Author and activist Naomi Klein believes that centrists, liberals, and progressives bear some responsibility for the proliferation of right-wing “conspiracy fantasies” in the run-up to the U.S. presidential election on Nov. 5.

In her Bartels World Affairs Lecture hosted by the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies on Oct. 23, Klein described how “conspiracy influencers” thrive when the government and civil society fail to address “the myriad hardships and debasements of racial capitalism” and “an ambient feeling of deep injustice.”

“It’s a very simple principle: politics hates a vacuum. And if you don’t fill that vacuum with credible hope … someone else is going to fill it with hate.”

Klein’s visit was part of Global Cornell’s year of events and discussions exploring global democratic trends. Vice Provost for International Affairs and acting director of the Einaudi Center Wendy Wolford welcomed Klein and thanked her for “helping us better understand the world we have created and live in, because as she argues, putting our world in conversation requires confronting our doubles and shadows.”

Klein’s 2023 book Doppelganger looks at how the far right has appropriated issues and language historically associated with the left. Her research included listening to hundreds of hours of the “War Room” podcast hosted by former president Donald Trump’s close advisor Steve Bannon.

“The surging far right is feeding off of the silences of liberals and progressives,” Klein said. “When a potent issue ceases to be discussed by us …, people like [Ohio senator and vice presidential candidate] JD Vance and Steve Bannon move in and make a doppelganger reactionary version of those issues.”

This “mirror world” has very different goals than the social movements of the left. In railing against immigrants, for example, Trump, Vance, Bannon, and others “harness the power of public discontent at the powerful and redirect that anger systematically at the most vulnerable,” Klein said. 

Reality has proven to be a weak weapon. Liberals and progressives once assumed that more—and more frequent—climate-related disasters would finally force skeptics to accept that climate change is real. Catastrophic storms, floods, fires, and heat waves have instead generated “parallel disinformation hurricanes.” 

The right has seized on this season’s hurricanes Helene and Milton to spread false claims that Democrats are controlling the weather and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) is broke because Vice President Kamala Harris has given all its money to undocumented immigrants. 

“They get the facts wrong, but they get the feelings right,” she said. “And I think that’s one of the most important things to understand about conspiracy culture.” 

That culture also obscures what Klein considers true conspiracies between large corporations, wealthy individuals and the government— including collusion between politicians and oil companies that have known for decades about the role of fossil fuels in climate change but have impeded efforts to regulate them. 

“Without leaders willing to tell the truth—even hard truth—as we face increasingly dire realities, lies and conspiracy fantasies will continue to flourish,” Klein cautioned.

Klein spoke several times about the war in Gaza, calling it “the most evil thing that I have ever witnessed in my life” and urging audience members to pay attention and speak up. She closed the lecture with a reading from Doppelganger, where she described one of her own “encounters with Israel’s doppelganger politics” during a 2009 journey across the Israeli border to talk with Palestinians and see the aftermath of the first Gaza War.

“The borders and walls don’t protect us from rising temperatures or surging viruses or raging wars,” she concluded. “And the walls around ourselves and our kids won’t hold, either. Because we are porous and connected, as so many doppelganger stories have attempted to teach us.”

After the talk, Cornell political scientists Kenneth Roberts and Suzanne Mettler (both College of Arts and Sciences) and past secretary general of the Community of Democracies Thomas Garrett (Einaudi Center Lund Practitioner in Residence) joined Klein on stage for a panel discussion.

Undergraduates Afsheen Alvi ’26 (information science, Cornell Bowers CIS), Natalie Dreyer ’27 (health care policy, Cornell Brooks School of Public Policy), and Bally Warren ’26 (government, A&S) then addressed questions to Klein. All three are Undergraduate Global Scholars at the Einaudi Center.

The Einaudi Center’s annual Bartels World Affairs Lecture and related events are made possible by the generosity of Henry E. Bartels ’48 and Nancy Horton Bartels ’48.