"Calm is a Form of Resistance"

On Naomi Klein's Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World

The two women sit across from each other at a sidewalk cafe table in Los Angeles, their hair loose and center-parted, their cell phones in front of them. Each is recording the interview—both say—to defend against the possibility that the other might release unflattering bits out of context.

On the left, closest to the street, is journalist Taylor Lorenz, who is writing a story about the woman on the right, Chaya Raichik, for the Washington Post. Raichik also calls herself a journalist; her work consists of scrolling social media for potentially embarrassing clips of supposed liberals (often LGBTQ individuals) and then framing and amplifying those clips for ridicule by the massive conservative audience that follows her Twitter account, Libs of TikTok. The targets of her posts often face violent threats; as Lorenz points out in the interview, 33 institutions—schools, hospitals—have received bomb threats after Raichik has posted about them.¹ The specific occasion of this interview is the death in Oklahoma of a non-binary student who was bullied for months in a district where Raichik targeted a teacher and where at least one trans student claims to have been “bullied by people who watch Libs of TikTok.”

For the interview, Raichik wears a t-shirt with an image of Lorenz crying during a TV interview about the online abuse she’s faced. It’s internet trolling brought into the real world—every time Lorenz looks across the table, she’s faced with her own image in a moment of abjection. Raichik wants to trap Lorenz in a horrifying hall of mirrors, an image of herself humiliating herself forever.

At least that’s the idea. In reality, Lorenz is unfazed by the t-shirt troll. In the hourlong interview—which Lorenz released in full after the Post published her story—Lorenz asks thoughtful, probing questions that Raichik struggles to answer. Lorenz pushes back when Raichik deflects, gently points out inconsistencies and contradictions. When Raichik tries to turn the tables and question her interviewer, Lorenz obliges, pausing to think about her answers and admitting when she doesn’t know how to respond. Where Lorenz comes off as generous and reasonable, Raichik seems defensive and petulant and, well, like she hasn’t really thought through the positions that have made her a right-wing media force.

“ohhhh Chaya Raichik is, like, STUPID stupid” went one tweet that echoed a popular reaction after Lorenz released the video. But I don’t think that’s fair. It’s easy to sound inarticulate when you haven’t prepared for an interview. What the interview does reveal is the extent to which Raichik, like so much of the right-wing counter-world that has developed in recent decades, apes mainstream institutions, exploiting their missteps rather than developing a thoughtful framework of ideas.

Every time Raichik managed a response in Lorenz’s interview, it took the form of whataboutism. When Lorenz asked how Raichik feels about the violent threats the subjects of her posts receive, Raichik countered, “I got tons of death threats this week after the entire media machine came after me. So are they responsible for those?”² And when Lorenz asked why Raichik spreads disinformation (her Twitter account still includes a tweet suggesting falsely that the Uvalde school shooter was trans), Raichik argued that the mainstream media lies, too.

It’s not that Raichik doesn’t have a thought in her head—it’s just that all of her talent is bent towards making herself invulnerable to attacks by drawing equivalences to the people (and groups, and institutions) she wants to bring down.

I watched Lorenz’s interview with Raichik, coincidentally, on the same day I finished reading Naomi Klein’s newest book, Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World. Doppelganger is ostensibly about a situation that’s very specific to Klein: the way she is continually confused with Naomi Wolf, a different writer and public thinker who tackles some of the same topics as Klein but takes some wild—and problematic—positions on those topics. But, really, Doppelganger is about the way any of us can lose our mind in a world that’s deliberately flooded with misinformation, gaslighting, and confusion.