Hatred as a refuge: How the far right is replacing climate fear with racial threats

“The far right does not deny the climate crisis—it simply replaces it with an easier enemy. Because it is too scary to fight climate change, they point to migrants. Thus, hatred becomes a ‘security blanket’ against fear of the future,” said Prof. Lee Medovoi during the international seminar for journalists “Fundamental Rights, Climate, and Environment,” held in Budapest from November 25 to 27. Lee Medovoi, during the international seminar for journalists “Fundamental Rights, Climate, and Environment,” held in Budapest from November 25 to 27, 2025, by BlueLink and Justice & Environment (J&E).

Lee Medovoi is an American social theorist and Professor of English at the University of Arizona, where he serves as Head of the Department of English and Founding Chair of the Graduate Interdisciplinary Program in Social, Cultural, and Critical Theory. Currently, he is a Senior Core Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study, Central European University (2025/26). Holding a PhD in Modern Thought and Literature from Stanford University, his research spans critical theory, biopolitics, race, religion, secularism, and environmental humanities. He is the author of influential books, including Rebels: Youth and the Cold War Origins of Identity (2005) and The Inner Life of Race (2024), both published by Duke University Press. A former founding director of the Portland Center for Public Humanities, he has led major Mellon Foundation-funded projects on global secularism and neoliberalism.

The full text of Prof. Lee Medovoi’s presentation:

Thank you so much for having me here today. I’d like to acknowledge up front that I am a social theorist and a visiting scholar at CEU’s Institute for Advanced Study this semester, so my methods and my audiences are probably very different from most of you. Still, I hope that what I have to say today will be of interest to this group.

The principal question I would like to consider with you is this: How and why do the politics of far-right movements complicate any effort to promote fundamental human and environmental rights in an era of climate change? I’d like to begin with two obvious observations about nationalist far-right movements and parties. The first is that they tend to deny that climate change is a major crisis for their nation, or indeed for life anywhere on the planet. At the same time, this doesn’t mean that we don’t claim this is a time of crisis. Instead, far-right political narratives dramatize other kinds of crisis: the crisis of an uncontrolled border, of crime by migrants, of cultural decline, or even a crisis of the great replacement of the national population by foreigners. All of these can be viewed as crisis narratives about a racial threat: they share a view that immigrants constitute a foreign population that poses an existential threat to the nation. You can see how fundamental rights in such a worldview will almost inevitably get pushed away from the dangers of climate change and toward an almost militarized logic of self-defense against foreign invasion.

So, on the one hand, a climate crisis that is denied, on the other hand, the crisis of a racial threat that is proclaimed from the rooftops. Are these two things connected in some way? Does the denial of climate change have anything to do with assertions about dangerous populations? I’m going to suggest that they are connected, but not in an obvious way. Since I’m visiting from the USA, let me begin with a few words by Donald Trump. But I will come back to the European context.

Trump is usually considered a denier of climate change. He doesn’t really believe in it. And this is why he withdrew from the Paris Climate Accord and canceled all of my country’s green policies. But look at the strange way that he denies climate change. He is what he said last month at the United Nations. There, he called climate change:
the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world in my opinion…All of these predictions…have cost their countries fortunes…If you don’t get away from this green scam, your country is going to fail.

Apparently, Trump wants to convince us that climate change is very important, just not as a reality. Let me propose a hypothesis: in calling climate change not a mistake, but instead a con job or a scam, Trump is claiming that someone is using the idea of climate change to secretly advance their interests. Trump is not alone here. In the UK, Nigel Farage has also called climate change a “scam” and “the biggest single waste of public money”. In France, Marine Le Pen has claimed that “environmentalism has been transformed into a religion”. And in this country, Victor Orban has called EU plans for tackling climate change a “utopian fantasy” that will drive up energy prices and destroy the middle class. European politicians are less likely than Trump to say that climate change doesn’t exist at all. But as you can see, they describe it as a highly exaggerated problem, used to defraud and perhaps socially control the public. It is still viewed as a scam.

Photo: David Valentine/Unsplash

What kind of scam is this? In a political ad titled the “Argument for America” that screened right before his election in 2016, Trump explains. The ad warns us about a corrupt establishment, including past presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, foreign ministers from around the world, and a number of financiers. All these people are said to be betraying American workers by handing their futures to foreigners and immigrants.

Trump’s ad dramatizes a conflict among three principal characters, each appearing multiple times: the American people, the corrupt global elites, and then a shifting third character who constitutes a different kind of threat. The American people appear as though worn out and nearly defeated by this corrupt establishment, which apparently dominates them through the power of finance. This is why the corrupt establishment is presented frequently through images of dollar bills and market readings. Then there is the third character. The ad pictures foreign workers who outcompete Americans from their Asian or Mexican factories. But it also pictures dangers out of home in America. Two men walking along a street with blurred faces. Are they criminals or cartel members? A crowd of people under a freeway underpass. Are they gathered for a political event? Are they homeless? These images seem intentionally ominous. The ad suggests that these are the people who most directly threaten American well-being. The establishment just ignores this threat because it is profitable to do so.

Now, even though climate change is never mentioned, even as a hoax, we can begin to see how it would fit into this story. It would be an example of the lies and fake news that the corrupt establishment uses to close factories, end the mining of fossil fuels, or encourage damaging trade deals and migrant labor. So, climate change IS a crisis, but only because it is part of a larger hoax used to cheat the people. What the far right is doing is substituting a human threat for an ecological one.
Why would such a substitution appeal to anyone? This a big question, and to answer it I’d like to introduce a concept from social theory called a “fetish.” A fetish is an object that we use as a magical substitute for a piece of reality that makes us anxious. It provides what Freud once called a “mechanism of defense” for the self. Let me illustrate what I mean through the example of a child’s security blanket. Imagine a child who is afraid of the dark. The child may not know exactly what it is afraid of. It is more than the darkness, somewhat like climate change, that creates a frightening uncertainty about what could happen next. To protect themself, the child invents a magical blanket that protects them when they hide underneath it.

Photo: Valentin Fernandez/Unsplash

If we think about it carefully, the child’s relationship to the anxiety-producing darkness would now appear split. On one level, the blanket relieves the anxiety and allows the child to feel safe. The child can now deny that they are still in danger. But on another level, the very fact that the child relies on this fetish every night shows that they recognize the persistence of the darkness as a threat. The blanket is actually a symptom of an underlying situation that has only been masked. The child continues to feel the anxiety. It is just that they have developed a technique for relieving it enough to get to sleep.

Let’s consider the far right’s talk of the climate change hoax through this concept of the fetish. On the one hand, an overheating world is anxiety-producing. People might suspect that, due to climate change, natural disasters are multiplying, food and water supplies are becoming unreliable, new diseases are spreading, and strangers in need are arriving, strangers who we fear might show us our own future. All this can undermine our basic sense of safety. Our relationship to reality gets colored by an anxiety that might burst out when we think we hear danger approaching, just like the child in the dark.

I am not just assuming that climate change makes people anxious. In her book, Generation Dread, sociologist Britt Ray interviewed over 10,000 people in ten countries between the ages of 16 and 25 about climate change. She concluded that serious anxiety had infected the everyday life of more than half of her subjects. Another discovery in her research is especially interesting. She noticed that fear of the changing climate is often combined with a sense of what she calls “government betrayal” and “moral injury.” You might think this feeling would make her subjects even more anxious, but I want to propose that instead, feelings of government betrayal and moral injury might reduce anxiety. Why? Because it gives you someone to blame for how you are feeling. It personifies the threat.

Photo: Nikolai Kolosov/Unsplash

 Here is a question. What would happen if you could transfer ALL the anxiety that climate change makes you feel onto to JUST your sense of political betrayal and moral injury? I’m proposing that you try to forget the original source of your anxiety in climate change by transferring it to a different crisis. Isn’t the far-right rhetoric of abandonment by a corrupt establishment—globalists, bureaucrats in Brussels—potentially an example of this? Perhaps the moment when climate change gets turned into the climate change hoax of the disloyal elites, it can become a fetish that protects the person who feels it. If they were actually aware of what they were doing, a person with such a fetish might say this: I know very well that I have found a magical substitute for something that frightens me very much. Still, don’t I find satisfaction and relief when the substitute makes me feel like the danger no longer exists? Or, I know that climate change hoax is just a replacement for the frightening reality of climate change. Still, isn’t it a huge relief to feel like the things that makes me feel so scared are really just some corrupt leaders and some dangerous immigrants?

The question we still haven’t answered, though, is why a story about corrupt leaders and dangerous immigrants would produce less anxiety than the thought of climate change. I’d like to answer this question by introducing the work of Moshe Postone, an American scholar who explored how Anti-Semitism worked during the era of the German Nazi Party. Postone begins with the observation that capitalism is an economic system with two interconnected aspects. On the one hand, it is a system that is always grounded in the material processes of mass production and wage labor. At the same time, because money is how the profit motive is realized, because people are paid for their work with money, and because they use that money to buy nearly everything required to live their lives, capitalism also has an abstract side to it that money represents. Even though industrial production is just as central to capitalism as money, says Postone, it is money alone that mistakenly comes to appear as an almost magically abstract substance from which all of capitalism’s power derives.

Photo: Trent Haaland/Unsplash

This has tremendous political consequences, according to Postone. Why? In moments of crisis, when capitalism produces hunger, misery, joblessness, inflation, or defeat, it encourages a politics that he calls “romantic anticapitalism,” which engages in a “one-sided attack on the abstract.” Postone notes that the Nazi Party talked a lot about how money and finance were destroying Germany. For them, capitalism’s power was completely located in the power of money. People felt dominated by hyperinflation, the shortages of goods, the lack of jobs. But it is hard to be angry with an abstraction. They therefore needed to personify the abstract power of these economic forces. This is why Hitler claimed that there were certain people—the Jews—who were the puppet masters that actually used the power of money to abuse the German people. Nazi antisemitism, in Postone’s account, is a kind of conspiracy theory. It presumes that the Jews hold a sort of manipulative power that actually belongs to a systemic situation. The abstractness of money’s power over us operates not unlike a child’s darkened room, creating a sense of dread about the future. The German encounter with this anxious reality, in Postone’s view, generated a defense mechanism. The Nazi Party invested the Jew with a magical status as the enemy whose existence could explain everything Germany had suffered from World War One onward. Blaming the Jews thus allowed people to discover political agency through the Nazi Party because, by personifying the hated power of the abstract in a human form, one could now try to defeat it through a campaign of retribution and, eventually, even extermination.

I mentioned earlier that the threat of money and its abstract power is also found in Trump’s ad. Consider, for example, the threat of money represented in these moments of the ad, a flurry of dollar bills gathered almost like an abstract painting, and an image of the futures market whose numbers fly by on a billboard. This threatening power of money produces anxiety because it acts upon you from everywhere and from nowhere. But immediately after, this series of images is followed by these, two personifications of this same power—George Soros and Janet Yellen, both of them bankers and maybe not coincidentally ones that happen to be Jewish. If we return briefly to an earlier slide we can see how, in Hungary too, personifying the abstract power of money acts as a political strategy.

Photo: Mark Olsen/Unsplash

How are these personifications of money as an enemy power connected to the far-right denial of climate change? Remember, the dollar bills and the futures market numbers, or the EU taxes appearing as puppet strings, don’t only signify economic activity as such at this point in history. They also represent climate change activity. This money is being used to buy gas, oil, and coal. The billboard represents the futures for fossil fuel commodities, automobiles,s and all the other commodities that rely on them. Climate change is a lot like economic power today. In fact, we could argue that it is a part of economic power. It represents an important new way in which our lives are subjected to an impersonal domination at the hands of billions of different acts in the cycle of production, distribution, and consumption. Each time I buy something at the store that was driven there by a truck and is wrapped in plastic, I make a little bit of profit for someone. And I also make the change in the climate a little bit worse. What will it mean tomorrow or in ten years? I don’t know. How do I deal with such an anxiety-producing situation? Maybe I need to imagine a concrete person or a specific population that can substitute for the abstract threat of climate change.

Climate denialism comes from somewhere. And in effect, I am arguing that it comes as a psychological defense against the emotional impact of climate change, which is very abstract. Do I know what will happen if temperatures rise globally by two degrees? Not really. An average temperature change is an abstraction, just like money. Its material effects cannot be easily predicted. One option I have if this makes me anxious, is to simply try to ignore it. I can say, I know very well that climate change is happening. Still, I will live my life today as though it were not happening. But perhaps it is no coincidence that the far right has grown steadily stronger as the situation worsens and it becomes harder to do this. In place of ignoring our anxiety, the far right offers a different solution. It doesn’t pretend that there is no reason to be anxious. Instead, it give us a different reason to be anxious that seems easier to control. Climate change is too big, too confusing, and comes from everywhere. But I can know what I want the government to do about dangerous migrants arriving from the Middle East, Africa, or elsewhere. And I also know what I myself should do about it. All I need to do is overthrow the corrupt establishment in Brussels and put into power someone who will eliminate all the threatening figures that I am using to replace climate change. Paradoxically, by inventing enemies, I begin to feel safer. The dangerous immigrant and the corrupt leader are my security blanket. 

Photo: Lutz Stallknecht/Unsplash

I am a social theorist and not a legal scholar. But I hope I can make clear how damaging the impact of the dynamic I have been describing is becoming for the protection of basic human rights in their relationship to climate change. What some people have called climate rights or climate justice is dependent on what the Paris Agreement of 2015, in its open statement, called “acknowledging that climate change is a common concern of humankind.” What I have been describing today is a process whereby climate anxiety itself becomes a force for disavowing the danger of climate change. It fundamentally undermines the acknowledgement of the reality upon which climate justice depends. But there is even more to it than this. As we have seen, the alternative to avowing climate change’s danger is to substitute the idea of population threat—dangerous migrants and corrupt elites—and this further erodes our prospects for guaranteeing human rights in the age of climate change. This is true for several reasons. First, migrants become exempt from the category of the human who deserveс rights. Indeed, they the migrant becomes the figure against whom the nations of Europe will need to be protected. He or she becomes simply the threat of population replacement, cultural decline, or criminal attack. The migrant becomes not the human but the danger to the human. And finally, insofar as the European Union itself can be railed against as the corrupting force that manufactures an overblown concern with climate change to conceal the real political problem—the invasion of foreigners—it intensifies a political distrust that makes the pursuit of climate rights impossible. As a body of journalists who seek to write stories about fundamental rights and climate, what I hope to leave you with is a sense that to write about climate, you also need to write about climate anxiety and the way it deflects our politics today. Climate change, partly through its inseparability from capitalism, is producing certain psychological effects that make it difficult for us to protect people’s fundamental rights. Looking for these psychological effects, the distractions they create, the fear of the foreigner they generate in this age of anxiety, should be part of the stories we tell if we hope to succeed in shoring up support for climate rights and climate justice.

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