Ideas - Tech billionaires are betting on a coming apocalypse

Episode Date: October 16, 2026

Authors Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor want to stop apocalyptic end-of-the-world thinking and its fantasies about colonizing other planets. “We love it here… we want to stay,” they say. They diagnose today's fascism as having an “Armageddon Industrial Complex,” whose main agents are apocalyptic fundamentalists, ethnonationalists, and tech billionaires fixated on creating a super-intelligence at any cost. In their book “End Times Fascism and the Fight for a Living World,” Klein and Taylor explore the convergent forces which not only welcome the end of the world, but seek to accelerate it.Guests in this podcast:Naomi Klein Naomi Klein is the author of several books including "No Logo" and "The Shock Doctrine," and "Doppelganger" which have sold in the millions around the world. Her work as a social activist, journalist, and documentary filmmaker critiques both the systems and the agents that have produced the climate crisis, consumer capitalism, and unaccountable corporatism. She is also a professor of Climate Justice at the University of British Columbia.Astra Taylor delivered the 2023 CBC Massey Lectures, called "The Age of Insecurity: Coming Together as Things Fall Apart." Among her other books are "The People's Platform" and "Democracy May Not Exist, but We'll Miss It When It's Gone." She's also a journalist, a documentary filmmaker, and co-founder of The Deck Collective. She once declared publicly that she doesn't see herself primarily as a public intellectual, but rather as a “feral intellectual."

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Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayyad. Hello, everyone. Good evening. Thank you so much for being here tonight. I am absolutely thrilled and honored to be here to speak with the authors of a very timely and important book, End Times Fascism. The book, End Times Fascism and the Fight for a Living World to Use Its Full Title, makes a big and terrifying claim that there is a powerful movement that not only welcomes, but is trying to accelerate a total apocalypse of the world. The book's authors are Astra Taylor and Naomi Klein. Naomi Klein is, of course, pretty much known globally, the author of several books, including No Logo and the Shock Doctrine,

and Doppler, which have sold in the millions around the world. Her work as a social activist, journalist, and documentary filmmaker critiques both the systems and the agents that have produced the climate crisis, consumer capitalism and unaccountable corporatism. On top of all that, she's also a professor and has been a guest on ideas over the years, and we're delighted to have her with us once again. It's also a delight to welcome Astra Taylor back to ideas. I say back, of course, because Astra delivered our 2023 CBC Massey lectures.

If you haven't read it yet, her series was called The Age of Insecurity, coming together as things fall apart. Among her other books are The People's Platform and the Wonderfully Title, democracy may not exist, but we'll miss it when it's gone. She's also a journalist, a documentary filmmaker, co-founder of the Debt Collective, and once declared publicly that she doesn't see herself so much as a public intellectual, but maybe a feral intellectual. Again, welcome Astra and Naomi.

Our conversation was recorded at Trinity St. Paul's Church in Toronto, and it's centered on their view that end-time's fascism is driven by three disparate yet interconnect. groups, tech billionaires, the extreme religious right, and ethno-nationalists. It isn't the fascism associated with the Second World War. End Times fascism, they argue, is unique to our own age. Let's get into it. Our mainstream kind of notion and understanding of what fascism is, of course, comes to us from the 20th century, Mussolini, Hitler, etc.

and in your book, of course, end times fascism, as you describe, you say, is not defined by goose stepping soldiers and the yellow stars that we saw in that version. What part of your understanding, Naomi, of fascism did writing this book and doing this research, what did they force you to abandon about the way you think about fascism? Well, it forced us to think about what fascism offers to its base to really kind of struggle with the appeals of it, right? I mean, it is what makes fascism different than an authoritarian dictatorship is that it has a mass base. It comes to power in elections. So this question around what the fascists of the 20th century did offer to their

in group, public works, the chance to take a vacation, there were real quality of life improvements, a home stolen from the Slavs or the Jews. And what we've been wrestling with this whole time is like what Donald Trump's base is really getting out of supporting him, right, other than sadism. Because sadism is always part of it and the pleasures of dominance. Dominance is a pleasure. It's a pleasure and a torture cell. I mean, this is something that is hard, I think, for us to admit to. But I think that the fact that that is all that they're offering is their greatest weakness. Well, maybe another way of asking that and maybe I'll show to you is what part of our understanding of fascism, our old understanding of fascism,

do we have to retain to understand end-times fascism? I mean, I think there are continuities, right? And there are also shifts. So the continuities are that fascism emerges out of crisis. So fascism is not just bad guys with individual pathologies. It is the product of social instability, insecurity, a crisis that is economic. So at one point we described fascism as capitalism with bared teeth. It's an elite threat response. And if we go back to the 20th century, the crises were. the wreckage of the First World War, the Great Depression, right? And also a threat from the left, the Russian Revolution. Also, women gaining more rights, so, you know, threatening patriarchy in the family and in the society. So there's that pincer move of a real material crises coupled with a threat from the left

that causes elites to respond by trying to direct the very real frustrations that people are feeling downward at the vulnerable. So scapegoating. There's another major continuity, right? So it protects elite power. So that is all a throughline, and they combine corporate power and state power and suppress labor. That's a through line. But what's different?

Well, our crises are different. We live in an age of crises that were unimaginable. So Mussolini and Hitler didn't know the atomic bomb. They died before the Trinity test. They didn't know climate change, right, which is roiling our world. Wealth was very concentrated then, but it's concentrated. now in the hands of individuals who have more money than countries, than huge countries. And we're facing the threat multiplier of artificial intelligence.

So our crises are global, and we think that is what is feeding the apocalypticism of fascism. So fascism always has what Umberto Echko called an Armageddon complex, sort of this idea of the final battle. But after that, after the final battle 80, 90 years ago, they imagined, as Naomi said, that, you know, there would be benefits for the in-group, real benefits here on our. Now, the Armageddon is, you know, when you follow the far right, as we have done for the last year, you know, they're talking about the end of the world, you know, and that's what we're seeing in the headlines every day. So take me to that moment when you guys had that conversation and decided, yeah, this is, that's the right descriptor for this, end times. He actually had a, well, the end times moment, you know, I actually used the phrase for the first time, honestly.

a stage. I was giving a talk to a feminist legal group in Vancouver called Leif, and it was early in the Trump term. And we're trying to pick apart what is different here, you know?

When Trump was in power before, he didn't threaten to annex Canada. And you know, there was talk of Greenland, but nothing so aggressive and determined the quotas for how many people they were determined to deport, just the absolute mask-off sadism of making videos just enjoying people suffering.

And so this was a change. And I think because I come out of the climate movement, climate justice movement has been predicting for a long time that eventually fascism would become the climate adaptation, that we were seeing signs of this art. armed lifeboat response. I mean, Europe has been fortressing itself in the face of what they call the migrant crisis in increasingly brutal and openly racist ways. And so this is not like Trump arrives overnight. This is a new phenomenon. It has been building. And so what Astor and I have been, you know, we're really talking about is like, what role is the planet playing in all of this, right? We know there is a planetary unraveling, even if some of these folks still claim to be climate

change deniers. You can't deny that our shared home is in crisis. You know it on some level. And so the issue is that there is not a horizon in their story, or the horizon is they think they're at the end of some story. Earlier iterations of fascism were at another point in this linear story of how history progresses. And this is why end times theology is surging. This is why our oligarchs are talking about going off planet and creating new species with AI. It is not the nostalgic, make America great again. I'm bringing back the 1950s, right? That is, that is barely registers now in the conversation, that kind of nostalgia. So we're, we are using their own story, right? Like, we are not the one saying we are in the end times. We're saying

that that story is what allows them to rationalize actions which accelerate collapse, because that is what capitalism is demanding. We don't think they're doing it for kicks. So you identify three main groups driving end times fascism, as you mentioned, tech billionaires, messianic, religious believers, and ethno-nationalists end timers. And despite, what you just said, there's a part of me that thinks, at some point, they probably couldn't have imagined being lumped in together into one grouping. Maybe Astro, what persuades you that they are, in fact, they belong together under this moniker? I mean, I'm not persuaded by an argument, I see them together. I see them making common cause and lining up behind Donald Trump or

Flavio Bolsonaro, right? I mean, we see them in action. So there are, you know, fascism, this is another continuity. Fascism is always an uncomfortable, fractious alliance, right? The word fascism comes from the Latin for bundle. So it is not a monolith. They don't all get along. They have their deep disagreements. And a big part of the book is mapping those disagreements, those fractures, and laying out where they are weak and how to fight them. But it is the religious fundamentalists who provide that in-time's template. So they're all playing with different variations of the same script, with this Armageddon complex. And Armageddon, the idea comes from the Bible, right, from the Book of Revelation, which the religious right takes very literally, especially in the United

States, but increasingly across Latin America, where they believe that we are in the literal end of days, and it is their duty to accelerate prophecy. And so what does prophecy say? It says at the end of the world, there will be floods, there will be pestilence, there will be plagues, there will be fires and floods, there will be war in the Holy Land, and then the Messiah will return. And so everything that most of us think are awful things, right, they see as felicit as signs, and they want to accelerate them. And so there are, you know, one leading Christian Zionist group in the U.S. has 10 million members, and they're lobbying Donald Trump nonstop to wage war in Iran to bring about Armageddon because they think that will mean paradise for their in-group. And what we were struck by is how that

template repeats across these three prongs of the alliance and how they're all sort of building their own arcs while also conjuring the flood. And you see this theological in-times apocalyptic language popping up in places you wouldn't expect it. And again, we don't think we're in the literal end of days, but we think we are in serious crises. But you're not, neither of you are, this book isn't contending that this is a pervasive way of thinking. I mean, in fact, the way you describe it is that end-time fascists are, in fact, quote, a minority even on the right. So why does this minority matter? The book tells a story, a very deliberate journey from margins to center of political power. So for the theological end-timers,

a lot of them used to have fairly limited relationships with political power because the state was seen as sacrilegious. So basically all you want from this state is just to make sure that you can run your religious schools and be left alone. And you know, you might care about a couple of issues, but you generally think that the state is sinful. And there has been a strategy to conquer every mountain. And so that means the judiciary government, media, entertainment. So it's been a deliberate strategy in the United States, and it has... And so we need to pay attention to them because we live in their world. And even if they are, they don't represent even the majority of Christians. Their power is outsized, right? So Mike Johnson,

speaker of the house, is a Christian Zionist, theocrat. Christian nationalism has become increasingly powerful, not just in the United States, but around the world. They're very internationally networked. But then we also have to pay attention to the tech end timers because they are literally the richest people in the world. We're all using their tech. They are also getting closer and closer to the levers of power. I mean, you think about the moment where, you know, Elon Musk is basically running the U.S. government. So we can't afford to ignore them, even if it is in a majoritarian position. The third bunker, right, we call them the three bunkers, because they're really united by this impulse to bunker, even if their bunkers differ, right? Like one group believes that

they get saved in a castle in the sky. Another group thinks their wealth will provide their bunkers, maybe in New Zealand, maybe in Argentina, maybe on Mars, maybe they're uploading their consciousness to the sky. But the largest group, the mass group, like to the extent to the which these movements have a mass base, sees the nation itself as a bunker, right? And this is really who we're contesting for. And some folks in this coalition are straight up white supremacists, and we are not going to win them over. There are people at the margins who are sort of deciding who, which way they're going to go. But this idea of the nation as a bunker, I think, is a defining force in global politics, including in Canada, and we would be very unwise

to believe that we're exempt from it. But this was really, I think, a key moment when we decided that we, like, that we were seeing something different when we were trying to understand what Trump was doing with foreign policy, what his interest in all of, like in us, in Greenland, Venezuela, we are arguing that U.S. foreign policy is supersized preparism. that they are kicking out of the national bunker, the unwanted people, and they are bringing into the national bunker the supplies that they believe they will need. And then, like, just a few days ago, Pete Hegseth just announced the new Fortress America model, which is all about fortressing, getting everything you need, all the critical minerals,

all the water being self-sufficient for what he calls survivability. Once again, taking collapse for granted. It is kind of a survivalist way of thinking. It's a survivalist approach to foreign policy because, of course, countries have always scanned the globe for things that they want. That's colonialism, right? But what is different about what we're seeing is that there is no claims to any higher purpose. There is no spreading civilization or God's word. It's we want your oil, Venezuela, we want your water, Canada, we want your critical minerals, you know, everyone.

And so that's what I think makes it unique, is this taking the end for granted. What do we need? What is our in-group need? What is our bunkered nation need to survive? But they aren't the only ones taking that attitude. You describe a number of kind of dynamics that underpin this loose coalition or grouping of end-times fascists, including something you call the Armageddon Industrial. complex. Help me understand. How does that work? How does that complex actually work, Ashtra? You know, as I said, Umberto Echko, who grew up under Mussolini, he wrote this famous essay called Urfascism, where he's trying to describe what are some of the consistent features of

fascism, and one of them is the Armageddon complex, this idea that there's a great battle. And so we update that idea and talk about how it is fueling this in-times fervor, but how it has also been monetized. So that is the Armageddon industrial complex. So many of these forces are literally banking on disaster. I mean, Naomi famously coined the term disaster capitalism. And this is that on steroids. At one point, I was like, we should call it Armageddonomics, but it doesn't roll off the tongue, obviously. It was like, it's so close to being a good phrase. What is that? I mean, it is the total investment in collapse, right? And so we quote, Alex Karp, who is the CEO of Palantir Technologies, a surveillance

firm that is co-founded by Peter Thiel, somebody hissed, and I like that. Let's just let it out. Boom. And he says on an earnings call, Palantir is built for bad times. Bad times are good for Palantir. And this is a man who is profiting from not just the privatization of health care because They are in health care systems, but they are collaborating with ICE. They are involved in the genocide in Gaza. They are building the surveillance state. And they are very explicit about this, right? That in a world where their buddies, the other tech executives,

are planning to destroy all of the jobs, and more and more people are going to be immiscerated and unemployed, well, you're going to need someone to track and contain and police all these surplus people. And so that is a model. And I think the Armageddon industrial complex also describes AI, right? Because they are saying, if you look at OpenAI, the definition of AGI is a technology that can do all economically valuable labor, right? They want to eat the economy, take all the jobs.

Well, what happens to the rest of us, right? We don't have money to pay for what we need to live. I mean, that is disastrous for most human beings. So they're really banking on different versions of collapse instead of trying to solve the crises that are making our. our lives difficult or impossible. Every one of your answers brings up about six different threads that I want to follow, so I have to kind of decide where to go. But I do want to just pick up on something you mentioned, specifically the ethno-nationalists,

that a key tenant for ethno-nationalists and for this entire movement is what you describe as the centrality of migrant hatred among end-times fascists. And there are those, of course, who would put the blame for the rise on fascism on the very real crisis of displacement that we're all watching live around the world. But what is the connection that you see between the plight of today's migrants and end times fascism? It's a huge question, right? Because we are entering an era where there will be more displacement. I mean, the projections for the number of climate refugees are, you know, heartbreaking. I mean, in country after country, migrants are the scapegoat. Again, what does fascism do? It takes. It takes.

that rage and that discontent and insecurity, and it channels it towards the vulnerable. Sometimes it's trans kids, sometimes it's feminist, sometimes it's usually all of these, right? But it's often migrants. And it's quite striking. So recently people probably saw that alternative for Deutsche Land, AFD, the far right party in Germany, won a historic election. And this was a region of Germany with, you know, high unemployment, really facing an affordability crisis and almost no migrants, right? Immigration was at lows for the entire country. And nevertheless, the right was able to make that the central feature of this political campaign. So what that shows me is that locking migrants out isn't going to solve people's problems

because there aren't any immigrants to really lock out, right? So in the, and in the right, right now people are talking about re-migration, which is a way of rebranding mass expulsions. I mean, ultimately, part of what's happening is that there's a way that the narrative is being flipped from the climate crisis towards immigration. And so we write, for example, about how after Hurricane Helene, when a tropical storm hit Appalachia right before the 2024 election, you know, what did Donald Trump and his buddy Elon must do? Instead of talking about climate change, they talked about how FEMA, which is the emergency management agency, didn't have enough money to help people because the Democrats had given the money to immigrants as part of the great replacement conspiracy, right?

So the idea is the globalists are trying to replace you. And so the existential threat becomes the threat of cultural replacement because of immigration instead of the climate crisis. And so that narrative, we cannot let that stand, which is part of why we have to resist this tendency that we see among liberals and among centrist parties to not talk about climate. change because what happens then is they will talk about immigration instead. And we're seeing that

pattern, which is an astonishing flip to be able to go from climate change to immigration. The emergency is not the climate. The emergency is people seeking safety. So when the nation is seen as a bunker, what happens, as you describe it, what's the vision of end timers for Western, diverse, multicultural societies like ours? Well, they're trying to, ethnically cleanse countries like ours. I mean, that's the vision. The vision, their calls for what they call remigration. And that's the call across Europe. It's the call in the United States. And like I said, we would be very unwise to not pay attention to the central role of anti-immigrant hatred at the center of the Alberta separatist movement. And, you know, frankly, in Quebec,

right now, the centrality specifically of banning hijabs. So this is kind of defining the national identity based on, you know, kind of a blood and soil type of argument. But the main thing it's doing is it's casting migrants, and particularly Muslim migrants, as the invading and replacing other. And it is very present in Canada. So what's the vision? The vision is casting diversity as a cancer. I mean, this is, and casting empathy as suicide. And, you know, and creating theology for it. I mean, we hear this from J.D. Vance, like, that, you know, he pushed this idea that, you know, the United States is not an idea, which it has been saying it is for a long time. It's about where your people are buried.

right, which is sometimes called mortuary nationalism. Yeah, I mean, but I just think it won't stop at immigrants, right? It doesn't stop at anyone. And you ask, you know, is there space in their vision in the end-time fascist vision of the future for us? And ultimately, there isn't. I mean, there's a cover, the new cover of Vanity Fair has Sam Altman looking off in the distance and it's like, Sam Altman sees the future.

Are we in it? You know, and the point is that ultimately, this is, a form of fascism that denigrates the human, right? That, you know, they're racing towards this post-human machine in future. So we are all caught up in the spiral and the wreckage. Some people are on the front lines of it. But this is why solidarity is so important because they're coming for everyone and for the living world. And for the living world. Given what Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor have been arguing so far, you can see why that phrase is in the subtitle of their book, End Times fascism and the fight for a living world.

This is Ideas. I'm Nala Ayyad. This week on West of Center, join me, Kathleen Petty and national reporter, Julia Wong. That's me. I'll take you to meet the man at the forefront of the Alberta separatist movement. That's right. Mitch Sylvester, in his hometown. Whether it's hockey or politics, Mitch told me he can sometimes be a sore loser. Well, Win or Loo's referendum day, Alberta's independence movement isn't going away. anytime soon. Find out more this week on Westa Center. Follow us wherever you get your podcasts. The territories explored in end times fascism are dark and foreboding. It is, after all,

about the converging forces that are trying, not to prevent, but to accelerate the apocalypse. And so, when I walked out on stage with Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor in front of a packed house of 800 plus people at Trinity St. Paul's Church in Toronto, I had one question on my mind that I felt compelled to ask. You have been on a deep, dark dive, basically an excavation of this moment in which we live. And you said in that first public event that you did about this book, that at times it was a bit scary, this excavation. And now that I've read the book, I know what you mean. Why you? Why is it that it's you who is sounding the... alarm and guiding us down to this dark place.

Naomi. Well, first of all, Nala, we're so happy to be in conversation with you and the incredible platform that you have created for serious discussion of ideas, which is all too rare. For the why us question, which nobody has asked us. Oh, good. I'm going to answer why Astra. Okay, that's good, sure. Which is, Astra has been working very deeply on issues of economic insecurity.

So the Massey lectures in particular, you know, we are arguing that that insecurity is the soil in which fascism spreads. So I think because Astra had been theorizing in those areas when we, when we decided to write this book, we wanted it to be an intervention in a timely way. We didn't want it to come out after it was too late. I mean, we really do believe what we're writing. And we're also friends. And that friendship, I think, made it possible to go into some really dark places and to support each other and to take turns falling apart and to make each other a little witch year.

Astra, you also talked about how helpful it was to have a partner in crime. when something so scary is standing in front of you. But just you're both writers also, meaning makers. Yeah. Why you? Yeah. First off, my response to the question of why Naomi Klein is who the hell else? Fair enough.

Fair enough. Several names are invoked repeatedly throughout end times fascism, those of tech billionaires. Sam Altman of OpenAI, Peter Thiel of Palantir. Mark Zuckerberg of Meta, Jeff Bezos of Amazon, and the world's first trillionaire, Elon Musk. Their combined wealth is astonishing, as is their political influence, and their role in what Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor call the Armageddon industrial complex. You mentioned the word grandiosity when it comes to the psychology of tech billionaires, and we all know, of course, what you're talking about.

Jeff Bezos, Ila Musk, obsessed with space travel, colonizing other planets. You know, Musk himself has at last count 14 known children. Just what is that all about? I mean, have you ever noticed that it's always a tech bro and not a tech sis, for example? But what does that mean? What does that tell us about this movement? I mean, there's a lot there. One of our positions, though, is that, you know,

what's going on with these guys? Like we can't see into their hearts, assuming they have them. But, you know, we think ultimately there's a material basis for this, right? It is the promise of AI for these guys is so

grandiose. So they talk about it in messianic terms. The final technology, the last invention, their IPOs basically say, whoever wins this will win the entire U.S. domestic economy. That's what they see the potential market as. You know, they are high on their own supply.

This is a technology that has admitted the world's first trillionaire. And they really think, in the words of Donald Trump, that whoever wins AI wins it all. And that's what's driving them, you know. And I think there's, but there's, and so the ideology, we argue, rationalizes that, right? Because when you are building something that is going to have catastrophes, you believe will have catastrophic economic effects, right?

That you know can cause psychosis and users that you know is hallucinating and spreading lies and endangering the world. You know, they are claiming there's a 25% or a 10% or a 70% chance of artificial intelligence causing human extinction. Now, we can quibble with whether their tech is what they say it is, but we believe that they think those odds are acceptable, right?

When you, these are engineers, These are people who are giving out green earth prizes not that long ago. They know that the infrastructure build out that they are part of and the way they are rigging up, you know, gas turbines and bringing coal back online, they know the consequences of that. So when you're engaged in an activity that's that destructive, you need an ideology that rationalizes it. And supremacist ideology is awful useful in that moment.

You need a story to tell yourself why you're chosen, why you're so great, why you deserve to be a trillionaire. And like the old narratives of meritocracy just don't cut it anymore, right? Fascist ideology needs to be there. On the feminist side, I mean, there's also something about the delusion that these guys are making life, right? It's like, they're, you know, Elon Musk is like, yeah, he's, he's like, it's increasingly looking like humans are the biological bootloader for digital superintelligence. Like, we're all just grist for grog. You know, they're making, this is a quote.

Like, you should rejoice in the fact that you are, you know, going to be superseded by hyper, super intelligent beings, you know, and Larry Page from Google has said that it's speciesist to not welcome these new digital entities. And so there's something there about this idea of, you know, making life without bodies, but also without women. and without all of the, what they see is the inconveniences of the incarnate.

And part of what we're saying is, being incarnate is pretty great. But is that some kind of envy? Or, I mean, what is that? I mean, envy? I don't know. They, ask their therapist. I don't know what's going on with these guys.

But I do know that their vision is a hideous one and that most human beings do not like it, do not want it, did not ask for it, and we will and should fight it with all we've got. There's this theme that's emerging as we're talking, where I'm reminded by something you wrote in the book, which is that every fascism has its sub-humans, and that there is maybe an exercise of sorting going on here. Naomi. Yeah, I mean, there's a quote in the book from a great Chicago organizer and writer named

Kelly Hayes, who says every fascism has its subhumans and for, heck fascists, the humans are the sub-humans. But within that, there are also subgroups for sure, and there are people who are more and less human than others, as Elon Musk's time at Doge made very, very clear. I mean, this is why one of the great frustrations of releasing this book is having conversations with journalists who, like, refused to believe that Elon Musk could mean the sort of trolley things that he posts. But it's not that he's just posting as head of Doge famously fed USAID into the Woodchipper, which is a program that provides nutrition and life-saving medications overwhelmingly to black and brown people around the world,

including children. And so he is not a troll. You know, he is doing these things while trolling, as we say in the book, they want to be our overlords and our edge lords. And, you know, he built his massive network of data centers in Memphis, Tennessee, and Mr. Green Energy did so by rigging together, methane spewing, temporary, what were supposed to be temporary turbines, generating enough power when he's finished the fourth one,

to provide electricity to 8 million people. And he's doing this with these... Eight million homes. Eight millions homes. So it is like a mega city just for fueling AI. And he cited it in a part of Memphis adjacent to a community called Boxtown, which is a majority black working class area that was founded by formerly enslaved people who already have dealt with a huge amount of environmental racism.

And he's poisoning the air. So how, you know, it feels like racism because it is racism. It is the most classic example. So the sorting is at every stage, and it's within his own family, right? He wants boys, and he wants his boys to stay boys, and he gets very angry. But as Astra said, you know, we spend limited time sort of psychoanalyzing them because it is a class project. It is not just about the psychology of Elon Musk and Peter T.

which are not good places to hang out at all. But it's a broader crisis, and they're being radicalized by this, not just the technology, but this stage of capitalism. AI is not like anything we have seen before. To describe the technology as destructive, doesn't begin to encapsulate it. It is also built on mass theft of everything we humans have created through our entire collective history. that's what they want because they are engaged in a kind of a wealth rapture.

But what Astra was describing before about this hatred of the body or this, this is where the religious story and the technological story becomes so similar at verges on plagiarism, right? Like there is this shared desire to escape the animate world. And some desire to get up to this cold, white, weird, place, which they think is heaven. And what we are saying and why we believe, it's important to look at this, believe them, and get really mad, is that it's great here. There's so much to protect and so much that we can make better. But that is what is a minority opinion. That is what is a minority

view. And so if we really look at it and believe it, we have a tremendous organizing opportunity. And we see this most of all in the movement against data centers and how it crosses political, religious, ethnic, racial lines like nothing I've seen before. But to stay for a moment with the idea of faith, as you describe it, being an incendiary accelerant. Of what? What? What is it? is it accelerating? It's accelerating the instability and chaos and pain that already, you know, plagues this earth.

So, you know, that phrase, we were thinking about how, you know, Carl Marx famously wrote that religion is the opium of the masses, which sounds very soothing. And, but that's not how religion is functioning today, you know, on the hard right. Again, they're saying this stuff is. is foredained. It's in the holy book. Let's make it happen. Let's lobby for the war of Gog and my Gogh to actually happen. Let's revel. I mean, literally, there are these in times pastors who have a direct line to Donald Trump, and they are saying there will be fires. Look, there are fires. This is happening now. And so that accelerationism is another pervasive phenomenon on the right.

I mean, accelerationism is a word I first heard in the tech sector, and it defines our politics right now, which is interesting, because it means, in a sense, you know, we are the conservatives in that sense that we want to conserve things, we want to not press our foot on the gas, and delusionally think we can escape our own fumes because we can't. So maybe this is a good place to ask you that throughout your book, you referenced examples of things that sound or feel like anti-examination. fascism in India, Israel, Russia. Canada doesn't come up very often. And so I wonder to ask you,

how does end times fascism most palpably manifest itself in Canada? Well, the increasingly central role of anti-immigrant, not just sentiment, but I think it deserves to be called hatred in the discourse around separation, but it's not only an Alberta thing by any means. But also, I think, you know, we argue in the book, fascism emerges out of a sense of injury among the strong, among the relatively strong, right? You had something and then you lost it. And so in the surging residential school denialism in this country, I think we see it very clearly. And in the way of misinformation. I mean, it is not only these hideous examples of what we recently saw in Ticumnoos

where, you know, a mob comes and says, show us the bones. It's also about this sort of injury of, like, losing some idea of what Canada was. So I think there seems to be this idea of, like, we had something that we used to be proud of, and then we didn't feel proud of it anymore. and now we're going to reassert our right to a purified idea of what this country is and was. So I think we see that really clearly there, but we're also seeing it. You know, in these claims, like indigenous people are going to come take your house, right? And this is also a global phenomenon, and it's something very strong in other settler colonial countries like Australia and New Zealand,

where similar talking points have been used, like the Maori are going to take away your water, for instance. And we also see it in the way we are imagined by Donald Trump. I mean, I think he sees Canada as a source of a whole lot of supplies, a whole lot of stuff that he wants, right? just a whole bunch of nature that you can turn into money. And I think he wants water. I don't think it's funny that he is renamed Lake Ontario. I think it's a tell about what they're interested in. What worries me is that Mark Carney also keeps saying we have what the world wants.

And he also seems to see our country as a giant Costco of some kind. for the preppers of the world. But, you know, this investment spectacle that was held in this city, I mean, this was basically the show, come peer into our window. Look at all this sexy lithium and copper and water and bitumen and lumber. These otherwise known as forests, lakes, mountains, rivers, Indigenous, unsurrendered land. You know, I, this is a really good moment to say this.

I really think the moral center of your book is a passage that I'd like to actually quote back to you. When you're describing these groups hastening or even welcoming the end of the world for their own purposes, hopefully not giving away too much here, but they don't know how to love this place, to savor the pleasure of other people's company, or to marvel at the mysteries, presented by other species. In short, we are up against an ideology that is given up not only on the premise and promise of liberal democracy, but on the livability of our shared world. There is something treasonous in this, treasonous to the unspoken pact made with the web of life that sustains us. They are traitors to creation to the wonders of here.

We love it here. This is our motto. We believe that what you these folks across their differences is this desire to leave, that paradise is elsewhere. And we want to stay. This is what we now write in all the books. Let's stay. And, you know, we work with a concept from the Jewish labor boom, doikite, Hearness. So Doikait translates to Heerness. And it was in response to the thereness. of Zionism and this idea that safety lied elsewhere. And the Boone said that yes, anti-Semitism was rampant and terribly dangerous, but they believed that safety rested in solidarity with other working people across race and

ethnicity and religion and that they had a right to stay where they lived and where their culture was and that they had a right to make here better and safer and more beautiful, fighting for the more beautiful world. And that really feels like the fight that we are all in. And when we say hereness, and we mean here in our communities, but we also mean here in our animate bodies and here on this living planet. And that's the work. Esther, to bring you in on this, just what, you know,

you're really kind of elevating the appreciation and love. love of the natural world kind of to an ethical imperative. And I'm wondering how you, what grounds this idea of Heerness to make it more than just, I don't know, maybe just a nice sounding sentiment. Yeah. I mean, I think it is an ethical imperative, but I also think it's something most of us just deeply feel, right? I mean, there's something unusual about the figures we're describing in their total disregard and contempt for this place. I mean, some stuff couldn't make it in the books quite long. So at one point we had this anecdote about Sam Altman.

And a journalist was talking about Sam Altman walking through the Redwood Forest in Northern California. It's just like oblivious to the trees. And he's like, the machines, the machines, the machines are smarter than my children. Like just his inability to appreciate what's around him. And I think the moment for me when I got, you know, I think when Naomi and I really jelled about writing, writing this, we were on a Zoom and it was talking about, we're brainstorming a bit. And we just were so angry at Elon Musk and his vision of being multi-planetary, right? I mean, he uses this as a moral shield.

So everything he does here on Earth, all the destruction is justified because he's going to save humanity and make us multi-planetary. And we were just like, we don't want to go to Mars. Mars is a shithole. We want to live on a teeming, divine, multi-species planet, not on this cancerous orb. And that, I think that is, I think that's a deeply felt principle. And it is, but it's one that we see manifested in all of the organizing that's happening. Look at the uprising in Spain right now, and people are saying, we want to live in our apartments. You know, we want to be able to exist.

People are saying, you know, I don't want my child being taught by a chatbot. I want well-funded schools. People across Europe. Yes. People want healthcare with real human doctors and not healthcare that is, you know, being colonized by Palantir, which is why nurses across the world are fighting in this international campaign to kick Palantir. out of hospitals. So we are seeing, yes, and we saw it very vividly in the fight against ICE and Trump's invasion of Charlotte, North Carolina, of Chicago, and of the Twin Cities,

where people were saying, you know, we love our neighbors. And there was this ethos of neighborism, of also a reclamation of some Christian theology and saying, you know what? The Bible actually tells me? It tells me to take care of other people, to love my neighbor. That's what we're doing. And that is how you, that's one way that you, you know, embody this politics of Hearnes. So Hearness is not localism. It doesn't mean small. It means a ferocious defense of our communities in this planet. And we think it's actually incredibly powerful to tap into that feeling because that is what can fuel us. We are out of time, but I do want to ask one last question that takes us right back to the beginning of the conversation, which is back to the 20th

century. And I'd like to quote intellectual historian Marcy Shore, who said in a lecture that we featured on ideas recently, that today's fascists do have something in common with the 20th century predecessors, in that they are, quote, regimes in which there are no longer innocent choices, because everyone is implicated, that the line between resistance and collaboration can become very fluid, that it can make people feel that in order to get along, in order to protect one's children, you have to make compromises with forces of evil. And so therefore, nobody, she says, has a clean space in which to stand. And it sucks away at people's ability to kind of mobilize their moral indignity. So it isn't only end times fascists themselves who are you're facing,

but also this undermining of the will to mobilize. How can Hearness counter that? It's a beautiful quote. And I think it's very true. And this is what's, I think, important about being honest about the fact that fascism never was a rupture, right? That the fascists studied the Indian Reserve System, that apartheid. They studied the Jim Crow South. They studied concentration camps across the colonial world and then industrialized it, because every fascism is shaped by the technologies of its time. So they had a Fordist fascism,

and we have increasingly an automated one. But we are deeply implicated, right? And I think that that is something that on some level we know that it isn't this like Captain America beats fascism. That was never true. And so we were implicated then, and we're implicated now. And, you know, fascists love purity, and we can't.

You know, I mean, this is one of the things that we write about in the book is that we need to not just be anti-fascist, but the antithesis of fascism. And that is going to mean a capacity to not just tolerate, but even appreciate levels of diversity, because, of course, fascists want sameness and uniformity and straight lines. but that's not how cities work, that's not how nature works, that's not how history works, so we're going to have to get a little bit messy and understand that we are not going to have to be pure before we can fight and that there's still so much worth fighting for.

And that speaks to the fact that we who are progressives who are on the left do have to learn from our past mistakes. Nobody is coming to save us. We have to save each other. And yeah, we're not going to be perfect or pure. It is going to be messy. And so that is, sometimes you just have to do shit with other people. So I am so grateful for this conversation, truly. Thank you so much for taking my questions and for the book.

Thank you so much, Mala. Thank you. Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor's book is called Enteim. Times fascism and the fight for a living world. Special thanks to the stellar recording crew at Trinity St. Paul's, Patrick Crosby, Gordon Peck, and Jason LaPrad. Thanks also to Ashley Dunn of Penguin Random House Canada and Anjou Gogh of another story bookstore who helped make the event a reality. Technical production for ideas, Danielle Duval, our web producer Lisa Ayuso, our senior producer is Nikola Luchic. The producer of this episode and the executive producer of ideas is Greg Kelly,

and I'm Nala Ayyad. For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca.ca.com.