Don't quote Naomi Klein!

I'm only bringing this up because the Democratic Socialism Now page quoted Naomi Klein. Let's just say, I did the work so you don't have to.

If you're going to quote Naomi Klein, you're going to lose all credibility because Klein has negative credibility.

I'm a huge fan of Hanlon's Razor, "Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity." I would love to be able to just call Klein an idiot and call it a day. I find myself unable to be so generous.

Probably her biggest claim to fame is her five hundred page hit job on Milton Friedman, The Shock Doctrine, which she conveniently released shortly after his death.

Her argument was that governments use "shocks" to force through unpopular free market policies.

Of course, this claim is utterly ridiculous. The trend has been the exact opposite. I mean, did government exploit the Covid pandemic to increase or decrease our freedom?

She claims that Milton Friedman's quote, "Only in times of crisis does real change occur." is a sort of smoking gun.

In the full context, all Friedman was saying is that bad policies lead to bad outcomes and that's when people demand change.

If Klein had just been careless and threw that quote in as an aside, that would be forgivable. She based her entire five hundred page hit job off of that quote.

She wasn't careless and she wasn't stupid, she lied and tens of thousands of people bought the lie without an ounce of skepticism.

If your values are so morally bankrupt that you need to lie in order to make them palatable, you need a new set of values.