Naomi KleinIllustration by Photo Illustratio by The Globe a
Off Duty is a series of lively conversations with influential people, from CEOs to celebrities, on life, work and the art of taking time off.
In losing control over her public self, the award-winning Canadian journalist and author Naomi Klein has found freedom in being herself.
Five years ago, Klein started to be mistaken for her so-called doppelganger, the American feminist writer turned conspiracy theorist Naomi Wolf, and receiving social-media backlash for extreme ideas with which she didn’t associate. She feared for what it would mean for her public persona.
Klein and Wolf are both brunette Jewish writers with a shared first name, but that’s where their similarities end. While Wolf gained fame for her bestselling feminist books including The Beauty Myth, she has since become a right-wing conspiracy theorist, spreading COVID-19 vaccine misinformation and appearing as a regular guest on Steve Bannon’s podcast. Klein, on the other hand, is a progressive, anti-capitalistic climate activist.
After the experience helped her let go of the need to control how the public perceived her, Klein took the opportunity to get to know the inner workings of the growing right-wing “mirror world” of conspiracy theories. The result is Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World, published last month. An instant New York Times bestseller, the book is a departure for the author, taking a more personal and experimental approach to her usual cultural analysis.
“The idea that there’s another person who the world perceives to be you can either be seen as a nightmare or just a reminder that we’re not actually in as much control as we might have thought,” Klein told me over the phone. “… You may as well just be yourself.”
Welcome to the mirror world, where nothing is as it seems
In an interview with The Globe, Klein shared how she disconnects in this time of overlapping crises, her thoughts on the wellness industry’s role in medical misinformation and why living in British Columbia is both comforting and heartbreaking.
Why did you decide to go the more vulnerable route with this new book?
I thought my personal story would be an entry point into a generalized feeling of vertigo. It’s sort of an uncanny period with all kinds of new and odd political alliances, and even uncanny weather because of the climate crisis. I think a lot of us are trying to get our bearings.
One such political alliance you mention in a description of your book is between “soft-focus wellness influencers” and “fire-breathing far-right propagandists.” What did you mean by this?
The world of wellness was overrepresented in a particular kind of medical misinformation during the pandemic. What I argue in the book is that the underlying tenets of a certain part of wellness culture are rhymed with the paranoid individualism of far-right conspiracies. The message is that you can’t control the world, but you can control your body and your only real responsibility is to get your own body into a state of optimal wellness.
We started to hear these very explicitly supremacist views, like, ‘Well, maybe they should die. If they don’t take care of their bodies, that’s not my problem.’ When you hear people say that, it’s not such a stretch to see them in alignment with people who think people should die in the desert or drown in the Rio Grande or in the Mediterranean because they don’t have citizenship. Once you start ranking human life and deciding that certain people have more of a right to live than others, you’re going down a pretty ominous path.
Have you changed how you approach social-media personally?
I took Twitter off my phone in 2015, during the Leap Manifesto in Canada. I was finding myself not able to focus on my child and I was not happy with having my attention split. I also have social media blocked on the computer that I write on, so the only place I can access it is my laptop. I use a program called Freedom where, when I’m concentrating, I block the internet entirely. And then I will take a month off completely in the summer sometimes.
What do you think of Meta’s news ban on Facebook and Instagram in Canada?
I always tell people to use social media as a tool – don’t be used by it. As much as possible, use it to steer people towards more substantive work. And that’s precisely what is being blocked. I think particularly in the era of overlapping staccato disasters, as we cope with the seemingly unending pandemic and climate breakdown and all kinds of political instability, we need to be able to get access to reliable information. So I think it’s very, very bad news.
How do you cope when you feel overwhelmed by the state of the world?
I’ve already outed myself as like the world’s worst yogi by writing in the book about doing yoga while listening to Steve Bannon’s podcast, so clearly nobody should be taking relaxation advice from me. But I do listen to a certain kind of binaural beats daily. They’re a kind of musical wave that is supposed to be very good for relaxation. I put on headphones and an eye mask and listen for 20 minutes, and it’s supposed to reset your brain.
What are you reading or listening to right now?
I recently read Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver, which was the best novel I’ve read in a really long time. Being gripped by a really great novel is always the best way for me to get out of my own head.
I’ve also been listening to Sinead O’Connor on repeat because I was just so sad, and I found that really cathartic but also enraging. I was mad at myself for not having continued to listen to her after she had been such an important influence on me when I was a young feminist in university.
How does it feel to be living in the picturesque, nature-filled province of B.C.?
My parents came to Canada during the Vietnam War. We moved around a fair bit – from Montreal, then out West – so I didn’t have a deep connection to one place. But I now feel deeply connected to B.C., where I’ve been living on and off since 2005 and full-time for the past three years. It’s where my parents are, where my grandparents are buried and where my son was born.
The relative wildness of B.C. is both a solace and something of a heartbreak. We are watching the last great trees fall and we are keenly aware that the temperature of the streams can get too hot for the salmon. It can all collapse very quickly. So it isn’t just as simple as saying that I take solace from nature. It also feels very melancholic because I always wonder if this is the last summer that will feel peaceful. The fires always feel so close and extinction feels close.
How has where you live changed your lifestyle?
My joy is paddle boarding. The water’s pretty freezing, even in the summer, but I try to do a long swim or a long paddle as much as I can and hang out with seals. They always pop their little heads up very close. My son’s school also backs onto this amazing network of trails so if it’s my turn to drop him off, I take the dog for a walk right away and sometimes I’ll call a friend in the woods. I try to spend time with the trees all year round.
This interview has been edited and condensed.