Yup, the media has gleefully repeated all kinds of wild predictions that have not even come close to being true. This has been going on for at least 50 years. Maybe closer to 100 years. These predictions are almost never correct. What's more is that many of them predict true doomsday scenarios that have never materialized.
Heck, the left has done this with nuclear apocalypse (that's when I was a kid in the 1980s). Before that it was in the 60s and 70s it was that the world economy would collapse because of the rapid increase in population and we wouldn't have sufficient food resources to avoid mass starvation. There was all the Y2k panic as well. Every one of these had a pretty big political aspect of it. Trying to influence global politics and change government policy. Heck, the company I worked for spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to update engineering software that were
The religious right is susceptible to these sorts of doomsdays as well. I'm thinking of a small group of religious folks who believe that 2nd coming of has arrived. Not sure that there is very much negative consequences from these predictions for anyone outside of the people who wasted their time believing.
However, you can argue that threat of fascism in the 1930s and communism in the 1950/60s were right-leaning doomsday scenarios as well. These, of course, were genuine existential crises. There were immediate threats that materialized in continuing and ongoing problems in the world.
