We are back from the third stop on our fall 2023 WITHpod tour and we’re thrilled to share a recording of the first half of our event in Philadelphia. Stay tuned for the second half in next week’s episode. From widespread conspiracies, to AI generated content, to mistrust of vaccines magnified by social media, it’s hard to know what’s real and what’s not in this era. Our guest this week points to a sense of “collective vertigo” that we’re experiencing as our realities warp around us in what she calls the “mirror world.” Naomi Klein is an award-winning journalist and a New York Times best-selling author of numerous books including her latest one, “Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World.” She joins WITHpod to discuss the trajectory of her own doppelganger (the impetus for the book), the convergence of paranoid conspiracy culture merging with broad reactionary scary visions of the future, how we got to this moment and how we might move forward.
Note: This is a rough transcript — please excuse any typos.
Chris Hayes: Hello, and welcome to “Why Is This Happening?” with me, your host, Chris Hayes.
Well, we recently returned from the third stop on our WITHpod national tour. It was phenomenal to be in Philly for a double header event. We were up against the Philadelphia Phillies in the NLCS and we still sold the place out. We had an amazing time. We’re so glad to share a recording of the first half of the program with you, be sure to tune in for the second half of the show next week. Enjoy
Doni Holloway: What’s up, Philly? Hey, everybody. Good evening and welcome to our live recording of “Why Is This Happening?”, the Chris Hayes Podcast. I’m Doni Holloway, producer of “Why Is This Happening?” I got to say we have been looking so forward to tonight. We’ve been counting down. We are so glad to be here. Thank you so much for joining us. As we go throughout the program tonight, don’t forget you can share some of your favorite moments from the conversations tonight by using the hashtag #WITHpod. You can keep the conversation going online, share quotables, pictures, videos, whatever you’d like online using the hashtag #WITHpod.
I got to say, Philly, we have really been feeling the love tonight. You all are an amazing, incredible audience, and I want you to join me in sharing even more of that love and making some noise for our host, Chris Hayes.
Chris Hayes: What’s up, Philadelphia? How we doing? Yes. Look at that. What a crowd. What a great honor and pleasure it is to be in your beautiful city. I can’t believe we sold this out against the Phillies. Also, understand why my invitation to Bryce Harper to be a guest was never returned. The guy is pretty good. So you know, this has been a brutal week and I think everyone’s kind of reeling from that and processing it their own way. Obviously, we’ve been covering it closely. I think some of those themes we’ll talk about it at some point tonight.
I wanted to start tonight by talking about the presidential candidacy of Robert F. Kennedy. Jr. Have you heard of him? Big fans in the audience. Okay, well, I was going to bring him out as a guest, but I guess that was a miscalculation. That was going to be the surprise. Guys, guess who’s here? So, you know, I think a lot of us, I mean I remember when I worked at a small lefty magazine in Chicago called “Indie Times Magazine”, yes, give it up for “Indie Times”, which is still going strong by the way. I recommend those subscription and, we would run pieces by him all the time. And you know, he was a fairly standard like progressive dude.
He had a radio show. He was obviously an environmental lawyer. He railed against corporate power. He started writing about, and I remember we even published an article by him on this, the vaccines and autism back I want to say 15 years ago. And at the time, I got to say the ideological coding of that was very different. Do people feel me on that?
Like this was not a right-wing thing. And as someone who moved in left circles, you would encounter people. And again, well, I’ll give a quick thing here that there was an article published in “The Lancet”, right, that erroneously seemed to establish a connection, which was subsequently retracted, so that data was wrong. So, people who thought that it was possible back then were dealing in a little bit of a different universe empirically than now, just to be a little clear about the shading of the nuance here. That said, this belief, this false belief and dangerous belief, obviously festered and grew.
And it became kind of like RFK Jr.’s like whole thing. And we’ve ended up in this situation in the year 2023 where RFK Jr. is like a weird double mirror doppelganger to his father.
Where like he looks like his dad, he sounds like his dad, but his dad had this set of politics that he kind of had. But somehow he’s like crawled through some nebulous warp in the internet and like come out on the other side. And if it were just the story of one person with a famous name and a weird, and let’s be honest, heavy inheritance, that would be one thing. But I think we all sense that like that one story about the strange mirror world into which Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has slipped is not just about him. I suspect there are people in the audience who have friends, loved ones, acquaintances who have, where you have watched them slip through a similar mirror world.
Okay, good for you. That’s one no. I think one of the weird sort of destabilizing and dislocating aspects of our days is that the political alliances, formations, tendencies and factions seem radically influx, right? Like at one level we’re very polarized. But if you push down beneath the polarization, the ideological conversation, particularly like when you look at the war in Ukraine, right, where Medea Benjamin of CODEPINK just was posing with Marjorie Taylor Greene about ending the war in Ukraine. Or if you look at vaccines or a whole bunch of things, right, you start to see this sort of politics that are built around this sort of bizarre mirror world of reality and that feast off distrust.
And that tendency, I think, is like one of the most important tendencies, political tendencies of our time. I think it’s related to Donald Trump’s ascent. It’s related to the fact that we lost hundreds of thousands of people to COVID that we shouldn’t have. It’s related to the threats to democracy because you can’t really run a low trust democracy. Like it just doesn’t work. It’s the glue that binds everything together. And all of these themes, which I’ve been thinking about a lot and I think observing and bouncing around my head in an (inaudible) way. In the last month, there’s this book published that just did a better job of talking about, expressing this than anything I had encountered.
It’s a really masterful piece of work. it’s called “Doppelganger” by Naomi Klein. Yes, you can applaud. Give it up. And I really recommend you buy it. Let’s try to move some product here tonight everybody. And it is my great, great pleasure and honor to introduce my good friend, Naomi Klein.
How are you?
Naomi Klein: I am good. I’m really glad to be with you. Hi, everyone. It’s great to be in Philly. I’m wearing Philly’s red. Thanks for having me. I’m a big fan of this podcast.
Chris Hayes: Oh, thanks. It means a lot to me.
Naomi Klein: I’m a listener. Yeah.
Chris Hayes: You’re a repeat guest. Can we start on how the book formed?
Naomi Klein: Yes. But before we do the actual podcast, I just also want to echo what you were just saying about what a wrenching, I think, 10 days now it has been. And I know that a lot, that I’ll bet that pretty much everybody here is carrying a lot of grief and fear for the loss of civilian life in Israel and right now in Gaza. I know I am. Almost feels like hard to go back into this material when everything in me just wants to be focused on this emergency. So, those of you out there, and I know it won’t be everyone who agree with me, that you can’t carpet-bomb your way to peace. Thanks, Chris. Sorry.
Chris Hayes: No, don’t apologize.
Naomi Klein: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: In fact, there’s a chapter in this book that relates to this that I think I would love to come back around to. The origin of this and actually it relates because of the identity of the person who is your doppelganger. When and how was this book conceived?
Naomi Klein: Sure, yeah. So, this is a very different kind of book for me. You know, for people who’ve read, earlier books of mine, like “The Shock Doctrine” or “This Changes Everything” about the climate crisis, you know, I write serious non-fiction.
Chris Hayes: Very serious.
Naomi Klein: Usually my method is, you know, I work things out in my journalism as you do, you know, and come up with an idea that’s too big for an article, that’s too, you know, a thesis. And, you know, I come up with an outline and I put it upfront and I know, you know, and I prove it in examples. And we go pretty straight up a mountain and then we say that we got there and that’s been the structure of the books I’ve written. This book starts from that place of pandemic vertigo. A kind of a place of speechlessness, of really of losing faith in that particular kind of argument that in these vertiginous times with all of those cross-political signals, where you have this migration of issues and people from left to right.
The right is sort of oddly becoming like a warped mirror of what the populist left used to be. It was all getting all mixed up. And I realized that I needed to write in a different way. I actually started working with a writing teacher because I wanted to write just more experimentally, more creatively. So, this is much more creative non-fiction than my earlier books. And, you know, while I was working with this teacher and doing all these exercises to try to find a more creative style that felt sort of truer to my own voice, I was experiencing this deluge of identity confusion online, where people kept mistaking me for the non-fiction writer, Naomi Wolf, who became one of those people who fell down the rabbit hole of misinformation during COVID and became a vector for medical misinformation.
It was just sort of tugging at me like just a distraction. And then I thought, actually, this might be a kind of a literary technique to get at the way, I think, a lot of us are confused about who we are right now and who other people are and to kind of map the weirdness of now or the wildness of now.
Chris Hayes: One of the things I love about the book and I think most non-fiction books, and this is just a secret between you and me and this audience, like you don’t really have to read the whole thing.
True of my books, I’ll be totally honest. Like you can scan. I mean, what I mean by that is a lot of non-fiction books because they make an argument, you can get a pretty good sense of what they are. And really great non-fiction books really do require you to read the whole thing. And one of the things I love about this book is, if someone says like, what’s the book about, it would be actually very hard for me to give them the tweet-length version of it.
Naomi Klein: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: Because it does so many interesting things. So, the origin of it is this confusion.
Just talk about the confusion and how it sort of manifested in your life. There’s amazing little anecdote you give in the bathroom where you overhear a conversation which is one of the first kind of pinpricks of this kind of Naomi Wolf-Naomi Klein confusion.
Naomi Klein: Yeah, so that took place almost a decade and a half ago, 2011. And I remember it was 2011 because it was during Occupy Wall Street and I was in New York. I was researching “This Changes Everything” and I was doing some interviews at Zuccotti Park about the intersections of the financial crisis and the climate crisis. And then there was a march through the financial district and as happens during marches, I needed to pee and went into a restroom in one of the office towers, which was crowded with marchers and lots of people with thick black eyeliner who were clearly not derivatives traders.
And I was in the stall and I heard these two women talking about me or frankly trashing me. And so I just froze and one of them said like, did you read that terrible article by Naomi Klein? I mean she really doesn’t understand our movement. And then they were just going on. And so this brought back every, you know, mean girl experience of high school. And I was like, how am I going to get out of here without them seeing me? And then it became clear to me that they were talking about another Naomi, but they were calling her Naomi Klein.
So, I had read the article, it was by Naomi Wolf. And she had claimed that she alone had divined the demands of this movement that very pointedly did not have a set of a demands. And she delivered those demands to Andrew Cuomo at a black tie Huffington Post party and got herself arrested. So, I didn’t want to be confused with her and I came out of the stall and said, I think you’re talking about Naomi Wolf. And that’s something I’ve now had to say many thousands upon thousands of times.
Chris Hayes: Right, because I mean one of the things you say is that because of the weird, you talk about social media as a global graffiti on the bathroom wall —
Naomi Klein: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: — which I thought was a pretty potent metaphor, that because of the way that mentions, work or whatever, it’s like if she says like —
Naomi Klein: You identified with that, didn’t you, Chris?
Chris Hayes: I don’t know. I don’t use social media, so I don’t. No. Yes, very much. I’m writing a book now literally on this topic. So, I’m thinking about this a lot myself. But when a particularly, you know, if I talk to (ph) statement, by her would go onto social media —
Naomi Klein: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: — suddenly it would be like this weird, like there’s like an alarm system, like a light up in your mentions for people either like —
Naomi Klein: Yes.
Chris Hayes: — cottoning to or castigating you for the crazy statement.
Naomi Klein: Or thanking me.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Naomi Klein: Or expressing their pity for me. Often it’d be like thoughts and prayers to Naomi Klein and I’d be like, what did she do now? And then I’d find out she went on Fox News with Tucker Carlson and said that Joe Biden had ushered in a coup d’état under the guise of a vaccine verification app to bring in Chinese-style social credit systems and so on. I mean —
Chris Hayes: He did not do that, just so for the record.
Naomi Klein: He did not do that, no, did not do that.
Chris Hayes: Just for standards, when they’re listening to the podcast later.
Naomi Klein: Yeah, so it was often a reverse engineering thing. And to be clear, the book is, you know, you said that it’s not about her.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Naomi Klein: But it does use her as a case study because it is significant that this is somebody who was, you know, probably the highest profile third wave feminist in the 1990s. You know, she wrote “The Beauty Myth.” She was then hired by Al Gore to be a senior advisor to coach him on attracting women voters. She was very much like inside the beltway for a while. And so, if somebody like that could turn into a person who’s on Steve Bannon’s podcast every single day, they co-wrote a book together about the Pfizer vaccine.
They put out t-shirts at one point. You know, she has bought into January 6th revisionism. She’s engaged in election denial. So if somebody like her could turn into somebody like that, you know, she takes pictures of her gun, you know, all kinds of things, that is telling us something because it isn’t only her. There’s a broader scrambling. And so, I thought, well, what if she’s my white rabbit? And I follow her down this rabbit hole and try to understand it and try to figure out what’s going on. Maybe that will make sense of, you know, the way COVID, I think, has redrawn political maps in all kinds of contexts.
Chris Hayes: More of our conversation after this quick break.
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Chris Hayes: There’s a viral tweet that you quote, which I remember. This is during one of these, you know, controversies, if the Naomi be Klein, you’re doing just fine. If the Naomi be Wolf, oh, buddy, oof. And I remember cracking up when I saw that viral tweet. But to your point, I mean, the reason I started with Robert Kennedy —
Naomi Klein: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: — RFK is because it’s similar and —
Naomi Klein: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: — and you know, different in some ways, but first I want to talk about COVID.
Naomi Klein: Right.
Chris Hayes: And then I want to talk about this sort of trust unraveling mirror world.
Naomi Klein: Right.
Chris Hayes: So, one of the themes of this podcast consistently has been COVID is undercounted as a kind of central causal mechanism for many of the things that have happened in the last several years.
Naomi Klein: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: I think part of the way that people experience disruption and trauma is like, you just kind of like sort of put it out of your head. And I remember reading about the great flu pandemic and how like, you know, no one talked about it afterwards and we weren’t taught about it. And I was like, that’s so weird. Now I’m like, I get it.
Naomi Klein: Right.
Chris Hayes: I get it. So, what did it do ideologically, socially, politically, emotionally? Like how do you understand the dislocation? Obviously, we understand that sort of daily dislocation but it did something deeper than that, I think, we all felt.
Naomi Klein: Yeah. I mean I think it’s helpful to think of it as an unveiling, that it is, yes, it is about the people who died, the millions of people who died and many, you know, many deaths that were not properly grieved for all of the reasons that we understand. But there is something very difficult to think about there. But then there’s all the inequalities of who died, who bore the risk and the way it peeled back these various kinds of disguises that our culture is very good at putting up to create an illusion of fairness, meritocracy, frictionlessness and even the story, the central story of the American myth, I mean, the individual who conquers the frontier, who is responsible for their success and, you know, did it all on their own.
Like I mean this is a highly individualistic culture. That’s not a big secret. But the thing about a virus that spreads through the air from person-to-person is it reveals that we are enmeshed bodies, right? And so it forced us as a society to reckon with our enmeshment in all kinds of really uncomfortable ways that flew in the face of all the stories of individualism that are really the underpinning, I think, of our societies.
And it’s worth remembering that a lot of us actually celebrated that, like that a lot of us wanted to set up mutual aid networks, were, you know, on our balconies cheering for healthcare workers, were fighting for nurses who were having to go to work in garbage bags because they didn’t have PPE. I mean, let’s remember all these unveilings. I mean people working in poultry processing plants, you know, who were forced to go to work, despite the fact that, you know, their bosses knew they had COVID. And, you know, bacon was declared like a national, you know, necessity.
Chris Hayes: Priority, yeah.
Naomi Klein: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: The national priority.
Naomi Klein: But there was a lot of organizing in those early days and there was a lot of solidarity in those early days. But I think for people who really bought that story hard, there was a lot of difficulty accepting that enmeshment, particularly if they were small business owners and that they felt that the supports were unfair. So, COVID, it was an unveiling of who bears the risk? The working class risk in our society, overwhelmingly black and brown people. People who are systematically unseen and suddenly we had to think, were they able to call in sick? You know, is the food I’m eating safe because of that?
Like all of that was revealed and it was very hard for a lot of people. I think it led to a kind of derangement. And I think that we shouldn’t be surprised by that because in some ways it was more strange to think that we could go from just take care of yourself and your nuclear family and that’s your only job to care about this whole society overnight, you know? I take heart from the fact that a lot of people welcomed that enmeshment actually, but that was not the only reckoning that happened in the COVID period.
I mean, a few months in George Floyd was murdered and we were in a reckoning with the foundation of this country, with the crimes of enslavement of African people, the stealing of indigenous lands. I mean, it was going very, very deep. So, we’re in this reckoning with the present we’re in a reckoning with the past. And then comes the climate crisis, we’re in a reckoning with the future because the climate crisis doesn’t take a break just because we’re in a pandemic.
So, I don’t think it’s just COVID that is a derangement. I think it is very hard to look directly at where we are at now.
Chris Hayes: Yeah, that point about enmeshment and the kind of collective, right. That, you know, there is such thing as society that we are embodied human beings with relationships to each other, the virus actually feast on those relationships, that there’s no individual way to deal with this.
Naomi Klein: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: That we have to do it collectively. And also at the same time in ways that mean we can’t socialize and we have to be alienated.
Naomi Klein: Yes.
Chris Hayes: Alone and spend all our time —
Naomi Klein: Yes.
Chris Hayes: — online which I think is like terrible for people’s brains. So, there’s like that weird combination, right? It’s like at an ideological level, it’s like this has to be solved collectively —
Naomi Klein: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: — while you’re in your own house. And you know, I remember —
Naomi Klein: — which is unprecedented.
Chris Hayes: It’s unprecedented and —
Naomi Klein: Because that’s what you won’t find in those books about earlier pandemics because they didn’t have the option.
Chris Hayes: They didn’t do it, no.
Naomi Klein: Yeah. I remember that (ph).
Chris Hayes: And I had Rebecca Solnit on “Why Is This Happening?” during COVID —
Naomi Klein: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: — who wrote this amazing book called the “Paradise Built in Hell” which is a really beautiful book about how contrary to, I think, expectations people have about times when there’s natural disaster. Like she talks about the earthquake in San Francisco in 1907 that, you know, people run wild and there’s marauding gangs, that actually people act with tremendous amounts of mutual aid and solidarity. But one of the things she said in that conversation was it’s hard to do that when we’re all separated.
So, there’s like this like combination of that ideological layer but then there’s the lived reality, which I do think played a role, particularly with your doppelganger, but in so many people, which is like —
Naomi Klein: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: — you’re cut off from your human trust relationships and then you’re like getting a lot of stuff from the internet —
Naomi Klein: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: — and replacing those IRL relationships with that, and I think that was part of what drove people a little —
Naomi Klein: Oh, absolutely.
Chris Hayes: — batty.
Naomi Klein: Absolutely because, and this is where, you know, the through line of the book is less her, although she does recur, and more this idea of doubles, of the way the self gets doubled and having a doppelganger, somebody who the outside world thinks is you and is not you or, you know, some of you have probably had the experience of bumping into, somebody who feels uncannily like a living mirror, that’s one kind of doubling. But our online avatars are another kind of —
Chris Hayes: Totally.
Naomi Klein: — double, right? Like who is that guy up there? You know, like, I mean —
Chris Hayes: I don’t know, but he is handsome.
Naomi Klein: I mean is like, is that you?
Chris Hayes: And he has no eyeballs.
Naomi Klein: So, this is an audio medium. I’m just pointing to the logo of Chris behind Chris. But we, you know, any of us who maintains a persona online, you don’t have to be a famous person. You know, is creating like a literal double that is this little thumbnail size picture of you, you know, that taken in just the right sort of light or just the right mood. And then you’ve got your, you know, sort of sassy little descriptor. And this is part of a broader revolution in how we have been trained to think of ourselves, which has to do with the casualization of work, the precarity of the gig economy, where we’re told actually that our brand is our job.
Like this is how you survive in these roiling capitalist seas. And the thing about creating a brand version of you is that it’s a commodity version of you. It’s a thing version of you. And the thing about doing that is that people will believe you, you know? And I don’t think we actually think each other are real online, you know? Even people who we know, I think we forget are actually —
Chris Hayes: No, it’s like playing a video game. It’s like playing a discourse video game.
Naomi Klein: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: It’s like it is to actual engagement conversation what a video game is to, you know, actual play. And I think that avatar double, like that double started standing in for a lot of people —
Naomi Klein: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: — during that period because the actual self couldn’t do anything, you know, or in many cases was forced to do things like slaughter chickens in unsafe conditions or be in a grocery store. I mean, this point about, I keep thinking about this category of essential worker —
Naomi Klein: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: — which is such an amazing category because it doesn’t map onto any other social hierarchy. Like if you were like, what’s the most well-paid jobs or you could say, what are the worst job, that you couldn’t come up with another category that has like ER doctors —
Naomi Klein: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: — food delivery people, grocery workers, people that slaughter chicken and people that like pick food at like in the same category but —
Naomi Klein: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: — that category was so profound about what actually on whose back society functions.
Naomi Klein: Yeah, and I do think that there was something, like for people who were not in that category, there was something almost like humiliating about it. Like you’re being told —
Chris Hayes: I’m inessential.
Naomi Klein: — just stay home. You know, just stay out of the way.
Chris Hayes: It turns out we don’t need what you do. Like we’ve checked and actually you’re not in that category.
Naomi Klein: Yeah. And so when I look at conspiracy culture, like there’s so much self-importance to it. Like you’re constantly uncovering —
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Naomi Klein: — this absolutely world-saving truth, you know, and you are deputizing yourself as like beyond essential. Like you and you alone and your friends have figured out this thing, like there’s actually a genocide that is being carried out undercover of these vaccines. There isn’t, right? But I do think that that was sort of part of it was people not liking this feeling that their job was just to stay home and click. So, turning that clicking into something very important and essential to give themselves a promotion.
Chris Hayes: No. Yes, chief vaccine investigator. I mean, I think that’s sort of the joke about doing my own research, right? But there’s also this. So then there’s this other ideological layer, and you talked about this with COVID, too, and this is where this sort of interesting double mirror world happens. You wrote this great book called “The Shock Doctrine” and it’s about moments of social dislocation and disruption that could be a financial crisis, international disaster in which there’s this kind of like stunned sort of paralysis shock. And in those moments, people, particularly people with power use them to achieve their aims, often bypassing normal democratic input.
And there were lots of people who felt that way about the pandemic, that this was a sort of a left wing shot doctrine, right? And this is like a theme that comes up in that conspiracy. And even with citations to you. I mean, I’ve definitely encountered conservatives citing “The Shock Doctrine.” And —
Naomi Klein: Yeah. I get told to read my own books a lot on the internet.
Chris Hayes: You should check it. It’s a good book. And I think because this is part of this ideological journey, right, because there’s this sense of distrust. There’s a sense of shock.
Naomi Klein: Well, to be clear, I do think that there have been examples of what I would call the shock doctrine and I’m allowed to say that. I mean, like what I actually meant by the shock doctrine during COVID, I think COVID has been used very cynically by politicians and corporations to advance a preexisting agenda, which is what I wrote about in “The Shock Doctrine.”
Not that they were creating the crises deliberately in order to exploit them, but that there was a sort of an infrastructure of opportunism ready to leap, when, you know, whatever the shock, whether it was Hurricane Katrina and closing schools and opening up charter schools and bulldozing public housing that didn’t suffer storm damage. Like, you know, these are examples of what I mean by the shock doctrine. And we have seen that in attacks on public healthcare systems, by the U.K. Tory government has used the fact that their hospitals have been overloaded as a way to attack the NHS.
In Canada, we’ve had some examples of that. I think tech companies were incredibly cynical in the early days where they’ve always wanted to push remote teaching. They’ve always wanted to have a cashless society and you know, they did all kinds of things. You know, like Eric Schmidt was really at the forefront of this where he was rubbing his hands together and being like, yes, now we can rebrand all of these things, driverless cars, et cetera, as —
Chris Hayes: Safety.
Naomi Klein: Safety, yeah. So, there are real examples of that but there is not a plot that brings together Klaus Schwab from the World Economic For Bill Gates, the Chinese Communist Party. You know, who else is part of it? Anthony Fauci —
Chris Hayes: Yup.
Naomi Klein: — you know, in order to bring in a new world order and enslave humans and make them eat bugs. No. And so, when “The Shock Doctrine” gets invoked in this weird doppelganger of itself, then that is a bit queasy-making, yes.
Chris Hayes: Yeah, I mean, you quote later in the book and a chapter I want to get to in a second about this famous line from a social democratic politician in Europe in the 19th century who called anti-Semitism the socialism of fools, right? And meaning like the sort of structural analysis of who controls the society sort of dumbed down and run through this kind of like bigoted, demagogic version, right? That’s what he means with the socialism of fools.
And there was a lot of like the Naomi Klein of fools happening during COVID, where like these sort of visions of how power operates or big sort of structural things operate got flattened into these conspiracy theories. But the thing that was so sort of troubling about them was that they had these like notes of leftness to them or notes of like ideological affinity.
Naomi Klein: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: Like I don’t trust big pharma.
Naomi Klein: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: It’s like, yeah.
Naomi Klein: Big tech, yeah.
Chris Hayes: Yeah, I don’t trust big pharma and big tech. It’s like, yeah, I don’t trust big pharma and big tech either. And then it was a hop, skip, and a jump from that to, you know, you’re vaccinating us to sterilize a population or whatever nonsense.
Naomi Klein: Yeah and I think, you know, the conspiracy culture, and I call it conspiracy culture, not conspiracy theories because it is very incoherent, right? You have these. You know, I have respect for theories. I like them. You know, I don’t think it’s fair to theories to say that these are actually theories because, one, they’re looking for where the heat is. So, when it was all about vaccine verification apps, it was the apps themselves that were eavesdropping on you, that we’re going to bring in a social credit system then when they lifted the apps mandates, then we forgot all about that. And now it’s back to the vaccines, it’s the vaccines that are doing it and so on or it’s the virus itself, which is a bio weapon that was cooked up in the lab in order to depopulate the west. But no, it’s just a cold. Why are you even wearing a mask?
Right, so it just moves around in ways that really contradict themselves. They are a distraction machine so that we aren’t talking about real scandals during COVID. I mean, I was very upset with Bill Gates as well for different reasons.
I didn’t think that he was trying to implant microchips in us, you know, so that we could be tracked. But I did think he was part of, you know, a whole network of folks, mainly the pharmaceutical companies, who were insisting that these vaccines have patents on them. And it was not clear to me that they should have patents on them because they were developed with public dollars. It was a fee-for-service arrangements with government money. So why —
Chris Hayes: We bulk purchased them, yeah.
Naomi Klein: Right. And so, we had huge vaccine injustice where we were lining up to get our third and fourth shots when much of the world had not even gotten their first ones. So what interests me about that socialism of fools is that you’re always not talking about the scandal that we can prove, that we know about that’s right in front of us. And you pivot over to this idea that we’re about to prove that there’s a room somewhere with just these like five guys and a bunch of Jews and some people from China who are doing the whole thing.
But this surges at particular moments in history when the center isn’t holding, right, when the central promises of society are not delivering. And we don’t do good or any political and economic education in this country or in most countries where we don’t explain what capitalism is, right? We tell people it’s a meritocracy and you work hard and you’re going to get ahead and it’s the best of all possible systems and it’s sunshine and big max. And then when it doesn’t work out for them, when they’re working multiple jobs and they’re falling behind and they can’t afford groceries, then they want someone to blame.
And it’s not going to be capitalism because capitalism is supposed to be good. So, that’s when conspiracy theories really surge. And so, this is why, you know, in the book, I really reject horseshoe theory because I actually think it’s only a systemic analysis of capitalism that has a chance. You know, I think a socialism of facts can fight a socialism of fools, if you will.
Chris Hayes: That’s a good line. I mean, you point out to, in this chapter, about your Jewish heritage and Jewish tradition and anti-Semitism, which there’s sort of a bunch of different layered themes through that chapter. The really interesting one, the sort of the figure of the Jew as a kind of double mirror for Europeans, right?
That this figure is somehow like us but permanently outside of us and this double identity is sort of a little bit like the double consciousness that Du Bois talks about for African Americans is sort of this central agitated vector of intellectual discussion among Jewish Europeans, also by government seeking to either exterminate or expropriate or oppressed Jews in Europe. But also like the idea of like Jewishness as adjacent to conspiracy theory for a very long time from Hitler talking about Jewish capitalism as like, to go back to the sort of horseshoe theory, right?
Naomi Klein: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: Like the specific problem is in capitalism. It’s Jewish capitalism. To “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” that like the figure of Jewishness is adjacent to conspiracy theorizing. You know, like as Chris Rock famously said in that standard routine, like that train is never late, right?
Naomi Klein: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: Like when you start going into those places, like who’s controlling this again? Like it doesn’t take that long.
Naomi Klein: Yeah and I think it relates to what we were just talking about is that it’s a theory that actually protects power, right? Well, it’s interesting because the two-central conspiracy theories about Jews really contradict themselves, It’s the Jewish banker and the Jewish Bolshevik, right?
Chris Hayes: Right.
Naomi Klein: and —
Chris Hayes: It’s true.
Naomi Klein: And they’re always on a sort of logical collision course with one another, but that doesn’t matter because it’s a distraction machine. And what it is, even though, you know, I’ve spent hundreds of hours listening to Steve Bannon and he’s always railing against the elites and the globalists, that’s the contemporary code for —
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Naomi Klein: — Jewish capitalism.
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Naomi Klein: The globalists.
Chris Hayes: They are unrooted to the land.
Naomi Klein: But if we look at, you know, who is pushing conspiracy theories most aggressively and most effectively in our culture, it’s some of the richest and most powerful people anywhere. It’s Elon Musk, for instance, you know, and it’s Donald Trump.
Chris Hayes: And Rupert Murdoch.
Naomi Klein: And Rupert Murdoch, yeah.
Chris Hayes: It’s like three of the most powerful people on earth.
Naomi Klein: And so, it is this doppelganger of the left in the sense that it seems to be critiquing elite or it claims to be critiquing elites. But actually it protects them because you aren’t talking about the system. You’re talking about that room somewhere that you’re about to expose. So yeah, my mom is convinced that the reason I get confused with Naomi Wolf is anti-Semitism.
So, that’s one chapter in the book when my mom is like, you do realize that this is just because you’re both Jewish or as she put it, “a type.” I think the type is, I’m not sure. I thought it was like kind of striving Jewess, but my friend Cecily (ph) was like, they think you’re both JAPs. Anyway, so I wrestled with that for a while. Philip Roth gets involved, and then we end up in Gaza.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Naomi Klein: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: We’ll be right back after we take this quick break.
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Chris Hayes: I’m sort of figuring out the fork in the road here. Well, here’s what I want to —
Naomi Klein: We do get there.
Chris Hayes: I do want to find out how you think basically like where wrenching people back —
Naomi Klein: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: — from this happens. The sort of thrill of the conspiracy theory is invigorating and also invigning because it’s like, I’m going to figure this out. There’s the kind of thrill of this sort of anti-elite populism. And talk for a little bit, as we sort of wrap this, is like how you view a vision of sort of taking people back through the rabbit hole in reverse. Like what that looks like and what hope there is? Because it does get super dark and there are a lot of people and sometimes I feel like maybe this all goes away and maybe social media companies all just sort of like go kaput or, you know, Twitter dies and — yeah, exactly and we’ll all sort of be better off. But then the other thing about it is that like, you know, this is from my book I’m writing, like, you know, they didn’t need social media for like, you know, burning witches in the colonies.
Like humans are pretty good at this whichever technology you give them. It’s not like, it’s like, oh, well the algorithm was making them do it. Like they were people. And so, I wonder like how you think about undoing?
Naomi Klein: Yeah. We can definitely overplay the algorithm. So, you know, I’m interested that many of you said that you have lost people down the rabbit hole. And I would encourage you, if it feels possible, if it feels safe to reach out to them. There were a lot of severed relationships during COVID because a lot of decisions were made that felt, you know, really urgent around safety, right, around immunocompromised people.
But all this social science research does show that if somebody is going to come back, if they’re going to change their mind, it is going to be somebody who they have a preexisting relationship with, somebody in their family, somebody they went to high school with who extends some kind of a bridge. Like you said, like you don’t like big tech either. You don’t like big pharma either. You know, maybe there are things that you can agree on. But part of the thrill of conspiracy, like just building on what you were saying, Chris, it’s also that it has a vision for justice.
It is a cartoon vision of justice, but it isn’t just about unveiling the conspiracies. It’s this Hollywood-style great storm, right, that’s central to the QAnon conspiracy. Have you seen these bumper stickers, “Make the Nuremberg Code great again.” And that’s all about arresting all the war criminals who imposed COVID health measures and bringing them up on war crimes trials. And, you know, you can laugh about it, but they have a plan, you know, or at least they’re claimed to, right?
So, they aren’t just saying things are bad. They’re saying things are bad and we will fix them. We’ll bring Donald Trump back into the White House. He will arrest everybody and so on. So, that begs the question of like what is our vision of justice, right, beyond just sending Trump to jail. Like, do we actually have a vision of justice that addresses these multiple unveilings that we were talking about earlier? Because if you are gonna ask people to reckon with the crimes of the present, past and future, then it can’t just be like, wow, we suck. Tings are terrible. We’re implicated —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Naomi Klein: — in all of it. There also has to be a plan for what we’re gonna do about it. And if you aren’t a conspiracy nut, then that plan has to involve collective action in politics. And there has to be a horizon of where we’re gonna go together and how things are gonna change. And, you know, the last time I was on your show, Chris, the auto workers had just gone on strike. And I said to you something I’ll say again, which is I believe that the best way to fight conspiracy culture is to have more union organizers like Shawn Fain on television saying —
Chris Hayes: Perfect.
Naomi Klein: — we’re gonna take on. No, but really. You know, when you have somebody who is actually taking on the elites, who’s wearing his eat the rich shirt and saying, you know, we’re gonna get, a much greater share of the profits for working people who’ve been getting screwed, it makes this whole pantomime of fake anti-elitism on the conspiratorial-right look like the sham that it is, right. And so, that’s what we need to do. We need more of that. we’re not gonna solve it one uncle at a time, but if you can bring your uncle back, try.
Chris Hayes: The book is called “Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World” by Naomi Wolf. Sorry. That’s a joke. It’s a joke. It’s a bit. I’m doing a bit.
Naomi Klein: Get him.
Chris Hayes: The book is called “Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World” by Naomi Klein. Please give it up for Naomi Klein.
Once again, my great thanks to Naomi Klein, who I’ve known for years. And I want to reiterate what I said on stage. The book is really a special book. You should definitely check it out, and you should check out all her books. It was just great to have her on.
Don’t forget to tune to the next episode of the second part of our double header program with the one and only Joy Reid. I learned so much about Joy in that one conversation. I can’t wait to share it with you. You can follow us on TikTok by searching WITHpod. You can follow me on threads @chrislhayes, on BlueSky @chrislhayes.
“Why Is This Happening” is presented by MSNBC and NBC News, produced by Doni Holloway and Brendan O’Melia. This episode was engineered by Fernando Arruda and Harry Culhane and features music by Eddie Cooper. Aisha Turner is the executive producer of MSNBC Audio. You can see more of our work, including links to things we mentioned here by going to nbcnews.com/whyisthishappening.
“Why Is This Happening?” is presented by MSNBC and NBC News, produced by Doni Holloway and Brendan O’Melia, engineered by Bob Mallory and featuring music by Eddie Cooper. Aisha Turner is the executive producer of MSNBC Audio. You can see more of our work, including links to things we mentioned here by going to NBCNews.com/whyisthishappening?