ADDRESSING a rally last weekend to protest against plans for a camp for 1,000-plus male Channel-crossing migrants to be sited in Bexhill-on-Sea, I noticed a subtle but significant change in the placards of the usual small gathering of counter-protesters. Instead of ‘refugees welcome here’, the new slogan of the self-declared anti-racists was ‘climate refugees welcome’ (my italics). The purported climate crisis and progressive ideology of identity politics have come together in this latest onslaught on traditional society.
The new theory has found its way into a learned journal. An essay by Cara Daggett which could be a parody, but isn’t, attributes climate change scepticism to white men desperately clinging to their passing privilege. Petro-masculinity: Fossil Fuels and Authoritarian Desire is the title of the paperpublished in Millennium: Journal of International Studies, and that might be enough deter TCW readers from further interest. But let’s explore the thesis, because it reveals the thinking of the ‘useful idiots’ in service of the globalist cabal.
Based at the Department of Political Science at Virginia Tech, Daggett introduces her article as ‘a feminist reading of climate denial and fossil fuel boosterism in new authoritarian movements in the West in order to interrogate the entanglement of masculinity and fossil fuels’. She notes that ‘the intersection of gender and energy remains understudied’.
Really? On what basis does she assume there is any difference in carbon consumption between men and women? Clothes, furnishing, cosmetics, car driving and smartphones are not restricted to male usage, at least not in my experience. In fact in my career I experienced a strong correlation between the demand for office heating and the number of female colleagues present!
But facts appear to be of little concern to Daggett, who begins her thesis with the contrived sociopolitical concept of ‘carbon democracy’. The modern world was built on fossil fuels, she graciously accepts, but the industrialisation that enabled the West to promote a creed of democracy also supported authoritarian regimes in the Middle East. What’s interesting are Daggett’s omissions – curiously she makes no mention of Rockefeller and other oil tycoons, perhaps due to an aversion to acknowledging the post-democratic global control ambitions of some of these men.
However for Daggett the concept of ‘petro-masculinity’ arises from the ‘historic role of fossil fuel systems in buttressing white patriarchal rule’. Predictably, writing during the presidency of Donald Trump, Daggett interprets the ‘Make America Great Again’ movement as a ‘reassertion of white masculine power’. She refers to a study by Aaron McCright and Riley Dunlap (2011) showing that ‘white, conservative American men – regardless of class – appear to be among the most vociferous climate deniers, as well as leading fossil fuel proponents in the West’.
Populism is too mild a term for Trump in Daggett’s view. She regards him and his supporters as ‘climate fascists’ due to their wilful destruction of the environment. White men apparently have a fetish for oil and coal, for smoke and fumes, and for ecological violence.
Daggett leans on the Frankfurt School alumnus Theodor Adorno for a psychoanalytic understanding of this authoritarian mentality. In 1947 Adorno devised the F Scale, a personality test to measure the presence of authoritarian traits. A rigid personality type was susceptible to aggressive impulses, suggestible to superstitions, and thus easily manipulated by demagogues. As an emigré from Nazi Germany, Adorno was influenced by his experiences and political leanings: the F was an abbreviation for fascism, and the test was not meant to reveal authoritarianism of the Left.
I remember in the aftermath of Trump’s election seeing commuters reading George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. Trump was cast by ‘liberal’ media as Big Brother, and anyone who didn’t believe that the president was a reprise of Benito Mussolini was failing to see the elephant in the room. Ironically, in his last year of office Trump’s administration was overwhelmed by the Covid-19 crisis in an exploited scare that enabled the real fascists to impose their revolutionary Great Reset on the US.
According to Daggett, white men must be restricted in their freedoms and political choices. Their attachment to fossil fuels is but another form of patriarchy: ‘Through the rosy nostalgia afforded by petro-masculine identity, the affront of global warming or environmental regulations appear as insurgents on par with the dangers posed by feminists and queer movements seeking to leach energy and power from the state/traditional family.’
Minority groups, she fears, are most prone to such ‘petro-masculine attacks’, because black, queer or trans women transgress patriarchal norms. Reactionary sentiment leads to misogynistic violence: ‘the aesthetics of fossil fuels are ripe for recoding as expressions of sexualised power and orgasmic satisfaction’. She draws ‘parallels between rape and extractivism’. Phallic pipelines and so on . . .
The same male fantasies are to blame for the wanton destruction of the planet and its oceans, creatures and minerals. Global warming, however, she sees as a ‘breach in the patriarchal dam’. White men face existential threat, and this ‘alerts us to the possibility that climate change can catalyse fascist desires to secure a lebensraum, a living space, a household that is barricaded from the spectre of threatening others, whether pollutants or immigrants or gender deviants’.
Calling for her own totalitarian environmental justice, Daggett warns that ‘authoritarian desires are likely to be aroused not only by the appearance of the Other at the gates – eg climate refugees from the global South – but also as a reaction to perceived enemies within the state, both human and nonhuman’.
While this inverted and manipulated perspective may be absurd, it is not just one writer’s lunacy. This is the ideology drummed into the heads of students in every educational institute, preparing them for battle. Ordinary people of Western countries are being weakened democratically and economically as vast funds are diverted supposedly for developing poorer regions but actually used to build a new world order, while enriching the predatory class.
Woke eco-zealots like Daggett who want to point the finger at white men should be aiming at those omnipotent white men imposing their power globally such as Klaus Schwab, Bill Gates, George Soros. That she ignores them, that these uber-powerful men don’t count, is a total giveaway of her thesis, if one was needed.
