You Might Also Like: Stateside with Kai and Carter

Naomi Klein (0:00)

Our crises are different than the crises of the 1920s and 30s, which were immense. But the idea of world ending was not so much a part of the fascist story. Now, you have religious fundamentalists who are welcoming war in Iran and Palestine as signs that this world is ending, and they're about to get their palace in the sky.

You have people like Elon Musk saying, I believe in the future, it's on Mars, you know, but it's sort of writing off this world. So this is different.

Carter Sherman (0:39)

Welcome to Stateside with Kai and Carter. I'm Carter Sherman.

You will hear Kai and I talk a lot on this show about the things that keep us up at night. Our billionaire tech overlords, authoritarianism, the destruction of the planet, and as of this past week, whether AI will destroy humanity in the next decade.

All of this can feel very heavy and it can leave me wondering beyond insomnia, how am I supposed to respond to this? How can we challenge our current world order? Today, I'm joined by two people who have written a book that seeks to answer exactly those questions. Naomi Klein is a journalist and author who writes for The Guardian and Astra Taylor is an activist and documentarian. Together, they are the authors of End Times Fascism And The Fight For The Living World. Naomi, Astra, welcome to Stateside.

Astra Taylor (1:25)

Thanks for having us.

Naomi Klein (1:26)

Thank you.

Carter Sherman (1:27)

So this book, End Times Fascism, it actually grew out of an essay that you guys wrote for The Guardian. And I wanted to ask, what made you decide to turn that essay into a book to devote 300-plus pages to this topic? And Naomi, I want to put this question to you because you are a columnist for The Guardian and I assume most of your columns do not end up becoming full-length books.

Naomi Klein (1:48)

Yeah, and I mean, it was a long read, to be fair. It wasn't a column.

And it was, yeah, I started talking to the Guardian team not long after Trump was re-elected. And the response was really overwhelming. People were very, I think, appreciative because the Trump method is to flood the zone. We've known that for a long time. And so everyone just feels constantly destabilized. They don't know what to take seriously and what not to take seriously. And that article, The Rise Of End Times Fascism, which ran in The Guardian, provided a framework. It was like, okay, there's these three groups. There's the religious end timers. And then what's going on with big tech? Because big tech originally was kind of boring with Trump. And now they're all lined up. And what are they getting out of it? So I think we understood that AI was part of it. We understood that there was a weird kind of parallel between the biblical dream of ascending to the clouds and the tech dream of ascending to the digital cloud, right?

Carter Sherman (3:04)

Cloud singular.

Naomi Klein (3:06)

Yeah. We understood that and we wrote about it in that piece. But I don't think we understood the extent of the AI frenzy and how much energy it was going to consume.

And so immediately after that piece came out, we started getting approached by publishers asking us to just turn it into a quick book because it went so viral, right? And we both were like, that sounds terrible. Like we don't want to spend that much time in the brains of these nihilists. Like we just, we were ready to move on. But then at one point, you know, we were just hearing about it more and more. And Astra said, you know, I'm down the rabbit hole anyway.

I can't stop, like Astra went really deep into like the ethno-nationalist, you know, living in the South and really feeling how proximate it was.

And you said like, if I'm listening to it and following it, I may as well do something with it. Cause right now it's just scary. And I think that that was really the deciding factor for me personally about whether or not to like deepen the research. We knew there was a lot more that we just scratched the surface. It was accelerating. But realizing like, do we want to be spectators to this or do we want to contribute something that might help a little bit?

Carter Sherman (4:19)

So why did you decide to write this book together? I mean, obviously you started this partnership when you were writing the essay. But why did you feel like actually doing this as a team is the way to go when approaching this as a full book-length treatment?