Naomi Klein: ‘Extreme wealth has a deranging effect. It turns you into a supremacist’

Naomi Klein’s new book starts on a mountaintop with two “faithful men gathering an audience to share their vision”. It’s a vision of a paradise city, gated at every entrance, no need for weapons there, everyone in it rich. One of the men has tears in his eyes as he describes its beauty. The opening scene of End Times Fascism, co-written with Astra Taylor, is not a metaphor, however. The men are Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff. The year is 2026, the mountain is Davos. The paradise city will be called New Gaza.The World Economic Forum get-together in Davos, Switzerland, has always had a twin purpose – to provide a platform for the super-rich to describe all the good they are doing on poverty and climate, and to give us a glimpse into their enviable lives. This year what we witnessed was, quite brazenly, the world’s richest men gathering to discuss the real estate possibilities of a mass grave.At that same Davos, Donald Trump announced his Board of Peace for the reconstruction of Gaza – it has delivered nothing substantial in the seven months since, but more significantly, Klein says, “we’re being hit with so many extraordinary events that it’s hard to hold on to what a big deal it is: they have announced a privatised United Nations”.“I think we understand that wealth compounds, right? Certainly rich people understand that wealth compounds,” Klein continues, speaking to me from her peaceful, roomy study in British Columbia. “But I don’t feel like we spend a lot of time really thinking about the implications of what it means for that much wealth to be compounded, and what that does psychologically. Part of the new shamelessness we’re seeing is just what happens when this amount of financial, mediagenic, technological and military weaponry is concentrated in the hands of this very small, unaccountable group of people. They stop trying to seduce us in any way.”Klein looks calm and curious as she delivers this message. She has a ready laugh. But then, she had the same unruffled, buoyant delivery when I interviewed her on stage in Manchester for Doppelgänger, her 2023 book in which she described how the digital world is destroying our connection to reality, and one another. In 1999, when her breakthrough work No Logo was published, she seemed exhilaratingly certain, at 29, that neoliberalism was bringing harm that we couldn’t yet even see the extent of, and nonetheless appeared centred and happy in the world. Somehow she manages to maintain this attitude, even though the news she delivers is always so convincingly, unbelievably bad.End Times Fascism describes the world we’re in, where the components of authoritarianism are modelled everywhere you look: anarcho-libertarian economics in Argentina, the destruction of a free press in Russia, the erosion of democratic institutions in Hungary (until Viktor Orbán was deposed), “anti-immigrant neofascism” in Italy, the weaponisation of trans identity by Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, Islamophobia in Modi’s India. But this is fascism with a difference. Its proponents are actively willing an apocalypse, or a wave of interconnected apocalypses brought forth by climate change and financial chaos, to hasten us towards a post-democratic world in which only a rich few survive to prosper.This book started as an article in the Guardian, “which went totally viral,” Klein says. “Astra and I knew there was a lot more reporting to do, but on a personal level, did we want to spend the next year in the minds of these people, in these cultures? Then Astra said, ‘I’m down the rabbit hole, I’m gonna be listening to these guys anyway. So I may as well feel like I’m doing something about it.’ This is the reason it’s the first book I’ve co-written. When you go to dark, scary places, it’s nice to bring a friend.” Astra Taylor is also a writer, activist and documentary maker, and founded the Debt Collective, a fascinating experiment in building structured, quasi-unionised solidarity around personal debt, with the long term goals of abolishing student tuition fees, nationalising healthcare and building tenant power.In the book, Klein and Taylor introduce us to the religious fundamentalists, Christian Zionists and Christian Nationalists in the US, readying themselves for the second coming. Describing a “bunkered state”, the authors connect climate-related disasters, a rabid anti-immigrant standing army in the form of ICE and a politics built on false promises and misinformation to depict a febrile, riven society that doesn’t know what to believe. But the truly terrifying bit is the bridging section, on tech billionaires. The super-rich have apocalypse fantasies of their own, built not on faith or ideology but on a calm and rational evaluation of how best to maintain their position; they would genuinely rather reign in hell than share in heaven. And they have all the money to make sure they get there.“These are trends I’ve been following for a long time,” Klein says. “The privatised enclave born of shock, of disaster, I saw when I was reporting from Iraq. There’s the image of the Green Zone, this Emerald City run by the US in the middle of Baghdad, built by Halliburton and all of these private contractors, with the power to appoint a viceroy. In the final parts of The Shock Doctrine [2007], I talk about how these contractors migrated [from Iraq] to Hurricane Katrina, and the idea that these climate disasters are their next growth frontier. Reporters started calling New Orleans ‘Baghdad on the Bayou’. The gang’s all here, there’s Halliburton, there’s Bechtel, there’s Blackwater.”But, and she cannot stress this enough, as useful as it is to know the recent history of these trends, you should not take comfort from the idea that you’ve seen it all before. “I have found the image of a spiral really useful, in terms of how to make sense of the fact that our era is both familiar and different,” Klein says. “The thing about a spiral is that you’re going round, but you’re not going to the same place. If the spiral is pointing down, it’s deeper, it’s tighter, it’s carrying more velocity, it’s carrying more force, it’s carrying more heat, it’s carrying more violence.” The image is at once poetic and extremely sobering. She proffers a brief morale boost, like someone handing you a slice of orange on your way into a war zone. “You can flip a spiral – it goes outwards, it’s the spiral of the universe.”At the moment we’re in now, when crises and disasters hit so frequently that we’re in a constant state of disorientation and shock, the status quo isn’t static, it’s always getting worse. “There’s this impulse to read history,” Klein says. “We’ve seen it again and again. After 9/11, people were suddenly reading history books about Afghanistan and Iraq, Chomsky, trying to find their bearings. We saw it again during the pandemic, people were reading about the plagues of the past. But there’s a trap in believing that everything has happened before, that there is not a compounding effect of history. After Donald Trump was re-elected, I’ll be honest with you, Shock Doctrine sales went crazy. People were saying, ‘It’s exactly like you said,’ and I was thinking, ‘I don’t think it is’.”The neoliberal age – for brevity let’s call it the period between the end of the cold war and Covid – was “capitalism lying on the couch in its underwear, going ‘what are you gonna do, leave me?’ In the cold war, a little competition went a long way – after the collapse of the Soviet Union, that competition is lost, capitalism stopped trying.” But there was a vulnerability to being super-rich in those days, because whether you’d come by your wealth through privatisation politics in the US or Europe, or by hastier, more kleptocratic means in ex-communist states, it was plainly public wealth that you’d captured. “So they would stage these seduction rituals, whether it was at Davos or Aspen, or at Ted, or the Clinton Global Initiative. They’d say, ‘We are going to cure the sick, and we are going to fund your schools in this new and exciting way, don’t worry about us. Don’t be afraid of our wealth. This is actually a new way of redistributing for the public good.’”I distinctly remember that world: huge conferences like the Skoll foundation awards, where journalists would be wined and dined while watching immensely rich people hand out £20,000 prizes to grassroots clean water initiatives in Kenya. To be fair, in the era before and directly after the financial crash, there were plenty of dissenting voices about capitalist benevolence solving intractable problems like inequality. Many people, Klein at their vanguard, pointed out that it smelled like a scam. But while we were having that discussion, the wealth agenda moved on.In the run-up to the 2024 presidential election, at the Faena Hotel in Miami, Peter Thiel hosted panel discussions titled “the enemy”, naming sustainable development goals, “precautionary principles” and “social responsibility” as those foes, rounded off with an “apocalypse ball”-themed fancy dress party . Some of the costumes, Klein and Taylor write, were “a doctor of eugenics’’; a “Haitian chef with a bloodied cat toy hanging out of his apron [a reference to the Springfield immigrant pet‑eating hoax, which spread in 2024, repeated by both Trump and JD Vance]; a couple wearing pagers as a ha-ha reference to Israel’s murderous attack in Lebanon.”Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor. Photograph: naomiklein.substack.comThiel has been explicitly anti-democracy for years, writing in 2009, “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” But other tech billionaires have had a complete volte face. “Jeff Bezos renamed a stadium in Seattle the Climate Pledge Arena, and gave out Earth prizes,” Klein points out. Elon Musk invested in electric cars and once saw himself as a saviour figure. “Any time anyone was in trouble, Musk would rush in to save them, ‘I shall save Puerto Rico’, ‘I shall save the children stuck down the mine’. It’s