What’s been happening with the progressive Canadian journalist and public intellectual Naomi Klein? She was a high-profile presence throughout the antiglobalization protests of the early millennium, and went on to tackle the global warming issue thereafter. Yet she’s been mostly a no-show through the COVID era - a time that seems tailor-made for her sharp brand of political and anticorporate critique.
Now, in Klein’s book Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirrorworld, we have an answer. She’s been cyberstalking activist-journalist Noami Wolf, whom she is commonly confused with.
I hope to add to Toby Roger’s excellent take by focusing on Klein’s intellectual arc leading up to Doppelgangers, before moving on to the book itself.
From No Logo to Shock Doctrine
I interviewed Klein for The Vancouver Courier back in 2000, when she was promoting her first book, No Logo: Taking On The Brand Bullies. She’d already been an editor at This Magazine and a regular columnist at The Toronto Star, and was on her way to becoming the anointed world queen of progressive media. The deeply-researched No Logo showcased both Klein’s investigative smarts and literary talent. She had a knack for original and precise insights, and a gift for a memorable turn of phrase. She became one of my intellectual heroines.
The author followed up No Logo eight years later with The Shock Doctrine: the Rise of Disaster Capitalism, which was even better than No Logo. She outlined how rulers have historically taken advantage of crisis moments to ram through measures that would otherwise meet stiff resistance from the ruled. (The central credo of disaster capitalism was unintentionally expressed by former Chicago mayor and Obama aide Rahm Emmanuel with his line, “you should never let a serious crisis go to waste.”)
On her book tour for The Shock Doctrine, Klein was asked if it was conceivable that powerful interests could invent or at least spark crises beneficial to their interests, rather than wait around for them to happen. What about 9/11? Didn’t the neocon’s own 1998 manifesto, Rebuilding America’s Defenses, state that it would prove difficult for America to dominate the globe in the coming years without “some catastrophic and catalyzing event - like a new Pearl Harbor.”
Klein dismissed the possibility of any such thing in the attacks on New York, which struck me as odd because it seemed a question at least worth asking. “False flags” as instruments to shift public sentiments - wasn’t that a natural extension of her own hypothesis of disaster capitalism, if not her “brand”? It’s not as if they were without historical precedents (the German Reichstag fire in 1933, the Pentagon’s Operation Northwoods in 1962, the Gulf of Tonkin incident in Vietnam in 1964, the Kuwaiti Incubator baby deception in 1990, etc.).
Alas, it appeared Klein had gone the route of other respectable commentators and authors on the left - Alexander Cockburn, George Monbiot, Gwynne Dyer, Matt Taibbi et. al - in refusing to look into dark and disturbing elements that didn’t fit into the official 9/11 narrative. I was more disappointed than surprised, but it wasn’t a good sign. On this thorny topic, Klein’s intellectual circle were content with dismissing 9/11 “truthers” by reciting talking points straight from The Mighty Wurlitzer.
(Klein doubled down on this point in Doppelgangers: “In my writings on shock exploitation, I thought I had been careful to stress that the catalyzing crises were not being manufactured as part of a grand backroom plot to exploit them. Rather, they were (and still are) exploited opportunistically, as a strategic means of circumventing political opposition to unpopular policies.”)
No fembot here
The author had a few more books out after that - some compilations of her articles and her 2014 manifesto on climate change, This Changes Everything.
Fast forward to May 2020, just two months into the coronavirus pandemic. In a report in The Intercept, Klein wrote that “a Screen New Deal” was on the horizon, with our homes acting as living laboratories “for a permanent — and highly profitable — no-touch future.”
It’s a future in which our homes are never again exclusively personal spaces but are also, via high-speed digital connectivity, our schools, our doctor’s offices, our gyms, and, if determined by the state, our jails. Of course, for many of us, those same homes were already turning into our never-off workplaces and our primary entertainment venues before the pandemic, and surveillance incarceration “in the community” was already booming. But in the future under hasty construction, all of these trends are poised for a warp-speed acceleration.
Two weeks before the announcement of a global pandemic, she observed, former Google head Eric Schmidt went on a public blitz for the ‘fourth industrial revolution’ in the pages of The New York Times and Wall Street Journal. However, now with a public emergency “...all of these measures (and more) are being sold to the public as our only possible hope of protecting ourselves from a novel virus that will be with us for years to come.”
I was relieved. Klein wasn’t turning into a fembot after all; the lioness of the left was roaring back at corporate cronies profiting from yet another disaster. “This is the first installment in an ongoing series about the shock doctrine and disaster capitalism in the age of Covid-19,” she wrote.
There was nothing from Klein on The Intercept for the next seven months. And then this:
Uh oh.
“Writing about “The Great Reset” is not easy,” Klein began. “It has turned into a viral conspiracy theory purporting to expose something no one ever attempted to hide, most of which is not really happening anyway, some of which actually should.”
She noted how the World Economic Forum is the source of “The Great Reset” meme, primarily through a book of the same name, coauthored by WEF cofounder Klaus Schwab. She wasn’t exactly a fan:
…the Great Reset encompasses some good stuff that won’t happen and some bad stuff that certainly will and, frankly, nothing out of the ordinary in our era of “green” billionaires readying rockets for Mars.
“Nothing out of the ordinary.” Not even when Schwab himself had said “the pandemic represents a rare but narrow window of opportunity to reflect, reimagine, and reset our world.” The author went on to criticize the WEF, but with more hand-waving attached. Sure, the annual Davos-based group-grope of world leaders and corporate moguls “played a leading role in the transnational campaign to liberate capital from all encumbrances,” but that was hardly news.
Long ago, however, Schwab realized that if Davos didn’t add some do-gooding to its well-doing, the pitchforks that had started amassing at the foot of the mountain would eventually storm the gates (as they came close to doing during the 2001 summit).
So in her take, The Great Reset was simply a rebranding / do-gooding effort by the Davos class, and little more than that. In fact, it was hardly worthy of her attention at all. Poor Naomi was practically forced into it!
I’ve been doing my best to ignore it for months, even when various Reset “researchers” have insisted that all of this is an example of the shock doctrine, a term I coined a decade and a half ago to describe the many ways that elites try to harness deep disasters to push through policies that further enrich the already wealthy and restrict democratic liberties.
Klein went on to repeat that the WEF is hardly above reproach, but it was just the rich up to their old tricks, and rejected any notion that captured governments and their private puppeteers were using the COVID pandemic as a cover to introduce even more regressive policies on a global population, while making out like bandits. The prog journalist wasn’t going there, certainly not when “legitimate critiques have now been blended together with truly dangerous anti-vaccination fantasies and outright coronavirus denialism.”
(In January 2022, Oxfam reported that billionaires added $5 trillion to their fortunes during the pandemic, making for the greatest transfer of wealth upward in recent history. She notes this happy accident for the Davos class in passing in Doppelgangers.)
In any case, Klein concluded her Conspiracy Smoothie piece with a crude, unfunny caricature of that bete noire of legacy media: those who do their own research:
It looks like far-left and far-right conspiracists sitting down over a tray of information-shit sandwiches to talk about how the Great Reset is Gates’s plan to use the DNA from our Covid-19 tests to turn the United States into Venezuela.
Wow.
It was then I knew Klein had completely lost the plot - in fact, the very plot she constructed in her book The Shock Doctrine, which she now steadfastly refuses to apply to the greatest test case in world history, even though it was arguably a perfect fit.
On to Doppelgangers in a forthcoming post.
Where oh where has Naomi gone? That Naomi, anyways. Lost at sea. Of all the behavioural mysteries that befell us during the last 3.5 years, the most disconcerting was that the progressives’ we used to look to for some adaptive wisdom mutinied on their own ship, now a ship of fools who have evidently missed the boat, and are still mostly drowning in a sea of corporate and govt and msm propaganda, along with far too many of my own friends and associates, artists, anti-corporates, otherwise-radicals who now couldn’t tell a jab from a jabberwocky, a ruse from a muse, a saviour from bad behaviour.
People have a tremendous blind spot when flinging around the term "coronavirus denialism", for which they just have listen a little Kary Mullis's own words and opinions, the Nobel prize winner for the PCR test, on both Anthony Fauci and ubiquity of his own test, to see a little past their own blinkers. It's worth searching out on alternate platforms, whilst you still can.