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THE RISE OF END TIMES FASCISM  
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Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor
April 13, 2025
The Guardian
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_ The governing ideology of the far right has become a monstrous,
supremacist survivalism. Our task is to build a movement strong enough
to stop them _

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The movement for corporate city states cannot believe its good luck.
For years, it has been pushing the extreme notion that wealthy,
tax-averse people should up and start their own high-tech fiefdoms,
whether new countries on artificial islands in international waters
(“seasteading
[[link removed]]”)
or pro-business “freedom cities” such as Próspera
[[link removed]],
a glorified gated community combined with a wild west med spa on a
Honduran island.

Yet despite backing from the heavy-hitter venture capitalists Peter
Thiel and Marc Andreessen, their extreme libertarian dreams kept
bogging down: it turns out most self-respecting rich people don’t
actually want to live on floating oil rigs, even if it means lower
taxes, and while Próspera might be nice for a holiday and some body
“upgrades”, its extra-national status is currently
being challenged in court
[[link removed]].

Now, all of a sudden, this once-fringe network of corporate
secessionists finds itself knocking on open doors at the dead center
of global power.

The first sign that fortunes were shifting came in 2023, when a
campaigning Donald Trump
[[link removed]], seemingly out of
nowhere, promised to hold a contest that would lead to the creation of
10 “freedom cities”
[[link removed]] on
federal lands. The trial balloon barely registered at the time, lost
in the daily deluge of outrageous claims. Since the new administration
took office, however, would-be country starters have been on a
lobbying blitz, determined to turn Trump’s pledge into reality.

“The energy in DC is absolutely electric,” Trey Goff, the chief of
staff of Próspera, recently enthused
[[link removed]] after
a trip to Capitol Hill. Legislation paving the way for a bevy of
corporate city-states should be complete by the end of the year, he
claims.

Inspired by a warped reading of the political philosopher Albert
Hirschman, figures including Goff, Thiel and the investor and writer
Balaji Srinivasan have been championing what they call “exit” –
the principle that those with means have the right to walk away from
the obligations of citizenship, especially taxes and burdensome
regulation. Retooling and rebranding the old ambitions and privileges
of empires, they dream of splintering governments and carving up the
world into hyper-capitalist, democracy-free havens under the sole
control of the supremely wealthy, protected by private mercenaries,
serviced by AI robots and financed by cryptocurrencies.

One might assume that it is contradictory for Trump, elected on a
flag-waving “America first” platform, to lend credence to this
vision of sovereign territories ruled over by billionaire god-kings.
And much has been made of the colorful flame wars between the Maga
mouth-piece Steve Bannon, a proud nationalist and populist, and the
Trump-allied billionaires he has attacked
[[link removed]] as
“technofeudalists” who “don’t give a flying fuck about the
human being” – let alone the nation state. And conflicts inside
Trump’s awkward, jerry-rigged coalition certainly exist, most
recently reaching a boiling point
[[link removed]] over tariffs. Still,
the underlying visions might not be as incompatible as they first
appear.

The startup country contingent is clearly foreseeing a future marked
by shocks, scarcity and collapse. Their high-tech private domains are
essentially fortressed escape pods, designed for the select few to
take advantage of every possible luxury and opportunity for human
optimization, giving them and their children an edge in an
increasingly barbarous future. To put it bluntly, the most powerful
people in the world are preparing for the end of the world, an end
they themselves are frenetically accelerating.

That is not so far away from the more mass-market vision of fortressed
nations that has gripped the hard right globally, from Italy to
Israel, Australia to the United States: in a time of ceaseless peril,
openly supremacist movements in these countries are positioning their
relatively wealthy states as armed bunkers. These bunkers are brutal
in their determination to expel and imprison unwanted humans (even if
that requires indefinite confinement in extra-national penal colonies
from Manus Island to Guantánamo Bay) and equally ruthless in their
willingness to violently claim the land and resources (water, energy,
critical minerals) they deem necessary to weather the coming shocks.

Though it builds on enduring rightwing tendencies ... we simply have
not faced such a powerful apocalyptic strain in government before

Interestingly, at a time when previously secular Silicon Valley elites
are suddenly finding
[[link removed]] Jesus,
it is noteworthy that both of these visions – the priority-pass
corporate state and the mass-market bunker nation – share a great
deal in common with the Christian fundamentalist interpretation of the
biblical Rapture, when the faithful will supposedly be lifted up to a
golden city in heaven, while the damned are left to endure an
apocalyptic final battle down here on earth.

If we are to meet our critical moment in history, we need to reckon
with the reality that we are not up against adversaries we have seen
before. We are up against end times fascism.

Reflecting on his childhood under Mussolini, the novelist and
philosopher Umberto Eco observed in a celebrated essay
[[link removed]] that
fascism typically has an “Armageddon complex” – a fixation on
vanquishing enemies in a grand final battle. But European fascism of
the 1930s and 1940s also had a horizon: a vision for a future golden
age after the bloodbath that, for its in-group, would be peaceful,
pastoral and purified. Not today.

Alive to our era of genuine existential danger – from climate
breakdown to nuclear war to sky-rocketing inequality and unregulated
AI – but financially and ideologically committed to deepening those
threats, contemporary far-right movements lack any credible vision for
a hopeful future. The average voter is offered only remixes of a
bygone past, alongside the sadistic pleasures of dominance over an
ever-expanding assemblage of dehumanized others.

And so we have the Trump administration’s dedication to releasing
its steady stream of real and AI-generated
[[link removed]] propaganda
designed solely for these pornographic purposes. Footage of shackled
immigrants being loaded on to deportation flights, set to the sounds
of clanking chains and locking cuffs, which the official White House X
account labeled
[[link removed]] “ASMR”, a
reference to audio designed to calm the nervous system. Or the same
account sharing
[[link removed]] news of the
detention of Mahmoud Khalil
[[link removed]], a US permanent
resident who was active in Columbia University’s pro-Palestinian
encampment, with the gloating words: “SHALOM, MAHMOUD.” Or any
number of homeland security secretary Kristi Noem’s
sadism-chic photo ops
[[link removed]] (atop
a horse
[[link removed]] at
the US-Mexican border, in front of a crowded prison cell
[[link removed]] in
El Salvador, slinging [[link removed]] a
machine gun while arresting immigrants in Arizona …).

The governing ideology of the far right in our age of escalating
disasters has become a monstrous, supremacist survivalism.

It is terrifying in its wickedness, yes. But it also opens up powerful
possibilities for resistance. To bet against the future on this scale
– to bank on your bunker – is to betray, on the most basic level,
our duties to one another, to the children we love, and to every other
life form with whom we share a planetary home. This is a belief system
that is genocidal at its core and treasonous to the wonder and beauty
of this world. We are convinced that the more people understand the
extent to which the right has succumbed to the Armageddon complex, the
more they will be willing to fight back, realizing that absolutely
everything is now on the line.

Our opponents know full well that we are entering an age of emergency,
but have responded by embracing lethal yet self-serving delusions.
Having bought into various apartheid fantasies of bunkered safety,
they are choosing to let the Earth burn. Our task is to build a wide
and deep movement, as spiritual as it is political, strong enough to
stop these unhinged traitors. A movement rooted in a steadfast
commitment to one another, across our many differences and divides,
and to this miraculous, singular planet.

Not so long ago, it was primarily religious fundamentalists who
greeted signs of apocalypse with gleeful excitement about the
long-awaited Rapture. Trump has handed critical posts to people who
subscribe to that fiery orthodoxy, including
[[link removed]] several
Christian Zionists who see Israel’s use of annihilatory violence to
expand its territorial footprint not as illegal atrocities but as
felicitous evidence that the Holy Land is getting closer to the
conditions under which the Messiah will return, and the faithful will
get their celestial kingdom.

Mike Huckabee, Trump’s newly confirmed ambassador to Israel,
has strong ties
[[link removed]] to
Christian Zionism, as does Pete Hegseth
[[link removed]],
his secretary of defense. Noem and Russell Vought, the Project 2025
architect who now leads the office of budget and management, are both
[[link removed]] staunch
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for Christian nationalism. Even Thiel, who is gay and notorious
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his party lifestyle, has been heard musing
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the arrival of the antichrist of late (spoiler: he thinks it’s Greta
Thunberg, more on that soon).

But you don’t need to be a biblical literalist, or even religious,
to be an end times fascist. Today, plenty of powerful secular people
have embraced a vision of the future that follows a nearly identical
script, one in which the world as we know it collapses under its
weight and a chosen few survive and thrive in various kinds of arks,
bunkers and gated “freedom cities”. In a 2019 paper
[[link removed]] titled
Left Behind: Future Fetishists, Prepping and the Abandonment of Earth,
the communication scholars Sarah T Roberts and Mél Hogan described
the longing for a secular Rapture: “In the accelerationist
imaginary, the future is not about harm reduction, limits or
restoration; rather it is a politics driving toward an endgame.”

Elon Musk [[link removed]], who
dramatically grew his fortune alongside Thiel at PayPal, embodies this
implosive ethos. This is a person who looks up at the wonders of the
night sky and apparently sees only opportunities to fill that inky
unknown with his own space junk. Though he burnished his reputation
warning about the dangers of the climate crisis and AI, he and his
so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge) henchmen
now spend their days escalating those same risks (and many others) by
slashing not only environmental regulations but entire regulatory
agencies, with the apparent end goal
[[link removed]] of
replacing federal workers with chatbots.

Who needs a functioning nation state when outer space – now
reportedly Musk’s singular obsession – beckons? For Musk, Mars has
become a secular ark, which he claims is key to the survival of human
civilization, perhaps via uploaded consciousnesses to an artificial
general intelligence. Kim Stanley Robinson, the author of the sci-fi
Mars Trilogy that appears to have partially inspired Musk, is blunt
about the dangers of the billionaire’s fantasies about colonizing
Mars
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It is, he says
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“just a moral hazard that creates the illusion we can wreck Earth
and still be okay. It’s totally not true.”

Much like religious end-timers who long to escape the corporeal realm,
Musk’s drive for humanity to become “multiplanetary” is made
possible by his inability to appreciate the multispecies splendor of
our only home. Evidently uninterested in the vast bounty that
surrounds him, or in ensuring Earth can continue buzzing with
diversity, he instead deploys his vast fortune to bring about a future
that would see a handful of people and robots eke out survival on two
barren orbs (a radically depleted Earth and a terraformed Mars).
Indeed, in a strange twist on the Old Testament tale, Musk and his
fellow tech billionaires, having arrogated god-like powers to
themselves, aren’t content to just build the arks. They appear to be
doing their best to cause the flood. Today’s rightwing leaders and
their rich allies are not just taking advantage of catastrophes,
shock-doctrine and disaster-capitalism style, but simultaneously
provoking and planning for them.

What of the Maga base, though? Not all are sufficiently faithful to
earnestly believe in the Rapture, and most certainly don’t have the
cash to buy a spot in a “freedom city” let alone on a rocket ship.
Fear not. End times fascism offers the promise of many more affordable
arks and bunkers, these ones well within reach for lower-level foot
soldiers.

Listen to Steve Bannon’s daily podcast – which bills itself as
Maga’s premier media outlet – and you will be barraged with a
singular message: the world is going to hell, the infidels are
breaching the barricades, and a final battle is coming. Be prepared.
The prepper message becomes particularly pronounced when Bannon
switches to hawking his advertisers’ products. Buy Birch Gold,
Bannon tells
[[link removed]] his
audience, because the over-leveraged US economy is going to crash and
you can’t trust the banks. Stock up on ready-to-eat meals from My
Patriot Supply
[[link removed]].
Sharpen your target practice using a laser-guided at-home system. The
last thing you would want to do is depend on the government during a
disaster, he reminds listeners (left unsaid: especially now that the
Doge boys are selling off the government for parts).

End times fascism is a darkly festive fatalism – a final refuge for
those who find it easier to celebrate destruction than imagine living
without supremacy

Bannon doesn’t only urge his audience to make their own bunkers, of
course. He also advances a vision of the United States as a bunker in
its own right, one in which Ice agents stalk the streets, workplaces
and campuses, disappearing those deemed enemies of US policy and
interests. The bunkered nation lies at the heart of the Maga agenda,
and of end times fascism. Inside its logic, the first job is to harden
national borders and expunge all enemies, foreign and domestic. This
ugly work is now well under way, with the Trump administration
[[link removed]], enabled by
the supreme court, having invoked the Alien Enemies Act to deport
hundreds of Venezuelan immigrants to Cecot, the now infamous
mega-prison in El Salvador. The facility, which shaves prisoners heads
and packs up to 100 people into a single cell, stacked with bare
bunks, operates under the civil liberties-destroying “state of
exception” first declared over three years ago by the country’s
crypto-loving, Christian Zionist prime minister, Nayib Bukele.

Bukele has offered to provide the same fee-for-service system for US
citizens the administration would like to drop into a judicial black
hole. “I love that,” Trump said
[[link removed]] recently,
when asked about the proposal. No wonder: Cecot is the sick if logical
corollary of the “freedom city” fantasy – a zone where
everything is for sale and due process does not apply. We should
expect much more of this sadism. In a chillingly candid statement, the
acting Ice director, Todd Lyons, told
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2025 Border Security Expo that he wanted to see a more
“business”-oriented approach to these deportations, “like Prime,
but with human beings”.

If policing the boundaries of the bunkered nation is end times
fascism’s job one, equally important is job two: for the US
government to lay claim to whatever resources its protected citizens
might need to get through the tough times ahead. Maybe it’s
Panama’s canal. Or Greenland’s fast-melting shipping routes. Or
Ukraine’s critical minerals. Or Canada’s fresh water. We should
think of this less as old-school imperialism than super-sized
prepping, at the level of the national state. Gone are the old
colonial fig leaves of spreading democracy or God’s word – when
Trump covetously scans the globe, he is stockpiling for civilizational
collapse.

This bunker mentality also helps explain JD Vance’s controversial
forays into Catholic theology. The vice-president, who owes his
political career in no small part to the largess of the premier
prepper Thiel, explained to Fox News that, according to the medieval
Christian concept of _ordo amoris_ (translated both as “order of
love” and “order of charity”), love is not owed to those outside
the bunker: “You love your family, and then you love your neighbor,
and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow
citizens in your own country. And then after that, you can focus and
prioritize the rest of the world.” (Or not, as the Trump
administration’s foreign policy would indicate.) In other words, we
owe nothing to anyone outside our bunker.

Though it builds on enduring rightwing tendencies – justifying
hateful exclusions is hardly new under the ethno-nationalist sun –
we simply have not faced such a powerful apocalyptic strain in
government before. The “end of history” swagger of the post-cold
war era is rapidly being supplanted by a conviction we are in the
actual end of times. Doge may wrap itself in the banner of economic
“efficiency”, and Musk’s underlings may evoke memories of the
young, US-trained “Chicago Boys” who designed the economic shock
therapy for Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorial regime, but this is not
simply the old marriage of neoliberalism and neoconservatism. It’s
a new, money-worshiping millenarian mashup that says we need to smash
the bureaucracy and replace humans with chatbots in order to cut
“waste, fraud and abuse” – and, also, because the bureaucracy is
where the Trump-resisting demons hide. This is where the tech bros
merge with the TheoBros
[[link removed]],
a real group of hyper-patriarchal Christian supremacists with ties
to Hegseth
[[link removed]] and
others in the Trump administration.

As fascism always does, today’s Armageddon complex crosses class
lines, bonding billionaires to the Maga base. Thanks to decades of
deepening economic stresses, alongside ceaseless and skillful
messaging pitting workers against one another, a great many people
understandably feel unable to protect themselves from the
disintegration that surrounds them (no matter how many months of
ready-to-eat meals they buy). But there are emotional compensations on
offer: you can cheer the end of affirmative action and DEI, glorify
mass deportation, enjoy the denial of gender-affirming care to trans
people, villainize educators and health workers who think they know
better than you, and applaud the demise of economic and environmental
regulations as a way to own the libs. End times fascism is a darkly
festive fatalism – a final refuge for those who find it easier to
celebrate destruction than imagine living without supremacy.

It’s also a self-reinforcing downward spiral: Trump’s furious
attacks on every structure designed to protect the public from
diseases, dangerous foods and disasters – even to tell
[[link removed]] the
public when disasters are headed their way – strengthen the case for
prepperism at both the high and low ends, all while creating myriad
new opportunities for privatization and profiteering by the oligarchs
powering this rapid-fire unmaking of the social and regulatory state.

At the dawn of Trump’s first term, the New Yorker investigated a
phenomenon that it described
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“doomsday prep for the super-rich”. Back then, it was already
clear that in Silicon Valley and on Wall Street, the more serious
high-end survivalists were hedging against climate disruption and
social collapse by buying space in custom-built underground bunkers
and building escape homes on high ground in places like Hawaii (where
Mark Zuckerberg has downplayed his 5,000 sq ft underground pad as a
“little shelter”) and New Zealand (where Thiel purchased nearly
500 acres but found his plan to build a luxury survivalist compound
rejected by local authorities in 2022 for being an eyesore).

This millenarianism is bound up with a suite of other Silicon Valley
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fads, all premised on an end-times-inflected belief that our planet is
headed towards a cataclysm and it’s time to make some hard choices
about which parts of humanity can be saved. Transhumanism is one such
ideology, encompassing everything from minor human-machine
“enhancements” to the quest to upload human intelligence into a
still illusory artificial general intelligence. There is also
effective altruism and longtermism, both of which skip over
redistributive approaches to helping those in need in the here and now
in favor of a cost-benefit approach to doing the most good in the long
term.

Though they can appear benign at first glance, these ideas are shot
through with dangerous racial, ableist and gender biases about which
parts of humanity are worth enhancing and saving – and which could
be sacrificed for the supposed good of the whole. They also share a
marked lack of interest in urgently addressing the underlying drivers
of collapse – a responsible and rational goal that a growing cohort
of figures now actively shun. Instead of effective altruism the
Mar-a-Lago regular Andreessen and others have embraced “effective
accelerationism
[[link removed]]”,
or the “deliberate propulsion of technological development”
without guardrails.

Meanwhile, even darker philosophies are finding a wider audience, like
the neoreactionary pro-monarchy rants of the coder Curtis Yarvin
(another one of Thiel’s intellectual touchstones), or the
“pro-natalism
[[link removed]]”
movement’s obsession with dramatically increasing the number of
“western” babies (a Musk fixation), as well as the exit guru
Srinivasan’s vision of a “tech zionist” San Francisco where
corporate loyalists and police join forces to politically cleanse the
city of liberals to make way for their networked apartheid state.

As the AI scholars Timnit Gebru and Émile P Torres have written
[[link removed]],
though the methods may be new, this “bundle” of ideological fads
“are direct descendants of first-wave eugenics”, which also saw a
small subset of humanity making decisions about which parts of the
whole were worth continuing and which needed to be phased out, cleared
out, or terminated. Until recently, few paid attention. Much like
Próspera, where members can already experiment with human-machine
mergers such as having their Tesla keys implanted
[[link removed]] into their hands, these
intellectual fads seemed to be the marginal hobby horses of a few Bay
Area dilettantes with money and caution to burn. No longer.

Three recent material developments have accelerated end times
fascism’s apocalyptic appeal. The first is the climate crisis. While
some high-profile figures might still publicly deny or minimize the
threat, global elites, whose ocean-front properties and datacenters
are intensely vulnerable to rising temperatures and sea levels, are
well-versed in the ramifying perils of an ever-heating world. The
second is Covid-19: epidemiological models had long predicted the
possibility of a pandemic devastating our globally networked world;
the actual arrival of one was taken by many powerful people as a sign
that we have officially arrived at what US military
analysts forecasted
[[link removed]] as “the Age of
Consequences”. No more predictions, it’s going down. The third
factor is the rapid advancement and adoption of AI, a set of
technologies that have long been associated with sci-fi terrors about
machines turning on their makers with ruthless efficiency – fears
expressed most forcefully by the same people who are developing these
technologies. All of these existential crises are layered on top of
escalating tensions between nuclear-armed powers.

None of this should be written off as paranoia. Many of us feel the
imminence of breakdown so acutely that we cope by entertaining
ourselves with various versions of life in a post-apocalyptic bunker,
streaming Apple’s Silo
[[link removed]] or
Hulu’s Paradise
[[link removed]].
As the UK analyst and editor Richard Seymour reminds us in his recent
book, Disaster Nationalism: “The apocalypse is no mere fantasy. We
are living in it, after all, from deadly viruses to soil erosion, from
economic crisis to geopolitical chaos.”

The forces we are up against have made peace with mass death. They are
treasonous to this world and its human and non-human inhabitants

Trump 2.0’s economic project is a Frankenstein’s monster of the
industries driving all of these threats – fossil fuels, weapons and
resource-ravenous cryptocurrency and AI. Everyone involved in these
sectors knows that there is no way to build the artificial mirror
world that AI promises to construct without sacrificing this world –
these technologies consume too much energy, too many critical
minerals, and too much water for the two to coexist in any kind of
equilibrium. This month, the former Google executive Eric Schmidt
admitted as much, telling
[[link removed]] Congress that AI’s
“profound” energy needs are projected to triple in the next few
years, with much of it coming from fossil fuels, because nuclear
can’t come online fast enough. This planet-incinerating level of
consumption is necessary, he explained, to enable an intelligence
“higher” than humanity, a digital god rising from the ashes of our
relinquished world.

And they are worried – just not about the actual threats they are
unleashing. What keeps the leaders of these entangled industries up at
night is the prospect of a civilizational wake-up call – of serious,
internationally coordinated government efforts to rein in their rogue
sectors before it’s too late. From the perspective of their
ever-expanding bottom lines, the apocalypse is not collapse; it’s
regulation.

The fact that their profits are predicated on planetary devastation
helps explain why do-gooder discourse among the powerful is giving way
to open expressions of disdain for the idea that we owe each other
anything by right of our shared humanity. Silicon Valley is done with
altruism, effective or otherwise. Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg pines
[[link removed]] for
a culture that celebrates “aggression”. Alex Karp, Thiel’s
business partner at the surveillance firm Palantir
Technologies, rebukes
[[link removed]] the “losing”
“self-flagellation” of those who question American superiority and
the benefits of autonomous weapons systems
[[link removed]] (and,
by association, the lucrative military contracts that have made
Karp’s vast fortune). Musk informs Joe Rogan that empathy is “the
fundamental weakness of western civilization” and he vents
[[link removed]], after failing
[[link removed]] to
purchase a supreme court election in Wisconsin: “It increasingly
appears that humanity is a biological bootloader for digital
superintelligence.” Meaning we humans are nothing but grist for
Grok, the AI service he owns. (He did tell us he was “dark Maga”
– and he’s not the only one.)

In arid and climate-stressed Spain, one of the groups calling for a
moratorium on new datacenters calls
[[link removed]] itself
Tu Nube Seca Mi Río – Spanish for “your cloud is drying my
river”. The name is fitting, and not just for Spain.

An unspeakably dismal choice is being made before our eyes and without
our consent: machines over humans, inanimate over animate, profits
over all else. With stunning speed, the big tech megalomaniacs have
quietly rolled back their net-zero pledges and lined up by Trump’s
side, hellbent on sacrificing this world’s real and precious
resources and creativity at the altar of a vampiric, virtual realm.
This is the last great heist, and they are getting ready to ride out
the storms they themselves are summoning – and they will try to
defame and destroy anyone who gets in their way.

Consider Vance’s recent European sojourn, where the vice-president
harangued world leaders for “handwringing about safety” in
relation to job-destroying AI while demanding Nazi and fascist speech
go uncurtailed online. At one point he made a telling aside, expecting
a laugh that never came: “If American democracy can survive 10 years
of Greta Thunberg’s scolding, you guys can survive a few months of
Elon Musk.”

His comment echoed those made by his equally humorless patron Thiel.
In recent interviews focused on the theological underpinnings of his
far-right politics, the Christian billionaire has repeatedly compared
the indefatigable young climate activist to the antichrist – a
figure he warns was prophesied to come bearing a misleading message of
“peace and safety”. “If Greta gets everyone on the planet to
ride a bicycle, maybe that’s a way to solve climate change, but it
has sort of this quality of going from the frying pan into the
fire,” Thiel intoned.

Why Thunberg, why now? In part, it’s clearly the apocalyptic fear of
regulation eating into their super-profits: according 
[[link removed]]to
Thiel, the science-based climate action Thunberg and others demand
could only be enforced by a “totalitarian state”, which he claims
is more dire a threat than climate breakdown (most distressingly, the
taxes under such conditions would be “quite high”
[[link removed]]).
There may also be something else about Thunberg that frightens them:
her steadfast commitment to this planet and the many life forms who
call it home – not to simulations of this world generated by AI, or
to a hierarchy of those deserving of life and those who are not, nor
to any of the various extra-planetary escape fantasies the end times
fascists are selling.

She is committed to staying, while the end times fascists have, at
least in their imaginings, already left this realm, ensconced in their
opulent shelters or transcended to the digital ether, or to Mars.

Shortly after Trump’s re-election, one of us had the opportunity
to interview [[link removed]] Anohni,
one of the few musicians who have attempted to make art that wraps its
arms around the death drive that has gripped our world. Asked about
what connects the willingness of powerful people to let the planet
burn and the drive to deny bodily autonomy to women and to trans
people like her, she responded by drawing on her Irish Catholic
upbringing: it’s “a very long-held myth that we are enacting and
embodying. This is the culmination of their Rapture. This is their
escape from the voluptuous cycle of creation. This is their escape
from Mother.”

How do we break this apocalyptic fever? First, we help each other face
the depth of the depravity that has gripped the hard right in all of
our countries. To move forward with focus, we must first understand
this simple fact: we are up against an ideology that has given up not
only on the premise and promise of liberal democracy but on the
livability of our shared world – on its beauty, on its people, on
our children, on other species. The forces we are up against have made
peace with mass death. They are treasonous to this world and its human
and non-human inhabitants.

Second, we counter their apocalyptic narratives with a far better
story about how to survive the hard times ahead without leaving anyone
behind. A story capable of draining end times fascism of its gothic
power and galvanizing a movement ready to put it all on the line for
our collective survival. A story not of end times, but of better
times; not of separation and supremacy, but of interdependence and
belonging; not of escaping, but staying put and staying faithful to
the troubled earthly reality in which we are enmeshed and bound.

This basic sentiment, of course, is not new. It is central to
Indigenous cosmologies, and it lies at the heart of animism. Go back
far enough and every culture and faith has its own tradition of
respecting the sanctity of here, and not searching for Zion in an
elusive ever-distant promised land. In eastern Europe, before the
fascist and Stalinist annihilations, the Jewish socialist Labor Bund
organized around the yiddish concept of _Doikayt_, or “hereness”.
Molly Crabapple, who has written a forthcoming book about this
neglected history, defines
[[link removed]] _Doikayt_ as
the right to “fight for freedom and safety in the places where they
lived, in defiance of everyone who wanted them dead” – and rather
than be forced to flee to safety in Palestine or the United States.
Perhaps what is needed is a modern-day universalization of that
concept: a commitment to the right to the “hereness” of this
particular ailing planet, to these frail bodies, to the right to live
in dignity wherever on the planet we are, even when the inevitable
shocks forces us to move. “Hereness” can be portable, free of
nationalism, rooted in solidarity, respectful of indigenous rights and
unbounded by borders.

That future would require its own apocalypse, its own world-ending
and revelation, though of a very different sort. Because as the
scholar of policing Robyn Maynard has observed
[[link removed]]:
“In order to make earthly planetary survival possible, some versions
of this world _need_ to end.”

We have reached a choice point, not about whether we are facing
apocalypse but what form it will take. The activist sisters Adrienne
Maree and Autumn Brown touched on this recently on their aptly named
podcast, How to Survive the End of the World. In this moment, when end
times fascism is waging war on every front, new alliances are
essential. But instead of asking: “Do we all share the same
worldview?” Adrienne urges us to ask: “Is your heart beating and
do you plan to live? Then come this way and we will figure out the
rest on the other side.”

To have a hope of combating the end times fascists, with their
ever-constricting and asphyxiating concentric circles of “ordered
love”, we will need to build an unruly open-hearted movement of the
Earth-loving faithful: faithful to this planet, its people, its
creatures and to the possibility of a livable future for us all.
Faithful to here. Or, to quote Anohni again, this time referring to
the goddess in which she now places her faith: “Have you stopped to
consider that _this_ might have been her best idea?”

_Naomi Klein is a Guardian US columnist and contributing writer. She
is the professor of climate justice and co-director of the Centre for
Climate Justice at the University of British Columbia. Her latest book
Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World is publishing in
September._

_Astra Taylor is a writer, organizer, and documentarian. Her books
include the American Book Award winner The People's Platform: Taking
Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age
[[link removed]] and Democracy
May Not Exist, but We’ll Miss It When It’s Gone
[[link removed]].
Her most recent film is What Is Democracy?
[[link removed]]_

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for its coverage of politics, the environment, science, social
justice, sport and culture. Scroll less and understand more about the
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