Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World

Many climate activists, including Klein, advocate for major changes to government environmental policy with the goal of mitigating and ultimately reversing the detrimental effects of climate change. These proposed policy changes are often called the “Green New Deal”—a reference to Roosevelt’s New Deal policies of the 1930s. Ideally, the Green New Deal would usher in sweeping changes that would impact every industry and every sector to make urgent changes to the way the world currently works. Though the term “Green New Deal” is primarily associated with American politics and history, activists have similar demands in countries all around the world that would require similar kinds of government policy change.

Klein refers to the social and political sphere occupied by conspiracy theorists and far-right politicians as “the Mirror World” throughout Doppelganger. She uses this term to emphasize that the “Mirror World” co-opts many of the ideas and rhetorical terms used by left-wing activists such as Klein herself, but reflect them back in a distorted way. For Klein, Naomi Wolf is her doppelganger in the Mirror World because while both women tend to write about the same types of issues, Wolf’s take on events is often a distorted, conspiratorial version of Klein’s views.

In Philip Roth’s 1993 novel Operation Shylock, the book’s protagonist (a fictionalized Philip Roth) encounters his double. Unwilling to call his double “Philip,” he opts instead for “Moishe Pipik,” with “pipik” literally meaning “bellybutton.” The name expresses the protagonist’s discomfort and his inability to take his double seriously. Klein takes this term further, coining “pipikism.” She notes the tendency of the far right to co-opt and twist the language and arguments of the left, making serious topics seem ridiculous. When a concept or term gets pipiked, many people on the left no longer feel that they can seriously engage with it for fear of being associated with the right. For instance, many people on the left were unwilling to express any skepticism of government vaccine policy or COVID-19 prevention policy because they did not want their own objections conflated with those of the conspiracy theorists.

QAnon is a conspiracy theory that gained popularity in the United States in 2017. The arguments made by QAnon adherents are wide-ranging: the claim that Donald Trump is destined to bring down a powerful group of pedophilic Satan-worshippers who secretly run the world, that the Earth is flat, and that the world is headed toward a major reckoning, at which point the secret groups who run the world will be executed to usher in a new era. QAnon is deeply rooted in antisemitic beliefs and has strong links to neo-Nazi groups in the US. The people who took part in the January 6 Capitol attack in 2021 were primarily QAnon believers.