According to some right-wing media figures, anyone who pointed out what was going on were actually the ones obsessed with semantics in the middle of public health crisis:
While this is all going on, right-wing media were also taking a victory lap to claim that their racist border and immigration policies were wise all along. From Fox’s Tomi Lahren: “[We] have long been criticized and labeled everything from xenophobic to racist and bigoted, but now, a few weeks into the coronavirus pandemic, turns out we may have been on to something. You think?”
In addition to claiming a perverse policy victory from emergency travel restrictions, right-wing media are also using the pandemic to warn against “resettling refugees in your neighborhood” and “dropping outsiders, foreign nationals into their communities.”
As awful as this is, it’s not going to stop without outside pressure. Bigotry is what binds the Trump coalition together, and anyone who has a problem with it jumped ship a long time ago. The ones that are left -- particularly on Fox News, right up to Lachlan and Rupert Murdoch themselves -- know that bigotry is always the go-to play, even when there’s a body count.
At the same time, as The Atlantic’s Adam Serwer points out, what conservative media figures want most of all is to distract from the colossal failings of the Trump administration and to make the national conversation about accusations of racism and a supposed backlash to political correctness.
So mainstream media should be aggressive calling this strategy out for what it is: Rank bigotry which disregards anti-Asian violence and seeks to support anti-immigrant policies. But it is also a transparent attempt to ignore how right-wing media’s hero grossly botched the response to a pandemic -- and how many people will now die because of it.
Some of right-wing media’s most prolific climate deniers are using the disastrous effects of the coronavirus to promote their anti-climate agenda across multiple platforms.
These figures have reframed their usual climate attacks around the pandemic. Some have compared the (alleged) outcomes of the Green New Deal to the (real) impacts of the coronavirus, while others have claimed that both the coronavirus and climate change are being used by leftists to push a radical agenda.
Green New Deal
Perhaps the most shameful connection made between coronavirus and the Green New Deal came from Daniel Turner, a fossil fuel industry shill whose recent career has been bankrolled by Koch Industries. Making his debut in The Federalist on March 13, with an article titled “How The Wuhan Virus Is Accomplishing The Green New Deal’s Goals,” Turner concluded that “coronavirus is a glimpse of the long-term pain a Green New Deal and environmental radicalism would inflict on America.”
Turner attempted to support this conclusion with false claims about the Green New Deal, claiming that, like the coronavirus, it would crush capitalism, put the “oil and gas industry into panic,” end travel, and control the population.
To add insult to blatant misinformation, he also stated that supporters of the Green New Deal should be “pleased” at what the coronavirus is accomplishing because “green activists don’t fret these casualties” and that “greens will rejoice” over the coronavirus’s disastrous effects.
Turner had previously pushed this narrative on March 11, again connecting the coronavirus and the Green New Deal to “more government control.”
Over the past year, Turner has made a habit of appearing in right-wing outlets to lie and fearmonger about the Green New Deal, and to promote climate denial in general. This is also not the first time he’s claimed that the Green New Deal is just a front for socialism. Since January 2019, he’s appeared on Fox News at least 12 times and on Fox Business at least 21 times, and written at least 40 op-eds for Fox News’ website.
The same day that Turner published his abhorrent piece in The Federalist, well-known climate denier Rush Limbaugh made a similar connection between the climate resolution and coronavirus on his radio show, stating that “If you want to know what the Green New Deal would look like, you're starting to see it”:
Leftist policies and government control
Claims that climate action, especially as embodied by the Green New Deal, is just a front for more government control over our lives are popular among right-wing media figures, and they’ve also been invoked when talking about the coronavirus.
On March 16, The Daily Wire’s Michael Knowles did just this, calling the responses to both climate change and coronavirus a “panic” and arguing that these issues are “simply being used to push through all the leftist policies that the left really, really wants.” He specifically referred to efforts “to pump up the Wuhan virus panic,” and he misrepresented climate science multiple times.
The great American longing for a generation-defining crisis — Pearl Harbor envy — is strange and enduring, and it shapes thinking on both sides of the great sociopolitical divide: On the left, global warming is the Third Reich, the so-called Green New Deal is the moonshot, and whatever unnecessary immiseration and chaos is unleashed by the fantasies of progressives are only sadly inevitable casualties on the beaches of this new Normandy. On the right, it’s an Islamic caliphate, the coming civil war (there’s always one), the nation’s being overrun by hordes of Spanish-speaking people, or — it is almost a relief to consider it — Armageddon itself. With everything from right-wing survivalist novels to ironic hipster zombie shows, we have been preparing ourselves, in our low-impact way, for just such an eventuality.
And in the plague, we see whatever we want to see: the need for a universal health-care system and paid leave, the need for a wall and for severing our relations with the Chinese.
Airplanes are grounded. Roads, deserted. The skies are clear and fish swim once again in Venice’s canals. Covid-19 has achieved in three short months what Greta Thunberg and her ilk could only dream of.
…
But climate hysteria has been relegated to the back pages by coverage of Covid-19. Thunberg and her devotees can find some silver linings though: not only does she not have to return to school (nice timing, G), but the virus has helped Mother Earth recover in ways that screaming, crying, and gluing themselves to trains never could.
…
But once things are back to normal, the environmental debate will likely start anew. This time, the Greta Thunbergs of the world can point to the current, virus-induced environmental uptick as proof that we can – when push comes to shove – give up our carbon addiction. However, remember that if your leaders are serious about meeting the climate goals they promise to, the lifestyle changes they ask of you will need to be enforced with the machinery of the state.
The author insinuates that “extreme measures” being taken to stop the spread of coronavirus are what “environmental crusaders” really want in pursuing their climate change goals.
The government control idea has also been espoused by fringe, far-right YouTubers. One YouTuber, who has over 360,000 subscribers, produced a nearly 18-minute video saying that coronavirus and climate change are both propaganda and that both of these “scaremonger” stories are being pushed by “globalist-backed” agendas that allow “governments to crack down on the public in various ways.” YouTube, which has a huge problem with climate change misinformation on its platform, has not tagged the video as pushing a climate falsehood.
No comments:
Post a Comment