Front Burner - Naomi Klein on Carney, trade war and 'end times'

Episode Date: October 6, 2026

Celebrated author Naomi Klein joins the show to talk about how Mark Carney's response to Trump's trade war echoes themes in her book The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. We also discuss her latest work "End Times Fascism: And the Fight for the Living World. For transcripts of Front Burner, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/frontburner/transcripts

This ascent isn't for everyone. You need grit to climb this high this often. You've got to be an underdog that always over-delivers. You've got to be 6,500 hospital staff, 1,000 doctors, all doing so much with so little. You've got to be Scarborough. Defined by our uphill battle and always striving towards new heights. And you can help us keep climbing. Donate at lovescarbro.cairbo.ca.

This is a CBC podcast. It has been almost 20 years since Naomi Klein's investigation of the relationship between free market capitalism and crisis in her book, The Shock Doctrine, The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. But lately, I've been hearing people bring up her shock doctrine theory in a contemporary context to describe some of what's happening right here in Canada now as the country reels from a trade war and threats of annexation by the United States. Naomi Klein's got a new book. out to called End Times Fascism and the Fight for the Living World with filmmaker and activist Astra Taylor. So we thought it would be a good time to have her back on the show to hear her perspective on Mark Carney's government, climate policy, AI, and the potential end of the world. And I'll just note here, since we'll be talking a fair bit about the Canadian government's policy

moves, that Naomi is married to Avi Lewis, leader of the federal NDP. Naomi, it's great to have you back on Frontburner. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you, Jamie. Thanks for having me. And I'll just note. that I am speaking for myself and not my husband or the NDP and expressing views that are long held. You are very much your own person. I mentioned in the introduction that I've heard critics of Carney's policies who are around the term shock doctrine to describe what he's been up to lately. And just before we get into the specifics, could you just start by reminding people what the shock doctrine is and how you briefly describe it? Sure. As you said, it's a, it's a, it's a,

term that was the title of a book that came out in 2007. And it describes a political strategy that I was documenting, but was actually, I sort of first identified after the invasion of Iraq by the United States. And it is using a state of shock, a collective shock, that happens when we experience something new and unprecedented to us, at least, and we collectively lose our story. everything feels strange and uncanny, and into that space, that gap between the shock and the understanding of the event, there has been a political strategy to push through pro-corporate policies that enrich elites, and that wouldn't be possible during non-shocking times. So the key policies that I wrote about in the shock doctrine were privatization, deregulation,

austerity, cuts to government spending. I wrote about it in the context of 9-11, of the September 11th shock and the loss of civil liberties and rights and also a privatization of government and also the wars themselves that were launched in the aftermath of that shock. So that's what I meant by the shock doctrine. Other examples that you use in the book are Pinochet's coup in Chile, the collapse of the Soviet Union, Tiananmen Square. And so do you see Donald Trump's 51st state threats? against Canada, the tariffs that he's wielded against Canada, as meeting the same bar here? I do. I think that they have been a tremendous shock to Canada's sense of the world that we lived in. I mean, this was our friendly neighbor, according to the stories we told, not to say that we

didn't have misgivings and concerns that came up during the negotiations of the free trade deals. But we've had a very cordial relationship with the United States. And suddenly we were having these fears of, you know, are they going to invade, what is going to happen? And so it was extremely destabilizing. And one of the things I write about in the shock doctrine using the September 11th example, because it was such a classic one, is the fact that we regress during times of shock. We want to be taken care of, right? And the danger of that is that you end up delegating too much trust to kind of father figures. I mean, when I was talking about the shock doctrine, I would often remind people that it maybe wasn't such a good idea to trust Rudy Giuliani

and Dick Cheney to the extent that we did. So Canadians want to fight. Canadians want to act, but there's also been a little bit of maybe more trust than we normally would grant to political leaders who are radically changing our infrastructure, our legal infrastructure, as well as our physical infrastructure and our ecology. You know, if we think about the response, to Stephen Harper, who also tried to do a lot of things very quickly. There was massive pushback. And I think people, because of the shock of Trump, we have been delegating a lot of trust. So just top line, before we get into specifics, you buy the application of the shock doctrine theory here. Like, how do you see Carney using this? Well, okay. So I would say that fundamentally, this is a strategy for doing an

end run around democratic debate, right? So we should, we should respond to shocks. We should respond to crises. But the issue is, has there been buy-in? Has there been debate? Is this something that we're collectively deciding? And so the danger of something like an omnibus bill that is 250 pages and that barely has time to be debated and itself is about having less time to debate significant investments like oil pipelines and LNG export terminals and so on, is that that also reduces the space for democracy. So, yeah, what I describe in that book is the constriction of democracy using those states of shock.

And I do think that Canada is in the midst of it. You know, I wrote a lot about natural disasters in that book, too, the Hurricane Katrina and the way schools got privatized instantly. Yeah, I mean, look, I've been on book tour, but I've been following this, you know, as much as I can in hearing about airport privatization and anything. it does seem like these are issues that were not run on during an election. And it would have been nice if this had been presented to Canadians. I do think we need a robust response to the Trump

shocks. I'm just not sure this is what Canadians voted for. I know a lot of Canadians who voted for Carney because he was somebody who was very vocal about climate change and wrote a book on the subject and figured he really was passionate about it and didn't expect him to be as enthusiastic about pushing a fossil fuel infrastructure. The scale of the investment shows it. The partnership, the true partnership that you have all created proves it. And the speed with which you're moving confirms it. Canada is working.

Canada's building big again. I want to get into some more specifics with you. So I confess we first decided that we really wanted to talk to you about this. during his big investment summit at the beginning of September. And I know you took part in a counter summit. Say more about what struck you about that whole event and how it was received in Canada. Yeah, it was a day-long counter-summit or a day and a half called the Many versus the Money.

And it was put together very quickly in response to this summit. And I think it's exactly the kind of thing that we need to do in moments where the rules are changing very quickly, which is get oriented, get out of that state of shock as quickly as you can do that by finding your bearings, mapping where you are. So it was really just a lot of information sharing. And, you know, I think people were processing this idea that Toronto was welcoming all of these huge American businesses at the same time as we were being told that this was all about not selling Canada out. Trump wants to break us so he can own us. But then why are we offering ourselves up and using words like peering into the shop window. And so what that

gathering was about was getting oriented. And there were labor people there, indigenous leaders, environmentalists. And very important that people are making connections with one another, especially when a bill is wrapping everything together. Karnie himself is a former central banker. at one point he was very high up at Goldman Sachs. Until recently he was the chair of Brookfield, asset management. And so where he was hired to lead their ESG and environmental, social, and governance. So this is what he was really kind of known for. Right.

That's where I first encountered him in the context of the UN climate summits, where there was a lot of tension about whether or not we were going to respond to the climate crisis with binding regulation or whether the private sector could be trusted to regulate themselves. And, you know, Mark Kearney was the kind of face of this idea. Don't worry about it. We don't need rules because we are going to voluntarily embrace environmental, social, and governance standards. We've got this. He was the guy who was saying that, right? And that hasn't gone very well. Yeah. I guess then are we surprised to see him now interested in privatization and deregulation? that he's prioritizing growing investment in the country?

Like, isn't this what people voted for? And wouldn't he have done this even without a crisis? I don't think he would have been able to do as much as he is doing without the Trump tariffs. And I think there just would have been a lot more pushback from labor, from First Nations, from the small and medium-sized businesses, who are also, who are the ones who are most affected by the tariffs? I mean, this is one of the things I'm really struck by is it is the smaller businesses

who have been exporting to the United States. I mean, I live in British Columbia. There's a lot of businesses that their whole, you know, model is exporting to Washington State and Oregon. And 50% tariffs are not really survivable at all. But what they're seeing is that it is massive corporations that are coming in and they're getting very little. And to be honest with you, Jamie, you know, my most recent book is about the rise of the far right around the world. And I think there's an argument for calling what Donald

Trump represents fascism. We look at how, you know, not that they've won everything, not that they're able to do everything, but there's a model, there's a playbook of dehumanization, of use of violence, you know, what ICE has been doing in U.S. cities. But they're also part of an international of far-right leaders. And in many countries, it is the failure of the center that created the context for these far-right parties

to win elections. People feel that their governments don't care about them, that they don't understand what they're dealing with with the cost of living, and they feel left behind. And so the far-right comes along

and says, we're going to save the day. It's really all the immigrants' faults. And I'm quite worried, even though I understand Mark Carney is the most popular politician in Canada, maybe the world right now. I'm worried about a brewing backlash that could turn very ugly because there's a lot of people who are not being helped by these investment-led responses to the crisis that are all about attracting large foreign investment.

Just given that, I wonder if it's worth noting here, you know, when we're talking about these energy projects, the construction of this pipeline that he's prioritized, it isn't particularly privatized at all. The feds and the Alberta government have a 90% ownership stake. And just how would you respond to the argument that this isn't sort of state gutting or about selling off to private corporations, but like a state directed industrial policy geared towards creating jobs and, you know, bringing prosperity to Canada? Well, I think it's primarily a subsidy to the fossil fuel industry who don't have to build their own pipelines. I mean, they're perfect. happy, why would they invest in this expensive infrastructure? What they want to do is export the

oil in the pipeline. So what we have is we have the privatized profits. And a lot, and it's not just the pipeline, a lot of risk is being offloaded onto the public. And I think it just raises a question, if we're going to be spending public dollars, is this what we want to spend it on? Because, you know, one of the most prominent Canadian exports in the past couple summers has been wildfire smoke. Besides Mark Carney, this is what Canada has come to be most known for is the fact that smoke from our wildfires is wafting south of the border, even reaching as far away as Europe. And this is another kind of shock. This is another kind of emergency that we are not talking about. So what you're saying, should we be surprised that a banker is acting like a banker and inviting other bankers to come to Canada,

Probably not, but I think the extent to which he is foregrounding fossil fuel infrastructure is a little bit surprising, even to me. And it should be a surprise. And frankly, unacceptable in the middle of a climate crisis that is impacting Canadians. It means that when we do public investments in so many communities, it isn't the kind of public investment that we can enjoy and that make our lives better. It's not like a new hospital or improvements in schools or fantastic high school. speed rail, although I understand that there is some planned. It's like raising a highway because there's a sea level rise or just recovering from a freak storm or rebuilding after a wildfire. And that doesn't even really bring you to baseline afterwards, but it's hugely expensive.

So we are paying very real costs because of the climate crisis. And I think Canada absolutely should be joining with middle powers and entering into the vacuum left by the rupture of Donald Trump. But it would be nice if we were doing that with robust green policies and real human rights policies. This government has announced like $70 billion in clean energy in a clean energy package. They plan to double the capacity of the electrical grid by 2050. So like these announcements are what to you? I mean, I do think, look, I'm not saying that everything is bad in the package. it is not on the scale of the investments in fossil fuel infrastructure, which are more significant.

And they are contradictory. I mean, we're making the crisis worse at the same time as we do some things to make it less bad. I mean, it's incoherent. I think Barcarnie is a very eloquent leader. And I think if he wanted to lead Canada in another direction and with that sense of coherent purpose, he definitely could do that. But it would be a lot harder to have it be led by foreign actors like Blackstone and Black Rock and other foreign sovereign wealth funds because they are, a lot of them, aligned with Trump, and they're no longer interested in the kind of ESG. Like, Trump made it very clear that he considers that woke capitalism.

He doesn't want banks to do this. And so all the banks that Carney, before he had this job, you know, he had gotten and all the banks to make net zero targets and all that, but they've already rolled that back. So if your model is attract a bunch of multinational hedge funds to come to Canada and investment banks, they are going to invest in the things they want to invest in. And what do they want? They want metals and minerals for data centers and weapons companies. They're not interested in that green transit, and they've made that very clear. So you would need another model. It would need to be much more of a public sector-led model. It would need to be more like what Canada did during the Second World War,

which was create a lot of crown corporations to fill in where the private sector was unwilling to go. And that is not who Mark Carney is. And Mark Carney brought his former colleagues to do what they want to do. And when I look at the deal book, right, and this idea that Canada has what the world wants. What it sounds to me is that our country is being imagined as a kind of massive Costco filled with bitumen and other raw resources. And we're offering ourselves up to the world so they can stock up on our copper, on our oil, on our water. And this is part of what we write about in the new book, this idea that everybody is bunkering for collapse. But those raw resources are our forests. They are our oceans, lakes, our rivers, our mountains. And most of all,

they are indigenous nations, mountains, and rivers and lands. And the idea that we're just sort of offering it up to the world without the kinds of robust debates that I think that that requires is a huge lost opportunity, and I would even say a betrayal. And we're going to regret it when we come out of shock. I just, I don't want to make you repeat yourself too much, but I just, I just want to ask you just one more. Yeah. I just wonder what you would say directly to someone who's hearing what you're saying, but it's also like, look, he is in a tough spot. Like, we have to diversify away from our dependence to the U.S. We simply cannot trust them anymore. The quickest way to do that is to, A, expand our energy, export capacity to Asia. or to build up our military so that we have some agency there.

I just think that there are all kinds of mixed messages. And once you drill down a little bit, there are a lot of contradictions. Like, okay, we want to invest in the military because we feel vulnerable. I understand that. But then we're also integrating our military more and more with the United States. So are we afraid of them or are we giving them a whole lot of data and are we buying a whole bunch of weapons from them? And are we in the process of offering up our critical minerals for their weapons?

So there's a lot in what I'm seeing that looks like we are integrating more with the United States. And, you know, a phrase like diversification to me means we should be diverse. I mean, we've all been saying for so long that we need to become less dependent on raw resource extraction. This has been a refrain in Canada since the 60s. or longer. And that's really what it means to diversify your economy, not just diversify who you sell raw resources to. I mean, I think it's a fair question. But it means like one of the things, I was looking for this before I came over. I was trying to find this advertisement that I remember from the election campaign, which was like the world needs more Canada. Canada, it's time for more

us because we're more than just a place on a map. We're an attitude, one with more empathy than ego, more unity than division. More grit, go, and we got this. The more we choose to stand up as our most flag-flying, maple-le-fying, local adventuring selves, the more we are the true North,

unbreakable, strong, and free. And it's not an election promise. It's more of a feeling, right? But if you look at what the images were, it was like indigenous people dancing, and it was diverse cities and people who care about all of these, you know, that we take care of each other. And I think the implication was that in standing up to Donald Trump, we were going to be more Canadian.

And what makes us different from the United States is that we have invested more in our social infrastructure. We have universal health care. We have the CBC. We have decided that we, and this is, you know, this is, you know, this is, vulnerable, right? Because in lots of ways, Donald Trump says, it's just a line on the border. Why does it even exist? And that line represents something to people and what it represents are these policy choices that we have made that do make us different. And when I look at what, and it's not just Carney, it's also the premiers, what they have decided to do in a

hurry, and you said, he's in a tough spot. I see them making us less like, can't, and Canada. Like what I see is doors being opened up for private health care privatization in Alberta. I see austerity in the public sphere. I see more surveillance. And I see attacks on indigenous rights. And so in the name of standing up to Donald Trump and not becoming the 51st state, it feels like we are becoming more American. And I think that's a broken promise. After the break, I want to talk to you about your new book and times fascism and the fight for the living world. This ascent isn't for everyone. You need grit to climb this high this often.

You've got to be an underdog that always over delivers. You've got to be 6,500 hospital staff, 1,000 doctors all doing so much with so little. You've got to be Scarborough. defined by our uphill battle and always striving towards new heights. And you can help us keep climbing. Donate at lovescarborough.ca.a. Viking. Committed to exploring the world in comfort. Journey through the heart of Europe on a Viking long ship with thoughtful service and cultural enrichment. On board and on shore.

Learn more at viking.com. Okay, so I know you've been doing a lot of interviews. for this new book, and I was listening to some in preparation for our conversation, and I heard you talk about how people look back to the shock doctrine as a sort of paradigm for trying to understand a lot of what's going on today, as we just were in the first part of this interview. But you talk about how, in your view, history doesn't just repeat on a loop. It compounds. And that end times fascism is almost like an updated shock doctrine for the times that we're in now. And I just wonder if you could say more about that for me or if you think that I've just given you a fair summary of your

argument. Yeah, I can actually go home now. You did great. No, I think that's absolutely true. And we ended up writing the book in part because I was frustrated that after Donald Trump was reelected, I kept hearing what he was doing described as, oh, this is the shock doctrine and suddenly people were refining that book, which is nice for any writer. But it didn't actually feel like an example of that to me. When I'm talking about Canada, that's one thing, because we're dealing with a particular event in the form of Donald Trump and his threats on our economy. And they're not just threats. It's actually happening. But from people who are living under Donald Trump in the United States, it is a nonstop of

garage. It is not a singular event. It is coming at you from all directions. And it hasn't stopped for a while now, right? I think that the pandemic was a real pivotal point in this. And even during the pandemic, we saw that kind of compounding of shocks, the economic shops, the price shocks in the supply chain, and then wildfires and climate shocks on top of that. So I think what we're seeing now is not what I describe in that book is just disaster capitalism, which is kind of descends after a shock, you know, buys up distressed assets at fire sale prices. But an economy that has emerged and political movements on the right that are taking a future of collapse for granted and are bunkering down and becoming more openly supremacist in their ideology, which is why we use

the term fascism, because fascists are supremacists and are saying, okay, it's all going down, but we the chosen are going to survive. And so we, we, fascism is always an alliance. And what we try to do, what Astra Taylor and I do in the book is map the different kinds of alliances that we're seeing, the different forces. Who are these end times fascists that you map out in the book? How do they kind of work together? Yeah, for sure. So, and this is not just an American phenomenon. But it's certainly, clear in the states. So one group, and the reason we call it end times fascism is, you know, they're literal believers in end times religion. Trump had massive support among evangelicals. He also had a relatively strong support among Jewish voters who support the Likud government of Benjamin Netanyahu. These are sects within face. I mean, this is not all Christians. This is not all Jews. But these are people who look at every one of the kind of signs that I

I've mentioned, COVID, L.A. burning, you know, everything bad that happens is a sign that the end is near. And so there have always been preachers. And, you know, I write about this in the shock doctrine, right? Like, Hurricane Katrina was a sign. It was punishment for the gays, right? It was for Mardi Gras. There are always people who will say this, but they have never had more power within the U.S. government. And within the Israeli government, you have people like Ittmar Ben-Givir, who comes out of the settler movement, and they really believe that the Messiah is coming, and they want to accelerate that. They're accelerationists. So, you know, we'll often see news stories about Ben-Givir leading groups of people to Alaksa Mosque every time more people praying in the open, which violates

what's called the status quo, which is what has governed the Al-Aqsa compound or what Jews called Temple Mount since Israel took control over it in 1967. So this is very, very volatile. incursions onto Alaksa are, you know, if they actually were to rebuild this third temple, this would trigger World War III. So what we say in the book is we don't believe that they are right that we are entering the biblical end times, but they do have the power to trigger a very real apocalypse for the rest of us. And we should be aware of it. And we can't tell ourselves, like, just because those people seem to us maybe to be a little

kooky, I mean, I don't want to call people names here. that doesn't mean we can afford to ignore them. Or fringy, yeah. Yeah, I mean, they are not the fringe. They used to be the fringe, but Eshmar bin Gavir is in charge of internal security in Israel. Mike Huckabee, who is a Christian Zionist, which means he is very focused on Israel as the site where the Battle of Armageddon will take place. He also wants the third temple to be rebuilt. He also has talked about using the Bible as a kind of a map for where Jews have a right to be in the entire region.

So if God gave them that land, then they have a right to take it. it now by your definition, unless I'm missing something completely. I think you're missing something because they're not asking to go back to take all of that, but they are asking to at least take the land that they now occupy, they now live in, they now own legitimately, and it is a safe haven for them. He is Trump's ambassador to Israel, so we can't ignore this. Tangibly, there are groups in the United States, like Christians United for Israel, Kufi that claims 10 million members and has been gunning for war with Iran for many years. And now

they have it. And, you know, when Trump started that war with Israel, they sent thank you notes. And this is, you know, part they believe they believe the end is nigh. The leader of Kufi describes the Bible. He says the Bible stands for basic instructions before leaving Earth. So they imagine the rapture is coming and they are going to be, they're going to ride an elevator to the sky. And, you know, since I've been writing about disaster capitalism, I've often been struck by the way the privatization of protection from disasters is a weird kind of like secular rapture. Like I wrote about the first private firefighters to show up in Los Angeles. So firefighting is something that we used to just do in the public sector.

But in the past 20 years, we've seen the first concierge firefighters, which will go to the homes of wealthy people and make sure that they don't burn down, spray them with fire retardant, and even fight the fires themselves. And it's like an earthbound version of this story that you are going to be protected in heaven, except they're protected down here. So the other part of the alliance really are very wealthy people, particularly in tech, who have different versions of escape that don't involve. going to heaven. They may involve going to Mars. They may involve... Elon Musk. Yeah. Yeah. Um, uploading their consciousness to the cloud. I mean, AI is kind of a dream of dematerialization. Um, you know, we quote a lot of people, uh, very senior in tech who's, who talk about how with AI they're conjuring a god or a demon. Um, and even a new species of life. Um, and yeah, we're just quoting them. Um, um,

And, you know, once again, it'd be nice if this were marginal, but we're talking about some of the wealthiest people in the world. I just want to interrogate that a little bit more because I think people hear these examples. I mean, you have this one example in your book where Peter Thiel's venture capital firm is hosting like an apocalypse ball. And you can dress either in black tie or you can dress for dystopia, right? And it's just so easy to roll your eyes at this stuff. Talk to me a little bit more about why you think we should take these tech pros seriously. Because some of it kind of feels like trolling. I mean, it's a struggle, right? Because I think that as we write in the book, they want to be our overlords and they want to be our edge lords. And that strategy of keeping people constantly destabilized

of like, I don't know whether to take this seriously or not, I think it is quite dangerous because it means that you can wait too long before you say, okay, these guys actually mean it. So one of the things we write about in the book is the fact that a lot of folks in U.S. cities that have had the most direct experience with some of the technology that Peter Thiel has helped unleash on the world because he's a co-founder of Palantir. like, you know, they work very closely with ice. And so people who live in Chicago, which faced, you know, a early ice invasion, and also particularly in Minneapolis, most famously, where, where that city was just overrun with ice agents, they didn't wait around to decide whether they were really dealing with people who meant it when they were bundling their neighbor's into cars, wearing masks, and also using facial recognition soft,

where to say, I know where you live, I know your name before you've even opened your mouth, they organized and they stood together, they protected their neighbors, and it was so powerful and so inspiring that the Trump administration has not sent ICE agents to invade another city since, and they pulled them back, Christina lost your job, so did Greg Bevino. So you actually can resist these folks, but not if you don't believe them when they tell you who they are, right? And so I don't believe every single thing that they say. I don't believe Elon Musk is going to colonize Mars. But I do believe that there is a casual attitude that is consistently expressed about apocalyptic consequences, whether of AI or the fact that AI is being fueled by fossil fuels. And these tech companies like the banks we were talking about earlier all had net zero targets that they've done. deleted from their websites because they are consuming, you know, extraordinary amounts of coal and methane to fuel the data center expansion. And the effect of that is very real and they don't

seem to be worried. And, you know, even the warnings about, okay, well, is there a 10% chance or a 30% chance that AI is going to wipe out humanity? I don't know whether or not I believe that that really is a threat. But I do believe that that. they believe it. Yeah. And the fact that they believe it and are building it anyway and are proposing voluntary codes of conduct rather than binding regulation. And indeed in the book, we show that a big part of the reason why Silicon Valley lined up for Trump was because they were angry that the Biden administration and the European Union were regulating AI and putting guardrails there. That tells me they think they're going to be okay. They think that whatever is unleashed, they will be protected. Yeah.

And that's just not okay with me. I was listening to Peter Thiel kind of talk about this the other day. And if I can remember correctly, I think the argument that he was making was like, oh, well, if it's a 10% chance, but you have this other chance to do progress, incredible progress with AI. Isn't it worth a 10% chance? I just, a lot of people might say no. It's not worth a 10% chance. I mean, I think there's some risks that we simply shouldn't take. because life is too precious.

And it's why the subtitle of our book is in the fight for the living world. And we track the growth of the movements against data centers, which Canada is a little behind on because we didn't have as many data centers as were built very, very quickly under Donald Trump. But now that we're getting them, we're seeing a lot of pushback in cities and rural areas,

the same kind of unifying. It's interesting to me because my last book, was about, you know, city and town councils being torn apart over wars, over drag brunches and vaccines and all these so-called culture war issues. But now you're seeing communities come together and saying, like, I don't think the robots should get all the water. I don't think, you know, I don't think AI should drive our energy prices up. We need this land to grow food and really this basic defense of what we as human beings need to survive, especially in a world facing more scarcity and collapse.

These resources are precious. People know it, however they vote. And the more that artificial intelligence technologies get pushed on communities, the more they seem to come together and find common ground and say no. Just to kind of close a loop on this, the last group that you focus on the ethno-nationalists that really want to be able themselves. I don't know if you want to say anything more about that group briefly. No, it's important.

Because, I mean, what I was trying to figure out was what is Trump's foreign policy? You know, he's kidnapping president of Venezuela and just announcing he's taking the oil. He is meeting with Zelensky and saying, we want the critical minerals. He's renaming Great Lakes. And some people have just said, okay, this is colonialism. But there's no, like colonialism has a facade. It says we're spreading civilization and democracy. And it's certainly.

colonial, but to me it looks more like supersized prepping, that what we're seeing as foreign policy is we know things are going down. You can't deny it anymore. Pete Hegseth just announced a new, I don't know what to call it, some kind of like the new ethos for the U.S. military. He's calling it Fortress America, and it's to prepare the United States for survivability. Every major military installation in America is going to generate its own power, independent of the civilian grid. We're bringing our critical supply chains home. We are building long overdue strategic reserves, deep enough that if the world's supply lines break and in a real war, they're going to break. America keeps fighting anyway.

So it's this sense of like everything is collapsing, but we're going to bunker down. So the nation itself is imagined as the bunker. So it isn't like the billionaire bunkers or we're going off to Mars or we're going to heaven or are the other parts of this coalition. It is the world is going down, but our nation, our relatively wealthy nation state, is going to be the bunker, which means we are going to expel the outgroups. So that's what ICE has been doing by really ethnically cleansing the United States. And we are going to bring into the bunker the supplies that we need.

And if you look at U.S. foreign policy, that's what they've been doing. And I think that a lot of what they're interested in Canada is those resources. As Mark Carney says, we have what the world wants. But what that is is our country. Whether you sell it off in pieces or all at once, it's still the country. These groups, you argue that they have kind of the power and the cachet that they have to say because they're kind of coalescing around the Trump. administration. If you remove the Trump administration, if the Democrats trounce the Republicans in the midterms if they win in 2028, does it take out some of the steam here? Or does it release some of the

steam? Well, it depends what the Democrats do once in power. Depends if they really, I mean, there is a kind of civil war going on within the Democratic Party over issues like abolishing ice, over issues like whether there's going to be universal health care. And I think we've definitely seen examples and we write about it in the book where you can actually, actually get Trump voters. I mean, Zoran Mamdani got 10% of New York City Trump voters, people who just voted for Trump to support him for mayor because he addressed their fundamental economic insecurity, which is something that my co-author Astrid Taylor did her Massey lectures on and your listeners might be familiar with. But the fundamental idea is that when people feel economically

insecure, they are much more vulnerable to these appeals, to these divisive appeals, to blaming immigrants, to blaming trans kids. But if you make their lives a little bit more secure, if you raise the floor by promising, as Mamdani did, free and fast buses, freezing the rent, then maybe they won't do that. So, yeah, I do think that winning the midterms is the beginning, but that alone is not enough. It matters what you do once you're elected. But I do want to say that this, what we're describing around bunkering the nation, Trump is a very dramatic example. We're seeing it very clearly in Europe. The new president of Chile ran on a campaign, but he would dig a moat. The figure of the migrant is absolutely central on the rising hard right

around the world. This idea of casting people who are essentially poor people in need as an invading army is the through line between the Vox party in Spain, Marine LaPont. Penn in France, Donald Trump, often using all of them actually using great replacement discourse. And, you know, I think it's a bait and switch because our world really is changing. I mean, this is what we've been talking about. It's very uncanny and strange to have the sky turn orange, to have somebody else's weather, you know, equatorial weather in England or whatever it is. I mean, France had the largest evacuation since the Second World War in response to the fires. And what the right has learned to do around the world is say, the thing you fear, this uncanny feeling, the world becoming strange, all of it is the fault of, you know, somebody who has less than you.

And that is why we call it fascism, because fascism emerges during times of systemic crisis when there is real anger and fear. surging through the culture and that actually might go up at the system itself that produced those crises and out of fear that that will happen, what fascism does is pivots it and redirects it towards the vulnerable. And so I'm not saying that that is happening in Canada right now, but my fear is that if in response to the shocks and fears that we have, that are real fears, we don't get at the underlying drivers, and the result of it is more economic and secure, in Canada. And I think that that is what happens when you push privatization and deregulation.

I think that's the story of the past 30-plus years. Then we will unleash forces that will then be harnessed by a version of what I'm describing in the United States in Canada. We won't have to be annexed by Trump because we'll have full-on Trump politics here. That feels like a good place, Amy, for us to end today, although I could keep going to be all day. Naomi Klein, thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much, Jamie. All right, that is all for today. I'm Jamie Possom. Thanks so much for

listening. Talk to you tomorrow. For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.