Doppelganger, page 11
I have a few minor follow-up questions though. Once in Bethlehem, Naomi, now poor and desperate, does instruct her daughter-in-law to put on perfume; sneak onto the barley threshing floor, where an old, well-off relative, Boaz, is sleeping; and “uncover his feet and lie down.” The goal is for this to result in a hookup that will set Ruth and Naomi up for life. After some haggling, it ends in marriage, eventually leading, three generations on, to the birth of King David.
“Naomi does sort of pimp Ruth out to Boaz,” I gently point out. “Is that really a nice person to be named after?” Michele pauses. She is eighty-two and sharp as hell. We agree that it’s probably best not to impose our values on biblical stories and return to our coffees in someone else’s sun-drenched kitchen. (If I did want to impose my values, I might say that Old Testament Naomi was a bit of a hustler, doing what it took to get by in a broken system, protecting her people’s future at all costs.)
That was pretty much it for Wolf-adjacent content, and it wasn’t even really about Wolf. I preferred to think of it as an impromptu feminist Bible study. Michele did ask what had brought on this curiosity, at which point it would have been rude not to tell her a little bit about my Wolf research. Also, I thought she might have some intel: Michele wrote a popular newspaper column for decades, and I had a vague memory that she met Wolf in the 1990s.
“What was she like, back in the day?” I asked, trying to sound nonchalant.
“Well, I didn’t think much of that Beauty Myth book; there wasn’t much new there. But we were all glad that this pretty young woman was choosing to identify as a feminist.”
That made a lot of sense. The 1980s had been a grim slog for second-wave feminists. It must have been a balm to have Wolf come along at the dawn of a new decade and wear the badge as if it were a chic bolero jacket, as was the style back then.
And that was that. Seriously. The whole discussion. It was fleeting, and certainly not a full-blown relapse into my doppelganger’s world. That didn’t come for at least another week.
Here is how it happened, and I’m not going to sugarcoat it. I was in significant back pain and, because we were on a small island with some of the lowest Covid rates outside New Zealand, I decided I would take my chances and seek professional help.
The appointment was a forty-five-minute drive away, and I set off midmorning, under clear skies on a virtually empty two-lane road banked by sand dunes, red cliffs, and crashing Atlantic waves. As I drove, I realized I was something I had barely been in sixteen months: alone. Alone and surrounded by natural beauty. Elation flooded my body, down to the tips of my fingers clasping the steering wheel.
In that perfect moment, I could have listened to anything. I could have rolled down the windows and filled my ears with the surf and the gulls. I could have blasted Joni Mitchell’s “Blue,” which I had recently rediscovered thanks to Brandi Carlile’s cover. But I didn’t do any of that. Instead, I touched the purple podcast app, pulled up Steve Bannon’s War Room, and read the capsule summary of the most recent episode. It was a speech by Donald Trump, recorded live, in which he announced that he was suing the Big Tech companies for deplatforming him, followed by reaction from …
What? Why her?
I scrolled down and saw that I had missed several other recent appearances by my doppelganger while abiding by my no-Wolf diet. I gulped them all, one after another. And that’s how I ended up on the side of the road, with my hazards on, late for a much-needed treatment, on my first vacation in two years, scribbling in a tiny red notebook as I tried to transcribe the words coming through my phone’s speaker: “black shirts and brown shirts,” “Fauci demonic,” “petrifying,” “your body belongs to the state,” “like China’s one-child policy and forced sterilization,” “geotracking,” “evil x2.”
This was a full-blown relapse.
In my meager defense, Wolf’s elevated status on Bannon’s podcast marked a major development in the life of my doppelganger. It’s one thing to be invited onto a flagship show of the Trumpian right to freestyle about vaccine passports or to trash Joe Biden—any semi-prominent self-described Democrat would be welcome to pull that stunt. It’s quite another to be the person whom Steve Bannon goes to for exclusive reaction to one of the first post–White House speeches by Donald Trump—a man whom the vast majority of Bannon’s listeners are utterly convinced is the rightful president of the United States (and whom Wolf had referred to, in her earlier life, as “a horrible human being, an awful person”). It’s not just that it sells books and subscriptions to her website. It signals real power—the ability to reach and potentially influence the behavior of millions of people.
A few weeks earlier, when Wolf was kicked off Twitter, many on the platform rejoiced as if she had just been deleted from planet Earth. People dug up screenshots of her most outrageous posts and made little videos of them, set to Celine Dion music, thanking her for the memories. Someone tweeted “Ding dong the witch is dead”—and that was precisely the vibe, at least among progressives. I admit that I felt a combination of relief and emptiness at her ejection. She had caused me so much misery—could her wild ride really be over? Could it possibly be that simple?
What I realized on the side of that road was that it most definitely is not that simple. Bannon used to keep a ticker at the top of his website that claimed to track how many times his show had been downloaded. At around that time, the number was nearing 100 million—that on top of the millions of live feeds he claimed on multiple video and television platforms. Those figures shouldn’t be taken at face value, coming as they do from the architect of Trump’s shiny tower of “alternative facts.” Still, there is no question that Bannon’s War Room is just that: a nerve center for the far-right presidency in waiting, whether headed by Trump or someone even more dangerous.
“Action! Action! Action!”
That is War Room’s mantra. Bannon repeats it often. It appears on a plaque behind his head when he broadcasts. He sends it with the pieces of content he pushes out on Gettr (“the Twitter killer”) and in his newsletter (Daily Command Brief).
He means it. Unlike Fox News, which, despite its obvious bias, still has the trappings of cable news, War Room has built an explicitly activist media platform—or, more precisely, a militarist one. Rather than television’s airbrushed talking heads, Bannon cultivates a feeling that his audience is part of a rolling meeting between a commander and his busy field generals, each one reporting back from their various fronts: the Big Steal strategy (challenging the results of the 2020 election); the precinct strategy (putting ideological foot soldiers in place at the local level to prevent the next election from being “stolen”); the school board strategy (challenging “woke” curricula as well as masks and vaccine policies); the “command by negation” strategy (pressuring Republican representatives to deny Biden every possible legislative victory).
The hosts and guests may be talking to one another in that particular moment, but talking is not the point of the show—the point is doing. “Stick around after, I want to talk to you more about this off air,” Bannon will often say at the end of a segment, and the audience gets the thrill of feeling that they are eavesdropping on history in the making. Key to the show’s appeal is its lack of slickness, underlined by Bannon’s trademark personal dishevelment: dark, rumpled doubled-up button-down shirts; chaotic waves of gray hair, rivaling Wolf’s for volume; and blotchy face, pointedly shunning the fakery of television makeup. This is a show with no spectators, only proud members of the “War Room posse” or, when Bannon is particularly keyed up, the soldiers in his “cavalry.”
If Naomi Wolf was Bannon’s go-to guest not just to rail against vaccine mandates but now to live-spin Trump’s speeches, that meant she had crossed an entirely new threshold, becoming a full-blown player in this world. Shortly after, Wolf would go so far as to join Trump’s class-action lawsuit against Twitter as a co-plaintiff, challenging her own ouster from the platform (though she still claimed to “profoundly” disagree with Trump “ideologically”). It was there, on the side of that road, that I became convinced that whatever was happening with her wasn’t just relevant to me because of my admittedly niche doppelganger problem—it was far more serious than that. If someone like her could be shifting alliances so radically, it seemed worth trying to figure out what was driving that transformation—especially because, by then, it was also clear that quite a few prominent liberals and leftists were making a similar “post-left” lurch to the hard right.
Even after following Wolf’s antics for years, or rather, after having them follow me, I was taken aback by the decisiveness of this boundary crossing. How did she—a Jewish feminist who wrote a book warning how easily fascism can throttle open societies—rationalize this alliance with Trump and Bannon? How, for that matter, did Bannon—a proud anti-abortion Catholic who was once charged with domestic assault and whose ex-wife told a court that he didn’t want their daughters “going to school with Jews”—rationalize teaming up with Wolf? (Bannon pleaded not guilty to the domestic assault charges, which were dismissed after his wife did not show up in court, and he denies the remark about Jews.)
Despite these contradictions, Wolf was not merely a regular guest on Bannon’s War Room; she was fast becoming one of its most recognizable characters. At the peak of their collaboration, Wolf would appear on War Room nearly every single weekday for two weeks. They even partnered up on co-branded “DailyClout War Room Pfizer investigations” into various vaccine rabbit holes and packaged them into an e-book. Clearly, neither was letting past principles stand in the way of this union.
What I was trying to figure out was this: What does this unlikeliest of buddy movies say about the ways that Covid has redrawn political maps in country after country, blurring left-right lines and provoking previously apolitical cohorts to take to the streets? What did it have to do with the “freedom fighters” blocking ambulances outside hospitals that required their staff to get vaccinated? Or refusing to believe the results of any elections that didn’t go their way? Or denying evidence of Russian war crimes? Or, or, or …
A Global Diagonal Meridian
The reshaping of politics that is one of Covid’s primary legacies is far bigger than Wolf and Bannon, of course. The hallucinatory period when the pandemic melded with economic upheavals and climate disasters accelerated all manner of strange-bedfellow coalitions, manifesting in large protests first against lockdowns and then against any sensible health measure that would have helped make the lockdowns unnecessary. These new alliances eventually kicked off the self-described Freedom Convoy that shut down Ottawa, the capital city in my own country, for three weeks, and then spread to the United States and Europe, branching out from Covid-related grievances to a more general, amorphous cry for “freedom.”
These formations bring together many disparate political and cultural strains: the traditional right; the QAnon conspiratorial hard right; alternative health subcultures usually associated with the green left; a smattering of neo-Nazis; parents (mainly white mothers) angry about a range of things happening and not happening in schools (masks, jabs, all-gender bathrooms, anti-racist books); small-business owners enraged by the often-devastating impacts of Covid controls on their bottom lines, which gave way to rage at everything from inflation to induction stove tops. Significant disagreement exists inside these new convergences—Wolf, for instance, is neither a QAnon cultist nor a neo-Nazi. Yet galvanized by large-platform misinformers like her and Bannon, most seem to agree that the pandemic is a plot by Davos elites to push a reengineered society under the banner of the “Great Reset.”
If the claims are coming from the far right, the covert plan is for a green/socialist/Venezuelan/Soros/forced-vaccine dictatorship, while the New Agers warn of a Big Pharma/GMO/biometric-implant/5G/robot-dog/forced-vaccine dictatorship. With the exception of the Covid-related refresh, the conspiracies that are part of this political convergence are not new—most have been around for decades, and some are ancient blood libels. What’s new is the force of the magnetic pull with which they are finding one another, self-assembling into what the Vice reporter Anna Merlan has termed a “conspiracy singularity.”
In Germany, the movement often describes its politics as Querdenken (which means lateral, diagonal, or outside-the-box thinking) and it has forged worrying alliances between New Age health obsessives, who are opposed to putting anything impure into their carefully tended bodies, and several neofascist parties, which took up the anti-vaccination battle cry as part of a Covid-era resistance to “hygiene dictatorship.” (This was meant to trigger memories of Nazi-era “race hygiene,” as if the Nazi atrocity of treating human beings as germs and treating germs as germs was in any way the same thing.) Inspired by the term Querdenken, but taking it beyond Germany, William Callison and Quinn Slobodian, both scholars of European politics, describe these emergent political alliances as “diagonalism.” They explain: “Born in part from transformations in technology and communication, diagonalists tend to contest conventional monikers of left and right (while generally arcing toward far-right beliefs), to express ambivalence if not cynicism toward parliamentary politics, and to blend convictions about holism and even spirituality with a dogged discourse of individual liberties. At the extreme end, diagonal movements share a conviction that all power is conspiracy.”
Despite claims of post-partisanship, it is right-wing, often far-right, political parties around the world that have managed to absorb the unruly passions and energy of diagonalism, folding its Covid-era grievances into preexisting projects opposing “wokeness” and drumming up fears of migrant “invasions.” Still, it is important for these movements to present themselves (and to believe themselves to be) ruptures with politics-as-usual; to claim to be something new, beyond traditional left-right poles.
That’s why having a few prominent self-identified progressives and/or liberals involved is so critical. Importantly, the role of these progressives is not to renounce the goals of social justice and embrace a hard-right worldview (the journey made by well-known ex-Trotskyists like Irving Kristol in the mid-twentieth century). On the contrary, they must continue to identify as proud members of the left, or devoted liberals, while claiming that it is the movements and tendencies of which they were once part that have betrayed their own ideals, leaving these uniquely courageous individuals politically homeless and in search of new alliances. These exiles from progressivism package themselves not as defectors, but as loyalists—it’s their former comrades and colleagues, they claim, who are the imposters, the fakes.
Among several such figures, my doppelganger has become particularly practiced at this maneuver. For instance, when Wolf first started appearing on right-wing media outlets in 2021, her posture was reticent, anything but defiant. She talked about having voted for Biden, stressed that she used to write for The New York Times and The Guardian and appear on MSNBC, described herself as a liberal “media darling.” But now, she said, right-wing shows like Carlson’s and Bannon’s were the only ones courageous enough to give her a platform.
For their part, every time a fiery right-wing host had Wolf on as a guest, they would indulge in a protracted, ornate windup listing all of her liberal credentials, and professing shock that they could possibly find themselves on the same side. “I never thought I would be talking to you except in a debate format,” Tucker Carlson said the first time he had Wolf on. Then, referring to a tweet in which Wolf said she regretted voting for Joe Biden, he added, “I was struck by the bravery it must have taken you to write it—I’m sure you lost friends over it, and for doing this [show].” Wolf smiled wistfully and nodded, accepting the hero’s welcome.
When she appeared on the podcast hosted by one of Britain’s most vocal climate change deniers and far-right provocateurs, James Delingpole, he began by saying, “This is so unlikely … five years ago, the idea that you and I would be breaking bread … I sort of bracketed you with the other Naomi—you know, Naomi Klein, Naomi Wolf, what’s the difference?” (Insert silent scream from me.) He went on: “And now, here we are. I mean, I think we are allies in a much, much bigger war. And you’ve been fighting a really good fight, so congratulations.” Once again, she drank it in, playing her demure part on these awkward political first dates.
As time went on, and Wolf became more of a fixture, she seemed to relish her new role, eagerly playing the part of the coastal liberal elite that right-wing populists love to hate, even dropping French words into her Steve Bannon appearances. During a segment on France’s lockdown rule, she asked, “Whatever happened to ‘Liberté, égalité, fraternité’?”—as if most of his listeners weren’t the very same people who changed the name of “French fries” to “freedom fries” after France refused to join George W. Bush’s 2003 invasion of Iraq. And the first time she went on his show, she told Bannon, “I spent years thinking you were the devil, no disrespect. Now I’m so happy to have you in the trenches along with other people across the political spectrum fighting for freedom … We have to drop those labels immediately in order to come together to fight for our constitution and our freedoms.”
That is the key message we are meant to take away from diagonalist politics: the very fact that these unlikely alliances are even occurring, that the people involved are willing to unite in common purpose despite their past differences, is meant to serve as proof that their cause is both urgent and necessary. How else could Wolf rationalize teaming up with Bannon who, along with Trump, normalized a political discourse that dehumanized migrants as monstrous others—rapists, gang members, and disease carriers? This is also why Wolf leans so heavily and continuously on extreme historical analogies—comparing Covid health measures with Nazi rule, with apartheid, with slavery. This kind of rhetorical escalation is required to rationalize her new alliances. If you are fighting “slavery forever” or a modern-day Hitler, everything—including the companion you find yourself in bed with—is a minor detail. It’s similar, in many ways, to how evangelical Christians were coaxed by their leaders to set aside the fact that Trump’s behavior—the philandering, the alleged sexual assaults, the lying, the cruelty—violated their professed values. To get over all that, they had to cast him, in all seriousness, as the Lord’s messy messenger, put on earth to fight God’s own doppelganger: the devil. With stakes as high as eternal salvation, what’s a little pussy grabbing?
