We should call this what it is: fascism

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1:20The New Statesman.

1:29Hey Naomi, it's Olly Dougmore at The New Statesman. There is so much I want to talk to you about and whilst this isn't the only component part of it, I've been having this personal dilemma myself in a British context, right, which is the extent to which we use the word fascism to describe what is happening now. I've gone back and forth myself about it. because I feel like the 1930s were a really quite specific political phenomena, and I'm not sure that the sort of contextual factors that were happening at that time are present now. But then I also feel like I don't really have the vocabulary otherwise to talk about what's happening at the moment.

2:09So I would love to tease that out with you. And then side note, something else I'm really interested in, these kind of, you know, three core groups, right, of religious fundamentalists, the tech bros, the oligarchs, and ethno-nationalists. And on the one hand, whilst I view them as kind of the three component parts of the MAGA coalition, there's also clearly a role for them in your book as well. So, look, there's loads for us to talk about. I'm really excited, honored even, to have you in the studio. Really looking forward to it. See you later. Bye.

2:39Naomi Klein: Hi, Ali. I'm looking forward to seeing you again in studio, in your new studio. And I'm happy to unpack both of those themes. I have been discussing the weight of the term fascism with a few different people leading up to this. So I've got some thoughts. Yeah, see you soon. Since the publication of No Logo in 1999, a critique of big brands and consumer culture, Naomi Klein has been one of the most influential voices in leftist politics in the world. In the past three decades, she's explored the intersection of capitalism, war, climate and conspiracies. Now, in her latest work and first written collaboration, she turns to fascism.

3:28As she sees it, we've entered end times fascism, a perfect storm of the rise of right-wing authoritarianism, tech evangelism and ever-growing inequality. The most powerful people in the world are preparing for the end of the world, she warns. An end they themselves are frenetically accelerating. It's a difficult conversation to have contemplating the destruction of our world. But if there's one person who can articulate this clearly and precisely, it's Naomi Klein. And if you enjoyed George Monbiot in last week's episode, speaking about watching tuna jump from his kayak, well, stick around. Somehow me and Naomi also get onto the beauty of fish.

4:08I'm Olly Dugmore, and you're listening to The Exchange from the New Statesman. I hope you enjoy the conversation.

4:16Naomi Klein, hello. How are you?

4:18Naomi Klein: I'm good. How are you? Yeah, not too bad, thank you. Really glad to have you here. Thank you. Glad to be here. So you've written this book, End Times Fascism, artfully placed over your shoulder there, and we can see from the cover it's you, but it's also you in collaboration with Astra Taylor. And this is your first collaborative work in that sense of book like that. So tell me why. Why did you want to collaborate on a project like this? Um, well, we wanted to do it in a timely as a timely intervention. It's, you know, it's a pretty urgent intervention about the stakes of what we are up against, not just in the United States, because, you know, we live in the world that is very much affected by what happens in that country.

5:08Naomi Klein: I live in Canada. they're threatening to annex us. But even if I didn't live right next door, I think we do all need to pay attention. And also what we're describing in the book, we're arguing is a global phenomenon. But within the US, it really matters. We wanted to get it out before the US midterms even to sort of give people a framework. And Astra is a friend and a collaborator, a comrade, has different areas of expertise for me, has been studying democracy for a long time. Her last book was on economic insecurity, which is a real driver of this fascist alliance. And so we were able to kind of divide and conquer and edit each other's work and put the book together pretty quickly.

5:59Naomi Klein: And people keep remarking that there's events fairly recent that we're analyzing. and yeah it's an intervention and so we we we combined efforts and uh and it was fun to to have it's great to have a collaborator on a book like this because it's also scary so we could take turns just freaking out and the other one could just be like we're gonna get through calming each other calming each other down yeah obviously we'll talk about some of the some of the ideas that you mentioned there not least the kind of obviously we're talking in the uk and i might be inclined to say the sort of transatlantic nature of the of the of the new and hard right but you're right to say that it's it's global and not just in that sense but before we do i am interested if you could talk a little bit more about that collaborative process like how did your creative process as a writer yeah change so the framework itself i had already sort of like this framework of trying to find what unites the religious uh hard right and the Christian Zionists, Messianic Jews, with the tech oligarchs and the bunkering of the nation, like that, those elements, I was actually already working on a piece about that for The Guardian, which ended up being the piece that extended into this.

7:16Naomi Klein: But I was really, I think, it was such an overwhelming time that I just couldn't, I just couldn't do it, honestly. Like, Like I was, I, the news was changing so quickly. This was just in the first couple months of the first, of Trump's second term. And I was just drowning in it. I just, I could not tame the beast to just like get this distilled. And I had did a public event with Astra and was, I was trying to name the fact that I I really think that climate breakdown is really central to this feeling of kind of scarcity, seeing migrants as invaders, bunkering the nation, looking outward for like supplies.

8:07Canada's got water.

8:09Naomi Klein: Ukraine's got critical minerals. Greenland's got all of it and oil. And just this kind of sense that this was not just like old school colonialism, but just this kind of supersized prepping. And then, of course, you've got Elon Musk at Doge, and he thinks that his Labus Rom is on the moon. And we were just chatting about this, and Astra said, you know, Musk wants to, he wants, he keeps saying he wants us to be multi-planetary, but what he wants is for humans to eke out a living on two dead orbs. After they've finished with Earth, it'll be drained of life. And then they want to go to Mars, which is essentially like a cancerous planet, incredibly hostile to life.

8:55Naomi Klein: And she's like, I'd rather live on a multi species planet here on Earth. And I was like, Astra, can you please help me? I'm really having trouble with this article. I mean, she's a great writer. And, you know, is responsible for some of the zippiest lines, like, you know, they're not just building the arcs, they're conjuring the flood is an asterism. So yeah, so she came in and kind of saved me on that piece. But so the process was like, honestly, at that point, I had dumped 10 ,000 words into a document. And, you know, she came in. But then on the book, which like, so that essay, which was called The Rise of End Times fascism that came out in April, 2024, went viral.

9:38And a lot of people asked us at that point to write a book. And we were feeling that we didn't want to spend that much time in the brains of

9:48Naomi Klein: some of these people like Stephen Miller or Palmer Luckey, who is the kind of sort of, is he the CEO or the main designer of the company Anderle, which is an automated weapons company. You know, it kind of combines Christian nationalism with automated weaponry in a way that is quite menacing and demonstrates the weapons on YouTube as if they are a video game. Anyway, we're just not sure that we wanted to commit to spending more time in this world. And then at a certain point, Astra just said, you know, I'm down the rabbit hole anyway. I'm listening to the Theo Bros podcast. I can't stop. So we may as well feel like we're being productive and we're not just spectators.

10:40Naomi Klein: And that convinced me because I realized the same thing was happening with me and what was going on with tech in particular. So we kind of split up the work and we came together for some intensive writing retreats and we got it done. You know, Naomi, I don't know how you could possibly think it's depressing to spend time with Palmer Luckey in his mind, you know, a man who wears Hawaiian shirts and flip flops and has a really cool haircut and names all of his bombs after swords in Lord of the Rings. Like, you know, that's such a happy ending. I see you've been spending some time with him as well.

11:15Yeah, perhaps a little bit too much time as well. Look, you've alluded to it in your answer there. But nevertheless, you know, to be really specific for a moment, end times fascism. Is this something that is happening right now or is this something that is coming towards us? Mm-hmm.

11:33Naomi Klein: So I would just reframe it a little bit. Is this something that is already a victorious, dominant, running everything? Or is this something that is ascendant? Because it's here. We're not writing about people without power. We are writing about people who have tremendous amounts of power in the U.S. government, in the Israeli government, who have already started wars, expanded wars. and who have built out with staggering speed an AI arms race between themselves and between China. And so a great deal has been done. Cities have been occupied by masked men. Thousands of people have been thrown into dark holes and deported to countries, countries, some of them countries they have never been to.

12:41So we are not speculating about something that might happen in the future, but there are all kinds of cracks and fissures. They have not been able to do everything they would like to do. They have great vulnerabilities. And this is why we wrote the book with a sense of urgency and see it as an intervention, because the idea of writing the book was not to sort of marvel at the power and dominance of Palmer lucky, is to understand how they've gained the power that they have, the promises they've made, the broken promises, the fractures in the alliances, the ways that it is already weakening, so that it can be weakened further.

13:20So I don't think it is foretold that they will have all their dreams come true. And in fact, as we were writing the book at a certain point, we started to feel like we were racing to keep up with the opposition and the winds of that opposition. And they started to be in significant retreat in certain areas, like after the occupation of Minneapolis, which was a very, you know, where ICE, you know, was an invading army. And that was kind of the boldest move of the Trump administration. You know, this is in the wake of the Charlie Kirk assassination, which was really seized upon. That was a moment where we were feeling like things are really not going well, like when they had that memorial for Charlie Kirk.

14:11It's always useful to remember what, for instance, Stephen Miller said, you know, to that crowd. you know it was a very fascist speech and they were there was a really clear narrative after Charlie Kirk's assassination to say this was not the work of one man it was the work of the left we must crush the left we must you know they you know we are the builders they are the destroyers I mean it was it was it was a very chilling moment they send ICE agents into occupied Minneapolis, they're sure that this is going to work very well for them. They have all of their stories about how the state is being exploited by Somali people who are feeding off of the state with fraud and all these stories.

15:04And there's always a grain of truth. There was fraud, but there was a lot of lies. And people in Minneapolis just fought back with incredible organization and courage. And that was a real turning point. And that I think they have not regained the narrative fully since then of what in terms of what we're describing. And that's important. We tell that story in the book, because people need to know that you can fight back against fascism. And fascism is always a process. You know, when there's, I think there is, like, you know, you mentioned that you're, you have some discomfort about the word, right?

15:46And I think partly that's because when we think about what fascism is, if we're thinking about, you know, Europe after the First World War, and during the Second World War, we think about the maximalist moment, and we don't think about all the stages leading up to it, when fascism was not totalizing and it was not at its most violent and genocidal stage. That took years. And so we don't want to wait until they have achieved all their goals to say, hey, okay, now I think we can call it fascism. Therapy's biggest impact doesn't show up in some dramatic breakthrough. It shows up in the smallest moments.

16:31You bite your tongue instead of escalating. You put your phone down instead of firing off that text. You say what you actually mean instead of what would hurt someone else the most. Nobody applauds those moments, but they quietly change your life. That's what growing feels like, and that's exactly what Grow Therapy is here for. Grow is therapy that works, covered by insurance. Sessions average$21 with insurance, and some pay as little as$0 depending on their plan. There are no subscriptions, no long-term commitments. You just pay per session. Grow connects you with thousands of high-quality, licensed therapists across the U.S., offering both virtual and in-person sessions, nights and weekends.

17:13You can search by what matters, like insurance, specialty, identity, or availability. And you can book a therapy session in minutes and begin in as little as two days, not the national 48-day average. See if you could pay as little as$0 for therapy in seconds at growtherapy.com slash ACAST. That's growtherapy.com slash ACAST. growtherapy.com slash ACAST. Availability and coverage vary by state and insurance plan. Business is booming. Is your fulfillment ready for peak season? Switch to ShipStation now and handle more volume with confidence when it counts. ShipStation connects Shopify, Amazon, TikTok Shop, and over 200 more integrations with one platform that does it all.

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18:16Just before we get there, briefly, because we've spoken, you've alluded to the alliance there and I mentioned it as well in my intro. So just before we do, because I really want to have that conversation with you about the term, so we'll do that next. But who are we talking about here? What is that alliance?

18:31Naomi Klein: Yeah. Okay. So first of all, fascism is always an alliance. I mean, the original term in Latin, it means bundle. And it tends to be a bundle of aggrieved groups who have a sense of loss of status and power, injury. Fascism is an alliance of the injured strong. And this differentiates it from a proletarian revolution, which are uprisings of the oppressed, right? Fascism is a counter-revolution. It emerges during times of crisis when there is a threat from below is usually the conditions under which fascism rises. So the people that we're talking about as making up the contemporary fascist alliance, it's not include everybody on the right.

19:20And it doesn't include everybody who voted for Trump, but it does include three powerful factions who share some things in common and also have some really significant differences. The first group are the religious end timers. And so these are both Christian nationalists and Messianic Jews who are interpreting the planetary scale crises that are real and that we genuinely face, like climate change, pandemics, the economic shocks of a very interconnected economy. Now we've got AI. Of course, we've got nukes. By the way, these were all things unknown to Hitler and Mussolini, which is why it's important to understand that our crises are different from their crises.

20:04And our crises have changed all of our imaginaries, including the fascist imaginary, because they are in conversation with these planetary scale crises. So the end time religious folks are focused on heaven beyond, right? And they follow a theology which interprets very bad things as good things because in their religious texts, the plagues and the floods and the fires is, hey, we're here, we're coming, it's go time. And the reason they're excited, of course, is according to the stories that they believe in, that these are the conditions that are going to create the return of the Messiah or the arrival of the Messiah for the first time, depending on who we're talking about.

20:55Much of the drama in the story is focused in Jerusalem and the surrounding area.

21:03Naomi Klein: This is where the Battle of Armageddon goes down. This is where the Third Temple gets rebuilt. And so we have a section of the book describing how these forces have joined. We have this alliance between Christian Zionists and Messianic Jews in Israel and also outside who are planning very actively to rebuild the Third Temple. It figures like Ismar Ben-Gavir in Israel is in charge of national security, who makes ever more brazen incursions until the Al-Aqsa Mosque, which is the third holiest site in Islam, and also where he has said the third temple will be rebuilt. Um, so that is the first faction and they, you know, the, the Christian faction got groups like CUFI in the United States, um, Christians United for Israel, very powerful lobby, um, who have been gunning for war with Iran for a long time and are currently very happy that it is happening.

22:09Um, we heard reports from, uh, US soldiers that their commanders kept telling them in the early days of the attack on Iran, that it was the Armageddon and the bloodier the better. They were complaining because they thought there was a separation of church and state, and that they were not fighting a holy war. But in fact, they were told by some of their commanders that they were. Pete Hegseth is a very important figure in this story. So a lot of the book is about the travel from the margins to the center. These are not new ideas. There have been evangelical end timers on the margins of US politics for a long time, but not the Secretary of Defense, the American ambassador to Israel, head of national security in Israel, head of the budget in Israel.

22:55Here I'm talking about Smotritz and Ben-Gavir. So there has been a travel from margin to center. Some of these figures were considered terrorists and unable to travel because they were so associated with a Kahanist wing of Israeli politics. So they are not trying to fix any of our problems. They see crises as wonderful salutary signs that the Messiah is coming and heaven awaits beyond in their golden cities in the sky, their new Jerusalems.

23:29Naomi Klein: We were struck in listening to the tech oligarchs, and this is the second group, the tech end timers, that the stories that they were telling about AI were increasingly taking on religious overtones that mimicked these stories so precisely they verged on plagiarism. They were talking about inventing a technology, whether we're talking about Sam Altman or his friend Elon Musk, his frenemy, or some of the Google founders, that they were summoning a god a demon. You know, they're having debates about whether it's speciesist to not build super intelligence. It's weird stuff, you know, we made a little film to go with the book just because we feel like when, when we're just quoting them, we sound insane.

24:19Naomi Klein: And it's important to hear it directly from them, you know, it's not my fault that they believe these things. You know, of course, Peter Thiel is buzzing around the whole situation, talking about defeating death, you know that he's striving for immortality there's a lot of talk of uploading your consciousness into the AI seeding the stars the story they're telling whether it's a it's about ascending into the machines right or ascending to Mars in the rocket ships you know and we had the SpaceX IPO which produced the first trillionaire this is why I'm saying this is something that is happening that is amassing great power, great wealth.

25:02Naomi Klein: We can't just talk about it as something off in the future. It's significant that a figure like Musk also was at Doge and slashing foreign aid

25:17and local programs that were helping the neediest people, because we think we're seeing a story that is really about who survives the future.

25:27Naomi Klein: Not everyone's invited into the rocket ships or the AI singularity, whether or not you think it's gonna happen or not. Like it's a supremacist story of the chosen surviving, much like the end time story in the Bible, right? Not everybody gets to heaven. Not everybody is in the rapture. Lots of people get left behind. And then you have the ethno-nationalists. And that story is kind of hazier, but it is also imbued. And this is the mass base of the movement, right? Because these other groups, the numbers are smaller, the people who believe those stories. But the ethno-nationalists, and this is very present here in the UK, all over Europe, and also in parts of Latin America.

26:12the story on the hard right, whether you want to call it fascist or proto-fascist, is obsessively focused on borders, obsessively focused on migrants who are cast not as human beings in search of safety and economic opportunity, survival, but rather as an invading army. and this has been repeated and repeated in such a way that you know people barely remark on it but i think it should be considered remarkable that we are talking about refugees as invaders um so often uh this has been the discourse that brought trump to power twice the the discourse of the invasion and as somebody who's been studying the climate crisis for a long time you know this is something that we knew was coming.

27:07You know, that if you fail to act in the face of this very real crisis that is already making large parts of the world less and less inhabitable, at a certain point, you can no longer deny the reality that our world is changing. And all that is left to deny is the humanity of your fellow humans. And so I think we're seeing a sadistic form of climate adaptation where the nation state in relatively wealthy parts of the world is imagined itself as the bunker, as the savior, as the lifeboat. And I think that's really viscerally felt on an island like this one. Yeah, definitely. I mean, so let's talk about the word itself and, you know, as a piece of political vocabulary, right?

28:00because maybe I'll start by just explaining how I've been thinking about it. Because here in the UK, you've alluded to it there, but on the kind of hard right of our electoral politics, until quite recently there was basically one political party in town, which was Reform, the party led by Nigel Farage. And they are now committed to a policy platform that involves mass deportation. We're talking about tens of hundreds of thousands of people potentially being deported from the UK. And in the past, when governments have attempted to deport people, fly them to different locations, there's been a number of things that have happened.

28:39First, very often airline companies refuse to accept the charter. Second, there's a degree of civil disobedience and resistance that stops the flights from taking off. And so if you're looking at this proposed idea to deport this many people, you're sort of left asking the question of essentially like, how does that take place? How do you do it? because you can take into account the fact that people in reform have described ICE in America as the blueprint for what they want to do. But in the UK, our border force is nowhere near as militarized, is nowhere near as strong and is nowhere near as well resourced.

29:13Similarly, the police has endured austerity over the 2010s. They're not a mass mobilization organization. And so you're sort of left wondering, okay, well, if you want to get rid of that many people in Britain, you're probably talking about using the armed forces in order to do it, whether it's the RAF to run the flights, whether it's the army to go around and round these people up. And so at that point, what word do I use to describe that? If we're talking about potentially the armed forces knocking on doors, rounding up people of different ethnicities and nationalities and deporting them from the country, what do you describe that as?

29:45Now, I appreciate, I think fascism is a political term. People contest the definition. I think it's previously been described as like trying to nail jelly to a wall right and yeah whilst i think perhaps the best example of it is probably mussolini and and italy and i say that because not because i don't think the nazis were fascist but i've kind of viewed nazism as this like kind of very specific and unique thing that differs but you can talk about the importance of technology you can talk about a militarized society status symbol and then the context in which it emerged right which is like you said, economic calamity, technological revolution at that time in the 1930s.

30:21And then I think perhaps most crucially, the point where we differ now, because we have the technological revolutions and we've had economic, maybe not collapse, but certainly stagnation in the West, certainly here in Europe, is the sort of simple fact of having millions of demobbed young men return from war, return to their societies and be deeply unhappy about what they came back to and therefore be capable of being mobilized into committing street violence, you know, hunting people down the street, whether they're communists or ethnic minorities. And I appreciate I've said quite a lot here and I'm sort of, I'm not sure it answered a question.

30:56I'm just sort of offering that I simultaneously don't know how to describe what is happening without using the word, but it also feels so unique and different to where the term, the origin of where the term comes from. Okay. And this is a question then.

31:10Naomi Klein: But I want to respond to some of what you said. Okay. Well, yeah. Well, I will just kind of end, finish by saying that I have also this hesitation that if we misapply the term, that it perhaps cheapens it. And so I'm worried about that being the case. Over to you, Naomi. Sorry. Yeah. And what, okay. So you're worried about it being cheapened. What would happen if that happened? People would stop listening. Yeah. if you say so and so like this this is fascism yeah we have to resist this with all our all our worth potentially well literally if you believe that's what's happening direct action you know civil disobedience civil resistance if you believe that the country's being taken over by fascists what i'm telling you is that the only thing that has pushed these people back is exactly that right like that happened in minneapolis and in and in chicago um you know to a lesser degree where where ICE moved in less aggressively in Los Angeles, there was also a lot of pushback.

32:09But Minneapolis, it was a total occupation. I mean, it was thousands of masked ICE agents who were not the demobilized soldiers,

32:22Naomi Klein: but were the kind of, like the, you know, see themselves the kind of forgotten working class, and they were given big signing bonuses, very little training, masks to cover their faces, and pumped up by Stephen Miller and different figures in the Trump administration who certainly play with fascist tropes. And Greg Bovino walking around in his coat certainly signaled something, picking up a tear gas canister. But I think people, I don't know if people understand the extent of Minneapolis's organization and fight back. And I want to come back to how we define fascism and how much of a rupture it actually is and should be understood as, because I don't see it as exceptional as you're painting it.

33:24But so there is a history in the through line of fascism of people drawing their blinds, not responding when people get bundled into cars, and looking away and sort of knowing and not knowing in the state of double consciousness and knowing that that is what allowed fascism to grow more powerful and more sadistic. And also the other thing that you need to understand about why fascism grows more sadistic is that it is a great deal of criminality takes place. And that criminality has a velocity to it because then you have to protect yourself. You have to not end up in jail. You need to destroy the institutions that might hold you accountable or might vote you out.

34:16So the more crimes that are committed, whether they're violent crimes or financial crimes, the more further crimes need to take place. But in Minneapolis, we saw, I think, a lot of what was projected to the world were the people following the license plates and getting in the way and filming and observing. And these were the conditions that led to the murders of Alex Preddy and Renee Good. But there also, you know, what we show in the book is that there were these networks, many of it organized by churches and mosques, unions, where people set up signal groups with thousands of their neighbors in them so that they knew who was in their house and couldn't, for instance, get to the laundromat.

35:06Okay, they're going and picking up laundry. Who hasn't had a hot meal? Okay, they're bringing hot meals. whose kids need an escort to get to school? Who can't stay in their home because ICE knows where they live and needs a spare bedroom? I mean, the entire city was organized into a network of love thy neighbor, help your neighbor. It doesn't matter if you don't know them, doesn't matter where they were born, we help each other. And so that direct action was so effective and also so beautiful and moving to people who saw it, that even among the MAGA base, I mean, you start to see people standing with the protesters.

35:46I mean, they weren't just protesters, they were organizers. It was a resistance movement saying, I voted for Trump and this isn't what I voted for. And, you know, you start to see fracturing among the influencer class, the MAGA influencer class, some people like this has gone too far, this is wrong. you know christy noem lost your job right um you know and so so i i think this it does it does demand it it does demand it and the people who have understood that it demands this type of reaction are the people who are the reason it is not worse you know like they're heroes and should be lifted up as such and we're really proud to do so um so there's that but okay there is a definition of fascism that I think you've been alluding to that holds that Mussolini, who coined the term, who self-described as fascist, invented it.

36:43That it was this extreme rupture in European history, a real diversion that grew out of those crises. And there's no doubt that it was a blood-soaked, hideous chapter in European history. But there was always a counter story to the idea that it was a rupture that was being voiced by a few Europeans at the time, people like Walter Benjamin, and quite a few political leaders in the global South, and in what's sometimes called the South and the North. I mean, in indigenous communities, in Australia, in black radical communities in the United States. So here I'm thinking about W.E.B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes.

37:34Langston Hughes in 36 was saying, this thing that you're saying is a fact is that you're calling fascism and is saying is a rupture in Europe is exactly what is being done to black people in the United States. I mean, this is the 30s, not the 40s. But what he knew is what was true, which was that the Nazis had studied the Jim Crow South, which grew out of also crisis conditions for elites, right? Grew out of the Civil War, the defeat of the South, grew out of the fact that a lot of rich people lost what they considered to be their property, which was enslaved human beings. And it grew out of a fear of redistribution from below because that's what was happening in the Reconstruction period after the Civil War.

38:18Black people were gaining real political power and real economic power. And so you saw fascism that was not yet called fascism. So when Emile César, who's a Martinique poet, essayist, and politician, writes in Discourse on Colonialism, fascism is the twin of colonialism. It is the boomerang. It is the homecoming of what you've done in the colonies, right? Or Sven Lindquist writes in Exterminate All the Brutes.

38:47Naomi Klein: actually began in Europe with the extermination of, I mean, I would start with the witches myself, but, you know, he starts with the expulsion of the Jews and Muslims. But this drive to exterminate, I mean, the Germans did it in what is now Namibia against the Nama and Herero people, just 30 years before the Nazis came to power. And you have very direct lines between the Nazis. I I mean, the Nazi party and the race science that emerged out of the concentration camps in Africa that the Germans ran. So if you accept the premise that fascism has a prehistory, that it was not, in fact, a rupture in time and space that came out of nowhere, but that it came out of somewhere, it looked different because history does not move in a loop.

39:40Technology changes us. Economic conditions changes us. So this was a Fordist fascism that was introduced in Europe, and it was able to kill faster and in a more industrial way. But because history doesn't move in a loop, and now we are somewhere else, right? To your point of, okay, well, where are the organized troops, right? Where are the soldiers? I mean, you could ask that of every part of our society, right? Like we are much less organized, much more atomized. So the fascism that we have just looks like us.

40:16Naomi Klein: It's all about monetizing. Everything's online. It's influencers, not like generals. It looks like the culture it comes out of. we've got AI. We have automated mass killing now, as opposed to the Fortist factory. So if we're looking for a repeat, we will constantly say it doesn't match. So we use the image of the spiral as opposed to the loop of history. That history doesn't move, repeat on a loop. It moves in a spiral, which means it turns and it looks familiar. But every turn of the spiral, you end up somewhere different, somewhere deeper, carrying more weight, carrying more velocity. And that helps us understand why the fascism that we face is dealing with trillionaires, atomized populists, influencers fighting with each other over cliques.

41:13Naomi Klein: I mean, why wouldn't it look like us? It comes from us. Yeah, I think I might be convinced. We're going to take a short break. Stay with us. We will be back after this.

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42:54Let's talk about circling the drain. Let's talk about AI. And you mentioned the AI race already and that centrifugal force of the competition between the various companies and China too. And I'm struck as well by the sort of grand scale, almost national prepperism we've mentioned. But we could talk. And also you mentioned about how strange some of the things that Sam Altman and others have said. I've got a quote from him here in 2016. He said, I have guns, gold, potassium iodide, antibiotics, batteries, water, gas masks from the Israeli Defense Force and a big patch of land in Big Sur I can fly to.

43:39Naomi Klein: No one knew who Sam Altman was when he said that. That was actually an article about Peter Thiel. Yeah. And so you're right. Hearing it now, it does give you a slightly different perspective on it. Can you talk about AI in that sense? I mean, you have done a little bit already, but I'm sort of asking you to flesh it out a bit. This kind of idea that people may be knowingly, I mean, very recently we've seen models not being released. We've seen earnings calls, people talking to senior investors saying, you know, there's a possibility that this technology wipes us all out. And the kind of how that twins with this then survivalist prepper mindset that people like Altman and others have.

44:26I mean, it seems – how does that connect to the theory that you're proposing? Because it seems insane, does it not, to have these incredibly wealthy, powerful people being like, yeah, we're doing this thing. And by the way, it might actually end up killing everyone.

44:39Naomi Klein: And we're having an IPO next week. Would you like a share? Do you want in? Yeah. I mean, it's literally happening. So, yeah, it turns out you can IPO as long as you disclose in the risk section that your product might wipe out humanity. And that's what Anthropic is doing. Yeah. So I, you know, I think even without the more sci-fi scenarios, and I'm not dismissing them completely. I think, you know, here I'm talking about the scenarios where AI, I mean, it doesn't need to gain consciousness for this to happen. in, but just it sort of escapes all control and decides that the most efficient way that it can achieve its goals is by wiping out humanity, which is this scenario they're talking about.

45:44Even without that, this is an incredibly dangerous technology and the makers of it know it. So I just want to set aside those scenarios that are sort of dominating the news, because there's a

45:54Naomi Klein: way in which by moving the horizon of what we should be worried about away into the speculative future, we don't look at what we do know, which is that these companies have defined their success point, the point at which they reach artificial general intelligence, the race they're all moving towards, or sometimes they call it super intelligence. Trump has put a wrench in this by just renaming AI super intelligence as it currently exists. But up until now, they have been defining this point that they're working towards as the point at which the technology is able to perform the vast majority of economically productive activities.

46:37That's how OpenAI and Microsoft explain why they're building so many data centers and what they're trying to achieve. And yes, they're not making money now, but at a certain point, they're going to reach AGI. And then not only will they make money, they will completely swallow the economy. So if you look at what Anthropic is currently telling investors, they're telling investors that their future market is potentially$30 trillion.

47:08Naomi Klein: $30 trillion is$2 trillion less than the entire U.S. economy. And when Donald Trump says whoever wins AI wins it all, they truly believe this. Or at least they have convinced a lot of people with a lot of money that what they are now racing towards is not like dominating the taxi market or displacing hotels or connecting you with your friends, but everything, right? No more internet. Everything is running through their technology. It's performing our jobs. So we live under capitalism, not fully automated luxury communism. What happens to all the people who used to do those economically productive activities?

47:47Naomi Klein: So that is a kind of apocalyptic scenario, right? This is why we have Bernie Sanders going, we need a moratorium. We don't actually think that the companies that are driving towards this will have any plan to care for the people who are being economically displaced by it. And people are already being economically displaced by AI. In some cases, it's bosses who are just using it as an excuse to lay off workers. And actually, the tech is not good enough yet. But, you know, it's pretty rough time to enter the job market for a young person. So it's already having having economic effects that we should be talking about, as well as these sci fi scenarios.

48:25Naomi Klein: The other thing we know is that AI is already affecting carbon levels in the atmosphere. Last year, the International Energy Agency put out its annual global energy audit report where they tell us how we're doing on our carbon reduction targets. And the news was not good. And they said that there were two places where we're seeing unexpected increases in carbon emissions. One was the use of air conditioning. And this was particularly in the global south. And this was in response to climate change, right? We're in a kind of negative feedback loop because things are so hot. You know all about this in the UK, right?

49:06We had some pretty wild weather this summer. And, and people are using a lot more energy, it's powered by fossil fuels, it's fueling the carbon in the climate crisis. The other unexpected increase was the build out of data centers in the United States powered by fossil fuels. And this is actually what got Donald Trump interested in AI in the first place. He was not an AI guy until he had a meeting with some venture capitalists in Silicon Valley during the election campaign in 2024, when they explained exactly how much carbon they needed. And he was like, now you have my attention. And then he started describing AI as an electricity eating monster.

49:46And Astro and I found this quote, we hadn't seen anybody use it. We saw it. He used it in a speech in North Carolina on the campaign trail. He was excited.

49:54Naomi Klein: An electricity eating monster. In fact, because he's bad at math, he misunderstood how much electricity it was going to use. And he kept saying it was going to use three times as much as the entire U.S. economy. And he was so happy about this. OK, so it uses a hell of a lot of electricity, but not three times as much as all the electricity currently used in the United States. So you've got a sociopathic president who understood that this was a lifeline to the fossil fuel industry, which was facing increasing economic competition from solar, which was now as cheaper than fossil fuels for the first time.

50:34Naomi Klein: And this is what's happened. Coal burning power plants have been brought back online. Um, it has been a lifeline for LNG. You've got all these green, uh, so quote unquote, green companies like Amazon and, and Microsoft who throwing, hurling their net zero targets, uh, across the room and saying, we are now, um, going to solve climate change with AI, but, but, but, but before then we need to burn a hell of a lot of fossil fuels. So I'd like to talk about that because that is also a world ending project. And so, but I'm not, I'm not, I'm not also, I mean, there's the way it's being used within existing wars, right?

51:22So this is a problem with the sci-fi scenarios. We're not talking about the fact that in the first 24 hours of the U.S.-Israeli attack on Iran, AI, we don't know exactly which models generated 1 ,000 targets in 24 hours. We do know that in those 24 hours, a girl's school was targeted. We do know there were some old maps online that showed it as a military target. And anybody who has used AI could very easily picture this technology using some old maps and mislabeling a school. So I want to talk about that. I want to talk about the use of AI and the genocide in Gaza, which was systematic. And I'm personally not one of these people who completely discounts the sci-fi scenarios, because I know that they're building something that they don't understand and are genuinely afraid of.

52:22And I don't think you should be allowed to build things that you don't understand and you're genuinely afraid of. Seems like a pretty legitimate bar for development, I think. You're also making me reconsider what I was saying earlier about the 1930s, you know, the advent of the radio. It seems like we've got a potentially more transformative technology in our lives right now compared... I'm sorry my answers are so long. It's great. I'm very happy listening to you. Don't you worry. So we're getting towards the end of our time together. And I'm just struck listening to you talk then about Israel.

52:55And it reminded me of the last time we spoke was about doppelganger. And, you know, at the end of that, there's a chapter on Israel, which you describe as the ultimate doppelganger. And I just kind of wonder in the time since that's been published and where we are now. Perhaps if you could maybe, first of all, for people who might not be familiar, just to give us a bit of a top line of what you meant when you said that. But also in light of the last two, three years, whether that analysis has changed or updated, but I guess particularly in the context of what you've just been talking about there in terms of how AI is interplaying with it all.

53:32I mean, everything I wrote about in Doppelganger has only accelerated and worsened. The book came out a month before October 7th.

53:46And, you know, I talked about how these societies were kind of twinned and the figure of the use the figure of the doppelganger because often in stories about doppelganger, what you do is you project everything that you cannot bear to see about yourself onto your hated double. And I think Israeli society does that with Palestinians. It projects everything that it refuses to see about itself, including the accusation of genocide, accusing Palestinians of being the ones who tried to commit genocide or want to commit genocide as Israel commits genocide. and you know in the book I talk about why this misunderstanding of what fascism is this fundamental misunderstanding and refusal to look at the colonial roots of European fascism and the imperial and colonial roots of European fascism and there are consequences to that failure that refusal to understand.

54:53Like if you refuse to see what the German Nazis learned from their own colonial projects in Africa and Britain's colonial projects around the world, you know, then you will also not see how the project continues in a settler colonial project in Israel. You will call it reparations when in fact it is a continuation of these logics of apartheid, of racial hierarchy and supremacy, of unseeing the other. And that was baked in from the beginning. That was baked in with the Nakba. So I don't like being right, but like that, and these are not my ideas. This was said by Palestinians and anti-colonial leaders and scholars from the beginning.

55:55And it was a refusal, there was a refusal to see, not an inability to see, but a refusal to see, especially in the countries who only wanted to tell a story of the Second World War in which our countries, the allies, were able to cast ourselves only in heroic terms. We didn't want to know what the Nazis had learned from the Indian residential schools and the reserves and the Jim Crow South and British colonialism, we wanted to be the heroes, the superheroes who defeated the Nazis. That's the only story we wanted to tell. So we emerged from it purified instead of looking in the mirror and seeing our own contributions.

56:47And the cost of that has been borne by Palestinians. Yeah. And is still borne by Palestinians. Absolutely, yeah. Yeah. I don't know. Have you seen NASA? No, not yet. Yeah. Have you? I mean, I could go on about, yeah. I mean, it could be a whole other conversation because, I mean, also on this question of the double, because the way the film is constructed is very relevant to this because it's all about how, you know, it's shot in Tel Aviv on the rooftop of an apartment building, looking into apartment buildings in Tel Aviv.

57:33And down the beach is Gaza, and these are intelligence officers who were part of constructing and deploying the targeting, the AI-generated targeting of, well, using the targeting of individuals as the excuse to destroy entire buildings, entire. So the double is very much in the way it's shot. And I think that's very deliberate.

58:11Yeah, I mean, in the book, I invoke China Mieville's City in the City and this sort of like a city built on top of another city that you can't acknowledge or believe exists. But in the case of Gaza, being actively wiped out. And yeah, but I think that the film,

58:39it has the most evidence we've ever had just from the kind of horse's mouth of what AI warfare actually means and looks like. And I think it really needs to be evidence in a court of law. And has obviously exploded a political storm in Israel as well. Right. Like I said, the more criminal you are, the more violent you have to be, including against the people who are telling the truth. You recently said in an interview, I feel most sadness and rage at a willingness to let it all burn or to try to escape. when I see a dorsal fin of an orca slice through the waters. And we had George Monbiot. George Monbiot was sat in the chair you sat in a couple of days ago.

59:23And we talked about something very similar. We were talking about the return of bluefin tuna to British waters and how in, surrounded by all of this horror, there are these sort of moments of like almost divine inspiration and natural beauty and that that can be a sort of wellspring for political inspiration and resistance. And I just, I wonder if, this is my last question to you, Naomi, if you could talk about how beauty and probably actually specifically natural beauty informs your politics and how you think about the very somber, very serious and very upsetting themes that the book focuses on and we've been talking about for the last hour.

1:00:04Naomi Klein: Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, I think that I'm probably weird. In that I think that different people have different motivating forces. I am very attached to wild animals in terms of this, what powers me. And I like people too. Don't get me wrong. Always good to introduce that qualifier. Yeah. No, I mean, I think in this book, you know, my son, who cares very deeply also about the natural world, and challenged me after Trump was reelected on whether I had done enough in the election to keep it from happening. You know, I told him that he was so upset the night Trump was reelected. And I said to him, you know, I want you to know I've spent my whole life trying to prevent this from happening.

1:01:05Naomi Klein: And he said, what specifically did you do in this electoral cycle, though? I was like, huh, OK. So yeah, and when I went on this tour, I said, OK, do you have any messages? And he said, the stakes. Tell them the stakes. He just turned 14. But he loves orcas. He really loves seals, though. He's a seal boy. He goes paddleboarding with them. um he he uh he has challenges with peers but he's very very good with animals no he has friends too he's an awesome kid but you know we i i'm just i'm very lucky because my parents moved to british columbia when i was i didn't grow up there um my mother became disabled when when um i was a teenager and couldn't deal with um cold and snow the way she used to so they moved to this beautiful part of the world that I had never been to before to British Columbia.

1:02:00Naomi Klein: And, and maybe because, well, I look, I think we all of us in BC are sort of understand how lucky we are to live among such wildness. And, you know, we still have wild salmon. And because we still have wild salmon, we have a lot of, a lot of, I mean, all the animals agree, salmon are great. So seals, sea lions, orcas consensus salmon delicious you know they feed the trees the bears you know bring it into the forest um so we there's so much we have to lose you know and we also feel on a on a knife edge because salmon also don't do well in warm streams and so um it's all it feels so precarious it feels like it could all collapse because it could it really could i mean once the salmon are gone.

1:02:49Naomi Klein: It's all gone. So when I think about people who only see, as Musk says, we need to colonize space because you need something to look forward to. I think that is so sad for you that you don't have anything to look forward to down here. And it's an existential crisis for us and we just have to stop them. Naomi Klein, thank you so much for making time to speak to us. I really appreciate it. Thank you so much. You've been listening to The Exchange from the New Statesman with me, Olly Dougmore, and my guest, Naomi Klein. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and we will be back next week.

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