The industry-backed climate deniers at the Heartland Institute held their big climate disinfo conference last week, with hours and hours of mostly old, almost exclusively white, and predominantly male free market fundamentalists talking to each other. While Heartland's weekly climate newsletter claimed to have gotten over 100,000 views on the stream, the YouTube videos from the 2-day denialfest struggle to crack just 1,000 views.
Even more pitiful is that they brag about getting coverage, but all they can point to are three stories, two of which are very critical of Heartland's conference. Scott Waldman at E&E described it as "who’s who of climate deniers," and focused on Trump election denial lawyer (detained pantless) Jeffrey Clark, who "held up a piece of cardboard on which he had written 'meta control'" to illustrate his discussion of the "communistic purposes" and the "self-interested… dark forces" behind climate change.
The second story Heartland had to promote (because there was nothing kinder) was from Inside Climate News, where Kristoffer Tigue covered the conference in the context of how it disproves the propaganda about the GOP's supposed climate conversion. He described Heartland as having "a long history of spreading misleading and false claims about global warming" and being "widely viewed by climate advocates as a disinformation machine." (Fact check: true, but it's not just climate advocates! Journalists like Emily Atkin have referenced Heartland as being part of the disinformation machine, author Shawn Laurence Otto called it back in 2012, as have professors and scientists like Michael Mann, and Duke historian Nancy MacLean even listed Heartland in an Orion Mag piece headlined "The Disinformation Machine.")
Somewhat disappointingly, by comparison, the third link Heartland had to show for its work was from fringe right-wing blog Ace of Spades HQ, which is only worth mentioning for the sake of acknowledging the disinfo conference’s third media hit. We'll just mention that this post praising Heartland's conference ends with an old song about spring being a little late this year, which is funny, because it was in the 80s in February when Heartland held the conference in Orlando, a cool 20°F above average.
But those articles actually weren't the only coverage that Heartland got! It received a second favorable write-up from Cowboy State Daily, another right-wing blog. There's little worth saying about it, except that it focused on comments by Alex Epstein, the Big Oil whipping boy who was Heartland's keynote speaker.
It was interesting to see the Cowboy State's reporting that Epstein, in addition to his standard spiel, also said that conservatives need to reframe the climate and energy issue. Specifically, Epstein turned to none other than "Martin Luther King" to support his case, because the Reverend/Dr./Nobel laureate — supposedly — just reframed "the issue of civil rights around the idea that people should be judged by the content of the character and not their skin color" and found success by linking policies "to a goal people agreed with."
While white people have exploited, appropriated and bastardized King's advocacy for years, this is a particularly egregious example when you know about Alex. Not only is Epstein invoking Martin Luther King Jr. to sell a product that disproportionately hurts Black communities, in a way that shamelessly invokes King's "Dream" as though it were merely a marketing gimmick or crisis communications trick, but also it's not even an intellectually honest speech by Epstein, because Alex has a history of trashing the very legacy that he now co-opts for his fossil fuel propaganda.
Epstein's racist history was covered by The Washington Post last year, and his reaction didn't exactly clear him of the allegations. Back in college, Epstein argued against recognition of Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday as a federal holiday. He noted that "Black crime has increased steadily since King’s time," and then wrote, and published, on purpose, in a college newspaper, that "because of the bad ideas he promoted, Dr. King is responsible for a great part of the destruction that has occurred in America today, especially among black Americans."
Yes, demonstrating his early adeptness at disinformation, a young Epstein blamed Martin Luther King Jr.'s "bad ideas" for causing the Black struggle, as though campaigning against about structural racism is what actually somehow caused the symptoms of that structural racism decades later.
Alex Epstein is on the record, in writing, of disapproving of Martin Luther King Jr's "bad ideas" about race. So why is Epstein invoking those very ideas now, to sell fossil fuels?
Because that's how propaganda works, and this is as hamfisted as it gets.
Epstein’s hypocritical past might just be why Heartland chose to promote two stories embarrassing them, instead of the one that let Epstein embarrass himself.