Terry Newman: Naomi Klein: From No Logos to Nazis

Klein apologized for praising alleged rapist, but left out his Nazi tattoo

Last Tuesday, Canadian author, documentarian and activist Naomi Klein admitted on Bluesky that she “truly f—ked up” for not doing her “due diligence” on Graham Platner, who recently won the Democratic U.S. Senate nomination in Maine, before she praised him as an “extraordinary political communicator” in March. Klein’s apology followed last Monday’s publication of Politico’s interview with Jenny Racicot, a 41-year-old woman who accused Platner of forcing her to have sex with him five years ago, after she objected. But last Monday wasn’t the first time Platner’s sexual impropriety made the news.

Back in May, Platner’s wife informed his campaign that he had sent sexually explicit texts to numerous women. Despite this, she posted a video excusing her husband’s actions, saying, “being newly married is hard.” In her post on last Tuesday, Klein admitted that, “Enough was out there at the time,” and that she “should have been more cautious,” while apologizing to women “who came forward only to be disbelieved and smeared.”

This mistake, she wrote, “gutted” her. What Klein failed to mention was that months before she praised Planter, he admitted on a podcast that he had a Nazi SS emblem tattooed on his chest. But she qualified her feigned displeasure by saying: “He is surging and I think it’s worth understanding what he’s doing right.”

Klein rose to fame in the late 1990s after publishing her first book, No Logo, a critique of the brand strategies of large corporations like Nike and Disney, whose marketing campaigns sold lifestyles and identities that she believed were turning people into passive consumers. In the book, Klein criticizes Nike for opening factories in foreign countries in order to avoid unions, take advantage of vulnerable workforces and increase profits, blaming the rise of temporary and low-paid McJob’s on competition among corporations for cheap labour. This was Klein’s more innocent, well-meaning, anti-capitalist, anti-corporate, anti-globalist and pro-labour period.

Klein’s activism, which began with spunky culture jamming — rewriting corporate ads in order to critique companies — has grown increasingly hopeless and dark. It includes climate alarmism, austerity activism and her upcoming co-authored book, “End Times Fascism.” Like Lewis, Klein is also a vocal anti-Zionist and suggested in an interview with Democracy Now last year that Israel weaponized October 7 trauma to justify “genocide” in Gaza.

National Post