Pod Insights The Ezra Klein Show We’re All Living in the ‘Mirror World’ Now About this episode Naomi Klein saw where our politics was headed before most people on the left. Her 2023 book “Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World” is hard to describe. But among other things, it traces the new coalitions Klein saw forming on the right, the ways they were co-opting issues long associated with the left, and finding huge audiences and influence outside existing institutions.
The people and coalitions that Klein wrote about run our world now. We are all living in the mirror world. As she put it, it’s “doppelgangers at the wheel.” So I wanted to have Klein on the show to help understand how that happened, what the left failed to see at the time and the lessons the left should take from it now.
As Klein told me: “The thing about doppelgangers is, in literature, they’re always a message telling you a warning: You have to look at yourself. There’s something about yourself that you’re not seeing.”
Note: We recorded this episode before the war in Iran.
Mentioned:
Doppelganger by Naomi Klein
No Logo by Naomi Klein
“Minnesota Proved MAGA Wrong” by Adam Serwer
End Times Fascism by Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor
Book Recommendations:
Empire of AI by Karen Hao
Here Where We Live Is Our Country by Molly Crabapple
Fire Alarm by Michael Löwy
Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected] .
You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs.
Transcript 13,976 words · 10 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:31 Ezra Klein? The author Naomi Klein is probably best known for 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 advisor, but who had in the COVID era become one of the most prominent right-wing conspiracists. 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.
1:14 Ezra Klein? It can only have been written by one person at one moment in their life. What Klein was interested in was the ways that 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. become a core part of the MAGA coalition? 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.
1:57 Ezra Klein? 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.
2:15 Ezra Klein? But now that world, the mirror world, it's our world. Now its leaders are our leaders. So I wanted 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, [email protected] .
2:59 Ezra Klein? Naomi Klein, welcome to the show.
3:01 Naomi Klein? Thank you.
3:02 Ezra Klein? So your book revolves around two concepts, doppelgangers and mirror worlds. And I thought maybe good to start by just defining them.
3:10 Naomi Klein? Sure. So a doppelganger is a German word that literally translated means a double goer or a double walker. And it's the idea that out there somewhere, you could bump into somebody who looks just like you and isn't you. And it's that sort of uncanny vertigo that addresses the strangeness of that which is most familiar, which is yourself. Mirror world is a term I use 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 exact mirror of where we live
3:54 Naomi Klein? 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 I was trying to find language for a discomfort 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.
4:28 Ezra Klein? How did you get interested in the idea of the doppelganger?
4:32 Naomi Klein? So a few different routes took me there. It was deep in the pandemic 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. So I started working with a writing teacher and was just sort of playing with form. And in the background, I was having this strange experience where in this time when we were all being represented exclusively by our
5:13 Naomi Klein? avatars in the digital sphere, I started being confused on a massive scale with another nonfiction writer named Naomi, Naomi Wolf. And it sort of became one of left Twitter's favorite jokes at the time. And so every time I would 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, what I would be confronted with was all these people sort of screaming at me about something that's 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
5:57 Naomi Klein? 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. And I've been wanting to return to that theme, which was actually the subject of my first book that I wrote in the late 1990s and came out in 2000, No Logo. I've been wanting to come back to it, but I couldn't find a way to write about it that didn't feel sort of hectoring a 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 self performance and self protection
6:40 Naomi Klein? 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.
6:49 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 remember that book and it being kind of left canon as I was growing up and becoming a writer. So what was the argument of No Logo? What were you sensing then? And what were you trying to pull up into visibility about the world?
7:10 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 politic that was sort of doing an end run around governments. And it was going directly for the multinationals, you know, whether Nike because of sweatshops in Indonesia or Shell because of oil spills in Nigeria. And it was, it was, 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, where they were all just declaring that they were
7:53 Naomi Klein? no longer in the business of making products. 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. They were contracts. And the real work of production was the production of image. And that was affecting youth culture that, you know, as a young person thinking about this, we were all being told that we should be our own brands, which didn't really make any sense in the 1990s because this was pre-social media, it was pre-iPhone. In No Logo, I wrote about the first celebrities who were themselves lifestyle brands like Michael Jordan and Oprah. And this was like a new concept that an individual could be a brand. But the idea that a non-famous person
8:35 Naomi Klein? could be a brand made no sense to us because we didn't have marketing firms.
8:39 Ezra Klein? It also feels to me like it's 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 70s. So this sort of anti-advertising, anti-branding, anti-consumer politics that was very, very strong, I feel like, in the 90s.
9:10 Ezra Klein? Feels pretty absent today.
9:12 Naomi Klein? Yeah, because we really could be our own brands, right? So 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, 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, 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.
9:40 Ezra Klein? Yeah.
9:41 Naomi Klein? But everybody knows that everybody 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.
9:53 Ezra Klein? So I want to bring in the, back in the other character here, which is Naomi Wolf. Intellectually, politically, who is she?
10:02 Naomi Klein? Her sort of heyday was the 1990s with a breakthrough book called The Beauty Myth. It came out when I was an undergrad. And it had a thesis that young women were being forced to add a third shift. There's already like 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 women were being held back from advancing in the workplace because they were having to put so much work into being beautiful.
10:34 Speaker 02 Why has the conflict on the sexual battlefield suddenly come out into the open? And can the long-fraught fears about date rape and harassment ever resolve themselves? Joining me now, bestselling author Naomi Wolf.
10:47 Speaker 03 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.
11:03 Naomi Klein? She was the face of what was called at the time third wave feminism. It was a controversial term, you know, whether it actually was a wave or not. And, you know, she wrote a bunch of bestselling books, called Fire with Fire. One of her high slash low points was advising Al Gore's presidential campaign on how to reach women voters because she was a very prominent feminist at the time. And, yeah, so that's who she was. And now she is someone quite different.
11:32 Speaker 03 Hi, everyone. It's Naomi Wolf here at Daily Cloud. And I'm doing something that I have been promising for a while after.
11:40 Naomi Klein? 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, 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 just started posting a whole lot about different kinds of conspiracy claims, everything from like taking pictures of clouds and claiming they were cloud seeded.
12:08 Speaker 03 I began to notice a very distinct pattern that these emissions, these trails would, I'm not going to say be laying down, because I don't know for sure what the motivation is, I've got some hypotheses, but they would clearly stay there, not dissipate, spread, and create cloud cover and block the sun.
12:32 Naomi Klein? To claiming ISIS beheadings or crisis actors.
12:36 Speaker 03 Saying they're not yet independently verified. The only source for them, early on at least, was this very questionable site called SITE, S-I-T-E, which gets half a million dollars from the United States government a year and is run by these Islamophobe establishment types who are connected to the sort of US anti-terrorism establishment.
13:00 Naomi Klein? So like kind of 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 to the vaccine as a bioweapon.
13:16 Speaker 03 The market for the COVID injections has kind of come and gone because people are aware now that it's a deadly and sterilizing injection.
13:25 Speaker 03 But the side effects live on.
13:27 Naomi Klein? To the vaccine verification apps are a Chinese communist plot to subdue the West.
13:34 Speaker 03 The vaccine passport platform is the same platform as a social credit system like in China that enslaves a billion people.
13:45 Naomi Klein? At a certain point during the pandemic, she was on Steve Bannon's show every day for a couple of weeks. She has become a really big star on the on the right.
13:55 Ezra Klein? You described when you were defining mirror worlds, that 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 theses 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?
14:28 Naomi Klein? Yeah, so the year year before the pandemic in 2019, she published a book called Outrages. And she very famously made a foundational factual error in that book where she misinterpreted a phrase in the historical record. The book dealt with persecution of gay men in England. And she misunderstood the term death recorded, where she thought that it meant that they had been killed by the state. And this was exposed live on the BBC.
14:55 Speaker 04 Death recorded. I was really surprised by this. And I looked it up. Death recorded is what's in, I think, most of these cases that 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.
15:23 Speaker 03 Well, that's a really important thing to investigate. What is your understanding of what "death recorded" means? Death recorded?
15:30 Naomi Klein? It became one of these moments of mass online ridicule, just public shaming. It's like, I hate telling the story because it's like every writer's worst nightmare.
15:39 Ezra Klein? Yeah.
15:40 Naomi Klein? Every time something like this would happen to Wolf, 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 had a sort of front row seat on it. And it was really ugly. And I do think that that happens a lot with the people who we ask that question of, of like, why did they change in that way? We'll often find some kind of public shaming, you know, or something really wrong that they did, right? Like, it's not just that we were mean to them. It's that they did something maybe unforgivable, and then got really shamed for it. And then they were embraced in this other world where facts matter a lot less.
16:16 Ezra Klein? Well, this is where I want to follow you into the other world, as you follow her into the other world. And you have 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 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. R.I.P. 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.
17:01 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 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 We were just blessing them with our attention by looking at them and writing about them. And I really felt, as I was listening to Bannon, that I was watching a new political coalition cohere. He was calling it MAGA plus at the time. This is, you know, 2021, 2022.
17:43 Naomi Klein? And I had seen Bannon in 2016 peel off part of the Democratic coalition, particularly white unionized men, 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, you know, he would wind up the introduction.
18:05 Speaker 05 Okay, our guest is Naomi Wolf. Naomi, you came, you started as a feminist, a huge writer, bestselling author, public intellectual, lionized by the left and the established order and the, you know, the conventional thinking. And now you're kind of a renegade and every day a rebel.
18:26 Naomi Klein? She used to consult for Al Gore. She consulted for Bill Clinton. And that was central to her appeal is that she could potentially deliver this constituency that Trump really was weak with. And I think Bannon understood that these sort of angry COVID moms were a new part of his coalition, 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 particulates 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.
19:10 Naomi Klein? And women were making videos on Instagram saying that they'd kicked their husbands out of their beds because they weren't going to sleep with vaccinated people anymore. And things were going wild. And so there was this 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 traced it back to, a lot of it, back to Naomi Wolf. 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 Steve Bannon. And when I would mention to a friend, like, oh, 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.
19:54 Naomi Klein? 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.
20:05 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 in 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, powerful in government. And so this idea that you could just shun people out, right? That that would be an effective way of creating social change in politics took hold. And it wasn't a crazy idea.
20:48 Ezra Klein? And there are ways it has worked in the past and ways it worked even then. But it missed how much is happening outside the institutions and how 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.
21:12 Naomi Klein? I feel like so much of this is just about social media. And I know that it's sort of slightly hackneyed, but all of this is playing out on platforms, right? And I even think that something like the mute button or the block button 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.
21:39 Ezra 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 legible network that is now arguably the default network in in American life.
22:01 Naomi Klein? I mean, this is the thing about endoplegangers, endopleganger 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. 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 Dostoevsky is the double as protagonist is getting carted 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 doppelganger is doppelganger is at the wheel.
23:00 Ezra Klein? The one thing that I have kept thinking about and that I feel like your book gets out really well is the underling 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 very powerful person with a incredibly powerful and broad elite network and child sex trafficking at the center of
23:45 Ezra Klein? it. And again, I don't believe in QAnon, but 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?
24:01 Naomi Klein? I'm really interested in the work that conspiracy culture is playing, like in how it distracts from conspiracies that are real. And I never doubted that there was a conspiracy that Epstein was involved in. And that's been clear for a long time. The reason why people are being drawn to conspiracy culture is that we all feel that this world is rigged against us. And power has concentrated and wealth has concentrated so much 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.
24:45 Naomi Klein? I think QAnon has the structure of, it's sort of like, it's why antisemitism was called, is still called, the socialism of fools. It's just sort of like, it kind of explains how capitalism works, except for it twisted, and it's just a cabal of rich Jews.
25:08 Naomi Klein? But, you know, we need stories to explain our reality, and we need them, and so do the super elites need them. And, you know, one of the things that the files do 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 wealth and power, but-
25:35 Ezra Klein? And you see Epstein talking about that quite a lot in the emails.
25:38 Naomi Klein? Yeah, yeah. I think it's inextricable from the fact that we live in a time where if you're rich enough, you think the rules don't apply to you. 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 accountable to any rules. Trump embodies that, 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, one of the more progressive, caring billionaires, right? I think, it seems to me that, like, Epstein was like the after-after party for Davos, right?
26:23 Naomi Klein? Where it's just like, he was the guy who could make it all happen.
26:27 Ezra Klein? It is clear to me that his impunity was an object of envy. The way he lived.
26:32 Naomi Klein? Yeah.
26:33 Ezra Klein? That maybe they didn't all know.
26:37 Ezra Klein? 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.
26:59 Naomi Klein? And part of the attraction of Trump. I mean, Trump is that. He's the 80s guy who always had the beautiful women around him 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 and now don't even bother claiming to care about, whether, you know, climate change or equity diversity and inclusion. But I, I see these things as really interrelated because, you know, I say the past 50 years because this is the sort of counter-revolution against the New Deal era. This is sort of what I wrote about in The Shock Doctrine. This is the revolution against regulation and the era of privatization and unmaking of the state. And it really
27:42 Naomi Klein? 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 state, right? And that's where it's really interesting 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. I'll fix schools, you fix poverty, you know, you fix malaria and, and we've got this. You don't really need governments anymore because we are so socially responsible and we're going to use our wealth to fix the world. But I think that what was actually
28:22 Naomi Klein? happening is that power is for using. The whole point of becoming this rich is to not have to play by these types of rules. And I think what Trump has unlocked and what Epstein always was, 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.
28:50 Ezra Klein? What have you made of Steve Bannon's closeness to Jeffrey Epstein? So here you have somebody who certainly presents himself as the populist, 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. Bannon sends this to Epstein. And Epstein doesn't answer. And a couple hours later Bannon's like, "So my guy's going to Israel. Can you meet with Ahud Barak?" Right? They just like move right on. So here you have this guy who's like populist in the front stage and backstage.
29:35 Naomi Klein? Uh huh.
29:36 Ezra Klein? Is very, I mean, this is happening in 2019, this particular text message I'm talking about. How do you think about that?
29:44 Naomi Klein? Yeah, so I guess I should have made this clear earlier. Like, I think Bannon is a terrible fraud. And I think he performs being the voice of the little guy. And even the sort of way in which he took on Musk early in this Trump administration 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. What I think about Bannon is that he is a strategist. 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 how to build a coalition. And he's strategic about that.
30:28 Naomi Klein? I think he platforms conspiracy theorists because he understands that it is very useful for people to believe outlandish things, in part because it distracts them, 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. And it's really interesting. 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 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 centrally implicated in and implicated
31:13 Naomi Klein? in ways that are really about rearranging the political map. I mean, he's interested in Epstein because he thinks Epstein can help fund the populist international, which is weaving together these far-right, often fascist, openly fascist parties in Europe and Latin America with the United States. And, you know, he needs a funder for this.
31:32 Ezra Klein? And connections.
31:33 Naomi Klein? So it's political. Yeah. And so what we're seeing in these files is part of how the world that we're in right now is built. And I don't know how you feel about the like, is this fascism? Is this not? Where are you falling on that?
31:45 Ezra Klein? I think it's pretty fascist.
31:46 Naomi Klein? Yeah.
31:47 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, et cetera, that they become, people stop being willing to use them because it feels like you've moved outside of ordinary discourse. But these words describe things.
32:05 Naomi Klein? Yeah.
32:06 Ezra 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.
32:19 Naomi Klein? Exactly, yeah.
32:20 Ezra Klein? But there's a reason they're all very interested in Schmidt.
32:23 Naomi Klein? Yeah, yeah. And I think part of the hesitancy has to do with like really exceptionalizing Hitler and that like it sounds like you're saying if he is fascist, he is Hitler. And that's not what the term means. And there've been plenty of fascists who weren't Hitler. And, you know, history doesn't repeat on a loop. It changes. It iterates. It compounds.
32:48 Naomi Klein? But the reason I ask, do you think it's fascist is that?
32:53 Naomi Klein? Fascism is a pathology of injured power. It emerges in Italy and in Germany in the injuries of the First World War. Right. It's soldiers and generals and industrialists who are hurt, right? By the sanctions, but it's powerful people who are hurt, right? Whereas like left revolutions are powerless people 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. But one of the things that we see in the Epstein files are these concerns about Me Too, about accountability, like, you know, a lot of talk about Me Too, people going to Epstein because he is a sex criminal and they know that. And they're asking him for advice about what to do about the fact that,
33:37 Naomi Klein? you know, the movement is coming for them and they might be held accountable. So if we are in a fascist moment, then it is a counter-revolution. Like, we have to understand, like, what are elites revolting against? Like, what, who hurt them? What hurt them? And, you know, I think part of what they are revolting against is that there was starting to be some accountability, like their impunity was, there were a few jinx in the armor. And some of that was women who were beginning to hold powerful men accountable. So this unleashing of the far right is partly them protecting themselves.
34:15 Ezra Klein? Well, and nothing was more radicalizing, I think, to the tech-right CEO and venture class than the feeling that their corporations were being taken over by the staff. Marc Andreessen has talked about this directly, that the sense that on any given day, you might almost have a riot of your own employees and you had lost power.
34:37 Speaker 06 You know, the employee base is going feral. 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.
34:47 Naomi Klein? He's a bit of an exaggerator, I've noticed.
34:51 Ezra Klein? Well, he's describing the way he thinks felt to him. And at the very least, I will.
34:55 Naomi Klein? He said he was being terrorized by the Biden administration because they tried to regulate crypto.
35:00 Speaker 06 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 that's really when we knew that we had to really get involved in politics.
35:14 Naomi Klein? But this is related, like the fact that Marc Andreessen sees the most mild accountability as an existential attack. I mean, the way he talks about 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, Marc Andreessen was on a throne on the cover of Time magazine, a golden throne, I believe, you know, and he was, I think, 23. I think that may have gone to their head, you know? I think that the kinds of depravity that we see in the files is related to the, it's dangerous to lift people up and treat them as gods and kings. And I think we did that as a culture, just because people were rich.
35:56 Naomi Klein? You know, the other place where we see pedophile rings is in the Catholic Church and survivors talk about the kind of unique horror of being abused by somebody who has God on their side, right? And we did treat 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 Marc Andreessen. So 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.
36:37 Naomi Klein? And this solidarity that they show one another, the support that they give to one another up against Congress, up against the most powerful men in the world, like it's so moving to me. And the, you know, women journalists who believed them when nobody else did, this is a beautiful story. I mean, it's a horrible story, but it's, there's also, there's beauty in it.
36:56 Ezra Klein? Let me try a thought on you because I know you're working with Esther Taylor on a book about fascism. And I was thinking, as you were talking about what kinds of injuries create fascist movements, 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.
37:29 Naomi Klein? Yes.
37:30 Ezra Klein? But what is the bottom upside of Trumpism and is often the bottom upside of fascism? Is the feeling that many people have, ordinary people, at times of rapid change, 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 what its destiny is. And I mean, this is also pandemic book and to some degree 2024 era Trumpism is a pandemic era phenomena. People are very, very angry about all of a sudden being told that they're
38:12 Ezra Klein? 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 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.
38:28 Naomi Klein? I mean, just to stay with the pandemic thing for, you know, one more moment. This relates to the work that Astrid 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 crises are now hitting, right? It's not just like this may happen. It's this is happening. And COVID, 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
39:11 Naomi Klein? shut down. Like you could walk through Times Square and I was in it. And I think that that shifted something in our brains, a lot of us, including very powerful people who realize that actually the stuff's gonna happen. We're now in the, in the age where it happens.
39:27 Naomi Klein? And so I think what we saw during COVID was that that presents us with a pretty stark choice about what kind of society we're going to have. We will either have a much stronger state that takes care of people. And we saw a more robust social state during COVID. We had governments pay people to stay home. We had periods where where there was eviction moratorium. We had free masks and and testing like kind of a taste of universal healthcare in the United States. And there is another option. And that option is screw them. This is nature taking its course. This is culling. This is survival of the fittest.
40:08 Naomi Klein? And and I think a lot of that diagonalism that came together of people on the kind of new age 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 know, when it comes to Silicon Valley and these sort of tech elites and the moment that they're in, I think, even though they COVID was really good for them, just in terms of their bottom lines, I actually think that what freaked them out
40:48 Naomi Klein? more than anything was the quiet quitting, was people actually not needing the jobs as much and losing that sort of boss worker power for a while. And workers saying during a pandemic, you better pay me more if you want me to risk my life, right? 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 OK with mass death. And the genocide in Gaza happens and a lot of people showed that they could live with it. I think that those two events, I think it was COVID in Gaza that produces the Trump moment. And it really was about a fear of this fork in the road moment.
41:31 Naomi Klein? 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 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.
41:47 Ezra Klein? You used a term in there that I want to pick up on, which is diagonalism. What is diagonalism?
41:53 Naomi Klein? Diagonalism is a term, Quinn Slobodin and William Callison, who are both scholars of European history, they use that that term in an essay about the German anti-lockdown movement early in the pandemic, which is sort of a rough translation of a German word, which seems to be coming up called Kerdunken, which means like outside of the box thinking, which is how these sort of wellness influencers and entrepreneurial kind of not traditional right wingers made alliance with right wing parties. And so it just speaks to these kind of unlikely bedfellows like my doppelgänger and Steve Bannon, like people meeting, it's kind of an alternative to the horseshoe theory, I suppose, because the horseshoe theory sort
42:37 Naomi Klein? of assumes that it's like far left and far right, but a more significant shift are sort of liberal wellness California types who very focused on kind of bunkering their own bodies, making alliance with people who are bunkering their national borders.
42:52 Ezra Klein? What's interesting to me about about this theory of diagonalism, and this goes back to pick up on our fascism conversation to fascist movements, that there does seem to me to be a sorting, not just around religion, we use religious sorting 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 in the book, is I guess the the role of spirituality and
43:37 Ezra Klein? 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 thought about it then and since.
43:49 Naomi Klein? 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. And, you know, European fascists, you know, in the 1920s and 30s were very interested in all kinds of new age health fads. But I think in our version of it, it's really related to the kind of optimized self and, you know, the way in which we can just protect ourselves in a world in which we don't have very much control by purifying our bodies and optimizing ourselves in every way. And, yeah, I mean, I don't think it is very left. I think it's highly individual.
44:33 Naomi Klein? I, you know, I think, I think leftists generally survived the pandemic without becoming conspiracy theorists for the most part. But where you really saw it was like yoga studios. And so I think that they kind of coded left-ish. But I don't think that they were that political before.
44:51 Ezra Klein? I, I agree with this. I'm not trying to say that it's about hardcore communists becoming QAnon members. I guess maybe the place 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 left, which I'm describing here very broadly, kind of Democrats, leftists, liberals, et cetera, it becomes more institutionalized, technocratic. It believes science. It believes experts. And what it ends up ejecting is people who have profound distrust. You talk a lot in the book about RFK Jr., who goes from a kind of fringe presidential candidate
45:33 Ezra Klein? as a Democrat 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.
45:43 Speaker 07 I'm here to join you in making a new Declaration of Independence for our entire nation. We declare independence from the corporations that have hijacked our government. And we declare independence from the Wall Street, from big tech, from big pharma, from big ag, 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.
46:25 Speaker 07 And we declare independence from the cynical elites who betray our hope and who amplify our divisions.
46:34 Ezra Klein? What do you think when you hear that?
46:36 Naomi Klein? 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 a lot of the people in these coalitions can be pulled out of them because the world that they're in now is just nonstop grifting. 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 has been trading emails with Epstein and is part of this whole world that they've supposedly been taking on. You know, he also is being sued for a meme coin,
47:16 Naomi Klein? FJB meme coin, which was the 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, all of them 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 for a deeper connection with nature. You know, he speaks really poetically about the natural world.
47:46 Speaker 08 When I was a little boy, I used to visit the White House and there were a pair of Eastern and Adam Peregrine falcons nesting on the roof. And I was a falconer from when I was a little boy. I was fascinated with hawks. But I used to watch those birds. It was the most beautiful predatory bird in our country. And it was salmon pink and had a white sear on it. So it could fly 240 miles an hour. And I could watch them come off the cupola of the post office and come down Pennsylvania Avenue at those speeds and pick pigeons out of the air 40 feet above the heads of the pedestrians on the sidewalk on Pennsylvania Avenue in front of the White House. For me, seeing that sight was much more exciting than visiting my uncle at the White House or my father at the Justice Department. But that
48:30 Speaker 08 bird went extinct in 1963 from DDT poisoning.
48:34 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
48:59 Naomi Klein? It's hard to lose a story. You know, I don't feel too sorry for Mark Henry's and losing his story about the, not the, did he have a crown?
49:09 Ezra Klein? What a question to have to ask.
49:10 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, 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 yanks a story away and say like, 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 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, in literature, there are always a
49:55 Naomi Klein? 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.
50:04 Ezra Klein? You talk about your critiques of, of the left in the book. So I'll offer critique of liberalism, which is that liberalism has become very arid. 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 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.
50:39 Naomi Klein? Yeah.
50:40 Ezra Klein? 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. 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 Teller Rico taking off so much. I think there's a real hunger for religious language again. But one thing you're very attentive to throughout this book is a way that.
51:23 Ezra Klein? Movements will often abandon issues that the other side picks up. It's like they treat the other side's embrace of something as it makes that whole issue area toxic. As opposed to seeing like, there's energy, there's some yearning here. How do I connect to that?
51:39 Naomi Klein? Yeah.
51:39 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 they feel something and they are looking for somebody who helps them articulate that feeling.
51:54 Naomi Klein? Yeah. It's interesting what you're saying about liberalism and these policy solutions. I mean, when it comes to the environment, 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 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 we're all connected to and just being like, how can we make it totally disembodied? So, you know, I have a whole critique of carbon markets, but just beyond the policy critique, there's also an emotional critique.
52:35 Naomi Klein? Like, it makes sense when we're trying to motivate people to act in the face of the climate crisis, just start with our connections to the natural world. Like, start with the fact that maybe you love trees or oceans or just like, and that's one of the things that 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 the river keeper. And that ability to speak for the wild, right? It's very powerful. We don't have many people in public life who are able to do it anymore. It's one of the reasons why FDR was such a great politician. It's just that he had that sort of love of nature and the speeches he would make about the civilian conservation corps and how
53:18 Naomi Klein? Good it is for the spirit to be out in nature and for the right of people in cities to like experience the forest and national parks, like that is really powerful stuff. And it's really healing and re-accessing that kind of politics is incredibly important. It's one of the things I think we did wrong during COVID. You know, why didn't we have a resurgence of outdoor education as opposed to just Zoom learning? That's also pretty COVID safe. Where I see, you know, what you're talking about most clearly is in the uprising against data centers, actually. It is one of those issues that was being discussed more to a degree on the right than the left.
54:02 Naomi Klein? It's one of the things 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 AI and the sort of war on the human. He was talking about it more from a kind of a religious perspective. 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 and they're consuming just-
54:44 Ezra Klein? Well, they think they have a market for it.
54:46 Naomi Klein? Well, they think someone's going to win it then. 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 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 market that's gonna, that's gonna win. So OpenAI is worried Google's going to be the last one standing. So they all have to, at the same time, build out these massive data centers. And so in the communities that are facing this industrialization.
55:20 Naomi Klein? This kind of spirit, like I've interviewed people who describe it as a spiritual war, you know, that they, you know, Bezos wanted to build this huge data center in Tucson called Project Blue, of all things. And people started organizing 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 so hard to get information out of these companies. And the fact that this has been, you know, pushed by the Trump administration so aggressively. And the way people are organizing in the face of this, it goes beyond the data center. It's like, what is economic development for?
55:55 Ezra Klein? Well, I think there's the great question that AI is going to pose across functionally every level of society is what is the human for? Right? So we have trained people to act in ways that are useful to the economy. Then we create, then we trained AI models on the output of those people.
56:18 Naomi Klein? Yes.
56:18 Ezra Klein? And now we're like, hey, we got these AI models that can act like people acting in economically useful ways. And to me, there are two very, very profound and dueling questions here. One is, what are humans for? What do we value in education? What do we value 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 value away from? And then I was just talking to 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
57:01 Ezra Klein? 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. 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 five, 10, maybe beyond that, years. And right now are very, very ill answered.
57:28 Naomi Klein? Yeah, and I just don't know, like, who is asking those questions and who has power to answer them? Because they're so fundamental, but it assumes that there's any role for the public in this discussion. 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, such a bait and switch, right?
58:11 Naomi Klein? I mean, they said, trust us, 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? So, 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 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, the basic question of 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.
58:54 Naomi Klein? So until that question is answered, I don't think we can have the other questions.
58:58 Ezra 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.
59:02 Naomi Klein? 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. And these are technologies that exist because they fed off of the
59:18 Naomi Klein? Accumulation of all of human knowledge and output. I I believe we own them already.
59:23 Ezra Klein? I used to talk to some of the people who are now in charge of 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 that is proving pretty true right now. As you watch people from OpenAI 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, we'd have to become some kind of public. But then you got there and you have the money and you have the power and you don't want to become public in that way.
1:00:06 Naomi Klein? I look, I think there is a way of understanding the Trump administration as like a tech revolt against AI regulation. Like that that was a major driver of the decision to backroll him, you know, and it wasn't just Musk. It was, you know,
1:00:21 Ezra Klein? And crypto regulation.
1:00:22 Naomi Klein? Yeah, the two.
1:00:52 Ezra Klein? This opens up a question, I think, about the Trump administration and 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 one of the things you're very attentive to is the way Trump and the people around him.
1:01:13 Ezra Klein? 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 tech right oligarchs. And so it's this movement that is highly internally contradictory.
1:01:34 Naomi Klein? Yeah.
1:01:34 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, our choice on AI has been let it rip.
1:01:52 Naomi Klein? Yeah.
1:01:53 Ezra Klein? Try to unwind even the ability of states to regulate it.
1:01:56 Naomi Klein? Which is so unpopular with the base.
1:01:57 Ezra Klein? Which is in many ways unpopular with the base.
1:01:58 Naomi Klein? And he did not run on it.
1:02:00 Ezra Klein? And there are a lot of things like that. It's having to make these decisions. And so I guess one question about Trumpism 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 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 superposition has like cohered a lot.
1:02:33 Naomi Klein? Yeah. And he's also starting a lot of wars.
1:02:35 Ezra Klein? And he's also starting a lot of wars.
1:02:36 Naomi Klein? The other thing he was to a lot of people was somebody who wasn't going to do that.
1:02:40 Ezra Klein? Yep.
1:02:41 Naomi Klein? I think what the book tracks is how they cobbled together an electoral coalition that they have since detonated in lots of ways. Right? I mean, including the Latino parts of the coalition who are really angry, like not everyone, but a lot of people are disgusted 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 I think it's a huge opportunity for the left. You know, I say the left, not the Democratic Party, because I think it's possible to blow the opportunity, and I think the Democratic Party is really good at that. But the other reason why it's worrying is it's worrying when an autocrat who wants
1:03:26 Naomi Klein? to be a dictator doesn't seem to care about reelection. And so it's, you know, you can't just-
1:03:32 Ezra Klein? Well, hopefully he can't get reelected.
1:03:34 Naomi Klein? No, I know, but he-
1:03:35 Ezra Klein? Despite his musings.
1:03:36 Naomi Klein? His own party, right? I mean, it's worrying going into the midterms because he's being reckless with his coalition, and I think that should worry us.
1:03:45 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 is a tremendous energy in AI populism right now, and 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 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?
1:04:25 Ezra Klein? Okay, this is the opportunity, but it maybe requires going into some uncomfortable places or building new coalitions.
1:04:34 Naomi Klein? 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.
1:04:59 Naomi Klein? To turn to this nihilistic politics. And so, you know, my friend Kianga Yomada-Taylor, you know, was a professor at Princeton, historian. 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 and the sort of, you know, what Adam Suro called neighborism, describing that movement. I mean, neighborism is such a welcoming idea, like, and it's just this, it's not jargon filled, 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 here, we've got your back.
1:05:40 Naomi Klein? And we're going to express that in all these different ways, whether it's like doing laundry for people who can't leave their homes, or dropping kids off at school, you know, or the, you know, the images we've all seen of people trailing ICE 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. And then when I look at the campaign that Mamdani ran here in New York, I think that it had the best of what we saw in ourselves during COVID, of just like, I want to see the people who make this city run. And I want to valorize them, like, you know, he did, made this wonderful video about the night shift. You remember that one? Where it was like, he just like went out in the middle of the night and just like went
1:06:23 Naomi Klein? to LaGuardia and to the taxi line and just interviewed cab drivers.
1:06:28 Speaker 09 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. Thank you, brother. As much as taxis have been celebrated, as much as they've been woven into the most prominent examples of what it means to be a New Yorker, or the films and the books that we all love about this city, I watched, as did many New Yorkers, as driver after driver was trapped in debt peonage and their struggles were simply overlooked by politicians. You know, it's, it's time to also speak to New Yorkers for whom the workday starts at night.
1:07:01 Naomi Klein? It was just like, it's not just during a pandemic that the working class holds of New York City. No, everyone is so cynical about those early COVID days where people clapped for healthcare workers, but. 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 deserve wage increases and sick days and all kinds of things they didn't get. But this is what I mean by that fork in the road that COVID represented. Like, 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
1:07:43 Naomi Klein? timeline. But what you see with the Mamdani 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. And that kind of work, that kind of just talking to your neighbors, it's not the work of jargon. It's like, what can we find to bond over? What's our quickest, fastest bond? And this is the other kind of doppelganger that I try to get at at the book is like, we all contain doppelgangers in ourselves. Like, we are both this and that. You know, 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, hey,
1:08:22 Naomi Klein? let's be that other part of you, you know? But I do think that what Mamdani showed was one way of doing that. I think you got 10% of people who voted for Trump. 10% is a lot in a federal election. But you have to do it with economic populism. 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 they'll be able to harvest it in one election cycle and then it'll backlash again. And also, I think climate action has to come back. 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
1:09:07 Naomi Klein? about climate. You know, I've used the phrase eco-populism to think about even something like free public transit, that 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. It gets people out of cars. We can have electrified transit, and it addresses cost of living, and it makes life easier. And so I think that we need to focus on those types of policies. But the other thing I see happening... Is we are becoming afraid of our phones. And it's really scary that the merger, like the Silicon Valley merger with the Trump administration,
1:09:49 Naomi Klein? 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, what Palantir is doing. But what is emerging in real time is that there are profiles of us. And AI is superpowering this. I guess what I'm saying is that people are deciding to touch grass, both because they like grass and also because they're becoming afraid of these devices
1:10:30 Naomi Klein? that have flipped into very dangerous surveillance devices. I think we always knew the technology could do that, but now we're seeing it actually happen.
1:10:41 Ezra Klein? Yeah, I agree that that's going to be a tremendous generator of our politics going forward. I think that sense of, oh, we actually do need to be afraid now is very real. And I think that when either Democrats have enough power, 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. It's sort of like with the Epstein fellows. There's a lot we don't currently know. You can see hints of it.
1:11:26 Ezra Klein? You can worry about it, but. I think when the, you know, there's 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 Palantir, the government and trying to integrate Grok into our warfighting?
1:11:49 Naomi Klein? Yeah.
1:11:50 Ezra Klein? I think it's going to get very scary.
1:11:51 Naomi Klein? And what you were saying before about this 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, you know, there were contracts that were canceled because of tech worker organizing because they didn't want to be doing contracts with ICE or with the US military. I think that that's fair. I think people should have a say 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, you know, area of real worker empowerment.
1:12:34 Ezra Klein? I was thinking about, as we were talking about AI and what it means to be human and what it means to have dignity in the economy, that something that we're sort of dancing around there is the way economic logic has taken a lot over. And the way I think as that has kind of accelerated down a very disembodied technological path, now sort of culminating at some level in AI. And I think there's something here about how many zones of life you can have corporate and economic logic encroach on.
1:13:18 Naomi Klein? Yeah.
1:13:19 Ezra Klein? And I think that some of what is going to emerge in all of this, and it reflects what we're talking about RFK Junior in nature, is just a sense that people want, they want alternatives to how things feel. I mean, that is partially policy. It's partially universal healthcare and expanded child tax credits and, you know, free transit. But it's also partially just a recognition of values and aspirations and that it, that it doesn't need to feel like this.
1:13:49 Naomi Klein? Yeah. Did you see that exchange between Joyce Carol Oates, the novelist, and Elon Musk?
1:13:54 Speaker 02 No.
1:13:55 Naomi Klein? It was this fascinating exchange. I wish I had the quote in front of me, but
1:14:01 Naomi Klein? she just trolled him on his own site, you know, and said, isn't it interesting that you can have all the money in the world, but you don't never seem 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 this just this incredibly bad behavior from the wealthiest people in the world, who clearly, you know, don't deserve the reverence that they were given. But we also see that they
1:14:41 Naomi Klein? seem kind of miserable, like incapable of enjoying everything that they have. And there was this moment when Bezos was talking to William Shatner, and William Shatner had just came down from one of Bezos's rockets. And he wanted to talk about what he had seen, like, he was like, whoa, like, it's mind blown, like, you know, overview effect of like, fragile blue marble. 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 to appreciate, like, that which is irreplaceable. And that failure seems to me to be very connected with the
1:15:21 Naomi Klein? willingness to just replace art with AI, replace universities with AI. 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 think, and shouldn't we have a conversation about whether or not we want to get rid of that whole concept? And so I think there is something in your, you know, what you were saying before about the opportunities.
1:15:49 Naomi Klein? I think there's huge political opportunities to speak into that which is irreplaceable, that which you can't put a price on. I'm not a nationalist, but I refer to these tech oligarchs as traitors because I think they're traitors to creation. I think that there's something broken where they're not actually appreciating the beauty of this world. And in The Epstein Files, there's an exchange between, I think it's Bannon, who he really did not like Pope Francis. Pope Francis really spoke into this with his encyclical on ecology. I think that he was such a remarkable leader in identifying the need to connect
1:16:28 Naomi Klein? the reverence for the natural world and its vulnerability as a spiritual duty, whatever you believe it's a spiritual duty. And it's a profound betrayal not to cherish the natural world. And what I see running through all of the emergent movements in this era, whether it's the Mumdani campaign, or whether it's the anti ICE protests in Minneapolis, or the data center movements, is like this, we cherish where we live. We cherish our water, we cherish our land, our soil. And so
1:17:05 Ezra Klein? The values of our city.
1:17:06 Naomi Klein? Yeah, it's a rootedness. And it's not a whitewash either. People are rooting down where they are and learning their histories, including the really difficult histories, right? There was a lot that's come out in Minneapolis, like birthplace of the American Indian Movement. Minnesota was the site of the largest mass hanging in US history of Dakota men. And connecting that history with ICE, it's a live action history lesson, right? And 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?
1:17:47 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?
1:17:52 Naomi Klein? All right. So this is a little bit obvious, but Empire of AI by Karen Howe. 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, which I think is really true. I guess we've been talking around this, but my friend Molly Crabapple has an absolutely brilliant book coming out called "Here Where We Live Is Our Country: The Story of the Jewish Bund." And it's available for preorder, comes out in April. And I think it gets at what an alternative story of hear-ness could be, of really committing to hear, which is what the Jewish Labor Bund was doing before, between the wars.
1:18:35 Naomi Klein? And the third book is a book called Fire Alarm, reading Walter Benjamin's On the Concept of History by Michael Lowey. And Walter Benjamin is the, this is the text that he wrote right before he took his own life fleeing the Gestapo in 1940. And it gets at this idea of the way history doesn't repeat but compounds, in Benjamin's term, piling wreckage upon wreckage.
1:19:05 Ezra Klein? Naomi Klein, thank you very much.
1:19:07 Naomi Klein? Thank you so much, Ezra.
1:19:20 Ezra Klein? This episode of Ezra Klein chose produced by Jack McCordick, fact checking by Michelle Harris. Our senior audio engineer is Jeff Gelb with additional mixing by Alman Zoda. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show's production team also includes Annie Galvin, Marie Cassillon, Marina King, Roland Hu, Kristin Lynn, Emma Kelbeck, and Jan Kobel. Original music by Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Kristina Cemiluski and Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie Rose Strasser.
Previous What Trump Didn’t Know About Iran Next How Bad Could the Iran Oil Crisis Get? Page updated October 26, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated
