Naomi Klein Speaks with Jia Tolentino about “Doppelganger”

The New Yorker Radio Hour

WNYC Studios and The New Yorker

Politics, Arts, News, Wnyc, Books, David, Storytelling, Society & Culture, Yorker, New, Remnick

4.2 • 6.2K Ratings

🗓️ 19 September 2023

⏱️ 21 minutes

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Summary

For twenty-some years, Naomi Klein has been a leading thinker on the left. She’s especially known for the idea of disaster capitalism: an analysis that the forces of big business will exploit any severe disruption to take over more space in our lives. She was often confused with another prominent political writer, Naomi Wolf—once a feminist on the left who has, in recent years, embraced conspiracy theories on the right and is now on good terms with Steve Bannon. Klein’s new book, “Doppelganger,” starts with this simple case of mistaken identity and broadens into an analysis of our political moment, which she describes as “uncanny” in the psychological sense. “Freud described the uncanny as that species of frightening that changes what was once familiar to something unfamiliar,” she tells the staff writer Jia Tolentino. “It’s that weirdness of ‘I think I know what this is, but it’s not what I think.’ ” Klein argues that the left and the right have become doppelgangers of one another—and that denialism regarding climate change has widened to any number of topics, including the claim that Joe Biden is dead and is being played by an actor. “Whenever you don’t like reality, you can just say that it’s not real,” she says.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.
0:09.6	This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, and I'm David Remnick.
0:13.9	For 20-some years, Naomi Klein has been a leading thinker on the left.
0:19.5	She's especially known for the idea of disaster capitalism,
0:23.0	an analysis that says that the forces of big business
0:26.5	will exploit any severe disruption to take over more space in our lives.
0:32.5	A few years back, Naomi Klein appeared at the New Yorker Festival,
0:36.1	and she was interviewed by staff writer Gia Tolentino,
0:38.6	and Gia's friends texted her, good luck with Naomi Wolf. Hmm. Naomi Wolf was also a prominent
0:45.9	writer on the left at the time, and apparently this confusion between the two Naomi's happened
0:52.0	quite often on social media and elsewhere. Now, this seems
0:56.1	pretty unsurprising and relatively harmless, and it was at first. With that case of mistaken
1:01.7	identity, particularly online, and the way it's gotten weird as Naomi Wolf has moved right
1:08.1	word and taken up various conspiracy theories is the subject of Naomi Klein's new book.
1:14.4	It's a fascinating book and it's called Doppelganger. And the other day, Naomi Klein sat down to talk
1:20.3	once again with Gia Tolentino. Here's Gia. When I first read the galley of Naomi Klein's new book, Dopplganger, I was kind of instantly
1:30.6	dying to talk to her about it. I have been a fan and I've read all of her work and this book
1:37.3	seemed different. It starts in a stranger place. It addresses a stranger reality. So this book takes,
1:42.7	as its premise, the doppelganger situation that Naomi
1:45.8	Klein finds herself in. The book starts with the double Naomi situation, but it doesn't stay there.
1:52.3	It takes that as a jumping off point to the world of conspiracy, conspiracy profiteering, of surveillance
2:00.0	capitalism, of various other forms of political
	...

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