A review by Socialist Aotearoa member Maria.

If you only read one book over summer, make it this one.

Entertaining, lucid, smart and surprisingly optimistic, Klein’s look at the ‘Mirror World’ of conspiracy theories and our ‘doppelganger’ selves is a much-needed deep dive into views and behaviours we often dismiss as plain nuts.

Klein makes you think again about simply scoffing at those who likened strict anti-Covid measures to apartheid, slavery or even Nazi Germany. About belittling those who believed QR codes were a covert government espionage operation with the sneering comment ‘wait till they hear about cellphones’. Stay with me here. It’s not that these notions aren’t bonkers, and often downright offensive. It’s that they signal something the left should pay very, very close attention to.

The book begins with Klein’s exasperation at increasingly being confused with Naomi Wolf – she of The Beauty Myth fame, one-time feminist and now handmaiden of Trump strategist Steve Bannon.  No, handmaiden is too mild; it suggests a kind of kowtowing. Wolf came up with her wacky theories all by herself (including calling for a parallel sewage system for vaccinated people because their waste amounted to a biohazard). Better to call her a useful ally. Bannon – a world-class opportunist – simply pounced on the chance to have this formerly respected feminist Democrat on his side.

Klein explores Wolf’s bizarre and seemingly unfathomable trajectory from former despiser of Trump and champion of women’s rights to becoming the darling of the immigrant-hating, misogynist, MAGA maniac, conspiracy theory-riddled right. In a world where we are all seemingly yelling at each across a fence, outraged at the loony beliefs of the opposing camp, Klein does that rare thing. She pauses to forensically and almost empathetically ask: what the hell happened to her?
 
She then extends this examination to look at how such political transformations happen on a wider scale.

The book starts with Klein’s mild amusement and then deep frustration at being confused with Wolf. Imagine spending decades, as Klein has, building up a profile as a staunch anti-capitalist who writes scrupulously researched books like The Shock Doctrine savaging the neo-liberalism agenda only to be trolled for batshit conspiracy views – none of them yours – formed as a result of Wolf interviewing her own keyboard. Or staring at clouds (yes, really).

Klein carefully unpacks what is going on here and finds that it is the failure of the left to seriously challenge the cruelties and injustices of capitalism that drives many to look for easy answers.  But surely you have to be crazy to fall for some of the conspiracy nonsense? Well, here’s the twist. The reason conspiracy theories appeal is that they often contain a nugget of truth.

The fact is we are being tricked. News sites aren’t about news but click-bait; housing isn’t about homes but property speculation. Capitalism is predatory and extractive – only not in the way conspiracy theories would have us believe.

“QAnon believers imagine secret tunnels underneath pizza parlours and Central Park, the better to traffic children. This is fantasy, but there are tunnels – literal Shadow Lands – under some major cities and they do house and hide the poor, the sick, the drug-dependent, the discarded,” writes Klein.

The Musks and Tumps of this world love conspiracy theories because they divert our gaze from the true issue.

Take the anti-vax argument, for example. It was spot-on that the Covid vaccine was an unfair two-tier system, one that treated certain people as an underclass. Only it wasn’t the unvaccinated yoga entrepreneurs in California who were being oppressed and being forced – heaven forbid – to sacrifice their bodily sovereignty to protect the elderly and immune-compromised (some anti-vaxers even wore yellow stars to signal their downtrodden status). The true vaccine inequity was between the West and developing nations. As the UN wrote in 2022: “The overall number of vaccines administered has risen dramatically, but so has the inequality of the distribution: of the more than 10 billion doses given out worldwide, only one per cent have been administered in low-income countries.” This at colossal economic and human cost to the desperately poor nations overlooked as we lined up for our second, third and fourth boosters.

Klein writes: “Like my doppelganger projecting all of our surveillance fears on a vaccine app, conspiracy theorists get the facts wrong but often get the feelings right – the feeling of living in a world with Shadow Lands, the feeling that every human misery is someone else’s profit, the feeling of being exhausted by predation and extraction, the feeling that important truths are being hidden. The word for the system driving those feelings starts with c, but if no one ever taught you how capitalism works, and instead told you it was all about freedom and sunshine and Bic Macs and playing by the rules to get the life you deserve, then it’s easy to see how you might confuse it with another c-word: conspiracy.”

Klein’s refusal to simply go on a verbal rampage against those sucked into the Mirror World, her level-headed calm in examining what is at work, is the perfect medicine for our times – an age where point-scoring and cancel culture and ‘being right’ count for so much. She argues that we all contain an inner doppelganger. A ‘me’ that could easily, in the right circumstances, flip to the dark side. One startling example is the Tale of Two Trucker Convoys.

Remember the anti-vax trucker convey that shut down Ottawa for the best part of a month back in 2022? A protest that claimed the vaccine was a kind of tyranny, that had the full-throated support of some notoriously nasty racists, and that had Trump and Musk hailing the participants as ‘working class heroes’? Well, there was a lesser known convoy eight months earlier. One organised in solidarity with one of Canada’s indigenous communities by a trucker named Mike Otto. It was prompted by the shock discovery of the graves of some 215 children at the site of a school for indigenous children who had been removed from their parents. A report into the graves discovery identified that the true number of children who died or were killed at these Catholic-run residential schools across Canada between the 1880s and late 1990s was closer to 25,000. The report termed it ‘cultural genocide’. White trucker Otto, who lived near one of the burial sites and was shaken by the thought of what his indigenous neighbours must be going through, organised a We Stand in Solidarity convoy of 400 truckers, their rigs plastered with Every Child Matters banners and messages of love, as they quietly and respectfully passed in front of the burial grounds, stopping only to leave offerings.

Why mention these two starkly contrasting events? Because some truckers were on both convoys. “In June 2021 they felt sorrow and solidarity; in February 2022, rage and self-righteousness. They were, like everyone, both that and this. And marginally different circumstances – social, political, economic – brought out different sides of them.”

This then is the crux of Klein’s argument. It’s not that we should shake our heads over the migration of so many people to toxic politics, but that we should recognise the ability to win them over to socialist ideas. It’s the duty of the left to offer credible alternatives, and to direct people’s justifiable anger at the right target. To turn the gaze of the oppressed to the rightful cause.

Most of all, it’s our duty to really listen – to what people are afraid of, to what angers and frustrates them. And not to nitpick or dismiss or cancel them because their views do not exactly align with ours or their terminology may be a bit ‘off’.

Uniting is not an empty hope. History is littered with examples of the working class overcoming their differences and coming together to challenge and overthrow the prevailing order. From Russia in 1917 to Red Vienna, history has given us chinks of light, fragments and glimmers of a beautiful, just world.

There is a section on the proud history of Jewish socialism that will break your heart – the murdering of a movement that argued for a diaspora that would remain and build a better society where they were rather than flee to an artificial homeland built on the oppression of others. It will break your heart because in the ruins of that dream lie thousands of dead Palestinian babies – and Klein’s railing against the project of Zionism was written before October 7, 2023.

But with the planet burning and the biggest power in the West about to be handed to a few unhinged billionaires, we need more than ever to harness and fight for ideas that did not fail, but which were crushed. To not blame and call out one another, but to fight the system that thrives on our division.

As always, Klein puts it so well. “When power and wealth and weaponry and information technology are concentrated in so few hands, splintering is tantamount to surrender. Up against oligarchy, all we have is the power latent in our capacity to unite.”

It’s time to keep raising our voices – whether around Te Tiriti or Gaza, disability rights or attacks on migrants – and target the real causes of oppression. To envision a future that works for the many, and not just for the few.