(AfriquesPlus) - Award-winning journalist Naomi Klein and writer-activist Astra Taylor argued in an extended interview on Democracy Now! that a new and dangerous political current, which they call "end times fascism", is taking hold among some of the world's most powerful people, from Silicon Valley billionaires to Christian nationalists and ethnonationalist politicians. Their new book, End Times Fascism and the Fight for the Living World, was released the same day as the broadcast, hosted by Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzalez.
Klein told the hosts that she and Taylor deliberately avoided framing today's far-right resurgence as a simple repeat of 1930s European fascism. Instead, she described it as a "sequel," in which the old logics of dehumanization and racial hierarchy are being redeployed amid genuine planetary emergencies (climate breakdown, pandemics, and nuclear-armed states) that Mussolini and Hitler never had to contend with. Fascism, she said, historically surges as a reaction that protects capitalism from systemic change by redirecting popular anger toward scapegoats; today's version, she argued, responds to the threat of climate and technological collapse with a strategy of "let it burn," in which elites retreat into bunkers, rocket ships and gated enclaves rather than confront the crisis collectively.
The authors identified three overlapping factions that make up this movement: religious end-timers awaiting biblical rapture, "tech end-timers" who believe artificial intelligence may doom humanity but see profit to be made regardless, and ethnonationalists who frame geopolitical struggles, particularly around Israel, in apocalyptic, civilizational terms.
AI, Silicon Valley and the Trump alliance
A central thread of the conversation tied the far right's rise to the political awakening of the AI industry. Taylor recounted how JD Vance, once a critic of Donald Trump, was drawn into Silicon Valley by venture capitalist Peter Thiel, a longtime funder who bankrolled Vance's Senate run and reportedly brokered his rapprochement with Trump. According to Taylor, it was Vance who arranged a pivotal dinner at David Sacks' home that persuaded Trump, previously hostile to "big tech," to embrace the AI industry's agenda in his second term.
Klein argued this alliance secured tech executives a deregulated "frontier" for AI development, undoing modest safeguards that had been debated in the prior administration and at the United Nations. She rejected the industry's justification that competition with China requires unregulated development, noting that Beijing has adopted more rules on AI, including restrictions on children forming personal relationships with chatbots, than Washington currently has.
Both authors suggested that Trump himself has effectively become the very "monster" tech elites feared unleashing. "They created Donald Trump," Klein said, describing him as now beyond their control even as they publicly call for the regulation of an industry they lobbied to leave unregulated.
Gaza and the "New Gaza" development project
The interview devoted significant attention to Gaza, opening with a segment from the book's companion video depicting Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff unveiling a redevelopment vision for postwar Gaza at Davos, branded "New Gaza." Klein called this the book's starting point and "the most dangerous story ever told", an apocalyptic narrative in which mass death is framed as the necessary prelude to a golden future reserved for a privileged few. She linked this to the Trump administration's proposed "Board of Peace," which she said is designed to sideline the United Nations while granting its architects legal immunity.
Taylor drew a historical parallel to the 1950s, when most Americans rejected individual bomb shelters in favor of collective nuclear disarmament activism. She proposed what the authors call the "Stephen Miller test": if a technology or concentration of wealth would be dangerous in the hands of the worst possible actor, it should not exist at all — a standard they apply equally to nuclear weapons, AI and extreme wealth itself, which they describe in the book as a "weapon of mass destruction."
Both authors pointed to the growing grassroots movement opposing AI data centers as an emerging site of political convergence, uniting communities across ideological lines around shared concerns about resource use, jobs, and control by unaccountable corporations.
