Climate skeptics’ biggest online target is often women
Right-wing anti-climate online pages often attack VP Kamala Harris, Greta Thunberg, Ocasio-Cortez, women celebrities for their climate activism
Climate skeptics have used ad hominem attacks - or going after the speaker in lieu of criticizing their argument - to argue against climate science for years. These days, climate skeptics online love to deploy these attacks against women climate activists, and they’re often rewarded with tons of engagement on social media for doing so, especially on Facebook. Overall, we found that so far this year, 40 of the top 100 posts by climate-denying pages about climate change, global warming, or the Green New Deal use women as the target of their attacks.
The single most-engaged post from climate skeptics so far this year, by Dan Bongino, got over 170,000 interactions, comments, and shares, and its central implied argument is that he knows more about Vice President Kamala Harris about how climate change affects mass immigration.
Bongino also made very successful anti-climate Facebook posts by going after Harris in at least threeotherinstances, but the vice president is unfortunately not the only woman who climate skeptics target over and over online. Other targets that seem to help generate tons of engagement for climate skeptics include pretty much every high-profile woman who talks about climate change and/or clean energy: Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm (whom climate skeptic men piled on in May during the Colonial Pipeline shutdown), Sen. Elizabeth Warren, Rep. Alexandria-Cortez, and even National Climate Advisor Gina McCarthy.
Another frequent target of right-wing furor is Greta Thunberg, the Swedish climate activist who is only turning 18 just this year. Still, that hasn’t stopped Ben Shapiro, Dinesh D’Souza, Steven Crowder, Breitbart, Newsmax, Mike Huckabee, PragerU, and plenty of other climate-denying men and right-wing pages from using her as a target to get tons and tons of likes. Three of the 10 most-engaged Facebook posts about Thunberg this year are from Shapiro, and other top posts about Thunberg came from Crowder and D’Souza.
Other women whom right-wing pages have targeted this year for their climate activism include Duchess Meghan Markle and Angelina Jolie. Breitbart has gone after both of them this year, leaning into the argument that these wealthy women are talking down to “working class peasants.”
Though not as common (and more difficult to track), some right-wing pages and GOP politicians will go so far as to buy Facebook and Instagram ads to use these womens’ high profiles to collect emails and donations, with a particular focus on demonizing Ocasio-Cortez on the issue of clean energy.