Dave Wiegel At Semafor Latest To Carry Koch Water About Supposed Schism With Trump

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Friday March 24, 2023 · 6:57 AM PDT

2023/03/24 · 06:57

It's 2015, and Koch network operatives are reportedly not working with Donald Trump's presidential campaign, as its operatives go to work for the Donald Trump campaign.

It's 2016, and Koch network operatives are staffing Donald Trump's presidential transition team, and the Trump administration.

It's 2017, and Koch network operative Mike Pence is Vice President under Donald Trump.

It's 2018, and Koch network operatives are attacking the idea of more inclusive climate policy, and denying even their own anti-climate lobbying.

It's 2019, and Koch network operatives are reframing themselves as climate champs, and rebranding as “Stand Together,” while lying about the Green New Deal and denying the climate consensus. "

It's 2020, and a Koch network operative admits anyone who fell for the prior rebrand ruse is "going to be surprised" because the plan is "to go bigger than ever before." Ten months later, a Koch network operative, Charles “Chuckie” Koch gives an interview about the network's less-partisan rebrand, even as he sets up a new disinfo center at Tufts and spends over $1 billion helping Republicans in the 2020 elections.

It's 2021, and Koch network operatives are lobbying against EPA regulations, using hundreds of millions of dollars in donations to inject disinfo into schools and universities.

It's 2022, and Koch network operatives are telling media they're going to figure out who's behind all this polarization, as though they're not the ones spreading fake news attacking their clean competitors, defending doing business in Russia, spending over $50 million on climate disinfo, buying a Supreme Court majority, and sending errand-boy Mike Pence on an ill-fated anti-ESG crusade potentially robbing taxpayers of hundreds of millions to billions of dollars.

It's 2023, and Koch network operatives are claiming to rebrand as less partisan and separate themselves from Donald Trump, not on ideological grounds, but because they want someone "who can win." Semafor, the newest entry in the access-driven DC press world, takes this as an opportunity to prove once again that it puts a greater priority in appeasing fossil fuel sponsors and billionaires who, like them, claim to want to reduce polarization, than it does on doing actual journalism.

It's like Semafor's David Weigel read Popular Information's February explainer on "how Koch manipulates the media" and decided it was his turn to write the same exact sort of story that hacks have run about Koch and Trump since 2016, with a headline wondering, "Did Donald Trump break the Koch machine for good?"

No.

For the past eight years, at least, Koch network operatives have played supposedly-savvy DC reporters for saps, pretending to oppose a political operation even as they staff it.

It's a testament to the perverse incentives of some Beltway press that—despite the obvious duplicity of these constant supposed rebrands—Koch network operatives keep finding success in running the same obvious disinfo play, even at outlets that, just days earlier, covered that playbook!

For The GOP, 'Freedom' Means You're Free To Pay More For Their Donors' Dirty Energy

ClimateDenierRoundup

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Thursday March 23, 2023 · 7:05 AM PDT

2023/03/23 · 07:05

When you think of "freedom," do you think of paying more for a worse product? No? Well good, you shouldn't. No one does. Except, perhaps, House Republicans, whose new HR 1 bill, the "Lower Energy Costs Act," would increase energy costs, and includes a section labeled "Homeowner Energy Freedom" that would leave homeowners 'free' to continue using old, inefficient, and wasteful appliances.

How would a legislative package named for lowering costs actually increase them? Well, Republicans want to boost methane (née natural) gas exports, because they don't care that it hurts low-income communities and people of color on the frontlines of fossil fuel pollution in Texas and Louisiana. And they don't care that gas exports result in Americans paying more when competing on the global market, where prices can be five times as high.

Even worse is the Homeowner Energy Freedom section, which you know is bad because it's dressed up with such a name. Other sections are named plainly to describe the intention: for example, the "Natural Gas Tax Repeal" section would repeal the section of the Clean Air Act that provides an incentive for oil companies to reduce methane emissions.

Some conservatives love to claim that putting a price on pollution is a market-based solution that Republicans could support. However, when Republicans actually have policymaking power, they use it to try and repeal such efforts, even though a price on methane could reduce the climate-warming pollution by 40-80% at no net cost to producers, and despite the fact that reducing methane pollution is critical to protecting the 17 million people living close enough to be subjected to other types of pollution from these facilities.

But the GOP didn't even try to hide those facts with a fancy name for that section, probably because repealing a tax is always going to sound good enough on its own to them.

On the other hand, people like free money for upgrading their home appliances to more efficient new models that would reduce energy consumption and save on their power bills, so Republicans had to disguise their attempt to repeal those measures.

By calling it the "Homeowner Energy Freedom" section, they're clearly hoping to confuse people about why they're repealing measures that would help people save hundreds of dollars per year on their energy bills by switching to electric appliances, programs that were designed to help low- and moderate-income households make upgrades to cleaner, better products.

Why? Because for Republicans (and the decades of disinformation underpinning modern conservatism), "freedom" isn't about being able to openly embrace your gender identity or sexuality or being free to watch a drag show. It's not the freedom to choose whatever book you want from the library. It's not a life free from someone else's pollution, to be free to choose what to do with your body, to be free from racial discrimination while working at supposedly-too-'woke'-Wall Street businesses, and to be free not to put your money in fossil fuel companies.

Instead, it's the freedom to keep paying higher power bills because you're stuck with a crappy old appliance. It's the freedom to discriminate, to disinform, and, most importantly, to donate millions of dollars to the political party that will sell out Americans and fight for your freedom to continue ripping them off.

IPCC Report Reactions From Fox, Wash Times, Daily Caller: Lazy, Or Lazy And Racist

ClimateDenierRoundup

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Wednesday March 22, 2023 · 6:15 AM PDT

2023/03/22 · 06:15

The UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released a major Synthesis Report this week, explaining as patently as possible, for one last time before it's too late to take action, that we can't build any more fossil fuel infrastructure if we want any hope of meeting the Paris Agreement goal of limiting warming to under 1.5° C.

Initial reactions from deniers span from lazy partisan gossip coverage at Fox and the Washington Times, to lazy and racist coverage at The Daily Caller.

We'll start with Fox, which ran at least three pieces about the IPCC’s report on its website. The first was a straightforward write-up of the UN press release, published on Monday afternoon. Then on Monday evening, Fox ran a second piece, this time dressing up a bunch of right-wing tweets as a story with the headline "UN report predicting climate catastrophe in 2030 met with mockery: 'Every single prediction' has been 'wrong.'" Why do your own reporting when you can just crowdsource old disinfo from your right-wing propaganda-filled Twitter feed?

To complete the lazy trifecta, Fox ran a third piece on Tuesday morning, which just extensively quoted an interview that climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe gave to PBS, in which she debunks the disinformation Fox ran the day prior. Hayhoe explains, "The previous predictions were not wrong. The uncertainty is us. The predictions were for what will happen depending on the choices we make."

That's a nice summary of how disinfo outlets initially "report" on these kinds of releases. They mostly just quote other people paid by conservative billionaires to spread conservative propaganda, or lazily lift the work real journalists did elsewhere, knowing that their audience won’t treat the woman climate scientist with the respect and deference her expertise deserves.

Over at The Washington Times, we can see what the opinion side of these "news" rooms puts out to inform their readers about the fate of the planet's ability to sustain human civilization: column-length versions of the sort of stupid tweets that Fox quoted.

According to columnist Cheryl Chumley, the "good news" is that UN Secretary-General António Guterres is "a socialist-slash-Marxist" and therefore like all socialist/Marxists, is "an inherent liar," so you can "yawn and go back to the PlayStation. Or to the mulching. It is spring, after all."

Yes, Chumley draws on the century-old industry propaganda tactic (recently documented in Naomi Oreskes’ and Eric Conway's new book "The Big Myth") of calling anyone who stands in the way of unchecked profits a socialist and communist, because if it's worked for 100 years, why change it up now?

Well, apparently there are also new ways to be terrible these days, as evidenced by Chumley's comrade in denial Michael Bastasch, a Koch-trained political operative disguised as a journalist working as the Koch-funded Daily Caller's managing editor.

Bastasch's column on Tuesday ramped up the propaganda, because that's what you do when you have no facts. "The UN's newest climate report is a woke dumpster fire masquerading as science," reads the headline, informed by Bastasch's very scientific analysis. "Variations of the words 'equity' and 'inequity' appear 31 times in the 36-page document," according to Bastasch, putting the whole of all his "Ctrl+F" reporting skills on display.

"Variations of 'inclusive' and 'inclusion' appear 17 times," he continues, and "the document even mentions 'colonialism' and repeatedly refers to climate and social 'justice' for 'marginalized' groups." If you read that and thought, 'well, good!' then you are not in Bastasch's target audience.
"'Equity,' if you remember," he explains for those who are a little slow on the manufactured outrage uptake, "is that word then-candidate Kamala Harris famously described as a system where 'we all end up in the same place.' Sounds a lot like socialism, doesn't it?"

No, but that's only because we actually know what equity and socialism mean, and aren't just running racist propaganda to cover for our polluting funders.

Deniers Claim Climate Alarmism Is The Real Colonialism

ClimateDenierRoundup for Climate Hawks

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Tuesday March 21, 2023 · 6:48 AM PDT

2023/03/21 · 06:48

In 2021, it became clear that Big Oil was ramping up its “wokewashing” efforts, co-opting the language of social justice to shore up its social license to operate. This is just a fancy way to say that the oil industry wants to look like it cares about the people it pollutes so people won’t hate them for that whole polluting thing. In the years (before and) since, we've noted wokewashing in California, Canada, and conservative media, and the latest example comes from the CO2 Coalition's Vijay Jayaraj and the Heritage Foundation's Daily Signal.

As we've explained before, Jayaraj, who is from India, is a compelling spokesperson to deliver the 'energy poverty' narrative that Peabody Coal got caught pushing and that we're used to hearing from white American fossil fools like Alex Epstein. Basically, the argument says that fossil fuels are good for the developing world. (Nevermind that they're dirty, expensive, and unreliable.)

In a podcast recorded at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), Jayaraj gave an oddly liberal-aimed critique of climate policy.

Echoing a recent post from fellow disinfo-spreader Bjørn Lomborg, Jayaraj said, "There is a growing sentiment among the leaders in the developing world about imperialism and reemergence of colonialism." He claimed that world leaders consider "climate alarmism" as "infringing upon the rights of the poor people" and their "hopes about having a future where they can have reliable energy access."

Now, given that CPAC attendees weren't sure what woke was last year and still aren't this year, but just know they're against it, it's a bit jarring that Jayaraj was there to give a decidedly woke pitch that American conservatives should care about the well-being of people in countries that their de facto leader considers a "shithole."

This is not to say that Jarayaj doesn't otherwise toss some red-meat-denial to the industry-funded Heritage Foundation's Daily Signal audience. He claims that there isn’t more pushback on the climate consensus from the academic community because doing so could cost people their jobs. Actually, the opposite seems to be true, as evidenced by climate denier Matthew Wielicki, who like Jordan Peterson, wasn't pushed out of academia but instead opted to leave his professor job and instead pursue the disinfluencer path.

Then Jayaraj contradicted himself, claiming that people would lose funding or their job if they questioned the climate consensus but also saying that "we do have a lot of peer-reviewed scientific journals that are not talked about in the mainstream media."

Which is it? Do researchers have to accept the consensus or lose their jobs, or are they questioning it frequently in the scientific literature and merely being misrepresented by mainstream media?

Jayaraj says that it's the latter, and "all people have to do is access Google Scholar and search for the terms that they're interested in, their [sic.] wide range of articles and scientific publications that do not agree with the current dominant climate narrative."

So we took his advice, went to Google Scholar, and put in a search term we're interested in: climate consensus. It turns out there are lots of studies confirming that scientists agree on climate change!

Then we tried another Google Scholar search: Vijay Jayaraj. No results!

It seems that even by his own metric of relying on science and not biased media, no one should bother taking Jayaraj's wokewashing seriously.

Two Young Women Activists, Greta Thunberg and Sophia Kianni, Both Exist, So Deniers Go Misogynistic

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Monday March 20, 2023 · 6:44 AM PDT

2023/03/20 · 06:44

Happy Women’s History Month! Unfortunately, it comes as no surprise that the climate disinformation sphere is once again filled with misogynistic attacks against women climate activists.

Recently, Greta Thunberg was targeted on social media for allegedly deleting a 2018 tweet that linked to an article that predicted climate change would wipe out humanity by 2023. However, a fact check in Newsweek explained that the original article that Thunberg's tweet quoted and linked to did mischaracterize the views of climate scientist James Anderson, who never actually said that humanity would go extinct in 2023. Newsweek concluded that “the claim that Thunberg deleted the tweet recently because the world has not ended this year is clearly misleading.”

But that’s just the start of it. Thunberg was also targeted on social media this week for an MSNBC interview that she did in 2021. Climate-denying Twitter trolls twisted her words in an attempt to keep the #ClimateScam disinformation alive.

The relentless harassment of Thunberg by climate disinformation-spreaders raises the question: why are they so intent on targeting her?

Well, misogyny might have a lot to do with it, as demonstrated by the barrage of foul posts comparing Thunberg to climate activist Sophia Kianni.

Kianni is a prominent environmental campaigner who founded Climate Cardinals, the erstwhile Twitter-partnered nonprofit organizing youth volunteers to translate climate information into over 100 languages. She is also the youngest member of the UN Secretary-General’s Youth Advisory Group on Climate Change.

Yet for months, fossil fuel advocates have been calling Kianni “the new and improved Greta” and “Greta 2.0,” as if there could only be one young woman involved in climate activism at a time. Misogynistic trolls in the digital disinfosphere (and others) have policed her clothing choices and criticized her for doing normal things like taking selfies. Some have even claimed that the climate movement is replacing Thunberg with Kianni because of ageism.

The sexist climate disinformation, which fixates on women activists’ appearances, downplays their achievements, and pits successful women against each other, upholds both patriarchal systems of power and the fossil fuel industry. Scholars like Cara Daggett have long pointed out the intersection between climate denial and misogyny through the concept of petro-masculinity, which describes the way that fossil fuel systems uphold patriarchy, white supremacy, and authoritarianism.

As the misogynistic “manosphere” continues to spread its toxic influence across online platforms, women climate scientists, journalists, and activists are put at further risk of harassment and threats of violence.

The constant flood of online attacks against Thunberg and Kianni serves as a sobering reminder that climate disinformation and misogynistic hate speech are deeply intertwined.

Breitbart Accidentally Fact-Checked Itself, But Intentionally Called Out Koch's Train Rule Lobbying

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Saturday March 18, 2023 · 6:33 AM PDT

2023/03/18 · 06:33

After losing most of its real advertisers, Breitbart has been limping along and, as a result, relies heavily on syndicated content from the AP and AFP to fill out the site, with sometimes amusing results.

For example, this week, the outlet ran multiple stories blaming the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank on it 'going woke' and supposedly focusing more on diversity and ESG than investing. It was then amusing to see Breitbart post the AP's "Fact Focus," which explains that there's "no evidence" of such an impact and that the real reason the bank failed was that it "had not properly managed the risk on large investments it had made in recent years." What's more, "SVB wasn't even all that diverse," as the "executive team was all white and mostly male and its board of directors had just one Black member and one LGBTQ member."

Who could have guessed that scapegoating minorities wasn't accurate? (Everyone.)

What's actually surprising, though, was the original piece produced by Breitbart reporter John Binder, headlined, "Koch-Linked Groups, Including One Funded by Norfolk Southern, Line Up Against J.D. Vance’s Rail Safety Reforms."

Since when is Breitbart running pieces that are critical of Koch-linked groups and supportive of government regulation of business?

Well, Breitbart is criticizing these groups because they’re opposing a bill put forward by J. D. Vance, the “douchey,” Peter Thiel-backed, and fascism-friendly freshman Ohio senator. Vance previously made his MAGA name with Hillbilly Elegy, a book that's "woven through with dog whistles about class and race [and] gender," according to (at least) one expert on Appalachia.

There has always been a somewhat friendly rivalry between Breitbart and the Koch network disinfo outlets like the Daily Caller or Signal, which pander to the same crowd with often overlapping propaganda campaigns. However, there's also a palpable rift between the Koch network (and traditional Republicans) and the more alt-right camp represented by Steve Bannon's Breitbart and backed by Thiel and the Mercers. Essentially, the Koch network would prefer that Breitbart quit saying the quiet (racist) parts out loud.

While the Koch network uses political ideology as a means to prevent regulations and protect profits, the Thiel and Mercer fortunes aren't reliant on pollution remaining unchecked. Instead, the regressive white supremacist political ideology is Thiel’s and the Mercers’ end goal, and capturing the Republican party is the means to enforce that worldview.

Immigration is the clearest example. Because immigrants are an easily exploitable source of cheap labor, the Koch network and its Big Business backers are more eager to welcome immigrants into the country than the "populist" (racist) wing of the party that supported frauds who wanted to build a wall, and as reflected Breitbart's decidedly unflattering coverage of immigrants.

Now we're seeing a new rift open up, as J. D. Vance capitalized on the Ohio train derailment and petrochemical disaster to offer up some reasonable-sounding regulations — with some bipartisan support. With right-wing disinfo buzzing about the disaster being a Biden failure, it's an obvious choice for Vance to try and position himself as being the one to fix the train problem.

But just because Vance and Breitbart are the enemies of our enemies in the Koch network, there is no reason to start treating them like friends.

This is especially true given that historically, fascists’ promises to get trains running on time were actually more a matter of propaganda than punctuality.

Jeffrey Epstein, China, And JPMorgan Are Using TikTok For '5G non-Kinetic Warfare': Daily Caller

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Friday March 17, 2023 · 6:24 AM PDT

2023/03/17 · 06:24

We pick on The Daily Caller quite a lot, but that's only because they deserve it. They run so much dreck that is so very awful, it's hard to resist. Heck, even its Wikipedia entry has both a "journalistic standards" section about instances demonstrating their lack of journalistic standards, and a "controversies" section for its climate disinfo, election conspiracies, non-profit sketchiness, and white nationalist hires.

The latest contender for the "controversies" section is from Michele Gama Sosa, the Daily Caller's opinion editor who brings a take that we're surprised to see outside one of the white nationalist blogs that The Daily Caller's has a history of hiring writers from.

It's hard to even describe or paraphrase Gama Sosa's diatribe, which is summarized, sort of, by the headline: "America's biggest enemies are in the boardroom, not abroad." Michele says China isn't the US’s biggest problem, while also ginning up anti-Chinese hate. For example, he describes TikTok as "part of Beijing’s 5G non-kinetic warfare operation" that "corrupts our youth with liberal propaganda" and claims that "JPMorgan is happy to help them get it done" (unclear how), which is apparently "little surprise, considering the bank's alleged Epstein ties."

…What? Banking giant JPMorgan is helping "communist China" use TikTok to liberalize Americans because… Jeffrey Epstein, presumably? Gama Sosa does not explain or expand as he gish gallops his way through the rest of the piece.

It doesn't get any more coherent from there, as Gama Sosa attempts to convince readers that because American businesses wanted to make money in China in the 1960s, today they're "undermining American sovereignty" by "destroying industry, pushing poison to our children and cooperating with the Chinese and the WEF to create a global digital prison."

According to Gama Sosa's version of history, the opening of China to capitalism has now become "ESG, as the likes of BlackRock and Vanguard call for America's deindustrialization in the name of saving the planet," as though Wall Street was actually more interested in saving the world than making a buck while it burns. But supposedly those capitalists and "their friends" at WEF, "for all their alleged climate and justice concerns, are no different, telling us we need to eat the bugs while looking the other way for China – and themselves, of course."

A big-business-backed conservative disinformation outlet like The Daily Caller (that more or less exists to appease its funders with nice coverage about them) railing against Big Business may be unexpected. Unfortunately, the anti-Chinese COVID lab leak conspiracy paragraph is not. Joining in the rising anti-China rhetoric taking over Congress and disinfo outlets, Gama Sosa also foments hate against Chinese students conducting research in the United States and dismisses all allegations of anti-Asian racism as a tactic of deflecting scrutiny.

For those playing along at home, you're right to start counting, because between the anti-ESG, anti-WEF, anti-climate, and anti-China boxes checked, Gama Sosa almost has a completed Conspiracy Theory Bingo card! He just needs one more, and sure enough, he uses the standby of so many conspiracies that it could be the center free square: antisemitism.

Laced throughout Gama Sosa's tirade are the standard dog whistles of the dangerous conspiracy theories that Jewish people are a shadowy force secretly controlling world events. He invokes the Great Reset conspiracy, refers to "unelected oligarchs and their pawns like Dr. Fauci," and suggests that "Klaus Schwab and his corporate buddies at the WEF" infiltrate governments, "ensuring people like Joe Biden are just their puppets."

Gama Sosa complains about "Disney rewrites" to make "Western literature and American films" more "inclusive," by which he means they "cut out white/European characters." (Are there no Black Americans? Why is "white" synonymous with European?)

In the conclusion, Gama Sosa doesn't say who the enemy "behind China" is, that's supposedly "much more powerful and organized" than the world's most populous country, a shadowy force that "answers to no government or authority other than itself" and is "out to destroy us." He implicates a vague Big Business type conspiracy, but anyone who's seen or heard a standard antisemitic conspiracy theory will certainly hear the dog whistles loud and clear.

He doesn't have to say that Jewish people are out to “replace us" outright, because after centuries of hate-mongering propagandists separating a good white "us" from a bad non-"white/European" group of people who are secretly pulling the strings for their own greedy purposes, his rightwing audience knows exactly who he's talking about. That's the whole point of dog whistles.

This article serves as a chilling reminder of the fact that climate disinformation doesn’t exist in a vacuum: it is inextricably intertwined with white supremacy, and it is a threat not only to the future of human life on this planet but also to Jewish people and people of color right now.

Daily Sceptic's CO2 Saturation Argument Is Just As False Now As It Was In 1900

ClimateDenierRoundup for Climate Hawks

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Thursday March 16, 2023 · 6:26 AM PDT

2023/03/16 · 06:26

There's an old saying that says you shouldn't be so open-minded that your brain falls out. Sure, be open to new things, but not without a healthy dose of skepticism. For some reason, though, people who define their identity as skeptics often show themselves to be gullible enough to fall for any old lie that reinforces their supposed skepticism (which is why this isn't the “Climate Skeptic Roundup”).

For example, Environment Editor Chris Morrison of the UK-based and oft-fact-checked COVID and climate disinfo site The Daily Sceptic resurrected the false CO2 saturation argument last week in an attempt to argue that “Net Zero is Completely Pointless.”

The bogus claim goes something like this: if we keep pumping out CO2, everything will be totally fine because the atmosphere will eventually reach a “saturation point,” after which additional CO2 will not have any warming effect. Unfortunately for the fossil fuel industry and The Daily Sceptic, this argument is false on multiple (atmospheric) levels, and has been for 123 years. It's based on a flawed study that Swedish physicist Knut Ångström conducted all the way back in 1900.

What’s really going on is that higher concentrations of greenhouse gasses (GHGs) impede the flow of infrared radiation into space. GHGs like CO2 absorb infrared radiation as heat. Normally, that heat rises into space at the top of the Earth’s atmosphere, where there are less GHGs and the air is thinner. However, as we burn fossil fuels and emit more climate pollution, these gasses spread to the upper levels of the atmosphere, and the flow of infrared radiation to space has to occur at a much higher altitude, where it is colder and heat doesn’t escape as effectively. As a result, more heat is recycled back down, raising temperatures in the lower atmosphere and on the Earth’s surface.

The CO2 saturation argument fails to differentiate between the lower and upper levels of the atmosphere. As DeSmog's debunking put it almost fifteen years ago, “Since the higher layers are the ones that determine whether or not… excess energy leaves the atmosphere (and, thus, how much extra warming occurs), whether or not the surface levels are saturated – and, just to be clear, they’re not – makes little difference.”

Chris Morrison himself admits that the CO2 saturation argument “has been ignored in the important science journals and its findings have not been reported in mainstream media,” and he asks, “Why is this?” Well, the argument is being ignored because it’s wrong. It’s really as simple as that!

And if Morrison were actually a skeptical journalist, he would have done the research and found that out for himself. After all, his sources are not exactly credible. The two academics he cites to back up his CO2 saturation claims are William Happer and William van Wijngaarden, who are both part of a well-known climate disinformation group called the CO2 Coalition that is backed by some of the top funders of climate denial. William Happer in particular has directly received fossil fuel funding, so he’s probably not the person you want to go to for unbiased information about fossil fuel pollution.

Just in case the CO2 saturation lies didn’t work, Morrison also added some thinly-veiled antisemitic conspiracy theories for good measure, calling net zero targets “a political project now embedded in many countries around the world and supported by an almost unlimited transfer of wealth to many controlling and financially-interested elites.”

Sowing doubt about climate science using biased, fossil-funded scientists and spreading hateful conspiracy theories is standard practice for dedicated disinformation sites like The Daily Sceptic, which was founded in response to COVID but is already so lacking in fresh material that it had to resort to century-old lies.

Daily Caller's Climate Disinfo Coming From Around "News"room, Not Just Koch Operatives With Opinions

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Monday March 13, 2023 · 6:34 AM PDT

2023/03/13 · 06:34

As internal text messages prove what most have long known about Fox News (that it's a conservative propaganda machine posing as a news outlet), it's important to remember that these days, Fox is hardly alone. While Murdoch's Fox and Wall Street Journal are the unquestioned Big Leagues of right-wing disinformation, there's a whole set of bush league outlets serving as training grounds.

The Tucker Carlson-founded Daily Caller is one of the primary examples of how Fox and the Koch-funded climate change counter-movement are intertwined. Back when they were mostly Koch-funded, Koch-trained Michael Bastasch was regularly running climate disinformation featuring Koch-funded climate deniers. These days, their funding has diversified a bit thanks to Carlson's feud with Kochs, though giving the Daily Caller money still appears to increase the odds of the outlet writing favorable content about you. But Bastasch returned last year as Managing Editor of the Daily Caller's non-profit tax dodge foundation, after a stint at Fox News writing for election-lie-spreader Laura Ingraham.

Since his return, we've been watching closely to note any changes, and at this point can say it definitely appears that Bastasch is using his position to spread climate disinformation through multiple channels at the Caller, not just the "Big Tent" opinion vertical we noted last week.

In the past, most of the Caller's climate disinfo would come from just one or two employees who appeared to be tasked with turning press releases from Koch cronies into "news" as their job on the "energy" beat (like Thomas Catenacci, who now works for, you guessed it, Fox News).

But these days, attacks on climate change science, policy, and experts have become a feature of coverage across the website and its various staffers.

It really stood out between 5 and 7 p.m. last Wednesday, when the Daily Caller published a triple-play of climate disinfo: defending a fossil-fuel loving white supremacist, cherry-picking climate change from a US National security assessment, and attacked environmentalists organizing on TikTok to #StopWillow.

The first was from "news and commentary writer" Brianna Lyman, who provided a short write-up framed as criticism of Rep. Cori Bush (D-MO), who "accused one of the witnesses of being racist." Who, you might ask? Well, despite the fact that 'who/what/where/why/when' is a basic tenet of journalism, Lyman didn't identify the person at the center of the House committee meeting, and in fact, described Bush as "criticizing the oil industry before turning her attention toward an unidentified witness."

Which is an absolutely astonishing thing for a supposed journalist to write, because Congressional hearings are very easy to look up. Alex Epstein, one of the "so-called ‘energy experts’" called by Republicans, is who Rep. Bush called "a philosopher who has previously espoused white supremacist views," before Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO) interjected to try and censor her by calling for the comment to be removed from the Congressional record.

But naming Epstein would require doing actual reporting, and apparently all Lyman did was watch a video clip of the hearing (that she embedded in the story). If you'd like to see what real reporting of the hearing looks like, as opposed to someone running cover for a fellow traveler, Timothy Cama covered it for PoliticoPRO and named Alex Epstein right up front.

Roughly thirty-six minutes after Lyman’s article defending a racist was posted, the Daily 'whoopsie we keep hiring racists' Caller published a piece on the US intelligence community's Annual Threat Assessment. The headline of "reporter" Micaela Burrow's coverage? "Intel Community Warns Fight Over Green Energy Tech Will Worsen Global Tensions."

The 10-paragraph write-up quotes the assessment just twice to justify the story's thrust that fighting climate change will somehow make the world more dangerous. That's probably because the 40-page assessment only devotes 2 pages to climate, and then otherwise focuses on a bunch of things that the Daily Caller doesn't spread disinfo about.

Finally, rounding out a very busy day for the Caller, "Associate Editor" Ailan Evans' hit piece ran at 6:49, attacking the #StopWillow campaign on TikTok because one of the participating groups is funded by "a Swiss billionaire with a documented history of philanthropy and political donations, primarily to left-wing causes and candidates." Though it's dressed up as some sort of scandalous revelation, at no point does Evans attempt to explain how or why this is somehow bad.

But that's the kind of training you get from the Daily Caller. Both Evans and current Fox Production Assistant Kendall Tietz were 2021 fellows of the Daily Caller's American Journalism Institute, where they train the next generation of political hacks to pretend to be journalists.

So next time you hear about some bizarre disinformation, rank political propaganda, or shameless defense of racism on Fox News, remember that it's not an accident, they're trained to be that awful. There's a whole farm league of conservative propaganda shops like the Daily Caller — the frack-backed Daily Wire and Heritage's Daily Signal come to mind — and while they'd all oppose a Universal Basic Income as socialism, they're proof that as long as would-be-journalists are willing to play ball for the highest bidder, they'll never want for work.

Conservative Think Tanks Behind Offshore Wind and Whales Disinfo Support Offshore Oil Drilling

ClimateDenierRoundup

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Friday March 10, 2023 · 6:30 AM PST

2023/03/10 · 06:30

Last September, when organized denial actors announced their opposition to offshore wind, we figured it'd be pretty hard for anyone to take the claims seriously after that. Unfortunately, despite the obviousness of the bad faith campaign, the disinformation has rolled on.

Fortunately, mainstream outlets have been covering how the lie that offshore wind projects kill whales is part of a coordinated campaign to undermine the offshore wind industry. Fast Company reported that anti-wind astroturf groups with innocent-sounding names like “Protect Our Coast New Jersey” and “The Save Right Whales Coalition” are linked to Big Oil through the Caesar Rodney Institute, while right-wing media outlets like Fox News, Breitbart, and The Western Journal continue to spread harmful disinformation blaming offshore wind for whale deaths. Greenpeace oceans director John Hocevar told USA Today that this is “a cynical disinformation campaign” that is “not based in any kind of evidence.” Even NOAA had to come out and say that “there is no evidence to support speculation that noise resulting from wind development-related site characterization surveys could potentially cause mortality of whales.”

In case you had any remaining doubts about whether or not free market fundamentalists actually care about whales, we’re here to inform you that individuals working for CFACT, The Heartland Institute, and The Caesar Rodney Institute have ardently advocated for offshore oil and gas development, which actually threatens whales and other marine species.

As the Center for Biological Diversity explains, “Offshore oil and gas exploration uses deafening seismic surveys that generate the loudest human sounds in the ocean, short of those made by explosives. Seismic testing involves blasting the seafloor with high-powered airguns (a kind of powerful horn) every 10 seconds and measuring the echoes with long tubes to map offshore oil and gas reserves. These blasts disturb, injure and kill marine wildlife [including whales] around the clock for years on end.”

If you're unswayed by the idea that constantly blowing horns harms creatures that rely on sonar to navigate, consider the other impacts of offshore oil drilling. According to the Group for Research and Education on Marine Mammals, “the installation of a drilling platform causes long-term effects on the surrounding marine area such as habitat fragmentation, chemical pollution, water quality degradation or even an increase in maritime traffic and the risk of collisions.”

Then there's the fact that expansions to offshore drilling increase the risk of oil spills, which absolutely devastate whale populations, not to mention the whole climate change thing.

Offshore drilling is therefore the last thing that a supposed whale defender should be supporting, and that’s why it is very telling that so many allegedly pro-whale organizations have ardently advocated for offshore oil and gas production.

First off, CFACT has repeatedly used whales to attack wind, but Craig Rucker, CFACT’s Co-Founder and Executive Director, has a decades-long history of supporting offshore drilling. In 2002, Rucker touted “the eco-benefits of off-shore rigs,” and in 2013, he again endorsed the shameless claim that offshore drilling has environmental benefits and will clean up the ocean. In 2017, he once again argued in favor of offshore drilling, saying that “Oil and gas production, done right, does not hurt coastal tourism.” Rucker made his stance on climate change and wind power very clear in a 2020 pro-fracking article, in which he downplayed the “alleged climate dangers from fossil fuels” and rehashed a variety of anti-wind and anti-solar propaganda.

Next up is The Heartland Institute, which has published a flood of articles lying about offshore wind causing “whale hell” since at least 2016. At the same time, Heartland fully embraces offshore drilling. A 2018 Heartland press release criticized wind and solar energy and expressed enthusiastic support for offshore drilling, “state of the art seismic data,” and even blatant climate denial. Heartland Policy Advisor Arthur Viterito wrote, “I wholeheartedly applaud the proposal to increase off shore drilling. In light of the enormous uncertainties surrounding the CO2 – global warming link, U.S. energy independence should be this country’s top priority.”

Last but certainly not least hypocritical is the Caesar Rodney Institute (CRI), which, as mentioned above, funds numerous anti-offshore wind astroturf groups. David Stevenson, Director of CRI’s Center for Energy Competitiveness, member of The Heartland Institute’s Board of Policy Advisors, former Dupont executive, and former Trump advisor, has a clear record of opposing offshore drilling bans, dismissing the risks of seismic testing and oil spills, and advocating for increased offshore oil and gas development.

So, be mindful of who's opposing wind farms, and if it’s actually the genuinely concerned, whale-loving environmentalists, or if it’s really climate deniers whose primary interest in dead whales is turning them into anti-wind disinformation.

Steve Bannon's 'Populist Press' Now Points to 'Political Signal' (to Evade Google Ad Ban?)

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Thursday March 09, 2023 · 6:46 AM PST

2023/03/09 · 06:46

In 2020, Google demonetized Steve Bannon, removing him from YouTube and blocking ads on his War Room website after he fomented the Jan. 6 insurrection and called for Dr. Anthony Fauci to be beheaded. However, ProPublica revealed a year later that Bannon was still using Google's ad network, including on a then-recently-demonetised site called Populist Press, which had been revealed in 2020 to be part of a Facebook disinfo scam.

We've kept an eye on Populist Press over the past couple years, as it provided an example of what non-Big-Oil-controlled right-wing disinformation looks like, as it tried to replicate the Drudge approach of aggregating a bunch of propaganda in one place and calling it news.

And we say "provided” in past tense, because as of last week, the new text on the website reads, "Big Tech Has Shut Down Populist Press for Good! WE COULD NO LONGER RUN A FREE AND FAIR PRESS."

Indeed, after years of trying and failing to evade Google's demonetization, it appears Bannon admitted defeat… and immediately started doing the exact same thing at a new URL.

With all the subtlety you'd expect from Stevey Three-Shirts Bannon, AKA The HotTub Crime Machine, AKA Mr. Nazis Wrote My Website's Style Guide, the message on Populist Press turns from black and title-to-all-caps to red and random (MAGA-style) capitalization: “PLEASE go to www.PoliticalSignal.com They are the BEST aggregator alternative and run by patriots.”

In case readers didn't get it, the next line is an all-caps instruction to bookmark the link, and then, for good measure, the website lists "www.PoliticalSignal.com" four times in a column. The Internet Archive shows Populist Press up and running on 2/27, but a new splash with the shutdown message loads on March 2nd's save.

We begrudgingly clicked over to Political Signal, and the unsecure HTTP site is basically indistinguishable from the old Populist Press in terms of layout and content: three columns of headlines, each linking to a page that summarizes/plagiarizes the original reporting that's linked out from that page.

On the "About" page, though, the website claims its "mission is to bring together news from both the left and the right that we feel represents Americans in the middle." This, of course, is a lie, as there were zero "left" links, only a few innocuous mainstream news links, and a ton of links to right-wing disinformation and propaganda outlets including Breitbart—just like Populist Press!

Is Political Signal just Bannon's latest attempt to get Google ad revenue? Because it does carry Google-placed ads! The way the Populist Press statement is written, it sounds as though the entities are separate and independent though.

But on Twitter, @PressPopulist is now going by "Political Signal," having switched seamlessly from posting links to Populist Press on Feb 28th, to linking to Political Signal on March 1st. It’s basically the same story at the Populist Press/Political Signal account on GETTR, and for the BannonWarRoom account on Gab.

It's technically possible (though improbable) that Political Signal was set up independently of Bannon's efforts, and maybe the Populist Press shutdown has a simple explanation (like that Bannon needed money to pay his lawyers the nearly half-million dollars he owes for representing him in that whole 'refusing to comply with a congressional subpoena about how he tried to overthrow democracy' thing, as well as the whole 'scamming racists who donated to build a wall' issue).

But if Populist Press didn't just rename itself in an attempt to bypass Google's ban, and the two entities are entirely separate, why are the Populist Press's social accounts now openly and exclusively linking to Political Signal?

Alex Epstein Cites MLK in Fossil Fuel Propaganda, After Blaming MLK for Black Crime

ClimateDenierRoundup

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Wednesday March 08, 2023 · 6:47 AM PST

2023/03/08 · 06:47

The industry-backed climate deniers at the Heartland Institute held their big climate disinfo conference last week, with hours and hours of mostly old, almost exclusively white, and predominantly male free market fundamentalists talking to each other. While Heartland's weekly climate newsletter claimed to have gotten over 100,000 views on the stream, the YouTube videos from the 2-day denialfest struggle to crack just 1,000 views.

Even more pitiful is that they brag about getting coverage, but all they can point to are three stories, two of which are very critical of Heartland's conference. Scott Waldman at E&E described it as "who’s who of climate deniers," and focused on Trump election denial lawyer (detained pantless) Jeffrey Clark, who "held up a piece of cardboard on which he had written 'meta control'" to illustrate his discussion of the "communistic purposes" and the "self-interested… dark forces" behind climate change.

The second story Heartland had to promote (because there was nothing kinder) was from Inside Climate News, where Kristoffer Tigue covered the conference in the context of how it disproves the propaganda about the GOP's supposed climate conversion. He described Heartland as having "a long history of spreading misleading and false claims about global warming" and being "widely viewed by climate advocates as a disinformation machine." (Fact check: true, but it's not just climate advocates! Journalists like Emily Atkin have referenced Heartland as being part of the disinformation machine, author Shawn Laurence Otto called it back in 2012, as have professors and scientists like Michael Mann, and Duke historian Nancy MacLean even listed Heartland in an Orion Mag piece headlined "The Disinformation Machine.")

Somewhat disappointingly, by comparison, the third link Heartland had to show for its work was from fringe right-wing blog Ace of Spades HQ, which is only worth mentioning for the sake of acknowledging the disinfo conference’s third media hit. We'll just mention that this post praising Heartland's conference ends with an old song about spring being a little late this year, which is funny, because it was in the 80s in February when Heartland held the conference in Orlando, a cool 20°F above average.

But those articles actually weren't the only coverage that Heartland got! It received a second favorable write-up from Cowboy State Daily, another right-wing blog. There's little worth saying about it, except that it focused on comments by Alex Epstein, the Big Oil whipping boy who was Heartland's keynote speaker.

It was interesting to see the Cowboy State's reporting that Epstein, in addition to his standard spiel, also said that conservatives need to reframe the climate and energy issue. Specifically, Epstein turned to none other than "Martin Luther King" to support his case, because the Reverend/Dr./Nobel laureate — supposedly — just reframed "the issue of civil rights around the idea that people should be judged by the content of the character and not their skin color" and found success by linking policies "to a goal people agreed with."

While white people have exploited, appropriated and bastardized King's advocacy for years, this is a particularly egregious example when you know about Alex. Not only is Epstein invoking Martin Luther King Jr. to sell a product that disproportionately hurts Black communities, in a way that shamelessly invokes King's "Dream" as though it were merely a marketing gimmick or crisis communications trick, but also it's not even an intellectually honest speech by Epstein, because Alex has a history of trashing the very legacy that he now co-opts for his fossil fuel propaganda.

Epstein's racist history was covered by The Washington Post last year, and his reaction didn't exactly clear him of the allegations. Back in college, Epstein argued against recognition of Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday as a federal holiday. He noted that "Black crime has increased steadily since King’s time," and then wrote, and published, on purpose, in a college newspaper, that "because of the bad ideas he promoted, Dr. King is responsible for a great part of the destruction that has occurred in America today, especially among black Americans."

Yes, demonstrating his early adeptness at disinformation, a young Epstein blamed Martin Luther King Jr.'s "bad ideas" for causing the Black struggle, as though campaigning against about structural racism is what actually somehow caused the symptoms of that structural racism decades later.

Alex Epstein is on the record, in writing, of disapproving of Martin Luther King Jr's "bad ideas" about race. So why is Epstein invoking those very ideas now, to sell fossil fuels?

Because that's how propaganda works, and this is as hamfisted as it gets.

Epstein’s hypocritical past might just be why Heartland chose to promote two stories embarrassing them, instead of the one that let Epstein embarrass himself.

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