Last week, protests against construction on Southeastern Pennsylvania’s Mariner East 2 pipeline blocked workers from doing their job. In response to a tweet from an industry group, local lawmaker Rep. Danielle Friel Otten, who opposes to the pipeline, pointed out on Twitter that “the Nazis were just doing their jobs too.” She added a link to a PBS story about the science behind how “just doing your job” can be used to justify things individuals might not otherwise be comfortable with.
Unsurprisingly, the industry responded by misrepresenting her tweet as an attack on union workers, as though pointing out the similarity in the “just doing their job” excuse was tantamount to accusing the employees of carrying out genocide. The manufactured outrage played out as one might expect: the Pennsylvania state GOP called for her resignation, Rep. Otten made multiple statements explaining the misinformation and eventually apologized.
But if the fracking industry is really all that concerned about invoking Nazis, they need not look any further than the mirror.
As DeSmog’s Sharon Kelly reported last week, a pro-fracking supposed news site has been calling fracking opponents Nazis for years. The website, Marcellus Drilling News, has run numerous “news” stories with headlines like “Enviro-Nazis say Marcellus pipelines equal global warming” or “Gang of five PA senators pull out the long knives for DEP sec.” Accompanying many of these posts is an image of an obscure Nazi-themed meme template.
The website, run by a blogger named James Allen Willis, also dabbles in Islamophobia and has, per Kelly, “repeatedly traded in racist rhetoric about indigenous communities.” And while it may not be hugely influential, Kelly reports that the blog is taken seriously by local columnists, invited to speak at industry conferences, and has been quoted by the Washington Post. Willis spent a few years writing for Energy in Depth, one of the fossil fuel industry’s many propaganda platforms.
Sadly, Willis would be far from the worst example of conservative or fossil-fuel-funded “media” outlets pandering to racists. In fact, a recent profile of a former Breitbart and Daily Caller “reporter” shows, in the words of Jake Tapper, “the smiling acceptance of anti-Semites and racists in certain circles of DC” or, in the words of Buzzfeed’s Ben Smith, how “the alt-right infiltrated the Washington conservative establishment.”
The profile in Buzzfeed is of Katie McHugh, who is now unemployed and apparently very very sorry for her failed career as one of the alt-right’s favorite racist reporters. As people have pointed out, the piece is far from perfect and deserves plenty of criticism for either intentionally or inadvertently serving to rehabilitate McHugh’s public profile, with a perhaps overly sympathetic focus on her healthcare and employment struggles and doe-eyed photos accompanying the story.
But McHugh’s rise and fall as the racist reporter dejure shows how intertwined white nationalists and the Daily Caller or Breitbart are, building on past reporting on white nationalists at the Daily Caller and Breitbart’s mainstreaming of white nationalism.
Weird how pipeline advocates got so up in arms about an opponent warning how the justification of “just doing your job” has a very dangerous historical precedent in Nazism, but the same organization has no problem tweeting out an article attacking pipeline opponents in the White Nationalist-employing, “night of long knives”-diminishing Daily Caller.
Almost like it has nothing at all to do with an ethical opposition anti-semitism, and instead is yet another example of the fossil fuel industry’s viciously bad-faith approach to public discourse…
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