On Petromasculinity and Protest

Amy: Last episode we heard American Petroleum Institute President Mike Summers talk about his concern that a small fringe was threatening our way of life.

Mike Sommers: A small fringe is stuck in the past. They oppose growth, expansion, and new infrastructure. They're against new jobs, higher living standards.

Amy: Trump, the President with the most fossil fuel money backing of any president ever is not so subtle.

Trump: What they've done to the country is just incredible. The. The environmentalists. I mean, they are terrorists.

They were terrorists. I call 'em the environmental terrorists

Amy: repression of dissent is a key marker of fascism, as is the targeting of an internal enemy, which for the Trump administration includes. Climate activists, the nebulous, catchall, Antifa, and of course, immigrants

ICE Archival: breaking into people's [00:01:00] cars and homes in scenes that evoke Nazi Germany or Stalinist Russia. What is happening right now in America is evil and it is completely illegal.

Amy: we're even hearing about it from folks who helped elect Trump in the first place.

Joe Rogan: You don't want militarized people in the streets just roaming around, snatching people up. Are we really gonna be the Gestapo? Where's your papers? Is that what we've come to?

Amy: 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.

Immigration news archival: Arresting and threatening to deport non-citizens, students and faculty for engaging in lawful political protests is a practice we associate with authoritarian regimes.

Amy: 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 [00:02:00] US War on Terror led very quickly to an expanded definition of terrorist, 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

Fionnuala D. Ní Aoláin: we don't have a globally agreed definition of terrorism. As the ash was smoldering, as the twin towers had fallen, the Security Council meets, and in that first month, they create a new resolution, UN Security Council Resolution 1373. We have adopted a very ambitious Comprehensive strategy to fight terrorism in all its forms throughout the world.

The meeting is adjourned. 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 [00:03:00] 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 as a terrorist with almost no consequence at the domestic level. And so what we're seeing around the globe is the imprisonment of a civil society actor. We're seeing direct targeting, in some cases killing, by The permissive framework of counterterrorism.

Amy: 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 [00:04:00] break. I'm Amy Westervelt, and this is Drilled.

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Derrick Morgan: we have seen. Uh, more and more dangerous and destructive tactics going against these infrastructure projects. Trying to, to shut them down on altogether.

Amy: This is Derek Morgan talking at a meeting of the American Legislative Exchange Council in 2016. At the time, Morgan was the top lobbyist for the American Fuel and Petrochemical manufacturers, the trade group for refiners, pipeline 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 Koch 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 protest, [00:05:00] specifically protests near big infrastructure projects like, I don't know, oil pipelines.

Derrick Morgan: I brought some couple statistics on the, the DAPL, uh, protests.

So between 10 to 15,000 protestors, uh, about 761 arrests. 94% of those were from out of state, not from North Dakota. Uh, and about a third or roughly about that had prior criminal records.

Amy: These are all classic anti protest talking points, especially the out-of-state activist thing, which fossil fuel companies in particular have been using since the early 1900s.

Derrick Morgan: So what we wanted to do was really strengthen, the laws on trespass. And so you see that in, in your, materials as well, that, this, model legislation with itemized criminal trespass.

Amy: 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 [00:06:00] 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 DAPL protest that you heard Morgan reference earlier.

It started in 2016, but by the time Trump had been elected and took office, the protest was ending and the backlash was getting going. Derrick Morgan, the lobbyist, you just heard talking there. He's a VP at the Heritage Foundation today. That's the organization that spearheaded Project 2025. Before he got into advocacy, he was a lawyer working for a law firm that might sound familiar to listeners of this podcast,

Derrick Morgan: Gibson Dun Crutcher.

Amy: Gibson Dunn and Crutcher.

That's the firm that eventually accused Greenpeace of orchestrating the Standing Rock protest, winning their pipeline company client a settlement of over $300 million. We did a whole season on it. Check it out. Season 12, slapped. Before Morgan worked at Gibson Dunn, he was [00:07:00] 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 protestors during his second term.

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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.

Rubio: Mr. Secretary, a Turkish student, uh, in Boston, was detained and handcuffed on the street by plainclothes agents A year ago. She wrote an opinion piece about the Gaza War.

Could you help us understand what the specific action, uh, she took, led to her visa being revoked?

Lemme be abundantly clear. Okay? If you go apply for a visa right now, anywhere in the world, lemme just [00:08:00] 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 'cause you wanna write op-ed.

But because you wanna participate in movements that are involved in doing things like vandalizing universities, harassing students, taking over buildings, creating a ruckus, we're not gonna 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 gonna take away your visa. And we have a right, like every country in the world has a 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 that are gonna go to your universities as visitors, they're visitors, and say, I'm going to your universities to start a riot.

Amy: 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 [00:09:00] 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, Ruby's Entourage moved on to Suriname and the New York Times hit him with another version of this question.

Ed Wong, NYT: Related to China, in 2019, you supported legislation to have the US government support the protestors in Hong Kong, the pro-democracy protestors and mostly the protests are peaceful, but also occasionally they disrupted public life.

And so based on your rationale for deporting campus protestors in the us. Would you now support the Chinese Communist Party or Hong Kong authorities deporting foreigners who took part in those protests in 2019?

Marco Rubio: So the people that we're getting rid of in our country are vandalizing co.

They're not protesters. They're taking over college campuses. They're harassing fellow students. We let 'em in our country to study.

They didn't say, I want to go to university and I [00:10:00] wanna vandalize your library and I wanna wear a mask over my face, like if it's Halloween and terrorize people, we didn't give 'em a visa to do any of that.

Amy: Keep in mind, Rubio was saying this as masked ice agents were terrorizing the city of Minneapolis.

Marco Rubio: So we don't want those people in our country. They're going beyond demonstration. They're 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 schools. They borrow money to go to these schools, and 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 'em out. Every one of them I find we're going to kick them out.

Amy: Again, in these press conferences, it's fossil fuels. American might a lot of rural strongman, tough guy rhetoric and targeting of a minority group that's causing problems or in rubio's speak a ruckus. We talked in our season Carbon Bros with Non-Toxic about the connection between male identity and [00:11:00] 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 Dr. 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.

Jordan Peterson: You know, it's an intrinsic part of life to feel guilty in relationship to nature and to feel guilty in relationship to culture. Now 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, 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, is 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 [00:12:00] 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 mode of force that drives you into the world to live is associated with rapaciousness.

And de spoilation 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?

Amy: 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 gonna send the unwashed masses after us. What do we do? This hearkens back to a certain strain of American male identity. Two, as [00:13:00] Hannah Morris laid out in her book apocalyptic authoritarianism, particularly with respect to the peak oil movement in the early two thousands.

Hanna Morris: And they learned about this. This peak, uh, oil and this, this, this collapse 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, this frontiersmen kind of identity.

And so tapping into really longstanding American masculine identities. Of feeling as though there's a, you know, a special trait among American men who can really grapple with harsh conditions and build a new society, build a new civilization.

Amy: This is being echoed again today in the rhetoric of the guys pushing these so-called network state idea. When Trump and JD Vance were [00:14:00] beating their chest and talking about taking over Greenland, yes, they were doing classic strongman fascism stuff, but they were also pursuing Greenland for a very specific reason.

The Peter Thiel backed 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. Praxis 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 Praxis founder Dryden Brown expounding on some of his beliefs in a really interesting interview with Amanda cassette on endgame. The parallels to peaks, colonialism and little boys in rocket [00:15:00] jammies are hard to miss.

Dryden Brown: 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, in the apartment. there were people who sort of found, found praxis, found us and, and thought it was maybe like an enclave of, of sanity. Maybe it was like a, you know, a better place to be like a, like a guy. It was a better place to be like a, a man.

There are a ton of women in practice too. It turns out that, uh, women didn't like the, the sort of, you know, co COVID man, double vaxxed mask wearing. So, soy, soy, man.

Amy: All of these folks from Trump and Rubio to Dryden Brown and Peter Thiel complain about the woke mob and snowflake Liberals cramping their style. They think Greta Thunberg is the antichrist. Literally, in Thiel's case, they long for the days when men were real men. Oh, well, 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 [00:16:00] 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 though 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 Carrie Daggett says This is no accident and she even coined a term for it, petro masculinity. Here she is talking to my Carbon Bros, co-host Daniel Penney.

Cara New Daggett: With that term, I think it took on a life of its own, which was a total surprise to me because, um, 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 [00:17:00] 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 in far right movements between misogyny, anti feminist politics, um, anti queer politics, and the 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 eco feminist work that has, for decades, um, pointed to the structural connections between the way so called [00:18:00] 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 nonhuman 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.

Amy: 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 [00:19:00] 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 on to power in every way possible. Scapegoating minority groups and trying to insist on the status quo using force and violence when necessary.

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Amy: Next time on drilled, 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.

Jamal + Salvador: We gave out this to Brazil and we gave all of this to Venezuela.

So now they claim that two-thirds of Guyana, they say belongs to them, not us.

no way. Sorry. Not happening. No.

[00:20:00] music up and credits:

Amy: 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 Zal Swick and Peter Duff.

Matthew Fleming did the artwork. Our first Amendment attorney is James Wheaton of the First Amendment Project.

Thanks for listening, and we'll see you next time.