I am delighted to welcome you to Substack, Andrew, and what a roaring start you are off to with this blazing critique of Naomi Klein’s decline into menticide, failure to register the lessons of her own past work, and vicious maligning of Naomi Wolf, who proved herself a courageous seeker of truth rather than a fanatical defender of regime propaganda like Naomi Klein has become.
I was pleased to see Toby Rogers has liked this post as the first thing I thought of was his excellent piece:
One of the thousands of article ideas I have jotted down is “A Tale of Two Naomis.” Since you and Toby have done such a good job of covering this topic, I can cross it off my todo list 😅
Thank you so much for your kind words, Margaret Anna. I too was highly impressed by Toby Roger's insightful review. I hope there will be others - even if you have decided not to write your own. We need more balance to the many favourable reviews in the corporate media of Klein's truly shameful book.
Excellent article. Correct me if I'm wrong—I haven't read Klein's book, just reviews—but I saw a quote from Doppelganger's section on "yes some conspiracy theories are true" suggesting that she, like Wolf, seems to be a closet 9/11 skeptic. (Wolf wrote favorably about my battle for 9/11 truth and against censorship at the University of Wisconsin in The End of America.) If both Naomis are closet truthers, and the ultimate shock doctrine event was the 9/11 false flag, yet somehow Klein never addresses 9/11 squarely, what does that say about her intellectual honesty?
I don't think Klein could ever question 9/11 publicly, it would surely destroy her career. Whether she has wondered personally about the truth of 9/11, who knows? One can't look into people's hearts. In 'The Shock Doctrine' (chapter 14) Klein discusses 9/11 as a classic disaster-capitalism event but not one that was pre-planned, at least not by the interests who actually pre-planned it.
She may well be a closet 911 conspiracy adherent. In my experience, there is a subset of "left progressives" who recognise the 911 conspiracy but fall for the official narrative on so many other events (especially covid), because they can shoehorn 911 into the simplified view that "the right-wing evil neocons, led by the Bushes, dunnit".
See people like the late comedian Trevor Moore, who referenced a number of conspiracies in his work, but ended up getting jabbed.
I see where you're coming from, but if Klein's a 'closet 9/11 conspiracy adherent', she's a very closet one! because in 'Doppelganger' (p. 223) she specifically debunks the 'conspiracy theory' that 9/11 was an inside job.
Yes, 9/11 creates a context for everything we see today, especially the COVID deception and the Hamas attacks. Anyone who excludes the 9/11 false flag from the framing cannot grasp the whole story.
Right: TSD thoroughly exposes the Hegelian Dialectical playbook, yet she dismisses the overwhelming evidence that 9/11 was a false flag. I really enjoyed the book and eagerly waited for her to connect the obvious dots. Alas.
Naomi Wolf had the guts to confront the DEPOPULATION agenda of the left. The accolades, awards, money laundering $$ book awards & appearances on communist controlled msm media is likely all there is to comrade klein.
A pity Naomi Klein isn't more familiar with the Jungian psychological principle of projection, since it seems her book is a major excursion into that territory. As you point out, Klein herself is the "evil twin." Jung determined that the way to mental health is through integration of the psyche's shadow: “For the sake of mental stability and even physiological health, the unconscious and the conscious must be integrated and thus move on parallel lines. If they are split or ‘dissociated,’ psychological disturbance follows." Contrast Klein's disavowal of any culpability with Wolf's candid articles admitting she had been a darling of the Left but that it had betrayed her during the pandemic. That takes humility—and courage—to admit you were duped and to come clean publicly. And it's a step toward psychic integration, compared to Klein's descent into cognitive dissonance and projection.
I welcome you... Substack is the last Bastion of Truth on the Internet.
If Margareta Anna Alice welcomes you... so do I.
I am very critical about Jews... as they are just another Ideology that puts itself above Humanity playing God... and under the Noahide Laws i would be killed by them... so I despise anyone who follows such an Ideology.
However if you follow the path of dissident Jews like Edwin Black Norman Finkelstein or others I salute you.
I like to have discussions with people I fundamentally don't agree... and I fundamentally don't agree with anyone who lives by the Kol Nidre... because it is an absolution to Lie.
I had discussions with Rabbi Yitzchok Dovid Smith which i value.
I also have a petition running which he signed against the Digital ID which is the same as the Auschwitz Tattoo... only in digital form.
I invite you also... any Jew should sign this because it is Auschwitz Technology.
Fantastic work! You might be interested in a piece we published about Naomi Klein early on in the scamdemic, entitled "Has Naomi Wolf sold her soul?". It contains details that you don't mention in your piece, which you may be unaware of.
The book even celebrates the fact that “in December 2019, Time magazine named Greta Thunberg its youngest-ever Person of the Year for her activism in calling attention to the climate crisis” (14) without feeling it necessary to mention that Time is owned by Marc Benioff of Salesforce, a leading associate of Klaus Schwab’s WEF and enthusiast for the Fourth Industrial Revolution and Great Reset.
There are times when one has the impression of reading not so much a book as a glossy advertising brochure for the “renewable energy” industry, aka climate capitalism.
There is lots of talk about wind turbines and solar panels, the latter being hailed as “the best hope for survival”, (15) “a step toward green, renewable energy—and environmental justice”. (16)
Klein and Stefoff rightly declare, of fossil fuels: “Depending on fossil fuels to power our lives means sacrificing people and places. To extract these fuels, people’s healthy lungs and bodies must be sacrificed to the bad air and the dangerous work of coal mining. People’s lands and water are also sacrificed to damage from mining, drilling, and oil spills”. (17)
But there is strangely no mention of the extraction, destruction and pollution involved in the manufacture, transportation and disposal of solar panels, pieces of industrial equipment which seem to have been turned into organic and “renewable” offshoots of Nature herself by the briefest wave of the magical greenwashing wand.
Sick bags all round for the passage where someone called Henry Red Cloud justifies covering what was once a traditional Native village with solar panels by insisting that “solar power was always part of Natives’ lives…. It ties in with our culture, our ceremony, our language, our songs” (18) and describes those installing this industrial hardware as “solar warriors”! (19)
NK solar warriors
The authors are, in fact, quite shameless in promoting an explicitly hi-tech industrial future, while dressing up their rhetoric with talk of Thoreau and nature and age-old Native culture.
Anyone battling to protect the English countryside from the HS2 high-speed railway line project might be interested to know that Klein and Stefoff think the answer to environmental problems is to “build networks of fast electric trains”. (20)
Mooted “solutions” for the environmental crisis (questioned but not entirely dismissed) also include industrial “carbon capture and storage” (21) and geoengineering schemes such as “placing mirrors in orbit to keep sunlight from reaching the Earth, sending chemicals into the atmosphere to create artificial clouds, and building giant filters to pull greenhouse gases out of the air”. (22)
They could only hope to get away with the notion of “vehicles that do not emit greenhouse gases” (23) in a book aimed at the young, since anyone not born yesterday has understood that electric cars merely displace pollution to the site of power generation.
Green car
There is much talk of the “tools” with which the planet will be saved, which seems to be a rather coy way of referring not just to the continuing advance of the very industrial system which caused the mess in the first place, but to its progression into a new digital phase.
Henry Red Cloud’s tribal ancestors no doubt had a pretty good idea of where the sun passed through the sky in different seasons, but today he feels the need for “a tool called a Solar Pathfinder to find where the sun would hit each side of the house every day of the year”. (24)
“We already have the knowledge, tools, and technologies we need to do amazing things”, enthuse the authors. (25)
“Data and tools” are the key, they repeat: “The data is mountains of information. Over many years, measurements have been made of temperatures, wind speeds and directions, rainfall amounts, levels of salt in the oceans, sizes of glaciers, and much more. The tools are computer programs called models that are designed to mimic our planet’s complex climate system”. (26)
data centre
Sometimes we are left to read between the lines, as the detail is so sketchy (the kids aren’t interested in boring old facts, right?).
Does “investing in more efficient power grids and working to make electricity affordable and clean” (27) point to the smart metering being advanced as part of the Fourth Industrial Revolution?
Would “upgrading existing buildings, and constructing new ones to make efficient use of energy and water” (28) be leading us into the smart cities which are planned to be our techno-prisons under the new global order?
Not once in this book, for all the eco-rhetoric, is there any questioning of the actual need for “high-speed trains” (29) and “factories” (30) and “data”. (31) Indeed, the authors go out of their way to insist that they want to see a society which is “modern and wealthy”. (32)
Their work is, in fact, compelling evidence of “the powerful influence of pro-business ideas” (33) of which they themselves complain!
They do not want to challenge the industrial capitalist system at all, in fact, but rather to develop it yet further, into “smart” Fourth Industrial Revolution mode.
If Klein and her accomplices were really interested in protecting nature and traditional ways of life, then they would not be promoting the “tools” of the next phase of industrial repression and destruction.
Instead, they are using the very real environmental crisis, and people’s very real concerns about it, in order to garner support for a political manoeuvre motivated by the potential for financial gain.
The fake green youth “movement” they are trying to build is intended to push the agenda of “A Green New Deal”, (34) which is nothing but a massive hand-out of public money to those astute businessfolk and financiers who have invested in the deceitful “renewables” bubble.
Klein and Stefoff write: “Movements will make, or break, the Green New Deal. Any presidents or governments that try to make a Green New Deal a reality will need powerful social movements backing them up, demanding change, and resisting efforts to hang on to harmful old ways. These movements will need to go beyond just supporting leaders and governments that steer their countries toward change—they will have to push those leaders and governments to do more”. (35)
When climate capitalists talk about the need for government to “do more”, what they really mean is that they want governments to shove more of our money in their direction.
One of the big plus points about the Covid spectacle, for Klein and Stefoff, has been the way in which “governments found funds to pump into their countries’ economies”. (36)
They see the same logic apply to their pet climate cause and declare, in language chillingly reminiscent of Klaus Schwab’s Great Reset pitch: “This dangerous moment in time also brings an extraordinary opportunity”. (37)
Great Reset KS
A big inspiration for them was the USA’s Marshall Plan, which enabled the financially and structurally ruined nations of western Europe to “build back better” after the Second World War and also constituted a massive advance for the profitability and domination of US socio-economic-military power.
They are quite blatant about this, in fact: “The Marshall Plan did much to put European factories, businesses, schools, and social programs back on their feet. And, as Marshall had predicted, by lifting up the stricken nations of Europe, the United States helped itself, too. It forged stronger trade and political ties to those nations, which were ready to engage in international commerce much sooner than they would have been without the Marshall Plan. Today, with the climate crisis upon us, some people have called for a global or green Marshall Plan for the world”. (38)
And they add: “Would programs like these be expensive? Yes, but the New Deal and the Marshall Plan proved that governments can find resources when they have to. More recently, the US government spent enormous sums bailing out bankrupt financial institutions and buoying up the economy after a financial crisis and recession in 2008–2009 and again amid the COVID-19 economic downturn. The money is there—if the need is clear and people demand it And the need for climate action is clear. People and movements across the United States and around the world are calling for their governments to meet the climate crisis with sweeping programs of changes”. (39)
So there we have it. “Sweeping programs of change” involving enormous amounts of money directed to helping “international commerce”. This is the same “disaster capitalism” which the authors decried earlier in the book, the moment “when the rich and powerful take advantage of painful shocks to widen existing inequalities instead of correcting them”. (40)
It is telling that at a time when people are increasingly clued up about the Great Reset, Klein was wheeled out on the once-interesting The Intercept site to declare that any such insight was “a viral conspiracy theory” which “blends together legitimate critiques with truly dangerous anti-vaccination fantasies and outright coronavirus denialism”.
In 2021, Naomi Klein is no longer warning us about the global ruling class’s “Shock Doctrine” but, cynically and hypocritically, helping to advance it.
That's a really interesting review. Thanks for posting a link to it. I'm sure that you do need to sell your soul in order to be given the job of Professor of Climate Justice.
A great piece, Andrew. Thank you. This sentence would resonate with many of us great unwashed who had the effrontery to "do our own research":
"On what grounds does she claim working people to have been brainwashed by populist demagogues, apparently regarding them as incapable of forming their own opinions?"
I think the most shocking aspect of Klein's book is her contempt for the ordinary working people whose interests she claims to seek to promote, not least the Canadian truckers (pp. 260-4).
Indeed! NK is just one in an endless procession of pseudo-intellectual professional phonies who seem to make it their life's mission to earn a spot in the Pantheon of Hypocrites.
When push comes to shove, those class lines remain firmly in place. An armchair liberal at heart, who "daringly exposed" some of the Big Finance rot, but still wants to have cushy academic standing. She's furious with the other Naomi for breaking ranks and siding with the great Uneducated Unwashed. Because this is about the ordinary man and woman daring to have opinions and insight.
Probably also jealous, because Naomi Wolf is both smart AND pretty - and has a far more imposing surname.... 😏
Yes, 'armchair liberal' pretty much sums her up nowadays. A great pity, because to write 'The Shock Doctrine' Klein did get out into the field and get her hands dirty. But that was a long time ago.
Wow that was a banger of an article -- I see what you did there -- used the “micro” of the Klein Wolf duopoly to explore and articulate the much broader and more important “macro” phenomenon of creeping techno totalitarianism we’re all now facing. That gets a “subscribe”!
Thanks very much for your kind words. I think Klein has actually done us all a favour! the micro- to macro- approach of her book has helped us better to see the nature of the threat we're all facing. It's much easier to understand issues if they are personalised rather than simply presented on an abstract level.
A really good article. I'm glad i stumbled across it. I confess (to the extent that I've thought about it at all) that I, too, always thought Klein and Wolf were the same person. But after reading some of Wolf's recent posts, here on Substack, I know the difference now. And, although I haven't read Klein's book (nor even heard of it) you do a great job of describing the problem with lefties like Klein....that is, they can be real good at marshalling words in support of their point of view.....but they are completely and utterly impervious to logic and accountability.
Thank you. I fear that's the problem we all face at the moment: that there's no point trying to debate with people who have no interest in changing their position, regardless of the evidence. As the saying goes, you can't reason someone out of a position he didn't reason himself into.
About the only advantage of getting old, if you actually paid attention to the world outside the micro one you create in the first place, is you live long enough to see the vast number of conspiracy theories that were actually dead right all along. The list is endless.
The very first red flag about Convid "debate" that should be considered by everyone is that the pharma industry demanded & received an unprecedented 75 year ban on all testing information & blanket protection from lawsuits until they were forced to reveal the data (after which few people actually analyzed personally).
Why was that necessary & why did nearly every govt agree to it? Correct answer is:
By the time their deception & lies are "voluntarily" disclosed in 2095, at least 95%+ of the people affected/infected, who weren't infants & might still remember what actually happened will be 💉🕳🪦. As for the rest of the survivors, no one will listen to a handful of institutionalized old farts & their conspiracy "theories", who after all were just teenagers when it went down. So it goes...
I remember that when my other half and I attended our first local 'resistance' group meeting in London in the early spring of 2021, we had anticipated that most of the other members would be younger than us, but in fact pretty much everyone was around our age (early 60s). Where are all the young people? we wondered. Well, you've produced at least part of the answer - the older one gets, the more experience one has of being lied to!
Back in the Ice Age, Spock from Star Trek was my role model. I was blessed in grade 10, @16yrs old, with 1 true teacher who taught me how to question, research,teach myself & stand up for what is true. That man's knowledge passed on to me was worth more than all the other years of rote memorization. He did a live experiment that I never forgot. He sent 5 bright students out of the room, then claimed he could convince all 5 that blue was green!?! - if we all colluded & agreed it was "true". When they returned from their errand, he pointed pointed out to them 1 of 3 island posters, the only one with a (green) lagoon & asked to them to join our debate as to what caused the water to be ""blue". There were confused at first as to which picture. When
I pointed it out to them, all 5 argued it was green. We began to laugh & ridicule our "colour blind" friends. We played it straight & in less than 5 minutes all of them agreed that the green lagoon was blue. I never forgot that lesson. 2 of them became doctors 1 a lawyer,1 business owner, other unknown. Peer pressure does strange powerful things to all humans, regardless of status age education IQ...
Young are not taught critical thinking skills any longer, so emotion based "reasoning" is an oxy looking for a moron. We're just observing the results of that.
Usual govt imposed no disclosure gags on state secrets are min 25-50 years so 75 is highly unusual. Few leader$ que$tioned why.
That's a great tale, and encourages me when I find myself in the company of go-along to get-alongers. I end up every time standing by my convictions knowing I will be collectively dismissed in future gatherings. I have to live with myself after all :)
That part of the answer is to be expected. What's more frightening is the other part - I've been seeing this play out on my university campus since the Fees Must Fall campaigns of 2015. Which is that the kids have been programmed by shame-campaigns as they are buffeted from one divisive virtue-signalling "cause" to the next. Their brains have turned to gibbering mush, as they tilt at fabricated windmills - foaming with outrage at all the "injustice" and skewering each other in the process. Piled on top of that, is the mass demoralisation "climate-crisis" campaign, which has turned them into self-denying, self-hating nihilists. They are depressing themselves into future extinction and barrenness. No wonder they haven't been able to summons the fortitude to tackle this. They have latched onto what they believe are the "real" problems and misdirected all their youthful outrage at them instead. What a waste..
I saw MAA send up the Bat Signal to check out this Substack, and I am not disappointed. A great read, even if the topic is one that I too find highly frustrating. I look forward to reading more!
A like from Toby and the title tempted me to click on this engaging piece. There are so many examples of exactly what you state in your title. Thank you for writing it.
My top two are Noam Chomsky and, perhaps less widely read in the anglosphere, Rutger Bregman. His book Humankind attempts to argue that people are by nature good and have very little need of top-down management. Interestingly, a quote from his book is featured on the homepage of the WEF. His previous book about UBI sounded promising, but after the past four years I have jumped off that bandwagon. Personally, I think we can value the arguments made by these writers before they sold out, which we must simply mourn and move on.
I've only known of klein at a distance for the last few years. When I learned of her shock doctrine talking points, I thought they were spot on. But the little I've heard from her around the scamdemic seemed to go against the obvious covid shock reality. The two ends didn't meet for me, but I wasn't interested in her enough to investigate. This sheds an interesting light and clarity on the subject.
Yes, she sure seems to be a huge narcissist or, a writer lacking ideas to need to create a book about Namoi Wolf relative to herself. I think it's possibly a shield to cover that she has has suspended disbelief and the ability to logically discern truth from fiction, to prevent admitting to herself she was immensely duped by the fake pandemic and the perpetrators behind it. Whether I'm on to something or not, only someone of complete moral weakness would write a book like doppelganger.
I am delighted to welcome you to Substack, Andrew, and what a roaring start you are off to with this blazing critique of Naomi Klein’s decline into menticide, failure to register the lessons of her own past work, and vicious maligning of Naomi Wolf, who proved herself a courageous seeker of truth rather than a fanatical defender of regime propaganda like Naomi Klein has become.
I was pleased to see Toby Rogers has liked this post as the first thing I thought of was his excellent piece:
• https://tobyrogers.substack.com/p/in-doppelganger-naomi-klein-scapegoats
One of the thousands of article ideas I have jotted down is “A Tale of Two Naomis.” Since you and Toby have done such a good job of covering this topic, I can cross it off my todo list 😅
Thank you so much for your kind words, Margaret Anna. I too was highly impressed by Toby Roger's insightful review. I hope there will be others - even if you have decided not to write your own. We need more balance to the many favourable reviews in the corporate media of Klein's truly shameful book.
Thanks for bringing this piece to your reader's attention.
Excellent article. Correct me if I'm wrong—I haven't read Klein's book, just reviews—but I saw a quote from Doppelganger's section on "yes some conspiracy theories are true" suggesting that she, like Wolf, seems to be a closet 9/11 skeptic. (Wolf wrote favorably about my battle for 9/11 truth and against censorship at the University of Wisconsin in The End of America.) If both Naomis are closet truthers, and the ultimate shock doctrine event was the 9/11 false flag, yet somehow Klein never addresses 9/11 squarely, what does that say about her intellectual honesty?
I don't think Klein could ever question 9/11 publicly, it would surely destroy her career. Whether she has wondered personally about the truth of 9/11, who knows? One can't look into people's hearts. In 'The Shock Doctrine' (chapter 14) Klein discusses 9/11 as a classic disaster-capitalism event but not one that was pre-planned, at least not by the interests who actually pre-planned it.
She may well be a closet 911 conspiracy adherent. In my experience, there is a subset of "left progressives" who recognise the 911 conspiracy but fall for the official narrative on so many other events (especially covid), because they can shoehorn 911 into the simplified view that "the right-wing evil neocons, led by the Bushes, dunnit".
See people like the late comedian Trevor Moore, who referenced a number of conspiracies in his work, but ended up getting jabbed.
I see where you're coming from, but if Klein's a 'closet 9/11 conspiracy adherent', she's a very closet one! because in 'Doppelganger' (p. 223) she specifically debunks the 'conspiracy theory' that 9/11 was an inside job.
Yes, 9/11 creates a context for everything we see today, especially the COVID deception and the Hamas attacks. Anyone who excludes the 9/11 false flag from the framing cannot grasp the whole story.
Right: TSD thoroughly exposes the Hegelian Dialectical playbook, yet she dismisses the overwhelming evidence that 9/11 was a false flag. I really enjoyed the book and eagerly waited for her to connect the obvious dots. Alas.
Exactly!
Naomi Wolf had the guts to confront the DEPOPULATION agenda of the left. The accolades, awards, money laundering $$ book awards & appearances on communist controlled msm media is likely all there is to comrade klein.
A pity Naomi Klein isn't more familiar with the Jungian psychological principle of projection, since it seems her book is a major excursion into that territory. As you point out, Klein herself is the "evil twin." Jung determined that the way to mental health is through integration of the psyche's shadow: “For the sake of mental stability and even physiological health, the unconscious and the conscious must be integrated and thus move on parallel lines. If they are split or ‘dissociated,’ psychological disturbance follows." Contrast Klein's disavowal of any culpability with Wolf's candid articles admitting she had been a darling of the Left but that it had betrayed her during the pandemic. That takes humility—and courage—to admit you were duped and to come clean publicly. And it's a step toward psychic integration, compared to Klein's descent into cognitive dissonance and projection.
I'm sure you've seen Toby Rogers' excellent review of Klein's book which does deal with the projection issue: https://tobyrogers.substack.com/p/in-doppelganger-naomi-klein-scapegoats
Yes, but thanks for posting the link so others may read it too!
I welcome you... Substack is the last Bastion of Truth on the Internet.
If Margareta Anna Alice welcomes you... so do I.
I am very critical about Jews... as they are just another Ideology that puts itself above Humanity playing God... and under the Noahide Laws i would be killed by them... so I despise anyone who follows such an Ideology.
However if you follow the path of dissident Jews like Edwin Black Norman Finkelstein or others I salute you.
I like to have discussions with people I fundamentally don't agree... and I fundamentally don't agree with anyone who lives by the Kol Nidre... because it is an absolution to Lie.
I had discussions with Rabbi Yitzchok Dovid Smith which i value.
I also have a petition running which he signed against the Digital ID which is the same as the Auschwitz Tattoo... only in digital form.
I invite you also... any Jew should sign this because it is Auschwitz Technology.
https://www.petitions.net/i_oppose_the_digital_id__auschwitz_id_and_all_those_who_support_it
If we agree that Truth and Humanity must come before Ideology you have my support.
Technology is a way to defeat them who want to use technology and technocratic Fascism against Humanity.
This is my Technology I could use some support.
https://fritzfreud.substack.com/p/suing-richard-branson-and-elon-musk
Fantastic work! You might be interested in a piece we published about Naomi Klein early on in the scamdemic, entitled "Has Naomi Wolf sold her soul?". It contains details that you don't mention in your piece, which you may be unaware of.
You can check it out here: https://nevermore.media/2021/07/08/has-naomi-klein-sold-her-soul/
Excerpt:
The book even celebrates the fact that “in December 2019, Time magazine named Greta Thunberg its youngest-ever Person of the Year for her activism in calling attention to the climate crisis” (14) without feeling it necessary to mention that Time is owned by Marc Benioff of Salesforce, a leading associate of Klaus Schwab’s WEF and enthusiast for the Fourth Industrial Revolution and Great Reset.
There are times when one has the impression of reading not so much a book as a glossy advertising brochure for the “renewable energy” industry, aka climate capitalism.
There is lots of talk about wind turbines and solar panels, the latter being hailed as “the best hope for survival”, (15) “a step toward green, renewable energy—and environmental justice”. (16)
Klein and Stefoff rightly declare, of fossil fuels: “Depending on fossil fuels to power our lives means sacrificing people and places. To extract these fuels, people’s healthy lungs and bodies must be sacrificed to the bad air and the dangerous work of coal mining. People’s lands and water are also sacrificed to damage from mining, drilling, and oil spills”. (17)
But there is strangely no mention of the extraction, destruction and pollution involved in the manufacture, transportation and disposal of solar panels, pieces of industrial equipment which seem to have been turned into organic and “renewable” offshoots of Nature herself by the briefest wave of the magical greenwashing wand.
Sick bags all round for the passage where someone called Henry Red Cloud justifies covering what was once a traditional Native village with solar panels by insisting that “solar power was always part of Natives’ lives…. It ties in with our culture, our ceremony, our language, our songs” (18) and describes those installing this industrial hardware as “solar warriors”! (19)
NK solar warriors
The authors are, in fact, quite shameless in promoting an explicitly hi-tech industrial future, while dressing up their rhetoric with talk of Thoreau and nature and age-old Native culture.
Anyone battling to protect the English countryside from the HS2 high-speed railway line project might be interested to know that Klein and Stefoff think the answer to environmental problems is to “build networks of fast electric trains”. (20)
Mooted “solutions” for the environmental crisis (questioned but not entirely dismissed) also include industrial “carbon capture and storage” (21) and geoengineering schemes such as “placing mirrors in orbit to keep sunlight from reaching the Earth, sending chemicals into the atmosphere to create artificial clouds, and building giant filters to pull greenhouse gases out of the air”. (22)
They could only hope to get away with the notion of “vehicles that do not emit greenhouse gases” (23) in a book aimed at the young, since anyone not born yesterday has understood that electric cars merely displace pollution to the site of power generation.
Green car
There is much talk of the “tools” with which the planet will be saved, which seems to be a rather coy way of referring not just to the continuing advance of the very industrial system which caused the mess in the first place, but to its progression into a new digital phase.
Henry Red Cloud’s tribal ancestors no doubt had a pretty good idea of where the sun passed through the sky in different seasons, but today he feels the need for “a tool called a Solar Pathfinder to find where the sun would hit each side of the house every day of the year”. (24)
“We already have the knowledge, tools, and technologies we need to do amazing things”, enthuse the authors. (25)
“Data and tools” are the key, they repeat: “The data is mountains of information. Over many years, measurements have been made of temperatures, wind speeds and directions, rainfall amounts, levels of salt in the oceans, sizes of glaciers, and much more. The tools are computer programs called models that are designed to mimic our planet’s complex climate system”. (26)
data centre
Sometimes we are left to read between the lines, as the detail is so sketchy (the kids aren’t interested in boring old facts, right?).
Does “investing in more efficient power grids and working to make electricity affordable and clean” (27) point to the smart metering being advanced as part of the Fourth Industrial Revolution?
Would “upgrading existing buildings, and constructing new ones to make efficient use of energy and water” (28) be leading us into the smart cities which are planned to be our techno-prisons under the new global order?
Not once in this book, for all the eco-rhetoric, is there any questioning of the actual need for “high-speed trains” (29) and “factories” (30) and “data”. (31) Indeed, the authors go out of their way to insist that they want to see a society which is “modern and wealthy”. (32)
Their work is, in fact, compelling evidence of “the powerful influence of pro-business ideas” (33) of which they themselves complain!
They do not want to challenge the industrial capitalist system at all, in fact, but rather to develop it yet further, into “smart” Fourth Industrial Revolution mode.
If Klein and her accomplices were really interested in protecting nature and traditional ways of life, then they would not be promoting the “tools” of the next phase of industrial repression and destruction.
Instead, they are using the very real environmental crisis, and people’s very real concerns about it, in order to garner support for a political manoeuvre motivated by the potential for financial gain.
The fake green youth “movement” they are trying to build is intended to push the agenda of “A Green New Deal”, (34) which is nothing but a massive hand-out of public money to those astute businessfolk and financiers who have invested in the deceitful “renewables” bubble.
Klein and Stefoff write: “Movements will make, or break, the Green New Deal. Any presidents or governments that try to make a Green New Deal a reality will need powerful social movements backing them up, demanding change, and resisting efforts to hang on to harmful old ways. These movements will need to go beyond just supporting leaders and governments that steer their countries toward change—they will have to push those leaders and governments to do more”. (35)
When climate capitalists talk about the need for government to “do more”, what they really mean is that they want governments to shove more of our money in their direction.
One of the big plus points about the Covid spectacle, for Klein and Stefoff, has been the way in which “governments found funds to pump into their countries’ economies”. (36)
They see the same logic apply to their pet climate cause and declare, in language chillingly reminiscent of Klaus Schwab’s Great Reset pitch: “This dangerous moment in time also brings an extraordinary opportunity”. (37)
Great Reset KS
A big inspiration for them was the USA’s Marshall Plan, which enabled the financially and structurally ruined nations of western Europe to “build back better” after the Second World War and also constituted a massive advance for the profitability and domination of US socio-economic-military power.
They are quite blatant about this, in fact: “The Marshall Plan did much to put European factories, businesses, schools, and social programs back on their feet. And, as Marshall had predicted, by lifting up the stricken nations of Europe, the United States helped itself, too. It forged stronger trade and political ties to those nations, which were ready to engage in international commerce much sooner than they would have been without the Marshall Plan. Today, with the climate crisis upon us, some people have called for a global or green Marshall Plan for the world”. (38)
And they add: “Would programs like these be expensive? Yes, but the New Deal and the Marshall Plan proved that governments can find resources when they have to. More recently, the US government spent enormous sums bailing out bankrupt financial institutions and buoying up the economy after a financial crisis and recession in 2008–2009 and again amid the COVID-19 economic downturn. The money is there—if the need is clear and people demand it And the need for climate action is clear. People and movements across the United States and around the world are calling for their governments to meet the climate crisis with sweeping programs of changes”. (39)
So there we have it. “Sweeping programs of change” involving enormous amounts of money directed to helping “international commerce”. This is the same “disaster capitalism” which the authors decried earlier in the book, the moment “when the rich and powerful take advantage of painful shocks to widen existing inequalities instead of correcting them”. (40)
It is telling that at a time when people are increasingly clued up about the Great Reset, Klein was wheeled out on the once-interesting The Intercept site to declare that any such insight was “a viral conspiracy theory” which “blends together legitimate critiques with truly dangerous anti-vaccination fantasies and outright coronavirus denialism”.
In 2021, Naomi Klein is no longer warning us about the global ruling class’s “Shock Doctrine” but, cynically and hypocritically, helping to advance it.
That's a really interesting review. Thanks for posting a link to it. I'm sure that you do need to sell your soul in order to be given the job of Professor of Climate Justice.
A great piece, Andrew. Thank you. This sentence would resonate with many of us great unwashed who had the effrontery to "do our own research":
"On what grounds does she claim working people to have been brainwashed by populist demagogues, apparently regarding them as incapable of forming their own opinions?"
I think the most shocking aspect of Klein's book is her contempt for the ordinary working people whose interests she claims to seek to promote, not least the Canadian truckers (pp. 260-4).
Indeed! NK is just one in an endless procession of pseudo-intellectual professional phonies who seem to make it their life's mission to earn a spot in the Pantheon of Hypocrites.
When push comes to shove, those class lines remain firmly in place. An armchair liberal at heart, who "daringly exposed" some of the Big Finance rot, but still wants to have cushy academic standing. She's furious with the other Naomi for breaking ranks and siding with the great Uneducated Unwashed. Because this is about the ordinary man and woman daring to have opinions and insight.
Probably also jealous, because Naomi Wolf is both smart AND pretty - and has a far more imposing surname.... 😏
Yes, 'armchair liberal' pretty much sums her up nowadays. A great pity, because to write 'The Shock Doctrine' Klein did get out into the field and get her hands dirty. But that was a long time ago.
Yes! I read that line twice.
Wow that was a banger of an article -- I see what you did there -- used the “micro” of the Klein Wolf duopoly to explore and articulate the much broader and more important “macro” phenomenon of creeping techno totalitarianism we’re all now facing. That gets a “subscribe”!
Thanks very much for your kind words. I think Klein has actually done us all a favour! the micro- to macro- approach of her book has helped us better to see the nature of the threat we're all facing. It's much easier to understand issues if they are personalised rather than simply presented on an abstract level.
This review was crying out to be written. Almost perfect - thanks.
Very kind of you.
A really good article. I'm glad i stumbled across it. I confess (to the extent that I've thought about it at all) that I, too, always thought Klein and Wolf were the same person. But after reading some of Wolf's recent posts, here on Substack, I know the difference now. And, although I haven't read Klein's book (nor even heard of it) you do a great job of describing the problem with lefties like Klein....that is, they can be real good at marshalling words in support of their point of view.....but they are completely and utterly impervious to logic and accountability.
Thank you. I fear that's the problem we all face at the moment: that there's no point trying to debate with people who have no interest in changing their position, regardless of the evidence. As the saying goes, you can't reason someone out of a position he didn't reason himself into.
Andrew, great essay! I'm honored to see you reference my book, Jabbed.
About the only advantage of getting old, if you actually paid attention to the world outside the micro one you create in the first place, is you live long enough to see the vast number of conspiracy theories that were actually dead right all along. The list is endless.
The very first red flag about Convid "debate" that should be considered by everyone is that the pharma industry demanded & received an unprecedented 75 year ban on all testing information & blanket protection from lawsuits until they were forced to reveal the data (after which few people actually analyzed personally).
Why was that necessary & why did nearly every govt agree to it? Correct answer is:
By the time their deception & lies are "voluntarily" disclosed in 2095, at least 95%+ of the people affected/infected, who weren't infants & might still remember what actually happened will be 💉🕳🪦. As for the rest of the survivors, no one will listen to a handful of institutionalized old farts & their conspiracy "theories", who after all were just teenagers when it went down. So it goes...
I remember that when my other half and I attended our first local 'resistance' group meeting in London in the early spring of 2021, we had anticipated that most of the other members would be younger than us, but in fact pretty much everyone was around our age (early 60s). Where are all the young people? we wondered. Well, you've produced at least part of the answer - the older one gets, the more experience one has of being lied to!
👍🍻
Back in the Ice Age, Spock from Star Trek was my role model. I was blessed in grade 10, @16yrs old, with 1 true teacher who taught me how to question, research,teach myself & stand up for what is true. That man's knowledge passed on to me was worth more than all the other years of rote memorization. He did a live experiment that I never forgot. He sent 5 bright students out of the room, then claimed he could convince all 5 that blue was green!?! - if we all colluded & agreed it was "true". When they returned from their errand, he pointed pointed out to them 1 of 3 island posters, the only one with a (green) lagoon & asked to them to join our debate as to what caused the water to be ""blue". There were confused at first as to which picture. When
I pointed it out to them, all 5 argued it was green. We began to laugh & ridicule our "colour blind" friends. We played it straight & in less than 5 minutes all of them agreed that the green lagoon was blue. I never forgot that lesson. 2 of them became doctors 1 a lawyer,1 business owner, other unknown. Peer pressure does strange powerful things to all humans, regardless of status age education IQ...
Young are not taught critical thinking skills any longer, so emotion based "reasoning" is an oxy looking for a moron. We're just observing the results of that.
Usual govt imposed no disclosure gags on state secrets are min 25-50 years so 75 is highly unusual. Few leader$ que$tioned why.
That's a great tale, and encourages me when I find myself in the company of go-along to get-alongers. I end up every time standing by my convictions knowing I will be collectively dismissed in future gatherings. I have to live with myself after all :)
That part of the answer is to be expected. What's more frightening is the other part - I've been seeing this play out on my university campus since the Fees Must Fall campaigns of 2015. Which is that the kids have been programmed by shame-campaigns as they are buffeted from one divisive virtue-signalling "cause" to the next. Their brains have turned to gibbering mush, as they tilt at fabricated windmills - foaming with outrage at all the "injustice" and skewering each other in the process. Piled on top of that, is the mass demoralisation "climate-crisis" campaign, which has turned them into self-denying, self-hating nihilists. They are depressing themselves into future extinction and barrenness. No wonder they haven't been able to summons the fortitude to tackle this. They have latched onto what they believe are the "real" problems and misdirected all their youthful outrage at them instead. What a waste..
Brilliant Andrew.
Thank you, Catherine.
I saw MAA send up the Bat Signal to check out this Substack, and I am not disappointed. A great read, even if the topic is one that I too find highly frustrating. I look forward to reading more!
A like from Toby and the title tempted me to click on this engaging piece. There are so many examples of exactly what you state in your title. Thank you for writing it.
My top two are Noam Chomsky and, perhaps less widely read in the anglosphere, Rutger Bregman. His book Humankind attempts to argue that people are by nature good and have very little need of top-down management. Interestingly, a quote from his book is featured on the homepage of the WEF. His previous book about UBI sounded promising, but after the past four years I have jumped off that bandwagon. Personally, I think we can value the arguments made by these writers before they sold out, which we must simply mourn and move on.
Thank you, thank you.
I've only known of klein at a distance for the last few years. When I learned of her shock doctrine talking points, I thought they were spot on. But the little I've heard from her around the scamdemic seemed to go against the obvious covid shock reality. The two ends didn't meet for me, but I wasn't interested in her enough to investigate. This sheds an interesting light and clarity on the subject.
Yes, she sure seems to be a huge narcissist or, a writer lacking ideas to need to create a book about Namoi Wolf relative to herself. I think it's possibly a shield to cover that she has has suspended disbelief and the ability to logically discern truth from fiction, to prevent admitting to herself she was immensely duped by the fake pandemic and the perpetrators behind it. Whether I'm on to something or not, only someone of complete moral weakness would write a book like doppelganger.
Yes, I guess Klein needed to try to justify her position to herself.