The Testosterone Pipeline: How the Manosphere Fuels Climate Denial

It might be hard to remember at this point, but think back to just after the election. This is what a lot of the news sounded like.

Did an election that was supposed to revolve around women's issues actually come down to the flight of.

Men young men.

The headline was that men, and especially young men, swung big for Trump. His campaign even consulted Baron Trump for tips on which podcast he should go on, which young male influencers he should court, and with the help of money from big oil, Peter Teal and Elon Musk. It worked. Not because Trump went on those podcasts per se, but because he tapped into the ethos of those guys and made himself the candidate for aggrieved young.

Men of the people. I want to bend to know boys An ross Uh, theil baughn also with the boys and left, but not least the mighty and powerful Joe Rogan.

And practically the same breast. Trump promised to roll back the rights of women and trans people, conduct mass deportation of immigrants, get the EPA, and get rid of anything that looks like climate policy. At this point, you might be wondering why we're talking about the manosphere. On Drilled, a climate podcast. The answer is simple, the long standing and ever increasing overlap between male grievance culture and climate

Thanks. Amy, So excited to be doing this show together. There are a lot of ways malesculinity and climate are tied up in our culture and politics, and we'll be diving into a few of them. But I think you're right that the most obvious place to start is the so called manosphere. This is the write coded online world of dudes like Joe Rogan, Andrew Tate, Jordan Peterson, Charlie Kirk.

Stephen Krauda, Matt Walsh, Tucker Carlson, Van Manteno, Theo Wong, Jake and Logan, Paul.

Lever, King, Andrew Huberman.

Ben Elk, Boys, Flagrant, and many others.

Okay, so I've heard of some of these guys, but that is a long ass list, and honestly, some of these names sound like they've been made up. I don't buy it.

It's impossible to keep up with all of them, and because we live in such a fractured media ecosystem, you're not going to hear about many of these guys unless you're actively seeking them out, or you've got a man in your life who's a big fan, which I feel

If you're a male in a society with that ethos, you're associated with rapaciousness and despoilation on the natural front, and then oppression and atrocity on the social front. It's like, well, then if you're the least bit conscientious, because this sort of accusation hurts conscientious.

Young man the most.

Then the best you can do is, well.

Let's say castrate yourself. How would that be?

This climate change narrative, this is a really coofy thing that people on the left are talk about. This is because of climate change. This is climate change causes fire. It's just la. It's not climate change.

Climate change is real, but it's not the most serious environmental problem in the world. It's not the end of the world, and we need to be telling kids the truth.

If you don't recognize those voices, that was Canadian psychologist turned podcaster Jordan Peterson, failed comedian turned MMA announcer turned podcaster Joe Rogan, and a relatively new intrant to the manosphere Breakthrough Institute co founder turned to Twitter files thread guy, self proclaimed journalist and newsletter star somehow not yet a podcaster, Michael Schellenberger.

We included him here because he's a super obvious example of why we're even talking about the manosphere undrilled in the first place. Shellenberger is like horseshoe theory come to life, and his journey from environmental pr guy to climate skeptic to dipping a toe in the misogyny and anti trans universe. Illustrates just how porous the lines between these two worlds is. And there are plenty of other dudes like them popping

For these guys, masculinity and climate are linked in a larger reactionary project. They want to return world to some imaginary golden age when energy was cheap and men were in charge. And their message is resonating, not just with the out of work blue collar guys pundits were so obsessed with. After Trump's victory in twenty sixteen. Those guys in the diner remember them, but with younger educated men,

Yeah, that is the piece that feels pretty new to me, and also like something that has been pretty strategic and intentional and in a pretty smart way. This masculine sort of reactionary politics has been around for a long time, but it's been adapted really easily to tap into some real issues facing young men today inflation, wage stagnation, and pin those issues on feminists and climate activists.

Peterson and Rogan don't always talk about climate, but they're doing so more and more these days. Just like fitness instructors and guys who give business advice on TikTok have been solely blending political talking points into their podcasts, Peterson and Rogan have been incorporating fossil fuel talking points into their shows.

Meanwhile, Schellenberger has long been a so called reformed environmentalist raising an eyebrow at climate action, but he's only recently come around to what I've been calling the gentleman grift. So, you know, the relationship between climate deniers and gender warriors goes both ways. Here's a clip of Schellenberger talking at a recent conference for a new fun little group created

The moralizing men, the woe men are actually weak men. Manly men are an improvement. Without any morality or sense of concern or empathy, they become an Andrew Tait. We can strive for something better, to be gentlemen. Gentlemen are men that have the power of violence and aggression, but they would never use it to take advantage of the week and the vulnerable. Instead, they would use it to build a civilized society.

Andrew Tait is a useful foil for the gentleman battalion of the Manisphere Army. They can always point to Tate, an alleged sex trafficker and Ponzi schemer and say we're not misogynists, We're not like that guy, while still spreading their regressive ideas about gender and their reactionary social views and complacency about climate change. Even Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, enemy of all things woke, had this to say when the Tate Brothers landed in his state to fight a recent case.

No, Florida is not a place where you're welcome with those that type of conduct.

And I don't know how it came to this. These guys go on each other's shows to grow their audiences and reinforce one another's message, or to just get paid because there's a lot of fossil fuel money slashing around the manisphere too. Just sticking with podcasts. Nine out of the ten with the largest followings across platforms or right leaning, with a total following of more than one hundred and ninety seven million, all but one of them hosted by men.

What our findings underscore is that the rights as a disproportionate reached to a wide variety of audiences. We looked at about three hundred and twenty top online shows that either have a right leaning or left leaning ideological bent, and what we found was that a lot of these shows are not outright saying that they're ideological, and yet when you dig into the content of the shows, you start to see how some of these right wing talking

Boys. I know a lot of you guys are thinking, like me, You're seeing what's happening in this country.

Everything's just getting.

Really really weird.

You got men plan and women's sports, the borders wide open.

This election might be the most important election in.

US is three and of the restoration.

They're not going there for news and politics. They're going there to hear from their favorite comedians. They're going there to hang out with the bros basically, and so they go on different shows and they kind of have this camaraderie and that makes these your listeners kind of feel like in the club, you know.

But how did these dudes who just love martial arts and comedy before become mouthpieces for misogyny and climate denial.

So there are really a few different species of these dudes. Some of these guys started as legacy media conservative darlings, like former Fox host Tucker Carlson, who has endorsed the idea that wind turbines kill whales and that sunning your scrotum increases sperm quality. And then you've got guys like Charlie Kirk of Turning Point USA, or Dennis Prager of the conservative edutainment company Prager You and Ben Shapiro, who

Yes, there's been a few really great pieces of reporting on these guys over the years. The one I always think of is this article that Jeff Dembickie wrote for Vice News a while ago where he talked about how the Wilkes brothers have really tied this into kind of evangelical Christianity as well. So, for example, at his church, Dan Wilkes requires women to quote keep silence and has

And conservatives have been doing this for a long time, building networks of talent to get out their message. Here's Kayla.

Conservatives and conservative donors. They put money into building these networks, and they have been doing that for years. We saw them dominate you know, right wing talk radio for instance, back in the nineties and early two thousands. You know the rush Limbas and the Glenn Becks, they really dominated that space. Then you saw them move into cable and that you know, now you see Fox started to really

Okay, so there's an obvious reason why donors like the Wilks Brothers would be investing money to boost the careers of climate denying anti feminist podcasters.

But then there are the dudes like Joe Rogan or the guys from Flagrant who didn't always have an opinion on climate change, or their opinion seems to shift all the time. Sometimes in the case of Brogan, he was having guests like David Wallace Wells, the climate columnist for The New York Times and author of the book The Uninhabitable Earth, which is all about what unchecked climate change will look like in a few years. So Rogan has really shifted in recent years, as has his audience, and

And the algorithm is really good at kind of leading you down these rabbit holes. We actually just published a study within the last few days TikTok new TikTok account and we followed five of the leading podcasters. So we followed a page that had full sense content for instance, that had Joe Rogan's content for instance.

Well, the third type.

That got mentioned on mission was reptilios.

They don't want to talk about the reptilion presence at all.

Was there any sort of an explanation did anybody give you of why they don't want to talk about it?

But we wanted to see what following some of these kind of podcasters and seeing this content once you're starting to see that content, we.

Wanted to see where TikTok's for you page would lead you.

We found that the algorithm started leading us down to conspiracy theories and toxic masculinity videos and by Toxic Toxic Masculinity videos.

They were often framed as motivational.

What's your dream my father asked, grinding until my bank account looks like a phone.

They had clips of like expensive watches and boats and cars and and you know, very.

Kind of Andrew Tate esque.

I would say, where he's talking about, like, you know, getting rich?

Really I decided to get rich rich.

Step one is I've tried decided to be very logical about it.

Just player right, So it's like, I want money? What is money?

Using even some of his voiceovers, So some of the sounds would use his voice and would talk about, you know, coaching men about their girlfriends.

In one instance, we.

Saw a video say, uh, tell her that you're going to quit your job because you want to chase your dreams and run your own business.

Those sorts of things.

Wow, that is wild. And how many people are starting with these podcasts and then winding up watching these clips.

So it's hard to say exactly because these clips are broken up in so many different ways and distributed around the internet. But Kayla, you know, could say more people are tuning into podcasts and online shows, for instance, than they are into cable news. We did it, Daniel, We did it. Unfortunately, I'm not so sure that non toxic or drilled are included in those top podcasts, but you know,

Wow.

Another Pew study from the previous year in twenty twenty three found that eighty seven percent of people who hear the news on podcasts said they expect it to be mostly accurate, and thirty one percent said that they even trust the news they hear from podcasts more than traditional news.

That is terrible because, unlike US, most podcasts do not fact check like at all. I mean, Jogan is sort

So about seven to ten Americans believe in climate change and think humans are contributing to the warming of the atmosphere. But there's a gap between men and women, and it's pretty large, especially when you drill down by age or party. If you're listening to this podcast and you're a man, you probably care about climate change. And if you're not a man, you probably know men who care about climate change.

Now, Well, we do see differences between men and women when it comes to climate change.

This is Alec Tyson, Associate director of Research at pe Research Center.

Women tend to be more concerned about the issue and more willing to either take action or see themselves as playing a role in addressing the issue.

Wow, that is really fascinating and I'm honestly kind of surprised that this is still the case. I know that from stuff that I've worked on before. The pollsters working for the fossil fuel industry figured this out a long time ago, like in the nineties, and really leaned into it. I did not realize it was still working quite so well.

Right, It is interesting how much that gender gap is still very present today, and it may actually be getting wider. Alex studies public views on science and technology, and he's been looking at the particular differences between men and women when it comes to whether climate change is happening and how ct is that we deal with it.

Seventy two percent of women view it as a very or moderately big problem. That shares fifty six percent among men, So a sizeable shares of both groups, but a sixteen point gap here where women are expressing more concern about the importance or urgency of the issue.

Here, and for the men who don't believe in climate change or who don't think it's salient, how does that lack of interest in climate or lack of belief in the climate crisis track with other political beliefs or political identities.

So just among men men who lean or identify with the Republican Party, just twenty nine percent view climate change as a salient problem. Let's talk about men who leaner identify with the Democratic Party. Ninety percent view climate change as a highly salient problem. That's a sixty one point gap within men. We're talking about men. We're staying within gender here, but this partisan difference between Republican men and Democratic men is enormous.

Okay, so there's a sixteen point gap, sixteen point gap that really that does kind of blow my mind between American men and women. But then there's also this huge divide among men on the importance or even the reality of climate change depending on their political party affiliation. What's that about.

So it turns out that climate denial doesn't just correlate with being a man, but with a particular type of men. Men who care about the idea of traditional masculinity are way more likely to be climate deniers. Here's alec on that.

We have great colleagues who did a survey on men in masculinity, and they share who describe themselves as highly masculine or very masculine, they tend to be older men

Hearing your conversation with alec, I was actually reminded of something we did on Drilled. All the way back in season one. There was a story about a group of fossil fuel executives who wanted to change the narrative about climate change and discovered something very interesting about how masculinity relates to climate change messaging.

Tell me more.

Okay, So the group was called ICE, not Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, the new bad ICE, but the Information Council for the Environment. This is early nineteen ninety one, the summer of nineteen eighty eight, just a couple of years before, had seen Jim Hansen's testimony before Congress that climate change was now visible. We had a burning planet on the cover of Time magazine. A little bit after this, the

I'm guessing the fossil fuel industry didn't like that.

No, they did not. The nationwide heatwave, remember it technically because it were on a vacation, we were going to have on the eastern shore, on the Chesapeake Bay, on the World Waters all one drive.

This is Fred Palmer, a cole lobbyist who worked on the ICE campaign, talking to Guardian reporter Graham Redfern.

Jim Hansen, who never was muscled in any circumstances by anybody, came in front of that subcommittee and announced this with the leading ede catastrophic global warming, with his loaded dice and the internet and the best international the next morning, and we've been harding about it evercess Well, you know, at the time, I don't think people really understood the import of it. But I did understand the import of it, and I engaged immediately. But ICE was not my idea.

Palmer says he eventually got disillusioned with ICE and decided to focus more on science and education. But what exactly did he mean when he said we did it? What did ICE do? So?

ICE was part of a really successful campaign. They figured out specific audiences to target with climate Nile talking points, and it really moved the needle from the majority of Americans accepting the science and being concerned to more or less the mess we have. Now here's Kurt Davies, a longtime Greenpeace researcher who's now at the Center for Climate Integrity, telling us all about their campaign back on Season one of drilled.

Data indicates eighty nine percent say they have heard of global warming, eighty two percent claim some familiarity with global warming, eighty percent claim the problem is somewhat serious, while forty five percent claim it is very serious, and thirty nine percent back federal legislation without any quantification of cost. And only twenty two percent of those consider themselves green consumers.

So this thing that he's talking about is really important. It's again nineteen ninety one. Governments are starting to get behind the idea of not just national policy, but actually global agreements to tackle emissions. And it's not just environmentalists who know and care about this. It's breaking through.

So it's penetrated. A vast majority have heard of the issue, think it's serious, and the campaign is to reverse that, is to change that. The strategies quote unquote include repositioning

Let's put that in plain English. They figured out that old white dudes without college degrees were susceptible to climate disinformation exactly.

Also fun fact, both Palmer and the Edison Electric Institute are still around today and still pushing a lot of the same talking points. They're still trying to protect coal too, although Edison is also very into protecting gas at the moment. Ice is no longer around after an expose decades ago leaked their internal documents, but they were really, really effective at the time, and their success became the basis of

Yeah, it's the guys who are doing their own research.

As soon as I read that line, I'm like, oh God, I know these I know these men very well. I love how blunt and straightforward they are. In this study, they write, we conclude that the unique views of conservative white males contribute significantly to the high level of climate change denial in the United States. Well, not a lot of gray there, No, It makes it really easy to see how we get the conservative talk radio star climate denier and anti feminist you know them and love them,

About expeditions to Antarctica to study climate change and global warming getting stuck in ice so thick that icebreakers couldn't even reach them, and they were shocked, and they were stunned. They believe their own nonsense that the ice at the North and South Pauls is melting when it's not.

It's getting bigger again. That was not true.

The North and South Pools are actually melting faster than many scientists initially predicted. But the upshot of all this is that we're still dealing with the results of this ice media campaign. It's reflected in those opinion numbers that Alec from Pugh is talking about. Over the last thirty years, climate de nile has become a core part of conservative male identity.

But it's not as simple as just blaming the coal and oil industries for targeting men with misleading information, which they did. The twisted relationship between masculinity and the domination

Oh yeah, that's our story next time.

Carbon Bros. Is an original series from Drilled and Non Toxic written by me Daniel Penny.

And me Amy Westervelt. Our senior producer and sound designer is Martin Zelt's. He also composed our theme song.

Our audio engineer is Peter Duff.

Fact checking by Shilpa Jindia.

Original artwork by Matthew Fleming.

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