Eindtijdfascisme: En de strijd om het leven op aarde

by Naomi Klein, Astra Taylor, Alexander van Kesteren (Translator)

We zijn de eerste generatie in de geschiedenis van de mensheid die zoveel overlappende bedreigingen tegelijk ervaren. Dat bewustzijn heeft ons gevormd – onze kunst, ons zenuwstelsel, onze dromen. En het heeft het fascisme gevormd dat we moeten bestrijden. Dit boek is een baanbrekende analyse van een nieuw fascisme én biedt een hoopvol alternatief voor een gedeelde toekomst.

Genres: Nonfiction, Politics, History, Audiobook, Sociology, Technology, Economics

515 pages, Kindle Edition

First published September 15, 2026

About the author

Naomi Klein is a Canadian author, social activist, and filmmaker known for her political analyses; support of ecofeminism, organized labour, and leftism; and criticism of corporate globalization, fascism, ecofascism and capitalism. As of 2021, she is an associate professor, and professor of climate justice at the University of British Columbia, co-directing a Centre for Climate Justice.
Klein first became known internationally for her alter-globalization book No Logo (1999). The Take (2004), a documentary film about Argentine workers' self-managed factories, written by her and directed by her husband Avi Lewis, further increased her profile. The Shock Doctrine (2007), a critical analysis of the history of neoliberal economics, solidified her standing as a prominent activist on the international stage and was adapted into a six-minute companion film by Alfonso Cuaron and Jonás Cuarón, as well as a feature-length documentary by Michael Winterbottom. Klein's This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate (2014) was a New York Times nonfiction bestseller and the winner of the Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize for Nonfiction.
In 2016, Klein was awarded the Sydney Peace Prize for her activism on climate justice. Klein frequently appears on global and national lists of top influential thinkers, including the 2014 Thought Leaders ranking compiled by the Gottlieb Duttweiler Institute, Prospect magazine's world thinkers 2014 poll, and Maclean's 2014 Power List. She was formerly a member of the board of directors of the climate activist group 350.org.

Reviews

[emma · Rating 3.5 out of 5]

we need naomi klein now more than ever

(thanks to the publisher for the e-arc)

[Trevor · Rating 5 out of 5]

Liz Wait commented under one of my reviews that she had just finished this and said in her review that what she liked about this book was that it wasn’t quite written in the way other books like this are written. That is, that often these books tell you all of the horrible things that are happening in the world and then tell you what people could be doing to stop it. Like her, I don’t like that at all. It too often feels like the utopia that they are proposing just feels all too unlikely to ever happen. This book gives real life examples along the way of what people are doing here and now that is making a difference. And that is a remarkably empowering thing.

I’m not going to go into too much detail about what this book is about – it is pretty clear from the title. A lot of people probably think that it is too much to call what we are witnessing fascism. I don’t think that at all. What I find most remarkable about the current situation is how stupid so many of the characters are that are proposing our fascist future. The book starts by discussing end times Christian nationalists. It feels too easy to think of these people as basically crazies. And yet, they hold remarkable power in so many places – not least the United States. The cruelty of these people does not appear to know any bounds. A very long time ago I read a collection of essays by Gore Vidal where he said that Israel should think very carefully about the support it gets from the Christian right in the US. Their support for Israel is not based on a love of Jews – quite the opposite. They believe that when the end times comes either the Jews in Israel will convert to Christianity or they will all die in the final battle. It would not be hard, all things being equal, to see these people as amongst the world’s worst antisemites. But all things aren’t equal and Israel is less worried about their potential antisemitism in an undefined (and unlikely) future than they are for the immediate support they receive from them in the present.

Just as insane are the tech bros who see a future where the rest of us are not merely expendable, but would be better off if we weren’t here at all. This is perhaps even more terrifying, since they hold so much wealth and so much power. What is interesting about all of this is the vision of the future both the tech bros and the end time Christians share. It is not that the vision is identical in the pathway to get there – but the destination is more or less the same. As the authors say throughout, the fascist vision is always one where we need to go through a horrible time to prepare the way for a glorious future – a heaven on earth.

And then they said something that stopped me. They mentioned the Diné Navajo tradition and how it did not propose a heaven that is in the sky when we die, but that we are currently living in paradise and that our task is to both preserve that paradise and to pass it on to the next generations. This is so much more interesting than the motto from, I guess, the 1980s that said ‘think globally, but act locally’ – even if, in some ways, they say similar things. It also sounds somewhat Buddhist, the idea of living in the here and now, rather than in some hoped for future ideal plain. The movements discussed in the book are mostly local in character. They don’t ignore the global problems the world faces, but they are also not overwhelmed by the immensity of those problems either.

This was well worth the read, and even for someone who is prone to pessimism, this was a book full of hope. That can’t be a bad thing.

[Ellie Moon · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thank you to NetGalley and Farrar, Straus and Giroux for providing me with an ARC of this book. All opinions are my own.

I was really pleased to have a new book by Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor to read, and this one lived up to my expectations!

The authors articulate a cohesive narrative around the current political moment we’re living through and offer a compelling blueprint for how to resist.

Much of this book treads very recent history, so for those of us closely attuned to geopolitics and US politics in particular, there is a lot of information that is not new. However, Klein and Taylor bring together seemingly disconnected phenomena to offer an explanation of how these trends towards fascism by different groups are ultimately deeply connected to the same deeply exclusionary, violent, and individualistic view towards the world.

At this point, it’s clear that we need to develop a compelling vision of a way to all live together in the world, one that is more persuasive than the vision that’s been presented to us by religious end-times accelerationists and tech bro oligarchs. Klein and Taylor give examples of movements and politicians who have done just this, providing inspiration at a moment when it is sorely needed. I read a lot of non-fiction that offers a single, final chapter to give possible solutions and offer a bit of hope, but this books stands out in digging deeper into the way forward.

In the end, we must save each other. Klein and Taylor offer one way we can collectively make steps towards this—it’s up to all of us to live it out.

[Savage Bookwolf (new Mario the lone bookwolf) · Rating 5 out of 5]

The end times may come digitalized.

What we’ve got here goes beyond the bonds of just one book or a few. It’s a detailed Big History description of what is going on right now: accelerating, growing, taking up exponential speed, and lifting off. Just joking—it lifted, and why it was even able to fly has some mind-blowingly clever reasons.

Maybe you’ve read the one or other book about politics, economics, and especially technology?
If not, I strongly recommend trying out some of Klein’s other works, and other progressive, controversial authors who have theories differing from what is considered a dogma in some fields of social sciences and humanities. It’s quite a downer but, well, at least one can know much about things that are set in motion and, subjectively, unstoppable. Because it’s not as if, all of a sudden, this power structure grew out of nothing.

There have been elites since the dawn of humanity.
But the sheer scope and especially range of their power has always been limited until global trade started hundreds of years ago. Until the middle of the last millennium, states, continents, and the world just fought against neighbors or maybe another continent from time to time. Something like world domination wasn’t possible. The 20th century came; attempts failed again for all systems of government except for the ones winning World War II. And there the story begins.

Without some special reading about what happened between 1945 and 2026, one can’t get how serious this is.
Because, back to the power structure example: After 1945, power grew without any software, computer, or AI. That slowly accelerated decades ago, and now we have a recipe for disaster that’s unprecedented in human history. An absurd concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a few people that can best be described as neofeudalism. One can easily do a real-life exercise by comparing what Nobel Prize–winning economist Milton Friedman says in contrast to what Naomi Klein, Noam Chomsky, Jean Ziegler, and David Graeber think.

Milton Friedman and neoliberalism: free markets, labor-market flexibility, consumer choice and market coordination, limited government, competition and efficiency, monetarism, individual freedom, privatization, capital mobility, skepticism toward central planning, school choice, deregulation, free trade, negative income tax, fiscal discipline, market liberalization, reduced role of the state, individual responsibility.

Naomi Klein, Noam Chomsky, Jean Ziegler, and David Graeber: capitalism and corporate power, neoliberalism and free-market ideology, economic inequality and wealth concentration, globalization and exploitation, imperialism and foreign intervention, propaganda and media manipulation, democracy and political participation, labor rights and workers’ movements, debt and financial domination, poverty and global hunger, consumerism and commodification, climate crisis and environmental destruction, disaster capitalism and crisis exploitation, state power and authoritarianism, social movements and collective resistance, human rights and social justice, indigenous rights and land dispossession, anarchism and mutual aid, bureaucracy and institutional power, money and the origins of economic systems, debt and moral obligation, the military-industrial complex, corporate influence on public policy, privatization and austerity, international trade and global supply chains, political corruption and elite interests, inequality between the Global North and Global South, humanitarian crises and structural violence, alternatives to capitalism and economic democracy, solidarity and collective action.

And now go out and check the news and the history of the last 20 years.
What do you think happened after this was made real? After an economic theory became the dogma of capitalism? Did it turn the planet into a paradise for everyone with equality, peace, and prosperity? Or may it be that this concept has the one or other weakness? Is it possible that there is no “end of history” and that there are some serious problems as soon as something is seen as natural, a dogma, and mustn’t be talked about? As soon as no discussion is allowed and everyone who says something else is not considered as someone who could help find flaws in one’s own mindset? But someone just used to deepen cognitive biases and dig even deeper into own intellectual echo chambers? Especially as a kind of reflex when someone comes up with

The topics of End Times Fascism: And the Fight for the Living World

End-times fascism, climate crisis and ecological destruction, solidarity and a shared vision of the future, tech oligarchs and Silicon Valley, hope as a political practice, ethnonationalism and racism, political movements and collective action, religious fundamentalism and apocalyptic visions, democracy and anti-fascist resistance, survivalism among the super-rich, authoritarian right-wing politics and far-right extremism, social inequality and the devaluation of others, artificial intelligence and technological accelerationism, the history of fascism and anti-fascist resistance, catastrophe capitalism and concentration of power, apocalypse vs. the future, technological power vs. democratic control, isolation vs. solidarity, rule vs. equality, fatalism vs. collective agency.

And all of this has the extremely disturbing option of The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy

All these topics are hard to swallow, inconvenient, controversial,
and, especially, you don’t make any friends by mentioning them. That’s no small talk; that’s totally in your face. And people really don't like that stuff, and I can say that as someone who really likes to talk about nonfiction books. And I don’t mean debating with people who don’t read nonfiction. There is this extremely widespread group of intelligent, intellectual, reading, well-educated people that read a lot of nonfiction. But for some reason, they never read the stuff and authors I mention in this review. Again: cognitive biases, filter bubbles, and echo chambers. They read nonfiction that tries to avoid being too specific, avoids these topics, or even constructs completely wrong and unscientific theories.

My two absolutely favorite examples of reading suggestions I get from those people are:
Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World – and Why Things Are Better Than You Think

Strangely, the reading suggestions hardly ever include:
Capitalism and Freedom The Road to Serfdom Atlas Shrugged

Why? It’s all the same. The only difference is that Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress and Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World – and Why Things Are Better Than You Think are incredibly good at arguing without saying anything of substance.

Capitalism and Freedom, The Road to Serfdom, and Atlas Shrugged are at least honest about what they mean.

And all 5 together helped to get us where we are right now.

[Venneh · Rating 5 out of 5]

Klein and Taylor do a great job about explaining the relation of some of the most godawful shit that's going on in America and around the world and apocalyptic Christianity. At the same time, they balance the awful shit going down with the people who are trying to fight it, which is needed. Highly recommended to understand our current hellscape.

[Coach · Rating 1 out of 5]

The Irony of End Times Fascism

In End Times Fascism, the authors set out to expose what they call a dangerous new wave of right wing authoritarianism. But in their rush to sound the alarm, they fall into a classic, dangerous trap: they become the exact monsters they claim to fight.

The book's biggest flaw is its lazy, totalizing name calling. Instead of recognizing the deep differences between a traditional conservative, a tech libertarian, and an actual neo Nazi, the book treats them all as the exact same threat. They blindly slap the "fascist" label on a massive, diverse group of opponents. This isn't just bad political science. It’s a dangerous rhetorical tactic. When you paint your political rivals as absolute, existential evils, you subconsciously lower the bar for how society treats them. You essentially frame aggressive, illiberal retaliation as a moral necessity.

This ideological flattening creates a cold irony. While the authors warn against tyranny, their own solutions lean heavily into authoritarianism. They demand massive, sweeping state crackdowns, like the forced redistribution of wealth and heavy handed government containment of entire industries.

When you advocate for total State control while simultaneously painting your opponents as planetary threats who don't deserve political legitimacy, you aren't defending democracy. You are practicing the very fascism you claim to oppose. End Times Fascism is a cautionary tale of modern politics. Its words are proof of how easily a fierce hatred of authoritarianism can morph into a mirror image of their perceived oppressors.

[M. · Rating 2 out of 5]

this was such a hard read. a good chunk of the book (90%) is klein and Taylor quoting things fascists say. and when they have quoted them, they make the same argument again and again - that the fascists of today cannot imagine or promise a future and instead plan to bunker themselves from the expected apocalypse. That this apocalypse is coming is clear to them, they simply want to profit from this „end of the world“.

While this is certainly true for the evil capitalists described, this idea of „profiting from the end of the world“ is not as new as described in the book. Eventually, capitalism has always worked liked this, it has always needed some sort of state regulation, because it aims to maximize profit by all means. it simply does not matter that much if CEOs want the end of the world or not, the way they are producing automatically entails it (looking at the climate crisis in particular). I don’t quite understand, why the same argument does not apply to fossil fuel companies in the 80s who had large campaigns against global worming initiatives - ideologically, its bosses might not have been end times fascists, but practically they were working towards the same future, the destruction of the planet by all means to keep their profits flowing.

What is certainly true is that today’s fascists are different and that they have the absolute ability to destroy us all - through AI weapons, atomic bombs etc. However, it is the „end times“ in front of the fascist that is still not that convincing to me and simply saying, they do not promise a better future for certain people is not enough for me. The fascists of the 20th century obviously had to promise their in group something („lebensraum“, better roads etc), because they were up against a powerful workers movement. as this is absent today, fascists don’t have to make any concessions. fressen oder gefressen werden eben.

But most of all, the book is really fucking boring. It’s like a collection of the most evil shit - Bezos wedding, some billionaire islands, Elon Musks tweets. We know all of that, I don’t have to be reminded of everything in detail. I would have loved to hear more about the authors‘ OWN thoughts, because this is what made „double ganger“ so strong. the questioning, the inner monologues, the hesitation. End times fascism has none of that, it’s a collection of horrible statements countered by some sort of local resistance movement that made me more depressed than ever. Because you can’t be reminded that somebody has a red button to swipe out humanity and then end with a „love thy neighbor“-politics chapter.

I was waiting for this so long but yeah 💔

[heptagrammaton · Rating 4 out of 5]

A plea for and practice in grounding: foregrounding the willful alienation of the present-day fascist elite as a framework and insisting on being in the world as the path out and on. Readable. Clear. Mindful. Needful.

A lot of what Klein and Taylor had to say was not ncesserily new to me, but I found the most unexpected value of End Times Fascism to be presively what digestive help it offers in processing, ordering and understanding presicely what is not-new; post-processing is vital, and information technologies are not built to deliver it; indeed, much of the informational millieu of facism, explicit (as with Putin's propaganda, as it's been propagated at home and abroad for more than a decade) and implicit (capitalism), is built break-your-neck unceasing, quantity the quintissential quality,

I won't be re-reading on recommending this in a decade, most likely. But there is a moment, too, for books of the moment.

[Susan Scribner · Rating 4 out of 5]

Chilling, infuriating, horrifying and just a tiny bit reassuring. Klein and Taylor do an excellent job of explaining why today's brand of fascism is so much more alarming than previous iterations. Three key powerful groups - evangelical Christians, tech titans, and ethno-nationalists - believe that it's already too late to save our world, and they are part of the small, deserving group of people who will survive the apocalypse, whether in bunkers, outer space, or the New Jerusalem.

You may think you already hate Trump, Musk, Steven Miller, Vance, Hegseth and their international counterparts, but reading this book will curdle that feeling to murderous rage. The authors offer a few examples of people fighting the good fight such as the Minnesotans who stood up to the ICE invasion, and Zohran Mamdani (?), and they warn against leftists tendencies to revel in their own catastrophizing. The forces of evil are strong, but the struggle continues.

BTW, New York Times book reviewer Damon Linker should f*ck all the way off with his insistence that Klein and Taylor are overreacting to a cyclical situation, and should think instead "as sober-minded adults about our many real (but not apocalyptic) problems."

[Bruce Katz · Rating 3.75 out of 5]

"Let's just plan for catastrophic success." -- Jared Kushner, in his Davos presentation of "New Gaza," part of President Donald J. Trump's Comprehensive Plan to End the Gaza Conflict. This prospective New Gaza would be "a high-tech community where ‘non-time-limited’ memberships were for sale for $1 billion in cash." Presumably there would be no actual Gazans in residence.


The basic premise of this alarming and well-researched book is this: there are, broadly speaking, three groups or factions of who believe the world is in crisis, the "end" is coming (through climate change, violent uprising, technological disruption, or the arrival of the religious End Times) and “are determined to be among the chosen few who survive the cataclysm.” Not only survive, but in fact prosper. Far from doing what they can to prevent these dire events, these “accelerationist fanatics,” as the authors call them, actually seek to make them come sooner. “The most powerful people in the world are preparing for the end of the world, an end they themselves are frenetically accelerating.” (Or as one reviewer of “End Times Fascism” nicely put it, “in a world on fire instead of joining bucket brigades, some people are hunting for kindling.”)

In virtually any other context this might sound like a conspiracy thinker’s fever dream, but as Klein and Taylor show, it’s quite real and it's all being done out in the open.

The book takes deep dives into the Hows, Whos, and Whats of each group and what motivates them. The networks the authors describe — of extremely wealthy individuals, powerful organizations, and government officials — are vast and interwoven. Klein and Taylor closely examine each group, looking at its history, expression, and key actors. At the end of the book they offer suggestions on how these networks can be resisted.

The three factions are, respectively, religious extremists, “techno-fascists,” and “ethno-nationalists.” Each group uses different words in describing their world views and objectives, but all of them are fundamentally anti-human, anti-nature, rigid, and fascistic (although, as they take pains to point out, this is a different kind of fascism than we’re used to envisioning when we hear the word. This fascism is “capitalism with bared teeth.”)

“Whether religious fanatics or tech oligarchs or white nationalists," the authors write, "seizing the state is often a stepping stone toward something more ambitious and more final. In different ways, they are all chasing an intoxicating messianic fantasy: an exit to a parallel gated city, a fortressed Zion, whether in the sky or here on earth. They are plotting their escape from our shared world, unconcerned about the fates of those who aren’t among the chosen.”

Religious extremists are convinced we have ‘entered the biblical end of days.” Apocalyptic messages are delivered from pulpits in wealthy mega-churches and on social media urging listeners to act or believe a certain way so that they will be “among the chosen.” The messengers see their jobs not as a matter of preparing people for the coming bad times but rather to speed things up. They use the levers of money, government, and science to bring the Final Days about. Efforts are made to breed the “perfect red heifer” that will be sacrificed at the newly rebuilt Third Temple in Jerusalem, which would, of course, require the destruction of al-Aqsa, thus setting off massive outbreaks of violence and war. They also want to expand Israel’s borders, no matter what the cost to Palestinians or Israel’s standing in the world. (Mike Huckabee, Trump’s ambassador to Israel, viewed this outcome as the fulfillment of God’s pledge to Abraham. Trump Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, said much the same thing at a news conference in 2018). And to reshape governments along specific religious guidelines.

It's a very dark future these extremists envision. “What will it take for the Messiah to finally enter the door and cross the threshold? More ethnic cleansing, more slaughter, more settlements. Control over the Temple Mount. And of course, an even wider war with Iran, waged until total regional dominance is achieved.”

The views of the techno-fascists are more secular, to be sure, though equally apocalyptic. (Peter Thiel, founder of PayPal and Palantir, hosted an “Apocalypse Ball” where guests were instructed to “dress for dystopia.” He has also called climate activist Greta Thunberg “the anti-Christ.” Others, like Musk, talk about creating “digital gods.”) These are the super-wealthy with their numerous housing compounds, underground bunkers, private jets and private islands, and expanding presence in government; the people who invent, manufacture and tout new technologies (that they withhold from their own children), and that monitor and control more and more of our lives. In a very real sense, these (mostly) men essentially live on a different planet than the rest of us, one that is answerable to no government or constrained by morality. They may speak about how AI will improve everyone’s lives in countless ways, but in every meaningful way Silicon Valley’s leaders actually demonstrate a deep disregard, even disdain, for nature and humanity. They are quietly developing global surveillance networks (and selling them to authoritarian states), autonomous weapons systems that can identify and eliminate targets without any human intervention, disrupting economies, building human-less factories and massive energy- and water-devouring data centers, turning human governance into government by AI, extending their own longevity, controlling what information is made available to certain populations… And while all this is going on, the billionaire and trillionaire techno-fascists are buying islands and building bunkers, and even working on ways to escape Earth entirely, to protect them when everything falls apart.

The third group is made up of ethno-nationalists, the xenophobes who who envision some perfect (mythological) past where certain people were in charge and shared particular values and religions, and others knew their place. These are the ‘preppers,“venders of Great Replacement Theory, who use visions of disaster (and sometimes actual disasters) to frighten the population, undermine expertise and diversity, and turn the country into a garrison state that must be protected from outsiders. For them, power, wealth, and influence depend on worsening the crisis — or at least make it seem like things are always getting worse, and only they can be relied on to keep the populace safe.

“End Times Fascism” is a bleak, depressing book. From time to time I found myself pushing back against the use of the word “fascist” because it seemed misleading and inaccurate. But then I decided that in this context literal accuracy wasn’t the issue; conveying the extent of the danger was what mattered. Sometimes too I felt there was a kind of “over-harvesting,” if you will — many of the examples as fitting the paradigm they were exposing struck me as less than convincing.

Klein and Taylor cover a lot of ground in “End Times Fascism,” and they are earnest in calling for pushback against the purveyors of Apocalypse. (In this, the book shares a great deal with Jill Lepore’s most recent book, “The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State.”) They close the book with a number of suggestions on how ordinary people can push back. The reactions of Minneapolis’s citizens to ICE brutality is held up as an example, as is the need to create real, physical connections with other people (the book cites Hannah Arendt’s observation that totalitarianism is “organized loneliness”), and to rediscover awareness of nature and feed our sense of awe. They focus in particular on the historical model of the Jewish Labor Bund and the idea of doikayt or ‘hereness.’ Ordinary people join together to solve problems where they are, to build solidarity and take care of each other in the here and now. Doikayt is, the authors say, “a fierce commitment to place and community that [is] not based on bloodlines.”

“To fight [back],” they authors say, “we will need to be clear that it is not the people themselves who are the root of the problem, but rather the systems that concentrated so much power and wealth in the first place.”

My thanks to Farrar, Straus, Giroux and Edelweis for providing a digital ARC in return for an honest review.

[Shazza Hoppsey · Rating 5 out of 5]

Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor draw together the current threads of democratic erosion by a small class of powerful, wealthy individuals, naming it "end times fascism" and explain how this presents an existential threat to humanity.

At a minimum, read or listen to the final chapter, which makes the case for the global rule of law and the UN, flawed as it is. We can't go back to what was, but there's an opportunity now to pursue justice. Despite the depressing times this is an ultimately positive book of clear ideas and demontrates it is a time for level headed bravery.

[Philemon - · Rating 4 out of 5]

I suppose many on the right might read this as propaganda. And maybe it is: it has an in-group, to-the-choir ring to it. But what the heck, with so much about the world looking so desperate, it might just be too late in this fugue for Klein and Taylor not to pull out the stops. The race to inequality has only speeded up -- the very richest are seeing their portfolios grow by $100 million/day. By K & T's accounts, those megabillionaires are not nice people. Their comprehensive bid for power we need to take very seriously, if we care about keeping the freedoms we have left.

The first sections of the book give us the grim details, which I won't summarize here. Trust me, thry're grim. The remainder gropes toward strategies the rest of us can try to organize against it. Special attention is paid to Minnesota, perhaps our best laboratory for protest; how anti-ICE opposition there has grown, crossing racial, cultural, class, and religious lines; and how many newly awakened there have found purpose and joy in building a powerful, inclusive movement. The ball is in our court.

[Anton Alexandrov · Rating 4.5 out of 5]

The chapters describing the various components of the global fascist system we live in are great but in my opinion the authors should have spent more time talking about capitalism being the root problem (they do mention wealth redistribution and unlimited growth but only in passing) and cooperative ownership in tech as an important part of the solution. Also the chapter on Mamdani is great for showing what's possible if you have a progressive element in the system but it doesn't really talk about the limits inherent in it and the necessity of breaking it.

[Parker · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love the deeply ambitious endeavor that is End Times Fascism. I think Klein and Taylor help us focus on what matters in these destabilizing times, which is that the religious right, tech billionaires, and corrupt politicians want to obtain unprecedented wealth, natural resources, and dominance, and could not care less what happens to those outside their circles. Unfortunately for us, establishment politicians on both sides have let the house catch fire and burn.

It's a great look at what got us to this point, and thankfully leaves us hope crumbs sprinkled throughout.

Three cheers for wealth redistribution and new policies to protect people from the harms of big tech. And yet, I can't help but feel we (referring to all Painters of Better Future Pictures TM, not just these authors) could dig a little deeper into navigating this age of technology. It's time to play offense and go vigilante mode, imo, because who's actually going to stop all the punks running quantized AI models on their phones, hitting the nudification button 1000 times a minute? I hate to say it, but no one is coming to save us. Tech is already in the wrong hands and we can't go back. But we can still win. Creative technologies built by the right hands (community-sourced) and deployed in a sustainable and open way have a role to play if we can fit it into the vision. We just have to be intentional about putting The Role Of Technology in Our World and How To Build It Inclusively right there in the plan. I'm craving some more meaty discussion in this area.

[Phil · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very laudable sentiment throughout the book, but it fails to say anything adequate or revelatory to the absolute klusterfuk that's going on. It doesn't have the conceptual muscle of Doppelganger, and to be honest with you most of the time I'm asking " why isn't this a video or essay?".

Maybe it's a sign of me being brain broken and oversaturated by America's Trumpian tantrum, but again, don't feel like I got anything substantial out of this.

Recommended for someone who hasn't read any political criticism in the last 10 years, otherwise, watching interviews about the book would probably be a better use of one's time.

[Caitlin Lang · Rating 5 out of 5]

She's done it again!!!

[laurel [the suspected bibliophile] · Rating 5 out of 5]

Naomi Klein: *long drag on cigarette* first we fill ya with despair, then we give ya hope. Now it's up to you, kid.

A compilation, it feels like, of both More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley's Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity, Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman's OpenAI. and something else I can't put my finger on (but was referenced quite a bit on this work).

Yes, the technofascists are having their moment, but still, the regular people can prevail if we band together and remember that we have the answers already. We need to maintain the will and the unity.

Basically: apes together strong.

[Taighe · Rating 5 out of 5]

Naomi rips

I’m a bit biased, I’ll probably always give Naomi 5 stars and definitely any book that is trying to do what this book is

It’s an assessment of the current political nutso wave happening all over the world, and a love letter to the places we call home

AI sucks, billionaires suck, fascism sucks — our planet, our cities, our towns, our homes, all rule & deserve better

*Not as strong as Doppelgänger, but it’s obvious why. The book is an attempt put all the crazy politics in one place and offer alternatives / solutions that ARE possible

There’s a favourite quote of mine that, while not included in the book, I feel connects to the main idea of End Times Fascism:

“Now he understood that a man never knows for whom he suffers and hopes. He suffers and hopes and toils for people he will never know, and who, in turn, will suffer and hope and toil for others who will not be happy either, for man always seeks a happiness far beyond that which is meted out to him. But man's greatness consists in the very fact of wanting to be better than he is. In laying duties upon himself.

In the Kingdom of Heaven there is no grandeur to be won, inasmuch as there all is an established hierarchy, the unknown is revealed, existence is infinite, there is no possibility of sacrifice, all is rest and joy. For this reason, bowed down by suffering and duties, beautiful in the midst of his misery, capable of loving in the face of afflictions and trials, man finds his greatness, his fullest measure, only in the Kingdom of this World.”

— Alejo Carpentier, The Kingdom of This World

[Daniel Warriner · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent, urgent, and compelling. Essential reading for 2026.

[Magdelanye · Rating 4.5 out of 5]

Fascism is a morbid response to very real threats and crises, a set of techniques directing public fears away from the systems driving those crises. p72

....a way of making sure that the public anger...is directed downward at the vulnerable rather than upward at the system itself and its most privileged stewards and beneficiaries. p32

The most powerful people in the world are preparing for the end of the world, an end they themselves are frantically accelerating. p11

They have the power to program fascism into the machine. p152

They are stockpiling for the collapse they themselves are causing. p199

Naomi Klein has teamed up with Astra Taylor to produce a thoughtful and comprehensive investigation of the most alarming current trends threatening our life on earth today.

One of the central themes of this book: the way history doesn't just repeat, it accumulates, piling wreckage upon wreckage. p270

Todays battle lines are not simply between people who struggle to survive under increasingly degraded and costly conditions and an oligarch class....On the one side are those of us who have no escape, no bunkers in the sky or underground...committed to staying right here. p244
On the other are those with rapturous plans.... Instead of improving conditions for actual people on earth, end times fascists are plotting their escape. p245

We have a whole economy now built on keeping us in our rooms, on our phones, for as many hours a day as possible. p250

There is no going back to the way things were, nor should we want to. But one thing is clear: we have entered a uniquely unstable and treacherous era. p299

What distinguishes this book from a mere rant is the hope infused throughout. Yes, the general fears we have are all
addressed: climate change, wars, AI and the widening gap between foes with the ugly names and histories all researched. But the authors also include current creative responses to these threats and even some suggestions for those so moved to stand up for a livable world.

Today's end time fascists don't bother to manufacture consent as much as manufacture confusion, undermining democratic deliberation by unleashing bigotry and disinformation. p154

Chat bots...don't need to be particularly smart, let alone "superintelligent" to fill our heads with fascist nonsense. p155

Fascist regimes always offer spasms and spectacles of violence. p178

Power masquerades as objectively...synthetically produced slop, racist and misogynist deep fakes and bot generated replies...many people give up on any hope of differentiating fact from fiction. p153

This important book gives those of us who love the world the impetus to keep finding ways to care for it and for each other.

Just because (the powerful names) don't know how to read...those warnings...doesn't mean we have to remain trapped in their stories. p255

[Lauren M · Rating 5 out of 5]

In End Times Fascism, Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor explain that, for the billionaires and oligarchs, the most terrible aspects of the world that has resulted from their pursuits of power and wealth are features, not bugs. They don’t care that climate change is wreaking havoc because they think they’re insulated from it in figurative and sometimes literal bunkers. They don’t mind that their engineering could throw Earth into an apocalypse state, because it fits with their evangelical beliefs and philosophical dogmas.

Every new Naomi Klein book somehow feels even more timely than the one before, and each one somehow makes me even more angry than the last. This book lays out the way that the elite turn us against each other – when social services are cut and resources are (artificially or genuinely) limited, it says, then it becomes so much easier to convince people that the blame lies with their immigrant or fellow working-class neighbors than when there is enough to go around.

And yet, this book doesn’t offer doomerism as a solution. Instead it talks about the Diné Navajo belief that Heaven is not a future paradise, but a contemporary Earth that we must safeguard. It talks about the Jewish Bund, an alternative socialist movement that emerged in the same year as Zionism that focused on “hereness,” the idea that rather than emigrating to an ethnostate you can fight for dignity and freedom in your home.

The book — and here, co-author Astra Taylor’s experience as an organizer adds a great element to the narrative — covers solidarity movements and figures who are fighting the good fight. Some are people with political clout, but most are ordinary people who have organized and stood up to power in a way that we are all theoretically capable of, and must feel empowered to take out of the hypothetical and into the world.

Maybe not Klein’s absolute strongest book, but possibly her most actionable, and therefore an important read ideally situated for the current moment. Highly recommend.

[Andrew Stewart · Rating 5 out of 5]

A compendium of reasons not to be cheerful, though the chapter on Mamdani was encouraging and the concluding chapter is must reading.

[reli · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm amazed as to why these books do not attack the liberal center!

You could say people are crazy for trump. But clearly not that much as they gave their vote to bidden. Then they told bidden, "we and more money in our pocket" and stop funding the slaughter of kids man. The kamala came on and said we finally decided to tell biden has gone mad for some time now, I'll be taking over, but do not worry, nothing is going to change

At a gathering, she told anti-genocide protesters to shut up or else trump is going to win.

Shouldn't these books critique that just as much? Because if people demand a revolution to overthrow the system, kamala, obama and hillary with take up guns against the people

[W · Rating 5 out of 5]

I cried twice

[Martin Gaede · Rating 3 out of 5]

I kept having the same problem while reading *End Times Fascism*: I was often interested in the material being discussed, but considerably less convinced by the framework being used to connect it all. Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor bring together several genuinely troubling developments: religious apocalypticism, ethnonationalism, the enormous political power accumulated by parts of the tech industry, climate breakdown, billionaire fantasies of escape, increasingly fortified borders, and the idea that the future might belong not to everyone but to whichever chosen group can survive what is coming.

There is plenty worth thinking about there. In fact, some of the connections were precisely what kept me reading. But I wanted considerably more distinction between the different groups and ideologies being discussed. “Fascism” is already a word carrying an enormous amount of historical and political weight, and applying it across a very broad collection of movements can sometimes obscure more than it reveals. A Christian nationalist, a notorious Silicon Valley billionaire, an ethnonationalist political movement and someone embracing authoritarian populism may overlap in important and dangerous ways. They may support one another. Their interests may converge. That doesn't necessarily make their beliefs, motivations or ultimate objectives interchangeable.

And those differences matter. Not because distinguishing between them somehow makes any particular movement harmless, but because different dangers require different explanations. Religious fundamentalism can threaten societies in ways that aren't identical to technological oligarchy. Ethnonationalism has its own logic. Authoritarian movements can exploit economic insecurity, migration or cultural resentment without necessarily sharing the worldview of people preparing bunkers for civilizational collapse. Sometimes the most useful question isn't simply what these groups have in common, but why they are different and why those differences make each of them dangerous in their own particular way. I wanted much more of that.

The geographical balance also felt a little off to me. Klein and Taylor do venture well beyond the United States, so I wouldn't call the book narrowly American in scope, but the American political landscape still dominates the discussion to a degree that sometimes made a global argument feel more US-centric than it needed to be. I would have liked more sustained attention to how these tendencies manifest differently elsewhere—not simply additional examples from other countries, but more examination of the different political, religious and historical circumstances producing them. Those differences might also have helped with my broader problem with the book: the temptation to gather movements with quite distinct origins and aims beneath the same conceptual umbrella.

Perhaps that's partly why I found the book more convincing when it was describing specific developments than when it was trying to fit all of them beneath one conceptual roof. There are individual observations here that I found genuinely interesting, particularly around the relationship between extreme wealth, technological power and a peculiar kind of abandonment of the future. The idea that some powerful people are increasingly interested in insulating themselves from catastrophe rather than preventing catastrophe is certainly worth examining. I'm just not sure calling the whole constellation “end-times fascism” always helped me understand it better.

There is an irony there, because the book is arguing for recognizing connections at a moment when apparently separate crises increasingly feed into one another. I don't disagree with that instinct. Climate, migration, inequality, technology, nationalism and political instability obviously don't exist in separate little boxes. But synthesis works best for me when it preserves differences rather than flattening them.

I came away with quite a few passages and ideas I wanted to think about further, alongside a persistent feeling that the analysis would have been stronger had the authors occasionally loosened their central definition rather than trying to bring quite so much inside it.

[Mirjana (Mirjana_bere) · Rating 4.5 out of 5]

Klein & Taylor s sistematičnim pristopom (kot ponavadi v knjigah Naomi Klein) razložita mehanizme fašizma in zakaj trenutno aktualni val ni enak prejšnjim, ampak je veliko bolj nevaren - in to ne samo zaradi digitalnih možnosti 21. stoletja.

Je pa relativno več fokusa na ZDA napram ostanku sveta, zato ni čistih 5⭐️

[Daniel Kukwa · Rating 5 out of 5]

In some ways it's a long treatise on stating the obvious...yet, in this day and age, some people are either oblivious to the obvious...or are consciously trying to make it oblivious in order for the darkness to succeed. This is timely and depressing reading, laying out the state of affairs up to a few months ago...and there is sadly much more that can already be added to the analysis since publication. This should be taken as a call-to-arms...and a guide to the litany of men and women who seemingly line up to be enemies of humanity.

[Laura Petto · Rating 4 out of 5]

I like Klein and Taylor’s analysis in the first half - strong, compelling, well reasoned arguments that are thoroughly researched . My issue comes in the latter half, when Klein writes about Bernie and Mamdani with quite rose colored glasses and without analysis of policy application, especially with regards to Bernie. I noticed this in Doppleganger too, and in her online posts. I generally align with Klein politically and am a big supporter of Zohran but I think it diminishes her thesis to not address weaknesses of the movement. Her lack of addressing Bernie being an institutionalist wrt structural reform stood out to me the most.

This is a minor criticism bc it’s not the focus of the book but it’s what took this from 5 stars to 4. The book is primarily about the rise of right wing fascism and how to combat it, not an analysis of the left. But when the authors present radical optimism and the politics of Mamdani as a potential solution, while comparing it to Bernie’s presidential campaigns, without acknowledging internal responsibility for the latter’s failures, it does weaken the book.

[michael reid · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am in awe of Naomi Klein (and Astra Taylor). This is essential reading!

[Jim Parker · Rating 4.75 out of 5]

No it’s not your imagination. The world is at an extraordinarily dangerous juncture. And the ‘F’ word (for fascism), so long dismissed by beige centrists as an exaggeration in describing the movements sweeping the world, now seems entirely appropriate.

This book by Canadian journalist Naomi Klein and filmmaker Astra Taylor looks at what the authors call ‘end times fascism’ - a disturbing radical tendency on the contemporary right evident in many countries, including Australia. In a nutshell, Klein and Taylor show how influential political, religious and technological elites are increasingly treating ecological and social breakdown not as something to prevent, but as something inevitable, desirable, or survivable for a chosen few.

In short, this unhinged fascist coalition of religious fundamentalists, racial supremacists, extreme nationalists, billionaire AI and space entrepreneurs, and political grifters are urging on the end of the world - so they can either meet a returning Jesus, purify the white race, or escape a dying planet with their rich friends.

“Today, a constellation of corporations and reactionary regimes have evolved their own shock tactics—and done the original practitioners of disaster capitalism one better by provoking and deepening the global-scale crises from which they benefit,” the authors write. “Most crucially, unlike their predecessors, they don’t see the shocks and disasters as exceptions, piercing an otherwise calm and non-shocking status quo. Rather, they foresee an apocalyptic future in which rolling chaos and carnage are the norm. A world where pandemics, climate emergencies, resource wars, and rogue tech are routine, and politics stirs the pot. A world where the growing masses of unruly poor must be constantly tracked and contained, and where the fortunate few pay top dollar for protection and escape.”

A few years ago, I would have thought such a prognosis overly dramatic. But in the face of figures like Trump, Putin, Netanyahu, Musk and Bezos who doesn’t get the feeling that the world has come off its axis? As Klein and Taylor put it, the smart money is now on apocalypse and it has been for some time.

“Many of us feel this shift on a visceral level,” they write. “We sense that we have entered a new paradigm, a world of perpetual upheavals in which stability is the exception and uncertainty the baseline.”

We can all see it happening in real time, yet the discredited centrists of the so-called centre left and centre right mainstream political parties stand around wringing their hands, either mouthing platitudes or tossing together me-too policies of reduced immigration and culture wars to appease the masses’ inchoate anger.

“An ominous evolution is under way on the internationally networked hard right, a shift related to the reality that humanity has entered an era of unprecedented, global-scale existential crises. Instead of seeking to address those crises, this new iteration of fascism has made peace with the prospect of permanent shocks, and is waging a supremacist war over who is going to survive the future—a war powered by technological tools with hitherto unimaginable powers to both make synthetic worlds and break the real one. What unites this emerging, fractious, and often contradictory movement is a shared conviction that our common world is coming to an imminent end, so the chosen—whether selected by their wealth, faith, biology, or ancestral claims to particular pieces of land—must usher in the next phase of human history.”

Essential reading.