Naomi Klein

Naomi Klein was born in Montreal in 1970 to American parents who had relocated to Canada as conscientious objectors during the Vietnam War. She grew up in a politically engaged household and studied at the University of Toronto, where she edited the student newspaper. Her early journalism focused on campus politics and consumer culture, threads she wove together in her landmark 1999 debut, No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies. That book, published just before the Seattle WTO protests, became something like a manual for the antiglobalization movement, dissecting how multinational corporations had colonized public space, labor, and identity through branding.

Her 2007 book The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism marked a significant expansion of her analytical scope. Drawing on Milton Friedman's Chicago School, CIA-backed coups, and the post-Katrina privatization of New Orleans schools, Klein argued that neoliberal economic reforms had consistently been imposed during moments of collective trauma and disorientation — when populations were too shocked to resist. The book was translated into dozens of languages and established her as one of the most widely read left critics of capitalism in the English-speaking world.

This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate (2014) brought her analysis to the climate crisis. Klein argued that the same deregulatory ideology blocking climate action had created the crisis, and that meaningful response required confronting capitalism directly rather than relying on market mechanisms or carbon trading. She became a prominent voice in the climate justice movement, helping found the Leap Manifesto in Canada and later advising the Green New Deal coalition in the United States. Her 2019 collection On Fire: The (Burning) Case for a Green New Deal assembled her climate journalism alongside a new introduction laying out a transformational program.

Her 2023 book Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World explored political disorientation in the age of social media, conspiracy theory, and her own strange public confusion with Naomi Wolf. It used that personal experience as a lens for examining how the left and right mirror each other in distorted ways, and how neoliberal atomization had left populations vulnerable to authoritarian doppelgangers of genuine grievance politics. Klein teaches at the University of British Columbia and remains an active journalist, public speaker, and organizer.