Is nature left or right?

Anyone interested in following developments affecting the corrupt scheme of lies and disinformation organized around the figure of former US President Donald Trump (a scheme in which the Brazilian polsonarian is a sort of dazzling apprentice) should be cheered by the news that Fox News has finally decided to let go of anchor Tucker Carlson. , In the foreground cheerleader The far right in the United States.

Carlson’s downfall comes on the heels of Fox News’ decision to agree to pay nearly $1 billion in compensation to a company that produces systems used in the recent US presidential election. Evidence unearthed in a judicial investigation showed that the news outlet (and Carlson in particular) knew that the allegations they were making against the company — that its devices had been rigged to boost Joe Biden’s vote — were false, and they insisted on repeating them. them anyway.

American jurisprudence requires that, in order to convict a newspaper company of defamation, it must prove “malicious intent.” This is a very high level of evidence and is almost impossible to achieve (it is not easy at all, after all, to physically prove the “intent” behind the gesture). The fact that Fox News preferred to pay a nearly $1 billion over $700 million settlement, via settlement, to avoid taking the case to trial is riveting — to say the least.

Safe and insecure

But all this is just a preamble. Let’s get to the main thing: Carlson’s resignation has led me, at last, to watch misinformation which he co-wrote and showed for Fox last year, “The End of Men.” With just over half an hour running, the film unleashes the thesis that there is a big conspiracy—involving the pharmaceutical industry, pesticide manufacturers, agribusiness and the educational system—to feminize Western men, making them less masculine, and therefore easier to master.

“Big companies are literally waging chemical warfare against the country and your body, but you’re not allowed to know what’s going on,” says Carlson. “The chemical and pharmaceutical companies are poisoning us, our water, our food, our air. And they are doing it with the help of the government.” It might seem like the anchor here went into a medium trance and started sketching out some Greenpeace press releases.

And, in fact, Tucker Carlson fully and unabashedly embraces the premise (which It’s like a fairy tale) “Environmental Endocrine Disruptors” – Idea, Very dear but until today not proventhat some substances (especially some plastics and some synthetic pesticides) are capable, even at very low or residual concentrations, considered safe according to traditional toxicology, altering the hormonal balance of the human body and causing chronic or long-term health problems.

It is not a matter of denying the existence of molecules capable of affecting hormonal function—the contraceptive pill is an obvious example, among many—but distinguishing between the (real) effects of concentrations found in commercial drugs or preparations, or excessive doses given to mice in the laboratory, and the effects hypothesized. (highly hypothetical, if not entirely fictional) trace traces detected in the environment or in food.

Tucker Carlson makes plenty of space in the documentary for Linda BirnbaumA toxicologist who is a leading advocate of the environmental endocrine aetiology hypothesis, which he presents as a target of political persecution, does not mention that she resigned from public service during the Donald Trump administration. Birnbaum, a scientist with serious credentials, is one of the few exceptions in the film of someone talking, albeit in a biased way, about something he has experience with. In general, the “documentary” is largely dominated by figures such as the head of the anti-vaccination movement, Robert F. Palpatine. he).).

Insisting on ignoring this necessary distinction and pretending that the material is “safe” or “unsafe” in and of itself, regardless of focus, degree of exposure, and context of use, is a rhetorical irritant on the left, but something that the Carlsonian right does not hesitate to embrace.

pesticides vs. testosterone

What changes from one context to another is the nature of the powers attributed to the bogeyman. If perturbations to the left cause cancer and contaminate breast milk, they suppress testosterone on the right, shortening the penis and lowering sperm count. “glyphosate Keep Your Penis Small.” How Staff Agroecology Didn’t you think about that first?

Half of the disinformation is occupied by practitioners of something called “Bro Science,” essentially men and boys interested in preserving or increasing their masculinity, who seek homemade solutions, and share advice among themselves, to that end. As a science, Bro Science fails the first test, that of organization—or, as the cliché goes, “the plurality of personal experiences is not scientific data.” In other words, just because a group of your friends say that swallowing thirty raw eggs a day will raise your testosterone level doesn’t mean it’s true.

And here we come to the “Raw Egg Nationalist,” author of the Thirteenth Recommendation, which he says comes from bodybuilder Vince Gironda (1917-1997). This “nationalist,” whose real name is not revealed, introduces himself as “a bodybuilder and writer distributing ‘red pill’ health and fitness information to the masses.” The “red pill” — a reference to the red pill that allows characters in “The Matrix” to realize they’re inside a simulation — is the password and favorite metaphor for many conspiracy theories, but mainly those associated with misogyny.

His general idea is that there is an international cabal (“Soybean globalists”) who want to enslave humanity, and to do so, they are trying to impose a poor diet on the world (to the endless list of supposed endocrine disruptors being waved around the world by the most distant environmental movement) . Sinister, the right includes an additional element: soybeans, which would be “feminization” – a Frequent false rumors). In his book Raw Egg Nationalism – Theory and Practice, the indomitable red pill bodybuilder writes:

Consider not eating bread an important part of your revolt against the domestication of the human spirit, which has been going on since the dawn of time – and still going on. Never forget that while Master Lies wants you to live on GMO glyphosate bread, maybe a mushy soy sausage or burger Bugs for a change, they themselves would eat the best of God’s stock – the best Angus beef, prime pork, fowls of the sky and fish of the sea…”

In Carlson’s film, “Raw Eggs” only claims to “convey the wisdom of the ancestors.” “Being right means just believing there is a natural system,” says one bodybuilding influencer.

what nature?

And here we come to the question posed in the title: Is nature on the left or on the right? The answer, veiled in current public discourse but fairly obvious to anyone who thinks about it for more than three seconds, is: both. Nature is what it is. Political movements try to interpret it in their own light and take advantage of the word’s romantic appeal to attract supporters and curse opponents.

Contemporary environmentalism has a progressive undertone, but this was not always the case. He led the landscape gardening movement in the United States, a major promoter of white supremacy in the early 20th century. Madison Grant (1865-1937), who as a conservationist succeeded in saving the American bison from extinction. And historiography about the ideological roots of Nazism is full of works linking the emergence of the nationalist far-right to normal health and a return to simple life, more closely related to nature, movements that emerged in Germany in the 1920s.

Both sides of the political spectrum are unabashedly embracing The fallacy of the intrinsic superiority of the “natural” – when it suits them. It is not just an argument but a maneuver to explore feelings, raise fears and mobilize bases. The words (“natural,” “artificial,” “war,” “ancestor,” for example) no longer have their own meanings and are reduced to vectors for the manipulation of emotions.

Carlson’s movie became infamous upon release because one of Bro Science’s “tips” was to expose the testicles to infrared light to stimulate testosterone production (does not work). This practice was duly derided under the name “tanning balls”. But it is not more ridiculous than Brush your teeth with turmeric. Anyone who laughs at one but takes the other seriously—or makes it relativistic, pulling “good looks” out of his pocket—has colonized critical sense through ideological affinity.

Carlos Orci is a journalist and editor-in-chief of Revista Questão de Ciência, author of “O Livro dos Milagres” (Editora da Unesp), “O Livro da Astrologia” (KDP), and “Negacionismo” (Editora de Cultura) and co-author of “Pure Picaretagem” (Leya ), “Science in Daily Life” (Editora Contexto), the work that won the Jabuti Prize, and “Against Reality” (Papirus 7 Mares)