Offline with Jon Favreau - Bunkers Won't Save the Billionaires

Episode Date: September 26, 2026

From underground compounds to planet-fleeing rockets, tech oligarchs and the MAGA elite aren’t just anticipating an apocalypse—they’re hastening it. Author and climate activist Naomi Klein sits down with Jon to discuss End Times Fascism: And the Fight for the Living World, her new book with Astra Taylor. She and Jon trace the connection between the religious right, Silicon Valley elite, and nationalist movements around the world, and uncover how Donald Trump and J.D. Vance are weaponizing the human instinct to protect our own. Then they discuss how to make people feel safer, less prone to zero-sum thinking, and more invested in a future we have to share. Hate listening to ads? Become a Friends of the Pod subscriber for ad-free episodes of Pod Save America, Pod Save the World, Lovett or Leave It, Runaway Country, Offline with Jon Favreau, and more—plus exclusive content, including bonus episodes of Pod Save America. Subscribe now at crooked.com/friends, on Apple Podcasts, or through the Pod Save America YouTube channel.You can request a transcript by emailing [e-mail]. Include the podcast name, episode title, and air date. Please allow 48 hours for delivery.

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That's HungryRoot.com slash offline. code offline to get 40% off your first box and a free item of your choice for life. U.S. voters abroad. Have you got your ballot yet? All states are now sending ballots to overseas voters. So if you want to vote this year, you should request your ballot right away. Go to votefromabroad.org and click request my ballot, ask to receive it by email. Questions? Ask our support team directly. Don't miss this gins to shape the future. Don't delay. Vote fromabroad.org. It's a fascism that is sort of embracing and accelerating the idea that it's all going down and is focused on the in-group surviving, being bunkered.

So it's really a war over who's going to survive the future. I like the bunker mentality a lot. I think it explains a lot. I believe that betting against Earth, against all of life, is a uniquely treasonous act. Their eagerness to escape this world, to escape this world, realm is something we really need to look at. End times fascism. It seems to me like it's survival of the fittest, like politics sort of taken

to the political extreme. We have developed something that we call the Stephen Miller rule, which is if you wouldn't want something to end up in the hands of Stephen Miller, then it should not exist. Protect yourself, protect your kids, protect your family, your tribe, survive. You know, it's obviously an incredibly powerful human instinct. It is not inherently evil. We're not saying that it's wrong to prep, but the response has to be at getting at the root causes of the crisis and also coming up with credible plans for how we take care of everyone during a crisis, right? How we prep together. We are not built to handle crises of this scale all by ourselves with our phones. The first time Barack Obama ever mentioned Donald Trump in a speech was the first big one I wrote with him, a 2005 commencement at Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois.

We wanted to frame America's history as a choice between two competing stories, one where we act like we're all in this together, and one where it's everyone for themselves. Obama called the latter social Darwinism, which he said is, quote, It's especially tempting because each of us believes we will always be the winner in life's lottery, that we're the ones who will be the next Donald Trump, or at least we won't be the Trump who Donald Trump says, you're fired. I've been thinking about how these competing stories have evolved over the last two decades, especially as we begin a debate next year about where America goes after Trump.

When Obama gave that speech, there was still hope that globalization and technology would make the world feel smaller, that greater connection would reveal our dependence on one another and lead to more cooperation on problems that none of us could solve alone. Instead, we've lived through endless wars, a financial crisis, a pandemic, climate disasters, mass migration, and now the prospect of another technological upheaval. all of which have definitely made the world feel smaller, but also more unstable, uncontrollable, dangerous. And when people feel threatened, the impulse to widen our circle of concern competes with a much older instinct. Protect what's yours. Look out for yourself. Take care of your own.

That instinct is central to the story told by leaders in places as far flung as Putin's Russia, Modi's India, Netanyahu's Israel, and of course here in Trump's America. Where perhaps it's clearest articulation has come from the president's potential successor, J.D. Vance. When he was asked last year about the government's immigration crackdown, the vice president invoked a Christian concept known as Ordo Amoros, which he said establishes a hierarchy of obligations. You love your family, and then you love your neighbor, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow citizens in your own country,

and then, after that, you can focus and prioritize the rest of the world. Vance's answer prompted a response from Pope Francis, who, just months before his death, made it clear that he wasn't on the same page as the U.S. government's highest-ranking Catholic. Quote, love is not a concentric expansion of interest that little by little extend to other persons and groups. The true Ordo Amoros that must be promoted is that of the Good Samaritan. In that parable, a traveler is robbed, beaten, and left for dead. Members of his own religious community pass him by. The person who finally stops to help is a stranger, an outsider from a group he'd been taught not to trust.

Not surprisingly, I'm with the Pope on this one. But I do think Vance is appealing to something real. I don't know anyone who doesn't believe that we have special obligations to the people closest to us. I would do things for my kids that I wouldn't do for a stranger. I assume you would too for your family. The hard question isn't whether those obligations exist. It's what happens when they collide with what we owe everyone else. Which brings me to the incredible essay that the journalist Nicole Hannah-Jones published last week.

Nicole and her husband made a choice many years ago to send their daughter to a high poverty, mostly black public school in New York City. The kind of school wealthier families with options generally avoid. They made that choice because they believed if families like theirs always escaped segregated, struggling schools, those schools would never improve. But their decision came with a cost for Nicole's daughter, who confronted her mother years later. You knew my school wasn't as good. You could have sent me somewhere better.

Why didn't you? Which led Nicole to admit the hardest thing. That even though all the children in her daughter's school deserved better, her daughter was hers, and she had failed her. And even though her daughter finally got to choose a better, wealthier high school, the peace ends with a brutal truth that still hasn't changed. If every family with the means to do so rescues their children from failing public schools, other children will suffer. countless other children who committed no sin other than being born poor in America. Politics is what we choose to do about that truth. One story says, sorry, there just isn't enough for everyone.

Enough schools, enough money, enough land, enough security, which means we can't all win, which means some people have to lose. The strong take what they can and the weak suffer what they must. Or, to quote Stephen Miller's modern take on the ancient Greeks, We live in a world that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. In their new book, End Times Fascism, Naomi Klein and Astor Taylor used the image of a bunker to literally and figuratively describe this survival of the fittest mentality among the tech and MAGA elite. Underground compounds on private islands, rockets to escape the planet, drones on top of the White House and a fortress underneath,

bigger fences outside, bigger walls on the border, more land to control, more resources to dominate, more wealth to insulate you from whatever comes next. The problem with the bunker, though, is that the world will eventually find its way in. None of us, not even the billionaires, will ever be able to fully escape the consequences of living in a society together. The safety of our neighborhoods, the health of our families, the food we eat, the technology we can't live without, the stability we take for granted. All of this depends at some level on other people.

And if enough of those people become sick or poor or desperate, it all starts to unravel. The hospital can't take you. Crops aren't harvested. Police don't show up. The power doesn't come back on. None of this means that the instinct to protect ourselves and take care of our families is wrong. What's wrong is a politics that exploits that instinct by telling us that the only way to keep our own family safe is to care less about everybody else's. The lie told by Trump and Vance and the new right is that we have to settle for a world

where too many are fighting over too little. We're loving our own children, requires us to accept a system that treats other people's children as disposable. But a better politics, a more hopeful politics, shouldn't ask us to choose between taking care of our own and caring about everyone else. It should tell a story about a society where those obligations point in the same direction, where the best way to protect the people we love is to build a world that works for people beyond our walls. My guest this week is Naomi Klein, who stopped by the studio to discuss the book she wrote with Astra Taylor that I just mentioned. End times fascism and the fight for the living world. Naomi is an award-winning journalist and the best-selling author of No Logo, The Shock Doctrine, and Doppelganger,

which she first came on the show to discuss a few years ago. In this conversation, I wanted to go deeper on the argument she and Astra are making in their new book. what they mean by end times fascism, why they see connections between the religious right, the tech elite, and nationalist movements around the world, and where that framework gets more complicated, especially when it comes to the very human instinct to protect our own. Most of all, I wanted to talk about what an alternative politics could look like that actually makes people feel safer, less trapped in zero-sum thinking, and more invested in a future we have to share.

Here's Naomi Klein. Naomi Klein, welcome back to the show. Thank you. It's great to meet you in person. I was going to say it. Great to have you in studio. To be offline. Right, to be offline.

Here we are. Okay, so you wrote this wonderful book with Astra Taylor. Yes. It's called End Times Fascism. Yes, that's not wonderful. What is End Times fascism? The book comes out of an attempt to understand what this coalition is that brought Trump to power and how it's different from the first Trump.

administration. You know, I wrote a book about his first term, didn't call him a fascist, didn't see them as being as directly engaged with kind of notions of collapse. So what we mean by end times fascism is all the things we understand about fascism, the in groups, the expelling of the outgroups, the supremacist thought, the violence, all of that. But unlike 20th century fascism, which had a vision of the future. This is a fascism that is responding to our era of planetary scale crises, you know, pandemics and climate change and a very interconnected global economy. And so it's a fascism that is sort of embracing and accelerating the idea that it's all going down and is focused on the in-group, sort of.

surviving and being bunkered. So it's really a war over who's going to survive the future. You mentioned at one point this is a nihilistic project. Can nihilism and fascism coexist? I ask that because, you know, I go back and forth on this and I have with Trump for a long time, which is, is this an authoritarian movement where there is a place? plan and there is a vision and you're trying to activate people. Or is this, and I think this goes for some of the tech billionaires as well, or is this

like, hey, I'm going to take whatever I can get and who cares and I'm going to deepen cynicism among the electorate and everyone's for themselves and that's it. Yeah. So there are these extended academic debates about what is the difference between authoritarianism, like just somebody who doesn't believe in democracy and wants to be a dictator and we'll use violence and torture and like the tools the tools of authoritarianism. But like what's the difference between that and fascism? And the generally the agreed upon difference is whether or not there is a mass base, whether or not there is a popular base. And Trumpism has a mass base. I mean,

that's why they were able to win an election. But it's precarious. And the relationship between Trump and his mass base, as the polls show, is weakening because of the force, because of the nihilism, right? And, you know, the reason why Astro and I decided to write the book was not to sort of marvel at the strength of this coalition, but precisely because we understood that it was infused together with dental floss and string and that it could actually be broken apart pretty easily with the right kind of opposition. And, you know, this relates to the last conversation we had when I published Doppler, based on, as you know, listening to hundreds of hours of Steve Bannon and knowing, I think, as few people like on my side of the political spectrum know just how much Trump's base hates big tech. And so the decision to go all in with Silicon Valley on AI was a huge betrayal.

It's not what he ran on. He barely mentioned AI on the campaign trail. He came to it late. And then the speed of the data center roll out and what they're selling, like this idea of transhumanism. I mean, Steve Bannon had a transhumanism correspondent during COVID, right? Just to scare his listeners and viewers with what Silicon Valley planned. So, yeah, I mean, I think they're really vulnerable. And the mass part of this, which is kind of what makes it fascism,

is something that can and should be broken away from him. Just to take a step back, when you guys wrote this, what were you hoping to change about how people currently view the movement that's in power right now? Which is, thankfully, at least for now, quite unpopular. Trump's unpopular. The tech billionaires who stood behind him at the inauguration are now some of the most loathed people in the country, if not the world. And you're saying this isn't just because our book came out last week. That's right.

Yeah, exactly. You guys did it. The impact is quick. Mission accomplished. Yeah. So, yeah, so like they're already unpopular. But if someone's reading this who doesn't like Trump and doesn't like these elites, like what are you hoping that they think?

What do you want them to take away from this? Yeah. I mean, first of all, when we decided to write the book, the coalition was stronger. But we did believe that it was weak. that in particular the decision to fuse with Silicon Valley was going to be make Trump very vulnerable. And, you know, we were seeing the splits. You know, a lot of what is written about fascism is sort of about a one-to-one comparison

with Hitler and Mussolini. It's like, here's the checklist, does it match? If enough, if there's enough of a match, we say it's fascism. And that's not how I understand. I understand fascism. I understand fascism as a through line in our history. Mussolini didn't invent it. Hitler learned a lot from studying the Jim Crow South. Anticolonial leaders and scholars in the 1930s were saying, okay, this thing that you're all saying is a rupture is actually a homecoming of colonialism, of imperialism. So, you know, this is, I teach a course on this subject called the Long Arc of Fascism. So fascism has a prehistory and it also changed after the end of the end of the Second World War. There was fascism in Latin America in the 70s under dictatorships like Pinochet. So what I wanted people to understand is how fascism is changing in our era of crisis,

of planetary scale crises. Hitler and Mussolini didn't know a world with nukes. They died in 45 before the Trinity tests. So the fact that the fascists today aren't offering a future to their base is a huge vulnerability. Like Mussolini offered his base a chance to like take a holiday on the train at reduced rates. Like we were not nostalgic about ye oldy fascism.

Yeah. But the point is, is that it had real benefits for the in-group, including you could get like a nice piece of farmland stolen from the Slavs and you could get a nice house stolen from the Jews. There were rewards. and Trump is offering sadism. And this is very, you know, he's offering memes. And this is not what people thought they were going to get.

I mean, they thought they were going to get affordability addressed. They thought that the mass deportations was going to reduce the cost of living and create jobs. And so the decision to go all in on a technology that defines success as the point at which they replace most economically productive activities is a bit of a broken promise. So we wanted to heighten the contradictions, as we say on the left. But also I think that in understanding this and mapping this, it should be helpful for all of us who are fighting this form of fascism, which is a global project. It's not just in the United States.

And so that was one goal. Another goal is, if I can be honest with you, I mean, one of the things that Astro and I say is, however much you hate them, you don't hate them enough. Because what we are saying is, that they are accelerationists, right? And so we map, like, the religious end-timers who, like, literally believed, okay,

like, expand the war in Gaza, like get more countries involved. Iran, let's go. This is go-time. The Messiah's coming, or he's coming back, depending on whether you're a Christian. Especially the settler movement. Yeah, so you've got messianic Jews

running large parts of the Israeli government right now. These are not marginal figures that margins have moved to the center. And they want to destroy Alaksa. They want to build the third temple. They are accelerationists. They believe all of this will create the conditions for the Messiah's arrival.

We disagree, but we do believe they can create Armageddon. We do believe that they can start World War III. And then you have the Christian Zionists like Mike Huckabee and Mike Johnson, you know, who went on a pilgrimage to see the spotless red heifers at the settlement in the West Bank to just check them out, make sure. I mean, there's a bit of a deep cut, but the red heifers that this is part of the prophecy of what needs to happen before the Third Temple can be rebuilt.

There have to be spotless red cows. There is a rancher in Texas who claims to have found them. They sent them to Ben-Gurion. They were greeted. They were brought to the West Bank. All of this is stuff that we would love to not have to know about, right? Except for that Mike Hockaby and Mike Johnson went to visit the red heifers, just to see if everything was going according to plan, right?

So that's the religious end timer piece. Would love to ignore them, can't. The template of that story is everything bad is good. Plagues, floods, fires, that means we are getting closer to the great battle and the chosen few are going to ascend to a golden city in the sky. the tech end timers have another vision, but it bears some resemblance to this story, right? I mean, you know, and you've been covering the wild things that they say about what they're building with AGI, right? With superintelligence, as Trump now call it, has renamed it.

Yes, we've renamed it officially. But it's a quasi-religious story. I mean, Musk talks about summoning a digital god, a digital demon. They burn effigies at open AI to try not to. bring a bad digital god. So they, and the dream is a dream of total dematerialization, right? Like you want to ascend into the digital sphere. So it would- uploading our consciousness to the cloud.

Yeah, once again, I would love for this not to matter for it just to be like a quirky little cult and not like the richest people dominating the top stocks that are like holding up the entire global economy, right? Right. Right. But that is where we are. So we believe, I believe, that betting on our against earth, against all of life is a uniquely treasonous act. Not treasonous to a flag or a country, but to like what humans are supposed to do, which is protect and enhance life. And their eagerness to escape this world, to escape this realm is something we really need to look at and

wrap our minds around and let it fuel us in what, you know, all of our work in taking them on. So that's why we say, like, like, really, you know, think about the places and people you love the most and realize that they want, they're happy for it all to burn and let that, let that animate the work that you do in these midterm elections. I don't know. Offline is brought to you by ProtonVPN. Whether you're traveling or just unwinding at home, your online activity shouldn't be up for grabs. Proton VPN adds a layer of protection that keeps your browsing habits private and your data out of the wrong hands. Proton VPN is a secure VPN service designed for people who want to prioritize their digital privacy

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Download the Quince app for app exclusive offers or go to quince.com slash offline. Get free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. Now available in Canada and the UK, too. That's Q-U-I-N-C-E.com slash offline. line. One thing I was wondering is, so you mentioned that, you know, what differentiates fascism from, say, authoritarianism, is fascism has a mass movement. Do you think that the fact that this movement, Trump's movement, has been shown to be more brittle than we thought, still makes it fascism? And the fact that he's, I mean, because, you know, and then you said, what's different about it? Well, and he's not

offering anyone anything. And I do wonder that, like, the failure to, you know, and the failure to, you know, really activate the citizenry behind some vision, whether it's a vision of the future, vision, I mean, I guess it was a little bit of a vision of the past, but it does seem like so much of the support for Trump, the support for the tech vision of the world, the support for the religious fundamentalists. The motivations are varied, and they, depending on the person, and they change from election to election. And for a lot of people and a lot of people who voted for Trump, they actually don't pay much attention to politics at all.

And they have much more prosaic concerns when they go to the polls, which is just like, oh, he seems like he's going to make the economy better. And so that's that. Right. I don't believe that everyone who voted for Trump isn't end-time fascist or a fascist of any kind. I mean, I think that the sort of true believers, and this is the third camp that we talk about in the book are the ethno-nationalists, right?

So these are the people who really do subscribe to the Great Replacement Theory and who are treating the nation state as a kind of a bunker in this era of collapse, right? So if we think about... I like the bunker mentality a lot. I think it explains a lot. And this was really like what I was trying to understand in the early days of Trump was like, what is going on with his foreign policy? because it is different than the first time around.

He was not threatening to invade Canada, where I happen to live. He was not threatening to annex Greenland or, you know, kidnapping Venezuela as president and, you know, taking their oil. And I realize, like, ascribing, like, reason and thought to the Trump administration is, like, a little bit dicey. But I do think that there is something identifiable about what they're doing, which is not, I mean, some people just say, oh, this is colonialism. This is old school colonialism. And I think, you know, whenever you grab another country's resources, it's colonialism. But there is no manifest destiny to it. There is no idealism to it.

It is just a kind of a supersized hoarding, right? And so, and whereas the fascists of the last century were focused on expanding the border, right? Like you wanted your Labas Rom, you want more territory. I think what Trump is mainly focused on his stuff. Like he wants Canada's water. And, you know, that's why I don't actually think it's. particularly funny that he's renaming Great Lakes, because I think, I do think he has people around him who do understand that water is going to be very valuable in this era. I think he wants critical

minerals wherever they are and oil. And so I think that there is a base. It is not everyone who voted for Trump by any means. But around the world, we are seeing a morphing on the hard right. So here I'm talking about, you know, I think it's clearest in Europe because they are not climate change deniers. So whether you're talking about Marine Le Pen, or the Vox Party in Spain, they recognize that climate change is real and their climate policy is fortressing the border. They're very open that remigration, as the AFD calls in and as increasingly the U.S. government calls it, which means mass expulsions of people who are citizens. and so like purging the outgroup and fortressing the border and then bringing into the

bunker nation all that you might need. So I think that there is a mass base, like, and that maybe that's the 30% of people who are sticking with Trump. I mean, I don't know how many people fit the bill. But I do think there is a mass that is whether it is explicit, whether it's like conscious or not, I think they know that we are in an era of. collapse and that they've got to prepare. I mean, this is another thing I learned from listening to too much Steve Bannon. Almost all of his ads are for things like my Patriot Supply, right?

And it, it's very prepper. And I, like, I was really wondering, like, is he going to start advertising other stuff now that Trump is president? Because like, like in the Biden era, as you know, because I know you listen to his show, right? Like in the Biden era, it was all like Biden's tanking the economy. Get birch gold. Like, you know, and get your ready to. me eat to eat meals that can last you for like three months and also like do this special laser target practice and things like that. But so I was interested that well after Trump had been in power for six months, we're still prepping. Like for what? Right. So, yeah. Because they always need an enemy. Oh, they always need. I mean, I do think that part of it is Trump and all these, you know,

this happens when someone's in power, but they, now that they have all the power, now that they run everything. Yeah. The only way to keep the story going is to continue to have enemies, whether it's the invaders, whether it's the Democrats, the communists, that, you know, so they always have some kind of enemy. I do, I wonder, as I was reading the book, like, end times fascism, it seems to me like it's survival of the fittest, like politics sort of taken to the political extreme. I think that's right. Like just a very old idea that, and I know You mentioned the quote that shocked me when I heard it live the first time from Stephen Miller when he said, you know, these are the iron laws of nature and that the real world is governed by strength and power and force and just being the most honest explanation of what they're doing. Right. But it does seem like that's, you know, the strong take what they must and the strong take what they can and the weak suffer what they must.

Yeah. And I mean, you know, someone who's been involved in. climate research for a long time and different kinds of climate movements, many people were predicting that this would happen if we failed to act in the face of the climate crisis, that we would end up with the politics of the armed lifeboat, right? That it would, and that once you pass the point where you can deny the reality that the climate is changing, that entire cities are burning, you know, we're here in L.A. this past summer in Europe, the Danube dried up You know, they had to shut down nuclear power plants because they couldn't cool them. There were the largest evacuations since the Second World War in France because of the fires, right?

So you can't deny that this is, you know, that we are in a time of collapse. But after you can't deny the reality of climate change, what you can deny is the humanity of your fellow humans. Like you can embrace supremacist thought because that is what will allow you to rationalize, you know, allowing thousands of people to drown in the Mediterranean off your beaches. So this was predicted. It's coming to happen. I mean, honestly, I don't care if you call it fascism or not. I mean, it's supremacist thought. It's violence without limit.

I mean, this is what I think we do need to understand about people like Stephen Miller and Marco Rubio, who we don't think. pay enough attention to, I think, is that they are inspired by the dictators of Latin America, particularly Rubio. They have t-shirts that say free helicopter rides for leftists and Pinotchet did nothing wrong. They will take this as far as they are able to take it, which is why it matters so much when, you know, Minneapolis rises up and just, learns from history and says, you know, you're not coming for our neighbors and we are going to defend each other and sends a very clear message. And it does mess up the base. Like I think that that really screwed up their narrative and they lost a lot of people. So it's supremacy. That's when you say

like survival of the fittest. I mean, this is social Darwinism and it's it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's the ideology that said, well, yeah, indigenous people are just going to die off because their genes aren't as strong and this is God's will. Yeah, and one of the reasons that I'm digging in on this is because I kind of want to talk about like what the rest of us do and why the rest of us sort of haven't been able to get it together. We're having this conversation during UN General Assembly week. The agenda is almost, you know, perfect for your book. It's climate change, refugees, development, pandemics, all problems. No country can solve by itself. And by the way, all three groups that we're calling the end-time fascist coalition, one of the things they agree on is that they want

to eliminate the UN. Right. And it's like a symbol of the fact that the institutions that we have created since World War II to deal with all these shared problems are seem at least weaker and are certainly less trusted than they've been in a long time. What do you make of that, that contradiction that as the need for cooperation, not just within nations, but between nations, has never been greater. And the problems have never been larger. The institutions we've created for cooperation and diplomacy have never been weaker and less trusted. Yeah. And the U.S. has played a terrible role in weakening these institutions and, you know, abusing the veto power. And really from the start, the UN was rigged to not live up to its basic premise, which was this was a space where every country had a vote and that decisions would be made democratically.

And, you know, one of the very first resolutions at the United Nations was resolving to eliminate nuclear weapons. based on the idea that we can't actually have a peaceful, fair world and co-exist with weapons of annihilation. And, you know, that's why at the end of the book we call for a new disarmament movement. Because, you know, a lot of people have said, like, how is it possible that, like, the worst people in the world have gotten their hands on the most powerful tools and weapons, which is something I think we all think about? And one response to that could be like, let's get the good guys in charge again, you know, and relax, right? We need our tortured, you know, Oppenheimer characters who feel really conflicted about nuclear weapons and, you know, quote, Sanskrit and things like that. Like we, you know, and then we can feel like our fates are in good hands. And we have developed something that we, as a counter argument, which we call the Stephen Miller rule, which is if you,

if you wouldn't want something to end up in the hands of Stephen Miller, then it should not exist. Because eventually those powerful tools and those just deplorable people, egregious people, am I allowed to say deplorable? Yes, you can. They exert a magnetic pull on one another, and they will eventually find one another, whether it is the bombs or the tech or the tech, you know,

the AI meeting the bombs. which is something we're all very worried about. And we also believe that the wealth itself has become deranging to our elites, that we have to disarm the wealth bombs. So yeah, the Stephen Miller rule. I mean, it's interesting because I think as, and this has happened throughout history,

but especially now, as the threats that we all face become more acute, you know, the instinct that the Trumps and Millers and all them of the world are appealing, to, it's not an exotic instinct, right? It's protect yourself, protect your kids, protect your family, your tribe, survive. And, you know, it's obviously an incredibly powerful human instinct. It is not inherently evil, but obviously can certainly go to bad places. How do you think about appealing to people who are afraid, who believe that they and their family should be?

be protected and that they want to keep their family safe. But are at least open to another appeal that is not from the movement that Trump is leading. Yeah, it's a great question. I hope we go to an ad for Simply Safe Security. Afterwards. Sorry, I'm not trying to lose advertisers. Believe me, we make fun of it all the time. One of the things that we stress in the book is that we are, you know, we're not saying

that it's wrong to prep, that it's wrong to think about how we care for each other in times of real crises. And fascism always surges during times of real crises. And it tries to resolve those crises or actually protect the system from threat by pivoting all of the public anger and insecurity towards scapegoats, right? That's the fascist move. But the response from the left can't just be, oh, they're overreacting, things are fine. No, it has to be at getting at the root causes of the crisis and also coming up with credible plans for how we take care of everyone during a crisis, right? How we prep together. And I'm seeing more and more of this happening. Like, it's interesting, like folks in Minneapolis who set up those incredible signal groups, right,

where you know everybody on your block and you know who needs help. And, you know, and, who needs their laundry done and who needs to make sure their kid gets to school, and that really deep organizing and mutual aid. One of the things that we heard from organizers in Minneapolis is that they know that those networks are going to be incredibly useful the next time there's a climate disaster because they will know who has mobility challenges. They will know who's living alone, right? And so that spirit of, okay, the shocks are coming,

but that doesn't mean we actually have to act like monsters. In fact, we can help each other, which humans have a beautiful tendency to do. Like, this is the thing. You know, you think about Hurricane Helene and people kayaking to their neighbor's homes and like saving them and going back for their dogs, you know. That's what actually a lot of people do during disasters. They save strangers. They save people they don't know.

They are so heroic, right? So we have to admit that we are, we, we, we, really big challenges, really big shocks are coming. We have to do what's necessary to not lock in climate change that we actually can't survive, and we have to prepare for the shocks that are coming and figure out how to do it in ways that doesn't leave people behind, and we still can be decent people and not follow J.D. Vance with his concentric circles of love, which he keeps getting in trouble from Pope's. Yeah, Pope Francis, like two months before he died, hit back. on that. Yeah, J.D. Vance is Ordo Amoris. Right. Because he's trying to make a theology out of what we're

talking about, right? Like, my duty is to love my family and then the neighbors who look like me. And then as you get further out, you care less and less. One thing I wondered about reading the book and thinking, I've thought a lot about that J.D. Vance, Pope Exchange. And I wonder if what Vance wants and Trump and all these guys is to sort of force people to choose. It's either your family or it's you caring about strangers. And they want to tell you, the other side wants to tell you, just be generous and sacrifice and they don't care about your family. And I wonder if what's missing on our side is a story about interdependence and about how, like actually, the false choice is this idea that I have to choose between my family safety and your family safety.

Exactly. And that we have to, like, that life is just fighting over scarcity. Which is exactly what folks in Minneapolis put on a clinic doing, right? I'm saying like you're all, like, you're all our neighbors. And many of the people who organized were, you know, faith groups, right? Like people who came out of their churches or their mosques and were organized in groups like Faith in Minnesota and Isaiah, and went out there, and they understand their work. I mean, we quote some of them in the book as being a war with Christian nationalism,

and that they are out there trying to enact the commandment to love thy neighbor, you know. And it's really beautiful. And embracing what Adam Server calls neighborism, like this, this expansive neighborism that is the neighbors we know and the neighbors we don't know yet. And so we need to do that. And we also need to talk about climate change. Like, I mean, last election, Harris barely talked about climate change. And this, you know, in the climate movement, it's called climate shushing. And we don't like it.

We actually have to be honest that the crises are here and have a plan for how we're going to help each other and not force those violent choices on people. And, you know, I think Mom Dani has given people a fantastic model for this as well. Offline is brought you by three-day blinds. Love three-day blinds. We got some here in the office. I have loved three-day blinds since I moved to L.A. 10 years ago, more now, and got them installed the first place I lived here. And it's so easy.

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Go to vote fromabroad.org and click request my ballot, asked to receive it by email. Questions? Ask our support team directly. Don't miss this chance to shape the future. Don't delay. Vote fromabroad.org. If you miss some of your favorite crooked pods this week, don't worry, you can now catch up on the week's best moments on MS Now on Saturday nights. MS Now is streaming an episode of highlights from your favorite crooked pods, packing as much analysis, funny moments, and 100% correct opinions into 40 minutes as humanly possible. Crooked on MS now airs every Saturday at 9 p.m. Eastern, 6 p.m. Pacific. A challenge on the left, I think, you mentioned climate, is, you know, we're talking about sort of, end times fascism on the right, the left is accused often and has been for a long time of

doomerism, first doomism with climate change, then during the pandemic. You know, the doomers were more on the left and we should take precautions and all the public, listen to the public health officials. And then now AI, right? The craziest thing I heard over the last couple weeks around the AI debate. The Dumas are like the people building the AI. Well, they are too. But some of the like, some of the like, some of the, like the David Sacks that the Trump AIs are, you know, because they're like, oh, these, these dooms, these are the same people who told us that climate change was going to kill us all. Because now Trump's using it too.

And the pandemic was going to kill us all. It's like, well, actually both of those things are happening. Yeah. The pandemic did kill a bunch of people. No, and they're making a very deliberate. There's a very deliberate campaign to basically get rid of the whole, all the checks and balance. on AI. They're just like, they're, they're worried that it's going to mess up their IPOs. And so I wonder if, I've been listening to SACs very closely the last few days. Yeah, they,

they're really, really upset. They're really upset because this is the golden goose. Yeah, and they're making that COVID analogy. There is a strain of leftism that verges on eco-fascism that is just like the earth is healing. Maybe humans are a cancer on the earth. Like, maybe this is all for the best and it's all going down. Like, I think it's a pretty marginal. part of the left. But I think being honest about the crises that we face is something that we should do because people are responding to them. They feel it. They're experiencing it. They know it is happening. And if we aren't honest about the drivers of that crisis, then somebody who comes along and says, the reason this is happening is because, well, what Trump did during Hurricane Hulene.

Like, the Democrats gave all the FEMA money to immigrants. And that's why you, that's why no one helping you. And then the proud boys show up with a chainsaw and say, the nice Nazi is going to save you. Right. Which happened. Well, I mean, that brings up an interesting point too. And then that is sort of like the flip side of the neighborism that you talked about, right? Which is if you want to build a movement and build trust, you show up. A hundred percent. And you build stuff locally. Yeah. And I wonder if a lot of the, you know, whether it's the accusations of doomism or the doomerism itself is sort of, of facilitated and amplified by the way that we communicate now, which is the internet. And so when I think about Musk and Trump and some of these people, I'm like, maybe the

explanation is not much more complicated than the internet has broken all of our brains, but these people are the richest and most powerful people in the world, and they are online all the time. And when their brain breaks, all of us have to deal with it. Yeah. And I mean, and I do think that Musk's decision to buy Twitter was a very smart. business move because, you know, he is the great conductor of hate and rage, right? Because he's, he's there going like, don't come for me. Like, like, here.

Here's a target. And, you know, from his person, as the first trillionaire, I mean, if he's, I don't know if he's a trillionaire this week or not. But he's been going up and down. He's got a vested interest in that rage not coming for him. So it might be a bad sort of business decision just as a, as one. business, but he has larger interests. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I think, I mean, one of the things that I find weirdest about this moment, especially around all of the apocalyptic predictions that we're

hearing from people who are in the AI industry, right, and saying, you know, the whistle, the so-called whistleblowers, I don't know what to call them exactly. But, I mean, I actually believe they're genuinely worried. I don't, I don't. Well, they've been doing it for a while, too. Yeah. We're all paying attention now, but they've been saying it for a while. Yeah, and Musk has been saying, I mean, the whole reason why they started Open AI, supposedly as a nonprofit, was because they were worried about the potential of this technology destroying the world. And then, anyway, we know that story.

But the way it's being metabolized, like in places like Instagram where people are just like, I'm just going to make like a weird meme about the end of the world and just sort of perform. like for like an audience like just all alone try to take this on and this is why it's nice to be on on book tour and be talking to like rooms full of actual humans and just be like it we are not built to handle crises of this scale all by ourselves with our phones we have to get together we have to kind of believe that this is actually happening this is why I mean like we have to find like the depths of the betrayal like what does that actually mean to be like is it 10% chance or a 30% chance that this technology that is being built will wipe out humanity.

I don't know if that's true. I don't know if that's alarmist. But the very fact that we're talking about, this is not something we should be doing all alone, you know? Yeah, and it's fascinating because I feel like I balance and have for the last 10 years of doing this job, like wanting to make sure people understand the stakes and what we're facing and the dangers that Trump is bringing

without alarming people to the point where they just tune out. And I think it's tougher for our side of this fight to do that because, you know, for the Trump's advances of the world, it's, yeah, you know what? Don't worry about any of this. Don't really pay attention. We got everything. We got it covered. You go about and live your lives and we're fine.

And it all be good, right? For like the mass. That's like their mass message for people. But on our side, like, you know, I talk to people about my AI fears over the last couple weeks. And I'll either get the response that's like, well, I don't know. Maybe it's just a ploy. Maybe it's not going to be that bad. Or, yeah, but you know what?

It's too late. It's already happening. And we're already headed towards AGI. So what can we do? And you can see. And so it's either cynicism is one response. Yeah. And it's a response to sort of the political times that we're in where people are like, you know what?

I worried about this for the first couple years, the first Trump term. I can't do the second again. Yeah. Or another thing now, AI, we just did the pandemic. I can't worry about this too. Yeah. And I do think that cynicism sort of erodes our ability to, like, build the movement we need to solve these problems and cooperate with each other. And it's a, I think that piece of it is a creature of the fact that so much of the communication about this is happening online.

And it's all of us alone. Yeah. And even the people who are saying AI is not inevitable. and I think because I, whatever, my algorithm is selecting for those people right now, and I'm seeing lots of people putting out videos saying AI is not inevitable, and I love it, but I think we would feel it more if we were together and had an organizing structure that was harnessing all of that and a plan. To be honest with you, where people feel most hopeless is Democrats taking money from the AI

companies and looking at polling that shows that data centers are less popular than nuclear waste. being like, I think that we should run the pro campaign, you know, or just, and, and so, you know, the people who just have very clear messages are catching fire, a lot of them, because people are so hungry for it. I've never seen such a gimmy of an issue. I mean, there's, I think there's that comedian who called it the most bipartisan issue since beer. Yeah, right. But it is Trump who is rolling it out. It is Trump who is not letting local councils and states regulate it. He can absolutely be made to wear it, but only if Democrats don't take the money and have clear policies. I'm seeing from Bannon a strategy to just pivot this to war with China. I mean, he did this event

alongside Bernie Sanders. And I don't know if you listened to what Bannon said, but it was really interesting because he did the Bannon move. He acknowledged how much everybody hates the tech oligarchs and was happy to be there with Bernie. But his message was not stop, slow down. It was we need to build a moat around American tech. We can't let China have the chips, and we have to expel every Chinese national from every single lab and every university. He's basically calling for internment camps. And, you know, he's been wanting this war with China. And that is not popular either, right?

Because his base is mad about the wars that are a broken promise. They're mad about the AIs. He wants to join them into one giant project that is, incredibly unpopular. And the only thing that could keep this from turning to the Democrats' favor is if they are hedging and saying, but maybe, you know, let's not get too excited. I think a lot of them don't know the issue well enough. Don't know what they're supposed to be doing. There's... Do you really think that? Yeah. I mean, I think some of them. But some of them are getting a lot of money from... Yeah, well, some of them are getting money from, like,

the anthra... The other thing that's crazy is, like, there's these dole... super PACs, right? And so there's like the leading the future super PAC, which is I think maybe started bipartisan, but is now only electing Republicans. And then Anthropic funded the other super PAC, which is now pro-regulation. And so now, you know, like that was in one of those New York congressional races that I was covering. But I do think that they don't know whether they can just stop it. They know that the technology could be beneficial in some ways. They don't know what the guardrails can be. Again, it's like you don't leave this to companies. We don't leave when a company tells you that they're creating a product that might not be safe, let alone kill us all.

You don't just like let them do it. And the Biden administration was starting to regulate this. And this was a huge, I mean, this is what we argue in the book is if you want to know why Silicon Valley lined up for Trump, it had way less to do with the fact that they were mad at their, you know, woke kids. They were mad at the Biden administration. They were, they were furious. And they were furious about the fact that they were starting to regulate AI. Yep. And they were furious that the EU was doing the same. They were furious that the United Nations was starting to come up with an international

set of rules. This is around the time that Peter Thiel starts calling the UN the Antichrist and, you know, Greta the Antichrist because, you know, their idea of hell is being regulated. Well, and this goes back to the international cooperation part because the other challenge for a lot of these Democrats is they think, well, we don't want China to win this race, right? Because, you know, that could be a threat to us. And I think there's some truth to that. China's doing more to regulate AI.

But also it's like at some point we have to talk to, we have to do a deal. We have to have diplomacy. Like this is, AI is a challenge that no country can solve by itself, just like climate change, just like a pandemic. And so if we don't have these strong international institutions, which the right is calling like, you know, the one world global order. But if we don't have those, then we're not going to solve these problems. The one question in the book that really stuck with me is, you said, you know, what would make people like their lives enough that they stopped fantasizing about burning the whole thing down?

And you talk sort of about how, you know, on the right, this is that this is so much of this is myth making, right? And on our side, like, what is the, what do you see as like a story that could sort of galvanize people and say, like, yeah, this is this is worth fighting for? Yeah. You know, it's one of the reasons why I was great to write the book with Astra because she really is a serious organizer. Yes. You know, and she, you know, she organizes people in debt. She was, she was one of the founders of the debt collective, right? And so she's thought a lot about this and actually done a lot of this because there's nothing more isolating than being in medical debt than being in student debt and just having all of that weight on you. But when you get together with other people in debt, you can, you know, you have some power. a problem for the people who you owe money to, right, as opposed to it just being your problem.

I think Mamdani is the person who has shown us most clearly what it would look like. The whole campaign, right, which was an extraordinary organizing flex from the DSA, right, of getting 100,000 people to volunteer, which means that one in every 10 people who voted for Mamdani, volunteered for Mamdani, but making it so fun with, with, you know, all kinds of parties and scavenger hunts and joy and the whole campaign being a love letter to New York City and the whole campaign being about, we love this city, the city that gets vilified by, you know, J.D. Vance and, you know, the Republicans nonstop. We, and we want to stay, right? So, you know, the last section of the book is called Let's Stay or the Levers.

Oh, that's what we write in the book, Let's Stay, but it was called the Levers versus the Stayers, right? So this idea of this is kind of a paradise, this world of ours, right? And we don't want to eat out a living on two dead orbs, as Elon Musk seems to want to do, right? Between like draining all of life from the earth so that you can go to Mars, which is a cancerous planet. We have a pretty great place here. It could be a lot better, and we need plans for making it a lot better than it is and a lot fair. And that sort of spirit that you saw in the Mamadani campaign of, okay, what would make New York even better than it is? It's great.

How could it be even better? Free and fast buses, you know, universal child care, how freezing the rent. Does that sound good? And just that sort of giving people permission to love where they are, love their city, love their town, love this planet. Make it better. And make it better, right? But from that place of it's pretty great. And these people who want to leave are demented.

Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, people will say, okay, well, that's a city, and even though it's the biggest city. But that's one city and, you know, it's a liberal New York and how are you going to do that everywhere else? But I do think, and you guys talk about this in the book, that it speaks to the need for local efforts. I mean, same thing with Minneapolis, right? Sort of local organizing to spring up. And it's like, yeah, you have to run the Mamdani campaign and that kind of grassroots campaign where people are involved everywhere.

Yeah. You know, the next presidential, right? It's not just the seven swing states, but like all the communities in those states and all the communities in the other states. Like you need to make it, mass movement politics really is, I think, you know, paired with, obviously, inspirational leaders, but you kind of need both in order to sort of stitch this whole thing back together. Yeah, and I think the local is a place to start. It's a place to stand, right? But I don't think anybody believes that any of these crises or problems can be fixed just with the local. fight. But I think people are waking up. You see it in the data center resistance where it's like,

okay, I'm worried about water. You know, if it's Tucson and Amazon wants to build a huge data center, they know how little water they have because they're on water restrictions much of the year, right? They think about water all the time. They're in a desert. So they care about water. And you have farmers in Kentucky organizing because they are worried about farmland, you know. Whatever it is, it's very tangible. It's very material. It's very the opposite of AI. It's like, we are humans, we have needs, you know. And in lots of places, it's like, are we going to get the water or are the machines? Like, are we going to get cooled or are the machines?

Like, it's becoming that basic. But then from there, it's like, okay, well, what are the national regulations? What are the international regulations? And kind of trickling up. And I think that's a good way to do politics. It certainly is. And so it's a hopeful way to do politics. I think so.

Naomi Klein, thank you so much. Thank you. Let's stay. The book is End Times Fascism. It's a fantastic read. Everyone go check it out. Thank you so much. It's a real pleasure.

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