Klein’s first ‘cancel culture’ firestorm came from pro-Palestinian campus writing.

Evidence

I did interview her about The Beauty Myth, in a vestibule off the common room, and the article took up a full page in The Varsity, right across from a piece denouncing the first Gulf War (“U.S. Out of the Gulf: No More Vietnams!”). And we talked about more than the book as well. Her instant-intimacy stunt worked, and I spilled my guts. No, I had not just been raped, not recently. But I was in the middle of a different kind of assault. The first Intifada was raging, and one week earlier I had published an angry article in our campus newspaper about Israeli human rights abuses. As Wolf’s writing would do two and half decades later, it had caused a firestorm. There had been furious excommunications and death threats, and thousands of copies of the student newspaper were thrown in the dumpster outside our offices. There was a campaign to get university donors to threaten to withdraw funding unless the paper was sanctioned, and at least one tried, without success. I suppose it was my first experience with what today is called cancel culture. — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, 1137

Categorization

• XREF: Directly prefigures the Israel/Palestine chapters and the Mirror World’s metabolism of pro-Palestine positions.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: Klein frames her own early experience of ‘cancel culture’ as a target, which complicates her device of being the enemy double.