Conspiracy influencers enter mainstream politics in Europe following pivot from climate topics

Jennie King, ISD’s Director of Climate Disinformation Research and Policy, featured in an article for Rolling Stone speaking on the effects of conspiracy influencers and narratives on the previously broad consensus on climate action. This is largely attributed to COVID-19 conspiracy ideology infiltrating and becoming enmeshed in mainstream life, only to later pivot to other narrative spheres.

“Climate is now firmly embedded in the culture wars,” warned Jennie. “They saw that it was successful and doubled down on that strategy. Bad actors flooded into those spaces and weaponised them in pursuit of other agendas, one of which was opposition to the climate movement.”

She adds: “As the climate has become a more polarised topic, and has really been taken up by right-wing parties and the more extreme factions of centrist parties, it has weakened the public mandate.”

While Jennie advised caution in directly linking the influence of conspiracy theorists to election outcomes and government policies, she acknowledged a strong impact in the divisiveness of climate action, increasingly dismissed as a so-called ‘woke’ concern. She further noted that extreme online views are crossing into real life, with incidents of people disrupting council meetings, issuing death threats, and accusing politicians of pushing a tyrannical green agenda that wants to enslave them.

“All of this,” Jennie warned, “creates the worst possible enabling environment for the kinds of really ambitious and quite seismic systemic forms of climate action that the science says we need to be pursuing.”

The full article, which examines various conspiracy influencers and those even entering political ranks, is available on Rolling Stone.