1/15/2024 0 Comments Vaccine passport naomi wolfShe reads Freud and Poe and Ursula Le Guin and Dostoevsky, and gets over her loathing of Philip Roth’s misogyny to find a surprising richness in the Bundism-Zionism face-off dramatised in Operation Shylock (1993) her bad back, her son’s neuroatypicality, the No Logo seam-rippers she handed out on her first ever book tour, all are given their little parts to play. ‘Which also meant that anything I did to correct the record … would just train the algorithm to confuse us even more.’ĭoppelganger is both more literary and more personal than Klein’s other books. Nine months into her rock-life new normal, Klein angrily responded to a Twitter user who had accused her of comparing government vaccine mandates to Nazis forcing Jews to wear yellow stars: the algorithm, it turned out, was so accustomed to the word ‘Naomi’ being followed by ‘Wolf’ in such contexts that it was autocompleting it. But the pandemic changed an occasional irritant into a full-on mind-fuck. Klein had already noticed a habit, among the inattentive, of getting their Naomis mixed up – ‘We both write big-idea books … We both have brown hair that sometimes goes blonde from overhighlighting … We’re both Jewish,’ and both have enormous followings online. Which raised an alarming question: Who, then, was I?’ ‘Going online to try to find some simulation of the friendships and communities I missed,’ Klein found instead ‘The Confusion: a torrent of people discussing me and what I’d said and what I’d done – only it wasn’t me. The household moved to be near Klein’s parents on ‘a rock’ in British Columbia, three hours from the nearest city. ‘On the exhilarating days … part of me thought we might actually pull it off and get Bernie into the Oval Office, as improbable as that seemed.’ But then in April, Sanders folded, and Klein found herself locked down in New Jersey with her eight-year-old 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’. Klein’s 2020 had begun ‘with manic intensity’, out campaigning for Bernie Sanders to win the Democratic presidential nomination. But Covid made it so very hard to act on.’ ‘“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 … Solid advice. And yet Klein too found herself unravelling during the Covid era, as her new book, Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World (Allen Lane, £25), relates. Klein herself, by contrast, is famous for the calm and poise with which she mainstreams a clear, solidly leftist political-economic critique: brands and marketing in No Logo (1999), the neoliberal takeover in The Shock Doctrine (2007), corporate greenwashing in This Changes Everything: Capitalism v. Dowd is the author of a book that claims Covid vaccines are killing people, especially the young and apparently fit. ‘Ed Dowd Reveals Astonishing Death Rates in the UK,’ her feed had pinned the last time I looked. And it’s been no better since Wolf was allowed back on ‘X’, as we must now call it after Elon Musk took over Twitter. Naomi Klein, who has had reason to make an extremely close study of this story, sees her collapse into conspiracism as sometimes sudden, sometimes gradual, but having taken a sickening lurch in the Covid era: ‘tainted, murderous vaccines’ the World Health Organisation in league with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in a ‘transnational group of bad actors’ ‘Dear Friends, Sorry to Announce a Genocide’. ‘I would be delighted to be talking to CNN and MSNBC and publishing in the New York Times like I used to, but those are not the platforms that are calling me, they aren’t the ones who want to talk about rights and freedoms.’ ‘How Wolf ended up here is … an interesting story,’ Kinchen wrote, recalling Wolf’s decades as a ‘liberal-left … darling’, author of The Beauty Myth (1990) and political consultant to Al Gore. ‘Look, I’m a progressive Democrat,’ Wolf said. ‘She is increasingly out on a limb,’ Kinchen observed, listing Wolf’s top topics of the time, the anti-lockdown stuff and the anti-masking and the terror of ‘vaccine passports’, and noting that she had just appeared on Steve Bannon’s hard-right War Room webcast. I n June 2021, shortly after she was kicked off Twitter, Naomi Wolf gave an interview to Rosie Kinchen of the Sunday Times.
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