How Tech Giants and Apocalyptic Ideology Are Fueling Modern Fascism

A recruitment advertisement for Palantir, a Silicon Valley data firm that works with intelligence agencies, military units, and corporations, recently declared: "A moment of reckoning has arrived for the West." The language was stark. "On the factory floor, in the operating room, across the battlefield," it continued, "we build to dominate." This collision between cutting-edge technology and unvarnished talk of dominance has prompted a reckoning of its own. In newsrooms, on television, and in political discourse, a single word has surfaced with new urgency: fascism.

Two recent books attempt to diagnose what this means for our moment. Naomi Klein and filmmaker Astra Taylor's "End Times Fascism and the Fight for the Living World" and journalist Gil Durán's "The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy" both argue that fascism has not simply returned unchanged from the twentieth century. Instead, it has evolved, fusing with apocalyptic ideology and technological systems in ways that demand new language to describe.

Klein and Taylor locate the core of this evolution in what they call "end times fascism"—a worldview that takes collapse as inevitable and responds to that inevitability with deliberate cruelty. The premise is straightforward: our economic, institutional, and environmental systems are failing. Housing is unaffordable. The cost of living surges. Ecosystems are degrading. Planetary boundaries are being breached. But rather than treating these crises as problems to solve, end times fascism treats them as labor pains. Dysfunction becomes necessary. The world must burn so that something glorious can be built from the ashes—or so that the chosen few can escape to something better. The authors trace this logic across three domains. First, they examine messianic nationalism, following the Zionist project through to what they describe as genocidal reset in Gaza, where one society's future is constructed on another's destruction. Second, they unpack Silicon Valley's faith in artificial superintelligence and the claims of existential risk that justify massive investment and concentrate power among the already powerful. Third, they document the "prepper" impulse among elites—the drive to bunker against the future, to establish separate tech infrastructures, ethnostates, and literal bunkers where the wealthy can ride out the apocalypse they have accelerated.

Klein and Taylor's counter-argument is deceptively simple: the world is not doomed. They champion what they call "hereness"—the choice to stay, to engage with broken reality, to do the slow and messy work of improvement rather than abandonment. They hold up Zohran Mamdani, the progressive mayor of New York City, as an exemplar of this stance, a leader who has built power through grassroots organizing and celebration of the city's diverse communities and cultures. The book is careful to distinguish between mainstream religious teaching—which emphasizes love of neighbor, including the migrant—and the weaponized fundamentalism that cherry-picks scripture to justify exclusion and violence. Churches and faith organizations in Minnesota, for instance, mobilized against Immigration and Customs Enforcement deportations, offering aid and sanctuary. The authors praise Klein and Taylor for this precision, though they note a structural limitation: the book remains focused on powerful individuals and dramatic events rather than systemic analysis. Donald Trump appears repeatedly as a common thread. Yet if end times fascism depends on such men, what happens when they leave the stage? The book's claim that the ideology will persist becomes harder to sustain.

Durán's "Nerd Reich" takes a different angle, centering Silicon Valley itself. He traces the intellectual roots of tech fascism to "The Sovereign Individual," a 1997 prediction book by former Times editor William Rees-Mogg and financial advisor James Dale Davidson, which imagined the information age as a liberation from state control. Durán identifies Peter Thiel—PayPal co-founder and Palantir backer—as the lynchpin connecting business, politics, and religion into what he calls a "terrifying bundle of power." But Durán's circle extends far beyond Thiel. It includes Elon Musk, Vice President JD Vance, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, cryptocurrency entrepreneur Balaji Srinivasan (who advocates for Silicon Valley's "ultimate exit" from the United States), and venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, who champions the acceleration of "techno-capital" while dismissing democracy. For Durán, tech fascism bundles powerful technologies—artificial intelligence, cryptocurrency, social media—toward authoritarian ends that benefit a small, interconnected oligarchy. It seeks to privatize what is public and eliminate democratic institutions.

Durán's strength lies in his insider knowledge of San Francisco politics. He documents how tech money flooded local elections to flip the city council from progressive to conservative. He names names: Garry Tan of Y Combinator, Sam Bankman-Fried and his fraudulent FTX exchange, Curtis Yarvin and his illiberal ideas about remaking the state as a startup. Yet this journalistic approach fragments the narrative. Chapters become a whirlwind of vignettes—gossip, backstory, psychedelic use—without a clear throughline connecting them. The reader must assemble meaning from scattered pieces.

Both books risk a common pitfall: they focus on the Big Man, the swaggering founder or deep-pocketed politician who can impose his vision through sheer resources. This makes for compelling storytelling. But it leaves crucial questions unanswered. Where did these fascist energies originate? How do they spread among ordinary people? How are they packaged and narrated to make them compelling? The answer lies in understanding technology not as a neutral tool but as a system that operates in three ways. First, it augments fascist visions, turning ideology into operational reality—Palantir's data systems enabling ICE deportations, for instance. Second, it alienates, creating a vacuum of meaning that powerful mythologies rush to fill. The Great Replacement Theory translates complex economic and climate anxieties into a single scapegoat: the migrant. Third, it manipulates, creating environments where desire and fascist ideology reinforce each other over time. Manosphere influencers package misogyny and xenophobia into viral content. Ex-radicals describe a pipeline effect where algorithmic feeds gradually nudged them toward more extreme positions. Together, these mechanisms explain how fascism moves from the boardroom to the feed, from elite vision to everyday belief.