Naomi Klein on Trumpism and Our Age of ‘Unlikely Bedfellows’

27:26And 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.

28:01I 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 like 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.

28:43But 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 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. You know, 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.

29:25But 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 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.

30:09I'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 and we'll actually do whatever we want we're rich and we're keeping it and we're not going to pretend anymore.

30:47And 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.

31:27Can you meet with Ehud Barak? Right? They just like move right on. So here you have this guy who's like populist in the front stage and backstage. Mm-hmm. I mean, this is happening in 2019, this particular text message I'm talking about. How do you think about that? Yeah. 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 Musk early in this Trump administration and claims to be taking on like the tech oligarchs who are supposedly kind of polluting MAGA.

32:11You know, he has been in with his own tech oligarchs from the beginning, like with the Mercers. 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 Bannon world is really in crisis right now because of the Epstein files.

32:50And 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 in 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.

33:31And, 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 that we're in right now is built. And I don't know how you feel about that. 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.

34:03But these words describe things. And I don't think you can understand the aesthetic of Trumpism. I don't think 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 really exceptionalizing Hitler and that 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.

34:41And history doesn't repeat on a loop. It changes. It iterates. It compounds. But the reason I ask if 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 industrialists 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.

35:28A 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 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. We have to understand what are elites revolting against? Like, 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.

36:08So, 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. Marc Andreessen has talked about this directly, that the sense that on any given 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 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.

36:48He's a bit of an exaggerator, I've noticed. Well, he's describing the way things 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 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 Marc Andreessen sees the most mild accountability as an existential attack.

37:23I 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 1990s. You know, when I was writing No Logo, Marc 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 the kind of unique horror of being abused by somebody who has God on their side, right?

38:10And 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 and treason. 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 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, it's so moving to me.

38:47and the women journalists who believed them when nobody else did. And that's 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 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.

39:24It's an injury to your story. So you're describing the way we told, we told the tech titans a story about them. 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, certainly not a checkered history, the story of their nation and how great their nation 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.

40:10People 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. This is a big part of what you're describing in there. And 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?

40:47Like 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 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.

41:24We'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 where there was eviction moratorium. We had free masks and testing like kind of a taste of universal healthcare in the United States. And there is another option. And that option is screw them. This is nature taking its course. This is culling.

42:06This 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 it 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.

42:42I think even though COVID was really good for them, just in terms of their bottom lines, I actually think that what freaked 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.

43:22I 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? Diagonalism is a term, Quince Lebedien 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 Kerdanken, which means like outside of the box thinking, which is how these sort of wellness influencers and entrepreneurial kind of not traditional right-wingers made alliance with right-wing parties.

44:26And so it just speaks to these kind of unlikely bedfellows like my doppelganger and Steve Bannon, like people meeting. 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 are 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 like, substantively and aesthetically used to be at least associated with the left.

45:22But 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 curious how you thought about it then and since. It's true that the sort of organic green world is more associated with the left these days, but it's also true that there's a fascist lineage to it. And European fascists in the 1920s and 30s were very interested in all kinds of New Age health fads.

46:10But 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. You know, 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.

46:52I agree with this. I'm not trying to say that it's about hardcore communists becoming QAnon 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, etc., it becomes more institutionalized, technocratic. It believes science. It believes experts. And what it ends up ejecting is people who have profound distrust.

47:28You 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 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.

48:26And 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 was supposed to protect them from the oligarchs has been trading emails with Epstein and is part of this whole world that they've supposedly been taking on.

49:13And, 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.

49:47When 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. 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 in it, a white seer on it, so it could fly 240 miles. an hour. And I could watch them come off the cupola, 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.

50:23For 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. I mean, 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.

51:01You know, I don't feel too sorry for Mark Andreessen losing his story about the, not the, did he 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 I 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 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 is like in literature they're 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 reality starts doubling.

52:05You talk about your critiques of the left in the book, so I'll offer a critique of liberalism, which is that liberalism has become very arid. 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 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.

52:59But 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 Tallarico 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. As opposed to seeing like there's energy, there's some yearning here. How do I connect to that yearning?

53:41How 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 them 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, right? 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.

54:19It's like taking something that is 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 to 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.

54:55Because, you know, I knew him from before, like when he was a river keeper. 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.

55:36It'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. Um, 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 on the right than the left. is 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.

56:19But 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. 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?

56:54And 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 OpenAI 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.

57:31And 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 it's 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, 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 yes 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.

58:30One 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 to 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.

59:12And 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.

59:59But 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 OpenAI, 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?

1:00:38Like 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 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.

1:01:07And 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, we'll have to be nationalized.

1:01:43And I would scoff at them. I'd say, if you get to that point, there is 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 OpenAI 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. I think there is a way of understanding the Trump administration as like a tech revolt against AI regulation.

1:02:15Like that was a major driver of the decision to bankroll him. You know, it wasn't just Musk. It was, you know. And crypto regulation. Yeah, the two.

1:02:36Thank you.

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1:04:24This opens up a question, I think, about the Trump administration and the MAGA movement. And 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 we're 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 were 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.

1:05:07It 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? Yeah. Try to unwind even the ability of states to regulate it. Which is so unpopular with a base. Which is in many ways unpopular with this 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, Banning 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 be set by contradictions.

1:05:52And 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 cohered 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 was 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.

1:06:31And the fact that it's just straight-up racial profiling, so they 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 can't just well hopefully he can't get re-elected 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.

1:07:15And I think that should worry us. One of the things that 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 mentioning data centers a minute ago. I think that there's no doubt that there's 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 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.

1:08:06I 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 Kianne, Yamana Taylor, you know, who's a professor at Princeton, historian, one of the things she said immediately after the election is we have to build a more welcoming left.

1:08:45And 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. Like, 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, you know, the images we've all seen of people trailing ice.

1:09:27filming them. I mean, these are just acts of like neighborliness and welcomingness and just 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. You remember that one? Where it was like, He just went out in the middle of the night and just 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.

1:10:06Thank 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 the city, I watched, as did many New Yorkers, as driver after driver was trapped. Thank you, brother. Thank you, inshallah. debt peonage and their struggles were simply overlooked by politicians. You know, it's time to also speak to New Yorkers for whom the workday starts at night. It was just like, it's not just during a pandemic that the working class holds of New York City. You know, everyone is so cynical about those early COVID days where people clapped for health care workers.

1:10:44But 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, hold the world up. Now, clapping is not enough. They also deserve wage increases and sick days and all kinds of things they 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.

1:11:16But what you see with the Mamdani campaign is that didn't go away. you know 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 you know the thing about politics is that it can light up different parts of ourselves.

1:11:50You 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 % is 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.

1:12:29and 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.

1:13:02And 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.

1:13:43But 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 or 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.

1:14:53It'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?

1:15:38And there were contracts that were canceled because of tech worker organizing because they didn't want to be 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 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.

1:16:26And the way I think as that has kind of accelerated down a very disembodied 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 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 with RFK Jr. in 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, you know, free transit. But it's also partially just a recognition of values and aspirations and that it doesn't need to feel like this.

1:17:21Yeah. 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 like, 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.

1:18:18And 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, 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.

1:18:59why 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 in your you know what you were saying before about the opportunities I think there's a huge political opportunities to speak into to 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.

1:19:36I think that there's something broken where they're not actually appreciating the beauty of this world. And, you know, in the Epstein files, there's an exchange between, I think it's Bannon who, he really did not like Pope Francis. And, 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.

1:20:32We cherish our water. We cherish our land, our soil. And so - The values of our city. Yeah. It's a rootedness and it's not 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.

1:21:13And 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'd 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.

1:21:56And it's available for pre-order, comes out in April. And I think it gets at what an alternative story of here-ness could be, of really committing to here, which is what the Jewish labor bund was doing before, between the wars. And the third book is a book called Fire Alarm, reading Walter Benjamin's On the Concept of History by Michael Lowy. And Walter Benjamin 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 Benjamin's term, piling wreckage upon wreckage. Naomi Klein, thank you very much.

1:22:40Thank you so much, Ezra. Thank you.

1:23:13and Jan Kobel. Original music by Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Christina Samalewski and Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times Pending Audio is Annie Rose-Strosser.

1:23:36Two-time Academy Award winner Adrian Brody and Golden Globe and Emmy Award nominee Tessa Thompson make their Broadway debuts in The Fear of 13. After an acclaimed run on the West End where the Times of London gave it five stars and raved, The Fear of 13 belongs in a league of its own. This gripping new play arrives on Broadway for a strictly limited engagement. Don't miss Adrian Brody and Tessa Thompson in The Fear of 13. Tickets at thefearof13broadway.com.