Factually! with Adam Conover - End Times Fascism with Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor

Episode Date: September 16, 2026

Fascism has a different face in 2026. Not only are we facing very real existential threats in the form of climate change and AI, the millenarians who once sat on the fringes of society now wield the most power. Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor join me today to unpack our current era of 'apocalyptic fascism' and what we can do about it. SUPPORT THE SHOW ON PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/adamconoverSEE ADAM ON TOUR: https://www.adamconover.net/tourdates/SUBSCRIBE to and RATE Factually! on:» Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/factually-with-adam-conover/id1463460577» Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0fK8WJw4ffMc2NWydBlDyJAbout Headgum: Headgum is an LA & NY-based podcast network creating premium podcasts with the funniest, most engaging voices in comedy to achieve one goal: Making our audience and ourselves laugh. Listen to our shows at https://www.headgum.com.» SUBSCRIBE to Headgum: https://www.youtube.com/c/HeadGum?sub_confirmation=1» FOLLOW us on Twitter: http://twitter.com/headgum» FOLLOW us on Instagram: https://instagram.com/headgum/» FOLLOW us on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@headgum» Advertise on Factually! via Gumball.fmSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This is a headgum podcast. Welcome to Factually. I'm Adam Kanover. Thank you so much for joining me on the show again this week. We are going to be talking to some incredible thinkers about how messed up the world is. We're going to break down exactly why and what we can do about it. You know, for a long time, there have been people who have said that the world is about to end, you know. But what is strange about our current moment is that those people are actually in charge of almost every country and system that we live beneath. and they are in fact trying to hasten the very apocalypse that they predict.

I'll explain what I mean. Look at artificial intelligence, right? This is a technology that is supposed to take away all of our jobs and usher in a new age. Well, the people in charge of the tech industry are fighting to make that happen. Oh, and by the way, they're also hastening climate change while they do it. That's how important they think it is. Then there's the religious extremists who think that, you know, the world has to be consumed by fire and war so that Christ can come. or, you know, pick the messianic deity of your choice, well, you can see those in the people

who are running America and Israel and other countries' foreign policy. You know, that's maybe why we have so many wars in the Middle East to begin with and so many visions of the Golden City on a hill that'll come along right after the war is done. And then, of course, you have the anti-migrant apocalyptic thinkers who believe that Western civilization is under threat from hordes of dirty immigrants who are trying to to tear down the cathedral around us and that any measure is justified in order to stop them. Those people are, of course, in charge of many governments in Western Europe. So if you feel that things have been going off the rails for the last decade or so, you're right.

Some of the weirdest and stupidest and most extreme people are in charge of almost every single lever of society, and they're using it for specifically fascist ends. When we talk about the rise of fascism around the world, we're talking about the rise of specifically apocalyptic fascism. It's a terrifying moment, and you might be wondering, hey, what the hell are we supposed to do about it? You know, we're just average Joe's and Jane's walking around on the earth. The rest of these people run.

They're trying to end it. What do we do? Well, today on the show, we have two absolutely brilliant thinkers on to chat about this apocalyptic moment and where we go from here. Naomi Klein is one of the foremost leftist intellectuals on the planet. I was absolutely thrilled to have her on the show a couple years ago to talk about her book, Dopplganger, one of my favorite episodes we've ever done. She's back again.

And her co-writer, Astra Taylor, is a documentarian, writer, and activist. Now, before we get into it, if you're watching on YouTube, you may have noticed I'm suddenly wearing a different outfit. That's because we have two big announcements to make that we locked in after we recorded the intro to this episode. The first is that we are relaunching our Patreon book club as a bonus podcast exclusive for our subscribers. Here's what's going to happen.

Every couple months, we are going to read a new mind-blowing, world-expanding work of non-fiction. Me and my incredibly smart and funny producer, Sam Rodman, are going to read the book. And then we're going to come together on the internet where we are going to discuss the book with the two of us, with all of you,

and with some special guests. And the first book that we are reading is the book that we're talking about in this very episode. Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor's end times fascism. And, you know, I won't say who our special guests for the first episode are, but, you know, we're working on, let's just say, some big names that you'll be very excited to hear from.

So if you'd like to join, if you'd like to read more mind-blowing books that change the way you see the world and talk about them with other smart and funny people, join us on Patreon, patreon. Patreon.com slash Adam Conover five bucks a month. Get you access to the book club, to the bonus podcast. You get every episode of this podcast ad-free. you can join our online Discord. We'd love to have you,

Patreon.com slash Adam Conover. And one more big announcement for you, I am so excited to say that my new stand-up comedy special, big divorce energy, is going to drop for free on this YouTube channel on October 23rd.

I self-produced this special with the help of some wonderful people. I directed it myself. It is a real change in the type of material that I do. It's a lot more vulnerable, a lot more personal. So you might be able to tell from the title than a lot of my other work.

and, you know, it was really just a very powerful experience for me to write all of this stuff and to tour it around the country for all you guys and now to finally get to release it for free for all of you to see. So please check that out. October 23rd, Big Divorce Energy. And now let's get to this week's interview with Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor. Naomi and Astra, thank you so much for being on the show. Glad to be here. Yeah, Naomi, your last book, Doppelganger, I got it right here behind me on the shelf. one of my favorite books of that year.

Was that 2024? Was it that long ago? It was 2023. 2023. Incredible book. A lot has changed in the world since then. Literally everyone in the book is now running your government. Oh, yeah.

That was before Trump, too. You're right. I didn't even think of that. And you're one of my favorite political commentator is too small of a label for you. Analyst of our age, I would say. Cassandra, perhaps. A prophet. I don't know. What moment are we in? I mean, obviously we're in a moment of rising fascism. Your book is called End Times Fascism. How does that differ from Fascism Classic? Well, first of all, the subtitle is, and the fight for the living world. I just got to get that in there because Astro and I are driven by love. and rage. Love for this beautiful world, rage at the maniacs who believe that paradise is in the next one, whether that is, and this is what makes these fascists different, there's always an apocalyptic strain in fascism, but we are looking at a breed of fascists who are navigating a species,

scale of crisis that your grandparents, fascists, did not have to contend with. I mean, Hitler and Mussolini died before the first nuclear tests and use of the bomb. They didn't know a world with planet, in which humans had the ability to essentially end the world. They didn't understand that our carbon emissions were overheating the planet. And so this strain of, of religious apocalyptic that sees every, every massive disaster as a wonderful sign that the end is near and the rivers of blood are coming and the faithful will be saved and live forever in a golden city. That is no longer a marginal way of thinking because, first of all, Christian Zionists and messianic Jews have a lot of power in the U.S. government and in the Israeli government.

And so there's a lot of apocalyptic in the U.S. attack on Iran and this sort of this idea of like the worst, the better. But also your favorite people, the tech oligarchs and their race to reach, you know, what they call it. AGI, artificial general intelligence, follows a similar narrative arc of like the paradise is when we reach this world where we will all lead lives of leisure and all will be known and unlocked. I mean, to hear Sam Alton and Elon Musk wax rhapsodic about what AI can bring, you know, it's very similar to some messianic thought. And also they're burning so much carbon that they are, you know, kind of destroying the world as they go in lots of ways and destroying the economy as well. They're willing to risk everything in a really apocalyptic way. So that's why we call it end times fascism because it is a fascism that is really in conversation with these powers that were not available to the fascist of the last century. Am I missing something important, Astra?

I think that's basically it. I mean, these guys, we like to say that these guys are. are following this old narrative, right, this sort of New Testament narrative of apocalypse, of Armageddon, you know, of sort of this cleansing battle, right? And only a few will make it to the other side. But in a kind of old twist on the New Testament tale, they're both building the ark and conjuring the flood, right?

So they're like, we'll be safe because we'll be uploaded to the cloud or we'll be raptured to heaven or safe behind the fortress borders of our nation. And damn everyone else. And we are the everyone else. And so we need to know what side we're on and invite these guys because they think they're going to be okay, right? They think they can burn it all down and they're going to be good because they've got their bunkers. They've got their rocket chips. They've got their computer gods.

And they're risking everything for a total delusion. And one of the things that your book does is it brings. that sort of tech apocalyptic into conversation with religious or millinarianism or you know that the apocalypse is right around the corner which has been part of the religious right in America for decades and decades but always as sort of a fringe group right and now has really become dominant and then combining that with the sort of apocalyptic racists the people who are saying that Western civilization is going to crumble because of an influx of

brown people and the great replacement and da-da-da-da, which is also a very sort of like apocalyptic narrative. And all three of these groups are in power now in a way that they were not in the past. Do I have that right? Yeah, I mean, fascism, the word fascist actually comes from the Latin for bundle. So fascism is always an awkward alliance, right? It's not a tidy thing. And so in our analysis, you know, you just laid them out. There are sort of three main components of the times fascist bundle. You just name them, right? These religious fundamentalists,

waiting for the Messiah, the tech accelerationists, and the ethno-nationalists, you know, for whom the existential threat is the immigrant, right? It's the threat of culture, you know, the great replacement, you know,

civilizational erasure, to quote the American government. And so we're, they're not a monolith. They're different. They have, you know, but they're playing with sort of similar themes, themes of apocalypse,

of superiority, supremacy, separation. They dabble in different kinds of eugenics, like some it's more of eugenics of markets, the superiority of wealth, right? For some, it's race, just good old fashioned racism. But what we, you know, so we want to say, well, what unites them? And it really is this idea that our shared world

is coming to an end, right? And that they want to be among the save. So it's like a war over who's going to survive the future. And I think lots of people can feed them. that these camps exist and they're bad. We're trying to say, yeah, and here's how they are, you know, here's what they're coming together around. But also here are the chinks in their armor, right?

Here's where they're weak. Here's where they disagree and where they're unstable so that we can figure out how to fight them. But first we have to name them. And, you know, and I think one of the things that we kept feeling right in this book was like, we sound crazy talking about these people because they say stuff that is so nuts, right? Yeah.

You have a Sam Altman saying, AI might bring about the end of the world, but there sure will be some great companies, right? Or you have Elon Musk saying, you know, painting London, as though it's like the most diabolical place that's ever existed on earth because immigrants are there, right? And you're going to be killed if you go out in the streets. And I think that can be, it can be hard to, like, take these guys seriously

because it's so over the top. But we absolutely have to because these are, You know, just as you said at the beginning, like these were fringe figures and doppelganger. Like Naomi was saying, hey, something's happening over there. And now they are some of the most powerful people who have ever existed in the history of humanity. Why do you think we have so much trouble as a culture or, you know, as a media grappling with this crazy perspective these folks have? I mean, a couple weeks ago, there were a couple pieces. I think Jamel Bowie was like writing in the New York Times or maybe just in his own channels about how.

you know, Elon Musk is like a horrible gutter racist, you know, that he's, that he's just posting, you know, the most virulent kind of racist, like stuff out of the 40s, you know, on a daily basis. And this is the wealthiest man in the world who, you know, at the same time, like SpaceX is IPOing. And he's in the business pages for other reasons. And it's like when the Times op-ed or other writer says,

Well, hey, did you notice that this guy is also, like, racist on a scale that we thought was sort of impossible for a figure to be that, like, a couple decades ago in the 90s? If, you know, Bill Gates had said stuff like this, it would have been front page news for a year. And yet, Elon does it. And this is one example. It's, like, hard for us to, that article comes out and we're kind of like, yeah, yeah, yeah. We know. But he's making so much money or whatever. there's a different we have trouble getting our arms around it it seems like.

Yeah. And I mean, I think one of the things that we're trying to do is, is decompartmentalize this, right? Because it's sort of like, yeah, he, yeah, Elon builds great companies too bad about the racism. We think this is one story, right? That the companies that Musk is building are really all about now, about the dream of escape.

I mean, you look at that presentation for, for the SpaceX IPO. And it, it's just, it makes no sense. I mean, I mean, don't get me start

about the SpaceX IPO. Like it just, none of the valuations makes sense. It's pure fiction. But it's just, like the first few pages of it are just like rockets blasting off,

right? And it's just like, we're leaving, let's go. And Musk, you know, joins by video conference, you know, to the NASDAQ and says,

like, this is, we're making, you know, we're taking, you know, the fiction out of science fiction, anybody who wants to go anywhere in the universe will take them. You know, it's not just the moon and Mars. It's like literally anywhere. It's like,

hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, let's go, SpaceX, hop aboard, right? But meanwhile, most of the valuation is linked to AI. And if you look at how Elon Musk is advancing AI in Memphis, which is where he's chosen to build his massive data centers, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, practically, you know, majority black parts of the city. He, Mr. Green Energy himself is rigging together these gas-fired power plants and just poisoning the air. This is not somebody who is a climate change denier. He knows exactly what he is doing.

And this is why, you know, we really are making the case that if you want to understand why Silicon Valley flipped fascist and lined up behind Trump, it is not most of the reasons that we're told, you know, that it was just that they're afraid of pissing a mom. or it's something to do with China or whatever, or maybe they were mad at their workers for not returning to work or whatever it was. Or Elon Musk. Yeah, they're mad at woke.

You know, there's a little bit of all that, but we're making the case that it was the AI that made them do it in the sense that they knew full well that as they convinced Trump. And, you know, we show how he actually got on board their train, not the other way around. He was not a big AI booster. He had no interest in AI in his first presidency, barely talked about it on the campaign trail, until he, you know, had some fundraising dinners in San Francisco that were convened by David Sachs and Mark Andreson.

And they explained to Trump how much energy AI is going to use. And suddenly they have his attention. And he starts saying that AI is, and this is a quote, an electricity, eating monster. And there's nothing Trump loves more than fossil fuels. And he's just had all the oil and gas executives to Mara Lago and said, if you give me a billion dollars, you know, I'm going to make every wish come true. And what he realizes about AI is that this is actually a life raft for the fossil fuel sector. And so all these guys have been handing out earth prizes and claiming they were going to, you know, revolutionize energy and turn it green.

are making alliances with Trump, and they are just like, let's just burn it down. I mean, that's what they've done. That's what they're trying to do. This is why we have to stop them. Among all the other reasons, we have to stop them. But we're not talking enough about the climate implications of it, I don't think. You know, I was lucky enough to never need braces as a kid. But as I've gotten older, I started noticing my teeth getting totally out of alignment.

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Climate change, in a casual way. Ah, climate change is unstoppable. We've done episodes about that in the past. And, you know, certainly on the left, there are people. who think that, you know, the world is fundamentally corrupt and needs to be reborn in some way, right? That is part of the sort of left-wing philosophy to a certain extent. Would you just contrast that with the sort of fascist version of it? Because certainly, you know, folks who believe in climate change do believe that something is going to happen to the earth, right?

That needs to be addressed and that the world we're going to be living in 100 years from now is going to be very different than the one today. I mean, I think there are different, I think there are different elements in what you're saying. I mean, I do think there have been, you know, apocalyptic strains on the left that are, or almost messianic strains on the left. There's just sort of bad political theory and bad philosophy, right? This sort of, you know, even the idea that, you know, history is in this, you know, inevitable forward march towards a socialist utopia or something that some, you know, very, very vulgar Marxists might believe.

You know, I think it's good to not have that kind of politics. I mean, the environmental apocalypticism, though, has a real basis. I mean, we are living through a great extinction. We are living through, I mean, just think about what we have endured together this summer alone, right? The fact that we have injured a world where we now talk about heat domes, like that's a normal phenomenon, where we don't just talk about fires and droughts. We have to say megafires and megatroutes where 16,000 people died of excess heat. And you're up in a single week this summer, right?

We are entering, I mean, it is not an exaggeration to say that we are entering a climate that has, you know, the earth has been hot before. It has been a ball of ice before. The earth has been many different things. But human civilization has never existed with a world as hot as the one that we are about to live in. Right. I mean, we have, we're, you know, it's apocalyptic. It's, it's bleak, but it's also what, you know, it's what the scientists warned about, right? We fucked around, we're finding out. That's what we're in right now. I think the difference is, you know, what we're identifying on the right, is this sort of a welcoming of it, embracing of it, right? Everything, the bad stuff is a felicitous sign, right? So there, you know, many of these people on the religious. is right. It's like, you know, the war is in the Middle East. Those are signs that were in the end times and that's a good thing. You know, Armageddon means we're that much closer to the Messiah's return or, you know, and so it's that welcoming of these terrible, terrible events

and consequences that is so destructive. That's such a destructive approach to life because, you know, what happens? Real people suffer. Real people die. Real people are. are oppressed. And so that, but I think we, we do have to acknowledge that terrible things are happening and speak to that directly because I think another thing we're saying is that in a way, that's what the right is doing, right? It's tapping into people's sense of an ease, their sense of disorientation. And instead of saying, hey, the problems climate change and the problems the oligarchs and the problems that they actually want to build these robots and take, not just your job, but also like to be your girlfriend or your boyfriend and like, you know,

talk to your kid for you because that's somehow too much trouble. Like something weird is happening, something uncanny. And we need to address that and say, hey, actually, you know, here's the real problem. Here's the real cause of what ails you. Let's fight that, right? Let's, let's name the right targets and the right enemies and the right solution. I think that's a perfect answer because what's the difference is on the left or in liberal circles we're always fighting the we're always fighting Dumerism. We're saying no, no, no, we can actually solve problems. This will work, you know? I mean, a big leftist slogan is a better world is possible, right? You're trying to help people envision it. Yes, things are bad, but like we can actually create something better versus the, the rights

version is to embrace Dumerism and to say, well, it's absolutely going to happen and it's good and you'll come out on top. And the problem is the trans kids. The problem is, you know, the immigrants and the kebab shops or whatever, right? And, you know, to find scapegoats as well. And that is, you know, to redirect the rage that people should feel, but to redirect it down towards a vulnerable as opposed to up towards the people at the top. I've been around for long enough to have been at the first conference that coined the phrase,

another world as possible, 26 years ago. Wow. And so, you know, when you do. walk around for 26 years, you know, and you don't do, you know, you do more of the very things that are being warned about, it does start to restrict your options, you know. And when I, you know, I still believe that there are alternatives to fascism. But we're in it now. We're not in the, hey, this might happen. We are in, it's happening, and this is the beginning. And if we don't change really, really quickly in extremely robust ways,

then we're going to be dealing with a level of change that we actually can't navigate. But I do believe that we should be seeing this kind of fascism as a form of climate adaptation, like that this is actually the right way of adapting to the climate crisis, is to embrace narratives like the one Elon Musk, I think bought Twitter to spread. Yeah. that say, hey, don't let that rage be directed at the system itself. And certainly don't let it be directed at the richest man in the world. It's the kebab shop down the street that's making you feel uncanny when you no longer have seasons that make any sense.

Or, you know, as Asthma was saying, all of this uncanniness, it's really interesting, you know, doing, like reading the sort of original text of the great replacement theory, like what this is all kind of based on. they're all about this feeling of like, my home is not my home, you know? Like, I'm going to this street that I've always known and it's totally different. I feel ill at home in my home because of these so-called invaders. But the deepest uncanniness is, you know, having weather that your entire ecology is not adapted to deal with, right? I mean, we are dealing with the deepest form of uncanniness translate as like unhomeness. right, that our home is becoming unrecognizable at the most fundamental sort of ecological levels.

And as Asstra was saying, you know, add AI to the mixed and like this inability to even know who and what is real. It's so convenient to the people who are driving these crises to have us be attacking each other and embracing theories that create a hierarchy of life that says actually you don't have to care about all those people. And you see it really clearly, like in Europe this summer, where you had the largest evacuations, hundreds of thousands of people just in Bordeaux, right, because of the fires, largest evacuations since World War II. And the enthusiasm with which the global right focused on this largely staged in, quote unquote, invasion in Morocco,

like not even on the continent of Europe in a Spanish, essentially colony. And just like, look at that, look at that. That's the invasion. That's what we need to focus on. Not these fires, not the fact that, like, the Danube has gone dry and all of these, like, you know, fossils are coming out of the river, like, including dozens of Nazi warships that had been sunk in the Danube, right? Let's just look at this sort of made for TV, quote unquote, invasion. So it's really a bait and switch that we're seeing. And, you know, it's stories that say you will be safe and you don't have to care about those other people.

And that's what fascism always does. But it's up against a scale of crisis that last century's fascists didn't have to contend with. Right. So it's either we change or we become monsters. This is all, you know, it was always the choice, you know, socialism or barbarism. Well, and it's so explicit, right? I mean, you see this in the war on empathy. I mean, Musk, again, is a great example of this, right?

With this greatest civilizational weakness of the West is empathy. But it's also a thing you hear in Christian nationalist circles that empathy is actually a sin or it's toxic. You know, this need to rationalize uncaring in a world that's getting more and more unstable, right? And our job is to turn that around and say, actually, you know, we actually have a better chance of surviving when we take care of each other. We prep together when we do empathize, which is that overt rhetoric of, you know, selfishness is really a striking phenomenon.

It crosses the three prongs of the alliance that we discuss in the book. But it's a hard sell because people actually have this tendency to care about cruelty and their neighbors, right? As we saw with, you know, the Minneapolis uprising against ice, it's hard. You've got to work pretty hard, which is why I think that this like obsessive media consolidation, right? That we're seeing is really about like, we need to control the truth. I mean, that's another piece of this, Adam. I'm curious to hear your take on is just, you know, how much of the drive towards AI is about this desire to have these truth machines, right? that Elon Musk and David Ellison can control,

that, you know, can edit out the parts of the world that are inconvenient, you know, make sure you can't find the word genocide, you know, as it relates to Israel or whatever it is. But what an appealing idea. And it's a really quite fascist idea, the idea of having a centralized control over truth. Yeah, and the way that, you know, AI plays into our sort of day-to-day desire

to give up control to a certain extent. Well, the AI said it, you know. I remember when, you know, in the television industry, we went from going with TV networks that measured ratings to streamers that had an algorithm. And you started to, you know, hear the executives say, well, you know, the algorithm says, right? They would defer to it as a thing that cannot be argued with. And you hear people doing that more casually in their day-to-day lives. Well, AI said.

AI said. And, you know, there's, we want to be able to skip some steps, I think, if nothing else but for convenience. But yeah, if you're in a position of wanting to control what other people do, distilling the entire world down into, you know, a series of numbers that you control and that produce, you know, answers that come from whatever numbers, you know, you decide to sort in is quite, quite easy, you know. I was using one AI, because I do occasionally play around with it just to like ask a question or two and see what it'll tell me. And I found one, I used one part of the service called Kagi, which is a paid search engine. They have an AI assistant attached and it's private,

so I feel a little bit better using it because it doesn't come from one of the big vendors, so I play around with a little bit more than the others. And I asked it some question, and it cited Grapaedia, which is Elon's Wikipedia clone that he made, using Grock. And this is what makes you stop using these things very quickly, right? And luckily, you know, the particular one I was using shows you what it's citing, so I was able to see that that's what it was doing.

But, you know, I laughed at Grockapedia along with everybody else, but it's slowly becoming a source of truth, which is, yeah, I mean, that's transparently what Elon wanted with this. I mean, why else are that, you know, Ellison's trying to buy an entire another media company and freaking out when they're not allowed to? and of course all their investments are also in AI. I want to dwell a little bit more, though, on the switch we've seen in the tech industry

because prior to AI and the Trump administration, whatever causal weight you want to give them, the tech industry really seems to me to have been the ultimate version of American liberalism. Liberalism, sometimes I define it as the belief that, hey, the world's actually pretty good and we can make it a little bit better. And that's all we got to do.

We've got to make a little bit better tomorrow. And we'll get a little bit, you know, we'll end racism a little bit more. We'll get a little bit greener, et cetera, et cetera. And for most of my life, that's sort of what the tech industry was offering, right? Hey, you can send photos of your niece to your grandma. You know, oh, you can, here's a more efficient car.

I mean, that's literally what Elon Musk was selling, right? Just like, that's a better car than anybody else made. And again, you know, that was, The rise of tech industry was during the Obama era, which of course was peak liberalism and American society and politics in a lot of ways. But it's so fast to switch the premise and philosophy of your entire industry from, hey, our job is making the world marginally more convenient for everybody, step by step, year over year, to the apocalypse is coming and we're causing it and we need to hasten it so that we can create, you know, a singularity, moment where, you know, we're all uploaded and nobody has to work a day in their lives. And, you know, by the way, a bunch of us are leaving on a rocket ship and the rest of you are going to be stuck here.

That's, it was like less than five years. Yeah. You know, just looking at Elon himself, switching from one to the other in terms of his public presentation. And you think that, you feel that's purely because of AI or is there something else going on as well? I think there's a combination of factors. I do think that the kind of brute force technology of these large language models that are really just about throwing as much, quote unquote, compute as possible, at, like, you know, these people are not programmers, right?

I mean, they have one idea, which is more compute, right? And I do believe that they genuinely believe that whoever wins this race wins a level of monopoly that has never existed before in capitalism. And so they understand that there's only going to be a couple of them merged standing, right? Not all of them can win. And so I think that that blots out the sun for them. The stakes are everything, right? Like I think they believe that if meta doesn't win, meta will die.

And so, you know, when you see them competing over who's going to rig together, you know, more gas methane spewing turbines, right, to build these data centers intense. I mean, the mania, the speed of construction, I think speaks to their fear. Yeah. But I do think that there is also just something about the money that is deranging, right? That we were in a phase of rapid accumulation and that they had to kind of pretend to be nice for a while. And they probably convinced themselves that they were nice, too.

but that flipped from I'm a superhero who's going to save the world, which is what Musk was doing previously, like five years ago, to I am Dark Maga, I am the villain, right? Like, as we know from superhero movies, like those are the two choices available if you think you're God, right? Right. So I think the money convinced them they were God, and they played around with being a benevolent God,

but then we weren't grateful enough. We, you know, workers went on strike and did, it was basically your fall, Adam. And then they were like, no, like, if we're not going to be worshipped as God, we're going to be the devil. Like, I mean, that's another way of thinking about it. And also it was very profitable to do so. I think all of that and there is also, along with the kind of, you know, appearance of liberality, right? the sort of Silicon Valley Obama alliance, there was a deep, deep tendency towards libertarian

on the better end, but like far right ideas in Silicon Valley. And scholars have been talking about that for a long time. And Peter Thiel is a great example, but it's not limited to him. I mean, back in 2008, he was writing and saying that democracy and freedom aren't compatible and essentially, you know, capitalism. is it and, you know, hey, maybe it wasn't so great that we gave the poor and the women the right to vote, you know, and he's nurtured those ideas through investments, through fellowships and through funding institutions. And, you know, he wasn't alone. And I think so that, you know, that's also how certain ideas spread, right, is people bide their time and wait for their moment. And this is the moment for that kind of thinking, overtly supremacist. thinking, right? I deserve to live forever. I should invest in longevity, you know, not universal health care for the plebs, but like, you know, me living like a god forever. That kind of thinking

has been around and I think it's, it's just kind of, you know, is meeting the moment, is having its moment coming out of the closet. And, you know, and alongside, you know, these economic forces that Naomi is talking about. I mean, I think these guys, news, that they were not going to be able to roll out generative AI, you know, a technology with the explicit purpose of taking people's jobs without a lot of force behind it, right? Like, this is not Instagram. This is not Snapchat. This isn't like a laundry app, right?

This is, we're taking your livelihood. People don't like it. And so they needed a strong man, and they found that in Donald Trump, who wanted something that would make him and his buddies rich and the fossil fuel sector reached and it was like this perfect marriage, right? And the other thing I'll say is, you know, the height of the Silicon Valley bro worship, right,

was 2015 or whatever. And people have become more and more skeptical, right? The public turned against social media turned against the tech oligarchs. And so they also knew going it, going into this AI boom, that there was going to be resistance, right? Because there had been resistance to their lesser technologies. And part of it is, you know, them saying, yeah, we're not going to let you people stop us. We're going to do this. You know, we are going to do whatever it takes

to be that, be one of those winners at the end. I mean, they talk about it in very messianic terms. This is going to be the ultimate technology, the final technology, the last company standing, you know, and essentially saying, yeah, we're in a race to own the world. world, even as we destroy it. Something that I'm thinking about as you're talking is, because you talk about the classic fascists, right? The fascists from 100 years ago, the fascist moment in the 30s and 40s. And something that I think, you know, scholars and commentators at the time talked about

a little bit more directly than we do now is the role of technology in that fascist movement. You know, at least when I learned about it in school, it's mass communication. It's the radio. It's film. It's just amplification, the fact that you could have a mass rally. That is what powered Hitler and Mussolini and the rest of them. And there was like a really clear cultural understanding of that fact, that that was what the technology could be used for.

Those leaders did that very directly. What strikes me now is when we had our new technological, you know, especially media revolution, our new communications revolution, we said for about 10 years, oh, this is going to be used for democracy. Arab Spring, you know, protest movements, et cetera, et cetera. And now we've sort of seen the opposite, and it sort of happened under everybody's noses. You know, it was like such a quick flip.

What do you attribute that to? Did we, you know, did we get tricked by our own naivete thinking that, hey, you know, all this stuff is happening under the Obama moment and it all be used for good? did the fascists, you know, seize onto it? What exactly, you know, or is it just historical gravity that any time there's a new communications medium, the fascists are going to get to it first? Well, I do think, you know, the idea that these should be privately controlled tools was the misstep. You know, that was where we should never have allowed the town square to be privatized, right? You know, when Musk bought Twitter, he said that he wanted to own the digital town square.

And we had a big debate about whether Elon should own it or not or somebody else. But we didn't really have a debate about whether the town square should be owned by anyone. And all the free labor that went into creating this tool in the first place, right? So I don't think it's inevitable that a technological advance will be fascist, but I do think that the desire to control a powerful tool, you know, by nefarious forces is going to happen. And I think that we should have, you know, we should have had fights to protect our digital commons. And I think that people are starting to have those fights. And the backing of Trump had a lot to do with the fact that, As Astra was saying, people were starting to belatedly start to regulate these companies, right?

Like, if we look at the things that really exercise some of the tech barons in this period, I mean, I was being flipped, but it's not a joke that actually the writer's strike had an impact, that there was mass, you know, organizing, shut down Hollywood for a good long time, and a central piece of the organizing was AI. Yeah. At the same time, Europe had finally gotten serious about regulating digital services and privacy, and we're gearing up to do something similar around AI. Biden didn't do enough, but he did bring in Lena Kahn.

And there were the beginnings of, okay, we're not going to make the same mistakes that we made about social media, about AI. And so the lining up behind Trump was like a decision to line up behind a guy who was going to let it rip, who just didn't care, right? I mean, in the book, we have this, like, completely bizarre moment, like talk about this bizarre moment where once he decided that he was going to be Silicon Valley's guy, this after spending much of his off years suing these very companies, you know, for de-platforming him, really against big tech, you know. He goes on, like, the Logan Brothers podcast.

Impulsed. Yeah. And he says that Elon just explained to him that, that AI could be a little bit dangerous because there could be a video of me, of seeming to say that like a nuclear attack is coming in 13 seconds and it would look exactly like me. And then he turns to the camera and he just says it. Like he's making it easier for the people doing the DSA.

And he's like, so that can happen, you know? And like, they were like, that's really scary. You're like, he's really deranged. He doesn't, nothing seems to scare him at all. And so, you know, I think that that's why he was their guy. No, I mean, I don't know that it had to be fascist. Yeah. I mean, I think it makes me think of another chapter in the book.

I mean, I think what you said, Adam, is really right, right? I mean, there's a way, I mean, to quote McLeon, I guess the medium is the message, right? So a certain type of media created a certain type of fascism. And I think that is something we write about, the way that, in a way the Trump alliance was formed by social media. I mean, if you look at the Motley crew that showed up on January 6th, right, those people found each other online in lots of ways. And Trump is like the influencer and chief, right? I mean, they wage me more fair. They're not engaging in a kind of 20th century industrial messaging, right? Where there, it's like control top down. It is this

more decentralized social media phenomenon. And that was powerful, right? That helped create the MAGA movement. But what we talk about in the book is the way, the same online dynamics are actually tearing the movement apart, right? And when you rely on, you know, for-profit social media channels and everybody's their own brand fighting for audience share, right, on their separate entrepreneurial podcasts,

then the incentives are not always to be like disciplined and information and, you know, working towards a common goal. And so this is- The brands go rogue like Candace. Exactly. And so I think, you know, yeah, Candice and Tucker are the, you know, some of the examples that we dig into.

And I think those are real problems actually, right? Like the absolute chaos that is unfolding. And it's like, are people taking principles, stances, are right-wing influencers taking principled stances against the Trump administration? Who knows? But what they are doing is finding their own revenue streams and engaging in, let's call them, argue, marshals, right? Right, for themselves. Because it's like, that's, that's profitable. So, you know, the internet giveth, the internet taketh away. That's an opportunity for our side, Adam, because, you know, one of the reasons why I am not overwhelmed with fear about this is that I,

You know, when I was writing doppelganger, as you know, I listened to like way too much Steve Bannon and immersed myself in like the kind of conspiracy culture that gave rise to this iteration of MAGA or, you know, what Steve Banner used to call MAGA plus. And, you know, that brought together Maha and like the, you know, the moms who were mad about masks and vaccines and all of that, right? And what I know from that research is that there's a huge amount of anger and suspicion, a big tech. And so now we're seeing these amazingly unlikely cross-partisan coalitions against flock cameras and against data centers. And they are starting to really lose their base. And if the Democratic Party didn't suck so much and was actually willing to like go where 70, what is it, like 70% of Americans oppose AI and data, don't want a data center in their community. Yeah.

Like this is, these are winnable fights. And there is a real opportunity. to propose real solutions. You know, the problem really is that both parties are bought off by the same big companies. And that's why, you know, there really do need to be these insurgent fights within the Democratic Party and why we wanted to get our book out before the midterm. Yeah, I mean, half of the Democrats in California, you know, support the Ellison's, you know, creating a larger media conglomerate by buying another company.

Like it's the same corporate logic that got us. here still controls both parties. But you make a great point about, you know, the fascist project is so weird and so many people don't like it that the coalition against it could be different than the coalition that the left or that liberals are used to, that there's an opportunity to bring more people into it. I want to make sure we bring in the anti-immigrant apocalyptic folks and the religious piece of it. Tell me how, you know, Christian.

Apocalyptic connects to all of this? Well, I mean, it's the template that they're all following. I mean, I think this is probably the most dangerous story ever told, and it's a very sticky, very powerful story, which is like bad is good, right? That you

want the worst things get the better they are for the small group of chosen, right? And, you know, that story is told in different ways in the Abrahamic religions. You know, there's like there's there's the the flood there's the Moses and the ark there's you know there's the

I think this is how the ancients thought about disasters right it was a way of making sense of them but you know there's no bloodier version than the book of revelations right and it's a very weird text and there's different ways of of interpreting it but the the story that has gained a lot of traction in evangelical communities in the United States is like around the rapture, right? So the idea that you, that eventually that we're getting closer and closer to the end, that every terrible thing that happens is actually a great sign that we're getting closer, right? So maybe it's a huge fire in Los Angeles or a huge flood in New Orleans or a big war in the Middle East, but it's all good

because it all means that the reckoning is coming and the, you know, people will either convert or they will drown in a sea of blood and then the good times start. I mean, that's the, that it's a system reboot. And so that's the story that I think is the one we need to shed. You know, there are lots of people who, you know, within these religions that, see these stories as more metaphorical, like that train us to see the apocalypticism and the messianism and the day-to-day, that it isn't a literal story of what is going to happen in a month from now. But those have not been the ones that have been dominant. The dominant forces have been these fundamentalist readings that are promising to the faithful that if they follow the rules, then they will be raptured up to a golden city in the sky. And so,

I think that that's the template for what billionaires are trying to build down here. It's also the template of the story that they tell about AI. It's also the plot line of a whole lot of Hollywood movies and video games, you know? And, you know, we say in the book, like, we need a story not of end times, but of better times, of how we actually navigate shocks and disasters without creating this hierarchy of the damned and the saved. But yeah, so I mean, there's a lot more to say about it. And many books have been written just about this part of the alliance. Yeah.

And this, I mean, just quickly on that, though, this, you know, the religious right is also not a new phenomenon in the U.S., but what is surprising is how powerfully they got behind Trump, right, 80% of evangelical Christians, and how profoundly he's served their interest. I mean, Trump has broken a lot of promises. but he has been really good to the Christian Zionist block that helped elect him. And that has been incredibly catastrophically genocidally dangerous for people on Earth, right? And so this, you know, this is not, you know, even necessarily a dominant strain in Christianity, but key figures in the administration subscribe to this idea that we need.

to have war in the Middle East in order to bring about the return of Jesus, right? This is the worldview held by the guy who is the speaker of the house and many other powerful figures. And the ambassador to Israel. And for those of us who don't believe this stuff, it's kooky. It is, it is kooky stuff. And they literally believe this, these guys. Absolutely, literally. I mean, we tell the story of, you know, the prophecy has different elements, right?

So for example, there have to be these spotless red heifers in the Holy Land. And they are trying to breed the spotless red heifers. A heifer is a cow that has never had a baby cow. So that. How much research we had to do for this book that have made us actively stupider. And, you know, and American elected officials are visiting the cows and going, oh, wow. You know, I don't, it does look, it looks perfect. In the illegal West Bay settlement home.

in their illegal West Bank settlements. And this stuff is... Mike Johnson visited the cows with Mike Huckabee. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, this is the problem. All of it, like we're in this, you know, I quote Philip Roth and doppelganger saying it's too ridiculous to take seriously

and too serious to be ridiculous, which was also a reference to the West Bank, by the operation Shilock. But I think that this is the sort of another kind of uncanniness of our moment is it's so it's so absurd and it's also been so told and retold in fictional form that it's almost hard to believe when it is real. Like we don't know, I don't know how you relate to it,

but it's a weird thing. It's a weird moment that we're living. And I think it's part of why people don't take Trump fully seriously is he doesn't seem fully real, right? And that's kind of what makes him the perfect president to have ushered in AI. right, like the fakeification of everything. So things have to get pretty unreal before you can really finish the job.

So I think part of what we need to do is like really, really have the wherewithal to like look squarely at just how insane it is. And then commit to the real, like commit to each other, commit to our neighbors. And we see that happening. I mean, this is why writing the book wasn't fully. depressing process. Like at certain points, it really felt like, okay, they're winning. It's happening so quickly. But then the data center resistance picked up.

Donnie won the election. Minnesota rose up against ice. And all of these, in all these fightbacks, they were these unlikely coalitions of neighbors coming together. And people are really committing to their place. You know, like we love New York. We want to stay. You know, we want to be able to live in the city.

And, you know, many, Minneapolis saying like this is our city. It's not ISIS city. Get the hell out. You know, and just like all these nice, you know, Midwesterners going greeting each other with fuck ice as their preferred greeting, you know. And and just standing up for their Somali neighbors, right? I mean, there's been an amazing neighborliness. And it's sort of like all of these movements in one way or another are kind of love letters to their city or their town of just like, you know, whether they're fighting against a data center in Tucson, Arizona, or whether they're deciding that they want free transit in New York, it comes from this place of love, like not hatred, but love and commitment and loyalty to this realm. And love for, yeah, love for the world they actually live in. I mean, if I can draw together some of the strains of what you guys have been saying over the last few minutes, it all fits together really beautifully because, you know, I think the biggest

overall criticism that's made of religion, writ large, is that religion tends to devalue the world that we currently live in in favor of a future world, right? Well, we live in a world of sin, but you'll go to heaven. People could look at Buddhism. Some strains of Buddhism are through a certain lens, you know, although life is suffering, but one day you'll have enlightenment, et cetera. And, you know, what that does is it stops you from improving the world that you live in today. And if you believe that, hey, the world we live in today is actually the only world that exists, there's not going to be a future one, right? It makes that other viewpoint look a little bit sick. And there's so many ways that the writer that fascism has adopted that logic by saying that, I mean, your book opens with, you know, the Kushner's saying after the war in Gaza, there'll be new Gaza, it'll be Neo Gaza, we'll build a shining city on a hill here.

You know, so we, you know, embracing the current war because there'll be a future golden place. You see it in Elon Musk saying, well, we have to become an interplanetary species in embracing climate change because, you know, we'll bring about the singularity if we get AI big enough. And then you just mentioned cities, you know, the right is so often talking about cities are disgusting, they're violent, they're full of horrible things, they're getting worse. and almost like taking delight in images of, you know, fires or homelessness or things being bad. Because like, ooh, if they get even worse, then, you know, there'll be some rupture and there'll be some better world on the other hand. And fighting back means saying, no, no, no, I love my city. I love, and I'm going to make it better. Like, like with my friends and colleagues, you know, with the people around me.

Like it's rooting yourself in the in the here and now and sort of rejecting the apocalyptic. I keep searching for a word that doesn't exist. Apocalyptic thinking and instead of focusing on how we support each other and how we improve the world that we live in together. Am I pulling things together well? I love that. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely.

I mean, we quote this evangelical slogan, why polish brass on a sinking ship, right? And so it's this idea that, hey, right? This isn't what we're focused on. We're focused on out there. So yeah, you've summed it up perfectly. And it's, you know, I think the thing about it is like looking at the world with clear eyes. Like New York City is not imperfect. It's met, you know, like we want the subways to actually run on time and be clean.

And we want, you know, there to be better social services. But it's like, but we also love it. there's all these people from different places and there are different languages and that you can walk somewhere, you know, and you can encounter people. And, you know, and it's that, it's that sense of like, yeah, it doesn't have to be paradise to be, you know, worth saving, right? And we don't, you know, and that, I think, you know, Mamdani has done a great job of kind of capturing that. You know, he's sort of in his campaign, reenchanted New York, right, in his media and his speeches and messaging of like, yeah, you know what? Yeah, this place isn't perfect, but this place is pretty

great and we can make it better if we get rid of some of the billionaires, tax them and spend the money on the things we need, you know, and a lot of people, including some people who voted for Trump were like, sounds good. That sounds good. It's also, you know, Adam, it's, I mean, I think that these ideas of these messianic ideas and escape, like a religion as escape to this beautiful world also resonate because people's lives are just so goddamn hard, you know. And, you know, one of the things we look at in the book is just like the history of liberation theology in Latin America, which was really powerful. And this was like a form of Christianity that brought together the socialist aspirations

with theology and talked about the, you know, and talked about the, duty to redistribute land, you know, and fight poverty as part of Christian fate. And that was stamped out really effectively with tremendous, as they say in Latin America, blood and fire with great help from the U.S. military. And then in comes in, you know, these Pentecostal mega churches that are just promising a better world beyond, right? Or if you support, Israel, you know, in Guatemala, right, then you will be blessed in this life. And so, you know, combination of that messianic theology, but also prosperity gospel. So like the, you know, if we want to fight fascism, we actually have to have a better offer, you know. We have to address the underlying

crises that fascism is feeding off of. Fascism always emerges in times of crisis. You know, 1920s and 30s in Europe were a time of mass dismemberment from the First World War I mean cities were filled with all these amputees from coming back from the war all of these orphans who lost their parents in the war so much poverty

and fascism says like we'll get your dignity back right but it was always a war on the left as well because it was also the fear that people might actually try to demand a better system right, a different system. So that's, you know, I think we do have to get at that deferral and just be like,

we really are where we are. Like believe where we are. I think I had a really formative moment in my own thinking about this that I think was a big part of the reason why I decided that I wanted to do this writing before we wrote our first piece for The Guardian when I interviewed the musician Anoni. Anoni had Her last tour was called It's Time to

It's Time to Believe What's Really Happening Which I think It's such a great title For a tour, right? And So we did this on-stage conversation And Anoni

You know, does not like the organized religions But was making the connections with AI And with With a Christian during because Anoni grew up in a very religious Catholic family, but is now more of an animist or maybe a Wiccan. I'm not sure exactly how they would describe themselves. But she said, have you thought to consider that this might be her best idea? And what she was referring to was this world, like that this world, that this sort of paradise of here might be her best idea.

Yeah. And I think about that all the time because there's a lot, there's, there's so much to protect. But, you know, even access to nature is a privilege for a lot of people. So, you know, we evoked the New Deal era because that was a time when the U.S. faced a fascist threat. And part of what the New Deal offered was a lot of urban kids, the opportunity to access nature and swimming pools and public luxury and all of that. Like that's the kind of ambition we really need to summon in the face of these monsters. Yeah. Man, as you talk, it continues to make connections for me.

And then I'm like, oh, when I start talking, I'm going to make this connection. And then you make it right at the last moment. I was thinking about how, you know, in politics here in L.A., you know, we're having our own civic moment. And about how, you know, Spencer Pratt was running for mayor on this. There is a God. Platform of hatred. The city is, I mean, his house literally burned down, right? There had been an apocalyptic set of fires.

But he was like, you know, abandon the city, right? We have to start anew. Burn it all in fire and flame. The hatred was palpable. There's monsters roaming the trees calling homeless people zombies and stuff like that. Then you have Karen Bass who's very much that, hey, we can't do any better. Like, we're trying quotation marks, but this is pretty much about as good as it's going to get. What do you expect me to do?

That's sort of the perspective. And then you have Nithia Rahman who's running on like, I love this city, right? It's the most magical city in the world and we can make it better. And here's some concrete ways we can make it better. We don't have to accept either of those other two things. And that message seems to, fingers crossed, be punching through. And yeah, as you were talking about we need to offer people something better. I was thinking about, yeah, the post-World War II that in the face of fascism

and also communism was the other competing ideology at the time. We did have the New Deal, and that's part of what made the U.S. maybe the positive beacon in that conflict. We had just gone through the New Deal. FDR was still president, and we had this sort of sense of positivity of what we could give people. And maybe we've as a nation lost that over the past couple decades, and maybe that's part of the problem.

but the fact that we can win with sort of love and positivity about the world that we're in and embracing, I mean, everyone feels that way about their city, right? Like everyone feels, eh, it's not perfect here, but it's home, his home is where I live, you know, go Mets or whatever. Everyone has that in their heart in the same way that everyone has, you know, that sort of sometimes reactionary fascist impulse too,

but you can pull it out of people if you, if you show it to them. So how do we do that? You know, I was joking with my producer, Sam, right before this conversation, about a TikTok or perhaps Instagram reel that I saw, one of the two, that I saw that was sort of lightly satirizing books like yours,

the left-wing analysis polemic book. You know the one talking about? And the guy's going, it's the end of every book like this. And it's him going, In the face of fascism and climate change, we must return to community or something. And indigenous knowledge could maybe help out. And, you know, this sort of like vague thing that you see at the end of a lot of books.

And it's also well-intentioned. But after you read three of them, you're like, okay, man, what the fuck do I actually do, though? Like, yes, I love indigenous knowledge and I love return to community. And third spaces and all those things. I commented on that post, Adam. Yes. What did you comment? I said, did I write that?

It feels good to be called out a little bit, right? To be provoked. I'm so glad you guys also saw it. Yeah, so I mean, how do you get past that sort of, you know, because look, there is such a thing as being stuck in place with a smile on your face, right? And saying, ah, I got the plan. I feel a little bit better. And then you wake up the next day and you're like, what? It all disappears like a dream, right?

So how do we get past that problem? This is why I was fun to write with Astra. If I can just say, like, Astra is an organizer. She's not like putting up with any of that vague stuff. And Astro found, I don't know if you know this about Asthma, but you co-founded the debt collective among many other things. Amazing. And so what are we going to do, Astra?

We're more bossy in this book than in previous books. Hell yeah. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I felt personally attacked by that TikTok, so that means it was doing a good job, right? We've written the books with the hope at the end. But, you know, to go back to the FDR example, FDR didn't, you know, fight for the New Deal out of the goodness of his heart, right? It was mass organizing.

There were strikes on a scale that this country had never seen before or since, right? And the socialists and the communists were mobilizing, right? there was a vibrant left that was part of that, that organized at every level. And so that is the message of that period. It's not just the policies that were passed and that people appreciated, but the incredible fight that it took to make those possible. So, I mean, the thing is, if writing a book or podcasting were enough, we'd be out of this mess already, people really do need to organize.

And that means building durable organizations. and institutions, it means joining things in real life with people and applying strategic political pressure. And that can be at the local level in a fight against a data center. It can be, you know, by engaging electorally, can be by joining a labor union. If you are in a workplace where that's a possibility, the debt collective is the world's first debtors union. So we fight for the abolition of unjust debts, student loans, and credit card debt and

medical debt that is usurous and shouldn't exist. And we fight for the provision of universal health care and free education. There are ways to fight back, but you have to do that in concert. I mean, I think us co-writing this book is part of it, right? We co-wrote this book because this is something that, hey, we don't think you can face this alone, but also we don't believe you can fight this alone. And so, you know, the thing I always say to people is join something. People always, you know, I give talks and they're like, what can I do about all of the issues you're writing about?

And it's like, but it's not about you as an individual. It really is about yielding collective strategic pressure. And so I'm just like, find a political home. It could be DSA. It could be indivisible. It could be a union. But find a political home and work with other people because that is what it's going to take. That's what it has always taken.

You know, history shows that. And in this moment, I mean, just to reiterate what. and we said, we have an incredible opportunity. We call this like a new pro-life movement, right? Because it really is like us are the robots at this moment. That's what they're, that's the proposition. And it's a moment to really try to invite other people in, to articulate the stakes, to make new alliances.

And there's something, I mean, we've been activists for a long time. And our spidey sense is like this, something is possible right now that could be really transformative. And let's not blow it. We also need to abolish billionaires. Yeah. We have some, we do have some policies. And we need to regulate the hell out of AI.

Yeah. It just can't be in the hands of these maniacs. And we need to send some people to jail. There needs to be some accountability moving forward, right? Like, there needs to be some real consequences. But I think that a lot of people, you know, who listen to podcasts like this one, walk around that, yeah, we need to abolish billionaires, but then the back of their minds, they're so like, well, what do I do? You know, and there's the we, there's the what do we do, and then there's the what do I do.

And I think if you're able to answer the what do I do for yourself, which means joining something, going to the meetings and then converting your question from how do we solve every problem to what action are we taking next week? And who's renting the van to put the folding tables in? you know who's bringing the chips to the meeting i mean that's sort of right yeah yep and and who's talking to the people who were having internal conflict with and who is you know once you are wrapped up in that work you can still be stressed out but then when you think well what am i doing you actually know like i could list for you the things that i did this week that were not part of my job that some of them were a real pain in the ass but you know that were like my my little my little

my little pebble on the mountain. And there's a lot of peace in, you know, putting in even if it's your five or ten hours a week into whatever your group is, right? Whatever your piece of it is. So I love that and it's what I try to return people back to

over and over again. And we do have examples of this like working, right? Like fascism was defeated in the past and we have, there's a couple environmental problems that we took care of acid rain. There's a couple that we did, in fact. Acid rain, yeah, acid rain is the one that we made progress on, right? And the ozone hole.

Ozone, ozone layer, probably. Ozone hole. Yeah. No, I mean, and also globally right now, and, you know, part of, like, it's, I think when you're in Trump land, it's hard to see beyond it. But this fascism is a global phenomenon. They are globally networked. We need to be more internationalists.

And if we look outwards, we can see that there have been people's movements that have toppled would be fascists in South Korea, in Hungary recently. There's incredible uprising in Albania against Jared and Ivanka started with them. But then it was like also the entire political class. You're all corrupt. And they're, you know, been in the streets relentlessly. And I love that they're, you know, that they're not a color revolution. They're an animal revolution.

there are the Flamingo Revolution. Then you have the cockroach revolution in India. Sparked by another kind of rage at corruption. But, you know, I think that this is a moment where sparks will happen, right? Like, we don't know what the next thing is that's going to bring people to the streets in the millions. But I have no doubt that that's going to happen. And we need to be ready with a program, right, of like how not to blow that energy. Because we've all been part of movements where they're,

there's been that kind of effervescent moment. And then we're like, what happened exactly? Like, that can't happen this time because the stakes are just too high. Yeah, we're also seeing it, by the way, in the revolution inside the Democratic Party, like the year of strife that the party is having or that the political left of center writ large in the U.S. is having. There's a lot of people sort of clutching their pearls and rending their garments over it. But, like, we're moving from hopefully a political class that does nothing in shrugs or adopts the liberalism of the past,

it doesn't know how to deal with the Trump moment, to one that is actually, you know, going to come up with some kind of plan and do something. It's a fight worth having. Yeah. It's a fight worth having. And we all need to resist, like, getting pulled into internet fights

that are not fights worth having because that's part of what those algorithms do and what these technologies do is convince us that that's how we should be spending our time. Not naming any names, but you know. Yeah, you're calling me. for the argument I got in on Blue Sky last week. No, I constantly need to be reminded of there's so many fights.

You know what? I'm just, I don't need to have this, especially when, you know, we don't just need to have like fist fights inside of Mark Zuckerberg's prison. You know, we need to break the fuck out. And I really thank you for coming on the show to talk to us about it. The name of the book is End Times Fascism. It comes out on September 15th. Oh, end times fascism and?

The Fight for the Living World. And the fight, what a, that is like the most beautiful subtitle. Because I always read the title and then I let the author fill in the subtitle. That's the most beautiful subtitle we've ever had for a book on this show. So I'm not going to leave it out. It's called End Times Fascism and the Fight for a Living World. It's out September 15th. Folks can, of course, pick up a copy in our special bookshop.

Factuallypod.com slash books. where else can people find you guys in your work? I mean, what do you want to direct them towards? I'm sure you have plenty of great places. For me, I always want people to join the debt collective, debt collective.org. That's the place to find me and the place to have a positive impact in my view. And I don't have an organization.

So I also want you to go to the Tech Collective, the DSA, and my substack, which is called Patterns. Oh, thank you folks so much for being on the show. Naomi and Astra. I can't thank you enough. And I hope that you have a new book out soon and we can have you back on the show. Or just any time, please drop by talking to you gives me so many new thoughts and ideas and connections and makes me feel so positively about the potential for the world. So I'm really grateful to you for being here. I am grateful to you for everything you're doing. And this was so fun. It really was a good time. Thanks for having us. Thank you. Well, thank you once again to Naomi and Astra for coming on the show. Once again, if you want to pick up a copy of their book

and Times Fascism, you can do so at our special bookshop, factuallypod.com slash books. And if you would like to join our book club where we will be reading and discussing this book together and releasing it as a bonus podcast episode, I hope you'll join us. Head to patreon.com slash Adam Con. Over five bucks a month,

gets you access to the book club, the bonus podcast episodes, our online community, and so much more. For 15 bucks a month, I will thank you in the credits of this very show. This week, we got some new $15 a month subscribers. So this week I want to thank, Shelby Drill, Shell, Shell, Shell B-Drill,

like the Pokemon, but Shelby, Shell-B-Drill, Agent Effie, who I've been messaging with and is from France. And very happy to have your support from France. Agent Effie, thanks so much. M.F., Dakota Tevis, Virginia Beckenbauer, Rebecca Chumpa, Christina Coranta, Sarrar, Troy Stiffler, and Fakriddin Ibrahimov.

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Everybody here at HeadGum for making the show possible. Thank you so much for listening. I'll see you next time on Factually Babies. Bye-bye. That was a hate gum podcast. That was a hate gum podcast.