Naomi Klein's 'End Times Fascism' Names a Privatized UN — SkimNews
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- Naomi Klein's new book 'End Times Fascism,' co-written with Astra Taylor, argues that extreme wealth has a 'deranging effect' that turns the ultra-rich into supremacists who 'stop trying to seduce us'
- The book opens at Davos 2026 with Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff pitching a gated paradise city called 'New Gaza' — with tears in Witkoff's eyes — which Klein frames as the real estate possibilities of a mass grave
- Donald Trump's Board of Peace for Gaza reconstruction announced at that same Davos has delivered nothing substantial in seven months, which Klein characterizes as a 'privatised United Nations'
- Peter Thiel hosted a pre-election 'apocalypse ball' at Miami's Faena Hotel in 2024 with costumes referencing eugenics, the Springfield pet-eating hoax, and Israel's pager attack in Lebanon; Thiel wrote in 2009 that he no longer believes 'freedom and democracy are compatible'
- Klein and Taylor map transnational authoritarian patterns across Argentina, Russia, Hungary, Italy, Brazil, and India, describing a fascism whose proponents actively will climate and financial apocalypses rather than awaiting them
- Klein describes the current moment as a downward spiral — familiar but carrying 'more velocity, force, heat, violence' than past iterations — and warns that taking comfort from 'we've seen it all before' is the trap
Why it matters: Klein reframes concentrated wealth not as authoritarianism's side effect but as its engine, using the Davos convergence — Trump's Board of Peace producing nothing in seven months while Kushner and Witkoff pitch a gated 'New Gaza' — to argue that billionaires have stopped pretending to be benevolent and now openly will catastrophe.
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