Push Kidd. Last episode, we heard American Petroleum Institute President Mike Summers talk about his concern that a small fringe was threatening our way of life.
A small fringe is stuck in the past. They oppose growth, expansion and new infrastructure. There are against new jobs, higher living standards.
Trump, the president with the most fossil fuel money backing of any president ever, is not so subtle. What they've done to the country is just incredible. The environmentalists, I mean they are terrorists.
They were terrorists.
I call it the environmental terrorists.
Repression of descent is a key marker of fascist as is the targeting of an internal enemy, which for the Trump administration includes climate activists, the nebulous Catchell Antifa, and of course immigrants breaking.
Into people's cars and homes and scenes that evoke Nazi Germany or Stalinist Russia.
What's happening right now in America is evil and it is completely illegal.
We're even hearing about it from folks who helped elect Trump in the first place. You don't want militarized people in the streets just roaming around snatching people up. Are we really going to be that the Gestapo? Where's your papers.
Is that what we've come to, and.
Of course it's all connected. The immigration enforcement apparatus is being used to punish non citizens who engage in protest of any kind.
For example, arresting and threatening to deport non citizens student.
And faculty for engaging.
In luliful political protests is a practice we associate with a card to regimes.
For the record, the courts have ruled over and over again that non citizens do have the right to free speech, and of course we laid out in our season the real free speech threat. How the creation of the Department of Homeland Security and the US War on Terror led very quickly to an expanded definition of terrorists, which led to the targeting of environmental and animal rights activists not just in the US but everywhere. Here's a clip from a UN report about it.
We don't have a globally agreed definition of terrorism. As the ash was smoldering at the Twin Towers had fallen Security Council meets, and in that first month they create a new resolution UN Security Council Resolution thirteen seventy three.
We have adopted a very ambitious, comprehensive strategy.
Their vortage for throughout the m.
Meeting as a jount.
Requires them to legislate against terrorism, but there's no agreed definition of terrorism. So each state essentially has got to define what terrorism is on its own terms, and the absence of a common definition has meant that there's been this real ripeness for abuse. States get to define whomever they like is a terrorist.
With almost no consequence at the domestic level.
And so what we're.
Seeing around the globe is the imprisonment of civil society.
Actor.
We're seeing direct targeting. In some cases, they're killing by the permissive framework of counter terrorism.
Now the Trump administration is targeting civil society groups writ large, using foreign influence laws to cut off funding to NGOs it doesn't like, and launching federal investigations into organizations that focus too much on civil rights or climate change or whatever else he's decided he doesn't like that month. In fact, nowhere have the fingerprints of the fossil fuel industry on this trend been so visible as during the two terms
of Trump's presidency. That's our story today. After this quick break, I'm Ami Westervelt, and this is drilled.
We have to see more and more dangerous and distructive tactics going to season destructure project.
I'm a shut them now altogether.
This is Derek Morgan talking at a meeting of the American Legislative Exchange Council in twenty sixteen. At the time, Morgan was the top lobbyist for the American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers, the trade group for refiners, pipe and petrochemical companies. They're kind of like the American Petroleum Institute for a different part of the industry, and instead of being dominated
by Exxon, they're dominated by coke industries. Anyway, Morgan was there to pitch conservative state legislators on a new sample bill that they could take home and adopt to increase jail time and fines for protests, specifically protests near big infrastructure projects like I don't know oil pipelinestistics on.
The Dapple protests.
So between ten and fifteen dollars protesters, seven hundred and sixty one arrests, ninety four percent of those from out of state, and third or really that happened for ourcrineral records.
These are all classic anti protest talking points, especially the out of state activist thing which fossil fueld companies in particular, have been using since the early nineteen hundreds.
What we wanted to do was.
Really strengthen the laws on trust me so I would see that through as well as auto legislation with highline criminal trustment.
Trespassing laws of course already existed in all of the states, just like private property laws and all kinds of other things. What these guys were really worried about was protest, particularly the Standing Rock protest, the largest Indigenous led protest in the country in decades, and one of the largest climate protests in the world. That's the Dapple protest that you
heard Morgan reference earlier. It started in twenty sixteen, but by the time Trump had been elected and took office, the protest was ending and the backlash was getting going. Derek Morgan, the lobbyist you just heard talking there, he's a VP at the Heritage Foundation today. That's the organization that's spearheaded Project twenty twenty five. Before he got into Advocate, he was a lawyer working for a law firm that might sound familiar to listeners of this podcast, Pressure Gibson,
Dunn and Crutcher. That's the firm that eventually accused Greenpeace of orchestrating the Standing Rock protests, winning their pipeline company client a settlement of over three hundred million dollars. We did a whole season on it. Check it out season twelve's left. Before Morgan worked at Gibson Dunn, he was
senior staff to Vice President Dick Cheney. The laws that were written and passed as a response to Standing Rock during Trump's first presidency put in place a lot of the restrictions that were then used against campus pro Palestinian protesters during his second term. Earlier this year, Marco Rubio did a little tour of an oil rich part of the Latin American and Caribbean region, stopping in Guyana and
then Surinam. He wanted to talk about oil, but the press corps kept asking him about the targeting of protesters back home. First it was a Reuters reporter at the press conference in Guyana.
Mister Secretary, a Turkish student in Boston was detained and handcuffed on the street by playing clothes agents. A year ago, she wrote an opinion piece about the Gaza War. Could you help us understand what the specific action she took led to her visa being a revolt.
Let me be abundantly clear.
Okay, if you go apply for a visa right now anywhere in the world, let me just send this message out. If you apply for a visa to enter the United States and be a student, and you tell us that the reason why you're coming to the United States is not just because you want to write op eds, because you want to participate in movements that are involved in doing things like vandalizing universities, harassing students, taking over buildings, creating a ruckus.
We're not going to give you a visa.
If you lie to us and get a visa and then enter the United States and with that visa participate in that sort of activity, We're going to take away your visa and we have a right, like every country in the world, right to remove you from our country.
So it's just that simple.
I think it's crazy. I think it's stupid for any country in the world to welcome people.
Into their country.
They're going to go to your universities as visitors. They're visitors and say I'm going to your universities to start a riot.
At this point, you can see the Guyanese leaders nervously exchanging glances and for good reason. This is a wild answer. First of all, students who go to the US to study and then decide to take part in a protest didn't lie on their visa application. They didn't immigrate solely
to take part in protests. They might not have even known, in fact, almost certainly didn't know that they were going to take part in One second, as I mentioned earlier in this episode, the first amendment extends to visitors, as Rubio calls them. The next day, Rubio's entourage moved on to Surinam, and The New York Times hit him with another version of this.
Question, related to China. In twenty nineteen, you supported legislation to have the US government support the protesters in Hong Kong, the pro democracy protesters, and mostly the protests are peaceful, but also occasionally the disrupted public life. And so based on your rationale for deporting campus protesters in the US, would you now support the Chinese Commanist Party or Hong Kong authorities supporting foreigners who took part in those protests in twenty nine.
So, the people that we're getting rid of in our country are vandalizing. They're not protesters. They're taking over college campuses. They're harassing fellow students. We let them in our country to study. They didn't say I want to go to university and I want to vandalize your library, and I want to wear a mask over my face like if it's Halloween and terrorized people. We didn't give them a visa to do any of that.
Keep in mind Rubio was saying this as masked ice agents. We're terrorizing the city of Minneapolis.
So we don't want those people in our country. They're going beyond demonstration. They are going and they're creating a ruckus. They are creating riots basically on campus, and it's unfair for students. People pay a lot of money to go to these they borrow money to go these schools. You can't even go to class because some lunatic who's covering their face is running through campus, spray painting things, harassing people, and they're in my country.
As a guest.
We want them out, every one of them.
I find.
We're going to kick them out again.
In these press conferences, it's fossil fuels, American might a lot of reals, strongman, tough guy rhetoric and targeting of a minority group that's causing problems. Or in Rubio speak, a ruckus. We talked interseason Carbon Bros. With Non Toxic about the connection between male identity and particularly American male identity, and fossil fuels and the way that environmental and climate policy can then be seen as not just an attack on America, like Doctor Brule explained last episode, but also
as an attack on masculinity. You hear this in the way that folks like Jordan Peterson talk about climate.
You know, it's an intrinsic part of life to feel guilty in relationship to nature and to feel guilty in relationship to culture. No, it's difficult for us to live in harmony with the natural world and for the natural world to live in harmony with us, and so we have that sense intrinsically that there's a lack in us that needs to be redressed, and unfortunately that can be
weaponized and has been. And what I see happening to young men that we have this sense in the world that human beings live in antagonism to nature, and that we're actually a malevolent force, and that our social structures, which are clearly capable of the commission of atrocity, are fundamentally oppressive patriarchal in their nature.
And so then if you're a male in a society with that ethos, you're the motive force that drives you into the world to live is associated with rapaciousness and despoilation on the natural front, and then oppression and atrocity on the social front. Well, then if you're the least bit conscientious, because this sort of accusation hurts conscientious young men the most, then the best you can do is, well, let's say castrate yourself.
How would that be?
You also hear it in the way the big tech guys are thinking and talking about this stuff, which is less climate is a hoax, and more unchecked climate change is going to send the unwashed masses after us. What do we do? This harkens back to a certain strain of American male identity too, as Hannah Morris laid out in her book Apocalyptic Authoritarianism, particularly with respect to the peak oil movement in the early two thousands.
And they learned about this peak oil and this cops of civilization, and this provide them a sense of control, a sense of power because of feeling like they are among a minority, a small minority of people who knew what the future holds, and that they can then navigate through that through their sort of rugged individualism, the s frontiersmen kind of identity and start tapping into really longstanding American masculine identities of feeling as though there's a special
trait among American men who can really grapple with harsh conditions and build a new society, build a new civilization.
This is being echoed again today in the rhetoric of the guys pushing these so called network state idea. When Trump and Jade Vance were beating their chests and talking about taking over Greenland, yes they were doing classics strongman fascism stuff, but they were also pursuing Greenland for a very specific reason. The Peter teelbacked company Praxis had tried to buy Greenland for the purposes of turning it into
a network state. That's a neo feudal concept where countries are replaced by corporate controlled regions or, in the euphemistic language of the network state bros, free economic zones. Anyway, Praxice had tried to buy Greenland and failed, but since Teal had funded both Trump's campaign and Praxis, they just tried again. This time with a Teal vance Pick as the US ambassador to Denmark. Here's Practice founder Dryden Brown expounding on some of his beliefs in a really interesting
interview with Amanda Cassette on Endgame. The parallels to peakists, colonialism, and little boys in rocket jammys are heart miss.
In the beginning, you know, we were talking about you know, traditional Western values. We were you know, eating eating raw meat, drinking eggs. We were like we had a suit of armor in our in the apartment. I think there are people who sort of found Found Practice, found us and thought it was maybe like an enclave of sanity. Maybe it was like a you know, a better place to be like a guy. Who's a better place to be like a man. There are a ton of women in Practice too.
It turns out that women didn't like the sort of you know, COVID man, double vaxed mask wearing soy man.
All these folks, from Trump and Rubio to Dryden Brown and Peter tele complain about the woke mob and snowflake liberals cramping their style. They think Gota Tunberg is the anti Christ. Literally in Teal's case, They long for the days when men were real men. All while not really fitting the bill themselves. It's hard to believe that any of these guys has ever thrown a punch let alone forged a frontier. Perhaps it's their own internal snowflake that
they're really mad at. In any case, for the past several years, the same folks fighting for a particular type of masculinity have been fighting against climate action as those saving the planet is somehow antithetical to the notion of men being heroes. Again, they've also been connecting oil and emissions with manliness. Sociologist Carry Daggett says this is no accident, and she even coined a term for it, petro masculinity. Here she is talking to my Carbon Brose co host Daniel Penny.
With that term. I think it took on a life of its own, which was a total surprise to me because it can be understood in this deep, structural and historic way, which is really where I wanted to go with it in the article. And at the same time, it's so visibly present that I think just saying the word people can understand or think of examples that they see.
When I wrote about this, it was during the first Trump administration, and what I wanted to do was understand this connection and far right movements between misogyny, anti feminist politics, anti queer politics, and this support for fossil fuel and climate denial, and they still tend to be talked about separately, as if they are sort of coincidentally inhabiting the same movement.
And the work that I was reading that led me to feel that they are not coincidentally happening together was really feminist and ecofeminist work that has for decades pointed to the structural connections between the way so called women's work or reproductive labor is exploited and treated, and the way that often racialized work and colonial work is exploited and treated, and then also the way that the work of nature or the work of non human animals and
creatures and plants as exploited and treated. That these kinds of justifications and narratives are really interconnected, and so on the one hand, it's this deep structural thing that can be very hard to see. But on the other hand, conveniently, now although tragically it's very easy to see on the surface that these things are coming together.
There's another thing happening to both men and the fossil fuel industry right now an existential crisis. And no, I don't mean climate change, although yeah, I mean that too. But just as fossil dominance is being threatened, so is
the patriarchy. The same men who feel threatened by the existence of trans people also feel threatened by the side of a windmill, and they're responding in the same way, trying to hang onto power in every way possible, scapegoating minority groups, and trying to insist on this st quo using force and violence when necessary. Next time on Drill, We're gonna wrap this little mini series up in a perhaps unexpected place, Guyana, with a look at what the US attack on Venezuela was really all about.
To Brazil, and we gave all of this to Venezuela. SLAUNI claimed that two thirds again that it belongs to them. Nata no way, sorry here not happening.
Drilled is an original Critical Frequency production distributed by Pushkin Industries. This mini series was written and reported by me Amy Westervelt. Our producers are Martin Saltz, Austwich and Peter Duff. Matthew Fleming did the art work. Our first Amendment attorney is James Wheaton of the First Amendment Project. Thanks for listening and we'll see you next time.