AFILM about how Jeremy Corbyn was targeted by a co-ordinated campaign to undermine his leadership of the Labour Party with false accusations of anti-semitism is now available online.
Oh Jeremy Corbyn — The Big Lie was due to be screened at last year’s Glastonbury festival but was dropped by organisers after they were hit by an online smear campaign which accused the film itself of anti-semitism.
‘Climate change is the idiot socialist get-out-of-jail-free card,’ Peterson recently tweeted. Image: Gage Skidmore, Flickr, CC.
Fringe climate crisis deniers who claim that the earth is “cooling” and greenhouse emissions are good for “biological productivity” are getting exposed to millions more people than they normally would on YouTube thanks to conservative influencer Jordan Peterson.
That’s according to viewership data newly reviewed by DeSmog, which reveals a massive visibility boost for public figures who’ve been active in the climate denial movement for years but whose ideas — such as the claim that plants are growing much better due to increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere — are now rarely taken seriously by most legacy media outlets.
They include climate crisis deniers like Judith Curry, Steven Koonin, Richard Lindzen, Alex Epstein and Bjorn Lomborg. Despite having either a modest YouTube presence or none at all, these figures have collectively garnered nearly five million views after being interviewed on Peterson’s channel, which has 7.31 million subscribers. The New York Times, by comparison, has 4.33 million YouTube subscribers.
This is especially worrying to climate scientists and disinformation experts because Peterson for years has been actively courting alienated males in their 20s and younger. Traditionally, people who are “doubtful” or “dismissive” of climate change have tended to skew older. Peterson is now planting doubt via his podcast and social media posts about the severity and urgency of global warming in the minds of younger generations.
“‘Climate change,’” he tweeted in June, is “the idiot socialist get-out-of-jail-free card.”
And he is now in the process of putting real political power behind the climate crisis denial movement. In late October and early November, a new group Peterson founded called the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC) will hold in London, England, its first ever meetings. It has on its advisory board Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, who during GOP debates in August said that “the climate change agenda is a hoax.”
ARC advisor Ramaswamy: ‘the climate change agenda is a hoax.’ Image: Gage Skidmore, Flickr, CC.
Advisors to the group include Lomborg, a Danish political scientist who earlier this year argued on Peterson’s podcast that “climate change is a real problem, but it’s not this catastrophic end of the world.” Lomborg didn’t respond to questions from DeSmog. Other advisors are Texas Republican congressmember Dan Crenshaw; Utah Republican Senator Mike Lee; former Australian prime minister Tony Abbott; and dozens of conservative policymakers, financiers, activists and journalists from the U.S., Canada, the U.K. and Australia.
The Alliance for Responsible Citizenship is being supported by founders and leaders of the Legatum Group, a Dubai-based investment firm behind The Legatum Institute, a pro-Brexit think tank in London with close ties to the U.K. Conservative Party. The Legatum Group is a leading investor in the rightwing British television network GB News. Read DeSmog’s in-depth report on ARC’s U.K. links here.
Experts argue this makes Peterson a key organizer at the global level for efforts to oppose and delay action on climate change. “I would say that Jordan Peterson has become a central cog in the denial machine,” Michael Mann, director of the Penn Center for Science, Sustainability and the Media at the University of Pennsylvania, told DeSmog.
“It’s concerning that he’s poisoning the minds of so many influenceable people with his pseudo-intellectual and pseudoscientific drivel, drivel that is being weaponized in the right-wing assault on science and reason,” Mann added, referring to Peterson’s frequent downplaying of climate risks, including the conservative influencer’s insistence that rising levels of carbon dioxide are good for the planet.
Spreading Denial, Making Money
Peterson’s influence depends to a significant degree on his gigantic YouTube following, which is larger than that of the liberal-leaning news network MSNBC. It also surpasses the following of The Daily Wire, a digital conservative outlet co-founded by Ben Shapiro that has a partnership with Peterson, which last year claimed a yearly revenue of $100 million.
Google, which owns YouTube, announced a policy in October 2021 prohibiting advertisements on content that “contradicts well-established scientific consensus around the existence and causes of climate change.” Elaborating on the policy in an email to DeSmog, a Google spokesperson wrote that “Debate or discussion of climate change topics is allowed, but when content crosses the line to climate change denial, we stop showing ads on those videos.”
Yet a Peterson interview from this year entitled “The Great Climate Con,” during which he framed rising greenhouse gas emissions as a positive for making the planet “green in the driest areas,” was accompanied by ads for Birch Gold and Masterworks. Climate scientists say that is a misleading argument because it doesn’t take into account the massively negative effects that intensified droughts, wildfires and heatwaves due to global warming have on plants and ecosystems.
“Debate or discussion of climate change topics is allowed, but when content crosses the line to climate change denial, we stop showing ads on those videos.”— Google spokesperson
“We’ve reviewed the videos,” the Google spokesperson wrote, “and did not take action on them.”
“What’s the point of having policies if you’re not going to enforce them?” Claire Atkin, co-founder of the anti-disinformation watchdog group Check My Ads, told DeSmog. “YouTube and its ecosystem of marketing tools allow Jordan Peterson to not only spread [misleading statements], but to make money off them.”
Peterson didn’t respond to questions from DeSmog about his current income nor his recent shift towards promoting climate crisis denial online.
‘Twisted Symbiotic Relationship’
One example of Peterson’s amplifying effect is his interview with Judith Curry, a former Georgia Institute of Technology climatologist who now does consulting work for clients including petroleum companies and natural gas traders. In testimony to Congress in 2015 she claimed incorrectly that recent data “calls into question the conclusion that humans are the dominant cause of recent climate change.”
While appearing on Peterson’s podcast earlier this year she argued that due to “natural variability” the planet could grow cooler over the next three decades rather than warmer, a position with no credible scientific basis, especially considering that July was the hottest month in recorded human history. Posted to YouTube, where Curry has no official channel, the interview garnered more than 960,000 views. She didn’t respond to questions from DeSmog.
Conservative author and fossil fuel activist Alex Epstein had a modest YouTube following of 15.2 thousand subscribers when he was interviewed by Peterson. “It’s out!” he tweeted after the video was posted. It now has over 1.04 million views, a significant boost considering that the vast majority of videos on his page have under 500 views.
“I think Jordan Peterson has become more interested in humanistic thinking about fossil fuels,” Epstein wrote in an email to DeSmog. “He has become even more convinced, thanks to my work and others, that the popular movement to rapidly eliminate fossil fuel use is based on invalid thinking methods, false assumptions, and anti-human values.”
During his interview with Peterson, Epstein claimed that “It’s kind of obvious if you have a warmer world with more CO2, it’s a more tropical world with more life. It’s a more green world in the life sense of green. And yet the green movement hates it.”
Peterson has echoed that statement frequently in his podcast, despite actual scientists saying that greening caused by rising greenhouse gases shouldn’t be celebrated. He claimed during his interview with Steven Koonin, author of a book on climate change science called Unsettled, that “since the year 2000 the world has greened by 15 percent … why the hell isn’t that good news?” That interview has since been viewed more than 1.1 million times. Koonin didn’t respond to a media request.
“Peterson—who doesn’t appear to know much at all about the science or politics of global warming—has become an influential promoter of illogical ideas,” Benjamin Franta, a senior research fellow in climate litigation at the Oxford Sustainable Law Programme, told DeSmog.
During an interview in 2022 on Joe Rogan’s podcast, for instance, Peterson argued that the climate is too complex a system to be modeled accurately, “and that’s a huge problem when you’re trying to model over 100 years because the errors compound just like interest.” “He sounds intelligent, but he’s completely wrong,” one climate scientist told the Guardian.
Though Peterson is among the most visible promoters of climate crisis denial, he’s also part of a wider digital network. Researchers with Climate Action Against Disinformation and the Center for Countering Digital Hate earlier this year found 200 videos on YouTube promoting delay or skepticism around measures to address the climate emergency, garnering nearly 74 million views altogether.
“[There’s] a twisted symbiotic relationship between these platforms and climate denial content,” Erika Seiber, a climate disinformation spokesperson at the nonprofit Friends of the Earth who is part of the disinfo coalition, told DeSmog. “YouTube runs ads on the content, incentivizing the creation of yet more misleading content, which allows deniers like Peterson to flourish and for their networks to grow.”
Enabled by Google and YouTube, climate crisis denial could be having real-world influence, disinformation experts say. A poll this summer suggested that 72 percent of U.S. Republican supporters think that the economy should be prioritized over addressing climate change, a 13 point increase from 2018, even as cities sweltered under record heat waves. Conservatives are opposing coastal wind turbines under the pretense of protecting whales. Republican Congressmembers in June passed bills protecting gas stoves in people’s homes.
“You can see how climate denial content from Peterson and others has informed policy discussions,” Seiber said. “It’s incredibly concerning.”
Starmer cannot allow voters to see what might have been or how he is outshone by his predecessor
Keir Starmer’s cowardly purge of the Labour left has extended even to the party’s YouTube page – every Jeremy Corbyn-era video but one (Corbyn’s 2019 conference speech) has been deleted from the channel in an attempt to airbrush Corbyn out of history, leaving a staggering nine-year gap in the video record:
Nine years of party videos… gone
Starmer is right to be afraid: Corbyn’s sincerity, authenticity and actual vision for the UK backed by actual policies shed a merciless light on the craven, empty and deceitful moral vacuum that is Keir Starmer.
The move is reminiscent of the infamous image in which Soviet leader Josef Stalin had a lackey who had fallen out of favour airbrushed out of a photograph as if he had never existed:
The UK has been robbed of the prospect of real change for the better, for the many – and has had an Establishment ventriloquist’s dummy foisted on it instead, to create the clearly inauthentic illusion of choice in this broken democracy.
And the spinelessness and dishonesty of Starmer and his ghoulish hangers-on know no bounds.
Senior Labour figures accepted valuable gifts from Google in the days before abandoning a plan to tax digital giants more, openDemocracy can reveal.
Labour’s shadow business secretary Jonathan Reynolds, his senior parliamentary assistant (who is his wife), and Keir Starmer’s political director all attended Glastonbury festival in June as guests of YouTube, which is owned by Google. Including accommodation and ‘hospitality’, Reynolds estimates his Glastonbury package for two was worth £3,377 – significantly more than the cost of two regular tickets, which were £335 each.
The next day, reports emerged that Labour had ditched its proposal to hike tax on digital businesses like Google.
The Digital Services Tax, introduced in 2020, is a 2% levy on the UK income of online companies like search engines and social media platforms. In August last year, Reynolds and his shadow chancellor colleague Rachel Reeves had called for an increase in the tax to 10%, saying the income would be used to fund a slash in tax for small businesses.
As recently as 5 June, Reynolds was still talking about the policy. Yet on 26 June this year, the day after Glastonbury ended, The Times reported that the policy had been ditched, with Labour saying it had “no plans” to raise the digital service tax when in government. Reynolds declined to comment.
It was not the only time senior figures in Starmer’s team accepted luxury gifts from Google in the months before the party’s U-turn. Shadow culture secretary Lucy Powell’s political adviser, Labour’s executive director of policy, and the party’s head of domestic policy all accepted tickets and transport to, and ‘hospitality’ at, the Brit Awards in February from the digital giant. Powell’s register of interests estimates that the adviser’s ticket was worth £1,170.
Starmer’s political director also accepted transport to and ‘hospitality’ ahead of the event from Google, though his ticket, along with that of Starmer’s private secretary, was covered by Universal Music.
YouTube will sponsor an event at Labour’s annual conference next month with the chair of the business and trade select committee, Darren Jones. The talk, hosted by the New Statesman Media Group, will be on “harnessing tech for growth”.
Last week, openDemocracy revealed that Starmer had accepted a £380 dinner from Google for him and one staff member during the World Economic Forum in January.
In total, openDemocracy estimates that Labour shadow cabinet members and their staff accepted luxury gifts from Google worth nearly £10,000 over the months before they announced their policy U-turn. By contrast, the value to the British public of the policy Labour appears to have ditched is estimated at around £3bn.
Nick Dearden, director of Global Justice Now, said: “This is a really very worrying set of events which suggests that big business has far too much access to senior opposition politicians.
“But this isn’t simply about foolish behaviour on the part of the individuals concerned. In office, Labour needs to radically restructure our economy if it’s to have any hope of creating a more sustainable and equal society, and undoing the damage of recent governments. To do that, they must take on vested interests, like the Big Tech monopolies, which have far too much wealth and power.”
Staff for other Labour shadow cabinet members have also accepted valuable gifts from controversial companies. A political adviser to the shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves, accepted two ‘box’ tickets to a Harry Styles concert worth £250 each from BT. In the 2019 Labour manifesto, the party committed to nationalising BT, a measure the company opposed. It’s not clear whether the party maintains this policy, but Reeves has distanced herself from other nationalisation plans.
In April this year, BT announced a 14.4% average increase in its prices, and £1.7bn in profit. An Openreach spokesperson said: “As you’d expect from any major employer investing billions into the UK, we engage regularly with a range of stakeholders to support the interests of our people, our customers and our business. Any hospitality is consistent with the rules, fully declared and transparent.”
Updated 31 August 2023:The original version of this article incorrectly stated that the value of the Harry Styles box tickets was £700 each. They were in fact £250 each.
A selection of recent UK and international news articles
Home Secretary waited until terror suspect was abroad before stripping citizenship | The Bureau of Investigative Journalism … [Home Secretary Theresa May] denied that it has a policy of waiting until individuals are out of the UK before removing their citizenship. But research by the Bureau has also found that of the 18 individuals we have identified who have lost their UK nationality removed since 2006, at least 15 were known to be abroad when orders to remove their citizenship were issued. Of those individuals, two – Mohammed Sakr and Bilal al-Berjawi – were killed in US drone strikes in Somalia. Another, Mahdi Hashi, was rendered to the United States where he’s currently awaiting trial on terror charges in a high-security jail. Speaking in the parliamentary debate, Diane Abbott pointed out that debate around citizenship-stripping often failed to presume the innocence of individuals who had not faced criminal charges. ‘We are talking about terror suspects. Nowadays in Parliament, saying that someone is suspected of terrorist activity is enough for the political class to assume that that person does not deserve due process,’ she said. …
If the government gets its way, from May this year your family’s patient-identifiable data will be uploaded from your GP surgery to a single, centralised database for the very first time. This ‘care-data’ database will include your NHS number, date of birth, postcode, ethnicity and gender. Your medical diagnoses, including cancer and mental health, your referrals to specialists, your prescriptions, your body mass index, details of your vaccinations and screening tests and your smoking and alcohol habits will be on there too.
The scheme, led by health secretary Jeremy Hunt, is being hailed as a revolution in the use of information to improve our healthcare and to advance medical research – admirable aims indeed. But once it goes live, organisations including drug and insurance firms will be able to apply to purchase ‘pseudonymised’ details about patients. And ‘backdoors’ to the database will allow bodies like the police to enjoy direct access to your medical records as well.
These floods are washing away the founding logic of David Cameron’s government | Jonathan Freedland | Comment is free | The Guardian… But that is the least of the damage that Cameron’s words have inflicted on himself. For this government was built, the coalition formed, on a single, simple premise: that austerity was unavoidable, that there was no alternative. There could be no more spending, an assertion endorsed by the outgoing Labour government in what must rank as one of the most ill-judged jokes of modern times: “There’s no money left,” said Liam Byrne in a note left for his successor at the Treasury. But now, less than four years on, it turns out that this is no longer true. The PM has told us that, should the need be urgent enough, there is money after all. Limitless supplies of it in fact; enough to defeat nature’s wrath. To quote Cameron in full, “Money is no object in this relief effort. Whatever money is needed for it will be spent.” This rather undermines the austerity message, for it shows what was always true – that the national belt is not tightened universally and for ever but can be loosened when the government wants to loosen it. The last demonstration of that truth came nearly two years ago, when George Osborne cut the top rate of tax from 50p to 45p. That destroyed at a stroke the claim that we were all in it together, but it also illuminated a more obvious fact: that, despite all the “no alternative” talk, the government had not lost its power of discretion. Even in the age of austerity, it still got to decide what to spend money on and what not to spend it on. …
Your bills help British Gas to £600m profit – Business News – Business – The Independent Centrica is set to announce on Thursday that its British Gas household supply arm made a profit of nearly £600m last year, helped by a 10.4 per cent hike in gas prices in November and an 8.4 per cent rise in electricity prices. Politicians and campaigners said the bumper profits provided further evidence that showed the Big Six were overcharging customers in an uncompetitive market.
17/2/14 edit: That would be Alex Salmon “accused of overheating production of Scottish farmed salmond to meet Japan’s insatiable demand for sushi in return for China’s loan of two pandas to Edinburgh Zoo.”
Bottom trawling: how to empty the seas in just 150 years | Environment | The Observer“For every hour spent fishing today, in boats bristling with the latest fish-finding electronics, fishers land a mere 6% of what they did 120 years ago. Put another way, fishers today have to work 17 times harder to get the same catch as people did in the 19th century.” And the reason for this startling state of affairs is straightforward: we have caught so much fish in our own waters over the past 150 years, there is little left for us today. Some species hover at the edge of extinction. Our seas, and the floor below them, have been stripped of their riches.
