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Politics of paranoia Bizarre conspiracy theories are no longer a joke

NAT SEGNIT

DOPPELGANGER A trip into the mirror world

NAOMI KLEIN 416pp. Allen Lane. £25. CONSPIRITUALITY How New Age conspiracy theories became a health threat DEREK BERES, MATTHEW REMSKI,

JULIAN WALKER 384pp. PublicAffairs. £25. JEWISH SPACE LASERS The Rothschilds and 200 years of conspiracy theories MIKE ROTHSCHILD 336pp. Melville House Publishing. £30.

HOW A B O U T T H I S for a parlour game? Each player writes the name of a particularly odious, compromised or batshit-crazy public figure on a scrap of paper and places it in a hat. When i t ’s your turn, you pick out a piece of paper and assume the identity of the person written on it. The other players then hurl accusations at you, and it’s your job to explain, in the most persuasive terms, why your corruption, contempt for democratic norms or history of serious sexual misconduct is in fact the reason why you should retain their undying devotion. In Conspirituality, a fascinating study of the links between conspiracy culture and the New Age wellness movement, Derek Beres, Matthew Remski and Julian Walker cite the example of the New Age “channeler” Lorie Ladd. For her, Donald Trump’s racism, misogyny, far-right sympathies and long list of sexual-assault allegations are entirely consistent with the sort of transgressive contempt for the “conventional order” that marks the most gifted “wayshowers” or “lightworkers”, a race of mystical beings who, like the Donald, have been “sent by benevolent aliens to usher in humanity’s ascent into a new fifth-dimensional enlightened reality”.

It would be funny if it weren’t so terrifying. The temptation to take comfort in the sheer inanity of so much cultic and conspiratorial thinking – surely, you tell yourself, anyone who maintains that the Clintons are blood-drinking Satanists can be safely ignored – is forestalled by the numbers. A hell of a lot of people believe in this stuff. Ladd has 225,000 Instagram followers. Her “Is Trump a Lightworker” video has close to half a million views. Which is peanuts, of course, by the conspiratorial standards of Alex Jones, who by advancing the theories that chemicals devised by the Pentagon have turned the majority of American frogs gay, and that the Sandy Hook massacre was a false-flag operation mounted by leftist gun-control zealots, at its peak helped his far-right website, Infowars, to attract more monthly visits than the Economist. From the perspective of Ladd, Jones and their legions of followers, any dissent from their views i s automatically invalidated by the playground topsy-turvyism of the paranoid right. As Beres et al point out, the claim, put forward by “the wellnessinfluencer-turned-right-wing shitposter” J. “Pepe” Sears, that the worst of the violence during the

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January 6 attack on the Capitol was perpetrated by Antifa was only confirmed as true by the fact that Twitter had labelled it as misinformation.

It is the maddening, impenetrable inversions of this paranoid “mirror world” that concern Naomi Klein in Doppelganger, her sui generis mixture of memoir, reportage and cultural analysis charting what had begun as a source of mild amusement – the fact that she was frequently confused with Naomi Wolf, author of The Beauty Myth (1990). This became increasingly problematic as Wolf made her unexpected mid-career pivot from critiquing the impossible aesthetic standards expected of women to promoting the theory that a cabal of transnational bad actors, including the World Economic Forum, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and the Chinese Communist Part y, were using the “tainted, murderous” Covid vaccines to destroy western civilization. It hardly helps your standing as a public intellectual when social media users start mixing you up with an individual who is apparently undergoing some form of breakdown, particularly when, by focusing her rage on the governmental response to the Covid crisis, Wolf seemed to be t aking ideas Klein had developed in her wellregarded book The Shock Doctrine (2007 ) and refracting them “through a fun-house mirror of plots and conspiracies based almost exclusively on a series of hunches”. Klein was forced to append a clarification to her Twitter bio: “Not that Naomi”.

The tipping point for Wolf seems to have come in early 2019, when she made a notorious appearance on BBC Radio 3’s Free Thinking to promote Outrages, her book on the criminalization of same-sex relationships in Victorian Britain. Central to her thesis was her discovery that several dozen men had been executed for sodomy well into the nineteenth century. It fell to the presenter, Matthew Sweet, to point out that “death recorded”, the legal term that Wolf had found in Old Bailey records and taken as evidence of the executions, in fact meant that the judge had abstained from pronouncing a death sentence. None of the executions had taken place. The short silence that follows is one of radio’s great toe-curling moments. It also transpired that Wolf had conflated cases of child abuse with consensual gay sex, perpetuating, as Klein puts it, “a dangerous fallacy linking gay men with pedophilia”. Wolf was dropped by her American publisher and the entire

TLS

An anti-lockdown protest in Edinburgh, 2020

Nat Segnit’s most recent book is Retreat: The risks and rewards of stepping back from the world, 2021

US print run of Outrages was pulped. All but overnight her reputation among the transatlantic liberal intelligentsia was wrecked: there would be no coming back. What Klein’s account suggests is that, far from amounting to a mental collapse in response to her public humiliation, Wolf ’s rapid descent into cheese-dream cryptofascism was at once more of a piece with her former, more respectable public persona – from The Beauty Myth to Vagina: A new biography (2012), her work has been criticized for its tendentiousness, blatant exaggeration and fast and loose way with statistics – and, to the extent that it did represent a break with her past, a canny (if entirely reprehensible) career move. Since April 2021 Wolf has been a regular guest on War Room, the hugely popular podcast hosted by Steve Bannon, Trump’s former chief strategist and the man who, in Klein’s words, “has done as much as anyone in contemporary times to unleash the floodgates of xenophobic hate in the United States”. By the 2022 midterm elections Wolf had not only become a vocal election denialist, but also issued a “full-throated apology” to Bannon’s audience of Maga fanatics for “having believed media accounts of the violent January 6 assault on the Capitol”.

You get the sense that Bannon can’t believe his luck. A feminist intellectual, a self-described “darling of … bicoastal elite thought leaders”, on his show, freely offering her view that government plans to encourage vaccine take-up are “one step away from concentration camps”. In truth, however, the cognitive dissonance is a cinch to resolve. Wolf is no longer an intellectual, if she ever was, or a darling of anyone other than the not inconsiderable proportion of the American electorate who consider “bicoastal elite thought leaders” to be the agents of an authoritarian one-world government controlled by alien reptiles in the guise of Jewish bankers. Rejected by the liberal intelligentsia, Wolf has been eagerly embraced by a constituency that not only despises the liberal worldview, but also treats its adherence to evidence-based thinking – the very principle that had undone Wolf in the first place – as proof of its sheeple-ish delusion.

Where Doppelganger shifts up a gear is in extrapolating from the single instance – the liberal Dr Wolf clutching her throat, then re-emerging from behind the sofa as the saucer-eyed Ms Hyde of misinformation – a more general (and depressing) analysis of fascism not as the polar opposite of liberal democracy, a distant point on the same political spectrum, but as its shadow, a parallel realit y, unavailable for reconciliation because it disputes the epistemic grounds for debate. You can’t argue with stupid, they say, and even less so with someone who insists that your patient, evidence-based argument that the world is not in fact flat stands as irrefutable proof that it is.

It is this wholesale abandonment of reason – in favour of a paranoid world-view only entrenched by any efforts to question it – that has allowed for the weird coalitions that characterize the contemporary politico-cultural landscape, what Klein (drawing on the work of the historian Quinn Slobodian and the political theorist William Callison) refers to as “diagonalism”. If it no longer seems that incongruous for a former feminist intellectual to start disputing the results of the 2020 presidential election, precisely the same diagonalist logic applies to the phenomenon, amply described in Conspirituality, of educated, avowedly progressive yoga instructors and alt-health influencers aligning with the alt-right trolls of 4chan to “post stories about a secretive global cabal bent on controlling the world’s population with a genocidal vaccine”. Covid had dismantled the wal l be t ween wel l ne s s and white supremac y, between Deepak Chopra and Tucker Carlson.

Conspirituality grew out of the podcast of the same name, used by the authors, all seasoned (if sceptical) “wellness practitioners” themselves, to examine the intersection of New Age spirituality with the politics of paranoia. As Klein also points out, fitness and fascism are historical bedfellows. Heinrich Himmler conceived of the SS as a “yogic monastic order”. Beres et al give an excellent potted history of the

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