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‘WE ARE IN A MOMENT OF UNPARALLELED PERIL’: AN INTERVIEW WITH
NAOMI KLEIN  
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Cerise Castle
May 9, 2025
Capital & Main
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_ This counterrevolution is strange because there never was a
revolution. They’re upset about pronouns. They’re upset that their
workers want some workplace democracy. They’re upset about DEI. They
really believe that their power should be absolute. _

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THE MARRIAGE of Silicon Valley billionaires and far-right MAGA voters
has given rise to “end-times fascism” characterized by
“monstrous, supremacist survivalism,” author Naomi Klein writes in
her latest essay with Astra Taylor for _The Guardian_
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Klein describes tech oligarchs preparing for an apocalyptic end to
life on Earth, fueled by the carbon emissions generated by the
companies they own, by escaping to bunkers or through colonizing
Mars. 

Capital & Main’s Cerise Castle spoke with Klein on Wednesday about
what she sees as the path forward at the University of California, Los
Angeles’ Nimoy Theater in Westwood ahead of her lecture “Fascism
or Eco-Populism — Our Stark Choice,”
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by the UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy. 

_This interview was edited for brevity and clarity._

CAPITAL & MAIN: WE JUST WATCHED KATY PERRY AND GAYLE KING BLAST OFF
INTO SPACE ON JEFF BEZOS’ ROCKET, AND WE SEE THIS ABANDONMENT OF
EARTH AS A HOSPITABLE PLACE FOR HUMANITY POSITIONED AS A HIGH VALUE
MORALITY. CAN YOU TALK ABOUT THE ROLE THAT POPULAR CULTURE PLAYS IN
CREATING THAT NARRATIVE? 

NAOMI KLEIN: Popular culture is involved in this on so many levels.
Elon Musk will often take something that was written as a warning and
use it as a how-to manual, for instance, like _The_ _Hitchhiker’s
Guide to the Galaxy._ Jeff Bezos was fascinated with _Star
Trek,_ but . . . _Star Trek _is basically socialism in space, but
so he missed all that.

I think their fascination with sci-fi points to the fact that we are
really kind of in unprecedented territories. And often a lot of the
discourse on Trump and fascism tends to look backwards and just assume
that everything that we’re seeing now has happened before. So
there’s kind of like a checklist around like, “OK, well, Mussolini
did this,” or “Hitler did this and they’re doing it.”

And you’re there with your checklist waiting for attacks on the
courts, attacks on universities, creating an outgroup. But the danger
of that is that we don’t see what is actually new about our moment
in history. When there was fascism at scale in Europe in the 1930s,
there wasn’t an atomic bomb yet. There was no understanding of the
climate crisis and the connections between fossil fuels. I think that
our billionaire class understands that we are in a moment of
existential risk, that whether it’s a global pandemic and the nature
of our interconnected world, whether it is nuclear weapons, whether
it’s the climate crisis, we are in a moment of unparalleled peril. 

What is distressing about what they believe is that they take that
ending almost for granted, right? And this is why I’ve been focusing
on all the different kinds of escape fantasies that popular culture is
fueling. I don’t think that they’re doing this because they
watch _Silo_ or _Paradise_. I think we’re
watching _Paradise_ and _Silo_ because we know that they are
actually building their bunkers and sort of betting on apocalypse in
lots of ways.
 

“The most serious vulnerability that Trump has is that a large part
of his base really hates Silicon Valley and is not interested in being
replaced by machines.”

 
Really what we’re dealing with more than anything else is the
corrupting effect of an unprecedented level of wealth concentration.
I’ve been covering wealth concentration my whole life, and it’s
just exploded. And so it’s one thing to be like, “OK, a CEO is
making 200 times what his workers are making,” which is like the
kind of math that I was doing when I started becoming a journalist.
But when you think about the levels of wealth that are now
concentrated in the hands of a Jeff Bezos or an Elon Musk, I think
they truly believe that they’re gods. The point of their wealth is
to be able to exercise a kind of absolute power. 

And so this moment of counterrevolution that we’re in is strange
because there never was a revolution, right? They’re upset about
pronouns. They’re upset that their workers wanted to have some
workplace democracy. And it seems so minor, right? They’re upset
about DEI. These are not revolutionary gains that have been made by
social movements. What we need to understand is that they really do
believe that their power should be absolute. 

IN YOUR RECENT ESSAY FOR _THE GUARDIAN_, YOU’RE TALKING A LOT ABOUT
COALITION BUILDING AS A SOLUTION TO THE STATE THAT WE ARE CURRENTLY
IN. HOW DOES ONE REACH THE WORKING CLASS, FOR EXAMPLE — PEOPLE THAT
YOU DESCRIBED IN _DOPPELGANGER_
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PERHAPS FUTURE LABORERS THAT ARE IDENTIFYING WITH THE BILLIONAIRE
RULERS OR EVEN CONTENT TO BE SUBSERVIENT TO THEM? 

Like, this sort of oddness of Trump’s coalition and why somebody
like RFK Jr. is in it, and what the appeal of that is and the
coalition that they’re building. A lot of people I know really
willingly just tuned all of that out and felt pretty smug about it and
were like, “Why would I ever do that to myself?” It just seems to
me to be such a strange decision, especially if you’re a journalist
or a scholar and you’re attempting to understand this world, why
would you willingly just ignore half of it?

And one of the things that spending a lot of time listening, for
instance, to Steve Bannon has made me realize is that this coalition
that Trump has is very, very vulnerable, especially when it comes to
the alliance that he has made with Silicon Valley and Big Tech. That
sector cares about one thing and one thing only right now, and that is
AI. And the extent to which that was never part of what Trump ran on,
it is the opposite of what many people thought they were voting for.
These technologies are the greatest threat to working class people.

The most serious vulnerability that Trump has is that a large part of
his base really hates Silicon Valley and is not interested in being
replaced by machines. So it’s a monumental bait-and-switch that
Trump has done with this immediate alignment with the billionaire
class in Silicon Valley, and if the left can’t exploit that, then
we’re doing something wrong.
 

“There are a lot of people who voted Democrat their whole lives and
voted for Trump in this election because they thought he was going to
bring the jobs home.”

 
WHAT IS THE BEST MEANS OF EXPLOITING THAT VULNERABILITY? 

I think heightening the contradictions and the sense of betrayal.
People have a right to feel very, very betrayed, particularly when it
comes to jobs.

It’s not about convincing every single Trump voter that they’ve
been led astray. I think a lot of people are actually getting what
they want, which is a sort of a fascistic strongman, and they’re
getting pleasures related to dominance and hierarchy and supremacy.
We’re not going to get those people. But I genuinely believe that
there are a lot of people who voted Democrat their whole lives and
voted for Trump in this election because they thought he was going to
bring the jobs home. They thought he was standing up to these big
companies who they feel have treated them very unfairly, and it was a
lie.

One of the things I’ve learned from studying Steve Bannon is he
takes the task of peeling away parts of the Democrats’ coalition
very seriously, and he’s done it very successfully again and again.
So why wouldn’t we try to do it back to him? 

IS IT POSSIBLE TO INTERRUPT SOMEONE’S BELIEFS, AND IF SO, HOW CAN
THAT BE DONE? 

If it’s possible, it’s gonna be somebody who has a relationship of
trust with that person. It’s not usually gonna happen because you
get into a screaming match or you sort of barrage them with your true
facts versus their wrong facts. I think some of the most effective
results are when people find something that they do agree on, right?
And you can sort of extend a bridge. 

So, say it’s somebody who believes in very untrue things about
vaccines; maybe you also have some strong feelings about
pharmaceutical companies and how they’re taking advantage of
people’s pain, and maybe you can find a point of connection and then
sort of bring someone back. I wouldn’t think about it so much as an
interruption as a kind of extending a bridge to someone who might be
ready to kind of get out of there.

_Cerise Castle reports on inequality in California. As an independent
journalist, her work includes the 2021 series “A Tradition of
Violence: The History of Deputy Gangs in the Los Angeles County
Sheriff’s Department,” and produced as a 15-part podcast
[[link removed].]. For
that project she received the International Women’s Media Foundation
Courage In Journalism Award
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Journalism Award
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Best Use of Public Records. _

_Capital & Main is an award-winning nonprofit publication whose
mission is to educate the public on matters of importance such as
economic inequality, climate change, health care, threats to
democracy, hate and extremism and immigration. We produce
investigative reporting, news features and analysis in California and
across the country. Capital & Main’s stories are co-published in
hundreds of media outlets, including The Guardian, USA Today, Fortune,
Fast Company and Rolling Stone. _

* democracy
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* corporate power
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* Donald Trump
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* Silicon Valley
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* wealth inequality
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* Fascism
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