Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World

Klein obsessively listens to Bannon’s podcast, War Room, to keep up with Wolf’s right-wing arguments; Wolf has become a regular guest, despite apparently holding different political opinions to Bannon. Klein’s obsession starts to take over her life. She finds the dramatic shift in Wolf’s politics from liberal to far-right concerning and difficult to understand. It is equally confusing to see Bannon, a notorious antisemite, rationalize his association with Wolf.

The COVID-19 pandemic reshaped politics around the world, resulting in a phenomenon called “diagonalism.” Diagonalism takes people from across the spectrum of political ideology and unites them in a political alliance against a common enemy. Members of the right wing found that COVID-19 heightened their concerns about immigration and progressive politics. To bolster their perspective, far-right individuals like Bannon present themselves as operating outside of the binary of left vs. right-wing politics, welcoming members of the left in a diagonal political alliance. These new left-wing or liberal recruits are praised for standing up for the truth, supposedly proving that their ideas must be true if people from widely differing political ideologies can agree on their veracity.

Wolf’s shift from liberal politics to far-right ideology was a deliberate one. Wolf wants to have online clout and likes to center herself in discussions and debates that generate interest. She often claims to have uncovered secret knowledge that she could be persecuted for sharing, and she ends up at the center of trending cultural conversations. When the Outrages fiasco unfolded, mainstream outlets deplatformed her. To reestablish her clout and reinsert herself into discourse, Wolf had to find new friends who did not care about facts. She found these friends on the far right. This is one of the dangers of cancel culture: People who are “pushed out of progressive conversations or communities” (116) will then be welcomed into the Mirror World. What Wolf gains from her alliance with Bannon is everything that she lost after Outrages destroyed her credibility. She gets attention, respect, wealth, fame, and praise. Bannon gains something entirely different.

Klein listens to Bannon’s War Room because while liberals and leftists may not want to listen to him, he is listening to them. He is skilled at taking Democrat talking points and turning them upside down. During the COVID-19 pandemic, people on the left sometimes avoided certain discussions so that they would not sound like people on the right. The lack of discussion around topics like vaccine safety and the origins of the COVID-19 virus fueled fear and misinformation in the general public. Rather than explain how vaccines worked and have medical experts discuss their associated risks and benefits, liberal and leftist journalists left an information vacuum. People like Wolf gladly filled in the gaps with misinformation dressed up as the truth. In the face of misinformation and conspiracy theories, liberals and progressives opted to defend the status quo, despite the fact that they “could, and should, have demanded far more” (127) structural change to deal with the effects of COVID-19.

People like Bannon are listening to the issues that progressives are abandoning and are twisting them to bolster their own political goals (like Trump’s re-election). The far-right has absorbed leftist, progressive critiques of oligarchic rule, but instead of using them to address capitalism, they push “discombobulated conspiracies that somehow frame deregulated capitalism as communism in disguise” (131). Instead of offering meaningful solutions to the problems he discusses, Bannon gives his listeners scapegoats to blame. He also sells them products they can use to supposedly protect themselves. To draw in more formerly left-wing listeners, Bannon focuses on areas of relative common ground, avoiding overtly divisive talking points like gun control and abortion.

In Wolf’s The End of America, she argues that there are 10 steps that governments take on the road to fascism. The third step is to “Develop a thug caste” (136); ironically, her new friend Bannon is determined to ensure that the next time there is an election in America, “the thugs will be at every polling station” (136). Bannon knows that he needs people like Wolf on his side to appeal to predominantly white suburban mothers who, in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, are concerned with vaccine mandates and the safety of their children. These women feel that they are not being taken seriously. Bannon weaponizes their concerns and makes women like Wolf feel seen and heard, while pushing his own agenda. Fascist leaders like Mussolini and Pinochet used the same strategy.