messages of love, hung orange shirts on their grilles, and waved EVERY CHILD MATTERS flags. The convoy was met with cheers all along the way, and in some cases whole towns came to greet them and share food. When the trucks made it to the former residential school, honking their airhorns as they passed, many members of the Secwépemc Nation greeted them with ceremonial drumming, warrior songs, and burning sage. Fists were raised in resolve, and faces were washed in tears.

The protests certainly served up good visuals. There were snowball fights, beer kegs, pot in the air, and a sea of Canadian flags. There were Jericho Marchers and street sermons and many people claiming to be taking orders directly from God. There were hugs for strangers and epithets for passersby wearing masks. There really was an inflatable hot tub. And there were also all the unmistakable signs of political discombobulation that mark the diagonalist world: someone earnestly waving a giant swastika-festooned Nazi flag and others waving Confederate flags, alongside anti-vax demonstrators wearing their yellow stars and holding signs declaring themselves to be living under apartheid or Jim Crow. Were these people Nazis or anti-Nazis? Segregationists or anti-segregationists? Were they proud patriots or insurrectionists determined to overturn the results of our recent election? It hardly seemed to matter—the convoy was pipiked to its core, a knot of seriousness and ridiculousness that would never be untangled.

XREF: Connects to broader work on political incoherence and contradiction within movements, and to the 'diagonalist world' concept the author uses.

King is an open racist who has referred to Indigenous culture as “a disgrace” and who, in 2019, organized a similar though smaller convoy to oppose immigration and climate action, which were positioned as twin threats to the Canadian way of life. “It's called depopulation of the Caucasian race, or the Anglo-Saxon,” King claimed. “And, that's what the goal is, is to depopulate the Anglo-Saxon race, because they are the ones with the strongest bloodlines.” He also spoke of a plan to “not only infiltrate by flooding with refugees, [but also] to infiltrate the education systems to manipulate it.”

Many convoy supporters attempted to portray the obviously racist elements as isolated, likely a covert op by the secret police or antifa demonstrators, designed to discredit them. Inconveniently for these theories, the connections run deep. One of the convoy's most outspoken leaders was a man named Pat King, who offered logistical support for protesters via his Facebook page, which had around 350,000 followers at the time. King is an open racist who has referred to Indigenous culture as “a disgrace” and who, in 2019, organized a similar though smaller convoy to oppose immigration and climate action, which were positioned as twin threats to the Canadian way of life.

XREF: Connects to broader reporting on the Freedom Convoy's leadership exposed by journalists and researchers.

King was, of course, parroting the “Great Replacement” theory, which has been at the heart of so much white supremacist carnage. And he was far from the only convoy leader with openly racist views and affiliations. The Canadian Anti-Hate Network reported that virtually every group it monitors was playing a leadership role, including a network that seeks to carve out a new country called Diagolon, which would run from Alaska, through the Canadian prairies and Alberta, and all the way to Florida. According to the Anti-Hate Network, “Diagolon is increasingly becoming a militia network. Their goals are ultimately fascist: to use violence to take power and strip rights away from people who do not meet their purity tests based on ideology, race, and gender … Their motto is 'gun or rope.'”

XREF: Connects to 'Great Replacement' conspiracy theory literature and militia movement research covering far-right networks in Canada and the US.

For Jesse Wente, a prominent Ojibwe writer and chair of the Canada Council for the Arts, the mirroring was glaring. It’s “not a coincidence this occurs as more truths of history are revealed,” Wente wrote about the convoy, which he described as “a desire to reassert colonial dominance in the face of actually having to face [those truths] and to provide a sense of community where the pandemic has shown there is little.”

XREF: Connects to colonial-settler relations, collective memory studies, and pandemic-era community fragmentation.

Integrating the Shadow Lands on which the modern world was built holds out the potential for reaching something resembling solid ground. As Baldwin wrote, only when we confront the terrors of the past can history become something we can all use, perhaps even to forge a new basis for unity. But no one said that integration was going to be painless. So, one way of seeing the convoy of eighteen-wheelers that made its way to Ottawa is as an angry reassertion of innocence, an attempt to stuff down these difficult truths ever deeper in the shadows, while trying to reanimate that comforting dream of righteousness and dominance—as individuals and as a nation.

XREF: Connects to Baldwin's essay on the uses of history and to themes of collective memory versus national myth-making. Also echoes similar dynamics in other settler-colonial nations. SEED: Angle for an essay examining how protests that claim innocence often function as resistance to uncomfortable national truth-telling, drawing parallels across countries.

The convoy that shut down Ottawa made for a stark contrast with the lesser-known convoy that occurred eight months earlier. Where Mike Otto’s demonstration had been marked by a rare willingness to look honestly at the genocide that birthed our nation, this new convoy embodied an aggressive presentism—a refusal to contemplate any uncomfortable truths, whether Canada’s violent history, or the reality that Covid was still surging (many convoyers got sick), or the planetary warming they were helping along by idling their massive trucks for a month (the convoy’s unofficial symbol was the smuggled-in jerry can filled with gas). In less than a year, we had gone from the We Stand in Solidarity Convoy, a recognition and embrace of enmeshment, to the Freedom Convoy, a rejection of interdependence in favor of hyper-individual independence. Clearly, a subset of my country wanted their guilt-free fantasies back—and they would hold the rest of us hostage to get them.

Because ours is a doppelganger politics, a simple rejection of what is feared is insufficient—there has to be a mirroring, a mimicking, a pipiking. So, in addition to the snow forts and airhorns in Ottawa, the Freedom Convoy also had a peace pipe and a tepee (denounced by three local Algonquin chiefs). Some of the convoyers waved orange EVERY CHILD MATTERS flags off their trucks—seemingly not in recognition of the Indigenous children who were raped, tortured, and killed in residential schools and whose remains were still being uncovered, but rather in reference to their own children, who, in the ever-escalating diagonalist discourse, were facing what some demonstrators called a “second genocide” as a result of having to wear face masks and being expected to get vaccinated. This Mirror World equivalency had been building for months: within two weeks of the discovery of the first unmarked graves, a group of white anti-vax moms started selling orange sweatshirts and other items declaring COVID 19 IS CANADA’S SECOND GENOCIDE.

DEFINE: Defines the 'Mirror World' concept: political opposition works by appropriating and mirroring the rhetoric of the feared opponent rather than simply opposing it. XREF: Connects to theories of political parody, sympathetic magic, and how movements borrow symbolic structures from adversaries.

Did the truckers intend to upstage, blot out, and co-opt the Indigenous and Black racial justice reckonings that have so deeply challenged our national stories and so many of our self-conceptions during these pandemic years? Surely not in any conscious way. There was no shadowy room where Steve Bannon and the Proud Boys met with my doppelganger and Pat King to cook up that devious scheme. Rather, I think what we are seeing may be more like a reflex, an instinct for what feels, to its participants, like self-preservation.

It’s tough to live in a moment when so many truths that had been sold as settled suddenly become wobbly and wavy under our feet. It’s especially tough at a time when a great deal else feels uncertain: the possibility of owning a home, or scraping together enough money for soaring rents, or holding on to any given job, or even knowing how much the basics of life are going to cost week to week. It’s all tilting and rolling, and so much, like the assumed predictability of seasons, will never be stable again, at least not for several generations, and that is in a best-case scenario. All of this destabilization places demands on us: to change, to reassess, and to reimagine who we need to become. It should not be a surprise that a moment this demanding is conjuring up some extreme behaviors and apparitions. It should not be a surprise that, instead of looking squarely at what has been revealed in wave after wave of unveiling—the nurses forced to wear garbage bags instead of proper protective gear; the cool hatred in Derek Chauvin’s eyes as he pressed his weight onto George Floyd’s neck; the perversion of the priests; the skies stained orange from wildfires—many are opting for some rather spectacular distractions. Including the distraction of casting themselves as cosmic victims of every crime against humanity of the past five hundred years combined.

SEED: The idea that mass destabilization breeds spectacular distractions and victimhood casting is a strong essay angle on contemporary psychology and politics.

This might explain why the conspiratorial claims in the Mirror World so often seem to contradict one another. For this new political configuration, convincing people of their unproven theories was never the real point—it was only ever a tool. The point, consciously or not, is to foster denial and avoidance. The point is not to have to do hard and uncomfortable things in the face of hard and uncomfortable realities, whether Covid, or climate change, or the fact that our nations were forged in genocide and have never engaged in a remotely serious process of making repair. Denial is so much easier than looking inward, or backward, or forward; so much easier than change. But denial needs narratives, cover stories, and that is what conspiracy culture is providing.

XREF: Connects to broader literature on motivated reasoning and epistemic closure in political communities. SEED: Could seed an essay on how contradiction tolerance in conspiratorial spaces functions as avoidance machinery rather than failed persuasion.

Still, I'm troubled by the comfort this analysis implies, the fact that it places the denial all on those who inhabit the Mirror World. It's similar to the problem of climate change denial: There are the hard deniers, who are easy to spot, saying it's all a hoax. But the bigger obstacle may always have been the soft deniers, the rest of us who know it's real but act like it's not, who keep forgetting, in myriad ways, both large and small.

XREF: Connects to the broader pattern of acknowledged-but-ignored truths — same dynamic as climate inaction despite knowledge, and akin to the bystander effect.

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? If we can stand to look at the Shadow Lands even for a moment, it becomes clear that we are ensnared in a web of life-annihilating lies and that whatever the Mirror World is on about this week is neither the biggest lie nor the one with the highest stakes. It’s entirely possible that Bannon and Wolf’s war on reality is just what happens when so many of the big lies that built the modern world visibly crumble. As the house collapses, some people choose to take flight into full-blown fantasy, sure—but that doesn’t mean that the rest of us who were also born and raised in that house are guardians of the truth.

XREF: Connects with the Shadow Lands / Mirror World framing earlier in the book, contrasting systemic ideological lies with surface-level political ones.

Conrad drew on numerous examples of Europeans setting out to “civilize the savages” as a high-minded excuse for asserting a right to their lands, wealth, and bodies. Inevitably, that civilizing urge tipped into a blinding drive to wipe out the natives—a conclusion foretold as soon as one group of people set themselves up as biologically superior to all others.

QUESTION: How does belief in biological superiority inevitably lead toward extermination? Worth probing the psychological or ideological mechanism here.

Within this mindset, genocide is not a crime; it’s merely a difficult but necessary stage, one blessed (for the believers) by God or (for the rationalists) by Charles Darwin, who wrote in The Descent of Man, “At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace, the savage races throughout the world.” A “great replacement” theory if ever there was one.

XREF: Connects to the modern 'great replacement' theory and historical racist ideology—shows how Darwin's words were weaponized long before contemporary conspiracy theories. QUESTION: Worth investigating the full context of Darwin's passage to understand whether he meant it descriptively or prescriptively, and how later eugenicists repurposed it.

What I did not expect was to discover that Peck's opus was a doppelganger story. His thesis is that the dominant story we tell about Hitler and the Holocaust—which treats that frenzy of death as so extreme that it is without historical precedents or antecedents—is flat wrong. Peck argues instead that the Holocaust was an intensified and compacted expression of the very same violent colonial ideology that ravaged other continents at other times. The Nazis then applied that ideology within Europe itself. At the heart of Exterminate All the Brutes is the claim that Hitler—the twentieth century's most despised villain, and rightly so—was not the civilized, democratic West's evil "other," but its shadow, its doppelganger.

XREF: Connects to wider postcolonial and genocide scholarship challenging the Holocaust's uniqueness thesis, and to arguments about Western modernity's dark underbelly.

The story Peck and Lindqvist tell begins not in the Americas, but in Europe in the centuries leading up to the Spanish Inquisition and the burnings at the stake and the bloody expulsions of Jews and Muslims. Then it crosses the Atlantic and plays out on a vastly larger scale in the genocide of Native Americans, as well as the so-called Scramble for Africa, before looping back to Europe during the Holocaust. This challenges how the story of the Second World War is so often told: as one of heroic anti-fascist Allies united against the monstrous Nazis. Certainly, defeating Hitler and freeing the camps, however belatedly, was the most righteous victory of the modern age. Complicating this story is the fact that Hitler spoke and wrote extensively about the many ways in which he drew inspiration for his genocidal regime from British colonialism and from the various structures of racial hierarchy pioneered inside North America.

XREF: Connects to larger genealogies of genocide and settler colonialism informing European atrocity, upending the standard heroic WWII narrative.

For instance, in 1941, Hitler remarked, "Concentration camps were not invented in Germany. It is the English who are their inventors, using this institution to gradually break the backs of other nations." He was speaking for propaganda purposes, but with an element of truth. Concentration camps had, in fact, been used in many colonial contexts—by the Spanish in Cuba; by German colonists in Southwest Africa, against the Herero and Nama people; by the British in what is now South Africa, during the Anglo-Boer War, with tens of thousands of captives dying in the disease-ridden enclosures. Before Hitler began casting the mass murder of genetic "inferiors" as an act of health care for the race, the British Royal Navy commander Bedford Pim explained to the Anthropological Society of London in 1866 that, when it comes to killing Indigenous peoples, there was "mercy in a massacre."

XREF: Connects to the broader discussion of how genocidal practices against colonized peoples preceded and informed the Holocaust.

When Hans Asperger and other doctors in Germany and Austria began deciding which disabled people would live and which were "unworthy of life," they were heavily influenced by the United States, where the world's first eugenics-based law to mandate involuntary sterilization was passed in Indiana in 1907 and soon spread to other states. Through laws like these, the U.S. eugenics movement had already provided a pseudoscientific rationale for the forced sterilization of tens of thousands of would-be parents whose genes were deemed threats to the overall pool—a project riddled with built-in biases about the relative intelligence of those of Anglo and Nordic stock. The Nazis took this precedent and radically expanded it, with an estimated 400,000 people sterilized during their rule, but their innovations in this realm were a matter of scale and speed, not kind.

XREF: Connects to broader histories of eugenics and forced sterilization in the US and beyond, including the author's larger argument about American genocidal influences.

Praising European settlers for having "gunned down the millions of redskins to a few hundred thousand," Hitler claimed it was now Germany's turn to engage in cleansings and mass relocations on its own frontier.

QUESTION: The specific Hitler quote here is striking — worth verifying the original source and context of this statement, and whether it appears in Mein Kampf or elsewhere.

"There is only one task: To set about the Germanization of the land by bringing in Germans and to regard the indigenous inhabitants as Indians," Hitler said in 1941. He said at another point that year, "In this business I shall go straight ahead, cold-bloodedly … I don't see why a German who eats a piece of bread should torment himself with the idea that the soil that produces this bread has been won by the sword. When we eat wheat from Canada, we don't think about the despoiled Indians." On his right to lay claim to Ukraine's grain, Hitler joked, "We'll supply the Ukrainians with scarves, glass beads and everything that colonial peoples like."

XREF: Connects to settler-colonial logics where indigenous land occupation is framed as civilization; parallels with American westward expansion.

The Nazis saw some of the residents of the lands they usurped as fit for slave labor, but the Jews were considered beyond redemption and therefore faced eradication, in part to make room for German settlers. As the war went on, the scale and speed of death was unprecedented—no one had previously built gas ovens or crematoria and put them to use day after day to eliminate a vast population. But though the Nazis’ killing spree took state-sponsored hate to new extremes, extermination for the purposes of land theft was not Hitler’s innovation.

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.

XREF: Connects to Arendt's and Aimé Césaire's arguments that fascism was colonialism applied to Europeans, and to broader genocide studies.

This analysis destabilizes pretty much all the stories that I grew up with, which taught us that the Holocaust was a singular event without precedent, so far outside the bounds of human history that it was essentially impossible to comprehend. We learned, in myriad ways, that there was something sacrilegious about even speaking of the Nazi Holocaust in the same breath as any other crime, that to do so made it less horrific, less shocking, somehow ordinary. 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?

QUESTION: This challenges the prevailing framing of the Holocaust as singular and incomprehensible. Worth chasing whether the author's comparative analysis is persuasive in its evidence.

There are many well-known arguments for why the Holocaust perpetrated by the Nazis was different. It was higher tech. Death came faster. It was industrial in its scale. All true. But it's also true that every holocaust is different. Every genocide has its own particular characteristics, and every hated group is hated in its own special way. By sheer numbers of dead, the genocide of Indigenous peoples in the Americas surpasses all others. In terms of modern technologies, the transatlantic trade in kidnapped and enslaved Africans, and the plantations the trade served in the antebellum South and the Caribbean, were highly modern for their times. So cutting-edge, scholars have shown, that the systems developed to transport, insure, depreciate, track, control, and extract maximum wealth from this coerced labor shaped many aspects of modern accounting and human resources management.

XREF: Challenges the common framing that the Holocaust was uniquely modern or industrial; the author instead argues every genocide has distinct features while slavery's systems were equally modern.

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.

XREF: Connects to the dehumanization-by-labeling pattern seen across settler-colonial histories and 20th-century genocide.

Many people whose cultures, lands, and bodies had been targeted in these ways recognized the logic behind Hitler’s political project precisely because it was familiar. After Kristallnacht in 1938, for instance, a delegation from the Australian Aborigines League wrote a protest letter condemning “the cruel persecution of the Jewish people by the Nazi Government of Germany” and, in a little-known historical chapter, hand-delivered it to the German consulate in Melbourne (the consulate refused to accept it). This was well before Western governments were willing to confront Hitler; yet these Indigenous leaders, who were still fighting for basic rights of their own, clearly saw the gravity of the threat. The Nazis’ industrial killing was new, and the Jewish case is different. But so is every case. And some things are all too similar.

XREF: Connects to the shared history of colonial dispossession cited as the basis for Indigenous empathy with Jews facing persecution.

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.

XREF: Connects to scholarship on colonial genocide precedents and the 'Never again' framing — resonates with postcolonial critiques of Holocaust exceptionalism in Western historiography.

This is Lindqvist’s point: “Two events need not be identical for one of them to facilitate the other. European world expansion, accompanied as it was by shameless defense of extermination, created habits of thought and political precedents that made way for new outrages, finally culminating in the most horrendous of them all: the Holocaust.” And one of the hardest habits of thought to shake is the reflex to look away, to not see what is in front of us, and to not know what we know.

XREF: Connects to Arendt's thesis in Origins of Totalitarianism linking imperialism and totalitarianism, and to broader scholarship on colonial-genocidal continuities.

This, I fear, is the deepest danger posed by the Mirror World and its increasingly belligerent war on history. The door to the Shadow Lands was cracked open; truths were flying out that would no longer be contained. The most abused shadow workers in our economy—immigrant women and men on temporary work visas laboring in four care homes in a single day, or packing chicken parts in impossibly cold and bloody facilities—were finally on our television screens. Not because they were being cheered as heroes, but because they were the ones in the so-called hot spots: the ones whose bodies were piling up in morgues and refrigerated trucks. We had no choice but to see and to reckon with what had been so long hidden and repressed.

But if those truths are stuffed back away, they will keep haunting us and keep reemerging in the Mirror World in distorted, twisted form.

QUESTION: What are the mechanisms by which suppressed truths emerge distorted in mirror worlds? Worth exploring how digital platforms amplify or warp repressed content.

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. … Is that part of what we are seeing? Are increasingly violent conspiracy theorists in the Mirror World afraid of being rounded up, treated as second-class, occupied, and culled because on some level they know that these are the genocidal behaviors that created and sustain their relative but increasingly precarious privileges? Are they terrified that if the truths of the Shadow Lands—past, present, and future—are ever fully revealed and reckoned with, then it can only result in a dramatic role reversal, with the victims becoming the victimizers?

QUESTION: The author's rhetorical questions invite investigation of whether role-reversal fear actually drives violent conspiracy theories, or whether other mechanisms better explain them.

Well, it has happened before. In fact, it's happening right now, in a place where everything is doubled, where doppelganger politics govern every aspect of life. It's happening in Israel, and in its partitioned shadow land, Palestine. Our last stop, and the place where so many forces we have encountered on this winding journey converge and collide.

XREF: Connects to the broader theme of doubled/paired places the journey has traced, framing Israel/Palestine as the culmination.

I don't make the rules, either. Hannah Arendt had a rule, though. "If one is attacked as a Jew, one must defend oneself as a Jew," she wrote. "Not as a German, not as a world-citizen, not as an upholder of the Rights of Man." So is that what I have to do? What I have been putting off doing all this time? Do I have to defend myself from all this as a Jew?

XREF: Connects to Arendt's broader political philosophy on identity and the public realm, and to debates about whether one can transcend particular identities.

This is fair. Countless people on this planet riven with racial hierarchies contend with far more heinous forms of ethnic and racial projection, forced to represent only their skin color to white eyes. They also log on to social media to find themselves blamed and credited for the words and actions of others. The Australian poet Omar Sakr regularly shares outrageous stories about TV bookers and random readers confusing him with a parade of other public figures with brown skin. Once, he was even sent a complete travel itinerary so that he could arrive for his guest appearance on a home improvement show with which he had no prior contact. And the show made the same error with another writer, Osman Faruqi.

XREF: Connects to broader discussions about racial projection and the burden of representation that follows minority public figures.

Or think of all of the people who have to contend with the daily wince of having a "work twin"—another person of color from a vaguely similar ethnic background (or a wholly dissimilar one) with whom they are constantly confused by their colleagues. To state the obvious: these are not doppelgangers. There are no uncanny similarities between the people involved—it's just the way race continues to break so many of our brains.

XREF: Connects to literature on racial microaggressions and the psychology of intergroup perception, where outgroup members are seen as more homogenous than ingroup members. SEED: Could fuel an essay on everyday experiences of racialized depersonalization in professional settings and how colleagues rationalize persistent misidentification.

In truth, I have mostly been free to tell myself that this kind of doubling was not my cross to bear. I moved through the world blithely assuming the people I met would easily decode the distinctiveness in my particular arrangement of features and correctly identify me as me—and not project a presumed identity onto me based on a haze of my skin tone, hair texture, and eye shape. What my mother was saying over lunch, though, was that I have been badly fooling myself, that Wolf and I had always been lumped together inside a very particular cultural stereotype—that of the striving Jewess.

Some reproach me with being a Jew, some praise me because of it, some pardon me for it, but all think of it,” fretted the German political writer Ludwig Börne in 1832. (Changing his name from Loeb Baruch and converting to Protestantism wasn’t enough to protect him.) This is another theme that emerges in Roth’s Operation Shylock: the supposedly eternal nature of Jew-hatred. By the end of the book, Roth’s real double turns out not to be Fake Roth at all. We learn that, in a way, there is no Real Roth, a man of letters and intellect, just as there is no Fake Roth, a zealous activist and evangelist of Diasporism. Both, within the world of the novel, end up being cast as Philip Roth the Jew. And that means that both are Shylock, the moneylending mutilator in Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, determined to get his pound of flesh. For Roth, Shylock is the Jews’ eternal doppelganger. … 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.

XREF: Connects to Roth's Operation Shylock and the theme of doubles; resonates with ideas about stereotype threat and social identity theory.

All members of historically hated groups lug around versions of this invisible double, and some doublings are far more dangerous than others. To be Black in the United States, W. E. B. Du Bois wrote in 1897, required a “double-consciousness,” a constant feeling of “two-ness,” which generated a longing “to merge his double self into a better and truer self,” one that did not require this partition. To this day, Blackness generates a double that is so treacherous to those it is projected upon, and so unremitting in its persistence through the centuries, that no activity is safe from being overtaken by the lethal racial double—not driving, not going for a run, not walking home from the store, not struggling with the lock on your own jammed front door. (“I plan to give you reasons for your jumpy fits / and facial tics,” wrote June Jordan in her 1976 poem “I Must Become a Menace to My Enemies.”) Facial recognition software, originally marketed as a way to remove these kinds of biased doublings from policing, has automated them instead, with artificial intelligence repeatedly misidentifying Black faces, often leading to wrongful arrests and upended lives.

XREF: Connects to Du Bois's 1897 double-consciousness concept, showing its continued relevance and lethal stakes in contemporary policing. DEFINE: Extends Du Bois's double-consciousness framework into a contemporary claim about its persistence and danger.

For what is a racial profile if not a doppelganger made by the state? In practice, that meant that passengers with common names like Mohammed (never mind Osama) had to contend with the very real possibility that they had landed on some top secret, error-riddled no-fly list, which could get them pulled off a plane for special questioning or, worse, hooded and “rendered” to one of the Bush administration’s new “black sites.” The anti-Chinese scapegoating drummed up in the Covid era (with my doppelganger and her relentless spinning of CCP bioweapon plots playing no small role) has cast such an ominous shadow over Asian life that roughly one-third of Asian Americans polled by Pew Research in the spring of 2022 reported changing their daily routines to avoid being targeted by hate crimes.

XREF: Connects to broader themes of surveillance, no-fly lists, and state-constructed identities that echo the author's doppelganger framing elsewhere in the book. FICTION: The 'doppelganger made by the state' conceit offers a compelling character concept: a person forced to grapple with a lethal bureaucratic double.

Where does the Jewish double fit into this landscape of malevolent twinning? Hasidic Jews, conspicuous in black hats and long coats, are easy targets for street violence. But a secular Jew like me? Frankly, I’m battling the feeling that it is slightly fraudulent to even mention it in the same breath. Thanks to the timing and location of my birth, which coincided with a high point in Holocaust education and collective contrition, I have been largely protected from direct encounters with Jew-hatred. A notable exception was a year spent in Oxford, England, when I was ten, where “Jew” was such a frequent schoolyard taunt that I hid my religious identity and muddled my way through morning hymns (“Shine, Jesus, shine! Fill this land with the Father’s glory!”).

QUESTION: Does the author resolve this tension — how does one reconcile relative safety with inherited Jewish vulnerability?

It's a little different for Avi. He has more classically Jewish features and mannerisms than I do, and after a quarter century of living with him, I have come to recognize the visceral reaction he occasionally inspires. I recognized this same doubling at work when I was on the campaign trail with Bernie Sanders in 2020: some people just couldn't get past the pushy, angry, uncouth Jew they imagined him to be based on his style of speech and mannerisms—never mind the abiding compassion and gentleness of the man himself.

XREF: Connects to the broader phenomenon of how stereotypes operate through physical cues, similar to research on implicit bias.

It's also possible that the post-Holocaust lull in open Jew-hatred is coming to a close. Since Trump, anti-Jewish hate crimes have been on the rise. Jews figure prominently in the Great Replacement theory—we eternal Shylocks are apparently the reason so many immigrants are allowed in: so that we can make more coin exploiting them. This was the belief system espoused by the gunman who killed eleven people during Saturday morning services at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 2018.

XREF: Connects to broader discussions of rising far-right extremism and the Great Replacement theory's resurgence in mainstream discourse.

People don't quicken their steps or lock their car doors because of my Jewish shadow; doctors don't discount my body's capacity to feel pain, and assailants don't calculate that no one with power will come looking for me if they do me harm. And yet, as we have seen, the need for perfect likenesses can easily obscure commonalities—and, as importantly, short-circuit potential solidarities.

XREF: Connects to intersectionality frameworks and critiques of 'perfect likenesses' in identity-politics solidarity, echoing feminist and critical race theory discussions. SEED: Could seed an essay on how demands for identical victimhood undercut coalition-building across different forms of oppression.

The New Testament is a powerful cosmology of doubles: God/Satan, Christ/Antichrist, angels/demons, heaven/hell. Since Jews are associated with Satan in the gospels, Jews and Christians were placed in a twinned relationship from the start, with Jews perennially cast as the demonic doppelgangers of the faithful followers of Christ. Not only did we fail to recognize the true messiah when we had the chance, but we are perennially blamed for Jesus's death. (So, to correct my earlier statement: this is exactly our cross to bear.) It's a story that set the stage for centuries of smears and libels.

That spasm of violence was not the first time groups of humans slaughtered groups of other humans in battles over land and resources. But this is the period, argue Sven Lindqvist and Raoul Peck, that gave birth to the impulse, which would repeat again and again in the subsequent centuries, to “exterminate all the brutes” in the name of civilization, progress, and piety. And, not coincidentally perhaps, 1492 was the same year that Christopher Columbus's ships set sail to cross the Atlantic, bringing with them a globalization of these tools of pious annihilation.

XREF: Connects to colonial histories and the long arc of settler violence through subsequent centuries.

The association of Jews with satanism provided justification throughout the Middle Ages and well beyond for constraining Jews as second-class citizens, corralled in ghettos and excluded from owning agricultural land and from participating in key trades. Jews were therefore street peddlers and merchants, as well as moneylenders, a profession they were permitted largely because it allowed the Christian ruling class to keep this ungodly activity at arm's length. By the 1700s, small lenders grew into larger banks, and it was this development—itself born of anti-Semitism—that would sustain the more modern and ongoing forms of anti-Semitism, those focused on the figure of the money-grubbing Jewish banker, responsible for all the woes and hardships of working people—and plotting, in an international cabal of similarly scheming Jews, to do far worse.

XREF: Connects to the broader history of scapegoating and how economic roles are shaped by prejudice, echoing themes from other analyses of group persecution.

QAnon stands out not for the originality of its plotlines, but for its ability to mash up the more modern trope of a Jewish cabal running the world with the more ancient blood libel involving kidnapped and drained Christian children. In QAnon's version, an international conspiracy that includes many prominent Jews, but is not restricted to Jews, kidnaps children to drain them of adrenochrome, apparently in the hopes of prolonging the conspirators' own lives. These stories are currently coursing and combining and morphing in our culture, lending an ancient and sinister energy to the invisible ethnic double that we Jews lug around.

XREF: Connects to histories of antisemitic conspiracy theories and blood libel accusations across centuries.

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. To Shylock.

XREF: Connected to scapegoat dynamics elsewhere in political theory and to the scapegoating of middle managers/functionaries in other persecution contexts.

One of the Bund’s core principles was doi’kayt, or “hereness”—the idea that Jews belonged where they lived, in what was known as “the pale of settlement,” and should fight for greater rights and increased justice as Jews and as workers, alongside non-Jewish members of their class. They should not have to place their hopes in a far-off Jewish homeland, as the early Zionists had begun to argue in that same period. Nor should they have to flee to North America, as hundreds of thousands of German and Eastern European Jews had already felt forced to do. Doi’kayt proclaimed that Bundists would stay here—and make here better.

DEFINE: Explains the Bund's Yiddish term doi'kayt (hereness) and contrasts it with both Zionism and emigration.

In response to the surging revolutionary coalition, Russia’s elites, including the tsar, fought back in two ways: first, by offering concessions, including the creation of a weak multiparty parliamentary system, and second, and simultaneously, by unleashing a virulent campaign of anti-Semitic hate that painted the 1905 revolt as a plot by seditious Jews to rule over Christians. This combination of minor reforms with a major distraction did the trick. Immediately after the reforms were announced, anti-Jewish mobs staged bloody pogroms in 660 towns and cities, with the worst taking place in Odessa.

XREF: Classic divide-and-rule strategy. Connects to other historical cases where elites deflect class/revolutionary unrest onto ethnic scapegoats.

It is an image eerily reminiscent of the oil paintings from two centuries earlier depicting the Jewish blood libel—except now made real, and committed against Jews. According to Weinberg, “Ethnic divisiveness was a centrifugal force that diminished the capacity of Odessa workers to act in a unified fashion.” 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.

XREF: Connects to broader patterns where ruling powers weaponize ethnic scapegoating to divide opposition movements, echoing similar dynamics in other historical contexts.

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.

Just as Jews, because they were barred from so many other industries, were overrepresented in finance, Jews were also overrepresented among revolutionary socialists and communists. Like, really overrepresented. Their ranks included, but were by no means restricted to, Leon Trotsky and much of the Menshevik and Bolshevik leadership at the heart of the Russian Revolution; Rosa Luxemburg and many of her comrades in the Spartacus League who hoped to bring a more democratic version of the revolution to Germany; Vladimir Medem and the entire leadership of the Bund; Emma Goldman and the New York anarchist left; and Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, and others in the Frankfurt School.

XREF: Connects to the parallel overrepresentation of Jews in finance mentioned in the same passage, both stemming from exclusion from other industries.

Marxism sprouted in the same soil that fertilized The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and that would eventually produce Weimar and then Nazi Germany. No one's life was unaffected; no one was safe from their Shylock doubles, not even the converts and atheists. Marx's father converted not out of faith, but because he was a lawyer and a new Prussian decree had barred Jews from occupying legal positions or state offices. Eleanor Marx, Karl's daughter, chose to reclaim their family heritage and taught herself Yiddish so she could better organize Jewish garment workers in London's East End, unequivocally declaring, amid a spasm of European anti-Semitism, "I am a Jewess." Rosa Luxemburg's political party was a target of what she described as "an all-out orgy of anti-Semitism" in the press. Trotsky, in his early career as a journalist, was shaped by covering outbreaks of anti-Semitic mob violence, describing scenes of gangs "drunk on vodka and the smell of blood." He was himself routinely portrayed as a Jewish devil (horns and all) by his political adversaries. 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."

These revolutionaries had grander aims than simply denying their enemies the potent weapon of the anti-Semitic conspiracy theory. They dedicated their lives to enacting socialism in the real world. Still, in their fierce dedication to making political education accessible to working people, I think it's fair to see the battle against Jewish conspiracy as subtext, if not text. A quest to swap out the irrational hatreds of the vulnerable with worthier targets—economic systems, ideologies, structural inequities. To replace the socialism of fools with the socialism of facts.

XREF: Echoes the famous aphorism 'socialism of fools' attributed to August Bebel about anti-Semitism, which the author invokes directly.

None of this is to say that, among the Jewish intellectuals of these tumultuous times, there was any kind of agreement on what to do about the persistence of anti-Semitism. In the decades before Hitler synonymized Judaism with trauma, and before dissent was supplanted, in many corners, with terrified conformity, Jewish intellectual life roared with drag-down debates over what was then euphemistically called "the Jewish Question." (Today's equivalent might be called "the Identity Politics Question" or "the Race Versus Class Question.") The Cornell University professor Enzo Traverso, who has extensively researched this intellectual history, describes the Jewish Question as "a set of problems related to emancipation and anti-Semitism, cultural assimilation and Zionism"—and among Jewish Marxists and socialists, there was nothing approaching consensus about the possible answers.

XREF: Connects to contemporary debates between assimilation and group identity, and race-versus-class frameworks in current identity politics discourse.

Should Jews strive for full equality in Christian societies—voting rights, access to all industries (the position of the Social Democrats)? Or should the goal be revolutionary transformation of those societies accompanied by full Jewish assimilation into the liberated proletariat since religion would be less necessary as a source of solace (“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)? Was Judaism a prison from which the revolution would offer liberation (as the Bolsheviks claimed, though many conceded that there was a need to protect the right to religious practice in private life)? Or was Jewish assimilation, even in a socialist society, a trap, eliding the need for European Jews’ distinct culture and language to be protected within a multiethnic, multinational workers’ society (the Bund’s “hereness” position)? Or was Jew-hatred simply too deep on the continent, too primal, for any of this to work, so that Jewish liberation could be found only in the working-class movements of the amnesiac Americas (the position held by many of my family members as they crossed the Atlantic)? Or was even that mere fantasy, especially under the harsh, overtly racist, and anti-Semitic immigration laws introduced by the United States and Canada in the 1920s and ’30s, making the only hope for Jewish safety a nation-state of their own, where wandering would end and socialism could become a reality (the view of the Labor Zionists)?

XREF: The sub-options map onto later 20th-century Jewish political alignments—assimilation vs. Zionism, Bundist hereness vs. class-based universalism, which the author's family story seems anchored to. QUESTION: Worth tracking which of these positions the narrator's own family ultimately adopted, and how the Americas' racism complicated their hopes.

So the Bundists, with their tens of thousands of working-class members devoted to “hereness,” regularly debated the Zionists, mocking them for their “thereness.” The Bund held fast to the belief that Jews would be free when everyone was free, and not by building what amounted to a militarized ghetto on Palestinian land. “Your liberation can only be a by-product of the universal freeing of oppressed people,” wrote the Bundist leader Victor Alter in 1937. Besides, argued Walter Benjamin, “things will go very badly in Europe if the intellectual energies of the Jews abandon it.”

Rosa Luxemburg, years earlier, had sparred with the Bund and advocated a universalism unbound by her Jewish identity. “What do you want with this theme of the ‘special suffering of the Jews’?” a friend asked in 1917. She replied, “I am just as much concerned with the poor victims on the rubber plantations of Putumayo, the black people in Africa with whose corpses the Europeans play catch … I have no special place in my heart for the [Jewish] ghetto. I feel at home in the entire world wherever there are clouds and birds and human tears.” Those lines led her detractors to claim that she minimized Jewish suffering at a time of great hardship. I prefer to see her reaching, however idealistically, for a vision of human solidarity that transcended identity and national borders.

XREF: Connects to debates about universalism versus particularism that recur in leftist and identity politics discourse today. QUESTION: Whether Luxemburg's position was principled universalism or a minimization of group suffering remains genuinely contested.

The tumultuous debates over the Jewish Question did not end because one faction won the argument due to the greater force of their ideas, or because they captured the hearts and minds of the majority of Jewish people. The debates died out because, like Red Vienna, the whole terrain on which the debate was happening was crushed by terror, with betrayal and abandonment foreclosing on one possibility after another. Jews were annihilated in the lands where the Nazis gained control and where Jewish workers' movements, filled with revolutionary swagger, had staged strikes and organized self-defense leagues. When Stalin took command of the Soviet Union, he further centralized power, waging ruthless war on his rivals and attempting to cover over his atrocities by unleashing the hounds of anti-Semitism once again (even, according to Trotsky, calling up the ancient blood libel to accuse his son Sergei of plotting the mass poisoning of workers). Meanwhile, the United States and Canada, like so many other nations, offered little safe harbor to boats filled with desperate Jewish refugees coming from Europe.

The one who haunts me most is a Belgian leftist named Abram Leon. Still in his twenties during the war, he could have passed for a young Trotsky himself: a round baby face topped with wavy black hair and heavy black-framed glasses. As a teen, he had lived in Palestine with his family. Back in Belgium, he grew disillusioned with Zionism and became a staunch Trotskyist. During the Nazi occupation, he was forced underground but continued to organize clandestine meetings and publish illegal pamphlets and newspapers. He also worked on a project that might be described as an attempt to understand his own Jewish double: during the war, Leon researched and wrote a scholarly treatise about the uses of anti-Semitism to the global capitalist project, reaching back to the Roman Empire and continuing to the Nazi era.

Cast as distinct from the rest of supposedly healthy and decent capitalism, Jewish capitalism was a mythic structure, a bogeyman, with a familiar purpose: “Big business,” Leon wrote, “endeavored to divert and control the anti-capitalist hatred of the masses for its own exclusive profit.” Very much as the internationally networked Bannonite right rages at “globalists” to divert popular rage away from capitalism as a system and toward an imaginary cabal that can be cut out, leaving the structures that created and protect the global billionaire class intact.

XREF: Connects to the author's framing of scapegoating in other contexts; parallels historical anti-Semitic tropes with contemporary 'globalist' rhetoric.

Leon also explained how the Nazi Party, having witnessed the successful workers’ revolution in Russia, and seeing communism gaining political power in Germany, set out to deliberately weaken the importance of class in the minds of German workers. This was done by replacing class solidarity with racial solidarity, supplanting the common interests shared by all workers with the pleasures and rewards that flowed from belonging to the Aryan race, a bond that claimed to unite the poorest Christian workers with the wealthiest industrialists. But because workers and owners actually have starkly different interests under capitalism, that maneuver required a shadow, an evil twin. “Just as it is necessary to cast the different classes [of Aryans] into one single race,” Leon wrote, “so is it also necessary that this ‘race’ have only a single enemy: ‘the international Jew.’ The myth of race is necessarily accompanied by its ‘negative’—the antirace, the Jew.”

DEFINE: Explains the mechanism of Nazism's 'antirace' concept — the Jew as the necessary negative counterpart to the Aryan racial myth.

Leon's story encapsulates the fate of the debate over the Jewish Question within the Jewish left: it was murdered midsentence. Traverso writes that “the war and the Holocaust … by exterminating most of [the debate's] actors, destroyed the conditions for such a debate.” It was more than that, too. For many of those who survived, Stalin went on to kill their confidence in the possibility—even the desirability—of revolutionary change. Unlike the beacon of Red Vienna, the more brutal and totalitarian the Soviet experiment became, the less socialism seemed able to offer a moral alternative to barbarism. Stalin's greatest betrayal of all.

And so, in the now very real battle over land and borders, a great many of those earlier debates appeared to fall away. Inside the young nation, and especially after the 1967 war and the protracted occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, anti-Semitism came to be treated not as a question in need of historically informed answers, but rather as something eternal, outside the bounds of history. In this pessimistic telling, Jew-hatred was cast as so potent, so deeply rooted in the collective understory of humanity, that attempts to fight it by advancing principles of universal human equality, and by joining forces with the many other groups of people who have been terrorized and slaughtered in the name of racial or religious purity and/or superiority, were treated by Israeli leaders and many Jews in positions of leadership as not just naïve but also actively dangerous.

QUESTION: When and how did this framing solidify after 1967? What debates did it displace?

Zionism's offer after its ideological competitors were drastically weakened was simple: rather than trying to defeat anti-Semitism by getting at its roots, we will hold a gun to its head and force it into submission. And in the face of the spectral Shylock, the eternal Jew that is the shadow-double of all Jews, Israel will respond with a doppelganger of its own: the sunbaked, muscle-bound, land-hungry, machine-gun-toting New Jew—that unbound alter ego of the pale, studious, melancholic Old Jew.

DEFINE: Defines the New Jew concept as Zionism's muscular, militarized counter-archetype to the diasporic Old Jew.

This was the doubling that preoccupied Roth, but it didn't end there, of course. Just as the Old Jews were trapped in a fraternal battle with European Christians, cast as devils onto which all evil was projected, so the New Jews required their own anti-self: the Palestinian, a locus of perpetual threat inside Israel and on its borders.

XREF: Connects to Philip Roth's 'The Counterlife' and the Old Jew/New Jew doubling theme the author develops.

The 1930s saw a series of Arab revolts against the influx of Jewish migrants to Palestine, which was then under British control. This wave of Jewish immigration was regarded by many Palestinians as a colonial imposition, a perception that was further cemented when British troops and local police put down the Arab uprising with tremendous force, fueling further resentment. When Palestine was partitioned in 1947, a move with overwhelming Arab opposition, and Israel declared statehood the next year, the first Arab-Israeli war was locked in. These were the years that Palestinians call the Nakba, or catastrophe: roughly 750,000 Palestinians were expelled, hundreds of Palestinian villages were destroyed, and thousands were killed, with many of the horrifying truths about these atrocities finally escaping Israel's own Shadow Lands in recent years.

XREF: Connects to the broader Israel-Palestine conflict narrative and the Nakba, relevant context for historical and current geopolitical discussion.

Yet rather than seeing Arab resistance for what it was—a nationalist, anti-colonial battle over land and self-determination (with some anti-Semitic elements, to be sure)—many influential Zionist leaders portrayed the entire Palestinian cause as nothing but more irrational Jew-hatred, a seamless continuation of the very same anti-Semitism that had resulted in the Holocaust, and that therefore needed to be crushed with the kind of militarized force that Jews had not been able to marshal in Nazi-controlled Europe. Within this imaginary, the Palestinian, as the Jew's new eternal enemy, was treated as so illegitimate, so irrational, so other, that Israelis believed themselves to be justified in reenacting many of the forms of violence, dehumanizing propaganda, and forced displacement that had targeted and uprooted the Jewish people throughout Europe for centuries, a process that continues to this day with ongoing home demolitions, Israeli settlement expansions, targeted assassinations, settler rampages through Palestinian communities, openly discriminatory laws, and walled ghettos into which Palestinians are corralled.

Looking back as the parent of a child older than we were then, I am struck by what wasn't a part of these strangely mechanical retellings. There was space for the surface-level emotions: horror at the atrocities, rage at the Nazis, a desire for revenge. But not for the more complex and troubling emotions of shame or guilt, or for reflection on what duties the survivors of genocide may have to oppose genocidal logics in all of their forms. I am struck that we never actually grieved, nor were we invited to seize our anger and turn it into an instrument for solidarity.

XREF: Connects to literature on how genocide education shapes emotion, and to critiques of simplified moral lessons in history pedagogy.

Many years later, my friend Cecilie Surasky, then one of the leaders of Jewish Voice for Peace, observed of these kinds of educational methods: “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. Our education did not ask us to probe the parts of ourselves that might be capable of inflicting great harm on others, and to figure out how to resist them. It asked us to be as outraged and indignant at what happened to our ancestors as if it had happened to us—and to stay in that state.

DEFINE: Distinguishes re-membering (a quest for wholeness through grief) from re-traumatization (ritualistic reenactments that keep losses fresh).

The reason for this frozen quality to our education, I now see, was that the Holocaust was a plot point in a larger, prewritten story we not only were being told but also were trapped inside: a phoenix-from-the-flames narrative that began in the gas chambers of Nazi-controlled Europe and ended on the hilltops around Jerusalem. Though there were certainly exceptions, for the most part, the goal of this teaching was not to turn us into people who would fight the next genocide wherever it occurred. The goal was to turn us into Zionists.

QUESTION: How did this nationalist framing shape the author's later views, and does it reflect broader Israeli educational practice beyond her personal experience?

The line between the terrifying stories of our people being hunted and exterminated and the existence of this state on the other side of the world, was, we were told, a straight one. It went like this: If fascist fervor ever surged again, and men in jackboots got it into their heads to purge their national bodies of Jewish genes, we would not be left helpless and unarmed once again, not be left to plead for our survival, not be locked out of every nation that might have saved us, not be devoured by the specter of our Shylock doppelganger. Why? Because next time we would have Israel—the white-and-blue flag that flew at every school assembly, the place where the trees we had donated our allowances to buy were standing tall, planted over the Palestinian villages we were never told existed.

XREF: Parallels settler-colonial erasure narratives and the hidden geography of Indigenous dispossession found in other postcolonial literatures. QUESTION: What role did school rituals like tree-planting donations play in normalizing the erasure of Palestinian geography for generations?

As was the case in many left-wing Jewish homes, I learned a different version of “Never again”—that it was a directive, a sacred duty, to oppose hate and discrimination in all its forms, no matter who was the target. But, for the same reasons that she selected my biblical name, my mother insisted that I go to Hebrew day school to cement the bond to our tribe, to learn the songs, rituals, and languages (both Hebrew and Yiddish) that our adversaries had been trying to annihilate since before the Inquisition. And at that school, “Never again” did not mean “Never again to anyone,” as it did in our home—it meant “Never again to the Jews.” It meant “Never again because of Israel.” It meant “Never again because we who have been haunted by Shylock forever have our own double now—and he has a great many guns.”

“Doppelgänger politics.” That is how Caroline Rooney, professor of African and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Kent, describes the state of Israel and the complex psychological space it occupies as both victim and perpetrator. The doppelganger nature of the country’s identity is embedded in the dualistic language used to describe it, in which everything is double and never singular: Israel-Palestine, Arab and Jew, Two States, The Conflict. Based on a fantasy of symmetrical power, this suturing together of two peoples implies conjoined twins in a state of unending struggle, an irresolvable sibling rivalry between the two peoples, both descended from Abraham.

XREF: Connects to critical theory work on naming and framing, e.g., Edward Said's Orientalism and the politics of describing asymmetric conflicts with symmetric language.

Israel as doppelganger exists on two levels. First, it is a doppelganger of the forms of chauvinistic European nationalisms that turned Jews into pariahs on the continent since well before the Inquisition. That was Zionism’s win-win pitch to anti-Semitic European powers: you get rid of your “Jewish problem” (i.e., Jews, who will leave your countries and migrate to Palestine), and Jews get a state of their own to mimic/twin the very forms of militant nationalism that had oppressed them for centuries. (This is why Zionism was so fiercely opposed by the members of the Bund, who believed that nationalism itself was their enemy and the wellspring of race hatred.)

XREF: Connects to critiques of nationalism and the Bund movement's anti-nationalist stance — relates to any reading on the origins of Zionism versus diaspora socialism. QUESTION: How central was the 'mimicry' argument to early Zionist appeal, versus pre-existing Jewish nationalist sentiment? Worth chasing the Bund source. DEFINE: Clarifies 'doppelganger' here as a structural mimicry/twinning of oppressive nationalist forms, not an actual mirror image.

Israel also became a doppelganger of the colonial project, specifically settler colonialism. Many of Zionism’s basic rationales were thinly veiled Judaizations of core Christian colonial conceptions: Terra Nullius, the claim that continents like Australia were effectively empty because their Indigenous inhabitants were categorized as less than fully human, became “A land without a people for a people without a land”—a phrase adopted by many Zionists and that originated with nineteenth-century Christians. Manifest Destiny became “land bequeathed to the Jews by divine right.” “Taming the wild frontier” became “making the desert bloom.”

DEFINE: Illustrates how the 'doppelganger' concept maps specific colonial justifications (Terra Nullius, Manifest Destiny) onto Zionist rationales via altered slogans. XREF: Connects to settler-colonialism scholarship by Patrick Wolfe and to comparative studies of national founding myths across Israel, the US, and Australia.

As in all colonial projects, Israel’s settlers needed to engage in various kinds of active unseeing. The legendary U.S. investigative journalist I. F. Stone supported the creation of a Jewish homeland in Palestine, even embedding himself on one of the clandestine boats, crowded with Holocaust survivors, that eventually made it to safety in “stucco-colored Haifa” in 1946. But after the 1967 war, he conceded, “For the Zionists, the Arab was the Invisible Man. Psychologically he was not there.” Or as the Israeli prime minister Golda Meir put it, “There was no such thing as Palestinians … They did not exist.” The great Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish maps this spectral status—of being a “present-absentee”—in his book In the Presence of Absence. The lie of Indigenous absence, familiar to all settler colonial projects, required a great deal of effort to maintain. The Jewish National Fund planted pine trees on top of Palestinian villages and centuries-old agricultural terrace systems. Hebrew place names replaced Arabic ones. Olive trees, some millennia old, were, and still are, uprooted.

QUESTION: The parallel drawn across colonial projects invites deeper research into similar erasure tactics in other settler contexts.

Israel, which became a state in 1948, was both a product of those forces and a glaring exception to them. Britain lifted its colonial mandate as part of a broader contraction of its once-global empire. Because a small population of Jews had lived in Palestine continuously, Zionists framed their movement as one of national liberation: like other oppressed people, Jews were getting a state of their own. Of course, from the perspective of the much larger population of Palestinians, who were being evicted from their homes, lands, and communities to make way for a brand-new country, Israel was very far from an anti-colonial project. It was the opposite: a settler colony being established at a time when the rest of the world was going in the opposite direction. This could only have been incendiary.

XREF: Connects to postcolonial theory and settler-colonialism literature on the tension between differing framings of a single historical event.

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."

XREF: Connects to settler colonial studies and the 'victims of the victims' framing that recurs in postcolonial scholarship on Israel/Palestine.

To do onto others the same othering that has been done onto you is, of course, psychologically intolerable. Indeed, such actions are so antithetical to Jewish values that they demand extreme repression and projection. Doppelgangers in literature often embody a partitioned self, and, as Rooney writes, “doppelgänger politics is first of all a politics of self-partition,” with everything we cannot bear to see projected onto the other. If Israel practices doppelganger politics by imitating European nationalisms, it also enacts it in this second way: by projecting all criminality and violence onto the Palestinian other, lest the state’s own foundational crimes be confronted.

XREF: Connects to the broader doppelgänger framework Rooney describes and to political psychology literature on scapegoating and projection.

It’s not hard to see why many were drawn to Zionism’s promise at the start. After so much trauma, it must have felt irresistible to be offered a flag, a uniform, and a gun—to have more choices than whether to be a target or a charity case. If I had been on one of those boats full of refugees no one wanted, would I have had the strength and forethought to resist the promise of a fortressed state of our own? I have no confidence that I could have.

XREF: Connects to broader analyses of how collective trauma renders populations vulnerable to nationalist or militarized political projects.

Rendered invisible and unseeable by Israelis, many Palestinians respond by refusing to see the state that refuses to see them. “The Zionist entity,” some still call it, seven decades after its formation. “Will you or won’t you acknowledge that Israel has a right to exist?” demand Israel’s leaders and defenders, insisting that a refusal to make this acknowledgment proves that Palestinians favor a second Holocaust. But many Palestinians and their supporters refuse to budge, knowing that conceding Israel’s right to exist would change nothing about its actions, and would uphold an idea of an exclusively Jewish homeland that they contest on principle. I understand this refusal—it is one of the few tools available to an occupied and vastly outgunned people. But it also seems worth acknowledging that for Jewish people who have been treated as inhuman for so much of our history, being called an “entity” is a wounding thing, and wounding in a way that may not be particularly constructive.

DEFINE: Explains the strategic function of Palestinians refusing to recognize 'The Zionist entity' — for an occupied people it operates as a form of resistance.

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.

XREF: Connects to broader concepts of settler-colonial dual societies, legal scholar Raef Zreik's work on 'two states' fiction, and comparative frameworks like apartheid analyses.

In interviews, Miéville expresses discomfort with the idea of his book as an allegory, saying that such a reading is too literal and that the novel explores the arbitrary logics of borders more generally, between nations and even inside them. … Yet in the crowding of these two, twinned peoples onto this tiny sliver of territory—the wrenching intimacy of the home invasions and demolitions, the ritualistic regularity of the pummeling of Gaza, the spectacle of once-stateless refugees exiling other people into the sea of statelessness—we see in hyper concentrated form the dead end of this project that dared to call itself "civilization."

XREF: Connects to Miéville as an worldbuilding author and his exploration of arbitrary border logics, relevant to speculative fiction about states and statelessness. FICTION: The 'arbitrary logics of borders' could seed a story world built around shifting or impossible frontier logics.

But the story didn't end there. Because the Allies, who finally saw fit to stop Hitler, decided that they did not want to open their borders to his surviving victims, and instead offloaded their Jewish problem, along with their collective shame and guilt about the Holocaust, onto the Arab world and said: "You take it."

QUESTION: This framing implicates the Allies in creating the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by offloading Jewish refugees onto the Arab world. Worth tracing the historical record of Allied refugee policy to verify this characterization.

Engaging with the form of Zionism that created the state of Israel in 1948 means accepting that a people, just like a person, can be victim and victimizer at the same time; that they can be both traumatized and traumatizer. So much of modern history is a story of pools of trauma being spatially moved around the globe like chess pieces made of human misery, with yesterday's victims enlisted as today's occupying army. The story we are trapped in is not about a people, or two people, or twins. It's a story about a logic, the logic that has been ravaging our world for so very long.

XREF: Echoes trauma-transfer logics in settler-colonial studies and the 'no exit' critiques of the 1948 paradox.

It was 2014 and Israel had launched a particularly deadly assault on Gaza, carried out in the name of destroying the tunnel systems that brought weapons (and much else) over the borders and stopping Palestinian rocket fire. The casualty toll tells the story of appalling asymmetry between occupier and occupied. According to a United Nations report, 1,462 Palestinian civilians were killed that summer, compared with 6 Israeli civilians; 789 Palestinian fighters were killed, compared with 67 Israeli soldiers. The Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem reported that of those who did not take part in the hostilities, “526—a quarter of all Palestinians killed in the operation—were children under eighteen years of age."

XREF: Statistically asymmetrical casualties reflect broader patterns of uneven power in asymmetric warfare conflicts.

People are asking why I am taking this 'side'. There are no sides. I mourn all victims. But every law of war and international law is being broken in the targeting of civilians in Gaza. I stand with the people of Gaza exactly because things might have turned out differently if more people had stood with the Jews in Germany.

XREF: Echoes the 'never again' discourse and comparisons between Nazi Germany and Israel's treatment of Gaza, a recurring and contested historical analogy.

What stood out most when I watched it recently was that it contained none of the swaggering overconfidence that she displays to such disastrous effect about epidemiology. Instead, her voice trembles, and she confesses to being terrified to be entering this fraught conflict. Yet, unlike other subject areas, where she seems to be mostly bluffing, Wolf knows her Old Testament and makes a convincing biblical case that Genesis never promised Israel to the Jews exclusively, that it was always conditional on behaving justly, including being kind to strangers.

XREF: Contrasts Wolf's credible biblical knowledge with her overconfident, bluffing approach in other subject areas like epidemiology.

All of this went very badly for Wolf. "Naomi Wolf's Allegations of an Israeli Genocide Fuel Anti-Semitism" was a typical headline in the Israeli press. In the United States, one prominent rabbi in particular, Shmuley Boteach, seemed to make it his mission to take her down. Wolf told The Guardian she lost her university position over the issue. "I was [teaching] at Barnard, and the trustees said they were not comfortable with my politics being the face of the university," she said. "All I ever wanted was to teach and do this kind of research." She also received "some serious threats online"—enough that she consulted a private security company, and that's where she met her husband, a former U.S. special forces officer who founded Striker Pierce Investigations. … Having run afoul of many of the same guardians of official Jewry over the past three decades, I have no doubt that these events were both frightening and painful for Wolf. These were her friends, family members, and colleagues turning on her. Zionism, moreover, had always been a plank in her political home. Now that plank was giving way. Which raises a possible question: Did that experience—followed by the public excommunications—contribute to how unmoored she became in subsequent years? Does losing her political home partially explain how far she would stray to find a new home?

QUESTION: The passage asks whether this public ostracism pushed Wolf toward unmoored positions later — a causal question worth pursuing.

Wolf's experience of being harshly attacked, threatened, and professionally penalized for questioning Zionist orthodoxy is far from unique. It's part of a much larger story about how a culture that once coursed with debate about these very questions—from our duties to universal rights to the possibilities for multiracial solidarity—had become its mirror opposite. There used to be so many ways to be Jewish and to battle anti-Semitism; it was a question, one with many possible answers. And then we were told that there was just one answer.

QUESTION: The claim asserts a cultural narrative of narrowing debate in Jewish communities. Worth investigating the specific mechanisms and turning point of this shift.

This reality lies at the root of my own discomfort with those progressive tendencies that cheer the censoring of our political opponents, or that offer blank deference to people claiming victim status: I have seen too often how both can go terribly wrong.

In Shylock, a character who turns out to be a Mossad agent describes Israel as “a Jewish country without a Jewish soul.” Fake Roth accuses Israel of, “in many, many terrible ways, deforming and disfiguring Jews as only our anti-Semitic enemies once had the power to do.” Yet another character, this one an old Palestinian friend of Roth’s (who some critics presumed to be based on the Palestinian American scholar Edward Said), describes diasporic Jewish culture as “all human, elastic, adaptable, humorous, creative” but declares that, in Israel, “all this they have replaced here with a stick!”

DEFINE: The highlight presents contrasting fictional formulations of Israeli vs. diasporic Jewish identity, situating the reader within a literary-critical argument about what constitutes authentic Jewish culture.

In a blazing 1963 Commentary essay, “Writing About Jews,” Roth had said that it was the job of a novelist neither to perform propaganda for his ethnic group nor to concern himself with parochial questions like “What will the goyim think?” Thirty years later, was he letting us know that he had changed his mind, that he was ready to do his tribal duty? Or was the entire ending parody—Roth toying with his Jewish critics by saying: Look, Rabbi, I’m doing state propaganda, like you always wanted me to—even letting the Mossad hack apart my book! Am I a good Jew now? Or maybe he didn’t want to choose: maybe he was telling us that he was both that and this.

QUESTION: Asks whether Roth's Operation Shylock ending was genuine reconciliation with his critics or pure parody — an unresolved interpretive crux.

That was the same day when, in Buffalo, New York, an eighteen-year-old white supremacist murdered ten people at a supermarket with a legally purchased AR-15-style rifle. … There was a mass shooting on that day too, this one at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas. The killer, also eighteen, murdered nineteen children and two teachers with a legally purchased assault rifle.

Still, it strikes me that it must be liberating, after living so long in opposition, then so long in humiliation, to finally be on the side with so few facts and so very many guns.

XREF: Examines how power compensates for intellectual or factual disadvantage, paralleling dynamics of authority gained through force rather than knowledge.

We weren't sure it would be possible to get in—Israel tightly controls access to Gaza through the Erez checkpoint, and getting a press pass as a foreign journalist required going through the Israeli press agency. Any one of us could have raised a security flag. But probably because of our Jewish names, the person staffing the office didn't bother looking into us, and we got the necessary accreditation. At the Erez checkpoint, our Jewish names activated our ethnic doubles once again and we were assumed to be sympathetic to Israel's occupation. So while Palestinians stood in long interrogation lines, we sailed through with just a quick ID check, along with bag and body X-rays. Then, jarringly, we were on the other side of the concrete wall, surrounded by watchtowers.

XREF: The 'ethnic double' concept seen earlier in the book apparently connects directly to this anecdote — names as identity markers shaping treatment and access. QUESTION: Does this suggest pervasive profiling based on surnames at Israeli checkpoints, and what systems could counter it?

I understand the primal terror that leads many of my people to co-sign that contract, because the same trauma has been passed down through the generations to me. But I still can't do it; the price is too high. And not just for Palestinians and Jews. Because the deal Erez offered us is a version of the same poisonous deal all who are relatively fortunate on this partitioned planet are being offered. Take the gun. Accept the cages. Fortress your escape pod, and your borders. Perfect your kids. Protect your brand. Ignore the Shadow Lands. Play the victim.

But partitioning and performing and projecting are no longer working. The borders and walls don't protect us from rising temperatures or surging viruses or raging wars. And the walls around ourselves and our kids won't hold, either. Because we are porous and connected, as so many doppelganger stories have attempted to teach us.

QUESTION: What does the porousness metaphor imply for individual selfhood and boundaries in daily life?

If the word integration means anything, this is what it means: that we, with love, shall force our brothers to see themselves as they are, to cease fleeing from reality and begin to change it.

Haunt the dreams of your comrades, and the nightmares of your enemies; live in a future that never came—be a specter, a memory, and a herald. Remind them that the current state was not inevitable until it came to be. Do not occupy yourself with the question of why this very possible future failed, leave the victorious to grope for answers. Be the question, and do not heed your impotence. A ghost has no need for material presence or action, you just need to shimmer.

FICTION: Potent metaphor for characters/movements embodying failed futures — ghosts as political or narrative forces that unsettle the given order without needing material power. SEED: Could fuel an essay on failed futures and how unrealized possibilities exert ongoing influence, or on the power of symbolic/spectral resistance in contrast to action.

Something shifted in me one year into that wretched disease, though. Maybe it was sparked by news that emissions were already rebounding in China, as they soon would everywhere else. Or maybe it was when Joe Biden started handing out thousands of new oil and gas drilling permits. Or when the cruise ships filled with tourists wanting to see Alaska's glaciers before they are gone started showing up again off the coast where I now live.

DEFINE: Clarifies how personal climate grief gives way to resignation when the wider world keeps emitting.

The greatest cause of my mounting despair, though, was none of this. It was when the mass movements that had grown so rapidly in recent years—staging climate strikes, supporting Sanders and other insurgent candidates, filling the streets with calls for racial justice—started dividing and devouring themselves from the inside, often with people who were clearly building their personal brands at the forefront of the divisions. With online clout too often determining movement leadership, and few ways to hold those leaders accountable, conflict and mistrust easily spread, supercharged by algorithms hooked on rage and egged on by fake accounts and Russian bots that heaped salt on all our open wounds. The predatory corporate logics that earlier iterations of the left recognized as our enemies were clearly deep inside us now: in the arteries that connected us, in our habits of mind, in our very cells. It felt like nothing could be trusted, least of all one another.

Yet, the further along I have gone on this journey into a world of doubles, the more it led me back to where I began. The more I looked at doppelgangers and the messages they carry, both personally and politically, the more relevant that knowledge seemed to our prospects of becoming the kinds of people capable of getting off our treacherous path.

SEED: This frames the doppelganger study as practical moral philosophy — could seed an essay on how the double reveals political self-knowledge.

The self as perfected brand, the self as digital avatar, the self as data mine, the self as idealized body, the self as racist and anti-Semitic projection, the child as mirror of the self, the self as eternal victim. These doubles share one thing in common: all are ways of not seeing. Not seeing ourselves clearly (because we are so busy performing an idealized version of ourselves), not seeing one another clearly (because we are so busy projecting what we cannot bear to see about ourselves onto others), and not seeing the world and the connections among us clearly (because we have partitioned ourselves and blocked our vision). I think this, more than anything else, explains the uncanny feeling of our moment in history—with all of its mirrorings, synthetic selves, and manufactured realities. At bottom, it comes down to who and what we cannot bear to see—in our past, in our present, and in the future racing toward us.

QUESTION: What would it take to see clearly past these constructed doubles?

Performing and partitioning and projecting are the individual steps that make up the dance of avoidance. What is being avoided? I think it's our true doppelganger. What Daisy Hildyard calls our "second body," the one enmeshed with wars and whales, the one benefiting from the genocides of the past and adding our little drops of poison to the great die-offs of the future. The second body that perpetually mines the Shadow Lands for its comforts and conveniences.

DEFINE: Introduces Hildyard's concept of the 'second body' as the entangled, ethically burdened self connected to global harms, and frames avoidance as a defense against confronting it.

James Baldwin, speaking about the double projected onto him as a Black man in the United States, observed that it had everything to do with the person doing the projecting. What was a white man seeing when he saw Baldwin? “It wasn’t me,” he said, “it was something he didn’t want to see. And you know what that was? It was ultimately, yes, his own death. Or call it trouble. Trouble is an excellent metaphor for death.”

XREF: Connects to theories of projection in psychology and how prejudice functions as displacement of self-anxiety. SEED: Potential essay angle on how we project our own mortality fears onto others, especially in racialized contexts.

But doppelgangers, by messing with our heads and our illusions of sovereignty, can help teach us this lesson: that we are not as separate from one another as we might think. Not as individuals, and perhaps not even as groups of individuals who have been born into various kinds of seemingly eternal fratricidal duels.

XREF: Relates to themes of identity and relationality, possibly echoing Buddhist concepts of non-self or Levinas on the face of the Other.

Self-involvement, however it manifests—my doppelganger's megalomania, my various neuroses, your fill-in-the-blank—is a story in which the self takes up too much space, just as the story of Judeo-Christian Western civilization puts the human (read: white, male, powerful human) at the center of the story of life on this planet, with all of it created for our species. None of it is true. Whether we are loving ourselves too much or loathing ourselves too much—or, more likely, doing both—we're still at the center of every story. We're still blotting out the sun.

XREF: Echoes ecological and posthumanist critiques that decentering the human is necessary — connects to thinkers from deep ecology to Haraway.

That, I concede, is far too neat an ending to this story. If performing and partitioning and projecting are all techniques of avoiding the Shadow Lands, then neither Buddhist detachment nor Freudian integration of the unconscious is enough to help us confront that which we have been avoiding. Our crises are material and profoundly collective, and so, ultimately, we will be able to bear unbearable realities only if we also work to change them.

XREF: Connects to themes of collective versus individual coping, echoing literature on how systemic problems resist purely psychological solutions.

This starts with naming, as bell hooks always did, the systems that have carved out the Shadow Lands, deemed them erasable, disposable: capitalism, imperialism, white supremacy, patriarchy. It requires teaching those words, and their true meanings, to the people in our lives, so that the next time someone tells them that their suffering and burdens are all the fault of child-stealing globalists, or job-stealing immigrants, or well-meaning teachers, or the Jews or the Chinese or the drag queens at the library, they will know better. And they will be able to fight better. "We can be hard and critical on structures, but soft on people," says the civil rights scholar john a. powell. That is the opposite of the discourse that dominates today, the one that is so very hard on people and far too soft on structures.

XREF: Connects to bell hooks' pedagogy of naming, and the john a. powell dichotomy between being hard on structures but soft on people — contrasts with the author's broader theme of displacement and scapegoating.

The shift to confronting and reimagining structures requires something else: a recognition that this work is not something we can do on our own, as individuals, with a charity donation or an equity and diversity training, or a performance of virtue on social media. Indeed, a central reason why so many of us cannot bear to look at the Shadow Lands is that we live in a culture that tells us to fix massive crises on our own, through self improvement. Support labor rights by ordering from a different store. End racism by battling your personal white fragility—or by representing your marginalized identity group in elite spaces. Solve climate change with an electric car. Transcend your ego with a meditation app.

Mariame Kaba, a longtime prison abolitionist who has done as much as anyone to imagine what it would take to live in a world that does not equate safety with police and cages, puts the lesson succinctly, one passed on to her by her father: "Everything worthwhile is done with other people."

XREF: Links to prison abolition discourse and the broader argument about punitive systems in this work. Connects to collective-action and mutual-aid traditions.

The tension is fruitful and does not need to be resolved. The problem lies in the fact that our culture is so biased toward one tendency over the other. It's the scramble for separateness that is richly rewarded and encouraged in our zero-sum economy, while the urge to act in solidarity and mutual aid with others is discounted and disappeared, when not being actively punished.

XREF: Connects to critiques of competitive individualism and the moral economy literature — the tension is framed as cultural bias rather than inherent necessity.

Conspiracy theories, as we have seen, are both symptoms of confusion and powerlessness and tools of division and distraction that benefit elites. But conspiracy theories are far from the only things that keep us divided; so, at times, are the ways we have learned to understand our own victimization, and the way it may or may not relate to the victimization of others.

We are going to need each other. This means staying attuned to the possibility of a collective power, instead of attached to a proprietary pain.

XREF: Connects to broader discussions of solidarity politics and how attachment to individual grievance can undermine coalition-building.

That is one overarching message I choose to take at the end of my doppelganger journey: time to loosen the grip on various forms of proprietary pain and selfhood, and reach toward many different forms of possible connection and kin, toward anyone who shares a desire to confront the forces of annihilation and extermination and their mindsets of purity and perfection. Faced with the ultimate doppelganger threat—the flip into fascism that is already well underway in many parts of the world—this ability to melt some of the hard, icy edges of identity, however well earned those defenses may be, will be important to any hope we have of success. It will not be enough to protect “our” people; we will need to have the stamina of true solidarity, which defines “our people” as “all people.”

SEED: Could anchor an essay exploring how porous identity boundaries function as resistance to fascism and purity politics.

This kind of universalism is hard. There are so many perfectly good reasons for people on the broadly defined left to be fed up, angry, and disappointed with one another, and to latch onto those disappointments to rationalize splintering into smaller and smaller groups. But when power and wealth and weaponry and information technology are concentrated in so few hands, and those hands are willing to deploy them for the most venal and reckless of ends, splintering is tantamount to surrender. Up against oligarchy, all we have is the power latent in our capacity to unite. Race, gender, sexual orientation, class, and nationality shape our distinct needs, experiences, and historical debts. We must hold on to those realities and build on a shared interest in challenging concentrated power and wealth, while constructing new structures that are infinitely more fair, and more fun.

XREF: Connects to familiar debates between identity politics and class-based/universalist organizing — echoes calls for coalition politics found in writers like Bernie Sanders and critical theory scholars. SEED: A potential essay angle: arguing why factional purity on the left is strategically self-defeating in an era of concentrated wealth and information control.

Most tasks are easier said than done. In the case of coming together across seemingly intractable barriers, however, the reverse may be true: this one is easier done than said. Stuck in the realm of words, we will never run out of reasons to fracture. But when we take action to change material circumstances—whether trying to unionize our workplaces, or halt evictions, or free political prisoners, or build alternatives to policing, or stop a pipeline, or get an insurgent candidate elected—those tensions do not disappear, but they are often balanced by the recognition of shared interests, the pleasures of camaraderie, and, occasionally, the thrill of victory.

SEED: Could spin into an essay on how shared material struggle overcomes tribal/political fragmentation better than debate or dialogue.

This echoes a point made by John Berger in a 1968 essay about the alchemy of large protests, strikes, rallies, and sit-ins. These demonstrations, Berger wrote, don't just demonstrate something to those in power (that people are angry, say, and have the power to disrupt the smooth flow of business). They also demonstrate something to the people gathered on the streets. Those people come to realize that they are not merely individuals, with the limited power of their individual selves, but that "they belong to a class. Belonging to that class ceases to imply a common fate, and implies a common opportunity." Those opportunities manifest in different ways: when individual renters or debtors or workers can't pay the bills, it's a crisis for them and their families. When groups of renters or debtors or workers refuse to pay the bills, or decide to jointly withhold their labor, it's a crisis for their creditors, their landlords, and their bosses.

XREF: Connects to John Berger's 1968 essay on protest alchemy — relates to labor theory, class consciousness, and collective action literature.

Freud observed that when a person is confronted by their doppelganger, they become unfamiliar to themselves. On an individual level, that is deeply destabilizing, as I have learned. But I also know, as an activist who has lost herself in causes and crowds, that becoming unfamiliar to oneself need not be a horrifying experience; I have felt it to be transcendent. When we come together in movements working for the scale of change demanded by our times (which is less green juice than Global Green New Deal), it changes us, and we become people who are, if not unfamiliar, then certainly unexpected. Braver. More hopeful. More connected. More able to feel love toward people we barely know.

XREF: Parallels literature on collective effervescence (Durkheim) and identity transformation in social movements. SEED: Potential essay contrasting Freud's destabilizing doppelganger with movements' transcendent self-loss.

Something else changes, too: when our actions begin to integrate with our beliefs, when we are doing some of the work that we know needs to be done, we have less need for the various doubles our culture offers up disguised as a good life. The allure of disappearing into our digital avatars wanes—whether Bannon's idea of Ajax embodying himself in real life or the various glowing influencers performing themselves into the ether. As Marx said of religion, doubles are our opiates; we have less need for them when there is less pain and dissonance to escape.

XREF: Echoes the author's earlier theme on Bannon and digital avatars; connects to Marx's opiate-of-the-masses framing.

Though rare, I have seen this happen. I have been in factories taken over by their workers and squares occupied by the people and cities in the grips of revolutionary fervor—moments when everyone you meet is your political comrade and lifelong friend rolled into one. And it was there, too, in that U.S. presidential campaign that united millions with three words that began as a slogan and became a kind of social justice prayer: “Not me. Us.” The campaign's pivotal moment took place at a rally in Queens, New York, in October 2019. That's when Sanders, in front of a crowd of twenty-five thousand people, did something he hadn't done before. He exhorted everyone there to look to someone in their midst, someone they did not know, “maybe somebody who doesn't look kinda like you, maybe somebody who might be of a different religion than you, maybe they come from a different country … My question now to you is are you willing to fight for that person who you don't even know as much as you're willing to fight for yourself?”

XREF: Connects to how shared identity and collective action emerge — the 'Not me. Us.' framing parallels other movements that crystallize solidarity in a few words.

The trouble is, a presidential campaign isn't capable of making good on a promise like that. By definition, an electoral campaign has a finite life span, and it ends when the candidate wins or loses. When Bernie lost and that end arrived, the unselfing we felt so powerfully on the campaign trail seemed to end right along with it. Shut in our homes by the first wave of strict lockdowns, severed from the movement that had held us together, so many of us who had been overcome by the power of “us” felt as if we had just been summarily dropped into a deep sea of “me.”

XREF: Connects to literature on the psychology of mass movements and collective effervescence (Durkheim), and the inherent temporariness of political mobilization.

Still, we glimpsed what was possible, and we learned a critical lesson: An election is too fleeting and unstable a container to hold a message as important as “Not me. Us.” But that doesn't mean the message was wrong.

Freud speculated that the figure of the doppelganger recurs in the culture in part because the idea of there being duplicate selves stands in for the vast potentialities that our lives hold. We are the product of choices—made by us, and made by others. But, Freud wrote, those never are the only choices available. There are also “all the possibilities which, had they been realized, might have shaped our destiny, and to which our imagination still clings, all the strivings of the ego that were frustrated by adverse circumstances, all the suppressed acts of volition that fostered the illusion of free will.”

XREF: Connects to the reader's thinking about identity, selfhood, and alternate-life narratives — the same theme explored in fiction about parallel timelines and multiverses. FICTION: Strong prompt for a story where a character encounters their double as a mirror of the life paths they abandoned.

Yet we all know (or should know) that the choices available to us are hardly random. They radically expand and contract based on which countries we happened to be born into, which bodies, which genders, which races, which families. It’s not only individual lives that hold doppelganger potentialities—so, too, do whole societies. Because we all embody Philip Roth’s that-and-this-ness. Kind and callous. Compassionate and out for our narrowest self-interest. Open to one another and harrowingly closed.

My dive into doppelganger culture helped attune me to many examples of that-and-thisness, in myself and in others. Extreme cases, like Hans Asperger, who went from a doctor who was curious and caring toward people like my son, to a man who sent kids who were a little different to their deaths. Or even my own Jewish culture—the way it flipped from a place of such bold and elastic debate to the rigid orthodoxies of with-Israel-or-against-us that are only now beginning to crack. Or the way many people joined the 2020 racial justice uprisings, full of revolutionary hope at the prospects for transforming a society based on principles of equality and care—and then, one year later, some of those very same people seemed unreachable, lost to despair and, at times, conspiracy. “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. Each flip is different, but we are all surrounded by evidence of the different people we might have been, and might still become, under slightly different circumstances.

XREF: Connects to the doppelganger/conceptual twin theme and the 'that-and-thisness' exploration of divided selves.

Take those two trucker convoys: the noisy one and the quieter one eight months earlier, which was organized in solidarity with Indigenous communities grieving their stolen children. They made such a stark contrast. So, one way of seeing the two convoys is that one was good and the other bad. One was progress, the other a white-lash. That would be a comforting binary to choose between, and, in way, that’s how I told the story. But here is where the ground starts moving: some truckers participated in both convoys. In June 2021, they felt sorrow and solidarity; in February 2022, rage and self-righteousness. They were, like everyone, both that and this. And marginally different circumstances—social, political, economic—brought out different sides of them.

QUESTION: What exactly were the differing circumstances that drew out solidarity in one moment and rage in another — worth probing the causal mechanism behind this moral variability.

When I try to understand Other Naomi, I see something similar. She, too, is both that and this. As a young writer, she helped inspire countless women to become feminists. In middle age, she took stands that required real moral courage—as when she walked out of that synagogue or shared her platform with people being pounded by missiles. She has also, especially lately, done a great many things that are extremely harmful, and I think many of the reasons behind them are pretty uninteresting: a desire for attention, for ego gratification, for cash; perhaps a drive to prove that she was right and that every person who ever attacked her was wrong. But all of those baser impulses have been greatly exacerbated by a culture that places limitless value on attention and money, while creating information tools that seem designed to turn every person’s screwup into an opportunity for public shaming, mockery, abandonment, and humiliation on a scale previously unimaginable.

XREF: Connects to broader commentary on social media toxicity, public shaming culture, and how incentive structures shape behavior.

The question I am left with is not the one I hear so frequently about her: How did a person like that turn into a person like this? But: What kind of system is most likely to light up the best parts of all of us—and sustain the fire beyond a protest, or a summer uprising, or a presidential campaign?

SEED: Could spark an essay on designing systems and institutions that sustain collective engagement beyond initial energy spikes.

"I believe the starting point for building a more caring society," writes Sally Weintrobe, a psychoanalyst who specializes in the climate crisis, "is never forgetting that care and uncare are inherent parts of us all, and that each seeks expression and dominance over the other." In other words, we (not just those evil others) are all in a perpetual struggle with our that-and-thisness. The trouble is, we live in a society that encourages and rewards the uncaring parts of ourselves, while making it hard to care for others outside our immediate family (and often within it) in any sustained way. So, Weintrobe, argues, if we want more people to make better choices—not to shop for useless stuff as a source of solace, not to spread disinformation for clicks and clout, not to see other people's vulnerability and need as a threat to our own interests—we need better structures and systems. … What we need are systems that light up our better selves, the parts of ourselves that want to look outward at a world in crisis and join the work of repair. Systems that make it easier, in ways big and small, for care to win the battle over uncare.

This is not about what-ifs: What if the understanding of Hitler as a doppelganger to the colonial project—as expressed by W. E. B. Du Bois and Aimé Césaire and Walter Benjamin and Abram Leon—had been heeded eight decades ago? It wasn't. But it's not too late to listen now, and to have what we hear inform what we do next. We are told that the way things are is the only way they can be, because every other model has supposedly already been tried, and all have failed. But these ideas about different ways of being and thinking and living did not all fail; rather, many of them fell, crushed by political violence and racial terror. Being crushed is not the same as failing, because what was crushed can be revived, reimagined anew. For Freud, doppelgangers represented paths not taken, choices not made. We could also choose to see them as reminders of roads that can still be taken, of pasts that are still pertinent to our present.

QUESTION: How does the colonial/doppelganger reading of Hitler connect to concrete present action? The author gestures at this but the practical 'what we do next' remains open.

The one I think about most is Red Vienna, and the extraordinary child-centered society it built in the rubble of the First World War. That experiment fell under the boot of fascist force—but the spirit that built metaphorical palaces for children in order to tear down prisons was an enormous success. Democratic socialists organized at every level—from the workplace to the neighborhood to elected office—and enacted policies that were staggeringly popular and effective. The armies of care workers. The free diapers and clothing for babies. The light-filled social housing for workers, much of which still stands today. The parks and the swimming pools. The right to nature. The artistic and creative approaches to children's education. The refusal to write off poor or neurodiverse children. The insistent welcoming of refugees and victims of ethnic hatred. The commitment to providing an alternative to the evils of nationalism that were sweeping the continent.

QUESTION: What specific policies and organizational structures made Red Vienna so effective, and how much of the social housing survives today? SEED: A possible essay angle: what contemporary movements could learn from how democratic socialists organized at every level — workplace, neighborhood, elected office — to build a popular alternative to nationalism.

Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, a Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg writer and artist, said something to me more than a decade ago that I still think of often. She was talking about living in a part of Ontario that has been a site of intense industrial pollution, and the draw of moving to more "pristine" wilderness. But, she said, "when I think of the land as my mother or if I think of it as a familial relationship, I don't hate my mother because she's sick, or because she's been abused. I don't stop visiting her because she's been in an abusive relationship and she has scars and bruises. If anything, you need to intensify that relationship." You visit her even more. I related to this on many levels, as the daughter of a mother who became severely disabled and as the mother of a child with what is officially classified as a disability (though we prefer to see it as a different way of being human). Simpson's formulation calls on us to reckon with the sickened and impaired state of our world, but not to use that as an excuse to walk away in search of perfection. On the contrary, when we are surrounded by need, we are called upon to become better caretakers.

XREF: Connects to disability studies and care ethics — the parallel between damaged land and a disabled mother shifts the imperative from fleeing to intensified caretaking. SEED: Promising essay angle: reframing environmental degradation as a relational call to care rather than a reason for despair or escape.

I have written about settler colonialism in these pages as a violent and annihilatory practice, which it is. It also strikes me that it must have been frightening for the early European settlers of these lands to come to places they did not know or understand, places that, for them, had no stories, no myths, no sacredness. One of the ways that they attempted to orient themselves was by giving these places that were so new to them the names of other, more familiar places, or giving the new places their own names. The towns in the part of the world where I live mainly bear the names of men who happened to arrive with their families in the mid-1800s and had the audacity to name the land after themselves. Gibsons. Roberts Creek. Wilson Creek.

XREF: Connects to broader settler colonialism and place-naming discourse — echoes critiques of cartographic erasure of Indigenous place-names.

Now the green road signs along the highway often have two names: they will read TS’UKW’UM (WILSON CREEK) or XWESAM (ROBERTS CREEK); the two worlds occupy the same space. It makes for a challenging twinning, holding in one’s consciousness the names colonists gave places they barely knew and the names the shíshálh Nation had and never stopped having for these same places. The signs invite those of us who are not Indigenous to have a double consciousness—to remember that we are living in a nation that imposed itself onto other nations and tried to relegate those nations—their people, languages, cultures, ways of knowing—to the Shadow Lands.

DEFINE: Explains the concept of 'double consciousness' as introduced for non-Indigenous people through the pairing of colonial and Indigenous place names.

Much of the English-speaking world went into a strange kind of heart-thumping mourning, the kind of collective mourning our culture has not engaged in for so many other deaths: bad deaths, preventable deaths, premature deaths, tragic deaths.

QUESTION: What determines which deaths merit collective mourning? The author suggests a hierarchy of 'grievable deaths' worth exploring.

I’m honestly not sure why anyone should see one queen as absurd and the other as perfectly reasonable. It seems to me that fantasy is at work anytime anyone dares to put on a crown, or draw a line on the earth and declare a new country (especially if it’s someone else’s country, which it always is). In these lands designed to be doppelgangers of other lands (New York, New England, New France, New South Wales, and so on), created by decree by men in various kinds of robes far away, when we start trying to clear away the fact from fiction, fantasy from reality, it will be a good long time before we find something solid. 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. And if our present systems threaten life to its very core, and they do, then they must be changed.

XREF: Echoes social constructionist thought and Buckminster Fuller's rethinking of mundane systems; challenges the immutability of monarchy, borders, and wealth. SEED: Potential essay: how treating invented institutions as immutable naturalizes power, and why reinventing them is a creative act.

There were just thirty of us there in the room; that's how early it was in her fame. We sat cross-legged on cheap broadloom carpet listening as Wolf told us that powerful forces had developed unattainable beauty ideals at the precise moment when young women like us were finally on the cusp of breaking through glass ceilings that had held our mothers back. That was why so many of us starved ourselves, gagged ourselves, wasted valuable brain cells hating our bodies or dreaming of plastic surgery instead of doing the work we were there to do. It was exhausting us, distracting us, robbing us of our rightful power and place in the world.

XREF: Connects to second-wave feminist critiques of beauty culture as patriarchal control, echoing Wolf's The Beauty Myth.

None of this took away from her magnetism, though. Because what was revelatory was Wolf's person. The fact that these words about beauty were coming from someone so young, confident, and conventionally beautiful. She was like a pot-smoking older sister who had come of age in the freewheeling 1970s, whereas we had been teens in the glossy and suffocating 1980s. It might seem like a small thing, but Wolf didn't dress like a power author. Back then, she wore faded jeans and T-shirts. She had a leather jacket on in her author photo. All of this, and she had written a book that people were paying attention to. A Big Book about Big Ideas.

XREF: Touches on ethos and persona in rhetoric — how audence perception of the speaker amplifies or undercuts the message.

I did interview her about The Beauty Myth, in a vestibule off the common room, and the article took up a full page in The Varsity, right across from a piece denouncing the first Gulf War (“U.S. Out of the Gulf: No More Vietnams!”). And we talked about more than the book as well. Her instant-intimacy stunt worked, and I spilled my guts. No, I had not just been raped, not recently. But I was in the middle of a different kind of assault. The first Intifada was raging, and one week earlier I had published an angry article in our campus newspaper about Israeli human rights abuses. As Wolf's writing would do two and half decades later, it had caused a firestorm. There had been furious excommunications and death threats, and thousands of copies of the student newspaper were thrown in the dumpster outside our offices. There was a campaign to get university donors to threaten to withdraw funding unless the paper was sanctioned, and at least one tried, without success. I suppose it was my first experience with what today is called cancel culture.

XREF: Draws a direct parallel to modern cancel culture; connects to the author's own experience of pre-social-media backlash dynamics.

According to a 2005 article in the San Francisco Chronicle, "Her intense energy, deepened with high expectations for her students, can bring young women to tears." I wonder if she used that just-raped line on any of them.

FICTION: This could inspire a character study of an abusive authority figure whose destructive behavior is publicly framed as dedication or high standards.

If there is anything this journey has taught me, it’s that identity is not fixed. Not mine. Not Wolf’s. Not even the barrier between our two identities. It’s all fluid, shifting around and doubling constantly. Negotiating that doubling—between our younger selves and our older selves, between our public selves and our private selves, between our living selves and our dying selves—is a part of what it means to be human. A bigger part of being human, though, and certainly of living a good life, is not about how we make ourselves in those shifting sands of self. It’s about what we make together.

DEFINE: Frames identity not as a stable trait but as a negotiation between doubling pairs: younger/older, public/private, living/dying self.

Besides, I’m not named after Ruth, the loyal one, worth seven sons. I’m named after Naomi, the one who did what it took to survive.

XREF: Reframes a Biblical figure (Naomi vs Ruth) in terms of pragmatic survival rather than traditional loyalty ethics.

"Now who's more real": American Dharma, directed by Errol Morris (Utopia, 2018). … "People take on these digital selves": American Dharma. … "I want Dave in Accounting to be Ajax": Jennifer Senior, “American Rasputin,” The Atlantic, June 6, 2022.

XREF: Connects to Errol Morris's American Dharma and the 'Ajax in Accounting' quote about Bannon's self-mythologizing performance.

Trump fomented … Democrats enabled: Patricia Zengerle, Richard Cowan, and Doina Chiacu, “Trump Incited Jan. 6 Attack After ‘Unhinged’ White House Meeting, Panel Told,” Reuters, July 12, 2022; Dan Friedman and Abigail Weinberg, “Here’s the Whole Transcript of That Leaked Steve Bannon Tape, Annotated,” Mother Jones, August 17, 2022.

Russia accused Ukraine … “mirror imaging”: “Putin Accuses Ukraine of ‘Dirty Bomb’ Plans, Says Risks of World Conflict High,” Reuters, October 26, 2022; “Ukraine Says Russian Troops Will Fight for Key City as Proxy Government Flees,” New York Times, October 24, 2022.

XREF: Mirror imaging — accuser denouncing in the other party exactly what they themselves are doing or planning — connects to Cold War propaganda patterns and general frameworks of psychological projection in conflict rhetoric.

Monsanto lobbies ceaselessly … linked with cancer: Zach Boren and Arthur Neslen, “How Lobbyists for Monsanto Led a ‘Grassroots Farmers’ Movement Against an EU Glyphosate Ban,” Unearthed, October 17, 2018; “IARC Monograph on Glyphosate,” WHO International Agency for Research on Cancer; “Roundup Weedkiller ‘Probably’ Causes Cancer, Says WHO Study,” The Guardian, March 21, 2015.

QUESTION: The IARC monograph's classification remains contested by regulatory bodies like EPA and EFSA. Worth noting the scientific controversy around low-dose exposure and regulatory standards.

“I am a woman, I am a mother”: Benjamin Dodman, “‘Mother, Italian, Christian’: Giorgia Meloni, Italy’s Far-Right Leader on the Cusp of Power,” France24, September 24, 2022.