In the 21st century, the world is being taken over by a “noxious alliance” of three powerful groups—religious end-timers, techno-fascist end-timers, and ethno-nationalist end-timers—who have one thing in common: they want to see the end of the world as we know it, and they will destroy the world if no one stops them. TRNN speaks with internationally renowned activists and writers Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor about their new book, “End Times Fascism: And the Fight for the Living World.”
Credits:
- Pre-Production, Videography: Maximillian Alvarez
- Post-Production: Maximillian Alvarez, David Hebden
Transcript
The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. It will be updated.
Astra Taylor:
I’m Astra Taylor.
Naomi Klein:
I’m Naomi Klein.
Astra Taylor:
And we are the authors of…
Naomi Klein:
End Times Fascism.
Astra Taylor:
And the Fight for the Living World. The End Times Fascists are a very unappealing, dangerous, noxious alliance of three groups, the religious end-timers, the tech accelerationist end-timers, and the ethno-nationalist end-timers. They have their differences, they have their fractures, but they’re united in their conviction that the common world, the world we all share is coming to an end, and that they have a duty to not stop a collapse of reality, but accelerate
Naomi Klein:
It. Fascism isn’t new. It recurs throughout history. In the book, we talk about fascism is really capitalism’s worst mood. It’s capitalism under threat, capitalism in a time of crisis, but also in a time facing a threat from below, a threat that the systemic crises may be responded to with systemic change. So those are really the two factors that seem to define the eras when this worst mood, most violent supremacist through line really surges. We don’t see it as an exception. We don’t see it as something that happened once and could happen again. We see it as a through line.
Astra Taylor:
Yeah. It’s something that ebbs and flows and surges in certain moments under these conditions. And our conditions are unique because we’re living in a moment of history that hasn’t happened before. We’re facing things that are unprecedented, like climate change, like the concentration of wealth on a scale that creates someone like Elon Musk who is a trillionaire, at least on paper, which means he has more money than many of the biggest nations on the planet. So social media is another example, even though we are on it right now, or generative AI. So there are new crises fueling this iteration of fascism. It looks like tech executives, some of the most powerful people in the world saying, “Maybe our tools are going to destroy humanity. There’s a 10% chance or there’s a 25% chance.” It looks like the rollout of data centers and detention centers across the nation.
It looks like ice thugs and baiting cities and kidnapping people off the street. It manifests in many ways that rhyme with the fascism of the past, but again, are taking new form given these new technological realities.
Naomi Klein:
It also looks like an excitement about the expansion of war, particularly in and around Palestine. So whether it is end times theology or tech end timers, what’s so dangerous is that it inverts our intuitive protective impulses when we recognize the signs of crisis, the early signs of crisis as a warning that we should change, that we should respond, that we should try to avert the crisis becoming a cataclysm. But instead of doing that, if you are within this logic that it’s all going down anyway and actually out of those fires, out of that apocalypse, the next stage of human evolution is going to emerge, then you see bad as good. You see carnage as a felicitous sign that the end is near and that means that the chosen few are going to get their palace in the sky.
Astra Taylor:
It can sound a little unbelievable or abstract, but this is the literal theology of many people who are in control of the American military and portions of the US government as well as the government of Israel, people like the speaker of the house, Mike Johnson, who really believes that we are heading towards a rapture where a few chosen people will be whisked off on an escalator to the sky, just like maybe the same escalator that Trump came down, but the opposite direction. There’s a very literal reading of the Book of Revelation which says there will be pastilence and there will be floods and there will be fires and there will be suppression of certain groups. And so the signs that they see, things like COVID-19, things like war in the quote unquote holy land, they see as these literal indicators that they’re getting close to this rapturous moment.
And that basic narrative structure is repeated in these three prongs of this intense fascist alliance. Again, this kind of out of the catastrophe paradise for some. So that supremacist, new genesis refrain that is so common to fascism. So the right religious people will ascend or the people who are rich or smart enough who control the tech or maybe the digital beings that the tech oligarchs are creating or the people with the right passports who have the right ancestors in the graveyard. So there’s different variations, but kind of the same story told and retold.
Naomi Klein:
I think what we’re hoping the book might help people do is believe their own eyes. I think that a lot of us are in a state of some disbelief. We can’t quite believe that the people who have so much power, have our faiths in their hands really are okay with acceleration of the climate crisis or with the fact that we now have all these tech CEOs saying, “Well, there’s a 30% maybe more chance of what we’re building destroying the world, but we’re just going to see what happens.” I think everyone’s looking around going, “Is this a joke? Is this real?” If we understand that they’re not afraid of the end, whether because they have this religious faith or they have a faith in their own wealth that is so extreme and deranged that they actually think that they will be fine, that they and theirs will be fine when the whole thing goes down or that their country, their purified ethnically cleansed supremacist country will be fine.
These sort of unbelievable things start to make sense and it is a really important moment for us to believe what is happening in front of us. I think that might be one of our biggest challenges these days is actually believing that this is real in part because it’s also bad fiction. We’ve all seen the movie, we’ve all watched the show on Netflix and yeah, they are doing it because they all watched those shows when they were little and they were like, “Let’s do that.”
Astra Taylor:
And just because their specific fantasy about how it will work out isn’t real, it doesn’t mean that the damage they’ll inflict should be discounted. It can be a self-fulfilling prophecy in a really messy, gnarly, destructive way. So do we think that their rocket ships to Mars are going to save them? We do not. Do we think that the Messiah is going to return? I do not believe that. I do not think that you can save your brethren, the people with the right passports or the right racial lineage with a fortress wall because climate change does not care about your borders, but they can cause a lot of
Naomi Klein:
Damage. They can cause Armageddon. They’re not going to get to the paradise, but they can damn well cause Armageddon unless we stop them.
Astra Taylor:
I think they’re weak in multiple ways. One of the biggest ways they’re weak is that they’re not offering their base anything. So these three groups have come together in this unholy alliance united by the figure in the US of Donald Trump who has broken even the meager promises he made to his base. So affordability is now a hoax and he has said if you don’t want a data center, you want to be poor. He did not run as someone who was going to bring AI to his people. He ran saying he was going to lower the price of gas and rent and all that. So that is something we think is an important point of pressure, that there’s nothing on offer except sadistic memes and the chance to feel superior to people who are treated terribly. So that’s a big point. And we also see that in many ways their sadistic memes have not hit the mark that they were hoping they would.
People were repulsed by the crackdown in Minneapolis, by ICE agents shooting people in the street and kidnapping neighbors. So there’s a way in which by under delivering, by delivering nothing and then overreaching with the violence that they’ve created conditions where they’ve actually lost not their core supporters, but certainly some people who voted for Trump thinking that their lives would get marginally better.
Naomi Klein:
Coming back to what we were saying before about when fascism emerges, it emerges in times when the system is revealing itself to have betrayed people, to be failing people, to not be meeting their most basic needs. And in that way, it’s always a dialogue really between the failures of liberalism and surging fascism. And the threat for fascists is always that the anger that they’re harnessing could come for them, right? But that doesn’t just happen on its own. It happens when there’s an organized left. It happens when there’s an organized left that’s able to correctly diagnose the systems that are miserating people and clearly diagnosing the way division and hatred are being used to protect elite interests. So we’re in a really volatile moment and whether or not we are able to take advantage of these ruptures will really depend on how well organized the left is because in and of themselves, the ruptures don’t produce good outcomes.
They could produce even
Astra Taylor:
Worse outcomes. I mean, just to tie what we said together more explicitly, the disappointments also won’t spontaneously change people’s minds. People will feel that, okay, they’ve been betrayed now by the Democrats or the Republicans, but that discontent has to be organized and somebody has to be providing an alternative vision of the future that is credible enough that people want to work for it.
Naomi Klein:
And that’s starting to happen, which is why we’re seeing such a ferocious attack on the left.
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