What happened in this Culture story?

Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor's new book 'End Times Fascism' argues that today's radical right is an elite convergence — religious, tech, and political factions united by a readiness to embrace civilizational collapse as climate breakdown accelerates.

What is a key fact in this story? (1)

**Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor** published 'End Times Fascism,' arguing the radical right is an elite convergence responding to climate breakdown, writing that 'the most powerful people in the world are preparing for the end of the world, an end they themselves are frenetically accelerating.'

What is a key fact in this story? (2)

**The book** identifies three principal factions: religious fanatics welcoming end-of-days disasters, tech barons preaching AI salvation while dreaming of fortified enclaves, and political entrepreneurs building 'supersized prepping at the level of the nation-state,' with resource scramble as the unglamorous driver.

Klein and Taylor Map 'End Times Fascism' — SkimNews

By The Guardian Culture · Summarized & edited by Kapil Samant · 2026-09-14

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Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor published 'End Times Fascism,' arguing the radical right is an elite convergence responding to climate breakdown, writing that 'the most powerful people in the world are preparing for the end of the world, an end they themselves are frenetically accelerating.'
The book identifies three principal factions: religious fanatics welcoming end-of-days disasters, tech barons preaching AI salvation while dreaming of fortified enclaves, and political entrepreneurs building 'supersized prepping at the level of the nation-state,' with resource scramble as the unglamorous driver.
Klein and Taylor define fascism as 'capitalism with bared teeth,' drawing on Walter Benjamin and W.E.B. Du Bois to recast it as a recurring elite response when capitalism stops working in their favor.
The authors cite the Trump administration's 'New Gaza' vision, heavily influenced by Christian Zionists, as a property-developer fantasy arising from the wreckage of what they call Israel's US-backed genocide.
Zohran Mamdani's successful New York mayoral run is held up as proof that winning coalitions can be built by centering material concerns and 'celebrating difference rather than trying to deny or apologise for it.'
The book invokes doikayt — the leftwing diasporic Jewish idea of 'hereness,' meaning fighting for justice wherever you live — alongside other examples like Venetians resisting Jeff Bezos's wedding spectacle and Minnesotans running mutual aid during ICE raids.
The reviewer argues the account 'falters' by remaining largely US-focused, asking whether 'the rest of the world is expected to take its cue from American progressives' or whether longer-standing authoritarian contexts hold sharper lessons.

Why it matters: Klein and Taylor reframe fascism not as fringe extremism but as an elite convergence with three identifiable constituencies — religious, tech, and political — all positioned to profit from civilizational collapse they themselves accelerate, making the threat structural rather than ideological. Their resistance playbook argues material-concerns coalition politics can win, pointing to Mamdani's NYC victory, Venetian protests against Bezos's wedding, and Minnesota ICE-raid mutual aid as live models.