← The Ezra Klein Show
The Ezra Klein Show
We’re All Living in the ‘Mirror World’ Now
01:20:04
Naomi Klein saw where our politics was headed before most people on the left. Her 2023 book “Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World” is hard to describe. But among other things, it traces the new coalitions Klein saw forming on the right, the ways they were co-opting issues long associated with the left, and finding huge audiences and influence outside existing institutions. The people and coalitions that Klein wrote about run our world now. We are all living in the mirror world. As she put it, it’s “doppelgangers at the wheel.” So I wanted to have Klein on the show to help understand how that happened, what the left failed to see at the time and the lessons the left should take from it now. As Klein told me: “The thing about doppelgangers is, in literature, they’re always a message telling you a warning: You have to look at yourself. There’s something about yourself that you’re not seeing.” Note: We recorded this episode before the war in Iran. Mentioned: Doppelganger by ...
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- [00:00]
Naomi Klein
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- [01:01]
Ezra Klein
The author Naomi Klein is probably best known for scathing critiques of corporate power in books like no Logo, the Shock Doctrine, and this Changes everything. But in 2023, she published a pretty different kind of book. During the pandemic, Klein noticed how much she was being confused online with a different Naomi. Naomi Wolf, who in the 90s was known as a feminist author and journalist and Al Gore advisor, but who had in the COVID era become one of the most prominent right wing conspiracists. That experience, and the interest in Wolf that it created for Klein became the foundation of Doppelganger A Trip into the Mirror World. This is a hard to summarize book in a way. Books I really like often are. It could only have been written by one person at one moment in their life. What Klein was interested in was the ways that the pandemic was scrambling traditional political coordinates, creating a political coalition that didn't seem, at least by the logic that most people understood of politics, like it could continue to exist. How could somebody like Naomi Wolf, a pro choice feminist, become political allies with Steve Bannon? How could RFK Jr become a core part of the MAGA coalition? So Klein began following Wolf, her doppelganger, into this mirror world of the new MAGA right. She began to sense its rules and its concerns and its power and the way it was seducing people its allure. She saw it a lot more clearly than most liberals and leftists did, because at least in 2023, if you weren't choosing to follow it, very easy to miss it, and even easier if you're an institutionally minded liberal leftist, to convince yourself that it didn't matter that it didn't have power. But now, that world, the mirror world, it's our world now. Its leaders are our leaders. So I wanted to have Klein on to talk about her book and about what she's observed over the first year of the Trump administration as that new coalition has tried to hold together while governing. Klein, of course, is A columnist for the Guardian and a professor of geography at the University of British Columbia. And she's a forthcoming book co authored with Astra Taylor, called End Times, Fascism and the Fight for the Living World. And I want to note we recorded this before the war with Iran. As always, my email, Ezra kleinshoneytimes.com. Naomi Klein, welcome to the show.
- [03:31]
Naomi Klein
Thank you.
- [03:32]
Ezra Klein
So your book revolves around two concepts, doppelgangers and mirror worlds. And I thought maybe good to start by just defining them.
- [03:40]
Naomi Klein
Sure. So a doppelganger is a German word that literally translated means a double goer or a double walker. And it's the idea that out there somewhere, you could bump into somebody who looks just like you and isn't you. And it's that sort of uncanny vertigo that addresses the strangeness of that which is most familiar, which is yourself. Mirror world is a term I use to describe the relationship between the sort of liberal left world and the kind of far right world and the ways in which when people are ejected from our world, they end up in a world that is sort of the exact mirror of where we live in sort of like replica social media platforms. The same but different kind of doppelgangers, doppelganger publishing worlds, doppelganger narratives of the narratives that we tell ourselves. And I was trying to find language for a discomfort I had in myself, in noticing the ways in which we'd become incredibly reactive in the communities in which I live, where we were sort of defining ourselves against what was happening, what they were doing over there, as opposed to being guided by legible values and beliefs.
- [04:58]
Ezra Klein
How did you get interested in the idea of the doppelganger?
- [05:02]
Naomi Klein
So a few different routes took me there. It was deep in the pandemic, and I was feeling kind of speechless, like I just didn't want to write the same kind of thing that I have written over and over again. I think I was politically sad. And I realized that for the first time in my life, I had time to kind of experiment with writing in a way that I haven't had time in my adult life. So I started working with a writing teacher and was just sort of playing with form. And in the background, I was having this strange experience where in this time when we were all being represented exclusively by our avatars in the digital sphere, I started being confused on a massive scale with another nonfiction writer named Naomi, Naomi Wolf. And it sort of became one of left Twitter's favorite jokes at the time. And so every time I would go online to get some simulation of the Friendship and community that I missed years. You know, this was like sort of well into the second year of. Of the pandemic. What I would be confronted with was all these people sort of screaming at me about something that another Naomi had done. And at first I was very frustrated by this and I didn't think it was related to this writing work that I was doing. But then I realized that this destabilization of the self was a really interesting and fruitful mechanism to explore a bunch of ideas that I've been obsessed with, including the ways in which the idea of having a personal brand is basically destroying everything in our culture. And I've been wanting to return to that theme, which was actually the subject of my first book that I wrote in the late 1990s and came out in 2000, no logo. I've been wanting to come back to it, but I couldn't find a way to write about it that didn't feel sort of hectoring, a lecturing. And I wanted to write about it from inside. Like, I wanted to write about it from like being implicated. Because I don't think people can hear the critique if they just feel like you're just lecturing them as if you are not in the same polluted waters of self performance and self protection that we're all swimming in. So I thought, wow, I have a branding crisis here on my hands. This is really funny and also maybe interesting. So it started as an essay and then it just grew.
- [07:19]
Ezra Klein
Let's do a minute on no Logo because I think probably a lot of people listening haven't read that book, because that book was a big deal. I mean, I remember that book and it being kind of left canon as I was growing up and becoming a writer. So what was the argument of no Logo? What were you sensing then? And what were you trying to pull up into visibility about the world?
- [07:40]
Naomi Klein
It was, I think, first and foremost an attempt to understand the rise of these multinational corporations that were more powerful than governments and a shift that was going on in politic that was sort of doing an end run around governments. And it was going directly for the multinationals, you know, whether Nike because of sweatshops in Indonesia or Shell because of oil spills in Nigeria. And it was so as a young reporter, I was following these stories and I interested in that. But I was also looking at another element, which was the way that these multinationals were divesting themselves from the world of things where they were all just declaring that they were no longer in the business of making products. They were Selling a brand an idea they were sort of transcending. And what that meant in practice was that they didn't need to own their factories. Their factories were all outsourced, they were contracts. And the real work of production was the production of image. And that was affecting youth culture. That, you know, as a young person thinking about this, we were all being told that we should be our own brands. Which didn't really make any sense in the 1990s. Cause this was pre social media, it was pre iPhone, no longer. I wrote about the first celebrities who were themselves lifestyle brands like Michael Jordan and Oprah. And this was like a new concept that an individual could be a brand. But the idea that a non famous person could be a brand made no sense to us because we didn't have marketing firms.
- [09:09]
Ezra Klein
It also feels to me like it's of a politics that has really weakened. I mean, I think of that era and Adbusters and you go back earlier in the 20th century and fear about what advertising is going to do to our minds is very present in the 60s and the 70s. So this sort of anti advertising, anti branding, anti consumer politics that was very, very strong. I feel like in the 90s feels pretty absent today.
- [09:42]
Naomi Klein
Yeah. Because we really could be our own brands. Right. So, you know, I think it's important to understand that there's a kind of a desperation in the fact that we have all embraced this. And this is why, you know, saying that I wanted to find a way to write about it that was from inside of it. Because I think we all feel really attacked if we point out that, you know, it's why online everyone's constantly accusing each other of being performative, which I is today's version of selling out. But everybody knows that everybody else is being performative as well. So I think we have to find compassion in this discussion because people are just trying to pay the rent and it's not working. It's not enough to pay the rent.
- [10:23]
Ezra Klein
So I want to bring back in the other character here, which is Naomi Wolf. Intellectually, politically, who is she?
- [10:32]
Naomi Klein
Her sort of heyday was the 1990s with a breakthrough book called the Beauty Myth. It came out when I was an undergrad and it had a thesis that young women were being forced to add a third shift. There's already like the shift at work and then the shift at home, but on top of that there's a beauty shift. And so it was about how women were being held back from advancing in the workplace because they were having to put so much work into Being beautiful.
- [11:03]
Ezra Klein
Why has the conflict on the sexual battlefield suddenly come out into the open? And can the long fraught fears about date rape and harassment ever resolve themselves? Joining me now, best selling author Naomi Wolf.
- [11:17]
Naomi Klein
I think that men are in crisis because women are not sitting passively as the evil backlash hits us over the head where it's hard for us to understand the nature of our immense power. But I believe that since the Hill Thomas hearings we've seen a kind of spontaneous uprising among women in this country that is shifting the balance of the power between the sexes. She was the face of what was called at the time third wave feminism. It was a controversial term, you know, whether it actually was a wave or not. And yeah, she wrote a bunch of bestselling books called Fire with Fire. One of her high low points was advising Al Gore's presidential campaign on how to reach women voters because she was very prominent feminist at the time. And yeah, so that's who she was. And now she is someone quite different. Hi everyone, it's Naomi Wolf here at Daily Clout. And I'm doing something that I have been promising for a while after. She's one of these people. I mean this is one of the reasons why I wanted to write about her because I think there's so many people. It really accelerated during the pandemic where we would sort of say what happened to that person? Like they used to be this and now they're something else. Or what happened to my uncle? Like he's fallen down the rabbit hole and he has all these extreme views. So at a certain point Naomi Wolf just started posting a whole lot about different kinds of conspiracy claims. Everything from like taking pictures of clouds and claiming they were cloud seeded. I began to notice a very distinct pattern that these emissions, these trails would, I'm not going to say, be laying down because I don't know for sure what the motivation is. I've got some hypotheses. But they would clearly stay there, not dissipate, spread and create cloud cover and block the sun. To claiming ISIS beheadings were crisis actors, saying they're not yet independently verified. The only source for them, early on at least was this very questionable site called Site S I T E which gets half a million dollars from the United States government a year and, and is run by these Islamophobe establishment types who are connected to the sort of US anti terrorism establishment. So like kind of Alex Jones type of stuff. And then during COVID she went all in on a range of COVID related conspiracies. From the virus itself as a bioweapon to the vaccine as a bioweapon, to the market for the COVID injections has kind of come and gone because people are aware now that it's a deadly and sterilizing injection. But the side effects live on to the vaccine. Verification apps are a Chinese communist plot to subdue the West. The vaccine passport platform is the same platform as a social credit system, like in China, that enslaves a billion people at a certain point. During the pandemic, she was on Steve Bannon's show every day for a couple of weeks. She has become a really big star on the right.
- [14:25]
Ezra Klein
You described, when you were defining mirror worlds, that it exists partially for when you are ejected from one world into the other and you find many of the same concerns just somewhat perverted, distorted, warped. And I thought that word ejected was interesting because one of your theses about Woolf is that there was a moment of ejection and disruption in who she was before that required her to reinvent herself, even if just for psychological recovery. What was that moment?
- [14:57]
Naomi Klein
Yeah. So the year before the pandemic, in 2019, she published a book called Outrages. And she very famously made a foundational factual error in that book where she misinterpreted a phrase in the historical record. The book dealt with persecution of gay men in England, and she misunderstood the term death recorded where she thought that it meant that they had been killed by the state. And this was exposed live on the BBC.
- [15:24]
Ezra Klein
Death recorded. I was really surprised by this, and I looked it up. Death recorded is what's in, I think, most of these cases that you've identified as executions. It doesn't mean that he was executed. It was a category that was created in 1823 that allowed judges to abstain
- [15:42]
Naomi Klein
from pronouncing a sentence of death on
- [15:44]
Ezra Klein
any capital convict whom they considered to be a fit subject for pardon. I don't think any of the executions you've identified here actually happened.
- [15:53]
Naomi Klein
Well, that's a really important thing to investigate. What is your understanding of what death recorded means? Death recorded. It became one of these moments of mass online ridicule, just public shaming. I hate telling the story because it's like every writer's worst nightmare. Every time something like this would happen to Woolf, people would say thoughts and prayers to Naomi Klein, or, like, they would be sort of part of the joke that I would get blamed for it. So I had a sort of front row seat on it, and it was really ugly. And I do think that that happens. A lot with the people who we ask that question of. Of, like, why did they change in that way will often find some kind of public shaming, you know, or something really wrong that they did. Right? Like, it's not just that we were mean to them, it's that they did something maybe unforgivable and then got really shamed for it, and then they were embraced in this other world where facts matter a lot less.
- [16:46]
Ezra Klein
Well, this is where I wanna follow you into the other world, as you follow her into the other world. And you have a line in the book I thought was a really sharp description of something. This is about what is going on after Woolf is banned from Twitter for conspiracies and you write. This is the irony of liberal Twitter celebrating Wolf's seeming disappearance, at least until Musk welcomed her back. Since most liberals and leftists don't watch or listen to Bannon or the other shows where she, Wolf, has become a regular, they thought she had evaporated as a cause for concern. RIP DEATH RECORDED this is a bit like kids who think the world disappears when they close their eyes. Tell me about that other world you walk into.
- [17:31]
Naomi Klein
Well, first of all, I should say that world runs our world now, right? So this is a little bit, you know, I don't think that. That we have the same questions about it now as we did then because we can't ignore it now. Right. And I remember when the book first came out, I was interviewed and the interviewer asked me why I was giving these people attention. And it was such an arrogant question, like, as if, like, we control all the attention. And we were just blessing them with our attention by looking at them and writing about them. And I really felt as I was listening to Vannon, that I was watching a new political coalition cohere. He was calling it MAGA plus at the time. And this is, you know, 2021, 2022. And I had seen Bannon in 2016 peel off part of the Democratic coalition, particularly white unionized men who were angry at the Democratic Party over free trade deals and bring them over to Trump. And I was watching him do this with, you know, suburban white women who traditionally voted Democrat. And he understood that Wolf, you know, and he would wind up the introduction.
- [18:35]
Ezra Klein
Okay, our guest is Naomi Wolfe. Naomi, you came. You started as a feminist, a huge writer, best selling author, public intellectual, lionized by the left and the established order and the conventional thinking. And now you're kind of a renegade and every day a rebel.
- [18:55]
Naomi Klein
She used to consult for Al Gore. She consulted for Bill Clinton. And that was central to her appeal, is that she could potentially deliver this constituency that Trump really was weak with. And I think Bannon understood that these sort of angry Covid moms were a new part of his coalition, the plus one for maga, and she was very important. During the pandemic, there was a study that I think NPR commissioned to try to understand one particular piece of medical information that spread early on, which had to do with this idea that vaccinated people shed particulates onto unvaccinated people and endangered their health and possibly made them infertile. And there was this whole thing about how women were bleeding between periods from being around vaccinated people. And women were making videos on Instagram saying that they'd kicked their husbands out of their beds because they weren't gonna sleep with vaccinated people anymore. I mean, things were going wild. And so there was this sort of data study that was done to try to find the kind of ground zero for this particular piece of medical misinformation. And they traced it back to a lot of it, back to Naomi Walsh, who was a real vector for this piece of misinformation because she is associated with women's health and women's bodies. And then I started listening to all her talking to Tucker Carlson and talking to Steve Bannon. And when I would mention to a friend, like, oh, I heard this on Bannon, like, you know, I was. There were things that were happening that were making me very worried about elections. You know, I was watching the whole show. Instead of saying, like what? Like, asking, like, what did you hear? They would say, like, why? Like, why are you listening to that? Like, why would you do that? Like, almost like I had transgressed.
- [20:35]
Ezra Klein
One thing I found so interesting about this book that I didn't expect when I opened it up is how much it is a book in the background about the practice of politics and certain kinds of political engagement. And something I felt came up again and again was in different ways, liberals in the left became very powerful in institutions over the past 20 years. And this is before the mirror world basically took over our world, but powerful in the media, powerful in academia, powerful in government. And so this idea that you could just shun people out, right, that that would be an effective way of creating social change in politics took hold. And it wasn't a crazy idea. And there are ways it has worked in the past and ways that it worked even then, but it missed how much is happening outside the institutions and how they had become their own institutions. And Networks and media structures and that kicking somebody out of your institutions meant you couldn't see them anymore, but it didn't mean they were gone.
- [21:41]
Naomi Klein
I feel like so much of this is just about social media. And I know that it's sort of slightly hackneyed, but all of this is playing out on platforms, right? I even think that something like the mute button or the block button has a huge amount to answer for, just in terms of it being almost habit forming. Like we get used to this idea, like this person's annoying me. I'm going to just press a button and make them disappear. Right? And I think that that idea that this is how we relate to people spills offline as well.
- [22:09]
Ezra Klein
It created a tremendous space in which power could be built sort of in private with different rules. And then I feel like it exploded into dominance after the election and you see how much it's became a legible network that is now arguably the default network in American life.
- [22:31]
Naomi Klein
I mean, this is the thing about, in doppelganger literature and film, the storyline, usually what happens is like you've got a protagonist and then somebody comes along who's a double of them and they're so good at performing you, like so much better at performing you than you that they eventually overtake you. So at the end of Dostoevsky's the Double, his protagonist is getting carted away and sent to an asylum while the double just takes over. So I think that's kind of happened in our culture is that the doppelganger is doppelgangers at the wheel.
- [23:27]
Ezra Klein
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- [23:35]
Naomi Klein
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- [23:37]
Ezra Klein
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- [23:47]
Naomi Klein
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- [23:54]
Ezra Klein
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Naomi Klein
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Ezra Klein
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- [24:06]
Naomi Klein
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Ezra Klein
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Naomi Klein
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Ezra Klein
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Naomi Klein
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Ezra Klein
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- [24:28]
Naomi Klein
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- [24:59]
Ezra Klein
The one thing that I have kept thinking about and that I feel like your book gets at really well is the unnerving relationships between things that are really happening and things that we sort of pushed away or wanted to ignore as ridiculous. I think the one happening right now is Jeffrey Epstein, which I have found it disorienting how much it tracks the vibe of QAnon. Not every claim of QAnon. It's not, you know, John F. Kennedy Jr. Is still alive somewhere, but you are dealing with a very powerful person with a incredibly powerful and broad elite network and child sex trafficking at the center of it. And again, I don't believe in QAnon, but it is eerie how there was this thing that was like a mirror world or QAnon was a mirror world version of Jeffrey Epstein or something. How have you thought about that?
- [26:00]
Naomi Klein
I'm really interested in the work that conspiracy culture is playing like, in how it distracts from conspiracies that are real. And I never doubted that there was a conspiracy that Epstein was involved in. That's been clear for a long time. The reason why people are being drawn to conspiracy culture is that we all feel that this world is rigged against us and power has concentrated and wealth has concentrated so much over the past half century. And the impunity that follows from that is so extreme. I think it's really important not to just dismiss it as a conspiracy theory just because it has the structure of QAnon. I think QAnon had has the structure of. It's sort of like it's, it's why antisemitism was called, is still called the socialism of fools. It's, it's just sort of like it kind of explains how capitalism works except for it twists it and it's just a cabal of rich Jews. But you know we need stories to explain our reality, and we need them. And so do do the super elites need them. And one of the things that the files do is provide a window into the stories that elites are telling themselves to justify how much wealth they have, how much power they have. And that brings us to their obsession with eugenics and this idea that they are sort of better stock than everybody else. That's a story that can explain why you have so much wealth and power.
- [27:34]
Ezra Klein
And you see Epstein talking about that quite a lot in the emails.
- [27:38]
Naomi Klein
Yeah, yeah. I think it's inextricable from the fact that we live in a time where if you're rich enough, you think the rules don't apply to you. Whether that's Elon Musk just sort of laughing when journalists ask him for any accountability. And he used to send a poop emoji, and now he sends an auto reply that says, mainstream media lies. Like, it's just this defiant, I don't have to answer anymore. I don't have to be accountable to any rules. Trump embodies that. And I think Epstein really embodied that for a lot of very powerful people, including people like Bill Gates, who presented himself as, you know, one of the more progressive, caring billionaires. Right. I think it seems to me that, like, Epstein was like the after, after party for Davos, right, where it's just like he was the guy who could make it all happen.
- [28:26]
Ezra Klein
It is clear to me that his impunity was an object of envy, the way he lived.
- [28:31]
Naomi Klein
Yeah.
- [28:32]
Ezra Klein
That maybe they didn't all know that there was child sex trafficking at the center of his world, but the way in which he didn't play by the rules. He had this huge house, he had this island, he had this wealth, he had all these connections. He seemed to be completely living in this unabashed way was what made him an object of envy to other rich and powerful people.
- [28:58]
Naomi Klein
And part of the attraction of Trump, I mean, Trump is that he's the 80s guy who always had the beautiful women around him and never took part in any of that woke capitalism, quote, unquote. You know, I mean, he never pretended to care about any of the things that these guys were publicly claiming that they cared about, and now don't even bother claiming to care about whether, you know, climate change or equity, diversity and inclusion. But I see these things as really interrelated because, you know, I say the past 50 years because this is the sort of counter revolution against the New Deal era. This is sort of what I've wrote about in the Shock doctrine. This is the revolution against regulation and the era of privatization and unmaking of the state. And it really produces the oligarch class. Right. So it's important for the people who are the big winners in this to present themselves as a kind of a replacement for the state. Right. And that's where it's really interesting that Maxwell was central in launching the Clinton Global Initiative, for instance, because I think the Clinton Global Initiative was a place for many years when the Davos class got together and said, we're going to fix it. I'll fix schools, you fix poverty, you fix malaria. And we've got this. You don't really need governments anymore because we are so socially responsible, and we're going to use our wealth to fix the world. But I think that what. What's actually happening is that power is for using. The whole point of becoming this rich is to not have to play by these types of rules. And I think what Trump has unlocked, and what Epstein always was, was you don't really have to play by the rules like, here, come to the island, and we'll actually do whatever we want. We're rich and we're keeping it, and we're not going to pretend anymore, and our workers can suck it. And welcome to the new world.
- [30:49]
Ezra Klein
What have you made of Steve Bannon's closeness to Jeffrey Epstein? So here you have somebody who certainly presents himself as the populace, a person trying to break and destroy the elite conspiracies. But Bannon was very close to Epstein after, functionally, everything was known. There's this text message where Bannon sends Epstein a link to a Daily Beast story about Epstein's, quote, alleged sex ring. And the information coming out about that. Bannon sends this to Epstein, and Epstein doesn't answer. And a couple hours later, Bannon's like, so my guy's going to Israel. Can he meet with Ehud Barak? Right. They just move right on. So here you have this guy who's like, populist in the front stage and backstage is very. I mean, this is happening in 2019. This particular text message I'm talking about. How do you think about that?
- [31:43]
Naomi Klein
Yeah. So I guess I should have made this clear earlier. I think Bannon is a terrible fraud. And I think he performs, being the voice of the little guy and even the sort of way in which he took on Musk early in this Trump administration and claims to be taking on the tech oligarchs who are supposedly kind of polluting maga. He has been in with his own tech oligarchs. From the beginning with the Mercers. What I think about Bannon is that he is a strategist. All the things that we were talking about before, I think this is just about power. This is just about winning. And he understands how to build a coalition, and he's strategic about that. I think he platforms conspiracy theorists because he understands that it is very useful for people to believe outlandish things, in part because it distracts them in very large part from the conspiracies that can be proved. And so I think that the Bannon world is really in crisis right now because of the Epstein files. And it's really interesting, kind of checking in on his show in this whole period because he seems to be largely ignoring it and flooding the Zone with other conspiracies, like the Muslim Brotherhood is trying to hijack the elections in this state and that state. I mean, he's talking about everything but the biggest conspiracy in the world that he is himself centrally implicated in, and implicated in ways that are really about rearranging the political map. I mean, he's interested in Epstein because he thinks Epstein can help fund the populist International, which is weaving together these far right, often fascist, openly fascist parties in Europe and Latin America with the United States. And, you know, he needs a funder for this. So it's political. Yeah. And so what we're seeing in these files is part of how the world that we're in right now is built. And I don't know how you feel about the like, is this fascism? Is this not. Where are you falling on that?
- [33:44]
Ezra Klein
I think it's pretty fascist.
- [33:45]
Naomi Klein
Yeah.
- [33:46]
Ezra Klein
At some point, the word doesn't have any meaning if we can't apply it to things in the modern world. I think sometimes you end up with words that people have decided are so beyond the pale, racist, fascist, et cetera, that they become people stop being willing to use them because it feels like you've moved outside of ordinary discourse. But these words describe things. And I don't think you can understand the aesthetic of Trumpism. I don't think you can understand some of its impulses without at least some connection to fascist movements of the 20th century, which were, you know, everyone is different in its own way.
- [34:18]
Naomi Klein
Exactly. Yeah.
- [34:19]
Ezra Klein
But there's a reason they're all very interested in Schmidt.
- [34:22]
Naomi Klein
Yeah. Yeah. And I think part of the hesitancy has to do with, like, really exceptionalizing Hitler and that. Like, it sounds like you're saying, if he is fascist, he is Hitler, and that's not what the term means. And there have been plenty of fascists who weren't Hitler. And, you know, history doesn't repeat on a loop. It changes, it iterates, it compounds. But the reason I ask if, do you think it's fascist? Is that fascism is a pathology of injured power. It emerges in Italy and in Germany in the injuries of the First World War, right? It's soldiers and generals and industrialists who are hurt right, by the sanctions. But it's powerful people who are hurt. Right? Whereas, like, left revolutions are powerless people who are hurt. And it's these vertical coalitions that get built with people, you know, who had sort of relative power and are losing power. But one of the things that we see in the Epstein files are these concerns about MeToo, about accountability. Like, you know, a lot of talk about MeToo, people going to Epstein because he is a sex criminal and they know that and they're asking him for advice about what to do about the fact that, you know, the movement is coming for them and they might be held accountable. So if we are in a fascist moment, then it is a counter revolution like that. We have to understand, like, what are elites revolting against? Like, what, who hurt them? What hurt them? And, you know, I think part of what they are revolting against is that there was starting to be some accountability, like their impunity was. There were a few chinks in the armor, and some of that was women who were beginning to hold powerful men accountable. So this unleashing of the far right is partly them protecting themselves.
- [36:14]
Ezra Klein
Well, and nothing was more radicalizing, I think, to the tech right CEO and venture class than the feeling that their corporations were being taken over by the staff. Marc Andreessen has talked about this directly, that the sense that on any given day you might almost have a riot of your own employees and you had lost power. You know, the employee base is going feral. You know, there were cases in the Trump era, there were companies, multiple companies I know, that felt like they were hours away from full blown violent riots on their own campuses by their own employees.
- [36:47]
Naomi Klein
He's a bit of an exaggerator, I've noticed.
- [36:50]
Ezra Klein
Well, he's describing a way he things felt to him. And at the very least level, he
- [36:55]
Naomi Klein
said he was being terrorized by the Biden administration because they tried to regulate crypto.
- [36:59]
Ezra Klein
They just came after crypto, absolutely tried to kill us. I mean, they just ran this incredible, basically terror campaign to try to kill crypto. And then they were ramping into a similar campaign to try to kill AI. And that's really when we knew that we had to really get involved in politics.
- [37:13]
Naomi Klein
But this is related. Like the fact that Mark Andreessen sees the most mild accountability as an existential attack. I mean, the way he talks about basic regulation for crypto or AI as terror. Terror, I think speaks to the fact that these are men who came up in the 1990s. You know, when I was writing no Logo, Marc Andreessen was on a throne on the COVID of Time magazine, a golden throne, I believe, you know, and he was, I think, 23. I think that may have gone to their head. You know, I think that the kinds of depravity that we see in the files is related to that. It's dangerous to lift people up and treat them as gods and kings. And I think we did that as a culture just because people were rich. You know, the other place where we see pedophile rings is in the Catholic Church. And survivors talk about the kind of unique horror of being abused by somebody who has God on their side. Right. And we did treat wealthy people as if they were gods for a while. And I think they're angry that they no longer get treated like gods. And that feels like being terrorized. To Mark Andreessen, it's all relative. Right? But this is why I think at the heart of this is impunity, is a feeling of impunity, and we have to start holding people accountable. We're starting to see that, but not in the United States. And these, you know, these women who have come forward, I mean, they are heroes. They're absolute heroes. And this solidarity that they show one another, the support that they give to one another, up against Congress, up against the most powerful men in the world, like, it's so moving to me and the, you know, women journalists who believed them when nobody else did. This is a beautiful story. I mean, it's a horrible story, but it's. There's also. There's beauty in it.
- [38:55]
Ezra Klein
Let me try a thought on you, because I know you're working with Esther Taylor on a book about fascism, and I was thinking as you were talking about what kinds of injuries create fascist movements. There's often an injury that unites in a certain way the kind of fascist elites you're talking about, and at least portions of the masses, because fascism is also a mass movement in many places at many times. And it's often a loss of story. It's an injury to your story. So you're describing the way we told. We told the tech titans a story about them. Yes, but what is the bottom up side of Trumpism and is often the bottom up side of fascism is the feeling that many people have, ordinary people at times of rapid change, that they are losing the story. They're a part of the story of their own history and how that they are the good guys in history, not the. Certainly not a checkered history. The story of their nation and how great their nation is and what its destiny is. And I mean, this is also a pandemic book. And to some degree, 2024 era Trumpism is a pandemic era phenomena. People are very, very angry about all of a sudden being told that they're the bad guys for not getting vaccinated or not wearing a mask or. This is a big part of what you're describing in there. And that that was very, very effectively weaponized inside this movement. Because I know you're working on some of these issues. I'm curious how you think about that.
- [40:27]
Naomi Klein
I mean, just to stay with the pandemic thing for, you know, one more moment. And this relates to the work that Astra and I are doing and what we're calling end times fascism, which is really about how there is a consciousness that we are in what the Pentagon once called the age of consequences, right? Like that the forecasted existential global crises are now hitting right. It's not just like, this may happen, this is happening. And Covid, the fact that we experienced a global pandemic that shut down the world simultaneously was an extraordinary event. Right. I think there was a period where we didn't want to look back at it. And now we're just like, whoa, like, that really did happen. Like New York shut down. Like you could walk through Times Square. And I was in it. And I think that that shifted something in our brains. A lot of us, including very powerful people who realize that actually this stuff's gonna happen. We're now in the, in the age where. Where it happens. And so I think what we saw during, during COVID was that that presents us with a pretty stark choice about what kind of society we're gonna have. We will either have a much stronger state that takes care of people, and we saw a more robust social state during COVID We had governments pay people to stay home. We had periods where there was eviction moratorium. We had free masks and testing, kind of a taste of universal healthcare in the United States. And there is another option. And that option is, screw them. This is nature taking its course. This is culling. This is survival of the fittest. And I think a lot of that diagonalism that came together of people on the kind of new age wellness world who were saying, I have a powerful immune system. I don't need your vaccines. Coming together with the Steve Bannon world. Underneath it all was this. I'm comfortable if this is a cleansing, if this is the world correcting, maybe we'll have fewer people and that'll be better for the environment. That was one story, but it really is a stark choice. And so I think, you know, when it comes to Silicon Valley and these sort of tech elites and the moment that they're in, I think even though Covid was really good for them, just in terms of their bottom lines, I actually think that what freaked them out more than anything was the quiet quitting, was people actually not needing the jobs as much and losing that sort of boss worker power for a while, and workers saying during a pandemic, you better pay me more if you want me to risk my life. Right? So I think that that choice of, like, either we're going to have a much more activist state and it's going to be regulating a lot more, or we're going to embrace a world where we're okay with mass death and the genocide in Gaza happens. And a lot of people showed that they could live with it. I think that those two events, I think it was Covid in Gaza that produces the Trump moment. And it really was about a fear of this fork in the road moment. Either it's, we're just gonna harden our hearts and it's gonna get a lot uglier, or it's gonna get a lot more activist in terms of an activist state and more of a kind of a New Deal sort of state. And they don't want that because that will regulate them.
- [43:46]
Ezra Klein
You used a term in there that I want to pick up on, which is diagonalism. What is diagonalism?
- [43:52]
Naomi Klein
Diagonalism is a term Quinn Slobedian and William Callison, who are both scholars of European history, they use that term in an essay about the German anti lockdown movement early in the pandemic, which is sort of a rough translation of a German word which seems to be coming up, called Ker Duncan, which means like outside of the box thinking, which is how these sort of wellness influencers and entrepreneurial kind of not traditional right wingers made alliance with right wing parties. And so it just speaks to these kind of unlikely bedfellows like my doppelganger and Steve Bannon, like people meeting. It's kind of an alternative to the horseshoe theory, I suppose, because the horseshoe theory sort of assumes that it's like far left and far right, but a more significant shift are sort of liberal wellness California types who very focused on kind of bunkering their own bodies, making alliance with people who are bunkering their national borders.
- [44:51]
Ezra Klein
What's interesting to me about this theory of diagonalism, and this goes back to pick up on our fascism conversation, to fascist movements, that there does seem to me to be a sorting not just around religion. We're used to religious sorting in politics, but around a certain kind of spiritualism, back to the landism, which both I think substantively and aesthetically used to be at least associated with the left. But RFK Jr. I think, emerges as a central figure in a realignment, and it's something you're attentive to, that you see happening around you in the book is, I guess, the role of spirituality and mysticism and a kind of sense of bodily integrity and wholeness playing into this. I think that's underplayed in its power. So I'm curious how you've thought about it then.
- [45:47]
Naomi Klein
And since it's true that the sort of organic, green, you know, world is more associated with the left these days, but it's also true that there's a fascist lineage to it. And, you know, European fascists, you know, in the 1920s and 30s were very interested in all kinds of New Age health fads. And. But I think in our version of it, it's really related to the kind of optimized self and, you know, the way in which we can just protect ourselves in a world in which we don't have very much control by purifying our bodies and optimizing ourselves in every way. And, yeah, I mean, I don't think it is very left. I think it's highly individual. I think leftists generally survived the pandemic without becoming conspiracy theorists for the most part. But where you really saw it was like yoga studios. And so I think that they kind of coded left ish. But I don't think that they were that political before.
- [46:51]
Ezra Klein
I agree with this. I'm not trying to say that it's about hardcore communists becoming QAnon members. I guess maybe the place I don't totally agree is that I think this is more than optimized self. I think you get optimized self types across the political spectrum. I do think there's something here about ways of knowing and trust in institutions. And the left, which I'm describing here very broadly, kind of Democrats, leftists, liberals, et cetera. It becomes more institutionalized, technocratic. It believes science, it believes experts. And what it ends up ejecting is people who have profound distrust. You talk a lot in the book about RFK Jr. Who goes from a kind of fringe presidential candidate as a Democrat, and is now, of course, HHS secretary. But I want to play a clip from his presidential campaign announcement because I think it's interesting from this perspective. I'm here to join you in making a new declaration of independence for our entire nation. We declare independence from the corporations that have hijacked our government. And we declare independence from the Wall street, from Big Tech, from Big Pharma, from Big Ag, from the military contractors and their lobbyists. And we declare independence from the mercenary media that is here to. To fortify all of the corporate orthodoxies, from their advertisers, and to urge us to hate our neighbors and to fear our friends. And we declare independence from the cynical elites who betray our hope and who amplify our divisions. What do you think when you hear that?
- [48:35]
Naomi Klein
I think he's quite similar to Bannon in that he is really good at identifying these sort of vacuums, these political vacuums that need to be filled and sort of speaking into them. I mean, one of the things I think is just that a lot of the people in these coalitions can be pulled out of them because the world that they're in now is just nonstop grifting. You know, that goes for Bannon as well. I mean, one of the, you know, in addition to his Epstein problems at the moment, and people realizing that the guy who was supposed to protect them from the oligarchs has been trading emails with Epstein and is part of this whole world that they've supposedly been taking on. You know, he also is being sued for a meme coin FJB Meme coin, which was a scam. So they're getting scammed all the time. And the same is true of a lot of these wellness people, including, you know, everyone's selling supplements, everybody's selling these seminars. And, you know, the people that RFK Jr has amassed around him, all of them are trying to sell you something. And people are getting ripped off, like, they're getting ripped off all the time. But I think he's really good at speaking to this very deep longing for a deeper connection with nature. You know, he speaks really poetically about the natural world.
- [49:45]
Ezra Klein
When I was a little boy, I used to visit the White House, and there were a pair of Eastern and Atom peregrine falcons nesting on the roof. And I was a falconer from when I was a little boy, I was fascinated with hawks, but I used to watch those birds. It was the most beautiful predatory bird in our country. It was salmon banking at a white sea ur on its nose be it could fly 240 miles an hour. And I could watch them come off the cupola of the post office and come down Pennsylvania Avenue at those speeds and pick pigeons out of the air 40ft above the heads of the pedestrians on the sidewalk on Pennsylvania Avenue in front of the White House. For me, seeing that sight was much more exciting than visiting my uncle at the White House or my father at the Justice Department. That bird went extinct and in 1963 from DDT poisoning.
- [50:34]
Naomi Klein
People feel alienated from the natural world. And, you know, all the jokes about the bear carcasses and all of that, I mean, it's funny, but the reason why it has traction is I think people like the idea of somebody who has connections with wildness. Right. I mean, that has a powerful appeal. And so I think this speaks to what you were talking about before, about people losing stories. Right? And it's hard to lose a story. You know, I don't feel too sorry for Marc Andreessen losing his story, but the. Did he have a crown?
- [51:08]
Ezra Klein
What a question to have to ask the throne.
- [51:10]
Naomi Klein
I don't think he had a crown, but he lost the throne. But when you lose a story of what your nation was, I think we have to interrogate these stories. But the onus is also on us to come up with news stories. Right? And if you just think yank the story away and say, like, you're an idiot for having ever believed it and now you're on your own, people are going to get angry. And that can be a painful thing to hear. But I think we really have that responsibility. And I'm really moved by the fact that I see that happening on the left. Like, you know, there's a pretty harsh critiques in doppelganger of the left. Like, harsher than anything I've ever written. Maybe not harsh enough for some people, but a lot of it is trying to look in the mirror. I mean, this is the thing about doppelgangers is like in literature, there always a message telling you a warning, like, you have to look at yourself. There's something about yourself that you're not seeing if reality starts doubling.
- [52:03]
Ezra Klein
You talk about your critiques of the left in the book. So I'll offer critique of liberalism, which is that liberalism has become very arid. It has become in its ways of knowing and ways of relating, very, very technocratic. And I say this is a bit of a technocrat, and I think it has really lost something in being, over time, more severed from religion, but the desire for, I think, politics to be able to speak to how alienating it often feels to be alive right now.
- [52:38]
Naomi Klein
Yeah.
- [52:39]
Ezra Klein
When you're looking at your screenshots and you're often very separate from nature, and it's hard because there's not always an easy political answer to any of this. And I think that liberalism in particular doesn't really know what to do with issues that it can't offer a policy on. If something is. Can simply be. If we could just give you a tax credit. Well, we know what to say. But if what you are talking about is a kind of spiritual unease, a sense that something is lost in modernity, then it struggles much more. I think it's a reason you see people like James Talarico taking off so much. I think there's a real hunger for religious language again. But one thing you're very attentive to throughout this book is a way that movements will often abandon issues that the other side picks up. It's like they treat the other side's embrace of something as it makes that whole issue area toxic, as opposed to seeing there's energy, there's some yearning here. How do I connect to that yearning? How do I answer what might be beneath that? Because often people aren't coming to the issue because they know what the policy solution is. They're coming because they feel something and they are looking for somebody who helps them articulate that feeling.
- [53:53]
Naomi Klein
Yeah. It's interesting what you're saying about liberalism and these policy solutions. I mean, when it comes to the environment, the policy solutions often obscure the nature beneath what is being addressed. Right. So if you think about how much of the climate discourse focused on carbon trading and carbon markets, I mean, it's the most bloodless way to talk about the natural world. It's like taking something that is alive and animate and that we're all connected to and just being like, how can we make it totally disembodied? So, you know, I have a whole critique of carbon markets, but just beyond the policy critique, there's also an emotional critique. Like, it makes sense when we're trying to motivate people to act in the face of the climate crisis. To start with our connections to the natural world. Like, start with the fact that maybe you love trees or oceans or just like. And that's one of the things that I always thought people needed to take RFK Jr more seriously. Than they were because, you know, I knew him from before, like when he was a riverkeeper. And that ability to speak for the wild. Right, it's very powerful. We don't have many people in public life who are able to do it anymore. It's one of the reasons why FDR was such a great politician. It's just that he had that sort of love of nature and the speeches he would make about the Civilian Conservation Corps and how good it is for the spirit to be out in nature and for the right of people in cities to experience the forest and national parks. That is really powerful stuff. And it's really healing. And re accessing that kind of politics is incredibly important. It's one of the things I think we did wrong during COVID you know, why didn't we have a resurgence of outdoor education as opposed to just zoom learning? That's also pretty Covid safe. Where I see you know, what you're talking about most clearly is in the uprising against data centers. Actually, it is one of those issues that was being discussed more to a degree on the right than the left is. One of the things that worried me most when I became a regular Steve Bannon listener was that he was always talking about transhumanism and he was talking about AI and the sort of war on the human. He was talking about it more from a kind of a religious perspective. But I think this is very fruitful because I think there is a war on the human going on, a war on the animate world. I think it's absolutely untenable, the amount of electricity that is being consumed by this really wasteful way that US tech companies are engaging in the AI arms race, where everybody is building duplicative data centers that they know they don't have a market for and they're consuming just.
- [56:43]
Ezra Klein
Well, they think they have a market for it.
- [56:45]
Naomi Klein
Well, they think someone's going to win at the end. They don't actually think that there's a market for all of them to win. They're in the race stage, right? And so they kind of believe there'll be one or two companies left standing. But they all sort of seem to admit from what I'm seeing, is that there isn't like a $13 trillion market that's going to win. So OpenAI is worried Google's going to be the last one standing. So they all have to, at the same time, build out these massive data centers. And so in the communities that are facing this industrialization, this kind of spirit, like I've interviewed people who describe it as a spiritual war. You know, that they, you know, Bezos wanted to build this huge data center in Tucson called Project Blue, of all things. And people started organizing across partisan lines because they, you know, when you live in a desert, you know about water and you know, how scarce it is, and so hard to get information out of these companies. And the fact that this has been, you know, pushed by the Trump administration so aggressively, and the way people are organizing in the face of this, it goes beyond the data center. It's like, what is economic development for?
- [57:54]
Ezra Klein
Well, I think the great question that AI is going to pose across functionally every level of society is what is the human for? So we have trained people to act in ways that are useful to the economy. Then we trained AI models on the output of those people, and now we're like, hey, we got these AI models that can act like people acting in economically useful ways. And to me, there are two very, very profound and dueling questions here. One is, what are humans for? What do we value in education? What do we value in people? And what happens if we have, under capitalism, the structure of our society, spent a long time valuing something that we're now about to take a lot of the value away from? And then I was just talking with Jack Clark from Anthropic about this. There is this very unanswered question of what AI itself is for. I mean, if all it's for is replacing white collar workers, then that's not a profoundly inspiring vision. There's been no public agenda for AI. There's been no sense of how do we orient all this investment towards things we actually want as a society, as opposed to how to automate a call center. And both of those questions, like what are humans for? What is AI for? I think are going to be definitional to politics in the coming five, 10, maybe beyond that years, and right now are very, very ill answered.
- [59:27]
Naomi Klein
Yeah. And I just don't know who is asking those questions and who has power to answer them because they're so fundamental. But it assumes that there's any role for the public in this discussion, like these data center battles. Right. And partly what they're doing is trying to have the debate that you're describing and they're being told you have no role in this, that Washington has decreed that everyone's going to take their data centers and you don't have a right to regulate it. But the fact that they have as much energy as they have, I think is a reflection of the fact that this is being rolled out with absolutely no public input. And, you know, a company like OpenAI, such a bait and switch, right? I mean, they said, trust us, we're like Wikipedia, like, we're a public interest company. No, you can't let the profit motive determine such an important technology. Oh, we change our mind, you know. So, you know, what Bernie Sanders has been saying is, like, why would we trust these companies who, you know, don't even let their workers have a bathroom break to think about? Not, like, what does it mean to be human, but how are you going to eat when your job is replaced? Right? Like, the basic question of caring for people. Like, I don't think people have the capacity to think about what their lives are for if AI is replacing their jobs because they're worried about how they're going to eat and pay their rent. And they have absolutely no indication that they live in a society that cares at all about that question. So until that question is answered, I don't think we can have the other questions.
- [60:58]
Ezra Klein
Although I think we're gonna need to have them all at the same time. Cause I'm not sure it's gonna be answered first.
- [61:01]
Naomi Klein
Well, I think that this is a broader question about whether this belongs in the private sector. And I think that that's why I don't think it does. I mean, this is much too fundamental. And these are technologies that exist because they fed off of the accumulation of all of human knowledge and output. I believe we own them already.
- [61:22]
Ezra Klein
I used to talk to some of the people who are now in charge of the AI labs, and I would talk to them about, well, what happens if. If we're living in the world you're describing to me and you're building the thing you are telling me, and it becomes that powerful, and all the things you tell me come true. Well, at some point they would say to me, at some point, we'll have to be nationalized. And I would scoff at them. I'd say, if you get to that point, there is no way you will allow yourself to be nationalized. And I think that bet is proving pretty true right now as you watch people from OpenAI dump money into super PACs to fight AI regulation. I mean, it was people from these companies who would say to me, like, oh, if we ever got there, we'd have to become some kind of public. But then you get there and you have the money and you have the power, and you don't want to become public in that way.
- [62:05]
Naomi Klein
Look, I think there is a way of understanding the Trump administration as like a tech revolt against AI regulation like that. That was a major driver of the decision to bankroll him. And it wasn't just musk, it was and crypto regulation. Yeah, the. Honestly, I put off building a website way longer than I should have. Then I tried wixharmony and it was way easier than I expected. I just described what I wanted and I had an incredible looking website. The best part, I could change anything myself or ask my AI agent for help. I had everything my business needed right there. So if you've been procrastinating, this is your sign. Start building a website for free@wix.com Harmony it's tax season.
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Ezra Klein
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Naomi Klein
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Ezra Klein
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Naomi Klein
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Ezra Klein
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- [65:19]
Naomi Klein
Right. Yeah.
- [65:20]
Ezra Klein
Try to unwind even the ability of states to regulate it.
- [65:23]
Naomi Klein
It was so unpopular with the base,
- [65:24]
Ezra Klein
which is in many ways unpopular.
- [65:25]
Naomi Klein
And he did not run on it.
- [65:26]
Ezra Klein
And there are a lot of things like that. It's having to make these decisions. And so I guess one question about Trumpism and maga, and I mean, Bannon gets to say what he wants cause he's on the outside, but is whether or not it can sustain support, given that it is now truly beset by contradictions. And so Trump isn't. It was amazing to me how many things he was to how many people by October of 2024. But now it's like his sort of quantum superposition has cohered a lot.
- [66:00]
Naomi Klein
Yeah. And he's also starting a lot of wars.
- [66:02]
Ezra Klein
And he's also starting a lot of wars.
- [66:03]
Naomi Klein
The other thing he's was to a lot of people was somebody who wasn't going to do that. I think what the book tracks is how they cobbled together an electoral coalition that they have since detonated in lots of ways. Right. I mean, including the Latino parts of the coalition, who are really angry, like not everyone, but a lot of people are disgusted by what ICE is doing and the fact that it's just straight up racial profiling. So they may have thought that it was going to just go after certain people, but it's going after everybody. So I think it's a huge opportunity for the left. You know, I say the left, not the Democratic Party, because I think it's possible to blow the opportunity. And I think the Democratic Party is really good at that. But the other reason why it's worrying is it's worrying when an autocrat who wants to be a dictator doesn't seem to care about reelection. And so it's, you know, you can't just.
- [66:59]
Ezra Klein
Well, hopefully he can't get reelected.
- [67:01]
Naomi Klein
No, I know, but he, despite his musings, his own party. Right. I mean, it's worrying going into the midterms because he's being reckless with his coalition. And I think that should worry us.
- [67:11]
Ezra Klein
One of the things that seems like an opportunity in that is diagonalism on the left. It opens up questions about what is out there that has been abandoned, that at least some of its energy can be pulled in. You were mentioning data centers a minute ago. I think that there's no doubt that there's a tremendous energy in AI populism. Right now and that some amount of that is going to have to be actually spoken to and people are going to have to get much more thoughtful and sophisticated in speaking to it. But what else is there that as you've sort of thought about this critique and thought about what you wish had been done differently and what you wish had been paid attention to, okay, this is the opportunity, but it maybe requires going into some uncomfortable places or building new coalitions.
- [68:01]
Naomi Klein
I think that we know I'm not going to speak on behalf of the entire left, but I believe that a lot of people on the left understand and understood, particularly after Trump won, that we must have been doing something wrong if this many working class people went to Trumpism and if this many people felt alienated enough by what they were calling woke culture to turn to this nihilistic politics. And so, you know, my friend Kianga Yamada Taylor, you know, was a professor at Princeton, historian. One of the things she said immediately after the election is we have to build a more welcoming left. And I think about that phrase a lot. Like, welcoming. What does it mean to be welcoming? You know, and I look at me, what's happening in Minneapolis and this sort of, you know, what Adam Serow called neighborism, describing that movement. I mean, neighborism is such a welcoming idea. Like, and it's just this, it's not jargon filled. You're not throwing a whole bunch of isms at people and like creating a sort of huge litmus test for how you can join the movement. You're just saying, we're all neighbors here. Wherever you're from, if you're here, we've got your back and we're gonna express that in all these different ways. Whether it's like doing laundry for people who can't leave their homes or dropping kids off at, you know, or the, you know, the images we've all seen of people trailing ice and filming them. I mean, these are just acts of like, neighborliness and welcomingness and just a sort of, there's a simplicity to it. And then when I look at the campaign that Mamdani ran here in New York, I think that it had the best of what we saw in ourselves during COVID of just like, I want to see the people who make the city run and I want to valorize them. Like, you know, he made this wonderful video about the night shift. Do you remember that one where it was like, he just like went out in the middle of the night and just like went to LaGuardia and to the taxi line and just interviewed Cab drivers.
- [69:55]
Ezra Klein
For South Asians growing up in New York City, taxis were one of the ways we would see ourselves as part
- [69:59]
Naomi Klein
of the fabric of the city.
- [70:00]
Ezra Klein
Thank you, brother. Thank you. As much as taxis have been celebrated, as much as they've been woven into the most prominent example of what it means to be a New Yorker or the films and the books that we all love about the city, I watched, as did many New Yorkers, as driver after driver was trapped. Debt, peonage and their struggles were simply overlooked by politicians. It's time to also speak to New Yorkers for whom the workday starts at night.
- [70:28]
Naomi Klein
It was just like, it's not just during a pandemic that the working class holds of New York City. Everyone's so cynical about those early Covid days where people clapped for healthcare workers, but. But I actually think there was something really beautiful about what was being expressed and, like, insisting on seeing the people who make the world work, who hold the world up. Now, clapping is not enough. They also deserve wage increases and sick days and all kinds of things they didn't get. But this is what I mean by that fork in the road that Covid represented. There could have been a breakthrough for labor rights and all of the discussion about who essential workers were and all of that, and I think that was very threatening to a lot of people, and that's why we're in this fascist alternate timeline. But what you see with the Mamdani campaign is that didn't go away. You know, 100,000 volunteers. That is incredible. And it was all just people talking to their neighbors. It was another expression of neighborism. And that kind of work, that kind of just talking to your neighbors, it's not the work of jargon. It's like, what can we find to bond over? What's our quickest, fastest bond? And this is the other kind of doppelganger that I try to get at at the book is like, we all contain doppelgangers in ourselves. Like, we are both this and that. You know, the thing about politics is that it can light up different parts of ourselves. You know, you can have a politic that encourages the worst parts of yourself, and you can have a politic that says, hey, let's be that other part of you. You know? But I do think that what Mamdani showed was one way of doing that. I think you got 10% of people who voted for Trump. 10% is a lot in a federal election, but you have to do it with economic populism. Trump promised to bring the jobs back he promised to address cost of living. And if Democrats aren't credible in making that promise themselves, then I don't think that they will be able. Or they'll be able to harvest it in one election cycle, and then it'll backlash again. And also, I think climate action has to come back. It's nowhere in the political discussion, and that's not tenable because we are in a climate crisis. So we have to find a way of talking about climate. I've used the phrase eco populism to think about. Even something like free public transit, though that's a municipal issue, points to the fact that the climate movement made so many mistakes, like, why didn't we make free public transit a climate policy? It is a climate policy, gets people out of cars, we can have electrified transit, and it addresses cost of living and it makes life eas. And so I think that we need to focus on those types of policies. But the other thing I see happening is we are becoming afraid of our phones. And it's really scary that the merger, like the Silicon Valley merger with the Trump administration, means that these devices and these platforms that sold themselves as our liberation. You know, first we found out that they were tracking us to advertise to us, but now we find out that. That they have integrated with the Trump administration all kinds of ways that we don't fully understand in terms of what data was taken through doge, what Palantir is doing. But what is emerging in real time is that there are profiles of us and AI is superpowering this. I guess what I'm saying is that people are deciding to touch grass, both because. Because they like grass, and also because they're becoming afraid of these devices that have flipped into very dangerous surveillance devices. I think we always knew the technology could do that, but now we're seeing it actually happen.
- [74:07]
Ezra Klein
Yeah, I agree that that's going to be a tremendous generator of our politics going forward. I think that sense of, oh, we actually do need to be afraid now is very real. And I think that when either Democrats have enough power or there's a subsequent administration and you begin to have investigation on this era, subpoena power for the opposition in Congress, people going to court, what we are going to learn was happening, and certainly what was being attempted when whistleblowers are not as afraid as they probably are right now, is going to really chill people. It's sort of like with the Epstein fellows. There's a lot we don't currently know. You can see hints of it, you can worry about it, but I think when there's currently this fight between the Department of Defense and Anthropic, because the Department of Defense wants to make sure that in the AI it uses, it is extremely unconstrained in that use. What is being done in this sort of intersection of the government and Palantir, the government and trying to integrate GROK into our war fighting, I think it's gonna get very scary.
- [75:18]
Naomi Klein
And what you were saying before about the sort of anger at tech workers who are sort of taking over these companies, I mean, I think it was exaggerated, but what wasn't exaggerated is that tech workers were saying, we wanna have a say in what we build. Right. And they were. You know, there were contracts that were canceled because of tech worker organizing, because they didn't want to be doing contracts with ICE or with the US Military, I think that that's fair. I think people should have a say in whether or not their labor and their creativity and their brilliance is going into a war machine that they don't support, or into their own surveillance or into the deportation of their neighbors. So maybe that's another productive area of real worker empowerment.
- [76:02]
Ezra Klein
I was thinking about as we were talking about AI and what it means to be human and what it means to. It means to have dignity in the economy. That something that we're sort of dancing around there is the way economic logic has taken a lot over and the way. I think Azad has kind of accelerated down a very disembodied and technological path now sort of culminating at some level in AI. And I think there's something here about how many zones of life you can have corporate and economic logic encroach on. And I think that some of what is gonna emerge in all of this, and it reflects what we're talking about with RFK Jr. In nature, is just a sense that people want. They want alternatives to how things feel. I mean, that is partially policy. It's partially universal healthcare and expanded child tax credits and, you know, free transit. But it's also partially just a recognition of values and aspirations and that it doesn't need to feel like this.
- [77:15]
Naomi Klein
Yeah. Did you see that exchange between Joyce Carol Oates and novelist and Elon Musk?
- [77:21]
Ezra Klein
No.
- [77:22]
Naomi Klein
It was this fascinating exchange. I wish I had the quote in front of me, but she just trolled him on his own site and said, isn't it interesting that you can have all the money in the world, but you never seem to post about the things that normal people like, like pets or a film they saw or a book they read. Or just like any of these sort of things, like just basic enjoyment. And it really got under Musk's skin. And he started posting about movies for a while. But I do think that there is this divide where not only do we see, it's just this incredibly bad behavior from the wealthiest people in the world who clearly don't deserve the reverence that they were given, but we also see that they seem kind of miserable, like incapable of enjoying everything that they have. And there was this moment when Bezos was talking to William Shatner and William Shatner had just came down from one of Bezos rockets and he wanted to talk about what he had seen. He was like, whoa, it's mind blown overview effect of like fragile blue marble. And Bezos was like, just wanted to like spray champagne. And it was like something is missing. Like there's a sort of a fundamental failure to appreciate like that which is irreplaceable. And that failure seems to me to be very connected with the willingness to just replace art with AI, replace universities with AI. Why are we not pausing to just be like, like, hey, like I know universities aren't perfect, but it was this idea that people could have a time in their life where they could just like read and think and shouldn't we have a conversation about whether or not we want to get rid of that whole concept? And so I think there is something in your, you know, what you were saying before about the opportunities. I think there's huge political opportunities to speak into that which is irreplaceable, that which you can't put a price on. I'm not a nationalist, but I refer to these tech oligarchs as traitors because I think they're traitors to creation. I think that there's something broken where they're not actually appreciating the beauty of this world. And you know, in the Epstein files there's an exchange between. I think it's Bannon who he really did not like Pope Francis. You know, Pope Francis really spoke into this with his encyclical on ecology. Like I think that he would was such a remarkable leader in really identifying the need to connect the irreverence for the natural world and its vulnerability as a spiritual duty, whatever you believe, it's a spiritual duty. And it's a profound betrayal not to cherish the natural world. And what I see running through all of the emergent movements in this era, like whether it's the Mamdani campaign or whether it's the anti ice protests in Minneapolis or the Data center movements is like this. We cherish where we live, we cherish our water, we cherish our land, our soil.
- [80:31]
Ezra Klein
And so it's the values of our city.
- [80:33]
Naomi Klein
Yeah, it's a rootedness and it's not a whitewash either. Like people are rooting down where they are and learning their histories, including the really difficult histories. Right. Like, like there was a lot that's come out in Minneapolis, like birthplace of the American Indian movement. Minnesota was the site of the largest mass hanging in U.S. history of Dakota men. And sort of connecting that history with ice. It's a live action history lesson. Right. And it's looking backwards and forwards, I think, at the same time. And that's, I think the move that we need to be able to do is like, okay, where are we? Where do we want to go?
- [81:14]
Ezra Klein
I think it's a good place to end, always. Our final question, what are three books you'd recommend to the audience?
- [81:19]
Naomi Klein
All right, so this is a little bit obvious, but Empire of AI by Karen Howe, it's just such an incredible combination of just on the ground, globe trotting, investigative reporting, making the material inputs and human inputs of AI visible. But then it has this big idea thesis around empire building, which I think is really true. I guess we've been talking around this, but my friend Molly Crabapple has an absolutely brilliant book coming out called Here Where We Live Is Our country the Story of the Jewish Bund. And it's available for pre order, comes out in April. And I think it gets at what an alternative story of hereness could be of really committing to here, which is what the Jewish Labor Bund was doing before between the wars. And the third book is a book called Fire Alarm Reading. Walter Benjamin's on the Concept of History by Michael Lowy. And Walter Benjamin is the. This is the text that he wrote right before he took his own life fleeing the Gestapo in 1940. And it gets at this idea of the way history doesn't repeat, but compounds in Benjamin's term, piling wreckage upon wreckage.
- [82:32]
Ezra Klein
Naomi Klein, thank you very much.
- [82:34]
Naomi Klein
Thank you so much, Ezra.
- [82:46]
Ezra Klein
This episode of ezra clancho is produced by jack mccordick. Fact checking by michelle harris. Our senior audio engineer is jeff geld, with additional mixing by aman soda. Our executive producer is claire gordon. The show's production team also includes annie galvin, marie cassillon, marina king, roland hu, kristin lin, emma kelbeck and jan kobel. Original music by pat mccusker. Audience strategy by christina semolewski and shannon busta. The director of new york times opinion audio is annie rose strasser. So good, so good, so good.
- [83:33]
Naomi Klein
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Ezra Klein
How did I not know Rack has Adidas?
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Naomi Klein
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