Airport bookstores are often filled with customers, and surely some buy. I don’t. I just like to see what books among many millions of possible candidates land in such prime real estate.
As a publisher, I’m aware of the herculean efforts, vast resources, and network connections a publisher has to have to get there. It’s impossible for a small publisher. Indeed, there are very few that land there. And, I promise you, it has nothing to do with the quality of the product. Nothing.
What do you know but the new work by Naomi Klein was being featured in the store where I was today. The title is “Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World.” It’s one of the strangest, creepiest, and most morally rotten literary products I’ve ever encountered.
Why anyone would buy is beyond me. Why precisely it is being featured is another question.
The author was once a respected voice in public life, the leading critic of “disaster capitalism” before she became its leading champion. Indeed, she nearly perfectly forecasted the response to the 2008 financial crisis, which rescued all the big shots and the ruling class while imposing the sufferings and costs on the mass of people. Back then, the rallying cry was that the 1 percent should not have all the power and wealth and manipulate the whole financial system on their own behalf.
The terrible reality is that the critique against that state action became worse when the 1 percent shut down the world, smashed small businesses, surveilled the population for a respiratory virus, forced masks on everyone including children, kept schools and daycares closed, imposed travel restrictions, and then injected the population with an untested novel technology that became toxic and deadly for many.
Disaster capitalism, we hardly knew you.
Where was Naomi Klein during this entire period? Nowhere. Not a peep. She vanished, like most people on the left (and right and libertarian too). Why? Probably because her tribe was all for this entire egregious state machinery that directly oppressed billions around the world. She sat back and watched it all happen.
Sadly, however, her mind was still at work. This book is the result.
I suspect that this period of history drove her to a kind of madness.
“Like so many of us during Covid,” she writes, “I was online much more than usual, because, well, where else was I going to be? Previously, I had kept my social media use under pretty tight control. But in the isolation of Covid, and my isolated life on the rock, that all fell away. Social media was one thing I didn’t have to give up in the name of that damn virus, so, I reasoned, why should I?”
Okay, we get it. Our author went insane.
The book doesn’t have much in the way of augment in it, from what I can tell. It is a long, pathological, intensely obsessive, yammering rambling pile of blather, all designed toward one end and one end only: to shine a light on a person she despises because sometimes people confuse the author with her. That person is the famed author and mighty opponent of the fascistic biosecurity state, Naomi Wolf.
I told you that this is a weird book. It’s weirder than I can possibly describe. I simply cannot believe it was ever published, much less that it is being featured in airport bookstores for mainstream audiences.
It gives “cancel culture” a new name. Indeed, it seems like a warning shot against a personal enemy in an age of surveillance and growing violence. And make no mistake: the author is decidedly for the regime and against one of its most prominent critics. Indeed, I don’t see how any responsible publisher was confident in being on legal ground in going to print.
In short, Naomi Klein missed her moment. Instead, she became a full-blown Covidian and champion of the greatest upwards transfer of wealth in the history of humanity. She was a partisan of the very thing she had previously opposed: huge corporations controlling the government for their own benefit while robbing the general population and especially the poor of liberty, property, and life.
I’m guessing that Klein’s obsessiveness—spending countless thousands of hours stalking Wolf, watching her videos, reading her tweets, and so on—is a kind of defense mechanism. Klein has been incredibly wrong, while Wolf has been incredibly right. This is Klein’s weird, creepy, even psychotic way of lashing out.
But this raises another very important topic. Let me ask you. What do exalted experts do when their plans fail, they are revealed as shysters, and the population knows for sure that their vaunted expertise landed whole societies in a grim spot? Do they apologize, beg forgiveness, hit the books again, and reverse their terrible course? Do they admit error?
One might hope so. Before recently, I might have said: they will be embarrassed, seek forgiveness, and make amends.
But that would be wrong. I suspect you know the real answer. Look at none other than Anthony Fauci or Jacinda Ardern. They do not admit anything. They do not apologize. They do not congratulate those who were correct all along. Quite the reverse. They double down. They HATE those who were correct. But then it gets worse. They seek to destroy the individuals, society, and the world that failed to conform to their crazed visions.
In other words, such people become The Joker.
Sadly for all of us, there are millions of Jokers loose in the world today. Naomi Klein is among them, mad as hell, bent on revenge, willing to write immoral things, stalk and trash their betters, and even deploy their famed reputations to destroy the lives of others, possibly without limit. This becomes an ideology and it has a name: destructionism.
Sadly, there are many institutions in society today—among whom publishers—who are willing to assist them in doing this. That’s why this book is in the airport bookstore. That’s why Fauci is on a pricey lecture tour. That’s why Ardern is at Harvard. That’s why they all still have their jobs, are still celebrated by major media, and why some have been promoted up the ladder.
It’s a malicious world out there today. Klein’s book is an infuriating exhibit A. If it becomes a bestseller, I will despair for the world.
