Manufacturing dissent and working to cast doubt on established science has always been a cornerstone of organized denial’s playbook (just as it was for tobacco, lead, asbestos, etc.). So in the wake of its failure to get a climate debate from Scott Pruit’s EPA or Trump’s National Security Council, Heartland is attempting to go it alone and put on its own debates, one in New York City on September 23rd and then another a month later in Colorado.
Heartland has tried to make it a thing by issuing a press release, running an op-ed in the Washington Times, and even crafting a tweet explaining that Skype isn’t a good option for something like this. (Keep that in mind next time someone from Heartland makes a ‘why don’t scientists just Skype?’ quip about flying.)
Fortunately, it doesn’t look like any of the invited climate scientists are going to take the bait. Nor should they, because as Dr. Andrew Dessler lays out clearly on Twitter, the questions that will inform the debate have long been answered.
Rehashing denier myths isn’t a debate, it’s misinformation, so there’s no need to give these deniers any attention. Or, per Dr. Michael Mann: “I won’t debate a chihuahua about climate change either, even if it continues to nip at my heels…”
As Rebecca Leber explains in Mother Jones, the real debate has now advanced to quantifying just how much of an unnatural disaster’s damages can be pinned to the fossil fuel industry, and, perhaps, even individual companies.
Obviously, that’s a problem for the folks at Heartland who depend on a healthy fossil fuel industry to fund these sorts of shenanigans. But the other thing they rely on is mainstream media attention to carry their message to the public. And on that front, there are some who argue that Heartland’s propaganda should be broadcast widely for the public to judge for itself, as opposed to being shut out of decent society for being indecent.
But the latter option, also known as deplatforming, has proven effective in the larger cultural context. For example, Milo Yiannopoulous was once a rising star in right-wing circles due to his perch at Breitbart and funding from the Mercers (who also fund Heartland and other deniers).
In 2016, Yiannopolous was banned from Twitter for leading a band of hateful trolls in attacking comedian Leslie Jones. Things really went downhill the next year, when he made some pro-pedophila comments and resigned from Breitbart, losing his blogging platform, a book deal, and Mercer funding. Later in 2017, Buzzfeed revealed how central he was in laundering white nationalism into Breitbart, which made it even harder for poor Milo to make a buck off of being offensive.
He continued to fade away in 2018, and now he’s quite literally complaining about being broke, whining about being banned from all mainstream social media to a handful of supporters who he chastises for not buying enough merch to fund his lavish lifestyle.
That doesn’t mean he’s giving up the grift, though. Instead, he’s been relegated to the smallest and most obscure platforms. And while he was once the big dog on campus, he recently announced that he bought his own ticket to a Furry convention, as RightWingWatch’s Jard Holt reported. (For those wondering, Holt describes furries as “people who have interest in animal personas with human characteristics; people who participate in the subculture often present themselves as non-human characters via art and costumes.” It’s unclear why he sought to join that particular herd, though others have covered the neo-Nazi underbelly of the furry community, and Milo is hardly above using his sexuality as a shield for his trolling.)
But after a short time spent sniffing around Milo’s history, MidWest FurFest revoked his registration for the event.
Bear that in mind, then, when thinking about the chihuaha’s nipping at climate scientists’ heels, demanding a platform and debate. Because while the deniers at Heartland have yet to be fully deplatformed like their fellow grifter Milo, that doesn’t mean we need to take their yipping seriously.
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