---
title: "End Times Fascism: Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor Map a Far Right Preparing to Survive the Collapse It Is Causing"
description: Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor's End Times Fascism, out 15 September from Allen Lane, argues the new far right is building bunkers to survive a collapse it is causing.
author: Dr Marina Nani (Editor-in-Chief)
date: 2026-09-09T14:06:05.895Z
updated: 2026-09-09T14:06:05.915Z
canonical: https://richbooksmagazine.com/article/end-times-fascism-naomi-klein-astra-taylor
image: https://cdn.nanimediahouse.com/end-times-fascism-hero.webp
categories: books
content_type: Book Review
region: United Kingdom
publication: Rich Dad Magazine
about:
- type: Person
name: Naomi Klein
description: "Naomi Klein is a Canadian author and journalist, professor of climate justice at the University of British Columbia and co-director of its Centre for Climate Justice. Her books include No Logo (1999), The Shock Doctrine (2007), This Changes Everything (2014) and Doppelganger (2023), which won the inaugural Women's Prize for Non-Fiction in 2024. End Times Fascism: And the Fight for the Living World (2026), written with Astra Taylor, is her tenth book."
url: https://naomiklein.org/
jobTitle: Author, professor of climate justice at the University of British Columbia
sameAs:
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naomi_Klein
- https://naomiklein.substack.com/
- type: Person
name: Astra Taylor
description: "Astra Taylor is a Canadian-American writer, documentary filmmaker and organiser, and a co-founder of the Debt Collective. She directed Zizek! (2005), Examined Life (2008) and What Is Democracy? (2018), and her books include The People's Platform (2014, American Book Award), Democracy May Not Exist, but We'll Miss It When It's Gone (2019) and The Age of Insecurity (2023), the 2023 CBC Massey Lectures. She co-wrote End Times Fascism: And the Fight for the Living World (2026) with Naomi Klein."
url: https://astrataylor.com/
jobTitle: Author, filmmaker and co-founder of the Debt Collective
sameAs:
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astra_Taylor
---
The sentence at the centre of Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor's new book has been in circulation since April 2025: 'the most powerful people in the world are preparing for the end of the world, an end they themselves are frenetically accelerating.' It was the spine of a 5,000-word essay they wrote for [The Guardian](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2025/apr/13/end-times-fascism-far-right-trump-musk), and it is now the spine of End Times Fascism: And the Fight for the Living World, published by [Allen Lane](https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/480399/end-times-fascism-by-taylor-naomi-klein-astra/9780241816288) on Tuesday 15 September at £25 for the hardback, with an audiobook read by the two authors.
### Book: End Times Fascism
*And the Fight for the Living World*
By Naomi Klein & Astra Taylor
A blistering exposé of the new far-right apocalyptic alliance that's on the move around the globe - and how we resist
The far right is on the march again – but this time it’s different from anything we’ve seen before. A new, apocalyptic alliance of religious fundamentalists, billionaire Silicon Valley tech kings and ethno-nationalists is on the move. They’re united in their belief that some kind of cleansing cataclysm is coming, and they welcome a future of shocks, scarcity and collapse, convinced they’ll be among the saved on the other side.
This is the world of End Times Fascism.
In this blistering reckoning with our age, Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor take us deep into this man-made Armageddon complex – and show us how to resist it. Around the globe, they investigate how those who are making our world unliveable through climate chaos and job-consuming AI are preparing to protect themselves from the fallout, whether it’s by repairing to luxurious private islands for the super-rich, rocketing off to Mars or bunkering nations against a dehumanized ‘other’.
But, Klein and Taylor reveal, the new supremacist survivalists are far from impregnable. They have no vision of a shared future. All they offer are remixes of a bygone past: the nihilistic, sadistic pleasures of domination. If we’re to meet this critical moment and defend what’s left of democracy before it’s smashed up beyond repair, we must break the doom loop, and find a new way of living together, rooted in our existence on this earth, in the here and now. A story not of end times – but of better times. This book shows us how.
[Amazon](https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/0241816289?ref=cm_sw_r_ffobk_cso_wa_mwn_dp_GF1NBTWAQQ5ANWQDJNMH)
Their claim is that the far right of the 2020s is a different animal from the fascism of the 1930s, because it has stopped believing in a future. Umberto Eco's fascists had an Armageddon complex, Naomi and Astra concede, but they also had a horizon, a purified golden age on the other side of the fire. Today's far right, in their reading, offers 'only remixes of a bygone past, alongside the sadistic pleasures of dominance'. The people they write about, from [Peter Thiel and Elon Musk](https://richdadmagazine.com/article/how-we-arrived-at-the-age-of-the-tech-oligarchy) to the Christian Zionists in Donald Trump's cabinet and the governments turning their borders into fortifications, are alive to the real dangers of climate breakdown, pandemics and runaway artificial intelligence, and are responding by building escape pods rather than by trying to prevent the crash. Naomi's shorthand for it, given on the PBS programme Laura Flanders and Friends, is 'fascism without a horizon for the future'.
Two things make this book worth the reader's attention before the newspaper reviews land. The first is that the diagnosis has held up. The essay was written in the first hundred days of Trump's second term, when the plan to build 'freedom cities' on federal land and the deportation flights to El Salvador's Cecot prison were fresh. Seventeen months later the authors were writing in the Financial Times linking the summer's extreme weather to the same argument, and the fights over data centre construction they point to as early resistance are now local news across the United States. The second is that the two authors have spent their careers on adjacent parts of the same problem. Naomi has written about disaster capitalism since The Shock Doctrine in 2007. Astra co-founded the Debt Collective, a union for people in debt, and gave the 2023 CBC Massey Lectures on manufactured insecurity. What follows is drawn from the essay, the authors' own account of the book and the early trade notices, ahead of Tuesday's publication.
## The Bunker Is the Book's Central Image
*Photo: Photo: David McElwee / Pexels*
The organising picture of End Times Fascism is the bunker, and the authors use it at three scales. There is the literal one, the reinforced shelter, along with the freeze-dried food and gold that Steve Bannon's podcast sponsors sell to his listeners. There is the private one: the New Zealand compound Thiel was refused permission to build, the Hawaii estate where [Mark Zuckerberg](https://richdadmagazine.com/article/careless-people-sarah-wynn-williams-memoir-revelling-how-the-elite-shaped-world-events) keeps a shelter, and the startup-country projects such as Próspera in Honduras that want to carve democracy-free enclaves out of existing states. And there is the national one, which is the sharpest idea in the book: the wealthy country itself as a bunker, sealing its borders, expelling the unwanted and grabbing resources abroad while the climate deteriorates. Paige Oamek, reviewing the book in Dissent, put it in one line: 'the wealthy nation-state is a bunker, the private island resort is a bunker, and, of course, the literal bunker, stocked with goods for impending collapse, is a bunker.'
What links the three, in Naomi and Astra's telling, is a shared story about who deserves to survive. They call it 'super-sized prepperism', the belief that 'the human story itself has hit a wall and that only a small, deserving group of humans will survive the coming cataclysm'. JD Vance's account of the 'order of love', in which obligations run outward from family to nation and stop at the border, is read as bunker theology: 'we owe nothing to anyone outside our bunker.' Trump's designs on [Greenland](https://richdadmagazine.com/article/greenland-crisis-puts-nato-s-future-at-risk), the Panama Canal, Ukraine's minerals and Canada's water are read as prepping at the scale of a state.
## Christian Zionists, Tech Accelerationists and Bunker Nations
The argument is built on three groups who, on the surface, should have little to say to one another. The first are the religious literalists, the Christian Zionists and Christian nationalists who hold senior positions in the Trump administration and who read the escalating chaos of the age as prophecy on schedule. The second are the Silicon Valley figures who have swapped the old techno-optimism for a stack of ideas the authors trace back to first-wave eugenics: transhumanism, longtermism, Marc Andreessen's 'effective accelerationism', Curtis Yarvin's case for monarchy, Musk's pronatalism and his Mars project, which Naomi and Astra describe as a secular ark. The third are the ethno-nationalist governments, in the United States and beyond, that have decided the answer to a hotter and more crowded world is a harder border and a bigger prison.
The authors' point is that you do not need to believe in the Rapture to be an end times fascist. Musk's line that humanity is 'a biological bootloader for digital superintelligence' does the same work as a sermon about the Second Coming: it makes the present disposable. The line from the essay that has been quoted most often is that the tech billionaires 'aren't content to just build the arks. They appear to be doing their best to cause the flood.' The evidence for the second half of that sentence is economic. Fossil fuels, weapons, cryptocurrency and [AI data centres](https://richdadmagazine.com/article/flex-epc-power-ai-data-centre-power) are the industries the current American administration is built around, and each profits from the instability the others create. 'From the perspective of their ever-expanding bottom lines,' the authors write, 'the apocalypse is not collapse; it's regulation.'
## The Sequel to The Shock Doctrine
Readers who know Naomi's earlier work will recognise the move. The Shock Doctrine argued that governments and corporations use disasters as cover to push through policies nobody would accept in calm times. End Times Fascism updates the thesis for an era in which the same people are no longer waiting for the disaster to arrive. In the Guardian version the authors put it directly: today's leaders are 'not just taking advantage of catastrophes' but 'simultaneously provoking and planning for them'. Astra's earlier work supplies the other half. Her Massey Lectures argued that insecurity in modern life is manufactured and profitable, and the same logic runs through the account of Bannon's gold-and-survival-kit merchandising and the 'emotional compensations' offered to supporters, the pleasure of watching a deportation video or a diversity programme being cancelled. 'End times fascism,' they write, 'is a darkly festive fatalism.'
Naomi has said on her [Substack](https://naomiklein.substack.com/p/fighting-fascists-together-with-naomi) that the two of them discussed whether they wanted to spend months inside the heads of the people they were writing about, and that the research was 'like adjusting your eyes to physical darkness'. The trade verdicts so far are clear. Kirkus gave the book a starred review and called it 'an astute, original-minded analysis of the apocalyptic thinking that links tech, politics, and religion'. Booklist also starred it and praised its 'concrete, achievable methods for navigating this daunting new territory'.
> "A story not of end times, but of better times; not of separation and supremacy, but of interdependence and belonging; not of escaping, but staying put and staying faithful to the troubled earthly reality in which we are enmeshed and bound."
> — Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor, The Guardian
## Hereness Is the Answer the Book Offers
The second half of the title is the harder half to write, and the authors know it. Their answer to a politics of exit is a politics of staying. The word they borrow for it is doikayt, the Yiddish term for 'hereness' that the Jewish Labour Bund used in the early twentieth century to argue that Jewish workers should fight for their rights where they lived rather than leave for elsewhere. Naomi and Astra want a modern, universal version: 'portable, free of nationalism, rooted in solidarity, respectful of indigenous rights and unbounded by borders'. The practical shape of it is a coalition of everyone who intends to go on living here, whatever their other disagreements. They quote the organiser Adrienne Maree Brown's test for who belongs in it: is your heart beating, and do you plan to live? Then come this way.
That is a deliberately low bar, and it is the book's answer to the objection that the left cannot agree on anything. Naomi has framed the choice in lectures over the past year as fascism or eco-populism, and in the Financial Times essay the authors point to the movement demanding democratic control over AI, and winning freezes on data centre construction, as an early sign of what the second option looks like. What the authors say they want readers to leave with is 'not a tidy greeting card kind of hope, but a sense of hope that comes from deepening our love for the places and people we love and realising that they are worth fighting for'.
## Where Readers Have Pushed Back
The argument already has its critics. The climate-policy academic Jessica Weinkle, writing on 8 September, objects to the word fascism itself and argues that the authors' apocalyptic tone is 'another instance' of the doom-mongering they set out to describe. From the left, the writer Michael Sparks thought the original essay underrated Trump as a true believer and questioned whether the Silicon Valley figures are as secular as the authors suggest. Early readers on Goodreads, where the book was averaging 4.6 stars from advance copies this week, have praised the writing and, in one case, complained that it is 'focused mainly' on the United States. That last point is fair from a British seat. The freedom cities, the deportation flights and the cabinet Bible studies are American examples, and readers here will do some of the translating themselves, though the authors are clear that the bunker nation is a pattern they see from Italy to Israel and Australia as well.
The other open question is whether the remedy matches the scale of the diagnosis. Naomi and Astra describe a movement with money, state power and an eager audience, and ask readers to counter it with an ethic of place and a coalition of the willing. Readers can decide for themselves whether the second half of the book persuades them.
## Two Authors and the Books Behind This One
Naomi Klein is professor of climate justice at the University of British Columbia and co-director of its [Centre for Climate Justice](https://climatejustice.ubc.ca/profile/naomi-klein/). No Logo, published in 1999, made her name; The Shock Doctrine in 2007 and This Changes Everything in 2014 made her the best-known critic of disaster capitalism writing in English. Her last book, Doppelganger, about being confused with the conspiracy writer Naomi Wolf, won the inaugural Women's Prize for Non-Fiction in 2024. End Times Fascism is her tenth book.
Astra Taylor is a filmmaker (Zizek!, Examined Life and What Is Democracy?) and the author of The People's Platform, which won an American Book Award, Democracy May Not Exist, but We'll Miss It When It's Gone, and The Age of Insecurity, the printed version of her 2023 Massey Lectures. She co-founded the [Debt Collective](https://debtcollective.org/), which grew out of Occupy Wall Street and describes itself as the first union for debtors. She also toured with the band Neutral Milk Hotel for a year in her thirties.
## UK and Ireland Tour Dates in September and October
*Photo: Photo: bill emrich / Pexels*
The two are touring together across fifteen cities, starting in Toronto on 12 September and reaching Britain at the end of the month. The Bristol date on Monday 28 September is a [Guardian Live event at St George's](https://www.stgeorgesbristol.co.uk/whats-on/naomi-klein-and-astra-taylor-how-to-resist-end-times-facism/), tickets from £27.50. On Wednesday 30 September they are at Central Hall Westminster in conversation with David Olusoga for [How To Academy](https://howtoacademy.com/events/naomi-klein-end-times-fascism/), from £24.95, with a livestream option and a copy of the book included in the higher ticket bands. Brighton follows on Thursday 1 October with Ash Sarkar for [Novara Media](https://novaramedia.com/) at the Duke of York's Picturehouse, and the [Dublin Book Festival](https://dublinbookfestival.com/event/naomi-klein-and-astra-taylor-end-times-fascism/) closes the European leg on Friday 2 October at the RDS Concert Hall, where Sally Hayden hosts and tickets are €39, or €18 concession. The full list, including the North American dates, is on [Naomi Klein's events page](https://naomiklein.org/events/).
The hardback is £25, the ebook £13.99 and the audiobook, just under thirteen hours in the authors' own voices, £16. Find out more at [naomiklein.org](https://naomiklein.org/end-times-fascism/).
## FAQ
**Q: What is Naomi Klein's latest book?**
End Times Fascism: And the Fight for the Living World, written with Astra Taylor and published by Allen Lane in the UK and Farrar, Straus and Giroux in the US on 15 September 2026. It is her tenth book and expands the essay the pair published in The Guardian in April 2025.
**Q: What is the end goal of fascism?**
Klein and Taylor argue that the defining feature of the new far right is that it has no goal beyond survival. Where the fascism of the 1930s promised a purified future after a period of violence, the movement they describe expects collapse, welcomes it, and organises around making sure a chosen few are protected from it, whether in a private compound, a fortified nation or, in Elon Musk's case, on Mars.
**Q: Do we have fascism in the United States?**
The authors say yes, in a new form, and much of the book is built on American examples: the freedom cities plan, the mass deportation programme, Christian Zionists in the cabinet and the alliance between the Trump administration and Silicon Valley. Critics such as the academic Jessica Weinkle dispute the label and argue that calling opponents fascists is itself a form of apocalyptic politics. The authors are explicit that the pattern goes beyond the United States, citing Italy, Israel, Australia and El Salvador.