In order to maintain any sense of ethical integrity, I have to issue an apology to Naomi Klein.
I've been lambasting her since the publication of her book, The Shock Doctrine. I said that she's wrong, a liar, and an awful human being.
She's still a liar and an awful human being. I'm not apologizing for that.
She is, however, not entirely wrong about the shock doctrine.
Her charge was that people exploit - even create crisis in order to influence change to unpopular policies.
What she got wrong was that it was libertarians like Milton Friedman who exploited shocks to bolster free market economic policies.
There's no evidence of that whatsoever.
Here it is though, the people who are on the left of the left are standing out here, all pink and naked, almost proud that they're exploiting a shock in order to advance political agenda.
"We’re not going back to normal, because normal wasn’t good enough” said a senior advisor of Ayanna Pressley's.
For good people, the pandemic is something that we want to put behind us. For some good people, we want to put our foot on the gas as hard as we can to get out of it; for others, we wanna tap the gas peddle lest we blow past the exit.
For others, the pandemic is the excuse that they've been looking for. It's finally the opportunity to scare people into completely giving up capitalism, free speech, the right to go out and possibly have relationships unless the state approves it. All the while, the worshippers of the pandemic get to masturbate to their feelings of superiority and their sudden improvement in status.
Namely, I'm sorry Naomi. You were right. The shock doctrine is real. Only, it's people on your political side who are exploiting it, not mine.