Wolf entered the pandemic already destabilized by career collapse and her father’s death

Evidence

Wolf, unsurprisingly, saw a plot. In January 2020, she told an interviewer that the “viral attack” she faced after her foundational errors in Outrages were exposed was part of a shadowy effort to destroy her reputation and take her “off the chessboard.” All of this came at what was surely a tough time for Wolf—just a few months before the BBC interview, she had lost her father, the man she treated with such reverence in The Treehouse. This confluence of events means that she went into the destabilizing period of the pandemic in an already highly destabilized state, with little left to lose—and, as I would soon learn, with a great deal to gain. — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, 211

Categorization

• QUESTION: The biographical causation — career ruin plus bereavement as preconditions for Wolf’s descent into conspiracy — is the causal backbone of the doubling narrative; worth checking whether Klein over-psychologizes here.
• XREF: The claim that a disgraced public figure had ‘little left to lose and much to gain’ resonates with how the Mirror World rewards status loss — echoes the grifter logic of the wellness-to-conspiracy pipeline.