Ezra Klein: The author Naomi Klein is probably best known for her scathing critiques of corporate power in books like No Logo, The Shock Doctrine, and This Changes Everything. But in 2023, she published a pretty different kind of book. During the pandemic, Klein noticed how much she was being confused online with a different Naomi. Naomi Wolf, who in the '90s was known as a feminist author and journalist and Al Gore adviser, but who had in the co era become one of the most prominent right-wing conspiracists. Mass murder has not just taken place, it's still taking place, disabling people into the future, sterilizing the the next generation.

Ezra Klein: That experience and the interest in Wolf that it created for Klein became the foundation of Doppelganger, a trip into the mirror world. This is a hard to summarize book in a way. Books I really like often are. Uh it could only have been written by one person at one moment in their life. But what Klein was interested in was the ways of the pandemic was scrambling traditional political coordinates. Creating a political coalition that didn't seem, at least by the logic that most people understood, of politics like it could continue to exist. How could somebody like Naomi Wolf, a pro-choice feminist, become political allies with Steve Bannon? How could RFK Jr., the founder of Riverkeepers and attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council become a core part of the MAGA coalition.

Ezra Klein: So Klein began following Wolf, her doppelganger, into this mirror world of the new MAGA right. She began to sense its rules and its concerns and its power and the way it was seducing people, its allure. She saw it a lot more clearly than most liberals and leftists did because at least in 2023, if you weren't choosing to follow it, very easy to miss it. And even easier if you're an institutionally minded liberal leftist to convince yourself that it didn't matter, that it didn't have power. But now that world, the mirror world, it's our world. Now its leaders are our leaders. So I want to have Klein on to talk about her book and about what she's observed over the first year of the Trump administration as that new coalition has tried to hold together while governing. Klein of course is a columnist for the Guardian and a professor of geography at the University of British Columbia. And she's a forthcoming book co-authored with Astra Taylor called End Times Fascism and the Fight for the Living World. And I want to note we recorded this before the war with Iran. As always, my email, EzraKleinshownyTimes.com.

Ezra Klein: Naomi Klein, welcome to the show.

Naomi Klein: Thank you.

Ezra Klein: So, your book revolves around two concepts, doppelgangers and mirror worlds. And I thought maybe good to start by just defining them.

Naomi Klein: Sure. Well, so a doppelganger, um, it's a it's a German word that means like literally translated like a a double goer or a double walker. Um, and it's the idea that out there somewhere um, you could bump into somebody who looks just like you um, and isn't you. And it's that sort of um that that that uncanny vertigo um that that addresses the the strangeness of that which is most familiar, which is yourself. Um, mirror world is a term I use um to describe the relationship between the sort of liberal left world and the kind of far-right world and the ways in which when people are ejected from our world, they end up in a world that is sort of the ex exact mirror of of where we live in in sort of like replica social media platforms. the same but different kind of doppelgangers, doppelganger publishing worlds, doppelganger narratives of the narratives that we tell ourselves. And um I was trying to uh find language for a discomfort I I had in myself in noticing the ways in which we'd become incredibly reactive in the communities in which I live where we were sort of defining ourselves against what was happening what they were doing over there as opposed to being guided by legible values and beliefs.

Ezra Klein: How did you get interested in the idea of the doppelganger?

Naomi Klein: A few different routes took me there. It was deep in the pandemic. Um, and I was feeling kind of speechless, like I just didn't want to write the same kind of thing that I have written over and over again. I think I was politically sad. And I realized that for the first time in my life, I had time to kind of experiment with writing in a way that I haven't had time in my adult life. Um so I started working with a writing teacher and was just sort of playing with form and in the back like in the background I was having this strange experience where um in this time when we were all being represented exclusively by our avatars in the digital sphere I started being confused on a massive scale with another non-fiction writer named Naomi Naomi Wolf and it sort of became the one of left Twitter's favorite jokes at the time and So every time I would like go online to get some simulation of the friendship and community that I missed years, you know, this was like sort of well into the second year of the pandemic. Um, what I would be confronted with was all these people sort of screaming at me about something that another Naomi had done. And at first I was very frustrated by this and I didn't think it was related to this writing work that I was doing. But then I realized that this destabilization of the self was a really interesting and fruitful mechanism to explore a bunch of ideas that I've been obsessed with, including the ways in which the idea of having a personal brand is basically destroying everything in our culture.

Naomi Klein: And I've been wanting to return to that theme, which was actually the subject of my first book, you know, that I wrote in the late 1990s and came out in 2000, No Logo. Um, I've been wanting to come back to it, but I couldn't find a way to to write about it that didn't feel sort of hectaring and lecturing and I didn't I wanted to write about it from inside. Like I wanted to write about it from like being implicated because I don't think people can hear the critique if they just feel like you're just lecturing them as if you are not in the same polluted waters of um, you know, self-performance and self-p protection that we're all swimming in. So I thought, wow, I have a branding crisis here on my hands. This is really funny. and also maybe interesting. So, it started as an essay and then it just grew.

Ezra Klein: Let's do a minute on No Logo because I think probably a lot of people listening haven't read that book because that book was a big deal. I mean, I I remember that book and it being kind of left cannon as I was growing up and becoming a writer. So, so what was the argument of of No Logo? What were you sensing then and what were you trying to pull up into visibility about the world?

Naomi Klein: It was, I think, first and foremost, an attempt to understand the rise of these multinational corporations that were more powerful than governments and a shift that was going on in politics. I was sort of doing an end run around governments and it was going directly for the multinationals, you know, whether Nike because of sweat shops in Indonesia, you know, or Shell because of oil spills in Nigeria. And it was it was um so as a young reporter I was following these stories and I was interested in that but I was also looking at another element which was the way that these multinationals were divesting themselves from the world of things um where they were all just declaring that they were no longer in the business of making products. They were they were selling a brand an idea. They were sort of transcending. And what that meant in practice was that they didn't need to own their factories. their factories were all outsourced. There were contracts and the real work of production was the production of image and that was affecting um youth culture. We were all being told that we should be our own brands.

Naomi Klein: Um, which didn't really make any sense in the 1990s cuz this was pre social media. It was pre pre iPhone. You know, it was clear like we had the in No Logo I wrote about the first um celebrities who were themselves lifestyle brands like Michael Jordan and Oprah. And this was like a new concept that that an individual could be a brand. But the idea that a non-famous person could be a brand made no sense to us because we didn't have marketing firms.

Ezra Klein: It it also feels to me like it's of a of a politics that has really weakened. I mean, I think of that era and Adbusters and you go back earlier in the 20th century and fear about what advertising is going to do to our minds is very present in the '60s and the '7s. And so this sort of anti-advertising, anti-branding, anti-consumer politics that was very very strong I feel like in the '90s feels pretty absent today.

Naomi Klein: Yeah. because because we really could be our own brands, right? So, you know, I think it's important to understand that there's a kind of a desperation in the fact that we have all embraced this. And this is why, you know, I was saying that I wanted to find a way to write about it that was from inside of it because I think we all feel really attacked if we point out that um, you know, it's why online everyone's constantly accusing each other of being performative, which I think is today's version of selling out, right? Um, but everybody knows that everybody's else is being performative as well. So, I think we have to find compassion, you know, in this discussion because people are just trying to pay the rent and it's not working. like it's not enough to pay the rent.

Ezra Klein: So, I want to bring in the back in the other character here, which is Naomi Wolf. Intellectually, politically, who is she?

Naomi Klein: Her sort of heyday was was um the 1990s with a breakthrough book called The Beauty Myth. It came out when I was uh an undergrad and it was a book about uh you know it had a thesis that young women um were being forced to add a third shift to the work of there's already like the the shift at work and then the shift at home. But on top of that there's a beauty shift. And so it was about how um women were being held back from advancing in um the workplace because they were having to put so much work into being beautiful.

发言人: Why has the conflict on the sexual battlefield suddenly come out into the open? And can the long fraud fears about date rape and harassment ever resolve themselves? Joining me now, bestselling author Naomi Wolf. Um, I think that men are in crisis because women are not sitting passively as the evil backlash hits us over the head where it's hard for us to understand the nature of our immense power. But I believe that since the Hill Thomas hearings, we've seen a kind of spontaneous uprising among women in this country that is shifting the balance of the power between the sexes.

Naomi Klein: She was the face of what was called at the time third-wave feminism. It's a controversial term, you know, whether it actually was a wave or not. Um, and you know, she wrote a bunch of bestselling books. wrote a book called Fire with Fire. Um she I think one of her high high low points was advising Al Gore's presidential uh campaign on how to reach women voters because she was very prominent feminist at the time. Um and yeah, so that's that's who she was and now she is someone quite different. She's one of these people. I mean, this is one of the reasons why I wanted to write about her because I think there's so many people, it really accelerated during the pandemic where we would sort of say, "Whatever hap, what happened to that person? Like, they used to be this and now they're something else or what happened to my uncle? Like, he's fallen down the rabbit hole and he has all these extreme views." So, at a certain point, Naomi Wolf, you know, really went, you know, just started posting a whole lot about different kinds of conspiracy claims. Won't call them theories. I think that does a disservice to theories.

发言人: Hi everyone, it's Naomi Wolf here at Daily Cloud and um I'm doing something that I uh have been promising for a while.

Naomi Klein: Um so you know it was everything from like taking pictures of clouds and claiming they were cloud seated.

发言人: I began to notice a very distinct pattern that um these emissions these trails would I'm not going to say be lame down because I don't know for sure what the motivation is. I've got some hypothesis, but they would clearly stay there, not dissipate, spread, and create cloud cover. Um, and block the sun

Naomi Klein: to uh claiming ISIS beheadings were crisis actors.

发言人: They're not yet independently verified. The only source for them early on at least was this very questionable site called Site Site which gets half a million dollars from the United States government a year and is run by these Islamophobe establishment types

Naomi Klein: like kind of um Alex Jones type of stuff. And then during COVID, she went all in on a range of COVID related conspiracies from the virus itself as a bioweapon. The market for the CO injections has kind of come and gone because people are aware now that it's a deadly and sterilizing injection, but the side effects live on

Naomi Klein: to the vaccine as a bioweapon to the vaccine verification apps or a Chinese communist plot to subdue the West. The vaccine passport platform is the same platform as a social credit system like in China that enslaves a billion people. So she um you know at a certain point during the pandemic she was on Steve Bannon's show almost like every day for a couple of weeks and she has become a really big star on the on the right. you described when you were defining mirror worlds, the the mirror world in in a way I found interesting, which is that it it exists partially for when you are ejected from one world into the other and you find many of the same concerns just somewhat perverted, distorted, warped. And I thought that word ejected was interesting because one of your thesis about Wolf is that there was a moment of ejection and disruption in who she was before that required her to reinvent herself even if just for psychological recovery. What was that moment?

Naomi Klein: Yeah. So the year year before the pandemic in 2019, she published a book called Outrages. Um, and she very famously made um a a a basic a foundational factual error uh in that book where she misinterpreted a phrase in the historical record. The the book dealt with um uh persecution of gay men in England. Um and she misunderstood the term death recorded um where she thought that it meant that they had been killed by the state. And so this was exposed live on the BBC.

发言人: Death recorded. I I was really surprised by this and I I I looked it up. Death recorded is the is what's in I think most of these cases that you've uh um you've identified as executions. It doesn't mean that he was executed. It was a category that was created in 1823 that allowed judges to abstain from pronouncing a sentence of death on any capital convict whom they considered to be a fit subject for pardon. I don't think any of the executions you've identified here actually happened.

Naomi Klein: Well, that's a really important thing to investigate. What is your what is your understanding of what death recorded means?

Naomi Klein: It became one of these moments of mass online ridicule. Um just public shaming. It's like I hate telling the story because it's like every writer's worst nightmare. Yeah. Um, and yeah, so you know, every time she something like this would happen to Wolf, I would, you know, people would say thoughts and prayers to Naomi Klein or like they would be sort of part of the joke that I would get blamed for it. So I would had a sort of front row seat on it. I saw and and it was really ugly. And I do think that that happens a lot with with the people who we ask that question of of like why did they change in the that way we'll often find some kind of public shaming um you know or something that they something really wrong that they did right like it's not just that we were mean to them. It's it's that they did something maybe unforgivable um and then got really shamed for it and then they were embraced in this in this other world where facts matter a lot less.

Ezra Klein: Well, well, this is where I want to follow you into the the other world as you follow her into the other world. And and you have a a line in the book I thought was a really sharp description of something. This is about what is going on after Wolf is banned from from Twitter for conspiracies. And you write, "This is the irony of liberal Twitter celebrating Wolf's seeming disappearance, at least until Musk welcomed her back. Since most liberals and leftists don't watch or listen to Bannon or the other shows where she wolf has become a regular, they thought she had evaporated as a cause for concern. RIP death recorded. This is a bit like kids who think the world disappears when they close their eyes. Tell me about that other world you walk into.

Naomi Klein: Well, first of all, I should say that world runs our world now, right? So this is a little bit, you know, I don't think that that we have the same questions about it now as we did then because we can't ignore it now, right? And I remember when the book first came out, I was interviewed and the interviewer asked me why I was giving these people attention and it was such an arrogant question like as if like we control all the attention and you know and and we were just blessing them with our attention by by looking at them and writing about them. And I really felt as I was listening to Vannon that I was watching a a a new political coalition cohhere. Um he was calling it MAGA plus at the time. This is you know 2021 2022. Um and you know I had seen Bannon in 2016 peel off part of the Democratic coalition particularly white unionized men um who were angry at the Democratic party over free trade deals and bring them over to Trump. And I was watching him do this with, you know, suburban white women who traditionally voted Democrat. And he understood that Wolf as, you know, he would wind up the introduction.

发言人: Okay. Our guest is Naomi Wolf. Naomi, you you came you started as a feminist, a huge writer, um, best-selling author, public intellectual, lionized by the left and the established order and the, you know, the the the conventional thinking. Uh, and now you're you're kind of a renegade and everyday a rebel.

Naomi Klein: She used to consult for Al Gore. She, you know, she consulted for Bill Clinton. And that was part of, you know, that was that was part of her appeal was that she could she that I think it was central to to to her appeal was that she could potentially deliver this constituency that Trump really was weak with. And I think Bannon understood that these sort of angry co moms were potential like potential um new a new part of his coalition the the plus one for MAGA and she was very important during the pandemic. There was a study that I think NPR commissioned to try to understand one particular piece of medical information that spread early on which had to do with this idea that vaccinated people shed particullet onto unvaccinated people and endangered their health and possibly made them infertile. And there was this whole thing about how, you know, women were bleeding between periods from being around vaccinated people. And you know, the women were making videos on Instagram saying that that they'd kicked their husbands out of their beds because they weren't going to sleep with vaccinated people anymore. I mean, things were going wild. And so there was this um sort of data study that was done to try to find the kind of ground zero for this particular piece of medical misinformation. And they found they traced it back to to a lot of it back to Naomi Walsh. She was a real vector for this piece of misinformation because she is associated with women's health and women's bodies. And then I started listening to all her talking to Tucker Carlson and talking to to Steve Bannon. And when I would mention to a friend like I heard this on Bannon like you know I was there were things that were happening that were making me very worried about elections. You know I was watching the whole show. Instead of saying like what like asking like what did you hear? They would say like why like why are you listening to that? Like why would you do that? Like almost like I had transgressed.

Ezra Klein: One thing I found so interesting about this book that I didn't expect when I opened it up is how much it is a book in the background about the practice of politics and certain kinds of political engagement. And something I felt came up again and again was in different ways liberals and the left became very powerful in institutions over the past 20 years. And you know this is before the mirror world basically took over our world but powerful in the media, powerful in academia. And so this uh powerful in government and so this idea that you could just shun people out right that that that would be an effective way of creating social change in politics took hold. And it wasn't a crazy idea. And there are ways it has worked in the past and and ways it it worked even then. But it it missed how much is happening outside the institutions and how the they had become their own institutions and networks and media structures and that kicking somebody out of your institutions meant you couldn't see them anymore but it didn't mean they were gone.

Ezra Klein: I feel like so much of this is just about social media and I know that it's sort of slightly hackneed but all of this is playing out on platforms right and I I even think that something like the mute button or the block button uh has a huge amount to answer for just in terms of it being almost habit forming like we get used to this idea like this person's annoying me I'm going to just press a button and make them disappear right and I think that that idea that this is how we relate to people spills offline as well

Naomi Klein: it created a tremendous space in which power could be built sort of in private with different rules and then I feel like it exploded into dominance after the election and you see how much it's became a a legible network that is now arguably the default network in in American life. I mean, this is the thing about doppelgangers. In doppelganger literature and film, the storyline, usually what happens is like you've got a protagonist and then somebody comes along who's a double of them. Um, and they're so good at performing you, like so much better at performing you that they eventually overtake you. So, at the end of at the end of Dustki's The Double is protagonist gets getting cartered away and sent to an asylum while the double just takes over. So, I think that's kind of happened in our culture is that the the the the doppelganger is doppelgangers at the wheel like the doppelganger won and they usually do um in most of these stories.

Ezra Klein: The one thing that I have kept thinking about and that I feel like your book gets at really well is the unnerving way the unnerving relationships between things that are really happening and things that we sort of pushed away or wanted to ignore is ridiculous. I think the one happening right now is Jeffrey Epstein, which I have found it disorienting how much it tracks the vibe of QAnon. Not every claim of QAnon, it's not, you know, John F. Kennedy Jr. is still alive somewhere and but you are dealing with a like a very powerful person with a incredibly powerful and broad elite network and child sex trafficking at the center of it. And for everybody who dismissed QAnon, which I think, you know, again, I don't believe in QAnon, but there it is eerie how there was this thing that was like a mirror world or QAnon was a mirror world version of Jeffrey Epstein or something. How have you thought about that?

Naomi Klein: I I'm really interested in in the work that conspiracy culture is playing like in in how it distracts from conspiracies that are real. And I never doubted that there was that that that there was a conspiracy that that that Epstein was involved in. That's been clear for a long time. You know, I say that in the book that is that the reason why people are being drawn to conspiracy culture is that we we all feel that this world is rigged against us. Um and power has concentrated and wealth has concentrated so much um over the past half century and the impunity that follows from that is so extreme. Like I think it's really important not to just dismiss it as a conspiracy theory just because it has the structure of QAnon. I think KQanon has the structure of it's sort of like it's it's why anti-semitism was called and is still called is the socialism of fools. It's it's sort of like it kind of explains how capitalism works except for it twisted and it's just a cabal of rich Jews. Um, but you know, we need stories to explain our reality and we need them and so do the super elites need them. Um, and you know, one of the things that the files do is is provide a window into the stories that elites are telling themselves to justify how much wealth they have, how much power they have, you know, and that brings us to their obsession with eugenics and this idea that they are sort of better stock than everybody else. That's a story that can explain why you have so much so much wealth and power. And you see Epstein talking about that quite a lot in the emails.

Ezra Klein: Yeah. Yeah. Um so I think it's inextricable from the fact that we live in a time where um you know if you're rich enough you think the rules don't apply to you. You know whether that's Elon Musk just sort of laughing when journalists ask him for any accountability and he used to send a poop emoji and now he sends an auto reply that says mainstream media lies. like it's just this defiant I don't have to answer anymore. I don't have to be be accountable to any rules. Trump embodies that. Um, and I think Epstein really embodied that for a lot of very powerful people, including people like Bill Gates who presented himself as, you know, the one of the more progressive um, caring billionaires, right? I think it seems to me that like Epstein was like the after after party for Davos, right? Where it's just like he was the guy who could who who could make it all happen. Um,

Ezra Klein: and it is clear to me that his impunity was an object of envy. the the way he lived.

Naomi Klein: Yeah.

Ezra Klein: That maybe they didn't all know that there was child sex trafficking at the center of his world, but the way in which he didn't play by the rules. He had this huge house. He had this island. He had this wealth. He had all these connections. He seemed to be completely living in this unabashed way was what made him an object of envy to other rich and powerful people

Naomi Klein: and and part of the attraction of Trump, right? I mean, Trump is that he's the 80s guy, right? Who always had the beautiful women around him um and never took part in any of that woke capitalism, quote unquote, you know? I mean, he never pretended to care about any of the things that these guys were publicly claiming that they cared about. Um, and now don't even bother claiming to care about, whether, you know, climate change or, you know, equity, diversity, and inclusion. And so, I think that, but I I see these things as really interrelated because I say the past 50 years because this is this is the sort of counterrevolution against the New Deal era, right? This is sort of what I've wrote about in the shock doctrine. This is the the revolution against regulation and and and it's the era of privatization and unmaking of the state and it really produces the oligarch class, right? So, it's important for the people who are the big winners in this to present themselves as a kind of a replacement for the for for the state, right?

Naomi Klein: And and that's where it's really interesting that that that Maxwell was central in launching the Clinton Global Initiative, for instance, because I think the Clinton Global Initiative was a place for many years when the Davos class got together and said, "We're going to fix it. We're going to fix I'll fix schools. You fix poverty, you know, um and you fix malaria and and we've got this. You don't really need governments anymore because we are so socially responsible, right? and we're going to we're going to use our wealth to uh to fix the world. But I think that what we what was actually happening is is that you know power is for using. Um and the whole point of becoming this rich is is to not have to play by these types of rules. And I think what what Trump has unlocked and what what Epstein always was, right, was you don't really have to play by the rules. Like here, come to the island and and and we'll actually do whatever we want. We're rich and we're keeping it and we're not going to pretend anymore and our workers can suck it and welcome to the new world.

Ezra Klein: What have you made of Steve Bannon's closeness to Jeffrey Epstein? So here here you have somebody who certainly presents himself as the populace, a person trying to break and destroy the elite conspiracies, but Bannon was very close to Epstein after functionally everything was known. There's this text message where Bannon sends Epstein a link to a Daily Beast story about Epstein's quote alleged sex ring and the information coming out about that. And Bannon sends this to Epstein

Ezra Klein: and Epste doesn't answer and a couple hours later Bannon's like, "So my guy's going uh to Israel. Can you meet with Aud Barack?" Right. They just like move right on. So here you have this guy who's like populist, you know, in in in the front stage and backstage is very I mean this is happening in 2019. This particular text message I'm talking about. How do you think about that?

Naomi Klein: Yeah. So I guess I should have made this clear earlier like I think Bannon is a terrible fraud. Um, and I think he performs being the voice of of the little guy and even the sort of way in which he, you know, took on Musk early in in this Trump administration. Um, and claims to be taking on like the tech oligarchs who are supposedly kind of polluting MAGA. You know, he has been in with his own tech oligarchs from the beginning like with the Mercers. Um, I like what I think about Bannon is that he is a strategist. I think he like all the things that we were talking about before. I think this is just about power. This is just about winning and he understands that how to build a coalition and he's strategic about that. I I think he platforms conspiracy theorists because he understands that it is very useful um for people to believe outlandish things in part because it distracts them in in very large part from the conspiracies that can be proved. And so I think that the bannon world is really in crisis right now because of the Epstein files. It's it's really interesting

Naomi Klein: kind of checking in on his show in this whole period because he seems to be largely ignoring it and flooding the zone with other conspiracies like you know the Muslim Brotherhood is trying to hijack the elections in this state and that state. I mean he's talking about everything but the biggest conspiracy in the world that he is himself, you know, centrally implicated in and implicated in ways that are really about rearranging the political map. I mean, he's interested in Epstein because he thinks Epstein can help fund um the populist international, which is weaving together these far-right often, you know, um fascist, openly fascist parties in Europe and Latin America with the United States and and you know, he he needs a funer for this. Um so, yeah, it's it's and so this is what we're seeing in these files is part of how the world that we're in right now is built. Um, and I mean this brings us to like what what is I don't know how you feel about the like is this fascism, is this not? Where are you falling on that?

Ezra Klein: I think it's pretty fascist.

Naomi Klein: Like if you want to call it neoascis, I'm fine with that, too. But I I don't I don't shy away from the

Ezra Klein: at some point the word doesn't have any meaning if we can't apply it to things in the modern world. I think sometimes you end up with words that people have decided are so beyond the pale, racist, fascist, etc. that they become people stop being willing to use them because it feels like you've moved outside of ordinary discourse.

Naomi Klein: But these words describe things.

Ezra Klein: Yeah.

Naomi Klein: And I don't think you can understand the aesthetic of Trumpism. I don't think you can understand some of its impulses without at least some connection to fascist movements of the 20th century which were, you know, everyone is different in its own way.

Ezra Klein: Exactly. Yeah.

Naomi Klein: But I mean they there's a reason they're all very interested in Schmidt.

Ezra Klein: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I think part of the hesitancy has to do with like really exceptionalizing um Hitler and that like it sounds like you're saying like if if he is fascist he is Hitler. Um and that's that's not what the term means. Um and there have been plenty of fascists who weren't Hitler. Um and you know history doesn't repeat on a loop. It it changes. It iterates. It compounds. Um, so but I the reason I ask if do you think it's fascist is is that you know fascism is a it's a pathology of injured power, right? Like I mean we like it it emerges in in in Italy and in Germany in the injuries of the of of the first world war, right? It's it's it's soldiers and generals and industrialists who who are hurt, right, by the sanctions, but but it's it's it's powerful people who are hurt, right? whereas like left revolutions are are are powerless people um who are hurt and it's these vertical coalitions that that get built with people you know who had sort of relative power and are losing power. Um, but the other but one of the things that we see in the Epstein files are these concerns about me too about accountabil like you know a lot of talk about me too people going to Epstein um because he is a sex criminal and and and they know that and they're asking him for advice about what to do about the fact that you know the movement is coming for them and and they might be held accountable. So if we are in a fascist moment right

Ezra Klein: then it is a counterrevolution like that we have to understand like what are elites revoling against like what what who hurt them what hurt them um and you know I think part of what they are revoling against is that there was starting to be some accountability like their impunity was there there there were a few chinks in the armor and some of that was women who were beginning to hold powerful men accountable Um, and so this unleashing of the far right is partly them protecting themselves.

Naomi Klein: Well, and nothing was more radicalizing, I think, to the techright CEO and venture class than the feeling that their corporations were being taken over by the staff.

Ezra Klein: Yeah. that I mean Mark Andre has has talked about this directly that the the sense that on any given day you might almost have a riot of your own employees and you had lost power.

Ezra Klein: You know the employee bases going feral. U you know there were cases in the you know in the in the Trump era there were companies multiple companies I know that felt like they were hours away from full-blown violent riots on their own campuses by their own employees. He's a bit of an exaggerator, I've noticed. Like he

Naomi Klein: Well, he's he's describing the way he things felt to him. And at the very

Ezra Klein: least said he was being terrorized by the Biden administration because they tried to regulate crypto

Naomi Klein: and then they just came after crypto absolutely tried to kill us. I mean, they just like ran this like incredible basically terror campaign to try to kill crypto and then they were ramping into a similar campaign to try to kill AI and and that's really when we knew that we had to really get involved in politics. This is related like the fact that Mark Andrean sees the most mild accountability as an existential attack. I mean the way he talks about you know basic regulation for crypto or AI as terror terror I think speaks to the fact that these are men who came up in the 1990s you know when I was writing no logo Mark Andre was on a throne on the cover of Time magazine a golden throne I believe um you know and he was I think 23. I think that may have gone to their head.

Naomi Klein: You know, I think that the kinds of depravity that that that that we see in the files is related to the it's dangerous to lift people up and and and treat them as gods and kings. And I think we did that as a culture just because people were rich. You know, the other place where we see pedophile rings is, you know, in in the Catholic Church. And you know, survivors talk about the kind of unique um horror of being abused by somebody who has God on their side, right? And you know, I I think that we all we did treat well we wealthy people as if they were gods for a while. And I think they're angry that they no longer get treated like gods. And that feels like being terrorized to Mark Andre. It's all relative, right? But this is why I think at the heart of this is impunity is a feeling of impunity. And we have to start holding people accountable. We're starting to see that. But not in the United States. And these, you know, these women who have come forward, I mean, they are heroes. They're absolute heroes. And this the solidarity that they show one another, the support that they give to one another, um, you know, up against Congress, uh, you know, up against the most powerful men in the world. Like, it's so moving to me. um and the you know women journalists who believed them when nobody else did. And this a beautiful story. I mean it's a horrible story but it's there's also there's beauty in it.

Ezra Klein: Let me try a thought on you because I know you're working with Astra Taylor on a book about fascism and I was thinking as you were talking about what kinds of injuries create fascist movements. there is the there's often an injury that unites in a certain way the kind of fascist elites you're talking about and at least portions of the masses because fascism is also a mass movement in many places at many times and it's often a loss of story. It's an injury to your story. So you're describing the way we told we told the tech titans a story about them.

Naomi Klein: Yes.

Ezra Klein: But what is the bottomup side of Trumpism is and is often the bottom-up side of fascism is the feeling that many people have, ordinary people at times of rapid change.

Naomi Klein: Yeah.

Ezra Klein: That they are losing the story. They're a part of the story of their own history and how that they are the good guys in history, not the certainly not a checkered history. the story of their nation and how great their nation is and and what its destiny is. And I mean, you're this is also a pandemic book and to some degree 2024 era Trumpism is a pandemic era phenomena. Uh you know, people are very very angry about all of a sudden being told that they're the bad guys for not getting vaccinated or not wearing a mask or this is a big part of what you're describing in there. And that was very very effectively weaponized inside this movement. because I know you're working on some of these issues. I'm curious how you think about that.

Naomi Klein: I mean, just to stay with the the pandemic thing for, you know, one more minute. This relates to the work that Astra and I are doing and what we're calling end times fascism, which is really about how there is a consciousness that we are in what the Pentagon once called the age of consequences, right? Like that the forecasted existential global crisis are now hitting, right? It's not just like this may happen. It's this is this is happening and co the fact that we experienced a global pandemic that shut down the world simultaneously was an extraordinary event right I think there was a period where we didn't want to look back at it and now we're less like whoa like that really did happen like New York shut down like you could walk through time square and I was in it and and

Naomi Klein: the I think that that shifted something in in our brains a lot of us including very powerful people who realize that actually the stuff's going to happen. Like it's it we're now in the in the age where where it happens. And so I think what we saw during during CO was that that presents us with a pretty stark choice about what kind of society we're going to have where we we will either have a have a much stronger state that takes care of people. And we saw a more robust social state during COVID. Not enough for me. But um you know we had governments pay people to stay home. You know we had periods where where there was eviction moratorum there. We um you know had free masks and and testing like kind of a taste of universal healthcare in the United States. A and there is another option and that option is screw them. Like like this is nature taking its course. This is callulling. this is you know some like survival of the fittest and I think a lot of that coming that diagonalism of that came together of people on the kind of new age well wellness world who are saying I have a powerful immune system I don't need your vaccines coming together with like the Steve Bannon world underneath it all was this like I'm comfortable if this is a cleansing if this is like the world correcting maybe we'll have fewer people and that'll be better for the environment that was one story but it really is a stark choice and so I think you when it comes to Silicon Valley and these sort of tech elites and and the moment that they're in, I don't I think even though they co was really good for them in just in terms of their bottom lines, I actually think that what freaked them out more than anything was the quiet quitting was people actually not needing the jobs as much and and losing that sort of boss worker power for a while or work and workers saying during a pandemic you better pay me more if you want me to risk my life. So I think that that choice of like either we're going to have a much more activist state and it's going to be regulating a lot more or we're going to embrace a world where we're okay with mass death and the genocide in Gaza happens and you know a lot of people showed that they could live with it.

Naomi Klein: I think that those two events, I think it was co in Gaza that produces the Trump moment and it really was about a fear of this sort of like this fork in the road moment and it's like either it's we're just going to harden our hearts and it's going to get a lot uglier or it's going to get a lot more activist in in terms of an activist state and more of a kind of a New Deal sort of state and they don't want that because that will regulate them. you used a term in there that I want to pick up on which is diagonalism.

Ezra Klein: What is diagonalism?

Naomi Klein: Well, diagonalism is a term um Quinn Lebidian and William Callison who are both scholars of um European history. They used that that term in a in an essay about the German um anti-lockdown movement early in the pandemic which is sort of a rough translation of a German word um which seems to be coming up called Kurdunkan which means like outside of the box thinking which is how these sort of wellness influencers and entrepreneurial kind of uh like not traditional right-wingers made alliance with right-wing parties. And so it just speaks to these kind of unlikely bedfellows like my doppelganger and Steve Bannon like people meeting a it's not it's kind of an alternative to the horseshoe theory I suppose because the horseshoe theory sort of assumes that it's like far left and far right but I I think a a more significant shift are sort of liberal wellness California types um who very focused on kind of bunkering their own bodies um making alliance with people who are bunkering their national borders

Ezra Klein: What's interesting to me about about this theory of diagonalism and and this goes back to to pick up on our fascism conversation to fascist movements that there does seem to me to be a sorting not just around religion. Reese's religious sorting in in politics but around a certain kind of spiritualism back to the landism which both I think substantively and aesthetically used to be at least associated with the left but RFK Jr. I think emerges as like a central figure in a realignment and it's something you're attentive to that you see happening around you uh in the book is I I guess the the role of spirituality and mysticism and a kind of sense of bodily integrity and wholeness playing into this. I think that's underplayed in its power. So, I'm curious how you've thought about it then and since

Naomi Klein: it it's true that the sort of organic green, you know, world is more associated with the left these days, but it's also true that there's a fascist lineage to it. Um and you know European fascists um you know in the 1920s and 30s were very interested in all kinds of you know new age health fads and but I think in our version of it it's it's really related to the kind of optimized self and and you know the way in which we can just protect ourselves in a world that in which we don't have very much control by purifying our bodies and um and and optimizing ourselves in every way and and and yeah, I mean I don't think it is very left. I think it's highly individual. I you know I think I think leftists generally survived the pandemic without becoming conspiracy theorists for the most part. But I but where you really saw it was like yoga studios and um people who you know not not to say that so I think that they kind of coded leftish but I don't think that they were that political before.

Ezra Klein: I I agree with this. I'm not trying to say that it's about um hardcore communists becoming QAnon members. I guess maybe the place I I don't totally agree is that I think this is more than optimized self. I think you get optimized self types across the political spectrum. I do think there's something here about ways of knowing and trust in institutions and the the left which I'm describing here very broadly kind of democrats leftists liberals etc. It it becomes more institutionalized technocratic it believes science it believes experts but what it ends up ejecting is people who have profound distrust um you uh talk a lot in the book about RFK Jr. who is a, you know, goes from a kind of fringe presidential candidate as a Democrat um and is now of course HHS secretary. But I want to play a clip from his presidential campaign announcement because I think it's interesting from this perspective.

发言人: I'm here to join you and making a new declaration of independence for our entire nation. We declare independence from the corporations that have hijacked our government.

发言人: And we declare independence from the Wall Street, from big tech, from big pharma, from big egg, from the military contractors and their lobbyists. And we declare independence from the mercenary media that is here to to fortify all of the corporate orthodoxies from their advertisers and to urge us to hate our neighbors and to fear our friends. and we declare independence from the cynical elites who betray our hope and who amplify our divisions.

Ezra Klein: What do you think when you hear that?

Naomi Klein: I think he's I think he's quite similar to Bannon in that he is really good at identifying these sort of vacuums, these political vacuums that need to be filled and sort of speaking into them. I mean, one of the things I think is just that um a lot of the people in these coalitions can be pulled out of them because the world that they're in now is just non-stop grifting. Um you know, and that goes for Bannon as well. I mean, one of the you know, in addition to his Epstein problems at the moment and people realizing that the guy who was supposed to protect them from the oligarchs is has been, you know, trading emails with w with with Epstein and is part of this um whole world that they've supposedly been taking on. you know, he also is being sued for a memecoin that you know, he he which I write about in the book actually, F um FJB memecoin. Um I won't say what it stands for. Um but you know, it's a scam. So they're getting scammed all the time. And the same is true of a lot of these wellness people, including you know, everyone's selling supplements, everybody's selling these seminars, and you know, the people that RFK Jr. has amassed around him. They're just not all of them are are are trying to sell you something. And people are getting ripped off. Like they're getting ripped off all the time, but I think he's really good at speaking to this very deep longing

Naomi Klein: for a deeper connection with nature. You know, he speaks really poetically about the natural world.

发言人: When I was a little boy, I used to visit the White House and there were a pair of eastern and Adam paragan falcons nesting on the roof. And I was a falconer from when I was a little boy. I was fascinated with hawks and I used to watch those birds. It was the most beautiful predatory bird in our country and it was salmon pink and a white sear on it. So it could fly 240 m an hour and I could watch them come off of the coupe of the post office and come down Pennsylvania Avenue at those speeds and pick pigeons out of the air 40t above the heads of the pedestrians on the sidewalk on Pennsylvania Avenue in front of the White House. For me, seeing that site was much more exciting than visiting my uncle at the White House or my father at the Justice Department, but that bird went extinct in 1963 from DDT poisoning.

Naomi Klein: I mean, people feel alienated from the natural world. And you know, all the jokes about the bear carcasses and all of that. I mean, it's funny, but the reason why it has traction is I think people like the idea of somebody who has connections with wildness, right? I mean, that has a powerful appeal. And so I think this speaks to what you were talking about before about people losing stories, right? And it's hard to lose a story. I, you know, I don't feel too sorry for for Mark Andre losing his story about the cr about the about the um not the Did he have a crown? Um

Ezra Klein: what a question to have to ask

Naomi Klein: the throne. I don't think he had a crown, but he lost the throne. But when you when you lose a story of what your nation was, you know, I think the there is I think we have to interrogate these stories, but the onus is also on us to come up with new stories, right? And if you just yank the story away and say like, you know, you're an idiot for having ever believed it and now you're on your own, people are going to get angry. And I, you know, that can be a painful thing to hear, but I think we really have that responsibility. And I'm really moved by the fact that I see that happening on the left. Like you know there's a pretty harsh critiques in doppelganger of the left. Like um harsher than anything I've ever written. Maybe not harsh enough for some people. But you know a lot of it is trying to look in the mirror. I mean this is the thing about doppelgangers is like they're telling you there like in literature they're always a message telling you a warning. Like you have to look at yourself. There's something about yourself that you're not seeing if if if reality starts doubling.

Naomi Klein: You talk about your critiques of of the left in the book and and uh and so I'll offer a critique of liberalism which is that liberalism has become very erid. It has become in its ways of knowing and ways of relating very very technocratic and I say this is a bit of a technocrat and it doesn't have um I think it has really lost something in being over time more severed from religion but the desire for I think politics to be able to speak to how alienating it often feels to be alive right now.

Ezra Klein: Yeah. when you're looking at your screens and you're often very separate from nature and and it's hard because there's not always an easy political answer to any of this. And I think that liberalism in particular doesn't really know what to do with issues that it can't offer a policy on.

Ezra Klein: If something is can simply be if we could just give you a tax credit, well, we know what to say. But if what you're talking about is a kind of spiritual unease, a sense that something is lost in modernity, then it struggles much more. I think it's a reason you see people like James Telerico taking off so much. I think there's a real hunger for religious language again.

Ezra Klein: And but but but that one thing you're very attentive to throughout this book is the way that uh movements will often abandon issues that the other side picks up. It's like they they they they treat the other side's embrace of something as

Ezra Klein: it makes that whole issue area toxic

Ezra Klein: as opposed to saying like there's energy there's some yearning here.

Ezra Klein: How do I connect to that?

Naomi Klein: Yeah.

Ezra Klein: Yearning. How do I answer what might be beneath that? Because often people aren't coming to the issue because they know what the policy solution is. They're coming because

Ezra Klein: they feel something and they are looking for somebody who helps them articulate that feeling.

Naomi Klein: Yeah. It's interesting what you're saying about liberalism and these policy the policy solutions I mean when it comes to the environment the that the policy solutions often obscure the nature beneath what is being addressed right so if you think about how much of the climate discourse focused on carbon trading right and carbon markets I mean it's the most bloodless way to talk about the natural world it's like taking something that is alive and animate and that we're all connected to and just being like how can but how can we make it um totally disembodied uh so you know I have a whole critique of carbon markets but be just beyond the policy critique there's also an emotional critique like it makes sense when when when we're trying to motivate people to act in the face of the climate crisis to start with our connections to the natural world like start with the fact that you know maybe you love trees or oceans or just like and you know That's one of the things that I, you know, I always thought people needed to take RFK Jr. more seriously than they were because, you know, I knew him from before, like when he was a riverkeeper and and that ability to speak for the wild, right, is it's very powerful. We don't have many people in public life who are able to do it anymore.

Naomi Klein: It's one of the reasons why FDR was such a great politician. And it's just that he he had that sort of love of nature and you the speeches he would make about the Civilian Conservation Corps and how good it is for the spirit to be out in nature and to be and and for the you know the right of people in cities to like experience the forest and you know national parks like that is really powerful stuff and it's really healing. I mean reaccessing that kind of politics is incredibly important. It's one of the things I think we did wrong during COVID. Why didn't we like have a resurgence of outdoor education um as opposed to just zoom learning um that's also pretty co safe. Where I see you know what what you're talking about most clearly is in the uprising against data centers actually. It is one of those issues that you know was being discussed more to a degree on the right than the left. um is one of the things that that that that worried me most when I became a you know a regular Steve Bannon listener was that he was always talking about transhumanism and he was talking about um AI and the sort of war on the human. Um he was talking about it more from a kind of a of a religious perspective. Um but I think this is very fruitful because I think there is a war on the human going on a war on the animate world. I think it's absolutely untenable the amount of electricity that is being consumed by this really wasteful way that US tech companies are engaging in the AI arms race where everybody's building duplicative data centers that they know they don't have a market for

Naomi Klein: and they're consuming um just

Ezra Klein: well they think they have a market for it.

Naomi Klein: Well, they think someone's going to win at the end. They don't actually think that there's a market for all of them to win. They're in the race stage, right? And so they kind of believe there'll be, you know, one or two companies left standing, but they all sort of seem to admit from what I'm seeing is that there isn't like a 13 trillion dollar market that's going to that's going to win. So they, you know, Open AI is worried Google's going to be the last one standing. So they they all have to at the same time build out these massive data centers. And so in the communities that are facing the you know this industrialization this kind of spirit like I I've interviewed people who describe it as a spiritual war you know that that they you know like Amazon wanted to build this huge data center in Tucson called project blue of all things and people started organizing you know across partisan lines because they you know when you live in a desert you know about water and you know how scarce it is and um it was so hard to get information out of these companies.

Naomi Klein: and the fact that this has been, you know, pushed by the Trump administration so aggressively and um I like I I'm seeing this as a really like the way people are organizing in the face of this is it goes beyond the data center. It's like what is what is what is economic development for?

Ezra Klein: Well, I think there's the the great question that AI is going to pose across functionally every level of society is what is the human for?

Naomi Klein: Yeah.

Ezra Klein: Right. So we have trained people to act in ways that are useful to the economy.

Ezra Klein: Then we create then we trained AI models on the output of those people.

Naomi Klein: Yes.

Ezra Klein: And now we're like, hey, we got these AI models. It can act like people acting in economically useful ways. And that's going to like to me there are two very very profound and dueling questions here. One is what are humans for? What do we value? What do we value in education? What do we value in in people? And what happens if we have under capitalism, the structure of a society, like spend a long time valuing something that we're now about to take a lot of the value away from?

Naomi Klein: Work,

Ezra Klein: work.

Ezra Klein: And then I was just talking with Jack Clark from Anthropic about this. There is this very unanswered question of what AI itself is for. I mean, if all it's for is replacing white collar workers, then that's not a profoundly inspiring vision. There's been like no public agenda for AI. There's been no sense of how do we orient all this investment towards things we actually want as a society as opposed to how to automate a call center.

Naomi Klein: And both of those questions like what are humans for, what is AI for, I think are going to be definitional to politics in the coming 5 10 maybe beyond that years. and right now are very very illans answered.

Ezra Klein: Yeah. And I I just don't know like who is asking those questions and who has power to answer them because they're they're so fundamental but it assumes that there's any role for the public in this discussion. Like I don't think I don't like these data center battles, right? And partly what they're doing is trying to have the debate that you're describing and they're being told you have no role in this. That Washington has decreed that you know everyone's going to take their data centers and you don't have a right to regulate it. But the fact that they have as much energy as they have I think is a reflection of the fact that this is being rolled out with absolutely no public input. And you know a company like OpenAI

Ezra Klein: it was such a bait and switch right? But I mean they they said trust us. We're you know we're we're like Wikipedia. Like we're a public interest company. No, you can't let the profit motive determine such an important technology. Oh, we changed our mind. You know,

Ezra Klein: so what I, you know, I think, you know, what Bernie Sanders has been saying is like why would we trust these companies who, you know, don't even let their workers have a bathroom break, you know, to to think about not like what does it mean to be human, but how are you going to eat when your job is replaced, right? like like the the the basic question of you know caring for people like I don't think people have the capacity to think about what their lives are for if AI is replacing their jobs because they're worried about how they're going to eat and pay their rent and they have absolutely no indication that they live in a society that cares at all about that question. So until that question is answered, I don't think we can have the other questions.

Naomi Klein: Although I think we're going to need to have them all at the same time because I'm not sure it's going to be answered first. Well, I think that this is a broader question about whether this belongs in the private sector. And I think that that's why I don't I don't think it does. I mean, this is much too fundamental. Um, and these are technologies that exist because they fed off of the accumulation of all of human knowledge and output. I I believe we own them already. I used to talk to some of the people who are now in charge of the the AI labs and I would talk to them about well what happens if we're living in the world you're describing to me and you're you're building the thing you are telling me and it becomes that powerful and all the things you tell me come true like well at some point they would say to me at some point we'll have to be nationalized and I would scoff at them I'd say if you get to that point there is no way you will allow yourself to be nationalized and I think that bet is proving pretty true right now as you watch people from Open AI dump money into super PACs to fight AI regulation. I mean, it was people from these companies who would say to me like, "Oh, if we ever got there, well, you know, we'd have to become some kind of public." But then you get there and you have the money and you have the power, and you don't want to become public in that way.

Ezra Klein: I look, I think there is a way of understanding the Trump administration as a revol like a tech revolt against AI regulation like that that that was a major driver of the decision to bankroll him. Um, you know, and it wasn't just Musk, it was, you know, the crypto regulation.

Naomi Klein: Yeah. The two.

Ezra Klein: This opens up a question, I think, about the Trump administration and the the MAGA movement. One of the reasons I think this book is so interesting for thinking about the world we're in is, as you say, it's a book about how this movement was built and the way Trump and the people around him were sensitive to issues that had a lot of power in them, but maybe were not already well represented politically. And that goes for everyone from the Maha moms to the reactionary techright oligarchs. And so it's this movement that is highly internally contradictory.

Ezra Klein: It absorbs RFK Jr. with that aggressively anti-corporate speech and Elon Musk at the same time. And now we're here and it's actually an administration and so it is making choices. It can't be in the same way all things to all people. And like for instance, her choice on AI has been let it rip, right? Try to unwind even the ability of states to regulate it.

Naomi Klein: So unpopular with a base,

Ezra Klein: which is in many ways unpop

Ezra Klein: and there are a lot of things like that. It's having to make these decisions. And so I I guess one question about Trumpism and and MAGA and I mean Bannon gets to say what he wants because he's on the outside, but is whether or not it can sustain what are it can sustain support given that it is now truly beset by contradictions. And so Trump isn't it was amazing to me how many things he was to how many people by October of 2024. But now it's like his sort of quantum superp position has like cohered a lot.

Naomi Klein: Yeah. And he's also starting a lot of wars because

Naomi Klein: the other thing he was to a lot of people was somebody who wasn't going to do that. I think what the book tracks is how they how they cobbled together an electoral coalition

Naomi Klein: that they have

Naomi Klein: since detonated in lots of ways. Right. I mean, um, including the the, you know, Latino parts of the coalition who are really angry, like not not everyone, but a lot of people are disgusted by by what's by what ICE is doing and the fact that it's just straight up racial profiling. So, they may have thought that it was going to just go after certain people, but it's going after everybody. So, it's I mean, part of me I think it's a huge opportunity for the left. Um, you know, I say the left, not the Democratic Party, because I don't think I think it's possible to blow the opportunity. And I think the Democratic Party's really good at that. Um, but the other reason why it's wor it's worrying is it it's worrying when an autocrat who wants to be a dictator doesn't seem to care about re-election. So, it's, you know, you can't just

Ezra Klein: Well, hopefully he can't get reelected.

Naomi Klein: No, I know. But he's his

Ezra Klein: despite his musings,

Naomi Klein: his own party, right? I mean it it it's worrying going into the midterms because he's being reckless with his coalition and I think that should worry us.

Ezra Klein: One of the things that seems like an opportunity in that is diagonalism on the left. It opens up questions about what is out there that has been abandoned that at least some of its energy can be pulled in. You were mentioning data centers a minute ago. I think that there's no doubt that there's a tremendous energy in AI populism right now and that that some amount of that is going to have to be actually spoken to and people are going to have to get much more thoughtful and sophisticated in in speaking to it. But what else is there that you know as you've sort of thought about this critique and thought about what you wish had been done differently and what you wish had been paid attention to, you know, okay, this is the opportunity, but it it maybe requires going into some uncomfortable places or building new coalitions. I think that we know, I'm not going to speak on behalf of the entire left, but I believe that a lot of people on the left understand and understood, particularly after Trump won, that we must have been doing something wrong if this many working-class people went to Trumpism and if this many people felt alienated enough by what they were calling woke culture

Ezra Klein: um to to turn to this nihilistic politics. And so, you know, my friend Kiang Yamata Taylor um you know was a professor at Princeton um historian you know one of the things she said immediately after the election is we have to build a more welcoming left and I think about that phrase a lot like welcoming what does it mean to be welcoming you know and I look at what's happening in Minneapolis um and the sort of um you know what Adam Surro called neighborism describing that movement I mean neighborism is such a welcoming idea like and it's just this it's not jargonfilled, you know, it's not a you're not throwing a whole bunch of isms at people and like creating a sort of huge litmus test for how you can join the movement. You're just saying we're all neighbors here. Wherever you're from, if you're if if you're here, we're gonna we've got your back, you know, and we're going to express that in all these different ways, whether it's like doing laundry for people who who who can't leave their homes, you know, or or dropping kids off at school, you know, or the, you know, the images we've all seen of people trailing ICE and and filming them. I mean, these are just acts of like neighborliness and welcomingness and just a sort of there's a simplicity to it.

Ezra Klein: And then when I look at this the campaign that Mum Donni ran here in New York, you know, I think that it had the best of what we of what we saw in ourselves during CO of just like I want to see the people who make this city run, you know, that and I want to valorize them like you know and he made this wonderful video um about the night shift, but it was like he just like went out in the middle of the night and just like talked to taxi, you know, went went talk went to LaGuardia and to the taxi line and just interviewed um uh cab drivers.

发言人: For for South Asians growing up in New York City, taxis were one of the ways we would see ourselves as part of the fabric of the city.

发言人: Thank you, brother.

发言人: Thank you. As much as taxis have been celebrated, as much as they've been woven into the most prominent

发言人: examples of what it means to be a New Yorker or the films and the books that we all love about the city,

发言人: I watched as did many New Yorkers as driver after driver was trapped.

发言人: Thank you, brother.

发言人: Thank you.

发言人: Debt page and their struggles were simply overlooked by politicians early.

发言人: It's time to also speak to New Yorkers for whom the work day starts at night. Yeah,

Ezra Klein: it was just like let's remember like it's not just during a pandemic that the working class holds up New York City. You know, everyone is so cynical about those early co days where people clapped for healthcare workers, but I'm going to just be very corny like I actually think there was something really beautiful about what was being expressed and like insisting on seeing the people who make the world work, who hold the world up. Now clapping is not enough. They also deserved wage increases and sick days and all kinds of things they didn't get. But this is what I mean by like that fork in the road that CO represented. Like there there could have been a breakthrough for labor rights, you know, and all of the discussion about who essential workers were and all of that. And I think that was very threatening to a lot of people and that's why we're in this fascist alternate timeline. But what you see with the Mamani campaign is that didn't go away. You know, 100,000 volunteers. That is incredible. And it was all just people talking to their neighbors. It was another expression of neighborism, right? And that kind of work, that kind of just talking to your neighbor. Like you you you've got it's it's not the it's not the work of jargon. It's not the work of it's it's like what can we find to bond over? Like what's our quickest fastest bond? And this is the other kind of doppelganger that I try to get at the book is like we all contain doppelgangers in ourselves. Like we are both this and that. Like the thing about politics is that it can light up different parts of ourselves. you know, you can have a politic that encourages the worst parts of yourself and you can have a politic that says like, "Hey, let's be that other part of you, you know." Um,

Ezra Klein: but I do think that what Mum Donnie showed was one way of doing that, one way of of I think he got 10% of of people who voted for Trump. Um, 10%'s a lot in in a federal election, but you have to do it with economic populism. You know, Trump promised to bring the jobs back. He promised to address cost of living and if Democrats aren't credible in making that promise themselves, then I don't think that they will be able or or they'll be able to harvest it in one election cycle and then it'll backlash again. I I mean I think climate action has to come back. You know, it's nowhere in the political discussion and that's not tenable because we are in a climate crisis. So, we have to find a way of talking about climate. You know, I've used the phrase eco populism to think about, you know, like even something like free public transit, though that's a municipal issue points to the fact that the climate movement made so many mistakes. Like why didn't we make free public transit a climate policy, you know, it is a climate policy, gets people out of cars, get, you know, we can have electric electrified transit. Um, and it addresses cost of living and it makes life easier, right? And so I think that we need to have, you know, we need to focus on those types of policies. But the other thing I see happening is

Ezra Klein: we are becoming afraid of our phones. And it's really scary that this is like the the merger like the Silicon Valley merger with the Trump administration means that these devices and these platforms that sold themselves as our liberation, you know, first we found out that they were tracking us to advertise to us. But now we find out that they have integrated with the Trump administration all kinds of ways that we don't fully understand in terms of what data was taken, you know, through Doge. um you know what Palunteer is doing but what is emerging in real time is that there are profiles of us um and AI is superpowering this and I guess what I'm saying is that people like are deciding to touch grass both because they like grass and also because they're af becoming afraid of these devices that have flipped into very dangerous surveillance devices. Um, we I think we always knew the technology could do that, but now we're seeing it act actually happen.

Naomi Klein: Yeah, I agree that that that that's going to be a tremendous generator of our politics going forward. I I think that sense of, oh, we actually do need to be afraid now is is very real.

Naomi Klein: And I think that when either Democrats have enough power or there's a subsequent administration and you begin to have investigation on this era, subpoena power for the opposition in Congress, people going to court, what we are going to learn was happening and certainly what was being attempted when whistleblowers are not as afraid as they probably are right now is going to really chill people. Um, it's sort of like with the Epstein fells. I I don't there's a lot we don't currently know.

Naomi Klein: You can see hints of it. You can worry about it. Um but I think when the you know there's currently this fight between the department of defense and anthropic because the department of defense wants to make sure that in the AI it uses it is extremely unconstrained in that use. What is being done in this sort of intersection of the government and palanteer the government and you know trying to integrate Grock into our war fighting. I think it's going to get very scary.

Ezra Klein: And what you were saying before about the sort of anger at tech workers who are sort of taking over these companies, I mean, I think it was exaggerated, but what wasn't exaggerated is that tech workers were saying, "We want to have a say in what we build, right?" and they were um you know there were contracts that were cancelled because of of tech worker organizing because they didn't want you know to be you know doing contracts with ICE or or with the US military.

Ezra Klein: I think that that's fair. I think people should have a say um in whether or not their labor and their creativity and their brilliance is going into a war machine that they don't support or into their own surveillance or into the deportation of their neighbors. So maybe that's another productive uh you know area of of of real worker empowerment. I was thinking about as we were talking about AI and what it means to be human and what it you know means to have dignity in the economy that something that we're sort of you know dancing around there is

Ezra Klein: the way economic logic has taken a lot over uh and the way I think as that has kind of accelerated down uh a very disembodied and technological path now sort of culminating at some level in AI. And I I think there's something here about how many zones of life you can have uh corporate and economic logic encroach on.

Naomi Klein: Yeah.

Ezra Klein: It's not that it should be nowhere, but the feeling that it's everywhere with very few counterwes counterweights. Religion used to be a counterweight. Locality used to be a counterweight. there used to be a lot more friction like all over and so there are more sort of counterveailing cultural powers but now there aren't and and I think that some of what is going to emerge in all this and it reflects what we're talking about Junior and nature is just a sense that people want um they they want alternatives to how things feel and that's not I mean that is partially policy it's partially universal healthcare and expanded child tax credits and you know free transit but But it's also partially just a recognition of values and aspirations and that it that it doesn't need to feel like this.

Naomi Klein: Yeah. Did you see that exchange between Joyce Carol Oats and novelist and um Elon Musk?

Ezra Klein: Yes.

Naomi Klein: Uh it was it was this fascinating exchange. She just trolled him on his own site, you know, and said, "Isn't it, you know, interesting that you can have all the money in the world, but um, you know, never seemed to post about the things that normal people like, like pets or a film they saw or a book they read or just like any of these sort of things, like just basic enjoyment." And it really got under Musk's skin and he started posting about movies for a while. But I do think that there is this divide where we like not only do we see the just this incredibly bad behavior from the wealthiest people in the world who clearly, you know, don't deserve the reverence that that that they were given.

Naomi Klein: But we also see that they seem kind of miserable, like incapable of enjoying um everything that they have. And you know there was this moment when um Bezos was talking to William Shatner and William Shatner had just came down from his one of his rocket and he wanted to talk about what he had seen like he he was like whoa like it's mind blown like you know overview effect of like fragile blue marble and and Bezos was like just wanted to like spray champagne and it was like something is missing like there's a sort of a fundamental failure failure to appreciate like that which is irreplaceable. And that failure seems to me to be very connected with the willingness to just replace art with AI, replace universities with AI. like why are we not pausing to just be like hey like I know universities aren't perfect but it was this idea that people could have a time in their life where they could just like read and find out where they you know and think and like shouldn't we have a conversation about whether or not we want to get rid of that whole concept and so

Naomi Klein: I think there is something and you you know what you were saying before about the opportunities I think there's huge political opportunities to speak into the ir which is irreplaceable, that which you can't put a price on. I'm not a nationalist, but you know, I refer to these tech oligarchs as traders because I think they're traders to creation. I think that there's something broken where they're not actually appreciating the beauty of this world. And you know in the Epstein files there's this whole um there's an exchange between I think I think it's Bannon who he he really does not like did not like Pope Francis and you know Pope Francis really spoke into this with his encyclical on ecology like I think that he was such a remarkable leader in really identifying that the the need to connect the a reverence for the natural world and its vulnerability um as you know as a a spiritual duty. Whatever you believe, it's a spiritual duty. And it's a profound betrayal not to cherish the natural world.

Naomi Klein: And what I see running through all of the emergent movements in this era, like whether it's the Mandani campaign, um, or whether it's the the anti-CE protests in Minneapolis or the anti the data center movements, is like this real like we cherish where we live. It's like we cherish we cherish our water, you know, we cherish our land, our soil. Um, and so

Ezra Klein: the values of our city.

Naomi Klein: Yeah. It's a rootedness and and and and it's it and and and it's not a whitewash either. Like people are rooting down where they are and learning their histories, including the really difficult histories, right? Like you know, there was a lot that's come out in Minneapolis like birthplace of the American Indian Movement. Um Minnesota was um the site of the largest mass hanging in US history of uh um Dakota men. Um and sort of connecting that history with ICE. And so it's but it's not like a it's it's a it's a it's a liveaction history lesson, right? Um and it's it's looking backwards and forwards I think at the same time. And that's I think the move that we need to be able to do is like, okay, where are we? Where do we want to go?

Ezra Klein: I think it's a good place to end. Always our final question. What are three books you'd recommend to the audience?

Naomi Klein: Okay. Um All right. So, this is a little bit obvious, but but but Empire of AI um by Karen How um just because it's it it's just such an incredible combination of just on the ground globe trotting investigative reporting making the material inputs and human inputs of AI visible, but then it has this big idea thesis around empire building. Um which I think is really true.

Naomi Klein: Um, I guess we've been talking around this, but um, my my friend Molly Crab Apple has an absolutely brilliant book coming out uh, called Here Where We Live Is Our Country, the story of the Jewish um, Bund. And it's available for pre-order, comes out in April, and I think it gets at what an alternative story of here could be, of really committing to hear, which is what the Jewish labor bund was was doing before between the wars. And the third book is a book called Fire Alarm reading Walter Benjamin's on the concept of history by Michael Loey. Um and Walter Benjamin is the is this is the text that he wrote um right before he took his own life fleeing the Gestapo in 1940. Um, and it gets at this idea of the way history doesn't repeat but compounds in Benjamin's term piling wreckage upon wreckage.

Ezra Klein: Naomi Klein, thank you very much.

Naomi Klein: Thank you so much, Ezra.