Democracy Now! Audio - Democracy Now! 2026-09-15 Tuesday

Episode Date: September 15, 2026

Democracy Now! Tuesday, September 15, 2026

From New York, this is Democracy Now. So we've all been seeing the headlines coming out of Silicon Valley, where AI engineers, workers from Anthropic and other tech companies are warning that AI might cause mass extinction, the end of humanity. So I don't think that we should necessarily take seriously what they're saying about the tools, about AI itself, but we should take very seriously the fact that they are willing to gamble the entire world for what they believe is a very profitable technology. As AI researchers warn unregulated artificial intelligence could kill off the human race,

we'll speak with Astra Taylor and Naomi Klein, co-authors of the new book, End Times Fascism, and the Fight for the Living World. The book examines how wealthy elites, including tech CEOs, are preparing for the of the world, even as they contribute to growing inequality, political instability, wars, and the climate crisis. The book also looks at the social movements pushing back. All over the world, we're seeing social movements, whether they're rising up against data centers or against AI in schools or against corrupt governments in Albania. All over the world, these social movements are committing to the living world, that the places where they live are worth saving,

worth putting themselves on the line for. Their neighbors are worth saving people and the living world are worth saving. Today, Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor on End Times Fascism for the hour. All that and more coming in. Welcome to Democracy Now, Democracy Now.org, the War and Peace Report. I'm Amy Goodman. The Supreme Court has blocked President Trump's efforts to restrict mail-in-voting ahead of November's mid-term elections. On Monday, the court issued a brief unsigned order upholding a lower court ruling that bars the U.S. Postal Service from fully implementing Trump's

executive order which sought to create federal lists of citizens and to refuse delivery of mail-in ballots to people, not on those lists. This comes as a whistleblower is alleging federal agents may have broken state laws and a wide-ranging search for alleged unlawfully registered voters. The whistleblower reached out to California's Democratic Senator Alex Padilla who made the complaint public Monday. Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer warned the Department of Homeland Security pulled hundreds of federal agents from their normal roles to identify, opposed unlawful voters. DHS, under Trump, is forcing its officials to carry out an illegal scheme, break state laws, and treat U.S. citizens as collateral damage all to advance his scheme to rig the

election. They're even asking people to lie about their identities so they can create this illegal scheme. We are weeks from the midterms. Americans should not have to fear being targeted by their own government because of how they're registered to vote. President Trump's rejected calls to regulate artificial intelligence, calling warnings about the threat of super-intelligent machines a hoax. Writing on his truth social platform, Trump boasted, quote, the only controller guardrails that AI needs is a strong and smart, high IQ president. and the USA has that in spades.

There's a sick conspiracy going on against AI and data centers, and the only one that is happy about it is China. Whoever wins AI wins, Trump said. His comments came after Anthropic CEO, Dario Amadeh and other AI heads, publicly called for a slowdown in the development of frontier AI models and called for government regulation themselves. On Monday, Trump called Jensen Huang, the CEO of the computer chip maker in Vidia, while Huang was speaking at an AI summit in Los Angeles.

Wong put the president on speakerphone. Well, I also have common sense about AI. The robots will not be taken over. The AI will not be taken over the rest of the world. The whole thing is a hoax. We'll have more on artificial intelligence after headlines with Naomi Klein and Astra-Teller. co-authors of the new book, End Times Fascism and the Fight for the Living World. Yemen's Iran-backed Houthis sees two islands in the Southern Red Sea Monday as Saudi Arabia

launched 54 air strikes over the past 24 hours. The Houthis are currently digging into positions on the western coast of Yemen along the Red Sea. On Monday, Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman met with the U.S. commander who oversees Middle East operations days after President Trump dismissed the Saudi leaders' calls for help in combating the Houthis. Their meeting came as Vice President J.D. Vance claimed the U.S. is, quote, on top of the situation. We've also been engaged in direct conversations with the Houthis themselves. So we actually feel like we are on top of the situation. It's a very fluid and dynamic thing. but we're going to keep on monitoring it and making sure that Americans' best interests are represented.

Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps says it shot down two more U.S. operated MQ1 drones over the Strait of Hormuz and says an oil tanker exploded and caught fire after colliding with mines. The IRGC did not provide further details, but the claim came as a fire broke out and an oil tanker up the coast of Oman. Two dozen sailors were evacuated, two remain missing. On Monday, the Secretary of Iran's Supreme National Security Council rejected Trump's claim that he was open to resuming discussions with Iran, declaring, quote, no talks until Iran's conditions are met, period, unquote. On Monday, the yield on 10-year U.S. Treasury bonds passed 5 percent for just the second time since the 2008 financial crisis, pushing mortgage and other borrowing costs higher. Brent crude oil top $108 a barrel as officials in Saudi Arabia said it would take weeks to repair the East-West oil pipeline struck by Houthis last week. The former ICE jail in the Florida Everglades, known as Alligator Alcatraz, frequently locked detained immigrants in outdoor metal cages that were no bigger than a phone booth.

That's according to the Department of Homeland Security's internal watchdog report. At least 79 immigrants were held in these cages known as so-called calming areas for several minutes to nearly two hours. Investigators also found the ICE jail did not comply with standards related to medical care, food quality, personal hygiene, and recreation. The facility eventually shut down. legal challenges and scrutiny over its abuse and inhumane conditions. A coalition of six cities and counties led by New York filed a lawsuit Monday seeking to block the Trump administration's new rule, making it easier for federal officials to reject green card and visa applications from immigrants who've used public benefits.

Immigrants could also be denied a green card if they or a family member receive state or federal financial aid to attend college. New York Attorney General Letitia James announced a similar lawsuit against the Trump administration over the new rule on behalf of New York and nearly two dozen other states around the country. James spoke yesterday. The rule would allow immigration officers to consider use of critical benefits like Medicaid and SNAP and even participation in school meal programs as part of an applicant's circumstance. And that means immigrant New Yorkers may.

be forced to ask themselves impossible questions. Will getting health insurance hurt my chances of getting a green card? Will accepting food assistance when I fall on hard times be held against me? Donald Trump Jr.'s Bahamas' wedding was secretly bankrolled by Russian oligar close to Russian President Putin. That's the headline of a new ProPublica exposé, which found that Russian billionaire Umar Kremlin paid the bill for hundreds of thousands of dollars of expenses during Donald Trump Jr's destination wedding in May, including a fireworks display and the rental of two private islands. Kremlin is president of the International Boxing Association. He's been sanctioned by Ukraine over his ties to Putin, who awarded Kremlin the Order of Friendship in April.

Trump Jr. and his newlywed wife, Bettina Anderson, confirm ProPublica's findings, writing on social media, quote, Our dear friend Umar, very generously hosted two incredible nights of celebrations for us. It's unfortunate that something so personal and happy can be recast as something political or sinister simply because of who someone is or where they come from, said Trump Jr. On Capitol Hill, Kentucky Republican Senator Mitch McConnell returned to the Senate for the first time since suffering a medical emergency in June. He'd been almost entirely out of public view for three months. McConnell used an assisted wheelchair, appeared frail and spoke slowly when talking to reporters briefly outside the Senate chamber. Reporters were barred from recording video of the 84-year-old senator. In Turkey, authorities have detained at least 162 people in a series of raids on gay bars and the homes of LGBTQI plus activists. Police also searched the offices of six LGBTQ plus associations in weekend raids.

It's part of an operation called Keep My Families Safe. Same-sex relations are not illegal in Turkey, but homophobia and transphobia remain widespread. President Rich of Taip Erdogan has repeatedly blamed the LGBTQ-plus community for falling birth rates. A federal judge in Massachusetts has blocked the Trump administration from enforcing a new rule that would limit the visa length for international students, academics, and journalists. The new policy would have capped the stay of international students who are usually allowed to extend their U.S. visas until their studies are completed, while limiting foreign journalists to remain in the U.S. for just 240 days. In New York, Palestinian rights advocate Mahmoud Khalil has filed a federal civil rights lawsuit against Columbia University, accusing the school of failing to protect him and other pro-Palestine student activists from harassment.

Khalil was arrested by federal immigration agents who ambushed him at his Columbia University. apartment building in March of 2025. He spent over 100 days in an ICE jail in Louisiana, missing the birth of his first child. Speaking to reporters on Monday, Mahmoud Khalil announced what he called Colombia's deliberate indifference and discrimination aimed at intimidating Palestinian students. For over two years, we pleaded with Colombia. Colombia did not care. Our safety and will-being did not serve the ideological project its Board of Trustees was protecting.

So they traded us away. We are suing because no students, regardless of their background, should go through the hell that Colombia put us through over all these years. To see our interviews with Mahmoud Khalil go to Democracy Now, And music superstar Ed Sheeran has removed the Grammy-winning musician McElmore from the rest of Sharon's U.S. tour following a boycott by stadium owners who cited McElmore's Palestine advocacy and on-stage comments about Gaza and the occupied West Bank. In a statement shared on Instagram, McElmore detailed a call between Ed Sharon and Robert Kraft, the billionaire owner of the. New England Patriots and Gillette Stadium, rallied other stadium owners to ban McElmore, and told Sharon to remove the rapper from the shows or he, too, would not be allowed to perform. On September 4th, McElmore performed his song Hins Hall to a packed MetLife Stadium in New Jersey just outside

New York City. He dedicated it to Columbia University students who led a protest encampment in 2024. Hins Hall was named after Hindra Jab, a five-year-old Palestinian girl who was killed by Israeli soldiers in Gaza alongside six members of her family and the two paramedics who were dispatched to save her. I said, free Palestine. I want those words to be loud and clear. So the people from Gaza all the way to the occupied West Bank know that we have not forgotten. That was McElmore at MetLife Stadium. To see our interview with McElmore last year, go to Democracy Now.org. And those are some of the headlines.

This is Democracy Now, The War and Peace Report. Coming up, Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor, co-authors of the new book, End Times Fascism, and the Fight for the Living World. Stay with us. Where the reason is a burning of hatred that's crossing the lines. There's a blue thinks he's king selling. Who think you are? He plays us with his hate, turns man against man, but it's really not a game. And I pray to the ancestors' love, do not.

be fooled by this man's foolish talk. The serpent woke again in different times and places. There's a burning cross leading the mob people in chains. He's a quack, circus sack, creeping from the past. He's the symbol of the monster we no longer want to be what we used to be. The earth trembles with his names. Mussolini, Adolf Hitler, Pinochet. No respect for woman, no respect for race, no respect for anything that lives. The demagogue by Lila Downs here at Democracy Now Studios. This is Democracy Now, Democracy Now,org, the Warren Peace Report. I'm Amy Goodman in New York, joined by Democracy Now co-host Juan Gonzalez in Chicago.

Hi, Juan. Hi, Amy, and welcome to all of our listeners and viewers across the country and around the world. The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us by the end of the decade. That was the warning last week from former anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon that set off an escalating debate over how to regulate increasingly powerful AI systems. Coxon spoke to the BBC. So it's not at all an exaggeration to say that the people who are involved with both founding these companies and building the tech. believe there is a possibility of human extinction. And many of the people who are sort of deep in the weeds

on actually coding the thing believe that there is like a greater than 10% chance or even greater, some smaller, but they all have different numbers for a probability that humans might die. And they all keep this in their head on a daily basis while working on the technology. Amadai also called for the pace of development

of artificial intelligence models to slow down. And an essay he wrote that within six to 12 months, a swarm of AI agents could be capable of taking over the entire Internet and cause hundreds of billions of dollars in damage. He wrote, quote, the scale of damage would continue to increase from there if AI becomes more powerful without the necessary guardrails, unquote. But President Trump has rejected growing calls for placing regulatory guardrails on the AI industry and his call concerns over AI. a hoax. On Monday, Trump called Jensen Huang, the CEO of the computer chipmaker, NVIDIA, while Huang was speaking at an AI summit in Los Angeles. Wong put the president on speakerphone. The data centers are great, and they make people wealthy, and they make states wealthy,

and it's the oil of the next 20, 25 years. It's bigger than the Internet and the AI, you know, much more so. And they're just playing right into the hands of a lot of people that don't want to see it happen and that could be political people and it could also be China and we're not going to let that happen. It's a hoax. You're right. We're not going to let that happen, sir.

No, we're not going to let it happen. The robots are not going to be taking over the world. As the debate over AI intensifies, the award-winning journalists and writers Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor have a new book out today that's connected to all of this. It's titled End Times Fascism and the Fight for the Living World. It examines how wealthy elites, including tech CEOs, are preparing for the end of the world, even as they contribute

to growing inequality, political instability, wars, and the climate crisis. They'll join us in a minute. But first, here's a short excerpt from a video that was released with the book. end times fascism is not a monolith it's a dangerous and fractious alliance of three main groups religious end timers from the very beginning it's been clear that god has a special plan and purpose for the nation of israel tech end timers you know i think AI will probably like most likely sort of lead to the end of the world but in the meantime there will be great companies created ethno nationalist end timers America is fighting with Israel for a common goal to protect our future, to protect civilization against these barbarians. Good take right there. Seed fucking high. Let's fucking go. You would prefer the human race to endure, right?

You're hesitating. End times fascists haven't just given up on liberal democracy. They've given up on the possibility of a shared future for all of us. The most powerful people in the world are preparing for the end of the world. And in they themselves are both accelerating and profiting from. We have imagined Armageddon so many times. It can almost feel inevitable, except it's not. So, which side are you on?

the side of bunkering down, abandoning Earth and profiting from apocalypse, or staying loyal to this planet and its people? Who are you aligned with? Who are you protecting? And making life here better. A short video released in conjunction with the new book, End Times Fascism and the Fight for the Living World, written by our guests in studio. for the hour. Naomi Klein, award-winning journalist, documentary filmmaker, best-selling author of a

number of books, including doppelganger and No Logo and The Shock Doctrine. Naomi Klein is also an associate professor and co-director of the Center for Climate Justice at the University of British Columbia in Canada. Astor Taylor is an award-winning writer, activist, and documentary filmmaker, the co-founder of the Debt Collective, and author of several books, including the age of insecurity coming together as things fall apart, and the people's platform, taking back power and culture in the digital age. Thanks so much for spending the hour with us. Naomi, start off with the title. Start off with end times fascism. Why you chose this. Well, first of all, thank you for having us here, Amy. It's great to be launching the book on

Democracy Now. It just came out this morning, as you said. And I think we have a long, of launching books together. So we decided to call it end-time's fascism because we're trying to understand what is the same and what is different about our moment of far-right extremism. I mean, we know that far-right parties with lineages to the fascists of the 20th century

are rising to power around the world. I mean, we just saw a faithful election in a German state the first time the far right has won an election since the Second World War. We're seeing very, very disturbing polls in France, for instance. And we're seeing more and more open fascist expressions in the United States from very powerful people in government and in tech. But we don't believe that this is simply a rerun. We don't believe that history repeats on a loop.

We believe that we're in something more like a sequel where the logics of fascism, which are the logics of dehumanization, of othering, of racial supremacy and hierarchy, are now being applied in a time of global existential crisis. This is not news to democracy now, listeners and viewers, that we live in a time of climate breakdown and collapse. We have tools like nuclear weapons that were not known to Hitler and Mussolini that have the ability to inflict apocalyptic levels of violence that were beyond their reach. And fascism always emerges during times of systemic crises. And it actually emerges as a way to protect capitalism from systemic change. So if we think about 20th century fascism in Europe after the First World War, there was a rising socialist response to the wreckage of the First World War, then to the Great Depression. And fascism rises up. We call it capitalism threat response or capitalism with bared teeth to make sure that all of that popular public anger is pivoted towards the scapegoat. So in our time, as we see these global crises, that could lead to systemic change, or there

can be this what we're calling end times fascist response that says, let it burn, and now it's a fight for who's going to survive the future. Now it's about building, as you saw in that film that we were fortunate to work with a great team of filmmakers on. It's about building the bunkers and the rocket ships and the escape hatches for religious end-timers, it's literally about the bunker in the sky. It's about the idea of the rapture. But that is almost like a template for these more secular stories that are also a kind of a rapture, but we call it in the book a wealth rapture. If you've got resources, you can

rapture yourself away from the impacts of those threats that we are all in. So that's why we call it end-times fascism. It hasn't won yet. And the reason we wrote the book is because people are fighting back. And we think if we're able to look at this very frightening reality with clear eyes, the more it is exposed to the light, the less popular it is, because in fact, most people cherish our one and only home and want to stay and want to make it better. Naomi, how is this different, for example, if from the 1950s and 60s, when at the height of the Cold War, there were Americans. especially upper class Americans building bomb shelters, convinced that there was going to be a nuclear war.

And the rest of the population eventually began to organize in an anti-nuclear movement that peaked in the 1980s and that led really to capitalism being forced to restrain itself to some degree in terms of arms-controlled treaties. Why is this different than back then? Well, Juan, I guess it's different because the people we're calling end-time as fascists are systematically dismantling that precise international infrastructure. One of the things that all those three factions all agree on, whether it's the religious fundamentalists, the tech extremists that we heard from in that video, or the ethno-nationalists, they don't agree on everything, but they all agree they want to get rid of the United Nations.

They all believe that that is the sort of Antichrist of their story. Sometimes they literally call it the Antichrist. And that chapter that you're describing, which is we write about in the book one, and I would actually love Astra to bring Astra into the conversation because she went pretty deep into this research on the history of bunkering in the United States and how people shifted the tide because we actually think that's a really inspiring story that we need to know better. Can I bring an Astra?

my incredible co-author. Thank you so much. Again, thanks for having us. I mean, yeah, it is very quickly, in the 1950s, the government policy was to encourage people to build their own bomb shelters in their backyard, and that was the response to the nuclear threat. And only around 1%, 2% of households did that,

in part because people revolted at the idea of protecting themselves and letting their neighbors perish. And there was a massive debate in magazines, like Time Magazine, Life magazine, that was around the idea of gunning thy neighbor. And people said, we don't want to do that. We don't want to be hiding in a hole in the ground with guns pointing outwards. And turning the people we care about away.

And that is part of the genesis of the movement for nuclear disarmament. And, you know, it was ordinary people who put the right solution on the table, which is, let's get rid of nuclear bombs. Let's not turn on each other and bunker down. And there's a lesson in that for today. I mean, it's so interesting because what they understood at the time is like either you bunker. Either you just protect you and yours, or you get at the root cause of the crisis, and you say, actually, we can't live with these weapons, right?

It's just, it's too dangerous. And, you know, as you both know, the nuclear disarmament movement had tremendous successes. In many ways, we argued that in the book, in the book, that it was a victim of its own success because many people in the disarmament movement believed that they had won so many victories that now the people in charge were just going to finish the job because so many thousands of nuclear warheads were successfully disarmed, and it seemed like there was a new era. And the majority of the stockpiles were disarmed, but not enough.

And now there is a re-arming, and AI is being embedded in the nuclear arsenal, which is why at the end of the book we call for a triple disarmament movement. And in fact, Juan, we have something that you might be interested in, which a new coinage in the book, which is the Stephen Miller test. And basically the argument that we're making is that eventually the most powerful tools, most powerful weapons will meet the worst people in the world. And if you don't want those tools to find themselves in the hands of Stephen Miller, then the tools should not exist. And that applies to nuclear weapons. It applies to AI. It applies to the wealth concentration itself, which we believe should be now understood as a WMD,

that this level of wealth that has accumulated at the top of our economy has itself become a weapon of mass destruction. And so we need to be disarming the wealth bombs, the tech bombs, and, of course, the bomb bombs. but because we are now seeing that these very dangerous, completely immoral people who seem to have such a casual attitude, and we see this from Donald Trump's most recent posts, just a kind of shrug in the face of apocalypse, they will find, they exert a magnetic pull towards one another. Yeah, and I want to follow up and ask either one of you if you want to answer this, because I did read the book in the last couple of days and really found it to be tremendously well written.

At the same time, though, there were some concerns I had, for instance, there's very little mention of the rise of a multi-polar world, of how the rise of East Asia, especially, the shift of the world's industrial working class to China, Vietnam, India, Indonesia, Bangladesh, along with Brazil and Mexico, that's, in the view of many, that's the single biggest impediment to U.S. economic dominance of the capitalist markets expansion. And that's also the biggest

threat that many of these end timers, as you label them, are concerned about. They're concerned about China. Yet China and its impact on U.S. hegemony and capitalism is not mentioned at all in the book. Well, I think that the threat of China is really, really central to the unimpeded AI rollout. It's really the only argument they have, and we do write about that in the book, but you're right, it's not the central focus of the book. We are more focused on the United States and the way in particular this is being pushed through Latin America, because we think they're in Europe. But the threat of the multipolar world, I do think, is central because the only argument that Donald Trump really has in the face of the threats that are now being articulated from inside the house, from inside the companies, is, but China, but China. If we don't build it, they will.

And it's completely untrue that deregulated AI has to be built the way it's being built, or else China will build it. China is much more open to regulating these technologies to the multilateral, to rules within the multilateral system. It's the U.S. that has been blowing up these agreements. And, you know, when the doomsday clock was reset this year, it was really, I mean, it's always pretty harrowing. But this year it was particularly so. They moved it forward four seconds. And describe not just the threats, whether it was biological weapons, nuclear weapons, AI, but the way the U.S. government under Donald Trump was going after all of the international

agreements that governments like China had been part a party to and just saying we don't need them. So that's the, I think it's the tools and the dismantling of any attempt to constrain those tools. It's also about the narrative that the people in power are telling themselves. And I think, you know, we're tracking how there's a certain. embrace of apocalyptic narrative of Armageddon of the end times that, you know, doesn't, every government in the world doesn't have that narrative, right? It's something that's very powerful in certain branches of the United States political class in Israel, in parts of Latin

America. So we're not saying that it applies to every country around the entire world. And so that's one reason that that isn't, there are some, you know, very powerful international players that aren't central to the thesis. Astra and Naomi, you write about Peter Thiel saying, quote, today a staggering number of his former colleagues and acolytes occupy powerful positions in every part of the Trump administration. The most consequential of them is J.D. Vance. If you can explain who is Peter Thiel, what does it mean to have his inner circle populating these? inner circle of the United States. And talk about all of these figures that are so much in the news now that were standing behind President Trump during his inauguration people who were opposed to him before, who took them off their platforms. I mean, we're talking about people like Jeff Bezos, people like Mark Zuckerberg and others. Yes. Peter Thiel is a powerful billionaire

venture capitalist who has been in Silicon Valley for a long time. He's part of the PayPal Mafia, So he founded PayPal with David Sachs, who was Trump's former AI and CryptoZar, and also Elon Musk, of course, who is now the president of SpaceX. Everybody will know him. Peter Thiel is quite interesting because he's been on the far right very proudly for a long time since he was an undergraduate at Stanford when he and David Sachs actually wrote a book against political correctness. And he has been on the vanguard of being very much against democracy, very, very, very, very, quasi-libertarian, but now just explicitly authoritarian, and has written things like, you know, democracy and freedom are incompatible. He was one of the first figures in Silicon Valley to come out for Trump in 2015. And as we write in the book, and as you said, many of his protégés are now

in positions of power, and the most influential one is J.D. Vance. J.D. Vance has written about how his Life changed when he saw Peter Thiel give a lecture. And this lecture inspired Vance to go to Silicon Valley to become a venture capitalist, not a very illustrious one. And that's where he met critical figures who would fund his political rise, including Teal, who gave what was a record-breaking donation of $15 million and kind of launched and made possible Vance's bid to become a senator of Ohio. And it was Peter Thiel who also brokered the meeting at Mar-a-Lago where Vance was able to apologize for calling Donald Trump Hitler. So Vance is, of course, one of those figures who used to be opposed to. Explain that. Yeah, Vance was once, you know, he was once for green energy.

He was against Donald Trump, who he said misleads people and offers empty promises like building a wall, you know, which won't actually improve people's lives. But he's also quite an opportunist. and Peter Thiel brokered, brokered peace among those two. And now we know Vance is the VCVP. J.D. Vance is also critical in our book because he is who helped bring together the AI industry in Donald Trump. So we remember from Donald Trump's first term that he was against big tech. He was really against big tech all the time. Thanks to J.D. Vance, who hosted a dinner at David Sacks' house, Trump got on the AI train.

And it was a fundraiser, but it was also a pitch session. And Vance's Silicon Valley brethren told Donald Trump that AI would be good for the economy, but it would be very good for the fossil fuel sector. And now we see that the Trump administration is all in on AI and not much else. So when we look at the famous image of the second Trump inauguration, we see all those tech execs given their front seats. And they're lined up. You know, our position is that it was the AI, it is the promise of generative AI eating

the economy that actually turned them, turned them fascist and caused this incredible alliance with the Trump regime that we're seeing. Yeah, that they, that alliance has served them incredibly well. It has produced the first trillionaire. It has produced companies that are claiming valuations roughly equivalent to the entire U.S. economy. And what they wanted from Donald Trump was exactly what they got, a frontier. You know, you hear this phrase used all the time now, frontier AI. But if you think about what a frontier is, a frontier is a wild west, it has no rules. And what they were,

what they were upset about under the last administration was that there were some, you know, not radical, very simple rules like you have to label deep fakes, guard rails against precisely the scenarios that they're now talking about in terms of integration with weapons systems and the prospect of a rogue AI. So all of this was on the table years ago. There were discussions at the United Nations. It's interesting that they're always using China as the boogeyman of why they have to roll out AI without rules.

China has many more rules regulating AI than the United States has. including rules around not allowing children to have these personal relationships with AI where there's confusion about whether or not you're talking to a friend or a robot or a therapist or whatever it is. So first of all, that's a lie. And that's just the fact that people are not educated about what China is doing that is allowing people to fall for this line of like, oh, no, if we don't do it, China will. They just simply don't know how China is regulating this.

But one of the things I've been thinking about is, and we have to be aware of how active this push was for the frontier, because now, of course, these CEOs are all coming forward, and then please regulate us. We'll regulate ourselves. We know we need to be regulated as if they weren't the ones who not only demanded this Wild West frontier, but bankrolled it and created the strategic alliance with Donald Trump so that he would deliver it to them. And now they're realizing, okay, maybe we've gone too far and we have to look more credible. And Donald Trump is going, no way. Why is he saying no way? Because he is tanked. the entire U.S. economy.

And the only thing he has going for him is the AI stock bubble. And he's terrified of this bubble bursting all over him before the midterm elections or before the next presidential. He also is very invested in it personally, right? He's richer than he's ever been because of the rampant corruption of this administration, the money he's made from crypto, but also many different ways that he and his family are invested in AI. So that's why he's doing these friends.

things like calling Jensen Wong on stage to say, don't worry, we're not going to do anything. But if you'll allow me, I was really struck because there's this myth, you know, these are parables of the technology slipping out of the hands of the men who built it, right? The Sorcerer's Apprentice, Frankenstein, creating a monster, right? And that's the myth that they're all telling, oh, no, we've created this powerful monster. it's out of our hands and now it's going to destroy us. I would argue that that myth really is coming true, but the monster is not AI, Amy. It's Donald Trump.

They created Donald Trump. He is their monster. He's out of control and he just won't stop. And they're like, wait a minute, maybe it's going too fast. We're going to break and then come back to this discussion. Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor are co-authors of the new book out today, End Times Fascism and the Fight for the Living World. We'll continue our conversation in 30 seconds.

If you're coming for me by Macu Sound System. This is Democracy Now, Democracy Now.org, the Warren Peace Report. I'm Mimi Goodman with Juan Gonzalez. We're spending the hour with Naomi Klein and Astor Taylor, co-authors of the new book, End Times, Fascist. and the fight for the living world. I want to go back to the video that was released in conjunction with the book. On a mountaintop in the dead of winter, a group of faithful men gathered an audience to share their vision.

They had seen a gleaming city, bathed in golden light. The city would be filled with buildings so beautiful they would seem to float above the earth as if descended from heaven. Their vision already had a name. New Gaza. So, let's see if these things work. They never usually work. The mountaintop in question was the resort town of Davos. The faithful men presenting their vision were U.S. real estate moguls Jared Kushner and Steve Whitkoff.

Well, this is a very exciting day. See, I'm a real estate person at heart, and it's all about location. Look at this beautiful person. piece of property. Let's just plan for catastrophic success. Of a live stream genocide, an exclusive paradise was about to emerge fully. We've already started removing the rubble and doing some of the demolition. Part of the video that was released with the book, End Times Fascism and the fight for the

living world. It's by Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor. I wouldn't talk about Gaza right now. I mean, we're coming off of, I mean, in Venice right now, you have two Israeli filmmakers, Rachel Soar and Yuval Abraham, who just came out with a film called Naza. And now members of the Israeli government are threatening to take away their citizenship. And it was based on the commentary of high-level Israeli officials unnamed talking about the killing in Gaza deliberately. Naomi Klein.

Yeah, and the use of AI to do so. I actually haven't seen the film. I'm definitely looking to see it. But it underlines what we already know, thanks to Palestinian journalists at a huge personal cost in the documenting of a live stream genocide. Over 250 of them killed in this last two years. And, you know, as we say in the film,

this is the story that the Trump administration is telling is that out of apocalypse there will be this paradise. There will be what they're calling New Gaza. We begin the book with it because it is such a extreme distillation of the story. And I believe it's the most dangerous story ever told. It's a biblical story. It's deeply encoded in our culture, whether we're religious or not. And the story is, first comes the flood, first comes the apocalypse, first comes the mass death. And out of the mass death, the great cleansing, the fury of God, comes the golden city, the paradise for the chosen few.

And that story, which, you know, it's the story of the flood and the ark, it's told in its most violent form in the book of Revelation. For people who believe in it, literally, it has confused the difference between bad and good. It's kind of flipped the switch where when we see the things in our world that should be warning us, telling us, we need to act. We are in a time of crisis. It's an emergency, whether it's climate disasters, whether it's COVID, that things are breaking down. What is seen instead are signs. Oh, no. What it means is that we're entering the end times.

And while that may be bad for many people, it's actually very good for the chosen few. So, yeah, that's why we started with this myth of new God. There is no paradise that is coming out of the apocalypse in Gaza. but that is the story that the Trump administration is telling. It's a privatized paradise that they're proposing to build. They're using this kind of biblical narrative, but of course it's all for profit because it's the Trump administration. They want to build luxury condominiums over a mass grave.

And you saw there that it's a literal story. We do think that the Board of Peace is significant in the sort of evolution of the privatization of the state, the fact that the Trump administration is, is not just attacking the United Nations and defunding the United Nations, but trying to replace the United Nations with something called the Board of Peace, which Trump would be head of for life, that they would control, that they would give themselves immunity. And this is, you know, part of what we mean by bunkering, by escaping. It's like, it's like they see the state as a mine site. They see, like, the United States is a place that they can extract from,

not just extract wealth and resources and more watching. them do that, but also extract other things that matter to them like legal immunity, right? I mean, the Word of Peace gives them that. So that's why we start with that. And it brings together these different parts of the coalition because there are religious extremists, both Christian Zionists and messianic Jews, who really do believe that Gaza, Iran, mean that the Messiah's coming. Like the more violent, the better. And you've covered on the show, you know, officers in the U.S. military lodging complaints that their officers are telling them that they should welcome apocalyptic levels of violence in Iran because it means that Jesus is returning.

But it's not just the religious extremists. It's also the secular versions of this story. We don't think Trump believes in the biblical version of this story, but we do believe, he believes in a kind of a wealth rapture. And when you see those AI generated images of New Gaza and Trump sharing them, you can see how these stories have distorted his brain. Ashton, in a little time we have left, I'm wondering if you can talk a little bit about the resistance movements, the people's movements against this growing fascism. And also perhaps deal with some of the critiques of, let's say, of March.

like John Bellamy Foster, who basically insists that the fascist movement in the United States is the mass base of it is really the middle class. Those people driven out by the Walmarts and the targets from small businesses and franchisees and others who have been driven down by the growth of these top-end monopoly capitalists and who are now turned to a fascist movement for their salvation. Well, I think, you know, the answer the first part, sorry, the second part first, I mean, fascism is always a movement of the injured powerful. It is a movement that creates vertical solidarity between political and corporate elites and people who are not the worst off, but feel that they've lost status and directs their sense of insecurity downwards further towards

vulnerable scapegoats, towards immigrants, towards trans kids, towards feminist, instead of upwards at the oligarchs and the politicians. And so that's how we understand Elon Musk buying X or what was Twitter, right, is that it was a way for him to control a media ecosystem and help direct that rage downwards at the left and at the vulnerable instead of letting it be harnessed towards people like him. So I think that that's right. Fascism creates what we call it vertical solidarity

to protect capitalism, to protect the status quo. So that's certainly true. Fascism in the past. It's certainly true today. What we have to do to build the resistance is create that horizontal solidarity, right, to not scapegoat the vulnerable, to find, to build our own coalition and find our own unusual bedfellows. And I think you see that in the resistance to fascism that's growing in the United States and around the world. You know, one thing, you know, Naomi said this, the people were tracking, in times fascism is not a coherent. ideology necessarily. It's not a monolith, right? It's a fractious alliance of these three groups, the religious in-timers, the tech accelerationist, the ethno-nationalists. But what they have in common is the sense that things are going to be increasingly unstable. We say that they're

both building their arcs and they're causing the floods, right? They're accelerating collapse. They've decided to just bring it on and abandon this shared world in their various fantasies about bunkered nation or, you know, ascending to heaven or the digital cloud. So the resistance fundamentally needs to be grounded in a desire to stay here on Earth to commit to this place. We described them at one point in the book as traitors to creation, and we don't use that word traitors lightly. You know, we're saying they're not traitors to the flag or the nation, but to actually to life on Earth, to our shared humanity, our shared planet. And I think we see that commitment to what we call Hearness in the book, in the movement against data centers that is sweeping the nation in the resistance to ICE where people are saying, no, I'm going to defend my community and defend my neighbors, and people standing up and fighting for labor rights, which fascists are always attacking, fighting for the environment, fighting against detention centers. And so we see the resistance growing all over the world.

But I think that the data center revolt is the main one for us because it really draws new lines and shows people, is bringing people together who, you know, a year ago or a couple of years ago might have been fighting over culture war issues. And now they're saying, well, actually, we have a lot in common because there's a class of people who actually want to replace us with robots. Maybe we should be on the side of humanity against the machines. Including those small business people want who you're referring to.

And this is why it really is an opportunity to form those new alliances because Donald Trump has betrayed many of the people who did vote for him the first time. The trouble, of course, is that many powerful Democrats are also taking money from the large tech companies and so are not willing to harvest what has been called by, a comedian in, I believe it was Madison, the most bipartisan issue since beer is the opposition to these tech companies. But in order to gain political advantage from that huge bipartisan issue, you have to be willing to go against your donors or not take their money in the first place. And Naomi, the business model of these AI fascists, if they were to be able to prevail, throw millions of people

out of work. How will they make the money? Because obviously, Henry Ford back in the days of the early monopoly capitalism believed you had to give workers a living wage so they could consume the products that you produced. Well, I'm not sure it's all that thought through. I think that they think they're mainly going to be selling products to other businesses in the short term. But this is why, Taiwan, it is a bubble and it is a process of extraction. And the bubble is rigged to explode all over working people and their pensions right now. Yeah, I think they also think that they'll make a lot of money hooking up with the government and the military. I mean, there's a quote from Alex Karp, who's a colleague of Peter Thiel, a CEO of Palantir. And he said, we quote him in the book,

saying, you know, if these tech companies think they're going to take everybody's jobs and then not work with the military. They are. I'm going to change what he said and say, peep, they are foolish. And what he's saying is essentially, if you're planning to build a technology that causes a job apocalypse, you're also going to have to align with the state and help build the mechanisms to police and control and contain the masses of dispossessed human beings. I wanted to end with the end of your book. We didn't choose to be born into a fight quite so fateful. But we have reached a choice point. We can either follow end times fascists into oblivion, or we can commit to building the unruly boundary crossing movement they so deeply fear, one that rests away their weapons,

holds them accountable for their crimes, and defends the paradise of here. Those are the words of Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor, co-author of the new book, Out Today, End Times Fascism, and the fight for the living world. Happy birthday to Sam Alcoff. Naomi, and Astra will be in Brooklyn tonight at St. Anne's Church. Then they go from Brooklyn to Brookline, Massachusetts, tomorrow. And then they're headed to Washington, D.C., politics and prose and beyond. They'll also be in London and in Europe as well. On Thursday, September 17th, I'm going home to Bayshore, New York, in Long Island

for a screening of Steel the Story, please, at the Bolton Center with the director Tia Lesson and the producer Karen Sprott. This has been a remarkable conversation. Thanks so much for being with us. I'm Amy Goodman with Juan Gonzalez for another edition of Democracy Now.