WTF?! This is His Worst Nightmare Come True

So we're trying to understand what exactly is going on. Why do they want to expand war in the Middle East in the same way? What is this alliance with the tech oligarchs? Yes, they've always been racist and rapidly anti-immigrant, but the scale of the deportations, the speed with which they're building concentration camps. This is another order of magnitude. (upbeat music) All right, joining me is co-author of the new book End Times Fascism, Naomi Climbe, as you know, I also wrote a book on fascism and our books were here to compare notes before we head into the midterm. Naomi, what does End Times Fascism mean? Well, first of all, so great to meet you and congrats on your book. And it's amazing to be out on tour parallel with you and fighting the good fight. So what we mean by End Times Fascism is a fascism of our age, a primo levy said every fascism has its own age. Sorry, every age has its own fascism. Had a late night last night. We're going to get through it together. Okay, great. And our age is an age of existential crises and risk. We're not saying that our fascists are worse than Mussolini and Hitler, but we are saying that Hitler and Mussolini died before the first nuclear tests. They didn't live in a world where humans had the capacity to destroy the world. They didn't understand climate change. They, so they, we are playing with bigger scale risks, right? Including AI. And so in the face of this, this apocalyptic world view, which is rooted in theology of just like, the end is coming, but that's great. I'm saved, I'm chosen, you know, all about this. It was really like seeped into even the secular parts of the right. And it's very embedded in tech. And, you know, Astra and I are saying, let's stay here. It's really good here. We need to fight for the living world. And that is what it means to be antifascist today is actually saying no to this apocalyptic world view. - Yeah, so I know all about the apocalypse growing up in Oklahoma, begrudgingly know about it. - Exactly. - We know a lot of things we wish we didn't know. - Yes, because I was constantly threatened by my peers and warned about the incoming rapture. And this brings a lot of strange bedfellows. So you have tech oligarchs. So let's take Elon Musk. He clearly is not a religious person. Donald Trump is not a religious person. You have Christian, nationalist. And then you have white supremacists. How did these Christian Zionists? - And Christian Zionists - And Christian Jews. - Yes. And the Christian Zionists I'm abundantly familiar with who are also very anti-Semitic. We'll get to that later. But when you combine these people together, how do these groups find common ground? And what does each gain from the alliance? - Yeah. So, okay, just to back up a bit. I mean, we were trying to understand what was new about what we were seeing from Donald Trump this time around. You know, I wrote a book about him during the first term, the first Trump term, and he was not this excited to accelerate wars, to expand wars. He was not in bed with Silicon Valley. Like in the same way, like that image that we all remember from inauguration where all of the tech oligarchs are lined up with him. That was new. I live in Canada. He was not threatening to annex us last time around. He was not, you know, he was, he was not kidnapping the President of Venezuela last time around, right? So, we're trying to understand what exactly is going on. And so, we're arguing that this alliance, right? And in terms of what they're getting from each other, I mean, one of the things that God is Donald Trump, right? Like they made an electoral alliance, and fascism is always an alliance, as you know, right? Like the word in Latin means fascia, fascia means bundle, right? So you're bundling together these sort of strange bad fellows who are making common cause for power. And we're identifying what binds them together, but also what could potentially break this bundle apart. Because if you're an anti-fascist, that's what you want to do. You want to break apart the alliance. Fascist busting, exactly. And there are all kinds of contradictions. And in fact, the bundle was sort of falling apart as we were writing in lots of good ways. But what we are identifying is they all believe in different forms of chosenness. They all believe that there's an in-group that they're a part of that is going to save them from the end of the world. They don't agree on what the end of the world looks like, and they don't all agree on who it's chosen, right? The billionaires believe it's wealth that determines it, and it's really just them and their buddies. The Christian Zionists believe, and the Messianic Jews, don't even agree on what happens at the end of their alliance, right? Like the Christians believe that Jews die in a pool of blood, or rivers of blood, the Jews believe they're the ones who are saved. The Afno-Nationalists believe the nation itself is the bunker that saves them, the religious fundamentalists believe they're going to a bunker in the sky. The tech oligarchs have their own bunkers, or they think they're going to Mars. But it's a similar kind of pattern of thought. We're chosen, end of the world fine, maybe slam your foot on the pedal, because you're going to be okay. And what they're all doing is negotiating with the fact that capitalism actually has taken us to this point of crisis, and they have to rationalize that. Like fascism is always a right wing project that's protecting the status quo, but our status quo has gotten awfully radical in and of itself. So let's talk about it from this angle. So I argue in my book that some of the most co-opted people in the country are evangelical Christians. They've been co-opted by the NRA. They've been co-opted by Vladimir Putin. He entered through the prayer breakfast to disseminate pro-Russia propaganda. Donald Trump was delivered the presidency in 2016 via Jerry Falwell Jr. You remember the guy who hired the poor boy to bang his wife while he sat in the corner and watched and did extra things. So now I hear the tech oligarchs are whining and dining evangelical pastors are bringing them to Silicon Valley to let them know, AI is great. AI is a great way to message Christianity. And so we have, and this is what I would call, as you know, all of these fascists have to have a cult of personality. And so this cult of personality that we have in the United States, that feeds is now feeding in to so many of these different groups. If you talk about the Christian Zionist, you have the ambassador, Huckabee, who was over there. And I think Pete Hexeth was just visiting with him in Israel in the last day or two. What do you make of the personality cult that we have in the United States of America? And how easily co-opted they are? And how do we resist and better educate or get these people spun out of this? - It's a great question. And it's a challenge across the board. I mean, I think everybody in the culture has a tendency to create cult of personality even on the left, right? We all, like, this is one of the things that we're dealing with is if every age has its own fascism, we have influencer fascism in the age of influencers, right? And so we do. And Donald Trump is that for his base, but that also creates these rupture because then you have these influencer war, right? Where they all get super messy with each other. And it's like Tucker Carlson is warring with Donald Trump. They're warring with Candace Owen. And it's beautiful to watch the football. - Yeah, the cannibalism is delicious. - It's wonderful, they're all accusing each other of being gay, FBI agents. You know, what gets very dangerous is when you have corporate dams who are like, oh, they're taking care of each other. Like, let's just let them splinter and sort of grab the popcorn and watch as if that's enough. And as if there isn't a danger of somebody even more dangerous actually coming next. Because if you're watching this, like, a lot of what they're saying is, you know, Nick Fuentes is saying he's not fascist enough. He hasn't deported enough people. That's the problem we need like a real fascist. Donald Trump was a fake fascist. So let's, like something worse than Trump could follow Trump unless, you know, Democrats get their act together or there's like a successful Civil War within the Democratic Party and they're really, are democratic socialists who are getting at the root drivers of this. Like why people are looking to be saved and why their lives are so crap, right? And I actually think that the only happy ending is to die and end up in heaven. Like that is a really sad story, you know, which is why we're saying like, hey, let's stay and make here better. - So I agree with you, the incubation. So if you think back when Obama won in 2008, the Tea Party movement. And before that, you had Rush Limbaugh that was slowly pulling people away from corporate media and incubating them in more radicalized French spaces. Nobody took it seriously. When Donald Trump first came down the escalator, the Republican party, the establishment Republican party rejected him. Conservative media rejected him. And then he won because people are so desperate for an anti-status quo. So since we haven't changed the status quo at all, we've exacerbated the status quo. In a good way which Joe Biden exacerbated status quo, in a very bad way with Donald Trump exacerbated the status quo. And we're not dealing with the core problem which is this unregulated, unmitigated capitalism. So we have the capitalist system which is one problem and also a cultural problem that capitalism has produced in the United States is this rugged individuality that we value the rights of the individual. We do not really value collectivism where I grew up in Oklahoma in the Bible Belt. I see that people consistently, followers of Jesus Christ, I mean, that center their faith, they let you know within 1.5 seconds that they are a follower of Christ. They want you to go to their church, they're worried about your soul, et cetera. They value capital over life. And as these two things dovetail, this capitalism that favors a few people. And then how that has trickled down, not wealth, but this cultural rot to even people who are followers of Jesus who exclusively spoke out against the accumulation of wealth. He didn't mince words on it, you know, you can't worship both God and money, et cetera. And so you have these Americans that very much time and time again go and vote, I call them a capitalist with no capital, that go and vote to advance the needs of very few. How do we, what are your proposals that we start to take away at this? So it's true what you say, that the churches are saying, you know, we'll take care of your soul. But they're also running food drives. They're also some of the only places where you can get some child care for your kid for a few hours, you know, they're running a sort of impromptu social safety net that is not being provided by the state. But there's also like one of the things I was really struck by was because we co-gotten of deep on this on this Christian Zionism and the biblical tourism, right, that Micah could be like profiting off of right, like running the trips, his like now his son is doing it. All of them have just passed their businesses on to their sons and go out and gone like, oh no, I have nothing to do with that now, but they used to sell like you could go to Israel, walk in Jesus' footsteps, and also like meet Micah could be the former governor right? But do you imagine paying money to want to go meet Micah could be and that would be rock bottom. These are like, I mean, we quote in the book, these like Yelp reviews from some of these biblical tourism trips where they're like, and we got to see where the where the battle of Armageddon is going to take place, five stars, you know, no, no, it's wild, but also like you really, you really realize that people are longing for roots, like they're longing for a sense of history and purpose and meaning, and there's something about how derasinated the United States is, and this kind of like country that was itself born of these biblical stories, right? Like we are the city on the hill, like we are starting over, this is the New Jerusalem, right? And kind of blank, slating, indigenous history here and always starting over, always never looking back, right? So there's this and there's this feeling of nowhereness that I think a lot of people are coming from. And then they're told the place where you can feel like this deep sense of home and roots is in some somebody else's country, oh, and also you have to have a genocide there because those are the preconditions for the Armageddon where you get to be saved, right? So when I, where we feel hopeful is looking at the way people organize in Minnesota, in Minneapolis, under the ice occupation, which had a lot of people from churches and mosques and synagogues going, yeah, actually this is not what any of our faiths say. And yes, Jesus said, love thy neighbor, right? It wasn't only religious folks, but there were a lot of religious folks who were part of those demonstrations trying to like wrench their faith back from JD Vance. I think a lot of the work is, look, I mean, astronaut are not religious, but we came to be respectful of these traditions and people who are fighting within these faith traditions to try to separate their religious traditions from ethno-nationalists, whether it's Zionists and Jews trying to take our faith back from this ethno-nationalist project that is genocidal or Christians taking their faith back from ethno-nationalists who are, you know, ethnically cleansing the nation in the name of their faith. You bring up a really interesting point because I, I'm an atheist and every, well, my life sounds like we know, but I go really hard at evangelicals because I see how diabolical they are, how organized they are, how maniacal they are in organizing to completely restructure the Supreme Court. They've been very successful. That is a decades-long injection of politics in two churches to elect Donald Trump. And so I often am very critical and then I see people in our comment section that are, that are really good people that have a really good faith that is peaceful to them. And they're like, Jennifer, not all Christians are like that and of course I know that because after I moved out of the Bible belt and I live up here, I walk past a church and it's like refugees welcome here. Black lives matter. And I'm always like, maybe I wouldn't be so cynical if I'd grown up around churches like this instead of the hateful evangelical churches of the Bible belt. But I do think that the Onus goes on a lot of religious leaders to be louder than me the atheist about this is not what our faith is about. I liken it to Republicans in my home state when I would advocate for health care or say, you know, Oklahoma has problems, we have a Republican supermajority and look at how bad the state's running and they'd say, well, you shouldn't move out of the country, you're not a real American. Well, I am a real American. I am absolutely 100% a real American and it change takes people within the tribe calling 100%. I mean, I'm part of the anti-Zionist Jewish tradition, right? And we've been having, you know, you had my friend Molly Crabapple on the show. I love her. But we are part of like a real battle with in Judaism to try to say like, you don't get our faith, like you don't get to equate this ancient faith tradition with this very modern ethno state with all of its escalating violence, war crimes, atrocities, no, you don't get to do that. But we have to be really loud and they get really angry at us. Like you see the hate. And now, you know, you have J.D. Vance, I mean, he's fought with, like, he's a relatively recent Catholic convert. He is fought with two popes now, you know, killed one. But they're pushing back and they need to, like, these battles really do matter. And also people are right not to be religious at all. And there's still a spiritual quality to fighting for, you know, we call this the fight for the living world because, you know, the tech oligarchs, they have another kind of religious faith, right? Like they also want to kind of dematerialize this whole drive towards AI and the draining of water, land, energy, like to summon their digital gods. I mean, they literally talk about it as a digital god or Elon Musk says, maybe it's a digital demon. I mean, they've utterly lost their minds. They are deranged by their wealth. And you say, we do have some policy solutions at the end of the book, which is just like, we believe we need a new disarmament movement, where there are some things that are just too dangerous for the rest of us to coexist with, right? Nuclear weapons, yes, but also this concentrated form of tech that has corroded our democracies. And now they're telling us that in order to build their latest bubble and inflate their latest bubble, to race towards AGI, which is incredibly ill-defined, but it is the point at which they have replaced most of our jobs. Like this is how Sam Altman defines the goal of opening AI. It is the point at which AI replaces the vast majority of human economic activity, right? So when most of us no longer have any role in society and can't earn a living, that's when they win, right? So that's when we lose. And I think that that organizing we're seeing against AI is because people realize that. They're like, this is why you want to build this data center in my backyard and pollute our air and make noise nonstop so that you can replace our job surveilers, neighbors, and you know, bomb schools in Iran. That seems like a really bad deal. Yeah, it seems like a really, you know, this is capitalism's worst offer. Yeah. So in this past week, we've seen several examples of tech companies, efforts to dismantle democracy, pop this up Kylie, Mark Zuckerberg's Instagram suspended the No Kings Instagram account for today's No King action, Larry Ellison's TikTok shut down the account promoting Alex Gibney's Elon Musk documentary, Elon Musk promoted the fake story about James Talleriko on his ex site while donating over $150 million to help Ken Paxton. Your reminder that Trump's billionaire allies control what you see on TikTok, ex, Twitch, Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and YouTube where we are right now. And they have a vested interest in making sure Dems don't take the majority. So Trump isn't investigated. So we have. We make the argument in the book that this is why they aligned with Trump in the first place, that it was a revolt against the regulation that they were starting to see with people like Lena Khan and Biden did not do nearly enough. But there were some good people in that administration that were beginning to crack down on crypto, that were beginning investigations that would have trickled up to a bunch of these venture capitalist guys who led the charge away from the Democratic Party over to Trump, like people like Mark Andreson. But this is really. And this is also global, right? Like yes, those are great examples from the US. But they are. Like what Metta is doing in the Brazil, yes, Lula Bolsonaro, yeah. And they were just ordered to not discriminate against Lula's accounts, you know, as they have the runoff in Brazil, or else they get fined. But the trouble is, you can't find people worth this much money in a way that matters to them. Like what really matters is that they stay on Trump's good side, right? And he wants Bolsonaro's son to win, so Bolsonaro gets let out of jail. So this is the other thing that we're arguing at the end of the book is we can't co-exist with billionaires. Like it's for real. It's for real. It's for real. It's not a slogan. It's like we actually have to disarm the wealth bomb. We can't afford them. We cannot exactly. We cannot afford billionaires. And speaking of the richest man in the world, you've probably seen this last week that he is powerful enough to mess with Starlink and Ukraine. One man who nobody would ever vote for, because these billionaires don't put their names on the ballot. Peter Till knows he would never get elected. Elon Musk knows that he would never get elected. Hell, he's trying to prevent people from seeing a documentary that exposes who he really is. It's really good, by the way, everyone see that documentary. But he's able to stop Ukraine in favor with Russia, another fascist oligarch war criminal, Vladimir Putin, and the dangers of these billionaires to be able to act unilaterally like this and foreign policy is devastating to our country, but also to the entire globe. Yeah. The story did not start with Trump. Trump is a symptom of this story, right? Totally. Is the CEO who, like, government had already been degraded for so long since the Reagan era, right? Reagan famously said that the nine most dangerous words in the English language words, I'm from the government and I'm here to help. Yep. Right? Like, tell that to people who have just been hit by a climate change, accelerated, super storm, blood, heat wave, like, they want the government to come and help them, you know, and it's been so gutted, right, that they're more likely to have the proud boys show up with a chainsaw. So which I want to just point out, starting to rip, now all the proud boys that don't tread on me, guys, are ICE agents. Yes. Now, they're a part of the big machine they're rolled against, but go on. Rip, we use this image of the spiral, which is a bit of a witchy image, which is a bit of a tell, like we're not, that's more our religion, you know, but, you know, we often, and I think you're encountering this a little bit, like, you know, we talk about fascism now, you come up against, like, mainstream, some corporate media that is like, well, it's not exactly like Mussolini, so it's not fascism, right? As if history moves in this loop, as if we're going to have the exact same kind of fascism as they had in the 1920s, how is that possible? We have so atomized our society, everybody staring at their phones, work is completely casualized. So we're not going to have a foretaste industrial fascism in the same way. We're going to have proud boys turned into ICE agents, we're going to have influencers, we're going to have like a ridiculous CEO reality star, you know, because history doesn't move in a loop, it moves in a spiral. Yeah. And what a spiral, if you think about, like, you're from tornado country, you know, by the spiral is a very scary, right? Yeah. The more the more they turn, the tighter it gets, the more velocity, the more energy, right? You don't want to be at the bottom of a spiral, right? Because that's when you're carrying all the weight of history, and that's where we are now. That's how you end up with, like, you've so degraded the idea of government, the idea of the public sphere, the idea of the comments that you can have a failed businessman reality show, ridiculous person like Donald Trump come along and be like, I will, I will perform the presidency, and then, and then he brings in all these other corporations who are just paying them off, and they are just looting the government and replacing it. And that's how you end up with, with Elon with these satellites. I mean, we've to, if we're going to get out of this, we've to nationalize a lot of these companies. I agree. Yeah. Like, this is, this is part of getting rid of the billionaires is recognizing that their whole business models either built on theft or corporate welfare. Like, this is lately agreed. Okay. I completely agree with that. I don't think we should, we should nationalize the sports teams. Like if, if New York City that asshole Dolan that owns the New York, the next, biggest welfare addict. Yeah. The city should own the New York. Next. And then my city, Oklahoma City, the Oklahoma City should own the Oklahoma City Thunder. And they're building this huge, huge stadium. So, I mean, from us owning oil companies and all the way down to sports teams, I do think we need to nationalize. Because we've, it's our money anyway, we've, they've gotten so much subsidy, right? I can't just tell you a story about Elon Musk that really like plays. Okay. So, he's polluting the air in Memphis. And this is where you really see the racism of the project. I mean, there's many ways that you can see the racism of the project. It's so ridiculous that you actually have to be like, yes, you have to believe who these people are. You know, when he is saying, you know, I need, I'm going to, I'm going to, I, I, I, when we were interviewed by the New York Times, they actually said to us, but he likes babies. And we're like, he likes some babies. He likes his babies. He's also a doge slashing the programs at USAID feeding it into the wood shipper that are providing nutritional assistance and medicine to black and brown babies around the world, right? The witch babies. Does he like it? I mean, all fascists like some babies. Well, he doesn't like his trans baby, Vivian. He said, I mean, you know, is he's even the children he does have? He's a deadbeat father too. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, and, and, and, and the, and the salutes and the stadiums and all of that. The Nazi stuff. But, but it's very telling that when he decides that he is going to join the AI race, right? Because, you know, he's founded open AI with Sam Altman and then they had their spat. And then he warns everybody that AI is too dangerous to build. And then he's like, fuck it. I'm going. I'm joining. Right? And so then he's behind. He doesn't like being behind. So, he announces he's going to build the world's largest supercomputer. Where is he going to build it? Well, he decides that because he's behind, he doesn't have time to build a data center from scratch. He needs and he needs an empty factory. And the Chamber of Commerce in Memphis makes this offer to him. He's like, if you come to Memphis, we'll give you all of these tax incentives, all of these tax breaks, all, you know, we offer you costiers, lightening speed service, NDAs, nobody even knows this is happening. Memphis City Council doesn't know. The community doesn't know. But the real sweetener was an abandoned factory. Electrolux had built a factory in Memphis and they had gotten so many incentives to build this factory. It's down in Canada, built it in Memphis where it wasn't unionized. So there's already a race to the bottom, I guess is what I'm saying. This is the spiral. Right. So it's like, you know, get rid of the fact that the unionized jobs build in the non-unionized south, right? So you're already getting degraded, lower paying jobs. But you're getting jobs. You're getting 3,000 jobs. That's what they promise. Actually, when they open the Electrolux factory, they're making ovens. They end up only creating 700 full-time jobs, but they do create 700 full-time jobs, a bunch of casual jobs. And then they go actually, no, we're leaving. Okay. And then they leave this like state of the art factory that the taxpayers actually paid for, right? To lure them there. And then they offer to Elon Musk and his computers, almost no jobs here. Just security jobs. And it's just like you're seeing people are getting offered less and less. And he's also powering it with these rigged together methane spewing turbines. And you know, spewing carcinogens into the air, overheating the planet and not providing the jobs. So and he built it in a place that is going to be polluting, you know, a majority black working class community called Boxtown, which was built by formerly enslaved people. And just the disdain for human beings, but particularly for black people. He's so racist, Elon Musk is, objectively racist. I mean, I think so. I don't think. I mean, just looking at how many ways he has to tell us. I mean, his Twitter feed is nothing but re-tweeting white nationalist, great replacement theory. He is just all of the policy of the Trump administration to only the only refugees that can come in or why. South Africans. That is directly from Elon Musk's crazy mind that somehow he's a victim. And the billionaire psychosis not only can we not afford these people, but we can't afford to be around their egos because they exploit plunder and then when they're called out on it, they're victims. And you see this across the board, these personality traits from Jeff Bezos to Peter Teele to Elon Musk. But we did this, Jennifer. Like this is like we created these monsters. They are, you know, they're, they're my generation. Like, you know, Elon Musk is basically my age. And it's yummy too. And, you know, they, they, like you remember the peak of the dot com era when all these guys were on the cover of every magazine being treated like they were gods. Mark Andrews was on the cover of Time Magazine literally in a golden throne when he was 23 years old because he founded Netscape, which is a failed search engine. You know, and so like that, that's their starting point. That's where they got the idea that they should be worshipped. And then they just got richer and richer and richer. But then people started hating them. And they feel the sense of injury, which fascists always feel like it's like I have obsessed with the bunkers. They want a life space. Exactly. Yeah. The psychology of that. So I want to move along here to something that I think is really interesting. So FDR built back America after the Great Depression. And these programs, the social safety net that he did is when we had the most growth, the highest rate of taxation. And he did these things because he saw how dangerous unregulated capitalism was and that we needed to provide a large social safety net. And I was recently on a podcast. I was a guest and somebody said, I said, the Democratic Party needs to return to the party of FDR. And the person who questioned me said, yeah, but that was, you know, that was a time when we had just come out of the Great Depression. And this is the problem that women and men like you and me that have enough money and have the skin color that we have is we don't understand. We do. But American public doesn't treat the working class people. They are in a Great Depression right now. Well, the disparity has created the upper 1% and 0.01% are never going to be in a Great Depression. But the lower class absolutely is in a Great Depression. And the working middle class is evaporating and in a Great Depression. And we are not electing politicians who are seeing this with a sense of urgency. And one of my favorites, I'm sure you love this gal too. And she's been a guest on the show is Angie Nixon who is running in Florida. And she speaks so well to the split screen that we all live in where you see this wealth and the people who have it and they live their life without any concern for people who have to work two jobs, who my favorite is, you know, you have all of these people that work at a place like Amazon or work at a place like Walmart receive really shitty wages, no health care. And then they have to go get a government subsidy food stamps or snap or Medicare Medicaid. And nobody blames Walmart or Amazon for not paying them enough and that we're subsidizing for not paying them up. We blame the end worker. And so let's talk about that culturally about how there is a Great Depression in this country. 100% for so many people. Yeah, yeah. And and so many people working in media are so so insulated from it. And it's getting worse and worse. The more these tech oligarchs wage war on local media, right? So all that's left is the coastal big media who have very, very little contact with how most people in the country let alone outside of the country live. Like there's this, I forget who said it first, but like the future is already here, but it's just unevenly distributed. I think it was the science fiction writer William Gibson, but it's like this idea that like, oh, dystopia might come one day. It's like, it's already here. Like, you know, or even what these sort of speculative conversations we have about AI, where it's like something bad might happen. Like if if we if we keep building these technologies, it's like, there's already been an AI assisted genocide in Gaza. Like what are you talking about? Something bad might happen. Like there's already been AI completely embedded in the US military. They've already bombed girl schools, you know? So why are we talking about something that might happen in the future when we can already see this? Like the future is here. The dystopia is here. It's just not touching the like commentary yet, and so they have the luxury to speculate about something bad that might happen. But you know, we have to we have to fix the brokenness and we have a chapter at the end of the book, near the end of the book about about Mamdani's New York, right? Because it's an amazing anti-fascist story. And I interviewed Mamdani when he was at 1%, when I didn't know he was a friend of mine at DSA. I was like, can you talk to him? Like he's got some interesting green policies, like free and fast buses, which is something like, I've been part of the climate movement for a long time. It's always dreaming crazy that we can't get any of the green groups to just champion free public transit as a climate policy because that's a working class climate policy, right? And this is why why caring about the environment is seen as elite because you don't pay attention to how much like working class people are suffering. And you act as if, oh, like people can just afford to like pay a little bit more for energy. It's no big deal because it's not a big deal to you. It's a huge deal to that, right? And then you end up with backlash, which we've seen again and again. So, yes, what Mamdani said in that conversation, this was really like November 2024, was he said, you know, when I talk to Trump voters in my district, you know, living in public housing, their elevators have been broken for 10 months, you know, they're spending hours to get to work on terrible public transit. There's such a sense of brokenness that it's so easy to turn them against immigrants or turn them against unhoused people because they their lives are so broken. So unless we start raising the floor, unless we start having universal programs, like neoliberals are always trying to have like a special program just for one means tested group, right? You know, right. And what FDR knew is you've got to have universal programs. You've got to raise the floor. That's how you fight fascism in the taxation covers the people that have more means because we're taxing them at a more progressive rate. You were speaking about the elites in the media. And so, obviously, I want to talk about Barry Weiss, who would not survive in a normal meritocracy. You know, this is a person who was exclusively hired because she is willing to have no ethics to lie, to cover up the truth, to for me, the story that she spiked about the egregious human rights violations in C-Cott was just, you know, just a real window into this woman's soul. I mean, just as sick as a person, it gets, she's her ratings at, you know, Trump is all about ratings. Her ratings at CBS are absolutely abysmal. She's a failed daughter. Absolutely, a failed daughter and a radical Zionist that wants to promote that Zionist messaging to younger Americans because TikTok showed a younger generation what our tax dollars were doing. And so, she's the editor-in-chief, as you know, and she has turned this into a propaganda arm of Maggie. Let's take a look at this. So, this is from Simifor, CBS News editor, Barry Weiss pushed their outlet to tie Abdul Al-Sayed to 9/11 to peddle the lie that James Tallerika was in a mental health facility. So, this is this is crazy French conspiracy theories that are coming from the top boss at CBS News. And obviously, the reason she doesn't like either one of these candidates is because they are not as corruptable as the bag of fascists that she prefers. I hadn't seen that, but I'm not surprised. And she's, I mean, she's taking it. So, I'm not sure how much it is going to matter in the end. But yeah, they're killing legacy media. And you really do see, like Oracle and the Ellisons. Their main business is not CBS News. They're fine if this goes down, because actually, this is what AI is. This is like, it is a vampiric technology. It is vampire-like, right? And it feeds off of our world, our animate living world, whether it is water or energy, but also news, books, culture, art, like it just steals everything. And so, it feeds off of the media. It literally uses it to train its bots. But the point of it, and this is, you know, we make the argument that AI is a like at this kind of this kind of corporate centralized AI that we're getting from people like Musk and Altman, it's a fascist technology. Fascists want to control truth. That's why they burn books, right? But once again, we're in a spiral of history. So it's less about, I mean, although they are destroying books, right? Like, they are destroying that they feed. But now, it's that they are trying to build truth machines. That's what AI is. And that's why the these hardcore Zionists love AI, because they can program it to spew out their propaganda. So rather than having to persuade people that the genocide didn't happen, it's like sorry, no results found, you know, like this is, like the bot says, - Well, this is all you need to know about AI. And I don't know if you remember this for like six or seven months ago, maybe a year ago, Elon mess didn't like the way Groc was answering questions. So he gave it a lobotomy. And people started asking it like, and this was one famous one. Somebody tweeted, "Who is a better athlete?" LeBron James, or Elon Musk, and Groc said, Elon Musk, was a better athlete than LeBron James. And so they want to be able to - That's that love. - to lobotomize the truth. You know, they want to lobotomize the truth and change history. - This is like they want it to be Natalie Hart, buddy. - Exactly. - Exactly. And this is that new, because I grew up in Oklahoma, and you know what I never learned about in school? - What? - The Tulsa race riots. - Yes. - And this was before the internet, not that I'm that old listener, but we didn't have internet in the school. And I did not learn about that. I did not learn that in Tulsa, there was a black community that was flourishing that they had, it was the center of what was called the black wall street. And these people were violently murdered and all of their businesses torn down and wealth stolen generations wiped out. And I didn't learn about that. So this accelerant of AI, being able to dismantle a lot of the worst things that we've done is terrifying. - Can I just say something like, I'll tell you something that I didn't learn about in school. - All right, here it. - I didn't learn that Hitler didn't invent fascism. You know, they studied the Jim Crow South. - Yes. - That actually, the Tulsa race riots, the Tulsa, that was fascism. That was American homegrown fascism. It was the exact dynamics that emerged in Europe in the 20s, where you had a sense of humiliation, loss after the Second World War, right? The Germans lost. And you had these industrialists that had lost a lot of money, making alliances with the mass, right? Who like returning soldiers, the injury, a sense of injury. Well, what were the conditions that produced the bombing of Black Wall Street, that it was a sense of injury after the Civil War, reconstruction and Black businesses and Black politics, surging that threat from below, sense of injury from people who used to have something then lost it, right? Like they thought they could own human beings, turns out that they couldn't, right? And so this idea that fascism was invention of Mussolini and Hitler was a lie that we all grew up with. - You're exactly right. - And this is why people are waiting for a repeat of this one specific iteration of fascism. They pretended, didn't have a past, and they also pretended, doesn't have a future, and that's so dangerous, right? So yeah, I mean, when Israel began the genocide in Gaza, a lot of university students were making these connections, they were making connections between, the history of colonialism, the history of fascism, tracing it from before Hitler, because they had learned about it in university, like they've gotten a good education, and then they started waging war in universities, and then they're serving up chatbots instead of a real education, 'cause they don't want us to be well-educated, they don't want our kids to be well-educated, because it's dangerous to have a well-educated population, 'cause they do things like fight genocide. - Yeah, I think one of the more embarrassing, there's so many parts that are really embarrassing for America over the last few years, but the way they treated protesters in universities, I've found particularly disgusting, because that is an area in a space where it's kind of like college students smoke weed. Okay, that tracks. College students protest war, that tracks, and we have to live in a free society that allows them to be outraged that they're tax dollars, and the fact that when they graduate, the job market's gonna be abysmal. They're not gonna be able to afford housing, because we ship and fund terrorism abroad, while then we lecture the world about the dangers of terrorism, and the American arrogance in that, when we have so many policies that promote terror, and you have college students that are seeing that, objectively, and standing up against that, and the way they were shamed, and still continue to be shamed in the universities that bent the knee, just so sad, but let's-- - Yeah, I'm blown out. - Let's also learn from each other. I mean, this is one of the things they did, like the international students have a big influence on universities, because you meet classmates who come from different parts of the world of different experiences, and so you learn from your professors, you also learn from your classmates, and so they shut down international students, they started grabbing them off the streets, and putting them in detention, so there's a pattern to this. - Yeah, yeah. - So let's close out talking about the Democratic Party, the resistance. I am a Democrat, and I have gone through quite a bit of an evolution, from not a centrist, I would say it was a liberal, to-- And I would say it was progressive, but I'm far, far more progressive right now. I don't buy, I used to buy any bullshit that somebody like Cory Booker, or Chuck Schumer, or Hawkeam Drefres, or Kristen Gillibran, I used to think, well, they're a Democrat, and so I'm on their side. And so it's been, it's very important, as we talk about, I want Democrats to win, because somebody from a red state, I have to say, even a corporate Democrat for women in Oklahoma, and for queer people in Oklahoma, is a million times better than a mega person, and so I very much believe in harm reduction, but this, the corporate consulting class of the Democratic Party, is so in bed, with so many of the same donors of fascism, it's really terrifying, how much of the Venn diagram of a Hawkeam Drefres and a Chuckles, that's what I call Chuck Schumer, how much it is enmeshed with MAGA and their Venn diagram. So we're seeing the fear of Barry Weiss about a duel else I had, we see the freak out. It's just racism, but yeah, it is racism, but also, but it's fear, because he represents the Bernie Wing of the party, he represents, but the most, fascism is always a counter revolution, and they were afraid that Bernie got as close as he did twice. - Exactly, so let's talk about the Democratic Party, and your DSA, right? - Yeah, I support DSA. - Yeah, I mean, I do, I was DSA curious, but I think I'm all the way not curious anymore. - Not an amazing journey and bringing people along with you. - Thank you. - No, I really mean that. - What is the antidote? What is the antidote to all of this fuckery that we've said here and talked about? It's terrifying, let's leave my listeners with some hope, yeah, with a revolution that can happen. Let's leave them with some hope. - And that is happening, that what we're seeing is that when you have great candidates who are out there, and it's not just, I mean, they were able to say for a little while, oh, that's just New York, that's just Mamdani, and then it's like, well, what about Michigan? What is happening in Michigan? What is happening in Florida? What is happening in Tennessee? Look at Justin Pearson, you know, they tried to-- - I love him. - Unbelievable. Like, I think his campaign is one to watch. If people have some money to give, they should donate to his campaign, because this was such a racist redistricting. I mean, when it was clear that he was gonna win that primary, they just redistricted the district out of existence and put him in a Trump plus 20 district, and he went out and he was like, actually, I think we have more in common than we have dividing us. We all need rural health care, we all need, we all hate these data centers, and has built a multi-racial democracy, which is-- - It's incredible. - The antidote to fascism. The antithesis of fascism is the fact, you know, you look at what folks in Minneapolis did, and you know what, honestly Jennifer, this is why it does matter that you call it fascism, and you're out there doing it, is that because in Minneapolis, they knew they were facing a fascist occupation. They called it that, they responded as such. They knew their history. They know that fascism rises when good people draw their blinds when their neighbors are being bundled away, and say, it's not my problem, they're not coming for us, and they said, no, these are fascists. This is the fascist play, so we're gonna get out there, we're gonna defend our neighbors. So if you're not willing to admit what you're up against, you can't fight it. People are so far ahead of whether it's the corporate media or these corporate dams, and when they're given a real alternative, they vote for it. They're also being flooded with misinformation, though, right? And I am worried, like just like the numbers of what you cited earlier, about how much money Elon Musk is so desperately spending. It's the main, one thing I would say around Hopium, I don't know, look, what they're most afraid of is ending up in jail. We will feel happy and hopeful when some of these guys go to jail. I think we, like, we need that. We deserve that. - We need that. - Merit Garland did do that. And they are so scared of it. That is what, that is what fuels Elon Musk. He is afraid of ending up in jail 'cause he knows how many crimes he's committed. - A ton, yeah, I agree. And I think that we have to, the Democrats have to learn to walk in Shogam. They are going to have to investigate, defund and prosecute all of these crimes. these areas, whether it be eyes or other things that they've popped up, and incarcerate these people. Yeah. And like Abdel says, money out of politics, money in your pocket, money out of politics, because we can't keep finding ourselves in the same position of trying to win these unbelievably lopsided races. It's not a democracy when people get to cheat by putting $300 million in something. Yeah. It's cheating. Yeah. It's legal cheating. These people, I always tell my listeners. The reason Elon Musk is in a politician because nobody would vote for him. The reason Peter Till is not in a politician, nobody would vote for him. JD Vance is America's top prostitute. And I'm serious. He was bought by Peter Till. His name used to be James Something. He was in Atheist. He was Hindu. And now he's, you know, Trump is America's Hitler and now he's the biggest defender. These people are nihilists and absolutely horrible. And they have to cheat in order to win. Even though now, because of citizens united is in place, they are still cheating. They're not running on, this is who I am and this is what I believe in. They still have to expand the support. I mean, this has to be, I want justice is impeached, Naomi. More than FDR. Yeah. It has to be way more than FDR. I agree. I wanted to expand on the court. Okay. So final question. Yeah. You're Canadian. I'm Canadian and American. Okay. But you live in Canada now. Yeah. Little Marco. We don't go after Marco enough, by the way, because I agree. He is the worst. And I know. I'm a little worried. Yeah. I need to go. It's my one regret about the book. We were like very focused on we have to go after Vance, because he's the heir apparent. No, but Marco is going to come and say, look, we need to return to the old Republican party. I can already see the stick that he's going to roll out, but yeah, Marco is terrible. But how bad do they hate us in Canada? I mean, look, they're interfering with a lot of Canadians. They're trying to break Canada up right now. Like they are funding the separatist movement. Mosque is getting involved in Alberta, Alberta is having a referendum about whether or not to separate from Canada. I mean, this is the strategy of Trump and Mosque and the rest of them is they're trying to loot the United States, but they want the United States to be relatively strong, because they know that they need the guns, they need the army in order to control all the people they're making redundant in the U.S. and without, right, the surplus populations. But they, so they're trying to attack any other, like they're trying to break up the European Union, and they're trying to kind of carve up Canada right now. So yeah, we're not huge fans of the Trump. I'm not a huge fan of the Trump administration, either, which is why I just want to leave everybody with criticizing your government is really the most patriotic, important thing you can do. And if you're an American right now, criticizing the war crimes that our country is committing. If you're Israeli, criticizing the genocide that your government is committing is bigger than nationalism than loyalty to your country, it is the most important thing, I think. Naomi, I love that our books are here together. Yes. Let me hold your book. She said hers is a lot thicker now. Naomi, let me hold your book at the thickness, look at the, look at the disparity Naomi wrote a smart word to us. There were two. Look at that. That's sad. All right. Here's mine. Yes. All right. So go by in times fascism. Um, it is the sort of scare people with how thick my book is. No. I'm just so impressed with that because here's my, they are, they're friends. They're friends. They're buddies. They are. They are buddies. All right. Naomi, thank you so much. So nice to meet you. So fascinating. And I'm going to have your co-author on this. Yes. Oh, a straw. Okay. Yeah. [Music]