When Naomi Klein Realized People Regularly Confused Her With Naomi Wolf, She Went Down a Rabbit Hole

[Celerity]

In this exclusive excerpt from her new book, Doppelganger, the Shock Doctrine author takes on the Beauty Myth author, whose COVID conspiracism has further muddied the Naomi waters.

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2023/08/naomi-klein-naomi-wolf-book

https://archive.li/Ko3s0



The first time it happened, I was in a stall in a public bathroom just off 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, flashing 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. Then it hit me: I knew who had. I casually strolled to the sink, made eye contact 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.”

That 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. It was a collective howl against economic inequality and financial crimes that would, eventually, birth a new generational politics. That day the organizers of the original Manhattan encampment had called for a mass march through the financial 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 This 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 begun 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 This Changes Everything. But while I was there, organizers asked me to give a short talk about the shock of the 2008 financial crisis and the raging injustices that followed—the trillions put on the line to save the banks whose reckless trades had caused the crisis, the punishing austerity offered to pretty much everyone else, the legalized corruption that all of this laid bare. Naomi Wolf, once a standard-bearer of 1990s feminism, had intersected with the protests as well, and I suppose that’s where the confusion began. She had written several articles arguing that the crackdown on Occupy demonstrated that the United States was tipping into a police state. This was the subject of her book The End of America, which outlined “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 freedom restricted. The city was not allowing megaphones and sound systems 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 takeover she insisted was unfolding under their noses. Not wanting to give the police an excuse to clear the protest camp, the organizers took a different tack, using what became known as the “human microphone” (where the crowd repeats the speaker’s words so that everyone can hear them).

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[marble falls]

1. Interesting dilema. Is anyone who they say they are, or are they who others claim they are?