Security.
What is worth more art or life? Is it worth more than food? Worth more than justice? Are you more concerned about the protection of a painting or the protection of our planet and people? The cost of living crisis is.
Put On October fourteenth, twenty twenty two, two young people approached Vangu's famous Sunflowers painting in the National Gallery in London. They unzipped their jackets to reveal just stop oil t shirts, opened cans of tomato soup and chucked it at the painting. You can hear the shock of some of the other museum goers in that video. There what security? Oh my gosh. But the immediate response was nothing compared to the onslaught
of media coverage and commentary that followed. I can't think of another protest in recent history that was so immediately the central focus of the discourse. It's worth noting that the painting itself was not damaged. It was behind glass, and the soup only hit that glass display case. The National Gallery later reported that the painting's frame had sustained minor damage, but that's it. That did not stop many commentators from referring to the action as destruction or vandalism.
It's about the destruction. It is not about a better world. They're not going to school to learn how to create better tech to care the climate crisis, and not figuring out how to geoengineered. Not doing something productive. They're doing something destructive because the barbarians are about the destruction. These oils stop.
The oil protesters in the UK started doing more and more acts of wanton fadlis, and we've got a little matchup of their antics in the last few days.
Those were conservative commentators Ben Shapiro and Peres Morgan, but it wasn't just the usual suspects weighing in on this protest. People in favor of climate action also chewed on it for weeks, debating whether or not the climate movement should be engaging in such polarizing protests. Here's leftist commentator Hassan Piker weighing in.
I find a lot of these activists to be you know, I mean, they're doing they're right for their anger, their frustration is correct. I feel like that kind of protest oftentimes is just like very it's almost like self defeating, it's performative, it's cringe.
Even climate scientist Michael Mann got in on the action commissioning a survey and pointing to the results of it as proof that the action was alienating, a claim that lots of social scientists who study protests found rather alienating themselves. Soupgate fueled Twitter debates for weeks, and yet just six months earlier, right in the middle of Earth Month, another big piece of climate news had happened in the UK that generated almost no response.
There's been two rounds of trinalization of protest in the UK.
Doctor Oscar Bergland is a researcher at the University of Bristol. He focuses on social movements and he's spent the last few years particularly focused on extinction, rebellion and then it's spinoff groups just stop oil and insulate Britain in the UK. He's talking there about the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act of twenty twenty two and the Public Order Act was just went into effect in May twenty twenty three. Together,
the two seriously curte protest rights. They give police the right to impose time, noise and location restrictions on protests, to arrest anyone deemed to be causing a public nuisance, and to stop and search anyone they want near a protest with no need to justify the stop. They can also bar people they suspect will make a serious disruption from being in particular places or around particular people. The law even curtails how activists are allowed to defend themselves
in court. Climate activists have not been allowed to explain, for example, that it's the urgency of the climate crisis that drove them to commit particular acts.
Judges, in wanting to uphold the law as it is, have tried to limit what the jury is allowed to hear and let you know, you want allowed to give certain kinds of evidence that you want allowed to mention climate and so on. That text wasn't allowed to be heard in court.
It's a restriction that could reverberate well beyond the climate movement.
It's absolutely the case that you know, if you give, if you grant certain powers to the states to deal with one problem, they will use six to two people with other problems, so they seek it.
The passage of those laws got nowhere near the amount of attention as the tomato soup incident, particularly outside the UK. We've covered in previous episodes how the framing of climate activists as uniquely disruptive or annoying, which is how the Lion's share of media painted the Tomato soup stunt helps
justify laws that criminalize activism. In a future episode, we're going to get into the details of how things shifted so quickly in the UK, But for today, we're going to look at why tactics like the tomato soup protests and the many art and sport protests that followed it strike a nerve. We're going to talk about what they're intended to accomplish, whether they accomplish those goals, and why activists have been making a point of annoying people and
getting arrested for the better part of a century. That's coming up after the break I name U Westervelt and this is drilled the real free speech threat. There's a bit in the UK Policing Bill that you could miss the significance of entirely if you didn't happen to be obsessively reading everything you possibly could about the criminalization of
protest over the past few years. It talks about damage to memorials and how the sentence for this crime has been increased from three months to up to ten years in jail. Those cheers you're hearing are from a Black Lives Matter protest in Bristol, England in twenty twenty. People are celebrating the fact that a statue of the slave trader Edward Coulson, had once occupied a prominent position at Bristol's Port, has been pulled down and thrown into the harbor.
The increased criminalization of protests recently is certainly a reaction to disruptive climate protests, but it's also a reaction to the Black Lives Matter protests, which began in the US but quickly spread to other countries. Both movements bring something that powerful interests have been fighting against for the better
part of a century, multi racial, cross class solidarity. Nick Estes is an assistant professor of American Indian Studies at the University of Minnesota, co founder of the Native Advocacy Group with the Red Nation, and an enrolled member of the Lower Brule Sioux Tribe. He says the recent racketeering charges against activists protesting the proposed police trading facility known as Copp City in Atlanta is a clear example of how much various protest movements are being lumped together.
That's a very kind of clear example that they're seeing, you know, the Black Lives Matter movement, Standing Rock, all these other sort of social justice movements, climate justice movements as connected, and the best way to contain them is to basically slap a broad.
Label on all of it.
And it never anticipated that happening as Standing Rock. It never anticipated exploding the way that it did. In my own personal experience in twenty twenty, during the George Floyd summer, I saw a water protector, a white kid who I sort of knew, get gunned down. He got shot four times in the back in broad daylight in front of hundreds of people in Albuquerque, New Mexico, during an event
to take down a really you know, racist monument. And I was just thinking that there was this sort of demonization not just of Native people and black people, now, was a demonization of any white kid who decided to stand on the side of history with those very sort of marginalized groups, and an active campaign not just by law enforcement but by the media to sort of break that sense of solidarity.
Rees and class critiques are consistently levied at the climate movement. A recurring theme in conservative commentary about various climate protests is that these are spoiled, rich kids, out of touch elitists with nothing better to do than throw mashed potatoes or soup at fancy paintings or block a road where normal people are just trying to get to work. Don't get me wrong, sometimes those critiques are absolutely valid. Historically,
the climate movement has not been great on race. Here's Rev. Lennox Yearwood, president of the Hip Hop Caucus and a longtime activist, on that history.
The modern day climate movement meaning around the creation of EPA right around between nineteen sixty eight and nineteen seventy two.
Most of the large, the big.
Green organizations were created within that four year timeframe. Which also important is that the people were in the streets. So you had the black people with the Black Power movement was in the streets and that was.
The part of the process.
You had the women's movement that was emerging, the gay rights movement that was powerful in New York City. You had the anti Vietnam movements. Even young white kids who were putting out street heat, they weren't engaging. The climate movement literally said at the very beginning, we are not going to be a part of that kind of movement. So even if it's the anti war movement, or the gay rights movement, or the strong Femi this and womanist movement,
or the black power movement. They immediately pulled back from the inception and they coasted along. So then you go ten years and then when black folks are saying, don't put landfills in our community, that was their moment, and even then they pulled back.
So this is not just the Achilles heel.
This is who the movement is from its inception. And then at some point in time they realized that and some have some happen is that we can't do this a loon. We're not big enough or strong enough to beat the possip industry as a Birkenstock movement that's.
On the east coast, on the west coast.
So now they're a point where they're literally try and do a crash. Course on racism.
Class has also been a blind spot for the climate movement at various points. Here's Oscar Bergland on how that's played out in the UK.
Working class people will not be protected as the climate crisis worsens, And what you have here is actually a lot of working class people getting really angry about these climate protesters. So that you get actual clashes between them. I don't think that that's good for the climate movement. That has a potentially long term damaging effect. I think if your enemy is the fossil fuel industry, if you're being dragged away by shareholders in Michelle shareholders meeting or whatever,
I think that's a good fight to take. But if you're being dragged away by people trying to get to work, I don't think that's a good look.
But researchers and activists agree that these historic weaknesses are starting to be addressed, and as that happens, the movement is becoming a threat.
This is the kind of the attitude, you know, that we're seeing in general with this attack on you know, it's become a culture war sort of tagline for anything that is considered liberal or left or something that can be dismissed. And I think it's fascinating because in my mind, it's actually just trying to create lines of division between people. And I think this is, you know, just sort of the longer trend of the aftermath of Standing Rock.
In many ways, some people who would rather not see a cross racial, cross class coalition fighting for justice have been singling out white allies for critique or punishment, just like Nick Estes saw at Standing Rock. It's an extension of the outside agitator's accusation that gets thrown at protesters regularly. Scientist and activist Rose Abramoff says she got a lot of this when she was protesting the Mountain Valley pipeline in West Virginia.
There was a lot of sort of you're nut around here, are you, which is interesting because you know, I mean, I would argue that the Mountain Valley pipeline is not from around here, and that the main resistance against the Mountain Valley pipeline is primarily local as locals who don't want this pipeline going through their land. So that was an interesting line of argumentation.
When people across the country went to Standing Rock to stand with the Lakota and Dakota people defending their land and water rights, fossil fuel industry spokespeople and police highlighted the number of people from out of state in an attempt to delegitimize the protest. Not only was that narrative false, it was ignorant.
The thing about indigenous movements in contrast to modern sort of political movements or political parties, is that they're not sort of movements of strangers, other movements of relations. A lot of people are familiar with each other, or they're organizing according to their clan system or the societies that are created within traditional governance systems. There's societies, female societies, warriors societies, all kinds of different societies that exist.
In the case of Standing Rock, the Sioux or Ochetti shakoyn Oyat people are located in what is today Montana, Minnesota, Nebraska, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Manitoba and Saskatchewan and Canada.
So after the defeat of Keison Excel the Northern Leg, there was a lot of people in Standing Rock.
Was paying attention.
But it wasn't until I first went up to the camps there and a lot of the people back home that we had worked with on the Lobural Reservation were already there. Members of the Ocheti Shalcoy would have their own little camp system set up. It was actually just uniting people on the ground, our nation, the Ochetti Shacoi, the nation of the Seven Council Fires. It was all proof that these things had never gone away.
If they're hard to get right, and guaranteed, sometimes even engineered to piss off the public and ratchet up policing. Why engage in more disruptive tactics.
I did TMC live, they covered the US Open, and it was so funny because they both started out being like, Dana, can you believe this keeping people from watching tennis?
This is social scientist Dana Fisher.
Presor Fisher. Welcome to TMZ lot.
Thank you for having me.
So give us your take on what this did for the climate other than movement, other than extending the match.
Yes, the movement is much broader than what we call the radical flank, which is people who are engaging in civil disobedience like gluing themselves at events and throwing food. But the importance of this kind of tactic is that it's getting us all talking about the climate.
Well that makes it sound like you're saying it succeeded.
Then oh absolutely, I'm on coz line. For the first day I were like, oh, I don't support that doing this, but I do support doing something on climate. So it was just funny because I was like, look, you guys are textbook. This is perfect, a perfect example of why the radical flank happens. Because you're talking about it, and it's actually encouraging sympathizers like you who care about the issue to do something about the issue, but not that nobody's asking you to glude yourself to anything.
Fisher heads up the Center for Environment, Community and Equity at American University and has spent her entire career researching social movements. She says the incident, both the protest itself and the reaction after it, not only from the TMZ guys, but also from one of the tennis players, Coco Goff, who had a similar reaction, is an example of what
people call the Overton window effect. The idea is that basically, if you see someone engaging in a radical, disruptive act of civil disobedience, or even suggested a radical idea or policy, it's likely that your initial reaction might be shock or even dismay. But a lot of people, especially if they're already somewhat sympathetic to the cause, we'll think, you know,
we really do need to do something about that. In the context of climate protests, maybe gluing yourself to a road or throwing soup but a painting is a bit much. But people might think those activists are right, and we do need to do something. That's the entire purpose of what movement scholars like Fisher called the radical flank, the segment of a movement that's willing to risk arrest or cultural backlash or even violence to grab attention and rile
people up. The Suffragettes did it, the civil rights movement did it, and the anti war movement did it too, and it worked in all three cases. The Overton window is referenced a lot by progressives these days, but it's actually a term that was conceived of to understand how to shift the public towards more conservative views. In many countries, you could argue that far right ideas have shifted the entire political spectrum to the right much more than civil
disobedience has shifted things to the left. Particularly in recent years in Australia, it's mostly been left leaning labor governments that have passed state laws criminalizing protest, which might be unexpected. Researcher Liz Hicks says, that's the Overton window at work.
It's meant to change that framework of what is seeing as kind of normal and the middle ground and the mainstream by dragging one inge it really far out to the other side. But you actually see that a little bit with the way these laws have been passed by state labor governments. But the conservative position is so extreme
and ridiculous and also what the mining companies want. But suddenly it doesn't look like it's a repression on spaege because that is the moderate position between the representatives that you have in Parliament and these industry stakeholders.
It makes sense. The concept of the Overton window was introduced by a guy named Joseph P. Overton, who was a senior vice president for the Macinaw Center for Public Policy in the nineties when he developed this idea, and the Macinaw Center is, yep, you guessed it, a longtime member of the Atlas network of conservative think tanks. The link between the climate movement and previous social justice movements is becoming stronger as more people directly experience what Fisher
calls climate shocks. At the March to End Fossil Fuels held in New York during Climate Week in September twenty twenty three, Fisher surveyed participants to find out what had brought them to the protest. She asked whether they had engaged in other big climate protests previously, how they felt about the activists participating indirect action and about their direct
experience with climate impacts. She said she was shocked to find that a majority had experienced either increased exposure to storms and floods, extreme heat, or wildfire smoke.
We ask people if they had experienced the following items in the past six months.
Extreme heat, eighty.
Seven percent said they had. We asked them that they experienced wildfire or smoke from wildfires, eighty five percent said they had, and sixty percent said they had experienced more frequent and powerful storms, including hurricanes, typephoons, tornadoes.
Activists who participate in direct actions aren't necessarily thinking about the Overton Window or the radical flank, or civil rights history, or with the media or other climate activists will think of them. Oftentimes, they just want to feel like they're doing something tangible and directly impactful.
We're trying to stop this pipeline, and this is one of the most effective ways to do it, is to just get in front of and literally stop work on the pipeline.
That's scientist Rose Abramoff again. She was recently arrested for locking herself to a drill at the Mountain Valley pipeline.
We stopped construction for about half of half a day.
The vast majority of activists don't start out doing direct action. Instead, they show up to organize protests, maybe campaign for a politician they like, or call elected officials. In an earlier episode, we heard from Joanna Oltman Smith, who was arrested earlier this year for smearing fingerpaint on the display case protecting a DEGA statue in DC. She walked us through the years of activism that she participated in before risking a serious charge.
I've done a lot of on the ground organizing, and part of that has been rallying and protesting. I've done a fair amount of die ins and picket lines and blockading of buildings to raise awareness on different issues. What I just did with declare emergency in Washington, that was my first time stepping up as an individual, putting myself on the line with my partner Tim to really do something that we knew would raise the alarm.
Tim is Tim Martin, a fellow climate activist from North Carolina. In May, the two were charged with conspiring against the United States government. That's a charge that carries a possible sentence of five years in prison and a fine of two hundred fifty thousand dollars for each of them. Those
cases are still pending. If the idea that all attention on climate protests isn't necessarily good attention holds any water, it may be more in the sense that opponents of the movement can and do try to leverage certain moments to discredit activists, and that the more disruptive each protest gets, the more aggressive police and security are getting in response. Again, those who study social movements are not terribly surprised by the lockstep escalation of both protest tactics and backlash.
I think it's worth remembering that, like the radicalization of a civil rights movement, for example, happened over a very prolonged period of time, and it happened as activists, we start out with young people mostly you've led groups basically decided to start being more confrontational, and they were confrontational but nonviolent cit ins, you know, boycott, And what we saw happen was there was this increasing frustration in violence from law enforcement and others whom you know, in you know,
we generally think of as counter movements, but it was really you know, white supremacists in that case. But we're seeing a similar process happen where the you know, non violent civil disobedience is becoming more common and there are more people engaging in it, and we're seeing citizens and law enforcement getting increasingly confrontational response, which basically is a way that this kind of protest escalates from non violent to violent, because most of the time the violence starts
with the response, you know. And I mean we've justin you've been watching any of the videos of climate defiance where law enforcement or secure we'll call them security folks of all sorts are becoming more and more aggressive in response to the non violent civil disobedience we see from Climate defiance or from you know, the folks in Germany who are getting punched and pulled and yelled at, and
we see videos of that in the UK too. That's this is all classic escalation of in response to civil disobedience and in response to a social movement that is frustrated, and I actually think this is like a necessary next step.
Fisher has a new book coming out on the climate movement. She looks at its place in history, the tactics it's used, and how those relate to previous movements and what's probably going to be necessary for the movement to succeed.
As more people are disruptive, even engaging in non violent civil disobedience, law enforcement and counter protesters are going to emerge who are going to be violent against those protesters.
It happened very clearly during the Civil rights movement, and that was one of the reasons that a number of people who wrote about the movements say that the government started to respond because sympathizers who were paying attention and may have not supported the civil disobedience, but they absolutely were repulsed by the violence against these young black Americans who are getting beaten up for sitting at a countertop
and refusing to move, for example. That kind of violence initiates what we.
Call moral shocks.
Moral shocks are wonderful motivators to get people to do stuff. Absent of organizational ties and embeddedness and movements. People who care about the climate crisis, all of a sudden, seeing these young people being harmed is going to motivate them to do something because they are going to feel that it is unacceptable, and that is the kind of pressure that will be needed to actually get the kind of changes that are necessary.
That's a bitter pill to swallow. This idea that backlash to the point of violence is what may ultimately catalyze a response, or that anyone might be asked to sign up for getting punched in the face to get people to care. Meanwhile, the concern voice by climate conscious observers over the tomato soup protest, this idea that the action could turn off people who would otherwise support climate action
doesn't seem to be holding up. A year later, Fisher and her team surveyed March to End Fossil Fuel protesters at random. One hundred and seventy people agreed to answer the survey, and Fisher says she found the results really surprising. Ninety five percent of the people surveyed supported civil disobedience, which she defined as intentionally breaking the law as part
of a protest. Sixty seven percent said they strongly support it, and only five percent said they neither supported it nor didn't support it.
So nobody said they do not support these groups. So it was it was absolutely overwhelmingly supporting groups that do civil disobedience, even though you know, half of the people had never done civil disobedience, and they didn't say they were intending to write.
That's particularly interesting that only one percent of the participants who agreed to be surveyed had ever turned out for a large scale climate protest before.
In terms of anybody arguing that people organizations doing civil disobedience turn off people who are engaged in the movement from participating in the movement, this is absolutely showing that it is not true.
That's it for this week. Thanks for listening. We're going to take a quick two week break and be back with part two of this season in November. Make sure you're subscribed so you won't miss it. Drilled is an original Critical Frequency production. Our senior editor for this series is Allen Brown. Senior producer is Martin zaltz Ostwick, who is also our composer and sound designer. Mixing and mastering by Peter Duff, fact.
Checking by Woudn jan le Go, Review by James. Our artwork is by Matt Fleming. Our theme song is but in the Hand by four Known.
The show was created by me Amy Westerbelt. I also reported and wrote this episode. You can find a corresponding print story on our website at Drilled dot Media. You can also find documents there related to this season and sign up for our weekly newsletter to get a curated list of the week's top climate reads.
If you'd like to support the show, you can give us a rating or review wherever you listen to podcasts, share links to our stories, or upgrade to a paid newsletter or podcast subscription for access to add free early release episodes and bonus content. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you next time.
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