The Ezra Klein Show - Naomi Klein on Trumpism and Our Age of ‘Unlikely Bedfellows’

Episode Date: March 20, 2026

Naomi Klein saw where our politics was headed before most people on the left. Her 2023 book “Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World” is hard to describe. But among other things, it traces the new coalitions Klein saw forming on the right, the ways they were co-opting issues long associated with the left, and finding huge audiences and influence outside existing institutions. The people and coalitions that Klein wrote about run our world now. We are all living in the mirror world. As she put it, it’s “doppelgangers at the wheel.” So I wanted to have Klein on the show to help understand how that happened, what the left failed to see at the time and the lessons the left should take from it now. As Klein told me: “The thing about doppelgangers is, in literature, they’re always a message telling you a warning: You have to look at yourself. There’s something about yourself that you’re not seeing.” Note: We recorded this episode before the war in Iran. Mentioned: Doppelganger by Naomi Klein No Logo by Naomi Klein “Minnesota Proved MAGA Wrong” by Adam Serwer End Times Fascism by Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor Book Recommendations: Empire of AI by Karen Hao Here Where We Live Is Our Country by Molly Crabapple Fire Alarm by Michael Löwy Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [e-mail]. You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. You can also subscribe via your favorite podcast app here https://www.nytimes.com/activate-access/audio?source=podcatcher. For more podcasts and narrated articles, download The New York Times app at nytimes.com/app. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

The author Naomi Klein is probably best known for scathing critiques of corporate power in books like No Logo, The Shock Doctrine, and This Changes Everything. But in 2023, she published a pretty different kind of book. During the pandemic, Klein noticed how much she was being confused online with a different Naomi. Naomi Wolfe, who in the 90s was known as a feminist author and journalist and Al Gore advisor, but who had in the COVID era become one of the most prominent right-wing conspiracists. That experience and the interest in wolf that it created for Klein became the foundation of doppelganger, a trip into the mirror world. This is a hard to summarize book in a way books I really like often are.

It could only have been written by one person at one moment in their life. But Klein was interested in was the ways that the pandemic was scrambling traditional political coordinates, creating a political coalition that didn't seem, at least by the logic that most people understood of politics, like it could continue to exist. How could somebody like Naomi Wolf, a pro-choice feminist, become political allies with Steve Bannon? How could RFK Jr. become a core part of the MAGA coalition? So Klein began following Wolf, her doppelganger, into this mirror world of the new MAGA right.

She began to sense its rules and its concerns and its power and the way it was seducing people. It's allure. She sought a lot more clearly than most liberals and leftists did, because at least in 2023, if you weren't choosing to follow it, very easy to miss it. And even easier, if you're an institutionally minded liberal leftist, to convince yourself that it didn't matter, that it didn't have power. But now that world, the mirror world, it's our world. Now its leaders are our leaders. So I wanted to have Clown on to talk about her book and about what she's observed over the first year of the Trump administration as that new coalition has tried to hold together while governing.

Clown, of course, is a columnist for The Guardian and a professor of geography at the University of British Columbia. And she's a forthcoming book, co-authored with Astra Taylor, called End Times Fascism and the Fight for the Living World. And I want to note, we recorded this before the war with Iran. As always, my email Ezra Klein Show at nyatimes.com. Naomi Klein, welcome to the show. Thank you. So your book revolves around two concepts, doppelgangers and mirror worlds. and I thought maybe good to start by just defining them.

Sure. So a doppelganger is a German word that literally translated means a double goer or a double walker. And it's the idea that out there somewhere you could bump into somebody who looks just like you and isn't you. And it's that sort of uncanny vertigo that addresses the strangeness of that which is most familiar, which is yourself. mirror world is a term I use to describe the relationship between the sort of liberal left world and the kind of far right world and the ways in which when people are ejected from our world, they end up in a world that is sort of the exact mirror of where we live in sort of like replica social media platforms, the same but different kind of doppelgangers, doppelganger publishing world. old, doppelganger narratives of the narratives that we tell ourselves. And I was trying to find language for a discomfort I had in myself in noticing the ways in which we'd become incredibly reactive in the communities in which I live, where we were sort of defining ourselves

against what was happening, what they were doing over there, as opposed to being guided by legible values and beliefs. How did you get interested in the idea of the doppelganger? So a few different routes took me there. It was deep in the pandemic and I was feeling kind of speechless. Like I just didn't want to write the same kind of thing that I have written over and over again. I think I was politically sad. And I realized that for the first time in my life, I had time to kind of experiment with writing in a way that I haven't had time in my adult life. So I started working with a writing teacher and was just sort of playing with form. And in the background, I was having this strange experience where in this time when we were all being represented

exclusively by our avatars in the digital sphere, I started being confused on a massive scale with another nonfiction writer named Naomi, Naomi Wolf. And it sort of became one of the left Twitter's favorite jokes at the time. And so every time I would go online to get some simulation of the friendship and community that I missed years. You know, this was like sort of well into the second year of the pandemic. What I would be confronted with was all these people sort of screaming at me about something that another Naomi had done. And at first I was very frustrated by this. And I didn't think it was related to this writing work that I was doing. But then I realized that this destabilization of the self was a really interesting and fruitful mechanism to explore a bunch of

ideas that I've been obsessed with, including the ways in which the idea of having a personal brand is basically destroying everything in our culture. And I've been wanting to return to that theme, which was actually the subject of my first book that I wrote in the late 1990s and came out in 2000, no logo. I've been wanting to come back to it, but I couldn't find a way to it. to write about it that didn't feel sort of hectoring and lecturing. And I didn't, I wanted to write about it from inside. Like, I wanted to write about it from like being implicated. Because I don't think people can hear the critique if they just feel like you're just lecturing them as if you are not in the same polluted waters of self-performance and self-protection that we're all swimming in.

So I thought, wow, I have a branding crisis here on my hands. This is really funny and also maybe interesting. So it started as an essay and that it just grew. Let's do a minute on no logo because I think probably a lot of people listening haven't read that book because that book was a big deal. I mean, I remember that book and it being kind of left canon as I was growing up and becoming a writer. So what was the argument of no logo? What were you sensing then and what were you trying to pull up into visibility about the world? It was, I think first and foremost, an attempt to understand the rise of these multinational corporations that were more powerful than governments. And a shift that was going on in politic that was sort of doing an end run around governments, and it was going directly for the multinationals, you know, whether Nike because of sweatshops in Indonesia or Shell because of oil spills in Nigeria. And it was, it was, so as a young reporter, I was following these stories and I was interested in that. But I was also looking at another element, which was the way that these multinationals were divesting themselves from the world of things.

where they were all just declaring that they were no longer in the business of making products. They were selling a brand, an idea. They were sort of transcending. And what that meant in practice was that they didn't need to own their factories. Their factories were all outsourced. They were contracts. And the real work of production was the production of image. And that was affecting youth culture that, you know, as a young person thinking about this,

we were all being told that we should be our own brands, which didn't really make any sense in the 1990s because this was pre-social media, it's pre-Iphone. In No Logar, I wrote about the first celebrities who wore themselves lifestyle brands like Michael Jordan and Oprah, and this was like a new concept that an individual could be a brand. But the idea that a non-famous person could be a brand made no sense to us because we didn't have marketing firms. It also feels to me like it's of a politics that has really weakened.

I mean, I think of that era and ad busters. And you go back earlier in the 20th century. and fear about what advertising is going to do to our minds is very present in the 60s and the 70s. So this sort of anti-advertising, anti-branding, anti-consumer politics that was very, very strong, I feel like, in the 90s. It feels pretty absent today. Yeah, because we really could be our own brands, right? So, you know, I think it's important to understand that there's a kind of a desperation in, the fact that we have all embraced this.

And this is why, you know, saying that I wanted to find a way to write about it that was from inside of it, because I think we all feel really attacked if we point out that, you know, it's why online everyone's constantly accusing each other of being performative, which I think is today's version of selling out. Yeah. But everybody knows that everybody else is being performative as well. So I think we have to find compassion, you know, in this discussion because people are just trying to pay the rent. And it's not working. Like, it's not enough to pay the rent.

So I want to bring in the back in the other character here, which is Naomi Wolf. Intellectually, politically, who is she? Her sort of heyday was the 1990s with a breakthrough book called The Beauty Myth. It came out when I was an undergrad. And it had a thesis that young women were being forced to add a third shift. There's already like the shift at work and then the shift at home, but on top of that, there's a beauty shift. And so it was about how women were being held back from advancing in the workplace because they were having to put so much work into being beautiful. Why has the conflict on the sexual battlefield suddenly come out into the open and can the long

fraud fears about date rape and harassment ever resolve themselves? Joining me now, best-selling author Naomi Wolf. I think that men are in crisis because women are not. sitting passively as the evil backlash hits us over the head, where it's hard for us to understand the nature of our immense power, but I believe that since the Hill Thomas hearings, we've seen a kind of spontaneous uprising among women in this country that is shifting the balance of the power between the sexes. She was the face of what was called at the time Third Wave feminism. It was a controversial

term, you know, whether it actually was a wave or not. And, yeah, she wrote a bunch of best-selling books. She wrote it called Fire with Fire. One of her high-slash-low points was advising Al Gore's presidential campaign on how to reach women voters because she was very prominent feminist at the time. And yeah, so that's who she was. And now she is someone quite different. Hi, everyone. It's Naomi Wolfe here at Daily Cloud. And I'm doing something that I have been promising for a while.

She's one of these people. I mean, this is one of the reasons why I wanted to write about her. Because I think there's so many people really accelerated during the pandemic. where we would sort of say, like, what happened to that person? Like, they used to be this and now they're something else. Or what happened to my uncle? Like, he's fallen down the rabbit hole. And he has all these extreme views.

So at a certain point, Nehulph just started posting a whole lot about different kinds of conspiracy claims, everything from like taking pictures of clouds and claiming they were cloud-seated. I began to notice a very distinct pattern that these emissions, these trails would, I'm not going to say be laying down because I don't know for sure what the motivation is. I've got some hypotheses. But they would clearly stay there, not dissipate, spread, and create cloud cover. And blocked the sun to claiming ISIS beheadings, were crisis actors. Saying they're not yet independently verified. The only source for them, early on at least, was this very questionable site called site, SIT. which gets half a million dollars from the United States government a year

and is run by these Islamophob establishment types who are connected to the sort of U.S. anti-terrorism establishment. So like kind of Alex Jones type of stuff. And then during COVID, she went all in on a range of COVID-related conspiracies from the virus itself as a bioweapon to the vaccine as a bioweapon, The market for the COVID injections has come and gone because people are aware now that it's a deadly and sterilizing injection. But the side effects live on. To the vaccine verification apps are a Chinese communist plot to subdue the West.

The vaccine passport platform is the same platform as a social credit system, like in China that enslaves a billion people. At a certain point during the pandemic, She was on Steve Bannon's show every day for a couple of weeks. She has become a really big star on the right. You described when you were defining mirror worlds that it exists partially for when you were ejected from one world into the other. And you find many of the same concerns, just somewhat perverted, distorted, warped. And I thought that word ejected was interesting because one of your theses about Wolf is that there was a moment of, of ejection and disruption in who she was before

that required her to reinvent herself, even if just for psychological recovery. What was that moment? Yeah, so the year before the pandemic in 2019, she published a book called Outrages. And she very famously made a foundational factual error in that book where she misinterpreted a phrase in the historical record.

The book dealt with persecution of gay men in England, and she misunderstood the term death recorded, where she thought that it meant that they had been killed by the state, and this was exposed live on the BBC. Death recorded. I was really surprised by this, and I looked it up. Death recorded is what's in. I think most of these cases that you've identified as executions.

It doesn't mean that he was executed. It was a category that was created in 1823 that allowed judges to abstain from pronouncing a sentence of death on any capital convict whom they considered to be a fit subject for pardon. I don't think any of the executions you've identified here actually happened. Well, that's

a really important thing to investigate. What is your understanding of what death recorded means? It became one of these moments of mass online ridicule, just public shaming. I hate telling the story because it's like every writer's worst nightmare.

Every time something like this would happen to Wolf, people would say thoughts and prayers to Naomi Klein or like they would be sort of part of the joke that I would get blamed for it. So I would had a sort of front row seat on it and it was really ugly. And I do think that that happens a lot with the people who we ask that question of of like why did they change in that way will often find some kind of public shaming, you know, or something really wrong that they did, right? Like it's not just that we were mean to them. It's that they did something maybe unforgivable and then got really shamed for it. And,

And then they were embraced in this other world where facts matter a lot less. Well, this is where I want to follow you into the other world as you follow her into the other world. And you have a line in the book I thought was a really sharp description of something. This is about what is going on after Wolf is banned from Twitter for conspiracies. And you write, this is the irony of liberal Twitter celebrating Wolf's seeming disappearance, at least until Musk welcomed her back. Since most liberals and leftists don't watch or listen to Bannon or the other shows where she, wolf, has become a regular,

they thought she'd evaporated as a cause for concern. RIP, death recorded. This is a bit like kids who think the world disappears when they close their eyes. Tell me about that other world you walk into. Well, first of all I should say, that world runs our world now, right? So this is a little bit, you know,

I don't think that we have the same questions about it now as we did then, because we can't ignore it. right now, right? And I remember when the book first came out, I was interviewed, and the interviewer asked me why I was giving these people attention. And it was such an arrogant question, like, as if, like, we control all the attention and we were just blessing them with our attention by looking at them and writing about them. And I really felt, as I was listening to Van, and that I was watching a new political coalition cohere. He was calling it MAGA Plus at the time.

This is, you know, 2021, 2022. And I had seen Bannon in 2016 peel off part of the Democratic coalition, particularly white unionized men who were angry at the Democratic Party over free trade deals and bring him over to Trump. And I was watching him do this with, you know, suburban white women who traditionally voted Democrat. And he understood that Wolf, you know, he would wind up the introduction. Okay, our guest is Naomi Wolf. Naomi, you came, you started as a time.

A feminist, a huge writer, best-selling author, public intellectual, lionized by the left in the established order and the conventional thinking. And now you're kind of a renegade and every day a rebel. She used to consult for Al Gore. She consulted for Bill Clinton. And that was central to her appeal, is that she could potentially deliver this constituency that Trump really was weak with. And I think Bannon understood that these sort of. angry COVID moms were a new part of his coalition, the plus one for MAGA. And she was very important during the pandemic. There was a study that, I think, NPR commissioned to try to understand one particular

piece of medical information that spread early on, which had to do with this idea that vaccinated people shed particulates onto unvaccinated people and endangered their health and possibly made them infertile. And there was this whole thing about how, you know, women were bleeding between periods from being around vaccinated people, and women were making videos on Instagram saying that they'd kicked their husbands out of their beds because they weren't going to sleep with vaccinated people anymore. I mean, things were going wild. And so there was this sort of data study that was done to try to find the kind of ground zero for this particular piece of medical misinformation. And they traced it back to, a lot of it, back to Naomi Walsh. She was a real vector for this piece of misinformation

because she is associated with women's health and women's bodies. And then I started listening to all her talking to Tucker Carlson and talking to Steve Bannon. And when I would mention to a friend, like, oh, I heard this on Bannon. Like, you know, I was, there were things that were happening that were making me very worried about elections. You know, I was watching the whole show. Instead of saying, like, what, like asking, like, what did you hear? They would say, like, why? Like, why are you listening to that? Like, why would you do that? Like, almost like I had transgressed. One thing I found so interesting about this book that I didn't expect when I opened it up is how much it is a book in the background about the practice of politics and certain kinds of political engagement. And something I felt came up again and again was in different ways liberals in the left became very powerful in institutions over the past 20 years.

And this is before the mirror world basically took over our world. but powerful in the media, powerful in academia, powerful in government. And so this idea that you could just shun people out, right, that that would be an effective way of creating social change in politics to cold. And it wasn't a crazy idea. And there are ways it has worked in the past and ways that it worked even then. But it missed how much is happening outside the institutions and how they had become their own institutions and networks and media structures.

and that kicking somebody out of your institutions meant you couldn't see them anymore. But it didn't mean they were gone. I feel like so much of this is just about social media. And I know that it's sort of slightly hackneyed, but all of this is playing out on platforms, right? And I even think that something like the mute button or the block button has a huge amount to answer for just in terms of it being almost habit forming. Like we get used to this idea. Like this person's annoying me. I'm going to just press a button and make them to see.

disappear, right? And I think that that idea that this is how we relate to people spills offline as well. It created a tremendous space in which power could be built, sort of in private, with different rules. And then I feel like it exploded into dominance after the election. And you see how much it became an legible network that is now arguably the default network in American life. I mean, this is the thing about endoppelganger's, endoppelganger literature and film, the storyline, usually what happens is like you've got a protagonist and then somebody comes along who's a double of them

and they're so good at performing you, like so much better at performing you, that they eventually overtake you. So at the end of Dostoevsky's the double as protagonist is getting carted away and sent to an asylum while the double just takes over. So I think that's kind of happened in our culture. is that the doppelganger's, doppelgators at the wheel.

One thing that I have kept thinking about and that I feel like your book gets out really well is the underving relationships between things that are really happening and things that we sort of pushed away or wanted to ignore as ridiculous. I think the one happening right now is Jeffrey Epstein, which I have found it disorienting,

how much it tracks the vibe of QAnon. Not every claim of Q&N, it's not, you know, John F. Kennedy Jr. is still alive somewhere. But you are dealing with a very powerful person with a incredibly powerful and broad elite network and child sex trafficking at the center of it. And again, I don't believe in QAnon,

but it is eerie how there was this thing that was like a mirror world, or Q&O was a mirror world version of Jeffrey Epstein or something. How have you thought about that? I'm really interested in the work that conspiracy culture is playing, like in how it distracts from conspiracies that are real. And I never doubted that there was a conspiracy that Epstein was involved. And that's been clear for a long time.

The reason why people are being drawn to conspiracy culture is that we all feel that this, world is rigged against us. And power has concentrated and wealth has concentrated so much over the past half century. And the impunity that follows from that is so extreme. Like, I think it's really important not to just dismiss it as a conspiracy theory just because it has the structure of QAnon. I think QAnon has the structure of, it's sort of like, it's, It's why anti-Semitism was still called the socialism of fools. It's sort of like it kind of explains how capitalism works, except for it twists it, and it's

just a cabal of rich Jews. But, you know, we need stories to explain our reality, and we need them, and so do the super elites need them. And, you know, one of the things that the files do is provide a window into the stories that elites are telling themselves to justify how much wealth they have, how much power they have. And that brings us to their obsession with eugenics and this idea that they are sort of a better stock than everybody else. That's a story that can explain why you have so much wealth and power. And you see Epstein talking about that quite a lot in the emails.

Yeah, yeah. I think it's inextricable from the fact that we live in a time where if you're rich enough, you think the rules don't apply to you, whether that's Elon Musk, just sort of laughing when journalists ask him for any accountability and he used to send a poop emoji and now he sends an auto reply that says mainstream media lies. Like it's just this defiant, I don't have to answer anymore. I don't have to be accountable to any rules. Trump embodies that. And I think Epstein really embodied that for a lot of very powerful people, including people like Bill Gates, who presented himself as, you know, one of the more progressive caring billionaires, right? I think It seems to me that Epstein was like the after-after party for Davos, right?

Where it's just like he was the guy who could make it all happen. It is clear to me that his impunity was an object of envy, the way he lived. Yeah. That maybe they didn't all know that there was child sex trafficking at the center of his world. But the way in which he didn't play by the rules, he had this huge house, he had this island, he had this wealth, he had all. all these connections, he seemed to be completely living in this unabashed way, was what made him an object of envy to other rich and powerful people. And part of the attraction of Trump.

I mean, Trump is that. He's the 80s guy who always had the beautiful women around him and never took part in any of that woke capitalism, quote, unquote. I mean, he never pretended to care about any of the things that these guys were publicly claiming that they cared about. and now don't even bother claiming to care about, whether, you know, climate change or equity, diversity, and inclusion. But I see these things as really interrelated because, you know, I say the past 50 years, because this is the sort of counter-revolution against the New Deal era. This is sort of what I've wrote about in the shock doctrine. This is the revolution against

regulation and the era of privatization and unmaking of the state. And it really produces the oligarch class, right? So it's important for the people who are the big winners in this to present themselves as a kind of a replacement for the state, right? And that's where it's really interesting that Maxwell was central in launching the Clinton Global Initiative, for instance, because I think the Clinton Global Initiative was a place for many years when the Davos class got together and said, we're going to fix it. I'll fix schools. You fix poverty. You know, you fix malaria, and we've got this. You don't really need governments anymore because we are so socially responsible and we're going to use our wealth to fix the world. But I think that what was actually happening is that

power is for using. The whole point of becoming this rich is to not have to play by these types of rules. And I think what Trump has unlocked and what Epstein always was, was you don't really have to play by the rules. Like here come to the island and we'll actually do whatever we want. We're rich and we're keeping it. And we're not going to pretend anymore. And our workers can suck it. And welcome to the new world. What have you made of Steve Bannon's closeness to Jeffrey Epstein? So here you have somebody who certainly presents himself as the populace, a person trying to break and destroy the elite conspiracies. But Bannon was very close to Epstein after functionally everything was known. There's this text message where Bannon sends Epstein a

link to a Daily Beast story about Epstein's, quote, alleged sex ring and the information coming out about that. Bannon sends this to Epstein. And Epstein doesn't answer, and a couple hours later, Bannon's like, so my guy's going to Israel, can he meet with a hood Barack? Right? They just, like, move right on. So here you have this guy who's like populist in the front stage and backstage is very, I mean,

this is happening in 2019, this particular text message I'm talking about. How do you think about that? Yeah, so I guess I should have made this clear earlier. Like, I think Bannon is a terrible fraud. And I think he performs being the voice of the little guy. And even the sort of way in which he took on mosque early in this Trump administration and claims to be taking on like the tech oligarchs who are supposedly kind of polluting Maga. He has been in with his own tech oligarchs from the beginning, like with the Mercer's.

What I think about Bannon is that he is a strategist. Like all the things that we were talking about before, I think this is just about power. This is just about winning. And he understands how to build a coalition. And he's strategic about that. I think he platforms conspiracy theorists because he understands that it is very useful for people to believe outlandish things, in part because it distracts them, in very large part. from the conspiracies that can be proved. And so I think that the ban in world is really in crisis right now

because of the Epstein files. And it's really interesting kind of checking in on his show in this whole period because he seems to be largely ignoring it and flooding the zone with other conspiracies. Like the Muslim Brotherhood is trying to hijack the elections and this state and that state. I mean, he's talking about everything but the biggest conspiracy in the world that he is himself centrally implicated in,

and implicated in ways that are really about rearranging the political map. I mean, he's interested in Epstein because he thinks Epstein can help fund the populist international, which is weaving together these far right, often fascist, openly fascist parties in Europe and Latin America with the United States, and, you know, he needs a funder for this. So it's political. Yeah, and so what we're seeing in these files is part of how the world, world that we're in right now is built. And I don't know how you feel about the like, is this fascism? Is this not? Where are you falling on that? I think it's pretty fascist. At some point,

the word doesn't have any meaning if we can't apply it to things in the modern world. I think sometimes you end up with words that people have decided are so beyond the pale, racist, fascist, etc., that they become people stop being willing to use them because it feels like you've moved outside of ordinary discourse. But these words describe things. And I don't think you can understand the aesthetic of Trumpism. I don't know you can understand some of its impulses without at least some connection to fascist movements of the 20th century, which were, you know, everyone is different in its own way. Exactly. Yeah. But there's a reason they're all very interested in Schmidt. Yeah. Yeah. And I think part of the hesitancy has to do with like really exceptionalizing

Hitler and that like it sounds like you're saying if he is fascist, he is Hitler. And that's not what the term means, and there have been plenty of fascists who aren't Hitler, and history doesn't repeat on a loop. It changes. It iterates. It compounds. But the reason I ask, do you think it's fascist, is that fascism is a pathology of injured power. It emerges in Italy and in Germany in the injuries of the First World War, right? It's soldiers and generals and industrial. Austriolists who are hurt, right, by the sanctions, but it's powerful people who are hurt, right? Whereas, like, left revolutions are powerless people who are hurt. And it's these vertical coalitions that get built with people, you know, who had sort of relative power and are losing power.

But one of the things that we see in the Epstein files are these concerns about Me Too, about accountability, like, you know, a lot of talk about Me Too, people going to Epstein because he is a sex criminal and they know that. And they're asking him for. advice about what to do about the fact that, you know, the movement is coming for them and they might be held accountable. So if we are in a fascist moment, then it is a counter-revolution. Like, we have to understand, like, what are elites revolting against? Like, what, who hurt them? What hurt them? And, you know, I think part of what they are revolting against is that there was starting to be some accountability. Like, their impunity was, there were a few chinks in the

armor, and some of that was women who were beginning to hold powerful men accountable. So this unleashing of the far right is partly them protecting themselves. Well, and nothing was more radicalizing, I think, to the tech right CEO and venture class than the feeling that their corporations were being taken over by the staff. Mark Andreessen has talked about this directly, that the sense that on any given a day, you might almost have a riot of your own employees and you had lost power. You know, the employee base is going feral. You know, there were cases in the, you know, in the Trump era. There were companies, multiple companies, I know that felt like they were

hours away from full-blown violent riots on their own campuses by their own employees. He's a bit of an exaggerator I've noticed. Like he does. Well, he's describing a way he thinks felt to him. And at the very least I will. He also said he was being terrorized by the Biden administration because they tried to regulate crypto. They just came after crypto. absolutely tried to kill us. I mean, they just ran this, like, incredible, basically, terror campaign to try to kill crypto. And then they were ramping into a similar campaign to try to kill AI. And that's really when we knew that we had to really get involved in politics.

But this is related. Like, the fact that Mark Andretion sees the most mild accountability as an existential attack. I mean, the way he talks about basic regulation for crypto or AI as terror, terror, I think speaks to the fact that these are men who came up in the 19, 90s, you know, when I was writing no logo, Mark Andreessen was on a throne on the cover of Time magazine, a golden throne, I believe, you know, and he was, I think, 23. I think that may have gone to their head. You know, I think that the kinds of depravity that we see in the files is related to the, it's dangerous to lift people up and treat them as gods and kings, and I think we did that as a culture just because people were rich. You know, the other place where we

see pedophile rings is in the Catholic Church, and survivors talk about it. about the kind of unique horror of being abused by somebody who has God on their side, right? And we did treat wealthy people as if they were gods for a while. And I think they're angry that they no longer get treated like gods. And that feels like being terrorized to Mark Andreessen. It's all relative, right? But this is why I think at the heart of this is impunity, is a feeling of impunity. And we have to start holding people accountable. We're starting to see that, but not in the United States. And these, you know, these women who have come forward.

I mean, they are heroes. They're absolute heroes. And this solidarity that they show one another, the support that they give to one another, up against Congress, up against the most powerful men in the world. Like, it's so moving to me. And the, you know, women journalists who believed them when nobody else did. And this is a beautiful story.

I mean, it's a horrible story, but there's also, there's beauty in it. Let me try a thought on you because I know you're working with Esther to Taylor on a book about fascism. And I was thinking as you were talking about what kinds of injuries create fascist movements. There's often an injury that unites in a certain way the kind of fascist elites you're talking about. And at least portions of the masses, because fascism is also a mass movement in many places at many times. And it's often a loss of story. It's an injury to your story. So you're describing the way we told the tech titans a story about them. Yes.

But what is the bottom-up side of Trumpism and is often the bottom-up side of fascism is the feeling that many people have, ordinary people, at times of rapid change, that they are losing the story they're a part of, the story of their own history and how they are the good guys in history, not the, certainly not a checkered history, the story of their nation and how great their nation is. is and what its destiny is. And I mean, this is also a pandemic book. And to some degree, 2024-era-Trumpism is a pandemic-era phenomena. People are very, very angry about all of a sudden being told that they're the bad guys for not getting vaccinated or not wearing a mask or this is a big part of what you're describing in there. And that that was very, very effectively weaponized inside this movement.

Because I know you're working on some of these issues. I'm curious how you think about that. I mean, just to stay with the pandemic thing for, you know, one more moment, and this relates to the work that Astra and I are doing and what we're calling end-times fascism, which is really about how there is a consciousness that we are in what the Pentagon once called the age of consequences, right? Like that the forecasted existential global crises are now hitting, right? It's not just like, this may happen. It's this is happening. And COVID, the fact that we experienced a global pandemic that shut down the world simultaneously. It was an extraordinary event, right? I think there was a period where we didn't want to look back at it, and now we're less like, whoa, like that really did happen.

Like, New York shut down. Like, you could walk through Times Square and I was in it. And I think that that shifted something in our brains, a lot of us, including very powerful people who realize that actually the stuff's going to happen. We're now in the age where it happens. And so I think what we saw during COVID was that that presents us with a pretty stark choice about what kind of society we're going to have. We will either have a much stronger state that takes care of people. And we saw a more robust social state during COVID.

We had governments pay people to stay home. We had periods where there was eviction moratorium. We had free masks and testing like kind of a taste of universal health care. in the United States. And there is another option. And that option is, screw them. This is nature taking its course. This is culling. This is survival of the fittest. And I think a lot of that diagonalism that came together of people on the kind of new age wellness world who are saying, I have a powerful immune system. I don't need your vaccines coming together with like the Steve Bannon world. Underneath at all was this like, I'm comfortable if this.

is a cleansing, if this is like the world correcting. Maybe we'll have fewer people and that'll be better for the environment. That was one story. But it really is a stark choice. And so I think, you know, when it comes to Silicon Valley and these sort of tech elites and the moment that they're in, I think even though COVID was really good for them just in terms of their bottom lines, I actually think that what freak them out more than anything was the quiet quitting, was people actually not needing the jobs as much. and losing that sort of boss worker power for a while. And workers saying during a pandemic,

you better pay me more if you want me to risk my life, right? So I think that that choice of like either we're going to have a much more activist state and it's going to be regulating a lot more, or we're going to embrace a world where we're okay with mass death. And the genocide in Gaza happens and a lot of people showed that they could live with it. I think that those two events, I think it was COVID and Gaza that produces the Trump moment. And it really was about a fear of this fork in the road moment. Either it's we're just going to harden our hearts and it's going to get a lot

uglier or it's going to get a lot more activist in terms of an activist state and more of a kind of a New Deal sort of state. And they don't want that because that will regulate them. You used a term in there that I want to pick up on, which is diagonalism. What is diagonalism? Diagnolism is a term Quincylbidian and William Callison who are both scholars of European

history, they use that term in an essay about the German anti-lockdown movement early in the pandemic, which is sort of a rough translation of a German word which seems to be coming up called Kerr Duncan, which means like outside of the box

thinking, which is how these sort of wellness influencers and entrepreneurial kind of not traditional right-wingerers made alliance with right-wing parties. And so it just speaks to these kind of unlikely bedfellows like by doppelgamer and Steve Bannon, like people meeting a it's kind of an alternative to the horseshoe theory, I suppose, because the horseshoe theory sort of assumes that it's like far left and far right, but a more significant shift or sort of liberal wellness, California types, who very focused on kind of bunkering their own bodies,

making alliance with people who are bunkering their national borders. What's interesting to me about this theory of diagonalism, and this goes back to pick up on our fascism conversation to fascist movements, that there does seem to me to be a sorting, not just around religion, we're used to religious sorting in politics, but around a certain kind of spiritualism, back to the landism, which both, I think, substantively an aesthetic,

used to be at least associated with the left. But RFK Jr., I think, emerges as like a central figure in a realignment. And it's something you're attentive to that you see happening around you in the book is, I guess, the role of spirituality and mysticism and a kind of sense of bodily integrity and wholeness playing into this. I think that's underplayed in its power. So I'm It cares how you've thought about it then and since. It's true that the sort of organic, green, you know, world is more associated with the left these days, but it's also true that there's a fascist lineage to it.

And, you know, European fascists, you know, in the 1920s and 30s, we're very interested in all kinds of new age health fads. But I think in our version of it, it's really related to the kind of optimized self and, you know, the way in which. we can just protect ourselves in a world in which we don't have very much control by purifying our bodies and optimizing ourselves in every way. And yeah, I mean, I don't think it is very left. I think it's highly individual. I think I think leftists generally survived the pandemic

without becoming conspiracy theorists for the most part. But where you really saw it was like yoga studios. And so I think that they kind of coded left-ish, but I don't think that they were that political before. I agree with this. I'm not trying to say that it's about hardcore communist becoming Q&N members. I guess maybe the place I don't totally agree is that I think this is more than optimized self. I think you get optimized self-types across the political spectrum. I do think there's something here about ways of knowing and trust in institutions. And the left, which I'm describing here very broadly, kind of Democrats, leftists, liberals, et cetera.

It becomes more institutionalized, technocratic, it believes science, it believes experts. And what it ends up ejecting is people who have profound distrust. You talk a lot in the book about RFK Jr., who goes from a kind of fringe presidential candidate as a Democrat and is now, of course, HHS secretary.

But I want to play a clip from his presidential campaign announcement because I think it's interesting from this perspective. I'm here to join you in making a new declaration of independence for our entire nation. We declare independence from the corporations that have hijacked our government. And we declare independence from the Wall Street, from big tech, from big pharma, from big ag, from the military contractors and their lobbyists. And we declare independence from the mercenary media.

that is here to fortify all of the corporate orthodoxies from their advertisers and to urge us to hate our neighbors and to fear our friends. And we declare independence from the cynical elites who betray our hope and who amplify our divisions. What do you think when you hear that? I think he's quite similar to Bannon in that he is really good at identifying these sort of vacuums, these political vacuums that need to be filled and sort of speaking into them. I mean, one of the things I think is just that a lot of the people in these coalitions can be pulled out of them because the world that they're in now is just nonstop grifting.

You know, that goes for Bannon as well. I mean, one of the, you know, in addition to his Epstein problems at the moment and people realizing that the guy who is supposed to protect them from the oligarchs has been trading emails with Epstein and is part of this whole world that they've supposed to be. been taking on. You know, he also is being sued for a meme coin, FJB meme coin, which was the scam. So they're getting scammed all the time. And the same is true of a lot of these wellness people, including, you know, everyone's selling supplements, everybody's selling these seminars. And, you know, the people that RFK Jr. has amassed around him, all of them are trying to sell you something. And people are getting

ripped off. Like, they're getting ripped off all the time. But I think he's really good at speaking to this very deep longing for a deeper connection with nature. You know, he speaks really poetically about the natural world. When I was a little boy, I used to visit the White House, and there were a pair of Eastern and Adam Peregrine falcons nesting on the roof, and I was a falconer from when I was a little boy, and I was fascinated with hawks. But I used to watch those birds.

It was the most beautiful predatory bird in our country. And it was salmon pink and at a white sear on its nose, it could fly 240 miles an hour. And I could watch them come off the, cupola of the post office and come down Pennsylvania Avenue at those speeds and pick pigeons out of the air 40 feet above the heads of the pedestrians on the sidewalk on Pennsylvania Avenue in front of the White House. For me, seeing that site was much more exciting than visiting my uncle at the White House or my father at the Justice Department. But that bird went extinct in 1963 from DDT poisoning.

made people feel alienated from the natural world and, you know, all the jokes about the bear carcasses and all of that. I mean, it's funny. But the reason why it has traction is I think people like the idea of somebody who has connections with wildness, right? I mean, that has a powerful appeal. And so I think this speaks to what you were talking about before, about people losing stories, right? And it's hard to lose a story. You know, I don't feel too sorry for Mark and Driesen losing his story about the, not the, did you have a crown? What a question to have to ask. The throne. I don't think he had a crown, but he lost the throne. But when you lose a story of what your nation was, I think we have to interrogate these stories, but the onus is also on us to come up with new stories, right?

And if you just yank the story away and say, like, you're an idiot for having ever believed it. And now you're on your own. People are going to get angry. And, you know, that can be a painful. thing to hear, but I think we really have that responsibility. And I'm really moved by the fact that I see that happening on the left. Like, you know, there's a pretty harsh critiques in doppelganger of the left, like, um, harsher than anything I've ever written. Maybe you're not harsh enough for some people,

but, you know, a lot of it is trying to look in the mirror. I mean, this is the thing about doppelgangers. It's like, in literature, there are always a message telling you a warning. Like, you have to look at yourself. There's something about yourself that you're not seeing if, if reality starts doubling. You talk about your critiques of the left in the book, so I'll offer critique of liberalism, which is that liberalism has become very errant. It has become in its ways of knowing and ways of relating very, very technocratic, and I say this is a bit of a technocrat, and I think it has really lost something in being over time more severed from religion.

But the desire for, I think, politics to be able to be able to. able to speak to how alienating it often feels to be alive right now. Yeah. When you're looking at your screens and you're often very separate from nature. And it's hard because there's not always an easy political answer to any of this. And I think that liberalism in particular doesn't really know what to do with issues that it can't offer a policy on. If something can simply be, if we could just give you a tax credit, well, we know what to say. But if what you're talking about is a kind of spiritual unease. a sense that something is lost in modernity.

Then it struggles much more. I think it's a reason you see people like James Tellerico taking off so much. I think there's a real hunger for religious language again. But one thing you're very attentive to throughout this book is a way that movements will often abandon issues that the other side picks up. It's like they treat the other side's embrace of something

as it makes that whole issue area toxic. I was supposed to seeing like there's energy, there's some yearning here. How do I connect to that? Yeah. Yearning, how do I answer what might be beneath that? Because often people aren't coming to the issue because they know what the policy solution is. They're coming because they feel something and they're looking for somebody who helps him articulate that feeling.

Yeah. It's interesting what you're saying about liberalism and these policy solutions. I mean, when it comes to the environment, the policy solutions, often obscure the nature beneath what is being addressed. So if you think about how much of the climate discourse focused on carbon trading and carbon markets, I mean, it's the most bloodless way to talk about the natural world. It's like taking something that's alive and animate and that we're all connected to and just being like, how can we make it totally disembodied?

So, you know, I have a whole critique of carbon markets, but just beyond the policy critique, there's also an emotional critique. Like, it makes sense when we're trying to motivate people to act in the face of the climate crisis, just start with our connections to the natural world. Like, start with the fact that maybe you love trees or oceans or just like. And that's one of the things that I always thought people needed to take RFK Jr. more seriously than they were because, you know, I knew him from before, like when he was a riverkeeper. And that ability to speak for the wild, right?

it's very powerful. We don't have many people in public life who are able to do it anymore. It's one of the reasons why FDR was such a great politician. It's just that he had that sort of love of nature and the speeches he would make about the civilian conservation corps and how good it is for the spirit to be out in nature and for the right of people in cities to experience the forest and national parks. That is really powerful stuff and it's really healing. And re-accessing that kind of politics is incredibly important. It's one of the things I think we did wrong during COVID. You know, why didn't we have a resurgence of outdoor education as opposed to just Zoom learning? That's also pretty COVID-safe. Where I see, you know, what you're talking about most clearly is in the uprising against data centers, actually.

It is one of those issues that was being discussed more to a degree of. on the right than the left. It's one of the things that worried me most when I became a regular Steve Bannon listener was that he was always talking about transhumanism and he was talking about AI and the sort of war on the human. He was talking about it more from a kind of a religious perspective. But I think this is very fruitful because I think there is a war on the human going on, a war on the animate world.

I think it's absolutely untenable. The amount of electricity that is being. consumed by this really wasteful way that U.S. tech companies are engaging in the AI arms race where everybody is building duplicative data centers that they know they don't have a market for and they're consuming just. Well, they think they have a market for it. Well, they think someone's going to win at the end. They don't actually think that there's a market for all of them to win. They're in the race stage, right? And so they kind of believe there'll be one or two companies left standing. But they all sort of seem to admit from what I'm seeing is that there isn't

like a $13 trillion market that's going to win. So Open AI is worried Google's going to be the last one standing. So they all have to at the same time build out these massive data centers. And so in the communities that are facing this industrialization, this kind of spirit, like I've interviewed people who describe it as a spiritual war, you know, that they, you know, Bezos wanted to build this huge data center in Tucson called Project Blue, of all things. And people started organizing across partisan lines because they, you know, when you live in a desert, you know about water and you know how scarce it is and so hard to get information out of these companies. And the fact that this has been, you know, pushed by the Trump administration so aggressively. And the way people are

organizing in the face of this is it goes beyond the data center. It's like, what is economic development for? Well, I think there's the great question that AI is going to pose across functionally every level of society is what is the human for, right? So we have trained people to act in ways that are useful to the economy. Then we create, then we trained AI models on the output of those people. And now we're like, hey, we got these AI models that can act like people acting in economically useful ways. And to me, there are two very, very profound and dueling questions here. One is what are humans for? What do we value in education? What do we value in people? And what happens if we have, under capitalism, the structure of a society, like, spent a long time

valuing something that we're now about to take a lot of value away from? And then I was just talking with Jack Clark from Anthropic about this. There is this very unanswered question of what AI itself is for. I mean, if all it's for is replacing white-collar workers,

then that's not a profoundly inspiring vision. There's been like no public agenda for AI. There's been no sense of how do we orient all this investment towards things we actually want as a society,

as opposed to how to automate a call center. And both of those questions, like what are humans for, what is AI for, I think, are going to be definitional to politics. in the coming 5-10 maybe beyond that years.

And right now are very, very ill-answered. Yeah, and I just don't know, like, who is asking those questions and who has power to answer them? Because they're so fundamental, but it assumes that there's any role for the public in this discussion. Like, these data center battles, right? And partly what they're doing is trying to have, the debate that you're describing, and they're being told, you have no role in this,

that Washington has decreed that, you know, everyone's going to take their data centers and you don't have a right to regulate it. But the fact that they have as much energy as they have, I think, is a reflection of the fact that this is being rolled out with absolutely no public input. And, you know, a company like Open AI, such a bait and switch, right? I mean, they said, trust us. We're like Wikipedia. Like, we're a public interest company. No, you can't let the profit motive, determine such an important technology. Oh, we change our mind. You know? So, you know, what Bernie Sanders has been saying is, like, why would we trust these companies

who, you know, don't even let their workers have a bathroom break to think about not like what does it mean to be human, but how are you going to eat when your job is replaced, right? Like, the basic question of caring for people. Like, I don't think people have the capacity to think about what their lives are for if AI is replacing their own. jobs because they're worried about how they're going to eat and pay their rent, and they have absolutely no indication that they live in a society that cares at all about that question. So until that question is answered, I don't think we can have the other questions. Although I think we're going to need to have them all at the same time because I'm not sure it's

going to be answered first. Well, I think that this is a broader question about whether this belongs in the private sector. And I think that that's why, I don't think it does. I mean, this is much too fundamental. and these are technologies that exist because they fed off of the accumulation of all of human knowledge and output. I believe we own them already. I used to talk to some of the people who are now in charge of the AI labs, and I would talk to them about, well, what happens if we're living in the world you're describing to me

and you're building the thing you are telling me and it becomes that powerful and all the things you tell me come true? Like, well, at some point, they would say to me at some point, will have to be nationalized. And I would scoff at them, I'd say, if you get to that point, there's no way you will allow yourself to be nationalized. And I think that bet is proving pretty true right now as you watch people from Open AI dump money into super PACs

to fight AI regulation. I mean, it was people from these companies who would say to me like, oh, if we ever got there, we'd have to become some kind of public. But then you get there and you have the money and you have the power and you don't want to become public in that way. Look, I think there is a way of understanding

the Trump administration as like a tech revolt against AI regulation. Like that that was a major driver of the decision to bankroll him. You know, and it wasn't just Musk. It was, you know, that- And crypto regulation. Yeah, the two. This opens up a question to think about the Trump administration and the MAGA movement.

One of the reasons I think this book is so interesting for thinking about the world we're in is, as you say, it's a book about how this movement was built. And one of the things are very attentive to is the way Trump and the people around him were sensitive to issues that had a lot of power in them, but maybe we're not already well represented politically. And that goes for everyone from the maha moms to the reactionary tech right oligarchs. And so it's this movement that is highly internally contradictory. It absorbs RFK Jr. with that aggressively anti-corporate speech and Elon Musk at the same time. And now we're here

and it's actually an administration. And so it is making choices. It can't be in the same way all things to all people. And like, for instance, our choice on AI has been, let it rip. Right? Try to unwind even the ability of states to regulate it. Which is so unpopular with the base. Which is in many ways unpopular with its base. And he did not run on it. And there are a lot of things like that. It's having to make these

decisions. And so I guess one question about Trumpism and Maga and, I mean, Bannon gets to say what he wants because he's on the outside, but is whether or not it can sustain support given that it is now truly beset by contradictions. And so Trump isn't, it was amazing to me how many things he was to how many people by October of 2024. But now it's like his sort of quantum superposition has like coered a lot. Yeah, and he's also starting a lot of wars. And he's also starting a lot of wars. The other thing he was to a lot of people with somebody who wasn't going to do that. I think what the book tracks is how they cobbled together an electoral coalition that they

have since detonated in lots of ways, right? I mean, including the Latino parts of the coalition who are really angry, like not everyone, but a lot of people are disgusted by what ICE is doing. And the fact that it's just straight up racial profiling. So they're may have thought that it was going to just go after certain people, but it's going after everybody. So I think it's a huge opportunity for the left. You know, I say the left, not the Democratic Party, because I think it's possible to blow the opportunity, and I think the Democratic Party is really good at that. But the other reason why it's worrying is it's worrying when an autocrat who wants to be a dictator doesn't seem to care about re-election. And so it's, you know, you know,

You know, you can't just... Well, hopefully he can't get reelected. No, I know, but he's... Despite his musings. His own party, right? I mean, it's worrying going into the midterms because he's being reckless with his coalition, and I think that should worry us. One of the things, it seems like an opportunity in that, is diagonalism on the left.

It opens up questions about what is out there that has been abandoned, that at least some of its energy can be pulled in. You were mentioned data centers amenity. ago. I think that there's no doubt that there is a tremendous energy in AI populism right now, and that some amount of that is going to have to be actually spoken to, and people are going to have to to get much more thoughtful and sophisticated in speaking to it. But what else is there that, you know, as you've sort of thought about this critique and thought about what you wish had been done differently and what you wish had been paid attention to, okay, this is the opportunity,

but it maybe requires going into some uncomfortable places or building. new coalitions. I think that we know, I'm not going to speak on behalf of the entire left, but I believe that a lot of people on the left understand and understood, particularly after Trump won, that we must have been doing something wrong if this many working class people went to Trumpism.

And if this many people felt alienated enough by what they were calling woke culture to turn to this nihilistic politics. And so, you know, my friend Kiangayana Taylor, you know, was a professor at Princeton historian. One of the things she said immediately after the election is we have to build a more welcoming left. And I think about that phrase a lot, like welcoming. What does it mean to be welcoming, you know? And I look at what's happening in Minneapolis and the sort of, you know, what Adam Serro called neighborism describing that movement.

I mean, neighborism is such a welcoming idea. And it's just this, it's not jargon filled. You're not throwing a whole bunch of isms at people. and like creating a sort of huge litmus test for how you can join the movement. You're just saying, we're all neighbors here, wherever you're from. If you're here, we've got your back.

And we're going to express that in all these different ways, whether it's like doing laundry for people who can't leave their homes or dropping kids off at school, you know, or the images we've all seen of people trailing ice and filming them. I mean, these are just acts of like neighborliness

and welcomingness and just sort of there's a simplicity to it. And then when I look at the campaign that Mamdani ran here in New York, I think that it had the best of what we saw in ourselves during COVID, of just like, I want to see the people who make the city run. And I want to valorize them. Like, you know, he made this wonderful video about the night shift. Do you remember that one? Where it was like, he just like went out in the middle of the night and just like went to LaGuardia and to the taxi line and just interviewed cab drivers. For South Asians growing up in New York City,

taxis were one of the ways we would see ourselves as part of the fabric of the city. Thank you, brother. As much as taxis have been celebrated, as much as they've been woven into the most prominent examples of what it means to be a New Yorker or the films and the books that we all love about this city, I watched as did many New Yorkers

as driver after driver was trapped in debt peonage, and their struggles were simply overlooked by politicians. You know, it's... It's time. also speak to New Yorkers for whom the workday starts a night. It was just like, it's not just during a pandemic that the working class holds of New York City. Now, everyone's so cynical about those early COVID days where people clapped for health care workers, but I actually think there was something really beautiful about what was being expressed

and like insisting on seeing the people who make the world work, who hold the world up. Now, clapping is not enough. They also deserve wage increases and sick days and all kinds of things that you didn't get. But this is what I mean by that fork in the road that COVID represented. Like there could have been a breakthrough for labor rights, you know, and all of the discussion about who essential workers were and all of that. And I think that was very threatening to a lot of people. And that's why we're in this fascist alternate timeline.

But what you see with the Mamdani campaign is that didn't go away in 100,000 volunteers. That is incredible. And it was all just people talking to their neighbors. It was another expression of neighborism. And that kind of work, that kind of just talking to your neighbors, it's not the work of jargon. It's like, what can we find to bond over? What's our quickest, fastest bond? And this is the other kind of doppelganger that I try to get at at the book is like, we all contain doppelgangers in ourselves. Like, we are both this and that. The thing about politics is that it can light up different parts of ourselves. You know, you can have a politic that encourages the worst parts of yourself and you can have a politic that says, hey, let's be that other part of you. You know? But I do think that what Mamdani showed was one way of doing that. I think you got 10% of people who voted for Trump. 10%'s a lot in a federal election.

But you have to do it with economic populism. Trump promised to bring the jobs back. He promised to address cost of living. And if Democrats aren't credible in making that promise themselves, then I don't think that they will be able or they'll be able to harvest it in one election cycle and then it'll backlash again. And also, I think climate action has to come back. It's nowhere in the political discussion. And that's not tenable because we are in a climate crisis. So we have to find a way of talking about climate. You know, I've used the phrase eco-populism

to think about even something like free public transit, that's a municipal issue, points to the fact that the climate movement made so many mistakes. Like, why didn't we make free public transit a climate policy? You know, it is a climate policy, gets people out of cars, We can have electrified transit, and it addresses cost of living, and it makes life easier. And so I think that we need to focus on those types of policies. But the other thing I see happening is we are becoming afraid of our phones. And it's really scary that the merger, like the Silicon Valley merger with the Trump administration, means that these devices and these platforms that sold themselves as our liberation,

you know, first we found out that they were tracking us to advertise to us, but now we find out that they have integrated with the Trump administration, all kinds of ways that we don't fully understand in terms of what data was taken, you know, through Doge, what Palantir is doing, but what is emerging in real time is that there are profiles of us. and AI is superpowering this. I guess what I'm saying is that people are deciding to touch grass both because they like grass

and also because they're becoming afraid of these devices that have flipped into very dangerous surveillance devices. I think we always knew the technology could do that, but now we're seeing it actually happen. Yeah, I agree that that's going to be a tremendous generator of our politics going forward. I think that sense of, oh, we actually do need to be afraid now,

is very real. And I think that when either Democrats have enough power, there's a subsequent administration, and you begin to have investigation on this era, subpoena power for the opposition in Congress, people going to court,

what we are going to learn was happening and certainly what was being attempted when whistleblowers are not as afraid as they probably are right now is going to really chill people. It's sort of like with the Epstein fellows. There's a lot we don't currently know. You can see hints of it.

You can worry about it. But I think when the, you know, there's currently this fight between the Department of Defense and Anthropic because the Department of Defense wants to make sure that in the AI it uses, it is extremely unconstrained in that use. What is being done in this sort of intersection of the government and Palantir, the government and trying to integrate grok into

our warfighting, I think it's going to get very scary. And what you were saying before about the sort of anger at tech workers who are sort of taking over these companies. I mean, I think it was exaggerated, but what wasn't exaggerated is that tech workers were saying, we want to have a say in what we build, right? And they were, you know, there were contracts that were canceled because of tech worker organizing because they didn't want to be doing. doing contracts with ICE or with the U.S. military, I think that that's fair. I think people should have a say in whether or not their labor and their creativity

and their brilliance is going into a war machine that they don't support or into their own surveillance or into the deportation of their neighbors. So maybe that's another productive, you know, area of real worker empowerment. I was thinking about, as we were talking about AI and what it means to be human and what it means to have dignity in the economy, that, Something that we're sort of dancing around there is the way economic logic has taken a lot over. And the way I think as that has kind of accelerated down a very disembodied and technological path, now sort of culminating at some level in AI. And I think there's something here about how many zones of life

you can have a corporate and economic logic encroach on. And I think that some of what is going to emerge in all of this, and it reflects what we're talking about the RFK Jr. and nature

is just a sense that people want, they want alternatives to how things feel. I mean, that is partially policy. It's partially universal health care and expanded child tax credits and free transit. But it's also partially

just a recognition of values and aspirations and that it doesn't need to feel like this. Yeah. Did you see that exchange between Joyce Carol Oates and novelist and Elon Musk? No. It was this fascinating exchange. I wish I had the quote in front of me, but she just trolled him on his own site and said,

isn't it interesting that you can have all the money in the world? But you never seem to post about the things that normal people. people like pets or a film they saw or a book they read or just like any of these sort of things, like just basic enjoyment. And it really got under Musk's skin and he started posting about movies for a while. But I do think that there is this divide where we, like not only do we see it's just this incredibly bad behavior from the wealthiest people in the world who clearly, you know, don't deserve the reverence that they were given. But we also see that they seem kind of miserable like incapable of enjoying everything that they have. And there was this moment when Bezos was talking

to William Shatner. And William Shatner had just came down from one of Bezos's rockets. And he wanted to talk about what he had seen. Like he was like, whoa, like it's mind-blown, like, you know, overview effect of like fragile, blue marble. And Bezos was like, just wanted to like spray champagne. And it was like something is missing. Like there's a sort of a fundamental, failure to appreciate, like that which is irreplaceable. And that failure seems to me to be very connected with the willingness to just replace art with AI, replace universities with AI. Why are we not pausing to just be like, hey, like, I know universities aren't perfect, but it was this idea that people could have a time in their life where they could just,

like, read and think, and shouldn't we have a conversation about whether or not we want to get rid of that whole concept? And so, I think there is something, you know, what you were saying before about the opportunities. I think there's huge political opportunities to speak into that which is irreplaceable, that which you can't put a price on. I'm not a nationalist, but I refer to these tech oligarchs as traitors because I think they're traitors to creation. I think that there's something broken where they're not actually appreciating the beauty of this world. In the Epstein files, there's an exchange between, I think it's Bannon, who he really did not like Pope Francis. You know, Pope Francis really spoke into this with his encyclical on ecology.

Like, I think that he was such a remarkable leader in really identifying the need to connect the irreverence for the natural world and its vulnerability as a spiritual duty, whatever you believe, it's a spiritual duty. and it's a profound betrayal not to cherish the natural world. And what I see running through all of the emergent movements in this era, like whether it's the Mamdani campaign, or whether it's the anti-ice protests in Minneapolis, or the data center movements, it's like this, we cherish where we live. We cherish our water.

We cherish our land or soil. And so it's- The values of our city? Yeah. It's a rootedness. a whitewash either. Like people are rooting down where they are and learning their histories, including the really difficult histories, right? Like there was a lot that's come out in Minneapolis, like birthplace of the American Indian movement. Minnesota was the site of the largest mass

hanging in U.S. history of Dakota men. And sort of connecting that history with ice, it's a live-action history lesson, right? And it's looking backwards. and forwards, I think, at the same time. And that's, I think, the move that we need to be able to do is like, okay, where are we, where do we want to go? I think it's a good place to end. Always our final question. What are three books you recommend to the audience?

All right, so this is a little bit obvious, but Empire of AI by Karen Howe. It's just such an incredible combination of just on the ground, globe-trotting, investigative reporting, making the material inputs and human inputs of AI visible, but then it has this big idea thesis around empire building, which I think is really true. I guess we've been talking around this, but my friend Molly Crabapple has an absolutely brilliant book coming out called Here Where We Live is our country, the story of the Jewish Bund. And it's available for pre-order. It comes out in April. And I think it gets at what an alternative story of Heerness could be of really committing to hear, which is what the Jewish Labor Bund was doing between the wars.

And the third book is a book called Fire Alarm, reading Walter Benjamins on the concept of history by Michael Lowy. And Walter Benjamine is the, this is the text that he wrote right before he took his own life, fleeing the Gestapo in 1940. And it gets at this idea of the way history doesn't repeat but compounds in Benjamines' term piling wreckage upon wreckage. Naomi Klein, thank you very much. Thank you so much, Ezra. This episode of Ezrakan show is produced by Jack McCordick. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris. Our senior audio engineer is Jeff Gelb,

with additional mixing by Amund Zahoda. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show's production team also includes Annie Galvin, Marie Cassione, Marina King, Roland Hu, Kristen Lynn, Emmette Kellbeck, and Jan Kobel. Original music by Pat McCusker.

Audience strategy by Christina Samaluski and Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times opinion audio is Annie Rose Strasser.