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PORTSIDE CULTURE

EXIT STRATEGY  
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Paige Oamek
October 1, 2026
Dissent Magazine
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_ 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? _

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_End Times Fascism: And the Fight for the Living World_Naomi Klein and
Astra TaylorFarrar, Straus and GirouxISBN-13: ? 978-0374621384Exit
Strategy

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.

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