9/17/26: End Times Fascism with Naomi Klein, Astra Taylor

This is an I Heart podcast, guaranteed human, didn't catch the latest Roland Martin unfiltered podcast. Here's what you missed. There should not be a single law enforcement agency that does not have body cameras. It's real. Black farmers have been under attack. This is just the latest example of them just slapping DEI on anything. It's raw. And I'm sitting here going, they are playing y'all for fools. Catch Roland Martin's daily commentary on the Black Information Network. Download Roland Martin unfiltered on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast. Oh, wherever you get your podcasts. Hey guys, Ready or Not 2024 is here and we here at Breaking Points are already thinking of ways we can up our game for this critical election. We rely on our premium subs to expand coverage, upgrade the studio, add staff, give you guys the best independent coverage that is possible. If you like what we're all about, it just means the absolute world to have your support. But enough with that. Let's get to the show. JD Vance out with a pretty notable new pitch for midterms, please just give us another chance. There's a lot of good that's been done, but there's a lot of work left to do. Don't give power to the people who cause the problems that we're fixing. Give us another chance or give us another couple of years to continue to work on the amazing things that we've been doing for the past two years. And a second argument I'd make is even if you don't agree with us on every issue, the other party is consumed by craziness. You're consumed by people who want to steal everything, who want to give the country over to illegal aliens and criminals. They actively brag about it. I mean, I've heard a lot of crazy stuff guys over the past few years in politics. But when I heard somebody running for Congress in New York say that July 4th was about the liberation of Puerto Rico and Palestine, I thought to myself, this person needs to be checked into a mental hospital, not give it a seed in Congress. >> Good luck with that. For a sign of strength, the saga, when you're having to acknowledge number one, well, you may not agree with us on everything, but well, trust me, we're better than the other guys. And of course, a midterm election, which is going to be a referendum on the party in power. And number two, the implicit acknowledgement here of the dissatisfaction of the American public when he says, give us another chance. Not let us finish the job, which is what he tried to wrap it in. But give us another shot. Let us see if we can do a little better next time around. Negative polarization only works when you're out of power. Negative polarization very rarely works when you're in power. It has some chances. So for example, 2022, you had Roe versus Wade decision, Democrats massively outperformed a lot of their expectations. But that was because the party in power was actively for something which had just been taken away. It was very popular and voting Republican explicitly was an affirmation of something they just been taken away. So it was kind of a different story, right? This time around, again, I keep asking this. Like if I vote Republican, what am I going to get? By $5,000 check, right, which I'm sure Mitch will get right on top of, you know, vote. That was I for those of you who don't speak Mitch McConnell. I think that's yeah, if you don't speak vegetable, that's how we vote to I in the Senate. I just am like, that's, that's it. And then I get to keep the Dems out of Congress. I mean, it's just not a compelling pitch, especially when gas, diesel and all that. To be honest, I mean, Trump is screwing him because if he wants to run for president and he's trying to make him the face of the midterms, he's sending him all across the country. He's setting him up for failure, you know, to basically catch the bag when it comes to 2028. We have some of these humiliating incidents. We can just get to it now where JD is about to go campaign in what is in Iowa in Iowa and the Democrat there is like, oh, I'm busy, actually, I'm like, that's, that is never a good sign. Yeah. Ashley Henson's campaign, she's a Senate candidate tells, tells a reporter that she will not attend. And she chances rally and counsel bluffs because of previously scheduled events. Right. She was a little too busy for the vice president of the United States. But there's a bunch of stuff. Iowa, we've talked a lot about Iowa because first of all, it's a state that really frankly at this point should not even play for Democrats and Democrats have suffered extreme losses across rural America. Iowa, obviously, a rural state, a farm state, moves strongly into the Republican column over the past two decades after Barack Obama was able to win and he was the last one. And now you're seeing some real signs that Iowa Republicans are under a lot of pressure. And obviously, we've covered the polling here, but in some ways, the way the candidates are acting is even more telling. So you have that. You have Ashley Henson saying, I'm sorry, busy that day, Mr. Vice President. Can't be there to see you in person and campaign alongside you. Also, she cut an ad where she emphasizes how eager she is to work with the Democratic Party. Let's take a listen to that. Ashley Henson used to be that reaching across the aisle wasn't just okay, it was expected. Some people in Washington forgot that, I never have. That's why I worked with Democrats to expand mental health care for veterans and with President Trump to take on health insurance companies to lower your costs. I'm Ashley Henson and I approve this message because working across the aisle isn't always easy, but it's how you get results. Now, I ran for Congress in 2010 during the Tea Party wave as a Democrat, and so I'm very familiar with the desperate situation that Ashley Henson and other Republicans find themselves in. This is like the ads I'm seeing from the Republicans. There's a lot of attack ads on the Democrats are too extreme blah, blah, blah. But in terms of the affirmative pitches they're making themselves, they're the near image of what Democrats were running in the Tea Party era where they were saying, oh, I love to work with Republicans. And I too am concerned about the fiscal situation. Don't worry, I'm going to be a responsible steward because those were the right coded issues that were top of mind for voters at this point. And so not only here in terms of she's saying, I work with Democrats, don't worry, I'm not one of those crazy Republicans. But the thing she's choosing to emphasize to her, I'm going to deal with lowering costs. She's sort of playing on the landscape that Democrats have set here. So you can see that. You can also simply put D2 up on the screen and get soccer's reaction. You had a number of Iowa Republican incumbents who voted against Trump's Iran war recently, broke with the party to vote against the war. So from all of these things, you can see that they are really feeling the heat. And this matches up with the public polling, we're seeing that. >> Absolutely, so that's why follow this. Don't just follow public poll. Public polls can always be off. Candidates are always reacting to what they think is actually in their interests and it's not usually based just on public polling. Usually they have a much better sense than obviously we do here in Washington. And you're exactly right. So, I had a front row of this, Chet Edwards, he was my congressman. He was the Democrat representing the most Republican district in 2010. And he had a track record of winning in multiple wave election years for Republicans. Even though he was a Democrat, he won in 2006 and the sur, sorry, yeah, during the surge, all 2004, I mean, 2004, after the whole like Bush 9/11, John Kerry, and all that gets blown out. So he had a lot of credibility in my district. And he lost by over 30 points in the Tea Party. And just to show you, I mean, it's like there's just no, there was literally no chance that he had to be able to win. What ended up happening while he was running his race, he just kept on doing these ads, being like, I stood up to Nancy Pelosi, I work with Republicans. And a lot of it was like, he was like, you know me. I've been your congressman for 20 years, like the idea that I'm some Obama radical is just not true, but there were two things that screwed him. He was at a D next to his name and he had endorsed Obama back in, I think, oh seven. And at one point was on Obama's short list for Vice President. And that was enough, like just being associated with Obama. Trump is now Obama in this scenario where it's literally radioactive to have a photo next to him to be say that you're going to vote with him, there's no, no, no matter what you say about your track record of moving across the aisle in national elections. People know the stakes that are like, you're either we're going to vote D or vote R 95% of the time. I need to know which part of that 95% you're going to be period and historic. I think this is what it comes down to. Republican strategy at this point from a national level, individual Republicans, you know, in swing districts are going to have a different approach. From the national level, they are just trying to stem the losses. That's the reason why you have Trump going out and saying pretend I'm on the ballot. Not because that's going to appeal to independence, it's not because they want to at least get their base energized because that's what kept 2018, I mean 2018 was very bad for Republicans don't get me wrong, but there were some seats that were in play that would have been really crazy in deep red territory. What happened that time around is Brett Kavanaugh, that whole situation was unfolding. That really polarized and energized Republicans so that the polls in places that were deep red really shifted in the last week and Democrats were not able to get some of the furthest reaches that they were going for. That's what they're trying for at this point is not we're going to hold on to the House or maybe not even we're going to hold on to the Senate, although this strategy plays better when you're talking about a Kansas, when you're talking about Nebraska, when you're talking about an Iowa, places that are partisan were read. If you get your side to turn out, you can still win. That is really what they're playing for in a lot of instances. Let's go ahead and put D5 up on the screen, this is the latest generic ballot poll that has come out that has Democrats with a 13 point lead. It's a bit of an outlier, but not too much. Let's put D6 up on the screen, these are all the recent generic ballot polls. This is when you ask people, okay, do you, without naming names, do you prefer a Democrat or Republican, Dem plus 13, plus 12, plus 11, plus 9, plus 8.6, plus 8.5, plus 7, plus 6. So you have the RCP average at this point with all of those polls included has Democrats at roughly a plus 9. mark. One of the thing that's really interesting is a few of these polls have gone further than the generic ballot and they've actually asked voters for the New York Times, Yenipol, we covered this week as an example of this. In their district, they used the names of the candidates. And when you did that, Democrats hadn't even wider lead. So the specific candidates are actually outperforming the generic ballot as well. So another negative sign here for Republicans. One more thing to this, this is surprise, this is surprise to me, to be honest, let me put D7 up on the screen. So it says, "Pold," which is the serious pollster, how people feel about this theoretical $5,000 Trump dividend. 63% of the population opposes free money. Only 17% approve of it. I don't even know what to say about this. Like, I have some theories. I think part of what goes into this is that they just don't think it's going to happen. Exactly, that's what I think. And if you're a Republican, you're concerned about the deficit. If you're a Democrat, you just hate Trump and anything he stands for. And if you're an independent, you're like, this isn't happening anyway. So I hate the fact you're even putting this out here. But pretty incredible that Trump has even made literal free money, deeply unpopular. Absolutely. And what I also think too is people have been negatively polarized, not only against Trump, they think it's not going to happen. A significant part of the Republicans, it's not just about deficit. Remember, I mean, a significant part of them still think that all the inflation was caused by all of the stimulus checks that happen with COVID. And so, I mean, it's not totally unreal. It's part of the story. It's not the entire story. So there's a lot of reasons why a lot of people look at this and just say, this is a joke. And I mean, let's also look back to the COVID stimulus. It's not like it worked, necessarily. Like the COVID stimulus alone was not enough to make up for all of the structural problems of increase of the overall inflation, right? I mean, period and the story. So even 5,000, I mean, that would cover my increase in my health insurance and just that, not alone like all the other inflation. That's just me. And I'm healthy with one child and married. So just imagine if you have four kids or five kids, I can't even imagine what that dollar figure is. That's not even including grocery inflation or any of that. So they kind of look at it as a joke because they're like, look, one time check literally is not going to do very much. Like at all, is that if you don't fix the system, which you said you're not going to, then obviously they look at it as a cheap trick. And I think it obviously is. It just, it just reads as deeply cynical and unserious. Right. So American public picking up on Matt and his bowl is pretty wild. And let's give him credit. You know, it's a bread in circus. We don't, we make a lot of jokes. Certainly have here many times on the show about the median voter who literally knows nothing and is like a fascist communist. You know, that's, I'm not even joking. That's like actually like the median American voter. Didn't we have that one where it's like somebody voted for Mamdani because they thought he was Italian? Yes. It's like a anti Islam guy. He's like, I voted for Mamdani because I thought is Italian. You're like, oh, dear, like, dude. And they said he was running to Cuomo's right because he's talking about affordability, which is what Trump talks about. Yeah. Yeah. We have to live with these people, you know, these people, they get to drive cars, they get to literally drive on the same road as me. Right. Look, I, you know, I go back and forward because I feel that way. And then I see something like, you know, the overwhelming opposition to data centers and AI and I'm like, they kind of get at something and they are on war. They kind of get it sometimes. Yeah. It's a, it's a mixed back. The people are a true enigma. All right. Let's get to Massey. And they complained about the very thing to receive. It's wrong. I knew that the issue of transgender athletes was not going well with a lot of black men. Roland Martin unfiltered. I went off. I said, this is exactly what I'm talking about. Y'all go scream at Chanel, but you don't want to see a black luxury company in the same bag. 12 seats. Those are moving south. So if you Democrats, you don't wait to 2013. You better be hitting the ground going hard in the south now. And download Roland Martin unfiltered on the iHot Radio app, Apple Podcast. Whoever you get your podcasts. I'm Britt Coleman and I'm Trevor Sikama. If you ever watched a game and wondered what really made the difference beyond the final score, that's exactly why we created NFL Pro. 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Listen to NFL Pro on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. The new NFL season is here and you should be listening to NFL Daily as we march along to Super Bowl 61. Last year we had Mike McDonald, Sam Darno on the field after the game, but that was last year. If you're a football sickle like me, NFL Daily is your kind of show. It is in the name NFL Daily fresh content in your feed every day, all season long. Matthew Stafford coming off his MVPC on a dazzling darts from Matthew Stafford. Big time trades that shake up the NFL. And of course, those Seahawks trying to run it back and win another Lombardi trophy. The Seahawks win Super Bowl 60. They are bringing the Lombardi back to the northwest. If it's happening on a football field, NFL Daily will cover it. Listen to NFL Daily on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. Let's get now to a final farewell for our friend Thomas Massey yesterday. The House of Representatives adjourned officially until November. I'm sure we have some stuff to cook up in the lame duck. We won't be able to see many of the things he's been trying to do on the floor of the House of Representatives. He introduced articles of impeachment against Pete Hegseth over the Iran War. He had an Epstein discharge petition literally fighting hard against House leadership fighting so hard. In fact, he appears to have forced the House speakers, Mike Johnson's hand, to shut the house down a day early, send everybody home and say, don't even come back until the midterm elections have happened. Here he is laying some of this out, especially why he wanted the impeachment of Hegseth on CNN. Let's take a listen. Why didn't you tell them you were planning to introduce this? Every time they see the hand that I'm going to play, they get a chance to react. So last week that we were in session, I introduced the discharge petition for the Epstein files, the part two. What did they do? They called off two weeks of Congress between now and the election to keep me from getting to 218 signatures. This is the second Epstein recess. We had an Epstein recess a year ago where they called off Congress for like six weeks. So I didn't want to show my hand. I didn't show it to anybody. I was afraid that they would do something to subvert me getting on the floor for an hour and twenty minutes and reading these articles. And so you read all of this in terms of what happened here. Have you heard from Speaker Johnson since this afternoon? I have not heard from Speaker Johnson, but he has two legislative days, actually 48 hours to call this vote. So he could call the vote tomorrow or the day after tomorrow. And that was another reason for the timing. If I were to offer this tomorrow instead of today, they could have punted this until the after the election. This is a hot war. You know, this could become a nuclear war. And in the interim, even if it doesn't, there are civilian casualties that are racking up greater than they would have otherwise, because another one of my articles of impeachment shows that Peter Hexath has degraded the ability of the DOD to to minimize civilian casualties. Is his name Peter? I didn't know that. I actually didn't know about it. We'll go with it. I appreciate it. But he's 100% correct about what he's saying. Right. Well, let's put the next one up here. So just as I said, quote, there it is. As I predicted, they are canceling Congress tomorrow to avoid the vote on impeaching Secretary War. I will also make it harder for us to reach the 218 signatures on the Epstein discharge petition before the election. We were at 190 signatures last night. And so that's what they decided to do. Put E3 up there on the screen just to see also our glorious Congress. Here is Mike Johnson, apparently telling reporters. Like I said, votes are canceled. They will all leave as of last night on recess. This was after several House Democrats about 100 or so had called for him to cancel the recess to deal with AI and to actually pass some legislation. They basically said, no, everybody go home, go campaign. That is all that we need to do. >> They asked Massey whether he was going to file a decision. charge petition against Speaker Johnson. He was like, "I don't have to." He discharged himself. He's not doing anything. Like, why would I do that? Just to stick for one second on the Pete Hegseth thing, because I think it obviously, Pete Hegseth is not going to be impeached, at least not at this moment. But I think it was smart and obviously moral. Everything he said was absolutely correct. Congress of power to launch a war, declare a war resides with Congress that has been completely ignored. Congress, in fact, passed a war-powers resolution that has also been completely ignored. He is correct about Pete Hegseth dismantling the capability within the Department of War to be able to mitigate civilian casualties that is directly implicated in the mass murder of little girls in the first early hours of this conflict. And it would have been a more uncomfortable vote for Republicans than voting on another Trump impeachment. Because, look, we all know, like, the whole Trump has on the Republican base, Pete Hegseth is another deal. And a lot of these other Trump officials are a different deal entirely. It would be a more uncomfortable vote for Republicans, especially when you look at these Iowa Republicans, we're just covering who are breaking with the party over the Iran war, would make it a lot harder. So just shout out to him, like, obviously, I disagree with him on economics specifically, but how can you help but admire this man who breaks with this party, has courage and is also just so sort of quick-witted and forceful in his push-back. So I think there's a lot that Democrats could learn from the way that he has approached his time in office here. And he doesn't look at, like, oh, I'm a lame duck, oh, I've already been defeated. Let me just sling off into the shadows. It's like, no, I've got some power here. I have the ability to shine the spotlight. I'm going to use it for everything I possibly can. That's my thing to put about him is, like, I mean, I got plenty disagreements with Thomas as well. He voted a lot of things, which I agree with. That's fine. But what I respect here is he's not just spouting off. He's not just on CNN. He's actually doing it. He has strategy. He figured out, I mean, Rokana even said here. He's like, none of this would have happened without Thomas because he's like an engineer's mind. He's gone and studied the actual legislative process and the mechanisms where an individual, one of the biggest lies in Congress is I'm just one of 435. I can't do anything. When I'm in the house, Thomas has shown that is not true. That is empirically not true. Now, you're not going to win, but you can actually, you can make leadership's life hell. You can do all kinds of stuff. And that is what you have to respect more than anything. He's been going off lately with some recent comments, talking to reporters, E4. Let's take a listen. >> Real quick, Donald Trump, he was saying that we are now in a golden age. What are you making that? You agree? >> You need gold to buy diesel now. So maybe it is the golden age. >> I think you can. That was pretty good. Let's go to the next one. Thomas Massey, keep going. >> If you just always came down here and read your speeches, some of them are written by AI now. The staff better watch out. It was a good gig while you had it right in the speech for your robot boss to come down here. Here is my speech. Well, now they got a robot to replace you to feed your robot a speech. This is not a robot speech, folks. I am not a robot congressman, never have been. I mean, contrary to what Speaker said, a fully participating member of Congress. >> You got to love him. And then finally, on Ted Cruz. >> No, on American elections, should be designated a Ontario's organization. And if so, why are we not? >> I'm foreign policy. If you want to know my position, it's almost always the opposite. >> I have a photo after lunch. >> Do you agree with Ted Cruz? You mean he says, no. No, yeah, if you get me on that. >> You just have to love this man. And then finally, let's look at his learned colleague from the great state of Kentucky Commonwealth. I forget. >> Commonwealth, yeah. >> The Commonwealth of Kentucky, who are represented, who decided to kick this man out. Many apparently seem fine with their current representative in the United States Senate, Senator Mitch McConnell, who finally cast one of his first votes in public, I will say, where you are audibly able to hear him say aye. And see if you can make that out while you cast his vote from his wheelchair. Take a listen. >> Senator Slutkin. >> No, by proxy. >> Senator McConnell. >> All right. >> Do you guys see that? That's literally this fine-stine situation. >> Yes. >> He's panicking. He doesn't know what to do. >> It starts to do, it says no. >> Yeah. >> Staff has to intervene. >> No, no, no, sir. >> The woman behind, that's the staffer, the person who's telling him how to vote. The two of his colleagues, literally right there are both, they're like, no, no, no, no, no, you're voting yes, right? >> He took one vote. >> He took one vote. >> One vote and could not remember which way he's supposed to vote. >> Yeah, exactly. And if you want to see how with it is, let's play this video, guys. Let's put it up here and show you. Desiree Townsend, shout out to her fearless journalist. She just tracks Senator McConnell. Here he is in the back of the van in his wheelchair. She keeps shouting questions at him. I mean, I'm sorry, look, it's difficult because this person is very clearly in like health distress and you don't want to be ridiculing someone who is in this state. But he's the one choosing to stay around. Or at this point maybe he's not even the people around him are the one choosing for him to stay around. It's nuts. Like the guy, he cannot speak. He lit, or if he can, he's not showing us that he can. He hasn't spoken on camera. The eye is one of the closest that we've gotten. All he's capable of is his two finger move. I've seen him do this multiple times, not just with her, but anytime somebody asks him a question. It's beyond crazy. >> Scott Jennings claimed he had a 20 minute loose conversation with his man. Many other Republicans did as well. Liars. Absolute liars. There is no one home. Just look at his eyes. Look at him. Unable even to vote. He couldn't remember whether it was I or no on the one vote he had to take. I mean, it's just like putting Mitch McConnell aside, I think the American people look at this situation. Look at the dye and fine sign situation. Look at the Joe Biden situation. Look at all of the gerontocracy of people that are literally falling. John Featherman, who's not even that old, but obviously massive mental decline. Look at these people falling apart and are like, this is not democracy. Like there has to be some way to remove someone who is this incapacitated, because I guarantee you that the people of Kentucky, they're not going to vote the way I would want them to vote, but they deserve to have an actual representative in the Senate and not this vegetable. And that is the park, which just drives me crazy, because in the meantime, while he's in this state, these staffers, nobody elected them. They've probably been working for him for 30 years. They're just pulling the strings, running everything, and you didn't even vote for these people, and they're literally working on your behalf. It's bullshit. All right, Orion's going to come in. You guys are going to do this interview, and I will see you all later. And the argument is, do you want to win? If you don't win, you have no power. It's real. Those are the very people who I always say vote against their own economic interest, and they complained about the very thing they were seeing. It's wrong. I went off. Y'all go scream at Chanel, but you don't want to see a black luxury company in the same way. 12 seats. So if you Democrats, you don't wait to 23. Wherever you get your podcasts. Don't worry, this isn't just a show for stats experts. If you've ever wanted to know why a playwork, how a matchup was won, or what most fans missed on Sunday, NFL Pro delivers insights, you simply can't get anywhere else. Listen to NFL Pro on the iHot Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Last year we had Mike McDonald, Sam Darnal on the field after the game, but that was last year. It is in the name NFL Daily fresh content in your feed every day all season long. AJ Brown is loose. And of course those Seahawks trying to run it back and win another Lombardi trope. They are bringing Lombardi back to the Northwest. Listen to NFL daily on the I heart radio app Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast. We are very fortunate this morning to be joined by two extraordinary women Naomi Klein as a journalist, activist and author of a lot of consequential books, including No Logo, Shock Doctor and Double Ganger. And Astro Taylor is a writer, documentary and political organizer and co-founder of the debt collective. And for our purposes this morning, they are also co-authors of the new book, End Times Fascism and the Fight for the Living World. Excellent book. I am almost all the way through it and it does not, does not disappoint. Ladies welcome. Great to have you both. Yeah, of course. So to set this up, I wanted to play a decent chunk of the short film that you put out to sort of explain the framework of End Times Fascism. And the three segments of the right that you're taking a look at that all independently have these apocalyptic views of where we are heading and where they'd like us to head, frankly. So let's go ahead and take a listen to a little bit of that and then we can dig into the book. On a mountain top in the debt of winter, a group of faithful men gathered an audience to share their vision. They had seen a gleaming city bathed in golden light. The city would be filled with buildings so beautiful, they would seem to float above the earth as if descended from heaven. Their vision already had a name. So let's see if these things work. They never usually work. The mountain top in question was the resort town of Davos. The faithful men presenting their vision were US real estate moguls Jared Kushner and Steve Whitcoff. Well, this is a very exciting day. See, I'm a real estate person at heart. And it's all about location. Look at this beautiful piece of property. Let's just plan for catastrophic success. Out of the horrors of a live stream genocide, an exclusive paradise was about to emerge fully formed. We've already started removing the rubble and doing some of the demolition. We've heard the story of golden cities before. I thought a bit of the shining city upon a hill. Some versions of it are told and retold in the sacred tax of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. In God's prophetic clock, the seven signs for the end of days, first the horror, then we come to the place of Armageddon, the mass death. This is going to be your payday for the next 50 million years, a battle of Armageddon. Then for the blessed survivors, a New Jerusalem, but only for the favorite few. The apocalyptic prophecies are just a prediction of what humans are likely to do. Today's far right is united. I mean civilization could die with a bang or a whimper. By their belief in variations of this age-old apocalyptic myth. What I'm trying to focus on is doing as much of God's work as possible right now. And if at least the end times, okay. This is the dark core of the rising threat and ideology that we call. So, Naomi, perhaps I could start with you and you could just lay out the the top line of the three apocalyptic factions that you identify who have really found common cause under the second Trump regime. Yeah, absolutely. So these three groups and fascism is always a sort of a strange alliance between different forces, but the three groups that are united by this vision of kind of abandoning this world as we know it and escaping to some version of paradise or really bunkering down are the people who believe in the literal version of the end-time story, the religious fundamentalists, both Christian Zionists and Messianic Jews who quite literally want to rebuild the third temple to hasten the arrival or return of the Messiah, depending on which version of the story you believe in. And the people we're calling the tech end-timers who just can't wait to merge with the machines and to reach this kind of God-like superintelligence. And the third group, which is probably the largest groups that the mass base that that voted for Trump and not everybody who voted for Trump falls into this category, but are people who really see the nation itself as the bunker. And these are the ethno nationalist. And there are U.S. versions of this, but they're versions of this in Europe, they're versions of this in Chile, but the story is the hordes are coming as the world breaks down and we need to fortress our nation. We need to eject the unwanted people and we need to bring the resources into the nation that we will need as the world collapses. So it's very much a proper mindset we refer to it as super-sized prepping. And Astra, how much of this is kind of baked into where we are and how much of it is contingent? Like what can we as people in the United States or what can people around the world kind of do about the direction of this? Yeah, that's a great question. I mean, there's a material basis to this. This is a book that explores far-right fringe ideology. As Pamely said, in ideology, there's not dominant across the entire right, but certainly describe some of the most powerful people in the world. People at the top of government and corporations. But it is a response to unprecedented planetary crises. We live in a world that's very different from the world of last century when fascism took over Europe. We live in a world with nuclear weapons. We live in a world with generative artificial intelligence and all the risk that that poses. And we live critically in a world of climate change, where we are crossing all sorts of thresholds. We also live in a world of intense concentrated wealth, where Elon Musk has more wealth than many countries. So you know, he's the world's first trillionaire and there are many people who want to join him at that level. So the material crises are felt very deeply and they're driving a lot of this because we have not addressed many of our crises. And this is a moment where these elites are saying bring it on, right, bring it on. We're going to survive in our in our various ways and in the bunkers and the fortress nation. So it is driven by these crises, but that means that we can actually mitigate it by addressing those crises, which is why we need real policies on the table that get to the root of this and address extreme inequality, climate change, affordability, all the insecurity that is driving people to vote for demagogues, vote for strongments and make them more susceptible to building these kickgoats. So there are plenty of fractures in this alliance and opportunities we think for a visionary less politics because that's where the real solution is. Naomi, let's talk a little bit about how Trump fits into all of this. Let's put F2 up on the screen. You guys point out and I sort of forgot this moment from the campaign that he was on a podcast and he sort of had this throwaway line of like, you know, I'm kind of concerned, these AI deepfakes could trigger a nuclear war. Anyway, let's go ahead and talk about how we're proceeding full force with the AI data center build out in our glorious AI future. And it really underscored the fact that not very long ago, he was anti-crypto, he had his skepticism of AI. He'd been very critical of the tech world, which they saw as being woke and aligned with the Democratic Party. That gets sort of thrown out the window. And so how does Trump fit in with these various ideologies? Because it doesn't seem to me that he's a perfect fit for either for any of the three. And yet they've all kind of consolidated and found common cause under his presidency. I think that's really well said. Crystal, all of these different groups see Trump as useful to them. In the same way that the evangelicals, I, you know, have this story about him as this flawed king's iris, right? Like they know that he is, he is this kind of follow on king, but they've convinced themselves that he is the one who's going to fulfill prophecy for them. And this goes back to the first Trump administration. And the move in particular of the US Embassy to Jerusalem was seen as a really pivotal moment in this hastening, in this hastening and time story. I think for the tech oligarchs, it's precisely his, you know, that moment that you're referring to in the podcast, where he sort of shrugs about the end of the world. Like he says, yeah, AI could bring about a nuclear war. And he talks about how easy it would be to deep, deep fake him. And then he just sort of shrugs. And we're seeing this right now with his response to, you know, and this is a separate conversation of how seriously we should be taking the whistleblowers who are saying, you know, there's a temperate sense, that what we're building could and humanity. And Trump's response is just to shrug. So I think that he is useful to the tech oligarchs precisely because he is an extraordinarily sociopathic, a moral person who seems okay with pretty much any outcome he thinks he's going to be fine. He's got his golden bunkers. And he has an extraordinary level of callousness. It would seem about all of our future. So he is very, very useful. And, you know, what the tech oligarchs wanted from Trump was exactly what they got from him. They wanted a lawless AI frontier. They did not like that the Biden administration and the European Union were starting to introduce some regulations for artificial intelligence. There was a lot of talk about not repeating the mistakes that were made with social media, giving them a wild west and then realizing oops, we have some problems here and trying to race to protect privacy and so on. And so they were, they put some guardrails up, you know, there were things like incentivizing renewable energy, labeling deep fakes, guardrails about integration with weapon systems. And people like Mark Andreessen were flipping out about this. And they wanted that, you know, there's a reason they keep calling them frontier models, you know, and what a frontier is want, they want a wild west. And that's exactly what they have gotten under Trump. He has protected them from all attempts to regulate at the local level, at the state level, but also at the international level, you know, JD Vance gets dispatched to Europe, to scream at them about all of their, all of their laws. One of the first things Mark Carney did was, was, was, um, roll back a law that had been introduced by his predecessor to start taxing social media companies and start regulating along the lines of the European Union. So he just rolled over on that immediately. So we've seen this complete integration of the goals of big tech and US foreign policy. They want the world to be using US tech and they want it to be unregulated. And now, of course, they're ringing their hands. And we should be very skeptical about, about these claims now that they want to be regulated because they have been deregulated because they want it to be. And, Astro, while you guys are writing this book, Trump introduced something of a rupture into the, into the equation. You could obviously see directionally where things were heading. And that's what you guys are writing about. But his, is Iran war has done, has, has really produced an acceleration of a lot of factors. For instance, I just saw recently that apparently we're on track to have the first reduction in carbon emissions. This year, for a very long time, thanks to President Trump basically taking a wrecking ball to the fossil fuel industry. He's doing more to kind of disarm the United States than you could ever possibly imagine through some type of treaty. He's possibly opening up a kind of new global power arrangement in which the US is somewhat in retreat. And so I'm curious in that series of events, how does that retreat play into the forces that you're talking about? And does it kind of accelerate the millennial kind of apocalyptic sense of the people who are already, you know, feeling like they're under siege? Yeah, interesting. I mean, this gives you a question about contingency. I mean, we don't know how this will all play out. There's a lot of factors. It's a, we are in a multi-polar reality. I mean, the question, another consequence in addition to the ones you laid out is that he's alienated a decent portion of his base on this issue as well, some of his core supporters. I mean, many Republicans do support the war in Iran, but many prominent figures are very, very critical and are not in line. And so this is, you know, reveals the the figures that we're talking about and the the fractiousness of this alliance. So I think this is an opening that that shows the weakness of this alignment. It also, you know, it just makes us, one thing we say in the book is that, you know, there are these religious figures who are the, you know, the part of the made force driving the war in Iran, right? Who believe that they are enacting biblical prophecy in the Holy Land. And so they see the war in Iran through the lens of the Bible. It's the war of dog and mungog. These are some of the people that we show in the video that people should watch and fall online. And one point we make is that, you know, these self, these prophecies don't have to be literally true to be self-fulfilling and very, very dangerous. So there could be these, you know, more positive consequences that are opening that you just openings that you just laid out. But it's also risking a bigger war, regional war, you know, and so it could go in a very dangerous direction. It's certainly been very devastating for the people of Iran right now. So prophecies, again, they do not have to be literally true to be quite devastating. And that's why we should be paying attention to what these people are saying and what they're doing. Yeah, absolutely. And that actually is a good turn specifically to the tech guy's Astra. And you guys quote Alex Karp quite a bit in the book because he has a tendency of saying the quiet part out loud. And he really explains quite directly why some of the tech executives who five seconds ago were positioning themselves as ProDI and more, you know, socially responsible and all of these sorts of things. He tries to explain to them, well, if you're building technology that you think is going to get rid of mass amounts of human labor, you're going to need me and the other tough guys with the guns on your side and doing the mass surveillance. So we got to fit together hand and glove. So could you speak a little bit to that? And specifically, what is the vision that these tech oligarchs have for all of us? The quote that you highlighted from Alex Karp is absolutely critical. He basically says to his fellow AI executives, if you think you're building a technology that's going to take all the jobs, then there's no way for you to oppose the government. You also have to essentially what he says is you also have to help build the surveillance state. You have to get embedded with the military because you're going to need to control all of those unruly people who now have no way to survive, right? You're going to have to track, contain, imprison those people. So I think there is, you know, it's what was striking by the comment is that he's basically laying the authoritarian agenda out there, the fascist agenda. It's like if you are going to grab this much wealth and power, you're going to have to point guns at ordinary people. It's a very, very dark vision. It's the vision. Palantir is selling. We also quote Alex Karp saying that Palantir is built for bad times. Bad times are good for Palantir, meaning that they are planning for a world of rolling shocks of increasing peril, of wars, of storms, and that they are ready to profit from that. So they are profits of doom in a way, right? They're looking to profit here from an age of catastrophe and collapse. And so, you know, I think he's someone again, he can speak in a kind of ridiculous way and team bit over the top of really should be taking seriously what he's saying. He's one of the most powerful people in the United States right now. And Naomi, as you look through the history of other kind of versions of millennial and times fascism, what can you learn about what happens when let's hope that the world doesn't end? Let's go with that and that there's a day after that. What has happened to those movements? You know, after it crests and breaks and something new develops in the rubble or the aftermath of those movements? And how can we, how can you tell kind of looking back like when those turns start to take place? You know, it's interesting, Ryan, because I'm not sure that there are direct historical parallels with the moment that we're in. And this is part of what we're identifying is that often when we try to understand authoritarianism, we exclusively look to the past. And there's a lot that the past can teach us about resistance strategies and specifically the importance of signaling to people who want to exert a totalizing level of control over a society that people are united, that they're willing to take real risks to resist them. You see people, you know, the streets saying do not obey an advance. And that I think is a real attempt to learn the lessons of history. And it does work. And I think we saw this extraordinary pushback to the ice occupation of Minneapolis. And then we saw something of a withdrawal and to be clear, as we all know, ice continues to kid that very large numbers of people out of their homes, but they are not doing these kind of city level in your face occupations, because their own base started to turn against them, and they turned against them because they saw extraordinary courage from people on the streets of Minneapolis, standing up for their neighbors, and the level of, you know, of the extreme levels of violence that they really, like I think people like Steven Miller and Christine Ohm and JD Vance, who shrugged off the murders of Renee Good and Alex Prety, that didn't go well for them, right? I mean, Christine Ohm lost her job and there started, you know, there were memos that went out saying like, we're gonna be talking about criminals now, not mass deportations and there has been a shift of discourse ahead of the midterms, right? So learn from history. It is important, do not obey in advance, resist, know that these people will go as far as they're able to go, but also know that it is possible to push back. That's important, but part of what, or a big part of what we're trying to say here is that our world really has changed since fascism rose in Europe in the 20th century and the fact that there are these real crises at a planetary scale that they are responding to is something we need to pay attention to. We don't believe the world's gonna end Ryan. This is not what we're saying, but what we are saying is that something has changed, like even since I started writing about disaster capitalism and the way these guys start profit from disasters, there's now no discourse around solving any of these crises or even bothering to deny them. That is a real shift. The standing, the relationship to crisis, is taking it for granted that collapse is gonna happen and telling a story of how you will be okay. And even as we've been writing this, there has been a dramatic shift and rift between the tech faction of this coalition and the mass base and you've all been covering the data center backlash, but also the backlash to living under surveillance data at all, I think is very strong on the right. I mean, arguably the right has stronger privacy, it interests in privacy than we've had on the left. So this has become more and more unpopular with Trump's base as we've been writing about it and there's been more rifts within that coalition, which is something that if there was a strong democratic party, they'd be able to work with that. The problem is large portions of the democratic party are taking money from these big tech companies and are intervening to say, well, hey, let's not slow things down too much. I mean, this could be that AI is great and so on. So there isn't a clear alternative and then what enters into that rift in this coalition could be even more extreme, right? Like it could be even more a mask off Nazi. But this has been a very interesting writing process because for the first few months, it felt like it was going really, really well for this coalition. But then the turning point in Minneapolis was so significant and the data center resistance has spread so quickly that we really are in this very malleable moment as the book comes out. But in terms of what come, we don't believe the world is going to end, but we believe that we have to take their belief in the story they're telling very seriously because it's a really destructive and frightening story and it tells you not to try to fix anything. That's the most important part of this. And at the accelerationist and it's even more extreme because it means that any bad things are actually good, right? Like you should welcome the signs. It's a sign that the end is coming. - Yeah, for example, you talk about some of the extremist terror settlers who celebrate on October 7th because they know that this is going to allow them to move forward with their horrific genocidal plans. Astra, last question for you. I wanted you to dig a little bit into the ethno-nationalist here because my assessment I think you guys share this is in terms of actual popular support, the tech stuff is extremely for engine unpopular. You know, transhumanist stuff is you have to take it seriously because a bunch of very powerful billionaires who have grab control of the government are serious about it and most of the population finds it repellent. Next I would say in terms of being popular unpopular would be the Evangelical End Times ideology, which is held by some significant minority group in America. But the one that to me is the most politically potent and I think has just been proven by AFD success in Germany is the ethno-nationalist sentiment. And on the one hand, I see Minneapolis, I see the way that public polling has really shifted how there's a huge backlash, how there's a lot of horror among the populists about what mass deportation actually means and actually looks like. But on the other hand, I also know that in difficult times, this is what fascists grab onto. They use the scapegoating that anti-immigrant sentiment tends to rise. So do you see that as the most powerful sort of potent political force from the rights perspective and how are you thinking about the challenges of approaching that in a time when maybe the horrors of mass deportation aren't so front and center, how do we hold on to a more ethical view with regard to immigration? - Great, and I agree with your assessment of the three, we call them the three bunkers, the three prongs of this alliance and how deeply they engage a mass base. I mean, the example of AFD winning Saxony Unhold in Germany is important. Naomi and I wrote an essay recently for the Financial Times, actually. And we open with the image that was all over the media this summer of Nazi worships emerging from the Danube as the river receded due to extreme heat, right? And it was this incredible almost like two on the nose, visual metaphor for the fact that these parties with Nazi roots, or sometimes just members or power figures within them who play with Nazi tropes are spreading across the European continent. AFD won an election. It was the first time a far right party has won an election and they won over 40% of the vote. And so, you know, but we were looking at the image of these ships and the river and he said, well, we need to pay attention to us, actually the river, the climate change, right? The material crisis out of which these parties are emerging and other crisis are emerging from, which is the crisis of economic precarity. In that region, you know, people are struggling with affordability. They're struggling to find work that's well remunerated. They have a sense of futurelessness and in fact, very low levels of immigration. So what the far right is doing is, you know, pivoting, right? Pivoting the focus and saying the emergency isn't climate change, right? The emergency isn't the oligarchs sucking up all the wealth. It's the kebab shop. It's the trans kids. And so, you know, part of how we fight that is to keep our eyes on the real issues, right? The real issues that are making people's lives hard. You know, last century in the United States, the fascist threat was partly beaten back because of the new deal and because of policies that created jobs that improved people's livelihoods. They weren't perfect, but that's the model that we can partly follow moving forward. Like, let's address the real crises. And that means that we need a left in a democratic party that's putting real solutions on the table because fascism doesn't just flourish because it's got a lot of money behind it and it's cruel and it's, you know, willing to break laws and rules though all of that helped. It also flour, it also flourishes when there's a vacuum when there's no alternative, when there's a lack of courage and conviction and real solutions on the table. So what we have to do is keep organizing and speaking to people's real challenges and conditions and insist that we actually take on the power structure and take on the real crises and insist that we're blaming the people at the top not the people at the bottom. - The book, and one thing I would just add there if that's okay is just, we really believe that there is an extraordinary opportunity for a unlikely alliances between people on the traditional right and left, a bottom-up alliance to fight all a garkey. And I think Bernie Sanders has been very visionary about this and within the local data center resistance, we're seeing all kinds of evidence of people realizing that they have more in common than they do disagreements that they want to unite against these tech companies that are coming into all of their communities, raising their electricity bills, polluting the air, taking their farmland, and, you know, we're seeing really, really interesting conversations. It's been called the most bipartisan issue since beer and there's a lot that can be done, building on what Astro was just saying, you know, if it can really be combined with an affordability agenda, there's an amazing opportunity here. But I just wanna flag that there are also real dangers. If the alliance is imagined with the folks who are at the top of the ethno nationalist push, and here I'm thinking about people like Steve Bannon, Marjorie Taylor Greene. And I say this because, you know, I'm sure you probably covered the event that Bernie Sanders did with Steve Bannon very recently. And if you listen to what Steve Bannon said in his portion of that event, he pivoted almost immediately to cold, a cold war with China. And he used that phrase, he said we are in a cold war and he said the way to fight AI is to fight China. And this is the war that Bannon has always wanted, You know, Ryan knows. that the, as a fellow War Room listener, that this entire show is framed around taking down the CCP. And, you know, if part of what we're saying is that where our common ground is, our bipartisan common ground is, we all agree we don't want the endless wars and we don't want the oligarchy. Then it would be a real shame to blow this bipartisan moment with an alliance with people who actually have shown themselves to be absolutely fine making alliances with, with people like the mercers and other oligarchs and want very much to have a cold war with a major power. You know, Bannon was talking about, you know, everything from building a moat around US tech and making sure that China doesn't get their hands on our tech and banning Chinese students and, you know, it was practically sounding like, you know, in tournament camps. So, that is not the root and that is where things are going if we don't have a bottom-up alliance. So, we are all for breaking apart this fascist coalition. We think there are incredible opportunities. We also have some amazing people coming to Congress who came up with, you know, this incoming class is pretty extraordinary and I think they're going to be ready to provide that kind of leadership. But we've got a really narrow window here and we should not blow it. One quick question on that, you know, it's basically impossible to stop like Steve Bannon, you know, from talking, you know, he's got his own show, War Room. You know, he's going to get invited to events. So, like, so he's going to insert himself into this movement and if the left is also concerned about fighting back against data centers and all these other crises, they are then just objectively by definition kind of in coalition whether or not they're talking to him or not. To me, the best response then is there have to be kind of left leaders as well as the bottom-up base so that the movement doesn't get defined then, oh, this is Bannon's movement. But that's just my kind of immediate take like since calling him out is not a possibility. Like, how do you navigate that? Well, I think he's fighting for his own relevance in part because he's either that or lose his base because his base is organizing against data centers, right? And they have, he's right when he says that his base was part of fighting back various attempts to ban local regulations on data centers, but it's also true that unless he has this rhetoric, you know, they'll just go somewhere else. And one of the things that Astra and I write about in the book is one of the things that makes this form of, you know, we do call it fascism different from earlier generations is the role of these kind of entrepreneurial influencers. They'll just go to another podcaster who is willing to say these things. And so I think he's in an awkward situation. The other thing that he's saying is that it should all be done by executive order by Donald Trump. We know Donald Trump isn't going to do this by executive order. The only thing that Donald Trump might do and might listen to Steve Bannon about is this escalation of war with China, right? And so what was being signaled here is the way to show your base that you're serious about taking on AI is escalate the war with China because Donald Trump is up to his eyeballs in this personally and economically, right? So that's not going to happen. He is, he has made it clear that he's all in on AI. So yeah, we need left leaders. I think people like, you know, I think Abdul Al-Sahad has been, you know, doing that kind of organizing of going into red parts of the state and trying to build that common ground. Yeah, I'm sure Astra has some great organizing tips there to choose the true organizer in our duo. I mean, there's, you know, Greng says are talking about the needs for job guarantee. He is part of an AI policy. There are good, good ideas out there. We're a little skeptical of the idea of taking a stake in AI, but I think there's also some things that can be done. So agree with Ryan that what we need is bold left figures and visions, really filling that space so that Bannon cannot race in front and position himself as a leader of this movement because his Naomi said he's trying to follow his audience because he knows that the vast majority of Americans are extremely skeptical of AI and the tech oligarchs and aren't looking forward to the technology that promises to do not much besides take all the jobs and possibly in the world. Yeah, I mean, it sounds like on his face, his argument doesn't even make sense because if we need to be China in the AI race, then it's going to be off to the races. I mean, this is the argument that the tech oligarchs themselves are making about all of this stuff. There's nothing like racing towards destruction. Yes, love that. A Lorde's Ted Cruz said, well, if they're going to be killer robots, I want it to be an American robot that kills me. Not a Chinese one, inspiring stuff there from Naomi and Astor. Thank you so much, guys. The book is End Times Fascism and the fight for the living world. Congratulations to you both, and thank you so much for this discussion today and also your contribution to the intellectual discourse around this regime as well. All right, that does it for us, but since we have the advantage of having Ryan here, the salesman, the chief capitalist on the team, who everyone wants to apparently subscribe, when Ryan is around, we figured we would take advantage of this moment for you to make a pitch. Well, you get a month free. How could that, you know, what do you have to lose, nothing but your chains? But no, seriously, so this would be the most fun humiliation of Sagar. I agree. Since he did most of the show and we're at the back end of an episode here. So this is the diehars that are still watching this. Yes. You went all the way through the Naomi and Astor interview. Here you are. So if we can get at least a hundred people to sign up for this month free, go to brainpoints.com to the month free, Griffin promises he will make a code. Yes. Late for next week or week after however long takes will make it. That will be slash bongrips. Yes. You'll get a free month if you put in slash bongrips. But we have to get those signups today. Yes. If you want the bongrips code. Because it's unfortunately right now is a little bit of work, but Griffin will do it for the bongrips. So bongrips for Sagar. So there you go, guys. Sign up today for the bongrips for Sagar. And thank you for watching. We will see you guys tomorrow. It's real. This is a wholesale attack. It is targeting black people in every federal agency. It's wrong. White folks have never allowed that reckoning to last more than a decade. 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