Aletho News

Naomi Klein: Gatekeeper Extraordinaire

Veteran journalist lines up alongside the mainstream, attacking “conspiracy theorists” and “covid denialism”.

By Cat Maguire & Colleen Maguire | OffGuardian | December 11, 2020

With a title like The Great Reset Conspiracy Smoothie, it appears Naomi Klein is trying too hard to recapture her prowess at defining a meme. Her buzz-concept, “Shock Doctrine,” is spot-on and rightfully successful. But her “Screen New Deal” about Silicon Valley technocrats fizzled.

And now she puts forth “Conspiracy Smoothie,” declaring the multitudinous “conspiracies” out there are just one big bizarro mashup, an “inchoate meta-scream.” The word “smoothie” defeats her purpose, though, because smoothies are healthy, yet she wants to brand alternative thinkers as sinister and unhealthy. Ha! This feckless meme won’t catch on with anybody.

To her credit, Klein offers a very good history and analysis of The Great Reset, as long as she stays within the precincts of critiquing Empire, such as:

… [T]he Great Reset is not a serious effort to actually solve the crises it describes. On the contrary, it is an attempt to create a plausible impression that the huge winners in this system are on the verge of voluntarily setting greed aside to get serious about solving the raging crises that are radically destabilizing our world.

But once she gets near taboo topics, Naomi goes batshit mainstream. Unlike alt “researchers” (her raised-eyebrow quotes), these subjects are “inchoate” for her because, like NIST who doesn’t know there were explosives on 9/11, she hasn’t gone looking. She even admits, “I’ve been doing my best to ignore it [“conspiracies”] for months.”

Rather than go off-reservation and investigate for herself, like a typical conspiracy denier, everything under the hood is automatically deemed “off-the-wall.” Alison McDowall will surely skewer Klein again as seen during this prickly exchange they had about The Great Reset. (See video at 13:25 to 17:00)

Klein’s most damning accusation is her reference to “truly dangerous anti-vaccination fantasies and outright coronavirus denialism.” Is Klein really this naive about the objectives and tactics of the Medical Industrial Complex?

Her anti-vaxx slur is a defamation against vaccine-activists, most of whom actually advocate for safe and effective vaccines — the existence of which, however, are questionable. Vaccine manufacturers have no incentive to make a safe product because they were granted legal immunity in 1986 by Congress.

Proof there exists a serious safety deficit in vaccines is the current running tab of $4.2 billion awarded to victims and their families in “Vaccine Court” from vaccine deaths and injuries.

Klein’s political bifurcation of conspiracy theories telegraphs an utter misreading of allies and issues:

And yet search for the term “global reset” and you will be bombarded with breathless “exposés” of a secret globalist cabal, headed by Schwab and Bill Gates, that is using the state of shock created by the coronavirus (which is probably itself a “hoax”) to turn the world into a high-tech dictatorship that will take away your freedom forever: a green/socialist/Venezuela/Soros/forced vaccine dictatorship if the Reset exposé is coming from the far right, and a Big Pharma/GMO/biometric implants/5G/robot dog/forced vaccine dictatorship if the exposé hails from the far left.

After channeling Cass Sunstein in the above paragraph, she asks readers if they are confused. No, Naomi, you are the one who is confused. You are the one who cannot recognize that most of these issues are not only scientifically legitimate, but many are important to and shared by global activists and professionals across the political spectrum. You are the one who is out of touch for not recognizing how and why these issues unite many diverse communities. Unlike the binary tribalism you attribute to the above players, their unity is transpartisan.

In Klein’s inventory of 2020 shock doctrines, it’s all the fault of the right side of the aisle. There is not an ounce of finger-pointing, for example, that the extreme failures of the lockdowns are almost wholly the result of diktats by petty Democratic tyrants (not to mention their over-the-top hypocrisy).

Shockingly, she fails to comment on the source of the epic silencing of anyone who questions Official Narratives. To wit, Big Tech and Big Media censors are fully aligned with Democratic agendas. As for the Left’s political-identity swamp, there is nary a mention of Mao’s Cultural Revolution USA-style that has ravaged our country.

The World According to Naomi is full of plutocrats, but they’re all right-wing. She goes on and on about workers rights and all the populist issues that Democrats traditionally stood for. Didn’t she get the memo that there’s been a tectonic shift? Doesn’t she realize that the entire force of the 1% has arrayed itself with the Democrats, a party that has now disgracefully abandoned what had been their deplorables base for decades.

If Bernie progressives, we-the-people patriots, the Yellow Vests, indigenous peoples, and all the rest of the world’s 99% would just join hands, we could create a powerful transpartisan movement to abort The Great Reset’s dystopian agenda. But this can’t happen by staying within the Democrats’ Big Tent as Klein does, which likewise ultimately aligns her with the Establishment no matter how much she critiques them from her influential, mainstream-left perch.

Invoking an ever-reliable inference to Trump Derangement Syndrome, she writes:

Is it all a plan, another kind of elaborate conspiracy? Nothing so elegant. As Steve Bannon kindly told us, the informational strategy of the Trump era has always been to “flood the zone with shit.” Four years later, we can see what this looks like in practice. It looks like far-left and far-right conspiracists sitting down over a tray of information-shit sandwiches to talk about how the Great Reset is Gates’s plan to use the DNA from our Covid-19 tests to turn the United States into Venezuela.

“It makes no sense,” she concludes. Yep, Naomi, if you don’t investigate beyond ad hominem analysis and if you seemingly strive for a token social-responsibility seat at the Davos table, your current worldview will only ever perceive genuine opposition to The Great Reset as an indigestible smoothie.

Cat McGuire and Colleen McGuire are twin sisters who are activists and writers. Cat lives in New York City where she works with Break The Spell, a public outreach group raising awareness about the Covid plandemic and the Great Reset. Colleen practiced law in New York City for 16 years and now lives in Greece.

December 10, 2020 - Posted by aletho | Progressive Hypocrite, Timeless or most popular | Covid-19