Klein's 'End Times Fascism': Today's Right Welcomes Collapse — SkimNews
Get the Culture newsletter
Daily culture — film, music, books, the trends and ideas worth your attention. Free.
- Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor's new book 'End Times Fascism' argues the current far right is distinct from historical fascism because its proponents actively will interconnected apocalypses — climate change, financial chaos — to install a post-democratic world where only the ultra-rich prosper
- The book opens with a fictionalized Davos 2026 scene of Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff pitching 'New Gaza,' a gated paradise city built on a mass grave, while in reality Trump announced a Gaza 'Board of Peace' at the same forum that Klein calls a 'privatised United Nations' that has 'delivered nothing substantial' in seven months
- Klein frames today's ultra-wealthy as past persuasion, saying 'they stop trying to seduce us in any way' — a break from the Davos/Clinton Global Initiative era when billionaires staged 'seduction rituals' claiming to cure the sick and fund schools
- Peter Thiel hosted an 'apocalypse ball' at Miami's Faena Hotel before the 2024 election, with panels naming sustainable development goals and 'precautionary principles' as 'the enemy,' per the book
- Klein traces the lineage of privatized disaster capitalism from Iraq's Halliburton-built Green Zone to Hurricane Katrina — where the same contractors (Halliburton, Bechtel, Blackwater) made New Orleans 'Baghdad on the Bayou' — and warns today's climate disasters are their 'next growth frontier'
- Klein offers the image of a 'spiral' to describe how history rhymes but each cycle is 'deeper, tighter, carrying more velocity, more heat, more violence' — and cautions against the comfort of believing 'we've seen it all before'
Why it matters: Klein's central claim is that the political shock from Trump's re-election drove 'Shock Doctrine' sales to spike because readers felt they had been warned — yet Klein herself insists the present danger is qualitatively worse than what her 2007 book described, with mega-wealth now concentrated enough to openly back apocalypse rather than bothering to seduce the public. That diagnosis turns the 'haven't we seen this before' reassurance into a hazard: if the spiral is descending, drawing comfort from past parallels risks underestimating how much harder the next crisis will hit.
Ask SkimNews
