The doubling dynamic caused leftists to overcredulously accept official pandemic stories.

Evidence

Like most of us, I don’t know where the Covid-19 virus originated—whether a wet market in Wuhan, or the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s Biosafety Level 4 lab, or somewhere else entirely. But I do realize, in retrospect, that I was too quick to take the official story—that it came from a wet market where wild animals were sold—at face value. If I’m honest, I accepted it because it served my own motivated reasoning and reinforced my worldview: the pandemic was a little less frightening to me if it was yet another example of humans overstressing nature and getting bitten on the ass for it. Then, as time went on, and the “lab leak theory” became a key talking point from people like Wolf and Bannon in the Mirror World, where it was mixed with baseless claims about bioweapons, along with plenty of anti-Asian racism, there seemed to be further reason not to take another look at the facts. Even though more and more facts and documents were piling up that supported a serious consideration of the lab leak hypothesis, most liberals and leftists didn’t bother looking for months because we didn’t want to be like them, in the same way that I didn’t want to be like her. In an odd way, their over-the-top conspiracies fed our overcredulity; their “question everything” led to many of us not questioning enough. — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, 385

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘we didn’t want to be like them, in the same way that I didn’t want to be like her’ formulation is the core doubling device at its most explicit — directly relevant to the reader’s project of tracking how the device generates analytic insight.
• DEEPTHINKING: The central claim that over-the-top conspiracy claims (the ‘question everything’ of the Mirror World) paradoxically produced under-questioning on the left is a genuinely counterintuitive, load-bearing mechanism — the polarization circle Klein keeps returning to.