The Wrong Kind of Conspiracy Theorist
Naomi Klein's real message on RFK Jr.? Suspicion and speculation are fine when they're in the service of the establishment.
“I think it is high time that we scrap this word ‘anti-vax’, as it’s nothing more than a term used with the intent of intimidation and character defamation.” - Jannah Van der Pol, MD, quoted in The British Medical Journal, June 5, 2023
What is a conspiracy theory? Is it when you accuse a US president of being a Russian asset? Is it when you accuse an active-duty US Army officer of same? Is it when you portray a pro-choice, pro-China tech magnate as a far-right white supremacist? Or make the same claim about a trio of top medical professors, even though two of them are clearly South Asian, and at least one of them is a social democrat?
Above: The Columbia Journalism Review flatly states that an “alliance between Trump and Russia” was “an unsubstantiated conspiracy theory” promoted by the Clinton team, in chapter one of the “The Press Versus The President” series.
The esteemed public intellectual Naomi Klein is a celebrated expert on “conspiracy culture,” but she doesn’t seem to think any of those theories qualify. Although she helps to edit progressive publications where such ideas are regularly entertained, she’s never criticized any of them, and it’s safe to say they won’t be discussed much in her upcoming book Doppelganger, which denounces conspiricism at length.
Here's Klein’s idea of a wingnut batshit theory: the centralization of global power in a context of growing inequality is leading to that power being exercised over regulatory agencies, international bodies, and academic departments in ways that are deeply deceptive.
That is the premise of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in his best-selling book The Real Anthony Fauci, his past work for Children’s Health Defense, and his current presidential campaign. Klein wrote a 3,500 word screed denouncing Kennedy for The Guardian, a publication notorious in left-populist circles for framing Julian Assange as a Trump operative. Klein seems intent on deploying a similar disinformation campaign on Kennedy; before we’re a third of the way in, we’re treated to a lurid section linking RFK to QAnon, a movement he’s never mentioned in his life.
Miriam-Webster defines conspiracy theory as that which “explains an event or set of circumstances as the result of a secret plot by usually powerful conspirators.” * Recent positions of Naomi Klein that meet this criteria include:
That the Democratic Party secretly influenced “the media and culture industries” to downplay the dangers of climate change during the Obama era (On Fire, pg. 76).
That Barack Obama and the Filipino government conspired to remove anti-business climate negotiators from the Paris summit to deliver a plan so conservative it was basically “everything the Bush administration wanted.”
That the 1989 Montreal spree-shooting was not just conceived by a lone madman, as many experts have said, but was generated by a discreet cultural network of far-right misogynists.
That “an elite minority has a stranglehold over our economy, our political process, and most of our major media outlets.”
Above: Naomi Klein is so fond of this passage from her book This Changes Everything that she quotes herself in The Intercept
“An elite minority has a stranglehold” over our economy and major media outlets? I won’t claim that Klein, Jewish herself, is being antisemitic here. I prefer not to jump to conclusions. But it is one of the oldest dog whistles in the book. One that led to the Holocaust.
Few, if any, experts in the world endorse these views. And even many of Klein’s fellow progressives see conspiricism lurking in the pages of her popular book The Shock Doctrine. Joseph Stiglitz called her "overdramatic and unconvincing" and “not an academic" in her analysis, while ex-UN official Shashi Tharoor wrote that Klein "is too ready to see conspiracies where others might discern little more than the all-too-human pattern of chaos and confusion…” *
Looking at this pattern, it’s clear that Naomi Klein, like many of today’s high-status academics, has a policy of “radical skepticism for me, but not for thee.” Her problem is not that RFK is a conspiracy theorist, just that he’s the wrong kind.
*Some of the research for this post comes from “Naomi Klein, Conspiracy Theorist” by Lorenzo Raymond at WrongKindOfGreen.org