FAIR WARNING: Today’s ClimateDenier Roundup is not really about climate, but instead features a few stories from climate-denier-adjacent communities, where things are just fantastically and amusingly weird, despite the underlying horror of it all. So you may be excused if you’re busy, but … you’ll be missing out on some fun! (And some entertaining examples of the sort of paranoid, conspiracy-driven thinking that runs rampant in climate deniers.)
We’ll start with the GatewayPundit, the far-right conspiracy theory peddling “news” outlet that saw the white supremacist Patriot Front “crash” an anti-abortion rally this weekend in Chicago and said it had to be an FBI false flag, because the khaki-clad racists didn’t have fat enough asses. That’s not a joke, despite the many, many, funny tweets rightfully mocking it, GatewayPundit ran a whole story based on drawing yellow boxes around the ample “waste” size of KKK figures, compared to a decidedly slimmer and trimmer rear profiles of this particular batch of younger Neo-Nazis.
Now sure, it could be that Thomas Rousseau, who led the Patriot Front parade and also led 2017’s deadly “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, is secretly a Federal agent on a mission to make the right look like murderous, evil racists. (Just like how maybe communists have supposedly infiltrated the global scientific establishment to push the climate hoax to tank capitalism.) Or it could be that Rousseau’s demographic is decidedly younger than the sample of Klansman the GatewayPundit used as reference, and therefore haven’t yet had time to build such plump rubenesque figures. Or — and this is our most favorite but least plausible explanation — perhaps those brave young white men were actually on the cutting edge of MAGA-masculinity as well as anti-vaxx cure-alls, and are taking medicines more commonly used by trans women to block testosterone, and perhaps that’s what’s giving them such a trim figure!
Because as adamant Fox News-watchers will know, one of the key anti-vaccine groups has been pushing for those infected with coronavirus, but for whom the horse-paste didn’t work (shock!), to instead treat Covid-19 with spironolactone and finasteride. What’re those? Oh just testosterone suppressants, because more men were dying of Covid than women. So instead of taking a free, safe, and effective vaccine, the same coal-rolling petro-masculinists who spent years hurling “soy boy” as an insult and denigrating left-wing men for being effeminate/believing women about rape/not promoting a violent misogynist patriarchy, are now eagerly consuming “medical” advice telling them to take the actual medications trans women use to suppress testosterone.
What could be worse than an illness that would force the mighty (insecure) MAGA man to self-feminize? The Covid vaccines, of course!
That’s why one anti-vaxx influencer, “Vaccine Police” guy Chistopher Key, is insisting that his followers undergo “urine therapy.” Yes, apparently they have “tons and tons of research” showing the “antidote” to the vaccine (which Key called “the worst bioweapon I have ever seen”) is drinking your own pee. While it’s unclear how many bioweapons this trespassing, flamethrowing anti-masked crusader has seen, or how drinking your pee is supposed to protect you from the effects of other people taking the vaccine, his passion is undeniable.
Unfortunately, that’s exactly the problem. Because just like how climate disinformation uses conservative propaganda to shape politics, these aren’t just random fringe social media accounts potentially trolling, they’re real people, with enough followers to do real damage in the real world.
For example, the … er … crack … ahem … analysts at Gateway Pundit are part of the well-oiled, climate-disinfo-disseminating conservative pseudo-media machine that attacks Democrats and then repeatedly spread the sort of election conspiracy theories that motivated the January 6 insurrectionists who, as a recent HuffPost feature by Christopher Mathias explores, are also destroying innocent (Black and Brown, Democractic) lives back at home.
So there’s certainly plenty to ridicule, because a lot of people are ridiculous. And they get rewarded for it, by social media algorithms that prioritize engagement over quality and by conservative propaganda that poses as news, which together bestow the loudest wingnuts with countless followers, primed and ready to attack the sheeple who think vaccines are safe.
But hey, at least you’ll know when you’re talking to one, because they won’t be wearing a mask and you’ll be able to smell the pee on their breath!
(Best not to get too close, though, for a number of reasons.)