Naomi Klein: The super rich need to be abolished and ‘prescribed a middle-class life’

Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor’s End Times Fascism is a surprisingly uplifting book. Don’t misunderstand me – their analysis of the amoral tech billionaires, apocalyptic fundamentalists, ethno-nationalists and opportunistic crooks currently setting the agenda in the United States (and worldwide) is terrifying. But Klein and Taylor are activists as well as writers, and this affirmative read contains a hopeful prescription for community resistance. They seem surprised by the optimism themselves. “I thought we might be releasing this into a much darker moment,” says Taylor. “Which is not to downplay how dark it is. This book was an opportunity to both track the darkest parts of the emerging far right, but also to track the resistance.” Right now she can see movements of dissent growing all over the world, and in the US “at the electoral level, people voting for candidates who are democratic socialists or just very boldly progressive, who are naming ‘fascism’. They are presenting a real alternative to not just the far right, but to the corporate Democratic establishment.”They have a lot of experience to draw on. Klein is the bestselling author of political non-fiction books such as Doppelganger and No Logo. Taylor is a fellow Canadian-American writer, activist and documentary maker. One of their core points is that the fascism of Europe in the 1930s and 40s was not a “rupture” with the past, but an echo of things that had happened before. “There were these fundamental debates about what fascism is and was happening in the 1930s,” says Klein. “There was this narrative that [fascism was] something entirely new. It’s how the liberal class was metabolising nazism in the early stages. And then you had [Jawaharlal] Nehru travelling to Europe in that period. He was one of the first people to say, ‘Wait a minute, I recognise this. I recognise that what is being called ‘fascism’ in Europe as colonialism and what we’re experiencing in India’ ... These are not in any way new ideas. I don’t think they’re new in Ireland. Any body politic that has experienced colonialism recognised the patterns of fascism, but that was never the mainstream understanding in either Europe or North America.”READ MOREIn Klein and Taylor’s thinking, fascism is a recurring phenomenon. In the book they call it “capitalism’s most ferocious threat response ... When I teach my seminar on The Long Arc of Fascism,” says Klein, “I say, ‘fascism is capitalism’s worst mood’.” Says Taylor, “One of the eternal characteristics of fascism is what [Umberto Eco] calls an Armageddon complex. But we live in a world where the tools for Armageddon are much more profound. The classic 20th-century fascism was emerging out of the wreckage of the first World War and the Great Depression, but the leaders of that movement didn’t know a world where there were nuclear weapons, didn’t know a world where there was climate change, didn’t know a world with artificial intelligence. So the crises have changed. They are apocalyptic in many ways. “This backdrop of existential risk changes the nature of the fascists we’re dealing with, and their response is, ‘Pour gasoline on the flames. Don’t try to fix this and make people’s lives better ... There will be a day of judgment. And then for the blessed few, some folks are going to emerge on the other side in this cleansed paradise.’”For some of the coalition this paradise is literal heaven, for others it’s an ethno-state, and for others a tech utopia where the gifted few survive in bunkers or on Mars or uploaded to a computer (Taylor and Klein jokingly call this “the wealth rapture”). “Sometimes they have their religious beliefs,” says Taylor. “Sometimes it’s all just about the money. Some are digital eugenicists who can’t wait for the superior superintelligence, and others are just old-fashioned racists.”They trace the current elite moment of “crisis” back to the financial crash and the Occupy movement. “What Occupy was saying is that there’s something wrong,” says Taylor. “Corporate power is out of control. We need to check the wealth of billionaires ... It was also a key moment of elite impunity ... The bankers who caused the collapse did not go to jail. Obama said, it’s time to look forward, not back ... I think that the failure to check concentrated wealth and to listen to movements and their demands set the stage for what we’re experiencing now.”Filmmaker, activist, musician and co-author of End Times Fascism, Astra Taylor, appearing at Internazionale a Ferrara, an international journalism and cultural festival, held in Ferrara, Italy, in October 2025. Photograph: Carlo Vergani/SOPA Images/LightRocket/Getty Since then, fringe right-wing figures have increasingly moved to the mainstream, says Klein. “When I published Doppelganger in the fall of 2023, I did an interview [with the BBC], and the presenter asked me why I was giving these people my attention. I said what I wrote in the book, which is I believe that we’re seeing a new coalition find itself in real time. He was referring to people like RFK jnr [Robert F Kennedy jnr] who is now in charge of health and human services in the United States.”One of the “accelerants” for all this was Covid. “I would say bunkerism was a bit of a fringe hobby among the super-rich before Covid,” says Klein. “I think the message of Covid was, ‘It’s go time.’ If a global pandemic that could shut down the world could happen and take the planes out of the sky and empty out Times Square and our workplaces, then lots of other things could happen too. And so I think that a lot of the prepperism became less notional and really moved into the centre of politics. And I think that’s true for the religious end-timers and the more secular kind of wealth rapture folks that we write about, like Peter Thiel.”‘I do think that’s another thing that Gaza taught us – that we’re up against people who will go all the way and then defend it ...’— Naomi KleinWhat the Israeli government has done to the people of Gaza is central to a lot of their thinking in the book. “The fascism of colonialism doesn’t just stay in the periphery,” says Klein. “You have voices like Gustavo Petro in Colombia saying in late October of 2023 that the world’s poor see their future in Gaza, because of climate change. The wealthy will rationalise the disposal and elimination of the poor in the face of the climate crisis to protect their own consumption.”The impunity should be a warning sign in its own right, says Klein. “It’s the impunity that makes the governments believe that they can stage a live-stream genocide, and the impunity that makes companies like Palantir and Oracle think that they can participate in it and brag about it on podiums. But their own fear of the consequences of that are also what makes them attack the ICC [International Criminal Court] with a kind of frantic, thinly disguised terror that they might be next ... They’re afraid of ending up in jail.”Are the billionaires and oligarchs really frightened? “Absolutely,” says Taylor. “The attacks on the ICC ... The Trump administration explicitly said we will pull back the sanctions we are imposing on your judges if you put into writing that no member of the Trump administration will ever be prosecuted. They were very overt in that. If you watch their media, Steve Bannon has said, ‘This is incredibly high stakes because if the Democrats win, we’re all going to jail.’ The fear of accountability is front and centre.”Says Klein: “I do think one of the things that really does drive [the super-rich] is that they genuinely cannot believe what they’ve been able to get away with, in terms of wealth hoarding. It drives them towards eugenicist theories that help explain what they have through the lens of supremacist ideology – that they must somehow deserve it. But I think it also terrifies them that this can’t go on. And that’s why when there is [a politically motivated killer such as Luigi] Mangione, it sends them all spiralling.” She cautions that, historically, lone-wolf attacks have led to fascist overreaction: “We want them afraid, but I’d rather have them afraid of ending up at The Hague.”Naomi Klein: 'We’re not calling for the guillotine. All we want for these billionaires is to just have to live in the same world as us. It’s not so bad down here.' Photograph: Stacey Newman/SOPA Images/LightRocket/Getty The book also outlines the ways in which the far right coalition in the US is splintering from former Trump allies such as Tucker Carlson, and taking aim at his administration. “We definitely wanted to map those ruptures because they are opportunities for anti-fascism,” says Klein. “But I think we are both really wary of the idea that they’ll just fall apart on their own.”Klein and Taylor are keener to highlight the highly organised activist movements against Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and data centres and the way in which they cross traditional political divides. They refer to this phenomenon as “neighbourism”, a term they got from journalist Adam Serwer when he was trying to sum up the diverse nature of activism against ICE in Minnesota. There were anarchists, people of faith, people from indigenous communities, immigrants, and one-time Republican voters. The ethos, Serwer concluded, was neighbours helping each other irrespective of where they were born: Neighbourism.“We are absolutely opposed to a politics of purity,” says Taylor. “In fact, I want to celebrate a politics of impurity, [in] finding points of connection across difference. We really need a big tent to beat this ... We are up against literally the most powerful people in the world, and this is not something that we can win by keeping our movements small and insular and rigid. What a moment to create alliances. But we’re not going to do it if we’re assholes.”Says Klein: “I think the stakes might be higher than a lot of people are fully reckoning with. I do think that’s another thing that Gaza taught us – that we’re up against people who will go all the way and then defend it ... They’re willing to burn the living world to build the robot dystopia that every science fiction film has tried to warn us about.”“They’re so disconnected,” says Taylor. “The more they separate, and the more they see themselves as supreme, the less attached they are to community, to ecosystems, to the planet.”‘I think there’s a case to be made that we need to abolish billionaires and trillionaires and impose a wealth cap for their own good’— Astra TaylorWhat is Taylor and Klein’s call to action for readers of the book? Join a local campaign group, says Taylor. “It might be [about] a data centre that’s being built down the road or a detention centre. It might be the privatisation of a healthcare system or of public lands. This is a problem that’s so big we can only tackle it collectively. We each have to play our modest role.”Astra Taylor: 'What Occupy was saying is that there’s something wrong. Corporate power is out of control. We need to check the wealth of billionaires ...' Photograph: Rachel McIntosh On a higher level, she says, it “means being really serious about climate action and getting us off fossil fuels. That means taking away the power of these obscenely wealthy people and saying, ‘Actually, it’s not just about taxing you. It is about a wealth cap.’ It’s about meeting people’s material needs so that they will be less susceptible to the politics of a strongman, and scapegoating.”And, in contrast, what motivates the billionaires? “I’m always wary of trying to X-ray people’s hearts, especially when what they say is so incoherent,” says Taylor. “A little bit of psychoanalysis can help us understand what’s actually motivating people.”“Daddy issues, mommy issues,” says Klein.“They’re hoarders,” says Taylor. “They have deep, deep insecurity. We see this with Elon Musk most vividly – the desperation to be cool, to be admired. We actually think the wealth itself is deranging ... I think there’s a case to be made that we need to abolish billionaires and trillionaires and impose a wealth cap for their own good.”“They should be prescribed a middle-class life,” says Klein, and they both laugh. “They can thank us later ... We’re not calling for the guillotine. All we want for these billionaires is to just have to live in the same world as us. It’s not so bad down here.”Klein has spoken before about her love for the LGBTQ romance TV series Heated Rivalry. My romance-novel-writing wife would kill me if I didn’t ask about the importance of escapist art in these moments. “Is it escapist?” she says. “I think that Heated Rivalry is one of the best, sweetest love stories that disguises itself as smut ... And it’s also smut.” She laughs. “Okay, just to bring it back to the theme: I think it speaks to our deepest longings for a non-apocalyptic ending to our story.” End Times Fascism by Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor is published by Penguin