The Blindboy Podcast - Conspiracy Theories with Naomi Klein

Episode Date: October 24, 2023

I chat with legendary author and activist Naomi Klein about conspiracy theories and what they say about the current state of our world. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Dressed to impress the Vaseline Gannet, you tender Benjamins. Welcome to the Blind Boy Podcast. This episode is the sixth year anniversary of this podcast. I've been making this podcast every single week for six years. And what that means for me is, for six years solid, I've been able to earn a living doing what I absolutely love and adore. Before this podcast, I'd spent 10 years in the rubber bandits, trying to make it on television, radio and in music, operating very much within the space of traditional media. And the problem with that is,

you're not creating to make the best piece of work. You're not creating to express yourself. You're creating to impress a small amount of commissioners in the hopes that they'll give you a job. And you get a commission and you just take it. You're lucky to get one or two commissions a year. And then you have to live off that with complete uncertainty and no way to financially plan

or plan anything about your fucking life. And it's a soul-crushing and inefficient way to be an artist and it's a it's a terrible model for creative self-expression if you want to fund artists you have to fund artists to fail you gotta fund artists like like you'd fund a scientist you fund an artist to give them space to experiment and create and to try things if you do that you'll get occasional greatness tv radio and music industry doesn't do that they fund artists with the caveat that the work must be popular to draw in advertisers and under those conditions what you get is consistent mediocrity so for six years i've been completely out of that system. I don't have to think about

commissioners. I don't even, they don't enter my fucking head. Instead each week I get to deliver the best version of myself to you. I get to write like I'm four years of age playing with Lego. Instead of thinking about what I want to make, I'm exploring a field and a curiosity, using creativity. And from that, I've got a fucking body of work that I'm unbelievably proud of. And I get to experience a sense of meaning and purpose and place in the world. And we've got 1.2 million regular listeners now, after six six years 1.2 million people are thereabouts tune into this podcast regularly all around the world and I could not have done that on television radio just could not have done it because some commissioner would have come in and fucked it up. Instead of trusting the process, they'd have come in with anxiety

and tried to suggest or force an outcome. And then what would this podcast be? Brian McFadden would be my co-presenter, and each week we're talking about what gives us the ick. That's what this podcast would be. No disrespect to Brian McFadden. Love the podcast, Blind Boy. I love the stuff you're doing about the podcast you did last week

about medieval manuscripts. Can you do something about the ick? Chicken fella rolls. Uno mas. Chicken fella rolls. Can you do something like that? Can we get brands interested? I want smash burgers on IPAs.

Well, it's a podcast. I want to listen to it with my dick that's what commissioners sound like that's what commissioners sound like they sound like fucking car salesmen except they're not selling you a car they're trying to ruin your career do you know how TV gets made

like literally do you know how television shows get made? And I know this because I've been in these fucking rooms. A lot of people who are really winging it. They're not creative people. They're people who are thrown in at the deep end and they're winging it. They all go into an office. There's a whiteboard, someone else prints out photographs of the top 10 most popular TV shows of the past year. Then they stick all the photographs of the popular TV shows on the mood board and they try to come up with a new TV show idea that's made up of bits of other popular shows. And that's how television is made. Now that is not creativity, that's a fear-based approach where you treat your audience like idiots with the aim of consistent

mediocrity and then they present that to a commissioner. Commissioners are very rarely a creative person, they're kind of like like a nightclub manager who's found themselves in a creative job and then the commissioner says, I'm really seeing it, guys. I'm seeing the vision. But we've got to shake things up here. We've got to bring in the young creatives. Bring in the young creatives. So then the idea, which is made up of all bits of other successful TV shows,

is presented to a bunch of young creatives. And they're not young creatives. I've met these people. I've had conversations with them. They're people in their early 20s from very wealthy families who are popular and good looking and dress really well and these are brought in as like experts of what's good. They give feedback on the ideas, give some suggestions. This is re-presented to the TV Commissioner and then it's made into TV. And I've been at the receiving end of these fucking focus groups. I remember about 2011, I had an idea for a sitcom. It was basically The Town, but set in modern Limerick. The Town is like an epic from Irish mythology. So I wanted to remake The Tyne, but set in Limerick.

And it was starring the Rubber Bandits. So this idea was given to this broadcaster in Ireland. And it was brought through the internal ideas process and the young creatives. And the notes came back. And the young creatives couldn't, they couldn't handle the fact that we were wearing plastic bags in our heads. So instead of it being about The Tyne, it was now a TV show where the rubber bandits were burn victims. And the comedy show was about how we wore plastic bags in our heads to hide the scarring on our faces from... Because we were in a car fire.

And it wasn't about the Tyne anymore. It was just a comedy about two lads in Limerick. Who robbed cars and set them on fire. Because Limerick's full of scumbags. And I just said. I said fuck off. I said fuck off. Luckily I'm no longer involved in that process anymore.

Because I'm 100% fully independent. And I want to thank all of you who are listening to this podcast and sharing it with people and supporting me through Patreon. Thank you so much to every single one of you for making this possible, because I did not think that this podcast would be lasting six years. I really didn't think that. And I'm tremendously excited to just keep going, to keep going and keep making these podcasts

and exploring my curiosity and having crack. So as a special treat, I have an absolutely magnificent guest this week. I have the legendary Naomi Klein. She's an author, social activist, filmmaker. She's written hugely important books like No Logo, The Shock Doctrine and On Fire about climate crisis which she wrote a couple of years back. Naomi Klein uses pretty rigorous research to present scathing arguments against capitalism and neoliberal policies and she does it all in a way that's very democratic, that's very accessible. Her books are very popular, they can be picked up by anybody.

She's changed a lot of people's minds and made people think about systems of power in the world, people who might not have thought about this stuff before. Now Naomi's most recent book that just came out is called Doppelganger and it's a bit of a different Naomi Klein book. See, one of the strange things about Naomi Klein is there's another Naomi, Naomi Wolf. Now, Naomi Wolf was at one point a fairly respected feminist writer. But over the past decade, Naomi Wolf descended so far into conspiracy theory that her views no longer appear rational or evidence based. And this led to a huge loss of respect and credibility and quite a lot of mockery and humiliation for Naomi Wolf. But the thing is, people kept confusing Naomi Klein and

Naomi Wolf. They're both women, they're both Jewish women. They both became famous off the back of giant blockbuster books that were like unexpected successes. Books that were social critiques. So for a lot of people the two Naomi's were interchangeable and whenever Naomi Wolf would tweet something that's kind of conspiracy theory-ish, Naomi Klein would end up getting the backlash and it had real impact on her life. So Naomi Klein's most recent book, Doppelganger, she explores her doppelganger, the other Naomi. She explores the conspiracy world, conspiracy theory world that Naomi Wolf operates in effectively this book is an investigation into conspiracy theories and people who believe conspiracy theories so me and Naomi sat down and

had a chat about conspiracy theories and it was wonderful crack it was a fascinating chat now a few of you might be wondering why we don't speak about the situation in Palestine and Israel. The reason is that we recorded this in late September. I spoke about Palestine and Israel on last week's podcast if you'd like to go back and get a listen to that. But here you go. Here's the wonderful chat I had with Naomi Klein for the 60 year anniversary about conspiracy theories and check out her book Doppelganger which is available at the moment. Naomi Klein, thank you so much for taking the time out to have a little chat with me. I'm delighted to. How long are you going to be in Ireland for? Just a couple of days. Oh fantastic.

So Naomi, I've been reading your books for years. I adored No Logo when it came out. Shock Doctrine was really important to me and I'm really excited to be reading Doppelganger because I want to hear your take on conspiracy theories. Like I remember a time when conspiracy theory wasn't this dirty word like the golden age of the X-Files when conspiracy theory meant I'm interested in like Bigfoot and UFOs, like harmless fun stuff. And then something flipped around maybe 2012, 2013. The type of things that conspiracy theorists were interested in sounded to me almost close to the stuff that you'd been writing about in the shock doctrine or even the stuff that Noam Chomsky speaks about.

Conspiracy theories started to sound almost like critiques of capitalism, but with this strange right-wing twist to them. Conspiracy theorists stopped being like nards who were interested in Bigfoot and all of a sudden they became a little bit Nazi-ish. Like how did this happen? Yeah, definitely. They're sort of, the way I put it in the book is that it is that it sounds like us, but through a warped mirror. And it isn't the same if you listen closely. Yeah. of the conspiracy theories that I've come across is it's the opposite of what I try to do and what I think Noam Chomsky does and what most left theorists do, which is have a critique of a

system and have an understanding of what the system is designed to do. And our analysis is not what you learn at school, right? I mean, at school, we learn that capitalism is sunshine and rainbows and meritocracies and the best possible system. And you don't learn about its need for an underclass and dispossession and the consistent stratification of wealth in the history of capitalism and then counterpressures that for relatively brief periods of time win some redistribution gains, but it's built into the system. So this is why the book, though it begins with my own doppelganger confusion,

it is much more broadly about more collective forms of doppelganging, including the way that right-wing conspiracy culture forms a kind of doppelganger of these left theories, right? Because they don't have a systemic critique. They take the very real anger and suspicion at elite power. And then they say, well, it's five guys in a room somewhere, or it's the Jews, or the Jews and the Chinese, or whoever the enemy of the day is. And it's actually a system protecting critique critique because the conclusion of it being just this small group of people who are polluting the system is that you can just get those people and then all will be well. This has a really sinister history. It's simple. It's simple and it's dangerous.

It's simple and dangerous. You know, Hitler and the Nazis talked about Jewish capitalism being the problem, literally. I mean, as if there's some special kind of capitalism that is Jewish. And the conclusion of that was, get rid of the Jews, and then you get your good capitalism back. You get your healthy capitalism back. So, yeah, they might sound like us, but I don't really think we have that much in common. Um, but they're filling, they're filling a vacuum. Uh, you know, I think that their success, I can't help seeing partially as our failure

in the sense that I think they're filling a political vacuum. And, and I think we should be working harder to fill it with real critiques of the same system. So my experience on the ground, speaking to people I know who especially around COVID became radicalized towards conspiracy theories, the anger that I see from these people is like, as you mentioned, it's like a failure from the left. When I speak to people I know who would say they get the conspiracy theories from Facebook facebook they started off maybe questioning some narratives around covid then they went deeper and deeper then they start to become a little bit anti-semitic now they don't like refugees they've gone down the rabbit hole but also they've got an anger about leftists they feel like

leftists are talking down to them all the time you know like fuck you with your big smart words i know the truth i know i do my own research there's also an anger a feeling towards leftists that maybe leftists are more educated and that they're snide and passive aggressive and that they talk down to them and i see a lot of emotion and anger around that specifically. I think there is, but I think there's also, that anger at leftists is generated. It's part of the program. You know, I think that anyone who's paid attention. They call it cultural Marxism.

Yeah, exactly. It's one of the hated groups, right? And so, it may begin with an anti-big pharma or big tech suspicion or critique, which is rooted in real experience of these industries. my book I fall down the rabbit hole with my doppelganger and spend a lot of time listening to some of the most powerful figures in this world like people like Steve Bannon and Tucker Carlson and I mean this is just in the North American context I'm sure you have you know your influencers here. So Steve Bannon and Tucker Carlson, who you mentioned there, their videos would get shared a lot in Irish conspiracy spaces, but their messaging then would kind of sets the tone for what people who I know would be talking about. But what you see is it pivots very quickly away from, I mean, they don't have a campaign against Pfizer. They have a campaign against trans kids. They have a campaign against immigrants. Yes.

So it harnesses, I think, you know, I say that conspiracy theorists get facts wrong with the feelings right. So they start with a real feeling that is legitimate. And then they pivot it to scapegoats. that is legitimate. And then they pivot it to scapegoats. And so I think we can think, I mean, here in Ireland, there was just a recent sort of coming together of some of these forces outside the DAL that some of the reports I saw were, it was anti-immigrant, it was transphobic. There were the same talking points you'd expect to see from a similar rally in America or in Canada. Right. And these talking points are quite new to us in Ireland.

Right. But we often forget that one of the groups on their list are leftists, are Marxists. And I'm not sure how organic that is. I think it's pretty top-down, the focus on the cultural left. Like, I don't think people are waking up in the morning going, I hate cultural Marxists. You know, it's kind of like critical race theory. Like, this is a kind of a messaging campaign that has come from people who have, you know, done their market research, I suppose, about what sort of, but in the sense that it sounds snobby it sounds elite yes for sure i think you're right and something i'd love to ask you about too naomi is like so i'm fascinated with conspiracy in the way that you might be

like i'll read about things that the cia have done and i can see evidence for like this thing that was once conspiracy theory now appears to be fact because I'm literally looking at the documents where they admit it same with stuff to do with the British military in the north of Ireland there's a lot of stuff out there around conspiracy and mi5 and I'm really fascinated about this stuff and I read about it a lot and I'm forever trying to be careful of the line the line of when does this tip into me being crazy? You know what I mean? Like crazy is the wrong word. Yeah. I mean, I try not to use the word crazy. Me too. Me too. Cause that's me being an elitist prick. I don't want to call these people

crazy because to do so isn't compassionate. Yeah. And I mean, first of all, I try to be really careful to not even, to not call them conspiracy theorists. Sometimes I slip up just out of tiredness. So what's your preferred term? I call them conspiracy influencers and I call it conspiracy culture. Okay. And the reason I do that is for a couple of reasons. One, I think it's not fair to theorists to call them theorists because

they're just jumping around. When we're looking at the big players who are really pushing this, there's an economic reason why they are. And this is what has changed with the attention economy, is that I've done a lot of reporting during times of crisis, after hurricanes and tsunamis and military invasions. And whenever things are very uncertain, and especially when there's a lot of profiteering going on and people are being taken advantage of, which is what my book, The Shock Doctrine, was all about, people are going to try to make sense of that. And they might even conclude

that there's so many people taking advantage of a disaster that maybe they caused it in the first place. So when I was in Sri Lanka after the Asian tsunami, when there was this huge land grab going on where small farmers and fishing people were losing their land to big real estate developers, a lot of people started speculating that maybe the American military had detonated an underwater weapon and it had caused the tsunami. Now, I don't think that's true. If it is true, I've never seen any evidence of it. And that's, I think, the key point is like, how do we know what's a conspiracy, what sort of conspiracy theory should we pay attention to and what should we not? It's

not, is it crazy? Is it not crazy? Is there evidence? Is it proven or not? And so that's why I call them influencers. They're floating around wherever the heat is online, wherever the clicks are, wherever the views are. And the claims, the conspiratorial claims often wildly contradict one another, right? So one minute COVID is a bioweapon that has been cooked up in a lab by the Chinese government in order to depopulate the West. And then the next minute, while saving the Jews and the Chinese. And then the next minute, it's why are you even wearing a mask and definitely don't get vaccinated

because it's the vaccine that's a bioweapon. And it's kind of like, you should choose, you know, like if it's a bioweapon, we should probably try not to contract it, you know? So that's where I think the attention economy is important. So if we take the pandemic there and you have conspiracy influencers saying, well, if big pharma made the vaccine and they profited from it so massively, then they must

also have made the virus. And when I hear these arguments, I would love for those people to read like your book, The Shock Doctrine, which is about how under neoliberalism, certain policies have risen to dominance because of a deliberate strategy of exploiting crises and not just policies. When something happens like a recession which affects most people, the very wealthy can actually earn money from that. If everyone loses their house, then houses are cheap and rich people can buy them. Like, have you read a book, Naomi, called Blood on the Streets no wow okay have you heard of Jacob Rees-Mogg yeah he's a conservative politician conservative politician in England

so his da his da wrote this book called Blood on the Streets in about 1987 oh I have heard of this yes it's like a manual it's a manual for wealthy people that if there is a recession here is the manual of how you can make money from a recession if you're wealthy and when i read it i immediately thought of the shock doctrine i was like oh there it is there it is they've written it down there's the manual naomi was right and the doctrine is full of examples of right-wing politicians admitting that this is a strategy. But when I was writing that book, I was very clear that I think just because, I mean, I see these guys as kind of preppers in the sense that they know that this is a system that is very volatile. There are regular shocks, the economy crashes, there are

natural disasters, more of them because they're doing nothing about climate change and making it worse. Yes. And on and on. So all you need to do is have your, you know, I quote Milton Friedman in the shock doctrine who says that their goal is to have the ideas ready for when the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable. And he says only a crisis, real or perceived, produces real change. So they have their sort of right-wing deregulation, privatization, austerity, wishlist ready for whenever the shock hits. So they don't have to cook it up. There doesn't have to be a conspiracy to create the shock so that they can exploit

it. But there is a conspiracy to exploit it. You know, like in the shock doctrine, I have minutes from a meeting that took place at one of these big right-wing foundations in Washington, the Heritage Foundation, two weeks after Hurricane Katrina drowned New Orleans. The city was still partially underwater and they made a wishlist of what they called the 32 free market solutions to Hurricane Katrina and high gas prices. And it was just, you know, privatize the school system, drill for oil in Alaska. But the thing is, is

like, they didn't cause that disaster, unless you count all of the oil that is burned. They just were ready. They're always ready. And so this is, you know, I have a section of the book called The Conspiracy is Capitalism, and it talks about how some conspiracies are real, but the difference between a conspiracy just to use a disaster to enrich your industry, enrich yourself, and the kinds of conspiracies that surge in what I'm calling conspiracy culture is you know they're talking about you know an elite plot to to to kidnap children and drain them of adrenochrome yeah um you know these are kind of like hollywood inspired plots and you know i can see why they're appealing i mean they're strange

and weird and they're entertaining entertaining yes like i often find naomi with with conspiracy theories when i see them i go wow this is unbelievably entertaining this isn't this is a great story and i want a part of me wants to believe conspiracy theories because they're so fun and then the critical part of my brain kicks in and says hold on a minute minute here, buddy. Like this is reality. It's not a TV show. Like, do you ever see a, like a crossover, a parallel between conspiracy theories and mythology, folklore, storytelling? Well, definitely storytelling. So many of the people who are kind of stars in this world come from Hollywood and reality television. I think they're skilled mass market storytellers. Steve Bannon, Russell Brand, Donald Trump,

he was a reality television star, Andrew Tate. I think they're people who really have the kind of story structure down, leave people know, sprinkle some breadcrumbs. I'm trying to think of whether it follows a kind of ancient mythology structure. What do you think? Like you mentioned the adrenochrome there and that goes back a long time. Like you might know a bit more about this than me, but I understand the adrenochrome. To me, that's an anti-Semitic trope that's several hundred years old.

Oh, yeah. Yeah, that's the oldest one. Yeah. The conspiracy of eating human babies to get some type of secret hidden power. That's medieval anti-Semitism. No, I think that you're right about that one for sure. That, you know, I wouldn't call it ancient. Like, I mean, when you say ancient mythology, I'm thinking about your work on Greek mythology.

But absolutely, this is an old story. And the story, it goes back to early Christianity and the claim that Jews who didn't convert to Christianity were stealing Christian babies and draining their blood for rituals. were stealing Christian babies and draining their blood for rituals. And so QAnon is really just a new remix on that old tune. Let's take a little pause from that chat now so that I can have the ocarina pause. I don't have an ocarina. What have I got this week? I don't have any books either. I've got Turkish cologne.

I've got Turkish cologne that I bought in a barber's. That smells of wonderful lemon. So I'm going to spray some Turkish cologne. And then you're going to hear an advert for something. Oh, I don't want to get it into my eyes. Will you rise with the sun to help change mental health care forever? Join the Sunrise Challenge to raise funds for CAMH, the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health,

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It's not real. It's not real. Who said that? The first omen. Only in theaters April 5th. That is magnificent. The whole area around me now smells like the mist of lemons. Not real lemons, like a lemon's memory.

Too much lemon now. I'm inundated with lemon. I'm after inundating myself with the scent of lemon. That's too much. Fuck me. Alright, that was the lemon in the in the now it's all over the fucking mic man the mic is wet with lemon

that was the lemon in the the lemon in inundation pause I inundated myself with the scent of lemon. And you heard an advert for some shit. Maybe you didn't, I don't know. Look, support for this podcast comes from you, the listener, via the Patreon page. Patreon.com forward slash The Blind Boy Podcast.

If this podcast brings you joy, solace, distraction, entertainment, please consider paying me for the work that I'm doing. Because this is my full-time job. It's how I rent my office. It's how I pay my bills. It's how I exist. And it's how I have the space and time to do what I do to make this podcast. But if you can't afford that, don't worry about it.

You can listen for free. You can listen for free. Because the person who is paying is paying for you to listen for free. So everybody gets a podcast and I get to earn a living. It's a wonderful model based on kindness and soundness. Also it means I am not beholden to advertisers. No advertiser can come in here, tell me who to have as a guest on, tell me what to talk about, or influence the content in any way.

My new book of short stories. Topographia Hibernica. Which I cannot wait to share with you. Is out in Ireland on the 9th of November. And in the UK on the 19th of November. You can pre-order it now. Go to my Instagram. Blind by Boat Club.

And I have a little link there at the top of my page. For pre-ordering. I have a fantastic book slash podcast tour. live tour that I'm doing in November. London, Manchester and Edinburgh are sold out. There's still tickets available for Liverpool and Coventry on the 14th and 16th of November, respectively, only a few tickets left. Belfast, that's selling out real quick on the 18th. Belfast that's selling out real quick

on the 18th and then Vicar Street on the 19th come along to Vicar Street in Dublin on the 19th because that's just about to go

that's my Irish book launch slash live podcast and that's a Sunday night I always have my Vicar Street gigs on queer nights I never do Friday or Saturday I always do a weekday night or a Sunday because

you can treat it like the theatre and also I don't want people, I don't want drunk people in the audience. So doing a weeknight or a Sunday is the best way to get those results. My Vicar Street Life podcasts are probably my favourite gigs. I do a few a year and you can have a wonderful Sunday night crack even if you have a hangover. Just come along to the gig and you'll be home in bed ready for work the next day with no headaches. Just a wonderful gorgeous night. February I'm gigging in Oslo. Come along to the gig in Oslo. Look it up online. Berlin one gig is sold out. I'm adding a second night dog bless back to my chat with naomi klein where we speak about mythology folklore and conspiracy theories now well one of the reasons i was bringing up mythology and folklore is your use of the term mirror world in the book doppelganger

when you speak about naomi wolf your doppelganger you say that she lives like because of her conspiracy theory beliefs she lives in a mirror world. And it reminded me of Irish mythology, because in Irish mythology, we have a mirror world, this world that's like parallel to our world. And in Irish mythology, in the mirror world, that's where, you know, people shape shift into animals or fairies. And a lot of modern conspiracy theory, it reminds me of folklore. It reminds me of folklore it reminds me of folklore and in the past people who really believed in irish folklore it actually resulted in genuine moral panics and sometimes people were hurt and killed because of beliefs within folklore like

we have changelings in ireland like have you ever heard of changelings i have a section of on on that in the book no way so you know about changelings wellelings? I have a section on that in the book. No way. So you know about changelings? Well, I do because I have a section in the book on autism. Wow, okay. And the chapter is called Autism and the Anti-Vax Prequel because so many of the people who have been very influential in the anti-COVID vax world, cut their teeth propagating the autism vaccine myth. And then because the book is about doppelgangers,

I was looking at the figure of the twin and the double in mythology, and it brought me to The Changeling and this literature about how some people argue that changelings were early portrayals of people with autism before there was a language or understanding. Do you think that's true? Yeah. So within Irish folklore, we have changelings, which is like a fairy person. The folk belief was that fairies would come from the mirror world, the other world and and they would take a person that you love and put a changeling in their place and a changeling wasn't quite human there was something

off with the changeling so now we reckon this was like in the 1800s this is how people explained away things like mental illness or autism or people who might have been born deformed in some way if you had a loved one who was experiencing issues with mental illness they were away with the fairies they were away with the fairies so it's not your sister or your brother who's mentally ill that's a changeling the fairies have taken your relative and put this changeling in their place. Also infant mortality was very high so if a little baby died like that's a fairy baby it's a changeling. Your baby is away in the woods with the fairies and they've put a changeling in its place. But sometimes these beliefs in folklore they would have real world consequences like in Tipperary in 1895 there was a woman called Bridget Cleary. Now

by the sounds of things Bridget Cleary might have been schizophrenic or something like that but her husband believed that she was a changeling a fairy that she'd been taken away this was his genuine belief and I think a local priest told him to set her on fire so he murdered his wife and this is 1895 it's not that long ago because he believed that she was a changeling. And that's why I sometimes view conspiracy theory as like folk beliefs. That story with Bridget Cleary

reminds me of something like Pizzagate. I think in like 2016, this dude in New York went online and he believed that they were farming adrenochrome in the basement of some pizza place. And then he went in there with a machine gun to try and rescue the kids. But there's another side to folklore that i'd love to chat to you about especially because of your interest in the climate and it is just a theory

that i a thread that i pull at sometimes because of my work as an artist and a writer but i think that folklore and mythology exist in the human animal to keep us in line with systems of biodiversity and what I mean by that is like in Ireland up until the 1600s it used to be illegal to kill a white butterfly because people believed that white butterflies were the souls of dead children also it would have been frowned upon to interfere with bees because bees were seen as like magical insects that could float over to the other world in the mist into the mirror world so people didn't fuck with bees but really what you have there are a set of beliefs and superstitions that keep humans in line with systems of biodiversity and if you look at colonial capitalism when a culture is being colonized one of the first things to go is indigenous knowledge

and folklore so that wealth can be extracted now that's that's a crazy theory from me i agree completely because like like humans are animals and we're animals that that use language and when i look at indigenous folklore all around the world even like the crow nation people of yellowstone national park like you you know the story nation people of yellowstone national park like you you know the story about how in yellowstone park scientists reintroduced wolves and this healed the ecosystem in yellowstone so the ecosystem in yellowstone national park was collapsing and when they reintroduced the apex predator the wolf the entire system reinvigorated itself it regenerated but if you look at the mythology of the indigenous people who live in Yellowstone, who are the Crow Nation,

if you look at their origin mythology, the world comes from a wolf, from a coyote. So they knew it. Their mythology, which is thousands of years old, hinted at the answers that scientists had to find out. There's so many stories like that. And I just can't help but look at that and maybe think that there's a reason for it, that maybe we as humans, animals who have language, that folklore and mythology allows us to view nature

as something to be respected and feared and regenerated and restored rather than something that's just exploited for capital, which has gotten us into this awful situation that we're in now with climate collapse well i'll be very curious um to hear what you think about that chapter um around the changeling but also you know i the the book has three main sections one is the mirror world as you said but the said, but the one after that is the shadow lands and that, you know, I'm arguing that's what none of us want to look at because it's an excavation

that's going on. What are the shadow lands? Well, the shadow, I'm using the term really broadly to refer to the underbelly of capitalism we are in this moment of kind of unveiling and unearthing of the systems and the atrocities that created the modern world. And COVID was a kind of a searchlight for that, because capitalism tells us that we're all just little islands only responsible to ourselves and our families, but then you have an airborne virus and it lights up all of our interconnections and you have to see the people who you have unseen or told didn't matter or we're told we live in a frictionless economy, but of course, we just shove all the friction into the shadows or all the people who do the labor to hold up the world. And, you know, during COVID, we had to think about we call them essential workers, but they're actually sacrificial workers. with the truths of white supremacy and the truths of the transatlantic slave trade.

And in Canada, there was a further kind of unveiling that happened when the unmarked graves were confirmed at the former residential, so-called Indian residential schools. And it was a few months after that that we started to see these really wild protests. Like, I don't know if you remember the trucker convoy. Yeah, the trucker protest. That didn't get covered as much. Like, Canadian stuff doesn't get covered

as much as American news over here. But I was aware of the trucker protest. And again, this is something when I saw it, I thought, okay, this looks like a working class movement. This feels like like unions and then i peel it back and i'm like why the fuck are the far right involved what are they doing here yeah i mean it was it's a doppelganger of the kind of mass movements i've has, you know, kickstarted and sustained over the years is solidarity and interconnection. And really what animated those mass protests was the right to be left alone, you know, and it was a really a whale against the idea that we should be accountable to each other that you sometimes you have to do something for people who are more vulnerable and just for the listeners and for myself too why were those canadian truckers protesting like

what did they want well it wasn't just the truckers it started you know they were certainly the most um camera um friendly part of the coalition but but They were certainly the most camera-friendly part of the coalition, but there were also far-right groups. There were also yoga moms. And it was that weird mix of kind of new age, wholeness. Yeah, sometimes it's called diagonalism. It's this way in which political signals are getting mixed up these days. But what started it was a requirement to get vaccinated in order to cross the US border. That was the sort of spark. So it was part of the vaccine mandates. And that was one of the major demands also to bring everybody up on war crimes trials and accusing them of the vaccines of having

caused a genocide. And so there's this weird kind of appropriation that goes on because we were in the midst of the Pope came to Canada and he acknowledged that there had been a genocide of indigenous people. It was a big deal. And then suddenly you have all these anti-vax moms saying the real genocide okay is is is is what's going on you know to them and they actually actually made some of them made t-shirts and we're selling them online that said canada's second genocide like the back of the

covid 19 and immediately hearing you speak about that the words that come to my head are blue lives matter white lives matter it's like when i hear the phrase black lives matter at no point do i think i'm being attacked i don't think anyone is saying to me that my life doesn't matter like that's the other thing of this is like as you're mentioning there some people wanting to find a victimhood like if a marginalized group name their systemic oppression some people who actually benefit a victimhood, like if a marginalized group name their systemic oppression, some people who actually benefit from that systemic oppression, some of those people say, well, I'm a victim too. Where's my victimhood? Yeah, I think that's part of it. And,

but I think the deeper part of it is just how hard it is to actually be alive to the realities of our world today. I think we are in a reckoning with present day shadow lands and in the ways that we've been talking about, we're in a reckoning with the mythologies of our nation states. And this is not the story of Canada that any of us grew up with or the United States. the story of Canada that any of us grew up with or the United States you know or you know I think Ireland's a little different because there's a a deeper kind of opposition history it's strange in Ireland it's it's reversed in Ireland Naomi like we were so we were colonized Irish people are colonized people and and our revolutionary heroes are people who fought the British Empire and our heroes are people who not only fought against British colonisation but also had solidarity with other colonised people.

And we're seeing in real time these revolutionary figures being reappropriated into right-wing figures. The strange thing about Ireland is is if you call yourself like a nationalist in Ireland to be a nationalist is usually a dirty word it suggests a right wing leaning but in Ireland nationalists to call yourself a nationalist was never ever right wing because our nationhood was something that we were trying to take back whereas if someone calls themselves a nationalist in England like english nationalism is a little bit more aligned with colonialism we are the best and we deserve to take over cultures that we view as less than us but now

we're seeing nationalism in ireland flipping we're seeing groups waving irish flags and holding up banners of like our revolutionary heroes and comparing immigration as something that's akin to how British colonial forces invaded us and it doesn't make sense but I don't think it matters to these people because the emotion feels right they're reappropriating Irish nationalism to fit in with the anger they feel right now an anger which instead of being directed towards immigrants should be directed towards the neoliberal policies of our government who refuse to meaningfully address the housing crisis yeah i mean all i can say is i think maybe your anti-colonial identity in ireland saved you two years yeah and now it's here yeah like external forces have appeared to have disrupted that mood because when you listen to irish conspiracy people or far right

people they're just they're saying what tucker carlson is saying or saying what steve bannon is saying in an irish accent the information is being spread on Facebook from the outside, usually from America. But the reason why I think it's worth looking at the roots, parts of the movement that has its roots in the autism vaccine myth is the extent to which so much of this movement is centered around the figure of the child,

the child under attack, the pure child being invaded, right? And this is why they're outside drag shows and they're attacking teachers and librarians. But it's the same. The vaccine is an invasion. The mask is an invasion. History is an invasion. The mask is an invasion. History is an invasion. But the purity of the child is at the center of it, right? And that's what brought me to the changeling myth. My son is neurodivergent and he, you know, I don't write about him in the book, but I do write about my experience with the parents.

And it's this, you know, this search for a cure, for a scapegoat, the kind of abusive therapies. But it's the idea that you have this pure child and then there's been like an invasion of the body snatchers, right? of the body snatchers, right? And then anything you, any abuse to bring the child back is justified, which, you know, is there in the changeling stories as well. Strange thing you're seeing too in Ireland is like regarding some of the groups you mentioned there. In Ireland, conspiracy theory people and some right wing people, some of them are quite aligned with Catholicolic groups and you mentioned they're like trans exclusionary people you know we're defending women we're defending children and it's like you're not like in ireland we had massive massive historical abuse of children at the hands of the catholic

church and it's not just an irish thing that's all the world over but in ireland we really had this in in 2014 i think it was a woman found a mass grave with the bodies of 300 children because we had an orphanage that was run by the nuns in Ireland and they just threw the kids' bodies in there. They didn't care about them, you know? And it's like, there's the thing. If you actually care about kids, if you actually care about women, there it is.

We had magnum laundries. There's the paedophile ring. There it is. It was called the Catholicolic church and did untold damage to our country exactly you know i want to read you a little part of the book i want to read you this little passage from um it it comes from it's not it's a quote from from a guy i know he's a great writer and filmmaker his name is julian brave noise cat he's a great writer and filmmaker. His name is Julian Brave Noise Cat. He's an indigenous writer and filmmaker in the US and Canada. And you listen to this.

This was just like a long thread he did. And I quoted it with permission from him. He says, I'm struck by the similarity of right wing conspiracy theories to actual policies towards indigenous peoples. Replacement theory, manifest destiny. The idea that all these immigrants are coming to replace white people, what about white people who came to replace? So that's manifest destiny. QAnon, mass institutionalized child abuse equals boarding and residential schools. Plandemic equals smallpox, alcohol, bioterrorism. It's also Freudian.

The fear that it will happen to them stems from an implicit admission that they did it to others, as though the black, brown, and indigenous downtrodden are just as hateful as they are and are going to turn around and do to them what they did to us. So, you know, I do wonder, is that, you know, is that part of what we're seeing? But also, I think, you know, what you said is also a factor. You know, there's so many middle-class white women like me who are in this movement who seem to feel like, where do I fit in, in the hierarchy of victimization? Does anyone care about white women anymore? Well, maybe they will, if I claim that by not being vaccinated, I'm a victim of

apartheid and genocide and slavery. And all the greatest crimes of the past 500 years combined get projected onto a vaccine. So so i think that that's also at play i think there's a lot of stuff in play and i'm trying to pick it apart like i i had the word fascist angrily typed at me over the internet at the start of the pandemic because i i thought it was a good idea that people should wear masks oh yeah i couldn't believe it at the time and it's like they were appropriating this language because i just think it's a good idea to wear a mask because there's a virus. I mean, what else are you going to do? I didn't think I was being fascistic.

But that's so smart. That's so smart. And also, you know, the words that we would use to describe them have been rendered absurd. You know, it starts to feel like this like this is what this is the donald trump move you know where whatever you say bounces off of me yeah what i'd love for all of this naomi is i'd love to develop a type of radical empathy where i could i just want to step inside the head of somebody like naomi wolf and see what it's like for a day, you know? Like, to use empathy, like, even someone who believes in a flat earth, you know, these people exist.

I can see that the earth is flat, but you really think the earth is flat and you appear to be an otherwise rational person. What is that like for you? I don't think some of these people are lying. Like, a person who doesn't think that coronavirus exists and they can swat away any evidence to suit this narrative in their head. I don't think some of these people are lying.

I think they really believe these stuff. These are regular people. You see them in a coffee shop. Like what is going on internally? What's it like in that person's head? Yeah, and I think they're not all in the same category either. I think there's, you know,

I think the most important distinction to make is between the sort of big time disseminators and wolf is one of them um who really know how to monetize who have built kind of an industry around it and a huge name around it okay i didn't know naomi wolf was financially benefiting from this stuff too oh yeah i mean she's she she's got she's got all the platforms she's you know she's selling subscriptions yeah um she's selling all kinds of things t-shirts mugs i mean all of it yeah um the wolf pack oh wow okay yeah so so i think there's a distinction and i I also believe she believes it, but I think she has a vested interest in believing it, and I think there's a very who are really their customers, the people who are not financially benefiting from it, but deeply believe in it. I've talked to so many people who told me about sisters and uncles and friends and their former yoga teacher and who have,

the language of fallen down the rabbit hole and seem like a changeling or altered or strange, right? And I think it's really important to have as much empathy as we can bear. I think there were so many severed relationships during COVID because we were all so scared. That broke my heart. Yeah. And I mean, you know, so many families where it's like somebody who didn't get vaccinated was no longer invited to family gatherings and things like that so i really encourage people to if they can rebuild those relationships extend a bridge see if you can agree that you all hate big pharma you know like there's plenty yeah and that's the thing my heart breaks because of it knew me because a lot of this stuff it's like we're all angry at the

same shit it's like you're describing capitalism you're describing neoliberalism you're almost there you're angry at the same system but you're blaming different people and the words that you're using are completely different to the words that i'm using you know i also do think that we should hold people accountable when they make really dangerous um decisions you know wolf now takes pictures of her gun. She posts pictures, you know, she now has a partner who is, he's a former special forces soldier and she posts pictures of him doing target practice. She talks about civil war on the border. She hangs around with Steve Bannon. So even though I can understand that she's been publicly shamed, she's been mocked,

that's not enough of an excuse to go hang around with fascists. You know what I mean? I have empathy, but I also have limits. And I think she should be held accountable for the fact that a lot of people are listening to her because she used to be a trusted feminist author, and now she's leading people into the arms of real life fascists and i see this sometimes on a micro level online too if someone if someone gets i don't like using the word cancel but let's just say someone gets quote tweeted and mocked by leftists online because of something they said and they're being mocked and they're being made fun of and then suddenly they go well fuck you then uh now i'm a tarf Now I'm a racist because you were all mean to me.

I'm flipping now. I'm on the other side now. And sometimes I'm a bit like, no amount of mocking me is going to make me be a racist. It has to be there already. Or you mainly care about yourself. You know, I have this little equation that I use to describe some of these crossover stars and you know I don't think everybody ticks all the boxes but it's narcissism slash grandiosity yeah plus social media addiction these people are all just way too online plus midlife crisis okay divided because

they're very worried about losing relevance divided by public shaming okay um because many of them have had one of those moments including wolf she's had many of them but she had a very notorious sort of um moment on bbc in 2019 right before the pandemic where it was discovered she'd made these foundational errors and then there was just a huge twitter pile on i remember that do you think that was a triggering moment for her well for sure because the first time i heard of naomi wolf was she had written a book oh i know what you're gonna say because i know she had written a book and it was a factual error that was so great that it basically made the book entirely useless oh i thought you were gonna quote the belast tweet because that's the most famous. Belfast

tweet where Naomi Wolf tweeted it was amazing to go to Belfast because it doesn't have 5G yet. Everything was calm, still, peaceful and restful like the 1970s. Like Belfast in the 1970s was not calm and peaceful. Like we laughed at that in Ireland. It was hilarious. But before that

didn't Naomi Wolf, didn't she write some book about gay people being executed in medieval England not medieval but yeah in the um in the 1800s didn't she get like misinterpret what the word executed meant in in a legal context and then a journalist pointed out this error live on air and her entire thesis of her book just fell apart because of one error yes I mean you could understand why she made the error, because she was looking at these court records, and what it said was death recorded.

So she thought that that meant that these men had been executed long after it was generally believed that there had been no more executions for sodomy and so on. And so she just misunderstood the term and actually meant that they had been found guilty but released. So she was confronted with this live on the air on BBC. It was every writer's worst nightmare. And it was very, very humiliating.

And when I say it's's understandable it's understandable that on first glance you would get it wrong but it's not understandable that you don't fact check your work and and she experienced a level of public humiliation from that which is like an academic or a writer's worst nightmare i mean what i remember most from that was people getting second-hand cringe with how awful it was that this had happened to her. Well, also, it kind of happened to me because they all think that I'm her. But was that a tipping point for Naomi Wolf? Do you think so? Yeah, I think I think she had been she had been sort of dabbling in conspiracy and she

had made some claims where every few months she would sort of become a twitter spectacle you know and she said she's like the belfast tweet was actually before that oh or she would claim that like isis beheadings were perhaps crisis actors and those people hadn't actually been killed and you know that's a serious thing to do if you have got a few hundred thousand followers because those people have families they're real people you should actually not share that unless you have evidence i mean this is comes back to what we were talking about before it's the difference between a conspiracy theory and actual conspiracies that happen in the world that we should pay attention to and the difference is basically proof um yeah and yeah the other question to naomi and not necessarily

about naomi wolf but like i've been to college and not necessarily about Naomi Wolf but like I've been to college and I started studied at a master's level and I so I know what evidence looks like but some people don't and I've made the mistake in the past of arguing online with people who might be anti-vax or flat earth or whatever and sometimes they send me their evidence and when I look at the evidence I can clearly see this is a fake website. I know it says CNN at the top, but it's actually a fake website. And I know what a reliable source looks like because I had the benefit of studying that in college. Oh, absolutely.

But to some of these people, this is their evidence because they don't have access to tools that I have. And this is where the distinction is. Yeah. Yeah. The distinction between the people who are falling for it and the people who are really disseminating. Disseminating, yeah. But yeah, I think a lot of this comes back to this broad and correct sense that so many people have, that there are elites who are conspiring against them who do not have their best interests at heart. And they're trying to understand why if they are working really hard, they can't afford groceries or rent, let alone a mortgage. And they believed what they learned in school about how capitalism was a meritocracy. And if you worked hard,

you were going to be rewarded. And now they're trying to make sense of it because the system really is crashing and this is why we're in a really dangerous moment. I think we're in a moment that's akin to the 1930s where the center is not holding and we are in a, it's up for grabs whether this huge amount of public anger is going to tip right or left. And right now the right seems to have an upper hand, which is why it matters if they're appropriating words and targets that are generally left wing. And what I argue in the book is they're really only able to appropriate what we leave unattended, right? If we don't have a campaign about how the vaccines should never

have been patented in the first place, and these companies should never have been allowed to profiteer off of human misery for all of these years, and COVID should never have been a profit center in the first place. And why were these patents in place when the vaccines were developed with public money? Of course. And all the money is made by our governments buying the vaccines. And why were we being offered our fourth and fifth shot when those people on the planet had not even had one? The left was not fighting that fight. And we were telling people to roll up their sleeves and get vaccinated, which is part of what we should have been doing, but not all of it, right? And politics hates a vacuum.

And I think the right is filling in. And that's what makes me frantic is I feel like the left is falling apart when it's needed most. I could chat to you for hours, Naomi, but I have one last question. When it comes to conspiracy theories, if you follow the money, who benefits from conspiracy theories? But that's not the big picture. The big picture is, you know, why is Elon Musk a conspiracy influencer? Why is Rupert Murdoch writing a letter to the staff of News Corplishment, anti-elite, anti-big tech, anti-big pharma is now in the right-wing conspiracy land, it's actually an incredible way of protecting existing elite structures because it's a distraction machine. You're looking for the plot to prove that the election was stolen or that the kids are being kidnapped

for their adrenochrome instead of the myriad scandals that are right in front of our eyes that we can prove. You think back to the kind of grassroots left organizing that was, the image of the pamphleteer is sort of much derided, but it's because- Democritized language. Yeah. They were speaking in the vernacular. You know, they were, it was not something that was ivory towers, about reaching everyday people

in the language that resonated with their lives. And, you know, that's why it matters that we not be jargon laden and, you know, just impressing each other with how many isms we can load our language down with. And yeah. Thank you so much, Naomi, for that chat. I could have chatted you for hours. I know you're mad busy um just thank you for your time and best of luck with the book tour

oh it's so fun to talk with you I'm a real fan thank you mind yourself dog bless thank you Naomi Klein for taking the time out to come onto this podcast that was a most magnificent chat I'm really pinching myself that I got Naomi Klein on the fucking podcast as a guest I never thought I'd be able to say those words I hope all of you enjoyed that conversation and that you took something from it check out Naomi's books

not just Doppelganger but something like Shock Doctrine is essential reading I'll catch you next week rub a dog wink at a swan. Feed a hedgehog if they come to your back door. It's hedgehog feeding at the back door season isn't it? My throat is better this week as you can tell. It's about 95 percent. Still a little bit weird. By next week it'll be 100 percent% clear I'll have some delicious hot takes

and I think my sore throat is sufficiently cured that I can leave you with some kisses this week and not hug the microphone like a lunatic. Tag bless. Even though that freaks some people out.

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