Is the End of the World Now on the Table? | The Interview

We didn't write the book because we think these people are fascinating. I mean, we wrote this book because we want people to fight them and beat them. I'm David Marchese, and today I'm interviewing Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor. They've written a book together called End Times Fascism and the Fight for the Living World, which argues that a powerful coalition of tech billionaires, anti-immigration operatives, and many on the religious right have united around a shared belief that the world is ending. But rather than prevent its collapse, they want to accelerate it. We call them traitors, but not traitors to nation, not traitors to a flag or a border, but traitors to creation, like traitors to life. Klein has been a prominent voice on the left for decades, writing acclaimed books like The Shock Doctrine, which is about the link between capitalism and crisis. And Taylor is an activist and organizer who co-founded the Debt Collective, a group advocating for debtors' rights that came out of the Occupy Wall Street movement. You are not in debt because you live beyond your means, but because you are denied the means to live. Here's my conversation with Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor. But first, a quick message. If you're not a subscriber, we have some news for you. You can now explore The Times for free without paywalls during your first month in the New York Times app. Just download the app, and we hope you enjoy it. Okay, on to the interview. Astra and Naomi, thank you very much for taking the time to speak with me today, and thank you for being here. Really glad to be here. Thank you so much for having us. So the book is called End Times Fascism and the Fight for the Living World. Just to start, Naomi, the most obvious question, what is end times fascism? So end times fascism is a fascism that is very much in conversation with planetary-scale existential crises. A fascism that is taking the end of this world for granted. And I think we thought really long and hard about the politics of putting any kind of qualifier on a word like fascism. And the reason we ended up deciding that it did need that is when we really thought about how our world has changed since Mussolini declared himself a fascist. Our fascists have weapons that last century's fascists couldn't dream of. And there was no atomic bomb. Hitler and Mussolini died before the Trinity test. They didn't understand that fossil fuels were warming the planet. So our world has changed. Our world has become more dangerous. And fascism has changed in response and has kind of made peace with the idea of collapse. And now what they're fighting for is who is going to survive that cataclysm. So how does end times fascism make itself felt in the world today? The first thing I thought of was the SpaceX IPO. I mean, how does it make itself? I think for a lot of people, what resonates is like, hey, don't the billionaires have bunkers now? Aren't they somehow prepping? What is this sort of fixation on leaving the earth behind? And that the only vision of a future that seems to be on offer is a future that says, yeah, things are so messed up here that we have to get on a rocket ship and leave. Like, I don't think the idea of space exploration is inherently fascist, but I think the way it is being formulated by an Elon Musk is because it is just accepting that this is, as he puts it, he's saving humanity. What is he saving humanity from exactly? Why do we accept that this world needs escape from? I think sometimes a term like fascism can be foggy for people. It's compounded by the fact that over the last 10 or however many years, it's a term that has been used increasingly. So when someone hears you talking about end times and existential planetary risk, I think that's clear enough where that's coming from. But can you try and clarify, who are the fascists in this formulation? The question of who are the end time fascists, one thing we are clear on is it's not a dominant political worldview, even on the right. But it is a term we think applies to some of the most powerful people in the world who are leading governments and leading companies. And so part of what we try to do in the book is go, well, who is making up the end times fascist alliance today? And they are responding to the felt apocalypticism in different ways, but they are all responding to it. So in the book, we talk about religious end timers who want to hasten about the return of the Messiah, who kind of believe that they will be saved by the grace of their faith. Those are the evangelical Christian Zionists who are a very potent political force in the United States. That's Zionists in Israel who are a potent political force. So these are real groups of people with real power, messianic, yeah. And then there are the sort of tech end timers who believe that it's worth incinerating this world as long as they can build their virtual one, and that we are inevitably heading towards some sort of digital superintelligence, some sort of singularity. And there are these echoes in the story with the religious story. And then the third group we look at are the ethno-nationalists who believe that the nation is under existential threat from immigration, from cultural change, and their response is to fortress the nation, to sort of cast out the enemies, domestic enemies. And so these groups are different, right? There's contradictions, they're messy, they're not totally coherent, but they're responding to this apocalyptic, you know, sense, the sense that the world is increasingly fraught and dangerous, which it is. And they're responding by, you know, shutting down and trying to defend their group. And they've made this very dangerous alliance. Help me understand the coalition aspect, because, you know, I understand how some of these different groups share ideological traits, for example. You know, if someone were to say, like, I don't quite understand what, you know, religious nationalists have to do with Elon Musk. Is it like an ideological framework that we're putting on these people and saying, hey, like, they share these ideas? Or is there, like, actual, practical, coordinated effort between these people? Well, I would say that that effort is embodied by the Trump administration, right? I mean, if you look at this sort of awkward Frankenstein-like coalition that he has cobbled together and that brought him to power, it contains all of these elements, right? It's the massive funding coming from Silicon Valley and Elon Musk in particular, but certainly not exclusively. Then you look at the fact that he, you know, appointed Mike Huckabee, a Christian Zionist, to be his ambassador to Israel. The way he has understood that Christian Zionists are a key part of his base and the centrality of sort of advancing Messianic Zionist narratives in Israel, dating back to his first term when he moved the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem. That was huge in the evangelical community. And so how does the coalition hold together? I mean, ask Donald Trump. He's built this Frankenstein monster. We're just trying to understand it. Like, what are the common elements? I mean, if we think about the tech billionaire class, right? And particularly in Silicon Valley and that sort of moment in Trump's inauguration where some of the wealthiest people in the history of the world are lined up. The second inauguration. And this sort of moment of confusion of like, what exactly is going on? The first time Trump was president, many of these same billionaires were criticizing him. They were upset when he left the Paris Climate Accord. Zuckerberg was condemning him. Bezos was launching an Earth Prize. They were positioning themselves as the people who were going to save the planet. And one of the things we're arguing is as the world changes, our elites are changing, are becoming more fascist, are attracted to ideas that justify the idea that only some people are going to make it. But that is not the same story they were telling even just five years ago, right? So we need to pay attention to the way the story is changing as our world changes. I think a question about that would be, you know, if someone were to say, hey, you know, five years ago, the tech elite were not attempting to curry favor with Trump in the same way that they were more recently. I could say, well, yeah, they're responding to incentives to want to cozy up to him because that's better for their businesses. So can you unpack like the fascism element there? And as opposed to just people pursuing their incentives? Well, I think they're really entangled. And I don't think it's as simple as saying that, OK, they're lining up behind him because they know who he is and it's good for them because they could have done that last time and it would have been the same dynamics. Very few of them did. They also helped get him elected. I mean, in some cases, certainly in the case of Elon Musk and the huge amounts of money that he spent, but not only him. There was a real change. And we track this in the book of, you know, like several people played key roles, including Marc Andreessen. JD Vance was very much a conduit as somebody who is a creature of Silicon Valley, worked with Peter Thiel, had his own VC firm. He was celebrated as the VC VP pick among many of the people we write about. But there was a turning point during the campaign when a lot of people who had not supported Trump, who identified as lifelong Democrats, got behind him. We make the case that a lot of it had to do with AI. And what they understood was how ravenous AI was when it came to energy. And they understood that Trump, as a guy who loves the fossil fuel industry, they understood that he would open the floodgates for this AI arms race. And so that's an economic incentive. But I would also argue that there's a consciousness that the business model that they have embraced is a business model that is uniquely antithetical to a shared human existence. And I say this because these are the same people who were launching Earth Prizes a couple of years ago, right? They understand the climate crisis and they understand that what you feed AI is energy. It's overwhelmingly being fed with LNG and coal. And because they understand the climate crisis, they understand that that is going to do exactly what we're seeing right now, set whole cities on fire, create situations where huge parts of the world is unlivable. Humans are creatures of story. You need a story that will justify that kind of sacrifice of humans. So the increasingly brutal views that we're hearing from people like Elon Musk, where you just seem to be discounting huge swaths of humanity, or even actively playing a role in destroying USAID at the cost of perhaps, I mean, he would say no lives, but perhaps because he doesn't count African lives, right? These things go together. You need a story that discounts those lives. That is a fascist story. That is a story that has ideas about whose lives count and whose lives can be discarded. And I think it's quite active. It's not just like, oh, we're going where the money is. The money is making them fascist. It is important to note that far-right ideology has a long history in Silicon Valley, actually. It didn't start at the second inauguration. And a figure like Peter Thiel has been cultivating that worldview alongside David Sachs by investing in promoting a certain philosophical paradigm, right? In 2009, he wrote an article that is pretty famous for good reason, that basically says democracy and freedom are incompatible, right? So kind of staking his claim that if he has to choose between democracy and capitalism, he'd choose the latter. We talk in the book about a conference that Thiel's venture capital firm hosted just before the election in 2024. That was called Hereticon, a conference for thought crime. And the tagline was, maybe if you're not trying to destroy the world, you're not trying hard enough. I mean, their language, we've been wrestling with how to talk about what they say because some of it is so nuts that you sound a little kooky quoting them. But Elon Musk saying humanity, it increasingly looks like humanity is a biological bootloader for digital superintelligence, right? Or that we should rejoice in the fact they're building the digital beings who will come after humanity. Or Sam Altman saying that AI takes less energy to train than a human. One of the things that is always unfair in this comparison is people talk about how much energy it takes to train an AI model. But it also takes a lot of energy to train a human. It takes like 20 years of life and all of the food you eat during that time before you get smart. Yes, or that the world will be covered in data centers, right? I mean, so this is... There's so many ideas of what you're saying that it's hard for me to keep all my follow-up questions in my head. But the one that I'll raise now is, how do you disentangle or parse what might be trolling from actual ideological views? The Hereticon conference. My view is they want to be our overlords and they want to be our edgelords. Both and. And I think we've seen at this point that we do have to take some of the trolling seriously, right? If we... You can be a joke and be really dangerous at the same time. You know, the last book I wrote during the pandemic was about... It came out in the fall of 2023 and it was about a group of people who were dismissed as sort of conspiracy nuts and people who shouldn't be taken too seriously. And then less than a year and a half later, they are running the U.S. government. So I think that there is an impulse, like when you see lots of really extreme things, to just be like, cooler heads will prevail. But then if you look at who the U.S. Secretary of War is and what he's been doing or who is running health and human services and the effects that it's already having on communicable diseases and foodborne illnesses, like I don't think it... Even though we're at the New York Times and everyone is very calm here, you know, I think the reason... Speak for yourself. The reason... Comes in degrees. I think the reason not to be alarmist about alarming rhetoric is that you want people to take it seriously when there is a serious threat. And I think that there's enough... There are enough alarm bells going off right now that I don't think it's a good time to self-soothe with ideas that maybe that's just something they're saying to get a provocation. I think there's enough real-world action. If you look, as Astra said, they want to be our overlords and our edgelords. Obviously, the prototype of this is Elon Musk, but when he was head of Doge with his chainsaw... This is the chainsaw for bureaucracy. Chainsaw! You know, he really did slash entire programs that millions of people rely on for healthcare and nutritional support. I want to ask an Elon Musk question. I mean, he truly is a defining character of our age, for better or worse. And I think people who like him, which there are a lot of people who like him, well, actually, there's a real romance and grandeur to the idea of SpaceX rockets and colonizing, or even just humanity exploring outer space. Or somebody said to me, because I was talking through the ideas in the book with some of those folks, and somebody said to me like, well, Elon Musk is out there saying more people should have more babies because of population decline. How does that fit with somebody who's interested in hastening some sort of cataclysm? Or another person brought up the example of... Certain babies. Certain babies, yeah. Another person brought up the example of... That's a hallmark of fascism. Perhaps the Tesla self-driving cars are a lot safer than human drivers, and that could save tens of thousands of lives every year. And I just wonder if there is, if any of those things for you complicate the idea of what Elon Musk really believes in and how he acts on the world. Because to me, it looks incoherent more than anything else. Yeah, I mean, I don't want to do too much work to try to make him coherent. I think that's not my job. But I do think he has a vision of the future. I think he's obsessed with the vision of the future that he sort of grew up with and kind of pulpy science fiction and comic books and wants that future. He feels it was promised. We were promised flying cars. Where are my flying cars? Right, which Peter Thiel famously said. So the idea that he has a vision of a future does not mean he's not a fascist. I think that he has a vision of a future for a subset of humanity who get to enjoy the implants and upgrades and flying cars and rocket ships. It's not that he's completely nihilistic and doesn't believe there is a future. He believes in a kind of VIP bespoke future that is based on this hierarchy of humanity that allows him on the one hand to say that people in the so-called West should have more babies but slash programs that are providing food and medicine to children in Somalia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Those things are happening at the same time. But I think what you're getting to is the idea that there's something that appeals to people about the idea that we could be interplanetary. We share that. We share the idea that people need something mythic and something to look forward to. We just think it should be something to look forward to here on earth. And it should be inclusive and sustainable. You don't hear him talk about how the great future we could have here. It's all out there. And there are very few people in politics today or in the corporate world who are talking about a vision that feels credible for how we could live together. It's like either it's apocalypse or it's Sam Altman who realizes maybe he talked too much about destroying everyone's jobs and is now saying AI is a magic genie that's gonna grant you through wishes and something that feels like straight up fairy tale. And I think we believe it's the job of a credible political project of the left to put forward a vision of the future for how we live together well on this planet. Where we aren't engaged in some project of triaging who gets to live and who gets to die. Where we actually figure out how to share our resources and thrive. It's possible to do that. We wanna believe in the future. We have a right to believe in the future. And there's something treasonous about not believing in the future. So I wanna ask you a version of a question I asked Rebecca Solnit earlier this year, which has to do with sort of the language and terminology people use to describe their political opponents. And I had said to her, asked her something about, when you use such severe language or harsh language, do you maybe risk just pushing people into their respective corners? And she basically said, without using the words, that's kind of a dumb question. You gotta call a spade a spade. And yet I wanna ask you a version of that question. Do you have any concern that using language like end times or fascism makes it easier for people perhaps to dismiss your arguments? This book is a warning and it's not about a bunch of fringe characters. It is, we are quoting in their own words, the wealthiest people in the history of the world. The president of the United States, the prime minister of Israel. We have watched as people with previously like quite marginal belief systems, we've watched them gain more and more power, political and economic, and move from the margins to the center of power and to gain very powerful roles in government. I mean, you say end times is such an extreme word. Half of Christians in America believe we're in the end of times. It might seem like a marginal belief system where you're sitting, but these are not marginal ideas. That's a funky statistic though. I was looking at it because I saw it in the book. I was like, how can that be true? And I think it sort of is very dependent on how a given Christian interprets end times. A Catholic might believe that we've been in end times since Jesus ascended 2,000 years ago. So it might be a little murky to say, you know, half of Christians believe we're in end times. It's not necessarily the same thing as meaning they want to or like accelerate it. But I just don't think that these are marginal ideas. I think that these are some of the most powerful stories in our culture. They're incredibly deeply encoded. Like whether we're religious or not, they're kind of in us. And there's a kind of almost drive to repeat them because the stories are so powerful. So, you know, part of what we're saying is like, we need mythic stories of our own. You know, it can't just be like, yeah, we need universal healthcare and, you know, we need affordable lives, but we also need myth. We also, we need to recover our sense of wonder and awe at this world. And so, you know, that's why it's worth looking at it. I think there's things that we can learn from what is working, what is resonating. The idea that the end times is kind of like a story that we all, it's just in our bones in some sense, I think jibes with a feeling that so many of us have that yes, we are in a serious ecological crisis in addition to whatever other crises we're in at the moment. And if that's something that huge numbers of people feel across the political spectrum, why is it the case that the left does not seem to have been able to harness that apocalyptic energy in the way that the people on the right that you're pointing to have been able to both harness it and, you know, grab control of so many of the levers of power? I think building multiracial democracy is harder than building fascism or authoritarianism, right? Because we don't want to just grab the levers of power. You want to share power and you have to figure out how to live together. So I think our project is just inherently more difficult. And I think that the, I mean, in answer to your question about why can't, why hasn't the left harnessed it? I mean, I would say as somebody who's been on the left for a long time, that we've gotten closer than at any other point. You know, we've gotten, you know, heartbreakingly close, right? I mean, for those of us who were part of the Bernie Sanders campaign, I was living in the U.S. at the time and was part of that campaign as, you know, a surrogate for his Green New Deal program, which I felt was the kind of response that both addressed emissions and people's economic needs. But, you know, in politics, like you don't get a prize for second place. But I do think that this wave that Mamdani has helped lead and this wave of DSA candidates who are winning in the primaries speaks to the fact that the left is a lot more serious about fighting fascism, right? The willingness to call it fascism, to call it genocide, to use the words, describe reality, are actually far better at fighting fascism than a kind of a supposedly safe centrism that is collapsing around the world because it does not speak to people's lived reality and what they're seeing with their own eyes. So, yeah, I mean, the language is not the end in itself. It's what the offer is in the face of it. It's that combination of understanding the threat and understanding that there's actually something that we can do about it together. — You also point out in the book, and I think you mentioned earlier in the conversation, that the end times fascists, or who you call the end times fascists, still represent sort of a minority, even on the right. So where do you see opportunities on the right for pushback? Or do you see those on the right as already actively, in any way, pushing back against end times fascists? — The most awkward alliance is around the big tech companies and the MAGA base. They don't like the idea of being tracked by their phones, right? So there's definitely opportunities there. We are seeing it in these local meetings, which is really interesting to me because, you know, having done this research around the anti-vaccine, anti-masking, anti-COVID health measures movement during COVID, which then sort of rolls into a movement for book banning and anti-trans rights and all of that, those were the issues that were making people storm City Hall, you know, and go to a small town hall meeting that usually three people show up for and suddenly there are hundreds of people there screaming and they're furious. Today, the thing that is bringing people into their town hall meetings is opposition to the data center down the road. — Yeah, I mean, you know, we talk about data centers actually being sort of icons of this futurelessness, right? I mean, it used to be during the 20th century, it was like there was a kind of bargain. You'd get a factory in the town and that meant sure there was some pollution and maybe some tax abatements, but there were also jobs that supported your family even if the wages weren't the best. And, you know, going to Memphis, for example, where Elon Musk now has three supercomputers, but meeting the people there who are fighting against this development because Musk is powering them with gas turbines, you know, he's being sued for illegally operating them, right? So they're releasing a lot of toxins into the air and driving by them, they're just these huge, you know, enormous, right? Some of them are as big as 30 football fields and there's just, there's basically no jobs. Like, what is the offer? — And are there signs that you would be on the lookout for, sort of little flares on the horizon that would give you clues to the influence of end times fascists receding? Like, what would you see that would make you think, okay, their power is diminishing? — I mean, I think Minneapolis is a great example. I think that the Trump administration went into that assault thinking that it would be greeted gleefully, at least by their base, and that people would thrill at the video and, you know, sometimes AI-generated images being circulated celebrating the violence. And actually, they overreached, you know? They shot people in the street and even some of their base were appalled by that. So I think we're seeing signs that they're definitely not infallible. I mean, ultimately, what we would like to see is some of these people being held accountable. And this goes back to the attacks on the ICC and the criminal court and this constant assertion, well, we have immunity, right? That's why it matters when Mamdani says that Netanyahu belongs in The Hague and he should be arrested. — As I've said, I agree with the ICC that Benjamin Netanyahu should be arrested and tried for his crimes. — For too long, we have not put forward our own vision for accountability, a serious one, using these institutions. You know, what would it mean to really hold war criminals accountable and have it apply across the board, not only to people in Africa who commit crimes or the Philippines, but also the United States, also Israel? It would be the beginning of addressing such deep disillusionment right now because we are up against a very widespread feeling that there's nothing you can do, right? So doing a few things starts to break that spell, and it really does matter. — Yeah, even what you just said, we have this widespread feeling that there's nothing you can do. When you were just now saying, how could American politicians be held accountable by the ICC, my first thought is, well, that'll never happen. — Right, but I think that— — I'm not saying it should or shouldn't happen. I'm just saying it's not— — Well, I mean, sometimes things that seem improbable and impossible happen because people organize to make them so. — I don't think— I mean, we didn't write the book because we think these people are fascinating. I mean, we wrote this book because we want people to fight them and beat them. I mean, we think they're— you know, we use this word that neither Astra nor I have ever used before because we're not nationalist people, which is, we call them traitors, but not traitors to nation, not traitors to a flag or a border, but traitors to creation, like traitors to life. And so we spent a lot of time, as Astra said, looking at where this project is weak. Where it's strong is money, weapons. I mean, there's a lot to be worried about, right? We're dealing with trillionaires. We're dealing with people where that wealth has merged with the most powerful military in the world. But even compared to— and I'm not nostalgic for the last century's fascists. Let's be clear about that. But they had an offer to their base. You know, they were like, let's steal the homes of the Jews and the Slavs and live happily ever after, you know, in your labors from Ukraine, right? The people we're calling end-times fascists don't have an offer to their base beyond really this sadism. And one of the through lines of the book is that the end-times fascists are, you used the word, sort of betraying the world and the planet on which we live. And they're not seeing the beauty of it and the things that truly make life worthwhile. So at the risk of trying to bring things home on a slightly sentimental note, what are the things that just you individually think, oh no, this is what they're missing. This is what makes life worthwhile. If only they could see what I see. I mean, I think a big one, and we've touched on this already because it's a classic fascist trope, which is the fear of the city, the fear of the urban. The fear of encountering people from different walks of life, strangers. And I think there's tremendous pleasure in that. And I do think that we read about at length just how powerful the Mom Dining campaign was in kind of re-enchanting the city and not romanticizing it, not saying it's perfect. Yes, the subways have problems, but also, wow, you get to ride a subway and who knows what will happen and it will take you to some amazing place where you can eat something you can't make at home. And so I think just encountering and not fearing diversity, but reveling in it. And absolutely, this question of the more-than-human world of reveling in nature. But Naomi lives somewhere with really good nature, so I feel like she just has to take that one. Oh my God, where to start? Yeah, I do. I live in British Columbia. And my parents moved out there. I'd never been to this fairly wild part of Canada where they moved to when I was already in my 20s and have just become very committed to it. So I think where I feel, honestly, I feel the most sadness and rage at a willingness to let it all burn or to try to escape it is when I see a dorsal fin of an orca slice through the waters of the Salish Sea where I'm fortunate enough to live or just any of the sort of psychedelia of this part of the natural world. I mean, on the very, very dark nights, the water is completely bioluminescent and you look at your own limbs and they're made of pure light, like no mushrooms required. So to me, there's something, I think it is a tragedy for them and an existential crisis for us that the people who are closest up to the levers of most power on this planet are not enraptured by the beauty that is already here and all around us. Given the book, enraptured, this may be a telling choice of words, but thank you very much for taking all the time to speak with me today. I really appreciate it. Thank you. Thanks for having us. That's Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor. Their new book, End Times Fascism and the Fight for the Living World, will be published on September 15th. You can subscribe to our YouTube channel to watch all of our episodes, including this one. This conversation was produced by Paola Newdorf. It was edited by John Woo. Mixing by Sophia Landman. Original music by Dan Powell and Marian Lozano. Photography by Philip Montgomery. The rest of the team is Priya Matthew, Seth Kelly, Joe Bill Munoz, Wyatt Orme, Amy Marino, Eddie Costas, Gaby Contreras, Kathleen O'Brien and Brooke Minters. Our executive producer is Alison Benedict. Next week, Lulu talks to Aaron Sorkin about his new movie, The Social Reckoning. I'm David Marchese, and this is The Interview from The New York Times.