Naomi Klein: ‘A Grift Only Works If You’ve Got Customers’

In January 1991, Naomi Klein, then 20, interviewed Naomi Wolf, then 28, about Wolf’s The Beauty Myth for Klein’s campus newspaper, the Varsity. As Wolf spoke to a group of students in the common room of one of the college dorms, Klein writes, “I sat in the front row, transfixed.” Less at the depth and breadth of Wolf’s feminist thought — “we were already ahead of her,” Klein writes — but the fact that “these words about beauty were coming from someone so young, confident and conventionally beautiful.”

Three decades on, however, things had taken a rather drastic turn. Wolf, once known primarily for her feminism, even if it was of the proto-Lean In variety, had morphed into an outspoken COVID conspiracist during the pandemic, and began allying herself with far-right figures like Steve Bannon.

Soon, Klein — a Canadian leftist known for her work on environmental causes, her sharp critiques of capitalism, her support for organized labour, and her professorship at the University of British Columbia — began to be confused for Wolf online. In spaces like Twitter, quick-typing fingers assigned Wolf’s kooky pronouncements to Klein instead.

The confusion got so bad that someone wrote a viral poem:

If the Naomi be Klein
You’re doing just fine,
If the Naomi be Wolf
Oh, buddy. Ooooof.

The confusion also led Klein to take a deep dive into the conspiracy-ridden world in which Wolf had immersed herself, one where COVID saw New Age hippies strategizing with far-right propagandists to take aim at what they saw as government overreach — a sort of mirror world of similar but also radically different criticisms Klein herself has made of governmental opportunism during crises.

The result is Klein’s book Doppelganger, which she’ll discuss this weekend, Saturday, Oct. 21, at the Chan Centre for the Performing Arts at the University of British Columbia.

Ahead of that event, The Tyee caught up with Klein to discuss conspiracy, skepticism of institutions, and how to navigate the current political moment. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

The Tyee: The introduction for a Q&A you did with Salon describes Naomi Wolf as a “onetime feminist crusader and now, bafflingly, an adjunct member of far-right conspiracy culture.” One thing that I’m always personally trying to work out, when it comes to conspiracy theories, is how people who believe in them ended up believing in them. What radicalized them? Where’s the connective tissue? So I was immediately wondering about that word “bafflingly.” Is it baffling? Or did you begin to see a clearer line between Wolf’s earlier beliefs and later beliefs as you researched for Doppelganger?

Naomi Klein: I find her belief in, and spreading of, conspiracy culture — and I call it conspiracy culture more than conspiracy theory, because there’s barely a theory there, it contradicts itself, and really it goes wherever heat is — I find that less baffling than the political alliances she’s made, given her earlier work.

I think it’s probably more shocking that somebody who was such a prominent feminist and wrote against gun violence, wrote a whole book on fascism, wrote about reproductive rights, is now minimizing the Supreme Court’s attacks on reproductive freedom and abortion access. She is hanging around with people who are fascists, and who have a fascist project. And taking pictures of her guns.

In a way, that is the more important shift to understand. Because other people like her are shifting alliances in this way, and they’re moving to a very dangerous political project. I think we need to understand how that’s being rationalized.

In terms of what you asked about — were there clues in her earlier work? Some people have speculated about it. Some people have said, oh, she was always a conspiracy theorist, you know, The Beauty Myth was a conspiracy theory. But I don’t think so. It’s a very easy smear to make against any kind of anti-establishment systemic analysis. I think what’s more telling is that she was sloppy with facts in that book. And what’s more telling is that she kind of got addicted to the internet, the reward system in it. I think that those are the factors that signalled that this might be possible more than saying there was a conspiratorial tone to her earlier work.

You write about how Wolf’s COVID conspiracies sound a little like what you wrote about in The Shock Doctrine, but “refracted through a funhouse mirror of plots and conspiracies based almost exclusively on a series of hunches.” I was thinking about something similar when Donald Trump and his acolytes began railing about mainstream media during his presidential campaign. In particular, I guess, reflecting on the way books like Manufacturing Consent influenced the development of my own skepticism and approach to media analysis. Because there are very legitimate reasons to be skeptical of power and authority and mainstream institutions. But is there a different exigency in our current conspiracy-filled era to express that skepticism differently or more carefully, so that legitimate critiques don’t end up being distorted and weaponized?

I do think that our moment calls for greater attention to rigour, and I think we need to educate people, particularly young people, on the difference between a systemic analysis of power and an unfounded conspiracy. And real conspiracy, right? Because we have become so reactive that we’re suddenly acting as if there has never been a plot by wealthy people and governments to advance their own interests. That is just not true.

As part of our ongoing media education, we have to make a distinction between honest efforts to expose the real conspiracies that have always been a part of capitalism, from price-fixing to coverups to the long history of intelligence agencies being involved in dirty tricks and covert ops, mostly against revolutionaries at home, Indigenous resistance movements, Black liberation movements and socialist governments abroad. We need to distinguish between that and dishonest conspiracy fabulists, and influencers.

I talk about conspiracy influencers as opposed to conspiracy theorists because, first of all, I don’t think it’s fair to theory to call them theorists, and I also think calling them influencers gestures towards the fact that this is an industry. That’s something we really need to understand about why certain figures have decided that it is in their interest to spread unproven and often contradictory claims.

I think it is a doppelganger of investigative journalism, what we’re seeing in conspiracy culture, and it often has many of the same kind of formal trappings — you know, “giant scoop,” “breaking” — but it leaps over all of the guardrails that investigative journalism and rigorous academic research rely on. I don’t want to pretend that there isn’t a need to hold ourselves accountable. There is, and I think that that means showing our work. It means just because something feels true, and we have a hunch about it, that we have proved it right.

Those are just a few of my thoughts about what conspiracy culture calls on us to do. But I don’t think it means we need to become more credulous and more fearful of holding elites accountable. In fact, I think that’s a really dangerous approach. Because I think a lot of what we’re seeing on the far right is that they are opportunistically filling some vacuums left by a weakened left. And taking issues that have a lot of potency, like anger at Davos, anger at elites, anger at what globalization has done to communities, and co-opting them into this highly nationalist, violent, xenophobic, patriarchal project.

We don’t want that. We don’t want them to be able to take those issues. But that means we have to take them up.

There have been conspiracists yammering on about conspiracies for as long as I can remember, and probably for as long as there have been humans. But it feels far more fraught in our current moment, with real political implications. Why do you think things have gotten so out of hand?

If your massage therapist thought that there was, you know, mass poisoning going on because of 5G, that didn’t really hurt anyone, exactly, right? But the stakes were raised in a hurry because of the pandemic, and because of a confluence of factors. Those of us who were fortunate enough to be able to work from home were online way too much, trying to make sense of this novel virus, frightened, Googling. And the scientific method is slow. And so through no fault of the scientists who were trying to understand the virus, there was a period that was wide open for hucksters to say, "I have the tincture," "I have the magic cure" or "It’s all a hoax, you don’t need to worry about it, you don’t need to do these hard things that are being asked of you."

There’s always a cost to bad health advice for the people who take that advice. But in a pandemic, the cost is much, much higher. And, you know, because the nature of pandemic is that what we as individuals do affects the collective, that’s why I think we had to take it a lot more seriously.

Conspiracies have always been around, and maybe people found out about them through a free newspaper at the health food store, or a Facebook group. But it was that combination of fear, interconnection, a globally synchronous event and the fact that we were on platforms that allowed individuals to monetize conspiracy in a way that, from my research, is unprecedented. There are always conspiracies that surge during disasters. I’ve seen it again and again, but I’ve never seen anything like the number of people who decided to turn it into a business model, like we saw with COVID.

I think that explains why the influencers are in it, but of course, they’re influencing people who are not influencers, who are just kind of looking for answers — seekers — and that’s the flip side of it, is really understanding what is driving that. I think that’s more important.

More important to understand what’s driving the folks who are the seekers?

It’s easy to understand people who are really benefiting from this in terms of getting their follower counts to explode. But they’re only able to make money because there are millions of people who are buying what they’re selling. That is something that I think we don’t grapple with enough. It’s really easy to just write it all off as a grift. But a grift only works if you’ve got customers.

I spend a lot of time in different Facebook groups that emerged during COVID. And what I’ve seen is everyday people sharing different conspiratorial ideas with each other. Some of those, like calls against bringing in a central bank digital currency, haven’t gained much traction. But what has seemed to capture folks is anti-trans stuff, in particular when it comes to fear-mongering around how kids are expressing themselves and what they’re learning in school.

That energy from the COVID lockdown, it’s like a heat-seeking missile. It’s looking for where it’s going to get its next energy lift. Anti-trans hysteria is definitely a big area that this movement is turning towards, and, more broadly, anti-LGBTQ. It’s expanding very quickly.

And also the idea that there’s going to be a climate lockdown, that any sort of benign municipal attempt to put in a bike lane or restrict parking is actually a plot to lock you into your house forever. And that’s why you see city councils being stormed. There’s a lot of crossover between the two, to be clear.

In Europe, a lot of this energy is going into anti-immigrant sentiment, and border control — really, fascism. I was in Ireland on my book tour, and they had just had this protest outside their parliament, which is called the Dáil. And they were trying to make sense of that protest. It was anti-immigrant, anti-trans. And anti-climate action, and anti-vaccine.

And they were like, it’s completely incoherent. But I think that there is something that is coherent about it. And it has to do with the figure of the child, and the site of the family as a site of control. And the nation as a set of controls. A lot of it is about selling this illusion that in these really frightening times you can control your body and your kid, and own your nation.

The figure of the child is absolutely central to it, and the child as a kind of a double of the parent, which is why I think they are so able to mobilize around anti-trans bigotry.

It really calls on us, I think, to push back on the whole narrative that parents have a right to own their children, that their children are their double, their little mini-me. Children have autonomy, they have a right to their own identity, they have a right to privacy, they have rights. Whether that is the name they’re called at school or the book they want to read at the library. It’s really important that we have a robust discourse around children’s autonomy, which obviously is not limitless. Kids do need controls around them. But they’re not our property.

The other part of it that’s occurred to me is a sort of purity ideal or purity culture, which does kind of ideologically knit together a lot of those different factions.

Purity and “naturalness,” yes, appeals to the natural. It’s this idea of the vaccine as a kind of intrusion, of poisoning, and then it moves to the poisoning of kids’ minds and bodies. And I think that that’s where the door is open also to racial purity discourse and nationalist discourse.

As people in Canada have been trying to make sense of what was underpinning the trucker convoy or the recent 1 Million March 4 Children, they’ll often say the rhetoric and strategies have been imported from the United States, rather than being homegrown. Does that align with what you saw as you were researching? Or do people who live in Canada need to have a reckoning about the homegrown drivers of these movements?

There are certain code words that are a little bit more American, like maybe “parents’ rights” is a little bit more of a U.S. framing, but I think Canadians generally are way too quick to claim that this is a particularly American phenomenon.

That’s why, for example, it’s so important to know about the history of environmentalism in B.C., and the fact that it has long had elements that were entwined with xenophobia and fascistic thought. So no, it’s not just that we’ve been importing.

But one thing I will say is that, for example, Joe Rogan has the top podcast in the U.K. Increasingly I feel like we’re living on archipelagos of podcasts. Whatever idea we have in our heads of what it means to be Canadian, or what it means to be American or Irish, it’s becoming less important than our respective media diets and the kind of culture that we’re absorbing that way. So I think the roots are very real here in our settler colonial nation. But I also think that there’s ways in which the massive power of certain communicators are knitting together an international language and project.

It’s been very clear since Steve Bannon left the White House that he’s about building a nationalist internationale, and he takes it very seriously. Those are some of the moments where I was the most taken aback listening to his podcast. It’s more international than a lot of leftist media. He’s really paying attention to how it’s going with Marine Le Pen in France, and how it’s going with Giorgia Meloni in Italy, and Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil.

And I’m not saying that we don’t pay attention to it, but there is always a risk of parochialism on the North American left, and he’s got an international project. It’s a nationalist internationale project, and they’re uniting in xenophobia. They’re trading tactics, they’re trading language, they’re seeing what works.

Bolsonaro ran putting out these memes that cast his opponent, Fernando Haddad, who had been education minister under the PT government, as a groomer and a pedophile, and he won.

So I think I would just say both things are true. We shouldn’t be smug. And there really is a trading of tactics across borders.

When you were writing this book, you did reach out to Wolf to put some of the questions you raise in the book — her alliance with Steve Bannon, her seeming unconcern with the appeal of Roe v. Wade, the real-world effects of her vocal anti-vax conspiracies — but you never heard back. Why do think she wasn’t up for a conversation?

I think because she doesn’t really talk to any non-right-wing media anymore. I’ve listened to countless interviews that she’s done for right-wing media outlets and podcasts, and she’s invariably treated like a Cassandra, like a savant. She never gets a hard question. She’s getting everything she needs from that world, and all engaging with people like me holds for her is peril or challenge, which she’s not interested in.

It’s hard to figure out how to have debates with people who have completely different sets of facts. Like I say in the book, we’re not having a disagreement about different interpretations of reality. We’re having a disagreement about who is in reality and who is in a simulation, and it’s very hard to figure out how you stage a debate like that.

A colleague of mine, when we were chatting about this interview, said they felt like everything you’ve written about in your books just keeps getting worse. In a strange way, your trip into the mirror world — even though it’s at first discouraging — seems to bolster your spirits by the end. Could you talk a bit about that? Are you feeling more optimistic about where we’re at with regards to conspiracy culture and the climate?

What I feel is more oriented. I was truly confused by the way in which political signals were getting scrambled in periods in the pandemic, and kind of felt a bit speechless. And I think I wrote myself into a position of greater orientation, which is what one always does with writing. It starts very chaotic and confused, and we slowly order our thoughts and come out of it feeling more lucid. The process of writing and editing and refining did that for me.

But in terms of feeling hopeful, I don’t think that’s anything that I can do on my own. As I say at the end of the book, I think that’s collective work. And so the extent to which I feel a little bit buoyed depends on the news of the day. When the auto workers are on strike and the screenwriters are on strike and there’s all kinds of solidarity breaking out and it feels like there might be a pulse on the left again, that gives me great optimism, especially because I think it’s addressing real issues, and it makes it a lot harder for important issues to be co-opted and mixed and matched with this really nefarious, far-right agenda.

But today I don’t feel great. I’m absolutely horrified by the war crimes being committed in Gaza. I think we are in for a very long and brutal process of ethnic cleansing. And I think there needs to be very sharp, moral clarity and values governing our responses to all of it. I feel absolutely heartbroken and devastated by what’s happening in Gaza and Israel.

I just saw that one of the people who died in one of the initial Hamas attacks was a young man who graduated a few years ago from a high school in Vancouver. It’s so tough. I think a lot of people are feeling really heartbroken right now.

Part of the reason why I’ve been outspoken about the need to mourn all deaths and recognize that targeting of civilians is a crime, even as we recognize that the responsibilities are obviously different between an occupied people living in an open-air prison, and the occupiers, with all of the weapons that are possible to design and buy, is that I think it’s incredibly important that our responses be governed by an unwavering commitment to human rights law.

We have to oppose war crimes in every situation. And just be guided by a cherishing of human life. As I say in the book, what binds the yoga teacher in British Columbia who is saying "Maybe they should die" about immunocompromised people, and a “great replacement” gunman, are these ideas about purity and a rationalizing of huge, huge losses of human life.

It sounds simplistic and corny to say we have to be the people who cherish life, but that’s actually a very radical position in a world that is allowing migrants to drown in the Mediterranean and swim into saws in the Rio Grande, and telling people to go back to work and not wear a mask, despite their vulnerabilities.

This is a brutal culture. It’s a necropolitics at work. And I don’t know how you fight necropolitics without standing for the value of human life.

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Presented by the Vancouver Writers Fest in partnership with the UBC Centre for Climate Justice and the Chan Centre for the Performing Arts, Naomi Klein will be in conversation with Jarrett Martineau at the Chan Centre on Saturday, Oct. 21, at 7:30 p.m.