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

She’s tackled neoliberalism and the digital world, now the writer and activist is taking on tech billionaires. She explains how the super-rich are capitalising on climate and financial chaos in pursuit of power

N aomi 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.