Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor

SPEAKER_1 (0:11)

Welcome to City Arts & Lectures, a season of talks and on-stage conversations with some of the most celebrated writers, artists, and thinkers of our day, recorded before an audience at the Sydney Goldstein Theater in San Francisco.

Our guests today are Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor, two of today's most significant public intellectuals. Klein is the best-selling author of Doppelganger, No Logo, and The Shock Doctrine, The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. Her critiques of globalization and neoliberalism, as well as her climate activism, have made her a powerful voice of the progressive left. Astra Taylor is co-founder of The Debt Collective, a union fighting to cancel debt, and the author of several books, including The People's Platform, and Democracy May Not Exist. She's also the creator of documentary films like Examined Life and Zizek.

On September 22, 2026, Klein and Taylor came to the Sydney Goldstein Theater to talk about their new book, End Times Fascism. The conversation was hosted by Poulomi Saha, a professor and chair of the Program in Critical Theory at UC Berkeley. Join us now for a conversation with Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor.

Naomi Klein (2:12)

Thank you.

Poulomi Saha (2:20)

Thank you so much for being here.

Naomi Klein (2:23)

Thank you so much for being here. Thank you so much for being here. We're so happy to be back in the Bay.

Poulomi Saha (2:30)

Well, the Bay is happy to have you. And you know, I was going to ask about the book first, but since you've just arrived in the Bay, I thought I would ask you about how it felt to be greeted by all of those AI billboards as you pulled into this fair city.

Astra Taylor (2:49)

What's striking to me is just how long that they've been hanging there, right?

Other places are sort of just catching up to what has been visible here for a long time. So absolutely alarming. And there's a huge juxtaposition between seeing these billboards promising a humanless future and then getting to go and stay with my beautiful family and see my real friends work here. So, yeah.

SPEAKER_6 (3:13)

Well, bad, bad billboards.

Poulomi Saha (3:15)

We're going to aim to give you a little more human tonight. And this book that you have written together, End Times Fascism, is intense. It is truly gripping and shocking in its clarity.

I really would love for you to talk to us about why you chose to write this book. I mean, in the moment where I think a lot of us wish to know less and be less in the face of catastrophe, why take up End Times Fascism? And also, what is End Times Fascism?

Naomi Klein (3:53)

You want to go for it?

Yeah, sure, let's split it up.

We thought, we didn't decide to write the book easily or lightly. We really resisted it, to be honest. We decided to write an article together in the early months of the Trump administration. We had been having these public conversations with our friends and colleagues, Kianga Mata-Taylor and Chandra Ikumunike, through Haymarket Books. We've been doing these periodic, we call them emergency town halls. We have them when things get wonky, and I've done a lot of work on shocks and how disorienting it can be when something unprecedented happens and we lose the script collectively. So it grew out of the COVID lockdowns and a feeling of we need to narrate together, and we need to get oriented together. So we started having these conversations, and we had one immediately after Trump was re-elected, and we had another immediately after the inauguration, and they were really important, I think, for both of us in terms of pushing us to map what were the continuities from the first Trump administration, what were we seeing that was new, and we definitely felt we were seeing some new things. I wrote a book called No Is Not Enough about the first Trump administration, and he wasn't threatening to annex Canada or Greenland. We were trying to understand the foreign policy, we were trying to understand the speed with which they were building out concentration camps, the quotas for mass deportations, the joy in the sadism was of another order. So, we started working with these ideas of like, that actually what we need to understand that the planet is a player in our politics, that COVID had accelerated something, a sense that we are now in the collapse, and that we need to respond accordingly, but certainly from folks like Stephen Miller and Peter Thiel and Elon Musk.

So, we, you know, neither of us are people who throw the word fascism around lightly, but we felt that it was accurate that this was a proto-fascist moment, not that they had already won and it was totalizing, but it was that we were, that this shift was significant enough to that it merited the language, but we were also trying to put our finger on the way it was intersecting with global existential crises that were not known or understood in 20th century fascism, like that, that Hitler and Mussolini did not see, like their horizon was not the end of the world, the end of humanity, their horizon was, you know, after the cleansing violence, there will be a future in a home stolen from the Jews or a farm stolen from the Slavs. They had a horizon. And we were seeing that these figures didn't seem to have one, not at least one that we would recognize, you know, it was on Mars or it was in the AI cloud. And it seemed to be following this religious template of the kind of the rapture of the chosen few ascending. And as somebody who's been involved in the climate movement for a long time in the climate justice movement, we have been warning that this form of that fascism was a foreseeable form of climate adaptation, that once you could no longer deny the reality of climate breakdown, all that's left to deny is the humanity of your fellow humans. And there were all kinds of steps along this way that brought us to this moment. It wasn't sudden, the fortressing of Europe, the offshore detention camps in Australia. But with Trump, it seemed to really be speeding up. So that's when we decided to write the article. Maybe Astra can talk about the process of deciding to turn that into a book because we didn't, yeah.