1
OCCUPIED
T
he  rst time it happened I was in a stall in a public bathroom just
o Wall Street in Manhattan. I was about to open the door when
I heard two women talking about me.
“Did you see what Naomi Klein said?”
I froze,  ashing back to every mean girl in high school, pre- humiliated.
What had I said?
“Something about how the march today is a bad idea.”
“Who asked her? I really don’t think she understands our demands.”
Wait. I hadn’t said anything about the march— or the demands.  en
it hit me: I knew who had. I casually strolled to the sink, made eye con-
tact with one of the women in the mirror, and said words I would repeat
far too many times in the months and years to come.
“I think you are talking about Naomi Wolf.”
at was November 2011, at the height of Occupy Wall Street, the
movement that saw groups of young people camp out in public parks
and squares in cities across the United States, Canada, Asia, and the
United Kingdom.  e uprising was inspired by the Arab Spring and
youth- led occupations of squares in southern Europe— a collective howl
against economic inequality and  nancial crimes that would, eventu-
ally, birth a new generational politics.  at day, the organizers of the
18 DOPPELGANGER
original Manhattan encampment had called for a mass march through
the  nancial district, and you could tell by all the black clothing and
heavy liquid eyeliner that no one in that bathroom was on break from
derivative trading.
I could see why some of my fellow marchers had their Naomis mixed
up. We both write big- idea books (my No Logo, her Beauty Myth; my
Shock Doctrine, her End of America; my is Changes Everything, her
Vagina). We both have brown hair that sometimes goes blond from over-
highlighting (hers is longer and more voluminous than mine). We’re
both Jewish. Most confusingly, we once had distinct writerly lanes (hers
being women’s bodies, sexuality, and leadership; mine being corporate
assaults on democracy and climate change). But by the time Occupy
happened, the once- sharp yellow line that divided those lanes had be-
gun to go wobbly.
At the time of the bathroom incident, I had visited the Occupy plaza
a couple of times. I was mainly there to conduct interviews about the
relationship between market logic and climate breakdown for what
would become is Changes Everything. But while I was there, organiz-
ers asked me to give a short talk about the shock of the 2008  nancial
crisis and the raging injustices that followed— the trillions marshaled to
save the banks whose reckless trades had caused the crisis, the punish-
ing austerity o ered to pretty much everyone else, the legalized corrup-
tion that all of this laid bare.  ese were the seeds of disconnect that
right- wing populists in dozens of countries would eventually exploit for
a  ercely anti- immigrant and anti- “globalist” political project, including
Donald Trump, under the tutelage of his chief advisor, Stephen K. Ban-
non. At the time, however, many of us still held out hope that the crash
could catalyze a democratic revival and a new era of le power, one that
would discipline corporate might and empower  ailing democracies to
address our many surging emergencies, including the climate emer-
gency.  at’s what my speech at Occupy was about. You could look it up
and weep at how naïve I was.
Naomi Wolf, once a standard- bearer of 1990s feminism, had inter-
sected with the protests as well, and I suppose that’s where the confusion
OCCUPIED 19
began. She had written several articles arguing that the crackdown on
Occupy demonstrated that the United States was tipping into a police
state.  is was the subject of her book e End of America, which out-
lined “ten steps” she claimed every government takes on its way to
outright fascism. Her evidence that this evil future was now upon us was
the aggressive way that Occupy demonstrators were having their free-
dom restricted.  e city was not allowing megaphones and sound sys-
tems to be used in the park, and there had been a series of mass arrests.
Wolf, in her articles, argued that activists should defy restrictions on
their freedom of speech and assembly in order to prevent the coup she
insisted was unfolding under their noses. Not wanting to give the police
an excuse to clear the protest camp, the organizers took a di erent tack,
using what became known as the “human microphone” (where the
crowd repeats the speaker’s words so that everyone can hear them).
at was not the only point of disagreement between Wolf and the
organizers. For better or worse, the Occupiers had been very clear that
the movement did not have a policy agenda— two or three political de-
mands lawmakers could meet that would send them all home satis ed.
Wolf insisted this was not true: she claimed the movement actually had
speci c demands and that she, improbably, had  gured them out. “I
found out what it was that OWS actually wanted,” she wrote in  e
Guardian, explaining, “I began soliciting online ‘What is it you want?’
answers” from self- identi ed Occupy activists. Disregarding the move-
ment’s commitment to radical, participatory democracy, Wolf then
turned the results of her haphazard surveying into a short list of de-
mands and took it upon herself to deliver it to New York governor An-
drew Cuomo at a black- tie event organized by Hu ngton Post, where she
and Cuomo were both guests.
It got stranger. Failing to connect with Cuomo inside, Wolf le the
event to spontaneously address Occupy Wall Street demonstrators on
the sidewalk outside and, while informing the crowd what their demands
were and telling them that they were demanding them wrong because
“they had a  rst amendment right to use a megaphone,” managed to get
herself arrested in a burgundy evening gown, a melee documented by a
18 DOPPELGANGER
original Manhattan encampment had called for a mass march through
the  nancial district, and you could tell by all the black clothing and
heavy liquid eyeliner that no one in that bathroom was on break from
derivative trading.
I could see why some of my fellow marchers had their Naomis mixed
up. We both write big- idea books (my No Logo, her Beauty Myth; my
Shock Doctrine, her End of America; my is Changes Everything, her
Vagina). We both have brown hair that sometimes goes blond from over-
highlighting (hers is longer and more voluminous than mine). We’re
both Jewish. Most confusingly, we once had distinct writerly lanes (hers
being women’s bodies, sexuality, and leadership; mine being corporate
assaults on democracy and climate change). But by the time Occupy
happened, the once- sharp yellow line that divided those lanes had be-
gun to go wobbly.
At the time of the bathroom incident, I had visited the Occupy plaza
a couple of times. I was mainly there to conduct interviews about the
relationship between market logic and climate breakdown for what
would become is Changes Everything. But while I was there, organiz-
ers asked me to give a short talk about the shock of the 2008  nancial
crisis and the raging injustices that followed— the trillions marshaled to
save the banks whose reckless trades had caused the crisis, the punish-
ing austerity o ered to pretty much everyone else, the legalized corrup-
tion that all of this laid bare.  ese were the seeds of disconnect that
right- wing populists in dozens of countries would eventually exploit for
a  ercely anti- immigrant and anti- “globalist” political project, including
Donald Trump, under the tutelage of his chief advisor, Stephen K. Ban-
non. At the time, however, many of us still held out hope that the crash
could catalyze a democratic revival and a new era of le power, one that
would discipline corporate might and empower  ailing democracies to
address our many surging emergencies, including the climate emer-
gency.  at’s what my speech at Occupy was about. You could look it up
and weep at how naïve I was.
Naomi Wolf, once a standard- bearer of 1990s feminism, had inter-
sected with the protests as well, and I suppose that’s where the confusion
OCCUPIED 19
began. She had written several articles arguing that the crackdown on
Occupy demonstrated that the United States was tipping into a police
state.  is was the subject of her book e End of America, which out-
lined “ten steps” she claimed every government takes on its way to
outright fascism. Her evidence that this evil future was now upon us was
the aggressive way that Occupy demonstrators were having their free-
dom restricted.  e city was not allowing megaphones and sound sys-
tems to be used in the park, and there had been a series of mass arrests.
Wolf, in her articles, argued that activists should defy restrictions on
their freedom of speech and assembly in order to prevent the coup she
insisted was unfolding under their noses. Not wanting to give the police
an excuse to clear the protest camp, the organizers took a di erent tack,
using what became known as the “human microphone” (where the
crowd repeats the speaker’s words so that everyone can hear them).
at was not the only point of disagreement between Wolf and the
organizers. For better or worse, the Occupiers had been very clear that
the movement did not have a policy agenda— two or three political de-
mands lawmakers could meet that would send them all home satis ed.
Wolf insisted this was not true: she claimed the movement actually had
speci c demands and that she, improbably, had  gured them out. “I
found out what it was that OWS actually wanted,” she wrote in  e
Guardian, explaining, “I began soliciting online ‘What is it you want?’
answers” from self- identi ed Occupy activists. Disregarding the move-
ment’s commitment to radical, participatory democracy, Wolf then
turned the results of her haphazard surveying into a short list of de-
mands and took it upon herself to deliver it to New York governor An-
drew Cuomo at a black- tie event organized by Hu ngton Post, where she
and Cuomo were both guests.
It got stranger. Failing to connect with Cuomo inside, Wolf le the
event to spontaneously address Occupy Wall Street demonstrators on
the sidewalk outside and, while informing the crowd what their demands
were and telling them that they were demanding them wrong because
“they had a  rst amendment right to use a megaphone,” managed to get
herself arrested in a burgundy evening gown, a melee documented by a
20 DOPPELGANGER
bank of cameras.  is is what the women in the bathroom were referring
to when they talked about how “Naomi Klein” did not understand their
demands.
I had paid only peripheral attention to Wolf’s antics as they unfolded—
they were just one of many bizarre things swirling around Occupy during
that eventful fall. One day the camp buzzed with rumors that Radiohead
was about to perform a free concert— only to discover that it was an elab-
orate prank and the band was still in England.  e following day, Kanye
West and Russell Simmons actually did drop by, entourages in tow, bear-
ing gi s for the campers. Next it was Alec Baldwin’s turn. In this circus
atmosphere, a midcareer writer getting handcu ed while unsuccessfully
ordering around protesters half her age was barely a blip.
A er the bathroom incident, though, I started paying closer atten-
tion to what Wolf was doing, newly aware that some of it was blowing
back on me. And it kept getting weirder. A er police across the United
States cleared the parks and plazas of Occupy encampments, she wrote a
piece claiming, without any evidence, that the orders had come directly
from Congress and Barack Obama’s White House.
“When you connect the dots,” Wolf wrote, it all made sense.  e
crackdowns on OWS were “the  rst battle in a civil war... It is a battle
in which members of Congress, with the collusion of the American pres-
ident, sent violent, organized suppression against the people they are
supposed to represent.”  is, Wolf declared, marked a de nitive tip into
totalitarian rule— a claim that she had made before, under George W.
Bush, con dently predicting he would not allow the 2008 election to
take place (he did), and that she would make many more times in the
years to come. “Sadly, Americans this week have come one step closer to
being true brothers and sisters of the protesters in Tahrir Square,” she
wrote. “Like them, our own national leaders... are now making war
upon us.”
e logical leaps were bad enough. What made it worse for me was
that, with Wolf’s new focus on abuses of corporate and political power
during states of emergency, something she touched on only brie y in
e End of America, I felt like I was reading a parody of e Shock Doc-
trine, one with all facts and evidence carefully removed, and coming to
OCCUPIED 21
cartoonishly broad conclusions I would never support. And while I was
not yet confused with my doppelganger all that o en, I knew that some
people would credit me with Wolf’s theories. It was an out- of- body feel-
ing. I went back and took a closer look at the articles about her evening-
wear arrest, and a line in e Guardian jumped out at me: “Her partner,
the  lm producer Avram Ludwig, was also arrested.”
I read the sentence to my partner, the  lm director and producer
Avram Lewis (who goes by Avi).
“What the actual fuck?” he asked.
“I know,” I said. “It’s like a goddamned conspiracy.”
en we both burst out laughing.
In the decade since Occupy, Wolf has connected the dots between an
almost unfathomably large number of disparate bits of fact and fantasy.
She has  oated unsubstantiated speculations about the National Secu-
rity Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden (“not who he purports to
be,” hinting that he is an active spy). About U.S. troops sent to build  eld
hospitals in West Africa during the 2014 Ebola outbreak (not an attempt
to stop the disease’s spread, but a plot to bring it to the United States to
justify “mass lockdowns” at home). About ISIS beheadings of U.S. and
British captives (possibly not real murders, but staged covert ops by the
U.S. government starring crisis actors). About the arrest of Dominique
Strauss- Kahn, the former managing director of the International Mone-
tary Fund, on allegations that he sexually assaulted a housekeeper in a
New York City hotel room (the charges were eventually dropped and a
civil suit settled but Wolf wondered if the whole thing had been an “in-
telligence service” operation designed to take Strauss- Kahn out of the
running in French elections where he had been “the odds- on favorite to
defeat Nicolas Sarkozy”). About the results of the 2014 Scottish referen-
dum on independence, which the “no” vote won by a margin of more
than 10 percent (potentially fraudulent, she claimed, based on an assort-
ment of testimonies she collected). About the Green New Deal (not the
demands of grassroots climate justice movements, she said, but yet
another elite- orchestrated cover for “fascism”).
In our era of extreme wealth concentration and seemingly bottom-
less impunity for the powerful, it is perfectly rational, even wise, to probe
20 DOPPELGANGER
bank of cameras.  is is what the women in the bathroom were referring
to when they talked about how “Naomi Klein” did not understand their
demands.
I had paid only peripheral attention to Wolf’s antics as they unfolded—
they were just one of many bizarre things swirling around Occupy during
that eventful fall. One day the camp buzzed with rumors that Radiohead
was about to perform a free concert— only to discover that it was an elab-
orate prank and the band was still in England.  e following day, Kanye
West and Russell Simmons actually did drop by, entourages in tow, bear-
ing gi s for the campers. Next it was Alec Baldwin’s turn. In this circus
atmosphere, a midcareer writer getting handcu ed while unsuccessfully
ordering around protesters half her age was barely a blip.
A er the bathroom incident, though, I started paying closer atten-
tion to what Wolf was doing, newly aware that some of it was blowing
back on me. And it kept getting weirder. A er police across the United
States cleared the parks and plazas of Occupy encampments, she wrote a
piece claiming, without any evidence, that the orders had come directly
from Congress and Barack Obama’s White House.
“When you connect the dots,” Wolf wrote, it all made sense.  e
crackdowns on OWS were “the  rst battle in a civil war... It is a battle
in which members of Congress, with the collusion of the American pres-
ident, sent violent, organized suppression against the people they are
supposed to represent.”  is, Wolf declared, marked a de nitive tip into
totalitarian rule— a claim that she had made before, under George W.
Bush, con dently predicting he would not allow the 2008 election to
take place (he did), and that she would make many more times in the
years to come. “Sadly, Americans this week have come one step closer to
being true brothers and sisters of the protesters in Tahrir Square,” she
wrote. “Like them, our own national leaders... are now making war
upon us.”
e logical leaps were bad enough. What made it worse for me was
that, with Wolf’s new focus on abuses of corporate and political power
during states of emergency, something she touched on only brie y in
e End of America, I felt like I was reading a parody of e Shock Doc-
trine, one with all facts and evidence carefully removed, and coming to
OCCUPIED 21
cartoonishly broad conclusions I would never support. And while I was
not yet confused with my doppelganger all that o en, I knew that some
people would credit me with Wolf’s theories. It was an out- of- body feel-
ing. I went back and took a closer look at the articles about her evening-
wear arrest, and a line in e Guardian jumped out at me: “Her partner,
the  lm producer Avram Ludwig, was also arrested.”
I read the sentence to my partner, the  lm director and producer
Avram Lewis (who goes by Avi).
“What the actual fuck?” he asked.
“I know,” I said. “It’s like a goddamned conspiracy.”
en we both burst out laughing.
In the decade since Occupy, Wolf has connected the dots between an
almost unfathomably large number of disparate bits of fact and fantasy.
She has  oated unsubstantiated speculations about the National Secu-
rity Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden (“not who he purports to
be,” hinting that he is an active spy). About U.S. troops sent to build  eld
hospitals in West Africa during the 2014 Ebola outbreak (not an attempt
to stop the disease’s spread, but a plot to bring it to the United States to
justify “mass lockdowns” at home). About ISIS beheadings of U.S. and
British captives (possibly not real murders, but staged covert ops by the
U.S. government starring crisis actors). About the arrest of Dominique
Strauss- Kahn, the former managing director of the International Mone-
tary Fund, on allegations that he sexually assaulted a housekeeper in a
New York City hotel room (the charges were eventually dropped and a
civil suit settled but Wolf wondered if the whole thing had been an “in-
telligence service” operation designed to take Strauss- Kahn out of the
running in French elections where he had been “the odds- on favorite to
defeat Nicolas Sarkozy”). About the results of the 2014 Scottish referen-
dum on independence, which the “no” vote won by a margin of more
than 10 percent (potentially fraudulent, she claimed, based on an assort-
ment of testimonies she collected). About the Green New Deal (not the
demands of grassroots climate justice movements, she said, but yet
another elite- orchestrated cover for “fascism”).
In our era of extreme wealth concentration and seemingly bottom-
less impunity for the powerful, it is perfectly rational, even wise, to probe
22 DOPPELGANGER
o cial stories for their veracity. Uncovering real conspiracies is the in-
dispensable mission of investigative journalism, a subject I’ll return to in
greater depth later on. However, actual research is not what my doppel-
ganger was up to when she  oated her pulpy theories about Snowden
and ISIS and Ebola. Nor is it what she was doing when she imagined
plots in the appearance of oddly shaped clouds (which she has intimated
are part of a secret NASA program to spray the skies with “aluminum on
a global level,” potentially causing epidemics of dementia). Nor is it what
she was doing when she shared some truly remarkable thoughts on
Twitter about 5G cellular networks, including this one: “It was amazing
to go to Belfast, which does not yet have 5G, and feel the earth, sky, air,
human experience, feel the way it did in the 1970s. Calm, still, peaceful,
restful, natural.”  e observation sparked a transnational pile- on of the
kind of howling mockery for which the platform is infamous, most of it
pointing out that (1) Belfast had launched 5G by the time she visited and
(2) in the 1970s Northern Ireland was in the grips of a horri c, bloody
armed con ict that took thousands of lives.
It may seem hard to believe that all of this comes from the same au-
thor who wrote e Beauty Myth as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford. “What
little girls learn is not the desire for the other, but the desire to be de-
sired,” she wrote back then. “Girls learn to watch their sex along with the
boys; that takes up the space that should be devoted to  nding out about
what they are wanting, and reading and writing about it, seeking it and
getting it. Sex is held hostage by beauty and its ransom terms are en-
graved in girls’ minds early and deeply with instruments more beautiful
than those which advertisers or pornographers know how to use: litera-
ture, poetry, painting, and  lm.”
ere were major statistical errors in that book, a foreshadowing of
what was to come, but there was also patient archival work. Wolf’s on-
line writing today is so frenetic and fantastical that it can be startling to
read her early words and remember that this is a person who clearly
loved language, thought deeply about the inner lives of girls and women,
and had a vision for their liberation.
At the dawn of the 1990s, Germaine Greer declared e Beauty Myth
“the most important feminist publication since e Female Eunuch”
OCCUPIED 23
(Greer’s own bestseller, published in 1970). Some of this was timing. Af-
ter the lost decade of the 1980s— when feminism was suddenly too
earthy and earnest to make it in prime time— the corporate media were
ready to declare a third wave of the women’s movement, and e Beauty
Myth li ed up Wolf as its telegenic face. She was hardly the  rst femi-
nist writer to expose the impossible beauty standards imposed on
women, but she had a unique angle.  e core of Wolf’s argument was
that during the 1980s, just as the second- wave feminist movement had
succeeded in winning greater equality for women in postsecondary ed-
ucation and the workplace, the pressure on women to meet impossible
standards of thinness and beauty had increased sharply, putting them at
a competitive disadvantage with men in their  elds.  is was no coinci-
dence, she argued. “ e ruling elite” knew, Wolf wrote, that they held
jobs that would be at risk if women were free to rise unencumbered,
something that “must be thwarted, or the traditional power elite will be
at a disadvantage.”  e “myth” of beauty was invented, she speculated,
to drain women’s power and focus— to keep them busy with mascara
and starvation diets instead of free to climb the professional ladder and
outcompete their male rivals. In essence, she posed the heightened
beauty standards of the 1980s as a backlash to the feminism of the 1970s.
Yet the feminism Wolf proposed in response was not a throwback to
the radical demands of the 1960s and ’70s, a time when feminism had
been linked with anti- imperialism, anti- racism, and socialism and ac-
tivists had built their own collectives, movement publications, and in-
surgent political candidacies that set out to challenge and transform
dominant power systems from the outside. On the contrary, just as Bill
Clinton and Tony Blair moved their respective parties away from poli-
cies that championed universal public services and redistribution of
wealth toward a pro- market, pro- militarism “ ird Way,” Wolf’s version
of third- wave feminism charted a path to the center, one that had little
to o er working- class women but promised the world to white, middle-
class, highly educated women like her. Two decades before Sheryl Sand-
berg’s Lean In, Wolf published her second book, Fire with Fire, which
called on feminism to drop the dogma and embrace the “will to power.”
She took her own advice. Rather than building power inside the
22 DOPPELGANGER
o cial stories for their veracity. Uncovering real conspiracies is the in-
dispensable mission of investigative journalism, a subject I’ll return to in
greater depth later on. However, actual research is not what my doppel-
ganger was up to when she  oated her pulpy theories about Snowden
and ISIS and Ebola. Nor is it what she was doing when she imagined
plots in the appearance of oddly shaped clouds (which she has intimated
are part of a secret NASA program to spray the skies with “aluminum on
a global level,” potentially causing epidemics of dementia). Nor is it what
she was doing when she shared some truly remarkable thoughts on
Twitter about 5G cellular networks, including this one: “It was amazing
to go to Belfast, which does not yet have 5G, and feel the earth, sky, air,
human experience, feel the way it did in the 1970s. Calm, still, peaceful,
restful, natural.”  e observation sparked a transnational pile- on of the
kind of howling mockery for which the platform is infamous, most of it
pointing out that (1) Belfast had launched 5G by the time she visited and
(2) in the 1970s Northern Ireland was in the grips of a horri c, bloody
armed con ict that took thousands of lives.
It may seem hard to believe that all of this comes from the same au-
thor who wrote e Beauty Myth as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford. “What
little girls learn is not the desire for the other, but the desire to be de-
sired,” she wrote back then. “Girls learn to watch their sex along with the
boys; that takes up the space that should be devoted to  nding out about
what they are wanting, and reading and writing about it, seeking it and
getting it. Sex is held hostage by beauty and its ransom terms are en-
graved in girls’ minds early and deeply with instruments more beautiful
than those which advertisers or pornographers know how to use: litera-
ture, poetry, painting, and  lm.”
ere were major statistical errors in that book, a foreshadowing of
what was to come, but there was also patient archival work. Wolf’s on-
line writing today is so frenetic and fantastical that it can be startling to
read her early words and remember that this is a person who clearly
loved language, thought deeply about the inner lives of girls and women,
and had a vision for their liberation.
At the dawn of the 1990s, Germaine Greer declared e Beauty Myth
“the most important feminist publication since e Female Eunuch”
OCCUPIED 23
(Greer’s own bestseller, published in 1970). Some of this was timing. Af-
ter the lost decade of the 1980s— when feminism was suddenly too
earthy and earnest to make it in prime time— the corporate media were
ready to declare a third wave of the women’s movement, and e Beauty
Myth li ed up Wolf as its telegenic face. She was hardly the  rst femi-
nist writer to expose the impossible beauty standards imposed on
women, but she had a unique angle.  e core of Wolf’s argument was
that during the 1980s, just as the second- wave feminist movement had
succeeded in winning greater equality for women in postsecondary ed-
ucation and the workplace, the pressure on women to meet impossible
standards of thinness and beauty had increased sharply, putting them at
a competitive disadvantage with men in their  elds.  is was no coinci-
dence, she argued. “ e ruling elite” knew, Wolf wrote, that they held
jobs that would be at risk if women were free to rise unencumbered,
something that “must be thwarted, or the traditional power elite will be
at a disadvantage.”  e “myth” of beauty was invented, she speculated,
to drain women’s power and focus— to keep them busy with mascara
and starvation diets instead of free to climb the professional ladder and
outcompete their male rivals. In essence, she posed the heightened
beauty standards of the 1980s as a backlash to the feminism of the 1970s.
Yet the feminism Wolf proposed in response was not a throwback to
the radical demands of the 1960s and ’70s, a time when feminism had
been linked with anti- imperialism, anti- racism, and socialism and ac-
tivists had built their own collectives, movement publications, and in-
surgent political candidacies that set out to challenge and transform
dominant power systems from the outside. On the contrary, just as Bill
Clinton and Tony Blair moved their respective parties away from poli-
cies that championed universal public services and redistribution of
wealth toward a pro- market, pro- militarism “ ird Way,” Wolf’s version
of third- wave feminism charted a path to the center, one that had little
to o er working- class women but promised the world to white, middle-
class, highly educated women like her. Two decades before Sheryl Sand-
berg’s Lean In, Wolf published her second book, Fire with Fire, which
called on feminism to drop the dogma and embrace the “will to power.”
She took her own advice. Rather than building power inside the
24 DOPPELGANGER
women’s movement, as her feminist foremothers had done, Wolf
launched herself like a missile into the heart of the liberal establishment
in both New York City and Washington, D.C. She married a journalist
who became a speechwriter for Bill Clinton and a New York Times edi-
tor; she consulted with the political operative Dick Morris, who played a
key role in Clinton’s lurch to the right; and she helped start an institute
on women’s leadership. It appeared that Wolf did not want to tear down
elite power structures— she wanted to enter them.
e press could not get enough of Wolf, who, in her  rst decade in the
public eye, looked very much like Valerie Bertinelli in my favorite child-
hood sitcom, One Day at a Time. Not only was she poised and beautiful
as she shredded the beauty industry, but she also wrote graphically and
boldly about sex and young women’s right to pleasure.
Many excellent feminist theorists who came up before and a er Wolf
made powerful connections between intimate experiences— including
rape, abortion, domestic violence, race- based sexual fetishism, illness,
and gender dysmorphia— and the broad social structures that produced
those experiences.  e 1980s had been full of such books, many by
Black feminists: Ain’t I a Woman, by bell hooks; Women, Race & Class,
by Angela Davis; and Sister Outsider, by Audre Lorde, among others.  e
Vagina Monologues, the breakthrough feminist play by Eve Ensler (now
named V), was  rst staged four years a er e Beauty Myth was pub-
lished.  ese works contained personal revelations that helped weave
together mass movements for collective justice in which the personal
became political. What set Wolf’s writing apart from these kinds of
movement intellectuals was an apparent paucity of curiosity about the
lives of women who were not her, and whose lives were markedly di er-
ent from her own.  is came up in her  rst book, which somehow man-
aged to be a study of the impact of white, European beauty ideals without
engaging with the particular and acute impacts of those ideals on Black,
Asian, and other nonwhite women (let alone queer and transgender
women).
While there were always skeptics— her rival Camille Paglia dismissed
Wolf as a “Seventeen magazine level of thinker”— critiques of her work
rarely reached beyond women’s studies departments. And by the end of
OCCUPIED 25
the decade, Wolf was considered such an authority on all things wom-
anly that during the 2000 presidential election, Al Gore, the Democratic
Party nominee, hired her to coach him on how to appeal to female vot-
ers. Her widely reported advice was that Gore had to get out from under
Bill Clinton’s shadow and transform himself from a “beta male” to an
“alpha male”— in part by wearing earth- toned suits to warm up his ro-
botic a ect. Wolf denied providing fashion advice, but the reports still
sparked a torrent of mockery, including from Maureen Dowd in  e
New York Times, who wrote that “Ms. Wolf is the moral equivalent of an
Armani T- shirt, because Mr. Gore has obscenely overpaid for something
basic.”
In the new millennium, something changed in Wolf. Maybe it was
Gore’s electoral loss (or George W. Bush’s electoral the ), and the way
some of the post- vote recriminations focused on her controversial cam-
paign role. Perhaps it was something more personal— an unraveling
marriage with two young kids (she has made reference to “a year of
chaos, right a er I turned forty”). Whatever the cause, Wolf’s soaring
pro le dropped signi cantly in the early and mid- 2000s. In 2005, she
published a small book called e Treehouse: Eccentric Wisdom from My
Father on How to Live, Love, and See. In this daughter- father version of
Tuesdays with Morrie, Wolf depicts herself as a prodigal daughter re-
turning, a er decades of rebellion, to the wise, paternal fold. Her father,
Leonard Wolf, teaches her how to build an elaborate treehouse for her
daughter— and how to live a good life.
During her time as a feminist intellectual, Wolf writes, she had val-
ued hard facts and material change.  is went against what her father, a
poet and literature scholar with a specialty in gothic and horror, had
taught her to value: “My father had raised me to honor the power of the
imagination above all.” Leonard, she writes, understood that “heart”
mattered “over facts, numbers, and laws.” At the time, this was taken
bymost reviewers as benign if twee advice about creativity— in retro-
spect, given the creative way in which Wolf would go on to play with
facts, numbers, and laws related to Covid- 19, it feels more like gloomy
foreshadowing worthy of one of Leonard Wolf’s favorite books of gothic
 c t i o n .
24 DOPPELGANGER
women’s movement, as her feminist foremothers had done, Wolf
launched herself like a missile into the heart of the liberal establishment
in both New York City and Washington, D.C. She married a journalist
who became a speechwriter for Bill Clinton and a New York Times edi-
tor; she consulted with the political operative Dick Morris, who played a
key role in Clinton’s lurch to the right; and she helped start an institute
on women’s leadership. It appeared that Wolf did not want to tear down
elite power structures— she wanted to enter them.
e press could not get enough of Wolf, who, in her  rst decade in the
public eye, looked very much like Valerie Bertinelli in my favorite child-
hood sitcom, One Day at a Time. Not only was she poised and beautiful
as she shredded the beauty industry, but she also wrote graphically and
boldly about sex and young women’s right to pleasure.
Many excellent feminist theorists who came up before and a er Wolf
made powerful connections between intimate experiences— including
rape, abortion, domestic violence, race- based sexual fetishism, illness,
and gender dysmorphia— and the broad social structures that produced
those experiences.  e 1980s had been full of such books, many by
Black feminists: Ain’t I a Woman, by bell hooks; Women, Race & Class,
by Angela Davis; and Sister Outsider, by Audre Lorde, among others.  e
Vagina Monologues, the breakthrough feminist play by Eve Ensler (now
named V), was  rst staged four years a er e Beauty Myth was pub-
lished.  ese works contained personal revelations that helped weave
together mass movements for collective justice in which the personal
became political. What set Wolf’s writing apart from these kinds of
movement intellectuals was an apparent paucity of curiosity about the
lives of women who were not her, and whose lives were markedly di er-
ent from her own.  is came up in her  rst book, which somehow man-
aged to be a study of the impact of white, European beauty ideals without
engaging with the particular and acute impacts of those ideals on Black,
Asian, and other nonwhite women (let alone queer and transgender
women).
While there were always skeptics— her rival Camille Paglia dismissed
Wolf as a “Seventeen magazine level of thinker”— critiques of her work
rarely reached beyond women’s studies departments. And by the end of
OCCUPIED 25
the decade, Wolf was considered such an authority on all things wom-
anly that during the 2000 presidential election, Al Gore, the Democratic
Party nominee, hired her to coach him on how to appeal to female vot-
ers. Her widely reported advice was that Gore had to get out from under
Bill Clinton’s shadow and transform himself from a “beta male” to an
“alpha male”— in part by wearing earth- toned suits to warm up his ro-
botic a ect. Wolf denied providing fashion advice, but the reports still
sparked a torrent of mockery, including from Maureen Dowd in  e
New York Times, who wrote that “Ms. Wolf is the moral equivalent of an
Armani T- shirt, because Mr. Gore has obscenely overpaid for something
basic.”
In the new millennium, something changed in Wolf. Maybe it was
Gore’s electoral loss (or George W. Bush’s electoral the ), and the way
some of the post- vote recriminations focused on her controversial cam-
paign role. Perhaps it was something more personal— an unraveling
marriage with two young kids (she has made reference to “a year of
chaos, right a er I turned forty”). Whatever the cause, Wolf’s soaring
pro le dropped signi cantly in the early and mid- 2000s. In 2005, she
published a small book called e Treehouse: Eccentric Wisdom from My
Father on How to Live, Love, and See. In this daughter- father version of
Tuesdays with Morrie, Wolf depicts herself as a prodigal daughter re-
turning, a er decades of rebellion, to the wise, paternal fold. Her father,
Leonard Wolf, teaches her how to build an elaborate treehouse for her
daughter— and how to live a good life.
During her time as a feminist intellectual, Wolf writes, she had val-
ued hard facts and material change.  is went against what her father, a
poet and literature scholar with a specialty in gothic and horror, had
taught her to value: “My father had raised me to honor the power of the
imagination above all.” Leonard, she writes, understood that “heart”
mattered “over facts, numbers, and laws.” At the time, this was taken
bymost reviewers as benign if twee advice about creativity— in retro-
spect, given the creative way in which Wolf would go on to play with
facts, numbers, and laws related to Covid- 19, it feels more like gloomy
foreshadowing worthy of one of Leonard Wolf’s favorite books of gothic
 c t i o n .
26 DOPPELGANGER
More than this, what got my attention in e Treehouse was one of
Leonard’s key life lessons— his directive to “Destroy the box.” According
to Wolf, her father said, “Before you can even think about  nding
yourtrue voice, you have to reject boxes... Smash them apart.” She
stressed this point: “Look at what box you may be in and be willing to
destroy it.”
Up until that time, Wolf, by her own admission, had been squarely in
the feminist box. But two years later, she smashed it, coming out with
the patriotically paranoiac End of America in 2007.  ere was nothing in
it about women’s issues, and she appeared to have turned on the elite
institutions that she had once worked so hard to access. She now had a
new focus: the ways authoritarianism descends on once free societies,
and the dangers of covert government actions.
Looking back, this is really when the problems started for me; the
point when Wolf stopped seeming quite as much like her— the Naomi who
wrote books about the battles waged over women’s bodies— and started
sounding, well, more likeme— the Naomi who writes about corporate
exploitation of states of shock. Am I saying that this confusion was in-
tentional on Wolf’s part? Not at all. Just deeply unfortunate.
And it wasn’t just that one book. I had started writing about the
Green New Deal in 2018. She did, too, shortly a er, only with her special
conspiracy twists. I began publishing about the dangers of geoengineer-
ing as a response to the climate crisis, with a particular focus on how
high- altitude simulations of volcanoes that were intended to partially
dim the sun risked interfering with rainfall in the Southern Hemisphere.
She was busily speculating on social media about chemical cloudseeding
and covert mass poisonings. I based my writing on dozens of peer-
reviewed papers and managed to get access to two closed- door geoengi-
neering conferences, where I interviewed several of the key scientists
involved in lab- based research on sending particles into the upper atmo-
sphere to control the sun’s radiation. She started taking photographs
of random clouds in upstate New York and London, prompting the en-
vironmental magazine Grist to declare, in 2018, that “Wolf is a cloud
truther.”
I always know when she has been busy— because my online mentions
OCCUPIED 27
ll up instantly. With denunciations and excommunication (“I can’t be-
lieve I used to respect Naomi Klein. WTF has happened to her??”). And
with glib expressions of sympathy (“ e real victim in all this here is
Naomi Klein” and “ oughts and prayers to Naomi Klein”).
How much does this identity merger happen? Enough that there is a
viral poem,  rst posted in October 2019, that invariably shows up in
these moments, and that been shared many thousands of times:
If the Naomi be Klein
you’re doing just  ne
If the Naomi be Wolf
Oh, buddy. Ooooof.
As in any doppelganger story, the confusion  ows both ways. Wolf
maintains a large and seemingly loyal following across several platforms,
and occasionally I have noticed her correcting people, telling them that
she is  attered, but no, she did not write e Shock Doctrine.
For most of the  rst decade of the confusion, my public strategy was
studious denial. I would complain privately to friends and to Avi, sure,
but publicly I was mostly silent. Even when, in 2019, Wolf started tag-
ging me daily in her tweets about the Green New Deal, clearly trying to
draw me into a debate about her baseless theory that the whole thing was
a sort of green shock doctrine— a nefarious plan by bankers and venture
capitalists to grab power under cover of the climate emergency—I did
not engage with her. I did not try to address the confusion. I did not join
those mocking her.
I thought about it, but it never seemed wise.  ere is a certain inherent
humiliation in getting repeatedly confused with someone else, con rm-
ing, as it does, one’s own interchangeability and/or forgettableness.  at’s
the trouble with doppelgangers: anything you might do to dispel the con-
fusion just draws attention to it, and runs the risk of further cementing
the unwanted association in people’s minds.
In this way, confrontations with our doppelgangers inevitably raise
existentially destabilizing questions. Am I who I think I am, or am I who
others perceive me to be? And if enough others start seeing someone else
26 DOPPELGANGER
More than this, what got my attention in e Treehouse was one of
Leonard’s key life lessons— his directive to “Destroy the box.” According
to Wolf, her father said, “Before you can even think about  nding
yourtrue voice, you have to reject boxes... Smash them apart.” She
stressed this point: “Look at what box you may be in and be willing to
destroy it.”
Up until that time, Wolf, by her own admission, had been squarely in
the feminist box. But two years later, she smashed it, coming out with
the patriotically paranoiac End of America in 2007.  ere was nothing in
it about women’s issues, and she appeared to have turned on the elite
institutions that she had once worked so hard to access. She now had a
new focus: the ways authoritarianism descends on once free societies,
and the dangers of covert government actions.
Looking back, this is really when the problems started for me; the
point when Wolf stopped seeming quite as much like her— the Naomi who
wrote books about the battles waged over women’s bodies— and started
sounding, well, more likeme— the Naomi who writes about corporate
exploitation of states of shock. Am I saying that this confusion was in-
tentional on Wolf’s part? Not at all. Just deeply unfortunate.
And it wasn’t just that one book. I had started writing about the
Green New Deal in 2018. She did, too, shortly a er, only with her special
conspiracy twists. I began publishing about the dangers of geoengineer-
ing as a response to the climate crisis, with a particular focus on how
high- altitude simulations of volcanoes that were intended to partially
dim the sun risked interfering with rainfall in the Southern Hemisphere.
She was busily speculating on social media about chemical cloudseeding
and covert mass poisonings. I based my writing on dozens of peer-
reviewed papers and managed to get access to two closed- door geoengi-
neering conferences, where I interviewed several of the key scientists
involved in lab- based research on sending particles into the upper atmo-
sphere to control the sun’s radiation. She started taking photographs
of random clouds in upstate New York and London, prompting the en-
vironmental magazine Grist to declare, in 2018, that “Wolf is a cloud
truther.”
I always know when she has been busy— because my online mentions
OCCUPIED 27
ll up instantly. With denunciations and excommunication (“I can’t be-
lieve I used to respect Naomi Klein. WTF has happened to her??”). And
with glib expressions of sympathy (“ e real victim in all this here is
Naomi Klein” and “ oughts and prayers to Naomi Klein”).
How much does this identity merger happen? Enough that there is a
viral poem,  rst posted in October 2019, that invariably shows up in
these moments, and that been shared many thousands of times:
If the Naomi be Klein
you’re doing just  ne
If the Naomi be Wolf
Oh, buddy. Ooooof.
As in any doppelganger story, the confusion  ows both ways. Wolf
maintains a large and seemingly loyal following across several platforms,
and occasionally I have noticed her correcting people, telling them that
she is  attered, but no, she did not write e Shock Doctrine.
For most of the  rst decade of the confusion, my public strategy was
studious denial. I would complain privately to friends and to Avi, sure,
but publicly I was mostly silent. Even when, in 2019, Wolf started tag-
ging me daily in her tweets about the Green New Deal, clearly trying to
draw me into a debate about her baseless theory that the whole thing was
a sort of green shock doctrine— a nefarious plan by bankers and venture
capitalists to grab power under cover of the climate emergency—I did
not engage with her. I did not try to address the confusion. I did not join
those mocking her.
I thought about it, but it never seemed wise.  ere is a certain inherent
humiliation in getting repeatedly confused with someone else, con rm-
ing, as it does, one’s own interchangeability and/or forgettableness.  at’s
the trouble with doppelgangers: anything you might do to dispel the con-
fusion just draws attention to it, and runs the risk of further cementing
the unwanted association in people’s minds.
In this way, confrontations with our doppelgangers inevitably raise
existentially destabilizing questions. Am I who I think I am, or am I who
others perceive me to be? And if enough others start seeing someone else
28 DOPPELGANGER
as me, who am I, then? Doppelgangers are not the only way we can lose
control over ourselves, of course.  e carefully constructed self can be
undone in any number of ways and in an instant— by a disabling acci-
dent, by a psychotic break, or, these days, by a hacked account or a deep
fake.  is is the perennial appeal of doppelgangers in novels and  lms:
the idea that two strangers can be indistinguishable from each other
taps into the precariousness at the core of identity— the painful truth
that, no matter how deliberately we tend to our personal lives and public
personas, the person we think we are is fundamentally vulnerable to
forces outside of our control.
François Brunelle, a Montreal artist who has been photographing
hundreds of pairs of doppelgangers over decades for a project called I’m
Not a Look- Alike!, put it like this: “Someone, out in this world, is looking
at himself in the mirror and seeing more or less the same thing that I am
seeing in my own mirror. Which brings us down to the question: Who
am I exactly? Am I what I see in my re ection or something else that
cannot be de ned and is invisible to the eyes, even my own?”
In the dozens of books that have been written about people who en-
counter their doubles, doppelgangers consistently signal that the protag-
onist’s life is about to be upended, with the double turning their friends
and colleagues against them, destroying their career, or framing them
for crimes, and— very o en— having sex with their spouse or lover. A
standard trope in the genre is a nagging uncertainty about whether the
double is real at all. Is this actually an identical stranger, or are they a
long- lost twin? Worse, is the double a  gment of the protagonist’s imag-
ination— an expression of an unhinged subconscious?
In Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “William Wilson,” for instance, the
reader begins by believing the “detestable coincidence” that there is an-
other person with the same name, birthday, and general appearance as
the pompous narrator. Suspicions quickly emerge, though, that the coin-
cidences are a little too perfect. By the end, it is clear that the double,
who could not speak “above a very low whisper,” never existed outside
the narrator’s paranoid, self- loathing subconscious and that, by killing
his “arch- enemy and evil genius,” William Wilson had killed himself.
e same fate befalls the protagonist of Oscar Wilde’s novel e Picture
OCCUPIED 29
of Dorian Gray, which tells the story of a vain and lustful man who, a er
having his portrait painted, makes a demonic deal to stay young and
beautiful forever. As Gray holds on to his youth, the face in the painting
grows older and uglier, a kind of virtual doppelganger. When Gray tries
to destroy his gruesome double, he is the one who ends up shriveled and
lifeless on the ground.
e whole mess puts me in mind of my dog, Smoke, who, every eve-
ning at sundown, sees her re ection in the glass of our front door and
begins to bark ferociously. She is convinced, evidently, that an adorable
white cockapoo doppelganger (dogpelganger?) is bound and determined
to gain access to her home, eat her food, and steal the a ections of her
humans.
“ at’s you,” I tell Smoke in my most reassuring voice, but she always
forgets. And this is the catch- 22 of confronting your doppelganger: bark
all you want, but you inevitably end up confronting yourself.
Not Me
ere was another reason I didn’t bother much with correcting the re-
cord for the  rst few years of my doppelganger trouble: with the excep-
tion of the Manhattan bathroom incident, getting confused with Naomi
Wolf appeared to be a social media thing. My friends and colleagues
knew who I was, and when I interacted with people I didn’t know in the
physical world, her name did not come up; neither were we entangled in
articles or book reviews. I therefore  led away Naomi confusion in the
category of “things that happen on the internet that are not quite real”
(back when we were silly enough to do that about all kinds of things). I
told myself that I was not being confused with Wolf, but that our digital
avatars were getting mistakenly swapped— the thumbnail- sized photos
of us, and the tiny boxes that prescribed the parameters of our speech on
those platforms, just as they  attened and blurred so much else.
Back then, I saw the problem as more structural than personal. A
handful of young men had gotten unfathomably rich designing tech
platforms that, in the name of “connection,” not only allowed us to
28 DOPPELGANGER
as me, who am I, then? Doppelgangers are not the only way we can lose
control over ourselves, of course.  e carefully constructed self can be
undone in any number of ways and in an instant— by a disabling acci-
dent, by a psychotic break, or, these days, by a hacked account or a deep
fake.  is is the perennial appeal of doppelgangers in novels and  lms:
the idea that two strangers can be indistinguishable from each other
taps into the precariousness at the core of identity— the painful truth
that, no matter how deliberately we tend to our personal lives and public
personas, the person we think we are is fundamentally vulnerable to
forces outside of our control.
François Brunelle, a Montreal artist who has been photographing
hundreds of pairs of doppelgangers over decades for a project called I’m
Not a Look- Alike!, put it like this: “Someone, out in this world, is looking
at himself in the mirror and seeing more or less the same thing that I am
seeing in my own mirror. Which brings us down to the question: Who
am I exactly? Am I what I see in my re ection or something else that
cannot be de ned and is invisible to the eyes, even my own?”
In the dozens of books that have been written about people who en-
counter their doubles, doppelgangers consistently signal that the protag-
onist’s life is about to be upended, with the double turning their friends
and colleagues against them, destroying their career, or framing them
for crimes, and— very o en— having sex with their spouse or lover. A
standard trope in the genre is a nagging uncertainty about whether the
double is real at all. Is this actually an identical stranger, or are they a
long- lost twin? Worse, is the double a  gment of the protagonist’s imag-
ination— an expression of an unhinged subconscious?
In Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “William Wilson,” for instance, the
reader begins by believing the “detestable coincidence” that there is an-
other person with the same name, birthday, and general appearance as
the pompous narrator. Suspicions quickly emerge, though, that the coin-
cidences are a little too perfect. By the end, it is clear that the double,
who could not speak “above a very low whisper,” never existed outside
the narrator’s paranoid, self- loathing subconscious and that, by killing
his “arch- enemy and evil genius,” William Wilson had killed himself.
e same fate befalls the protagonist of Oscar Wilde’s novel e Picture
OCCUPIED 29
of Dorian Gray, which tells the story of a vain and lustful man who, a er
having his portrait painted, makes a demonic deal to stay young and
beautiful forever. As Gray holds on to his youth, the face in the painting
grows older and uglier, a kind of virtual doppelganger. When Gray tries
to destroy his gruesome double, he is the one who ends up shriveled and
lifeless on the ground.
e whole mess puts me in mind of my dog, Smoke, who, every eve-
ning at sundown, sees her re ection in the glass of our front door and
begins to bark ferociously. She is convinced, evidently, that an adorable
white cockapoo doppelganger (dogpelganger?) is bound and determined
to gain access to her home, eat her food, and steal the a ections of her
humans.
“ at’s you,” I tell Smoke in my most reassuring voice, but she always
forgets. And this is the catch- 22 of confronting your doppelganger: bark
all you want, but you inevitably end up confronting yourself.
Not Me
ere was another reason I didn’t bother much with correcting the re-
cord for the  rst few years of my doppelganger trouble: with the excep-
tion of the Manhattan bathroom incident, getting confused with Naomi
Wolf appeared to be a social media thing. My friends and colleagues
knew who I was, and when I interacted with people I didn’t know in the
physical world, her name did not come up; neither were we entangled in
articles or book reviews. I therefore  led away Naomi confusion in the
category of “things that happen on the internet that are not quite real”
(back when we were silly enough to do that about all kinds of things). I
told myself that I was not being confused with Wolf, but that our digital
avatars were getting mistakenly swapped— the thumbnail- sized photos
of us, and the tiny boxes that prescribed the parameters of our speech on
those platforms, just as they  attened and blurred so much else.
Back then, I saw the problem as more structural than personal. A
handful of young men had gotten unfathomably rich designing tech
platforms that, in the name of “connection,” not only allowed us to
30 DOPPELGANGER
eavesdrop on conversations between strangers but also actively encour-
aged us to seek out those exchanges that mentioned us by name (a.k.a.
our “mentions”). In a way, it was perfect that the  rst time I heard my
name confused with Wolf’s was in an eavesdropped conversation taking
place in a public restroom. When I joined Twitter and clicked on the
little bell icon signifying my “mentions,” that was my initial thought: I
was reading the gra ti written about me on an in nitely scrolling rest-
room wall.
As a frequently gra tied- about girl in high school, this felt both fa-
miliar and deeply harrowing. I instantly knew that Twitter was going to
be bad for me— and yet, like so many of us, I could not stop looking. So
perhaps if there is a message I should have taken from the destabilizing
appearance of my doppelganger, this is it: Once and for all, stop eaves-
dropping on strangers talking about you in this crowded and  lthy
global toilet known as social media.
I might have heeded the message, too. If Covid hadn’t intervened.
2
ENTER COVID, THE THREAT MULTIPLIER
C
an I just read you this one tweet?” I say, wandering into the
kitchen balancing my laptop in one hand.
“Fine,” Avi replies, lips tightening. He has decided to run for
a seat in Canada’s Parliament and is juggling all kinds of high- stakes
decisions: he needs to hire a campaign manager, dra a platform, raise a
hundred thousand dollars.
“She just wrote, ‘vaccinated people’s urine/feces’needs to be sepa-
rated ‘from general sewage supplies/waterways’ until its impact on
unvaccinated people’s drinking water is established. Can you believe
that? She thinks vaccinated people are biohazards! She wants to build a
parallel sewage system!”
“Where are you going with this?” Avi asks, not particularly patiently.
Where indeed?
=
In the years before Covid,  oating conspiracy claims seemed to be a
kind of hobby for Wolf. She hopped from one theory to another— Ebola,
Snowden, 5G, ISIS— but never stayed with any one subject for long, cer-
tainly not long enough to actually prove anything. She was just “raising