today we make a trip into the mirror world the acclaimed writer Naomi Klein has a new book out this week that delves deeply into the culture of conspiracy theories and a growing alliance between the far right and people who once identified as Progressive the book comes as Robert F Kennedy Jr campaigns against Joe Biden for the Democratic nomination for President Kennedy who was once a prominent Environmental Lawyer is now a leading figure in the anti-vaccine movement in July Kennedy made headlines after claiming quote covid-19 is targeted to attack Caucasians and black people he went on to say Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese are most immune to covid one notable defender of Kennedy's claims was the writer Naomi wolf who's best known for her 1991 book The Beauty myth in a sub-stack post wolf defended Kennedy writing quote RFK Jr is cursed and blessed with a passion for actual truth she wrote Kennedy and wolf have both been embraced by the far right Republican Mega donors are helping to bankroll Kennedy's long-shot presidential campaign while Wolff is now a regular guest on Steve bannon's podcast the war room where she spreads conspiracy theories about covert vaccines and other issues former Fox News host Tucker Carlson has also praised Naomi wolf saying she is quote one of the bravest clearest thinking people I know well Naomi wolf plays a central role in Naomi Klein's new book titled doppelganger a trip into the mirror World Klein examines how and why more and more people started confusing her with wolf as Naomi wolf fell deeper into what Naomi Klein called the mirror world where facts no longer matter Naomi Klein writes in the book quote the trouble with the mirror World there is always some truth mixed in with the lies always some devastating Collective failure it's identified and is opportunistically exploiting unquote in a moment Naomi Klein will join us live but first we play a short video produced along with the book hi I'm Naomi Klein and as some of you know I have a doppelganger a person who does many extreme things that cause strangers to chastise me or thank me or Express their pity for me I used to be horrified by this but then something happened that I didn't expect I got interested interested in what it means to have a doppelganger so I decided to follow My Doppelganger to a place I've come to think of as the mirror world it's a strange mirror image of the world where I live place where many ideas that I care about are being twisted and warped into dangerous doppelganger versions of themselves when I look at the mirror world I don't see disagreements over a shared reality I see us agreements about what is real and what is a simulation and with AI generating more and more of what we see in here it's only getting harder to distinguish the authentic from the synthetic after all artificial intelligence is a mirroring and mimicry machine we feed in the cumulative words ideas and images that our species has managed to create and these programs mirror back to us something that feels uncannily lifelike but it's not life it's a forgery of life I shadowed my double further into the mirror World a place where soft focused Wellness influencers make a common cause with fire breathing far-right propagandists all in the name of saving and protecting the children not everyone is dogged by their doppelganger but our culture is crowded with all kinds of doubling all of us who maintain a Persona or Avatar online are kind of creating our own doppelgangers forging a separate public identity that is both us and not us a doppelganger we perform for one another as the price of admission in a rapacious attention economy and all the while tech companies create digital profiles of us without our full knowledge data doubles or golems that follow us everywhere we go online carrying their own agenda their own Logics and their own threats what is all of this doubling and doppelganging doing to us how is it steering what we pay attention to and more critically what we neglect and ignore doppelgangers are often understood as a warning or an omen a message that something needs our attention reality is doubling multiplying glitching telling us to pay attention because it's not just individuals who can flip into a Sinister version of themselves the Earth can transform into a menacing uncanny twin of what we once knew all societies can flip that's the reason many doppelganger works of art are ultimately about the latent potential for fascism within our societies even within ourselves what I've learned by shadowing my double is that the forces that have destabilized my personal world are part of a much larger web of forces that are destabilizing our shared world and understanding these forces may be our best hope of getting to firmer around that video featured Naomi Klein author of the new book doppelganger a trip into the mirror World Naomi Klein is an award-winning author and journalist she's professor of climate Justice at the University of British Columbia founding co-director of the UBC Center for climate Justice her previous books include on fire the burning case for a green New Deal the shock Doctrine the rise of disaster capitalism this changes everything capitalism versus the climate no logo taking aim at the brand bullies Naomi is also a columnist for the guardian she's joining us now from Washington D. C as she begins her book tour around the country Naomi welcome to democracy Now it's great to have you with us and congratulations so much Amy on the publication of this book I like what the great artist and author Molly Crabapple said about your book a dazzling hallucinatory tour de force that takes the reader through Shadow selves and Global fascism leaving them gasping by the end so Naomi if you can explain more this journey you took through the pandemic into this mirror world who your doppelganger is and then go back tonight to 2011 and that moment in the Lou where you talk about hearing women talk about you or was it Naomi wolf take it from there right well first first of all Amy uh and darmin thank you so much for having me back on the show it's such a pleasure to be with you uh and thank you for for airing that video I just want to credit the director Colby Richardson who's an amazing video artist so those of you who are listening just to the audio I really encourage you to to watch the to watch the video version because it gets really trippy um Amy you listed some of my previous books in that in that lovely introduction uh my books back to no logo my first book which I wrote on the cusp of the of the New Millennium almost a quarter of a century ago um have been attempts to map our political moment they've been attempts to to make sense of moments of big shifts uh in our political world our cultural World um and uh and and in the case of of this changes everything our Physical World um and I would say that doppelganger is an attempt to make a to make a usable map of Our Moment the thing is Our Moment is a lot weirder and Wilder uh than any I've ever lived through uh there are all kinds of strange happenings at work all kinds of uncanny events so I thought in many ways that I needed to write in a different way a way that sort of mirrored the wildness of now and so you know I let myself have more fun with the writing I I uh I wanted to refind a voice that that felt more like me that felt more like the person who talks to their friends that was more conversational but also aim you know um and this project began during the pandemic and um I've written about large-scale Collective shocks that's what the shock Doctrine was about but I realized that in the past you know if I was covering Hurricane Katrina or the U. S and UK Invasion and occupation of Iraq or the Asian tsunami I mean these these huge cataclysmic events I was you know I think as as you are right the journalist who comes in with with with a notepad maybe a camera um and and and I'm interviewing other people about their shock but really I have this I've had a reporterial distance covid was different nobody was outside of that Shock It Up ended my world as it upended all of our worlds and in many ways the world became uncanny and unfamiliar Freud described The Uncanny as that species of frightening in which that which was familiar becomes strange I mean think about Times Square during the pandemic that is an uncanny of apparition it's something familiar that looks completely different it's empty uh one of the busiest places on Earth but I think there are many kinds of uncanny experiences that we have in in the world today you know I I now live in British Columbia we had a an extreme weather event a couple of years ago called a heat Dome uh and and hundreds of people died uh millions of marine creatures died um uh but what was most uncanny about the heat Dome is it was not our weather it was like somebody else's weather coming to a temperate rainforest and so I thought by using the uncanniness of having a doppelganger you asked about My Doppelganger I I am perennially confused and conflated with another writer named Naomi wolf named Naomi named Naomi Naomi wolf and you know having having that identity confusion is an extreme form of uncanniness because what becomes unfamiliar is you you see people and hear people talking about you but it's not you it's very destabilizing so I thought well this is an interesting technique and she really is less the subject of the book than a literary technique to to get into these other kinds of uh uncanny forces should I tell the bathroom the story please you really want me to do it yeah so so the the first chapter begins telling the story um where actually I was I was in New York City um uh to be part of Occupy Wall Street I was I was at a March through the financial district at the height of Occupy Wall Street and like other people at that March needed to use a public restroom and I was I was in one of these you know skyscrapers and and I don't remember exactly which building but while in the restroom I overheard a couple of people talking about me being quite unkind I must say Amy they were they were saying very they were they were sort of drawing like did you read that article by Naomi Klein oh my God she really doesn't understand our movement she doesn't understand our demands and I was sort of Frozen in fear but brought back all of all of my terrible High School memories you know these these mean girls were were talking about me but as I listened I realized oh they're not talking about me they're talking about somebody else so I I you know I came out of the stall and I met one of their eyes and I said words that I have had to say unfortunately too many times I think you're talking about Naomi wolf um but but in the end that became quite fitting to me because you know I think when you we overhear people speaking about us on social media we essentially are just reading the graffiti on the on on on the bathroom wall which is not healthy and we probably should stop doing that so I think it's getting that the first time I became aware of the identity confusion uh in the real world it was it was actually literally in a bathroom and women let's just say that this weekend is the 12th anniversary of Occupy Wall Street the Naomi has been going on for some time Naomi I'd like to just join Amy in uh congratulating you on this book I mean I know that I'm not alone in thinking this that when I read it I realized that it's actually the book that needed uh to be written I mean it's it's amazing the way you're simultaneously disclosive funny um subtle and so insightful about our present historical moment so I want to ask about the reasons that you it's the doppelganger effect that you identify is of course not just with Naomi wolf Naomi wolf is almost like incidental to what you come to identify which is that you recognize in seeing your doppelganger that you were also seeing quote in your words a magnification of many undesirable aspects of our shared culture so could you just enumerate Or List what those undesirable aspects are of which I mean you can select some because they're so numerous yeah absolutely um you know it definitely wouldn't have been worth doing this if it if if it wasn't kind of a narrow aperture to you know use a film image that would allow us to see much larger forces at work and I think we all know people who have changed dramatically in the past few years um you know who don't really seem like themselves you know I think it's less interesting that Naomi wolf is a seemingly a doppelganger for me for a lot of to a lot of people's eyes then that she seems to be a doppelganger of her former self right that she was a prominent feminist she was involved in Progressive movements and now here she is on Steve bannon's a podcast in some cases every single day like there have been weeks where she's been a guest every single day that he has been broadcasting I think probably democracy Now listeners would be surprised to learn that they published a book together they put out t-shirts together so she you know her role on Steve in Steve bannon's media sphere is almost like a co-host more than a guest she's a really important figure in this world but part of the reason we don't know this has to do with this what I call the mirror world and the fact that while they see us we have chosen for the most part not to see them and I think that that's very dangerous because these are really important political movements Steve Bannon is a is a very able political strategist he he got Donald Trump elected once and he fully intends to do it again and part of Steve bannon's strategy is that he is very good at looking at issues and people who have been abandoned by the Democratic party or even by the left people who have been mistreated ejected and saying come on over to this side come on over to this side of the glass and we'll take a little bit of Truth you know you use that quote that that there's always a little bit of Truth mixed in and we'll mix it up with all of these dangerous lies but to me as a lifelong leftist what concerns me about that is that many of the issues that they are co-opting and twisting are issues that I think the left should be more vocal about you know I had one of my most um you know I'd say like a moment in my in the research where I was listening to hundreds of hours of vanons podcast where I would say I felt most destabilized was when I would hear Bannon cut together a montage audio montage and a video montage of intros and outros of major cable news shows on CNN and MSNBC brought to you by Pfizer brought to you by moderna and you know his point was to say you can't trust these corporate media Outlets because they are bought and paid for by the drug companies that are trying to get you vaccinated right um but for me what was what was chilling about that was that it that was a doppelganger of the kind of media education that I grew up in you know we all read manufacturing consent we had these charts where we and I mean Amy they sounded a little bit like you they sounded like me they sounded like Noam Chomsky except through a warped mirror and what worried me about that is it really reminded me that I don't think we're doing that kind of um of of systems-based media education anymore where we really are looking at these ownership structures and if that doesn't happen then it's going to be co-opted in the mirror world so you know I guess and I mean thank you for your kind words about the book I'm so glad that it resonated with you it was a sort of a risk but I think maybe by being specific you know we're all thinking about the people in our lives and and this phenomenon that's that's affected that's all I think when I look at people who have made this a similar political migration from from liberalism or leftism over to the ban and ask right I think we often see um some economic forces at work Naomi wolf has has quadrupled her following because of this this uh um decision this political decision of hers um she's not the only one you know I'm sure people are thinking of other people it's actually a really smart business move um and and this is happening within an economic system that has monetized attention um you know people are trying to build their personal Brands because they've been told that they're not going to get a job that this is the only way they can survive in these roiling capitalist seas and there there are a lot of there's a lot of clicks over there so I think that's some of it um you know what are the other forces that get magnified well you know this is a little tricky to say because you know I I do write you know this I don't think this gives people a pass um but but wolf is one of these people who has experienced a lot of of shaming and kind of pylons on on left Twitter or liberal Twitter or X or whatever it's called she's really been I would say internet bullied um people can say okay well for good reason she's made all of she's spread conspiracies she's made major factual errors in her books but I don't think that's necessarily a justification for for cruelty um so I think that's something else that gets magnified because I think when people have an experience that is very very negative in left or liberal circles where they really get treated almost like they're they're they're they're they're they're not human and that's partly because they're performing themselves as a brand which is saying you know hey I'm out here I'm a commodity I'm a thing and then people start thinking well if you're a thing I can throw things at you and you won't bleed um you know I think that that's part of what is magnified here and that becomes a justification for I think an unjustifiable political alliance with extremely dangerous figures who are building a network of far-right political parties who take issues like rightful suspicion of big Pharma rightful anger at Big Tech rightful anger at the elites and flip it to to transphobia xenophobia racism you know and here I'm thinking about figures like Georgia Maloney who is you know a protege of Steve bannon's and Naomi I mean if you could if you could elaborate on on that point I mean one of the failures that you identify uh is for instance uh the Democratic party or progressives generally not focusing on making for instance uh different social media platforms more Equitable more democratic uh but rather you know when people are deep platformed including Naomi wolf kind of celebrating their removal and you say that believing that once they're de-platformed they've effectively disappeared is the equivalent of saying that children children who think that once they close their eyes the world has disappeared if you could elaborate on that yeah so I mean like when I would when I would confess to to to to to to people I knew that I was working on this book sometimes I would get this strange reaction like well why would you give her attention um and there was this sense that because she was no longer visible in the pages of the New York Times or on you know MSNBC or wherever um and because she had been de-platformed on on social media that or on the social media that we're on um that she just didn't exist and and there was this assumption that we whoever we are are are in control of the attention and so if if if if the spigot gets turned off then there's no more attention but because I was following this what I was seeing was that she had a much much larger uh um platform than probably she'd had since her star rose in the 1990s and she was advising Al Gore on his presidential run in 2000 uh you know what what Tucker Carlson and Steve Bannon can offer her is more than what a lot of liberal media Outlets can offer and she's been on you know a Jordan Peterson's podcast and she's also in these you know I call it the mirror world because there's kind of a one-to-one replica of many of the the social media platforms the crowdfunding platforms so she was kicked off Twitter she immediately got an account on on getter um uh and and get her they call themselves the Twitter killer um so I think it is really really Reckless to ignore this world because you know it's not like they're just uh you know it's not like it's a hobby what they're doing there as Steve Bannon says the goal is to take power for the next hundred years so not paying attention to this and not looking at what issues are getting traction there I think is really reckless in 2016 Steve Bannon successfully peeled away a portion of the democratic party base who had voted for Democrat after Democrat who promised them that they were going to renegotiate or can cancel free trade deals that had gutted their communities and offshore jobs and they didn't do it many of them signed more free trade deals and Steve Bannon saw an opportunity you know I don't think it's about whether or not he personally believes this is uh you know an important issue or whether Trump did anything really meaningful in this regard the issue is they picked up an issue that their opponents had abandoned and used it to political effect and that is now happening with opposition to Big Tech opposition to Big Pharma even standing up for free speech right and so I think that there need to be um you know and and it's wildly hypocritical because they're the same people who are Banning books uh but to me like we can't control them that we can control ourselves and whether or not we are doing a good enough job embodying our own principles um and and you know I think one of the things that happened during the pandemic is that the more misinformation was being spread by the likes of wolf and Bannon the more people who see themselves as Progressive started just getting into a reactive position where we're just defending the CDC we're just defending what the government is saying when in fact the role of the left is to push for much more right sure yes get vaccinated wear a mask but what about fighting for the right to indoor air quality for everybody what about demanding that schools have smaller classrooms more outdoor education more teacher giving essential workers the raises instead of just the Applause the the right I mean there's there you know or lifting the the patents on the vaccines and I know you you covered this on Democracy Now consistently but I think if we're honest it was the right that organized during the pandemic you know I live in Canada now I'm back in Canada and you know we had the trucker Convoy that shut down Ottawa for three weeks um and you know I'm not going to get into much about the chucker Convoy except to say that my you know one of the things that occurred to me is you know what had happened what would have happened if there was a robust left that had shut down is cities and demanded that before we got our fourth booster everybody on this planet got their first covid vaccine you know or made any of these other Collective demands about truly funding Public Health Care Universal Public Health Care would have been a good response to the pandemic so you know I think we have to be a lot more ambitious and a lot less reactive to just what they're doing that quote unquote they Naomi very quickly before we break we just have a minute if you could explain you mentioned the Trump Convoy you mentioned two Trump convoys what do you think principally why was that so important what was misrepresented oh that's a little maybe it's a little bit tricky to explain quickly but um but seven months before the famous trucker Convoy uh the one that you know made it on all the U.
S talk shows um and that was an anti mainly an anti-vax event um there was a uh there was a convoy that was in in British Columbia that was in response to the unmarked Graves that were con whose presences were confirmed at first at uh the the former the site of the former Kamloops Indian residential school and then uh more unmarked Graves confirmed at other uh form on the grounds of other former so-called residential schools I say confirmed because the community is always new uh that there were burial grounds on these uh the the grounds of these genocidal schools but their presence was confirmed using ground penetrating radar and there was such an outpouring of of uh of solidarity uh in the aftermath of that that there was a convoy organized by trucker years in British Columbia hundreds of trucks that went and drove in front of the the for the closed former residential school in Kamloops it was called the we stand in solidarity Convoy um and uh you know it was it it came from a place as I say and as they said of solidarity of of of of wanting to say that this is uh this atrocity um this genocide is not only an issue for First Nations to fight for justice it should be everybody's business so it was striking that there was this kind of doppelganger truck or Convoy seven months later but what I say in the book is that some truckers went to both and so what's interesting to me is the way doppelgangers stand in for the fact that human beings are complicated uh you know I think my own doppelganger is complicated you know she I think she's done some very good things in her life and she's done some really damaging things most that's true for most people so what interests me as as a political theorist is you know what are the systems that encourage the best parts of ourselves that support that impulse towards solidarity and compassion as opposed to light up the most individualistic parts of ourselves we're spending the hour with Naomi Klein her new book is just out it's called doppelganger a trip into the mirror World Naomi I wanted to talk to you about Robert F Kennedy Jr in July the Democratic presidential candidate spoke at a press event in New York City and claimed the covid-19 vaccine is a genetically engineered bioweapon that may have been ethnically targeted to spare people who are Jewish Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese open 19 there's no argument that it is ethnically targeted over 19 attacks certain races of disproportionately covid-19 is targeted to attack Caucasians and and black people the people who are most immune are asking shoes and uh in Chinese so that's Robert Kennedy Naomi you wrote an article before these comments and the guardian headlined beware we ignore Robert F Kennedy Junior's candidacy at our Peril um now you write extensively in this piece about his background it was not just covid-19 vaccines he was concerned about he goes way back in his anti-vax attitudes and activism talk about the significance of this and what you continually say throughout the book and that we ignore these views at our own peril yeah so I think um I mean in a way he is a doppelganger of his father and Uncle and he's sort of it's sort of I see it as a kind of a counterfeit politics I'm sorry for RFK Jr supporters who are listening don't know how many there are um I think that what he is doing is tapping into a lot of um real uh fears angers uh you know there are times when I listen to him when I'm I can't help nodding along when he's talking about regulatory capture of of government agencies um by the corporations that are supposed to be regulating that's something I've covered for a long time um you know or when he's talking about the military-industrial complex I think it's really important the reason why I call it you know a counterfeit politics is that although he is calling this out if you look at what he's running on um you know this is not Bernie he is not actually running on a platform of of significant regulations that would address the crises that he is talking about it's kind of a Libertarian platform I mean he had isn't even running on universal Public Health Care you know if you're worried about if you're worried about big Pharma and profiteering you know how about running on pharmacare that that that we shouldn't be leaving life-saving drugs to the market but you'll never hear him say something like that you know so I think to for for leftists who are frustrated with the centrism of the Democrats uh it can seem like this is really an alternative and I would really really caution against it um and and look at what he is actually running on is he running on raising the minimum wage and and it no he's not um he's tapping into these uh these real critiques and these real issues like an inflated military budget but then you know his position on Israel for instance is just more militarism same thing with Steve Bannon by the way you know he talks a great game about the military-industrial complex he's absolutely obsessed with China and positioning the U. S for you know at the third world war with China if you're a serious critic of the military-industrial complex you wouldn't be as focused as Steve Bannon is on on on on China bashing so uh you know RFK uh obviously with that clip that you played is uh it was extraordinarily um disturbing dangerous a lot of conspiracy culture starts ending up in this kind of anti-Semitic territory though it's the oldest conspiracy theory in the world you know would I make the art I make the argument in the book that part of what we're dealing with um with the rise of conspiracy culture and I call it conspiracy culture not conspiracy theories because the theory is so wildly uh um contradict each other it's just a posture of mistrust and just throwing wild theories at the wall so one minute covet is a bio weapon perhaps and the next minute it's just a cold so don't even wear a mask you really would need to choose if you had a theory between whether or not it was a bio weapon or whether or not it was a cold if it were a bio weapon presumably you would want to do pretty much anything you can not to be infected but they never attempt to resolve these glaring contradictions because the point of it is to throw up this kind of a a distraction so that we aren't focused on the the sort of what I would describe as kind of the conspiracies in plain view the fact that the that the pharmaceutical companies uh um turned covid into this profit Center uh the fact that these the despite the fact that so the vaccine development was funded with public dollars all the initial orders were were from the government there are these outrageous patents on on these vaccines and they should never have been patented in the first place um and I think we need to be really wary of being overly credulous we know that there are real conspiracies in the world you've been covering the 50th anniversary of the overthrow of Salvador Allende and new documents come out uh every week that that show us these you know behind the scenes meetings but if we look at that conspiracy it's a good example you know what you see in the documents about the U. S destabilization campaign of Salvador Allende it wasn't that there was a it wasn't that you know there was some nefarious goal about depopulating the Earth or draining kids of adrenochrome or whatever the conspiracy culture is claiming it was to protect U.
S copper interests you know U.
