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.

Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, loc. 925