I was recently recommended to look at the work of Cory Morningstar as an intelligent and more sympathetic voice for some of the conspiratorial thinking I might otherwise dismiss. I gave her several hours of my time doing my best to listen and understand her position. I know people for whom she is important and I genuinely wanted to get where she is coming from. I get her good heart and passion for the planet and I like her anti-capitalist stance. I also get her passion for the oppressed and marginalised and really want to like her for all that. So far, so good.
But, and it’s a big but, she ends up in places no sensible person should ever end up. She is guilty of huge sweeping generalisations and huge jumps of logic which leave me reeling. For someone of such obvious intelligence she undermines herself at every turn. I found reading and listening to her exhausting, so many jumps between so much frankly unconnected information, so much wild extrapolation from small scraps of circumstantial evidence and so many people swept up in her condemnation from Barack Obama to Desmond Tutu, from Bill McGibben to Mark Ruffalo. You can read a collection of her articles here and get a flavour of her writing.
Everyone else is wrong
Amongst Cory Morningstar’s work is a deconstruction of Greta Thunberg. “The Manufacturing of Greta Thunberg—for Consent: The Political Economy of Non Profit Industrial Complex Volume I and Volume II”. In essence she seeks to “prove” that Greta has no agency over her own life but is instead a corporate patsy manipulated by a variety of people for their own dark ends. I find her attempt to portray Greta as a pawn patronising and insulting. It is arrogant to try to take away her agency and to assume that a young girl cannot reach her conclusions herself or have the intelligence to know when she is being manipulated. More than that, many of us will recognise in our hearts that it is simply not true.
Yes, there are plenty of people and organisations out there who will unscrupulously use Greta’s iconic image as a way of making themselves look good. It’s part of the advertising world’s toolkit. In the same way only a few months ago around the time of COP26 I heard a Tory politician, Alok Sharma (without irony) say that all CEO’s and politicians were now the new Swampy. Everyone wants a piece of Greta, of course, and co-opting someone as a way of “defanging” them is a common tactic for defusing threat. However, Cory Morningstar’s trashing of Greta Thunberg is shameful and indefensible and, frankly, ridiculous. “How dare you?” to use Greta’s famous phrase.
Similarly I find her version of XR as a “designed and manipulated movement” insulting of the intelligence of those involved and her description of it as censoring and undemocratic betrays a fundamental lack of knowledge about how XR works. I can say that from my own direct involvement within XR, an involvement which Cory evidently does not have.
Her immense sweeping statements about NGO’s being part of the “Non-Profit Industrial Complex” and co-opted into the system, again, speak to me of someone who has lost discernment. From her fundamentalist viewpoint everyone is contaminated. Avaaz, 350.org, Greenpeace, Amnesty International, hardly anyone escapes her censure. It is of course true that radical organisations that have grown from grassroot movements can struggle to maintain their radical edge as they become insitutionalised and can lose contact with their true roots and that there are difficult problems to deal with when organisations grow. But they can also gain in their effectiveness to influence the course of the world. We need Greenpeace at the WEF just as we need Avaaz driving online petitions. What is it with Cory that she needs to knock them all?
This wholesale dismissal of all NGO’s, all environmental movements and individuals who have a high public profile speaks to me of a frankly paranoid take on reality. Why is the attack targeting all organisations with a green agenda rather than focus on the rabid rightwing? It effectively puts Cory on the same side as the corporate lobbyists and libertarian anti-regulation right wingers who she clearly opposes. Why not take the fight to them? Why spend so much energy trying to undermine the work of the green movement? Cory directs her fire at the same agencies that the right wing also love to attack. They don’t need any more help from her.
Elsewhere she argues that the climate change narrative is “manufactured”, or that we are being fed a false sense of urgency in order to push through some kind of new world order totalitarian dystopia. Really? I guess that’s why corporations and governments are so resistant to doing anything about it?? For anyone who follows the science or anyone already suffering the consequences of ravaging fire, drought, flood and their displacement from the land as a consequence of climate change, this is a stunning thing to be saying. Time is not on our side. Cory is not at all in denial of climate change but I see the dismissive critique she has of almost all attempts to respond to the climate crisis as sowing doubt in people’s minds and the danger is they then withdraw into a fearful state of inaction.
Fundamentalism vs real politik
In similar vein she dismisses the UN sustainability agenda or the New Green Deal or the New Deal for Nature as a corporate power grab which we should not support. Yes, of course, these initiatives are imperfect and limited. Yes, of course, there will be many people looking at how they can profit from them rather than serve humanity and yes we must always be vigilant around this. But her sweeping dismissal of so many initiatives is like throwing the baby out with the bathwater. The Paris Agreement, for all its flaws, for all its calculations based on technofixes, for all its underestimation of the speed of climate change, was still a collective inching forward. We need something way more radical but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t progress.
To oppose the New Green Deal is insane if our aim is to create a more just world and deal with the effects of climate change. The strength of it, in my view, is that it deals with the world as it is rather than how we would like it to be. It’s not perfect but it is “real politik”, an achievable step forward. It works with the system as it is. And this is at the core of my problem with Cory Morningstar. Believe me, I don’t like the system as it is. Like many people I realise that system change is ultimately what is needed and that addressing climate change and addressing social justice worldwide are inseparable. Capitalism is limited in its ability to deal with the problems it causes, on which it depends. But we have to work with what we have, to push the system as far as it will go. That means supporting initiatives such as the New Green Deal because they are moving us in a better direction. I’m not under the illusion that such deals will solve everything. They won’t. But they can create the conditions for the next step.
The New Green Deal being offered by the European parliament is far from perfect and there are valid and important criticisms. For example, it assumes we can achieve “green” economic growth whereas growth itself is part of the problem; it has a huge faith in technological solutions which are themselves dependent on the continued exploitation of natural resources; and the funding structure favours large corporations over smaller enterprises. I imagine Cory would critique them in this way, rightly so.
Where our views diverge is in the realm of action. Time is short and the situation urgent and here we have a package of solutions ready to go. Should we reject them because of the way they have been coopted and delay acting on climate change? Or should we give them broad support and advocate for their improvement? Personally I think we need a dual approach, to embrace what is already on offer and continue at the same time to advocate for a deeper economic restructuring. That is where we differ. There’s a useful discussion along these lines in an article in Open Democracy. And it seems to me perfectly consistent to support the new green deal and still be engaging in activism to push for more radical action.
There are much more radical and equitable new green deal proposals being discussed which I think can inform our shaping of the government backed deal. For example, there is a version from the southern hemisphere, a feminist new green deal and an alternative European proposal. These civil society versions would be much better at achieving a transition towards true global justice but, unfortunately, they are not the ones that are on the table.
So I guess it’s pretty clear that Cory Morningstar winds me up. She is a fundamentalist with utopian dreams but not a realist. In the end, the way she mows down row after row of people who, like herself, care passionately about the planet leaves a very bad taste in the mouth. And when you end up accusing everyone who is working hard to bring about a more just and safe world of being part of the problem, there really has to be something wrong with your reasoning process.
Daverick, with all due respect, I think it’s you who’s is clearly lacking discernment, there is a nativity and poor reasoning to your critique of Cory Morningstar, it’s not a strong enough argument to assert she is criticising so many, therefore is ‘overly-critical’ and arrogant, your assertion ‘we’ve got to do the best we can’, has echoes of that rather naive alternate-middle class position, ‘we’ve all got to do our bit’, though what does that truly amount to?…I don’t hear you really grasping the problems we face, and Morningstar so succinctly illustrates, i.e your focusing on the climate change narrative, (emphasis on ‘narrative’) rather than the more prescient issue posed by the WEF, W.H.O agenda, The Great Reset, The Fourth Industrial Revolution, with its Social credit System & dystopian ‘Stake Holder Capitalism’. Tritely dismissed as conspiratorial by those lacking discernment, but a very real prospect, clearly mapped out in broad daylight, and being test run in China as we speak, notably praised by many WEF members.
Wether Thunberg is manufactured isn’t really a debate, and doesn’t take much deciphering, your outrage is telling, and she is positioned to manufacture consent, a faux-figure alluding to capture and channel the supposed zeitgeist,…but is clearly manufactured, and I doubt has much of her own agency.
XR is state run, controlled opposition, and essentially amounts to an egregious abuse of trust, in regards to our youth, who are painfully misplacing their passion and energy into its mechanism. Extinction Rebellion ties to some of the world’s most powerful NGOs at the helm of the non-profit industrial complex (Avaaz, 350.org, Greenpeace et al.). Predominantly a white-led movement serving white power.
‘Following the science’, an absurd statement uttered by inept Tory politicians, science doesn’t lead anywhere, it’s always open to empirical test and inquiry, unless you’re alluding to ‘scienctism’, a quasi-religious form of authority. This is what the conservative government upheld during their appalling covid period. In terms of Climate Change Paul Kingsnorth astutely points out;
Climate change is a problem amenable to numerical questions and technocratic answers which go with the grain of a Machine culture. It is, furthermore, a problem which, almost by definition, can only be solved by elites’.
What you appear to miss in your partial praise/approval of The Great Reset, is the policy of rendering us humans as ‘standing reserve’, only viewed for our future potential profit, i think you’re aware, though have bought into the Fraud of the greenwash, and terms such as ‘sustainable development’, ‘New Deal for Nature’, that mask a thin veneer over a far darker motive, and before you say it I’ll quote John Waters, “do not allow the phrase ‘conspiracy theory’ even to flit across your mind: It has grown too late in the day for the luxury of superciliousness. I hardly need to list here all the ‘conspiracy theories’ that have been realised in full technicolour actuality over the past year”
The rationalism of the WEF is our biggest threat, that you can’t decipher the pseudo-science surrounding covid Is telling, it’s always a major part of Totalitarianism, ‘conspiracy’ means ‘a confluence of interest’, which covid certainly is, look at the transfer of wealth, the contracts for politicians mates for utterly needless toxic PPE gear, and the rollout of vaccines, or to be accurate ‘gene therapies’, as described by the pharmaceutical CO’s themselves.
Your unquestioning support of ‘The Green New Deal’, shows again a lack of investigation, to no doubt rile you I’ll quote Morningstar herself;
“The ‘the clean energy Revolution’ doesn’t threaten big oil it secures it. It doesn’t weaken capitalism. It strengthens it. It doesn’t inspire resistance- it crushes it, into oblivion”
It masquerades a policy of the financialisation of nature, to commodify our bodies, reducing humans to standing reserve. Is this something you’ve even entertained, all part of the ‘machines’, progress, the transhumanist agenda, The Great Resets mantra ‘you will own nothing and be happy’, is this just a superfluous tagline, I fear not, it translates as ‘we will own everything, inc your bodies, and be happy’, yes it’s a little dark, isn’t it, a little dystopian…but it is at hand!
While you focus on climate change and faux-urgency of carbon emissions, the true threat of global fascism, stealthily ushers in under the guise of public health emergency’s, pathologising their political nature, rendering them apolitical, and beyond reproach,
…one of the aspects which concerns me the most about the past two years, esp referring to Totnes, is how many well meaning alternate types, have almost completely failed to grasp what’s been happening globally, yourself and a number of others are quite influential within this area, this community I’m part of, I note you were part of blocking an important talk at the civic hall, which included such luminaries as Dolores Cahill and Patrick Henningsen, this was essentially ‘cancel culture’, which I deeply resent, who are you to deem what voices should be heard? Dolores Cahill has been outstanding and brave in her coverage of covid, an inspiration for those seeking the truth of whats taken place in our communities at large.
I’m afraid I don’t detect an enlightened voice in what you write, quite the contrary, the speakers were tritely discredited as ‘right wing’, conspiracy theorist, lest we forget the term ‘right wing’ has been so overused to discredit anything which that doesn’t follow the MSM that it’s lost its true meaning, ‘Rebel Wisdom’ was classed as ‘right wing’, prompting its founder to make a podcast titled ‘WTF if everything is right wing, nothing is’, there is an overemphasis on the dangers of the right wing, what about the extreme left, in case you hadn’t noticed there’s been an near inversion of the political left and right in the U.S, the Democrats really don’t stand for what they originally were, as Kaczynski said “The political left is technological society’s first line of defence against revolution;
What is needed is a new revolutionary movement, dedicated to the elimination of technological society.”
The only true source of information now is from independent news or self funded journalism.
As D.H Lawerence & Huxley termed it, ‘The Machine’, be that progress, AI, the march of technology, is unstoppable in many respects, what can we do to mitigate its effects, the idea it offers solutions for everything, in terms of science, is part of the problem, the rationalism, the utilitarianism of ‘machine environmentalism, ‘The New Green Deal’ isn’t as you say a step forward, Cory’s trashing of many green organisations is a wake up call, a radical call for a new vision, not the illusion of of one, we need to transcend rationalism. We need to change our narrative;
to defer to Kingsnorth again;
“This is the meaning of the ‘culture war’: an ongoing battle over stories, with no sign at all of whether any new grand narrative will rise to replace that of Progress.”
We all see the world through narratives, stories, there’s been much Polarisation, and divisiveness in our communities, it’s not a time to couch our language, I commented as i don’t see your efforts to cancel certain voices, as an aid to collective sensemaking, or positive to our information ecology, as harsh as that may sound, in my eyes Cory is a crucial source of journalism in a time when journalism has sold out wholesale, and severely suffered a lack of truthful voices, she will be very much on the right side of history….
This is not a criticism of you Daverick but of Cory Morningstar