End Times Fascism Review, a Chilling Diagnosis With a Hopeful Cure

End Times Fascism is Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor’s 2026 argument that today’s far right is no longer trying to build a better future for its followers; it is preparing for the end of the world and deciding who gets a seat in the bunker.

That is the whole book in one sentence, and it is a frightening sentence. Yet after finishing all nine chapters, I came away less scared than I expected, because the second half of the book is about the people who refuse to leave: the Memphis neighbours fighting Elon Musk’s supercomputer, the Minneapolis “helpers” who blew whistles when ICE came, the volunteers who knocked on three million New York doors.

If you want to know what the book actually says, where it is strong, where it overreaches, and whether it deserves your time, this End Times Fascism review and summary covers all of it.

Reader Recommendation for End Times Fascism: Who Will Love It, Who Will Bounce

You will probably love it if you:

• read The Shock Doctrine or Doppelganger and want Klein’s updated theory of how crises get exploited
• work in climate, labour, tech policy or community organising and want language for what you are fighting
• are trying to understand why Silicon Valley, evangelical Zionists and anti-immigrant parties ended up on the same side
• want a hopeful ending that is based on real campaigns, not slogans

You may bounce if you:

• want a neutral, both-sides political science text (this is openly a book of the left)
• are outside the United States and want a global study; most of the on-the-ground reporting is American
• are sensitive to strong language about Israel and Gaza, which the authors describe as genocide
• dislike books that read like fast, urgent journalism written while events were still unfolding

Introduction

Who wrote End Times Fascism, and when was it published?

End Times Fascism: And the Fight for the Living World was written by Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in New York on September 15, 2026, with 360 pages. I read it from an advance edition, so a few phrasings in the final print may differ slightly from the lines I quote below.

Klein is an associate professor of geography and co-director of the Centre for Climate Justice at the University of British Columbia, and a Guardian columnist.

Her previous books include No Logo, The Shock Doctrine, This Changes Everything and Doppelganger, which won the Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction. Taylor is a writer, documentarian and co-founder of the Debt Collective, author of The People’s Platform (American Book Award) and The Age of Insecurity, and the 2023 CBC Massey Lecturer.

Both authors say in the introduction that they have “decades of experience inside social movements,” from Occupy Wall Street to the Green New Deal.

What kind of book is it?

It is political nonfiction that mixes history, theology, reporting and manifesto. The authors travelled to Memphis, Venice, Tucson and Minneapolis, interviewed organisers, and joined Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral campaign as volunteers. So part of the book is on-the-ground journalism and part is argument.

What is the main thesis of End Times Fascism?

The central thesis is that fascism has evolved to fit a world of stacked planetary crises. As the authors put it, the new right “has made peace with the prospect of permanent shocks, and is waging a supremacist war over who is going to survive the future.”

They are clear that they are not saying Trump, Netanyahu or Putin are worse than Hitler or Mussolini. Their point is that “our world is more dangerous than their world”: deadlier weapons, stronger technologies, hotter climate, more concentrated wealth.

Background

Why did Klein and Taylor write End Times Fascism in 2026?

They wrote it because the calendar kept handing them evidence. The book opens in January 2026 at Davos, where Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff presented AI-generated images of a “New Gaza” resort city with, in the book’s account, “100% full employment,” 75 medical facilities and 200 schools, while real Gaza flooded and collapsed.

Five days later, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists set the Doomsday Clock at 85 seconds to midnight, the closest it has ever been. I checked that figure against the Bulletin’s own January 2026 press release, and it matches.

Almost twenty years earlier, Klein’s The Shock Doctrine (2007) described how governments used disasters to push through pro-corporate policies. The new book argues that the old playbook has been upgraded. Disaster capitalists once treated shocks as exceptions.

Now, the authors write, the powerful “foresee an apocalyptic future in which rolling chaos and carnage are the norm,” and they build it into their business models. Palantir’s CEO Alex Karp is quoted boasting that his company is “built for bad times.”

End Times Fascism Summary: Chapter by Chapter

I have tried to write this summary so that you come away knowing every major argument, example and conclusion in the book. It follows the book’s four parts.

Introduction: Gated Cities at the End of the World

The opening scene is written like scripture. Faithful men on a mountaintop describe a golden city rising from “wastelands of rubble and rivers of blood.” Then the reveal: the mountain is Davos, the men are Kushner and Witkoff, and the city is “New Gaza,” the flagship project of Trump’s “Board of Peace,” where permanent seats reportedly cost $1 billion “in cash.”

From there the authors define their term.

End Times Fascism is “a fascism rooted in a feeling of an ending,” the belief “that only a small, select group of humans will survive the coming cataclysm.” The line that stuck with me most is their twist on Noah: the oligarchs “aren’t content to just build the arks. They appear to be doing their best to cause the flood.”

They lean on Robert Paxton’s 2004 definition from The Anatomy of Fascism and on Umberto Eco’s observation that fascism always has “an Armageddon complex.” The difference today, they argue, is that the Armageddon complex has moved from a feature to the “unifying and guiding principle.”

Old fascists promised the in-group a stable future. These ones only promise a bunker.

The introduction also lays out the book’s structure: three bunkers (religious, tech, national) and one home (the “Hereness” of Part IV). And it closes with the idea that anchors the whole ending: End Times Fascism is “a crisis of rampant impunity born of concentrated power and wealth.”

Part I: Messianic Dreams

Chapter 1, The Spiral of History

This chapter argues that most of us were taught the wrong lesson about fascism. The standard Western story treats Nazism as a one-off “rupture.” Klein and Taylor side with the anti-colonial tradition that saw it as a “throughline.”

They quote Jawaharlal Nehru in 1938 calling fascism “a mirror to the past” of imperialism, and W. E. B. Du Bois arguing that every Nazi atrocity had already been practised on colonised people.

Their image for history is a spiral: it does not repeat, but it returns to familiar places in new forms. That is why we missed the warning signs. In their words, “we were looking for a re-run, but what we got was a sequel.” My favourite sentence in the chapter explains what that sequel looks like: “If we are waiting for soldiers goosestepping in formation, we’ll miss the venture capitalists and their autonomous weapons.”

They then give a two-part test for when fascism rises.

First, widespread crisis, when the market is visibly failing people. Second, a real challenge from below. Examples: the Jim Crow South after emancipation (whose race laws, they note, helped inspire the Nuremberg Laws), Europe after 1918 and 1929, and Latin America in the 1970s, where Miguel Kast, son of a Nazi exile, served Pinochet, and his brother José Antonio Kast was elected Chile’s president in 2025. Their one-line summary: “Fascism is capitalism with bared teeth.”

Applied to today, the “threat from below” was Occupy (2011), Black Lives Matter, Bernie Sanders, #MeToo, climate strikes that drew over four million people, and the anti-Big Tech mood that blocked Amazon’s Queens headquarters.

The authors use the Epstein Files, released in early 2026, to show elite panic: Steve Bannon writing to Epstein “Nobody safe” and promising a coalition that “staves off ‘Times Up’ for next decade plus.” Their conclusion: the rich chose “a counterrevolution against a revolution that had not yet occurred.”

The chapter ends with Walter Benjamin’s idea that past defeats can be fuel for future movements, a “messianism of the here and now, with no messiah other than ordinary people.”

Chapter 2, Rapture Ready

This is the most gripping chapter as storytelling. It starts in 1969 with Denis Michael Rohan, an Australian sheep shearer in the grip of “Jerusalem Syndrome,” who set fire to al-Aqsa Mosque on August 21 that year, convinced it blocked the building of the Third Temple. The 900-year-old minbar of Saladin burned.

At trial he declared, “I am above earthly courts.” Israel’s courts found him insane, and in 1969 almost everyone, including his own church, condemned him.

Then the book jumps to October 8, 2025. Israel’s National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir leads 1,300 settlers in prayer on the Temple Mount and declares, “we are the landlords.” The point is brutal and simple: what was lunacy in 1969 now sits in cabinet.

The chapter maps the “Israeli-American pincer.” Hal Lindsey’s The Late Great Planet Earth was the best-selling nonfiction book of the 1970s; the 16 Left Behind novels sold tens of millions; John Hagee’s Christians United for Israel claims ten million members.

Evangelical groups, according to a Haaretz investigation the authors cite, gave up to $65 million to settlement-area projects between 2008 and 2018. We meet the Temple Institute, the red heifers flown from Texas, Pete Hegseth’s “Deus Vult” tattoo and his 2018 claim that a rebuilt Temple is possible, and the “Seven Mountain Mandate,” whose approval among US Christians the authors say rose from 30 percent in 2023 to 41 percent a year later.

The chapter closes by turning Marx upside down. Religion here is not opium, it is speed: “God is gasoline tossed on already raging flames.”

Chapter 3, Real Crises and False Prophets

Why is this happening now? Because the crises are real. The authors begin with Columbus, who compiled a Book of Prophecies and hoped his voyage would fund the capture of Jerusalem. He wanted to jump-start the apocalypse; instead he triggered one for the Americas, where, by some estimates they cite, 56 million Indigenous people died in the following century.

Their thesis: apocalyptic fervour always grows alongside real disaster. Today’s version was accelerated by two shocks. First, Covid, which many evangelicals read through Revelation (vaccines as “the mark of the beast”), which pushed Doug Wilson from fringe to influence, and which fed into January 6.

The book reports that 80 percent of white evangelicals voted for Trump in 2016 after Lance Wallnau’s “Cyrus anointing” prophecy, and that self-identified Christians fell from nearly 90 percent of Americans to about 62 percent. Second, October 7, 2023, which settler rabbis and US televangelists read as a sign of the end, followed by the June 2025 strikes on Iran and the March 2026 war.

The key idea is that end times theology flips the warning lights. When the world is breaking, a sane response is to change course. Prophecy says the opposite: “bad is good, plagues are cures, war is peace.” The authors report that over 100 US soldiers complained to the Military Religious Freedom Foundation in the first two days of the Iran war about commanders framing it as biblical prophecy.

The chapter’s quietest and saddest scene is a reporter asking the Texas red heifer rancher Byron Stinson why he wants the world to end. His answer is essentially: if you are happy with life, you don’t. That leads the authors to their real question: what would it take for most people to be satisfied enough that the apocalypse loses its appeal?

They also explain how the destruction of Liberation Theology in Latin America, including the Guatemalan war that killed 170,000 Indigenous people, left a vacuum that prosperity-gospel Pentecostalism filled.

And there are signs of change: a 2025 poll found only 29 percent of evangelicals under 35 believe Jews are God’s chosen people, and a February 2026 Gallup poll found more Americans sympathising with Palestinians than Israelis for the first time in a quarter century.

Part II: Escape to the Cloud

Chapter 4, Big Tech Summons Its Digital God, or Demon

The tech section opens at Peter Thiel’s “Apocalypse Ball” in Miami, a week before the 2024 election, with guests told to “dress for dystopia” and panels like “You’re Probably a Eugenicist.” We get Thiel’s 2009 line, “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible,” and his stumble when Ross Douthat asked whether he wanted the human race to endure.

Then the book’s boldest claim: “we think it was AI that made them do it.” The authors say Silicon Valley did not swing to Trump mainly out of wounded pride over “wokeness.”

It swung because the AGI race needs unlimited electricity, water, land and data, and no democratic government would hand those over. Three things make the AI race different, they argue: its end goal looks more like religious faith than a business plan; its data centres are wrecking the climate; and it concentrates power by replacing human judgment with privately owned systems.

The numbers in this chapter are dizzying. Project Stargate’s $500 billion budget, which the authors compare to roughly twice the inflation-adjusted Apollo program. Roughly $8 trillion in committed compute spending.

Nvidia’s $5 trillion valuation in 2025. IBM’s CEO calculating that the industry needs “roughly $800 billion of profit” just to cover interest. A 2025 Pew poll finding only 17 percent of US adults expect AI to help the country over the next 20 years.

They quote Sam Altman in 2013 saying great founders set out to create “something closer to a religion,” then note he founded OpenAI two years later. They quote Musk calling AI “summoning the demon” in 2014 and later a “digital god.” They argue AGI and “superintelligence” are best understood as marketing terms inflating a bubble.

There is a section I found especially uncomfortable to read as someone who uses these tools: the Pentagon dispute. The book says Anthropic held two red lines (no mass domestic surveillance, no autonomous lethal weapons), that Hegseth labelled the company a “supply-chain risk,” and that OpenAI stepped in.

The authors treat this as proof of the deal on offer: tech firms can take everyone’s jobs, but they must hand their tools to the state. They borrow Francesca Bria’s phrase “the authoritarian stack” for the resulting merger of corporate and state power.

The chapter ends in the billionaire bunkers: Thiel’s New Zealand plan, Altman’s 2016 prepper list, Zuckerberg’s reported $300 million Kauai compound, and the film Elysium, which the authors keep returning to.

Chapter 5, Musk in Memphis

This is the best-reported chapter in the book. Musk needed to catch OpenAI, so he built Colossus in a former appliance factory in Memphis in what he called 122 days.

To power it, the book says, xAI at one point ran 35 unpermitted methane gas turbines, enough to power roughly 280,000 homes, next to Boxtown, a majority-Black neighbourhood whose name comes from boxcar scraps used by formerly enslaved people to build homes. The authors report Boxtown has cancer rates four times the national average and an “F” air quality rating from the American Lung Association.

The chapter follows organiser KeShaun Pearson, who calls Musk “a false prophet” and AI “the energy vampire,” and ties the fight to the 1968 sanitation strike and its “I AM A Man” signs. Independent researchers found nitrogen dioxide spiked up to 79 percent in xAI’s first months. At a public meeting, xAI’s site leader read a one-page statement and walked out.

The chapter also makes an economic point I had not considered: industrialisation was always a trade. Communities accepted pollution in exchange for jobs and taxes. AI factories break that bargain. A $1 billion Meta data centre in Wisconsin was estimated to create maybe 100 jobs. The authors’ phrase: “A ghost factory, destined to make more ghost towns.”

Then the hope. Across the US, the authors say, 48 data centre projects worth at least $156 billion were stalled or halted by local pushback in 2025. Google withdrew from Franklin Township, Indiana. Canton, North Carolina, a Trump-voting mill town, passed a moratorium. A Kentucky farmer turned down $26 million.

The authors call this “a new pro-life movement,” and they end with Martin Luther King Jr., who warned in 1967 that automation without moral change would give us “guided missiles and misguided men.” They also quote writer Kelly Hayes: “To technofascists, humans are the subhumans.”

Part III: Prepper Nation

Chapter 6, The Bunkered State

The third bunker is the nation. The chapter opens with Hurricane Helene in 2024: 73,000 homes damaged or destroyed and about 250 dead in the book’s tally, neighbours rescuing each other by kayak, Latino work crews clearing even a Confederate-flag-flying yard.

Then came the conspiracies about FEMA and weather control, and Trump’s claim that disaster money had been spent on migrants.

The authors call what followed “futureless fascism.” Old fascists at least delivered something: Mussolini’s “popular trains” sold over 8 million cheap tickets; Franco’s state subsidised more than four million housing units. Trump offers sadism instead: deportation flights to watch, Pokémon-themed DHS videos, detention camps named “Alligator Alcatraz.” This absence, they argue, is End Times Fascism‘s “greatest weakness.”

The chapter traces the Great Replacement myth to Renaud Camus’s 2011 pamphlet and back to Jean Raspail’s 1973 novel The Camp of the Saints, whose title comes from Revelation. The authors report that one-third of Americans and two-thirds of Republicans endorse some part of the theory, and follow its path from the manifestos of the Christchurch and El Paso shooters to ICE recruitment ads and the 2025 National Security Strategy.

The core image: “Paradise is the nation itself, and the border its temple.”

They also show how the far right is shifting from climate denial to eco-fascism. Vox in Spain, Le Pen and Jordan Bardella in France (“Borders are the environment’s greatest ally”) and Trump’s Greenland obsession show leaders who know the planet is warming and plan to hoard. The authors’ blunt update: these people “are not climate change deniers. They are arsonists.”

The chapter closes with the 1961 fallout shelter panic. Only about one percent of Americans built shelters, partly because they found the idea of shooting neighbours at the hatch morally repulsive. That refusal becomes the book’s model for rejecting bunker politics today.

Chapter 7, For-Profit Fascism

This chapter explains why the alliance is fraying. It follows YouTuber Nick Shirley from pest-control salesman to viral influencer whose Minnesota daycare video, boosted by JD Vance and Musk, drew over 135 million views and helped trigger “Operation Metro Surge,” with up to 4,000 ICE and Border Patrol agents in the Twin Cities. Two people were killed by federal agents: poet Renee Good and ICU nurse Alex Pretti.

The authors describe a booming “Armageddon-industrial-complex”: Palantir, private prison companies reporting revenue up 100 percent, a $220 million DHS ad campaign, and an influencer economy Goldman Sachs expects to approach half a trillion dollars by 2027. But influencers must fight each other for clicks, and after Charlie Kirk’s assassination, MAGA fell into what participants called a “civil war”: Candace Owens, Nick Fuentes, Tucker Carlson and Marjorie Taylor Greene versus the White House and each other.

There is also the “revolt of the trad wives,” as right-wing women push back against open misogyny and Grok’s “nudification” abuse.

Minnesota is the turning point. Decades of organising, from multi-faith networks to the 2023 “Minnesota Miracle” laws, produced a response of up to 100,000 people in a general strike with over 700 businesses. By early 2026, the book reports, two-thirds of Americans said ICE had gone too far. Kristi Noem was ousted.

The authors’ reading: the White House overestimated the public’s appetite for cruelty and underestimated ordinary heroism.

Part IV: Let’s Stay

Chapter 8, Hereness

This is the philosophical heart of the book. It opens in Venice, where the “No Space for Bezos” campaign pushed Jeff Bezos’s estimated $50 million wedding to a remote venue. The authors contrast those who have “no escape plan” with those planning to leave, and they call the leavers “traitors to creation, to the wonders of here.”

A striking section is about awe. William Shatner came back from Blue Origin’s flight overwhelmed by grief for Earth. Joyce Carol Oates noted that Musk never posts about nature, pets or books. The authors argue that people who cannot marvel at this planet find it easy to sacrifice it.

They borrow Hannah Arendt’s idea of “worldlessness” and Glenn Albrecht’s “solastalgia,” “the homesickness you have when you are still at home,” to explain why so many people feel alien in their own lives. Fascists harvest that feeling and blame immigrants and trans kids for it.

The fix is Doikayt, the Jewish Labor Bund’s Yiddish idea of “hereness”: a right to fight for safety where you live, based on action rather than ancestry, working alongside people of other faiths and backgrounds. Hereness respects Indigenous land ties but rejects “blood and soil,” and it is portable, because people have always moved.

The authors connect it to Adam Serwer’s “neighborism,” Minneapolis Indigenous patrols, Diné teachings (“We are in heaven right now”), Tikkun Olam, the Qur’anic idea of stewardship, and Pope Francis’s Laudato Sì, which he used to rebut JD Vance’s “ordo amoris” line about love flowing outward in rings.

The chapter ends with King’s last Memphis sermon: it is fine to talk about the new Jerusalem, but “God’s preacher must talk about the new New York, the new Atlanta.”

Chapter 9, The Leavers vs. the Stayers

This chapter is a case study: Zohran Mamdani’s campaign for mayor of New York. The authors first met him when he was, as a friend put it, “polling at 1 percent.” His plan was to win back working-class Trump voters with universal policies: free and fast buses, rent freeze, universal childcare, city-owned grocery stores, taxes on the rich. The campaign signed up more than 100,000 volunteers and knocked on over 3 million doors.

When billionaires threatened to leave New York, the threat backfired. It proved they had no loyalty to the place. Mamdani won with over 50 percent against Andrew Cuomo’s roughly 40 percent, and Trump later admitted “a lot of my voters” voted for him. The authors credit a “practical impurity”: no purity tests, clear principles, and a focus on winning. Mamdani’s line captures it: “The days of moral victories are over.”

The chapter tracks early wins (childcare from age two with Governor Hochul, landlord crackdowns, delivery-worker protections) and then admits the limits: a budget crisis, a state that controls tax rates, and dependence on Big Tech platforms to reach voters.

Conclusion, A New Disarmament Movement

The book closes with Dr. Strangelove. Kubrick, the authors argue, was warning about the weapons, not the men: sooner or later, terrible tools find terrible people. So they propose a “Stephen Miller test”: if you would not want a tool in the hands of Trump’s top adviser, it should not exist.

Their programme treats three things as weapons of mass destruction: nukes, accelerating AI and concentrated wealth. The proposals include AI red lines (no autonomous weapons, predictive policing or election deepfakes), public investment with democratic conditions, a public-sector jobs programme like the New Deal, a 2 percent global billionaire tax (Gabriel Zucman’s G20 proposal), the Sanders and Khanna 5 percent wealth tax, and ultimately a wealth cap, because “there is such a thing as enough.”

They defend the UN and the International Criminal Court as the institutions that End Times Fascists fear most, and they point to the anti-nuclear movement: roughly 54,450 nuclear weapons decommissioned between 1986 and 2015, proof that disarmament can work.

The last line asks readers to build a movement that “defends the paradise of here.”

End Times Fascism Critic Analysis

End Times Fascism is an urgent, angry and surprisingly tender book, the rare political warning that ends with a love letter to the ordinary places we live.

Does the book support its arguments with evidence?

Mostly, yes, with one caution. The reporting chapters (Memphis, Minneapolis, New York) are dense with named sources, dates and numbers, and the endnotes run to 223 citations in my edition. The theological history is well sourced. Where the book is weaker is in its big causal claims. “AI made them do it” is a persuasive hypothesis, and the Pentagon and Palantir material supports it, but the authors cannot prove motive.

They also lean on events so fresh (the March 2026 Iran war, Mamdani’s first three months) that the story is still moving under their feet.

Does it fulfil its purpose?

As a map, yes. I have read many books about the far right that treat evangelicals, tech billionaires and anti-migrant parties as separate problems. This one shows the shared idea that binds them: a gated paradise for the chosen. As a plan, it is less original.

Kirkus called the policy solutions “smart but familiar,” and I agree. Wealth taxes, AI regulation and public jobs are good ideas, but readers of Klein will have met them before. What is new is the frame of “Hereness,” which gives those policies an emotional reason to exist.

For balance, critics split. The Guardian‘s Daniel Trilling called it a “bold, clarifying intervention.” In The New York Times Book Review, Damon Linker found it “often chilling and illuminating” but was not fully persuaded that apocalyptic framing is the best way to fight apocalyptic politics.

The Texas Observer’s Josephine Lee questioned whether the book ties its three groups clearly enough to actual power. Book Marks rates the overall reception as positive.

Strengths and Weaknesses of End Times Fascism

What I found compelling

• The three-bunker structure. Sky, cloud and nation is a simple model that explains a lot. After reading it, I could not un-see it in the news.
• Memphis. The Colossus chapter is first-rate environmental justice reporting.
• The “futureless fascism” argument. Pointing out that old fascists at least built trains, while new ones offer only memes, is a sharp and useful way to explain why the coalition may be fragile.
• The Strangelove test. Judging a technology by what the worst person could do with it is the most practical idea in the book.
• Hope with receipts. The ending is not “we will win.” It is “here is how Minneapolis, Venice, Canton and New York actually fought.”

What left me unsatisfied

• US-centric. Trilling noted it too. Hungary, India and Brazil appear in lists, not in chapters. As a reader from South Asia, I wanted the Modi and Ayodhya thread developed beyond a page.
• One lens for everything. Almost every event becomes evidence of “end times” thinking. Some of it is plain greed or opportunism, and the frame sometimes flattens differences.
• Tone. Labels like “henchman,” “goons” and “mad king” will please the choir and push away the persuadable conservatives the book says it wants to reach.
• Israel and Gaza. The authors call it genocide throughout. Many readers agree; many will stop reading. The chapter is carefully sourced, but it will polarise.
• Speed. Some sections read like very good long-form journalism stitched together. A year from now, parts may feel dated.

Books Like End Times Fascism: How It Compares

What should you read alongside End Times Fascism?

The Shock Doctrine (Naomi Klein, 2007). The prequel. Shock Doctrine explained how disasters are exploited; End Times Fascism argues the powerful now want the disasters to continue.

The Anatomy of Fascism (Robert Paxton, 2004). Klein and Taylor quote Paxton’s definition. Read him for the historical model they build on, and to judge whether the “end times” update holds up.

Empire of AI (Karen Hao, 2025). The source for the book’s OpenAI material, including the bunker story. Hao is quoted directly on AI-fuelled delusions.

Disaster Nationalism (Richard Seymour, 2024). A close cousin that also reads the far right through catastrophe.

The AI Con (Emily Bender and Alex Hanna). For the skeptical case that AGI is marketing, which the authors adopt.

Eichmann in Jerusalem (Hannah Arendt). Arendt’s warnings about people for whom “fact and fiction” no longer differ run through Chapter 7.

Waste Land (Robert D. Kaplan, 2025). A realist, far less left-wing reading of a world in permanent crisis. Pairing it with Klein and Taylor makes a good debate.

Amusing Ourselves to Death (Neil Postman). The ancestor of the book’s influencer and “attention fracking” argument.

Conclusion: Should You Read End Times Fascism?

Who should read End Times Fascism?

Read it if you want to understand why billionaires talk like prophets, why prophets talk like generals, and why so many governments seem to be preparing for collapse instead of preventing it. It is written for a general audience, not specialists.

You do not need a background in theology or AI; the authors explain both clearly. Students of politics, climate activists, tech workers and anyone who has felt “homesick at home” will get the most from it.

Skip it, or read it alongside Kaplan or Paxton, if you want a neutral, global or strictly academic account.

My honest verdict: the diagnosis is chilling and mostly convincing, the cure is familiar but moving, and the idea of Hereness is the thing I will keep. After 384 pages about people planning to leave, I closed the book wanting to stay.

FAQs

References

• Klein, Naomi, and Astra Taylor. End Times Fascism: And the Fight for the Living World. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2026 (advance edition read by the reviewer).
• Book Marks, reviews roundup (NYT/Damon Linker, Guardian/Daniel Trilling, Texas Observer/Josephine Lee).
• The Guardian review via AOL (Daniel Trilling).
• Damon Linker, “The Politics of Apocalypse”.
• The Earthbound Report review.
• Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, “It is 85 seconds to midnight”.
• Macmillan publisher page.
• Naomi Klein’s official book page.