Naomi Klein realized that she had an alter ego, or doppelganger, during the Occupy Wall Street protests in 2011. She was in a public bathroom and overheard people talking about her. The author of numerous international bestsellers including “No Logo,” “The Shock Doctrine,” and “This Changes Everything,” Klein realized that she was being confused with Naomi Wolf, the liberal feminist author of the 1991 bestseller, “The Beauty Myth.” A decade ago, both authors were writing about the danger of unchecked corporate power and rising authoritarianism.

But in recent years, Wolf has become an anti-vax conspiracy theorist, a leading purveyor of Covid-19 misinformation, and a regular guest of right-wing provocateurs Steve Bannon and Tucker Carlson. Klein was horrified and intrigued about why “Other Naomi” had disappeared down a conspiratorial rabbit hole. She decided to follow her down the rabbit hole and report back.

In her latest book, “Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World,” Klein dives deep into the alternate reality of conspiracy theorists and the far right to understand why and how societies have become polarized and democracy has been pushed to the brink. “Doppelganger” has been named one of the year’s best books by the New York Times, Time, Slate and The Guardian. New York Magazine’s Vulture has named it the No. 1 book of the year.

Klein is Professor of Climate Justice and co-director of the Center for Climate Justice at the University of British Columbia and is Honorary Professor of Media and Climate at Rutgers. She is a columnist for The Guardian.

“Doppelgangers in art and literature stand in for the way societies can kind of flip into evil twin versions of themselves,” Klein told The Vermont Conversation. “This is what happens when fascism rises: a previously open society suddenly tips into something much uglier. And that that can happen. We're not immune to it.”

Klein explained that “right-wing conspiracy culture often gets the facts wrong, but the feelings right. They're often tapping into a feeling that the game is rigged, that these elites are getting away with murder, there's a whole different set of rules that applies to them."

"All of that is true — it is a rigged game,” she said. “That game is called capitalism.”

Klein said that the notion of doppelgangers helps explain what is happening in Israel’s war on Gaza. 

“If you have Israeli politicians openly saying that they want as many people in Gaza as possible to become refugees, then that is a genocidal logic. Some people say that's antisemitic, because how could a Jewish state commit genocide when Israel is itself conceived of as reparations for genocide? Well, victims can become perpetrators. This is where it comes back to doppelgangers.”

Klein said that there is a way out of the mirror world. “If you want to be able to break out of those partitioned narratives, you have to be able to see each other. You don't have to agree, but you actually have to believe that each other are real, that your stories exist. If all you do is just retell and retraumatize and cling to your parallel stories and don't even acknowledge that the other stories exist, we will never ever, ever get out.”

“Maybe,” said Klein, “we'll get to a wiser place out of this extreme trauma.”