Ok Mr Fua, I will certainly concede the number is far too high for someone trying to get a good nights sleep: **Short answer:** Based on the best available research, a *substantial minority* of U.S. evangelicals—typically **between one-third and one-half**—hold some form of “end times” or apocalyptic belief that can influence their political views. This is *far* from all evangelicals, but it’s also not a fringe sliver.
Below is a clearer breakdown of what we can say from the evidence.
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## 🔍 What the data suggests While none of the sources in the search directly give a single percentage for “evangelicals who see current Middle East conflicts as part of biblical end times,” we can infer from well-established polling patterns:
### 📌 1. Evangelicals are the U.S. group **most likely** to hold apocalyptic beliefs Pew Research Center has repeatedly found that evangelicals stand out in their biblical literalism and prophetic interpretation of world events. Their surveys show evangelicals are consistently more likely than other Christian groups to believe: - The Bible predicts modern geopolitical events - Jesus will return in their lifetime - Israel plays a central role in biblical prophecy [Pew Research Center](https://www.pewresearch.org/topic/religion/religions/christianity/protestantism/evangelicalism/)
## 📊 So what percentage believe in an “end times” interpretation of current events? Because no single study gives a precise number for this exact belief, we have to synthesize from related polling:
Within that group, only a **subset** would go further into *explicit* “holy war” or “end times are imminent” interpretations—but that subset is still politically influential because: - They vote at very high rates - They are overrepresented in certain political coalitions - They are highly mobilized around foreign policy issues involving Israel
---
## 🧭 Bottom line If evangelicals are ~25% of the U.S. population, and roughly **one-third to one-half** hold some form of apocalyptic worldview tied to Israel, then **about 8–12% of the total U.S. population** may hold beliefs that *could* frame Middle East conflicts in “end times” terms.
That’s not a majority, but it’s large enough to matter politically—especially in primaries and in shaping the rhetoric of certain politicians.
---
If you want, I can break down: - How these beliefs influence U.S. foreign policy - Differences between mainstream evangelicals and Christian Zionists - How Israeli politics interacts with American evangelical eschatology
Tehran’s ‘toll booth’: How Iran picks who to let through Strait of Hormuz
"When war looks like prophecy: How U.S. ‘end time’ narratives frame the war with Iran "They Believe They Are Fulfilling Prophecy-The Rest of Us Will Pay the Price""
Related: You are, again, badly misinformed. You've got no earthly business going all Gung ho about a situation that is fraught with danger to American troops. I can't think of a single better excuse for the American military to mount a coup against the biggest threat to the Constitution, YOUR renegade fascist fake president. Guarantee you that he goes TACO yet again. Stay tuned, keyboard commando. [...]## Intelligence Consensus US strikes have hit ~7,800 targets and degraded some Iranian assets, but experts deem island occupation unfeasible without tying down massive forces for weeks against asymmetric threats. Iranian rhetoric mocks seizure attempts, aligning with US hesitation amid Trump's diplomatic push (offering energy site pauses) and oil price pressures. This mix of defenses, geography, and escalation risks renders the "easy grab" notion detached from briefed realities. [cnn](https://www.cnn.com/2026/03/24/middleeast/us-israel-iran-middle-east-war-day-26-what-we-know-intl-hnk) https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=177436085
Iran has blocked the passage of vessels carrying 20 percent of the world’s oil and liquefied natural gas supplies.
The Callisto tanker sits anchored in Port Sultan Qaboos in Muscat, Oman, as Iran chokes off traffic in the Strait of Hormuz during the US-Israel war [File: Benoit Tessier/Reuters]
By Priyanka Shankar Published On 26 Mar 202626 Mar 2026
The de facto blockade of the Strait of Hormuz by Iran in response to the United States-Israel war has caused one of the worst energy crises in decades with experts warning of a looming global recession.
The maritime route, through which about 20 percent of global oil and gas supplies pass, has been thrust into the spotlight as Tehran has used it as a geopolitical bargaining chip in the war.
Nearly 2,000 vessels are stranded close to the narrow strait, which is located between Iran on its north side and Oman and the United Arab Emirates on its south side.
On Thursday, Iranian media reported that the country’s parliament is seeking to pass legislation to collect tolls for ships transiting the world’s single most important oil passageway.
The reports by the Tasnim and Fars news agencies, quoting the chairman of parliament’s Civil Affairs Committee, said a draft law has been prepared and will soon be finalised by the Islamic Consultative Assembly’s legal team.
“According to this plan, Iran must collect fees to ensure the security of ships passing through the Strait of Hormuz,” an official was quoted as saying.
“This is completely natural. Just as in other corridors, when goods pass through a country, duties are paid. The Strait of Hormuz is also a corridor. We ensure its security, and it is natural for ships and tankers to pay us duties,” he added.
So what is the toll booth system? How does it work? Is it legal?
Why has Iran made the decision to impose tolls?
Iran, whose territorial waters extend into the strait, has blocked the passage of vessels carrying oil and liquefied natural gas (LNG) from the Gulf to the rest of the world since the US and Israel launched the war on February 28.
The move has sent global oil prices soaring above $100 per barrel – a jump of roughly 40 percent from before the war – forcing countries, particularly in Asia, to ration fuel and cut industrial production. Impacted countries have been lobbying Iran to allow vessels to pass through the strait, which is the only route through which to export oil and gas from most of the Gulf producers.
Iran has demanded international recognition of its right to exercise authority over the Strait of Hormuz as one of its five conditions for ending the war.
---------- [ Insert: Iranians would know the law, so i'd guess that is one of their ambit claims, one they would be willing to drop. First thought, Panama:
AI Overview
Panama possesses sovereignty over the canal, but its legal right to block it is restricted by the 1977 Torrijos-Carter Treaties, which mandate the waterway remain permanently secure and open to peaceful transit for all nations.
Yes, the primary international legal framework demanding that the Strait of Hormuz remain open is the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), which establishes the "transit passage" regime for international straits.
While there is no single, specific treaty solely titled the "Hormuz Openness Treaty," the right of passage is governed by the following international laws and agreements:
* UNCLOS (1982): Part III (Articles 37-44) of UNCLOS holds that all ships and aircraft enjoy the right of "transit passage" through straits used for international navigation. This right cannot be suspended, and transit must be allowed to continue uninterrupted.
* Customary International Law: Even though Iran has signed but not ratified UNCLOS, and the United States has not ratified it, both countries largely recognize that the UNCLOS rules on transit passage reflect customary international law, which applies to all nations.
* The 1958 Convention on the Territorial Sea: Similar to UNCLOS, this convention forbids the suspension of innocent passage of foreign ships through straits used for international navigation.
* 1949 Corfu Channel Case: The International Court of Justice (ICJ) established that international straits must remain open for passage during peacetime, a principle that has been interpreted to apply even in situations of armed conflict.
Key Considerations in the Current Context (March 2026):
* De Facto Closures: While Iran legally cannot block the strait, recent Iranian threats and actions—specifically targeting ships linked to the US, Israel, and their allies—have caused "de facto" closures.
* Legal Challenges: Iran often claims the right to regulate passage during wartime, arguing that "non-hostile" ships may pass, while targeting others. However, this often violates the "no suspension" requirement of UNCLOS.
On Sunday, Iranian lawmaker Alaeddin Boroujerdi told the United Kingdom-based, Farsi-language satellite TV channel Iran International that the country has been charging some vessels $2m to pass through the strait.
“Now, because war has costs, naturally, we must do this and take transit fees from ships passing through the Strait of Hormuz,” he said.
VIDEOs Now Playing - 01:00 - GCC chief says Iran charging for ships to pass Strait of Hormuz
How many ships are waiting to pass through the strait?
International Maritime Organization Secretary-General Arsenio Dominguez told Al Jazeera that nearly 2,000 ships are waiting on both sides of the strait to sail through it.
Maritime intelligence service Windward said this build-up suggests that “many operators have chosen to hold position outside Hormuz rather than commit immediately to long-haul rerouting.”
Only 16 crossings by ships with their Automatic Identification System (AIS) switched on were observed in the Strait of Hormuz in the week from March 15 to Sunday. Windward separately confirmed that four cargo vessels crossed or were crossing the strait overnight on March 13 and into the early morning, including one Pakistani vessel.
Windward also observed the presence of eight “dark ships” exceeding 290 metres (950ft) long and operating in the strait with their AIS switched off.
Dark ships included a US-sanctioned ship observed near the UAE’s Khor Fakkan port, an important hub for oil tankers, on March 16 before turning off its AIS.
What is the process to collect tolls?
While the Iranian parliament is yet to pass the legislation to impose tolls, in the past two weeks, “26 vessel transits through the strait have followed a route pre-approved under the IRGC ‘toll booth’ system that requires the ship operators to submit to a vetting scheme,” Lloyd’s List reported on Wednesday. These ships did not have their AIS switched on.
Sources familiar with the new system have told .. https://www.lloydslist.com/LL1156720/Tehrans-toll-booth-system-is-now-controlling-Hormuz-traffic .. Lloyd’s List that to pass through the strait, vessel operators have to first reach out to intermediaries connected to the IRGC and submit all details of the vessel. This includes documentation, its International Maritime Organization number, the cargo being transported, the names of all members of the crew and the vessel’s final destination.
The intermediaries then submit the information to the IRGC’s naval command, which vets the information. If the vessel passes the screening, then the IRGC issues a clearance code and instructions on the route the vessel has to take to pass through the strait.
Once the ship is in the strait, IRGC commanders yell out over VHF radio, asking for the vessel’s clearance code. The ship answers, and if approved, a boat from Iran arrives to escort the vessel through the country’s territorial waters around Larak Island.
If ships don’t clear the IRGC navy’s screening test, they are not allowed to pass through the waterway.
On Tuesday, Alireza Tangsiri, the commander of the IRGC navy, said in a post on X that a container ship named Selen had been turned back due to “failure to comply with legal protocols and lack of permission” to pass through the Strait of Hormuz.
“The passage of any vessel through this waterway requires full coordination with Iran’s maritime authority,” he said.
Israel on Thursday said it killed Tangsiri along with other “senior officers of the naval command” in an air strike on Wednesday night. Iran has yet to comment on it.
Who pays the tolls?
Iran has said the Strait of Hormuz is open to all except the US and its allies.
In a letter sent to the 176 members of the International Maritime Organization on Tuesday, Iran said: “Non-hostile vessels, including those belonging to or associated with other States, may – provided that they neither participate in nor support acts of aggression against Iran and ?fully ?comply with the declared safety and security regulations – benefit from safe passage through the Strait of Hormuz in coordination with the competent Iranian authorities.”
So far, after talks with what Iran called “friendly” nations, some ships from Malaysia, China, Egypt, South Korea and India have been allowed to pass through the strait.
According to Lloyd’s, at least two vessels that have transited the strait so far have paid a fee in yuan, China’s currency. Lloyd’s List said on Monday that one “transit was brokered by a Chinese maritime services company acting as an intermediary, which also handled the payment to Iranian authorities”. It is, however, not clear how much the vessels paid.
But according to the Indian government, no payments have been made by New Delhi to Iran to secure the safe passage of Indian vessels through the strait.
“No permission is required to sail through the strait. … There is freedom for navigation through the strait. Since the strait is narrow, only the entry and exit lanes are demarked, which need to be followed by shipping lines. … It is the decision of the charterer and shipping company when to sail or when not to sail,” Rajesh Kumar Sinha, special secretary of the Indian Ministry of Ports, Shipping and Waterways, said on Tuesday, according to Indian media reports.
The ministry added that two ships carrying more than 92,600 tonnes of liquefied petroleum gas, had transited and are scheduled to reach the subcontinent between Thursday and Saturday.
Apurva Mehta, a partner at the Indian law firm ANB Legal, told Al Jazeera that permitting certain friendly nations to transit the Strait of Hormuz would be discriminatory.
“It is currently not clear which vessels would have to pay toll in the coming days and the currency in which such payments will be made,” she said.
“However, it would appear that commercial considerations would overpower legitimacy of such ‘tolls’ and nations would be keen on clearing their consignments, even if it would subject them to payment of ‘tolls’,” she added.
VIDEO - 2:23 - Asia hit by oil shock as Strait of Hormuz disruptions deepen: Explainer
Is charging tolls on vessels passing through the strait legal?
According to .. GCC chief says Iran charging for ships to pass Strait of Hormuz .. Article 38 of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), all ships and aircraft “enjoy the right of transit passage”, which cannot be suspended by any country.
Under Article 17 of the convention, every foreign ship has a right of innocent passage in the territorial waters of any nation, Mehta said.
“Under Article 19 of the UNCLOS, passage is innocent so long as it is not prejudicial to the peace, good order or security of the coastal state,” she told Al Jazeera.
Mehta explained that there are 13 categories under which the passage may be considered “prejudicial” by the coastal state.
“If the coastal state deems a passage to be not innocent, they can take necessary steps to prevent such passage, including suspending in specified areas of its territorial sea the innocent passage of foreign ships if such suspension is essential for the protection of its security,” she said.
Mehta noted that although Iran is a signatory to the UNCLOS, its parliament has not ratified it.
“Therefore, Iran would contend that they are not bound by the international regime under UNCLOS,” she told Al Jazeera.
[Thought: Since Israel, and the US under Trump, shits on and ignores UN laws why should Iran be different. One answer to that, of course, is that Israel has the US of it's side which gives it - for now - virtual immunity against violation of international laws.]
Jason Chuah, a professor of maritime law, said at its narrowest point, the Strait of Hormuz is only 21 nautical miles (39km) wide, and under the UNCLOS, coastal states may claim up to 12 nautical miles (22km) of sea from their coasts as their territorial waters.
“The entire width of the strait consists of the overlapping territorial seas of Iran and Oman,” Chuah from the City University of London said, adding that there is no high sea, or parts of the sea beyond the territorial waters of a country.
“Iran thus claims sovereignty over the area,” he told Al Jazeera.
However, he highlighted that Iran has no jurisdiction on anything beyond 12 nautical miles from its coast. “So it cannot charge a toll if your ship uses the Omani coastline.But it reserves the right to attack any ship whether on the Omani or Iranian side by missiles, mines or drones,” he said.
“So if you want your ship to be safe, you might decide to sail on the Iranian side and pay and get safe passage.”
He added that under the laws of armed conflict and the principle of self-defence, a belligerent state like Iran may also argue it has the right to “visit and search” vessels to ensure they are not contributing to the enemy’s war effort.
Visit and search procedures apply during times of war when “belligerent warships have a traditional right to stop and board merchant vessels to verify their nationality and check for contraband intended for the enemy,” Chuah explained.
He noted that for this to be legal under Article 51 of UNCLOS, the action must be necessary to repel an attack and proportionate.
“I would, however, argue that stopping all commercial traffic or charging transit fees exceeds the bounds of self-defence and becomes illegal economic warfare,” he said.
This is not the first time that wartime tolls have been reported.
In October 2024, a UN Security Council report alleged that Yemen’s Houthis had been charging ships passing along its coastline.
“The Houthis allegedly collected illegal fees from a few shipping agencies to allow their ships to sail through the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden without being attacked,” the UN report said. “The sources estimate the Houthis’ earnings from these illegal safe-transit fees to be about $180 million per month,” the report added. The Houthis have rejected these claims.
At that time, the Iran-backed Houthis had carried out attacks on commercial ships in the Red Sea in solidarity with Palestinians. The Houthis had claimed they were targeting Israeli-linked or Israel-bound vessels in protest against Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza.
While Iran has yet to legally ratify its toll booth system, Sultan al-Jaber, the CEO of the Abu Dhabi state oil company, ADNOC, has described any restriction of passage through the Strait of Hormuz by Iran as “economic terrorism”.
“When Iran holds Hormuz hostage, every nation pays the ransom at the gas pump, at the grocery store, at the pharmacy,” al-Jaber said in a speech in the US on Thursday.
“No country can be allowed to destabilise the global economy in this way. Not now. Not ever,” he added.
When war looks like prophecy: How U.S. ‘end time’ narratives frame the war with Iran "They Believe They Are Fulfilling Prophecy-The Rest of Us Will Pay the Price"
Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor
A businessman’s fist striking the Earth like a meteor, scattering debris.
The governing ideology of the far right has become a monstrous, supremacist survivalism. Our task is to build a movement strong enough to stop them
Yet despite backing from the heavy-hitter venture capitalists Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen, their extreme libertarian dreams kept bogging down: it turns out most self-respecting rich people don’t actually want to live on floating oil rigs, even if it means lower taxes, and while Próspera might be nice for a holiday and some body “upgrades”, its extra-national status is currently being challenged in court.
Now, all of a sudden, this once-fringe network of corporate secessionists finds itself knocking on open doors at the dead center of global power.
The first sign that fortunes were shifting came in 2023, when a campaigning Donald Trump, seemingly out of nowhere, promised to hold a contest that would lead to the creation of 10 “freedom cities” .. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/may/26/trump-project-2025-sanctuary-cities .. on federal lands. The trial balloon barely registered at the time, lost in the daily deluge of outrageous claims. Since the new administration took office, however, would-be country starters have been on a lobbying blitz, determined to turn Trump’s pledge into reality.
“The energy in DC is absolutely electric,” Trey Goff, the chief of staff of Próspera, recently enthused after a trip to Capitol Hill. Legislation paving the way for a bevy of corporate city-states should be complete by the end of the year, he claims.
Inspired by a warped reading of the political philosopher Albert Hirschman, figures including Goff, Thiel and the investor and writer Balaji Srinivasan have been championing what they call “exit” – the principle that those with means have the right to walk away from the obligations of citizenship, especially taxes and burdensome regulation. Retooling and rebranding the old ambitions and privileges of empires, they dream of splintering governments and carving up the world into hyper-capitalist, democracy-free havens under the sole control of the supremely wealthy, protected by private mercenaries, serviced by AI robots and financed by cryptocurrencies.
[Insert: Lime Time, I skipped and at 23:19 caught Kirk's admiration for Thomas Sowell. "Charlie Kirk Vs Liberal Students Highlight Reel" See, What’s wrong with Thomas Sowell? [...] What is not answered by this .. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3532411 , however, is why these inequalities would be unevenly distributed by race. It’s certainly not a realtor’s fault that there is a Black-White disparity in credit score, but that difference is not a natural fact of the universe. I and most other social scientists believe that there is inherited inequality from the entire history of American social life that at least in part accounts for why the distribution of these sorts of things are unequal by race. The literature on inherited racial inequalities in sociology, economics, and history is simply massive and cannot be hand-waved away. As it stands, Sowell’s argument on this point is hopelessly endogenous. P - This argument is also wrapped up with the claim that any government intervention intended to reduce disparities will result in unintended consequences that will most likely make things worse for the people you’re trying to help. This is, in the terms of Albert Hirschman .. https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674768680 , the “perversity thesis” — the common conservative argument that whatever change you want to implement in society will actually do the opposite of what you want it to do. The reason why this rhetorical move has power is because it seems intuitively true, and sometimes policies do have consequences of this kind. But it simply does not logically follow from the example that some such policies backfired that any such policy inevitably will. Black Rednecks https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=175229822]
Peter Thiel in Tokyo in 2019. Photograph: Kiyoshi Ota/Bloomberg via Getty Images
One might assume that it is contradictory for Trump, elected on a flag-waving “America first” platform, to lend credence to this vision of sovereign territories ruled over by billionaire god-kings. And much has been made of the colorful flame wars between the Maga mouth-piece Steve Bannon, a proud nationalist and populist, and the Trump-allied billionaires he has attacked .. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/31/opinion/steve-bannon-on-broligarchs-vs-populism.html .. as “technofeudalists” who “don’t give a flying fuck about the human being” – let alone the nation state. And conflicts inside Trump’s awkward, jerry-rigged coalition certainly exist, most recently reaching a boiling point .. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cdrgx4ky1xxo .. over tariffs. Still, the underlying visions might not be as incompatible as they first appear.
The startup country contingent is clearly foreseeing a future marked by shocks, scarcity and collapse. Their high-tech private domains are essentially fortressed escape pods, designed for the select few to take advantage of every possible luxury and opportunity for human optimization, giving them and their children an edge in an increasingly barbarous future. To put it bluntly, the most powerful people in the world are preparing for the end of the world, an end they themselves are frenetically accelerating.
That is not so far away from the more mass-market vision of fortressed nations that has gripped the hard right globally, from Italy to Israel, Australia to the United States: in a time of ceaseless peril, openly supremacist movements in these countries are positioning their relatively wealthy states as armed bunkers. These bunkers are brutal in their determination to expel and imprison unwanted humans (even if that requires indefinite confinement in extra-national penal colonies from Manus Island to Guantánamo Bay) and equally ruthless in their willingness to violently claim the land and resources (water, energy, critical minerals) they deem necessary to weather the coming shocks.
"Though it builds on enduring rightwing tendencies ... we simply have not faced such a powerful apocalyptic strain in government before
Interestingly, at a time when previously secular Silicon Valley elites are suddenly finding .. https://www.vanityfair.com/news/story/christianity-was-borderline-illegal-in-silicon-valley-now-its-the-new-religion .. Jesus, it is noteworthy that both of these visions – the priority-pass corporate state and the mass-market bunker nation – share a great deal in common with the Christian fundamentalist interpretation of the biblical Rapture, when the faithful will supposedly be lifted up to a golden city in heaven, while the damned are left to endure an apocalyptic final battle down here on earth.
If we are to meet our critical moment in history, we need to reckon with the reality that we are not up against adversaries we have seen before. We are up against end times fascism.
Reflecting on his childhood under Mussolini, the novelist and philosopher Umberto Eco observed in a celebrated essay .. https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1995/06/22/ur-fascism/ .. that fascism typically has an “Armageddon complex” – a fixation on vanquishing enemies in a grand final battle. But European fascism of the 1930s and 1940s also had a horizon: a vision for a future golden age after the bloodbath that, for its in-group, would be peaceful, pastoral and purified. Not today.
Alive to our era of genuine existential danger – from climate breakdown to nuclear war to sky-rocketing inequality and unregulated AI – but financially and ideologically committed to deepening those threats, contemporary far-right movements lack any credible vision for a hopeful future. The average voter is offered only remixes of a bygone past, alongside the sadistic pleasures of dominance over an ever-expanding assemblage of dehumanized others.
And so we have the Trump administration’s dedication to releasing its steady stream of real and AI-generated propaganda designed solely for these pornographic purposes. Footage of shackled immigrants being loaded on to deportation flights, set to the sounds of clanking chains and locking cuffs, which the official White House X account labeled “ASMR”, a reference to audio designed to calm the nervous system. Or the same account sharing news of the detention of Mahmoud Khalil, a US permanent resident who was active in Columbia University’s pro-Palestinian encampment, with the gloating words: “SHALOM, MAHMOUD.” Or any number of homeland security secretary Kristi Noem’s sadism-chic photo ops (atop a horse at the US-Mexican border, in front of a crowded prison cell in El Salvador, slinging a machine gun while arresting immigrants in Arizona …).
Kristi Noem speaks during a tour of an El Salvador prison in March. Photograph: Alex Brandon/AP
The governing ideology of the far right in our age of escalating disasters has become a monstrous, supremacist survivalism.
It is terrifying in its wickedness, yes. But it also opens up powerful possibilities for resistance. To bet against the future on this scale – to bank on your bunker – is to betray, on the most basic level, our duties to one another, to the children we love, and to every other life form with whom we share a planetary home. This is a belief system that is genocidal at its core and treasonous to the wonder and beauty of this world. We are convinced that the more people understand the extent to which the right has succumbed to the Armageddon complex, the more they will be willing to fight back, realizing that absolutely everything is now on the line.
Our opponents know full well that we are entering an age of emergency, but have responded by embracing lethal yet self-serving delusions. Having bought into various apartheid fantasies of bunkered safety, they are choosing to let the Earth burn. Our task is to build a wide and deep movement, as spiritual as it is political, strong enough to stop these unhinged traitors. A movement rooted in a steadfast commitment to one another, across our many differences and divides, and to this miraculous, singular planet.
Illustration of a gas mask.
Not so long ago, it was primarily religious fundamentalists who greeted signs of apocalypse with gleeful excitement about the long-awaited Rapture. Trump has handed critical posts to people who subscribe to that fiery orthodoxy, including several Christian Zionists who see Israel’s use of annihilatory violence to expand its territorial footprint not as illegal atrocities but as felicitous evidence that the Holy Land is getting closer to the conditions under which the Messiah will return, and the faithful will get their celestial kingdom.
Mike Huckabee, Trump’s newly confirmed ambassador to Israel, has strong ties to Christian Zionism, as does Pete Hegseth,his secretary of defense. Noem and Russell Vought, the Project 2025 architect who now leads the office of budget and management, are both staunch advocates for Christian nationalism. Even Thiel, who is gay and notorious for his party lifestyle, has been heard musing about the arrival of the antichrist of late (spoiler: he thinks it’s Greta Thunberg, more on that soon).
But you don’t need to be a biblical literalist, or even religious, to be an end times fascist. Today, plenty of powerful secular people have embraced a vision of the future that follows a nearly identical script, one in which the world as we know it collapses under its weight and a chosen few survive and thrive in various kinds of arks, bunkers and gated “freedom cities”. In a 2019 paper titled Left Behind: Future Fetishists, Prepping and the Abandonment of Earth, the communication scholars Sarah T Roberts and Mél Hogan described the longing for a secular Rapture: “In the accelerationist imaginary, the future is not about harm reduction, limits or restoration; rather it is a politics driving toward an endgame.”
Mike Huckabee touring Jewish settlements in East Jerusalem in 2008. Photograph: David Silverman/Getty Images
Elon Musk, who dramatically grew his fortune alongside Thiel at PayPal, embodies this implosive ethos. This is a person who looks up at the wonders of the night sky and apparently sees only opportunities to fill that inky unknown with his own space junk. Though he burnished his reputation warning about the dangers of the climate crisis and AI,he and his so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge) henchmen now spend their days escalating those same risks (and many others) by slashing not only environmental regulations but entire regulatory agencies, with the apparent end goal of replacing federal workers with chatbots.
Who needs a functioning nation state when outer space – now reportedly Musk’s singular obsession – beckons? For Musk, Mars has become a secular ark, which he claims is key to the survival of human civilization, perhaps via uploaded consciousnesses to an artificial general intelligence. Kim Stanley Robinson, the author of the sci-fi Mars Trilogy that appears to have partially inspired Musk, is blunt about the dangers of the billionaire’s fantasies about colonizing Mars. It is, he says, “just a moral hazard that creates the illusion we can wreck Earth and still be okay. It’s totally not true.”
Much like religious end-timers who long to escape the corporeal realm, Musk’s drive for humanity to become “multiplanetary” is made possible by his inability to appreciate the multispecies splendor of our only home. Evidently uninterested in the vast bounty that surrounds him, or in ensuring Earth can continue buzzing with diversity, he instead deploys his vast fortune to bring about a future that would see a handful of people and robots eke out survival on two barren orbs (a radically depleted Earth and a terraformed Mars). Indeed, in a strange twist on the Old Testament tale, Musk and his fellow tech billionaires, having arrogated god-like powers to themselves, aren’t content to just build the arks. They appear to be doing their best to cause the flood. Today’s rightwing leaders and their rich allies are not just taking advantage of catastrophes, shock-doctrine and disaster-capitalism style, but simultaneously provoking and planning for them.
What of the Maga base, though? Not all are sufficiently faithful to earnestly believe in the Rapture, and most certainly don’t have the cash to buy a spot in a “freedom city” let alone on a rocket ship. Fear not. End times fascism offers the promise of many more affordable arks and bunkers, these ones well within reach for lower-level foot soldiers.
Listen to Steve Bannon’s daily podcast – which bills itself as Maga’s premier media outlet – and you will be barraged with a singular message: the world is going to hell, the infidels are breaching the barricades, and a final battle is coming. Be prepared. The prepper message becomes particularly pronounced when Bannon switches to hawking his advertisers’ products. Buy Birch Gold, Bannon tells his audience, because the over-leveraged US economy is going to crash and you can’t trust the banks. Stock up on ready-to-eat meals from My Patriot Supply. Sharpen your target practice using a laser-guided at-home system. The last thing you would want to do is depend on the government during a disaster, he reminds listeners (left unsaid: especially now that the Doge boys are selling off the government for parts).
"End times fascism is a darkly festive fatalism – a final refuge for those who find it easier to celebrate destruction than imagine living without supremacy
Bannon doesn’t only urge his audience to make their own bunkers, of course. He also advances a vision of the United States as a bunker in its own right, one in which Ice agents stalk the streets, workplaces and campuses, disappearing those deemed enemies of US policy and interests. The bunkered nation lies at the heart of the Maga agenda, and of end times fascism. Inside its logic, the first job is to harden national borders and expunge all enemies, foreign and domestic. This ugly work is now well under way, with the Trump administration, enabled by the supreme court, having invoked the Alien Enemies Act to deport hundreds of Venezuelan immigrants to Cecot, the now infamous mega-prison in El Salvador. The facility, which shaves prisoners heads and packs up to 100 people into a single cell, stacked with bare bunks, operates under the civil liberties-destroying “state of exception” first declared over three years ago by the country’s crypto-loving, Christian Zionist prime minister, Nayib Bukele.
Bukele has offered to provide the same fee-for-service system for US citizens the administration would like to drop into a judicial black hole. “I love that,” Trump said recently, when asked about the proposal. No wonder: Cecot is the sick if logical corollary of the “freedom city” fantasy – a zone where everything is for sale and due process does not apply. We should expect much more of this sadism. In a chillingly candid statement, the acting Ice director, Todd Lyons, told the 2025 Border Security Expo that he wanted to see a more “business”-oriented approach to these deportations, “like [Amazon] Prime, but with human beings”.
If policing the boundaries of the bunkered nation is end times fascism’s job one, equally important is job two: for the US government to lay claim to whatever resources its protected citizens might need to get through the tough times ahead. Maybe it’s Panama’s canal. Or Greenland’s fast-melting shipping routes. Or Ukraine’s critical minerals. Or Canada’s fresh water. We should think of this less as old-school imperialism than super-sized prepping, at the level of the national state. Gone are the old colonial fig leaves of spreading democracy or God’s word – when Trump covetously scans the globe, he is stockpiling for civilizational collapse.
This bunker mentality also helps explain JD Vance’s controversial forays into Catholic theology. The vice-president, who owes his political career in no small part to the largess of the premier prepper Thiel, explained to Fox News that, according to the medieval Christian concept of ordo amoris (translated both as “order of love” and “order of charity”), love is not owed to those outside the bunker: “You love your family, and then you love your neighbor, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow citizens in your own country. And then after that, you can focus and prioritize the rest of the world.” (Or not, as the Trump administration’s foreign policy would indicate.) In other words, we owe nothing to anyone outside our bunker.
Though it builds on enduring rightwing tendencies – justifying hateful exclusions is hardly new under the ethno-nationalist sun – we simply have not faced such a powerful apocalyptic strain in government before. The “end of history” swagger of the post-cold war era is rapidly being supplanted by a conviction we are in the actual end of times. Doge may wrap itself in the banner of economic “efficiency”, and Musk’s underlings may evoke memories of the young, US-trained “Chicago Boys” who designed the economic shock therapy for Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorial regime, but this is not simply the old marriage of neoliberalism and neoconservatism. It’s a new, money-worshiping millenarian mashup that says we need to smash the bureaucracy and replace humans with chatbots in order to cut “waste, fraud and abuse” – and, also, because the bureaucracy is where the Trump-resisting demons hide. This is where the tech bros merge with the TheoBros, a real group of hyper-patriarchal Christian supremacists with ties to Hegseth and others in the Trump administration.
Steve Bannon advances a vision of the United States as a bunker in its own right. Photograph: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
As fascism always does, today’s Armageddon complex crosses class lines, bonding billionaires to the Maga base. Thanks to decades of deepening economic stresses, alongside ceaseless and skillful messaging pitting workers against one another, a great many people understandably feel unable to protect themselves from the disintegration that surrounds them (no matter how many months of ready-to-eat meals they buy). But there are emotional compensations on offer: you can cheer the end of affirmative action and DEI, glorify mass deportation, enjoy the denial of gender-affirming care to trans people, villainize educators and health workers who think they know better than you, and applaud the demise of economic and environmental regulations as a way to own the libs. End times fascism is a darkly festive fatalism – a final refuge for those who find it easier to celebrate destruction than imagine living without supremacy.
It’s also a self-reinforcing downward spiral: Trump’s furious attacks on every structure designed to protect the public from diseases, dangerous foods and disasters – even to tell the public when disasters are headed their way – strengthen the case for prepperism at both the high and low ends, all while creating myriad new opportunities for privatization and profiteering by the oligarchs powering this rapid-fire unmaking of the social and regulatory state.
Illustration of a fortified bunker filled with trees, with barred doors and barbed wire along the side. A security camera points outward. Outside the bunker are flames and rocks.
At the dawn of Trump’s first term, the New Yorker investigated a phenomenon that it described as “doomsday prep for the super-rich”. Back then, it was already clear that in Silicon Valley and on Wall Street, the more serious high-end survivalists were hedging against climate disruption and social collapse by buying space in custom-built underground bunkers and building escape homes on high ground in places like Hawaii (where Mark Zuckerberg has downplayed his 5,000 sq ft underground pad as a “little shelter”) and New Zealand (where Thiel purchased nearly 500 acres but found his plan to build a luxury survivalist compound rejected by local authorities in 2022 for being an eyesore).
This millenarianism is bound up with a suite of other Silicon Valley .. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/silicon-valley .. intellectual fads, all premised on an end-times-inflected belief that our planet is headed towards a cataclysm and it’s time to make some hard choices about which parts of humanity can be saved. Transhumanism is one such ideology, encompassing everything from minor human-machine “enhancements” to the quest to upload human intelligence into a still illusory artificial general intelligence. There is also effective altruism and longtermism, both of which skip over redistributive approaches to helping those in need in the here and now in favor of a cost-benefit approach to doing the most good in the long term.
Though they can appear benign at first glance, these ideas are shot through with dangerous racial, ableist and gender biases about which parts of humanity are worth enhancing and saving – and which could be sacrificed for the supposed good of the whole. They also share a marked lack of interest in urgently addressing the underlying drivers of collapse – a responsible and rational goal that a growing cohort of figures now actively shun. Instead of effective altruism the Mar-a-Lago regular Andreessen and others have embraced “effective accelerationism” .. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/10/technology/ai-acceleration.html .. or the “deliberate propulsion of technological development” without guardrails.
Meanwhile, even darker philosophies are finding a wider audience, like the neoreactionary pro-monarchy rants of the coder Curtis Yarvin (another one of Thiel’s intellectual touchstones), or the “pro-natalism” .. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/mar/11/what-is-pronatalism-right-wing-republican .. movement’s obsession with dramatically increasing the number of “western” babies (a Musk fixation), as well as the exit guru Srinivasan’s vision of a “tech zionist” San Francisco where corporate loyalists and police join forces to politically cleanse the city of liberals to make way for their networked apartheid state.
Marc Andreessen and Balaji Srinivasan speak during a panel discussion about bitcoin in San Francisco in 2014. Photograph: Paul Chinn/San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images
As the AI scholars Timnit Gebru and Émile P Torres have written, though the methods may be new, this “bundle” of ideological fads “are direct descendants of first-wave eugenics”, which also saw a small subset of humanity making decisions about which parts of the whole were worth continuing and which needed to be phased out, cleared out, or terminated. Until recently, few paid attention. Much like Próspera, where members can already experiment with human-machine mergers such as having their Tesla keys implanted into their hands, these intellectual fads seemed to be the marginal hobby horses of a few Bay Area dilettantes with money and caution to burn. No longer.
Three recent material developments have accelerated end times fascism’s apocalyptic appeal. The first is the climate crisis. While some high-profile figures might still publicly deny or minimize the threat, global elites, whose ocean-front properties and datacenters are intensely vulnerable to rising temperatures and sea levels, are well-versed in the ramifying perils of an ever-heating world. The second is Covid-19: epidemiological models had long predicted the possibility of a pandemic devastating our globally networked world; the actual arrival of one was taken by many powerful people as a sign that we have officially arrived at what US military analysts forecasted as “the Age of Consequences”. No more predictions, it’s going down. The third factor is the rapid advancement and adoption of AI, a set of technologies that have long been associated with sci-fi terrors about machines turning on their makers with ruthless efficiency – fears expressed most forcefully by the same people who are developing these technologies. All of these existential crises are layered on top of escalating tensions between nuclear-armed powers.
None of this should be written off as paranoia. Many of us feel the imminence of breakdown so acutely that we cope by entertaining ourselves with various versions of life in a post-apocalyptic bunker, streaming Apple’s Silo or Hulu’s Paradise. As the UK analyst and editor Richard Seymour reminds us in his recent book, Disaster Nationalism: “The apocalypse is no mere fantasy. We are living in it, after all, from deadly viruses to soil erosion, from economic crisis to geopolitical chaos.”
"The forces we are up against have made peace with mass death. They are treasonous to this world and its human and non-human inhabitants
Trump 2.0’s economic project is a Frankenstein’s monster of the industries driving all of these threats – fossil fuels, weapons and resource-ravenous cryptocurrency and AI. Everyone involved in these sectors knows that there is no way to build the artificial mirror world that AI promises to construct without sacrificing this world – these technologies consume too much energy, too many critical minerals, and too much water for the two to coexist in any kind of equilibrium. This month, the former Google executive Eric Schmidt admitted as much, telling .. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HXoXMETZUiE .. Congress that AI’s “profound” energy needs are projected to triple in the next few years, with much of it coming from fossil fuels, because nuclear can’t come online fast enough. This planet-incinerating level of consumption is necessary, he explained, to enable an intelligence “higher” than humanity, a digital god rising from the ashes of our relinquished world.
And they are worried – just not about the actual threats they are unleashing. What keeps the leaders of these entangled industries up at night is the prospect of a civilizational wake-up call – of serious, internationally coordinated government efforts to rein in their rogue sectors before it’s too late. From the perspective of their ever-expanding bottom lines, the apocalypse is not collapse; it’s regulation.
The fact that their profits are predicated on planetary devastation helps explain why do-gooder discourse among the powerful is giving way to open expressions of disdain for the idea that we owe each other anything by right of our shared humanity. Silicon Valley is done with altruism, effective or otherwise. Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg pines for a culture that celebrates “aggression”. Alex Karp, Thiel’s business partner at the surveillance firm Palantir Technologies, rebukes the “losing” “self-flagellation” of those who question American superiority and the benefits of autonomous weapons systems (and, by association, the lucrative military contracts that have made Karp’s vast fortune). Musk informs Joe Rogan that empathy is “the fundamental weakness of western civilization” and he vents, after failing to purchase a supreme court election in Wisconsin: “It increasingly appears that humanity is a biological bootloader for digital superintelligence.” Meaning we humans are nothing but grist for Grok, the AI service he owns. (He did tell us he was “dark Maga” – and he’s not the only one.)
In arid and climate-stressed Spain, one of the groups calling for a moratorium on new datacenters calls itself Tu Nube Seca Mi Río – Spanish for “your cloud is drying my river”. The name is fitting, and not just for Spain.
An unspeakably dismal choice is being made before our eyes and without our consent: machines over humans, inanimate over animate, profits over all else. With stunning speed, the big tech megalomaniacs have quietly rolled back their net-zero pledges and lined up by Trump’s side, hellbent on sacrificing this world’s real and precious resources and creativity at the altar of a vampiric, virtual realm. This is the last great heist, and they are getting ready to ride out the storms they themselves are summoning – and they will try to defame and destroy anyone who gets in their way.
Consider Vance’s recent European sojourn, where the vice-president harangued world leaders for “handwringing about safety” in relation to job-destroying AI while demanding Nazi and fascist speech go uncurtailed online. At one point he made a telling aside, expecting a laugh that never came: “If American democracy can survive 10 years of Greta Thunberg’s scolding, you guys can survive a few months of Elon Musk.”
https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/b89a547ccde49efecce70834a24d40aebbb721eb/0_0_4240_2827/master/4240.jpg?width=1900&dpr=2&s=none&crop=none JD Vance speaks at the Munich Security Conference in February. Photograph: dts News Agency Germany/REX/Shutterstock
His comment echoed those made by his equally humorless patron Thiel. In recent interviews focused on the theological underpinnings of his far-right politics, the Christian billionaire has repeatedly compared the indefatigable young climate activist to the antichrist – a figure he warns was prophesied to come bearing a misleading message of “peace and safety”. “If Greta gets everyone on the planet to ride a bicycle, maybe that’s a way to solve climate change, but it has sort of this quality of going from the frying pan into the fire,” Thiel intoned.
Why Thunberg, why now? In part, it’s clearly the apocalyptic fear of regulation eating into their super-profits: according to Thiel, the science-based climate action Thunberg and others demand could only be enforced by a “totalitarian state”, which he claims is more dire a threat than climate breakdown (most distressingly, the taxes under such conditions would be “quite high”). There may also be something else about Thunberg that frightens them: her steadfast commitment to this planet and the many life forms who call it home – not to simulations of this world generated by AI, or to a hierarchy of those deserving of life and those who are not, nor to any of the various extra-planetary escape fantasies the end times fascists are selling.
She is committed to staying, while the end times fascists have, at least in their imaginings, already left this realm, ensconced in their opulent shelters or transcended to the digital ether, or to Mars.
Shortly after Trump’s re-election, one of us had the opportunity to interview Anohni, one of the few musicians who have attempted to make art that wraps its arms around the death drive that has gripped our world. Asked about what connects the willingness of powerful people to let the planet burn and the drive to deny bodily autonomy to women and to trans people like her, she responded by drawing on her Irish Catholic upbringing: it’s “a very long-held myth that we are enacting and embodying. This is the culmination of their Rapture. This is their escape from the voluptuous cycle of creation. This is their escape from Mother.”
Illustration of a large, futuristic boot about to step on a small snail surrounded by grass and tiny red flowers.
How do we break this apocalyptic fever? First, we help each other face the depth of the depravity that has gripped the hard right in all of our countries. To move forward with focus, we must first understand this simple fact: we are up against an ideology that has given up not only on the premise and promise of liberal democracy but on the livability of our shared world – on its beauty, on its people, on our children, on other species. The forces we are up against have made peace with mass death. They are treasonous to this world and its human and non-human inhabitants.
Second, we counter their apocalyptic narratives with a far better story about how to survive the hard times ahead without leaving anyone behind. A story capable of draining end times fascism of its gothic power and galvanizing a movement ready to put it all on the line for our collective survival. A story not of end times, but of better times; not of separation and supremacy, but of interdependence and belonging; not of escaping, but staying put and staying faithful to the troubled earthly reality in which we are enmeshed and bound.
This basic sentiment, of course, is not new. It is central to Indigenous cosmologies, and it lies at the heart of animism. Go back far enough and every culture and faith has its own tradition of respecting the sanctity of here, and not searching for Zion in an elusive ever-distant promised land. In eastern Europe, before the fascist and Stalinist annihilations, the Jewish socialist Labor Bund organized around the yiddish concept of Doikayt, or “hereness”. Molly Crabapple, who has written a forthcoming book about this neglected history, defines Doikayt as the right to “fight for freedom and safety in the places where they lived, in defiance of everyone who wanted them dead” – and rather than be forced to flee to safety in Palestine or the United States. Perhaps what is needed is a modern-day universalization of that concept: a commitment to the right to the “hereness” of this particular ailing planet, to these frail bodies, to the right to live in dignity wherever on the planet we are, even when the inevitable shocks forces us to move. “Hereness” can be portable, free of nationalism, rooted in solidarity, respectful of indigenous rights and unbounded by borders.
Anti-Trump protesters march against the administration in New York in January. Photograph: Julius Constantine Motal/The Guardian
That future would require its own apocalypse, its own world-ending and revelation, though of a very different sort. Because as the scholar of policing Robyn Maynard has observed: “In order to make earthly planetary survival possible, some versions of this world need to end.”
We have reached a choice point, not about whether we are facing apocalypse but what form it will take. The activist sisters Adrienne Maree and Autumn Brown touched on this recently on their aptly named podcast, How to Survive the End of the World. In this moment, when end times fascism is waging war on every front, new alliances are essential. But instead of asking: “Do we all share the same worldview?” Adrienne urges us to ask: “Is your heart beating and do you plan to live? Then come this way and we will figure out the rest on the other side.”
To have a hope of combating the end times fascists, with their ever-constricting and asphyxiating concentric circles of “ordered love”, we will need to build an unruly open-hearted movement of the Earth-loving faithful: faithful to this planet, its people, its creatures and to the possibility of a livable future for us all. Faithful to here. Or, to quote Anohni again, this time referring to the goddess in which she now places her faith: “Have you stopped to consider that this might have been her best idea?”
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