Mirror World of Progressive Doppelgängers

I’m a voracious reader of the Free Press. Discarded magazines and newspapers are snuffed down like fast food. Snagged some relatively recent issues of The Progressive, reliably dishing out Far Left Liberal Bias. Editor Ruth Coniff thruples “election deniers, COVID-19 conspiracy theorists and the Republican Chaos Congress” in her Dec.2023 editorial, Getting Beyond ‘Us Versus Them’. She advises readers how to “slip out of intractable political stand-offs” using “deep canvassing” for “more fruitful conversations”, basically fake empathy to persuade cranky cousins they’re crazy and need to get jabbed. If that doesn’t work, there’s always canvas bagging refuseniks with mandates and economic hardship.

Coniff reviews Naomi Klein’s book Doppelganger, a buffet of half baked meringues from “monitoring Naomi Wolf online as she morphed from mainstream writer into a COVID-19 conspiracy theorist”, in the same issue. Not a critical review like this series. She praises Klein for alerting people to “the tremendous damage wrought by predatory capitalism”, but refuses non-dairy dessert. They love the plating, yet can’t stomach Convid Centerpiece as the trophy kill.

Klein’s book zeroed in on contrarian conspiracies about Covid lockdowns, mask mandates, mandatory jabs and vaccine passports, yet missed factual targets using the first fundamental fallacy- an appeal to authority long after its credibility was crashed. The Progressive concurs even as injection influencers drop dead from the shots. Imprinting is deep. Psyches are scarred from ripping off these blinders.

Klein parrots the long discredited paper on Proximal Origin of the illness, blaming a “novel and highly contagious zoonotic virus that demanded hard tradeoffs from all of us.” (Lockdowns and mask mandates were novel. The virus was brewed in a biolab. There was no “all of us.”)

Confined to a suburban home in New Jersey with her 9 yo “neuroatypical son, trying in vain to help him learn online”, after four months she fled with her Canadian husband to an isolated island in British Columbia. They had high speed internet, of course.

Klein became addicted to The Mirror World online, obsessively following her Doppelganger, Naomi Wolf. This Naomi was gaining hundreds of thousands of followers, (or Russian botswarms), preaching convid was “part of an experiment, a plot designed to turn us into technoslaves and convince us to voluntarily relinquish our freedoms, wiping out large swaths of humanity in the process. A genocidal, transnational group of bad actors”, the WEF, WHO, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, tech companies and the CCP “used the pandemic to crush humanity and to destroy the West.”

Klein aimed to “unpack and deconstruct the commingling world of conspiracy theories, wellness hucksters and their intersectionality with Covid-19 denial, anti-vaccine hysteria and rising fascism.” That’s pretty progressive. She followed Steve Bannon and Tucker Carlson shows, where Other Naomi became a regular guest, as conspiracists allied in “open warfare against objective reality.” Klein’s a cultural commenter, not an investigative journalist. No need to look into their claims to ridicule some outlandish ones.

She heard Wolf quote from Klein’s own Shock Doctrine thesis to a much larger and more diverse audience, creating “new alliances with some of the most malevolent men on the planet, sowing information chaos on a mass scale and gleefully egging on insurrection in country after country by exploiting deep racial, cultural and historical divides.” There really are mirror worlds in Uncanny Valley, featuring doppelganger charges made by left and right conspiracists with different villains.

She identifies Wolf’s website Daily Clout as a “relentless source of covid misinformation”, forming alliances with Republican state lawmakers to enforce their insanity. Wolf even claimed partial credit for dozens of red states’ legal bans on mask mandates and vaccine passports. NPR gave Wolf credit for a private school banning vaccinated teachers, to protect students from shedding, calling it a “pseudo-medical community.”

Klein insists there is “no link between vaccines and infertility” and that vaccines don’t shed. Flippantly informing readers that “Proof is available on line.” Not that she searched for it, she was entranced by reflections of her Doppelgangers, staring into the Mirror World. She comflates Alice in Wonderland metaphors- falling down the rabbit hole, with Alice Through the Mirror memes, without analyzing White Queen or Red Queen motifs.

Klein checked out Glowing Mama, a mother and child wellness influencer, who wouldn’t let her parents see their grandchildren to protect her kids from shedding. Unlike warning teens about killing gramps unless injected, vaxxshedding “flipped community caring on its head, where vaccinated people were the selfish ones sacrificing the most vulnerable, the real spreaders and shedders.”

For all her monitoring, Klein never ventures into the Mirror World, petrified by distorted images. She “always imagined myself to be immune to these shock tactics, since I knew how they worked” from writing Shock Doctrine, but like most “progressives and liberals” she was KO’ed by a slap with the left, punch with the right combination of psychological shock treatments.

I’ve been an old school progressive since I became politically aware, tempered by decades of participation and observation of talk and walk. Goals might be shared, but not failed solutions. Pragmatic Populism.

Weirdly, almost all antivaxxers were liberals when I joined the club in the 90’s. Now, it’s a crowd of conservatives and No Labels, while Liberal Bastions (The Progressive, The Nation, Mother Jones), cling to the last battlement. Vaccines are Perfectly God. No Dissent Allowed. Klein and Coniff blow shofars on the cliffs of Masada, Death before Denial.

For Republicans, Anti-Zionism is the Red Line even as they lead us into WWIII like hogs to the slaughter. For Blues it’s Anti-Vaxxers, as they herd cattle up the killing chutes, ignoring dead and disabled piled up on the ramparts. True Colors have been struck.

Klein thanks Doppelganger Wolf, who “helped me see better the dangerous systems and dynamics we are trapped in. [The virtual world of] online avatars, personal brands, tech companies using data troves to train machines to create artificial simulations of human intelligence and functions, the duplication of life like digital ether [serving] the rapacious attention economy.”

Can’t argue with that, but she balks at entering the Deep Woods of genocidal intent. Unlike Little Red Riding Hood, Klein can’t go into the wilderness where Wolf howls. She’s content with Bad Apples and Lone Nut flan, concluding “our political and health bureaucracies- hollowed out by fifty years of neoliberal clawbacks-, repeatedly fumbled or failed to control contagion, while drug companies maximized their profits by protecting patents that should never have been in place.” Predatory Capitalism and the Big Bad Wolf, not Death Angel Stew.