NYT Question: "But one could say the tech elites are responding to incentives to cozy up to Trump. That it’s better for their businesses. So can you unpack the “fascism” element?"

Naomi Klein: "I don’t think it’s as simple as saying that they’re lining up behind Trump because it’s good for them. They could have done that last time. Very few of them did. They helped him get elected [in 2024]. Certainly Elon Musk and the huge amounts of money that he spent — but not only him. Several people played key roles, including Marc Andreessen; JD Vance was a creature of Silicon Valley, worked with Peter Thiel. But there was a turning point during the campaign when a lot of people who had not supported Trump, who identified as lifelong Democrats, got behind him. We make the case that a lot of it had to do with A.I. and how ravenous A.I. is when it comes to energy. They understood that Trump, as a guy who loves the fossil-fuel industry, would open the floodgates for this A.I. arms race. So that’s an economic incentive. But I would also argue that the business model that they have embraced is a business model that is uniquely antithetical to a shared human existence. They understand the climate crisis and they understand that what we feed A.I. is energy. It’s overwhelmingly being fed with L.N.G. [liquefied natural gas] and coal, and because they understand the climate crisis, they understand that that is going to do exactly what we’re seeing right now: set whole cities on fire, create situations where huge parts of the world are unlivable. So the increasingly brutal views that we’re hearing from people like Elon Musk, where you just seem to be discounting huge swaths of humanity or actively playing a role and destroying USAID at the cost of — I mean, he would say no lives, but perhaps because he doesn’t count African lives. These things go together. You need a story that discounts those lives. That is a fascist story. That is the story that has ideas about whose lives count and whose lives can be discarded. And I think it’s quite active. It’s not just like, Oh, we’re going where the money is. The money is making them fascist."

The current political stakes, as Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor see them, could not be higher. In the view of these two influential leftist thinkers, a driving motivation behind far-right politics at the moment is nothing less than the apocalypse. In their alarming new book, “End Times Fascism and the Fight for the Living World,” Klein, the author of the best sellers “The Shock Doctrine” and “Doppelganger,” and Taylor, an author and documentarian as well as a founder of the Debt Collective, a debtors’ union, argue that a powerful coalition of religious fundamentalists, ethnonationalists and tech oligarchs (Elon Musk chief among them) is actively — and successfully — hastening the destruction of the world as we know it. Why? Because they believe that they’re primed to thrive on the other side of catastrophe, everyone else be damned. This is a sobering, scary vision of contemporary political battles. But as the still hopeful Klein and Taylor explain, they wrote their book because they believe the conclusion is far from foregone...

Full Interview(gift link) nytimes.com - Naomi klein astra taylor interview