This is an edited transcript of “The Ezra Klein Show.” You can listen to the episode wherever you get your podcasts.
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 1990s was known as a feminist author and journalist and Al Gore adviser, but who became one of the most prominent right-wing conspiracists in the Covid era.
That experience and the interest in Wolf that it created for Klein became the foundation of “Doppelgänger: A Trip Into the Mirror World.” This is a hard to summarize book in a way that books I really like often are. It could only have been written by one person at one moment in their life.
Klein was interested in 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 Robert F. Kennedy Jr. become a core part of the MAGA coalition?
So Klein began following Wolf, her doppelgänger, into this mirror world of the new MAGA right. She began to sense its rules, concerns and power — its allure — and the way it was seducing people.
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, it was very easy to miss it. And even easier, if you’re an institutionally minded liberal leftist, to convince yourself that it didn’t matter, that it didn’t have power.
But that world — the mirror world — is 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. She has 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.
Ezra Klein: Naomi Klein, welcome to the show.
Naomi Klein: Thank you.
Your book revolves around two concepts: doppelgängers and mirror worlds. I thought it might be good to start by defining them.
A “doppelgänger” is a German word that means, literally translated, a “doublegoer” or a “double walker.” It’s the idea that out there, somewhere, you could bump into somebody who looks just like you — but isn’t you.
It’s that 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 liberal left world and the far right world, and the ways in which, when people are ejected from our world, they end up in a world that is the exact mirror of where we live — in replica social media platforms, the same but different doppelgänger publishing worlds, doppelgänger narratives of the narratives that we tell ourselves.
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 defining ourselves against what was happening and what they were doing over there, as opposed to being guided by legible values and beliefs.
How did you get interested in the idea of the doppelgänger?
A few different routes took me there. It was deep in the pandemic. 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 had realized that for the first time in my life, I had time to experiment with writing in a way that I hadn’t had time in my adult life. So I started working with a writing teacher and was just playing with form.
In the background, I was having this strange experience where, in this time when we were all being represented exclusively by our avatars in the digital sphere, I started being confused, on a massive scale, with another nonfiction writer named Naomi — Naomi Wolf.
It became one of left Twitter’s favorite jokes at the time. Every time I would go online to get some simulation of the friendship and community that I missed — this was well into the second year of the pandemic — what I would be confronted with was all these people screaming at me about something that another Naomi had done.
At first I was very frustrated by this, and I didn’t think it was related to this writing work that I was doing. But then I realized that this destabilization of the self was a really interesting and fruitful mechanism to explore a bunch of ideas that I’ve been obsessed with, including the ways in which the idea of having a personal brand is basically destroying everything in our culture.
I’ve been wanting to return to that theme, which is actually the subject of my first book, which I wrote in the late 1990s and that came out in 2000, “No Logo.” I’d 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 and lecturing.
I wanted to write about it from inside. I wanted to write about it from being implicated, because I don’t think people can hear the critique if they feel like you’re just lecturing them — as if you are not in the same polluted waters of self-performance and self-protection that we’re all swimming in.
So I thought: Wow, I have a branding crisis here on my hands. This is really funny. And also maybe interesting.
So it started as an essay, and then it just grew.
Let’s do a minute on “No Logo.” I think a lot of people listening probably haven’t read that book. That book was a big deal. I remember that book and it being left canon as I was growing up and becoming a writer.
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?
It was, first and foremost, an attempt to understand the rise of these multinational corporations that were more powerful than governments and a shift that was going on in politics that was doing an end run around governments. It was going directly for the multinationals — whether Nike because of sweatshops in Indonesia or Shell because of oil spills in Nigeria.
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 no longer in the business of making products, they were selling a brand, an idea. They were 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. 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. 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. This was a new concept — that an individual could be a brand. But the idea that a nonfamous person could be a brand made no sense to us, because we didn’t have marketing firms.
It also feels to me like it’s of a politics that has really weakened. I think of that era and Adbusters. Fear about what advertising is going to do to our minds is also very present in the ’60s and the ’70s. This anti-advertising, anti-branding, anti-consumer politics was very, very strong in the ’90s, but it feels pretty absent today.
Yes, because we really could be our own brand, right?
I think it’s important to understand that there’s a desperation in the fact that we have all embraced this. This is why I wanted to find a way to write about it that was from inside of it. It’s why online everyone is constantly accusing each other of being performative — which I think is today’s version of selling out.
But everybody knows that everybody else is being performative, as well. So I think we have to find compassion in this discussion, because people are just trying to pay the rent. And it’s not working — it’s not enough to pay the rent.
I want to bring back in the other character here, who is Naomi Wolf. Intellectually, politically, who is she?
Her heyday was the 1990s with a breakthrough book called “The Beauty Myth,” which came out when I was an undergrad. It had a thesis that young women were being forced to add a third shift: There’s the shift at work and then the shift at home — but on top of that, there’s the beauty shift.
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.
Archival news clip: 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, best-selling author Naomi Wolf.
Naomi Wolf: 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.
She was the face of what was called at the time third-wave feminism. It was a controversial term, whether it actually was a wave or not. She wrote a bunch of best-selling books.
She wrote a book called “Fire With Fire.” I think one of her high or 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.
So that’s who she was. And now she’s someone quite different.
Archival clip of Wolf: Hi, everyone, it’s Naomi Wolf here, at DailyClout, and I’m doing something that I have been promising for a while.
One of the reasons I wanted to write about her was because there are so many people who really accelerated during the pandemic, where we would say: What happened to that person? They used to be this, and now they’re something else. Or: What happened to my uncle? 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 taking pictures of clouds and claiming they were cloud seeded ——
Archival clip of Wolf: I began to notice a very distinct pattern that these emissions, these trails, would — I’m not gonna say be laid 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.
To claiming ISIS beheadings were crisis actors.
Archival clip of Wolf: They’re not yet independently verified. The only source for them, early on, at least, was this very questionable site called Site, 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 U.S. antiterrorism establishment.
So 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.
Archival clip of Wolf: The market for the Covid injections has come and gone because people are aware now that it’s a deadly and sterilizing injection. But the side effects live on.
To the vaccine verification apps being a Chinese Communist plot to subdue the West.
Archival clip of Wolf: The vaccine passport platform is the same platform as a social credit system, like in China, that enslaves a billion people.
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 right.
When you were defining “mirror world,” you described that it exists partially from when you are ejected from one world into the other, and you find many of the same concerns, just somewhat perverted, distorted, warped.
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?
Yes. The year before the pandemic, in 2019, she had published a book called “Outrages.” And she very famously made a basic, foundational factual error in that book, where she misinterpreted a phrase in the historical record.
The book dealt with the persecution of gay men in England, and she misunderstood the term “death recorded.” She thought that it meant that they had been killed by the state. And this was exposed live on the BBC.
Archival clip
BBC Interviewer: “Death recorded” — I was really surprised by this. I looked it up. “Death recorded” is what’s — in 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 sentences of death on any capital convict whom they considered to be a fit subject for pardon. I don’t think any of the executions you’ve identified here actually happened.
Naomi Wolf: Well, that’s a really important thing to investigate. What is your understanding of what “death recorded” means?
It became one of these moments of mass online ridicule, just public shaming. I hate telling the story because it’s every writer’s worst nightmare.
Yeah.
Every time something like this would happen to Wolf, people would say: Thoughts and prayers to Naomi Klein — or it would be part of the joke that I would get blamed for it. I had a front-row seat to it. And it was really ugly.
I do think that happens a lot with the people whom we ask that question of: Why did they change in that way? We’ll often find some kind of public shaming or something really wrong that they did.
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.
This is where I want to follow you into the other world, as you follow her into the other world. 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 conspiracy theories:
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 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.
Well, first of all, I should say that world runs our world now.
Yes, that is our world.
I don’t think that we have the same questions about it now as we did then, because we can’t ignore it now.
I remember when the book first came out, I did an interview, and the interviewer asked me why I was giving these people attention. It was such an arrogant question, as if we control all the attention and we were just blessing them with our attention by looking at them and writing about them.
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 2021, 2022.
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.
I was watching him do this with suburban white women who traditionally voted Democrat. And he understood that with Wolf, he would wind up the introduction.
Archival clip of Steve Bannon: OK, our guest is Naomi Wolf. Naomi, you started as a feminist, a huge writer, best-selling author, public intellectual, lionized by the left and the established order and the conventional thinking. And now, you’re kind of a renegade and everyday rebel.
She used to consult for Al Gore. She consulted for Bill Clinton. And that was central to her appeal — that she could potentially deliver this constituency that Trump really was weak with.
I think Bannon understood that these sorts of angry Covid moms were a new part of his coalition, the plus one for MAGA.
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.
There was this whole thing about how women were bleeding between periods from being around vaccinated people. 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. I mean, things were going wild.
So there was this data study that was done to try to find the ground zero for this particular piece of medical misinformation. And they traced 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.
Then I started listening to her talking to Tucker Carlson and talking to Steve Bannon. And when I would mention to a friend: Oh, I heard this on Bannon — there were things that were happening that were making me very worried about elections, so I was watching the whole show — and instead of asking what I heard, they would say: Why are you listening to that? Why would you do that? Almost like I had transgressed.
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.
Something that I felt came up again and again was that liberals on the left had become very powerful in institutions over the past 20 years — this is before the mirror world basically took over our world — but powerful in the media, powerful in academia, powerful in government.
So this idea that you could just shun people, and that would be an effective way of creating social change in politics, took hold. And it wasn’t a crazy idea.
There are ways it has worked in the past, and ways that it worked even then, but it missed how much is happening outside the institutions. They had become their own institutions and networks and media structures. Kicking somebody out of your institutions meant you couldn’t see them anymore, but it didn’t mean they were gone.
I feel like so much of this is just about social media. I know that’s sort of slightly hackneyed, but all of this is playing out on platforms.
I even think that something like the mute button or the block button has a huge amount to answer for, just in terms of its being almost habit forming. We get used to the idea that this person is annoying me, so I’m going to just press a button and make them disappear. I think that idea of how we relate to people spills offline, as well.
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. You see how much this became a legible network that is now arguably the default network in American life.
This is the thing about doppelgängers.
In doppelgänger literature and film, the story line is usually: You’ve got a protagonist, and then somebody comes along who’s a double of them, and they’re so good at performing you, so much better at performing you, that they eventually overtake you.
At the end of Dostoyevsky’s “The Double,” the protagonist is getting carted away and sent to an asylum, while the double just takes over.
So I think what’s happened in our culture is that the doppelgänger is at the wheel.
The one thing that I have kept thinking about, and that I feel like your book gets at really well, is the unnerving relationships between things that are really happening and things that we pushed away or wanted to ignore as ridiculous.
I think the one happening right now is Jeffrey Epstein. I have found it disorienting how much it tracks the vibe of QAnon. Not every claim of QAnon. It’s not: John F. Kennedy Jr. is still alive somewhere. But you are dealing with a very powerful person with an incredibly powerful and broad elite network and child sex trafficking at the center of it.
Again, I don’t believe in QAnon, but it is eerie how QAnon was sort of a mirror world version of Jeffrey Epstein.
How have you thought about that?
I’m really interested in the work that conspiracy culture is playing in how it distracts from conspiracies that are real. I never doubted that there was a conspiracy that Epstein was involved in. That’s been clear for a long time.
The reason people are being drawn to conspiracy culture is that we all feel that this world is rigged against us. Power and wealth have concentrated so much over the past half-century, and the impunity that follows from that is so extreme.
I think it’s really important not to just dismiss it as a conspiracy theory just because it has the structure of QAnon. I think QAnon has the structure of — sort of like why antisemitism was called, is still called, the socialism of fools. It kind of explains how capitalism works, except it twists it so it’s just a cabal of rich Jews.
But we need stories to explain our reality. We need them, and so do the superelites. 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 — and that brings us to their obsession with eugenics and this idea that they are a better stock than everybody else.
That’s a story that can explain why you have so much wealth and power ——
And you see Epstein talking about that quite a lot in the emails.
Yes. I think it’s inextricable from the fact that we live in a time when, if you’re rich enough, you think the rules don’t apply to you — like Elon Musk just laughing when journalists ask him for any accountability. He used to send a poop emoji, and now he sends an autoreply that says: Mainstream media lies.
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 one of the more progressive, caring billionaires.
It seems to me that Epstein was like the after-after-party for Davos, right? Where he was the guy who could make it all happen.
It is clear to me that his impunity was an object of envy.
Maybe they didn’t all know that there was child sex trafficking at the center of his world, but the way in which he didn’t play by the rules, he had this huge house, he had this island, he had this wealth, he had all these connections. He seemed to be completely living in this unabashed way — which was what made him an object of envy to other rich and powerful people.
And it’s part of the attraction of Trump. Trump is that. He’s the ’80s guy who always had the beautiful women around him — and who never took part in any of that “woke capitalism.”
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 climate change or diversity, equity and inclusion.
But I see these things as really interrelated — I say the past 50 years — because this is the counterrevolution against the New Deal era, right? This is what I wrote about in “The Shock Doctrine” — this is the revolution against regulation. It’s the era of privatization and unmaking of the state, and it really produces the oligarch class.
So it’s important for the people who are the big winners in this to present themselves as a replacement for the state. That’s where it’s really interesting that Ghislaine Maxwell was central in launching the Clinton Global Initiative, for instance. Because the Clinton Global Initiative was a place for many years where the Davos class got together and said: We’re going to fix it. I’ll fix schools, you fix poverty, and you fix malaria. We’ve got this. You don’t really need governments anymore because we are so socially responsible. We’re going to use our wealth to fix the world.
But I think that what was actually happening is that power is for using, and the whole point of becoming this rich is not to 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: Come to the island, 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. Welcome to the new world.
What have you made of Steve Bannon’s closeness to Jeffrey Epstein? 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 “alleged sex ring” and the information coming out about that.
Bannon sends this to Epstein, and Epstein doesn’t answer. And a couple of hours later, Bannon is like: So my guy is in Israel. Can he meet with Ehud Barak?
They just move right on. So here you have this guy who is populist on the front stage, and backstage — I mean, this is happening in 2019, this particular text message I’m talking about.
How do you think about that?
I guess I should have made this clear earlier: I think Bannon is a terrible fraud. I think he performs being the voice of the little guy — the way in which he took on Musk early in this Trump administration and claims to be taking on the tech oligarchs who are supposedly polluting MAGA. But 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. All the things that we were talking about before — this is just about power, this is just about winning. And he understands how to build a coalition, and he’s strategic about that.
I think he platforms conspiracy theorists because he understands that it is very useful for people to believe outlandish things, in very large part because it distracts them from the conspiracies that can be proved.
The Bannon world is really in crisis right now because of the Epstein files. And it’s really interesting 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.
He’s talking about everything but the biggest conspiracy in the world that he is himself centrally implicated in — and implicated in ways that are really about rearranging the political map.
He’s interested in Epstein because he thinks Epstein can help fund the populist international, which is weaving together these far-right, often openly fascist parties in Europe and Latin America with the United States, and he needs a funder for this.
And connections.
Yes. This is what we’re seeing in these files — how the world we’re in right now is built.
I don’t know how you feel about the question of: Is this fascism? Is this not?
Where are you falling on that?
I think it’s pretty fascist.
Yes.
At some point, the word doesn’t have any meaning if we can’t apply it to things in the modern world. I think sometimes you end up with words that people have decided are so beyond the pale — racist, fascist, etc. — that people stop being willing to use them, because it feels like you’ve moved outside of ordinary discourse.
But these words describe things. 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. And every one was different in its own way. But there’s a reason they’re all very interested in Carl Schmitt.
Yes. I think part of the hesitancy has to do with really exceptionalizing Hitler. And it sounds like you’re saying that if he is fascist, he is Hitler.
But that’s not what the term means. There have been plenty of fascists who weren’t Hitler. History doesn’t repeat on a loop. It changes, it iterates, it compounds.
But the reason I ask if you think it’s fascist is that fascism is a pathology of injured power. It emerges in Italy and in Germany in the injuries of World War I.
It’s soldiers and generals and industrialists who are hurt by the sanctions. But it’s powerful people who are hurt. Whereas left revolutions are powerless people who are hurt. And these vertical coalitions get built with people who had relative power and are losing power.
But some of the things that we see in the Epstein files are these concerns about #MeToo, about accountability — 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 the movement is coming for them and they might be held accountable.
So if we are in a fascist moment, then it is a counterevolution. We have to understand: What are elites revolting against? Who hurt them? What hurt them? I think part of what they are revolting against is that there was starting to be some accountability.
Their impunity was — there were a few chinks 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 their protecting themselves.
Well, nothing was more radicalizing to the tech right, C.E.O. and venture class, than the feeling that their corporations were being taken over by the staff. Marc Andreessen has talked about this directly, the sense that, on any given day, you might almost have a riot of your own employees and you have lost power.
Archival clip of Marc Andreessen: The employee base is going feral. There were cases in the Trump era, there were multiple companies I know that felt like they were hours away from full-blown violent riots on their own campuses by their own employees.
He’s a bit of an exaggerator, I’ve noticed. [Laughs.]
He’s describing the way things felt to him.
He also said he was being terrorized by the Biden administration because they tried to regulate crypto.
Archival clip of Andreessen: They just came after crypto. Absolutely tried to kill us. I mean, they just ran this incredible, basically, terror campaign to try to kill crypto. And then they were ramping into a similar campaign to try to kill A.I. And that’s really when we knew that we had to really get involved in politics.
But this is related. The fact that Marc Andreessen sees the most mild accountability as an existential attack. The way he talks about basic regulation for crypto or A.I. as terror — terror! — I think speaks to the fact that these are men who came up in the 1990s.
When I was writing “No Logo,” Marc Andreessen was on the cover of Time magazine, sitting on a golden throne, I believe. He was, I think, 24. I think that may have gone to their head. [Laughs.]
I think that the kinds of depravity that we see in the files is related to the fact that 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.
The other place where we see pedophile rings is in the Catholic church. Survivors talk about the unique horror of being abused by somebody who has God on their side.
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. That feels like being terrorized to Marc Andreessen. It’s all relative, right?
But this is why, I think, at the heart of this 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.
These women who have come forward are heroes. They’re absolute heroes in 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. It’s so moving to me.
And the women journalists who believed them when nobody else did — this is a beautiful story. I mean, it’s a horrible story, but there’s also beauty in it.
Let me try a thought on you, because I know you’re working with Astra Taylor on a book about fascism.
I was thinking, as you were talking about what kinds of injuries create fascist movements: There’s often an injury that unites the fascist elites you’re talking about — and at least portions of the masses. Fascism is also a mass movement in many places at many times.
It’s often a loss of story. It’s an injury to your story. You’re describing the way we told the tech titans a story about them.
Yes.
But the bottom-up side of Trumpism — and often the bottom-up side of fascism — is the feeling that many ordinary people have at times of rapid change: that they are losing the story they’re a part of — the story of their own history and how they are the good guys in history — certainly not a checkered history. The story of their nation and how great their nation is and what its destiny is.
This is also a pandemic book, and to some degree, 2024-era Trumpism is a pandemic era phenomenon. People are very, very angry about all of a sudden being told that they’re the bad guys for not getting vaccinated or not wearing a mask. This is a big part of what you’re describing in there. That was 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.
Just to stay with the pandemic thing for one more moment, this relates to the work that Astra and I are doing and what we’re calling “end times fascism,” which is really about how there is a consciousness that we are in what was once called “the age of consequences.”
The forecast existential global crises are now hitting. It’s not just that this may happen, but rather: This is happening.
And Covid — the fact that we experienced a global pandemic that shut down the world simultaneously — was an extraordinary event. I think there was a period when we didn’t want to look back at it, and now we’re just like: Whoa, that really did happen. New York shut down. You could walk through Times Square — no one was in it.
I think that shifted something in our brains — for a lot of us, including very powerful people, who realized that actually this stuff is going to happen. We’re now in the age where it happens.
What we saw during Covid was 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 there was an eviction moratorium. We had free masks and testing — kind of a taste of universal health care in the United States.
And there is another option. That option is: Screw ’em. This is nature taking its course. This is culling. This is survival of the fittest.
I think a lot of that diagonalism came together with people in the new age wellness world who were saying: I have a powerful immune system. I don’t need your vaccines. The coming together with the Steve Bannon world — underneath it all was: I’m comfortable if this is a cleansing, if this is the world correcting. Maybe we’ll have fewer people, and that will be better for the environment.
That was one story. But it really is a stark choice.
When it comes to Silicon Valley and these tech elites and the moment that they’re in, even though Covid was really good for them in terms of their bottom lines, I actually think what freaked them out more than anything was the quiet quitting — people actually not needing the jobs as much, and losing that 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.
So I think that choice of either: We’re going to have a much more activist state, and it’s going to be regulated a lot more — or: We’re going to embrace a world where we’re OK with mass death.
And then the genocide in Gaza happens, and a lot of people showed that they could live with it.
It was Covid and Gaza that produced the Trump moment. It really was about a fear of this fork-in-the-road moment: Either 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 New Deal sort of state.
And they don’t want that because that will regulate them.
You used a term in there that I want to pick up on, which is “diagonalism.” What is “diagonalism”?
“Diagonalism” is a term that Quinn Slobodian and William Callison, who are both scholars of European history, used in an essay about the German anti-lockdown movement early in the pandemic.
It’s a rough translation of a German word called “querdenken,” which means outside-of-the-box thinking — which is how these wellness influencers and entrepreneurial nontraditional right-wingers made alliance with right-wing parties.
It just speaks to these unlikely bedfellows — like my doppelgänger and Steve Bannon. It’s kind of an alternative to the horseshoe theory, I suppose, because the horseshoe theory sort of assumes that it’s the far left and far right.
But I think a more significant shift are liberal wellness California types who are very focused on bunkering their own bodies, making alliances with people who are bunkering their national borders.
What’s interesting to me about this theory of diagonalism — and this goes back to fascist movements: There does seem to be a sorting, not just around religion — we’re used to religious sorting in politics — but around a certain kind of spiritualism, back-to-the-landism, which both substantively and aesthetically used to be associated with the left.
But R.F.K. Jr. emerges as a central figure in a realignment. It’s something you’re attentive to, that you see happening around you in the book: the role of spirituality and mysticism and a sense of bodily integrity and wholeness playing into this. I think that’s underplayed in its power. So I’m curious how you’ve thought about it since.
It’s true that the organic, green world is more associated with the left these days, but it’s also true that there’s a fascist lineage to it. European fascists in the 1920s and ’30s were very interested in all kinds of new age health fads.
I think our version of it is really related to the optimized self and the way in which we can just protect ourselves in a world where we don’t have very much control by purifying our bodies and optimizing ourselves in every way.
I don’t think it is very left. I think it’s highly individual. Leftists generally survived the pandemic without becoming conspiracy theorists — for the most part. But where you really saw it was yoga studios.
I think they coded leftish, but I don’t think that they were that political before.
I agree with this. I’m not trying to say that it’s about hard-core Communists becoming QAnon members. The place I don’t totally agree is that I think this is more than the 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: Democrats, leftists, liberals, etc. — becomes more institutionalized, technocratic. It believes science, it believes experts. But what it ends up ejecting is people who have profound distrust.
You talk a lot in the book about R.F.K. Jr., who goes from a fringe presidential candidate as a Democrat to now, of course, Health and Human Services secretary.
I want to play a clip from his presidential campaign announcement because I think it’s interesting from this perspective.
Archival clip of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.: 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 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 fortify all of the corporate orthodoxies from their advertisers and to urge us to hate our neighbors and to fear our friends.
And we declare independence from the cynical elites who betray our hope and who amplify our divisions.
What do you think when you hear that?
I think he’s quite similar to Bannon in that he is really good at identifying these political vacuums that need to be filled and speaking into them.
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.
And that goes for Bannon, as well. In addition to his Epstein problems at the moment, and people realizing that the guy who was supposed to protect them from the oligarchs had been trading emails with Epstein and part of this whole world that they’ve supposedly been taking on, he also is being sued for a memecoin — $FJB memecoin — which was a scam.
So they’re getting scammed all the time. The same is true of a lot of these wellness people — everyone is selling supplements, everybody is selling these seminars.
The people that R.F.K. Jr. has amassed around him, all of them are trying to sell you something, and people are 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. He speaks really poetically about the natural world.
Archival clip of Kennedy: When I was a little boy, I used to visit the White House, and there were a pair of Eastern anatum peregrine falcons nesting on the roof. I was a falconer from when I was a little boy. I was fascinated with hawks. I used to watch those birds, the most beautiful predatory bird in our country.
It was salmon pink, and it had white. It flied 240 miles an hour. 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 pedestrians on the sidewalk on Pennsylvania Avenue, in front of the White House.
For me, seeing that sight was much more exciting than seeing my uncle at the White House or my father at the Justice Department. That bird went extinct in 1963 from D.D.T. poisoning.
People feel alienated from the natural world.
All the jokes about the bear carcasses and all of that — I mean, it’s funny, but the reason it has traction is I think people like the idea of somebody who has connections with wildness. That has a powerful appeal.
I think this speaks to what you were talking about before about people losing stories. It’s hard to lose a story. I don’t feel too sorry for Marc Andreessen losing his story about the crown. Did he have a crown? [Laughs.]
What a question to have to ask.
I don’t think he had a crown, but he lost the throne.
But 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. If you just yank the story away and say: You’re an idiot for having ever believed it, and now you’re on your own — people are going to get angry. That can be a painful thing to hear, but I think we really have that responsibility.
I’m really moved by the fact that I see that happening on the left. There are pretty harsh critiques in “Doppelgänger” of the left, harsher than anything I’ve ever written. Maybe not harsh enough for some people, but a lot of it is trying to look in the mirror.
This is the thing about doppelgängers: In literature, they’re always a message, giving you a warning that you have to look at yourself. There’s something about yourself that you’re not seeing if reality starts doubling.
You talk about your critiques of the left in the book, so I’ll offer a critique of liberalism, which is that liberalism has become very arid.
It has become, in its ways of knowing and ways of relating, very technocratic. I say this as a bit of a technocrat. I think it has really lost something in being, over time, more severed from religion.
But there’s a desire for politics to be able to speak to how alienating it often feels to be alive right now — when you’re looking at your screens and you’re often very separate from nature.
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 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 Talarico taking off so much. I think there’s a real hunger for religious language again.
One thing you’re very attentive to throughout this book is the way that movements will often abandon issues that the other side picks up. They treat the other side’s embrace of something as if it makes that whole issue toxic, as opposed to seeing: There’s energy, there’s some yearning here. How do I connect to that? 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’re looking for somebody who helps them articulate that feeling.
Yes. It’s interesting what you’re saying about liberalism and the policy solutions. When it comes to the environment, the policy solutions often obscure the nature beneath what is being addressed.
If you think about how much of the climate discourse focused on carbon trading and carbon markets — it’s the most bloodless way to talk about the natural world. It’s like taking something that is alive and animate and that we’re all connected to and just being like: But how can we make it totally disembodied?
I have a whole critique of carbon markets, but beyond the policy critique, there’s also an emotional critique. It makes sense when we’re trying to motivate people to act in the face of the climate crisis to just start with our connections to the natural world. Start with the fact that maybe you love trees or oceans.
I always thought that people needed to take R.F.K. Jr. more seriously than they were because I knew him from before, when he was a Riverkeeper. And that ability to speak for the wild is very powerful. We don’t have many people in public life who are able to do it anymore.
It’s one of the reasons F.D.R. was such a great politician. He had that love of nature, and the speeches he would make about the Civilian Conservation Corps and how good it is for the spirit to be out in nature and the right of people in cities to experience the forest and national parks. That is really powerful stuff, and it’s really healing.
Reaccessing that kind of politics is incredibly important. It’s one of the things I think we did wrong during Covid. Why didn’t we have a resurgence of outdoor education, as opposed to just Zoom learning? That’s also pretty Covid safe.
Where I see 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.
One of the things that worried me most when I became a regular Steve Bannon listener was that he was always talking about transhumanism, and he was talking about A.I., and the war on the human. He was talking about it more from a religious perspective, but I think this is very fruitful because there is a war on the human going on, a war on the animate world.
It’s absolutely untenable, the amount of electricity that is being consumed in this really wasteful way by U.S. tech companies engaging in the A.I. arms race, where everybody is building duplicative data centers that they know they don’t have a market for, and they’re consuming just ——
Well, they think they have a market for it.
Well, they think someone is going to win at the end. They don’t actually think that there’s a market for all of them to win. They’re in the race stage, so they kind of believe there will be one or two companies left standing. But they all seem to admit, from what I’m seeing, that there isn’t a $13 trillion market that’s going to win. OpenAI is worried Google is going to be the last one standing. So they all have to, at the same time, build out these massive data centers.
In the communities that are facing this industrialization, I’ve interviewed people who describe it as a spiritual war. Amazon wanted to build this huge data center in Tucson called Project Blue of all things. And people started organizing across partisan lines, because when you live in a desert, you know about water, and you know how scarce it is. It’s so hard to get information out of these companies. The fact that this has been pushed by the Trump administration so aggressively — the way people are organizing in the face of this — it goes beyond the data center. It’s like: What is economic development for?
Well, I think the great question that A.I. is going to pose across functionally every level of society is: What is the human for?
We have trained people to act in ways that are useful to the economy. Then we trained A.I. models on the output of those people. And now we’re like: Hey, we got these A.I. models that can act like people acting in economically useful ways.
To me, there are 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 our society — spent a long time valuing something that we’re now about to take a lot of value away from?
And then — I was just talking with Jack Clark from Anthropic about this — there is this very unanswered question of what A.I. itself is for. If all it’s for is replacing white-collar workers, then that’s not a profoundly inspiring vision.
There’s been no public agenda for A.I. There’s been no sense of: How do we orient all this investment toward things we actually want as a society — as opposed to how to automate a call center?
And both of those questions: What are humans for? What is A.I. for? — I think are going to be definitional to politics in the coming five, 10 years — maybe beyond that. Right now, they’re very ill answered.
Yes. I just don’t know who is asking those questions and who has the power to answer them — because they’re so fundamental. But it presumes that there’s a role for the public in this discussion.
These data center battles, 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. Washington has decreed that everyone is going to take their data centers, and you don’t have the 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.
A company like OpenAI is such a bait and switch. They said: Trust us. We’re like Wikipedia — we’re a public interest company. No, you can’t let the profit motive determine such an important technology. Oh, we changed our mind.
Bernie Sanders has been saying: Why would we trust these companies that don’t even let their workers have a bathroom break to think about not: What does it mean to be human? — but: How are you going to eat when your job is replaced?
The basic question of caring for people — I don’t think people have the capacity to think about what their lives are for if A.I. is replacing their jobs. Because they’re worried about how they’re going to eat and pay their rent. They have absolutely no indication that they live in a society that cares at all about that question.
So until that question is answered, I don’t think we can have the other questions.
Although I think we’re going to need to have them all at the same time. Because I’m not sure that’s going to be answered first.
Well, I think that this is a broader question about whether this belongs in the private sector. I don’t think it does. This is much too fundamental. These are technologies that exist because they fed off the accumulation of all of human knowledge and output. I believe we own them already.
I used to talk to some of the people who are now in charge of the A.I. labs, and I would ask them about: What happens if we’re living in the world you’re describing to me, and you’re building the thing you are telling me, and it becomes that powerful and all the things you’re telling me come true?
They would say to me: At some point, we’ll have to be nationalized.
And I would scoff at them. I’d say: If you get to that point, there is no way you will allow yourself to be nationalized.
And I think that bet is proving pretty true right now, as you watch people from OpenAI dump money into super PACs to fight A.I. regulation.
It was people from these companies who would say to me: If we ever got there, we’d have to become some kind of public entity. But then you get there, and you have the money, and you have the power, and you don’t want to become public in that way.
I think there is a way of understanding the Trump administration as a tech revolt against A.I. regulation. That was a major driver of the decision to bankroll him. It wasn’t just Musk —
And crypto regulation.
Yes, the two.
This opens up a question 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 that it’s a book about how this movement was built.
You’re very attentive to the way Trump and the people around him were sensitive to issues that had a lot of power in them — but that maybe were not already well represented politically. And that goes for everyone from the MAHA moms to the reactionary tech-right oligarchs. It’s this movement that is highly, internally contradictory. It absorbs R.F.K. Jr. with that aggressively anticorporate speech and Elon Musk at the same time.
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. For instance, their choice on A.I. has been: Let it rip. Try to unwind even the ability of states to regulate it.
Which is so unpopular with its base.
It is in many ways unpopular with the base.
And he did not run on it.
There are a lot of things like that. It’s having to make these decisions.
One question about Trumpism and MAGA — and I mean, Bannon gets to say what he wants because he’s on the outside — is whether or not it can sustain support given that it is now truly beset by contradictions.
It was amazing to me how many things Trump was to how many people by October 2024. But now his quantum superposition has cohered a lot.
Yes. And he’s also starting a lot of wars.
He’s also starting a lot of wars.
The other thing he was to a lot of people was somebody who wasn’t going to do that.
I think what the book tracks is how they cobbled together an electoral coalition that they have since detonated in lots of ways — including the Latino parts of the coalition, who are really angry. 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. They may have thought that it was going to just go after certain people, but it’s going after everybody.
I think it’s a huge opportunity for the left. 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 it’s worrying when an autocrat who wants to be a dictator doesn’t seem to care about re-election.
Well, hopefully he can’t get re-elected.
No, I know. But ——
Despite his musings.
It’s worrying going into the midterms, because he’s being reckless with his coalition. I think that should worry us.
One of the things that seems like an opportunity in that is diagonalism on the left. It opens up questions about what is out there that has been abandoned, that at least some of its energy can be pulled in.
You were mentioning data centers a minute ago. I think that there’s no doubt that there’s a tremendous energy in A.I. populism right now, and some amount of that is going to have to be spoken to, and people are going to have to get much more thoughtful and sophisticated in speaking to it.
But what else is there, as you’ve thought about this critique and thought about what you wish had been done differently and what you wish had been paid attention to? What could be an opportunity but maybe requires going into some uncomfortable places or building new coalitions?
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, if this many people felt alienated enough by what they were calling woke culture to turn to this nihilistic politics.
My friend Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, who’s a professor at Princeton and a historian, one of the things she said immediately after the election is: We have to build a more welcoming left.
I think about that phrase a lot: “welcoming.” What does it mean to be welcoming? I look at what’s happening in Minneapolis and what Adam Serwer, describing that movement, called neighborism.
I mean, neighborism is such a welcoming idea. It’s not jargon filled, you’re not throwing a whole bunch of isms at people and creating a huge litmus test for how you can join the movement. You’re just saying: We are all neighbors here, wherever you’re from. If you’re here, we’ve got your back.
And we’re going to express that in all these different ways — whether it’s doing laundry for people who can’t leave their homes or dropping kids off at school or the images we’ve all seen of people trailing ICE and filming them.
These are just acts of neighborliness and welcomingness, and there’s a simplicity to it.
And 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: I want to see the people who make the city run, and I want to valorize them.
He made this wonderful video about the night shift. Do you remember that one? Where he just went out in the middle of the night and went to LaGuardia to the taxi line and just interviewed cabdrivers.
Archival clip of Zohran Mamdani: 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. 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. It’s time to also speak to New Yorkers for whom the workday starts at night.
It’s not just during a pandemic that the working class holds up New York City.
Everyone is so cynical about those early Covid days when people clapped for health care workers. But I actually think there was something really beautiful about what was being expressed and insisting on seeing the people who make the world work, who hold the world up.
Now, clapping is not enough. They also deserved wage increases and sick days and all kinds of things that they didn’t get. But this is what I mean by that fork in the road that Covid represented: There could have been a breakthrough for labor rights. All of the discussion about who essential workers were and all of that was very threatening to a lot of people, and that’s why we’re in this fascist alternate timeline.
But what you see with the Mamdani campaign is: That didn’t go away. It was a hundred thousand volunteers. That is incredible. And it was all just people talking to their neighbors. It was another expression of neighborism.
That kind of work, just talking to your neighbor — it’s not the work of jargon, it’s like: What can we find to bond over? What’s our quickest, fastest bond?
This is the other doppelgänger that I try to get at in the book. We all contain doppelgängers in ourselves. We are both this and that. The thing about politics is that it can light up different parts of ourselves. You can have a politic that encourages the worst parts of yourself, and you can have a politic that says: Hey, let’s be that other part of you.
But I do think that what Mamdani showed was one way of doing that. I think he got about 10 percent of the people who voted for Trump. Ten percent 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 the cost of living. And if Democrats aren’t credible in making that promise themselves, then I don’t think that they’ll be able to harvest it in one election cycle, and then it will backlash again.
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 about climate.
I’ve used the phrase “ecopopulism” to think about even something like free public transit. Even though that’s a municipal issue, it points to the fact that the climate movement made so many mistakes.
Why didn’t we make free public transit a climate policy? 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. 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. It’s really scary that the merger of Silicon Valley with the Trump administration means that these devices and these platforms that sold themselves as our liberation — 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 in all kinds of ways that we don’t fully understand, in terms of what data was taken through DOGE, what Palantir is doing.
But what is emerging in real time is that there are profiles of us, and A.I. 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 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.
I agree 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 — it’s very real.
I think that when either Democrats have enough power or there’s a subsequent administration and you begin to have an investigation on this era, subpoena power for the opposition in Congress, people going to court, what we are going to learn about what was happening and what was being attempted — when whistle-blowers are not as afraid as they probably are right now — it’s going to really chill people.
It’s sort of like with the Epstein files: There’s a lot we don’t currently know. You can see hints of it, you can worry about it.
I think this fight between the Department of Defense and Anthropic — because the Department of Defense wants to make sure that the A.I. it uses is extremely unconstrained in that use — what is being done in this intersection of the government and Palantir, the government trying to integrate Grok into our war fighting — I think it’s going to get very scary.
And what you were saying before about the anger at tech workers who are taking over these companies — I mean, I think it was exaggerated. But what wasn’t exaggerated is that tech workers were saying they want to have a say in what they build.
There were contracts that were canceled because of tech workers organizing because they didn’t want to be doing contracts with ICE or with the U.S. military. I think 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 area of real worker empowerment.
As we were talking about A.I. and what it means to be human and what it means to have dignity in the economy, something that we’re dancing around is the way economic logic has taken over a lot as that has accelerated down a very disembodied and technological path, now culminating at some level in A.I.
I think there’s something here about how many zones of life you can have corporate and economic logic encroach on.
Yes.
And I think that some of what is going to emerge in all of this — and it reflects what we’re talking about with R.F.K. Jr. and nature — is just a sense that people want alternatives to how things feel.
I mean, that is partially policy. It’s partially universal health care and expanded child tax credits and free transit. But it’s also partially just a recognition of values and aspirations — and that it doesn’t need to feel like this.
Did you see that exchange between the novelist Joyce Carol Oates and Elon Musk?
No.
It was this fascinating exchange. I wish I had the quote in front of me, but she just trolled him on his own site and said: Isn’t it interesting that you can have all the money in the world, but you 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 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 not only do we see just this incredibly bad behavior from the wealthiest people in the world, who clearly don’t deserve the reverence that they were given, but we also see that they seem kind of miserable — incapable of enjoying everything that they have.
There was this moment when Bezos was talking with William Shatner. And William Shatner wanted to talk about what he had seen. He was like: Whoa! Mind blown! Overview effect! Fragile blue marble!
And Bezos just wanted to spray champagne. [Laughs.]
It’s like something is missing. There’s a fundamental failure to appreciate that which is irreplaceable.
That failure seems to me to be very connected with the willingness to just replace art with A.I., replace universities with A.I.
Why are we not pausing to be like: Hey, I know universities aren’t perfect, but it was this idea that people could have a time in their life where they could just read and think. Shouldn’t we have a conversation about whether or not we want to get rid of that whole concept?
I think there is something in what you were saying before about the opportunities. I think there are huge political opportunities to speak to 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.
In the Epstein files, there’s an exchange between, I think it’s Bannon, who really did not like Pope Francis.
And Pope Francis really spoke into this with his encyclical on ecology. I think that he was such a remarkable leader in really identifying that the need to connect reverence for the natural world and its vulnerability is a spiritual duty — whatever you believe, it’s a spiritual duty. And it’s a profound be betrayal not to cherish the natural world.
What I see running through all of the emergent movements in this era, whether it’s the Mamdani campaign or the anti-ICE protests in Minneapolis or the anti-data-center movements, is this real sense of: We cherish where we live, we cherish our water, we cherish our land, our soil.
The values of our city.
Yes. It’s a rootedness. It’s not a whitewash, either. People are rooting down where they are and learning their histories, including the really difficult histories.
There was a lot that has come out of Minneapolis. It’s the birthplace of the American Indian Movement (AIM). Minnesota was the site of the largest mass hanging in U.S. history, of Dakota men. And connecting that history with ICE, it’s a live-action history lesson. It’s looking backward and forward at the same time.
And I think the move that we need to be able to do is: OK, where are we? Where do we want to go?
I think it’s a good place to end. Always our final question: What are three books you’d recommend to the audience?
This is a little bit obvious, but “Empire of A.I.,” by Karen Hao. It’s such an incredible combination of on-the-ground, globe-trotting investigative reporting, making the material inputs and human inputs of A.I. 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.” It comes out in April. It’s available for preorder.
I think it gets at what an alternative story of hereness could be, of really committing to here, which is what the Jewish labor bund was doing before, between the wars.
And the third book is a book called “Fire Alarm: Reading Walter Benjamin’s ‘On the Concept of History’” by Michael Löwy. This is the text that Walter Benjamin wrote right before he took his own life, fleeing the Gestapo in 1940.
It gets at this idea of the way history doesn’t repeat but compounds — in Benjamin’s term: “piling wreckage upon wreckage.”
Naomi Klein, thank you very much.
Thank you so much, Ezra.
You can listen to this conversation by following “The Ezra Klein Show” on the NYTimes app, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts. View a list of book recommendations from our guests here.
This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Jack McCordick. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Aman Sahota. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Marie Cascione, Annie Galvin, Rollin Hu, Kristin Lin, Emma Kehlbeck, Marina King and Jan Kobal. Original music by Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. Transcript editing by Sarah Murphy and Marlaine Glicksman.
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