Exit Strategy
In End Times Fascism, Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor make the case that the ruling class is not lording over our future, but trying to escape it. How should the left resist doing the same?
End Times Fascism: And the Fight for the Living World
by Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2026, 384 pp.
Is there a better place to build an ultra-luxury resort than on a former military base in the Adriatic? For Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump, there was no question. In December 2024, shortly after Donald Trump won his second term, the Albanian government gave preliminary approval for the couple’s project on Sazan, a small island at the country’s westernmost point, along with a portion of protected coastline. The proposal promised to transform the designated military exclusion zone and wildlife reserve into a high-end paradise with 800 guest rooms and suites, villas, a water park, and, naturally, a golf course. In a recent interview, Ivanka described the venture as “the culmination of all of my experience in real estate, all of my travel, a lot of reflection on how I want to live, how I think people increasingly are wanting to live.”
One might have thought that billionaire islands were out of fashion. But according to their real-estate portfolios, the mega-rich still want to live in their own fortified compounds. Earlier this year, Mark Zuckerberg purchased a $170 million estate near Miami—complete with nine bedrooms, eleven full bathrooms, and a 1,500-gallon aquarium—in a private enclave colloquially called “Billionaire Bunker,” where the Kushners, Jeff Bezos, and Tom Brady all have properties. Around the same time, Palantir’s Peter Thiel jetted off to Argentina to purchase a 17,200-square-foot Buenos Aires mansion along with an additional plot of land in neighboring Uruguay. “All billionaires of the world who want to flee countries increasingly regulated, with higher taxes and governments that persecute their citizens, are welcome in the Argentine republic, the new land of freedom,” President Javier Milei’s cabinet chief told the Argentine National Congress in April. The rich, it seems, are making backup plans.
In their new book, End Times Fascism: And the Fight for the Living World, writers Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor make the case that the ruling class is not lording over our future, but trying to escape it, building walled-off utopias for themselves while the rest of humanity is forced to manage the crises they’ve left behind. This coalition of religious apocalypticists, tech accelerationists, and ethno-nationalist survivalists, according to Klein and Taylor, are united by a “super-sized prepperism,” believing that “the human story itself has hit a wall and that only a small, deserving group of humans will survive the coming cataclysm.”
In End Times Fascism, the bunker is the defining metaphor for contemporary politics: the wealthy nation-state is a bunker, the private island resort is a bunker, and, of course, the literal bunker, stocked with goods for impending collapse, is a bunker. While a typical prepper might build a fallout shelter, the cranks in End Times Fascism are attempting to establish their own sovereign, tech-powered cities outside existing legal frameworks, often organized around artificial intelligence, cryptocurrency, and “biohacking.” Balaji Srinivasan, a former Andreessen Horowitz partner, has called for “tech Zionism,” a community-building strategy that “forms online and then gathers in physical space to form a reverse diaspora.” There are dozens of “freedom city” projects already underway, including Próspera, “a glorified gated community on a Honduran island that hosts a Wild West med spa,” and “California Forever” in Solano County, where a venture capital consortium has quietly accumulated $800 million of land over the last five years. Praxis, a project funded by Thiel, OpenAI founder Sam Altman, and Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale, pitched purchasing Greenland (even before Trump’s most recent push to buy the country) to create “prototype” cities for future settlements on Mars. These bunkers are clearly the projects of eccentrics, but they are eccentrics with essentially unlimited capital and significant political influence. “Far too much money, information technology, and weaponry have been allowed to concentrate into the hands of the few,” Klein and Taylor write, “and that unchecked power has deranged our elites, goading them to take risks that put our societies and countless species in existential peril.”
While it may have its largest home in Silicon Valley, the belief in an impending doomsday can be found across the country and the political spectrum. According to one survey, 39 percent of American adults believe they are living in the end times; among Black Americans, that figure rises to 68 percent. A separate international poll found that most young people agreed with the statement that “humanity is doomed.” It’s easy to see why. Wildfire seasons have become year-round threats, and extreme heat now kills more Americans annually than hurricanes, floods, and tornadoes combined. More than one in five Gen-Zers say that in the next five years, World War III is more likely than them buying a home. Over the past decade apocalypticism has become part of the national consciousness, from fictional zombies and robot uprisings, to Reddit’s r/preppers, or the countless men posting “wilderness survival” videos on YouTube.
The end times fascists are fleeing the crises of poverty, environmental destruction, and tech overreach they helped cause. And if the richest people on the planet are visibly searching for an exit strategy, should we assume they know something that we don’t? When they speak of the end of the world, are they bluffing?
End Times Fascism serves as a bleak sequel to Klein’s 2007 best-seller The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, which outlined a theory of how politicians and corporate interests exploit wars, natural disasters, and other major crises to push privatization and “free market” policies. Since then, the United States has gone through a recession and a pandemic, unleashed unlimited corporate cash on our electoral system, and minted our first trillionaire (if only briefly, for now). Nearly twenty years later, End Times Fascism shows how those same parties are “provoking and deepening the crises from which they benefit,” resigning themselves to a ruined world by focusing entirely on their own survival. “Unlike their predecessors, they don’t see the shocks and disasters as exceptions to the rule, piercing an otherwise calm and non-shocking status quo,” Klein and Taylor write. “Rather, they foresee an apocalyptic future in which rolling chaos and carnage are the norm. A world where pandemics, climate emergencies, resource wars, and rogue tech are routine, and politics stirs the pot.” This attitude can be seen most easily among the AI-booster crowd, who see the new technology as both earth-shattering and inevitable. Klein and Taylor argue that a new fascist right has not only made peace with apocalypse but is “waging a supremacist war over who is going to survive the future,” powered by their own technology. They “aren’t content to just build the arks. They appear to be doing their best to cause the flood.”
One of the first figures we meet in End Times Fascism is an Australian named Denis Michael Rohan, a born-again member of the Pasadena-based Worldwide Church of God. In March 1969, Rohan departed for Israel as a volunteer on a kibbutz. By August he had set fire to al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, the third holiest site in Islam. He believed that by setting the mosque aflame, the space could become a Jewish temple and hasten the second coming of Jesus Christ. The Christian Zionists of today, like Mike Huckabee, who became ambassador to Israel in April 2025, or televangelist Pastor John Hagee, still believe that Israeli control over biblical lands—at the cost of the destruction of Palestine—will bring about Christ’s return. As Klein and Taylor note, when Israeli Minister of National Security Itamar Ben-Gvir invaded al-Aqsa in 2025, neither Trump nor Benjamin Netanyahu condemned the move. For end times fascists, Taylor and Klein write, “the true danger is not war but peace.”
Klein and Taylor describe their book as “an attempt to chart this new territory,” but the terrain is not entirely unrecognizable. The John Birch Society, founded in 1958, was convinced that the United Nations was a communist plot to dissolve American sovereignty. The survivalist movements of the 1970s and ’80s built compounds in rural Montana and stockpiled for civilizational collapse decades before Thiel relocated to Argentina. Rajneeshpuram—the Oregon commune built by followers of the cult leader Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh in the early 1980s, which ended in the first large-scale bioterrorist attack in American history—demonstrated how quickly a community organized around a retreat from a corrupt outside world could curdle into something far more dangerous.
But the invention of nuclear weapons was the catalyst that “augured a new age of previously unimaginable existential risk,” Klein and Taylor note. They cite the work of Günther Anders, a German-Jewish philosopher who fled the Nazis in 1933; in the years after the Second World War, he argued that “because we are the first humans in charge of the apocalypse, we are also the first to live under its threat.” In his final essay, “Thanatos Triumphant,” Mike Davis observed that “there are few safety switches between today’s maximum leaders and Armageddon”—and that was before the second Trump administration. While Cold War bunkers shaped a modern understanding of nuclear disaster decades ago, the threats today loom ever larger. Trump has reportedly directed the Department of War to resume testing nuclear weapon systems, the Department of Energy is heavily investing in nuclear dominance, and his administration continues to provoke other global superpowers.
Climate change has also supercharged the apocalyptic mood; it is measurable in failed harvests, rising sea levels, and, most important, displaced persons. The migration crisis, made worse by war-mongering and environmental catastrophe, animates much of the end times fascists’ politics. More people are moving across borders than at any point in recorded history—a figure that has doubled since 1990. In 2015 alone, 1.3 million people sought asylum in Europe. Over a billion people could be displaced by climate change by 2050.
In Gaza, the scale of existential and environmental destruction has been incalculable. The Government Media Office recently stated that 223,000 tons of explosives had been dropped by Israel during the war—equivalent to sixteen times the payload of the nuclear bomb the United States dropped on Hiroshima—not only destroying buildings and killing civilians but causing a total collapse of civil infrastructure. Meanwhile, as Klein and Taylor note, world leaders recently met in Davos to discuss a “master plan” to turn Gaza into a “Dubai-like resort city for the superrich.” To steer this effort, countries can join Trump’s aptly named Board of Peace, with the low price of $1 billion for permanent membership. If the rich have their way, Gaza, too, will be a bunker.
The response to these crises from end times fascists is a classic double standard: borderlessness for themselves, walls for everyone else. Thiel and Zuckerberg relocate; Kushner builds his Albanian resort. The president signs an executive order for “Securing Our Borders” and shuts down the asylum system. Trump and his cohort see the United States as its own bunker, shielded from some of the environmental destruction, global poverty, and scars of war.
But within the country’s borders, communities that already carry disproportionate toxic burdens are also being asked to host the infrastructure of this tech billionaire future in environmental “sacrifice zones.” The book’s central case study is Boxtown, a Memphis neighborhood where Elon Musk’s xAI Colossus supercomputer was built on land already poisoned by decades of industrial use. The county leads Tennessee in childhood asthma-related emergency room visits, and Boxtown has cancer rates four times higher than average. In the book, one resident describes growing up in the area as “constantly going to funerals. Having to take your aunt to dialysis after dropping off your other aunt for her cancer treatment.” Similar dynamics can be seen at the Salton Sea in California. The 340-square-mile saline body is drying up as climate change shrinks its inflow from the Colorado River; as it does, its concentrated solution of pesticides, chemicals, and heavy metals becomes more deadly in the form of dust. Conveniently, one of the largest known lithium deposits sits underneath the lake. As communities die off, capitalists are rubbing their hands together at the possibility of mining it.
Of course, the desire to retreat into self-contained communities is not confined to the rich. Cities across the country are hard at work forming their own bunkers. Klein and Taylor note that for years the issues that typically brought people out to local council meetings were culture war flashpoints—bans on LGBTQ books, critical race theory, trans athletes, and homeless encampments—designed to exclude and put up walls. Environmental opposition to development, resistance to new housing, the politics of historic preservation—these can also function as a type of bunker mentality. The question of where neighborliness slips into NIMBYism is one that progressive communities have often avoided.
San Francisco is the obvious example, where progressive neighborhoods with the most vocal environmental and historic preservation politics have also been the most resistant to new housing, effectively pricing out the working class and people of color. Encampment sweeps have been brutal in blue and purple cities across the country, including in Portland and Los Angeles. The right-wing tech billionaire Joe Lonsdale cut his teeth on homelessness policy by supporting a camping ban in Austin, Texas, which passed with 57 percent of the vote. Lonsdale then built the Cicero Institute, an anti-homeless think tank, into a national operation, pushing model legislation that has since been introduced in legislatures across the country. Lonsdale didn’t create anti-homeless sentiment out of thin air, but he gave it infrastructure, supercharged it, and was empowered by liberal mayors and state leaders.
The impulse to preserve a place, a people, or a way of life has always carried within it the seeds of exclusion. Madison Grant, perhaps the most influential American environmental conservationist of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, was also the author of The Passing of the Great Race, a white supremacist tract that Adolf Hitler reportedly called his “bible.” Grant applied wildlife management principles to human populations, advocating for eugenics and strict immigration quotas to protect what he deemed genetically superior stock. The Christchurch shooter, who killed fifty-one people at two mosques in New Zealand in 2019, framed his massacre in explicitly ecological terms: “Kill the invaders, kill the overpopulation and by doing so save the environment.” Eco-fascism, the politics of environmental preservation fused with ethnic exclusion, is the endpoint of a logic that begins, not always consciously, with retreat.
The communities left behind by the end times fascists are vulnerable to clinging to what remains, but that in and of itself can morph into end times politics. There is the homesteading fantasy—the nuclear family retreating to self-sufficient land, growing their own food, withdrawing from supply chains and civic life. There’s the bohemian “van life,” or the off-grid “Earthship” homes constructed from recycled tires and bottles. There’s a burgeoning movement of nature schools and hybrid homeschooling co-ops, partly built from the genuine exhaustion with institutions that have failed children measurably and persistently.
How should we resist these trends? Like any critique from the left, End Times Fascism concludes with a hopeful political prescription. Klein and Taylor envision “a neighborly uprising,” emulating Zohran Mamdani’s 100,000-strong volunteer army or Minneapolis residents’ response to Trump’s Operation Metro Surge. Furthermore, invocations of religion do not belong to the apocalyptics alone, they argue; loving thy neighbor and caring for our world are found in a range of traditions, from Christian to Navajo to the Quranic concept of khalifah to Jewish Kabbalah’s tikkun olam. “The joyous love of here, even if here is kind of a wreck, and the concrete plans for repair and improvement, are obviously mutually reinforcing,” they write. “Because the more devoted you are to a place, the easier it is to put in the resources and energy required to fix it.”
Klein and Taylor are optimistic about community resistance. They note that in 2025, nearly fifty data center projects worth over $150 billion were delayed or stopped by grassroots activists. While they claim that some of the most militant opposition has emerged in conservative places, however, this activity has yet to bear fruit. While legislators in Vermont and Oklahoma have considered a freeze on data center construction, New York is, so far, the only state to have successfully implemented a moratorium.
Still, the politics around rejecting apocalypticist developments can be sensitive. In early 2026, California Forever struck what it called the largest construction labor agreement in history—a forty-year deal with the Napa/Solano Building Trades Council and Northern California Carpenters Union. Organized labor stands to benefit enormously from the initial construction phases of these projects, which creates a genuine tension: unions may find themselves the most effective brake on network state development or its most valuable enabler. In the end, it was local opposition that successfully pulled the California Forever proposal off the November 2024 ballot, a reminder that unsexy local zoning politics remains one of the more effective tools for organizers.
Despite these bright spots, many across the political spectrum believe that the system cannot be fixed, only escaped, that we must create bunkers of our own. Have you not been at a party and heard the least capable person in your friend group suggest that everyone should pool their money and buy some land? Whether it comes from a venture capitalist or a progressive parent, this individualist logic is the same: I will secure a better future for my people, and the rest can sort themselves out. If the coalition in End Times Fascism is defined by abandonment of a shared future, then the response cannot itself be a form of abandonment—not a smaller commune or a more righteous collapse. There’s little difference, after all, between a bunker and a tomb.
Paige Oamek is a Brooklyn-based writer who covers politics, privatization, money, and city life, with a focus on how technology shapes them.