One of the great disinformation attacks of the early 21st century was the manufactured "climategate" controversy, in which climate scientists' emails were leaked, selectively edited and released to media as though normal scientific banter were malicious corruption. The man who takes credit for coining the name and bringing it out of the blogs and into mainstream media, what he considered his "finest hour," is James Delingpole.
Far from having built on such a success, a decade and a half later, Delingpole's career is looking about as healthy as "climategate" was the true scandal he claimed it was. Most recently, as of the past week or so, his Twitter account was suspended. It’s back now, and James tweeted that “Twitter seems to be enforcing this new censorship policy called 'Twitter Circle.' Apparently, I can't retweet or quote tweet stuff to a general audience any more. Only to people in my 'Twitter Circle.'”
Is Twitter going down reddit’s path of “quarantining” harmful content? No, James just doesn’t know how to use Twitter, and someone explained he just had to select “everyone” in a drop-down menu when tweeting.
Delingpole didn’t say why his account went down, but it’s probably because of his recurring Covid-19 conspiracies, since Twitter doesn't have any policy for climate disinformation, something James had generally lost interest in anyway. (More on that in a second.)
Just because Twitter might take away that megaphone doesn't mean he'd shut up, as his "rambling conspiracy theories with cranks" podcast is available on a bunch of different channels. But as for serious mainstream-ish media content, his only bylines these days are watching Netflix and writing about it for the Spectator. Not exactly the climate beat!
You can find all his Putin-defending, "Ukraine is a #FakeNews gaslighting operation," chemtrail and other conspiracies, and justifying entertaining craziness like that the moon landing and school shootings are a hoax at his Substack, which he started in late January, 2022.
But there's one place that is also no longer carrying his drivel: Breitbart. Yes, the website that farmed out its early edits to literal white supremacists apparently found that Delingpole's racist-defending and lazy lie promulgating was too much even for them, as his most recent posts there are from early January, 2022.
No telling why, as Delingpole was the Executive Editor of Breitbart London, but now they seem to be going in a different direction, and exiled Delingpole to substack. Instead of having second-hand middlemen "interpreter of interpretations" hacks deliver climate propaganda, they're just letting advertisers post directly and going the sponsored content route (while also promoting a stupid new movie about Hunter Biden).
The first one we noticed, and to Breitbart's credit they did make it relatively obvious that it's "sponsored content" both from the home page and when you clicked on the content, was a warning from Stansberry Research that "inflation and energy crisis [are] barreling towards each other," foretelling "America's Nightmare Winter" before sending terrified readers to a nightmarishly long diatribe.
What's Stansberry Research? We did some research and found Stansberry Research has been pulling the ol' fearmonger-then-exploit trick since at least 2014, per Snopes, and its founder Porter Stansberry used anti-gay slurs and racist language, after defrauding investors with a promise of doubling their money if they paid $1,000 for a stock tip on an energy company.
A hateful con-man? Fits right in at Breitbart!
Similarly, "Consumers' Research" sponsored a post at Breitbart last week, attacking BlackRock as "the architect of 'woke capitalism.'"
For those who don't recognize the name of one of the oldest industrial front groups in the US, Consumers' Research was founded in 1928, and TrueNorth Research did a great exposé last year. The group "basically died in 2002 — with zero or almost no income for a decade — only to be reborn in 2013 as a vehicle for amicus briefs tied to GOP Attorneys General."
The group has "opposed life-saving airbags in cars, fuel efficiency standards, climate change science, rules against junk mail faxes, and even limits on cancer-causing products," as well as "sided with payday lenders against limits on interest rates" and "with Big Tobacco companies against second-hand smoke regulations."
These days, though, they're a key group pushing the Infowars Investing anti-ESG crusade, attacking Trans youth, and enjoying the support of Barre Seid, he of the $1.6 billion donation to conservative dark money propaganda.
Delingpole must be pretty pissed to be out of Breitbart, and not collecting any of that cash!