Conspiracy politics arises as foundational Western lies visibly crumble

Evidence

As I noted earlier, Bannon pounds relentlessly at what he calls the Big Steal—the claim that Biden stole the 2020 election—while the Democrats call that the Big Lie. And it is a big lie, a dangerous one. But is it the Big Lie? Bigger, say, than trickle-down economics? Bigger than “tax cuts create jobs”? Bigger than infinite growth on a finite planet? Bigger than Thatcher’s double whammy of “There is no alternative” and “There is no such thing as society”? Bigger, for that matter, than Manifest Destiny, Terra Nullius, and the Doctrine of Discovery—the lies that form the basis of the United States, Canada, Australia, and every other settler colonial state? If we can stand to look at the Shadow Lands even for a moment, it becomes clear that we are ensnared in a web of life-annihilating lies and that whatever the Mirror World is on about this week is neither the biggest lie nor the one with the highest stakes. It’s entirely possible that Bannon and Wolf’s war on reality is just what happens when so many of the big lies that built the modern world visibly crumble. As the house collapses, some people choose to take flight into full-blown fantasy, sure—but that doesn’t mean that the rest of us who were also born and raised in that house are guardians of the truth. — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, 873

Categorization

• XREF: Directly extends the Shadow Lands thesis from earlier chapters; the doubling device here turns on the moral equivalence between Bannon and the liberal center built on settler-colonial lies.
• DEEPTHINKING: The reframing of Mirror World conspiracy as the collapse-psychology of a house built on foundational lies, which implicates the reader (guardians of the truth?) rather than merely indicting the other, is genuinely paradigm-shifting.
• QUESTION: Does this equivalency between settler-colonial foundational lies and Bannon’s conspiracy claims risk flattening a genuine moral hierarchy? Worth tracking whether Klein calibrates it.