B X Lee -- ‘End Times Fascism’
‘End Times Fascism’
Project for Human Survival Meeting Today at 1 p.m. EDT / 10 a.m. PDT
*A link is below, and will be sent an hour before the meeting to paid subscribers.
Today at 1 p.m. EDT, at our “Project for Human Survival” meeting (joined with our “Presidential Psychiatric Emergency” meetings, since imminent and long-term emergencies have merged), Matthew Bywater will present. Bywater is a scholar, educator, and activist in the fields of humanitarianism, human rights, and authoritarian extremist groups. He has studied authoritarian societies such as China and North Korea, holds a master’s from the London School of Economics and Political Science, and is currently pursuing a doctorate at the University of Essex. He has been assisting the World Mental Health Coalition eventually to enter its Declaration of the Freedom of Mind, legally and politically, into the international human rights architecture.
Violence against the mind is indeed one of the gravest forms of human rights violations.
People are often surprised when I say that those who are violent against others—seizing everything for themselves and seeking to dominate everyone—are also violent against themselves. Yet, this is the very cycle in which we find ourselves: a cycle in which the impulse to dominate and destroy others becomes a force for self-destruction.
This is the collective mental state (“the spirit level,” to use Richard Wilkinson’s and Kate Pickett’s phrase) I warned we would devolve into, if we kept increasing inequality and structural violence. We have come to a place where we cannot change the structures unless we achieve a higher level of consciousness, or a state of greater health, but we also cannot achieve that greater state unless we educate ourselves on how to care for our minds.
We have grown sick enough to need doctors, but mind doctors (psychiatrists) are the last to be consulted in a time of greatest need. Thus, we see a direct outpicturing of mental sickness onto the world, first by giving sick minds power, and then by turning their suicidal tendencies into a drive for species extinction. The solutions are before us, but we will not access them until we fully understand the problem—and how we got ourselves into it.
There is a book review on End Times Fascism that gives a good summary of what journalist--activists Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor observe (though I do not agree with its analysis):
A significant challenge to thinking clearly about politics over the past decade has simply been that things have gotten extremely weird. Not only did a real estate mogul and reality-show star win the presidency twice and take over one of two parties in the most powerful nation on earth, but the fringes of his winning coalition also expanded, the second time around, beyond far-right Christian evangelicals and very-online white supremacists to include Silicon Valley tech-industry billionaires who readily concede they are building machines with a non-negligible chance of wiping out the human race.
And that’s just in the United States, which may reside at the leading edge of the weirdness but is hardly alone in succumbing to it….
Like many left-leaning observers of the political scene in recent years, Klein and Taylor believe we’re living through a resurgence of fascist politics…. All forms of fascism, they claim, function as “capitalism’s most ferocious threat response” to widespread socioeconomic and cultural despair, ensuring that “the public anger” is “directed downward at the vulnerable rather than upward at the system itself and its most privileged stewards and beneficiaries.” To this politics, the 21st century adds a prophecy of apocalypse and creates something new: the end times fascism of their title.
The adherents of this “apocalyptic faith” include “religious end timers,” “tech end timers” and “ethno-nationalist end timers.” Each far-right faction sees the end coming for different reasons, but they are all alike in their abandonment of “the very possibility of a stable future” and their determination to “be among the chosen few who survive” the looming cataclysm, “safely ensconced in impenetrable gilded bunkers, or behind fortressed borders or escaping Earth altogether.” They are also alike, Klein and Taylor contend, in that they share an alarming access to power.
The bulk of the book is devoted to examining these three far-right groups in brisk and often chilling and illuminating detail. The first is composed mainly of white evangelical Protestants in the United States and Israeli settlers eager to hasten the Messianic Age by annexing the West Bank, provoking a final showdown with Palestinian residents and sparking a wider interreligious war in the Middle East.
Confirmatory evidence is everywhere: in the Covid-19 pandemic and restrictive public-health responses to it, in the bureaucratic imposition of D.E.I. workplace regulations and in Hamas’s horrifying October 2023 attack on southern Israel from Gaza. All of these are signs, they think, of impending global catastrophe that require intense preparation and brutal acts of self-defense.
These religious doomsayers find unlikely allies in Silicon Valley, where superrich tech entrepreneurs, surrounded by a coterie of obsequious gurus, eagerly pursue breakthroughs in longevity, interplanetary travel and artificial intelligence that could well put tens of millions of Americans out of work and even exterminate humanity.
Despite these massive risks, the tech bros believe they must pursue the arrival of their “digital god—or demon” and push forward into a post-human future….
The final piece of the end-times-fascist puzzle is xenophobic nationalism. With wars and climate change driving refugee flows toward the wealthier countries of the world, right-wing demagogues increasingly champion “the bunkered state” and “fortressed borders.” Recognizing that its political fortunes are enhanced by worsening the crisis and promulgating fear of outsiders, the Trump administration actively undermines “every structure designed to offer universal protection from diseases, dangerous foods and disasters.”
As the crises mount, Klein and Taylor argue, fostering deep division between and within countries turns out to be a crucial means of uniting the three apocalyptic factions into the semi-coherent end-times-fascist movement that landed Donald Trump back in the White House in 2025.
To fight back, they advocate fostering a politics of inclusivity that emphasizes “our shared world” and “the web of life that sustains us” on the planet….
The reviewer finally refutes their analysis and solution, but it is difficult not to be confused in these times. Klein and Taylor bring clarity, but not complete clarity. I have stated that the depth of understanding determines the effectiveness of solutions. We all still have a long way to go, but first we have to desire to know.
For those who have missed it, it is a theme I discuss these matters with Anthony Davis of “The Weekend Show”:
Announcement:
Please join us for a PROJECT FOR HUMAN SURVIVAL interactive meeting today, October 21, 2026, at 1 p.m. EDT / 10 a.m. PDT. A meeting link will be sent to paid subscribers an hour before—and in the below.
Dr. Bandy X. Lee is inviting you to a live session:
Time: Oct 21, 2026 01:00 PM Eastern Time (US and Canada)
Discussion about this post
https://bandyxlee.substack.com/p/end-times-fascism
I wish you would tell us why you you disagree with the analysis. It seems coherent to me. Perhaps it is unduly pessimistic about whether the catastrophe arguably ahead can be averted.🙏🏾
On the analysis itself, a lot of this end-time thinking seems to come from simple hubris and excess ambition lacking perspective and imagination.😠
“For the sins of her prophets, and the iniquities of her priests, that have shed the blood of the just in the midst of her, They have wandered as blind men in the streets, they have polluted themselves with blood, so that men could not touch their garments." -- Lamentations 4 : 13-14 from ‘The King James Version’; c. 585 B.C.E.💔
I find it interesting that Dr. Lee is among other perceptive people who observe how those dominators are self-destructive (e.g., many Nazi leader suicides). All behavior that is negatively motivated (through selfishness, anger, hate, fear, etc.) ends in ruin. Those "end times" people betray a deep sense of futility which is a kind of dangerously massive insecurity. The challenge indeed is for caring and confident people like Dr. Lee to get a grip on this nonsense and direct it toward surviving/thriving. There are still some adults in the room! VOTE