The

The The author Naomi Klein is probably best known for scathing critiques of corporate power.

In books like No Logo, the shock

doctrine, and this changes everything. But in 2023, she published a pretty different kind of book.

During the pandemic, Klein noticed how much she was being confused online with a different Naomi,

Naomi Wolf, who in the 90s was known as a feminist author and journalist and Al Gore advisor,

but who had in the COVID era become one of the most prominent right-wing conspiracists.

That experience and the interest in Wolf that it created for Klein became the foundation of

doppelganger, a trip into the mirror world.

This is a hard to summarize book in a way books I really like often are.

It could only have been written by one person at one moment in their life.

What Klein was interested in was the ways that the pandemic was scrambling,

traditional political coordinates, creating a political coalition that didn't seem, at least by the logic that most

people understood of politics, like it could continue to exist. How could somebody like Naomi Wolf,

a pro-choice feminist, become political allies with Steve Bannon? How could RFK Jr. become a core

part of the MAGA coalition? So Klein began following Wolf, her doppelganger,

into this mirror world of the new MAGA right. She began to sense its rules and its concerns and its

power and the way it was seducing people. It's allure. She sought a lot more clearly than most

liberals and leftists did, because at least in 2023, if you weren't choosing to follow it, very easy to miss it. And even easier,

if you're an institutionally minded liberal leftist to convince yourself that it didn't matter,

that it didn't have power. But now that world, the mirror world, it's our world. Now its leaders are our leaders.

So I wanted to have Clan on to talk about her book and about what she's observed over the first

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