On Petromasculinity and Protest

Guaranteed human.

“It's time to move past doom and gloom because while the climate headlines make us feel”

like we're losing, we met the people winning, and they just might change how you see your role in this fight. I'm Charles Lloyd, and this is a fighting chance available wherever you get your podcasts. 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-filled 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 fascism, as is the targeting of an internal enemy,”

which for the Trump administration includes climate activists, the nebulous catch-all and Tifa, 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 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.

“A resting and threatening to deport non-citizens' students and faculty, for engaging in local”

political protest, is a practice. We associate with the authoritarian 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 U.S. 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 U.S. 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, and since the twin towers have fallen, 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 order to rule out. 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 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 whoever they like, the terrorists with almost no consequence of 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, killing by the permissive framework of counterterrorism. Now, the Trump administration is targeting civil society groups writ large, using foreign influence laws to cut off funding to NGOs that 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 Amy Westerl, and this is Drilled.

Wired has always put a microscope on the people power and forces shaping our world.

And Kenny Valley brings that same fearless reporting straight to your feed. Is Doge finally over?

Each week, Wired Journalists from across the newsroom are going to unpack where politics, technology, and Silicon Valley collide.

“From conversations with tech leaders across Silicon Valley, internet fandom investigations”

and government crackdowns on rigged gambling, we're taking you all over the news cycle going straight inside the priorities, pressures, and power plays driving today's biggest decisions. Uncanny Valley tackles the questions keeping you up at night and helps make sense of the future taking shape right now.

Listen to new episodes every Thursday wherever you get your podcasts. 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 exon, 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 protest. Specifically protest near big infrastructure projects, like I don't know, oil pipelines.

761 arrests, 94% of those are from out of state, and third or about that background record.

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. What we wanted to do was really strengthen the laws on trust net. And so, we see that and we have durians as well. That's non-ligislation with itemized criminal trust net. 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 double 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. Derek Morgan lobbies 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.

Gibson Dunn and Cratcher. That's the firm that eventually accused Greenpeace of orchestrating

these 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 flat. 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 writer's reporter at the press conference in Guyana.

Mr. Secretary, a Turkish student in Boston was detained and handcuffed on the street by plainclothes agents. A year ago, she wrote an opinion he's about the guy's award. Could you help us understand

“what the specific action she took led to her visa being revolved?”

We'll be abundantly clear. If you go apply for a visa right now, anywhere in the world, let me just send this message on. 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-ets, 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

activity, we're going to 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 going to go to your universities as visitors, their visitors, and say I'm going to your universities to start a riot. At this point, you can see the guy in these leaders nervously exchanging

glances. And for good reason, this is a wild answer. First of all, students who go to the U.S.

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 Serenom, and the New York Times

“hit him with another version of this question. Related to China in 2019, you supported legislation”

to have the U.S. government support the protesters in Hong Kong to pro-democracy protesters.

And mostly the protests are peaceful, but also occasionally they disrupted public life. And so

based on your rationale for deporting campus protesters in the U.S., would you now support the Chinese Communist Party or Hong Kong authorities supporting foreigners who took part in those protests in 2019? Yeah, so the people that were 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 were 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 schools, they borrow money to go 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 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 real strongman, tough guy rhetoric, and targeting

of a minority group that's causing problems, or in Rubio's 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 the environmental and climate policy can then be seen as not just an attack on America, like Dr. Broul 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 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 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 repatiousness and desperation 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 uncheck climate change is going to send the unwashed masses after us what do we do? This

heart comes back to a certain stream 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 2000s, and they learned about this peak oil in this, this, this, this, this, this, this

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 individuals on the”

frontiersmen kind of identity, and so tapping into really long-standing 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. This is being echoed again today in the rhetoric of the guys pushing these so-called network state idea. When Trump and J.D. Vance were beating their chests and talking about taking over Greenland,

yes, they were doing classics, strongman, fashism, stuff, but they were also pursuing Greenland

for a very specific reason. The Peter Teelebacked company, Praxis, had tried to buy Greenland for the purposes of turning it into a network state. That's a neo-futal 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 Teele had funded both Trump's campaign and Praxis, they just tried again,

this time with a Teal Vance pick as the U.S. ambassador to Denmark. Here's Praxis founder Dryden Brown, expanding on some of his beliefs and a really interesting interview with Amanda Cassette on Endgame. The Parals to Peacasts, Colonialism, and Little Boys and Rocket Jamies are hard to miss. In the beginning, you know, we were talking about, you know, traditional western values. We were, you know, eating raw meat, drinking eggs. We were like, we had a suit of armor

“in our, in the apartment. I think there were people who sort of found Praxis found us and”

thought it was, maybe like an on-clave of sanity, maybe it was like a, you know, a better place to be like a guy, it was a better place to be like a man. There were a ton of women in Praxis too. It turns out that, uh, women did like the sort of, you know, cooked COVID man, double-vax, mask wearing, so it's soy man. All these folks from Trump and Rubio to Dryden Brown and Peter Teele complain about the woke mob and snowflake liberals cramping their style.

They think Greta Tuneberg is the Antichrist, literally in Teele's case. They long for the days when men were real men. All 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 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 Cara 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 the steep structural in 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 eco-feminist 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

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 and 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 wind”

mill and they're responding in the same way, trying to hang on the power in every way possible, scapegoating minority groups and trying to insist on the status quo using force and violence when necessary. Next time on Drilled, we're going to wrap this little mini series up in a perhaps

“unexpected place, Diana, with a look at what the U.S. attack on Venezuela was really all about.”

But you gave all this to Brazil and we gave all of this to Venezuela. So now they claim that two thirds again, they say it belongs to them, Natal. No way. Sorry. Here. Not happening.

Drilled is an original critical frequency production distributed by push-in industries. This miniseries

was written and reported by me, any western out. Our producers, our Martin Salt's asterisk 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. It's time to move past doom and gloom because while the climate headlines make us feel like we're losing, we met the people winning and they just might change how you see your role in this fight.

I'm Charles Lloyd and this is a fighting chance available wherever you get your podcasts. This isn't "I Heart Podcast". Guarantee human.