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.

Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, loc. 408