By Richard Seymour

I noticed some years ago that the new far right was obsessed with fantasy scenarios of imaginary and extreme evil. FEMA death camps, “great replacement theory,” the “Great Reset,” fifteen-minute cities, 5G towers being beacons of mind control, and microchips installed in people through vaccines. In India, they have this theory called the Romeo jihad: that Muslim men are seducing Hindu girls and converting them to Islam, thus waging a sort of demographic war. Or take QAnon’s fantasies of satanist, communist pedophiles running the world. They are really enthralled and obsessed by hallucinatory scenarios of extreme disaster.

Why is this? There’s no shortage of real disasters: wildfires, floods, wars, recessions, and pandemics. Yet quite often they have denialist relationships with these disasters. Many say COVID-19 was just an excuse for the Fourth Reich, or that climate change is an excuse for a liberal totalitarian regime, a new form of communism, etc.

Right-wingers are really enthralled and obsessed by hallucinatory scenarios of extreme disaster.

I often take the example of the wildfires in Oregon. The fires ripped across the plains and through the forest and burned at 800 degrees Celsius. They were a real threat to people’s lives. But a lot of people refused to leave because they heard that it was actually Antifa setting the blazes and that it was part of a seditious conspiracy to wipe out white conservative Christians. So, rather than flee for their lives, they set up armed checkpoints and pointed their guns at people, claiming that they were on the lookout for Antifa.

Why do they go for this mass apocalyptic fantasy? Because it processes disaster in a way that is actually quite enlivening. Most of the time, when people go through disasters, it results in depression and withdrawing a bit from life and the public sphere. But the far right offers you a different way out. It says “those demons in your head that you’ve been wrestling with, they’re actually real and you can kill them. The problem is not anything difficult, or abstract or systemic, it’s just bad people, and we’re going to get them.” It takes all the difficult emotions that people deal with in the face of economic shocks and climate change and gives them an outlet that feels valid and validating.