End Times Fascism: And the Fight for the Living World
Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor
September 2026
What happens when the world’s most powerful people stop believing humanity has a shared future? Rather than preventing catastrophe, they begin constructing a world in which the wealthy, technologically powerful and politically connected can survive while everyone else is abandoned.
This is the disturbing premise of End Times Fascism, in which Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor argue that a new political ideology is emerging among sections of the global elite. It combines authoritarianism, religious fundamentalism, technological ambition and extreme wealth into something potentially more dangerous than twentieth-century fascism.
The Context: A World Entering Permanent Crisis
Written during Donald Trump’s second presidency, amid the Gaza catastrophe, the 2026 Iran war, accelerating artificial intelligence development and growing climate instability, the book attempts to explain why authoritarian politics is flourishing precisely when humanity faces unprecedented collective challenges.
The authors argue that traditional fascism promised national renewal. Hitler and Mussolini envisioned powerful states emerging from crisis, offering their preferred populations prosperity and stability through exclusion and conquest.
Today’s emerging authoritarianism, they contend, offers something different: survival for a privileged minority rather than prosperity for the nation.
This is an important distinction. The authors believe many powerful figures no longer expect existing political, economic and environmental systems to remain stable. Instead of repairing those systems, they are preparing to escape their consequences.
The book identifies three interconnected forces driving this transformation.
The first is religious apocalypticism. Klein and Taylor examine Christian Zionism, Jewish religious nationalism and influential political figures who interpret contemporary conflicts through biblical prophecy.
They argue that certain religious movements view wars involving Israel and the Middle East not simply as geopolitical struggles but as necessary steps towards divine redemption. Particularly troubling is the possibility that individuals holding such beliefs can influence military decisions involving nuclear-armed states.
The second is technological utopianism. Silicon Valley billionaires increasingly speak of artificial general intelligence, digital immortality and colonising other planets.
The authors argue that these ambitions resemble secular versions of religious salvation. Rather than heaven, technological elites imagine escaping human limitations through machines, artificial intelligence or space exploration.
The third is nationalist survivalism. Here, the nation-state becomes a gigantic bunker, protected by militarised borders, surveillance technologies and increasingly restrictive definitions of citizenship.
Migration, especially migration driven by conflict and climate change, becomes an existential threat rather than a humanitarian or economic challenge.
These movements have different objectives, but the authors believe they share one fundamental assumption: the future belongs to a select group, not humanity collectively.
The Book’s Most Revealing Insights
One particularly striking example concerns Gaza.
The book opens with Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff presenting an AI-generated vision of a reconstructed Gaza at Davos in January 2026. Luxury developments, advanced surveillance systems and gated communities feature in plans for a territory devastated by war.
For the authors, this illustrates how destruction can become an opportunity for powerful investors and political actors. Reconstruction is no longer necessarily about restoring the lives of existing inhabitants; it can become an exercise in redesigning territory around commercial and strategic interests.
Another fascinating example concerns Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence infrastructure in Memphis, Tennessee.
The authors describe how Musk’s xAI project, Colossus, was developed with extraordinary speed, benefiting from local economic incentives while raising environmental and democratic accountability concerns.
Their wider argument is that the AI revolution is not simply a technological competition. It is also a struggle over energy, water, land, labour and political power.
A third revealing insight concerns the relationship between economic collapse and elite opportunity.
The book recounts Jeffrey Epstein’s correspondence with Peter Thiel following Brexit, discussing political fragmentation and the opportunities created by instability.
The authors use this to illustrate how certain wealthy networks may regard disruption not as something to avoid, but as an opportunity to accumulate influence and resources.
Perhaps the book’s most provocative argument is that the contemporary authoritarian project is increasingly profitable.
Surveillance companies, private security contractors, detention operators, military technology firms and digital platforms can all benefit from an environment characterised by fear, insecurity and permanent emergency.
In this interpretation, political instability is not necessarily a failure of the system. For some businesses, it becomes the business model itself.
The book’s greatest strength is its ability to connect developments normally analysed separately: religious ideology, billionaire wealth, artificial intelligence, migration, climate change and military conflict.
It challenges the conventional geopolitical assumption that political leaders always seek stability and national prosperity.
Klein and Taylor conclude by advocating what they call a new disarmament movement—not only against nuclear weapons, but against excessive concentrations of technological, financial and military power.
They contrast elite survivalism with a politics of solidarity, community and shared responsibility, which they call Hereness.
For students of geopolitics, the book offers an important perspective often missing from conventional international relations analysis.
Geopolitics is not exclusively about geography, resources, military capabilities and competition between states. It is also about the ideas, beliefs and economic interests shaping the decisions of those who wield power.
End Times Fascism is valuable because it asks readers to examine not merely what powerful actors are doing, but what kind of future they believe they are creating.
Its central warning is unsettling: the greatest geopolitical danger may not be that humanity lacks the resources to prevent catastrophe, but that some of those with the greatest power have concluded they no longer need to. That makes this a provocative and worthwhile book for anyone seeking to understand the ideological forces reshaping the emerging world order.
