What had happened to Naomi Wolf? And what had the public confusion between the two of them-the encroachment of one Naomi on the other-done to Klein’s own sense of self? She found herself watching Wolf’s appearances on Tucker Carlson Tonight, listening to her guest spots on Steve Bannon’s podcast, transfixed by the front-facing video Wolf released on Why Vaccine Passports Equal Slavery Forever, and searching these appearances for clues. In her new book, Doppelganger, she writes of her compulsion to keep an eye on Wolf’s antics, at first as a defense mechanism, in order to steel herself for the blowback that was to come, but later out of a strange curiosity. She changed her Twitter bio to “not that Naomi,” and issued a “periodic reminder to keep your Naomis straight.” But privately Klein found the mix-ups more disturbing than she let on. Klein for her part kept a dignified silence as all this unfolded, limiting herself to the occasional wry comment at moments when “Other Naomi,” as she came to think of her, had said something particularly disastrous. Someone even composed a mnemonic that went: “If the Naomi be Klein / you’re doing just fine / If the Naomi be Wolf / Oh, buddy. (And perhaps the fact that Klein’s reputation was intact perpetuated the sense, essential to a Twitter pile-on, that someone’s good name was still at stake.) People were confusing the two Naomis so often that a subset of jokes began to do the rounds: “The real victim in all this here is Naomi Klein,” “Thoughts and prayers to Naomi Klein,” and so on. People stirred up by Wolf’s tweets would start yelling at Klein, wondering what had scrambled her political commitments, how the author of No Logo and The Shock Doctrine, who had devoted her career to studying the excesses of corporate power, could have come to this. People stirred up by Naomi Wolf’s tweets would start yelling at Naomi Klein online, wondering what had scrambled her political commitments.Ĭollateral damage in the saga was the writer Naomi Klein, who kept getting mistaken for Wolf in the fog of online indignation. Was this really the same Naomi Wolf, the author of a widely read feminist treatise, The Beauty Myth a longtime contributor to the liberal newspaper The Guardian a familiar face on MSNBC-a fixture in liberal media since the 1990s? What had happened to her? Each time that she declared, usually via Twitter, that Anthony Fauci was Satan, or that children who wore masks had lost the ability to smile, that the vaccines were a “software platform that can receive uploads,” or that she had uncovered a plot by Apple “to deliver vaccines nanopatticles that let you travel back in time,” ripples of consternation followed. In the first year of the pandemic, Wolf reliably drew fresh surprise and dismay when she made outlandish claims about the tyranny of public health measures and the dangers of vaccines. A notable feature of her career has been her ability to repeat the act of self-immolation over and over, singeing others along the way. Those rules have somehow not held true for the writer Naomi Wolf. A reporter who got their sources mixed up once will surprise no one next time they bungle a story a writer who spreads conspiracy theories is soon known as a crank.
Credibility is finite, and once it’s gone, there is not much left to burn. Torching your own reputation is usually a onetime engagement.
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