Call it a failure of imagination. I've struggled to grasp why in a world on fire, instead of joining bucket brigades, some people are hunting for kindling.
Thanks to Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor's brilliant new book, End Times Fascism: And the Fight for the Living World, I now have an answer. Klein and Taylor reveal in disturbing detail why some believe it is in their self-interest to fan the flames. They identify three groups of supremacists — religious extremists, technofascists, and ethnonationalists — who have converged around what the authors call "end times fascism." Despite their ideological differences, these factions have come together around their shared conviction that they are part of an elite destined to survive the coming apocalypse.
Klein, the author of nine previous books, is perhaps best known for No Logo, The Shock Doctrine and Doppelganger. Taylor is a co-founder of the Debt Collective, and her books include Democracy May Not Exist, but We'll Miss It When It's Gone and The People's Platform. Both are respected activists; it's hard to imagine better guides to lay out the threats before us. Crucially, Klein and Taylor also illuminate a path forward, highlighting not just the corrections we must make to our broken systems but also the many ways people are already building an alternative vision and fighting for our singular, precious world.
The authors dedicate a section to each of the three iterations of fascists noted above, beginning with religious extremists who believe that a final battle between good and evil is a necessary precursor to eternal salvation. Klein and Taylor guide us through the entwined histories of messianism and fascism, incorporating several incidents I'd never learned about previously. In one example from 1969, a young man with mental illness determined that "he alone among men had been chosen to end, and rebirth, the world." He could have initiated a global war after starting a fire at one of the holiest sites in Islam, but during that period religious end-timers were not key decisionmakers within governments around the world. This isn't the case today. Instead, we are in the precarious position where those who can influence the use of wildly destructive weapons believe that "world-ending horrors are imminent, but they should be embraced, even actively accelerated…. Because [they] are among the chosen…. [and] will escape the suffering others are forced to endure."
Klein and Taylor argue that while neither fascism nor messianism is new, the havoc they can wreak has been amplified. Yes, fascism has often arisen during moments of crisis, and it is especially likely to occur when economic and social pain have become so acute that the elites responsible choose to redirect that anger downward towards scapegoats. Fascists aren't worse today, the authors argue, but "our world is more dangerous than their world: its weapons deadlier, its technologies vastly more potent, its media more connected, its climate more unstable, its concentrated wealth more global in reach than at any point in human history."
The wealth and power of the technofascists present another example of this increased threat. Religious extremists may want to hasten the end times so they can ascend to a bunker in the sky, but technofascists are constructing literal bunkers on Earth while imagining they can flee to Mars or the moon. In the meantime, they wield their considerable power against the rest of us.
Take, for example, Elon Musk's decision to put his supercomputer Colossus in the Memphis neighborhood of Boxtown. This majority-Black, working-class community, which has long struggled with poverty and whose young people have exceptionally high asthma rates, saw a 79% increase in "nitrogen dioxide, a known health risk and respiratory irritant" within months, the book details. (Colossus, by the way, was named after the supercomputer in a sci-fi trilogy that "turns on humanity and begins a nuclear war.")
If this review only consisted of stories about the depravity of technofascists, it would run far beyond the space allotted. So, I'll confine myself to one more anecdote from the book about an "Apocalypse Ball" hosted by Peter Thiel's venture-capital firm. Guests were "instructed to wear 'black tie or dress for dystopia'" and arrived in costumes including "a 'doctor of eugenics'" and a "'Haitian chef with a bloodied toy cat hanging out of his apron.'"
The third group of end-timers, ethnonationalists, put a new spin on old-school fascism. Instead of focusing their hate on marginalized citizens within their nations or enemy nations abroad, their central target is migrants. Migrants are a particularly useful proxy in a world where climate chaos will force increasing numbers of people to flee homes that are no longer livable.
Despite these grim realities, Klein and Taylor remind us throughout that people have always resisted fascist attacks. Religious fanatics are opposed by "religious leaders of all faiths [who] have been at the forefront of resistance to the genocide in Gaza and the wider regional war…. [and] vocally oppose the twisting of their sacred texts to bolster the causes of militarism, nationalism, and capitalism," Klein and Taylor write. Musk's Colossus faces Memphis Community Against Pollution, which has already stopped a crude-oil pipeline that would have gone "right through their water aquifer and backyards." After the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti earlier this year following their protests of fascist immigration purges, Minnesotans fought back by demonstrating "cross-race, cross-class, and cross-faith solidarity."
The book's final section, "Let's Stay," turns toward solutions. The authors highlight leaders such as Mexico President Claudia Sheinbaum, who pushed through a landmark law granting gig workers labor protections and benefits, and Colombia President Gustavo Petro, who raised the minimum wage and called for a moratorium on new fossil-fuel development. They also spend significant time with now New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani, showing how his campaign's radical inclusion helped carry him from an initial 1% in the polls to the mayoralty of the largest city in the country.
Klein and Taylor offer concrete proposals as well: moratoriums on data centers, taxes on billionaires, a wealth cap, stronger international cooperation, and nuclear disarmament. They remind us, "we mortals are one another's salvation." The end times fascists may want us to believe that the end of the world is nigh and inevitable but this book shows, again and again, that there is a different way. It's up to us to follow it.
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