The Other Naomi

A left-wing author finds herself constantly confused with a right-wing conspiracist.

- Helen Lewis

In 2019, a mnemonic began to circulate on the internet: "If the Naomi be Klein/you're doing just fine/If the Naomi be Wolf / Oh, buddy. Ooooof." The rhyme recognized one of the most puzzling intellectual journeys of recent times-Naomi Wolf's descent into conspiracism-and the collateral damage it was inflicting on the Canadian climate activist and anticapitalist Naomi Klein.

Until recently, Naomi Wolf was best known for her 1990s feminist blockbuster The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women, which argued that the tyranny of grooming standards-all that plucking and waxing-was a form of backlash against women's rights. But she is now one of America's most prolific conspiracy theorists, boasting on her Twitter profile of being "deplatformed 7 times and still right." She has claimed that vaccines are a "software platform" that can "receive uploads" and is mildly obsessed with the idea that many clouds aren't real, but are instead evidence of "geoengineered skies." Although Wolf has largely disappeared from the mainstream media, she is now a favored guest on Steve Bannon's podcast, War Room.

All of this is particularly bad news for Klein, for the simple reason that people keep mistaking the two women for each other. Back in 2011, when she first noticed the confusion from inside a bathroom stall, she heard two women complain that "Naomi Klein" didn't understand the demands of the Occupy movement-this was merely embarrassing. The movement sprang from Klein's part of the left, and in October of that year she was invited to speak to Occupy New York. Was it their shared first name, their Jewishness, or their brown hair with blond highlights? Even their partners' names were similar: Avram Lewis and Avram Ludwig. Klein was struck that both had experienced rejection from their peer groups (in her case, by fellow students when she first criticized Israel in the college newspaper).