Tested By Fire
From Covid to Climate Change: The Alt-Right Pivot
Twenty-four hours is a long time in the news cycle, but even by the twenty-first century’s dizzying standards, the Daily Mail engaged in some remarkable editorial pirouettes this week. On Tuesday, the Mail responded to news that UK temperatures were about to hit 40 degrees, thereby breaking all historical records, with the following front page:
Inside, a comment piece by one Stephen Robinson accused the Met Office of ‘spreading alarm and scolding us with doom-laden lectures.’ Robinson reprised a theme that has been widely circulated on social media, and accused the Met Office of introducing an orange/red graphic map of the UK in order to terrify the country (damn these global elites - is there any dastardly trick that they won’t use to realise their awful plans?).
The Met Office have denied that they had any such intention, insisting that the new graphic was aimed to make it easier for colour-blind viewers to read. But Robinson and the Mail know what they know, and don’t care what they don’t know.
In addition to excoriating the weathermen for propagating this ‘doom-laden agenda’, Robinson attacked the ‘legions of snowflakes on social media’ for echoing the Met Office’s ‘agenda’. Even the Conservative government had succumbed to ‘infantile wokery’, he insisted, by expressing ‘querulous sentiments’ about the dangers of the coming heatwave.
All the ‘fatuous health and safety advice’ emanating from these quarters was another indication of the total subjugation of our institutions which are only ‘tolerated and bankrolled for as long as they parrot the predictable woke line.’
The news that the Met Office, let alone the Conservative government is being ‘bankrolled’ in order to parrot ‘the predictable woke line’, may raise a few eyebrows here and there, but Robinson sees what he sees, and what he sees is that a record-breaking heatwave is nothing that ‘real men’ can’t handle with a safari jacket and a ‘few beers.’
Nor was he the only one. The Mail’s editorial that day railed against the ‘apocalyptic pundits and the BBC’ and the ‘nannying officials telling us to stay indoors’ On Twitter Jeremy Clarkson had a larf at the expense of the doom-mongers:
And again:
Even as Clarkson was tormenting the wokies with these formidable insights, nearly 25,000 people were being forced to abandon their homes and campsites in the Gironde because of what meteorologists called a ‘heat apocalypse’ in western France. Across Europe wildfires were destroying thousands of hectares of land and forcing people to abandon their homes in France, Italy, Germany, Spain, and Portugal.
In the UK, it was all just a fuss about nothing for the Mail, and anyone who said anything different was a doom-mongering snowflake. Yet by the next day, things had changed:
How did we get from Sunny Day Britain to the Nightmare of the Wildfires? You may well ask. Well the fires happened, for one thing. Twenty homes burned in the east London village of Wennington; the London Fire Brigade taking 2,670 calls, compared with the usual 350 daily average - its busiest day since World War II; forty houses and shops destroyed in total; further fire incidents in Norfolk, Suffolk, Lincolnshire, Leicestershire and South Yorkshire.
Poor Sunny Day Britain. If only there had been a few more real men nearby who could have used their beers to help put these fires out. Meanwhile, rivers and reservoirs are drying up - the Lindley Wood Reservoir near Otley a shadow of its normal self - and farmers are already using more than 30 percent more water than a normal summer.
So did all this lead the Mail to some kind of Damascene conversion? That maybe the virtue-signalling snowflakes had a point when they suggested that none of this is normal, and that we should not just shrug our shoulders and remember the summer of 1976?
Don’t hold your breath. The Mail might like a good headline about the ‘wildfires’, but don’t expect it to link these fires to climate change, let alone suggest that they might become a regular occurrence in our overheating world.
This will not happen, because the Mail occupies that space where the alt-right and mainstream conservatism mesh to the point when they become almost indistinguishable from each other. This is not the conservatism of Alok Sharma for example, who led the COP26 conference in Glasgow. Sharma may not be my choice of a politician, but he did at least threaten to resign if the government rowed back from its net zero targets.
‘Climate Change Tyranny’
The Mail and its pundits occupy a very different political space. Beyond the macho posturing about ordering beers and keeping calm and carrying on, their antipathy to the very notion of climate change, let alone climate change mitigation, represents a common thread that connects the ‘new’ and ‘old’ right, which identifies climate change as another ‘culture war’ battlefield, in which expertise can be discarded, and their opinion is as good as anyone else’s.
Anyone who warns these tough guys that climate change is a clear and present danger to human survival is a ‘snowflake’ or a ‘bedwetter.’
These tendencies have been around for a while, but they have been turbo-charged in the new era of conspiracy theories and ‘anti-globalist’ politics, where any form of government interventionism is ‘nannying’ and ‘over-exaggeration’ at the least, and at the worst, represents a hidden ‘elite’ plot for world domination.
As a result, conspiracy theorists and purveyors of pandemic misinformation and disinformation have applied the same ‘world domination’ and ‘Great Reset’ tropes to climate change that they once attached to lockdowns, masks, and vaccines.
Even before the pandemic, Donald Trump called climate change a ‘hoax’ created by China ‘in order to make US manufacturing non-competitive.’ In Brazil in 2018, Jair Bolsonaro appointed a foreign minister who claimed that climate change was a plot by ‘cultural Marxists’ to benefit China.
The pandemic has provided new routes for the propagation of these views, and new audiences willing to hear them.
In 2021 the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (IDS) reported that climate change had become a ‘new front in the culture wars’ and argued that ‘Just as Covid has generated its own tribes and digital alliances, climate change has become yet another crucible in which formerly distinct movements, ideologies and actors can find common cause.’
Adherents to this ‘cause’ depicted climate change, like Covid, as an instrument of ‘elite domination’ and the ‘Great Reset’, and warned of attempts to impose ‘climate lockdowns.’
By May 2021, according to the IDS, the concept of a ‘climate lockdown’ had become ‘central to the right-wing lexicon of fear, on social media and beyond’ - that percolates through QAnon platforms, Fox News, YouTube conspiracy channels, and other alt-right outlets.
Variations on this pandemic-to-climate change- pivot can also be found in the arch-Brexiter Steve ‘Hard Man’ Baker’s evolving groupuscules, first the Brexiter ‘European Research Group’, then the ‘Covid Recovery Group’, and now the ‘Net Zero Scrutiny Group.’ You can also find it in the newly-ordained alt-right half-wit Calvin Robinson, who told GB News ‘All of the bishops talk about Brexit and climate change, but not our saviour Jesus Christ.’
Never one to turn down a good grift, Robinson has also associated himself with the alt-right Turning Point UK student organisation, which has been part-funded by what its founder Charlie Kirk calls ‘the fossil fuel space.’ No one will be surprised to find messages like this:
Most scientists agree that humanity has a diminishing window of opportunity in which to take collective action to prevent the world from burning up. The fossil fuel industry does not want that to happen, and that is why it funds movements that would have you believe that climate change is just a woke fuss about nothing.
This is why the Vox fascists in Spain will deny that the devastating fires in Spain have anything to do with climate change:
Let no one think these people don’t know what they’re doing. You might dismiss their arguments as stupid, but stupid ideas can go a long way in politics, especially nowadays. There are many powerful actors who have a vested interest in propagating such stupidity, and would like climate change to become one more divisive culture battle.
If they achieve that, they’ve won. And in these debased times, there is no shortage of loudmouths and chancers who will do this for money, or simply because they hate everything ‘woke’ and ‘left’ so much that they will oppose anything that seems to come from these circles.
Maybe, just maybe, some of them genuinely believe that climate change is not happening. But given their profoundly selfish and anti-social attitudes to almost everything else, it’s difficult to avoid the conclusion that they know perfectly well, but they just don’t care one way or another.
But we should care, and we should be aware of the game they’re playing, because the window of opportunity will not be there for long. We can’t afford to miss it. And we should not let ourselves be distracted by nonsensical conversation about hot summers and cool beers.