QAA Podcast - End Times Fascism feat. Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor (E389)

Episode Date: September 16, 2026

Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor join us to discuss their new book, End Times Fascism: And the Fight for the Living World. They explain how tech billionaires, Christian end-timers, and ethno-nationalists have converged around a politics of permanent catastrophe. This new fascism offers even its followers little beyond protected survival and the pleasure of punishing enemies, promising escape for the chosen elect and ruin for everyone else. We talk about “New Gaza,” AI and Silicon Valley’s alliance with Trump, climate-driven fortress politics, conspiracy theories from above, and fissures inside the far-right coalition. End Times Fascism: And the Fight for the Living World by Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor https://naomiklein.org/end-times-fascism/ Subscribe for $5 a month to get all the premium episodes: www.patreon.com/qaa Click here to become a subscriber to Cursed Media today to get access to new episodes of Raising Hell releasing right now, plus our other exclusive Cursed Media series: https://cursedmedia.net Produced by Liv Agar & Corey Klotz. Theme by Nick Sena. Additional music by Pontus Berghe. Theme Vocals by THEY/LIVE (instagram.com/theyylivve / sptfy.com/QrDm). Cover Art by Pedro Correa: (pedrocorrea.com) qaapodcast.com QAA was known as the QAnon Anonymous podcast.

If you're hearing this, well done, you found a way to connect to the internet. Welcome to the QAA podcast, episode 389, N-Times Fascism, featuring Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor. As always, we are your host, Jake Rakitansky, Julian Fields, and Travis View. Naomi Klein is an award-winning journalist in the author of several books, including no logo, the shock doctrine, this changes everything in doppelganger. Astra Taylor is an award-winning writer, organizer, and documentary filmmaker. She's the co-founder of the Debt Collective, and her books include The Age of Insecurity, and Democracy May Not Exist, but I'll miss it when it's gone. Together, they have authored the scariest and most hopeful book you're going to read this year.

Their new book, End Times Fascism, argues that the far right of the 21st century is not merely denying or exploiting the crises surrounding us. Its most powerful factions have accepted a future of permanent catastrophe and are fighting over who may be spared so that they may survive in a gated paradise and who will be abandoned. The book also asks what the opposite of this pessimistic vision might look like. Naomi, Astra, thank you so much for taking a time to speak with us today. Thanks for having us. It's great to be back with you.

Yeah, it's a pleasure. Yeah, Naomi, great to have you back. Yeah, congratulations on the book. I really loved it for a lot of reasons. First of all, it gave me kind of like a framework to make sense of like seemingly kind of bizarre or incoherent behavior from American elites, you know. Sometimes they do things or act in ways that like don't quite make sense. Like why do tech executives warn that like AI will destroy humanity while insisting like we must pour everything to like build it up?

Or like why do like evangelical leaders like they love, you know, this crude strong man who displays no obvious Christian virtues? It's like this seems like, you know, might on the surface might be like just the simple hypocrisy of convenience. But I mean, your book sort of like helped clarify that it's really more kind of like a rational self-interest driven by very dark visions of the future. Well, I'm glad it was helpful. And it's nice to hear you say that it was hopeful. And yeah, no, I mean, it's, it's nice to be back with you guys because I was just thinking, like, there's not that many people who know what it's like to have been, like, following a group of people who seem like really, really fringe and bizarre. And lots of people are like, why are you wasting your time with all these really marginal and important people and ideas? And then to watch those people systematically take over the U.S. government in a matter of, like, you know, the blink of an eye. It's a particular experience and I know, and I know you know it. Yeah. I mean, it's like there's so many people who were like just, you know, a couple years ago who had a passing familiarity with Cash Patel, for example, you know, was like he authored some goofy children's books and like he was a strange kind of like hangar on from the first Trump administration. But now he's

literally director of the FBI. And it's, yeah, it's, it is absurd to like watch this happen over and over again where these these figures who really we shouldn't know about. I sympathize. It's like I like yeah, it's like yeah, I think that there aren't, you know, they wouldn't be worth paying attention to if they weren't so influential and if their trajectory wasn't towards, you know, taking control of everything. Yeah. I'm glad that you feel that this, that that this is in the QAA wheelhouse because I think that part of what Astra and I are arguing in the book is that fascism has always been based on a conspiracy theory, right? It is always the classic conspiratorial move of changing the subject, right, of harnessing

righteous fury at systemic injustice that might be directed towards the system itself and finding, like, a more outrageous distraction scapegoat, right? You know, and in doppelgayor talked about how anti-Semitism is like the oldest conspiracy theory. right? But I think what we're what we're seeing now is people like Musk and the great replacement theory and all, like, just the way it's taken over our entire politics and the way the reality that we are in a time where we should be afraid of global scale threats, right? I mean, we write early in the book about the doomsday clock, right? They, which, which these very serious, you know, Nobel Prize winning scientists reset every year. And when they reset it this past January, They were like, we're really scared, guys. Like, you know, they moved it four seconds forward and then they just explain not just the AI, you know, rogue AI integrating with nuclear weapons systems and climate change accelerating. You know, the Dumes, these are scientists who came together after the advent of, you know, the first nuclear use of nuclear weapons to really reckon with what it means that humans now have the ability to make our. species extinct all on our own. Like we now have the power of gods, right? And that's different than

what there was before, which was, you know, humans could do a lot of damage, right? I mean, this was coming out of the Second World War. But there is a difference when you up the ante to the planetary scale and you have that ability to inflict extinction on your own species. That is not something that previous kinds of humans used to be able to do. It was only the gods that could do that, right? And so when that changed, you know, these scientists came together. And when they moved the doomsday clock forward this year, it wasn't just that they were saying the threats are getting worse. They were also like, and for some reason, the U.S. government seems hell bent on making every single one of these threats worse and dismantling the existing regulations that are trying to kind of pull us back from the brink,

right? Whether it's nuclear weapons treaties, whether it's climate agreements, you know, whether it's biological weapons agreements, right? There are things that that we, that we have done to try to mitigate these risks. And with laser-like focus, the Trump administration has gone after all of them. So how do you explain that, right? So yeah, so I think that this move of like, okay, the threats are real, we need to engage with them. But the way we're going to engage with them is by saying we should accelerate, bring on the end, and focus on how to make sure that a particular group survives it, right? You know, Astra has this great line in the book about how they're unleashing the flood and building the ark.

I was literally going to bring up that quote when you were talking about that. I thought that was such a great way of explaining what a dire situation we're in. That quote also gets at another element, which is the echoes of the biblical stories, right? Like these guys are riffing on some of the oldest and most dangerous stories we know. And so, yeah, there's a strange twist of that Old Testament tale, right? They're building the ark. They're conjuring the floods. They're cheering the flood on. But that story, you know, fascism is always a weird alliance that actually comes from the Latin word for bundle. Like, it's not a monolith. And it's certainly not coherent. And the sort of sense, I think normal people would use the word. It's not rational. But there are forces driving it. And there are ideas that unite the different elements of this coalition. You know, so we look at the way that the far right, we call them the Tekken timers have united with. the religious in-timers and the ethno-nationalist in-timers. And each of them are responding to these

global existential perils, right? They are responding to the fact we live in a world that is rapidly heating and where there is going to be more and more movement and immigration as people seek a safe haven. They're responding to the threats of the reality and threats of AI and so on and so forth. But they have their different ideologies and their different paradigms, but they're united around this awareness that our shared world is coming to an end and their determination. to be among the chosen. So they, you know, are riffing on old fascist themes of supremacy, of eugenics, right? So for the tech overlords, it's kind of digital eugenics, where their technology isn't just inevitable, right? It's supernatural. They're building super intelligence. It's going to be

smarter than humans. You know, and then for the ethno-nationalists, it's like old-style gutter racism. For a person like Elon Musk, it's both at once. Some people mix and match from the different camps. You know, I just, on the conspiracism front, though, you know, we're interested in this idea of like, where's the continuity, where are the changes. And as Naomi said, like, conspiracies are sort of central to fascism into that redirection, that redirection of what could be class rage towards the vulnerable. But I think it's just a reminder that the most powerful conspiracies have always emanated from centers of power. Sometimes in our culture, when we talk about conspiracies, it's like, oh, the rubs, the dummies, the idiots who need to be fact checked. You know, going back, like,

look at McCarthyism, right? Look at the Red Scare. Conspiracism has always been sort of central to the right-wing power centers. And I think, I think it's just important to just to name that, right? That this is actually something that is top down. It was the Russian czar who unleashed the protocols of the elders of Zion. Like you point out, what we're seeing right now are using the old tactics, tried and true, sort of like strategies of redirecting, you know, rage against the inequality we face. But you also contrast, you know, that kind of historical fascism, which, you know, sort of promised, like,

a great prosperity and stability to, like, the certain chosen people to obviously do the exclusion. of others with kind of contemporary fascism that promises like just sort of like survival. Like you'll be safe, maybe not as a glorious way, but you'll be protected from the horrors that are coming. It's like when did like, I guess when in the far right start being so futureless? I don't know. It just seems like, you know, there was this element of this idealized past and idealized future in a form of fascism that is not quite present in the sort of the vision of fascism that you describe in your book. Yeah, I think it's a really key difference. And, you know, it's tricky to talk about because we don't want to sound like nostalgic for ye oldy fascism, you know, that at least made the trains run on time, you know,

like unlike the Trump administration, right, where they're just like, ah, we miss the old gallows. Don't clip that. But it's, it is true, you know, when we were looking at Mussolini and, you know, in particular, like there were big public works projects, right? And there were ways that if you were part of the in-group, you, I mean, certainly huge sacrifices were being asked of you, right? especially if you were a fighting age man. But maybe your family went to the beach for the first time because they got reduced train fare and they were able, like there were actually economic populist policies that were part of the fascist dream.

And certainly like that was the Labisram dream that Hitler was offering in terms of the eastward expansion. And, you know, you Ubermensch get a nice farm that we stole from the Slavs and a whole bunch of stuff we stole from the Jews and you can live happily ever after after the apocalypse. And you're right, Travis, that this is really different, that there isn't really a future horizon. You know, Musk's the best they have where he just starts like a ketamine-fueled rant about like flying cars. We're going to fly cars. You know, like, get on my rocket chip, you know, like, and then we're like, be a trillionaire, you know. I mean, his IPO was wild. Or be a colonist on the desolate planet of Mars. This is not really

that optimistic. It is true. It is in dissociation that I think the visions of the future are being experienced by a lot of this class. You know, it's like an ill frame of mind and indigestion is causing hallucinations in people up high, essentially. I thought it was so bizarre that they didn't even a kind of pander to the groups that helped really get them elected the second time around. Like, I thought for sure that Trump and Elon were going to do. something with crypto. They were going to deregulate in some way and make all of these guys millionaires overnight so that they were

forever ingratiated, but they didn't do that. They made the video games more expensive. I mean, it's video games are never going to be, like a console is never going to be for a regular consumer again. Speaking of dissociative experiences, my video games are getting worse.

My God, I completely miss this whole betrayal. Yeah. Being a gamer, I didn't realize. I just, we knew about the price of milk, but you're really getting to the key thing here. Our RAM, our graphics cards are going because of the AI. Because of AI. Of course. This is amazing.

You need to do more on this. I'm supposed to be the Witcher. I'm supposed to exist in a different world. I'm supposed to be a 5-8 Jewish man who can dunk a basketball like Michael Jordan. They even screwed you. That's amazing. Oh, gosh, Astra, we have to talk about it. They're not even giving you anything, even the people who they're, you know, to sort of pad their end times with treats of the people who are keeping them in power.

I think that's a really interesting point. Like, they're so brazen at this point that they can just destroy and not even offer anything in return. And that is truly frightening. Yeah, but they did promise more, you know, around the election, right? Like even affordability, which is now a Democratic hoax, you know, and it was like the promise was, you know, Stephen Miller's really explicit. It's like once we kick all the immigrants out, like there will be houses to take. And the schools will, you know, have a great teacher-student ratio and suddenly health care will work magically. But yeah, even those vague and hateful claims have fallen by the wayside now.

And it's sort of like, yeah, okay, fine. You know, you'll never own a home in America, but you can own the libs. And I think what we're seeing is like there's only so much traction they can actually get with like sadistic memes and shit talking. You can't feed your kids liberal tears. There's no nutrients in them, really. Yeah, you can't afford your own gaming console, but you can watch Pete Hegseth bomb a boat in the Mediterranean on Twitter. I can't control it.

It's kind of like a cutscene, if you will, like a Call of Duty cutscene. You guys had a great line in just the introduction in the book where you're talking about the plan for Gaza. You know, they unveil this plan for the Gaza Strip. And you notice that all the little row of houses meant for the Palestinians who are clearly going to serve, you know, the kings and queens living in the, you know, this Dubai like city. You're like, you know, it's interesting that there's like

not as many houses for like people who are, you know, still alive in that region, you know, kind of insinuating that like the genocide will continue. And I feel like that's, you know, that's how they view things do that they're like, uh, there won't be any of them left. Like, we don't even need to build enough houses for them. Yeah. And that scene, you know, we start the, we start the book with this, this scene of, Jared Kushner and Steve Whitkoff at Davos. And it was this rapturous unveiling of what they called New Gaza. And they had all their AI props and so on. But they were genuinely excited. And Steve Whitkoff was fighting back tears. Like he was just like, it was going to be so beautiful. Like they were in

almost like an ecstatic state as they unveiled their fantasy. And so we use this as the opening of the book because it is the core story that we're that we're working with. It's paris. paradise out of apocalypse, right? Gaza is an apocalypse. And they believe that like magic, a golden city will emerge, right? And they call it new Gaza, like new Jerusalem. And it won't happen. Just like the Bible isn't true. You know, like it is a fantasy. You know, I've been covered these guys for a long time. You know, one of the things we talk about is like, what is different about this than disaster capitalism? And the biggest difference is that the disasters are not like one-off punctuations of otherwise normal times. It's a rolling apocalyptic state that never stops. But,

you know, covering the Iraq War, Hurricane Katrina, there was always this idea of paradise out of the rubble. And there was always this idea that the rubble was a blank sheet, a blank slate, right? And it was always this core confusion between horror and wonder. It's like, no, this isn't good. But they would look at New Orleans after Katrina, you know, underwater destroyed. And they would say things like, it's a blank slate. You know, I started the shock doctrine quoting somebody who was in a one of the big camps for displaced people outside of New Orleans. This Republican congressman had just said, we couldn't clean out the housing complexes, but God did. And this guy just was like, don't they see like, this is not, this is horror, you know? But it's like they can't see it. And the reason they can't see it is because

they're seeped in this story that horror is paradise. And, you know, this is the Q&OND story. Final battle. White hats, black hats, you know, the cleansing, the battle, right? The storm. The storm. But they don't realize, they don't realize. Steve Whitkoff doesn't realize that he's standing, like, choking back tears over.

You know, at the beginning of Terminator when they show the future? And it's just the robots, like, walking on just mounds of skulls. Like, that's what he's, like, holding his tears back over. It's the disconnect. That's the book of revelation, though, is my point. Yeah, the disconnect is so, yeah, how do we bridge that gap? I mean, it probably helps to go to church every Sunday and be told that rivers of blood up to the bridle of a horse are going to bring about a new paradise. I mean, that's not Whitkoff's tradition, but, you know, he got the arc in the flood.

Anyway, sorry. No, I mean, you guys mention about these military leaders who are talking to their soldiers and saying, You know, what we're doing here is good because it's bringing about the rapture. You know, that shit is terrifying. We also talk about nice Christians, right, Astra. You know, it's interesting. I come from a long lineage of atheists and heathens. So, you know, but I do want to say that counterintuitively, the research shows that actually

people who are churched and actually go to churches, like, you know, maybe not the big mega evangelical churches, but go to regular churches are actually less susceptible to this far right stuff into turning on their immigrant neighbors. So there's actually, they call it religious vaccinations. So this is partly, I think, tied to some other trends we're talking about, which is, you know, there's a deep religiosity in American culture. But actually, it's disconnected. It's morphing into a political identity. And it's kind of almost becoming secularized. And it's not necessarily tied to deep faith in the practice of religion. So, you know, we talk about some of the battles that are happening in religious movements and some of the resistance to this, you know, apocalyptic, nihilistic form of faith and this weaponization. of religion. I mean, and Hegg Seth is a great example of that. I mean, he's part of this group of churches called Kreck, right, where they're led by this, you know, crazed theocrat who's just a

total misogynist. And, you know, and has, they've totally merged Christian faith with authoritarian fascist politics and are now very overt about it. And it's another example of the fringe becoming the mainstream, right? Like, these folks were being written about his curiosities a decade ago. And now they control the Pentagon. Yeah. Yeah. It's pretty horrifying. I mean, it was interesting that, yeah, you describe, yeah, like three factions. Like there's the religious sort of rapturous, like tech accelerations, ethno-nationalists like you described.

It's not, there's overlap between each other. There's blending. But the same time, it seems like you also describe them as having kind of like really differing visions of who will be the elect that gets to escape the coming catastrophe and what that escape looks like, whether it's kind of like AI in the cloud, you know, the New Zealand bunker for the billionaires or whatever, or literal, you know, sort of like paradise for the religious people or just absolute lockdown, militarized borders for the nationalists. And in some ways, these are sometimes like not perfectly, you know, compatible.

I'm curious how these factions, like, regard each other are like this, this is sort of like an idea. This is sort of kind of like an informal alliance of convenience for now and they'll figure out who, what they're going to sort out after they imagine they win or does one faction regard the other two is kind of useful idiots for the moment for they're discarded. I mean, yeah, well, like what, I mean, I'm curious how they like work together. It's such a good question. And I, you know, as people who hate fascism and want to defeat them, like, I think, you know, big part of the reason why we wrote the book is because we think that there are big weaknesses. There are big vulnerabilities in this alliance, right? And fascism is always an alliance. It's always a kind of an awkward alliance of convenience that merges the interests of elites with the base. But as we were saying, before previous iterations of fascists offered more to their mass base of supporters than these fascists. And so we think it's important to highlight that betrayal. Also, like the last time I talked to you guys, I had just spent like hundreds of hours listening to Steve Bannon in order to follow my doppelganger down the rabbit hole, right? But one of the things that we talked about, right,

was like how during COVID, you know, in all of the maga media, right, there was this obsession with big tech and surveillance, right? And so when we started tracking Trump's realignment with Silicon Valley, and I don't know if you had this experience too, but like it was clear to me pretty early that this was not going to be easy, like an easy sell to the base, because they had just spent three years railing against big tech specifically for putting people under surveillance. And so it's really joyful to see this coalition that is happening now, like against flock cameras and data centers and Palantir, which is really, really cross-partisan at the grassroots. Because that's exactly what should have always happened instead of projecting everyone's surveillance fears onto the idea that Bill Gates was implanting

a chip in them through the vaccine or that the vaccine verification app was listening to their conversations over dinner, right? Like, people should be afraid of surveillance. You had lots of liberals rolling their eyes and, you know, and talking like, wait until they hear about cell phones. When the point is, this is a really ripe political issue that we should be organizing around and we should be upset about this. And so now we're really seeing that happen at the community level. And it's very, I think it's very exciting. It's taking some Democrats a really long time before they decide to get in on this. But thankfully, there's a lot of insurgent candidates who understand that this is where the votes are and this is where the energy is and they are winning in a lot of the primaries,

right? So that's something. Absolutely. Yeah. Any other cracks and fissures we should highlight, Asthma. There's a lot. Yeah. I mean, I think there are other cracks and fissures. I mean, you asked the question, like, how do they view each other? And I think they view each other as, you know, allies and what they see is the big war against the left, right? I mean, there's, you know, something clarifying about having an enemy. And for them, it's, it's us, you know. But there are definitely real, real ruptures at a high level, you know, like Bannon's, you know, quite outspoken about Musk. And there are definitely many conflicts. I think that some of those have a material basis. So we have a chapter about the fact that, you know, this form of fascism is much more

individually entrepreneurial than the fascism of a century ago, right? This isn't industrial fascism. This is influencer fascism. And that means that people have different incentives, right? I mean, you see it and just like the gross corruption and personal enrichment at the top of the Trump regime. I mean, it's just almost impossible to keep up with how much money they're grabbing. That's alienating some parts of the base, right? It's so out of control. Some of them are naming it as disgusting. And then you see it in like all forms of grifting, but also just like the chasing of an audience. you know, for your podcast, right? I'm trying to get clicks. And, you know, it's the internet giveth and the internet taketh away. Like, those dynamics helped forge the MAGA alliance. And they're

also helping to tear it apart because the audience of a Candace Owens or Tucker Carlson, like, they don't want to just be like told like, everything's great in Washington, D.C. Like, you know, follow the party line. They want entertainment and Armageddon and they want drama. You know, so that has created some real riffs. You know, I think part in, in some cases, prominent figures on the right have turned against the regime out of, you know, real disagreements. You know, there are battles over Israel and how overtly anti-Semitic to be, how much to bring that in, right? It's like, and then there's also like what gets an audience. And that, that's creating, you know, I think also some other opportunities for us. I mean, it's interesting.

Fascism has always had a powerful relationship to the media. But this is not the top-down radio of the 20th century. This is chaotic. And so I think that's also why you see the appeal of AI, right? Because it's like, oh, AI is a re-centralization machine. So then you have, you know, a must going, ooh, you know, truth GPT and forget Wikipedia, you know, Grogapedia, because it's like there is this fascist dream of being able to control what passes for truth. And that is happening alongside attacks on the university, attacks on research, attacks on independent journalism, investigative journalism. So I think those things are actually connected. But right now... We can just enjoy. Yeah. Get your popcorn. We can just enjoy that it's like battle of the conspiracies, right?

Where Stephen Miller and J.D. Vance after the Charlie Kirk assassination, we're like, okay, we've got the conspiracy. It's all George Soros's fault and the left. And Candace is like, ah, I think I can do a little better than that. And millions of people follow her to more outrageous. Yeah. And she was number one in the world. at the top of the international podcast charts. Like, it was no joke for a minute there. I mean, if she wasn't turning people actively against Jews and I have a skin in that game, I would just be able to enjoy that. But I have to keep reminding myself.

This isn't going to end well? It has been tough as a Jewish person, hasn't it? Right? Because on the one hand, it's like, I see people and I'm like, oh, I'm like, they're saying the right thing, but are they saying it because they just hate Jewish people and they've got like kind of like, it's open season right now? Or it's because they actually have valid, you know, criticisms. And there's a lot of people that are, you know, they're having fun muddying those waters.

Well, I mean, I think it's pretty clear Marjorie Taylor Green and Tucker Carlson, you know, one in ethno state. They just have a different hierarchy that they're after. So. Yeah, that's why, I mean, it really, in seriousness, it matters. Like, the ruptures matter because they're an opportunity for actual anti-fascists to enter into those vacuums and say, okay, this is what it is really about. And we are, you know, yes, we should oppose the genocide in Gaza and ethno states wherever they are, right, and have consistent ethics and values and also real solutions. And if we don't, then these ruptures will actually take us to a worse place. Like, no joke, right? We can't just grab the popcorn. Because, you know, we also can, there's different

clips circulating and you can listen to them rail against the atrocities in Gaza, or you can tune into the fact that they're also really mad at the Trump regime for not deporting millions of people for not cracking down and cracking enough skulls on the left. And there are other, you know, other grievances, you know, that if left unchecked, will pull us in an even more fascist direction. And then just as we are now like, collie, gee, George W. Bush doesn't look as bad as Trump. You know, there's a potential future where we're looking back on this with, I hesitate to say, nostalgia, but with a sense that we've fallen even further. Right. Under President Kushner. Yes.

I wonder if we're talking about fissures and fractures, but really, in a way, it's a dialogue that's occurring because there is no good line from the other side of the two-party system currently that can enter into dialogue. So all the dialogue has been absorbed by a range of different types of fascists because there is no alternative that is believable and no alternative that is credible from people who are, you know, bought and sold essentially. They're powerful people who see that alternative is a real threat, and it's not just the far right. It's liberals, too, right? Fascism doesn't just thrive out of cunning and, you know, crass capitalism, right? It also thrives because there's a lack of courage

and a lack of alternative vision and lack of willingness to name the real problems and the real solutions. So, you know, I think that's absolutely right. I mean, we are seeing, though, I think boldly anti-fascist people contest for power under the umbrella of Democratic socialism, and we're seeing how threatening that is to the Democratic establishment. They often say the percentage is like, we can't let these, you know, lefties have power because they'll be so irresponsible and it will be such a disaster. And I think what they're really afraid of is like that the left will govern well and convince more people

that redistribution and public investment is good, actually. That is deeply threatening to, people who just wish we could go back to the neoliberal status quo. And they're genuinely terrified that millions of people are listening to Hassan Piker, not because they actually think he's an anti-Semite, but because he is helping to funnel this huge platform into a voting base, right? I mean, he's turned his stream into a voter registration machine. And they are talking about him to a shocking and embarrassing extent, But they're doing it for a reason. The threat is real. This is a power struggle.

Yeah. I mean, I remember, you know, I was part of Occup Wall Street and they were like, you silly people, you should get involved in electoral politics and do things the right way, the grown-up way, you know, and now that people are doing that, they're like, aha, you know. It's like when I was an actor, my mom said that I should get a real job. And then when I quit acting and got a real job, she said she missed going to my shows, you know? It's just like that, yeah. Hey, mom. She's definitely going to listen to this episode, too. So, great. I'll say that of all the people I hung out with in Julian's apartment while we were starting the podcast, I wouldn't have guessed like Hassan Piker would be the one to cause a nationwide panic. Sure. And like so freak out from a lot of Democrats. You know, what I think they're also terrified of to build on that is that somebody in New York tweets a picture of a pothole and Zoran has it filled by the end of the day. I think they're terrified to see little things start to get fixed because here's like a big.

big bad, you know, socialist. Here's a communist who's now the mayor of New York. And like, what is he doing? He's like kind of going around and like fixing, making the bathrooms easier and fixing pot holes and doing stuff that like nobody can really be mad at. And I think to the, the techno ruling class, that's terrifying because it's, that's a problem that AI can't solve.

And one thing, while we're on the topic of hope, I'm very hopeful that AI will crash splendidly because it's not that good. It's not that good a product ultimately. It doesn't really serve the people very well, really at the end of the day. Ah, Comrade Jake is hoping for the collapse of the entire economy. Yes, now we're talking. Accelerationism is in the air. Mm-hmm.

Yeah, I just, yeah, I don't know what else. Yeah, I mean, I do think, I mean, whether we want it to collapse or not, it's going to collapse because, you know, the SpaceX IPO valued the company's, like, future, like, the reason why it was so absurdly large, right, is they named their potential market as being. potentially $28 trillion, and almost all of that was AI. And then there was just a piece in the Wall Street Journal about how Anthropic is telling investors ahead of its IPO that its potential market is 30 trillion. And they are valuing the stocks on this basis and betting everybody's pensions on it, you know, people who still have a pension, right? This is the not funny part of it, is that they all know that this is a joke. They all know it's not true. They are lying, they are grifting and they're building their bunkers and they're building their escape hatches and they have

rigged the structures of these IPOs so that you have to invest in them, right? Like that's one of the things that that Musk did, right? It's that there are these funds that are classified as like they automatically get like teachers' pensions and things like that. Like they're supposed to be safe investments. And instead of having, you usually have to wait a few years and prove yourself before you become a stock like that. And he gets it right away based on this completely notional math. So put some of these numbers in context, okay, 28 trillion for SpaceX, almost all AI, 30 trillion for anthropic projected revenue, all of it, AI. The entire U.S. GDP is 32 trillion. So these two, just these two companies, this isn't even open AI, this isn't even Google, are saying our revenue will be twice the size

of the entire U.S. economy. How is that not a bubble? Like, it's wild what they're doing. So we have to, we actually really do need to get bubble ready. Am I a bad person for? hoping that AI is going to fail. I don't know. I just, it seems inevitable. I think I'm with you. I think it seems inevitable to me. I mean, personally, I don't think we should get away for whether we want it or not. They have built a house of cards. Am I a bad guy for wanting the ocean to wash away my castle built in sand? I don't have a castle. I don't even, I don't even live by the ocean. I've got neither of those things. No, you don't, you don't get the analogy. No, I mean, I think Naomi's right. It's like, this isn't what we want. This is the reality. And it's like if their dreams work out, which we don't want, then what? Then we have like one or two companies that own everything. I mean, they talk about, you know, again, and they talk about their AI and these absolutely messianic terms. It's going to be the last company, the final technology, right? And this is the thing. They're like, we're going to displace all workers and have it all, right? Which is devastating. Or there's going to be some kind of economic reckoning, a crash that will come back to Earth, which is also bad. But, you know, I think the point is for us, you know, we need to.

to have real proposals at the ready for when a crash comes. And it can't just be like a repeat of 2008, where it's like slap on the wrist and bailouts for the banks and, you know, no real consequences or redistribution. Let's make it capitalism's last crash, Astra. Capitalism. But also, I, the final crash. The final crash. You know, and I, people are throwing stuff at the wall and some of it's not good. Like, I love Bernie, but I don't think we need a stake in these AI companies. We don't need a stake in a technology that is incinerating the planet. And that is trying to do our thinking for us and filling the internet with slop. Like, we don't want that.

So I do think that we need better proposals on the table that are more about calling the bluff, calling the bullshit, and just being like, no, actually, we would like real doctors, not OB, GYN robots and invest in that. And we need to expropriate all their mansions and their bunkers. Yep. And collectivize them. We could all just turn off our phones tomorrow. Let's do it right now. My way. We could log off the internet.

This is what I always, this is what drives me insane is that so much of this problem that that's been created is we all have to look at this. You know, it's like, we don't need the crypto, but all of our systems are built on it. So it's a, it's a pointless argument to say they're like, oh, why don't we just like all disconnect? It's like everything, our banking. I mean, I couldn't buy something at an estate sale last weekend because I did the QR code to my Zell and it went, this number has already registered with Zell.

So I couldn't even get to my fucking money to buy, you know, a collectible at an estate sale. And you know what I did? I just like put it away. I was like, well, I guess I'm not going to use my money today because the QR code isn't going to let me do the thing. You need an AI agent. This world victimizes you in so many ways involving figurines and video games. I'm with you. QR codes out of estate sales.

We want to buy our old stuff without AI. I just, just let me log into the goddamn apps. Oh, my God. I actually think that's not, I mean, but we're seeing that that's kind of like a populist platform. That's the whole like, you know, stuff around, you know, Mom Dani and Lena Khan talking about making it easy to cancel subscriptions and stuff. Like, I actually think there's a lot of rage at just like the stupidity of the technological interfaces. I mean, feel bad for old people, you know, it is so, it's just, it's so impossible to be old right now.

Nothing is legible. Nothing makes any sense. It's extraordinary. No, I do think that it is a very good idea because they are in sure. shitifying everything. Like Corey Doctor is right. But then the solution is, well, you need an AI agent. That's the issue. And then you'll just get your AI agent to make the world work for you. And then you lose all your privacy. Hand over all your codes, your banking information, your health records. Like, that really is the next stage. And I think people will hate it. It is really a rupture.

Like, I think the right actually cares more about privacy than the left. And it would be a good thing to tap into. It's a coalition waiting to happen. We all hate it now. I haven't met one person and it's like, you know what, all my tech is working really well for me, and I'm really happy and my life is a lot better because of it. I'm on some weird chat with people who are going to work in the AI sector and people trying to understand it. And I do get these messages occasionally where people are like bragging about how they're letting AI, they're writing music with it or something.

Like, there are some weird, some weird people who are eating it up in a way that doesn't make any sense to me. It makes me sad. Dr. Dre, Dr. Dre said he's using AI to make his beats. And he said that anybody not using it is going to be left behind, that it's a tool. That's how they're trying to sell it. It's a new tool. His new album, Chronic Neck Pain, is going to be amazing.

You discussed this a bit, like, how much the sort of, like, the billionaire classes and, like, tech elite classes sort of vision for the future has degraded. I was like, I remember the 90s, you know, there was this vision. It was like, oh, the Internet's going to bring people together. And like Bill Gates, you know, he wrote a book called, you know, The Road Ahead, you know, which is a vision of like how things are going to be. Thanks to technology, everyone's going to do so much better. And don't worry about how rich we're getting because we've set up these foundations to give our billions away. So it won't be as anxiety producing as you might think. But like now it's like, oh, okay, now you can invest all of your money and effort into this one technology.

And this one technology is all you get. And this little, it'll like alienate you and like make things shitty. And the us were we have our New Zealand bunkers. And for you, maybe you can escape this planet when a rockets get real good. I mean, it's like this vision for the future, I feel like is much, much weaker than it used to be. As you point out, like you write in the conclusion to your book, the era in which billionaires bragged about their do-gooding is over and never returning. Now, my question is like, since they're like, do-goating was like never really sincere in the first place.

Like, why do you think they stopped pretending? The things get like so bad. There's like, all it's like, all right, we know. know it's bad. We can't even lie to you anymore. We can't even lie about like how things are getting progressively better because of the technology we're developing. So we're just going to like stop the act and sort of like instead pretend that like a narrow vision of escaping disaster. Is it really more people really just like stopping, believing the PR of these tech giants? You know, we pose that question directly in the book. It's like, what happened to Silicon Valley, which was all about

weaving us into a giant friend group and connecting the world and likes and hearts? Like what happened? How did they all end up, you know, lining up at the second Trump inauguration? And in a nutshell, you know, we argue that actually AI was a huge factor, that the emergence of this technology was a was a very big material motivator. I mean, Silicon Valley, we know, is always looking for the next big thing, right? The next bubble. And crypto filled some of that for a minute. There's some NFT hypes or whatever. But, you know, with generative AI, they were like, this is our big play because it, you know, it's often referred to as a general purpose technology, right? Like social media, it's on our phones.

But generative AI can go into the healthcare system. It can go into our schools, right? It can go into our cars. It can go into our interpersonal communications. Like, they're like, this shit could be everywhere. And they knew people weren't going to like it, right? They knew that they were going to encounter even more resistance. Already the tech clash was growing.

You know, people on the left and right were skeptical about Silicon Valley and workers and Silicon Valley were organizing and sort of unionized and also been like, you guys are sexist creeps too. and also, you know, sure there's like a bouncy castle in the lunchroom, but we actually would like a labor union, you know? And so they were already experiencing this pushback. And I think they knew it was going to be even more intense with this technology that people weren't asking for. And they needed a strong man. And that was Trump. And they sold it. J.D. Vance organized a fundraiser for Trump in Silicon Valley and invited David Sachs and Mark and Jason and all these guys. And they made the case to Trump

in terms he understands. And they said, hey, you might not like big tech, but hey, there's this new AI thing. and it's going to require a lot of fossil fuels, and you're going to love that. And he was like, yeah, I'm in. And oh, thanks for the $12 million you raised at this dinner. You know, let's do this together. So I think the nature of the technology was decisive. And also there is that authoritarian promise in this tech, right, that this can bring about a new level of surveillance, a new level of control. You know, the technology is glitchy and shitty right now in lots of ways. We don't want to overinflate it. But, you know, it's there in predictive policing already. It's there. And being used, you know, it's being deployed in war zones. So those are also things that made this an appealing move for people who have fascist politics. And they don't care if it's bad. This is the thing. You know, I mean, when they are convincing universities to give, you know, Claude or LGBT to every undergrad, they know that it's glitching all over the place, but they don't care. you know, it's a captive market. And in terms of the way it's eroding public services, right,

because some of the biggest buyers are governments, right? They're buying it for health care system. They're buying it for housing. It's been their ideology for a long time that they don't believe in the public sector at all, right? That was the whole Doge ethos, right? Anything you can do, we can do better. But they don't care if it's better. They just want to do it, right? This is one market. They haven't been able to completely take over yet. So I think that that's part of it. But in terms of like the flip from the do-gooder era of billionaires, the kind of Clinton Global Initiative, you know, Aspen, Ted, Davos, you know, all cure malaria, you fix the schools, like that kind of billionaire moment. I think there are a couple things. One, I could make the argument that

it was just a phase, right? You know, Astra and I argue that wealth itself is deranging and the more that you accumulate, right, that they needed that story to say, okay, because this is the neoliberal era, right, that we're talking about. You know, we're talking about the era of privatization, deregulation, austerity. So when they were saying, we're going to fix all these problems, that was related to the way they were getting rich, right? So they were getting very rich off the backs of privatization and deregulation and cuts to taxes, but they were saying, don't worry, the things that you used to look to government for, we will provide through our foundations. So that was package deal, right? But then it was so successful in terms of their enrichment and the

compounding of their wealth that I think that they then were like, why are we pretending? Like, exactly why do we have to please these plebs? Like, do you know how rich we are? You know? And so then I think we're in another phase and that phase is just like, you and what army, right? The Epstein Island. Like, and that was always there, right? There was always the after party where no one was pretending anything. But another component of it is that I think when people like Bill Gates and Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos were saying, like, I am literally going to save the world through our foundation, you know, handing out Earth prizes. And no matter what the crisis was, Musk was out there tweeting, saying, like, I will bring power to Puerto Rico. I will save the children in the cave, right?

They had this superhero complex. Like their wealth was what was going to allow them to be the God, to be the Savior. But then, as Asthma was saying, when their workers started organizing, when people started telling them to fuck off, we don't want your headquarters in our city. when the tech clash really took off, I think what they took away from that was like, well, if we're not going to be gods, then we're going to be super villains. Like if we're not going to be superheroes, we will be super villains. Like we're not just going to be normal people, right? And so I think that that flip where Musk, you know, dressed in black says, I'm not just MAGA, I'm dark MAGA. I mean, I think that's like he's speaking the id of corporate America in that moment, right? He's like, if you're not going to give us the hero worship that we were promised in the 1990s, well, then we are going to be your worst nightmare. And plus AI. Yeah. You know, I think, I think, you know, another thing kind of like driving the like absolutely insane sort of development of like AI into every part of life. It's also driven by the fact that Silicon Valley is their like last idea.

Like Astor, you talked about how they tried to get like, you know, crypto and NFTs going. Another big one was VR. Like Facebook in 2021, they changed their. their company's name to meta, invested billions into VR worlds, because I thought this was the big platform. They thought this was going to be it. And so, and it just failed. They just flopped. So this AI buildout was not their plan A. It was not their initial idea of like how they would take over the world. They thought everyone would strap on the VR helmets and then they would just control our minds like this. But instead they got, it's like, well, we've sort of burnt in the last decade or so,

they burned through every sort of new technology and try to like take over every part of human life as they can. And AI is their last bet. And they have to go all in because they got nothing else. Because AI is, it's finally they've taken themselves, they've fired themselves as like creatives. And so, of course, yes, the final straw is this thing that creates for you. They're like, well, we can't make anything work. Maybe this machine will like figure it out for us. But also that is really key. And, you know, Karen Howe was the first person to point this out to me, like that there was this group chat that Altman and Teal and others who are on where they had some bet going over who was going to have the first billion dollar company with

no employees. And that is the dream, right? And it's related to what we've been talking about because they don't want to have to pay employees to program. And this idea that they can just put it into the prompt and not deal with these pesky employees who are causing so much problems, that's what they're all striving for, the billion dollar company with zero employees or one employee. And that's what I mean Like the scale of their dreams or their nightmares has changed from a century ago, right? Like the fascist of your could not be like, oh, a billion dollar company with no employees. These are dreams that are only now possible. And they do seem, you know, what's interesting too is because they are so vain, they all have

their podcasts and stuff. And so we can just listen to them, talk to each other. And they're so mad that we don't like it. And then they're like, oh, you know, we should have called it something nice. You know, just like rebrow, like as though it's a branding problem and not just the fact that most of us are just not, you know, freaks who want to live in that Terminator dystopia. So it's very weird. And it's like for what? Like no additional amount of money that they have could change their lifestyle. I imagine there they have the most that you can get at this, the top level, you know, they've maxed. They've they've hit their level cap. So at this point, it is all for what. And I think that the book makes a really good case is that it's like, They're burning it down. It's like there's nothing else to do with them. Yeah.

They're taking revenge on the people who didn't believe them, the people who didn't buy their products, the people who didn't support their companies. They hate each other and everybody else. This is a profoundly anti-human coalition. Yeah. Yeah. When you talk in the book about how like the apocalypse has kind of been ushered in like with the first like the world's first trillionaire and then just like an image of like

Elon Musk sort of like floated through my. my subconscious. I genuinely got like chills because I was like, this really does feel different. And that's what's so important about this is because this is a unique kind of fascism for this kind of time. And I think that you guys are giving people good terminology and understandable ways to explain it so that people that don't understand can see how dangerous it is and how we can start to fight back. That wasn't really a question, just to compliment, I guess, about the... We're taking it. We like it. Yeah. I mean, I guess, I also say to your point that it's profoundly anti-human, Julian, it's like, it is striking to me that,

you know, some people on the right who are angry about AI are talking about humans first, right? And they're speaking in a universalist register. They're not saying, oh, Americans first or, you know, specific humans first, Christian humans first. They're like, there's this sense, like, this is a threat to something really big. And that's why it feels like such a significant moment. I mean, Naomi and I together have decades of experience in movements, not just as writers, but we have been parts of many different uprisings. And what we feel is like there's the potential here to build a really big coalition and to speak to those fears people have without misdirecting their anxieties and actually doing the work of building solidarity. And, you know, like none of us like these guys. Great. That's something

we can work with. And they seem to be hell bent on making themselves even less likable and even more toxic. And so let's meet the moment and organize against them. Yeah. There was that moment. I don't know if you saw this clip of these two women who are cattle farmers in Kentucky, and they had turned down $26 million that was offered for their land to build a data center. And there was just like this little interview with them for the local news a few months ago. We quoted in the book where one of them says, yeah, I don't know about $26 million. I'd rather feed the nation. And it went just completely viral. And it was just like you had like MAGA people just being like, I will follow her anywhere into battle and you had like DSA people being like erect statues to this women you know and it was just

it was it was really it was really sweet you know and and nobody like made fun of how they looked even though it was on Twitter like you know like women who don't look like models on Twitter are saying things and they're not being like nudified like what's happening. Count your blessings. Yeah, no you know in the Pope's on side. You know like it's although he shouldn't make that alliance with Anthropic. That wasn't a good move. But he's trying. Yeah, but I mean, I guess I don't want to be overly optimistic in the sense that always in the background, and I'm sure you've thought about this, right? Like the fact that they're so disdainful of their base, the fact that they don't seem to care that they are doubling down on policies

are so tremendously unpopular with their voters right before elections. Like, it doesn't make me feel totally relaxed, right? Because what is, I mean, they've already openly said they don't, Peter Thiel doesn't believe in democracy. And I do think that they believe that their wealth is what allows them to enter the next phase. So, yeah, I think we need to be prepared for things to get pretty ugly around what to do when you can no longer win an election. Yeah. Because these guys do understand, as Steve Bannon said, that either they're in power or they're in jail. They do understand that.

There's been a lot of war crimes committed in public. Mm-hmm. And that also raises the state. And that's why, honestly, like, why no fucking around. Like, we have to build a very big and very strategic coalition that doesn't have time or patience for the usual left self-sabotage and purity politics and is, like, really serious about not doing things that are going to lose large portions that you currently have just to make yourself feel cool to your friends or whatever it is.

I mean, honestly, because they're playing for keeps. And we do believe they're fascists. And we do believe fascists through a left. out of helicopters and torture them. So we really do think we should beat them. Yeah, because otherwise the risk is having a situation like in Indonesia where the government that committed the genocide is still in power years later. And everyone has to kind of dissociate on the daily, you know, to kind of understand

the situation that they're in. But like you said, the fact that they don't seem bothered by elections is extremely worrisome because it means that they are aware of how far from the levers of power the average person is, including their own base. Yeah, talking about like the ways in which the elites of these fascist sort of movements have contempt for their base, I think there's really well illustrated when you talk about climate change and sort of the changing tactics on how they approach this. Because, you know, before the standard line was like denial. It's a hoax.

It's like it's a hoax to bring in, you know, these restrictionist policies or destroy the economy or take over or whatever. And they kind of, it seems that you discuss, they kind of shifting to kind of more like climate arson and like, eco-fascism. I mean, I don't understand how this like this even works. If they say like, okay, just kidding, actually Al Gore was right, but our solution is you need a gun to shoot at climate migrants because it's like it's going to get hot in Texas, you know? It's going to get chaotic where everybody lives. It's going to get bad regardless of who you hate and who you support. So I don't understand how you can shift tactics from saying it was a hoaxia, but it was like, but it's real, but we just have to like use fascist taxes to protect the elect or whatever.

Like how do you acknowledge climate breakdown while still like attempting to appeal to like normal people? I mean, it seems unworkable to me. Yeah, but we've seen it work. I mean, we've seen it work in the U.S. And we've seen it work in Europe. And we do write about this at length because we really think that you can't understand this iteration of fascism without understanding the reality of climate change. This is probably the or planetary crisis we're in.

I mean, look at what happened before the 2020. 24 election, we had Hurricane Helene in North Carolina and Florida. So people don't have to say, I acknowledge climate change. Actually, it is caused by greenhouse gas emissions. You can say there's an extreme weather event, right? But we don't exactly know what's happening. The climate has changed over time. Or maybe it's the Jewish space lasers, right? Maybe somebody's controlling the weather, which literally Marjorie Taylor Green said during Helene and also in previous wildfires. So, you know, you can acknowledge the fact it's hot. You can acknowledge the fact things are on fire and there's an inferno. You can acknowledge the tornado without saying, you know, actually,

it's the fossil fuel industry that has been lying to us about this for decades, which is the ultimate real conspiracy that people should be thinking about. And so what did the right in that moment of Helene, you know, overt white supremacist, proud boy style folks went to Appalachia and started recruiting folks by helping them clean up their properties at the upper level. Elon Musk after singing $300 million into at the Trump election, you know, coordinated messages with people in the Trump camp and was like, oh, you know, you're suffering because of the storm. Well, guess what? There's not enough money to help you because of immigrants, right? So they pivot from the emergency of climate change to these, you know, what Stephen Miller has called the border apocalypse, right, to the emergency at the border.

And we saw this day one of the second Trump administration. He declared various emergencies. And they were at the border. And it was also another emergency was there's not enough energy for AI. But it wasn't the emergency of climate change. So it's an opportunity for more redirection. In Europe, something's, you know, they're even less explicitly denialist. They do raise questions. You know, I'm thinking about the leader of the Spain's far right Fox Party, which has gained popularity after historic floods and historic fires by saying the problem is actually the climate fanatics who won't let us clear the brush in the woods, right? Who won't let us do conservative land management? And the problem is the problem is Brussels and the EU and their policies, right? So redirecting blame.

from industry towards liberal elites. While also doing that, you know, once again, we saw it this summer where, you know, instead of talking about the historic heat wave that was leaving thousands of people in Europe debt, talking about how there was a migrant invasion, quote unquote, in North Africa, in the Spanish exclaves, you know, and once again, shifting the frame. So, you know, eco-fascism is something that people have been warning about for a while. And I think we're seeing that that's going to be the playbook. That's going to be the strategy.

In France, the leaders of the far right are explicit. They say, you know, borders are our climate policy. Because what they're saying is, yeah, the world's getting hotter and more people are going to be on the move seeking shelter and refuge. And what are we going to do? Bunker down, right, and protect the in-group. And this is why it's so dangerous. I mean, after Helene, did Kamala Harris take that moment and go, gosh, we should really put

climate front and center and go back to that idea of a green new deal and how we could invest in a sustainable, secure future for people? no, she barely said anything about it. And that allowed that open space for absolutely mind-boggling, strategic misinformation about what was happening. And so we should be very concerned about climate. And we really need to see that climate change is driving this fascist politics. And so we can't respond by this climate hushing, whatever the phrase is, like, you know, from the Democratic establishment and the think tanks saying, like, don't talk about it too much because the poll show, people know, even in the U.S.

where there's been so much of an effort to suppress this issue like people want smart climate action they know it's happening we know that we're hot in a way we've never been hot we know we're at fire risk we know our property insurance is going up

like people know you know people feel it we're starting to talk about fires in the conversation when looking at property in California well what are the fire will we be able to be in short there are new questions that we're starting to ask working class people

people that are lower class questions that will continue to be asked as the planet continues to heat up. I think that's so, I'm so often looking for something to latch on to how can we combat this. And I think that leaning into climate and being a party that wants to save the planet as opposed to sell you AI seems very attractive. It seems like a very nonpartisan issue. Yeah. And save you money on your insurance bill, you know? I mean, I think there's, there's, it's not like affordability or the climate. We can merge these things together. And it's also, I think, about telling stories of who we are that highlight taking care of each other, right? Because

like we know that disasters, shocks, like they either bring out the best in us or they bring out the worst or sometimes they bring out both, right? I mean, we can all remember this from COVID, this sort of like outpouring of mutual aid and clapping for health care workers and this sort these are waves of solidarity, including the racial justice uprising and people, you know, going out into the streets and standing up for each other, right? But we also remember hoarding and toilet paper and things and thinking about how can I get, how can I get more space for my nuclear family and I can't count on anybody to take care of us. So we need to like have our own, you know, pod where we just meet all of our own needs in a privatized way, right? And the more

insecure people feel, the more supported people feel by their leaders and by their government structures, the more likely they are to be their best selves, right, and show up in those ways of taking care of their neighbors. And the more abandoned they feel, the more likely they are to bunker down, right? So instead of kind of finger-pointing, I think the task of the left is like to figure out, okay, how do we help people be their best selves? And we saw some of that in practice in in Minneapolis with the ice invasion and all the work that had been done in the years previously, which we write about to create a public narrative that we're the kind of people who dig each other out of the snow, right?

Which also meant we're the kind of people who save each other from ice. We're the kind of people who make sure their neighbors' kids get to school safely or that our neighbors are fed. And, you know, even thinking about Mamdani, like being out there publicly shoveling snow in the middle of these historic snowstorms, like anything that we can see, any models that we can see of our best selves, more likely we will be to be our best selves, right? And we have social support, too. I mean, we did some reporting in Italy for this book.

And one person I interviewed a fellow named Leonardo Bianchi, who's an expert in conspiracy theories in Italy, specifically in Europe. And so we're talking about how the great replacement has crossed borders and is just captivating Europeans and Americans alike and how there were some conspiracies around it's not the Green New Deal there, but the EU's plan for some. sustainability, you know, they're going to make you eat bugs and stuff like that. But one thing he said was that COVID conspiracies just did not catch on, right? That these health conspiracies just did not have the same appeal. Interesting. And why? Because people trust the health care system,

universal health care as a mitigating factor there, right? So there just wasn't the ability for those to fester in the same way. You know, I work on issues of medical debt. And I was very struck by how Maha often brings it up, right? Like one of the reasons to be healthy and to, you know, not eat the red food die or whatever, so you won't have to go to the hospital and go into debt possibly to get treatment. And so I think, you know, it's fear of, you know, poverty and the insecurity and the financial precarity. All of this creates conditions. So by making people's lives better, we help them be their better selves, maybe not their best selves, right? You know, and as we've said, people with means can be fascist. But in general, insecurity correlates

with an openness to authoritarianism and fascism. And so we mitigate that by investments and by building these collective structures of resilience. And we need to prep. Like, the world is changing. And so one thing Naomi and I are clear around the book is like, that instinct to prep is not bad. It just, we have to do it in a social, communal, collective way. Prepping together. Yeah, I mean, yeah, that's really fascinating about the state of conspiracy theories in Italy because sometimes it does bother me when people act as if like the real solution to preventing the dissemination of bizarre conspiracy theories is like creating a better like information ecosystem. Fact check, fact check, fact check.

No, you can't fact check your way out of this. We've got to organize and transform society. Yeah. I mean, facts are nice. I wish we had more attunement to them. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, yeah.

I mean, it's like, I really like, you know, being able to distinguish what is nonsense and what is true. I know that's like the reason people are attracted to these stories isn't because like happened to cross them, you know, or on internet. They saw, you know, a YouTube about lizard people and they started believing in that. There's like, there's a reason that story about like there's this alien race of people who are constantly oppressing me is appealing. And if we, if we start removing the conditions that make that story appealing, then the fewer, fewer people will believe it.

Right. The other thing around a great replacement conspiracies is, you know, we try to get into this a little in the book. But when you go back and you read the tracts that this is all based on, right? Like it speaks to this feeling of unhomeness, of uncanniness, of like, I'm going to this place that was once familiar to me. And it feels strange, right? And my home has been altered. And as somebody who's been, you know, immersed in the climate movement and the crisis for a really long time, that's really familiar to me because a lot of sociologists have been trying to be.

have been using words like inventing new words. Like there's this Australian named Greg Albrecht who came up with this term called solostalgia, which he defines as the nostalgia you feel when you are already at home, right? And it's that uncanniness of like my home doesn't feel like my home like this isn't my weather. It's been altered so much that I know I will never go back to it, right? And so it's the same move of like getting the facts wrong but the feelings right. Like, we live in an uncanny world. Like, our seasons are being scrambled.

There are robots pretending to be people online. Like, things are very strange. And it's very convenient to be like, it's the kebab shop that is making you feel that way. You know, like it's, it's. So, yeah, it's just another example of all that. They're putting out Halloween in May, you know? It's like you go into a store. They're putting Halloween out.

They're rushing you. They're rushing you through the seasons. No, but it's, you know, but you bring up, all jokes aside, you bring up a really good point, which is that, we as a species haven't evolved all that much, you know, this technology stuff is new and we can tell when things are wrong. And when Travis was, you know, when you guys were talking about conspiracy theories earlier, I was just thinking in my head like, yeah, it's like we need these conspiracies to hate one another because I feel like our default setting and when we are happiest is when we are like amongst our community and helping. And we feel like, you know, the weakest member is supported. And so it's almost like you need these theories because otherwise, like the rich people, you know,

the rich people won't be able to keep making money off of us. And it's this, yeah, it just feels like we're stuck, we're caught in this loop. I think that there's a little sliver of hope there, which is the, you know, this is something I wrote about in another book called Solidarity, but it's like, because I'm so focused on organizing it. And it takes so much work to build solidarity. Solidarity has to be intentionally constructed and do the work of reaching out to people and finding your common interests.

But, you know, dividing people takes a lot of work too. I mean, that's why they spend millions of millions and billions of dollars on, you know, passing laws that actually make organizing illegal or very difficult on, you know, why they spread this kind of misinformation and, you know, why Elon Musk wanted to own Twitter and rebranded X so that he could propagate this nonsense. Like, it's not a spontaneous project. The vision is not a spontaneous project. And they have to work really hard to turn people against each other.

And the task, you know, of turning us against each other and making a, you know, love their robot seems like an impossible one. So I think that's good news for us, even if we shouldn't be complacent. Yeah, you, in the end of the book, sort of the last last section, you discussed sort of an alternate to this vision of the future that requires a constant escape from disaster, which you call heerness. So how would you describe this? Well, we were riffing and building off of this concept that comes from the Jewish labor boom, which our friend Molly Krabbe, wrote a magnificent book called Here Where We Live is Our Country About. And the Jewish labor boom was very powerful between the World Wars in Europe, particularly.

It was the largest Jewish organization in some parts of Europe. And it was a labor union. It was community defense. It was sports leagues. And it was organized in response to both, it was a rejection of Zionism. So the phrase here and us was really about. saying that paradise is not, because people were saying like it's not safe in Europe, we'll never be safe here. Antisemitism is too strong. The pogrom's like, let's get the hell out of here

and go to Palestine. And they were saying, no, let's be in multiracial solidarity and make here better and hear where we live as our country, as the title of Molly's book said. So we were struck that this idea of committing to hear is really powerful in the face of these forces that all believe that paradise is elsewhere, right? It's not only Zah, Zionists who say that. It's all of the religious traditions in fundamentalist forms that are saying paradises in the golden city in the sky. It's the tech billionaires with their rocket ships and their AI uploading their brains to AI. It's all the ethno-latanationalists that want to turn their countries into these cleansed New Jerusalems, right? And so the idea of saying, like, we actually

love it here. You know, we quote another friend of ours, Morgan Bassacus, who's a playwright and organizer who texted during the New York City mayoral primaries. And they were just organizing like mad in this group Jews for Zoran. This is before Zoran won the primary. And it was all framed around like the billionaires were threatening to leave if he won. And it was all about people wanting to stay in their city, wanting to be able to afford to live in their city. The whole campaign was a love letter to New York. And Morgan wrote, we want to stay in our city. We want to stay on our planet. We love it here. And so that's this idea of really like re-enchanting the world. Like we think we're sad for Elon Musk that he doesn't think this place is worth saving.

And he thinks that there's more joy on a dead planet. You know, it's pretty great here. And we can make it better. We can make it fair. And, you know, I watch a lot of those bunker shows. My favorite one of the bunker shows is Silo. Do any of you watch Silo? It's so good.

I've watched the first season yet. I mean, it's just sweeter than most of them because one of the things that I really like about it is that They trade what they call relics from like the before times, which is our times. And, you know, they trade like just like pictures for magazines of like birds, you know, or like trees. And they really do a very good job of capturing that we are in a kind of paradise and that we'll miss it when it's gone. Like Astra says, but democracy. That should have ended on a more uplifting note. No, there was good.

There was plenty of uplift here. I thought we. Okay, okay. No, it was very, it was very good. The book is End Times Fascism and the Fight for the Living World by Naomi Klein and Aster Taylor. It is super fascinating. Pick it up. Naomi and Astra, thank you so much for joining us today.

That was great. Really glad to be here. Thanks for having us. Thank you. It was so fun. Thanks for listening to another episode of the QAA podcast. You can go to patreon.com slash QAA and subscribe for five bucks a month to get a whole second premium episode for every regular one, plus access to our entire archive. of premium episodes, and there are hundreds of them.

Hundreds. It's very good value for your money. For everything else, we have a website, QAAAAApodcast.com. Beautiful listener. Until next week, may the Deep Dish bless you and keep you. We have auto-keyed content based on your preferences. There is a political dimension of getting back to the future. You can't, you know, I don't know, this is a conversation I had with you.

Elon back in, you know, 2024, and we had all these, you know, conversate, I had this, I had this seesteading version with Elon where I said, you know, Trump doesn't win, I want to just leave the country. And then Elon said, there's nowhere to go. There's nowhere to go. This is the only place. And then, you know, you always think of the right arguments to make later. And it was about two hours after we had dinner and I was home that I thought of, wow, Elon, you don't believe in going to Mars anymore. 2024. 2024 is the year

where Elon stopped believing in Mars, not as a silly science tech project, but as a political project. Mars was supposed to be a political project. It was building an alternative. And in 2024, Elon came to believe that if you went to Mars,

you know, the socialist U.S. government, the woke AI, it would follow you to Mars.