'We Are in a Moment of Unparalleled Peril': An Interview With Naomi Klein - The American Prospect

[justaprogressive]

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. 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.

snip

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.

https://prospect.org/culture/2025-05-13-moment-of-unparalleled-peril-interview-naomi-klein/

[cachukis]

1. "There must be some way out of here,"

said the joker to the thief.

[erronis]

2. Another very strong warning by Naomi Klein

A few more paragraphs from the article:

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.

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.