Ezra's Bookshelf

End Times Fascism

by Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor

Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor examine what they call "end times fascism": a new and distinctly apocalyptic strain of far-right politics taking shape around the world. Their argument is that a loose alliance of religious fundamentalists, Silicon Valley billionaires, and ethno-nationalists shares a conviction that some cleansing catastrophe is coming—and, rather than working to prevent it, welcomes a future of scarcity, collapse, and shocks in the belief that they will be among the survivors. Klein, the author of The Shock Doctrine and Doppelganger, and Taylor, a writer and organizer, trace how the people accelerating climate breakdown and disruptive automation are simultaneously preparing to insulate themselves from the consequences, whether through private islands, bunkers, fantasies of escape to Mars, or the hardening of national borders against a dehumanized "other." The authors read this survivalist mindset as a politics without any vision of a shared future—offering only remixes of a bygone past and the nihilistic pleasures of domination. But they insist it is not invincible. Because the movement has no genuine account of collective flourishing, Klein and Taylor argue, it can be met and beaten by a politics rooted in interdependence and mutual care, grounded in life on this earth in the present. The book moves between reportage on the doomsday preparations of the ultra-rich and a broader analysis of why apocalyptic thinking has become so politically potent. It ends not on despair but on a call to break what they term the doom loop and to build a livable future together.

For fans of