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Don’t hate Canadian author Naomi Klein and Canadian-American filmmaker-activist Astra Taylor for their overheated declaration that we are living in the age of something called End Times Fascism: And the Fight for the Living World — the title of the duo’s new book. It’s the nature of the beast — if not exactly the Beast of Revelation.
Unless you look like Sydney Sweeney or can talk like President Trump, who is going to pay attention to you? That’s why, in the 21st century’s noisy attention economy, being an intellectual practically obliges you to choose an apocalypse and make it your own. It’s a lucrative racket: everyone loves a good dramatic story, and there is precious little accountability — by the time people might ask why your prediction never came to pass, they have already moved on to consume the next supersized threat, no matter which side of the aisle you’re standing on.
To wit, in the years after 9/11, we were told by both the Left and the Right that religious fundamentalism imperiled us all. During the Iraq War, then-President George W. Bush ping-ponged between several terms to describe the Great Evil: Islamic radicalism, militant jihadism, and Islamofascism, that last term popularized by the British journalist Christopher Hitchens. Liberals, on the other hand, braced for domestic theocracy from the religious Right. Books like political strategist Kevin Phillips’s American Theocracy and Left-wing journalist Chris Hedges’s American Fascists cast Bush-era evangelicals as crazed millenarians bent on world domination. When Right-wing Christians used slogans like “We’ll take back our country for Christ,” Hedges insisted it meant literally taking up arms for the Lord.
The Bush and the Obama years also gave us the climate apocalypse. In 2010, the climate activist and environmentalist Bill McKibben declared that we no longer lived on Earth, but on a different planet altogether, called “Eaarth,” because it was already broken beyond repair due to extreme climate change. Republicans countered that President Barack Obama was the existential threat: a secret Muslim, a Kenyan socialist, and the architect of scary “death panels,” wherein ObamaCare bureaucrats would decide the fate of the elderly. Maybe, the conservative commentator Glenn Beck mused, Obama was the Antichrist.
Then came Brexit and Trump, and the liberals insisted that — actually — the Donald, not Bush or Obama, was the new Hitler, and that he and Vladimir Putin were about to construct a new world order ruled from Mar-a-Lago and the Kremlin. Then came Covid, the closest the 21st century has actually had to a real biblical plague. Before the virus receded, we were supposed to believe cities were dead forever, office work was finished, and, as Anthony Fauci suggested, we would never shake hands again. After a mob stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, the pundit class settled on a second American civil war as the coming storm.
And yet here we are, and the extravagant prophecies that flood our inboxes keep going unfulfilled. Sharia Law never arrived in Brussels. Putin and Trump never got around to uniting to divide the globe between them. The cities everyone buried in 2020 as superspreader sites are full again. And the second civil war, five years after its publishing boom, has yet to produce a single skirmish, unless we count the anti-ICE rebellion in Minneapolis that has since gone quiet. The past decade has delivered plenty of genuine crises: growing inequality, the aforementioned pandemic that killed more than a million Americans, wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, and now the disruptive technology of generative artificial intelligence. Indeed, Trump is hastening the end of American supremacy abroad; the liberal order that followed the Cold War is coming apart in real time.
But the trouble with crying wolf is that it crowds out the actual, more mundane issues. Our contemporary problems in America don’t look like the Left Behind franchise or The Handmaid’s Tale. They look like slowly decaying media and institutions, an impotent Congress that can’t handcuff the executive, an economy in which the young can’t afford a house, and a state that can’t build anything. Our doomsday prophets point at the sky, which prompts us to watch for the cleansing fire rather than look around at the leaking pipes.
It’s clear that, even more than two decades into this century, we still haven’t learned our lesson about being distracted by vote-or-the-sky-will-fall proclamations. Enter the Left’s newest doomsday prophecy: End Times Fascism. What’s coming, co-authors Klein and Taylor aver, is Armageddon, or at least a bespoke secular version of it. The book’s thesis is that three overlapping tribes of “end timers” have fused into a single coalition under Trump and a multinational version of MAGA — as contradictory as that sounds.
First come the religious zealots, an alliance of “Jewish and Christian supremacists” — Zionists and Mike Pence-style evangelicals — fixated on building the Third Temple in Jerusalem and supposedly willing to “actively court World War III” to get there. Then come the tech titans, who have cozied up to Trump since the 2024 election. Finally, there are the ethno-nationalist preppers, the Right-wing radicals who imagine the nation-state itself as a purified bunker, which means the West should cast all undesirables out and isolate itself from the world, shutting the international door behind us.
It’s also not just an America or Israel problem, the book says: every spot on the map is seen as a “testing ground” for the same overarching international Right-wing agenda, whether it is President Nayib Bukele’s prisons in El Salvador, President Javier Milei’s chainsawing of the Argentinian economy, Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s closed borders in Italy, or Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s citizenship purges in India. What unites these disparate groups, the authors argue, is a kind of elite supremacism — white, Jewish, techno, or ethno — and “their common abandonment of the very possibility of a stable future.” Each has made peace with catastrophe, and some are hastening it, confident that they will be among the chosen few who survive wars, climate disaster, or economic insecurity: souls raptured to heaven, minds uploaded to the cloud, bodies hurtling in rockets to the stars or, at the very least, living in gleaming AI-powered smart cities in Silicon Valley walled off from the rest of humanity. They are an elite “few ascending to a gated paradise while the rest of us are abandoned to the floods and fires of the damned.”
As is standard for contemporary soothsayers, End Times Fascism reaches for a Historical Bad Guy to prove the point. Today’s leaders, the authors argue, are like Hitler and Benito Mussolini, but even more dangerous than the fascists of the early 20th century. Not because they’re more evil, but because their technological tools are more powerful: “We are saying that our world is more dangerous than their world: its weapons deadlier, its technologies vastly more potent, its media more connected, its climate more unstable, its concentrated wealth more global in reach than at any point in human history.” The rhetorical move here is to keep the old boogeyman label but inflate the stakes: they are not just fascists, they are cyber-fascists with nukes, bioweapons, and superintelligence. Call it Armageddon inflation. Every apocalypse narrated to us that fails to arrive must be replaced by a larger one, like a Marvel sequel that can only raise the stakes by threatening the multiverse.
Klein has toured this territory before but more modestly. Nearly 20 years ago, her polemic The Shock Doctrine argued that elites and governments exploit wars, coups, and hurricanes to ram through their agendas, especially wish lists of pro-corporate policies. It was a sharp book about political opportunism and how vultures show up to dine on the carcass. End Times Fascism is the spiritual sequel to The Shock Doctrine, but the argument is expansive: today’s oligarchs, the authors write, “aren’t content to just build the arks. They appear to be doing their best to cause the flood.” In other words, exploiting the disaster has been upgraded to manufacturing it; now the vultures are killing the animal themselves, to feed on their metaphorical flesh.
There is a real lack of self-awareness here. The Left often calls out the Right for taking a messy set of actors with wildly diverging interests and welding them into a single cosmic enemy. At the GOP’s recent midterm convention, speakers like Sen. Ted Cruz dusted off a new version of the so-called Red-Green Alliance — the idea that socialists and Islamists are secretly conspiring together in a plan to destroy the West. That is an incredible reach, but so is grouping together figures ranging from Mark Zuckerberg, Benjamin Netanyahu, Curtis Yarvin, and Tom Brady (he of the $150 billion bunker mansion in Miami) as part of a kind of new MAGA-flavored Evil Empire.
Another problem is that the book’s own evidence keeps pointing somewhere less metaphysical. It opens with a genuinely strong set piece with biblical overtones: on a mountaintop in the dead of winter, two men unveil a vision of a gleaming city rising from “wastelands of rubble and rivers of blood.” The mountaintop is Davos in January 2026, and the prophets are the Trump consiglieres Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff, while the city is “New Gaza,” rendered by AI in a PowerPoint deck with clouds parting and golden light pouring down. That’s exactly as grotesque as it sounds, and Klein and Taylor are right to be appalled. But is this much different than what the architects of the Afghanistan or Iraq War had in mind for those countries’ postwar reconstructions? The fantasy of turning a devastated Middle Eastern country into an investor’s paradise hardly began with Jared Kushner. Two decades earlier, Paul Bremer sought and failed to remake occupied Iraq through low taxes, foreign investment, and privatization.
End Times Fascism also awkwardly yada-yada’s over regimes that don’t quite fit in the narrative of tech CEOs, ethno-nationalists, and MAGA. In the introduction, there’s a brief concession that “parts of Iran’s ruling Shia elites are indeed steeped in dangerous end-times theology” before the book races back to “the mounting apocalypticism closer to home.” China’s authoritarian rulers — who are building the actual surveillance cities the authors fear — are conspicuously missing. Is Beijing with the Empire or the Rebel Alliance? Or is it sitting out Armageddon?
Despite End Times Fascism’s claim to the contrary, there is little evidence that anyone — not Trump, not Elon Musk, not Stephen Miller — is trying to end democracy, America, or the world intentionally, whether for ill-gotten gains, big viewership numbers, or a seat in paradise. There is, however, abundant evidence of greed, opportunism, and a ruling class eager to exploit our economic and geopolitical turmoil to bend, not break, the world order. But those are old sins and they don’t need a new theology to explain them. Sometimes the rich and the powerful just pursue their own self-interest. Was the title Shock Doctrine 2 not available?
The authors are correct that something ugly is happening in American politics. But Trump is now paying the price politically, with record-low approval ratings and the defections of erstwhile fellow travelers like Tucker Carlson, who has since suggested that Trump, in fact, may be the actual Antichrist. Most Americans are not ideologically driven, whether by Marxism or MAGA; they care more about gas prices than white supremacy or wokeness.
But who actually wants to read about gas prices? The doom-scrolling that defines our information ecosystem always requires fresh new doom to consume, so our pundit and political class keep going back to the lab. End Times Fascism was published in the same week as the nationwide freakout about the Rise of the Robots in the wake of an Anthropic employee’s tweetstorm about how AI could kill us all “by the end of the decade.” Meanwhile, Peter Thiel will soon lecture again about the Antichrist.
We’re quite literally in a doom loop. But it doesn’t have to be. Lest we forget, it’s the 20th century that remains the bloodiest, most destructive in human history. The defining feature of this century is the wild-eyed, fantastical, and increasingly surreal rhetoric and images about the end of democracy, America, the West, the universe, and everything, paired with the agonizingly slow but steady decline of our existing politics and institutions, unmitigated by the creation of new ones. One century looked like Armageddon; this one talks like it.
