Naomi Klein investigates ‘conspiracy theory culture’ that has shaken her life
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
"The Paranoid Style in American Politics" (1964), prev on HN https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24964931
(Although I might be inclined to agree with you that there are real, very obvious, unaddressed "conspiracies" that kind of happen while simultaneously everyone is aware of them but can't "see" them. Mostly to do with the operation of political donations, but things like the Sackler opiate scandal had evidence ignored for years. Or the Clarence Thomas bribery allegations.)
But somehow putting three simple facts together makes you a white nationalist. Which is odd since I wasn't white when I immigrated here.
I find the same is true for most other conspiracy theories. Epstein showed that there are a lot of very rich paedophiles. Covid responses around the world showed that vaccine passports were very much on the cards. And on and on.
It's pretty disheartening to see the ideology which was supposed to keep power in check worship it instead.
It's putting the observations together in ways that assign intent and blame in ways that don't make sense that's the problem. You can't add 1+1+1 and make 5.
(Especially in a country like the US that's literally built out of immigrants; is the argument that the US should revert to its 1600 population levels and their descendents?)
> Covid responses around the world showed that vaccine passports were very much on the cards
Well .. yes? They've been a thing for certain diseases for years. The US used to screen for TB at Ellis Island. I had to get a Yellow Fever vaccination with a little card in my passport to be allowed into Peru. And so on. What's the conspiracy?
> Epstein showed that there are a lot of very rich paedophiles
Now you're on to something; the way in which a lot of people will cover for sexual exploitation because it's happening among people they're friends with. #MeToo etc. Ronan Polanski. This one is hard to unravel. But you have to stick to evidence or you end up in a pizza parlor without a basement with a gun.
That media executives and politicians were paid off by Big Pharma to promote an experimental prophylactic (does not actually prevent infection, unlike every other vaccine in existence) under the guise of a campaign of fear to inject as many people as possible, even though only elderly/obese/very sick people would really receive a marginal benefit. Oh and if you had a bad reaction, you can't sue the manufacturer.
And still even today in the US, little kids are getting the mRNA treatment, when they are more likely to die from drowning than a coronavirus.
> But somehow putting three simple facts together makes you a white nationalist.
This is pretty easy to understand - the important part of the conspiracy theory, and the one your three simple facts are missing, is: there is no conspiracy to do these things. Yes, people in developed countries have below-replacement birth rates, but is that because there is a cabal of evil people trying to genocide them? Or is it due to numerous individual decisions by individual actors creating economic and social circumstances which lead to lower birth rates?
Same goes for your other points. There are simple, logical and realistic explanations that don't need some grand conspiracy to make sense. If you still choose to look for the evil cabal who want to destroy white people, what are you, if not a conspiracy theorist?
How did you get that from what I wrote? I legitimately have no idea. Do you think that "The great replacement" is about wage suppression?
The premise of replacement theory is that "the elites" are willfully and actively conspiring to replace white people, culturally and politically, with non-whites and eventually render the white race extinct. That they're doing it on purpose. Meeting in dark, smoke-filled rooms and planning it out.
Regardless, even in the absence of an active and willfull conspiracy, interpreting socioeconomic trends through the lens of race is still racist. Being concerned that globalism and immigration suppresses "native" wages isn't racist - but people need to learn in that case that what they hate isn't immigrants, but capitalism, because that's just efficient markets doing exactly what they're supposed to do. Being concerned that globalism and immigration suppressing "native" wages is an effort to commit white genocide and destroy white culture is what makes it racist.
What dichotomy am I proposing? I simply said that there is not one evil group conspiring against white people. It's possible that there are multiple groups with nefarious intent (e.g. to suppress wages, or to extract more money from the population), but surely we can all agree that the idea of "The great replacement" is ludicrous? Did this site drift so far to the right that even this statement is now controversial?!
Well not quite. It does make people expect that you're about to blame me somehow wanting to "breed out" white people, which puts them on guard and makes them hostile. Personally I observe the same phenomena as you but I'm not allowed to point them out either, because I can hardly blame myself.
It's a very strange experience, being the conspiracy world's favorite supposed conspirator but still seeing what people are trying to explain by turning to conspiracy theories.
Epstein was running a massive sex trafficking ring. Hillary Clinton was not running one out of a pizza parlor.
The CIA experimented with mind control. It did not use radio telescopes and chemtrails to do it.
The government has videos of weird things in the air. It does not have captured alien spacecraft.
Certain people actually did try to steal the 2020 election. Joe Biden was not one of them.
>Covid responses around the world showed that vaccine passports were very much on the cards.
This is strange to me. Of course they were on the cards! We've handled pandemics before. All these supposedly sinister tools have been used in the past. There's no need for cloak-and-dagger scheming when governments have well-tested legal authority to simply mandate vaccination.
Benjamin Franklin objected to “swarthy” german immigrants: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2008/02/swarthy...
Chinese, Italian, Irish, Eastern Europeans, Mexicans, the list just goes on..
There is always external (or externalized in the case of African-Americans) forces trying to dilute the purported “purity” of the hegemony, despite the fact that the country has always been defined by continuous immigration.
It’s just reactionary people desperately yearning for an imaginary past. One of the classic tropes of fascist movements like white nationalism, christian nationalism or the generally sclerotic and reality divorced movement that worships Trump.
Wolf seems to have drifted right only fairly recently - although I'm sure she would say that it's the Overton window around her that moved instead.
That's totally true. Conspiracy theories used to be a left-wing thing and are now a right-wing thing. Klein went from writing conspiracy theories to writing about them, while Wolf stayed course.
I don't think that's true. CIA involvement in South America or Italy, for example, used to be a leftist conspiracy theory; and now it is documented history.
In fact, I'd argue that the Left effectively ran out of conspiracy theories, as most of them were proven true. Once the Berlin Wall came down, a lot of "pro-capitalists" activity became overt and acceptable, often even initiated by leftist governments, and historical actors came out of the wood to describe what really happened - the Cold War was over and winners didn't have to be ashamed of the extreme measures they took to get there.
The only conspiracy left to the left (eh) was basically Echelon and internet surveillance; Snowden confirmed that too, so now there is nothing.
Is it an autobiography?
Either the ideas are sound, or they’re not. Which ideas do you think are unsound, and why? No hiding behind “someone could argue,” or “but she claims x but does y.”
Which ideas of Klein’s do you see as intending to affect which status quos, and why is it notable that they in themselves have not impacted them? Charles Babbage never lived to see his machine built. Does that make the endeavor less meaningful?
Note: I have read “No Logo” and “The Shock Doctrine.” I have not assessed their impact on any particular status quo. I am not claiming that they have. I am challenging the misdirection of your comment in an attempt to understand what you meant by what you wrote.
That's a pre-punk attitude, there. Ideas on their own do nothing, it's actions that produce change. Klein talks a good game but then publishes with the biggest conglomerates, does the promotion tours, etc etc; effectively, she sells out like everyone else. Does this make her work less meaningful? Yes, it weakens it significantly; claiming things like "capitalism is incompatible with controlling climate change" and "brands are bad for society" and then happily partaking in that same capitalism and branding, is incoherent to say the least. And sure enough, it does little except justifying her profile in the system.
By the standards you set, no idea which goes against the status quo can legitimate unless that status quo is so weak it can be totally circumvented: The biological corollary would be saying vaccines don’t work because they didn’t prevent every instance of the disease they were intended to prevent.
How many babies must we throw out with the bath water before we’re permitted to discuss the merits of the ideas themselves?
The misquote Sorkin, this the reason the Left in the United States looses so goddamn always.
You don't have to be a maximalist to express ideas, but if you express maximalist ideas (and Klein does), then it's only reasonable to expect you to be coherent. Otherwise you're just playing a part, for the benefit of a system that requires token opposition.
To be fair, she occasionally tried to be coherent - supporting Chavez in Venezuela, for example. That didn't work that well either.
Any criticism, to be useful, must be consist of two parts: (1) An assertion of fault and (2) a suggestion of remedy. You haven’t even provided (1), not really, but let’s pretend for a moment you have. What is your remedy for Klein’s faulty expression of anti capitalism? Printing ‘zines from paper made from the pressed dryer lint of guerrilla laundromats? How far does your purity test go before it itself becomes just an excuse to refuse to discuss the ideas themselves?
Or shall we just admit that your position is merely nihilism? If that is the case, let us state it out right; this, at least, dispenses with pretense of ideology.
If it's Klein, you're fine.
If it's Wolf, woof.