Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World

In Canada, where Klein lives, many progressives refuse to believe that America’s shift to the right could happen north of the border. COVID-19 denialism and conspiracy theories do exist, but most people (including Klein’s politician husband) associate them with a small and politically disempowered section of the right wing. Klein sees what others do not. She observes how people typically thought of as left-wing, like New Age hippies, fitness instructors, and holistic medicine practitioners, have been inculcated into diagonalist rhetoric. Many people who previously voted NDP (the left-wing New Democratic Party) have now flipped to voting for the People’s Party, a new ultra-right wing anti-immigration party. When Klein’s husband goes door-to-door to drum up NDP support, he speaks with a former NDP voter about COVID-19 protections for immunocompromised people. She tells him, “I think those people should die” (170).

Though the connection between New Age movements and the far right might seem obscure, fitness and alternative subcultures mesh well with fascism. Under fascism, the body is heavily politicized, and individual bodies are perceived to be superior or inferior. Those who are considered “unfit” die from disease and are not worth protecting; the strong and fit are considered superior and worthy of survival. In this fascist line of reasoning, there is no need for public health measures to protect people from viruses and diseases; in fact, disease is a way of “cleansing” society, leaving only the strong behind. During the pandemic, these ideas became more popular in fitness and natural wellness communities where health is considered an individual pursuit instead of a community effort.

Wellness movements concerned with remaining young, fit, and healthy have become increasingly popular because they allow adherents to feel that they are maintaining control over their lives in a world that feels increasingly out of control. Faced with inaccessible medical systems, many Americans (and Canadians) have turned to alternative medicine and lifestyles. This shift can leave people vulnerable to ineffective or actively harmful medical interventions. During the pandemic, some people rushed to sell alternative treatments and cures not backed by science. When alternative health and wellness sectors suffered from pandemic restrictions and a lack of government financial support, many people lost their faith in the government. This, in turn, emboldened fitness and wellness influencers to warn their followers about “dark forces coming to poison [them], and eventually, to gag, jab, and dominate [them]” (188).

Health and wellness influencers, whom Klein calls the “far-out,” are tied to the far-right by their mutual adherence to hyper-individualism and mistrust of government or scientific expertise. Rather than advocating for government policies to keep populations safe, or free, accessible vaccines and medicine to combat the virus, both the far-right and the far-out argued for an individual strategy: Each person was only responsible for their own health, and some people deserved to die. This rhetoric was used by the Nazis to justify the extermination of Jewish people, and by European colonialists to justify the colonization and extermination of Black and Indigenous peoples around the world. Over time, these new diagonalist recruits were exposed to more far-right ideas, like the “supposed naturalness of the gender binary, and of traditional family roles” (194).

Progressives and leftists did not do enough during the pandemic to push for government policies that would protect all people. Many people were sucked into the Mirror World because it provided assurances they could not get on the left. This is part of why so many countries have tipped further and further right over the past few years. Klein worries about the growing obsession surrounding “pure children and perfected bodies” (201) and what impact it might have on her own family.

Klein’s son, whom she calls “T,” has autism. Klein struggled to find resources to support him, especially when he was a young child. She finds communities of parents of children with autism online who see themselves as being “at war” with their children’s diagnoses, forcing them into dangerous treatments. She meets parents who blame the MMR (measles, mumps & rubella) vaccine for giving their children autism; this is not backed up by science.

These parents feel that they have been cheated out of having what they perceive to be a “normal” child. For them, parenthood is a kind of doubling: Children are extensions of their parents’ hopes, dreams, and even brands. When the child is not a perfect double, or appears to be flawed, this fantasy is destroyed. The parent looks for something to blame and tries to fix their child’s perceived flaws. Parents who buy into the conspiracy theory that vaccines cause autism would rather their child die of preventable diseases than have autism. They often speak as though their child has been replaced by an uncanny double after their autism diagnosis. During the pandemic, Wolf begins sharing anti-MMR conspiracies to discourage COVID-19 vaccination.

Klein examines the treatment of children with autism in the 20th century, starting just after World War I. Vienna’s socialist government at the time implemented many social services that supported people at all levels of life, from housing to health services. In this system, children were not seen as mere extensions of their parents, but as whole individuals with their own rights. The city provided a therapeutic educational clinic for these children, where they could have their educational and developmental needs met. They resisted formally diagnosing children as “abnormal,” opting instead to see “these behaviors as different ways of being human” (220). This progressive era for the city was known as Red Vienna. However, when the Nazis came to power and annexed Austria, this changed. The Nazis used the institutions that had previously helped children with developmental challenges to experiment on them and determine who they deemed to be unworthy of life.

During the Red Vienna era, Dr. Hans Asperger supported the idea that developmental differences represented normal variations in human behavior. When the Nazis came to power, his opinion flipped. Asperger began separating developmentally different children into two categories: Most, he agreed, should be eliminated from society, though a few were highly skilled in mathematics and other areas. He distinguished children in the second category as having what he called “Asperger’s syndrome,” and argued that they could still play a role in society and serve the Nazi party. Many of those who did not have Asperger’s syndrome were murdered in Aktion T4, a Nazi eugenics program that killed over 200,000 people with disabilities.

During the pandemic, Wolf engages in discourse that reminds Klein of this Nazi eugenicist rhetoric. Contrary to Wolf’s famous argument about the steps a government takes on its way to totalitarianism, fascism is not always imposed from the top down by a tyrannical individual. Ordinary people (like Wolf) can bring about fascism when they parrot dangerous arguments about purity and superiority. The drive for perfection can even spill over into more progressive circles that are otherwise meant to be predicated on community solidarity. When parents push their children to be perfect, they advance the notion that individuals can be superior or inferior, and that they can be pure or impure.