A Bit Fruity with Matt Bernstein - The Tucker Carlson Problem (with Naomi Klein)

Episode Date: May 16, 2026

Tucker Carlson has emerged as one of the most influential voices opposing the U.S. relationship to Israel. He’s also anti-Trump. So is he your friend now? Today, the inimitable Naomi KIein makes her A Bit Fruity debut to explain the Right’s burgeoning realignment, why the Republican successor to Trump could be so much scarier (sorry), and how an inept Liberal establishment made the rise of an antisemitic nationalist movement inevitable. And, of course, what we can do. Listen to bonus episodes on Patreon! Thanks to today’s sponsors! Sleep and dream well! Visit https://helixsleep.com/fruity to take advantage of their Memorial Day Sale exclusive partner offer — that’s 27% off sitewide. Get 15% off a cuter, more sustainable way to clean at https://www.blueland.com/fruity.  Naomi is currently platformless, but please preorder her forthcoming book, End Times Fascism. It will be brilliant. Also, read Doppelganger. Find me on Instagram. Find A Bit Fruity on Instagram. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The fascist job is to take that anger, acknowledge it, and redirect it, right? Redirect it at the scapegoats and at the left. That's why Tucker's never going to be our friend. But I think that this is the vision that he represents, and it's a really bleak vision. It's a really grim vision. And, you know, I think people can make short-term alliances that will end up backfiring on them very, very badly. Hello, hello, and welcome back to A BitFruity. I'm so happy that you're here. I was at a talk the other night about Palestine and the art world

when during the Q&A section, someone asked the panelists what they thought about Tucker Carlson. Most people in the room nervously laughed and shifted in their chairs. Tucker Carlson, who, when I started this podcast three years ago, was on Fox News complaining about how the green M&M is no longer sexy. Simpler times, right? Take me back. I guess. I don't know. I never thought I'd yearn for that time. Anyway, the green Eminem, you will notice, is no longer wearing sexy boots. Now she's wearing sensible sneakers. Leading women do not wear sexy boots. Leading women wear frumpy shoes. The frumpy or the better. That's the rule. The other big change is that the brown M&M has, quote, transitioned from high stilettos to lower block heels.

Also less sexy. That's progress. Eminem's will not be satisfied until every last cartoon character is deep, unappealing and totally androgynous until the moment you wouldn't want to have a drink with any one of them. That's the goal. When you're totally turned off, we've achieved equity. They've won. Tucker has emerged as one of the most prominent critics of the U.S. relationship with Israel, though not of Israel in and of itself, but let's put a pin in that. Why does this tiny country have so much control over our government? How do you break the stranglehold of the Israeli lobby on the U.S. government? Why is a country of 9 million people able to dictate terms to a country of 350 million people?

The government of Israel is promoting the largest pride event in the history of the region this June in the dead sea. Very close to, by the way, Sodom and Gomorrah. He's broken with Donald Trump, who he's campaigned for three separate times over this issue. And his opposition to the U.S. aid for Israel has made him a tempting and contentious and confusing figure on the the left, where we've been attempting for long before I was born, frankly, to build power around the Palestinian cause. And to find something that looks like power in Tucker Carlson, one of the conservative movement's most formidable figures is, at least to me, confusing on the surface. You know, I'm an anti-Zionist because Israel is a state founded upon an ethno-religious

hierarchy, which is enshrined in their legal system at every level. The genocide in Gaza and now bombardment of Lebanon are downstream consequences of a state held together by these values. And my values are that all human beings are equal. All humans of all races, religions, genders, sexualities, etc. For decades, Tucker Carlson and his ilk have demonstrated that they do not share this view about human beings and equality. So they're seemingly sudden and very strong stance.

against Israel are, sure, politically useful, but if it's not coming from a human rights-based framework, then where exactly is it coming from? And where might it lead? To disentangle all of this today, which many of you have asked me to do, I am joined by the one and only Naomi Klein, author of many books, including doppelganger and the shock doctrine as well as her forthcoming book, End Times, Fascism. Pre-oader link in the episode description. Naomi, welcome to the show. You're a bit fruity debut. Thank you so much, Matt. It's great to be with you. Naomi, I don't want to be like a weirdo, but I really am so excited to have you here.

And I'm sure many young people on the left have told you this. You are just a very important figure to me and my growth and my ideas. I did a slate of live shows last summer for this podcast. And one time during the Q&A section at one of my shows, someone asked me like who's your dream guest i was like well Naomi Klein you are you know also an anti-zionist Jew who's older than me and when we consider like the generational divide that often happens in Jewish families around Israel you have just been like such a sort of like comforting presence in my belief that people can

change and can learn and can shift and anyway thank you so much for being here it's really exciting. That is really beautiful to hear. I wish we were talking about something a little more fun than what we're going to be talking about today. But it's still going to be fun. But we on this podcast, we always make it fun. And I appreciate, I really, I'm here because I really appreciate your voice and all the work that you do. And it gives me great hope and inspiration. So it's neutral. Thanks for having me. You better stop. I'm going to leave that in though. Naomi, I feel like everyone and their mother lately has been opining about what exactly is the new role of Tucker Carlson. The New York Times just put out a two-hour-long interview with him titled, What Does Tucker Carlson Really Believe, accompanied by an editorial photo shoot?

Side note, I think that a lot of the speculation around this makes it out to be like a more like sexy and mysterious belief system than what he actually has. But anyway, we have a lot to talk about, I'd love to hear your top line thoughts. Well, I do think he makes it a little deliberately ambiguous where he is politically because he is a smart entrepreneur and he is appealing to different audiences simultaneously and I think signaling to different audiences. And also because we live in this age where most people don't subject themselves to like an hour and a half podcast, but just see the little clip, you can, put out little clips that are very carefully edited to appeal to one particular group and then

another clip from the same show to appeal to a completely different group, right? And so I think that's part of what's been happening is just the kind of clip culture, right? So we then project our values into what we don't hear, right? So if you hear somebody who seems to care a lot about the genocide in Palestine, then you kind of assume that that person also cares about Palestinian human rights more broadly, might want to help Palestinian refugees, has more of an internationalist perspective. And you kind of fill in the blanks, right? So I don't think it's entirely clear, but just knowing we were going to have this conversation, I did listen to some of the recent episodes in full of Tucker Carlson. Yeah, didn't you? Did you do your homework?

I mean, I have listened to a lot of Tucker Carlson over time, but like the fact that I subjected you to that research beforehand, I feel a little badly. No, I mean, you know I have this weird thing, right? Like, I've listened to hundreds of hours of steep band. And so it's good for me to diversify a lot of that. I've been researching the right for a really long time. But I was struck, you know, just last week he interviewed somebody for an episode that the headline was Somali Fraud Expoise, right? Like, he's still doing that. Like, because in the clips that we see, he's often just, he'll often say something like,

well, I believe all people are equal. That's what conservatism is. I'm like, is it? Is that what like? As a Catholic, I could not agree more with you. Yes. And what you're saying. I love all people.

Even the ones that don't like us, we have to love them all. And we have to recognize that we're required to. Yes. And then it's like, okay, so is that what Tucker now thinks? But no, he's still, you know, smearing entire groups of people by their ethnic. with headlines like Somali fraud expose. And he also was talking about the Great Replacement again. You know, it was talking about Somali fraud in the context of the great replacement in that episode.

He also was talking about that it's, you know, he talks about how it's natural to have a preference for your racial group, right? So it's essentially Christian nationalism that he, that he's doing. And I think he has been working very hard to. to break the ironclad relationship between the United States and Israel and also right-wing Christianity and Zionism. And he's been on a concerted campaign. And in that work, he's done some really revealing and I think important interviews with figures

like Mike Huckabee, Ted Cruz, Avron Berg, the former speaker of the Israeli Knesset, where he asked questions that it would be nice if the New York Times asked them, you know, or if his old employer at Fox News at them about what theology is guiding them, what the end game is. Here I'm thinking about the interview with Ted Cruz, where he was really getting at like, what is the theological basis on which you are basing this idea that there is a duty to support the state of Israel, right? I was taught from the Bible. Those who bless Israel will be blessed and those who curse Israel will be cursed. And from my perspective, I want to be on the blessing side of thing. Of those who bless the government of Israel? Those who bless Israel is what it says. Doesn't say the government of. It says

the nation of Israel. So that's in the Bible. As a Christian, I believe that. Where is that? I can find it to you. I don't have the scripture off the tip of mine. You pull out the phone and use the Google. It's in Genesis. So you're quoting a Bible phrase. You don't have context for it. You don't know where in the Bible it is, but that's like your theology? I'm confused. What does that even mean? Tucker. I'm a Christian. I want to know what you're talking about. Like he got him on record on some really important things that nobody had gotten him on record before. Same thing with Mike Huckabee, where it was like, if we're using the Bible as the real estate deed, where does that stop? You've appealed to Genesis. Genesis 15 says it's Abrams receives from God the news that his descendants will inherit the land.

And you tell me as the the theologian, if I'm getting this wrong, but from the Euphrates to the Nile. And that would include like basically the entire Middle East. Christian Zionism. I want to go back because that's where we started on this. I'm not going to let you off on this because you have said it three times. God gave this land to this people. What does that mean? Does Israel have the right to that land? Because you're appealing to Genesis. You're saying that's the original deed. It would be fine if they took it all. You know, for this book that Astra Taylor and I have been working on for a year now on anti-times fascism, you know, we use those quotes because nobody else got these guys on record, right? I want to acknowledge that

he's doing, like, he's doing some journalism. That's really important. But what's the broader end goal for Tucker Carlson as a political figure, which is where this gets really complicated. And his name comes up as a possible presidential candidate, right? And I think that the goal is to break the Judeo-Christian fusion, right? This idea that the U.S. is a Judeo-Christian nation. No, he says it's a Christian nation. Right. And this idea that the sort of theological duty is linked to creating a greater Israel, He's trying to break that and basically throwing his lot in with the idea that the New Jerusalem is the United States and that you want to bunker down with your Christian nation. So it's very tied to fortress borders. And also the kind of ethnic cleansing that we're seeing, you know, on the streets of U.S. cities.

That's part of the project. I mean, he thinks there should be more deportations. Yes. Yeah. I mean, that's who he is. It's complicated. And I think that within the context of the movements that you and I have. both been a part of and are a part of, I think that the people who are going like,

hey, maybe he's our great friend, you know, and maybe he's a great gift to these movements or whatever, I think that's really a story of a failure of solidarity, that I think when solidarity fails, when multiracial democracy fails, when internationalism fails, as a promise of security, and we're, you know, almost three years into a genocide that is ongoing, I think people start looking for strong men. They start looking for, for their own bully, right? And I think that that's what Tucker maybe represents to some people. So I think it's a sad story, right? I think it's a really sad story about the failure of solidarity and the vacuum that gets created and that happens. And it's a pattern that's repeated in history.

You just covered so many amazing bases that we're going to get into and a little bit more depth. But I first wanted to show you a very bizarre clip. That was my first exposure, to right wing, in heavy air quotes, anti-Zionism. And this came from Jubilee. Are you familiar with Jubilee? Yeah. Oh, you are. Well, I saw the one Medi did, the gang up thing.

You have been in the weeds with political slop content. It's nice to know that we're all there together. Jubilee, for those who don't know, it's a YouTube content farm that purports to foster honest dialogue and inspire human connection. But in practice makes videos like this one. called, is being fat a choice, fit men versus fat men? In it, Myron Gaines, a far-right podcaster who's representing the fit men side, says the following. Unfortunately, some people have emotional stuff that happened, traumatic stuff that's happened,

so you can't discount and just say, oh, because they're fat. Boo-hoo, man. Like, there's way worse stuff going out in the world versus people saying, oh, my God, I'm sad, I'm going to eat some ice cream. It's like, no, dude, it's like, you're fat, you made that decision, you live in a best country ever. If you live in a civilized, first world country where you have electricity, internet power, et cetera, you deserve to be bullied. It's ridiculous to me that we have all these fat people running around. Meanwhile, people are being bombed in Gaza. It's ridiculous. Yeah, it's so

interesting. It is so interesting. And the first time I heard that, I was like, wait, okay, so this is like, this guy is just like straightforwardly, like bullying a fat person. Okay, like dime a dozen. We've seen this. And then at the end where he's like, boo-hoo, people are being bombed in Gaza. I'm like, wait a minute. Well, look, this is where I think the Democrats, liberalism generally left a Texas-sized vacuum that now the far right is moving into. And it's intersecting with kind of edge lord culture, troll culture, whatever you want to call it, right, where you create a taboo, you create an unspeakable thing, right? And maybe that's just saying that people deserve to be bullied,

or maybe it's, you know, using the R word or whatever it is. I mean, we know that we're in this sort of festival of saying unsayable things and getting lots of views and monetizing it world, right? That's where we are. And one of those taboos is also talking to the genocide in Gaza, which is bonkers, but they have absolutely fused. And you see that, I mean, I'm not really steeped in Manosphere culture, right? Okay.

Nice to know that you have a line. I have a line, but I did watch that Netflix. documentary. And that was all over it. Like all these guys were like they they would just suddenly, all of a sudden, at the same sort of time, they all just started doing this, a similar line crossing using the genocide. And that's when I realized we were well and truly doomed. Yes. I don't think that's why you had me on the show. You probably wanted hope from me. We'll find hope. I promise we'll find hope. At least I'll find hope by the end. But You're so right.

And the way something that looks like anti-Zionism has infiltrated these manosphere spaces, and you saw it bizarrely at the Kevin Hart roast that just happened a couple nights ago, where Shane Gillis, someone tell me how it's pronounced, it's fine. I don't really care much about the man, to be honest. But he called out Chelsea Handler for being a Zionist. Chelsea is a Zionist. I'm not saying that's good a person. bet. Speaking of dead kids, she's a big fan of abortions. Now, if that came from like a left-wing figure,

I'd be like, yes, I, as a celebrity political person, would love to talk about Chelsea Handler being a Zionist. But Shane Gillis is, like, his whole thing is that he's a racist. And so it just seemed like such a strange thing, but also, I think something that we're going to get into here is that the far right has a long history of sort of ping ponging around between scapegoats. And I think what they are doing, while again on the surface, it can look helpful. It can look like, yeah, call out Chelsea Handler is in this. And you see someone like Nick Fuentes doing this very explicitly. They are, man, it's like, fucking, the ADL has made it like impossible for me to like talk about

anti-Semitism in this way? Well, it's brutal, right? Because you find yourself, as you pointed out, I'm significantly older than you. And I have been getting called a self-hating Jew and facing people who equate criticism of the state of Israel, criticism of Zionism with anti-Semitism, and accusing me of being, therefore, an anti-Semite for, since I was in college, which was a really long time ago, you know? And now when you actually see far-right figures doing the thing that you've been accused of, you're like, you're speechless, right? You don't, there's, like, the language that you need to describe reality is now, has been so degraded that is no longer useful, right? And this has been going on with a lot of words, right? I mean, I wrote about it

in doppelganger, just that feeling of speechlessness when Steve Bannonon is talking about fascism and othering, right? You're like, well, what words are left, right? I think that's what you're talking about. I want to tell the story of Tucker Carlson arriving at this moment, which involves a lot of other people. And I think inherent to that story is the MAGA civil war. Naomi, for those out of the loop, can you explain this sort of conservative civil war eruption that I think has accelerated a lot in the wake of Charlie Kirk's death? I know you also wrote about this in your book. Well, I think it has a lot to do with what, with this sort of economy that we're talking about, because it is an economy.

The influencer economy is a huge one, and it's part of broader economy that is sort of feeding off of instability and crisis, and it accelerated during the pandemic. When people were, everything was mediated through screens, lost their in-person communities, were frightened, you know, are finding their parisocial relationship. I'm not going to explain the internet to you. And so. You could explain anything to me. I would be very excited about it. But I do, I think that Trump came back to power really using the right-wing influencer sphere to his benefit, as we know. I mean, he sidestepped a lot of mainstream media and did the podcast tour and it all worked fantastically well for him.

Then it started to fall apart because for them, for the people, you know, who are making a living off of this and are building empires around it, it actually is not a good business. business model just to echo the president. I mean, that's what Fox News is doing. But that can't be what Tucker Carlson and Candace Owen are doing now that they don't have a boss, right? I mean, they're running their own companies. So I think that there were some real issues where people had splits over, including Israel. But I also think there's this broader issue where they're all competing with each other. When they fight, they get clicks. And I mean, I thought the left was brutal map that would you really? Oh my

God, right? Because my whole life, I've heard, especially from like the center liberals who are like, why don't we, especially recently where it's like, why don't we just fall in line? Why don't we just fall in line behind this candidate or that candidate, both blue no matter who, yada, yada, yada, yada, leftist purity testing. You never stop hearing about leftist purity testing,

which, okay, a separate conversation. But the adage, right, forever has been like, the Republicans, they just fall in line. Klein. I don't think so. I don't think so. And this is one of the, like, I mean, there's so many things that social media has given us that are terrible. But when it comes, but they have also destroyed the right. It has also destroyed the right. And it is, and I love it. Like, I love the

Maga Civil War. I think it is, it is a tremendous gift. They have created a vacuum that if there was a functioning left party in the United States, it would be having a field day right now. Because they, as you know, I mean, they are so messy. They are accusing each other of being feds. They're accusing each other of being trans. They're accusing each other of all kinds of things. Look, Tucker, that's why I'm sitting here, you know? Right.

I mean, because we had a contentious dialogue for a long time. Well, I thought you were a Fed. Yeah, and I thought you were a Fed. I was a Fed. Yeah. I'm not a Fed. You mentioned Charlie Kirk. I mean, Charlie Kirk was very much sort of part of this.

Things got very ugly between him and Nick Fuentes. And it was really like, who was going. going to be the most powerful influencer on the right and to get your piece of the action. You've got to attack each other. Then you have to have a collab, come back together, make peace. You know, they're just playing the game. I think that when Kirk died, it's worth remembering that the drum administration thought that they were going to be able to use that to actually fix some of this because it predated.

It was happening before. It was happening over Israel. Kirk had taken a lot of flack for inviting Tucker to speak at the big turning point conference. He was getting pressure from donors. He was starting to talk about it publicly. It was starting to come out. It was splintering. Then he's murdered.

And J.D. Vance is guest hosting his podcast. Remember that? Then they have the huge memorial and the unified message from the entire cabinet, who are all speaking, is now we come together and kill the left. This was not one assassin. It was the entire left that killed Charlie Kirk because it's a violent ideology. And that lasted for about five seconds. I remember that. They were all like the left killed Charlie Kirk, which like...

It was very scary. It was very scary. And also like whether or not the left even killed Charlie Kirk, whether the individual shooter, I mean, jury's still out. We haven't even gotten a trial yet. But it was, it was very scary. I was like, oh, no. Like, I mean, people were genuinely concerned there could be like a broader civil war

over some of the rhetoric that the Trump administration was using over Charlie Crick's death. And it wasn't just rhetoric. They were also saying, we're going to go after the funders. I mean, they were using it as a political tool to try to destroy the funding infrastructure for the left and to try to criminalize specific groups. And they were starting to arrest people over it. I mean, it was not. And people were losing their jobs. It was a very serious campaign. And if this MAGA Civil War had not happened, I think we'd be in a different world. So I actually think it's very good that the right is splintering. It's always good when the right is splintering. It's not lose sight of the big picture. That whole, I remember like charlie's murderers.com.

It was like anyone who posted like anything less than sympathetic about Charlie Kirk in the wake of his death, was docks on this website. Yeah, that lasted all of two days and then the right started to eat itself. Ideologically, where we are now with the MAGA Civil War, for those who aren't super tuned in, there are basically these two major warring factions. There is, Maga, right? Trump, Vance, people like Ben Shapiro, Erica Kirk, the sort of like turning point establishment, basically the entirety of Fox News. These are traditional neo-conservatives. They are very loyal to Trump, and they are very pro-Israel. Then there is the America First faction, which is made up of people like Tucker Carlson, Candice Owens, Marjorie Taylor Green, though she's

longer in government, Nick Fuentes. And I think talking about the America First faction will lead us into what exactly does Tucker Carlson believe? To understand Tucker Carlson's belief, which I think we can boil down more efficiently than the New York Times did in that interview, I think it's helpful to first explain the Groyper's. But first, I would love to take a quick break from the show to give a shout out to Helix for sponsoring today's. episode. You spend a third of your life in bed. And if you're like me and you work from home or maybe you're just a very sleepy individual, you might spend a lot more than a third of your life in bed. So why settle for anything less than the best? Since I was young, I've always been personally a very

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so if you would like to check it out, you can go to Helix. HelixSleep.com slash fruity for 27% off. That is Helixleep.com slash fruity. And now let's get back to the show. Naomi Klein, what do you know about the Grapers? I mean, I think that they are the ground zero of the transgression culture that we were talking about earlier. The name itself speaks to the kind of rebranding of what used to just be called neo-Nazi culture with something that maybe it's a joke. Maybe it's not a joke. Can we take any of it seriously? Is it all said with a wink? So it's a little bit harder to pin down. I think you'd probably explain it way better than me. The Groypers are, I mean, first and foremost, they're fans of the influencer, streamer, Nick Fuentes.

But they're much more than that. The Groypers, the ideological backbone of the group is ultra- ultra-nativist. They are very explicitly white Christian nationalists. They want to build in America that is full of white Christians and only white Christians. The Groypers hate Donald Trump. They really hate Donald Trump because he in their eyes has not gone far enough. They view him as a sort of fake authoritarian who doesn't have the balls to be a real authoritarian. The Groypers are highly motivated by the Great Replacement Theory, which says that Jews are conspiring to undermine white power in the United States by importing immigrants and, of course, wokeness. And, you know, who has been the greatest purveyor of the Great Replacement Theory in U.S. media?

Tucker Carlson. Tucker Carlson. And so while the Grypers, they are first and foremost fans of Nick Fuentes, I think they are also sort of ground zero and personal. perhaps the most extreme version of this emerging America First movement that seeks to go a lot further than MAGA. So I just want to add here that like while I love to see that Ben Shapiro's media company is currently falling apart, fired potentially half of its employees, his YouTube numbers, despite having like 18 million times more subscribers than I do, are lower than mine. Good job, guys.

you know, I worry that the faction of the right that will succeed the MAGA movement is scarier. Yeah, well, absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, this is why I said, you know, I love when the right splinters, because it's an opportunity for the left to put forward a vision that explains some of the main issues that they are being tapped into, but with an actual systemic analysis that talks about capitalism, that talks about how we ended up with what's being called the Epstein class, how we ended up with the billionaire class,

that provides that systemic analysis and also real solutions, real policies that are going to make people's lives better. I would be remiss if I didn't say that I think the politician who has shown how to do this, right, is Ron Mundani, who, you know, talked to Trump voters the day after the election and basically said, okay, so you voted for him because the economy is busted in your life, sucks and you're mad about U.S. wars and your tax dollars going to maybe bomb your relative somewhere else, how do you feel about a rent freeze and how do you feel about free public transit? And enough people said, yes, 10% of people who voted for Trump voted for Mamdani.

You know, that's part of the reason why he won. So I'm not saying that all those people should be written off or that there isn't any overlap. The question is how you build those coalitions, right? So I think there is an opportunity here for the left. We know what it looks like. we know how to do it. The problem is people in power in the Democratic Party don't want to do it. And you're absolutely right that what comes after Trump, if the right wins, is clearly a much worse version of Trumpism. And it's a truer form of fascism. And I think that that's what both

Fuentes and Tucker Carlson are teeing up. Yeah. And Tucker can articulate sort of a more polite version of this, whereas Nick Fuentes is more bombastic. Nick Fuentes has said of his movement, quote, there are basically two things going on, white genocide and Jewish subversion. So it doesn't really get more bald face than that. He's also said, quote, my problem with Trump is not that he's Hitler. My problem with Trump is that he is not Hitler. Right. And I think a lot of the people who are angry at Trump are angry because he hasn't deported enough people. or that he's just kind of making a show of it and not, the numbers aren't there. They want the numbers because this is their economic policy.

This is, you know, if you are willing to almost go there in terms of diagnosing the problem, it is genuinely very dangerous, right? If you're willing to talk about the Epstein class, but you're not willing to talk about capitalism. That's what the Nazis did, essentially, right? They talked about Jewish capitalism, which was, you know, this idea that, that capitalism had been perverted by the Jewish bankers or the, you know, that there was kind, like, if you could just purge this poison within the otherwise healthy body of capitalism, then things would be fines. And that's what the project was. And they understood, you know, this, these dynamics always emerge when the system itself is in crisis, when people are hurting, right? That was the case in the 1930s after, after the First World War, after the punishing sanctions. on Germany, the wreckage, and then the market crash of 1929, and people are really, really hurting. And socialism is rising, right? You have the Russian Revolution. You have a socialist worldview that says,

this has to spread to every country. You have elites who are terrified that it is going to happen in Germany, in Italy. And that's why they go after the communists and they go after the scapegoats, right? The vulnerable scapegoats. It's always a twin project. right of going after the left going after the possibility of an alternative and it harnesses that ball of anger that is going to go somewhere right and the left's job is to make sure that the anger goes up at the system itself and the fascist job is to take that anger acknowledge it and redirect it right redirect it at the scapegoats and also at the left that's why Tucker's never going to be our friend and the other thing that I think is really important to

remember is that, say he is running or some, or he's going to back somebody who he believes will do a better job. He sometimes says he's too lazy to be president. Maybe true may not be true. As we're seeing, you don't even have to be awake to be president. So I, you know, I just, not to interrupt you, I just kind of think that Tucker Carlson is happy being like a rich podcaster. That is my reason why I don't right now think he's going to run for president, but I am very willing to be wrong. I don't know. I really don't know. I mean, you could have said the same thing about Trump. That's true. But he will certainly play a role in U.S. politics that is pushing this ideology, whether it's him or some surrogate. I mean, it could be Vance, right? I mean, they're pretty close,

and it remains to be seen. Something that you talked about in Doppelganger that really stayed with me, which I would tell people to go read that book, and they should, but I have also recommended that book, like, in six different episodes of this podcast. So, you know. Get the new one. It's almost up. So get the new one. It's the sequel. It's the sequel. I was so excited to see you were writing a book because I was like, A, I'm excited to read another Naomi Klein book. And B, when people are releasing their books, they are more susceptible to taking debate on podcast invitations. We'll be back with Astra in September. But one thing that you wrote about in doppelganger is how fascists are very good at taking large groups of people,

correctly helping them identify the problem and then giving them the wrong solution. And in the context of that book, you were talking about how it's like, we don't have guaranteed health care in this country, among a lot of other things. And so it's very tempting to then buy into what like a Nazi wellness influencer is selling you in making your health care not like a community-oriented thing where we all take care of each other, but where like you just like lift as heavy as you can and have as much like protein and creatine and no vaccines and be the strongest soldier and it's all up to you and individual individual and of course a lot of people did take that bait and then buy into this like

maha movement but this strikes me as a similar thing where people are like yeah it is fucked up that Donald Trump facilitated a cover up of the Epstein files yeah it is fucked up that they're gutting food stamps and sending our tax dollars overseas to kill people in the name of another foreign country. I think the left could seize, and the broader left is seizing on this moment and saying, you know, the issue of all of this is capitalism. The issue is this sort of like global elite class protecting each other at the expense of all the rest of us. But the Democrats and sort of like this center establishment left that is funded by all the same people as the Republican Party, they can't do that because it threatens their whole structure. And so in place of that,

you have these right-wing figures coming in and saying, you know, what the problem is and why this is all happening. It's a global jewelry of which Epstein was a part of. Yeah. I mean, I just because of you, I listened to Tucker's episode with Thomas Massey, which was really an interesting episode. And what's happening to Thomas Massey is extraordinary. For those who don't know, he's a Republican congressperson who did help unite with Rokana, who's a Democrat, to force the release of half of the Epstein fire. I'm fully back that that kind of bipartisanship. They got the Epstein files released.

And now he is facing how much money is being spent against him? $10 million? It's a lot for this race. And he said the same people that are in the Epstein files are funding the campaign against him, are funding the ballroom, are funding the arch, right? And it's like almost there, right? But it's dangerous to be almost there and not go all the way there. But at the same time, you know,

Thomas Massey supports, you know, he calls himself a libertarian. He supports all the tax cuts. He supports all the deregulation that created the billionaire class that is now coming for him, right? So, you know, it's less to me about whether Thomas Massey and Tucker Carlson are willing to go all the way there and explain the system than whether the Democrats will, whether we have an organized left that is powerful enough to take over that party and win is what Bernie tried to do, right? And I guess this is where, you know, I think one of the more dispiriting things that happened was a kind of pile on on AOC for criticizing Marjorie Taylor Green. I can, we'll circle back to that. Okay. Okay.

We'll come back. Sorry. I got ahead of the plan. No, please, please, please. But I guess just just that point, right? That going almost there, but not going all the way there is a pretty dangerous place to be, especially if you're Jewish. And it's also, I mean, if you're someone. like Tucker, if you're someone like Thomas Massey,

and you are looking for a way to accrue power and tap into people's real desires and real disillusionment without actually challenging power, then this sort of, as you say, making it almost all the way there and then at the last minute, like pivoting right, is a great way to do that. Because the hard thing about being on the left

is that at the end of the day, you have to be like, yeah, the problem is, for example, billionaires. Billionaires are really hard to topple. But what if you're Tucker Carlson or Nick Fuentes, who does it, like, sort of, I think, more nakedly? And he goes all the way there. And then at the last second, he's like, and the problem is transgender people and the Jews. That is, it's just a lot easier to punch down.

Well, let's talk about the Epstein files per minute. Because thanks to Thomas Massey and Rokana and most especially the women who were abused by Epstein and refused to be silenced and came together and, you know, built this movement and the journalists who covered it when nobody else would. We don't have all the Epstein files, but we have some of them, including after the Brexit referendum. This was actually an email from Epstein to Peter Thiel. The most evil gay guy. Where he said, as we were saying in your office, pivot to tribalism. Basically, they saw the Brexit referendum as the beginning of an age of collapse, right? This is why Astro and I call it end times fascism, because they're sort of

celebrating that this is all going down and they're all going to, whether they're going to colonize Mars or have the AI singularity or just have their sort of corporate city states. You know, there's a sort of buffet of options. Peter, Teal is investing in all of them, right? And Epstein and Teal were talking about it. And the way he articulated was return to tribalism, right? It's interesting because Carlson has more in common with that worldview than he would like us to think, right? I mean, he's sort of standing up against the Epstein class, but they agree that this is what this era is about. Return to what they call tribalism, which means everybody gets there a little microethnostate. And this is Carlson's great grievance. Everybody gets their identity politics but white men.

This is what he's always complaining about. And this is where the great replacement ideology comes in, but this is also what Fuentes represents to all of them. He's the white guy who gets to have the identity politics that everybody else gets but but them. Right, according to them. According to them. But how do you answer this? You answer this with a vision of the world of the future rooted in solidarity, which where

everybody has a place, right? Everybody's included. Nobody gets sacrificed or thrown out. But I, you know, I think that this is the vision that he, that he represents. And it's a really bleak vision. It's a really grim vision. And, you know, I think people can make short-term alliances that will end up backfiring on them very, very badly.

Short-term alliance. That is something that I think should stay with everyone. The New Yorker published a great piece about the Groyper's called How the Internet Fringe Infiltrated Republican Politics, where they interviewed a young female Groyper. They exist. She encapsulated the Groyper ideology well. when she said, quote, the administration will post TikTok videos of ice raids, but it's

performative cruelty. Not enough actual deportations were happening. We don't want illegal immigrants to live in fear. We just want them gone. That, like, took my breath away. You know what's interesting about that is they are out of step with most Republicans even. And they've come to understand this. Like, after Minneapolis, there was a directive to the Republican Party ahead of the midterms.

not to talk about mass deportations, just to talk about criminal immigrants because there was such a significant backlash after the Minnesota uprising against ICE. And people saw, like, it's one thing to cheer for, like, a cool meme or something that, like, looks like your politics. It's another thing to actually see it happen, to see, you know, kids being tear-gast.

And to see, you know, know, everyday Americans stand up and be heroic. I think that that moment really revealed that this isn't actually mass politics. It is still fringe politics. And a lot, I don't know if it's a lot, but enough. Some Republicans spoke out, right, and said, this is not what we want, you know, joined the protests in Minneapolis. And so this is another kind of fracturing that we're seeing on the right.

And it's also, it's an opportunity for coalition that is a bottom up coalition of really figuring out, okay, what can we rebuild here? What kinds of alliances that isn't the top-down coalition with Tucker Carlson, but is people in their communities deciding what kind of values they want to have and how they want to live with each other? And that is where I think we should place our hope. It's a little less flashy. It doesn't play out on social media, but it is happening in communities across the U.S. It happened in New York, in these conversations that the Mamdani campaign facilitated with 100,000 volunteers. It happened in Minnesota, in the uprising against ICE. It's happening in this movement against data centers, which by some estimates has

blocked almost half of the proposed data centers. It's happening in red, really, really red parts of the country. I mean, what really strikes me, Matt, is that there was this really interesting article in the New York Times a week ago. The headline was the most bipartisan issue since beer, the data center opposition. Okay. It was a quote from a comedian who used that line. It's such a good line. The article described how these people who had blocked each other on Facebook over protests against trans brunches or like, sorry, drag brunches.

Oh, there we go. There's like trans brunches. Yeah, drag brunch. It was a drag brunch. And it was like somebody who ran like a Christian Facebook group. And they had been at war over a drag brunch. Simply to say that the last issue that brought this many people to like local community meetings, like it's the culture wars.

It's what's books to ban. It's vaccines. It's mask mandates. It's all the things I wrote about a doppelganger. But now people are coming together and say, no, we don't want that data center. And it's bringing communities together. And it's healing wounds from the pandemic where people are like, okay, we all agree we need water. You know, we need, we don't want our electricity bills to go up.

so there can be more AI-generated slop, and it can replace teachers and doctors. And so, you know, there's work to be done. And like, I'm against the litmus tests and all of that. But I just don't trust these particular figures to lead that alliance, to lead that coming together. Well, I want to talk a little bit about the Israel of it all, because I led with that, and I think a lot of people are still like, but he's good on Israel, right? and it's like, it's a hard kind of, right? I told you beforehand, I was like, I'm making a Venn diagram.

I'm not having Naomi Klein on my podcast and not making a Venn diagram. So, you know, just because someone's belief could look like yours does not mean that it is yours. And I don't even mean that it's like, oh, like maybe they arrived at your belief from a different place. It's like, it is a different belief, I believe. I made this Venn diagram of the growth. Royper right, of which I would, you know, include Tucker loosely and then the left.

Do you have the outline? You're not going to pull it up. You want me to... Sorry. Like I said, I don't have a producer for this podcast. It's just kind of like cobbled together with tape. Yeah, but you made a nice graph. Did you make it yourself or did you use AI? No, I made it myself.

I just like, I went to like Venn diagram.com and I like put in... Okay, good. On the Groyper right side, unique to the Groyper right, I wrote their America. America first, anti-immigrant, anti-LGBT, white supremacist, you know, very steeped in social conservatism, especially so with gender roles, anti-Semitism. And I wrote that they are billionaire friendly. And on the left, of course, pro-LGB, pro-immigrant, racial equity, feminism, pro-worker, wealth redistribution, market regulation, stuff like that.

What do these groups have in common? The Grooper right and the left both believe Trump is a fraud. I don't need to explain why the left thinks Trump is a fraud. I have told you that the Gryber Wright thinks that he's basically like a fake authoritarian, who should be a real authoritarian. They're both anti-epstein class, and they are both anti-war and anti-Israel. Could you, in your best ability, and I can join you on this, explain why this faction of the right is anti-Israel?

Well, they are against money going to Israel. because they are isolationist. They are, I think, against what pro-Israel lobbying has done to U.S. politics in that they believe Israel has pulled the U.S. into all kinds of wars, and they don't want to be fighting wars in other countries because they're isolationists once again. Like, I'm not sure they're anti-Israel and that they don't want Israel to exist. They don't want the U.S. to help Israel because they don't want the U.S. to help anyone. Yes.

And they're Christian nationalists. So they reject the joining of the Judeo and the Christian. They just want the Christian. Can I miss anything? Yeah, I think that's right. I think what you highlighted is so important that they are much more against the U.S. relationship with Israel than Israel itself. If Israel continued to function as like an apartheid, segregated ethno state,

I don't think Tucker would have a problem as long as our money was not. not going towards it. I actually have a clip that explains just that. I watched yesterday the two-hour conversation between Tucker Carlson and Nick Fuentes. So the fact that I am still here to talk to all of you is a miracle. Let's watch this clip where Tucker explains how he's quote, always thought he has the most moderate view on Israel. I've always thought I have the world's most moderate position on Israel. Don't hate Israel. Just don't want to get involved in their wars. Don't want to pay for this. don't want to pay for abortion on demand in a foreign country, sorry. When we're cutting food stamps on our own, like, that's outrageous.

It's not America first. So I think that illustrates what I'm saying pretty clearly. I think it's important to understand that that also doesn't preclude being anti-Semitic and that there's a long history of fascists supporting Israel because they think that that's actually where all Jews belong, that they can have their ethnostates so that we can have our ethno state, you know, our pure ethno state. but also that dumping all of the ills of capitalism onto a Jewish elite is a very old trick and a very useful one in terms of protecting capitalism.

So in times of crisis, when people are starting to ask deeper questions about an economic model that is screwing them over on a profound level, like I don't think it's just going to be left at, well, let's just let Israel be Israel. I think it will go beyond that because it's too useful in terms of protecting. Like the other thing on your chart, right, that it's a pretty pro-billionaire movement, right? And, you know, think about Tucker's relationship with Elon Musk. You know, when he lost his Fox show, Elon was his lifeline. He let him broadcast from X.

He was just quoting him the other day on the show about how Elon says that the U.S. is, I think it was him or maybe it was his guest that the, I think, but I actually think it was, I think it was Carlson. and saying that the U.S. was turning into South Africa. And Tucker talked about people being necklace, which is a reference in South Africa, to the, during apartheid, people would get burning tires put around their neck as a form of torture and murder.

So he was raising that prospect and invoking Elon. So the richest man in the world. I mean, this is a populist, right? I mean, he also is somebody who will talk, about how much of a libertarian he is and how, like, during COVID, how opposed he was to vaccine, you know, talking about vaccine mandates being authoritarianism and vaccine verification apps being authoritarianism. I haven't heard him say anything against what Palantir is doing, what his friend Elon did when he was running Doge and sent in people to hoover up

Americans' personal data and use it to train AI or whatever they. are doing. I mean, these are the most extreme violations of the most basic civil liberties, including, you know, what happened in Minneapolis. He may have been critical of what happened to Alex Prattie, but I didn't hear him say anything about people being stopped on the street because of the accent they had or how they looked and then having, you know, their doors kicked down, right? So simply to say he has said very little about Peter Thiel, Elon Musk. It's very dangerous. It's a very dangerous person to make an alliance with. And like Tucker Carl, and among a lot of other things, he supported gutting USAID, which Elon did with Doge,

and he supported gutting USAID for the same reason, I would argue, that he is broadly anti-Israel, which is that he just thinks that U.S. money shouldn't go anywhere except the U.S. Like, you know, one might ask of Tucker Carlson, why is one of the United States most prominent critics of Israel not organizing for Palestine? not raising money for Palestine, not doing anything for Palestine, except sort of the occasional opining against Israel with increasingly fringe members of the American far right. And it's because he's not an anti-Zionist.

And I'm not trying to be like pedantic by saying that. Anti-Zionism is a decolonial movement centered around the human rights of Palestinians. Tucker Carlson is a nativist and a white Christian supremacist who thinks that American Zionists support for Israel threatens their allegiance to the United States, which is the only allegiance they should have. The reality of a multi-ethnic country requires you to sort of set aside community or group interests

in favor of national interests, and you have to do that or else it doesn't work. I don't think, well, I'll speak for myself. I don't feel like I'm at war with the neocons or Israel, It's much bigger than that. It's like you want to restore America to a place where your grandchildren would enjoy growing up. That's it. Yeah.

He might be, you know, slightly concerned about the genocide in Gaza, but not enough to, like, do anything material about it or, like, advocate for Palestinians, which he does it. I mean, he started to get concerned when churches were targeted. And that tells you everything. Everything that he only started caring about, like, the genocide really in talking about it when church is. Perches in Gaza were targeted. On Sunday, one of the weirdest images of recent times, and there are a lot of weird images, appeared on the Internet. It appeared to show an Israeli soldier, an IDF soldier, using a sledgehammer to smash the face

of a statue of Jesus. So then you think, well, this just can't be real. And, of course, that's what they told you right off the bat. This is not real. But very quickly it emerged, no, this actually was real. Why would an Israeli soldier want to smash the face of Jesus? This is a country, we're often told, that is a safe haven for Christians in the region. How free are Christians to practice Christianity in Israel?

American Christians need to reassess their support for Israel. And so the genocide, it might be a secondary concern of Tucker's or even a tertiary concern, but his main concern is the opposite of humanitarian. Yeah. When I just was making before I got distracted around, you know, whether or not he's running for president or whether what role he's going to play in the next electoral cycle and next few electoral cycles is simply that people should remember that when politicians are cobbling together an electoral coalition, they say all kinds of things they don't believe or signal all kinds of things they don't believe. Trump did that with Latino voters. He did that with sort of maha moms, right? He put together the coalition that it would. take to win. And I think that the kinds of little signals that people on the left are starting to get and like from Tucker Carlson should be viewed with a similar skepticism, that they are trying to cobble together some kind of an electoral coalition and believe that maybe he's really, you know, anti-war in the same way that they convinced themselves that Trump was anti-war,

or pro-Palestine, as you're saying. Another thing that Tucker says a lot, is that Trump is controlled by Israel. This is sort of one of his central critiques of Israel. And I wonder what you make of that. Yeah, I mean, I think it's a story that exonerates U.S. power, right? I think anybody on the left who's aligning themselves with an ideology of American firstism should think hard about the role of U.S. foreign policy in the world and what it means to say that actually it's been, you know, Israel all along,

that is responsible for everything violent and imiscerating that U.S. policy has done. You know, the left response to this has to be internationalism. That's what the left is supposed to believe, which is the antithesis of any kind of exclusionary nationalism, whether it's calling itself America first or Christian nationalism, but especially American nationalism because of the blood on the hands of U.S. foreign policy. So, yeah, it's a kind of a clear. cleansing. I think he's kind of cleansing capitalism and he's cleansing the United States of all of its misdeeds. That's the project that is underway. A hundred percent. And, you know, I was just

explaining, like, one of Tucker Carlson's big critiques of Israel is that it's like people who have, like, American Zionists who have dual loyalty to Israel. They're like sort of breaking apart the American nationalist project. And I want to mention here where someone like Nick Fuentes takes that a step further, or at least is more explicit, is Nick Fuentes will say this is a Jewish problem because he believes that Jews represent a unique threat to American Christian nationalism because they have an ethno-religious obligation to Israel. Someone like Nick Fuentes believes that Jews, because they are Jews, are allegiant to Israel. Therefore, they are, if they're in the diaspora, if they're in the United States, they are,

are undermining sort of the American nationalism that should exist totally and completely within the United States. And so he does that sort of slight of hand where this is actually a Jewish problem. The idea that neoconservatism and Israel has nothing to do with Jewishness, Jewish identity, the Jewish religion, because clearly the state of Israel and the neocons are deeply motivated by that ethnic identity and their allegiance to Israel proceeds from that. There's like a natural affinity that Jews have for Israel. And he will say that to someone like Tucker Carlson virtually unchallenged. I want to also mention insofar as Tucker Carlson is tactically useful in the short term. I was talking with my Palestinian friend about this. And he mentioned,

you know, like the largest pro-Israel coalition in the United States is the Christian Zionist base. there are more Christian Zionists in the U.S. than there are Jews anywhere. And so, like, the one sprinkle of credit I can give to Tucker Carlson, again, only on a tactical level, is that he is probably breaking apart that coalition. Yeah, and I think coming back to what we were talking about earlier, this could be good. Like, it just depends on whether there is a left that can take advantage of that splintering, right? it's very important to break apart that coalition. I mean, it's something else that he's done very well on the show.

You know, some people want to argue that it's just anti-Semitic to even talk about this is that there's an increasingly powerful block inside Israel that really wants to rebuild the third temple where Alaksa is. And he had, as I said, Avranberg, former Speaker of the House on the show talking about how powerful this block is, you know, represented by Ben-Givir and Smotritch. Sort of like the Greater Israel people? I mean, they're beyond Greater Israel. They want, Greater Israel is only a piece of it.

They're, they're Messianic Zionists. This is where Christian Zionism and Jewish Messianic Zionism come together in their own strategic alliance, right? Because in the Christian version of this story, you need all the Jews to go back to Israel to occupy the... the biblical lands that was promised by God to Abraham in the covenant. And this is what Tucker Carlson was talking about with Ted Cruz, right? This is all part of breaking apart this story. So you sub in the promise to Abraham and then you say, well, that's a promise to the Israelites. And then

you say, that's a promise to modern day Israel. Once we start getting into the Bible of it all, I like have such a hard time. God is a real estate agent. Listen, I have been studying this now for more than a year. And I always say to my friends, like, I'm getting stupider. Like, the more I learn, the dumber I get. Like, I used to feel smart when I did research. And now I'm just like, what? It's so hocus pocus. I need to continue. So once you, did you ever watch any of the left behind movies? The what? The left behind movies? No, this is the rapture. This is the story of the rapture. Okay, you know a little bit about this? I know a little bit about, like, did Christian Zionists want the Jews to go to Israel so that like they can be saved and all the Jews can like burn in hell or something.

Yeah, that's basically the story. So, but certain things need to happen in order for those conditions to be met. You have to go to Israel and then they have to rebuild the third temple. And, and then there's a whole battle with the Antichrist, etc. Some Jews will convert and they'll also be saved. Faithful Christians will be saved. Everybody else will burn in hell. This is why I say it's a real strategic alliance. because you're making alliance with people who want you to burn in hell. Because the Jewish messianic version of this story is that you rebuild the temple and the messianic age begins. So it's not Jesus' return. They're both messianic stories.

One group thinks it's a return. The other group thinks it's happening for the first time. But they are agreeing to collaborate on the basics and they are deferring the big question about who burns in hell until later. Okay. So that's the alliance. And it's an incredibly damaging alliance. And this group is not the dominant in Israel, but they don't have to be dominant

in order to do some very, very destructive things. You know, October 7th, the name of the operation was Operation Al-Axa Flood. And the reason why it was named that is because there had been so many aggressive incursions onto Al-Axa. And so many things had happened to try to bring them closer

to the fulfilling of this prophecy. we get into things like red heifers importing them from Texas to the United to Israel. It's very, this is what I'm saying. Like, my brain has deteriorated. I was literally about to say your poor brain. Oh my goodness. Okay. But the thing is, it's like, you know, I have a line in doppelganger, quoting Philip Ross saying it's too ridiculous to take seriously and too serious to be ridiculous. And I feel like that is the slogan of our age, because it is, it is so ridiculous that you want to ignore it, but it's too serious to be ridiculous. because there are people with power who used to be quite marginal.

Now, you know, they have positions in the Israeli government that put them in charge of the whole police like Ben-Givir. This is why it matters that he, that Carlson will interview Mike Huckabee, who is the ambassador, U.S. ambassador to Israel, who says, I basically agree with this story. And he's a Christian Zionist. So it is important to break apart this coalition. It is an incredibly damaging and dangerous coalition between U.S. evangelicals and messianic Zionists and settlers.

There's a whole industry that brings people from their megachurches in the United States to go walk in Jesus' footsteps and go to illegal settlements, develop relationships, volunteer, give money. It's a huge industry. And it does matter that people are trying to break it apart. They're breaking it apart so that everybody can have their own fortress ethno-nationalist states and they can do their own ethnic cleansing in the United States. So we should not lose sight of that.

But if there was a functional, organized, strategic left in this country, they would use this opportunity. We would use this opportunity to say, okay, we actually want to build a different kind of world rooted in universal rights and international law and solidarity and things like universal health care and a higher minimum wage and things that are going to make people's lives and abolish billionaires. I mean, there's a lot of things that we know we need to do. And this is, can we talk about AOC for a minute? Yeah.

Yes. Yes. Yes. Do it. Do it. All right. You set it up the way you want to do it. I know I went on for a long time and I got to the red heifers, which I shouldn't have, you know?

But look, there are people who go on podcasts shaking little bits of ash of burned red cows in America, you know? Huge podcasts of millions of listeners. Next time we do this, you have to tell me which religious props to bring. Because I've started doing props. You have to bring a dime bag of ashes. Later, you'll explain to me why. Okay. I'd like to take a quick break from the show to give a shout out to Blue Land for sponsoring today's episode.

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dare I say. You pop in a tablet and some water to make whatever cleaning solution it is that you're going for, whether it's mirror cleaner, multi-purpose cleaner, you name it, and you're all set. And once you get to the bottom of that bottle, you can just refill it with water and pop in a new tablet. And those refill tablets start at just $2.25 a pop. So not only better for the planet, but also better for your wallet. If you would like to try Blueland today, you can get 15% off your first order at blu land.com slash fruity. That is Blueland.com slash fruity. Thank you so much to Blueland, as always, for sponsoring this show. And now let's get back to the episode. In preparing for this episode, Naomi was like, I really want to talk about the AOC Marjorie

Taylor Green Beef. And so here it is. This is the AOC MTG interlude. AOC was recently speaking at an event where she was asked about working across the aisle with political adversaries where she said this. I care about results. Now there are certain places where certain areas where I don't think that we should ignore some folks' record on some of these issues, right?

It's about where we trust intent, where we trust where those outcomes are going. I personally do not trust someone like Marjorie Taylor Green, a proven bigot and anti-Semite, on the issues of what is good for Gazans and Israelis. I know. I don't think that it benefits our movement in that instance to align the left with white nationalists. I don't think it serves us. And so I think it's about looking at the context.

the place, the results, the outcomes, intentions, and where we think that train would go. Now, this comment and the discourse that ensued will keep the lights on at blue sky for some time. Marjorie Taylor Green is, if you're out of the loop, someone who is elected to the House of Representatives in 2021 as sort of a Trump sycophant and perhaps his strongest soldier. And over the last year, became vocally disillusioned with Trump's cover up of the Epstein files and unwavering support for Israel, which she repeatedly called Miga, or Make Israel Great Again?

That's kind of their anti-Maga slur. Wow, I didn't know. Yeah, Miga. She was like, that's Miga, not Maga. Marjorie Taylor Green resigned from government in January after Trump began lashing out at her, saying that she didn't want to make her family endure the abuse. This led to a lot of hot takes,

and Naomi Klein, let's hear yours. Just kidding. It doesn't have to be a hot take. It doesn't have to be a hot take. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I mean, I don't particularly want to weigh in on the whether or not to trust Marjorie Taylor Green or not. You know, I think I've said before she's been on a journey. I don't know her. I don't know exactly what she believes. It's also just like a moot point in my opinion because it's like she's not in the government anymore. But sorry, continue. Yeah. And I think she wanted to run for the Senate in Georgia. I don't know. I do do know that. Unlike some of the people we've been talking about, But she does talk about the corruption within the Trump administration, like just the unbelievable level of self-enrichment and donors and so on.

She occasionally gets it right. No, I think the thing that really bothered me about the reaction was all where all these people saying, like, Marjorie Taylor Green is so much more courageous than AOC. And yeah, and she sacrificed her whole political career for her beliefs. Yeah. Sorry, I don't mean to cut you off. I'm with you. I'm with you. That was the line, right?

Like, Marjorie Taylor Green sacrificed her political career to, like, stand up for what she thought was right. I just want to say, Marjorie Taylor Green did not sacrifice her political career. She quit as soon as her views shifted and she would have had any leverage to actually enact change, according to her new views. Yeah. And I think it's politically smart within. MAGA to see that the sort of Trump train is crashing and there's going to be another wave and we'll see what she does, right? But being able to be like I was one of the courageous ones, you know, if you're running in kind of a purple state, is not a bad thing to be. So we'll see. No, I think

what bothered me about it is even though I think that EOC has made some big mistakes on Israel, you know, everybody was quoting the convention speech and the working tirelessly for a ceasefire was bad. Yeah, she carried water for Kamala's line about like we're working tirelessly for a ceasefire. In Kamala Harris, we have a chance to elect a president who is for the middle class because she is from the middle class. And she is working tirelessly to secure a ceasefire in Gaza. That was not true. I think she was she was in her mode of, you know, which is a mode that Bernie gets into as well, of just like doing everything, we need to stop Trump, you know. And looking at the way the world works now, you can see why people get into that mode, but it doesn't forgive a line like that in the middle

of a genocide and in the context of a convention where Palestinians were being blocked from from even having a speaker. So not to say that things like that haven't happened, but, you know, AOC added her name to the first ceasefire resolution that was introduced by Corey Bush and Rashida Talib, she signed it on October 18th. So this idea that she's taken no risks, that was a big political risk at the time. That was when Marjorie Taylor Green was standing with Israel and, you know, and it was, I mean, I was in Washington for that JVP rally. I don't know if you were there.

Were you there? In 2023? Yeah. Naomi, I honestly wasn't, not only was I not there, like I wasn't there yet. Okay. Yeah. I mean, yeah. Which I think is important to name.

Like my political evolution happened in the wake of October 7th, and I was not there yet. No. And, you know, Bernie wasn't there yet. I mean, it would be six months before Rokana called for a ceasefire. She was early. So I'm just saying that. I just want to say because a lot of people have been lying. She was early.

And she did take some risks. And she also, you know, was the voice of the Green New Deal in Congress. And that is the kind of a vision that we actually need to get us out. of this fascist house of mirrors that we're in right now. And she has been on the road with Bernie calling out oligarchy, and she has been taking on the tech giants. And I said, I think she's made mistakes over the years. You know, I don't think she should have gone through the Metball, you know, things like that, right?

Yeah. And I think people have a right to be critical and hold her accountable. But the idea that the left is in a better situation tearing down someone like AOC and trying to obliterate her entire record, you know, I think is doing the rights work for them. And so that's what bothered me about the exchange. You know, I have been opposed to Zionism for, you know, most of my life, not all of my life, because I did, I was exposed as a, as a kid and a teenager to the indoctrination. And, you know, I went to a Jewish day school. And it's important to know the story, to know the appeal and the appeal is we were weak, now we are strong. The story is a hideous story. You know,

and my friend Molly Krabapple has been so eloquent in her, you know, when she talks about the Jewish labor Bund and in her marvelous book about the Bund here where we live as our country, about the grotesque ways that Zionists have blamed European Jews for their own genitals. in this language of like lambs to the slaughter, or even when Netanyahu spoke to Congress, I forget, and he's done it so many times, but it was a couple of years ago, I think it was still the Biden administration, where he said, you know, we'll never walk like lambs to the slaughter again. Or, you know, it was a clip like that, maybe you can find it. Far from being lambs led to the slaughter.

Israel's soldiers have fought back with incredible courage. reiterating this idea of blaming the victims. And the story that Molly tells in the book is really that it was a failure of solidarity on every level. It was a failure of, you know, multiracial movements to stick together. And also failures of solidarity in the United States and Canada and all the countries that shut their doors to Jews. So that Palestine seemed to be the only safe place, right? but the story of we were weak now we are strong is part of what justified alliances Zionist alliances with anti-Semitic fascists in the interest of the Israeli state.

So this story, I mean, I was saying before, this is an old story of like when solidarity fails, you find your bully, right? I mean, you even think about it in a kind of schoolyard context. How do you protect yourself when you're vulnerable? You find your, you're a tough guy, you know? And so it really is solidarity, multiracial democracy. We're all, you know, we all keep each other safe. Or a world of warring ethno states where everybody finds their fascists, finds their bully.

These are the choices ahead of us or with us now in this moment. It's not ahead. It's now. I also, with respect to Marjorie Taylor Green, just want to point out that like it's not even really a transformation. Marjorie Taylor Green isn't necessarily a gropeer. I think she would probably say she's too old for that. But she's groper adjacent in her politics and even in her opposition to Israel. I mean, she's a little better than some of the others.

She does seem to have a genuine humanitarian concern for the genocide on Gaza. She's, you know, in the fact that the liberal establishment has left, as you said, the lane wide open. For her to be the person talking about that on CNN is insane. horrifying, but she's still extremely anti-immigrant. She's still anti-vaccine. I think she's on Twitter right now recommending like Ivermectin for the Hanta-Viris. She is very anti-abortion, very anti-trans. In her resignation letter, she was like, I join this to get the men out of women's sports.

You know, it's like... She's also very proud of her work with Doge and says that, you know, that things started to go bad when they didn't go far enough with Doge. So I think we're sensing a pattern among these people that it's like these beliefs that have the aesthetic of some sort of thing that looks like some of what we practice on the left are not. And, you know, as recently as last summer when Zoron won the primary, Marjorie Taylor Green posted, did you say this? She posted an AI generated image of the Statue of Liberty covered in like a burqa. Yeah, I think you're right what you said before. that why are we talking about her? She's not, she's, she's, she's not in politics right now. She's now an influencer. We can't read her mind. You know, she said some good stuff. She said some absolutely

atrocious stuff. Why would we speculate about whether she's really changed or not changed? It's a waste of time. One thing that I think, I think is clear is that there's going to be something after Trump. There are going to be people who are going to try to fill this vacuum. And they're going to to try to fill it by saying, we are not going to do the things that hurt you that Donald Trump did, right? Because that's just smart politics. So it will be a kind of an anti-Ebstein class, host Maga Maga. And I think that we can anticipate that they will be talking much more specifically about being anti-corruption, because there has been so much corruption in this administration is absolutely unprecedented, the looting that's going on. So they will have to be

claimed to be anti-corruption. And I think that the other thing that's really struck, you know, Astro and I, as we've been doing this research, about what makes this fascism different than it's like a Passover question. Why is this fascism different than other fascisms? And one of the things is that it has not offered really anything but vicarious cruelty to its base, right and not to get nostalgic for Mussolini but that's the part they'll clip no look there's no there there is no nostalgia for 20th century fascism but it was a kind of a fortist fascism that had an offer to its base if you were part of the in-group you got material benefits right it wasn't all memes you got like a nice home that they stole from the Jews or the

Slavs, right? You got social programs. You've got big public works, whether we're talking about Franco, Mussolini, or Hitler. I mean, look at even what Israel by their land theft has given Israelis. And that's what Tucker's mad about, right? That's what made me think about it, right? It made me realize that I think that the next stage of this will make more serious social welfare offers, right? And that will be called a bipartisan coalition, because we'll all agree, right? It'll seem like we can agree. We agree that Israel is a genocidal state and we also agree that people should have health care or social security. And it's going to be really important to understand this history, that that is not the coalition that we need to make. What we need is actually to have a genuine left offer that doesn't throw anyone out. And that's what what Mamdani has showed can work in the context of a city and it can also work in the context of a country. That's where where Marjorie Taylor Green and Tucker Carlson and Nick Fuentes are headed, and we should be ready for it because people are going to try to tell us it's progressive and it's not. It's fascist. Mm-hmm. Could I play you one more video to react to? Yes, please.

I just want to really make light of something that we've mentioned, which is the way that, like, liberal Zionist institutions have paved the way for Tucker's rise and Nick Fuentes's rise and Marjorie Taylor Green to look like a reasonable person. And I think nothing represents that better than this viral clip from an interview that Tucker did with the editor-in-chief of the economist, wherein she asks him the following. You are critical of the government of Israel. Do you believe in that Israel's right to exist? Would you consider yourself a Zionist in that narrow definition? What does that mean a right to exist? The existence of the political state of Israel as it has existed. But it has a right, what does that mean?

But you don't, you think it should continue in its existence as a state right now? So you are the, you do not agree with Iran, for example. Let me just ask, since you asked me the question is fair for me to get you to define the term so I can answer it. You've asked two questions. The first was, do you believe Israel is a right to exist? And the second question was, do you believe Israel should continue to go on as a nation state? And those are very different questions. So I often hear the phrase.

Having been created as a political entity in 1940, Does it have a right to exist? Is that what you're asking? I don't want to get hung up on the right. No, no. Should it continue to exist? That's how I define narrowly designed. Because the phrase you used was devised by the Israeli government, of course, does it have a right to exist?

And so my question to you would be, what does that mean? Why don't you answer my question? It's a very simple question. Are you asking, does it have a right to exist? or do I want it to exist? Do I seek its destruction? Fine. Answer it that way.

Well, of course I don't seek its destruction. I've already said, as you know, because I said it to you, I don't want Israel to be destroyed or have to use nuclear weapons. We've established that you are in that narrow terms of Zionist. I'm in no sense of Zionist. I don't want any country to be destroyed at all, and I don't want people to die, particularly ones who committed no crime, because I don't believe in killing innocence, period. That's the basis of Western civilization.

Eastern civilization, it's a whole different view. They believe in collective punishment. I don't. So you're in no sense a Zionist. I don't even know what that means. Why don't you define the term? And then I'll tell you whether I am. What's a Zionist?

In my narrow term, this definition, is that the state of Israel, the political state of Israel, has the right to continue existing. The right? Where does that right come from? What do you mean? These are like, I'm not being a lawyer about it. I just want to know what you're asking me. You're saying to answer the question.

Because I don't know what you're asking me. You don't want to define your question, and I don't know why. I mean, insane Tucker Carlson laugh aside. He's running laps around this person. She can't be honest what she means about things like Zionism or the right to exist or whatever. Yeah, and he said that's what Western civilization stands for. That was one of the things that stood out to me, that Western civilization stands for that. I mean, there's, I'm not so sure it does.

Like, I'm not so sure that that's what the history of Western civilization shows us, because genocide has been committed in the name of Western civilization many times. And what he's actually describing is, is universal human rights and international law. And I would like to ask Tucker Carlson if he believes they have a right to exist. I want to ask him if he thinks the UN has a right to exist. You know, the genocide convention is a product of that post-second World War II infrastructure that was a response to genocide committed in the name of Western civilization, in the name of Western values against pollutants. So, yeah, he can run laps around her and everybody can be thrilled with it. But I liked Mamdani's answer to that question better when he said, I believe in international law.

And every state should abide by it. And if they abide by it, then they should exist. Which was a better way of getting around that gotcha question. And there's lots of different ways. But I think people are so sick and tired of it that anytime anyone stands up to it, it's going to go viral. And, you know, that's what happens. Yeah. And I don't say that he's running laps around her to, like, do some crazy Tucker Carlson praise.

I think it's very easy, like you said, to just get around this question with like a normal answer of like, I believe in international law. States don't have rights. And there's lots of ways to get around it. Yes. Francesca Albanyes, Almanese, has also done an incredible answer to this. So has Tana Hossi Coates, ones that are based in human rights frameworks. But what kills me, what drives me crazy as someone on the left, is that the dishonesty of these institutions that are sort of like Zionist first because they are whatever, allegiant to these systems and capital. and all of that other stuff, they have left the lane wide open for these people to swoop in and look like the rational ones in the situation when, as we've described over this episode,

they are leading people to a much worse place. You know, if you look at what someone like McFuentes believes, which, as I've explained, is that, like, Jews are Israel. Jews support for Israel is downstream of their ethnicity. It is inherent and it is therefore a danger to the American nationalism because they have dual loyalty, whatever, whatever, whatever. When he says that this is a Jewish issue and that Zionism is a Jewish issue, he's speaking the same language as all of these sort of like ardent, staunch Zionist defenders at these

institutions, Zionists like those at the ADL, Jonathan Greenblatt, who I've covered on this podcast, or at the New York Times, or Jake Tapper and Dana Bash at CNN, who I would argue have done more than almost anyone to assist the rise of figures like Fuentes, Tucker, Candice, and the like by insisting on these falsehoods and these conflations and their sort of undemocratic attempts to silence any dissent, especially within liberal circles. And like this is what drives me crazy is I feel like these people have made the rise of a Fuentes or a Tucker inevitable, you know? I think they have. I think this has been a group project. And, you know, we like we are more than two and a half years into a genocide that coalitions of the left

have failed to stop and I think we are now in a moment where people are looking around going are there other alliances we can make that might be and and I think from the beginning there have been people who who have had that perspective that it's really about just finding strength and like I said, Israel itself is a product of that kind of thinking, right? And this is what Molly gets at in her book so well that the Zionists and the Bundists were at war because they had radically different visions of safety, right? The Bundist idea of safety was the safety and solidarity and transforming the world wherever we live in multiracial alliance with other working people, with other working class people.

And the Zionist vision was a fortress vision in alliance with powerful imperial actors. So, yeah, we've been brought to a really bleak place. I think that we need to double down in our work as anti-Zionist Jews. And that work is disentangling Judaism from Zionism. because that fusion of faith and nationalism is incredibly dangerous. It's also dangerous in the United States, which is what Tucker Carlson is doing. It's a fusion of Christianity and Americanness, nuclear-powered, you know, by any means necessary. So there are alliances to be made with people of faith who are Christian, who are trying to disentangle their faith from what J.D. Vance is trying to do with it, right?

I think the Pope is trying to do it. You know, I think there's, I think there are interesting alliances that we should be making. Some of them are tricky and unexpected. Like, I don't think we should be just looking for people who agree with us on everything. Yeah. But I don't think we should be making alliance. Like, I don't think we should be trying to take on one form of supremacist to ethno-nationalism by making alliances with people who believe in another one.

Because I don't think that's going to end well. But you're absolutely right to point out that we would not be. here if that vacuum wasn't created by the Democrats, if Zionism hadn't fused Judaism with an ethno state. And then people like Nick Fuentes and Tucker Carlson say, well, you're the ones who said, you know, you're the ones who said Judaism is Israel. So we have a lot of work to do. And I think what worries me is that, you know, when people make alliances with anti-Semites, I worry that people who have been, you know, part of the anti-Zionist Jewish organizing world will sort of start to turn away. And I think that that would be a mistake because I think that there are lots of people who are trying to do politics differently.

And like Abdul-Assad in Michigan, the campaign he's building, I think there are a lot of candidates who are trying to forge another kind of politics. I think we should, you know, get out there and support them. It's not all bleak. It's not all bleak. And, you know, just to conclude, a lot of people do ask me, you know, because the adage has always gone in these, like, mainstream Jewish institutions like the ADL, where they're like, the best way that you can, you know, stand up against anti-Semitism is like, be louder about your support for Israel and, like, wear, like, more necklases about it or whatever. But I think, like, I would really just like to argue again that, like, the best thing that, in my opinion, you can do to fight anti-Semitism is continue to fight this conflation. Because this conflation that people, like, again, like Dana Bash continue to insist on every night on CNN is the same conflation that Nick Fuentes is making when he's sitting down with Tucker Carlson. and it is that conflation that they are then using to justify what could be an extraordinarily

anti-Semitic future for the Republican Party. That's like the most coherent I think I've ever felt in my entire life. It was really good. It was really good. No, I mean, you know, I was just thinking, I was just thinking how to say this because it's so fucking complicated. But thinking about the 1930s in the United States, you know, fascism was. rising and figures like the ones we've been talking to, America Firstism was rising. And it was,

you know, a moment when the U.S. could have gone, could have gone fascist itself, right? And the U.S. has gone fascist itself, right? I mean, it's like this thing of could it happen here. It did happen. I mean, the Nazis learned, studied the Jim Crow laws to write the Nuremberg laws. They didn't invent fascism, even if they gave it a proper name. It existed in the the colonies it existed in under settler colonialism. But that kind of capital F fascism could have come to the United States. And there were lots of people who wanted it to. And they called themselves America first. And the only thing that really succeeded in defeating it were programs that actually made Americans lives better. And the reason why I hesitate to lift it up is that the New

Deal, you know, those policies were white supremacist. I mean, they were segregated in the South. they discriminated against black people systematically. There were all kinds of professions that were excluded from New Deal protections because they were predominantly black sectors. But the huge numbers of jobs that were created under Public Works programs under FDR and the social protections that were created in the New Deal era are what kept the United States from turning into a fascist country. And that is the only thing that will stop this tide that we've been talking about, which is

why we shouldn't be tearing down left politicians. We should be challenging them and holding them accountable and holding them to high standards, but we should be building the left that would be capable of winning that and more. Because it's the only thing that will stop it. There's the optimism. All right. Naomi Klein. We did it. Thank you so, so much for being here today. It really is a dream and an honor. So thank you for allowing me to help you promote your book. Where can be back in talking about end times fascism with Astra because my brain is still a little bit.

The book is still in its final stages. So there's this thing that happens like before it comes out where like we get really organized with our talking points and I'm not there yet. So forgive me for being a little ramblier than usual. And please have me in Astra back to really blow your mind with this stuff. I can't wait. For now, where can people? find more of you. Oh.

No, actually, this is the only interview I've done. Because we've been so locked down with the book. No, I don't know. I'm not really anywhere. I stop posting on X. Don't really understand Instagram, as you know. You're the first person who's answered this question with nowhere. You can find Naomi at the bookstore. I'm platformless. So it's really good to talk.

Well, I'm so grateful that you came here for this episode. I know it was like sort of like more advanced, complicated, like political unpacking of what's going on. But, you know, sometimes we just have to do episodes like this. We can't always talk about celebrities, but in two weeks we probably will again. I love you so much. Thank you for listening today. And until next time, stay fruity. That's my little outro.