Naomi Klein’s Extremely Strange Attack on Naomi Wolf
I. Introduction
Watching my former heroes succumb to fascism is one of the most heartbreaking aspects of the iatrogenocide. Naomi Klein was once my favorite public intellectual. I’ve seen her speak in person several times. She’s the scholar I most sought to emulate. But during the pandemic she became a Pharma fascist. This book review is the story of how she unwittingly went from fierce critic of capitalism to a shameless defender of its worst aspects….
Covid is the most extreme example of “disaster capitalism” in history. Disaster capitalism is defined as, “the practice of taking financial advantage of natural or human-made disasters and unstable social, political, or economic situations.” Creating a gain-of-function virus, releasing it, and blocking access to safe and effective treatments to create the market for the most deadly vaccine in history IS taking financial advantage of a human-made disaster.
Since the publication of The Shock Doctrine in 2007, Naomi A. Klein has rightly been seen as the foremost public intellectual in the world on the topic of disaster capitalism. It appears that she coined the term with an article in theNation in 2005. For the next fifteen years, Ms. Klein did more to bring the world’s attention to this troubling new form of capitalist exploitation than anyone else.
But during the Covid catastrophe, Ms. Klein disappeared from public view. She did not follow the money, she did not break any major new stories, she did not speak out against the profiteering nor the destruction of civil liberties. Because she never challenged the powers that be, Ms. Klein was never banned from social media, never deplatformed, and never demonetized. Ms. Klein was a non-playing character during what should have been the defining moment in her career.
Now with the publication of Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World, we discover what Ms. Klein was up to for the last three years. It turns out that Ms. Klein occupied herself during the pandemic by stalking Dr. Naomi R. Wolf.
I wish I was joking. It fills me with sadness to even type those words. But it’s true. By her own admission Ms. Klein ignored her aging parents; did not campaign much for her husband who ran for a seat in the Canadian parliament (he lost); and stopped working on any aspect of corporate power, climate change, or disaster capitalism — so that she could listen to Dr. Wolf’s appearances on Steve Bannon’s Covid War Room and track Dr. Wolf’s every move across alternative media.
When Ms. Klein told her agent that she had spent the pandemic stalking Dr. Wolf, that should have been interpreted as a cry for help. She needed a good therapist. Instead, legendary publisher Farrar, Straus and Giroux gave Ms. Klein a book deal. Doppelganger attempts to explain how Dr. Wolf lost her way amidst the pandemic. But, unwittingly, the book explains how Ms. Klein lost her way, even before the pandemic. The book is a disaster that will leave a permanent stain on Ms. Klein’s legacy. The only silver lining is that it gives us a very detailed look inside the mind of a Covidian.
II. Contempt dressed up in fancy German cultural theory
Ms. Klein’s thesis in Doppelganger goes something like this:
‘Dr. Wolf was a beloved progressive public intellectual as a result of her books The Beauty Myth, Fire with Fire, Promiscuities, and The End of America. But she’s an attention hound and a bad researcher and she got “humiliated” in a BBC interview in 2019 because she possibly got one fact wrong in her book Outrages: Sex, Censorship, and the Criminalization of Love. Facing banishment from polite society, Dr. Wolf turned to the political right, is now on Steve Bannon’s show several times a week, and she is leading the U.S. and the world into right wing fascism during the era of Covid.’
If that sounds far-fetched it’s because it is.
The facts are (not in the book, so I will present them here):
- Dr. Wolf is a brilliant scholar who has been at the top of her game for over three decades.
- Regarding that BBC interview, Dr. Wolf interpreted an official historical court document literally when apparently it could be read figuratively — hardly the worst offense a scholar could make. But the BBC had decided to lynch her for straying from the official progressive narrative on other matters and so they manufactured a pretext to go after her.
- During Covid, Dr. Wolf followed the money and broke hundreds of major stories by leading a team of researchers that are analyzing the half a million pages of Pfizer clinical trial documents that the FDA initially hoped to keep secret for 75 years.
- The progressive left lost its mind and went fascist during Covid and banned any truth-tellers including Dr. Wolf from the mainstream and social media.
- So Dr. Wolf got her message out however she could — making alliances with former political adversaries including Mr. Bannon, who has a better understanding of government corruption in the age of Covid than anyone on the political left. (Full disclosure: I appeared on Bannon’s Covid War Room along with Dr. Wolf in June 2022.)
- Dr. Wolf is rightly seen as a hero in the freedom movement for her extraordinary work to draw attention to the harms women are experiencing from Covid shots.
- Dr. Wolf has become one of the leading figures in the world trying to stop the iatrogenocide.
Ms. Klein must have sensed that a book about stalking a rival would read like the ravings of a jealous mean girl in middle school. So Ms. Klein dresses up her argument with German cultural theory about doppelgangers. It’s difficult to try to summarize her model faithfully because it’s dishonest, disjointed, and often contradictory but here’s my best try:
‘Throughout recorded history, storytellers have described doppelgangers — shadow selves, body doubles, people who look and act like us but are not us. Freud argues that doppelgangers are a form of projection whereby we cast onto others undesirable traits about ourselves. Doppelgangers traditionally appear during times of great crisis, personally and in society. Dr. Wolf is somehow Ms. Klein’s evil twin as evidenced by the fact that the public gets them mixed up all the time. The key to addressing the appearance of doppelgangers in our lives is to see and integrate the dark and light sides of ourselves and our societies. So if Canada, the U.S., Europe, and Australia would acknowledge their past atrocities against indigenous people and the environment, and make amends by providing better social services and stopping climate change, our evil cultural shadow (Wolf, Bannon, Republicans) would somehow fade from view, and everything would be better.’
Or something like that. The book is a hot mess but that’s the essence.
Along the way, Ms. Klein portrays lockdowns, masks, social distancing, censorship, vaccine mandates, vaccine passports, and vaccine apartheid (that kept upwards of 75 percent of Black Americans from being able to enter restaurants in New York City) as appropriate interventions that saved lives — while describing Dr. Wolf as hysterical for opposing this fascist takeover of the developed world.
In perhaps the most galling betrayal of her previous values, Ms. Klein describes conspiracy theories themselves as “the latest reprise of disaster capitalism” while ignoring the over seven million people killed by Fauci et al. and the trillions of dollars stolen from the poor and working class by the Fascist Pharma State.
III. Things left unsaid
One can learn a lot about a book by looking through the index. What’s striking about Doppelganger is what’s NOT included in the index and thus not included in the book. There is NO mention of:
- Central Bank Digital Currencies
- 15-minute cities
- Del Bigtree
- The Highwire
- Aaron Siri
- Informed Consent Action Network
- Peter McCullough
- Robert Malone
- Pierre Kory
- Paul Marik
- Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance
- Alex Berenson
- VAERS
- V-Safe
Imagine trying to tell the story of the Covid era and not mentioning any of the people or things on this list? It would be impossible but that’s the bizarre progressive echo chamber that Ms. Klein lives in.
Now maybe it was just poorly designed but do you know who else does not appear in the index? Naomi Wolf, even though she is the main focus of the book. Ms. Klein wants to erase Dr. Wolf from this earth and in the index Naomi Wolf is nowhere to be found.
It gets worse, as it always does these days.
Dr. Wolf, in her writings on Substack and Daily Clout and in her numerous appearances on podcasts and TV, is making verifiable claims. If one thinks she’s wrong one can go look up her sources and challenge them however one wishes. Dr. Wolf wrote an entire book explaining her views — The Bodies of Others: The New Authoritarians, COVID-19 and The War Against the Human (published May 31, 2022) and Dr. Wolf published Pfizer Documents Analysis Volunteers’ Reports eBook: Find Out What Pfizer, FDA Tried to Conceal (on January 16, 2023). Yet neither book is mentioned in Doppelganger.
Ms. Klein’s entire engagement with the scientific debate in connection with Covid and Covid vaccines consists of the following sentences:
“That is not how lipid nanoparticles work. It is not how vaccines work. It is not how anything works.” p. 112.
At no point does Ms. Klein ever provide any evidence of how these things “actually” work according to her trusted experts. Instead Ms. Klein’s entire attack on Dr. Wolf’s verifiable claims boils down to ‘nuh-uh!’
Later Ms. Klein gives away the game by saying that the general public could not possibly read and understand vaccine studies for themselves. That is a flat-out lie. The statistics in vaccine studies are relatively straightforward — just odds ratios, risk ratios, and such. Anyone with at least one semester of college statistics (or even a good high school statistics class) can understand them and see how they are manipulated and rigged. What this tells us though is that Ms. Klein has never read an original vaccine study for herself, which means that all of her opinions about vaccines come from secondary sources — filtered through the gatekeepers who usually have a financial conflict of interest.
One last point before the big reveal. Ms. Klein, like so many progressives, portrays herself as the champion of the working class. Her entire brand is built around this — from No Logo to The Shock Doctrine to This Changes Everything. She prides herself on having dropped out of college and her investigative journalism, before she sold out, often consisted of daring undercover work reporting from inside dangerous workplaces.
During Covid, there was a genuine working class revolution in response to vaccine mandates. The trucker convoys in Canada and the US along with hundreds of thousands of protestors in France and Australia were exactly the sort of working class uprising against corporate and government power that progressives have always dreamed of. And like so many of her progressive colleagues, when the revolution came, Ms. Klein sided with the Pharma fascist ruling class against the working class that was demanding sovereignty over their own bodies. Ms. Klein’s betrayal of the working class during Covid and in the book is absolutely shameful.
IV. What actually happened
The field of psychology is foundational to the progressive worldview. During World War II the Marxian psychologists and sociologists fled Germany and many ended up at the New School in New York. There they tried to figure out how fascism happened while correcting for the flaws in Marxism. Psychology was the tool by which progressives would build the new man, new woman, and better world, free from the violence that destroyed Europe and Asia in World War II.
There are several ideas that are central to this envisioned psychological reformation of society.
Projection, from Freud.
Maslow’s hierarchies — the idea that there are base instincts that are dominant when we are just trying to survive that give way to more refined ways of being and connecting with others as our circumstances improve.
Splitting (from Ronald Fairbairn, popularized by Otto F. Kernberg, Donald Winnicott, and Melanie Klein) — the inability to see nuance and shades of gray, making some people appear all-good and other people all-bad in one’s mind.
Integrating the shadow (largely from Jung), overcoming “othering,” finding wholeness and acceptance of both the light and dark in ourselves and others.
I get what Ms. Klein is trying to do. She sees this “other,” Dr. Wolf, who she absolutely detests. As a good progressive scholar, Ms. Klein wants to use the pop psychology tools that are available to understand why Dr. Wolf is so triggering for her — so that she can ultimately reintegrate that shadow side of her self that has been split off.
But Ms. Klein never gets there. She hates Dr. Wolf so much that even while she’s describing all of this fancy German cultural theory about projection, the shadow, and the importance of integration, Ms. Klein just rains hate, projection, and othering down upon Dr. Wolf from the first page to the last.
So Ms. Klein sets up this game — ‘we shall study doppelgangers past and present’ — and then fails to apply the lessons from the study to her own life. Without even a hint of irony, Ms. Klein mentions several times how characters in movies, books, and stories often kill their doppelganger and in the process sometimes kill themselves. Yet in the final frame of the book, Ms. Klein is still seething, and one can interpret her final message as not so much wanting to kill Dr. Wolf but wanting to become her — the bad bitch who always finds a way to get sh*t done.
This is all very strange. Ms. Klein is far too good a scholar to write a book this cartoonishly bad.
The explanation for what’s really going on is right there in the introduction and it runs throughout the book. But Ms. Klein cannot see it because she’s still in it. Here’s the subtext:
At age 42, Ms. Klein and her husband, Avi, welcomed a child into the world, a son. Previously unbeknownst to most of her readers, at age four her son was diagnosed as being on the autism spectrum. They tried to make mainstream school work in Canada but the teacher, facing 30 kids — five of whom were special needs — quit. Then the instructional aide quit and the classroom descended into chaos. One of the main reasons why Ms. Klein accepted the job at Rutgers University as the inaugural Gloria Steinem Endowed Chair in Media, Culture, and Feminist Studies is because Ms. Klein and her husband hoped to get better autism services for their son in New Jersey than they could get in Canada. In the New Jersey schools they received lots more support for their son, but it was mostly Applied Behavior Analysis that they found dehumanizing. So when Covid hit, they returned to Canada where they now live “on a rock” three hours outside of the nearest large city. They’ve found a school that works for their son, now eleven, where he can go for a walk in the forest with a teacher’s aide anytime he is having a hard day.
What took Ms. Klein off the political chessboard was not Dr. Wolf, it was the demands of raising a special needs child.
So why isn’t Ms. Klein with us on the issue of toxicants causing an increase in autism rates? She’s a fierce critic of corporate polluters. And as a high-profile figure, Ms. Klein is in contact with lots of parents. As she recounts in the book, both in Canada and in the United States fellow parents have taken her aside repeatedly to describe vaccine injury including autism in their kids. But in page after page, Ms. Klein heaps contempt upon these parents — accusing them of not loving their children because they want to help them heal from these toxic injuries. Ms. Klein trots out one gonzo neurodiversity cliché after another in defense of the status quo. She even argues that stories of changeling children in literature are evidence that autism has always been with us at the same prevalence rate as today. We also learn that Ms. Klein’s father was a professor of pediatrics at McGill University in Canada, the birthplace of evidence-based medicine (that has since been completely captured by Pharma).
In order to stand with us, Ms. Klein would have to repudiate her father’s career, acknowledge her own possible role in her child’s disability (for believing in the trustworthiness of felonious corporations), and work alongside her former adversaries to overthrow the Fascist Pharma State (as Dr. Wolf is doing) — while raising a special needs child. And it’s all too much. So her personality split and she projected upon Dr. Wolf all of the hurt, rage, and pain that she was likely feeling towards herself, her father, and the system that betrayed her.
THAT’S the shadow that needs to be integrated. It’s not that Dr. Wolf is a fascist, it’s that Ms. Klein, the world’s foremost expert on disaster capitalism inadvertently slid into Pharma fascism herself and does not know how to extricate herself from the fact that she was tricked by the most vile aspect of global monopoly capitalism. Ms. Klein spent her life battling the dragon of capitalism and then it found her weak spot — the trusted advice of her pediatrician — and now her world is upside down.
I have enormous empathy for Ms. Klein. The travails of motherhood have radically circumscribed her public role, that she was good at and she adored. But it is beyond sinister that she has now allowed Pharma to turn her into the point of the spear to persecute other parents of vaccine-injured children, just like they did with Brandy Zadrozny (at NBC News) and Peter Hotez.
V. An invitation
I have an invitation for Ms. Klein — come join us. That’s how you integrate your shadow, that’s what will make your double vision disappear. As Robert Frost once wrote (paraphrasing Dante), “The only way out is through.”
You can start by reading my doctoral thesis, The Political Economy of Autism. It’s all there — how science and medicine were captured, how the childhood vaccine schedule along with lots of other toxicants are causing the autism epidemic, how regulators work for industry and not the people. It’s The Shock Doctrine but applied to Big Pharma.
Ms. Klein, the revolution that you have sought your whole life is right here — in the medical freedom movement — left, right, and, center; rich and poor; all nations, races, and ethnicities fighting with a common purpose to stop corporate capture and corruption. Together we can and will overthrow the Fascist Pharma State and create a world that supports, loves, respects, and protects all children.
You were misled, unintentionally or otherwise — by your father; the “experts”; your friends at the Guardian, the New Yorker, and MSNBC; and the predatory global monopoly capitalist system.
It’s not your fault.
We all once believed what you believe. Then we turned and faced the horror of the world as it actually is and got to work making things better by confronting the system that is poisoning kids (and adults now too).
There’s an astonishing freedom here on the other side, that you feel with every breath once you renounce the ridiculous bougie system. The medical freedom movement is amazing. None of us are walking around worried about doppelgangers because we are united by a single-minded focus on stopping the iatrogenocide and bringing the perpetrators to justice. We are the underground resistance fighting the fascists and we are absolutely going to win. Look, I get that you probably hate me right now for writing this critical review. But when you finally hear that still small voice inside your heart letting you know that the dirty anti-vaxxers are actually right, own it, and come over to our side. You have nothing to lose but your chains (and your doppelganger).
Peace.
Reposted from the author’s Substack
Published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
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Author
Toby Rogers has a Ph.D. in political economy from the University of Sydney in Australia and a Master of Public Policy degree from the University of California, Berkeley. His research focus is on regulatory capture and corruption in the pharmaceutical industry. Dr. Rogers does grassroots political organizing with medical freedom groups across the country working to stop the epidemic of chronic illness in children. He writes about the political economy of public health on Substack.
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