View: https://youtu.be/XtYSyb6fCxo?si=fI03nkKIUqBXkQQc
This Journalists makes some interesting points about the new Fascists.
Specifically she points out that while it is useful to draw comparisons to past Fascists like the Nazis, Mussolini etc, what we should be looking for is what is different about this fascist movement.
One thing that is different is the diversity of the followers, you have his base, you have these billionaires, and you have the tech industry.
What unites them she argues is this belief that these are the end times, and they are going out to screw the planet as far and fast as they can because in their world view the end of the world is imminent (and by their direct actions in destroying the planet for profit they are the cause and the accelerant).
You have these looney CEOs that want to live on Mars. Because they know they are destroying this planet.
You have these Christian Nationalists that believe in the Rapture and other book of Revelations signs.
And you have AI which is exhausting our resources at an unsustainable rate while being accelerated without checks and balances making the risks more rather than less likely that AI becomes an existential risk to humanity.
Ok ignoring the Terminator Judgement day stuff, she makes a really good point that from the Pov of AI (allow some ironic use of POV and AI....it has no POV) there is no desire to preserve the natural world because its world is an artificial world. To me that makes sense as an undeniable existential risk from AI which needs no science fiction to understand it.
She calls this binding force of the far right in America an apocalyptic fever, a shared and unifying belief that the world is ending and she makes it clear these people know in their heart of hearts that climate change is real, they know that we are running out of resources and poisoning our ecosystem, the danger is they have this nihilistic view of the future which is self created.
It is interesting to consider that the last truly threatening fascist regime (world threatening) happened in a nuclear free context (this journalist I keep calling she - apologies Naomi Klein, makes some brilliant discussion points).
I know my posts have the same doom alarmist end of the world tone to them, but this why, look....the shit is happening, I want to go to my grave knowing I said something, even if it is was here where is doesn't matter, because it matters to me.
And I know that a lot of people are feeling quietly nervous, because while they may not be as outspoken, or jump so readily to the enth degree of the worst case scenarios like I am, they know, like I know, that even if the shit doesn't collapse completely, we are in danger....period.
I hear my kids say every so often, thanks Dad and Grandad for leaving us nothing and destroying the planet and leaving us no future. They say it in a dark humored way, but they mean it, they have no hope, they feel there is nothing to believe in, no cause to get behind, no great figures of inspiration to guide them, no better world to strive for. Nothing greater than themselves.