Joshua Scheer

The billionaires selling us the future are making plans to escape it. They promise artificial intelligence will liberate humanity while concentrating the wealth and power to decide whose lives are expendable. Their bunkers offer a revealing answer to the question their public relations campaigns avoid: What happens to everyone else?

In this conversation with Doomscroll host Joshua Citarella, Naomi Klein examines what she and co-author Astra Taylor call “end times fascism”—an alliance of religious fundamentalists anticipating Armageddon, tech oligarchs dreaming of transcending humanity, and nationalist movements building fortresses against the people their policies help displace. Klein argues that decades of privatization, austerity and corporate rule prepared the ground for this politics. The respectable centrists who presided over the wreckage now offer more of the same as its cure.

Klein’s warning cuts through Silicon Valley’s salvation racket: concentrated wealth has become a threat to collective survival. An elite that believes it can buy its way out of catastrophe has little reason to prevent it. Fighting back means confronting billionaire impunity, breaking concentrated corporate power and organizing around the things their grand visions keep sacrificing: water, food, dignity and a habitable world.

Understand the forces shaping your feed—and your future. Doomscroll with Joshua Citarella digs into internet culture, political extremism and the ideologies moving from online subcultures into mainstream power. Artist and writer Joshua Citarella brings curiosity and sharp analysis to conversations that go beyond the outrage cycle. Subscribe on YouTube, read his Substack and support the show on Patreon.

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Naomi Klein on Doomscroll with Joshua Citarella

Edited transcript

Editor’s note: This transcript was edited from the supplied automated transcript for readability. Timestamps, filler sounds, stutters and redundant verbal repetitions have been removed; punctuation, paragraph breaks and clear transcription errors have been corrected while preserving the speakers’ words, arguments and conversational sequence. Speaker labels have been inferred from context. Brackets flag wording or attribution that cannot be resolved confidently from the supplied text; “[expletive]” preserves words censored in the source. This edit has not been checked against the recording and is not a verbatim, audio-verified transcript. Statements and factual claims remain those of the speakers.

Opening excerpt

Naomi Klein: The concentration of wealth itself has become a deranging force in our society. So we must bring these people back into our shared world. And their wealth is what makes them think that they will be okay no matter what happens.

Joshua Citarella: Let’s unburden them from it. [Laughter.] It’s clearly driving them crazy.

Klein: Well, exactly. I think in the end they will thank us.

[Overlapping exchange; attribution uncertain]: They will greet us as liberators or not. [Unclear] either way.

Citarella: Welcome to Doomscroll. I’m your host, Joshua Citarella. My guest is Naomi Klein, an author, activist and professor at the University of British Columbia.

Far-right factions

Klein: The first group that we look at are the people you think of when you think of end times. They’re the theocrats. They’re the religious fundamentalists who literally believe in the end of days. And the way they metabolize our era of serial shocks, right? I mean, we’re in New York. You probably remember the sky turning orange this summer.

Within this theology, those are all signs. They were all foretold. And there’s a kind of excitement and an accelerationism.

Citarella: It’s real convenient because those signs are getting faster and faster. They’re more frequent.

Klein: Well, the crises are real, right? It’s a question of how you interpret them. And the dangerous thing about end-times theology is it interprets danger as something good.

And so the natural survival mechanisms that we have as humans, where it’s like, okay, an alarm should be going off now. We need to react to get to safety. You run towards the fire. You’re excited, right?

I don’t know if you saw that news story. It was only a couple of days, because we do live in a time of nonstop shocks, but—

Citarella: Which one?

Klein: Well, at the start of the U.S.-Israeli attacks on Iran, there were a series of stories about U.S. soldiers complaining that their commanders were telling them that it was Armageddon and it was great, and that the more violent the war in Iran was, the better, because it was going to hasten Christ’s return.

And so you had army commanders who were quoting the Book of Revelation to their soldiers, and even Christian soldiers were like, “This is not right. We are not—” [Overlapping speech unclear.] But also, the rules of the military: you’re not supposed to use theology within the military. But Pete Hegseth’s military has some very different rules.

So within the alliance of what we’re calling end-times fascism, you have the literalists who really believe the end of days is nigh. But then Astra and I were really struck, as we started to pay more attention to the discourse in tech around artificial intelligence, that there was a way that it was directly echoing these narratives of messianic ascension. Like, are we going to reach superintelligence?

Citarella: Eschatological.

Klein: Yeah, exactly. Although that is a word that I begrudgingly use only once in the book. [Laughter.]

Citarella: Okay, okay.

Klein: Just because I feel like it’s one of those words that normal people don’t understand, but once you understand it, you use it all the time, and then people don’t know what you’re talking about. I try to stay away from words like that.

Citarella: You’re writing for a mass audience.

Klein: Sure. Trying. I mean, end-times religion is pretty mass, actually. So if you’re within those circles, you certainly understand.

But when Elon Musk talks about summoning a digital god, or perhaps a digital demon, or Sam Altman talks about reaching a level—he talks about AI now as a genie that’s going to grant all our wishes. But even more than that, particularly in the early days after ChatGPT was launched, there was more of a discourse—I don’t know if you remember this—but it was casting a future where we were all just going to be lounging around, making art, reading books, the secrets of the universe unveiled to us. We would not have to work again, because the robots would be—

Citarella: In 1930. I’ve heard this one before.

Klein: Yeah, right. But we were also like, wait a minute, these are the same people who won’t let their Amazon employees go to the bathroom. So we don’t actually think they’re going to give us fully automated luxury communism. They’re not even going to give us fully automated social democracy here.

Citarella: Exactly.

Klein: But there is this way in which it echoes exactly what messianic religious believers say about what happens once the Messiah comes. Like, all secrets will be revealed, all will be known. And we’ll just be able to give ourselves to knowing the secrets of the universe, which is what Elon Musk says Grok will do.

Citarella: I think that’s on the splash page of the website.

Klein: Really? So it is a similar story. But then they also say, “Or we might kill everyone,” right?

Citarella: So it’s this dialectic.

Klein: Yeah. And I do think that story about the end of the world is so deeply encoded in our culture that whether we grow up in a religious context or not—maybe we just grew up watching disaster movies or playing video games like Fallout—it’s in us. We have that very linear: we’re driving towards the end, and then a small group of survivors makes it.

So there’s a way in which that story becomes self-fulfilling, and it seems really, really powerful in tech right now. So that’s the other piece of the coalition.

But then there’s the mass piece, because neither of those are necessarily the masses—although evangelical Christians played a significant role in electing Trump; he couldn’t have gotten elected without them. But the ethnonationalist faction, which is increasingly focused on fortressing the border—and it’s very strong in Europe, very strong in the United States, strong in certain Latin American countries, particularly Chile, which is currently digging a moat—is envisioning a future, clearly, where the hordes are at the gate, right?

And it’s a fascism. If we think about the fascism of the 20th century being mainly focused on expanding the border, it would seem that the fascism of today is very focused on fortressing the border, expelling the unwanted people and bringing into the national bunker the resources that the in-group might need, like water from Canada.

Citarella: Yeah. Fortress America.

Klein: Yeah. But you need the minerals and the oil and lots of things from outside the fortress. So that’s why we argue that Trump’s foreign policy is best understood as supersized prepping at the level of the nation-state.

Citarella: So you outlined in the book, to be a little reductive about it: race, religion and tech. There are these three ascending right factions.

Klein: I’m going to start using that. [Laughter.]

Citarella: Nine years ago you wrote a piece for The Guardian titled “It Was the Democrats’ Embrace of Neoliberalism That Won It for Trump.” I did read that.

Klein: Yeah.

Neoliberalism vs. populism

Citarella: Did these three factions grow out of neoliberalism, or are they a rejection of it? Because some of them are economic populism. There are all sorts of different flavors. So are they a kind of lineal descendant of neoliberalism, or are they a break from that tradition?

Klein: First I would just say: yes, I believe that neoliberalism created the context for fascism by failing to respond to the crises that neoliberals don’t deny, right?

Neoliberals don’t deny the reality of climate change. They’ll have lots of conferences promising to have market-based solutions to the problem and so on. But by failing to actually address the problems that are evident and are not denied—let’s go to Davos and wring our hands about inequality and disease and so on—and not just allowing but indeed accelerating the crisis through a [word unclear] embrace of a growth-based economic model, they have brought us to the point where fascism then resolves the crisis.

We define fascism as capitalism with its teeth bared, or capitalism’s most ferocious threat response. So I think that neoliberal centrism has created the conditions both for a surge of democratic socialism and an organized left that’s more resurgent than it’s been at any point in my lifetime in the United States—though that’s not saying much. [Laughter.]

But also a more organized fascism than at any point in my lifetime, and since the 1930s. FDR resolved it with the New Deal, right? The Democrats today, even the ones who claim to be FDR Democrats, because that’s a more fashionable thing to claim to be, have not introduced anything on the scale of the New Deal.

Citarella: Well, we tried it. We made a good effort.

Klein: Who did? The Green New Deal? I mean, yeah, but they didn’t really try that.

Citarella: We didn’t win.

Klein: Yeah, we didn’t. We’ve been pushing for this. I think the Bernie campaign, this civil war that’s been going on within the Democratic Party—I think many of us who were part of the Bernie camp have understood that this is how we fight fascism.

I had a “Bernie Beats Trump” pin, and that partly came from going out in 2016 and talking to people who were choosing between Bernie and Trump, just in the same way that Zohran was able to get 10% of Trump voters to vote for him.

Citarella: Yeah.

Klein: The crises are real. This is what I want to stress. The crises that fascism is harnessing, and people’s sense of brokenness, are as real as the brokenness was in the 1920s after the First World War, when soldiers came back maimed, when cities were crowded with orphans and widows, and economies were decimated.

In moments of rupture, there’s a ball of rage at the center of society, and there is a battle over whether the rage is going to go up at the system itself or whether it’s going to go down towards scapegoats. And the reason why we say that fascism is capitalism’s threat response is that it is responding to a real possibility that there might be redistributive responses.

And those threats are not as credible as I would like them to be. I always feel like the left is far weaker than it should be. When you listen to these billionaires, they seem to feel like the pitchforks are at the gate. And I think partly it’s all relative.

I came of political age in the ’90s, and that’s when all these CEOs were on the cover of every magazine, being shot from below in front of their private jets. Marc Andreessen, who led Silicon Valley to back Trump and led a lot of Democrats to decide to back Trump in 2024—I always think it’s really significant that Marc Andreessen was put on the cover of Time magazine in a literal golden throne when he was 23 years old.

Citarella: A literal golden throne.

Klein: A literal golden throne. He built Netscape. I don’t know.

Citarella: Well, that was quite an accomplishment. But to your credit, in the “Techno-Optimist Manifesto” he cites Marinetti, who was admittedly an artist and a poet, but was a proper capital-F fascist.

But I want to ask you one of the stories that you tell in the book, particularly about this tech sector. I’ve said many times that I think the most important story of recent history is the shift you describe from techno-libertarianism to national conservatism.

So how did we go from Patri Friedman on the seastead to Thiel talking at the National Conservative Conference in, like, 2019–20, right? Because there’s a big ideological gap between those two.

Klein: What—2020, was it?

Citarella: The National Conservative Conference. Yeah, the NatCon conference. He was one of the keynote speakers. But there’s a kind of drift between the anarcho-, anti-statist libertarianism to this embrace of the military-industrial complex and things like Palantir. So how do you understand that ideological transformation?

Libertarians vs. Palantir

Klein: I mean, Thiel backed seasteading.

Citarella: Yeah.

Klein: But Thiel, though he may have identified as a libertarian, had already founded Palantir, which was founded with seed money from the CIA and is really a creature of the state. So I don’t know how seriously to take a libertarian who is working to build a surveillance state.

I know he identified that way, but I think it was 2009 where he gave a speech saying he no longer believed in democracy, and he blamed women and Black people, essentially. He’s like, everything went wrong when women got the vote and all these people on welfare were allowed to vote. And he says in this speech, that’s when I realized that democracy and [word unclear] were incompatible.

Citarella: That was a kind of rupture from the Milton Friedman, “Democracy and freedom go hand—” He says that if you allow people to vote, they’re going to vote to enrich themselves and redistribute to themselves, which I think, from the left: yes, that is actually a large part of what we’re trying to do. That is just an accurate description.

Klein: But also in the fine print—it wasn’t even that fine—Milton Friedman was also saying that people would vote for the color of their tie, was his quote. So he also equated consumerism with democracy.

Citarella: The color of their tie?

Klein: Yeah. That was democracy.

Citarella: What color? Blue color? Or what’s the meaning of the tie?

Klein: He just meant that shopping was choosing. So when he talked about “free to choose”—

Citarella: Yeah.

Klein: And so he went to Singapore, which had no democracy, and said it was freer than the United States because it had a freer economy. So he was always eliding. And he worked with the Pinochet dictatorship.

My main argument in [title unclear] was, I’m not so sure that Milton Friedman really—what he defined as freedom really was what I define as freedom. He was really talking about freedom of market and consumer freedom—

Citarella: Capital.

Klein: But it was a little muddy. And then along comes Peter Thiel, and he says at the Cato Institute, which Friedman played a very central role in—

Citarella: Yeah.

Klein: No, they’re incompatible, because these masses will not vote for true freedom, which he defines as the freedom to do whatever you want with your money, right? And he was talking about how hard it was to find tax havens anymore, and he was talking about freedom from regulation. It’s a very negative freedom.

So he defines three sites of freedom in that speech. One of them is seasteading, which you’re referring to. And he puts Patri Friedman in charge, Milton Friedman’s grandson.

Citarella: Three generations of libertarian homeschooling.

Klein: Oh, really?

Citarella: What it does to a [expletive].

Klein: Yeah. Oh, interesting. So one is—seasteading was sometimes referred to as “vote with your boat.” [Laughter.] So, like, I don’t like this country. I’m getting on a floating oil rig.

Citarella: I think he should just follow his own advice and float out to sea.

Klein: Exactly. No problem with that. The other one was the internet as a libertarian space, right? And Marc Andreessen was very much a part of the push to, like, don’t tax the internet. It’s the frontier. And now you see that same language of frontier that was used around the internet in this era where AI needs a frontier.

Citarella: Was space in there also?

Klein: Well, it was actually crypto. So it was internet and crypto. It was leaving national currencies—

Citarella: Stateless money.

Klein: Stateless money. PayPal was the original idea, but then that graduated into crypto. And then the third was space.

Citarella: They’ve got their own coin now.

Klein: But this is why we call them—we call them lots of names. [Laughter.] Which should I choose? I actually think one of the best ones is in a quote from a wonderful organizer named Marisa Franco, who founded the migrant rights group Mijente.

She says they’re quitters. They just want to leave. They want to abandon. And it’s an exit. We also call them traitors. Traitors to—

Citarella: Okay, cool. I’d like to defend my use of the word “traitors.” I’m not sure I’m right, by the way. [Laughter.]

Klein: I’m more on board than you know.

Citarella: Okay, but please continue.

Klein: So you’re talking about the evolution from the libertarian—

Citarella: Yeah.

Klein: —to this more openly—

Citarella: If I can show my cards a little bit, I’m curious about how the techno-capitalist class decided that they need to grab control of the levers of the state, right? Because before they wanted to abolish it. They were going to go out to “Freedom on the Seas,” or whatever, and then they’re like, “Oh, [expletive], actually we need to just buy off sections of the public sector, public organs in the state.”

Klein: And I guess I’m saying, weren’t they always feeding off the state? Isn’t that what SpaceX is? Isn’t that what Palantir is? I mean, this is not a free-market company.

Citarella: Well, sorry, I am really into the deep philosophical weeds on this, but the monetarist faction would be opposed to SpaceX basically grabbing control of the money printer, right? Because they are creating market distortions when they’re the supplier for public services, or they have a market monopoly or something like that. So it’s anti-competitive.

Klein: Yeah.

Citarella: And so there is a kind of factional split inside of these things where some portion of this libertarian strain of techno-capitalists decided that actually printing money is good if it’s printed for us. And that is a kind of evolutionary leap in the evolutionary cycle of the libertarian Pokémon. There’s a new one that we call national conservative now.

Klein: I think I mainly see it as a rationale for greed that changes as conditions change. [Laughter.]

Citarella: Do you know? Okay, so Vivek Chibber uncovered this in, like, the 1980s. You can uncover this document. It’s scrubbed from the archives. But Milton Friedman wrote to the government of India about the flourishing prosperity that would be brought by economic planning. These guys are [expletive] intellectual mercenaries. You pay them to say whatever you want.

Klein: Thank you. So this is what I’m saying. He’s their great intellectual. [Laughter.]

Citarella: Certainly libertarianism. I do have to ask you, among these different factions—

Diversity and nationalism

Citarella: One of the things that we’ve talked about a lot on the show is that this left social democratic coalition is disproportionately white and college educated. As a white college-educated man, I’m very aware of this. And the Republican Party is increasingly, or historically unprecedentedly, diverse now.

So how do we account for this demographic shift in these three different factions?

Klein: In these three different factions?

Citarella: Among these emerging factions. How would the 47% of Latino men that voted for Trump, right—are they motivated by race, religion, tech? Or what are their class interests that they express with voting for the conservative party?

Klein: To be honest with you, I was not sure I wanted to write this book just because it’s very bleak. Astra and I wrote an essay—

Citarella: End times.

Klein: Yeah. In the end, I think we found some hope. I hope you didn’t find it too depressing, because there ended up being more of a fight that we were tracking.

Citarella: We’re going to go deep about the policy proposals you have at the end. I appreciated that.

Klein: And even just the fact—or very much the fact—that there started to really be a pushback, right? In Minneapolis, electorally, like here in New York City. And then the local data center fights are really interesting to me. But certainly when we decided to write it, there was much less of that.

And we wrote an essay that went kind of viral for The Guardian and started getting approached: you should expand it into a book. And I just felt like, I can’t spend this much time in Palmer Luckey’s brain. That sounds absolutely terrible. [Laughter.]

And Astra at one point was just like, “I’m down the rabbit hole anyway. I can’t stop listening to these theobros and their podcasts, so we may as well do something with this.” And I realized that she was right. It wasn’t like we were going to not pay attention, but we would just be spectators if—at least we were feeling like we were able to give people some tools.

Because I think that we’re up against a strategy that is so chaotic that it’s really easy to just get very overwhelmed. I know a lot of people who are just like, “Okay, my brain’s exploding.” So just ordering it a little bit, I think, brings our blood pressure down a little bit. And we’re like, okay, we know what to pay attention to and what is probably hype, and how we could form an alliance.

I also wanted to write it because I had watched Trump assemble what Steve Bannon called—what did he call it? Not “diverse national”—I’m blanking.

Citarella: Civic nationalism? Biracial nationalism?

Klein: No, he doesn’t use words—“inclusive nationalism” is what he was calling it. So he calls it inclusive nationalism.

Citarella: Diversity, equity, inclusion and nationalism. [Laughter.] I love it. But he is great at branding. You’ve got to give him that.

Klein: Well, listen, he is, because he actually also started calling it “MAGA Plus.”

Citarella: MAGA Plus.

Klein: Yes.

Citarella: LGBTQIA MAGA. Are you [expletive]? Wow.

Klein: And the MAGA Plus—I joke that the plus one was all the mad moms from COVID lockdowns, right? Who were upset about the vaccines and upset about masking. And so my last book, Doppelganger, was really following how he cobbled together this Frankenstein coalition, because I was listening to War Room every day during—[Laughter.] I know, I know.

It was like, wow, watching him fold in the mad moms. And he gave a huge microphone to Naomi Wolf, who I was following very closely for personal reasons. And he would call her the mom-in-chief: you’re the voice of all these mad moms who don’t want their kids to be vaccinated and think their husbands are shedding vaccine particles onto them and getting them sick, and things like that.

Citarella: And then there was also “far out to far right” at some point.

Klein: Far out, yeah. And so that coalesced into MAHA, right, as part of Trump’s coalition. And then there was a lot of culture war stuff around trans youth, bathroom politics, sports, and he was using that to bring in a more racially diverse coalition.

I would just say I think it’s to the great shame of the left that at certain points it has been clear to me that the right is more international, just in terms of paying attention to what’s going on in other countries.

Citarella: No, it’s true. It’s true. [Brief phrase unclear.]

Klein: They learned that from Bolsonaro. Bolsonaro’s first election. And, Lord help us, Bolsonaro’s son may well—

Citarella: They took the lessons from Gamergate.

Klein: But electorally, there was a huge electoral swing when they started accusing—so Bolsonaro originally ran against Lula’s education minister. And because he was education minister—his last name is Haddad, Fernando Haddad—they were able to project all these fears of the child.

So they were filling WhatsApp chats with baby bottles shaped as dildos. And it was all about perversion and pedophilia and all of this. And it was a massive electoral swing. All the polls were wrong. It worked so well.

And so Bannon is a very internationally focused guy, as we know, and he’s learning, okay, what worked for Duterte? What worked for Meloni? He’s constantly focus-grouping this stuff.

So I watched that coalition come together. And the thing that I knew from that research was that, boy, does Steve Bannon’s audience hate big tech.

Citarella: Yeah.

Klein: And so when Trump went all in on AI and started getting very rich off of crypto and the rest of it, it was very clear to me that this was going to be a way bigger betrayal and a potential rupture of the fascist coalition than a lot of folks realized.

Because I had been listening to them project all of their fears of surveillance onto vaccines, vaccine apps. But now Trump is working with Palantir and all these tech companies to usher in an incredibly powerful—

Citarella: Terrified of the CCP and the surveillance state, so they build it here at home.

Klein: So I think the reason to think about this is not to show how strong they are, but actually to show how weak they can be if we have a left that is able to take advantage of these betrayals and say, “Yeah, you have a right to be angry at big tech.”

And instead of projecting all of this onto a pretend fantasy that Bill Gates is trying to implant chips in you with the coronavirus—or the vaccine—

Citarella: We’re demonetized already, so go for it. [Laughter.]

Klein: Maybe your phones shouldn’t be tracking you, and maybe they shouldn’t be allowed to hold on to your data. And maybe we can actually get at the root causes of these fears, and maybe we can have a conversation about why the digital town square was allowed to be privatized in the first place. I mean, there can be a left approach to tech that isn’t anti-tech, I would hope.

Citarella: Yeah.

Citarella [podcast announcement]: This is episode 56. We’re a fully independent program that only exists because of viewers like you. The best way to support the show is on Patreon or Substack. We do a bonus episode with every guest. Subscribe to our newsletter to get notified when new videos are published. Let’s get back to the episode.

Climate and internationalism

Citarella: Let me ask you about the left, though. We’ve been talking a lot about diagnosing the problems coming from these right-wing factions, but you do make some policy proposals in the book.

You mentioned Duterte before, who has recently been brought in front of the ICC. You look at two examples, the UN and the ICC, international organizations, and you propose passing a new law called ecocide—

Klein: A proposal that’s been made. A series of lawsuits coming from countries like low-lying island nations, because of the emissions of mostly people in the Global North—but globally, the rich are mostly responsible for climate change. I mean, broadly defined rich.

Citarella: Yeah. Their consumption with jets and everything, power consumption.

Klein: And the choice not to respond to climate change in full knowledge of what we needed to do, and all of the mountains of IPCC reports, was a conscious decision by governments and corporations.

And so these small island states that are facing disappearance—I mean, climate change is an existential threat to many low-lying island states in the Pacific—believe that this should be a crime, and that the crime should be called ecocide.

Citarella: Yeah. And so is there something proportionate to—for every inch of sea level that rises, there is a penalty levied upon people who have excessive carbon consumption, or something like this? How do we define ecocide?

Klein: There have been a few different legal attempts, and this is a small part of the book, thinking about ways—various attempts to sue oil and gas companies for the cost of the climate crisis. As we know, these islands are disappearing at a time when countries are fortressing their borders, as we’ve been discussing. So where are people supposed to go as their lands disappear or desiccate and become uninhabitable?

There are costs. There are debts that are owed. I don’t know what the precise mechanism can be. There are attempts to actually use the ICC. I’m not sure that will be successful. There have been attempts to pass new conventions at the UN.

I think they’re theoretically good. I think it’s theoretically sound, but I’m not an international lawyer, nor do I think this is likely to pass in the current constellation.

Citarella: Yeah. Two other things that come up in the book: one is, I believe, a wealth cap, period—an international wealth cap—and then a policy drawn from FDR, a 100% wealth tax above a certain level.

Klein: Yeah.

Citarella: How do you feel about the international entities that could enforce these things? Where do we start? What is the lever to put these things in motion?

Klein: The final section of the book is about various ways that people are trying to take on the people we’re calling end-times fascists. And we are seeing a huge shift in public opinion on Israel, for instance. The level of support for not arming Israel in this country would have been unthinkable a few years back. The opposition to taking AIPAC money. And we are seeing these shifts in opinion reflected in some elections.

And right now we’ll see what happens with the 5% billionaire tax in California. But what we’re seeing is that it’s an uphill battle, and a huge part of the reason is the amount of money in politics in the U.S.

But I guess at the end of this research project, there is this mismatch between these—I wouldn’t say it’s small to be mayor of New York City. It’s a really big, important city, but there’s only so much a mayor can do. They can’t arrest Netanyahu. They can’t bring him to the ICC. That’s something that only a national government can do.

Citarella: Yeah.

Klein: And it’s the nature of the crises that we’re talking about that they are planetary in scale. That’s what makes them different than the crises that fascists were responding to previously. Capital is incredibly [word unclear; reference to international reach]. So are these technologies. And so I think we do need international responses.

And it’s really striking that these factions that we’ve described—it is a fractious alliance. There are all kinds of fractures that I think could easily be deepened if we were strategic about it. But there’s one thing that the three groups really agree on, and that is that the UN needs to go. There’s a hatred of international law that runs through the three factions.

And it’s becoming more and more explicit. I think there are very clear reasons for that, in part that the tech companies have been so integrated into the U.S. military that now there’s real worry that there could be prosecutions. Like, if the Republicans are out of power and people start looking at whose technology was used to target that girls’ school in Iran, and whose technology exactly was used to do extrajudicial killings in the Caribbean, right?

We’re seeing a level of lawlessness from this government with a lot of complicity from corporations. And so now we’re seeing this very accelerated attack on the ICC, which I don’t think is just about Israel. I think there are very powerful forces within the United States, for their own reasons, including the U.S. government, who don’t want the ICC hanging over their heads.

So I think it’s interesting to me that Peter Thiel, when he goes around lecturing about the Antichrist, obsesses over the prospect of international regulation, both of AI and—he has a really unhealthy obsession with Greta Thunberg and floats the idea that maybe she could be the Antichrist. Why? Because she has been pushing for binding regulations, and I think that’s their idea of hell.

Citarella: On the topic—

Klein: So I think we should lean into it. I think that’s a good indication that maybe there could be something there.

Citarella: On the topic of Peter Thiel, you do mention treason a few times in the book.

Klein: Yeah.

Citarella: I had always said that if someone was trying to plot their exit from the state, this constituted treason.

Klein: Oh, interesting.

Citarella: And that’s a heavy thing to say because there are pretty explicit penalties for treason. I’m curious: why in the book don’t you just propose that these people are committing treason? They’re doing tax evasion.

Klein: Yeah.

Treason vs. humanism

Citarella: Right? They are undermining the legitimacy of public institutions. Why don’t we just grab control of the levers of the state and say they’re committing treason?

Klein: That’s interesting. I wouldn’t be opposed to it, but I’m just thinking: Trump, what he’s doing with the Board of Peace is actually an exit strategy, right? He’s created an extra-national body. He used a UN Security Council resolution, and he used the U.S. Treasury to fund it, but he created a body that outlives his presidency, that he is head of for life until he decides he doesn’t want to be. Members of his family are part of a cabinet.

Citarella: It’s like a hereditary monarchy.

Klein: It is. And he also gave himself the thing that he most cherishes, which is immunity, right? That is literally what the exit dream is. So it’s happening under our nose in a strange way.

We use the word “treason” and “traitors,” not in the national context, I guess, because I’m not a nationalist. I think it’s treasonous to give up on the living world—to say that life is [unclear] and hope. Like Elon Musk says, we have to seed the stars and we have to have rocket ships because there has to be something exciting to look forward to. He doesn’t see anything worth fighting for here. And I just think that’s treasonous, not just to the United States.

I don’t live in the United States. I’m less concerned about that than the fact that I can’t look up at the sky without seeing one of his—what I call his space bugs. I’m concerned that he vandalized the moon. That doesn’t belong to the United States.

This book is the hardest book I have ever toured with. And it’s because what we’re describing—actually willing an end to this stage of human existence, wanting—the famous pause heard around the world where Peter Thiel is asked, “Do you want humanity to survive?” And he starts stuttering, and then talking about transhumanism, finally.

Citarella: Yeah.

Klein: But I think it’s so antithetical to what we’re built to do, which is care for our one and only home, that you almost can’t believe it. And even after spending a very long time studying it and documenting it, it almost slips through your fingers and slips out of your brain because it’s wrong.

And so I think they’re betraying fundamental duties of what it means to be a human being, and not just a citizen of a single country. And these are transnational figures who don’t just affect the United States. If the United States wants to find ways to prosecute them, that would be great. [Laughter.] But they’re not just the United States’ problem. They are a problem for the world.

Citarella: A point in the book: European bureaucrats—correct me if I’m wrong, I think in the ICC—were debanked and deplatformed from American companies. If you lose your Twitter or you lose your Chase account, for example, because of the Trump administration putting political pressure onto those companies here at home.

So the reach of these platforms is literally transnational, and you can take political revenge on people who work for different governments that are not accountable to you. That is actually very powerful.

Klein: [Name unclear] is really good on this: these companies are redefining what nation-states even mean because they’re zigzagging across borders.

Citarella: You mentioned—

Klein: And we’re so dependent on them, right? We’re so dependent.

Citarella: Entirely. They should be public.

Klein: Thankfully, a few European governments are starting to do things like get off Microsoft, stop using Gmail at all, because you can’t have these vulnerabilities for—

Citarella: You need a EuroStack for—

Klein: Yes, yes.

Citarella: Yeah. You had mentioned the Thiel interview. So Ross Douthat—I’m not sure I’m saying his name right. [Brief exchange about pronunciation unclear.] I dropped one of my papers, but it’s okay, I remember the question.

He did an interview with Hasan, and he asked Hasan if he was a post-liberal. I’ll explain what that means because it’s a little bit of a weird phrase. So “post-liberal” comes from Patrick Deneen, who’s a conservative thinker, and it means people who are basically ready to forgo certain civil liberties for conservative values. And it has a religious, theocratic context.

But I think what he’s getting at—he might be directionally correct that we’re at this point of historical development where liberalism has created these contradictions that we can’t resolve now, right? The old fixes from neoliberalism are not working. So you have an ascendant right-wing populism, and you have social democracy.

And I think the question I’m trying to wrap my head around: what are we proposing that comes after liberalism, right? And this question was posed to me—I had an off-the-record conversation with a journalist, and the conversation came to the point where we were trying to draw the distinction between liberals and the left. And the question is something like—

Liberalism and the left

Citarella: Do we on the left believe the same thing as liberals, but we believe it more, or do we believe something different?

Klein: Do we believe the same thing, but believe it more, or do we believe something different? Well, I think that’s a good question. And I don’t believe that there is one “the left” that would answer that question in the same way.

And I guess I’m just pausing because I am unclear on what exactly liberals want in the United States. Something like universal health care has not been something that Democrats have—

Citarella: Francis Fukuyama is saying this now. He’s saying universal health care, right? The liberals are kind of sounding—so this is where it gets fuzzy. The liberals, when we talk about affordability, we sound really similar.

Klein: And so I think the question is, there’s actually more classical liberalism, and then there’s neoliberalism. The only liberalism I’ve known in my life is neoliberalism. I’ve grown up in the neoliberal era, right? And so that is the era of privatization of the public sphere—

Citarella: Deregulation.

Klein: Yeah, and austerity to the public sphere. It’s been the era of liberal dismantling.

The paragon of liberalism right now, that liberals absolutely love, is Mark Carney, my prime minister.

Citarella: You’re right about his talk in Davos.

Klein: Yeah. Mark Carney had a press conference this morning announcing the privatization of key pieces of Canadian infrastructure. Because Mark Carney was head of Brookfield Investment. He is a lifelong investment banker who then became a central banker in Canada, and then sort of reached rock star status when he came in post-Brexit and was head of the British—the UK—is it British central bank? Anyway.

I like it when he stands up to Trump. It’s good. He says “elbows up,” because everyone wants hockey metaphors. And his ideas are deregulation, privatization, austerity and AI data centers, right?

So I’m just saying, he is the liberal hero of the world. I say we’re keeping the neoliberal dream alive in Canada because he just invited the heads of [unclear], Blackstone, BlackRock and all the large sovereign wealth funds and handed them a menu of Canada’s infrastructure and said, “Here, it’s for sale.”

So this is a guy who said Donald Trump tried to break us so he could own us. And his response is, “I will protect Canada by selling it directly to the people who funded Donald Trump.” It’s laughable. So I’m pausing to say, when you say “liberal,” what is that? I don’t know what that is.

I know they think Mark Carney is their sun god. [Laughter.] And I think he’s going to create the conditions for fascists to come to power in my country, unless my husband, who’s the leader of our social democratic party, beats him first.

Citarella: You write in the book, “Mamdani’s reforms are a welcome start, but we fear significantly more will be needed.” On this question of post-liberalism, and what we might propose that would be different than the liberals, than the establishment: what about the soft Jack Ma treatment?

What if we put Elon Musk—

Klein: Soft? Oh, okay. Jack—

Citarella: If we put Elon Musk and anyone who owns over $10 billion worth of wealth [under] national house arrest: they’re a threat to national security; they’re a risk for capital flight. This is illiberal because they lose their freedom of movement, but it might be actually in the interest of the demos.

Klein: Well, look, this is the PG-13 version of those things. [Laughter.] So that’s interesting. I mean, look, I think they should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law in every country where the laws apply.

At the end of the book, we put forward various ideas, proposals for ending the age of impunity. We believe that impunity is the cancer of our time, and that the belief that rules are for other people is at the core of all of these other crises, and that the concentration of wealth itself has become a deranging force in our society.

So we must bring these people back into our shared world. And their wealth is what makes them think that they will be okay no matter what happens.

Citarella: Let’s unburden them from it. [Laughter.] It’s clearly driving them crazy.

Klein: Well, exactly. I think in the end they will thank us.

[Overlapping exchange; attribution uncertain]: They will greet us as liberators or not. [Unclear] either way.

Citarella: No, I think there’s a fair argument, even from the liberal center here, that the disproportionate amount of political power that these superwealthy individuals have is actually a net drain on the productivity and even the GDP of the country, right? If you want to have a prosperous society, you need to have some level of a wealth cap for these people because they’re [expletive] the whole—

Klein: They have to live in the world. And I’ve been fighting and naming the problems of economic inequality for a long time, but it was mostly about the fact that we needed their money for us.

And now I think the bigger problem is just that the wealth itself has become a WMD. It’s just too dangerous for this amount of wealth to accumulate. That’s why we call for a disarmament movement, but not just of the weapons—of the wealth, and also the concentrated tech.

Citarella: Who’s the best candidate for the Democrats in 2028?

Klein: Oh my gosh. No comment. [Laughter.]

Citarella: Okay.

Klein: I’ve already alienated half the internet. [Wording uncertain in supplied transcript.]

Disarmament

Citarella: You choose the nuclear disarmament movement as your analogy for progressive struggle today, particularly on the international level. What are the lessons that you want to take away from that movement for us as organizers now?

Klein: Well, it was really international. I kind of grew up in that movement, but my parents were really involved in it, and my brother was really involved in it. I wasn’t. I was like, “Don’t make me go to the protest.”

There was a huge protest, actually, in New York City. It was the largest protest I think the city had ever had up to that point, in 1980, I think.

Citarella: Okay.

Klein: It was a peak of the disarmament movement in the streets. And I remember my parents tried to take me. I did go, I think, and that was when I said, “You’re never taking me to a protest again.”

Citarella: Wow.

Klein: Anyway, this is a side point. Hated being dragged to protests. But I remember my mom organizing with women in the Soviet Union, across the Iron Curtain, and it was really about creating solidarity, but from below. And I think that is a lesson worth learning.

It just built a really broad tent. And this is what I believe: I think we have an opportunity to build the broadest coalition in defense of life that I’ve ever seen possible. It’s gotten very, very basic in terms of what folks are fighting for. They want to protect the ability to grow food. They want to make sure they have water.

And there is a kind of healing process that is going on in communities as they confront, in particular, these data centers, but not only that. Also, some of the movements against ICE facilities are very bipartisan—against ICE detention centers, concentration camps.

I’m seeing some potential there to build as broad a coalition as came together around disarmament, which eventually changed Ronald Reagan’s mind, which is something.

What else to learn? The internationalism, but also, don’t quit before you finish the job. Because I was asking some people who were really involved in that movement—they successfully disarmed tens of thousands of nuclear warheads, the majority of the warheads. And then there were just a few thousand left, and they took their eye off the prize and let it slide.

I actually asked my brother, because he was really involved in the student arm of that movement, why. And they thought that it was happening, that it had a momentum to it, and that inertia would finish it.

It just seemed like—I think this was the era of globalization. I don’t know what it was. I mean, it wasn’t technically my brother’s fault, but [laughter] maybe it was.

No, I think that’s his version of it: there was a momentum. All the governments were saying the right thing. We were in the era of disarmament. They were signing treaties all over the place. The walls were falling. We were good. And it was the neoliberal era, so there were other things that we had to deal with.

But they didn’t finish before it was done, and now we’re rearming, and the weapons are getting paired with AI. So I guess, finish the job.

Citarella: Yeah. No half measures. End Times Fascism, co-authored with Astra Taylor. Naomi Klein, thank you.

Klein: Thank you so much. Thank you for having me.

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