Kelly Webb

“Every night when I doomscroll, I encounter more people tossing around chilling language about their good genes and their strong immune systems and their “pureblood” and their perfect children as an argument against taking simple actions, like putting on a mask, that would protect people a little less strong and perfect than they imagine themselves to be. Largely unknowingly, they are the inheritors of the barbaric traditions that once sought to rid the world of children like mine. When glowing influencers spew fatphobic bile at people daring to ask them to consider their impacts on others, they are tapping into deep supremacist logics about which lives have value and which lives are disposable. When parents refuse to give their children vaccines that have controlled viruses like measles for generations because they are gripped with the terror of having the kind of child that the Nazis declared unworthy of life, they are feeding into these logics, too.”
― Naomi Klein, Doppelganger: a Trip into the Mirror World

“Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men, my dear. All I understand for sure is that people have a very strong need to explain the world in ways that make them feel better, or safer, or more powerful, or more well liked, or more in control, but not necessarily in ways that are true. Alas, the truth is of very low importance, psychologically speaking. We’re really very silly creatures.”
― Nathan Hill, Wellness

“There is, of course, a difference between a system doing what it was designed to do, no matter the human costs, and secret cabals of nefarious individuals interfering with an otherwise fair and just democracy. That, I have always believed, is one of the core reasons for the left to exist: to provide a structural analysis of wealth and power that brings order and rigor to the prevailing (and correct) sense that society is rigged against the majority, and that important truths are being hidden behind pat political rhetoric. Because we cannot change what we do not understand. And because the system is rigged, and most people are indeed getting screwed—but without a firm understanding of capitalism’s drive to find new profit sources to enclose and extract, many will imagine there is a cabal of uniquely nefarious individuals pulling the strings.”
― Naomi Klein, Doppelganger: a Trip into the Mirror World

“For Roth, the writer, Demjanjuk’s ordinary homelife was no kind of alibi. The frightening thing was precisely that a person can be both that and this—the monstrous killing machine and the caring family man. The doubles coexist; they do not cancel each other out. “The Germans have proved definitively to all the world,” Real Roth observes, “that to maintain two radically divergent personalities, one very nice and one not so nice, is no longer the prerogative of psychopaths only.”
― Naomi Klein, Doppelganger: a Trip into the Mirror World