Bannon war room pandemic podcast10/10/2023 But the book’s occasion of telling is the strange phenomenon of Klein getting mixed up on social media platforms with her red-pilled dark twin, Naomi Wolf. She touches on this at the end of our conversation here, edited for length and clarity. The Left has reason to be depressed, and much of Klein’s new book, Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World, seems to have been written from a place of grief. When I mentioned Occupy last week, Klein asked me if I was going to make her depressed. Of course, Occupy, like the WTO protest movement (and the Bernie Sanders presidential campaigns, and the Green New Deal), has not brought about as much change as many activists once hoped it would. I believed then that the great upheaval might have arrived. But I wanted to tell her that when I was bringing sandwiches to the Occupy L.A. When I spoke to Klein on September 6, in Los Angeles, I didn’t expect her to remember meeting me. When I asked her how she thought change would happen, she said: only with great social upheaval. So readers will have to take my word for what I remember of the original conversation. A search through its surviving articles in the Internet Archive came up empty. The weekly newspaper where I was working as a reporter during that initial meeting, the Boston Phoenix, is now gone. I have a distinct memory of sitting in the lobby of a hotel somewhere in Boston and asking her point-blank: how did she think profound social change might actually come about? She and her book were, as she put it to me, “kind of anointed as the voice of a movement.” Klein’s work played a key role in cracking that shell. The sense back then was that the global corporations had won, hands down, and that people would always care more about a new pair of Nikes than about cracking the protective shell of corporate hegemony and neoliberal economic power. It’s hard now, more than 20 years later, to describe the dominant political mood at the time. That book, and Klein herself, became central to the anti-capitalist movement that erupted into protests at the World Trade Organization summit in Seattle. AT SOME POINT in 1999, I interviewed the author and journalist Naomi Klein about No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies, her exposé of the extractive and exploitative realities behind the shiny packaging for Nike and Starbucks.
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