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1:00

Hello and welcome to Why is this happening

1:02

with me, your host, Chris Hayes.

1:09

Well, we recently returned from the third

1:11

stop on our WithPod national tour.

1:13

It was phenomenal to be in Philly for

1:16

a doubleheader event. We were up

1:18

against the Philadelphia Phillies in the NLCS

1:20

and we still sold the place out. We

1:23

had an amazing time. We're so glad

1:25

to share recording the first half of the program with

1:27

you. Be sure to tune in for the second half of the

1:29

show next week. Enjoy. What's

1:33

up Philly?

1:37

Hey, everybody. Good evening

1:39

and welcome to our live recording

1:42

of Why is this happening? The Chris Hayes podcast.

1:44

I'm Donnie Holloway, producer of

1:46

Why is this happening? I gotta say we have been looking

1:49

so forward to tonight. We've been counting

1:51

down. We are so glad to be here. Thank

1:53

you so much for joining us. As

1:56

we go throughout the program tonight, don't forget you

1:58

can share some of your favorite moments.

1:59

from the conversations tonight by using

2:02

the hashtag with pod. You can

2:04

keep the conversation going online, share quotable

2:07

pictures, videos, whatever you'd like online

2:09

using the hashtag with pod. I

2:11

gotta say Philly, we have really been feeling

2:14

the love tonight. You are an amazing,

2:16

incredible audience. And I want

2:19

you to join me in sharing even more

2:21

of that love and making some noise for

2:23

our host, Chris

2:25

Hayes.

2:31

What's up, Philadelphia?

2:33

How we doing? Yes.

2:36

Look at that. What a crowd.

2:44

What a great, great honor and pleasure it

2:46

is to be in your beautiful city. I

2:50

can't believe we sold this out against the

2:52

Phillies. Also

2:55

understand why my invitation to Bryce Harper

2:58

to be a guest was never returned. That's

3:02

pretty good. So,

3:05

you know, this has been a brutal week and

3:07

I think everyone's kind of reeling from that and processing

3:10

it their own way. Obviously we've been covering it closely.

3:12

I think some of those scenes we'll talk about

3:14

at some point tonight. I wanted

3:16

to start tonight by

3:19

talking about the presidential candidacy of Robert

3:21

F. Kennedy Jr. Have you heard of him? Big

3:24

fans in the audience. OK, well, I

3:26

was going to bring him out as a guest, but I guess that was a miscalculation

3:30

on my back. It was going to be a surprise. Guys,

3:34

guess who's here? So,

3:37

you know, I think a lot of us, I mean, I remember when

3:40

I worked at a small lefty magazine in Chicago

3:42

called In These Times magazine. Yes,

3:45

give it up for In These Times, which is still going strong, by the

3:47

way. I recommend those subscription. And

3:51

we would run pieces by him all the time. And,

3:54

you know, he was a fairly

3:56

standard, like progressive dude. He had

3:58

a radio show. He was obviously. environmental lawyer,

4:02

he railed against corporate power, he started

4:04

writing about, and I remember we even published

4:06

an article by him on this, vaccines

4:09

and autism back,

4:13

I want to say 15 years ago. And

4:15

at the time, I got to say the ideological

4:18

coding of that was very different. Do

4:20

people feel me on that?

4:23

Like,

4:24

this was not a right-wing thing. And

4:27

as someone who moved in left circles, you

4:30

would encounter people. And again, I should

4:32

just well, give a quick thing here that there was an

4:34

article published in The Lancet, right, that

4:36

erroneously seemed to establish a connection,

4:39

which was subsequently retracted. So

4:41

that data was wrong. So people who thought that it was possible

4:43

back then, we're dealing in a little

4:45

bit of a different universe empirically than now, just

4:49

to be a little clear about the shading of the nuance here.

4:51

That said, this belief, this

4:54

false belief, and dangerous belief obviously

4:57

festered and grew. And it became

4:59

kind of like RFK

5:01

Jr's whole thing. And

5:05

we've ended up in this situation in the year 2023, where RFK Jr.

5:09

is like a weird double mirror

5:11

doppelganger to his father. He looks

5:15

like his dad, he sounds like his dad,

5:18

but his dad had this set of politics

5:20

that he kind of had, but somehow he's crawled

5:23

through some nebulous warp in

5:26

the internet and like come

5:28

out on the other side. And

5:32

if it were just the story of one

5:34

person with a famous name and a weird, and

5:37

let's be honest, heavy inheritance, that

5:39

would be one thing. But

5:41

I think we all sense that like that

5:44

one story about the strange mirror

5:46

world into which Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

5:48

has slipped is not just about him.

5:50

I suspect there are people in

5:53

the audience who have friends, loved

5:55

ones, acquaintances who have, where you have watched them

5:58

slip through a similar mirror world. Okay,

6:02

good for you. That's

6:07

one no. I

6:11

think one of the weird sort

6:13

of destabilizing and dislocating

6:16

aspects of our days is that

6:19

the political alliances, formations,

6:22

tendencies, and factions seem radically

6:24

in flux, right? Like at

6:26

one level, we're very, very polarized. But

6:29

if you push down beneath the polarization,

6:31

the ideological conversation,

6:33

particularly like when you look at the

6:35

war in Ukraine, right? Where

6:38

Medea Benjamin of Code Pink just was posing

6:40

with Marjorie Taylor Greene about

6:42

ending the war in Ukraine. Or if you look at vaccines

6:45

or a whole bunch of things, right? You

6:47

start to see this sort of politics that are built

6:50

around this sort of bizarre mirror

6:52

world of reality and that

6:54

feast off distrust. And

6:57

that tendency, I think is like one

6:59

of the most important tendencies, political

7:02

tendencies of our time. I think it's related to

7:04

Donald Trump's assent. It's related

7:06

to the fact that we lost hundreds of thousands of people

7:08

to COVID that we shouldn't have.

7:11

It's related to the threats to democracy because

7:14

you can't really run a low trust democracy.

7:18

Like it just doesn't work. It's the glue

7:20

that binds everything together. And

7:23

all of these themes, which I've been thinking about a lot and I think

7:25

observing and bouncing around my head in

7:27

an inchoate way. In

7:30

the last month, there's this book published

7:32

that just did a better job

7:34

of talking about expressing this

7:37

than anything I had encountered. It's

7:40

a really masterful piece of work. It's

7:43

called Doppelganger by Naomi Klein. Yes,

7:45

you can applaud. Give it up. I

7:49

really recommend you buy it. Let's try

7:51

to move some product here tonight, everybody. And

7:56

it is my great, great pleasure and honor to introduce

7:58

my good friend, Naomi Klein.

8:15

How are you? I

8:18

am good. I'm really glad to be with you.

8:20

Hi, everyone. Great to be in Philly. I'm

8:22

wearing Philly's red. Thanks for having me. I'm a big fan of this

8:25

podcast. Oh, thanks. I'm in the library.

8:27

I'm a big fan of this podcast. I am a lister. You're

8:29

a repeat guest. Can

8:32

we start on how the book formed?

8:34

Yes. But before

8:36

we do the actual podcast, I

8:38

just also want to echo what you were just saying about

8:41

what a wrenching, I think 10

8:44

days now it has been. And

8:46

I know that a lot, I'll bet

8:48

that pretty much everybody here is carrying

8:50

a lot of grief and fear for

8:53

the loss of civilian life in

8:55

Israel and right now in Gaza. I

8:57

know I am. Almost

9:00

feels like hard to go back into

9:02

this material when everything

9:05

in me just wants to be focused on this

9:07

emergency. So those

9:09

of you out there, and I know it won't be everyone who

9:11

agree with me that you can't carpet

9:14

bomb your way to peace. Thanks, Chris.

9:17

Sorry.

9:17

No, don't apologize. In fact,

9:19

there's a chapter in this book that relates

9:22

to this that I think I would love to come back around to.

9:26

The origin of this and actually relates because

9:28

of the identity of the

9:30

person who is your doppelganger.

9:34

How did you, when

9:37

and how was this book conceived?

9:39

Sure. Yeah. So

9:41

this is a very different kind of book for me

9:44

for people who've read earlier books of

9:46

mine like The Shock Doctrine or This

9:48

Changes Everything About the Climate Crisis. I

9:51

write serious nonfiction. Very

9:54

serious. Actually,

9:57

my method is I work

9:59

things out in my journalism as you do, you know,

10:02

and come up with a, you know, an idea

10:04

that's too big for an article, that's too, you

10:06

know, that a thesis. And, you know,

10:08

I come up with an outline and I put it up front. And

10:11

I know, you know, and I prove it and examples

10:13

and we go pretty straight up a mountain.

10:15

And then we say that we got there. And

10:17

that's been the structure of the books I've written. This

10:20

book starts from that place of

10:22

pandemic vertigo, a kind of a place

10:25

of speechlessness, really of losing

10:27

faith in that particular kind

10:29

of argument that in these vertiginous

10:33

times, with all of those cross

10:35

political signals, where

10:37

you have this migration of

10:40

issues and people from left

10:42

to right, the right is sort

10:44

of oddly becoming like a

10:46

warped mirror of what the populace left

10:48

used to be. It was all getting all mixed

10:51

up. And I realized

10:54

that I needed to write in a different way.

10:56

I actually started working with a writing

10:58

teacher, because I wanted

11:00

to write just more

11:02

experimentally, more creatively. So this

11:04

is much more creative nonfiction than my earlier

11:07

books. And, you know,

11:10

while I was working with this teacher and doing all these

11:12

exercises to try to find a more creative

11:15

style, that felt sort of truer

11:17

to my own voice, I was experiencing

11:19

this deluge of identity confusion

11:22

online, where people kept mistaking

11:25

me for the nonfiction writer, Naomi Wolf,

11:27

who became one of those people

11:30

who fell down the rabbit hole of misinformation

11:33

during COVID and became a vector

11:35

for medical misinformation. It

11:38

was just sort of tugging at me like just a distraction.

11:40

And then I thought, actually, this might be a kind

11:42

of a literary technique to get at

11:45

the way I think a lot of us are confused

11:47

about who we are right now and who other people

11:49

are and to kind of map the weirdness

11:52

of now or the wildness of now.

11:53

What one of the things I love about the book and I

11:56

think this

11:57

most nonfiction books and this

11:59

is just secret between you and me in this

12:01

audience. Like, you don't really

12:03

have to read the whole thing. True,

12:07

true of my books, I'll be totally honest. Like,

12:09

you just, you can skim or... I mean,

12:11

what I mean by that is, a lot of non-fiction

12:14

books, because they make an argument, you can get a pretty good

12:16

sense of what they are. And

12:18

really great non-fiction books really do require

12:20

you to read the whole thing. And one of the things

12:23

I love about this book is that it is, if someone

12:25

says like, what's the book about? It would be actually very

12:27

hard for me to give them the tweet

12:29

length version of it. Because it

12:31

does so many interesting things. So the origin

12:34

of it is this confusion. Just

12:38

talk about the confusion and how it sort of manifests

12:41

in your life. There's a amazing little anecdote

12:43

you give in the bathroom where

12:47

you overhear a conversation, which is one of the

12:49

first kind of pinpricks of this kind of

12:51

Naomi Wolf, Naomi Klein confusion.

12:53

Yeah, so that took place almost

12:56

a decade and a half ago, 2011, and I remember it was 2011

13:00

because it was during Occupy Wall Street and I was in

13:02

New York. I was researching this

13:04

change of everything and I was doing some interviews

13:07

at the Cottie Park about the

13:10

intersections of the financial crisis

13:12

and the climate crisis. And

13:14

then there was a march through the financial

13:17

district. And as happens during

13:19

marches, I needed to pee and went into

13:21

a restroom in one

13:24

of the office towers, which was crowded

13:26

with marchers and lots of people

13:28

with thick black eyeliner who were clearly

13:30

not derivatives traders. And I

13:33

was in the stall and I heard these two women talking

13:36

about me or frankly trashing me. And

13:39

so I just froze. And one of them

13:41

said, did you read that terrible

13:43

article by Naomi Klein? I mean, she really

13:46

doesn't understand our movement. And

13:48

then they were just going on. And so this

13:50

brought back every mean girl

13:53

experience of high school. And I was like,

13:55

how am I gonna get out of here without them seeing me? And

13:58

then it became clear to me that they... were

14:00

talking about another Naomi,

14:03

but they were calling her Naomi Klein. So

14:05

I had read the article, it was by Naomi

14:08

Wolf, and she had claimed that she

14:10

alone had divined the demands

14:12

of this movement that very pointedly did not

14:14

have a set of demands, and she delivered

14:17

those demands to Andrew Cuomo

14:20

at a black tie Huffington Post party

14:22

and got herself arrested. So I

14:24

didn't want to be confused with her, and

14:28

I came out of the stall and said, I think

14:30

you're

14:30

talking about Naomi Wolf,

14:31

and that's something I've had

14:33

to say many thousands

14:36

upon thousands of times.

14:38

Right, because I mean one of the things you say

14:40

is that

14:41

because of the weird, you

14:43

talk about social media as a global graffiti on

14:47

the bathroom wall, which I thought was a pretty potent metaphor,

14:50

that because of the way that mentions work, or whatever,

14:52

it's like if she says like... You identified

14:54

with I didn't hear Chris.

14:56

I don't know, I don't use social media.

14:58

No, yes, very much. I'm

15:01

writing a book now, literally on this topic, so I'm

15:03

thinking about this a lot myself, but when a particularly,

15:06

you know, Fakakta statement

15:10

by her would

15:11

go on to social media, yeah,

15:13

suddenly it would be like this weird,

15:16

like there's like an alarm system, like a light up in your

15:18

mentions, for people either like

15:20

cotton into or castigating

15:22

you for the crazy statement.

15:25

Or thanking me, or expressing their

15:27

pity for me. Often it'd be like thoughts

15:29

and prayers to Naomi Klein, and I'd be like,

15:31

what did you do now?

15:34

And then I'd find out she went on Fox News

15:36

with Tucker Carlson and said

15:38

that Joe Biden had ushered in

15:40

a coup d'etat under the guise of

15:43

a vaccine verification app to

15:45

bring in Chinese style social credit

15:47

systems, and so on. I

15:49

mean,

15:50

he did not do that, just for the record. No, did not

15:52

do that. Just for standards, when you're listening

15:54

to the podcast later.

15:55

But yeah, so it was

15:58

often a reverse engineering thing, and And

16:00

to be clear, the book is, you know, I mean, you

16:02

know, you said that she it's not about her.

16:03

No, I'm working on. Yeah.

16:05

But it does use her as a case study, because

16:08

it is significant that this is somebody who

16:10

was, you know, probably the

16:12

highest profile third wave

16:14

feminist in the 1990s. You know, she wrote

16:16

The Beauty Myth. She was then

16:19

hired by Al Gore to be a

16:21

senior advisor to coach

16:23

him on attracting women voters. She was

16:25

very much like inside the beltway for a while.

16:28

And so if somebody like that

16:31

could turn into a person who's on Steve Bannon's

16:33

podcast every single day, they

16:35

co-wrote a book together about the

16:37

Pfizer vaccine. They put out T

16:40

shirts at one point, you know, she

16:43

has bought into January

16:45

six revisionism, she's engaged in election

16:47

denial. So if somebody like her

16:49

could turn into some somebody

16:52

like that, you know, she takes pictures of her gun,

16:54

you know, she's all kinds of things. That

16:56

is telling us something because it isn't

16:59

only her there is there is it there's

17:01

a broader scrambling. And so I

17:03

thought, well, what if what if what if she's my

17:05

white rabbit, and I follow her down

17:07

this rabbit hole and try to understand it and

17:09

try to figure out what's going on? Maybe that will make

17:11

sense of, you know, the way

17:14

COVID I think has has redrawn political

17:16

maps in all kinds of contexts.

17:18

More of our conversation after

17:20

this quick break.

17:28

Calling all entrepreneurs and business owners,

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17:39

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17:55

US is the global force behind

17:57

all birds, Raffi's and Brooklinen and

17:59

millions of entrepreneurs of every size.

18:01

Plus, there's

18:04

a viral tweet that you quote which I remember this is during

18:06

one of these controversies.

18:26

If

18:33

the Naomi B. Klein you're doing just

18:35

fine. If the Naomi B. Wolf ooh,

18:37

ooh. And

18:39

I remember cracking up when I saw that viral

18:41

tweet. But to your point, I mean,

18:43

the reason I started with Robert Kennedy RFK is

18:45

because it's a very similar and,

18:48

you know, different in some ways. But let's talk a

18:50

little bit about first, I want to talk about

18:52

COVID. Right. And then I want to talk about

18:55

this sort of trust unraveling

18:57

mirror world. Right. Right. So

19:00

one of the themes of this podcast consistently

19:02

has been COVID is undercounted

19:05

as a kind of central causal

19:09

mechanism for many of the things that

19:11

have happened in the last several years. Yeah.

19:14

I think part of the way that people experience

19:17

disruption and trauma is like you just kind of like

19:20

sort of put it out of your head. And I remember

19:22

reading about the great flu pandemic and how

19:24

like, you know, no one talked about it afterwards

19:26

and we weren't taught about it. And I was like, that's so weird. Now

19:28

I'm like, I get it. Right. I get it.

19:32

So

19:33

what do you what did it what did it do? Ideologically,

19:36

socially, politically,

19:39

emotionally, like, how

19:40

do you understand the dislocation? Obviously,

19:42

we understand that sort of daily dislocation, but it did something

19:45

deeper than that. I think we all felt.

19:47

Yeah. I mean, I think it's helpful

19:49

to think of it as an

19:51

unveiling that it is.

19:53

Yes, it is about

19:56

the people who died, the millions

19:58

of people who died and made.

20:03

a

22:00

lot of organizing in those early days, and there was a

22:02

lot of solidarity in those early days. But I think

22:05

for people who really bought that story

22:07

hard, there was

22:09

a lot of difficulty accepting

22:12

that enmeshment, particularly if they were small

22:14

business owners and they were seeing that they were not

22:16

getting, you know, they felt that it was the

22:19

supports were unfair. So

22:21

COVID was it was an unveiling, it was an unveiling

22:24

of who bears the risk, the working class

22:26

risk in our society overwhelmingly black

22:28

and brown people, people who are systematically

22:31

unseen and suddenly we had to think, did they have,

22:33

were they able to call in sick, you know, is

22:36

the food I'm eating safe because of that, like, all

22:38

of that was revealed. And it was very

22:41

hard for a lot of people. I think it I think it led

22:43

to a kind of derangement. And I think that we

22:46

shouldn't be surprised by that, because

22:49

in some ways, it was more strange

22:51

to think that we could go from your just

22:54

take care of yourself and your nuclear family and that's

22:56

your only job to care about this

22:58

whole society overnight. You know,

23:00

I take heart from the fact that a lot of people

23:02

welcome that enmeshment actually, but that

23:05

was not the only reckoning that happened in the COVID

23:07

period. I mean, a few months in George

23:10

Floyd was murdered and we were in

23:12

a reckoning with the

23:14

foundation of this country with

23:17

the crimes of enslavement

23:20

of African people, the stealing of

23:22

indigenous lands. I mean, it was going

23:24

very, very deep. So we're in this reckoning

23:26

with the present. We're in a reckoning with

23:29

the past. And then comes the climate

23:31

crisis. We're in a reckoning with the future because

23:33

the climate crisis doesn't take a break just because we're

23:35

in a pandemic. So I don't think it's just COVID

23:38

that is that is a deranger. I think it is very

23:40

hard to look directly at where

23:42

we are at now.

23:43

Yeah, that point about enmeshment and

23:45

the kind of collective right that that that you

23:47

know, there is such thing as society that we are embodied

23:50

human beings with relationships to each other. The virus

23:52

actually feasts on those relationships that

23:54

we there's no individual way to deal with

23:56

this, that we have to do it collectively, but and

23:59

also at the same time.

23:59

in ways that mean we can't socialize and

24:02

we have to be alienated alone and spend all

24:04

our time online Which I think is like terrible

24:06

for people's brains. So there's like that weird combination,

24:09

right? It's like at an ideological level.

24:11

It's like this has to be solved collectively

24:14

while you're in your own house And

24:17

you know, I remember

24:17

which is unprecedented You

24:20

won't find in those books about earlier pandemics

24:22

because they didn't have

24:23

the do it. No. Yeah, and I

24:26

Rebecca Solnit on why is this

24:28

happening during COVID who wrote this amazing book called

24:30

the paradise built in hell Which is a really

24:32

beautiful book about how contrary

24:34

to I think expectations people have

24:36

about Times when there's natural disaster

24:38

like she talks about the earthquake in San Francisco in 1907 that you know

24:43

People run wild and there's marauding gangs

24:45

and actually people act with tremendous

24:47

amounts of mutual aid and solidarity But one

24:50

of the things she said in that conversation was

24:52

it's hard to do that when we're all separated

24:54

So there's like this like

24:55

combination of that ideological layer, but

24:57

then there's the lived reality Which I do think played

25:00

a role particularly with

25:02

your doppelganger but so many people which

25:04

is like

25:05

you're cut off from your human test

25:07

relationships and then you're like

25:10

Getting a lot of stuff from the internet.

25:12

Yeah and replacing those IRL Relationships

25:16

with that and I think that

25:18

was part of what drove people a little. Oh, absolutely

25:20

Absolutely, absolutely because and

25:23

this is where you know The through line of

25:25

the book is less her although

25:27

she does recur and more this

25:30

idea of doubles of the

25:32

way the self gets Doubled and having a doppelganger

25:34

somebody who the outside

25:37

world thinks is you and it's

25:39

not you or some You know some of you have probably

25:41

had the experience of bumping into somebody who

25:43

feels uncannily like a living mirror That's

25:46

one kind of doubling but our online avatars

25:49

are another kind of double right like who

25:51

is that guy up there,

25:52

you know I don't know

25:54

but he's handsome. I Mean

25:57

is like is that you have no eyeballs? So

26:01

this is an audio medium I'm just

26:03

pointing to the logo of Chris

26:05

behind him, Chris. But

26:08

we, you know, any of us who maintains a

26:10

persona online, you

26:13

don't have to be a famous person,

26:15

you know, is creating

26:17

like a literal double, that is this

26:19

little thumbnail-sized picture of you, you

26:22

know, they're taken in just the right sort of

26:24

light or just the right mood and then you've got your,

26:26

you know, sort of sassy little descriptor

26:29

and this is part of

26:31

a broader revolution

26:34

in how we have been trained to think of ourselves which

26:36

has to do with the casualization of work, the precarity,

26:39

the gig economy, where we're told actually

26:41

that the brand, our brand is our job, like

26:43

this is how you survive in these roiling

26:46

capitalist fees and

26:48

the thing about creating

26:50

a brand version of you is that

26:53

it's a commodity version of you, it's a

26:55

thing version of you and the thing

26:58

about doing that is that people will believe you,

27:00

you know, I don't think we actually think

27:02

each other are real online,

27:05

you know, even people who we know I

27:07

think we forget are

27:08

actually real. No, it's like playing a video game, it's

27:10

like playing a discourse video game.

27:14

It's like it is

27:16

to actual engagement conversation

27:18

what

27:19

a video game is to, you know, actual

27:22

play and I think that that avatar

27:25

double, like that double started standing

27:27

in for a lot of people during that period because

27:29

the actual self was

27:32

couldn't do anything,

27:33

you know, or

27:35

in many cases was forced to do things

27:37

like slaughter chickens in

27:39

unsafe conditions or be in

27:41

a grocery store. I mean this point about,

27:43

I keep thinking about this category of essential worker

27:46

which is such an amazing category because

27:48

it's like, it's

27:51

an amazing category because it doesn't map onto

27:53

any other social hierarchy.

27:56

Like if you were like what's the most well-paid

27:58

jobs or you could say

27:59

what are the worst jobs?

28:02

You couldn't come up with another category that has

28:04

like

28:05

ER doctors, food delivery people,

28:07

grocery workers, people that slaughter chicken, and

28:10

people that like pick food at like in the same category,

28:13

but yeah that category was so

28:15

profound about what actually on

28:18

whose backs society functions.

28:20

Yeah and I do think that there was something

28:22

like

28:23

for people who were not in that category

28:26

there was something almost like humiliating

28:28

about it like you're being told

28:30

I'm inessential stay home, just

28:33

stay out of the way. It turns out we

28:35

don't need what you do. Like

28:37

we've checked and actually you're

28:40

not in that category. Yeah

28:41

and so when I look at conspiracy culture

28:44

like there's so much self importance

28:46

to it like you're constantly uncovering

28:48

this absolutely world-saving

28:51

truth you know and you are

28:53

deputizing yourself as like beyond

28:56

essential like you and you

28:58

alone and your friends have figured out

29:00

this thing like there's actually a genocide

29:02

that is being carried out under cover of these vaccines.

29:05

There isn't right but you but

29:07

but you can I do think

29:09

that that was sort of part of it was people

29:12

not liking this feeling that

29:16

that their job was just to stay home and click

29:18

so turning that clicking into

29:20

something very very important

29:22

and essential to give themselves a promotion.

29:25

No I yes

29:28

chief vaccine investigator I mean I think that's the

29:30

that's sort of the joke about doing my own research right.

29:33

But there's also this so so then there's this

29:35

other ideological layer and you talk about this at COVID

29:38

too and this is where this sort of interesting

29:40

double mirror world happens. You wrote this great book called

29:42

the shock doctrine and it's about moments

29:45

of social dislocation and

29:47

disruption that could be a financial crisis and

29:49

a natural disaster

29:50

in which there's this kind of like stunned

29:53

sort of paralysis shock. And

29:56

in those moments people particularly people with power

29:59

use them.

31:59

Yeah, so

32:01

there are real examples of that, but

32:04

there is not a plot that

32:06

brings together Klaus Schwab from

32:09

the World Economic Forum, Bill Gates, the Chinese

32:11

Communist Party, who else

32:14

is part of it, Anthony Fauci,

32:16

in order to bring in a new world order

32:19

and enslave humans and make them eat bugs. No.

32:22

And so when the shock doctrine gets invoked

32:24

in this weird doppelganger of itself,

32:28

then that is a bit queasy making. Yeah,

32:30

I mean, you quote

32:32

later in the book, and a chapter I want to get to

32:34

in a second about this famous line from a

32:37

social democratic politician in

32:39

Europe in the 19th century who called anti-Semitism

32:42

the socialism of fools, right?

32:45

And

32:46

meaning like the sort of structural analysis

32:49

of who controls a society sort of dumbed

32:51

down and run through this kind of like

32:54

bigoted

32:55

demagogic version, right? That is what he

32:57

means with the socialism of fools. And there is a little bit

32:59

of like, there was a lot of like the

33:01

Naomi Klein of fools happening during

33:03

COVID, like where like these

33:05

sort of visions of how power operates

33:08

or big sort of structural things operate

33:11

got flattened into

33:13

these conspiracy theories. But the thing that

33:15

was so sort of troubling about them was that they

33:18

had these like notes of leftness

33:21

to them or notes of like ideological

33:23

affinity, like I do not trust big pharma.

33:26

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

33:29

I do not trust big pharma and big tech. Like, yeah, I do not trust big pharma and big

33:31

tech either. And then it was a hop,

33:34

skip and a jump from that to, you

33:36

know, they are vaccinating us to

33:39

sterilize a population or whatever nonsense.

33:42

Yeah. And I think, you

33:44

know, the conspiracy

33:47

culture, and I call it conspiracy culture, not conspiracy

33:49

theories because it is very incoherent,

33:51

right? You have these, you

33:54

know,

33:55

I have respect for theories. I like them. I,

33:57

you know, I don't, I don't think it's fair to theories.

33:59

to say that these

34:03

are actually theories. Because one, they're kind

34:05

of, they're looking for where the heat

34:07

is. So when

34:10

it was all about vaccine verification apps, it

34:13

was the apps themselves that were eavesdropping on

34:15

you, that were going to bring in a social credit system. Then when

34:17

they lifted the apps mandates,

34:19

then we forgot all about that, and now it's

34:22

back to the vaccine, it's the vaccines that are doing

34:24

it and so on. Or it's the virus

34:26

itself, which is a bioweapon that was

34:28

cooked up in the lab in order to depopulate

34:31

the West. But no, it's just a cold,

34:33

why are you even wearing a mask? Right, so it

34:35

just moves around in ways that really contradict

34:38

its themselves. They are

34:40

a distraction machine, so that

34:42

we aren't talking about real scandals

34:46

during COVID. I mean, I was very upset with Bill Gates

34:48

as well, for different reasons. I didn't

34:51

think that he was trying to implant

34:53

microchips in us, you

34:55

know, so that we could be tracked. But I did think

34:57

he was part of, you know, a whole

34:59

network of folks, mainly the pharmaceutical

35:02

companies, who were insisting that

35:04

these vaccines have patents on them.

35:06

And it was not clear to me that they should have

35:08

patents on them, because they were developed

35:11

with public dollars. It was a fee for service

35:13

arrangements with government money. So,

35:15

yeah. We bulk purchased them,

35:17

yeah. Right, and so we had huge

35:19

vaccine injustice, where we were lining

35:21

up to get our third and fourth shots, when much

35:24

of the world had not even gotten their first ones.

35:27

So, what interests me

35:29

about that socialism of fools,

35:31

is that it's always, you're always not

35:34

talking about the scandal that we can prove,

35:36

that we know about. That's right in front of us. And

35:38

you pivot over to this idea that we're

35:40

about to prove that there's a room

35:43

somewhere with just these, like, five guys

35:45

and a bunch of Jews, and some people from

35:47

China, who are doing the whole thing. And

35:49

so, but this surges

35:52

at particular moments in history, when the

35:54

center isn't holding, right? When people,

35:58

when the central promises of. society

36:00

are not delivering. And we don't do

36:03

good or any political and economic

36:05

education in this

36:07

country or in most countries

36:10

where we don't explain what capitalism is,

36:12

right? We tell people it's a meritocracy and

36:14

you work hard and you're going to get ahead and it's the best of all

36:16

possible systems and it's sunshine and

36:18

Big Macs. And then when it doesn't work out

36:20

for them, when they're working multiple jobs

36:23

and they're falling behind and they can't afford groceries,

36:25

then they want someone to blame. And it's

36:28

not going to be capitalism because capitalism

36:31

is supposed to be

36:33

good. So that's when conspiracy

36:35

theories really surge. And

36:38

so this is why in the book I really reject

36:40

horseshoe theory because I actually think it's only

36:43

a systemic analysis of capitalism

36:45

that has a chance. I think a socialism

36:48

of facts can fight a socialism of fools,

36:50

if you will. That's

36:51

a good line. I mean, you point out

36:53

to in this chapter about your

36:56

Jewish

36:57

heritage and Jewish tradition and antisemitism,

37:00

which there's sort of a bunch of different

37:02

layered themes through that chapter that are really interesting. One,

37:05

the sort of the figure of

37:06

the Jew as a kind of double mirror

37:10

for Europeans, right? That this

37:13

figure is somehow like us, but permanently

37:15

outside of us. And this double

37:18

identity is sort of a little bit like the double consciousness

37:20

that Du Bois talks about for African Americans is

37:23

sort of this

37:23

central created

37:27

vector of intellectual

37:29

discussion among Jewish Europeans, also

37:32

by

37:33

governments seeking to

37:35

either exterminate or expropriate

37:37

or oppress Jews in Europe. But

37:40

also like the idea of like Jewishness

37:43

as adjacent to conspiracy theory

37:45

for a very long time from

37:47

Hitler talking about Jewish capitalism

37:50

as like to go back to the sort of horseshoe theory, right?

37:52

Like the specific problem is in capitalism, it's

37:54

Jewish capitalism to the protocol, the elders

37:57

of Zion that like the figure of Jewishness

37:59

is adjacent to conspiracy theorizing,

38:02

you know, like, as Chris Rock famously said

38:05

on that stand-over team, like, that train is never

38:07

late,

38:08

right? Like when you start going into

38:10

those places, like, who's controlling this again?

38:13

Like it doesn't take that long.

38:14

Mm-hmm. Yeah, and I think it

38:16

relates to what we were just talking

38:19

about, is that it's a theory that

38:22

actually protects power, right? And

38:24

the figure of

38:27

the Jewish, well, it's interesting because

38:29

the two central conspiracy theories about

38:31

Jews really contradict themselves. It's the

38:33

Jewish banker and the Jewish Bolshevik, right?

38:39

And they're always on a sort of logical collision course

38:42

with one another, but that doesn't matter

38:44

because it's a distraction machine. And

38:47

what it is, even though, you know, I've spent

38:49

hundreds of hours listening to Steve Bannon and

38:51

he's always railing against the elites

38:54

and the globalists who I think are the,

38:57

that's the contemporary code for

39:00

Jewish capitalism, the globalists. They

39:02

are unrooted

39:02

to the land.

39:04

But if we look at who is,

39:06

you know, who is pushing conspiracy

39:08

theories most aggressively and most

39:10

effectively in our culture, it's some of the richest and

39:12

most powerful people anywhere. It's

39:15

Elon Musk, for instance, you

39:17

know, and it's Donald Trump.

39:18

And Rupert Murdoch. Three

39:21

of the most powerful people on

39:22

earth. And so it is

39:24

this

39:25

doppelganger of the left in the sense that

39:27

it seems to be critiquing

39:29

elites or it claims to be critiquing elites,

39:32

but actually it protects them because you aren't talking

39:34

about the system. You're talking about that room somewhere

39:37

that you're about to expose.

39:39

So yeah, my mom is convinced that

39:42

the reason I get confused with Naomi Wolf is

39:45

anti-Semitism. So that's one chapter in the

39:47

book when my mom's like, you do realize that

39:50

this is just because you're both Jewish

39:52

and you are, or she put it a type.

39:59

is i'm not sure i i thought

40:02

it was like kind of striving gf

40:04

uh... about

40:06

my friend that they would like to think you're

40:09

both jack

40:09

anyway

40:13

so i wrestle with that for a while philip roth

40:15

gets involved uh... and

40:17

then we end up in gaza

40:18

we'll be right

40:20

back after this quick break

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41:27

uh... figure out the parking lot here will

41:30

hear here's what i want to i do get there

41:32

i do want to find out how you think

41:35

basically like we're wrenching

41:37

people back yet from this it happens

41:40

the sort of thrill of the conspiracy theory

41:43

is invigorating and

41:45

also in beginning because it's

41:47

like

41:48

i'm gonna figure this out there's

41:50

the kind of thrill of the sort of anti elite populism

41:53

talk for a little bit

41:55

of the sort of served rap this is

41:57

like how you

42:00

How you view a vision of sort of taking

42:02

people back

42:03

through the

42:04

rabbit hole in Reverse Like

42:07

what that

42:08

looks like and what hope there is because

42:11

it does get super dark And

42:13

there are a lot of people and sometimes I feel like

42:15

maybe this all goes away and maybe social media

42:17

companies all just sort of like go kaput or you know

42:19

Twitter dies and Yeah, exactly

42:22

and we'll all sort of be better off But then the other

42:24

thing about it is that like,

42:25

you know,

42:26

this is from the own book on my book I'm writing

42:28

like, you

42:29

know, they didn't need social media for

42:31

like, you know

42:32

burning witches in the colonies Like

42:35

humans are pretty good at this whichever technology

42:37

you give them It's not

42:40

like it's like oh, well the algorithm was making

42:42

him do it like they just they

42:44

were people and so I wonder like how

42:46

you think about

42:48

undoing

42:49

Yeah, we can definitely overplay

42:52

the algorithm So, you know,

42:54

I do see I'm interested that that

42:56

many of you said that you have lost

42:58

people down the rabbit hole And

43:00

I would I would encourage

43:03

you if it feels Possible if it

43:05

feels safe to to reach out to them Well,

43:07

there were a lot of severed relationships

43:09

during during kovat because a lot of decisions

43:11

were made that felt, you know Really

43:14

urgent around safety right around immunocompromised

43:16

people But all the social

43:18

science research does show that if somebody is

43:20

going to come back if they're going to change their mind it

43:23

is Going to be somebody who

43:25

they have a pre-existing relationship with

43:27

somebody in their family Somebody they went to high

43:29

school with who extends some kind

43:32

of a bridge Like you said like you don't like big

43:34

tech either you don't like big pharma either, you know

43:36

Maybe there are things that that you

43:38

can agree on But part

43:41

of the thrill of conspiracy like just

43:43

building on what you were saying Chris It's also

43:45

that it has a vision for justice.

43:48

It is a cartoon vision of

43:50

justice, but it isn't just about Unveiling

43:54

the conspiracies. It's this it's

43:57

this Hollywood style great

43:59

storm that's central

44:02

to the QAnon conspiracy, that

44:04

there's the white that you're going to, have

44:06

you seen these bumper stickers like make

44:08

the Duremberg code great again? And

44:10

that's all about arresting all the war

44:13

criminals who imposed COVID health

44:15

measures and bringing them up on

44:17

war crimes trials. And you can laugh

44:19

about it, but they have a plan,

44:22

or at least they're claimed to, so they aren't

44:25

just saying things are bad. They're saying things

44:27

are bad and we will fix them. We'll

44:29

bring Donald Trump back into the White House, he will arrest

44:32

everybody and so on. So that

44:34

begs

44:34

the question of like, what is our vision

44:36

of justice, right?

44:37

Beyond just sending Trump to jail.

44:39

Like, do we actually have a vision

44:42

of justice that addresses

44:44

these multiple unveilings that

44:46

we were talking about earlier? Because if

44:49

you are gonna ask people to reckon with

44:51

the crimes of the present, past and future, then

44:54

it can't just be like, wow, we

44:57

suck, things are terrible. We're implicated

44:59

in all of it. There also has to be

45:01

a plan for what we're gonna do

45:03

about it. And if you aren't a conspiracy

45:06

nut, then that plan has to involve

45:08

collective action and politics. And

45:11

there has to be a horizon of

45:13

where we're gonna go together and how things are gonna change.

45:15

And you know, the last time I was on your show, Chris,

45:18

the auto workers had just gone on strike. And I

45:20

said to you something I'll say again, which

45:22

is I believe that the best

45:24

way to fight conspiracy culture is to

45:27

have more union organizers like

45:29

Sean Fain on television saying we're

45:31

gonna take on. No, but really,

45:34

but really, because she,

45:36

you know, when you have somebody who

45:38

is actually taking on the elites,

45:40

who's wearing his eat the rich shirt and saying,

45:42

you know, we're gonna get a much

45:44

greater share of the profits for working people

45:47

who've been getting screwed. It makes this

45:49

whole pantomime of fake anti-elitism

45:51

on the conspiratorial right look like

45:53

the sham that it is. Right? And

45:56

so that's what we need to do. We need more of that.

45:59

We're not gonna solve it.

45:59

one uncle at a time but if you can bring

46:02

your uncle back try

46:03

uh... the

46:05

book is called doppelganger a

46:08

trip into the mirror world by naomi wolf uh...

46:10

sorry

46:14

that's a joke it's

46:17

a bit, i'm doing a bit, it's called doppelganger

46:19

a trip into the mirror world by naomi klein, please

46:22

give it up for naomi klein

46:32

once again my great thanks to naomi klein who

46:34

i've known for years and uh... i want

46:36

to reiterate what i said on stage that the book is really

46:39

a special book you should definitely

46:41

check it out and you should

46:43

check out all her books it was just great to have her on don't

46:46

forget to tune in to the next episode for the second part of our doubleheader

46:49

program with the one and only joy reid i learned

46:51

so much about joy in that one conversation i can't

46:53

wait to share it with you you can follow us on tiktok

46:55

by searching withpod you can also follow me on threads

46:58

at chrysalhaze on bluesky at chrysalhaze

47:01

why is this happening is presented by MSNBC

47:03

and MSNBC news produced by donnie holloway and

47:05

brendan o'mealia this episode was engineered by fernando

47:08

arruda and harry colhane and

47:10

features music by eddie cooper aisha turner

47:12

is the executive producer of MSNBC audio

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you can see more of our work including links

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to things we mentioned here by going to mbcnews.com

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slash why is this happening