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. After all, for a quarter of a century, I have been a person who writes about corporate power and its ravages. I recognize that this decision is somewhat out of character. It was an out-of-body experience: if she, according to this torrent of people, was me, who, then, was I?Īll of this may help explain why I made the admittedly odd decision to follow my doppelganger into the rabbit hole of her rabbit holes, chasing after any insight into her strange behaviour and that of her newfound allies that I could divine. The glib expressions of sympathy (“The real victim in all this here is Naomi Klein” and “Thoughts and prayers to Naomi Klein”). The denunciations and excommunication (“I can’t believe I used to respect Naomi Klein. In those lonely months, I would wander online to try to find some simulation of the friendships and communities I missed, and find, instead, The Confusion. And all the while, my doppelganger troubles deepened, in part because I was relatively quiet in this period, isolated in my Canadian home and unable to perform so many of the activities that once reinforced my own public identity. But over a decade ago, she started talking and writing about power grabs under cover of states of emergency – and the once-sharp yellow line that divided those lanes began to go wobbly.īy early 2021, when she was casting nearly every public health measure marshalled to control the Covid pandemic as a covert plan by the Chinese Communist party, the World Economic Forum and Anthony Fauci to usher in a sinister new world order, I began to feel as if 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. Most confusingly, my doppelganger and I once had distinct writerly lanes (hers being women’s bodies, sexuality, and leadership mine being corporate assaults on democracy and the climate crisis). I read the sentence to my partner, the film director and producer Avram Lewis (who goes by Avi). “Her partner, the film producer Avram Ludwig, was also arrested.” There was even a moment, while reading an article in the Guardian about her being arrested at a protest in New York, when I experienced the unmistakable chill of the doppelganger, an uncanny feeling Sigmund Freud described as “that species of the frightening that goes back to what was once well known and had long been familiar”. Or the guy who tweeted that I had been losing my mind for years and now equated having to get a Covid vaccine with Jews in Nazi Germany having to wear yellow stars – linking, of course, to a statement by Wolf saying that very thing. Or the time Jordan Peterson slammed me on his podcast for allegedly writing The Beauty Myth (to be fair, he also slams me for things I have written). Like the time I offended a famous Australian author by failing to remember our prior encounter at a Christmas party hosted by our shared publisher (it was Wolf’s publisher, not mine, and I had been to no such party). There are too many instances and varieties of identity confusion to summarize here. We both have brown hair that sometimes goes blond from over-highlighting (hers is longer and more voluminous than mine). We both write big-idea books (my No Logo, her Beauty Myth my Shock Doctrine, her End of America my This Changes Everything, her Vagina). And the worst part of the confusion is that I can see why people get their Naomis mixed up. Today, she is a full-time, industrial-scale disseminator of unproven conspiracy theories on everything from Islamic State beheadings to vaccines. In the 1990s, she was a standard-bearer for “third wave” feminism, then a leading adviser to US vice-president Al Gore. I am referring, of course, to Naomi Wolf.
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