Free Republic

Naomi Klein is by all accounts a wonderful person – warm, low-key, modest, committed and enormously hard-working. She also looks terrific in a crisp white shirt, which is what she wore for a recent photo shoot for Vogue. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Vogue is interested in fashionable intellectuals, and right now there’s no intellectual more fashionable than Ms. Klein. She told Vogue that her new book, This Changes Everything, is “a book about climate change for people who don’t read books about climate change.”

THE battle to save the world is an arduous and paradoxical one. Today's most visible scourge of globalisation and brands is herself an inexhaustible globetrotting brand: a 32-year-old Canadian journalist, armed with little more than a portable computer, a plane ticket and Internet access. Naomi Klein is the pre-eminent figure (she would deplore the term “leader”) in a worldwide protest movement against companies, free trade and global integration—in effect, against capitalism—that has no name or organisation, but is the most vigorous expression of leftist sentiment since the 1960s. The movement burst on to the scene in Seattle in December 1999,...

In a development that may portend extended disruptions, veteran street organizer Lisa Fithian, previously dubbed “Professor Occupy,” recently trained Ferguson protesters how to “simulate chaos.” Fithian is a legendary organizer who once announced she seeks to “create crisis, because crisis is that edge where change is possible.” She was one of the luminaries of the Occupy Wall Street movement and was a lead organizer in the infamous 1999 Seattle riots against the World Trade Organization that descended into violence. The 1999 WTO event in Seattle devolved into widespread rioting in which more than 40,000 protesters, some using violent tactics, descended...