The climate is collapsing. Wealth inequality is at an all-time high. Wars are being waged. A.I. is threatening the last remaining jobs. And yet, many in power are not only failing to solve these problems, but seem to be actively hitting the accelerator.
When I sit down with Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor, the authors of End Times Fascism, they’re excitedly dissecting a newly released clip of Vice President J.D. Vance, who told evangelist podcaster Bryce Crawford that he is focused on “doing as much of God’s work as possible right now. And if that leads to the end times, okay.” It’s a seemingly perfect line to promote the release of their new book about the capitalist elite playing the impending apocalypse for political points. (Vance himself appears on more than one occasion.) “We’re so demented,” laughs Klein. “We’re just like, Oh, this is great. They’re admitting they want to end the world. Score one for us. What has this done to our brains?”
Reading End Times Fascism feels a bit like baptism by fire, if not least for its thorough exploration of doomsday prophecies and tech giants’ worshipful devotion to our impending A.I. overlords. Mostly, though, it’s challenging to see the multitude of existential crises we’re facing folded into a little over 300 pages, however offset it all may be by invigorating calls to revolutionary coalition building. But the challenge, Klein and Astra contend, is part of the point. Things are bad, and we should understand why.
That perspective makes End Times Fascism the ideal inaugural read for The CULTURED Book Club. The new initiative from the magazine will see our editors pick one book a month that helps us parse the issues of our time, offering our readers an excerpt from the new release, as well as a sit-down deep-dive with its author(s), to help give you some pointers before you get started. Klein and Taylor emphasize that theirs is a book best read with others—for coalition-building, but also emotional support. Below, read their thoughts on putting together one of the year’s most urgent texts.
I’m excited to be talking to you about this book, although I have to say it was a bit of a tough read, like, I’m glad that I have this information, but also being confronted by it all in one place is a lot to get through. What was the process of writing it like?
Naomi Klein: Astra described it as writing about a tsunami from inside of it. It was really crashing over you, right? This is not something that we’re writing about that’s already happened. The fascism is accelerating. It’s not abstract. I mean, we’re part of the left that they want to destroy.
Even if you aren’t on the front lines—and we both know that we’re not on the front lines—it does affect the experience of it. There was a real low point around Charlie Kirk’s assassination and that moment when they’re like, “We are declaring war on the left.” But then the pushback started accelerating. The data center resistance movements and the anti-ICE resistance movements were so courageous and inspiring. And these electoral wins—we have a chapter on the Mamdani campaign. It started to feel like we were racing to keep up with what we call, not anti-fascism, but the antithesis of fascism, which is different than anti-fascism, because it’s not just oppositional, it’s really embodying very different values. That definitely got us through the final push.
We would like to say that the collaboration that birthed the book is how we need to think about how we confront these monsters, because it is scary to read it alone, right? So read it with a friend. We’re interested in creating scaffolding around the reading of the book because everyone’s in the teeth of the crisis. This isn’t abstract for anyone. It should be hard to read, but we still have to look at it because the more we understand it, the more people want to fight it, frankly.
“It should be hard to read” is such an interesting point. As writers, what kind of balancing act were you doing between thinking this should ultimately have a hopeful tone to it, because you want people to pick up the book and feel empowered to do something about it, and at the same time, you can’t really soft-pedal this horrible thing that is happening?
Astra Taylor: There’s a power to calling things by their true names and to staring into the darkness, because then your eyes adjust. You can see things more clearly, and a big part of the book isn’t just the hope of the resistance—that’s critical, and that’s where we invest a lot of time—it’s also that, when you look at the alliance that makes up the end-times fascist phenomenon, there are fissures. There are deep disagreements, there are deep ineptitudes, so they’re not all powerful, but also they won’t fail on their own.
We have to strategically make use of those foibles and those fractures, and ultimately, one thing I love about Naomi is that she’s a writer and someone who’s been deeply—I mean, deeply—invested in and supportive of social movements. That’s where I also spend a lot of my time. Ultimately, the hope is in the doing. What we want to do is give people enough hope that they leave the house and go find some other people to read with, to work with, to process with, to fight the authoritarians with.
You use the phrase soft pedaling, and I don’t think it does us any favors to soft-pedal and to help these guys rebrand. We need to actually take them at their word. When people like Dario Amodei and Elon Musk are like, “There’s a 25 percent chance the machines I’m building will destroy all of humanity,” I’m not convinced their machines are that powerful yet—but I do believe that they are such nihilistic narcissists that they think those odds are acceptable. That means they should not have that much wealth and power. We need to figure out ways of taking that power away from them.
Klein: I’m also thinking about the fightback that we’re seeing around data centers and Flock cameras and Meta glasses. People are looking at the darkness and realizing that this is a fascist project. It’s very motivating and it’s very unifying.
It is interesting to see the pushback to these data centers because it feels like there’s been such a rapid encroachment of tech companies for a decent amount of time. People knew they weren’t doing good things, but also didn’t have this kind of visceral response, the way that people have to A.I. What do you think was the breaking point? Are we a more informed public now? Is it the fact that we’ve watched it in sci-fi movies our whole lives and do not want to enter a deranged dystopia?
Taylor: First, to your point of the sci-fi, I actually wouldn’t discount that. We talk about how part of what we’re seeing within end-times fascism is this constant riffing on the ancient story of Armageddon. That out of catastrophe, out of the rubble, out of destruction, some paradise will emerge for the chosen few—or not.
That’s sort of the plotline of the Book of Revelation, but it’s also the plotline of so many disaster films, and all of these dystopian series we’re seeing. It’s interesting that a lot of the tech billionaires are steeped in those narratives as well. Naomi has this line in the book like, “Instead of reading them the way you’re supposed to read them, which is warnings, they seem to have read them as instruction manuals.” Like, “This sounds great. Let’s build the killer robots and see what happens, as long as I control them.”
People, I think in some ways, are primed to not want a Terminator future. There was certainly a major pivot when Trump returned to office, but the tech class has actually been building for many, many years. It’s not coming out of nowhere. From the left and the right, there’s deep discontent about big tech. From the left, it was about their attacks on unions. Workers were organizing and trying to force them to cut ties with ICE and with the military. There’s obviously concerns about misinformation, the algorithms, and predatory forms of surveillance and advertising. From the right, it was more about censorship and feeling that the tech companies were actually aligned with Democrats.
So, the American public was primed to be suspicious of these guys, but … I think the public’s relationship to tech has changed as we’ve felt exposed to it and been made vulnerable by it. [Tech giants] have [also] changed as they have amassed more power and have been searching for the next big bubble. In their minds, whatever A.I. company makes it, will be the company that controls everything. We can quibble with whether that’s a valid prophecy, but that’s what they are playing for: everything. They think they’re building tools that can displace all of us, and take all of the money. You see that in Anthropic telling The Wall Street Journal that there’s $30 trillion of revenue. That’s how big the American economy is. They’re saying, “We will own everything.” There’s something demented and power hungry about that that people are rightly suspicious of.
Klein: What’s coming up in the data center resistance and in the A.I. resistance is really about how we want to live and what is important to us. All of this is rolled out without our consent. We were never asked, right? So these fights around a particular piece of infrastructure are about the things that people say that they’re about: They are about noise pollution, they are about water in an area that already has water restrictions, they are about whether people want the final product, they’re about surveillance, they’re about Gaza. Everything comes up in these battles. Depending on who the company is and what else they’re doing, it becomes this kind of coalition builder.
We’ve seen that in Tucson, Arizona, where Amazon is building a huge data center called Project Blue. It became about the fact that Amazon Cloud Services has contracts with ICE, has contracts with the Israeli military. But I also do think that because there have just not been spaces where we get to talk about how we want to live with each other, it’s become these broader, spiritual movements. This is a phrase that one of the organizers in Tucson used with us: She was like, “We believe we’re in a spiritual warfare.” Which is a phrase that you usually hear from the right, but I think what she meant was that this is about water, this is about life. KeShaun Pearson in Memphis said, “These are energy vampires.” People really feel it’s feeding off of them.
The optimist in me is like, This is forcing us to figure out what we love enough to fight for. Maybe that’s the right to create art, and maybe that is the right to see the stars. Maybe that is the right to hear the crickets instead of the roar of the data centers.
Throughout the book, you both really position coalition-building as one of the things people can do to take the next step forward. It made me think of the quote that has been posted everywhere from AOC where she’s like, “Woke 1.0 was crazy. We made some errors there.” One of them certainly was the infighting, or the inability to bring a massive group of people together to accomplish some of these goals. Meanwhile, one of the most hopeful things in this book was actually you guys describing how the misinformation machine of the right has turned against them and is sort of eating itself from within.
What do you hope people do after putting down this book? There is such a sense, particularly with young people, of just, I have no idea what step to even take.
Taylor: It’s important that we not equate purity politics and self-righteousness and bad behavior on the left with Woke 1.0 because it preceded it. These are problems that go back decades, if you read about movement history, so I think it’s something we have to be vigilant about. Naomi and I have been on the left and writing and organizing for a long time, and we have always dreamed of movements of a coalition of the 99 percent, to use the Occupy terminology. We feel that we are at an unprecedented moment where that coalition is possible. What could be clearer than a group of oligarchs who want to replace humans with their robots, and then they’re like, “We’ll go to heaven or we’ll go to outer space and leave you all behind”?
Even people on the right are sensing it. We quote one of Steve Bannon’s allies who thinks the Great Replacement is real, but he calls the push towards A.I. the “greater replacement.” This is a moment where categories are getting scrambled and what you do then is you try to talk to people and find common cause and build a coalition and help reframe their understandings of the world. What fascism does is it says, “You can’t pay your bills, you can’t find a good job. It’s not your boss. It’s not your landlord. It’s not the creditor who’s gouging you with userless interest rates. It’s the immigrant, it’s the trans kid, it’s the pronouns that make you stumble.”
This is a moment when people are reassessing, where we can say, “Actually, it is the oligarchs, it is your boss, it is the landlord, it is the tech company.” We need to meet that moment and meet people over there and be generous. In 2020, we had 30 million people on the street, wanting a more just, less violent, more egalitarian world. I think the real problem was that there just weren’t organizations to onboard people so that they could have a political home in their community. Those organizations are where we need to put our energy. What people need to do is—even if no organization is perfect, no organization will solve everything—find something to join and be part of, because you can’t fight this alone.
Klein: I do think this is why, when we wrote about [New York Mayor Zohran] Mamdani, we wrote about the fact that, yes, he’s an incredibly gifted politician, but what won that election was a movement infrastructure, and DSA being able to create an infrastructure that could hold 100,000 volunteers. It really is an extraordinary fact to think that 1 in every 10 persons who voted for Mamdani volunteered for him. That is not what politics has been in recent years. The beautiful thing about being part of a broad-based movement as opposed to just being involved in one issue is that yes, okay, you’re going to focus on this one area because that’s where you have particular interest and particular strength, but you know that when you’re doing your little thing, there’s a broader vision. So you don’t feel that frantic sense of, Everything I’m doing isn’t enough. Of course it isn’t. We’re talking about changing the world here.
Something I was wondering while reading the book, and that I wondered a lot watching Trump and Elon Musk become these huge figures in culture, is how much self-awareness they have. Does an end-times fascist know that they’re an end-times fascist? Is it a calculated drive to the end of the world? You look at someone like Zuckerberg, and that feels very easy to believe. But one big reappraisal with Trump, for example, is the initial thought of His campaign’s a joke. He’s an idiot. He’s just bumbling through the presidency. As time goes on, you can’t bumble through that many targeted, incredibly effective choices. How much do these people know what they’re doing?
Taylor: [Laughs] I don’t think they identify as end-times fascists. Though, since we finished the book, I have seen more videos on the right that are like: “Fascism, maybe not bad? Maybe good?” Nick Fuentes has embraced the word, but other right-wing influencers are going, Maybe I do like this concept, and actually [Augusto] Pinochet was a really cool guy, right? And maybe Hitler was too.
In general, these people do know what they’re doing. This is why we say they’re not old-fashioned climate denialists. It’s not useful to think of them in that way. They know the planet is burning—we’ve all lived through the heat domes, we’ve all lived through the hurricanes—and they are consciously accelerating these catastrophes. They know that wealth is concentrating at unprecedented rates, they don’t want even a modicum of redistribution. There is an absolute knowingness, and you see this in their rhetoric. For example, JD Vance saying that if he brings on the end times, he’s fine with that. Even just thinking about the White House ballroom that is on top of this bunker, and they’re boasting about how fortified it is. There’s certainly a knowingness and a willingness to push policies that are death dealing, whether that’s accelerating conflict in the Middle East and risking nuclear war, or cutting international aid and laughing in the face of millions and millions of deaths, including 3 to 4 million children over the next few years.
Klein: The thing I would caution against is overly personalizing it on this particular cast of characters, because then that does take us to a place of, If we just didn’t have Musk and Trump, then things would be okay. We are making the argument that these people were not always as nefarious as they have become, that they have been radicalized by the crises. So the real issue [is that] fascism is a response to real crises. It is capitalism’s worst mood. It is capitalism’s threat response.
What a system that is just built to enrich a small group of elites will do is simply rationalize mass death on a huge scale. Whoever is in charge will do that. Right now the world’s having a love affair with [the Canadian] Prime Minister Mark Carney, who people are imagining is a fantastic alternative to Trump. I understand why people like Carney better than Trump, but I regret to inform you that Mark Carney is rolling out data centers and weapons deals and trying to figure out how to sell more of [the Canadian] healthcare system to U.S. hedge fund companies. He is not saving the living world. It’s a different way of protecting capitalism that doesn’t manifest as quite so nasty, but, the real problem is that we need real solutions to these crises that have taken us to this place.
Taylor: That’s why we end with the problem is the tools, not necessarily the people whose hands they are in. Naomi came up with this great idea of the Stephen Miller test, which is if you don’t want someone like Stephen Miller to have a certain kind of power, that power should not exist. I think that is an important note, and would be a wonderful rule to have implemented around the world. May we live to see it enshrined in international law.
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