Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor Say the End of the World Is Now on the Table

The current political stakes, as Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor see them, could not be higher. In the view of these two influential leftist thinkers, a driving motivation behind far-right politics at the moment is nothing less than the apocalypse. In their alarming new book, “End Times Fascism and the Fight for the Living World,” Klein, the author of the best sellers “The Shock Doctrine” and “Doppelganger,” and Taylor, an author and documentarian as well as a founder of the Debt Collective, a debtors’ union, argue that a powerful coalition of religious fundamentalists, ethnonationalists and tech oligarchs (Elon Musk chief among them) is actively — and successfully — hastening the destruction of the world as we know it. Why? Because they believe that they’re primed to thrive on the other side of catastrophe, everyone else be damned. This is a sobering, scary vision of contemporary political battles. But as the still hopeful Klein and Taylor explain, they wrote their book because they believe the conclusion is far from foregone.

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Just to start: What is “end-times fascism?”

Naomi Klein: End-times fascism is a fascism that is very much in conversation with planetary-scale existential crises; a fascism that is taking the end of this world for granted. We thought long and hard about the politics of putting any kind of qualifier on a word like “fascism.” And the reason we ended up deciding that it did need that is we thought about how our world has changed since Mussolini declared himself a fascist. Our fascists have weapons that last century’s fascists couldn’t dream of. There was no atomic bomb. Hitler and Mussolini died before the Trinity test. They didn’t understand that fossil fuels were warming the planet. Our world has become more dangerous, and fascism has changed in response and has made peace with the idea of collapse. And now what they’re fighting for is who is going to survive that cataclysm.

How does end-times fascism make itself felt in the world today?

Klein: The first thing I thought of was the SpaceX I.P.O. I think what resonates is like: Hey, don’t the billionaires have bunkers now? Aren’t they somehow prepping? What is this sort of fixation on leaving the Earth behind? I don’t think the idea of space exploration is inherently fascist, but I think the way it is being formulated by Elon Musk is, because it is just accepting that, as he puts it, he’s saving humanity. What is he saving humanity from exactly? Why do we accept that this world needs escape from?

A term like “fascism” can be foggy, and it’s compounded by the fact that over the last 10 or so years, it has been increasingly used. So can you clarify who the fascists are in your formulation?

Astra Taylor: It’s not a dominant political worldview, even on the right, but it is a term we think applies to some of the most powerful people in the world who are leading governments and companies. In the book, we talk about religious end-timers who want to hasten the return of the Messiah, who believe that they will be saved by the grace of their faith. Those are the evangelical Christian Zionists, who are a very potent political force in the United States; that’s Zionists in Israel. These are real groups of people with real power. Then there are the tech end-timers, who believe that it’s worth incinerating this world as long as they can build their virtual one and that we are inevitably heading toward some sort of digital superintelligence, some singularity. And then the third group are the ethnonationalists, who believe that the nation is under existential threat from immigration, from cultural change, and their response is to fortress the nation, to cast out the domestic enemies. These groups are different. There are contradictions, they’re messy and not totally coherent, but they’re responding to this sense that the world is increasingly fraught and dangerous — which it is — and they’re responding by shutting down and trying to defend their group. And they’ve made this very dangerous alliance.

Help me understand the coalition aspect. If someone were to say, “I don’t quite understand what religious nationalists have to do with Elon Musk” — is there an actual, practical, coordinated effort between these people?

Klein: I would say that effort is embodied by the Trump administration. If you look at this awkward, Frankenstein-like coalition that he has cobbled together and that brought him to power, it contains all of these elements. The massive funding coming from Silicon Valley, and Elon Musk in particular. The fact that he appointed Mike Huckabee, a Christian Zionist, to be his ambassador to Israel, and the way he has understood that Christian Zionists are a key part of his base, and the centrality of advancing Messianic Zionist narratives in Israel. And I mean, think about the tech-billionaire class and that moment in Trump’s second inauguration where some of the wealthiest people in the history of the world are lined up. What exactly is going on? The first time Trump was president, many of these same billionaires were criticizing him. They were upset when he left the Paris climate accord. Zuckerberg was condemning him. Bezos was launching an Earth prize. They were positioning themselves as the people who were going to save the planet. One of the things we’re arguing is, as the world changes, our elites are changing, are becoming more fascist, are attracted to ideas that justify the idea that only some people are going to make it. That is not the same story they were telling even five years ago. We need to pay attention to the way the story is changing as our world changes.

But one could say the tech elites are responding to incentives to cozy up to Trump. That it’s better for their businesses. So can you unpack the “fascism” element?

Klein: I don’t think it’s as simple as saying that they’re lining up behind Trump because it’s good for them. They could have done that last time. Very few of them did. They helped him get elected [in 2024]. Certainly Elon Musk and the huge amounts of money that he spent — but not only him. Several people played key roles, including Marc Andreessen; JD Vance was a creature of Silicon Valley, worked with Peter Thiel. But there was a turning point during the campaign when a lot of people who had not supported Trump, who identified as lifelong Democrats, got behind him. We make the case that a lot of it had to do with A.I. and how ravenous A.I. is when it comes to energy. They understood that Trump, as a guy who loves the fossil-fuel industry, would open the floodgates for this A.I. arms race. So that’s an economic incentive. But I would also argue that the business model that they have embraced is a business model that is uniquely antithetical to a shared human existence. They understand the climate crisis and they understand that what we feed A.I. is energy. It’s overwhelmingly being fed with L.N.G. [liquefied natural gas] and coal, and because they understand the climate crisis, they understand that that is going to do exactly what we’re seeing right now: set whole cities on fire, create situations where huge parts of the world are unlivable. So the increasingly brutal views that we’re hearing from people like Elon Musk, where you just seem to be discounting huge swaths of humanity or actively playing a role and destroying USAID at the cost of — I mean, he would say no lives, but perhaps because he doesn’t count African lives. These things go together. You need a story that discounts those lives. That is a fascist story. That is the story that has ideas about whose lives count and whose lives can be discarded. And I think it’s quite active. It’s not just like, Oh, we’re going where the money is. The money is making them fascist.

Taylor: It’s important to note that far-right ideology has a long history in Silicon Valley. It didn’t start at the second inauguration. A figure like Peter Thiel has been cultivating that worldview alongside David Sacks by investing in promoting a certain philosophical paradigm. In 2009, he wrote an article that is pretty famous for good reason, that basically says democracy and freedom are incompatible, staking his claim that if he has to choose between democracy and capitalism, he’d choose the latter. We talk in the book about a conference that Thiel’s venture capital firm hosted just before the election in 2024 that was called Hereticon, “a conference for thought crime.” And the tagline was: “Maybe if you aren’t trying to destroy the world, you aren’t trying hard enough.” We’ve been wrestling with how to talk about what they say because some of it is so nuts that you sound a little kooky quoting them. Elon Musk saying it increasingly looks like “humanity is a biological bootloader for digital superintelligence,” or that we should rejoice in the fact that they’re building the digital beings who will come after humanity.

Klein: Or Sam Altman saying that A.I. takes less energy to train than a human.

Taylor: Or that the world will be covered in data centers.

But how do you disentangle trolling from actual ideological views?

Taylor: My view is they want to be our overlords and our edge lords. And I think we’ve seen that we do have to take some of the trolling seriously. You can be a joke and be really dangerous at the same time.

Klein: The last book I wrote was about a group of people who were dismissed as conspiracy nuts and who shouldn’t be taken too seriously. And then less than a year and a half later, they are running the U.S. government. So I think that there is an impulse when you see lots of really extreme things to be like, Cooler heads will prevail. But then you look at the U.S. secretary of war and what he’s been doing, or who is running Health and Human Services and the effects that it’s already having on communicable diseases and food-borne illnesses. The reason not to be alarmist about alarming rhetoric is that you want people to take it seriously when there is a serious threat. There are enough alarm bells going off right now that I don’t think it’s a good time to self-soothe with ideas that maybe that’s just something they’re saying to get a provocation. The prototype of this is Elon Musk. When he was head of DOGE with his chain saw, he really did slash entire programs that millions of people rely on for health care and nutritional support.

I want to ask an Elon Musk question. He is a defining character of our age, for better or worse. I think, for people who like him, there’s a real grandeur to the idea of SpaceX rockets and colonizing outer space. Or I was talking through the ideas in your book with some folks, and someone said to me, Elon Musk is out there saying more people should have more babies because of population decline. So how does that fit with hastening cataclysm? Does any of that, for you, complicate the idea of what Elon Musk believes in and how he acts? To me it looks incoherent more than anything else.

Klein: I don’t want to do too much work to try to make him coherent. But I do think he has a vision of the future. I think he’s obsessed with the vision of the future that he grew up with in pulpy science fiction and comic books and wants that future. He feels it was promised. We were promised flying cars. Where are my flying cars?

Which Peter Thiel famously said.

Klein: So the idea that he has a vision of a future does not mean he’s not a fascist. I think that he has a vision of a future for a subset of humanity who get to enjoy the implants and upgrades and flying cars and rocket ships. He believes in a kind of V.I.P. bespoke future that is based on this hierarchy of humanity that allows him, on the one hand, to say that people in the so-called West should have more babies, but slash programs that are providing food and medicine to children in Somalia and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Those things are happening at the same time.

Taylor: I think what you’re getting at is that there’s something that appeals to people about the idea that we could be interplanetary. We share that. We share the idea that people need something mythic and something to look forward to. We just think it should be something to look forward to here on Earth, and it should be inclusive and sustainable.

Klein: Because you don’t hear him talk about the great future we could have here. There are very few people in politics today, or in the corporate world, who are talking about a vision that feels credible for how we could live together. So we believe it’s the job of a credible left to put forward a vision of the future for how we live together well on this planet — where we aren’t engaged in some project of triaging who gets to live and who gets to die, where we actually figure out how to share our resources and thrive. We want to believe in the future. We have a right to believe in the future. And there’s something treasonous about not believing in the future.

Do you have any concern that using language like “end times” or “fascism” makes it easier for people to perhaps dismiss your arguments?

Klein: This book is a warning, and it’s not about a bunch of fringe characters. We are quoting, in their own words, the wealthiest people in the history of the world, the president of the United States, the prime minister of Israel. We have watched as people with previously quite marginal belief systems have moved to the center of power and gained very powerful roles in government. I mean, you say “end times” is an extreme term. Half of Christians in America believe we’re in the end of times. It might seem like a marginal belief system where you’re sitting, but these are not marginal ideas.

That’s a funky statistic, though. It’s very dependent on how a given Christian interprets “end times.” A Catholic might believe that we’ve been in the end times since Jesus ascended. So half of Christians believing in end times is not necessarily the same as meaning they want to ——

Klein: Accelerate it, yeah. But I just don’t think that these are marginal ideas. These are some of the most powerful stories in our culture. They’re incredibly deeply encoded. Whether we’re religious or not, they’re in us, and there’s a kind of drive to repeat them because the stories are so powerful. So we need mythic stories of our own. It can’t just be, We need universal health care, and we need affordable lives. We also need myth. We need to recover a sense of wonder and awe at this world. That’s why it’s worth looking at it. There’s things that we can learn from what is resonating.

Why does it seem like the left has not been able to harness apocalyptic energy in the way the right has?

Taylor: I think building multiracial democracy is harder than building fascism or authoritarianism. Because we don’t want to just grab the levers of power. You want to share power, and you have to figure out how to live together. So I think our project is just inherently more difficult.

Klein: In answer to your question, as somebody who’s been on the left for a long time, we’ve gotten closer than at any other point. For those of us who were part of the Bernie Sanders campaign — I was living in the U.S. at the time and was part of that campaign as a surrogate for his Green New Deal program, which I felt was the kind of response that both addressed emissions and people’s economic needs. But in politics you don’t get a prize for second place. I do think that this wave that Mamdani has helped lead, and this wave of D.S.A. candidates who are winning in the primaries, speaks to the fact that the left is a lot more serious about fighting fascism; the willingness to call it fascism, to call it genocide, to use the words that describe reality are actually far better at fighting fascism than a supposedly safe centrism that is collapsing around the world.

Where do you see opportunities on the right for pushback against end-times fascists?

Klein: The most awkward alliance is around the big tech companies and the MAGA base. They don’t like the idea of being tracked by their phones, so there are definitely opportunities there. We are seeing it in these local meetings, which is really interesting to me, having done this research around the anti-vaccine, anti-masking, anti-Covid health-measures movement during Covid, which then rolls into a movement for book banning and anti-trans rights. Those were the issues that were making people storm city hall and go to a town hall meeting. Today the thing that is bringing people into their town hall meetings is opposition to the data center down the road.

Taylor: We talk about data centers being icons of this futurelessness. There used to be a kind of bargain: You’d get a factory in the town and that meant there was some pollution and maybe some tax abatements, but there were also jobs that supported your family, even if the wages weren’t the best. And going to Memphis, for example, where Elon Musk now has three supercomputers, and meeting the people there who are fighting against this development because Musk is powering them with gas turbines. Some of them are as big as 30 football fields. And there are basically no jobs. What is the offer?

Are there signs, little flares on the horizon, that would give you clues that the influence of end-times fascists is receding?

Taylor: Minneapolis is a great example. I think that the Trump administration went into that assault thinking that it would be greeted gleefully, at least by its base, and that people would thrill at the video being circulated, celebrating the violence, and actually they overreached. They shot people in the street, and even some of their base were appalled by that. So I think we’re seeing signs that they’re definitely not infallible. Ultimately what we would like to see is some of these people being held accountable. And this goes to the attacks on the I.C.C. [International Criminal Court] and this constant assertion, “Well, we have immunity,” right?

Klein: That’s why it matters when Mamdani says that Netanyahu belongs in The Hague and he should be arrested. For too long we have not put forward our own vision for accountability, a serious one, using these institutions. What would it mean to really hold war criminals accountable and have it apply across the board, not only to people in Africa who commit crimes, or the Philippines, but also the United States and Israel? It would be the beginning of addressing such deep disillusionment, because we are up against a very widespread feeling that there’s nothing you can do. Doing a few things starts to break that spell.

What you just said — could American politicians be held accountable by the I.C.C.? — my first thought is, That’ll never happen. I’m not saying it should or shouldn’t happen. It just seems unlikely.

Taylor: Sometimes things that seem improbable happen because people organize to make them so.

Klein: We didn’t write the book because we think these people are fascinating. We wrote this book because we want people to fight them and beat them. We use this word that neither Astra nor I have ever used before because we’re not nationalist people: We call them “traitors.” Not traitors to a nation, not traitors to a flag or a border, but traitors to creation, traitors to life. And we spent a lot of time looking at where this project is weak. Where it’s strong is money, weapons. We’re dealing with trillionaires; that wealth has merged with the most powerful military in the world. I’m not nostalgic for the last century’s fascists, let’s be clear about that, but they had an offer to their base. They’re like, Let us steal the homes of the Jews and the Slavs and live happily ever after in your Lebensraum Ukraine. The people we’re calling end-times fascists don’t have an offer to their base beyond sadism.

One of the through lines of your book is that end-times fascists are not seeing the beauty of the world and the things that truly make life worthwhile. What are the things that you think, Oh, if only they could see what I see.

Taylor: A big one, and it’s a classic fascist trope, is the fear of the city, the fear of encountering people from different walks of life. We write about how powerful the Mamdani campaign was in re-enchanting the city — not romanticizing it, not saying it’s perfect. Yes, the subways have problems. But also, Wow, you get to ride a subway and who knows what will happen, and it will take you to some amazing place where you can eat something you can’t make at home. Just encountering and not fearing diversity but reveling in it. And absolutely the more-than-human world. Naomi lives somewhere with really good nature, so I feel like she has to take that one.

Klein: Oh, my god, where to start? I live in British Columbia. Honestly I feel the most sadness and rage at a willingness to let it all burn, or to try to escape when I see a dorsal fin of an orca slice through the waters of the Salish Sea, where I’m fortunate enough to live. Or just any of the psychedelia of this part of the natural world: On the very, very dark nights, the water is completely bioluminescent, and you look at your own limbs and they’re made of pure light — no mushrooms required! It is a tragedy for them, and an existential crisis for us, that the people who are closest to the levers of power on this planet are not enraptured by the beauty that is already here and all around us.

This interview has been edited and condensed. Listen to and follow “The Interview” on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, iHeartRadio or Amazon Music. Follow us on Instagram and TikTok.