Bunkers Won't Save the Billionaires
2026-09-26 09:55:00 • 1:01:59
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It's a fascism that is sort of embracing and accelerating
the idea that it's all going down
and is focused on the in-group surviving being bunkered.
So it's really a war over who's gonna survive the future.
I like the bunker mentality a lot.
I think it explains a lot of I believe
that betting against Earth, against all of life,
is a uniquely treasonous act.
Their eagerness to escape this world,
to escape this realm is something we really need to look at.
End times fascism, it seems to me like it's survival
of the fittest, like politics sort of take
into the political extreme.
We have developed something that we call the Stephen Miller rule,
which is if you wouldn't want something to end up
in the hands of Stephen Miller, then it should not exist.
Protect yourself, protect your kids,
protect your family, your tribe, survive.
You know, it's obviously an incredibly powerful human instinct.
It is not inherently evil.
We're not saying that it's wrong to prep,
but the response has to be at getting
at the root causes of the crisis
and also coming up with credible plans
for how we take care of everyone during a crisis, right?
How we prep together.
We are not built to handle crises of this scale
all by ourselves with our phones.
The first time Barack Obama ever mentioned Donald Trump
in a speech was the first big one I wrote with him,
2005 commencement at Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois.
He wanted to frame America's history
as a choice between two competing stories,
one where we act like we're all in this together
and one where it's everyone for themselves.
Obama called the latter social Darwinism,
which he said is, quote,
It's especially tempting because each of us believes
we will always be the winner in life's lottery,
that we're the ones who will be the next Donald Trump,
or at least we won't be the Trump who Donald Trump says,
you're fired.
I've been thinking about how these competing stories
have evolved over the last two decades,
especially as we begin a debate next year
about where America goes after Trump.
When Obama gave that speech,
there was still hope that globalization and technology
would make the world feel smaller.
The greater connection would reveal our dependence
on one another and lead to more cooperation
on problems that none of us could solve alone.
Instead, we've lived through endless wars,
a financial crisis, a pandemic,
climate disasters, mass migration,
and now the prospect of another technological upheaval,
all of which have definitely made the world feel smaller,
but also more unstable, uncontrollable, dangerous.
And when people feel threatened,
the impulse to widen our circle of concern
competes with a much older instinct,
protect what's yours.
Look out for yourself.
Take care of your own.
That instinct is central to the story told by leaders
in places as far flung as Putin's Russia,
Modi's India, Netanyahu's Israel,
and of course here in Trump's America,
where perhaps its clearest articulation
has come from the president's potential successor,
JD Vance.
When he was asked last year about the government's
immigration crackdown,
the vice president invoked a Christian concept
known as Ordo Amoris,
which he said establishes a hierarchy of obligations.
You love your family and then you love your neighbor
and then you love your community
and then you love your fellow citizens in your own country
and then after that you can focus
and prioritize the rest of the world.
Vance's answer prompted a response from Pope Francis,
who just months before his death,
made it clear that he wasn't on the same page
as the US government's highest ranking Catholic.
Quote, love is not a concentric expansion of interest
that little by little extend to other persons and groups.
The true Ordo Amoris that must be promoted
is that of the good Samaritan.
In that parable, a traveler is robbed,
beaten and left for dead.
Members of his own religious community pass him by.
The person who finally stops to help is a stranger,
an outsider from a group he'd been taught not to trust.
Not surprisingly, I'm with the Pope on this one.
But I do think Vance is appealing to something real.
I don't know anyone who doesn't believe
that we have special obligations to the people closest to us.
I would do things for my kids that I wouldn't do for a stranger.
I assume you would too for your family.
The hard question isn't whether those obligations exist?
It's what happens when they collide
with what we owe everyone else.
Which brings me to the incredible essay
that the journalist Nicole Hannah Jones published last week.
Nicole and her husband made a choice many years ago
to send their daughter to a high poverty,
mostly black public school in New York City,
the kind of school wealthier families
with options generally avoid.
They made that choice because they believed
if families like theirs always escaped
segregated, struggling schools,
those schools would never improve.
But their decision came with a cost for Nicole's daughter
who confronted her mother years later.
You knew my school wasn't as good.
You could have sent me somewhere better.
Why didn't you?
Which led Nicole to admit the hardest thing?
That even though all the children in her daughter's school
deserve better, her daughter was hers and she had failed her.
And even though her daughter finally got to choose
a better, wealthier high school,
the piece ends with a brutal truth
that still hasn't changed.
If every family with the means to do so
rescues their children from failing public schools,
other children will suffer, countless other children
who committed no sin other than being born poor in America.
Politics is what we choose to do about that truth.
One story says, sorry, there just isn't enough for everyone.
Enough schools, enough money, enough land,
enough security, which means we can't all win,
which means some people have to lose.
The strong take what they can in the week's suffer
what they must, or to quote Stephen Miller's modern take
on the ancient Greeks.
We live in a world that is governed by strength,
that is governed by force, that is governed by power.
In their new book End Times Fascism, Naomi Klein
and Astrotailer use the image of a bunker to literally
and figuratively describe the survival of the fittest
mentality among the tech and mega elite.
Underground compounds on private islands,
rockets to escape the planet, drones on top of the White House
and a fortress underneath, bigger fences outside,
bigger walls on the border, more land to control,
more resources to dominate, more wealth to insulate you
from whatever comes next.
The problem with the bunker though,
is that the world will eventually find its way in.
None of us, not even the billionaires,
will ever be able to fully escape the consequences
of living in a society together.
The safety of our neighborhoods, the health of our families,
the food we eat, the technology we can't live without,
the stability we take for granted.
All of this depends at some level on other people.
And if enough of those people become sick or poor or desperate,
it all starts to unravel.
The hospital can't take you.
Crops aren't harvested.
Police don't show up.
The power doesn't come back on.
None of this means that the instinct to protect ourselves
and take care of our families is wrong.
What's wrong is a politics that exploits that instinct
by telling us that the only way to keep our own family safe
is to care less about everybody else's.
The lie told by Trump and Vance and the New Right
is that we have to settle for a world
where too many are fighting over too little.
Where loving our own children requires us to accept a system
that treats other people's children as disposable.
But a better politics, a more hopeful politics,
shouldn't ask us to choose between taking care of our own
and caring about everyone else.
It should tell a story about a society
where those obligations point in the same direction.
Where the best way to protect the people we love
is to build a world that works for people beyond our walls.
My guess this week is Naomi Klein,
who stopped by the studio to discuss the book she wrote
with Astra Taylor that I just mentioned.
End times fascism and the fight for the living world.
Naomi is an award-winning journalist
and the best-selling author of No Logo, The Shock Doctrine,
and Doppler Ganger, which she first came on the show
to discuss a few years ago.
In this conversation, I wanted to go deeper
on the argument she and Astra are making in their new book,
what they mean by end times fascism,
why they see connections between the religious right,
the tech elite, and nationalist movements around the world,
and where that framework gets more complicated,
especially when it comes to the very human instinct
to protect our own.
Most of all, I wanted to talk about what an alternative
politics could look like that actually makes people
feel safer, less trapped in zero-sum thinking,
and more invested in a future we have to share.
Here's Naomi Klein.
!
!
!
Naomi Klein, welcome back to the show!
Thank you, it's great to meet you in person.
I was going to say it, great to have you in studio.
To be offline.
To be offline, here we are.
Okay, so you wrote this wonderful book with Astra Taylor.
Yes.
It's called End Times Fascism.
Yes, that's not wonderful.
What is End Times Fascism?
Then the book comes out of an attempt to understand
what this coalition is that brought Trump to power
and how it's different from the first Trump administration.
I wrote a book about his first term,
didn't call him a fascist, didn't see them as being
as directly engaged with notions of collapse.
So what we mean by End Times Fascism
is all the things we understand about fascism,
the in groups, the expelling of the out groups,
the supremacist thought, the violence, all of that.
But unlike 20th century fascism,
which had a vision of the future,
this is a fascism that is responding
to our era of planetary scale crises,
pandemics and climate change and a very interconnected
global economy.
And so it's a fascism that is sort of embracing
and accelerating the idea that it's all going down
and is focused on the in group surviving
and being bunkered.
So it's really a war over who's going to survive the future.
You mentioned at one point, this is a nihilistic project.
Can nihilism and fascism coexist?
I accept.
Well, yeah.
Because I go back and forth on this
and I have with Trump for a long time,
which is, is this an authoritarian movement
where there is a plan and there is a vision
and you're trying to activate people?
Or is this, and I think this goes
for some of the tech billionaires as well,
or is this like, hey, I'm going to take whatever I can get
and who cares?
And I'm going to deepen cynicism among the electorate
and everyone's for themselves and that's it.
Yeah.
So there are these extended academic debates
about what is the difference between authoritarianism,
like just somebody who doesn't believe in democracy
and wants to be a dictator and will use violence
and torture and like the tools, the tools of authoritarianism.
But like, what's the difference between that and fascism?
And the generally, they agreed upon differences,
whether or not there is a mass base,
whether or not there is a popular base.
And Trumpism has a mass base.
I mean, that's why they were able to win an election.
But it's precarious and the relationship between Trump
and his mass base as the polls show is weakening
because of the force, because of the nihilism, right?
And the reason why Astro and I decided
to write the book was not to sort of marvel
at the strength of this coalition,
but precisely because we understood that it was
it fused together with dental floss and string
and that it could actually be broken apart pretty easily
with the right kind of opposition.
And this relates to the last conversation we had
when I published doppelganger based on, as you know,
listening to hundreds of hours of Steve Bennett
and knowing, I think, as few people,
like on my side of the political spectrum,
no, just how much Trump's base hates big tech.
And so the decision to go all in with Silicon Valley on AI
was a huge betrayal.
It's not what he ran on.
He barely mentioned AI in the campaign trail.
He came to it late and then the speed of the data center
rolled out and what they're selling,
like this idea of transhumanism.
I mean, Steve Bennett had a transhumanism
correspondent during COVID, right?
Just to scare his listeners and viewers
with what Silicon Valley planned.
So yeah, I think they're really vulnerable
and the mass part of this, which is kind of
what makes it fascism is something that can
and should be broken away from him.
Just to take us back, when you guys wrote this,
what were you hoping to change about how people currently
view the movement that's in power right now?
Which is thankfully, at least for now, quite unpopular.
Trump's unpopular, the tech billionaires
who stood behind him at the inauguration
are now some of the most loath people in the country,
if not the world.
And you're saying this isn't just because our book came out last.
That's right.
You guys did it.
That's the impact is quick.
Mission accomplished.
So yeah, so like they're already unpopular,
but if someone's reading this who doesn't like Trump
or doesn't like these elites, like what are you hoping
that they think?
What do you want them to take away from this?
Yeah.
I mean, first of all, when we decided to write the book,
the coalition was stronger, but we did believe
that it was weak.
That in particular, the decision to fuse with Silicon Valley
was going to make Trump very vulnerable.
And we were seeing the splits.
A lot of what is written about fascism
is sort of about one to one comparison
with Hitler and Mussolini.
It's like, here's the checklist.
Does it match?
If enough, if there's enough of a match,
we say it's fascism.
And that's not how I understand fascism.
I understand fascism as a throughline in our history.
Mussolini didn't invent it.
Hitler learned a lot from studying the Jim Crow South,
anti-colonial leaders and scholars in the 1930s
were saying, OK, this thing that you're all saying
is a rupture is actually a homecoming of colonialism,
of imperialism.
So this is, I teach a course on this subject
called the Long Archer Fascism.
So fascism has a prehistory, and it also
changed after the end of the Second World War.
There's fascism in Latin America in the 70s
under dictatorships like Pinochet.
So what I wanted people to understand
is how fascism is changing in our era of crisis,
of planetary scale crises.
Hitler and Mussolini didn't know a world with nukes.
They died in 45 before the Trinity tests.
So the fact that the fascists today aren't offering
a future to their base is a huge vulnerability.
Like Mussolini offered his base a chance
to take a holiday on the train at reduced rates.
We were not nostalgic about ye oldy fascism.
But the point is that it had real benefits for the in-group,
including you could get a nice piece of farmland stolen
from the Slavs, and you could get a nice house stolen
from the Jews.
There were rewards.
And Trump is offering satism.
And this is very, he's offering memes.
And this is not what people thought they were going to get.
I mean, they thought they were going to get affordability
addressed.
They thought that the mass deportations
was going to reduce the cost of living and create jobs.
And so the decision to go all in on a technology
that defines success as the point at which they replace
most economically productive activities
is a bit of a broken promise.
So we wanted to heighten the contradictions
as we say on the left.
But also, I think that understanding this and mapping this,
it should be helpful for all of us who
are fighting this form of fascism, which
is a global project.
It's not just in the United States.
And so that was one goal.
Another goal is, if I can be honest with you,
I mean, one of the things that Astro and I say,
is, however much you hate them, you don't hate them enough.
Because what we are saying is that they are accelerationists.
And so we map the religious end timers who literally
believed, OK, expand the war in Gaza, get more countries involved.
Iran, let's go.
This is go time.
The Messiah is coming.
Or he's coming back, depending on whether you're a Christian.
It's a settler movement.
Yeah.
So you've got Messianic Jews running
large parts of the Israeli government right now.
These are not marginal figures that margins have moved
to the center.
And they want to destroy Al-Aksa.
They want to build the third temple.
They are accelerationists.
They believe all of this will create the conditions for the Messiah's arrival.
We disagree.
But we do believe they can create Armageddon.
We do believe that they can start World War III.
And then you have the Christian Zionists like Mike Huckabee and Mike Johnson.
Who went on a pilgrimage to see the spotless red heifers
at the settlement in the West Bank?
To just check them out, make sure.
I mean, there's a bit of a deep cut.
But the red heifers that this is part of the prophecy of what
needs to happen before the third temple can be rebuilt.
There have to be spotless red cows.
There is a rancher in Texas who claims to have found them.
They sent them to Ben Gorion.
They were greeted.
They were brought to the West Bank.
All of this is stuff that we would love to not have to know about, right?
Except for that Mike Huckabee and Mike Johnson
went to visit the red heifers just to see if everything was going according to plan, right?
So that's the religious end time or piece.
We'd love to ignore them.
Can't.
The template of that story is everything bad is good.
Every plague, floods, fires.
That means we are getting closer to the great battle.
And the chosen few are going to ascend to a golden city in the sky.
The tech end timers have another vision, but it bears some resemblance to a story, right?
I mean, you know, and you've been covering the wild things that they say about what they're
building with AGI, right?
With super intelligence as Trump now calls.
Has renamed it.
Yes, we have renamed it officially.
But it's a quasi religious story.
I mean, Musk talks about summoning a digital god, a digital demon.
They burn effigies and open AI to try not to bring a bad digital god.
So they and the dream is a dream of total dematerialization, right?
Like you want to ascend into the digital sphere.
So that was a weird.
I'm learning our consciousness.
Yeah, yeah.
Once again, I would love for this not to matter.
It just to be like a quirky little cult and not like the richest people dominating the
top stocks that are like holding up the entire global economy, right?
Right.
Right.
But that is where we are.
So we believe, I believe that betting on against earth against all of life is a uniquely
treasonous act, not treasonous to a flag or a country.
Not to like what humans are supposed to do, which is protect and enhance life.
And their eagerness to escape this world, to escape this realm is something we really
need to look at and wrap our minds around and let it fuel us in what, you know, all of
our work in taking them on.
So that's why we say like really, you know, think about the places and people you love
the most and realize that they want their.
They're happy for it all to burn and let that, let that animate the work that you do in
the midterm elections.
I don't know.
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One thing I was wondering is, so you mentioned that what differentiates fascism from say
authoritarianism as fascism has a mass movement.
Do you think that the fact that this movement, Trump's movement has been shown to be more
brittle than we thought still makes it fascism and the fact that he's, you know, and then
you said, what's different about it?
He's not offering anyone anything.
I do wonder that the failure to really activate the citizenry behind some vision, whether
it's a vision of the future or vision, I guess it was a little bit of a vision of the
past.
This seems like so much of the support for Trump, the support for the tech vision of the
world, the support for the religious fundamentalist.
The motivations are varied and they, depending on the person and they change from election
to election and some, for a lot of people, a lot of people who voted for Trump, they
actually don't pay much attention to politics at all and they have much more prosaic concerns
when they go to the polls, which is just like, oh, he seems like he's going to make
the economy better.
So that's that.
Right.
I don't believe that everyone who voted for Trump is an end times fascist or a fascist
of any kind.
I mean, I think that the sort of true believers, and this is the third camp that we talk
about in the book are the ethno-nationalists, right?
So these are the people who really do subscribe to the great replacement theory and who are
treating the nation state as a kind of a bunker in this era of collapse, right?
So if we think about-
I like the bunker mentality a lot, a bunker.
You have a-
I think it explains a lot.
Yeah.
And this was really like what I was trying to understand in the early days of Trump was
like, what is going on with his foreign policy?
Because it is different than the first time around.
He was not threatening to invade Canada where I happened to live.
He was not threatening to Annex Greenland or kidnapping that as well as president and taking
their oil.
And I realized like ascribing like reason and thought to the Trump administration is like
a little bit dicey.
But I do think that there is something identifiable about what they're doing, which is not-
I mean, some people just say, oh, this is colonialism.
This is old school colonialism.
And I think, you know, whenever you grab another country's resources, it's colonialism.
But there is no manifest destiny to it.
There is no idealism to it.
It is just a kind of a supersized hoarding, right?
And so-
And whereas the fascists of the last century were focused on expanding the border, right?
Like you wanted your labours from, you want more territory.
I think what Trump is mainly focused on is stuff.
Like he wants Canada's water.
And you know, that's why I don't actually think it's particularly funny that he's renaming
Great Lakes because I think- I do think he has people around him who do understand that
water is going to be very valuable in this era.
I think he wants critical minerals wherever they are and oil.
And so I think that there is a base.
It is not everyone who voted for Trump by any means.
But around the world, we are seeing a morphing on the hard right.
So here I'm talking about, you know, I think it's clearest in Europe because they are not
climate change deniers.
So whether you're talking about Marine Le Pen, you know, or the Vox Party in Spain, they
recognize that climate change is real.
And their climate policy is fortressing the border.
They're very open that, you know, re-migration as the AFD calls in and as increasingly the
US government calls it, which means mass expulsions of people who are citizens.
And so like purging the out group and fortressing the border and then bringing into the bunker
nation, all that you might need.
So I think that there is a mass base.
And that maybe that's the 30% of people who are sticking with Trump.
I mean, I don't know how many people fit the bill.
But I do think there is a mass that is whether it is explicit, whether it's like conscious
or not.
I think they know that we are in an era of collapse and that they've got to prepare.
I mean, this is another thing I learned from listening to too much Steve Bannon.
Almost all of his ads are for you.
It was like my Patriot supply, right?
And it is very prepper.
And I was really wondering, is he going to start advertising other stuff now that Trump
is president?
Because like in the Biden era, as you know, because I know you listen to his show, right?
In the Biden era, it was all like Biden's taking the economy, get birch gold, like, you
know, and get your ready to eat meals that can last you for like three months and also
like do this special laser target practice and things like that.
So I was interested that well after Trump had been in power for six months, we're still
prepping like for what, right?
So yeah, they always need an enemy.
And they always need, I mean, I do think that part of it is Trump and all these, you know,
this happens when someone's in power, but they now that they have all the power and
now that they run everything.
The only way to keep the story going is to continue to have enemies, whether it's the
invaders, whether it's the Democrats, the communists, that, you know, so they always
have some kind of enemy.
I do, I wonder, as I was reading the book, like, N times fascism, it seems to me like it's
survival of the fittest, like politics sort of taken to the political extreme.
I think that's right.
Like just a very old idea that, and I know you mentioned the quote that shocks me when
I heard it live the first time from Stephen Miller, when he said, you know, these are the
iron laws of nature and that the real world is governed by strength and power and force
and just being the most honest explanation of what they're doing.
Right.
But it does seem like that's, you know, the strong take what they must and the strong
take what they can and the weak suffer what they must.
Yeah.
I mean, you know, someone who's been involved in climate research for a long time in
different kinds of climate movements, many people were predicting that this would happen
if we failed to act in the face of the climate crisis that we would end up with a politics
of the armed lifeboat, right?
That it would, and that once you pass the point where you can deny the reality that the
climate is changing, that entire cities are burning, you know, we're here in LA this
past summer in Europe, the Danube dried up, you know, they had to shut down nuclear power
plants because they couldn't cool them.
There were the largest evacuations since the Second World War in France because of the
fires, right?
So you can't deny that this is, you know, that we are in a time of collapse, but after
you can't deny the reality of climate change, what you can deny is the humanity of your
fellow humans.
Like you can embrace supremacist thought because that is what will allow you to rationalize
is, you know, allowing thousands of people to drown in the Mediterranean off your beaches.
So this was predicted.
It's coming to happen.
I mean, honestly, I don't care if you call it fascism or not.
I mean, it's supremacist thought, it's violence without limit.
I mean, this is what I think we do need to understand about people like Steven Miller
and Marco Rubio who we don't pay enough attention to, I think, is that they are inspired
by the dictators of Latin America, I mean, particularly Rubio.
They have t-shirts that say free helicopter rides for leftists and Pinochet did nothing
wrong.
They will take this as far as they are able to take it, which is why it matters so much
when, you know, Minneapolis rises up and just learns from history and says, you know,
they're not coming for our neighbors and we are going to defend each other and sends
a very clear message.
And it does mess up the base.
Like I think that that really screwed up their narrative and they lost a lot of people.
So it's supremacy.
That's when you say like survival of the fittest.
I mean, this is social Darwinism and it's racism.
It's, you know, it's the ideology that said, well, yeah, indigenous people are just going
to die off because their genes aren't as strong and this is God's will.
Yeah.
And one of the reasons that I'm digging in on this is because I kind of want to talk about
like what the rest of us do and why the rest of us sort of haven't been able to get it
together.
We're having this conversation during UN General Assembly Week.
The agenda is almost, you know, perfect for your book.
It's climate change, refugees, development, pandemics.
All problems, no country can solve by itself.
And by the way, all three groups that we're calling the N Times fascist coalition, one
of the, one of the things they agree on is that they want to eliminate the UN.
Right.
And well, and it's like a symbol of the fact that the institutions that we have created
since World War II to deal with all these shared problems are seem at least weaker and
are certainly less trusted than they've been in a long time.
What do you make of that contradiction that as the need for cooperation, not just within
nations, but between nations, has never been greater.
And the problems have never been larger.
The institutions we've created for cooperation and diplomacy have never been weaker and less
trusted.
Yeah.
And the US has played a terrible role in weakening these institutions and, you know, abusing
the veto power and really from the start, the UN was rigged to not live up to its basic
premise, which was this was a space where every country had a vote and that decision decisions
would be made democratically.
And, you know, one of the very first resolutions at the United Nations was resolving to eliminate
nuclear weapons based on the idea that we can't actually have a peaceful, fair world
and co-exist with weapons of annihilation.
And you know, that's why at the end of the book, we call for a new disarmament movement.
Because, you know, a lot of people have said, like, how is it possible that like the worst
people in the world have gotten their hands on the most powerful tools and weapons, which
is something I think we all think about?
And one response to that could be like, let's get the good guys in charge again, you know,
and relax, right?
We need our tortured, you know, open-himer characters who feel really conflicted about
nuclear weapons and, you know, quote, Sanskrit and things like that.
Like, you know, and then we can feel like our fates are in good hands.
And we have developed something that we, as a counter argument, which we call the Stephen
Miller rule, which is if you, if you wouldn't want something to end up in the hands of Stephen
Miller, then it should not exist.
Because eventually those powerful tools and those just deplorable people agree just people,
am I allowed to say deplorable?
Yes, you can.
Yeah, we're doing it.
We'll, like, they exert a magnetic pull on one another and they will eventually find
one another, whether it is the bombs or the tech or the tech, you know, the AI meeting
the bombs, which is something we're all very worried about.
And we also believe that the wealth itself has become deranging to our elites, that we
have to disarm the wealth bombs.
So yeah, the Stephen Miller rule.
I mean, it's interesting because I think, as, and this has happened throughout history,
but especially now, as the threats that we all face become more cute, you know, the
instinct that the trumps and millers and all of them over the world are appealing to,
it's not an exotic instinct, right?
It's protect yourself, protect your kids, protect your family, your tribe, survive.
And you know, it's obviously an incredibly powerful human instinct.
It is not inherently evil, but obviously can certainly go to bad places.
How do you think about appealing to people who are afraid, who believe that they and their
family should be protected and that they want to keep their family safe?
But are at least open to another appeal that is not from the movement that Trump has
lead it?
Yeah, it's a great question.
I hope we go to an ad for Simply Safe Security.
I'm not sure if you lose advertisers.
Believe me, we make fun of it all the time.
One of the things that we stress in the book is that we are, you know, we're not saying
that it's wrong to prep, that it's wrong to think about how we care for each other in
times of real crises.
And fascism always surges during times of real crises.
And it tries to resolve those crises or actually like protect the system from threat
by pivoting all of the public anger and insecurity towards scapegoats, right?
That's the fascist movement.
But the response from the left can't just be, oh, they're overreacting, things are fine.
No, it has to be getting at the root causes of the crisis and also coming up with credible
plans for how we take care of everyone during a crisis, right?
How we prep together.
And I'm seeing more and more of this happening, like, this interesting like folks in Minneapolis
who set up those incredible signal groups, right, where you know everybody on your block
and you know who needs help and who needs their laundry done and who needs to make sure
their kit gets to school.
And that like really deep organizing and mutual aid.
One of the things that we heard from organizers in Minneapolis is that they know that those
networks are going to be incredibly useful the next time there's a climate disaster
because they will know who has mobility challenges.
They will know who's living alone, right?
And so that spirit of, okay, the shocks are coming, but that doesn't mean we actually
have to act like monsters.
In fact, we can help each other, which humans have a beautiful tendency to do.
Like this is the thing, you know, you think about Hurricane Helene and people kayaking to
their neighbors homes and like saving them and going back for their dogs, you know, that's
what actually a lot of people do during disasters.
They save strangers, they save people they don't know.
They are so heroic, right?
So we have to admit that we are, we face really big challenges, really big shocks are coming.
We have to do what's necessary to not lock in climate change that we actually can't survive
and we have to prepare for the shocks that are coming and figure out how to do it in ways
that doesn't leave people behind and we still can be decent people and not follow JD Vance
with his concentric circles of love, which he keeps getting in trouble from popes.
Yeah, Pope Francis, like two months before he died, hit back on that.
Yeah, JD Vance's Ordo Amoris.
Right.
Because he's trying to make a theology out of what we're talking about, right?
But my duty is to love my family and the neighbors who look like me and then as you get further
out, you care less and less.
One thing I wondered about reading the book and thinking, I've thought a lot about that
JD Vance Pope exchange.
And I wonder if what Vance wants and Trump and all these guys is to sort of force people
to choose.
It's either your family or it's you caring about strangers and they want to tell you,
the other side wants to tell you, just be generous and sacrifice and they don't care about
your family.
And I wonder if what's missing on our side is a story about interdependence and about
how, like actually the false choice is this idea that I have to choose between my family
safety and your family.
Exactly.
And that we have to, like, that life is just fighting over scarcity.
Which is exactly what folks in Minneapolis put on a clinic doing, right?
Right.
Saying like you are all, like you're all our neighbors and many of the people who organized
were, you know, faith groups, right?
Like people who came out of their churches or their mosques and were organized in groups
like faith in Minnesota and Isaiah and went out there and they understand their work.
And they asked me, we quote some of them in the book as being a war with Christian nationalism
and that they are out there trying to enact the commandment to love thy neighbor, you
know?
And it's really beautiful and embracing what Adam Surer calls, the neighborism, like
this, but this expansive neighborism that is the neighbors we know and the neighbors we
don't know yet.
And so we need to do that.
And we also need to talk about climate change.
Like, I mean, last election, Harris barely talked about climate change.
And this, you know, in the climate movement, it's called climate shushing.
And we don't like it.
We actually have to be honest that the crises are here and have a plan for how we're going
to help each other and not force those, those, those violent choices on people.
And I think Mamdani has, has, has given people a fantastic model for this as well.
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A challenge on the left, I think you mentioned climate is, you know, we're talking about
sort of end times fascism on the right.
The left is accused often and has been for a long time of doomers, first doomers with
climate change, then during the pandemic.
The doomers were more on the left and we should take precautions and all the public health
officials and then now AI.
The craziest thing I heard of the last couple weeks are on the AI business.
The doomers are like the people building the AI.
Well, they are too.
But some of the like the David Sacks, the Trump AI's are, you know, because they're like,
oh, these doomers, these are the same people who told us that climate change was going
to kill us all because now Trump's using it too.
And the pandemic was going to kill us all.
It's like, well, actually both of those things are happening.
Yeah, the pandemic did kill about 15 changes.
No, and they make a very deliberate campaign to basically get rid of the whole, all the
checks and balances on AI.
They're just like, they're worried that it's going to mess up their IPOs.
And so I wonder if I've been listening to Sacks very closely the last few days.
Yeah, they really, really upset.
They're really upset because this is the golden goose.
Yeah, and they're making that COVID analogy.
There is a strain of leftism that verges on eco-fascism.
That is just like the earth is healing.
Maybe humans are a cancer on the earth.
Like, maybe this is all for the best and it's all going down.
Like, I think it's a pretty marginal part of the left.
But I think being honest about the crises that we face is something that we should do.
Because people are responding to them.
They feel it, they're experiencing it, they know it is happening.
And if we aren't honest about the drivers of that crisis, then somebody who comes along
and says, the reason this is happening is because, well, what Trump did during Hurricane
Helene, the Democrats gave all the FEMA money to immigrants.
And that's why no one's helping you.
And then the proud boys show up with a chainsaw and say, the nice Nazis is going to save
you.
Right.
Well, that brings up an interesting point too.
And then that is sort of like the flip side of the neighborhood you talked about, right?
Which is, if you want to build a movement and build trust, you show up and you build
stuff locally.
Yeah.
And I wonder if a lot of the, you know, whether it's the accusations of doomers or the
doomers themselves is sort of facilitated and amplified by the way that we communicate
now, which is the internet.
And so, like, when I think about,
I think that the Musk and Trump and some of these people, I'm like, maybe the explanation
is not much more complicated than the internet has broken all of our brains, but these people
are the richest and most powerful people in the world.
And they are online all the time.
And when their brain breaks, all of us have to do with it.
Yeah.
And I mean, and I do think that Musk's decision to buy Twitter was a very smart business
move because, you know, he is the great conductor of hate and rage, right?
Because he's there going like, don't come for me like here.
Here's a target.
And you know, as the first trillionaire, I mean, if he's, I don't know if he's a trillionaire
this week or not, but he's got invested interest in that rage not coming for him.
So it might be a bad sort of business decision just as one business, but he has larger
interests.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, I think, I mean, one of the things that I find weirdest about this moment, especially
around all of the apocalyptic predictions that we're hearing from people who are in the
AI industry, right?
And saying, you know, the whistle, the so-called whistleblowers, I don't know what to call
them exactly, but I mean, I actually believe they're genuinely worried.
I don't, I don't.
Well, they've been doing it for a while.
Yeah, I know.
We're all paying attention now, but they've been saying it for a while.
Yeah.
And Musk has been saying, I mean, the whole reason why they started OpenAI supposedly
as a nonprofit was because they were worried about the potential of this technology destroying
the world.
And then anyway, we know that story.
But the way it's being metabolized, like places like Instagram where people are just like,
I'm just going to make like a weird meme about the end of the world and just sort of perform,
like for like an audience, like just all alone try to take this on.
And this is why it's nice to be on on BookTour and be talking to like rooms full of actual
humans and just be like, we are not built to handle crises of this scale all by ourselves
with our phones.
We have to get together.
We have to kind of believe that this is actually happening.
This is why I mean like we have to find like the depths of the betrayal.
Like what does that actually mean to be like, is it 10% chance or 30% chance that this
technology that is being built will wipe out humanity?
I don't know if that's true.
I don't know if that's alarmist.
But the very fact that we're talking about this is not something we should be doing all
alone, you know?
Yeah.
And it's fascinating because I feel like I balance and have for the last 10 years of
doing this job, like wanting to make sure people understand the stakes and what we're facing
and the dangers of the Trump is bringing without alarming people to the point where they
just tune out.
And I think it's tougher for our side of this fight to do that because you know, for the
Trumps and vases of the world, it's, yeah, you know what?
Don't worry about any of this.
Don't really pay attention.
We got everything.
We got it covered.
You go about and live your lives and we're fine.
And it'll all be good, right?
For like the mass, that's like their mass message for people.
But on our side, like, you know, I talked to people about my AI fears over the last couple
of weeks and I'll either get the response that's like, well, I don't know.
Maybe it's just deploying.
Maybe it's not going to be that bad or, or, yeah, but you know what?
It's too late.
It's already happening and we're already headed towards AGI.
So what can we do?
Yeah.
And you can, and it's so it's either cynicism is one response.
Yeah.
And it's a response to sort of the political times that we're in, where people are like,
you know what?
I worried about this for the first couple of years, the Trump, the first Trump term.
I can't do the second again.
Yeah.
Or another thing now, AI, we just did the pandemic.
I can't worry about this too.
Yeah.
And I do think that cynicism sort of erodes our ability to like build the movement we
need to solve these problems and cooperate with each other.
And it's a, I think that part piece of it is a creature of the fact that so much of
the communication about this is happening online.
Yeah.
And it's a lone, and even the people who are saying AI is not inevitable.
And I think because I, whatever my algorithm is selecting for those people right now, and
I'm seeing lots of people putting out videos saying, AI is not inevitable.
And I love it.
But I think we would feel it more if we were together and had an organizing structure.
That was harnessing all of that and a plan.
But to be honest with you, this, where people feel most hopeless is Democrats taking money
from the AI companies.
And looking at polling that shows that data centers are less popular than nuclear waste.
And being like, I think that we should run the pro campaign, you know, or just, and
so the people who just have very clear messages are catching fire.
A lot of them, because people are so hungry for it.
I've never seen such a gimme of an issue.
I mean, well, there's, I think there's that comedian who called it the most bipartisan
issue since beer.
Yeah, right.
But it is Trump who is rolling it out.
It is Trump who is not letting local councils and states regulate it.
He can absolutely be made to wear it.
But only if Democrats don't take the money and have clear policies.
And what I'm seeing from ban in a strategy to just pivot this to war with China.
I mean, he did this event alongside Bernie Sanders.
And I don't know if you listened to a ban and said, but it was really interesting because
he did the ban and move.
He acknowledged how much everybody hates the tech oligarchs and, you know, was happy to
be there with Bernie.
But his message was not stop, slow down.
It was we need to build a moat around American tech.
We can't let China have the chips and we have to expel every Chinese national from every
single lab and every university.
It's basically calling for internment camps.
And you know, he's been wanting this war with China.
And that is not popular either, right?
Because his base is mad about the wars that are a broken promise.
They're mad about the AIs.
He wants to join them into one giant project that is incredibly unpopular.
And the only thing that could keep this from turning to the Democrats favor is if they
are hedging and saying, but maybe, you know, let's talk into excited.
A lot of them don't know the issue well enough.
They don't know what they're supposed to be doing.
Do you really think that?
Yeah, I mean, I think some of them.
But some of them are getting a lot of money from...
Yeah.
Well, some of them are getting money from like the other thing that's crazy is like there's
these dueling super PACs, right?
And so there's like the leading the future super PAC, which is, I think maybe started by
partisan, but is now only electing Republicans.
And then anthropic funded the other super PAC, which is now pro-regulation.
And so now, you know, like that was in one of those New York congressional races that
I was covering.
But I do think that they don't know whether they can just stop it.
They know that the technology could be beneficial in some ways.
They don't know what the guardrails can be.
Again, it's like, you don't leave this to companies.
We don't leave.
When a company tells you that they're creating a product that might not be safe, let alone
kill us all.
And the Biden administration was starting to regulate this.
And this was a huge, I mean, this is what we argue in the book is if you want to know why
Silicon Valley lined up for Trump, it had way less to do with the fact that they were
mad at their, you know, woke kids.
Yeah, they were mad at the Biden administration.
They were, they were furious.
And they were furious about the fact that they were starting to regulate AI.
Yep.
And they were furious that the EU was doing the same.
They were furious that the United Nations was starting to come up with an international
set of rules.
This is around the time that Peter Teo starts calling the UN the anti-Christ and, you know,
Greta the anti-Christ because, you know, that, their idea of hell is being regulated, you
know?
Well, it goes back to the international cooperation part because the other challenge for a
lot of these Democrats is they think, well, we don't want China to win this race, right?
Because, you know, that could be a threat to us.
And there's some truth to that.
China is doing more to regulate AI.
But also it's like, at some point we have to talk to, we have to do a deal.
We have to have diplomacy.
Yeah.
Like, this is, AI is a challenge that no country can solve by itself, just like climate
change, just like a pandemic.
And so if we don't have these strong international institutions, which the right is calling like,
you know, the one world global order, but if we don't have those, then we're not going
to solve these problems.
Yes.
Yeah.
The one question in the book that really stuck with me is, you know, what would make people
like their lives enough that they stopped fantasizing about burning the whole thing down.
And you talk sort of about how, you know, on the right, this is so much of this is myth-making,
right?
And on our side, like, what is the, what do you see as like a story that could sort of galvanize
people and say, like, yeah, this is what this is worth fighting for.
Yeah.
You know, it's one of the reasons why I was great to write the book with Astra because
she really is a serious organizer, you know.
And she, you know, she, she organizes people in debt.
She was, she was one of the founders of the debt, the debt collective, right?
And so she's thought a lot about this and actually done a lot of this because there's nothing
more isolating than being in medical debt than being in student debt.
We're just having all of that weight on you.
But when you get together with other people in debt, you can, you know, you have some power.
You become a problem for the people who you owe money to, right?
Yeah.
As opposed to it just being your problem.
I think Mamdani is the person who has shown us most clearly what it would look like.
The whole campaign, right, which was an extraordinary organizing flex from the DSA, right?
Of getting 100,000 people to volunteer, which is means that one, one in every 10 people
who voted for Mamdani volunteered for Mamdani, but making it so fun with, with, with, you
know, all kinds of parties and scavenger hunts and joy and the whole campaign being a love
letter to New York City.
And the whole campaign being about, we love this city, the city that gets vilified by,
you know, JD Vance and, you know, the Republicans nonstop.
And we want to stay, right?
So, you know, the last section of the book is called Let's Stay or the levers, that's
what we write in the book Let's Stay, but it's called the levers versus the Stairs, right?
So, this idea of, this is kind of a paradise, this world of ours, right?
And we don't want to live on, eke out a living on two dead orbs as Elon Musk seems to want
to do, right?
Between like, like draining all of life from the earth so that you can go to Mars, which
is a cancerous planet.
We have a pretty great place here.
It could be a lot better and we need plans for making it a lot better than it is and a
lot fairer.
And that sort of spirit that you saw in the Mamdani campaign of, okay, what would make
New York even better than it is?
It's great.
How could it be even better free and fast buses, you know, universal childcare, how freezing
the rent?
Does that sound good?
And just that sort of, that giving people permission to love where they are, love their
city, love their town, love this planet, make it better, and make it better, right?
But from that place of, it's pretty great and these people who want to leave are
demented.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
A city and even that's the biggest city.
But that's it.
That's one city and, you know, it's a liberal New York and how you're going to do that
everywhere else.
But I do think, and you guys talked about this in the book, that it speaks to the need
for local efforts.
I mean, same thing with Minneapolis, right?
Yeah.
Sort of local organizing to spring up.
And it's like, yeah, you, you have to run the Mamdani campaign and that kind of grassroots
campaign where people are involved everywhere.
Yeah.
You know, the next presidential, right?
It's not just the seven swing states, but like all the communities in those states and
all the communities in the other states, like you need to make it mass movement politics
really is, I think, you know, paired with obviously inspirational leaders, but you
kind of need both in order to sort of stitch this whole thing back together.
Yeah.
I think the local is a place to start.
It's a place to stand, right?
But I don't think anybody believes that any of these crises or problems can be fixed
just with the local fight.
But I think people are waking up, you know, you see it in the data center resistance where
it's like, okay, I'm worried about water, you know, if it's Tucson and they, Amazon wants
to build a huge data center, they know how little water they have because they're on
water restrictions much of the year, right?
They think about water all the time.
They're in a desert.
So they care about water.
They, you know, and you have farmers in Kentucky organizing because they are worried about
farmland, you know, whatever it is, it's very tangible.
It's very material.
It's very the opposite of AI.
It's like we are humans, we have needs, you know.
Yeah.
And lots of places it's like, are we going to get the water or are the machines?
Like are we going to get cooled or are the machines?
Like it's becoming that basic.
But then from there, it's like, okay, well, what are the national regulations?
What are the international regulations and kind of trickling up?
And I think that's a good way to do politics.
Yeah.
That certainly is.
It's a hopeful way to do politics.
Thank you so.
Naomi Klein, thank you so much.
Thank you.
Let's say.
Sometimes fascism.
It's a fantastic read.
Everyone go check it out.
Thank you so much.
It's a real pleasure.
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That's the sound of sunshine pouring into your spacious room.
And that's the sound of a happy baby taking in its first view.
Because when it comes to your birthing experience, we've thought of everything.
St. John's.
Everything.
For the better.
I want a vacation with rides, a water park, and an aquarium, a deep sea adventure, and
a real submarine.
Then I want to build and find my own spaceship.
Through a whole Lego galaxy.
A grown-up might call that unrealistic.
We call it Kids Free San Diego, where children under 12 play for free at places like Lego Land,
all October.
Discover deals and discounts at Legoland.com slash October.
Restrictions supply offers me very see partner for details, funded in part with the city
of San Diego tourism marketing district assessment funds.