Naomi Klein’s Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World is a polymathic work that serves up new political heuristics with the firepower we’ve come to expect from the coiner of “disaster capitalism.” A Dante-spiral through our circles of cultural hell, it’s also a memoir of demoralization, self-evaluation, and persistent hope.
If this sounds overly ambitious or grandiose—that’s a fair suspicion in this age of galaxy-brained pundits who want to write *that book about everything.* In less humble, less feminist hands, a project like this could feel like a vanity vehicle for an author’s unbearably brilliant mind.
But that doesn’t happen here, because Klein’s intersectional discipline—which despite many flights of fancy, she never abandons—serves the values of economic, racial, and climate justice, and she does it by always citing her sources and elevating the voices of the marginalized.
Derek, Julian, and Matthew discuss briefly before Klein joins Matthew to discuss her way into and out of this bizarre and demoralizing land.
Show Notes
Doppelganger — Naomi Klein
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Welcome to Conspiratuality, where we investigate the intersection of conspiracy theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience, and authoritarian extremism.
I'm Derek Varys.
I'm Matthew Remsky.
I'm Julian Walker.
You can stay up to date with us on Instagram, at Conspiratuality Pod, and you can listen to all of our new episodes ad-free and access our Monday bonus episodes and other And I would like to remind you all that while we gush over Naomi Klein's new book this week, that our book is also awesome and you should buy it.
and if you've bought it, please review it.
Conspiratuality 171, cracking the mirror world with Naomi Klein.
now.
Have you ever had a doppelganger?
I've had a few random ones, like people telling me he's out there, even sending me photos from Yoga World.
Though to be honest, bald white dudes with beards aren't exactly rare in that domain.
Yeah, right.
There was one once of an Arizona yoga instructor that I actually thought was a photo of me until I realized he didn't have any tattoos.
But even those brief three seconds was unsettling.
The idea that there's another spitting image of me or I of him out there in this world.
So honestly, I can't imagine what Naomi Klein has gone through for the last decade plus.
The Canadian author and social activist has written numerous important books, which I think we are all fans of here on the podcast.
There is No Logo, her breakthrough book, The Shock Doctrine.
That book mainstreamed the concept of a term that she coined, disaster capitalism, which influenced Matthew's own coinage on this podcast of the concept of disaster spirituality.
She also wrote This Changes Everything, her influential book on climate change.
And she's back with a brand new book out today, the day we're recording it, so two days ago when you're hearing this, called Doppelganger, A Trip into the Mirror World.
And it talks about her experiences being mistaken for the other Naomi, Naomi Wolf.
Now, Wolfe is also an author, also Jewish, also brown-haired, and also guilty of writing very big-picture books like her breakthrough 1991 work, The Beauty Myth, along with her 2007 political tome, The End of America, for which, full disclosure, I hosted her alongside previous guests here on the podcast and my good friend Dax Devlin Ross for a reading of that book in Jersey City.
Wow.
OK, so wait, what was that like?
Was America ending?
Did you happen to call her Naomi Klein?
What happened?
It did end.
We are no longer in America right now.
We're not here.
You need to stay up on Apple News.
At the time, I thought...
I was a little more politically ignorant.
I thought it was a good book.
It was kind of like a low-rent Timothy Snyder warning, although Snyder is actually an academic, so you should definitely listen to his books on authoritarianism.
Whereas, as it turns out, Naomi Wolf was making a lot of shit up.
But, honestly, I, like many others, also confused Wolf for Klein.
Not then, but shortly after.
And it's pretty weird how that happens, given how far into conspiracy land that Wolf has gone while Klein has remained an essential voice on the American and Canadian left.
But it happens, as she writes about in detail.
And in her fascinating book, she talks about what it's like to have a doppelganger and much, much more, as you're going to hear in her interview with Matthew in a few minutes.
Yeah, it's really interesting to me that what Klein has done is to describe her uncanny and disorienting personal experience of having this purportedly feminist, academic, intellectual doppelganger with the same first name, with a husband in the same profession.
Who also has a very similar name.
Hi Avi!
But who has actually been fully red-pilled after having been largely exposed as completely lacking in research rigor.
And Klein uses this as a way to then explore the larger cultural and political phenomenon in the world right now, which we're all sort of fumbling our way towards describing, and I think she nails it down, in which we face not so much a battle between ideology Or ideologies, but a battle between an actual sincere ideology and then a completely cynical, co-opted, reality-distorting, imposter performance of the same ideology that succeeds in convincing almost half of the world, or certainly half of the American electorate,
That it is somehow fighting against what are, in fact, its own anti-democratic, anti-science, proto-fascist beliefs and agendas.
The woke agenda is turning us into an authoritarian regime.
They say vaccines are going to destroy our collective health.
They say the left is censoring free speech.
So we have to ban the entire canon of what is essentially pro-democracy, pro-human, signature 20th century American literature from our schools.
And of course, the capital insurrection was an uprising of patriots trying to prevent our election from being stolen.
Yeah.
So, too, for Naomi Klein to hear Naomi Wolf pontificating daily on what sounds like Klein's analysis about disaster capitalism on Steve Bannon's War Room podcast, no less, as a basis for right-wing accelerationism, is very disorienting, as she tells us.
Yeah, so pulling back, big picture, Klein opens using an anecdote, which is her perceived relationship and confusion with Wolf, to understand what doppelgangers are and why they haunt us.
She goes through literature and cinema, I was very happy to see.
She read Jose Saramago's excellent book called The Double on this topic, but she pretty much scoured everything.
Focusing in, it's really about the mirror world, which Julian just referenced, this alternate mindset and media space that we now occupy in which, just to give one example, conspiracy theorists co-opt the dying words of Eric Garner and George Floyd, I Can't Breathe, to describe how they felt having to put on a mask for five minutes while waiting for their latte.
There's a lot of co-optation in the book that she describes and well beyond it, and Klein frames what this mirror world is exceptionally well.
The most interesting part of the book to me is how she writes about the left losing its ability to coordinate and fight for what it believes, which opens up a space for men like Steve Bannon to pick off disenchanted voters that the left has left behind.
As we have a chapter in our book describing what conspiritualists get right, Klein frames conspiracy theorists' ability to win over minds by stating, they get the facts wrong, but the feelings right.
And I think that's an essential lesson for progressives to learn.
Totally.
That's the heart of the book, I think.
Yeah, and it's not a unique observation.
She makes it very well, but I personally think it's a very important one.
You know, Bannon took great pride, in his own words, in flipping working-class two-time Obama voters into electing Trump in some key states in 2016, especially in the Rust Belt, where the perception was that the Dems had moved away from a traditional union-strong coalition Toward what a lot of people saw as more elite, coastal, niche, identitarian positions, which were more reflective, actually, of wealthy, white, young college students, as well as, and we'll get into this later, collaborating with neoliberal big tech surveillance capitalism, which, you know, I know you have more to say about, Derek.
Yeah, that's a big example in the book.
I mean, let me just say that it's a joy to read.
I really like an author at the top of her game.
So just a reading experience, it just pulls you in, it's hard to put down.
But one of those examples is privacy issues.
And this is something that Klein believes everyone should care about, but the left didn't really pick up on it, so Bannon ran with it.
And once the right declares an issue to be theirs, the left reflexively adopts either the opposite side or they just ignore the issue.
And to be fair, this goes both ways.
But here's how Klein frames it in the book.
Quote, the Faustian bargain of the digital age, free or cheap digital conveniences in exchange for our data, was only ever explained to us after it was already a done deal.
And it represents an enormous and radical shift not only in how we live, but also, far more importantly, in what our lives are for.
We are all mine sites now, data mine sites, and despite the intimacy and import of what is being mined, the mining process remains utterly obscure and the mine operators wholly unaccountable.
Yeah, damn.
Yeah, so what's an issue for everyone, all Americans, all citizens, is to be up in arms about this, but Bannon helped make this a right-wing issue, which effectively paralyzed the left on it, so we can't build a coalition to actually battle the tech companies that are behind this or try to get the government to regulate it.
I could go on with examples from this very rich and detailed and beautifully written book, but the double as a key to understanding our politics in this strange mirror world that we occupy, alongside the left losing its effective activist voice, is what I'm really taking away from the book.
And just to underline what you were saying a moment ago, Derek, like that piece about the non-consensual move, radical move towards surveillance capitalism, largely through social media and, you know, the new development of what was happening with the internet, that's the underpinning of several of the more Thoughtful, like somewhat tech-savvy conspiracy theories that we dealt with quite early on in the pandemic.
That what was happening now with the pandemic, with vaccine passports, et cetera, even with 5G, which of course was ludicrous, but that it was the next step of something that was going on that really alarmed some people, but that many of the rest of us were just saying, ah, it's not such a big deal.
Don't worry about it too much.
And one thing we haven't done here yet Is to acknowledge that Klein actually mentions Conspiratuality Podcast twice in the introduction to her book.
We were totally fanboying out when we saw that.
And she referenced us as being companions on her journey into this hellscape, which is really quite flattering and kind of her to say.
And at one point she acknowledges a kind of parasocial closeness to us during the isolation of the pandemic.
Which is very touching, but also, you know, really exemplifies how all of us human beings are susceptible to those dynamics.
But look, we're all giving our, Derek, you and I are giving our impressions here.
And before we run Matthew's great interview with her, Matthew, I want to hear your thumbnail on why this is such an important and timely book.
Because I know you've gone really deep on it over the last couple of months.
I know it's been very captivating and stimulating for you.
Yeah, I am cline-pilled for sure.
And I think I'll reiterate a couple of the things that you've said.
But delving into this book has been really great for me personally, like on a intellectual,
but also mental health level.
It's much better than obsessing over Bobby Muscles.
I did say a ton about the book in my full review that was posted to the feed on last Saturday,
but I wanted to distill what I believe Klein has argued and accomplished.
So I'll try to be really brief.
Basically, the systems of organization and control that speed run this unequal and dissociated life
that we share.
These systems are so immense and immersive that even those of us on the left
who have historically analyzed and resisted them have often caved under their pressure.
Now, Derek and you both, you've just pinged the analysis of surveillance capitalism
and how, of course, it strip mines our humanity, our interior lives for profit.
But that totalism, that hyper objectness applies to everything, finance, for-profit medicine,
aggressive foreign policy, and also just the general collective stupor
of social media.
All of these things, as Klein points out, become so regular and normal
that we who know how wrong they are, we begin to defend ourselves psychologically
instead of act out politically.
And we defend ourselves with irony and melancholic shrugging.
We lose our inner Bernies, I would say.
Or we turn him into this meme, where he's just sitting on the Capitol steps with his big-ass mittens on, like, wondering when he can finally go home for some hot chocolate and, like, a little Netflix.
And that abdication leaves a moral and political vacuum.
And in our interview coming up, Klein says that politics abhors a vacuum, and if people feel something is wrong, they will listen to those who are most compelling on it, whether they are lying or not, and that's the secret sauce of RFK Jr.
When corrupt governments suddenly pretend to care about people's health by squeaking out the most basic pandemic measures they can politically afford, It's going to be charlatans like Bannon who slide into the gap and raise the most cogent sounding rebellious responses.
And they're going to capture people with emotions, but not with facts and not with actual strategies for change or justice.
And really part of what you're saying is they're not only going to capture people with emotions, they're going to tap into emotions that people have that say something is not right here.
We're being screwed over.
I can't quite articulate it.
Here's an eloquent propagandist who knows how to give me an explanation for my feelings.
Yeah, in fact, all of the emotions that the Sanders campaign specifically was so good at tapping into, at collecting, at farming, really.
And there's a lot of background in Klein's book about how her iteration of the mirror world emerges out of the aftermath of that campaign.
So then, in the logic of social spectacle, Which is for Klein that like the techno architecture of the mirror world, it's really easy for influencers to hide the fact that they have no moral center, like no educated principles or values.
It's really easy to mimic social justice language, to be Ron DeSantis and outlaw critical race theory under the premise that it is a vast indoctrination campaign that will promote inequality.
It becomes easy to pretend that you are being anti-racist in the yoga world while promoting Hindu nationalism.
So we live in this funhouse of political affect where rebel and contrarian and resister are like these floating LARP costumes that any neo-fascist can put on.
It's a place where Naomi Wolf can pretend that she is the progressive by implying that vaccination programs are like the Holocaust.
And then, speaking of the Holocaust, I speak a little bit in the review about how this is, I think, probably the deepest ground zero layer of her book, is how she reflects on her own leftist orientation towards the fact, the horror of the Holocaust and its reverberations.
The most cursed form of pretense, of mimicry, of bastardizing and aping is when suburban moms are encouraged by people like Bannon to steal the language of the Holocaust or of First Nations justice.
And pretend that putting masks on their children is like sending them to residential schools where they will be stripped of their pure souls and finally killed.
And this is great for those stakeholders because they become the biggest victims of all.
They have the highest rates of fake moral capital.
So, you know, it's an amazing description of the problem, but Klein, unlike me, I think, and maybe unlike a lot of people who study this phenomenon, she really doesn't leave people hanging with it.
She is pretty consistent with what the answers would be.
So there's a lot about that in my review, but basically, this impossibly complex problem has an impossibly simple Answer.
Because over and over again, Klein says that people on the left have to simply put down their phones and organize communities of practice.
That they have to, like, re-storm this empty territory of resistance to injustice so that RFK Jr.
can't fill it up with TikToks of him bench-pressing and fantasizing about Camelot.
Oh, my God.
says that we can't be overly ironic anymore.
And this funny thing came to me today.
It's almost like she's the in real life, non-mirror world Jordan Peterson of the left.
Oh my God.
Not wearing a Batman vomit suit, and actually a good writer, a great writer,
but she's telling us to stand up straight, to clean up our rooms, and to get on with life.
the existential questions that we've been putting off with a ton of scrolling and just watching
the empty doubling images flow by.
So, I am super grateful for that.
What does she say about lobsters?
Yeah, right.
They're bloody important.
♪ Hello, Naomi Klein, and welcome to Conspiratuality Podcast.
Thank you so much.
I'm thrilled to be with you.
We're thrilled to have you.
And in lieu of a lengthy introduction, I'm just going to say that with this book, it's clear that you are not the Naomi Klein that so many of us have known.
We might even say that you've rebranded, although that's a big part of the problem that you're exploring with this book.
Um, I think that for so many of us, you have for decades played the role of feminist rabbi detective of the left, connecting the dots, meticulously gathering resources, nurturing a kind of pragmatic faith, and also plotting out survival and resistance plans.
But with this book, You've taken like a mystic sabbatical, deeper into the temple, maybe, and become a kind of self-aware oracle of the collapse spectacle.
So, I wanted to just ask straight off, is that fair?
Oh my goodness, that is a lot to unpack.
I would say, first of all, that I think thank you.
I am still me, and I would argue more me than I was in my last few books, just in the sense that what I really was trying for in this Was to write in my actual voice, in my true voice, in the voice that I use when I'm talking to my friends and that admits to doubts and fears and has a pretty strong sense of the absurd.
And you know, when I first started writing, my voice was quite a bit, sort of, a lot lighter.
My first book, No Logo, which I wrote when I was in my 20s, you know, is quite self-aware, self-deprecating.
You know, I referred to it as a mall rat memoir, you know, and yet also an anti-corporate manifesto.
And I always felt that when engaged in cultural criticism in particular, it's really important not to be on the outside wagging your fingers because then people feel judged, which is something I know from personal experience because I grew up with parents who were 60s radicals in a rage against the 1980s and everything that me and my friends were doing.
So I know what it feels like to be judged by people who think that your culture is crap.
So I, you know, when I wrote No Logo, I wanted to cop to the pleasures and seductions of the culture and still do the critique, you know?
And so I guess I see this book as a return to it.
I don't see, you know, you use the phrase like, Collapse spectacle, and I don't think I'll ever see collapse as spectacle.
I will still always be trying to find ways for us to come together and fight for what we can and fight for each other.
I'm not a doomer, but I do want to be honest and create some space to feel What we have already lost, right?
Because I think that it's not healthy for movements to just kind of barrel ahead as if losses and setbacks and disappointments don't happen.
And I think particularly in North America, in our current political moment, We equate that sort of assessment with doomerism, right?
But yeah, in the book I'm saying, look, I'm not going to be that cheerleader right now.
Right now, I don't think this is a moment for cheerleading.
I think it's a moment for sober assessment.
And also, you know, I did want to implicate myself.
I am somebody who has written about shocks since Hurricane Katrina and the invasion of Iraq with a certain reportorial distance.
You know, these were not my shocks.
I was coming with a notebook to other people's communities and other people's countries.
But COVID was different, right?
Because we were all in it.
And that was Was interesting to me, you know, that I was finding my own brain clouded and confused.
And so I just tried to write honestly about that.
So it's kind of like, you know, writing from within the eye of the hurricane instead of outside of it.
We definitely will go into the mirror work that you're pointing to as you describe the mirror worlds that you elucidate in the book.
But I want to start with the biggest picture, as I see it anyway.
About halfway through the book, you write, all my adult life, and this will also point back to No Logo, you say, I have been writing about the severing of signs from meaning.
And then your related comments, reprise shock doctrine by suggesting that that severance happens through some kind of shock to the political or personal system.
So I have all of these notes that I use to prepare for this, but I think if there's a single thesis that I would pull out, it's connected to this idea.
You basically argue that the horrors of rising fascism and climate denial are connected to a primal fracture Between the troubled souls that we are and the gentle souls that we imagine ourselves to be.
And that fracture is exacerbated when our discourse combines with our capitalism to create these alternate realities.
Is that a fair big picture?
Yeah, I think that what you're getting at around the severing of words from anything we could You know, to describe his meaning in the sense of being attached to action, being attached to, you know, there being any kind of causality between the postures we adopt with our words, right?
And what we do as members of communities, societies, that's the severing, right?
And I did notice that because that's what troubles me about our moment.
I think we're like swimming in this sea of Of language, and what makes it feel vertiginous in part is that we don't know who we can trust, but part of why we don't know we can trust it is because we don't necessarily see a relationship between these very kind of radical positions that people take and any change in the world, right?
So, I'm not giving up on words, I'm not giving up on language, but I do think there needs to be a kind of suturing back together of words with Some causality around action.
And I also think that it makes a lot of sense that people are fleeing into those fantasy worlds, or what I'm calling the mirror world, because it's very hard to be alive to our moment in history.
It is a very, very heavy moment.
And very few public intellectuals and artists are Really trying to grapple with it, or able to grapple with it.
I mean, it's kind of like a hyper object of hyper objects, to use Timothy Morton's phrase, for something that is just too sprawling, complex, omnipresent for our brains to wrap themselves around, right?
So we've got surging fascism, we've got climate breakdown, mass extinction, Just like barbaric cruelty on our borders, endless wars, I mean all of it, right?
And we don't have a political class with any kind of plan, anything resembling meeting this moment, right?
So to me it's not surprising that a That a startling number of our fellow humans are just kind of choosing to live in fantasy and just say, like, COVID's not real.
Climate change isn't real.
Nothing is real.
Joe Biden's an actor in a mask.
You know, that is like, I think, first and foremost, conspiracies are a way Of avoiding reality, right?
And that is why they're so appealing to elite actors and people who serve the interests of billionaires like Steve Bannon and Tucker Carlson.
Like, I don't think they believe what they say.
I think that this is, it is very, very useful for people not to believe that reality is real.
And this is, you know, they didn't invent this, you know, Karl Rove talked about the truth-based community or whatever, the fact-based community.
So, But I guess the only thing I would add to that is that I don't think conspiracy is the only way to avoid reality.
I think we all do it.
And, you know, coming back to the being complicit in it, I mean, I think, I think I probably watch too much streaming television, which is my way of, you know, severing from reality and probably listening to too many podcasts is a way of severing from reality.
Well, to that point, you know, we should get this out of the way.
You do kindly reference our podcast.
And QAnon Anonymous is like a kind of background music for, you know, research on your book.
So that's great.
I hope it was of some help.
You say that the projects are, you know, editing averse and, you know, I have to say that, yeah, we're busted on that.
We could have benefited from a good Guardian editor.
But more importantly, and this is about the complicity that we're starting to turn around, I think it's the most important part of the book for me, What do you think the 101 is on what we and other left-leaning detectives of COVID conspiracy theories could have done a better job on?
I appreciate that you didn't take that too personally.
No, not at all.
It was hilarious.
I was leaning into my persona as a destabilized narrator at the beginning of this book, which, you know, the book is a journey from a highly destabilized state to something resembling stability.
I really did call Keo McClear, if you must know, that's who it was, my dear friend Keo McClear, one day, and whimper into her voicemail that I felt closer to the hosts of Conspiratuality than to her.
So I didn't mind the editing aversion because, you know, this parasocial relationship was much needed company on this journey, and also like a really important counterweight to listening to Steve Bannon, who Who is much more editing averse than you.
He puts out a conspirituality verse worth of content every single day.
I think that What we all need to do better at, to come back to your question, is ask ourselves, yes, we need to pick it apart, right?
And we need to understand how it's working.
You know, what are the ploys, slow it down, unpack it.
But I don't think that's enough.
I also think we can't look at how fast this sphere is growing without Being very curious slash concerned about the needs that it's tapping into and why these are the people who are filling it and not other people, right?
You know, politics hates a vacuum.
I've said it many times and, and, and it will be filled.
So why, why, You know, and this is where the book is, you know, self-critical of the left generally, is like, why were so many of these ideas available to be picked up and twisted in the mirror world, right?
When I listen to Bannon, you know, he does these audio collages sometimes, and I'm sure you've heard them, where it's just like a bunch of mainstream, you know, corporate news shows going, brought to you by Pfizer, brought to you by Moderna, brought to you, you know, and It's kind of like media literacy 101.
It doesn't sound all that different from the teachings of the ultra globalization movement in the, you know, late 90s, early aughts, where we were like mapping who owns which media outlets and so on.
And it was, you know, following the money, you know, and so on.
But I would say that a lot of us On the left have gotten too far away from following the money and doing kind of muckraking investigative journalism of that type.
And that leaves the door wide open to the grifters of the world to come in and capitalize on it.
And we see that with Bannon, we see it with RFK Jr.
I guess the other thing is that, and this is, you know, I don't think I've necessarily paid enough attention to it.
It's one thing to look at the leaders, right, which is what you do and to some extent I'm doing with my doppelganger, right.
She is a true star in this world, my doppelganger.
She's on, you know, some weeks she's on Bannon every single day.
We can analyze their grift, right, and analyze, you know, what equation is driving them.
But I think we also have to pay attention to the millions of people who are not making money from listening to them and really believe them.
Like, I don't know if there are millions of them who believe them, but a lot of them sincerely believe it.
And that's troubling on a bunch of different levels.
Some I've already discussed around like, why are Why aren't more credible, sincere people speaking to a sense of distrust of the elites?
That is fair, right?
But also, I think because this world engages in such apocalyptic and violent discourse, the likelihood that people will take this to its logical conclusion and commit acts of real world violence, which of course is already happening.
You began to mention your doppelganger, Naomi Wolf, and I thought that maybe we could go through a list of the doubles that you write about and maybe do like a lightning round where I name the doppelganger and then you give the elevator pitch and maybe I'll ask a follow-up.
Does that sound good?
Sure.
Okay, so you are crudely, absurdly, and very unfairly mistaken for Naomi Wolf over and over again for years.
What do you want me to do?
Stick a fact!
It's a fact!
Welcome to my mentions!
But the book is not really about her, is it?
No, I mean, the book is the book.
She is the white rabbit, I would say.
And it is not about the white rabbit.
It's about it's about the rabbit hole.
It's about it's about so much more interesting figures.
I found when I followed her, followed her down the rabbit hole.
But also.
You know, another way that I see her is because we are in this hyperobject of hyperobjects moment, right?
Doppelgangers are helpful because they provide a narrow aperture.
They're kind of like those, you know, those weird contraptions when there's a solar eclipse, you know, and you can't look at the sun directly because it'll fry your eyeballs.
Well, And so then you have these things where there's like a pinhole aperture and it reflects it onto another surface and then you can look at the solar eclipse?
Right.
So one of the things I did in trying to understand, I'm not doing a lightning round at all, but one of the things I did to try to make sense of my identity confusion is read a lot of novels about doppelgangers, you know, back to Dostoevsky and Edgar Allen Poe and obviously Philip Roth, you know, Ursula Le Guin.
There's so many great books about doppelgangers and also watch the doppelganger movies.
And one of the things that becomes clear is that this is a figure that recurs in the history of film and literature with great consistency, never disappears, back to ancient mythology, but it does ebb and flow.
And the moments when it really flows, the moments when there seem to be doppelgangers everywhere, are moments that are really scary.
And we're looking for something that will kind of shrink the world into something really hard, into a figure that our brains can understand.
So doubles emerge because they help us understand something really frightening.
And so Otto Rank wrote the first major theoretical work about doppelgangers in the first year of the First World War in 1914.
And when that came out in translation, his translator speculated that maybe there's a reason for that.
Like, maybe doppelgangers help us understand You know, unfathomable acts, right?
Because they tap into these repressed selves and repressed desires.
Then you have Chaplin with The Great Dictator in 1940, making this incredible anti-fascist film.
Doubles himself, right?
He's both the Jewish barber and he, nobody accused him of doing Jew face, by the way.
He's both the Jewish barber and he's the Hitler-esque fuhrer.
So, that is also what she is to me.
She's the narrow aperture to understand the wildness of now, if that makes sense.
She shrinks it down to a size that I can wrap my mind around.
Well, she does that on a personal level, but then she also does it structurally and ideologically, especially when she teams up with somebody like Steve Bannon, because you find that they begin to construct a mirror world version of The Shock Doctrine, which must have really blown your mind.
It did.
I mean, the funniest thing that happens to me around that is...
You know, often people will scream at me about how I should read my own books because, you know, we are in the middle of the biggest shock doctrine of all time, which is, of course, the fact that we we have health officials who treated a pandemic like a pandemic and and, you know, did their best to try to save lives and didn't do enough because millions of people died.
So, yeah, it was a very weird phenomenon.
I don't know what to it's truly uncanny, you know, Freud described the uncanny as that species of frightening that is frightening because of its familiarity, right?
So there's something very weird to hear somebody named Naomi say something that sounds a little bit like the shock doctrine, but with all the facts and evidence removed, and feed the thought puree to Tucker Carlson, who nods vehemently.
That's kind of an out of body experience.
I don't think it's conscious mimicry.
This is something I want to say.
I am not saying that she's like stealing my ideas on purpose or anything like that.
It's just, it just happened.
What can I say?
And you know, this is what happens when you put ideas out in the world and, and people pick them up.
And I'm not saying I'm the first person who's ever written about states of emergency being exploited.
But yeah, it's been weird.
There is maybe a little bit more of a conscious mimicry going on with somebody like Steve Bannon in your description of how he mimics leftist empathy, however.
And so maybe you can talk a little bit about that.
Yeah, absolutely.
I do think Bannon is very skilled and conscious.
In the ways he, he looks at the issues that, in particular, the Democratic Party are, he looks at the discontent, right?
The people being left behind, the people who don't feel represented, because he is first and foremost, a political strategist, right?
He has, I think his main goal is, as he said, you know, taking power for 100 years.
He says it over and over again on the podcast.
You know, I think he really enjoyed his time in the White House and he would like to get back there as soon as possible.
You know, and he spends a lot of time re-ingratiating himself to Donald Trump.
I also think he is an You know, as close as we have to a modern day fascist, I think he is making, you know, he's very open about the alliances he's making with people like Bolsonaro, Orban, Maloney.
He is an extremely dangerous character.
So I want to say that, first and foremost, his project is racist and xenophobic and misogynist, but he is skillful enough To find those issues that are going to get traction, in part because they used to traditionally be issues that the Democratic Party owned and then they later abandoned them.
We saw this in 2016 with free trade deals, right?
And the way he, as Trump's You know, main strategic advisor, I think, really helped Trump develop this line around, you know, we'll protect Medicare, we'll protect Social Security, we'll bring the jobs home, you know, we'll tear up those bad trade deals that de-industrialized your communities.
He was able to do this because the Democratic Party had promised in successive elections that they were going to do a lot of these things and didn't do it, right?
So what I see him doing with Wolf is, you know, he studies the maps and he knows that their biggest weakness is white women.
And that if they're going to get back into power for a hundred years, they have to do something about the women.
And he sees Wolf as he, one time he said, you're up there at my candidate for woman of the year.
You know, I describe her as his kind of mom in chief.
And there's a kind of a pivot happening with COVID where it starts off with kind of like angry moms, moms who are upset about remote schooling, they're upset about masks, they're upset about vaccines, and then it expands and you sort of introduce, you know, trans rights, anti-racist education, and then it all sort of You know, melds and merges into an agenda.
So that's what she represents to him.
But in terms of, you know, the mimicry that he engages in, you know, he co-ops this discourse that yeah, some of it, some of the anti-corporate discourse, anti-Big Pharma, anti-Big Tech, Could be something I've said, could be something Noam Chomsky said, you know, could be something on Democracy Now!, but it pivots.
It doesn't stay there.
Those aren't his real targets.
He's not trying to change any of that.
He just goes where there's energy, where there's some juice, and then he pivots to the real targets who are immigrants, you know, who are trans folks.
And the goal, of course, is power.
The goal is always power.
But the other mimicry that I think you're referring to has to do with affect, right?
Yeah.
Because I think those of us who don't watch or listen to Steve Bannon with regularity, and I understand that decision, we probably only see him when he's being dragged away in handcuffs, looking really mad, or some clip on Media Matters saying, well, put their heads on spikes, right?
That's the Bannon we know.
Whereas you know the Bannon that you're listening to at 11 o'clock at night while you're doing yoga, trying to like wind down for sleep, and then Avi comes in and says, Really?
And, and yeah, I felt that scene.
Oh my god, it's so I'm such a bad yoga person.
I mean, I don't know if you're going to tell, Matthew, that we know each other from the Toronto yoga scene back in the day.
Back in the day?
Well, why not?
Yeah.
I've always been just a terrible yogi, so I will like listen to podcasts that are enraging while I'm in pigeon pose because I just can't stop multitasking.
I think that's fantastic, actually.
You're toxing and detoxing at the same time.
Thank you, I appreciate that.
But what I will say is that it passes the time.
Okay.
And that what you realize when you are a longitudinal listener, as opposed to just getting like the snippets online, is that there is this other side to him that is not that ragey Bannon, that actually performs inclusion, kindness.
He really is good at He's creating a community around his podcast.
He calls them the War Room Posse.
He's very good at flattering his listeners.
He's really good at giving them things to do, right?
And, you know, it's the take over your school board, take over the local Republican chapter.
And he's really good at, you know, it's called the war room for a reason, right?
It's the idea is that you're not listening to a podcast, you're eavesdropping on a strategy session between the general and his busy lieutenants who are dropping in to report on all of these various front lines.
And so it does do something that I think I hesitate to say we could learn from because I think he's learned from us and then we forgot a bunch of it.
You know, we also should be giving people things to do.
We also should be doing grassroots organizing.
And we also should be nicer to each other, frankly.
Agreed.
My radical position for the day.
Yeah.
Be nice!
One of the hardest things for us, I think, all to swallow about conspiracy theories is that they make sense a lot of the time, not only in terms of their fantasy potential and the potential for emotional relief, but because they are often derived from some true thing.
The shock doctrine politics, There's always a kernel of something, right, that they're building on.
pharmaceutical corruption.
You write, I found this very powerful, that the conspiracy theory gets the feelings right,
but the facts wrong.
So I'm wondering if you can just say a little bit more about that.
There's always a kernel of something, right, that they're building on.
And I think this is something I've heard you guys talk about on the podcast, right,
around like, we often feel that our doctors don't have time for us.
Our doctors often feel the same way, you know?
They're frustrated that they're locked within a system that is, you know, giving them seven minutes with each patient.
So then you go to see an alternative health practitioner who may well be a quack and may well be a grifter, but they seem to care about you and they have time for you and they have questions and you feel seen, right?
So yeah, I started noticing this with Wolf where she really started taking off in this world was when she started talking about vaccine passports, which was a stupid term that should never have been used for those QR codes that were scanned for a while to see whether folks had been vaccinated.
And she made a video saying that the vaccine passports equaled slavery forever.
Right.
And it got a lot of views, and it got picked up by different Fox News hosts and GB News, and suddenly she was all over the place saying that these were going to bring Chinese Communist Party social credit system to the United States, that the apps could listen to you, not only would the government know where you were, they would know who you were with, they would know what you were talking about, they would even somehow know when you were at home.
It's like, how are these QR codes going to be doing this, right?
And, you know, there was a lot of laughing at this stuff, you know, in Left Twitter.
Yeah.
And I remember that there was this joke that was that was swirling around at the time, which was, wait till they hear about cell phones, right?
Right.
Do you remember that joke?
Yeah.
In other words, all of that stuff is already happening.
Why are you so naive?
Right.
We don't need a disaster for surveillance capitalism to do what it does.
Right.
But the posture of the joke was, oh, this is no big deal.
You know what I mean?
And that is really dangerous because it actually is a big deal that our cell phones can track us.
And we somehow normalized surveillance capitalism.
So that's what I mean, is that there are all these issues that are being kind of normalized and kind of snarkily accepted in liberal circles, in knowingly, right?
And then it doesn't take much for a charlatan to come along and tap into all of those latent anxieties.
Well, I love how you finish that section, actually, because you say that actually they are quite aware of what cell phones do, and they're asking you, what are we going to do about it?
Right, and they're giving you something to do about it.
It's not real, it's send money, you know, it's subscribe, it's all the grifter things, you know, but at least it's something.
And the people who are posting, wait till they hear about cell phones, are not offering anything, right?
Except for being part of the knowing club or something like that, right?
And that isn't anything real.
So, you know, there was another point in the book where... Oh, wait, wait, wait, though, I have to just mark that because like, because the smugness isn't a real response.
It doesn't offer anything real.
That mirrors the unreality of Bannon offering cryptocurrency and survivalist supplements, right?
Like, so back across the same line, people are handing each other nothing.
Absolutely.
And there are things that we can do about surveillance capitalism.
Right.
You know, there are regulatory responses.
It's just that we haven't done them.
And, you know, I think We're in a really, really tough spot now, especially as the, you know, as we get closer to U.S.
presidential elections, because debate always shuts down, you know, in that year before, because it's like, oh, you're helping the enemy.
You're helping, you know, where where you can't sort of say simple things like Biden did promise to do something about this and very little has happened.
Could that have something to do with the huge amounts of donations from Silicon Valley to the Democratic Party?
And it's like, wait a minute, do I sound like RFK?
You know, I know, I know.
It's just that vertigo where reality starts to disintegrate.
And, you know, I think if there is a message in this book, it's like, we have to, we have to have our conviction again, you know, it's like, it's that Yates quote, like, the worst are full of passionate intensity, the best... I don't love that quote, because like, we're the best, but we lack all conviction.
But still, It's like, believe in yourselves, because when progressives don't have the strength of their convictions to actually fight for what we believe in, the grifters really do move in.
And there was another point, if I have time just to share, because I'm sure that you found it quite funny.
And I must say, my doppelganger is the gift that keeps on giving because like every interview, she just goes further and further and further.
And there was this one interview, I had already written the book, but I was like, whoa, did she really go there?
So she, it was a fairly obscure, I think, Christian podcast where she suddenly made the claim that she'd gone into New York City.
She hadn't been there for a long time.
She lives in upstate New York.
And she had and she had noticed that because of the very high vaccination rates, New Yorkers no longer seemed like human beings.
Hmm.
In fact, they didn't seem to have a smell anymore.
Uh huh.
And oh, interesting.
Yes.
That was the evidence was that they were it was like they had become like Stepford.
She often uses the sort of Stepford analogy.
But it was like, did she really just say that vaccinated people don't have sense, don't smell anymore, like that they've become And there was this whole thing about lipid nanoparticles and spike proteins blocking the wavelength that is love and this whole thing.
And so I had that in the book and it was just like a kind of a, whoa, she's really gone there sort of thing.
And then I shared the book with a writer who I really admire, China Mieville, who writes about mirror worlds in his science fiction.
And he said, you know, it's a little too easy what you're doing there because there is A kind of soullessness to the modern cities.
And they are tapping into that, you know, so I push myself to say, like, you know, they're getting the facts wrong and the feelings right again, because because there is a loneliness.
There is a loneliness.
There is a there is an isolation.
Yes, of course.
Vaccinated people smell.
We're still humans, et cetera.
Maybe she has had COVID and, you know, her her her smelling was impacted.
Right.
An obvious point.
Yeah.
But still, there's something there.
And just the immediate reaction to just mock it, I think, doesn't get at why this is getting the traction it's getting.
Do you think that's too much?
I don't think it's too much at all.
And I think it relates to what we see in the pseudo-working man's ballad from Oliver Anthony.
Where it seems to look like this cry from the downtrodden, and yet it's actually punching down, it's making fun of fat people on government assistance, and, you know, it's serving all of the wrong ideas, and there's no sort of service or even understanding of what solidarity would be like.
Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.
And at the same time, he is also describing a kind of immiseration that can't be ignored.
And whatever Wolf is seeing as she walks around the soulless, you know, landscape that she's entered into, yeah, it can't entirely be dismissed.
Like, she's seeing something real, in other words.
Mirror world or no mirror world, she's reporting something.
And she's tapping into something that is maybe not being spoken to by, you know,
figures on the left and, yeah. So that interests me. You know, and I,
You know, when I heard that song, I guess I had a similar feeling, right?
Like, of course, what you're saying is true.
It's punching down and so on.
But it recalls so strongly the folk music Mm-hmm.
I told you I had hippie parents.
I grew up with this music, like the true protest songs, the union organizing songs, the ballads of the dispossessed.
And when I heard it, I thought it did make me It did make me think that we need more good protest music on the left, you know?
It did make me think, oh, just, oh, that guy is making fun of fat people, yes.
It made me think we've got to do better.
Yeah.
Because if we don't, then that is where the energy goes, right?
And Marjorie Greene will pick it up and all the things that have happened.
Does it concern you that Steve Bannon and other neo-fascists are almost defined by not being interested in this kind of self-examination.
Are we at a disadvantage when we share or overshare our self-doubt?
You know, I think we are at a disadvantage for a lot of different reasons, and I don't think being honest about I think this is self-critical.
You know, I'm saying I believe in our ideas and I want us to believe in them more, you know, but I want to be self-critical about behaviors that undercut Shared goals.
I want to be honest about what hasn't worked.
And I think that there is a powerful left tradition of, you know, when we are in moments where we clearly have failed to capitalize, if you pardon the term, on moments of incredible mobilization, You know, whether it's the student climate strikes, where you had millions of people around the world in the streets in 2019, or the racial justice reckonings in 2020, nobody I know on the left is happy with where we are at.
And if we can't stop and say, what are we doing wrong?
What can we do better?
We are not, we're just going to keep repeating And I think there's a rich left tradition of rigorous self-criticism that I think, frankly, we've lost.
I'm thinking of Stuart Hall in the Thatcher years.
We need to be able to do that.
And I think it's part of the kind of amnesiac culture of an always forward looking, you know, North American capitalism that we're not allowed to look back and reassess.
We just have to just try it again, fail better, you know.
But we're not going to fail better if we don't admit why we failed.
I agree.
I'm not self-doubting, Matthew.
I think you can be self-critical without sort of saying, oh, you know, we were all wrong.
Or, you know, we should treat each other better.
You know, we should be more strategic.
-♪ -♪ Yeah.
With this catalog of doubles, which is quite terrifying, you don't stop with a description of how conspiracy
theories mirror and distort real conspiracies.
You also point at a kind of psychoanalytic view of why this happens.
You suggest that the doppelganger is always showing us a truth about ourselves that we'd rather not face.
And this takes many forms.
You give numerous examples.
It's throughout the book, but it reaches one of many peaks in your exploration of psychological projection and displacement at a cultural level involving some recently exposed shame.
And you bring this into burning focus by citing Julian Brave Noisecat, a writer and colleague of yours from the climate justice movement.
They write, I'm struck by the similarity of right-wing conspiracy theories to actual policies towards Indigenous peoples.
Replacement theory is alighted with manifest destiny, QAnon or mass institutionalized child abuse, is similar to boarding and residential schools.
Plandemic, we might equate with smallpox, alcohol, bioterrorism.
They write, it's also Freudian.
The fear that it will happen to them stems from an implicit admission that they did it to others.
As though the black, brown, and indigenous downtrodden are just as hateful as they are, as they are, and are going to turn around and do to them what they did to us.
And I just found that extraordinary, and I was wondering what the penny drop moment for you with this particular passage was.
Yeah.
Yeah, it is an extraordinary passage.
And Julian is an extraordinary writer.
Folks should look him up if they're not familiar with him.
He's done some writing for The New Yorker.
He's doing film right now.
I think, you know, you and I both live in Canada.
And I think most of your listeners are probably in the States and might
be unaware of what was going on in the spring and summer of 2021 in terms of a national reckoning with the violence
genocide of the residential school system in Canada.
People probably remember that there was a news story about hundreds of unmarked graves being confirmed at a residential school in Kamloops, which is in the interior of British Columbia, currently on fire.
And it was really a kind of a layering with the racial justice Reckonings and uprisings that followed the murder of George Floyd the summer earlier, which also provoked some uncomfortable reckonings for white people and settlers on these lands.
And then here in Canada, it continued, right?
And It was very, you know, I thought it was harrowing.
It was also inspiring.
So it was kind of extraordinary in British Columbia, where I live.
One of the more extraordinary things that happened is that Canada Day was cancelled in a lot of cities, which As far as I know, it never happened before.
Victoria, the capital of British Columbia, pretty colonial place.
Like British Columbia, Victoria.
And after the unmarked graves were identified in Kamloops, that was May, Canada Day is July 1st, they said that this was going to be a day of mourning and reflection.
Right?
Where I live on the Sunshine Coast, Canada Day, there wasn't a single Canadian flag to be found.
It was just a sea of orange T-shirts, which are the shirts worn in solidarity with First Nations who are mourning the loss of those children.
And the shirts say, Every Child Matter.
So I think that the moment, the pin drop, the penny drop moment for me was in September.
And I remember because I wrote to you, Matthew, I DM'd you to tell you that there had been a protest in Sechelt across from the SheShot band.
Outside the local hospital.
And this is a small community, but it was the largest protest in our history.
And it was the big anti-vax medical freedom.
And it was because the hospitals had introduced vaccine mandates for their staff.
And they were blocking ambulances.
They were doing all kinds of things.
But one thing that they did, That sort of stopped me dead in my tracks was they sang the Women's Warrior song.
So they appropriated the song.
And there was all of this kind of cultural appropriation going on.
And so, yeah, when I read what Julian wrote, I think, and I also quoted Jesse Wente, who's a wonderful algebra writer and film critic.
You know, who also wrote about, there was a kind of a toxic amnesia going on, that these national mythologies were being questioned, and we were being forced, Canadians, settler Canadians, were being asked to reckon with a truer story of how our nations came to be.
And, you know, it was challenging a lot of national pride.
But it was, I think, starting to get us to somewhere truer and more stable.
And then?
And then comes the convoy, just a few months later, right?
Yeah.
And it is just a sea of Canadian flags, right?
And one MP described it as Canada Day times a thousand.
And that sort of mirroring and co-opting Just the proximity of these events, right, one after another and the way Indigenous songs and, you know, at the convoy there was a tipi and peace, I mean there was all kinds of things going on.
That just made it very clear that these were not separate events.
They were reacting, even if it was subconscious, as Julian said.
It may be Freudian, but there's something subconscious going on.
And then you have all the anti-maskers saying, I can't breathe.
Do they understand what they're saying?
I'm not sure they do.
Well, also in the spring, we're talking about the spring and summer, we're talking about forensic evidence from the earth of missing and murdered children.
And then the echo of that in the truckers convoy is hashtag save the children with all kinds of inflated trumped up statistics about you know the mole children or how many people have been trafficked and It's all very abstract.
It's like the status quo has to seize and really own the burbling beginning of some kind of reconciliation or realization for itself in order for it not to have an impact.
While simultaneously denying, engaging in genocide denialism to the extent that there are actually people who showed up in Kamloops with shovels to say that they were there to do their own examination.
I mean, the most violent genocide denialism.
But yeah, I mean, I don't know if this survived, but originally one of my chapter subheads was, you know, I too am a victim, the biggest victim, Because it's just this kind of smorgasbord of, you know, the greatest crimes in history.
Like, you know, it is the Holocaust, it is Jim Crow, it is slavery, it is the indigenous genocide.
I mean, it's just claiming absolutely every one of these.
But what is it?
It's the vaccines?
It's masks?
I mean, just the absurdity of it.
But I think the appropriation is telling us something very important.
Winding down here, I wanted to finish up with a game that you might hate, which is... That's awesome!
Which is, who said it?
Naomi Klein or a mirror world influencer?
Okay, you ready?
Every nation has a darker side, and the easiest thing that a politician can do is to appeal to our hatred, our anger, our bigotry and greed, our xenophobia, and all the alchemies of demagoguery.
I have to say, whether I said it or somebody else said it, do I have to know who said it?
You don't have to know who said it.
I didn't say it.
You didn't say it, okay.
Sounds like you could have, or no?
I didn't set this up very well.
This is not a very good game.
Yeah, no.
I could have said it except for certain phrases that I stay away from.
Right.
I would have said shadow side.
Right, exactly.
Yeah, yeah.
Okay, all right.
Now here's this one, one more.
A dark mirror shows features one would rather not see.
You gaze at the repulsive visage in the picture frame, the caricature of everything despicable, only to realize with dawning horror that you are looking not at a portrait, but at a mirror.
This is sort of like a remix of like the portrait picture of Dorian Gray here, I guess.
Yeah.
But no, I didn't write that.
But I do believe... I mean, you know, when I went looking at my doppelganger, I did have some wince-mirror moments.
Yeah, I mean, these are statements from R.F.K.
Jr.
and Charles Eisenstein.
And I'm bringing them up because your incredible book is going to enter a discourse in which it's evidence-based discoveries.
can be mimicked, may already be being mimicked by those with opposite or incoherent agendas.
And so, you know, this raised two related questions for me.
When you emphasize the need for self-examination through this book, Some people might find it hard to separate this out from the self-work message that has been so, you know, difficult or sometimes unhelpful in neoliberal wellness discourse.
So how will your readers tell the difference?
Well, it's definitely not an individual self-help book.
Yeah.
You know, I think that the through line of the doppelganger of the double and the different ways that I use this, the narrow aperture of that to look at a variety of issues, the through line is the way we double We put so much on the self, right?
That we believe that the only way we can respond to these huge collective problems is by personal branding or turning our children into extensions of ourselves, you know, that are going to improve our status or perfecting our bodies, you know, through wellness.
You know, as I say in the book, like all of these are ways of the self blotting out the sun, you know?
And in the end, what I take away from my doppelganger experience is that I should stop taking myself less seriously.
I mean, that's why I let myself have fun writing this book.
Like, there's a certain freedom in being a person who has Kind of carry like at a certain points in my career sort of felt like I had to carry the weight of the left on my shoulders and and and had to be so so very careful in my tone um and and and felt kind of surveilled to just be like screw it you know who cares about me um because and doppelgangers do that you know you can guard yourself as as tightly as you can but if there's another person out there
who a huge number of people think is you, and they're doing all kinds of wild, off-brand things,
then all of the things you have done to protect your identity
are entirely futile.
So you may as well just kind of do something with other people,
you know, and that is the message, yeah.
Yeah, that's one of the things that I love the most about the destabilization description that you begin with.
That you're confused with this person for so long that you are eventually liberated to go on a kind of retreat.
And that the persona that you've created through this career is now not something that you can actually spend time defending.
And that leaves you free to really go into this forest.
But also, like I said, I think doppelgangers are ways to look at a hyperobject.
They're ways to look at things that are unfathomably hard to look at.
But I don't think we can look at them alone.
I'm not Robin D'Angelo.
I'm not here to help you You know, just confront your inner demons.
You know, I'm saying what Walter Benjamin said, that barbarism is the flip side of every project of civilization.
And we can only look at something like that together.
We must look, but we can only do it together.
It is collective work, like Mariam Kaba says, everything worth doing is done with other people.
And so, I don't think that the book really does reinforce those messages.
I hope it subverts them, those messages of just like, improve yourself, you are the problem, look in the mirror.
That's not my message.
When your readers turn the last page over, what, in real life actions, do you think they'll be able to take to break free?
Like, how will they touch the ground?
So, you know, as I said, I think a lot of this comes down to how much we are placing on the self, you know, we as in, not you and me individually, but our society, that we, that ourselves are our You know, in the absence of jobs, they are income, you know, our branded selves, our retirement plans, our fortresses in a warming world.
It's too much.
And I don't think it should come as any surprise that a lot of selves seem to be cracking and breaking under the weight of that.
I think we break free when we get ourselves into proper perspective, right?
I'm not arguing for ego death, I don't think that that's possible, but I think that we can get the relative size and importance of ourselves into a better perspective and we can organize in our communities and in our workplaces and we can Get active in our union if we're lucky enough to have one, or we can form one if that's possible, or we can join the debt collective, or a tenancy.
I mean, there's all kinds of ways to organize and there are all these interesting, unconventional, new organizing Configurations that are responding to the atomization of life, right, that we don't all, you know, most of us don't work in big factories anymore, where you can just kind of form a union.
But we do live somewhere.
And, and, you know, a lot of us have debt.
And, you know, there are things that we there, there are ways that we can organize in these unconventional ways.
So yeah, so the other Naomi is still in there, as you can see, Matthew, like I'm not all gone.
I'm still just like a boring leftist telling people to organize.
Well, that's where we started.
I mean, I suggested that you had rebranded, kind of tongue-in-cheek, but I think you're right.
I don't think that you really have.
I don't love the idea of being of brand, as I think you know.
I realize it's a contradiction.
We're all trying to function in a system that we didn't build.
I'm trying to be true to my beliefs.
Yeah, it's more how I would put it.
And not give up.
Because you know what?
You don't know.
This is the one thing I would say, Matthew, is like, the reason why I'm not a doomer, even though I can see how bleak things are right now, is that when you've been a leftist for as long as I have, and it's been a good long time now, you have the humility to know that there are all kinds of twists and turns that you couldn't have seen coming, right?
Like when I wrote, This Changes Everything, I didn't know about Greta.
I don't know how old she was at the time.
Seven?
Or that the Green New Deal would be suddenly on the agenda and on the tip of everyone's tongue.
So when you get surprised by history a few times, and I have been a few times, you know that all you can do is just Be ready, have your community, have your principles, what you believe, what you're fighting for, in as good shape as you can.
You know, to quote Milton Friedman, for when the politically inevitable becomes politically possible.
Do you want to end this interview quoting Milton Friedman?
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
Against him.
Against himself.
Yes.
Yeah.
You have to be ready.
Thank you, Naomi.
Thank you so much.
Thank you.
It was a real pleasure, Matthew.
Appreciate all your work.
Say hi to the other guys for me.
I will.
Thank you.
Thanks for joining us for another episode of Conspiratuality.
Join us next Thursday here on The Main Field when Mike Rothschild returns to discuss his excellently titled new book, Jewish Space Lasers.
