Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor’s End Times Fascism and the Fight for the Living World is critical reading for anyone seeking to understand and push back against the far-right coalitions wielding considerable state and corporate power around the world.
Klein and Taylor posit that today’s fascists believe that end times have arrived, and have made it their mission to profit from cascading global crises, while hunkering down and protecting themselves as the world burns around them.
The book details three factions of end times fascists, united by their shared apocalypticism. The religious fundamentalists believe end times are upon us, but they will be saved by their messiah. The Silicon Valley technologists are building technologies they say could be world-ending, that in the meantime are killing jobs, consuming vast resources, and polluting communities. The ethno-nationalists espouse conspiratorial ideas about cultural replacement and treat immigration as an existential threat.
DeSmog Canada editor/reporter Mary Stuart spoke with Astra Taylor about how climate change fits into end times fascism, the importance of AI data centre fights, and how we can understand Canadian Prime Minister Carney’s neoliberal moves in response to U.S. President Donald Trump.
Taylor is a writer, documentarian, and activist. She co-founded the Debt Collective, a membership-based union for debtors, and is the author of several books, including The Age of Insecurity and Democracy May Not Exist But We’ll Miss It When It is Gone.
This interview was conducted by phone and has been edited for length and clarity.
Mary Stuart: I want to start by asking how your book can help us understand some recent elections. Jair Bolsonaro’s son Flávio won the first round of voting in Brazil’s election and nearly became president. The far-right AfD recently won in Saxony-Anhalt. How do these wins fit into your analysis of end times fascism?
Astra Taylor: One phenomena we describe in End Times Fascism relevant here is the role of Pentecostal religious communities in turning out the vote. To paraphrase reporting from Brazil, a voter said “my heart’s with Lula, but my pastor told me to vote for Flávio”.
The incredibly difficult conditions that we’re living under created fertile terrain for prophecy and religion, for kinds of pentecostalism, a faith that is focused on prosperity, individual advancement and banking on the idea that life is suffering here on earth, but you will be rewarded in the afterlife.
There’s also interference from Tech oligarchs. We don’t know the half of it at this moment, but the way the platform [Meta] refused to run ads for Lula’s party and beyond is certainly a factor. And the Trump regime [is playing a role] as well.
AfD is a similar. Naomi and I wrote a piece in the Financial Times and we open with the images that went viral this summer of the Danube River drying, and Nazi warships emerging. Hundreds of Nazi warships sank during WWII, and as the river receded, this paraphernalia was coming out of the mud. We thought it was a powerful metaphor for today. What’s really striking is the riverbed— the fact that it’s drying because of climate change. Our point is that fascism always emerges from crises. And we cannot separate the ecological and economic crises people are facing.
People are really struggling with affordability. People are feeling that they don’t have a future. And actually quite strikingly, rates of immigration are quite low, right? So [Saxony-Anhalt is] one of the places with the least immigration, but [the AfD] step in and say “the problem is the immigrants, it’s not a larger economic system.” This is a classic fascist move that we describe throughout the book.
MS: What role do climate change and climate denial play in end times fascism?
AT: Naomi and I are insistent that the planet is a player in our politics. Fascism always surges in moments of crisis.
We are in a world that is being roiled by disasters and shocks. We’ve reached a point where the consequences [of climate change] are undeniable. You cannot deny a heat dome when you’re inside it. You cannot deny a hurricane when it’s blowing the roof off your house. Of course, you can still deny why the storm is coming. You can embrace a Marjorie Taylor Greene perspective and say that it’s due to space lasers or you can say “the climate has always chained, this is nothing new, we don’t know if it’s human causing it.”
The far-right is adapting to circumstances … where ecological catastrophes are the norm, people can’t pay their property insurance bills anymore because the rates have been jacked up or because the insurers have pulled out, or where people have to pay the cost of fixing their homes or moving because of disasters.
The far-right is having to acknowledge that there are fires, there are storms, that people are suffering. They’re responding by deflecting, by saying, “don’t blame the fossil fuel companies and the politicians who take their money, blame the globalists in the EU and their climate policies, or blame the immigrants”.
We saw this really vividly after Hurricane Helene, a tropical storm that hit Appalachia. Trump and Elon Musk were going around saying “FEMA has no money for you because the Democrats spent it on immigrants.” So they use the hurricane to advance the Great Replacement Conspiracy. It’s an amazing pivot to go from a storm destroying tens of thousands of houses to say, “the problem is the globalists are importing immigrants to replace you”. But it’s working.
People have been warning for many years about ecofascism being the consequence of climate change. Ecofascism is the consequence of decades of denial, not just from the far-right, but by liberals who insisted that we could address this crisis through market policies that were doomed to fail.
It’s absolutely criminally irresponsible to not talk about climate change right now because that will create a vacuum for this pivot from the real arsonists to the immigrant victims. And we need to insist on robust climate policies. Not just renewables. It’s investments in care work and in all sorts of low carbon important initiatives. It needs to be at the centre of our politics.
There was a time when liberals could think people will stop denying climate change when they experience it firsthand. We’re seeing that is not true. People in that state of vulnerability and shock are more susceptible to strongmen and scapegoating, and we need to be right there with a different plan and a different story.
MS: In the book you talk about a number of site fights and bright spots, one of them being the AI data centre backlash. What is the importance of AI data centre fights in defeating end times fascism? Can these fights be sites of expansion for movements to touch on other issues as well?
AT: The data centre fight is an amazing opportunity to weave together all of these issues that we know are interconnected. People aren’t fighting data centres in their backyard for just one reason. They are fighting them because they care about their air and water, because they don’t want a future where all the jobs are gone and every bit of economically valuable work, as OpenAI calls it, is performed by robots. It’s also a democracy fight. These data centres are coming in under the cover of non-disclosure agreements, often with little input from even the city council and no input from the community.
But it’s more than that. There’s such intensive capital, like borrowing on capital markets right now. That’s part of why interest rates are being jacked up around the world, which increases the cost of borrowing for ordinary people. Rates are going up, it’s making homes more unaffordable. The fact that the population is buried by debt is a huge part of what drove Flávio Bolsonaro’s surge in recent months.
All of these factors are compounding, and so it would be foolish for environmentalists not to intervene and try to connect those those dots. The data centre fight has to be connected to affordability.
MS: In Canada, our Prime Minister Mark Carney is a former investment banker who Naomi recently referred to as the ‘paragon of liberalism’. He’s privatizing key pieces of Canadian infrastructure, doubling down on fossil fuels, other extractive projects, and AI, while using the language of standing up to Trump. His approval ratings are incredibly high. How are we to understand this?
AT: Naomi might call him a paragon of liberalism. I call him Sir banks a lot. I don’t trust bankers, especially those who are committed to the kind of neoliberalism and financialization that he’s proposing.
It’s dangerous to say “peer into the window, asset managers of the world. Canada has lots of resources that you can purchase and we have a healthcare system that can still be privatized and higher education system that still has some public funding that we could siphon off to the private sector.”
These are the policies and conditions that created fertile terrain for the far-right. Carney does not seem to have learned that lesson. It was striking when he gave that speech at Davos, about there being a rupture. The world was so ready for Canada to lead, and to project onto that speech that he was actually standing up for true universalism and for international law.
Instead he’s doing this nostalgic hyper-nationalist neoliberalism that isn’t really nationalist, because it was reported by the the Toronto Star that the amount of money going to [the] American tech sector from the Department of National Defense has doubled in the last year. He’s spending Canadian money to enrich the very companies that are behind Trump. You cannot fight oligarchy with oligarchy. You definitely can’t fight fascism with oligarchy. You fight it with solidarity and with democratic socialism, with addressing the root crises.
People want to believe that this figure can protect them when the truth is protection is in building collective power and insisting on a deep economic and political transformation. What he’s doing is incredibly dangerous. And the fact that he’s rolling back already weak climate policies when Canada’s main export is wildfire smoke, is just incredibly insulting and incredibly dangerous. The world needs Canada to stand firm against fascism.
MS: You talk about the power of stories, and detail the stories that the end times fascists are telling. What’s a counter story that’s been missing?
AT: In the book we talk about how we need to tell stories not of end times but of better times. We are entering a period where there are going to be roiling crises. We need to figure out how to live together well under these conditions.
I think we need stories that just remind us of how critical this fight is and that ground us in a love of this world. Naomi and I want stories that connect people to that, that remind people that we do live in a planetary paradise. It’s worth defending.
Ultimately, the organizer in me says we need more than stories. I think it’s incumbent on all of us to try to find a political home, to face the fact that fascism is not something that we can fight alone, we can only fight it together. If there’s not something for you to join, where you live, then start something … It takes not just stories, but actions, however imperfect, however small, however inadequate, but when we all take them, it adds up.
End Times Fascism and the Fight for the Living World can be ordered in Canada, the U.S. And UK.
