On a morning when a sitting head of state can promise, almost in passing, that "a whole civilisation will die tonight," and when history's first trillionaire is free to amplify racist conspiracy theories to an audience of hundreds of millions, it is worth asking a simple, vertiginous question: how did we come to accept any of this as ordinary? That question sits at the restless heart of a new intervention by writers Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor, whose concept of "end times fascism" attempts to name — and thereby expose — the convergence of interests quietly reshaping democratic life across two continents and beyond. Klein and Taylor identify three interlocking factions, all largely rooted in American political and business culture. The first are religious nationalists who greet each new catastrophe as a sign of prophesied apocalypse, finding unlikely common cause with secular demagogues who promise glittering empires on the rubble of the present — a logic visible, the authors suggest, in fantasies of a rebuilt Gaza rising from the ruins of destruction.

The second faction is composed of the new tech aristocracy, whose faith in an artificial-intelligence arms race as civilisational salvation sits uneasily beside their private preparations for societal breakdown in fortified, remote compounds. The third are the political entrepreneurs who have learned to harvest fear itself, converting visions of scarcity and disorder into electoral gold. What unites all three, Klein and Taylor argue, is not pessimism but a particular, predatory relationship to the future: the most powerful people in the world are not merely watching collapse approach but are, in their phrase, "frenetically accelerating" it. The climate crisis, on this reading, is less a problem to be solved than a resource to be exploited — a permanent state of emergency in which concentrated power thrives and accountability quietly perishes.

The book arrives at a moment when a British political party is reportedly manoeuvring toward government on the rhetorical slipstream of this same international movement, which suggests that the geography of "end times fascism" is far wider than any single flag.