“Wind turbines pose a significant risk for birds and bats,” reads Mary-Jean Harris, who until recently ran Fairytale Princess Parties, which dispatched Disney princess cosplayers like Mary-Jean to children’s parties. (More on this later.) Now, sadly sans fanciful dresses and accessories, erstwhile princess Mary-Jean Harris appears to have been captured and held in a tower, forced to make climate denial YouTube videos.
With the screen presence of a hostage making awkward, direct eye contact with camera, broken only to check the script, she reads a claim that “fatalities to birds and bats caused by wind turbines far exceeds those caused by collisions with communication towers, power lines, windows, and cats,” which is wrong by several orders of magnitude and ignores the fact that fossil fuels are far more dangerous. Who is forcing this once-noble professional princess impersonator to star in a most ignoble fossil fuel propaganda production?
In concluding, she reveals her captors: “To learn more about this and other topics in climate change, please visit icsc-canada.com.”
ICSC stands for the International Climate Science Coalition, and like so many climate denial coalitions these days, it exists less as a group of like-minded advocacy organizations, and more a Canadian version of the sort of “shadowy groups” that companies like ExxonMobil use to advance their interests.
Before you mount a rescue mission though, we should note that all jokes aside, Mary-Jean has not, of course, been taken prisoner. Instead, she appears to be working for family, as she bears an undeniable likeness to (and a last name with) ICSC’s Tom Harris, an engineer-turned-career PR man, spending his days pushing industry-friendly propaganda.
And it turns out quackery runs in the family, as googling Mary-Jean brought up her extensive goodreads profile (she’s a historical fantasy author!) and this gem of a headline from VICE World News, starring none other than Mary-Jean Harris: Anti-Maskers Have Weaponized Disney Princesses.
Seems the pandemic was rough on Mary-Jean’s business. At the start of it in March of 2020, she’s quoted in OttowaStart talking about how her company, Fairytale Princess Parties, was struggling due to the lack of social gatherings requiring a Princess, and was hoping the switch to Facebook live streams would help make up for the lost revenue.
Apparently, it did not. Instead, she used the costumes for an Instagram influencer campaign against mask-wearing. Her Freedom Princess Canada account would post pictures of Mary-Jean as various Disney characters (which she insisted to VICE were based on generic fairytales, and not copyrighted Disney characters) accompanied by captions telling presumably impressionable audiences to “wear a crown, not a mask!”
True to Disney motif, she seems to have given up on her dream of being a princess (who leads her unmasked audience to an early and avoidable grave) and shut down the page shortly after the VICE piece ran last February. Since then, it seems business is still slow in the princess party world, and she’s taken a boring job at the family business (peddling climate denial).
Or, perhaps more true to those dark fairytales Disney whitewashes, Tom Harris saw how well Mary-Jean could get attention, noted her business was not going great, and is now exploiting this would-be damsel in distress as his own Anti-Greta puppet (without the Nazi strings attached).
Either way, the Disney costumes have not made an appearance in Mary-Jean Harris’s videos for ICSC.
Not yet, anyway.
They are apparently still being used for Fairytale Princess Parties Ottawa, if you’re in the area and want to book Princess Denial.