The far right grows through disaster fantasies
Cory Doctorow:: The right thrives on fantasies about urban collapse, “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,” while denying the existence of real-world catastrophes like climate change.
Think of conservatives' obsession with imaginary and hypothetical children, from Qanon’s child trafficking conspiracies to the forced birth movement’s fixation on “the unborn.”
It’s not just that these kids don’t exist – it’s that the right is either indifferent or actively hostile to real children. Qanon peaked at the same time as Trump’s “kids in cages” family separation policy, which saw thousands of kids separated from their parents, many forever, as a deliberate policy.
The forced birth movement spent decades fighting to overturn Roe in the name of saving “the unborn” – even as its leaders were also overturning the Child Tax Credit, the most successful child poverty alleviation measure in American history. Actual children were left to sink into food insecurity and precarity, to be enlisted to work overnight shifts in meat-packing plants, to fall into homelessness – even as the movement celebrated the “culture of life” that would rescue hypothetical children.
Lifting kids out of poverty and building a world where parents can afford to raise as many children as they care to have is a collective endeavor. Firebombing abortion clinics or storming into a pizza parlor with an assault rifle is an individual rescue fantasy that escapes into the world.