Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor Say the End of the World is Now on the Table

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1:27You are not in debt because you live beyond your means, but because you are denied the means to live. Here's my conversation with Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor. But first, a quick message. If you're not a subscriber, we have some news for you. You can now explore the times for free without paywalls during your first month in the New York Times app. Just download the app and we hope you enjoy it. Okay, on to the interview. Astra and Naomi, thank you very much for taking the time to speak with me today. Thank you for being here. Really glad to be here. Thank you so much for having us. So the book is called End Times Fascism and the Fight for the Living World. Just to start Naomi, the most obvious question, what is End Times Fascism? So End Times Fascism is a fascism that is very much in conversation with planetary scale, existential crises, a fascism that is taking the end of this world for granted.

2:34And I think we've thought really long and hard about the politics of putting any kind of qualifier on a word like fascism. And the reason we ended up deciding that it did need that is when we really thought about how our world has changed since Mussolini declared himself a fascist. Our fascists have weapons that last century fascists couldn't dream of. And there was no atomic bomb. Hitler and Mussolini died before the Trinity test. They didn't understand that fossil fuels were warming the planet. So our world has changed. Our world has become more dangerous. And fascism has changed in response and has kind of made peace with the idea of collapse. And now what they're fighting for is who is going to survive that cataclysm. So how does End Times fascism make itself felt in the world today? I was the first thing I thought of was the SpaceX IPO.

3:36I mean, how does it make itself? I think for a lot of people what resonates is like, hey, don't the billionaires have bunkers now? Aren't they somehow prepping? What is this sort of fixation on leaving the earth behind? That the only vision of a future that seems to be on offers of a future that says, yeah, things are so messed up here that we have to get on a rocket ship and leave. Like, I don't think the idea of space exploration is inherently fascist, but I think the way it is being formulated by an Elon Musk is because it is just accepting that. This is, you know, as he puts it, he's saving humanity. Why is he saving humanity from exactly? Why do we accept that this world is needs escape from? I think sometimes a term like fascism can be foggy for people. It's compounded by the fact that over the last 10 or over many years,

4:37it's a term that has been used increasingly. So when someone hears you talking about End Times and existential planetary risk, I think that's clear enough where that's coming from. But can you try and clarify like, who are the fascists in this formulation? The question, who are the End Times fascists? One thing we are clear on is it's not a dominant political worldview even on the right, but it is a term we think applies to some of the most powerful people in the world who are leading governments and leading companies. And so part of what we try to do in the book is go, well, who is making up the End Times fascist alliance today? And they are responding to the fell to poccalipticism in different ways, but they are all responding to it. So they're in the book we talk about sort of religious end timers who want to hasten about the return of the Messiah who kind of believe that they will be saved by the grace of their faith. Those are the evangelical Christians, Zionists, who are very potent political force in the United

5:40States. That's Zionists in Israel who are potent political force. So these are real groups of people with no power. Messianic. Yeah. And then there are the tech, the sort of tech end timers who believe that you know, it's worth incinerating this world as long as they can build their virtual one and that, you know, we are inevitably heading towards some sort of digital superintelligence, some sort of singularity. And there are these echoes in the story with the religious story. And then the third group we look at are the ethno-nationalists who believe that the nation is under existential threat from immigration, from cultural change, and you know, their responses to fortress the nation to sort of cast out the enemies, domestic enemies. And so these groups are different, right? There's contradictions. They're messy and not totally coherent, but they're responding to this apocalyptic sense, the sense that the world is increasingly fraught and dangerous, and they're responding by shutting down and trying to defend their group.

6:44And they've made this very dangerous alliance. Help me understand the coalition aspect, because I understand how some of these different groups share ideological traits, for example. You know, if someone were to say, like, I don't quite understand what religious nationalists have to do with Elon Musk, is it like an ideological framework that we're putting on these people and saying, hey, like, they share these ideas? Or is there like actual practical coordinated effort between these people? Well, I would say that that effort is embodied by the Trump administration, right? I mean, if you look at this sort of awkward Frankenstein coalition that he has cobbled together, and that brought him to power, it contains all of these elements, right? It's the massive funding coming from Silicon Valley and Elon Musk in particular, but certainly not exclusively. Then you look at the fact that he

7:48appointed Mike Huckabee, a Christian Zionist to be his ambassador to Israel, the way he has understood that Christian Zionists are a key part of his base. And the centrality of sort of advancing messianic Zionist narratives in Israel, dating back to his first term when he moved the US Embassy to Jerusalem. That was huge in the evangelical community. And so how does the coalition hold together? I mean, as Donald Trump, he's built this Frankenstein monster. We're just trying to understand it. Like, what are the common elements? I mean, if we think about the tech billionaire class, right? And particularly in Silicon Valley, and that sort of moment in Trump's inauguration where some of the wealthiest people in the history of the world are lined up. Second inauguration. The second inauguration. And the sort of moment of confusion of like, what exactly is going on the first time Trump was

8:51president, many of these same billionaires were criticizing him. They were upset when he left the Paris climate accord. Zuckerberg was condemning him. Bezos was launching an earth prize. They were positioning themselves as the people who were going to save the planet. And one of the things where we're arguing is as the world changes, our elites are changing, are becoming more fascist, are attracted to ideas that justify the idea that only some people are going to make it. But that is not the same story they were telling even just five years ago, right? So we need to pay attention to the way the story is changing as our world changes. I think a question about that would be, if someone were to say, hey, five years ago, the tech elite were not attempting to curry favor with Trump in the same way that they were more recently, they're responding to incentives to

9:51want to cozy up to him because that's better for their businesses. So can you unpack like the fascism element there as opposed to just people pursuing their incentives? Well, I think they're really entangled. And I don't think it's as simple as saying that, okay, they're lining up behind it because it's because they know who he is and it's good for them because they could have done that last time. And it would have been the same dynamics. Very few of them did. They also helped get them elected. I mean, in some cases, certainly in the case of Elon Mosque and the huge amounts of money that he spent. But not only him, there was a real change when we track this in the book of like several people played key roles, including Mark and Dreson. JD Vance was very much a conduit as somebody who was a creature of Silicon Valley worked with Peter Teal, had his own VC firm. He was celebrated as the VC VP pick among many of the people we

10:54write about. But there was a turning point during the campaign when a lot of people who had not supported Trump who identified his lifelong Democrats got behind him. We make the case that a lot of it had to do with AI. And what they understood was how ravenous AI was when it came to energy. And they understood that Trump, as a guy who loves the fossil fuel industry, they understood that he would open the floodgates for this AI arms race. And so that's an economic incentive. But I would also argue that there's a consciousness that the business model that they have embraced is a business model that is uniquely antithetical to a shared human existence. And I say this because these are the same people who are launching Earth prizes a couple of years ago, right? They understand the climate crisis and they understand that what you feed AI is energy. It's overwhelmingly

11:56being fed with LNG and coal. And because they understand the climate crisis, they understand that that is going to do exactly what we're seeing right now. Set whole cities on fire. Create situations where huge parts of the world is unlivable. Humans are creatures of story. You need a story that will justify that kind of sacrifice of humans. So the increasingly brutal views that we're hearing from people like Elon Musk where you just seem to be discounting huge swathes of humanity or even actively playing a role in destroying USAID at the cost of perhaps, you know, I mean, he would say no lives, but perhaps because he doesn't count African lives, right? These things go together. You need a story that discounts those lives. That is a fascist story. That is a story that has ideas about whose lives count and whose lives can be discarded. And I think it's quite active. It's not just like, oh, this we're going where the money is.

13:01The money is making them fascist. It is important to note that far right ideology has the long history in Silicon Valley actually. It didn't start at the second inauguration. And figure like Peter Tiel has been cultivating that worldview alongside David Sacks by investing in promoting a certain philosophical paradigm, right? In 2009, he wrote an article that is pretty famous for good reason that basically says, you know, democracy and freedom are incompatible, right? So kind of staking his claim that if he has to choose between democracy and capitalism, he'd choose the latter. We talk in the book about a conference that Tiel's venture capital firm hosted just before the election in 2024. It was called heredicon, a conference for thought crime. And the tagline was, maybe if you're not trying to destroy the world, you're not trying hard enough. I mean, their language, we've been wrestling with how to talk about what they say because some of it is so nuts that you sound a little kooky quoting them. But Elon Musk saying, humanity,

14:03increasing looks like humanity is a biological bootloader for digital superintelligence, right? Like, you know, or that we should rejoice in the fact they're building our digital, you know, the digital beings who will come come after humanity. Or Sam, I wouldn't say that AI takes less energy to train than a human. One of the things that is always unfair in this comparison is people talk about how much energy it takes to train an AI model. But it also takes a lot of energy to train a human. It takes like 20 years of life and all of the food you eat during that time before you get smart. Yes, or the world will be covered in data centers, right? I mean, so this is... There's so many ideas on what you're saying. That's hard for me to keep all my follow-up questions in my head. The one that I'll raise now is how do you disentangle or parse what might be like trolling from actual, like, you know, ideological views, the heredic context.

15:06I feel like they want to be our overlords and they want to be our edge lords, like both both and, you know, and I think we've seen at this point that we do have to take some of the trolling seriously, right? If we... You can be a joke and be really dangerous at the same time. You know, the last book I wrote during the pandemic was about... It came out in the fall of 2023 and it was about a group of people who were dismissed as sort of conspiracy knots and people who shouldn't be taken too seriously. And then less than a year and a half later, they are running the US government. So I think that there isn't impulse, like, when you see lots of really extreme things, to just be like, cooler, headzwill prevail. But then if you look at who, you know, the US Secretary of War is and what he's been doing or, you know, who is running health and human services and the effects that is already having on communicable diseases and foodborne illnesses, like, I don't think it even though, like, we're at the New York Times and everyone is very calm here.

16:09You know, I think the reason... Speak for yourself. The reason... Comes in degrees. I think the reason not to be alarmist about alarming rhetoric is that you want people to take it seriously when there is a serious threat. And I think that there's enough... There are enough alarm bells going off right now that I don't think it's a good time to self-suse with ideas that maybe that's just something they're saying to get a provocation. I think there's enough real world action. Like, as Astra said, they want to be our overlords and our edge lords. Obviously, the prototype of this is Elon Musk, but, you know, when he was head of Doge with his chainsaw. You know, he really did slash entire programs that millions of people rely on for health care and nutritional support. I want to ask an Elon Musk question. I mean, he truly is a defining

17:12character of our age for better or worse. And I think people who like him, which there are a lot of people who like him, well, actually, there's a real romance and grandeur to the idea of SpaceX rockets and colonizing or even just humanity exploring outer space. Or, you know, somebody said to me, because I was talking through the ideas in the book with some of those folks. And somebody said to me, like, well, Elon Musk is out there saying more people should have more babies because of, you know, population decline. How does that fit with somebody who's like interested in hastening some sort of cataclysm or, you know, another person brought up the example of certain babies. Yeah. Another person brought up the example of, that's a hallmark of fascism. Of, you know, perhaps the Tesla self-driving cars are a lot safer than human drivers. And that

18:15could save tens of thousands of lives every year. And I just wonder if there is, if any of those those things for you complicate the idea of what Elon Musk really believes in and how he acts on the world. Because to me, it looks at incoherent more than anything else. Yeah. I mean, I don't want to do too much work to try to make him coherent. I think that's not that's not my job. But I do think he has a vision of the future. I think he's obsessed with the vision of the future that he sort of grew up with and kind of pulpy, you know, science fiction and and comic books and and you know, wants that future. He feels it was promised. We were promised flying cars. Where are my flying cars? Right. Peter Teal famously said. Yeah. So the idea that he has a vision of a future does not mean he's not a fascist. I think that he has a vision of a future

19:18for a subset of humanity who get to enjoy the the the implants and upgrades and flying cars and rocket ships. It's not that he's completely nihilistic and doesn't believe there is a future. He believes in a kind of VIP bespoke future that is based on this hierarchy of humanity that allows him on the one hand to say that people in the so-called West should have more babies but slash programs that are providing food and medicine to children in Somalia and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Like like those things are happening at the same time. But I think what you're getting to is the idea that there's something that appeals to people about the idea that we can be interplanetary like we we we share that we share the idea that people need something mythic and something to look forward to. We just think it should be something to look forward to here on earth and it should be inclusive. Yeah because you don't you don't hear him talk

20:20about how the great future we could have here. It's all out there. And there are very few people in politics today who are in the corporate world who are talking about a vision that feels credible for how we could live together. It's like either it's apocalypse or it's Sam Altman who realizes it may maybe he talked too much about destroying everyone's jobs and is now saying you know AI is a magic genie that's going to grant you through wishes and you know something that feels like straight up fairy tale right. And so and I think we believe it's the job of you know a credible political project of the left to put forward a vision of the future for how we live together well on this planet right where we aren't engaged in some project of triaging who gets to live and who gets to die where we actually figure out how to share our resources and thrive

21:23it's possible to do that we want to believe in the future right and we should we have a right to believe in the future and there's something treasonous about not believing in the future. The New York Times app unlocked everyone knows the times as behind a paywall only subscribers have access to all the reporting but what if you could explore the times for a month for free without putting in a credit card. Now you can when you download the New York Times app for the first time your first month in the app is free a month to go behind the paywall to see what time subscribers get every single day all the investigations the reviews the recipes the deeply reported fact-based journalism if you don't already subscribe to the New York Times download the Times app today and get free access for 30 days. So I want to ask you a version of a question I asked Rebecca Solnit earlier this year which has to do with sort of the language and terminology

22:26people use to describe their political opponents and I you know I had said to her ask her something about you know if when you risk when you use such severe language or harsh language do you maybe risk just pushing people into their respective corners and she you know basically said you know without using the words that's kind of a dumb question you know you got to call a spade a spade and yet I want to ask you a version of that question do you have any concern that using language like end times or fascism makes it easier for people perhaps to dismiss your arguments. You know I think this book is a warning and it's not about a bunch of fringe characters it is you know we are quoting in their own words the wealthiest people in the history of the world the president of the United States the prime minister of Israel we have watched as people with

23:28previously like quite marginal belief systems we've watched them gain more and more power political and economic and move from the margins to the center of power and to gain very powerful roles in government I mean you say end times is such an extreme word you know half of half of Christians in America believe we're in the end of times like these like it might seem like a marginal belief system where you're sitting but it's these are not marginal ideas. That's a funky statistic though can I just I was looking up because I saw I saw in the book yeah I was like how can that be true and I think there's it sort of is very dependent on how a given Christian interprets end times you know a Catholic might believe that we've been in end times since Jesus ascended 2000 years ago so it might be a little murky to say you know half of Christians believe we're in end times it does it's not necessarily the same thing as meaning they

24:29want to are like accelerate yeah but I just don't think that these are these are marginal ideas I I think that these are these are some of the most powerful stories in our culture they're incredibly deeply encoded like whether we're religious or not they're kind of in us and there's a kind of almost drive to repeat them because the because the stories are so powerful so you know part of what we're saying is like we need mythic stories of our own you know I can't just be like yeah we need universal healthcare and you know we need affordable lives but we also need myth we also we need to recover our sense of wonder and awe at this world and so you know that's why it's worth looking at it's I think there's things that we can learn from what is working what is resonating the idea that the end times is kind of like a story that we all it just in our bones in some sense I think jibes with a feeling that so many of us have that yes we are in a serious ecological crisis

25:40in addition to whatever other crises were in at the moment and if if if that's something that huge numbers of people feel across the political spectrum why is it the case that the left does not seem to have been able to harness that apocalyptic energy in the way that the people on the right that you're pointing to have been able to both harness it and you know grab control of so many of of the levers of power um I think I think building multiracial democracy is harder than building fascism or authoritarianism right because we don't want to just grab the levers of power you want to share power and you have to figure out how to live together so I think our project is is just inherently more difficult and I think that the I mean an answer to your question about why can't why hasn't the left harness did I mean I would say as somebody who's been on the left for a long time that we've got we've gotten closer than at any other point you know we've gotten

26:49you know heartbreakingly close right I mean for those of us who are part of the Bernie Sanders campaign and I was living in the US at the time and and was was part of that campaign as as you know a surrogate for his for his Green New Deal program which I felt was the kind of response that both addressed emissions and people's economic needs um but you know in politics like you don't get a prize for second place um but I do think that this wave that Mamdani has helped lead in this wave of DSA candidates who who are winning in the primaries speaks to the fact that the left is a lot more serious about fighting fascism right though willingness to call it fascism to call it genocide to use the words describe reality um are actually far better at fighting fascism than a kind of a supposedly safe centrist that is collapsing around the world um because it

27:53does not speak to people's lived reality and what they're seeing with their own eyes so yeah I mean the language is not the end in itself it's what the offer is in the face of it it's that combination of understanding the threat and understanding that there's actually something that we can do about it together you also um point out in the book and and I think you mentioned earlier in the conversation that the the end times fascists or who you call the end times fascists still represent a sort of a minority even on the right so where do you see opportunities on the right for pushback or do you see those on the right as as already actively in any way pushing back against end times fascists the most awkward alliance is around the big tech companies and the mega base they don't like the idea of being tracked by their phones right so there's definitely opportunities there and we are seeing it in in these local meetings which it really interesting to me because you know having done this

28:59research around the the the anti vaccine anti masking anti COVID health measures movement during COVID which then sort of rolls into movement um for book banning and anti trans rights and all of all of that those were the those were the issues that were making people storm city hall you know and go to like a small you know town hall meeting that you know usually three people show up for and suddenly there are hundreds of people they're screaming and they're furious today the thing that is bringing people into their town hall meetings is opposition to the data center down the road yeah I mean the you know we talk about data centers actually being sort of icons of this futurlessness right I mean it used to be during the you know 20th century it was like there's a kind of bargain you'd get a factory in the town and that meant sure there was some pollution and maybe some tax abatements but there are also jobs that supported your family even if

30:01the wages weren't the best and you know going to Memphis for example where Elon Musk's now has three super computers but meeting the the people there who are fighting against this development because Musk is powering them with gas turbines you know he's being sued for illegally operating them right so they're really releasing there are a lot of toxins into the air and driving by them they're just these huge you know enormous right some of them are as big as 30 football fields and there's just there's basically no jobs like what is the offer and are there signs that you would be on the lookout for sort of little um flares on the horizon that would um give you clues to to the influence of end times fascists receding like what would you see that would make you think okay their their power is diminishing I mean I think Minneapolis is a great example I think

31:01that the Trump administration went into that assault thinking that it would be greeted gleefully at least by their base and that people would thrill at the video and you know sometimes AI generated images being circulated celebrating the violence and actually they over they they overreached you know um they shot people in the street and even some of their base were appalled by that so I think we're seeing signs um that they're not they're definitely not infallible um I mean ultimately what we would like to see is some of these people being held accountable and this is it goes back to the attacks on the ICC and the criminal court and you this constant assertion while we have immunity right that's why it matters when mom donnie says that Netanyahu belongs in the hagg and he should be arrested as I've said I agree with the ICC the Benjamin Netanyahu should be arrested and tried for his crimes for too long we have not put forward

32:07our own vision for accountability a serious one using these institutions um you know what would it mean to really hold war criminals accountable and have it apply across the board not only to people in Africa who commit crimes or the Philippines but also the United States also Israel it would be the beginning of addressing such deep disillusionment right now because we are up against a very widespread feeling that there's nothing you can do right so doing a few things you know starts to break that spell um and it really does matter yeah even what you just said you know we have this widespread feeling that there's nothing you can do when you were just now saying you know how could uh you know uh American politicians be held accountable by the ICC my first thought is oh that'll never happen right you know but I think that you know if I the I'm not saying it should or shouldn't happen it's not well I mean yeah sometimes things that

33:07seem improbable and impossible happen because people organized to make them so I don't think I mean we didn't write the book because we think these people are fascinating I mean we wrote this book because we want people to fight them and beat them I mean we think they're you know we we use this word that neither as far as nor I have ever used before because we're not nationalist people which is we call them traders but not traders to nation not traders to a flag or a border but traders to creation like traders to life and so we spent a lot of time as Astra said looking at where this project is weak where it's strong is money weapons I mean there's a lot to be worried about right we're dealing with trillionaires we're dealing with people where like where where that wealth has merged with the most powerful military in the world but but even compared to and I'm not nostalgic for for the last centuries fascists let's be clear about that but they had an offer to their base you know they're like let's steal the homes of the Jews

34:12in the slums and live happily ever after you know in the your labus rom Ukraine right the people were calling and times fascists don't have an offer to their base beyond really this sadism and one of the through lines of the book is that the end times fascists are used the word sort of betraying the world and the planet on which we live and they're not seeing the beauty of it and the things that that truly make life worthwhile so at the risk of trying to bring things home on on a slightly sentimental note what are the things that just you individually think on a this is what they're missing this this is what makes life worthwhile if only they could see what I see I mean I think a big one and it's we've touched on this already because it's a

35:13classic fascist trope which is the fear of the city the fear of the urban the fear of encountering people from different walks of life strangers and I think that's you know there's tremendous pleasure in that and I do think that you know we we read about it linked this how powerful the mom dining campaign was in kind of reen chanting the city and not romanticizing it not saying it's perfect like yes you know the subways have problems but also wow you get to write a subway and who knows what will happen and it will take you to some amazing place where you can eat something you can't make it home and so I think the the just encountering and not fearing diversity but ruffling and and absolutely this question of the more than human world of ruffling in nature but Naomi lives somewhere with really good nature she feel like she just has to take that one oh my god where to start yeah I I do I live in British Columbia and my parents moved out out there I'd never

36:19been to to this like fairly wild part of Canada where they moved to when they I was already in my 20s and have just become very committed to it so I think where I feel I honestly I feel the most sadness and rage at at at a willingness to let it all burn or or or to try to escape it is when I you know see a dorsal fin of an orca you know slice through the the waters of the of the Salish Sea where where I'm fortunate enough to live or just any of the sort of psychedelia of of this part of the natural world I mean on the very very dark nights are the the the the the water is completely bioluminescent and you look at your own limbs and they're made of pure light you know like no mushrooms required so to me there's something you know I think it is a a tragedy

37:30for them and an existential crisis for us that the people who are closest to the up to the levers of the most power on this planet are not enraptured by the beauty that is already here and all around us given the book enraptured it's maybe a tell but thank you very much for taking all the time to speak with me today I really appreciate it thank you thanks for having us you that's Naomi Klein and Astro Taylor their new book End Times Fascism and the fight for the living world will be published on September 15th you can subscribe to our youtube channel at youtube.com slash at symbol the interview podcast to watch all of our episodes including this one this conversation was produced by Paola Newdorf it was edited by John Wu mixing by Sophia Landman original music by Dan Powell and Marion Luzano photography by Philip Montgomery the rest of the

38:32team is Priya Matthew Seth Kelly Joe Gilmunoz Wyatt Orm Amy Moreno Eddie Costas Gabby Contreras Kathleen O'Brien and Brooke Mentors our executive producer is Allison Benedict next week Lulu talks to Aaron Sorkin about his new movie The Social Reckoning I'm David Marquesi and this is the interview from the New York Times this week on the Wirecutter Show have you ever had trouble finding a bra that actually fits you're not alone 32b tells you the band size and the cup size of that bra in that brand but it really doesn't tell you anything else Wirecutter style writer Zoe Vanderweed joins us to demystify this garment and suggest brands that Wirecutter loves tune into the Wirecutter Show on the New York Times app or wherever you like to listen