Okay – I will be the first to admit this is a toss-away, but considering what we’ve been treated to with Harvard and the Poison Ivies, not to mention being at the mercy – for years – of the smug, self-anointed, over-educated elites of the world, these two “academic” papers were too precious to pass up sharing and skewering.

This is what passes for Science™ and Experts™. Now, both of these have been published online in “The Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues” – I can already hear you snickering from here.

STOP THAT IN THE BACK RIGHT NOW

These people are serious – “concrete empirical underpinnings” and all. Can’t argue with concrete.

One paper is open access, and the other, mercifully, is pay-per-view, so I’ll only be able to share the abstract with you.

That should be enough.

All credit for the first doozy goes to WattsUpWithThat’s email for the heads-up. I had to read it three times before I even clicked through to the original because I could not believe it was real. I certainly understand Charles Rotter’s introduction:

There’s nothing I can add to the self-parody that is this paper. I will get the obligatory citations out of the way and then just paste extensive quotes from the open access paper. Let the hilarity ensue. For masochists who wish to read the paper in its entirety use this link.

Being a cynical, masochistic sort, you can bet I picked that scab.

Oh. My. GAWD.

Misogyny, authoritarianism, and climate change
Nitasha Kaul, Tom Buchanan

These cultists have too much time and too much money on their hands. Try to keep up – the acronyms will kill you. And Lord knows the emphasis is mine.

Globally, democratic politics are under attack from Electorally Legitimated Misogynist Authoritarian (ELMA) leaders who successfully use misogyny as a political strategy and present environmental concern in feminine and inferior terms. The ascendancy of such projects raise questions involving socioeconomic structures, political communication, and the psychological underpinnings of people’s attitudes. We offer misogyny, conceptualized in a specific way – not simply as hatred or disgust for women, but as a way of accessing a gendered hierarchy whereby that which is labeled “feminine” is perceived as inferior, devalued, and amenable to be attacked – as a relevant transmission mechanism in how ELMAs like Trump may connect with public opinion by systematically investigating the interplay between misogyny, authoritarianism, and climate change in the context of the United States. Using a survey methodology (N = 314) and up-to-date questionnaires, we provide a concrete empirical underpinning for recent analytical and theoretical work on the complexity of misogyny. We analyze how misogynist and authoritarian attitudes correlate with climate change, adding to the literature on opposition to climate change policy. An additional exploratory aspect of our study concerning US voter preferences clearly indicates that Trump supporters are more misogynist, more authoritarian, and less concerned with the environment.

That’s the abstract, and let’s stop there. I certainly hope none of this is plagiarized. The thought of multiple and identical pieces of this blithering tripe existing on the same spatial plane is terrifying. What a waste of space and oxygen.

There are several touchy, feely, neo-feminist quotes betwixt abstract and intro, almost as if they felt a need to have their work blessed by kindred cult spirits. I can smell the patchouli and hear the crystals tinkling.

“Gender is a game-changer, like the Archimedean fulcrum, with the potential to shift economic logics from profit-exploiting systems of injustice to functional praxes of life-affirming care for ecosystems, human others, and planetary co-habitants.”

[Glazebrook, 2015, p. 126]

That was nice.

Let’s rustle through introduction in case there’s any rational meat on th…oh.

Many contemporary democracies are under severe strain from right-wing majoritarian political projects, and these are headed by electorally legitimated misogynist authoritarians (henceforth, ELMAs) who continue to command significant public support in spite of their many contradictions and policy failures. As Kaul (2021) argued, ELMAs come to power claiming a monopoly on nationalism denouncing their critics as anti-national, and claim to challenge neoliberalism, while benefitting from crony capitalism. Their exclusivist majoritarian nationalisms are both neoliberal and nationalist, and result in perverse outcomes for human security. Even so, these projects continue to draw upon support from the public in multiple democracies; the ELMA project examples are many and range the gamut from Bolsonarismo in Brazil, Modification in India, Dutertismo in Philippines, Erdoganism in Turkey, and Trumpism in the United States. Especially, Trump exemplifies such leadership and hence here we focus on the United States, but we expect that the main arguments that we lay out here may also be salient in several other countries that are the focus of our continuing work.

Trump, Trump, Trumpity, Trump.

…The structure of the article is as follows. In the first section, we briefly introduce the relevant conceptual backdrop for intersections of masculinity, nationalism, and climate change. Then, we detail the salient findings from existing empirical studies that focus on correlations between prejudices and climate beliefs. This creates the rationale for why we chose the design of our research. We explain the importance of misogyny understood in a specific way: gender as power and feminization as devaluation as opposed to simply hatred toward women. In the next section, we present our hypotheses and details of methodology, followed by the results of our study. We provide a summary of our findings and discuss how and why these insights matter. We conclude by pointing out the implications of our research and indicate directions for further enquiry.

Conceptualizations of masculinity, nationalism, climate change
Gender is deeply imbricated in any discussions of climate change. As Allen et al. (2019, p. 1) point out, gender roles are socially constructed and shape climate change vulnerabilities and how society responds to climate change…

And…that’s enough.

Do you want to know why these lunatics lay in roads and dump soup on priceless paintings and glue themselves to bannisters, and there is no reasoning with them?

It’s because the world indulges their fantasies to the point of letting them believe this is serious. That this world they’ve constructed in the pink and purple vapor-filled recesses of their tiny minds is serious.

The second brilliant work – paywalled, more’s the pity – I found because it was running as a selection in a menu down the side of the page. The title was…catchy.

Attitudes towards Trump Policies and Climate Change: The Key Roles of Aversion to Wealth Redistribution and Political Interest
Angelo Panno, Giuseppe Carrus, Luigi Leone

And the abstract, well – no better word to describe it.

Both psychological and political science researchers have pointed out that Trump policies embrace right wing and authoritarian dispositions. In turn, such dispositions have been related to climate change denial and aversion to wealth redistribution. Nevertheless, little is known about the mechanisms underlying the relationship between individuals’ favorable attitude towards Trump and climate change skepticism. We aimed to understand two cruxes in this relationship: (i) whether the favorable attitude towards Trump influences climate change skepticism through the aversion to wealth redistribution and (ii) whether people’s interest in politics interacts in the relationships between attitude towards Trump and two social outcomes—climate change denial and aversion to wealth redistribution. We considered a representative sample of the US electorate (ANES 2016 database, N = 4271), assessing attitudes towards Trump by aggregating several indicators concerning respondents’ evaluations of Trump. Interest in politics, aversion to wealth redistribution, and climate change skepticism had also been assessed. Results showed that favorable attitudes towards Trump related to climate change denial through the aversion to wealth redistribution. Moreover, the link between such attitudes and both climate change skepticism and aversion to wealth redistribution was stronger for people showing a greater interest in politics.

Again, Trump, Trump, Trumpity, Trump. Only this paper also seems earnestly trying to understand why you don’t want your hard-earned money aka “wealth” taken and redistributed at random – why one would be “adverse” to such a thing? I believe the authors feel “wealth” acquisition is a Trump induced phenomena, and must be addressed as such. Trump as an – what was that previous acronym again – ELMA obviously had the power to make people greedy to covet what they owned.

This first paper is authored by two Brits from the University of Westminster and I’m making allowances for that. The Brits have long been socialist, wealth grabbing yobs, and think nothing of believing that the person doing well owes everyone who isn’t doing a thing what he has. The last one is another round of socialists from Italy, again taking a run at American society in the guise of a worldview and let’s pick one example from the list.

I have no doubt these scholarly works – particularly the one on misogyny and climate change – are even now being reverently quoted in climate cult academic circles.

They’re “published,” don’t you know. Ergo Experts™ available in any appeal to authority during another vacuous argument with a true believer in purple hair holding a can of soup and a hammer.

Academics. Unicorns, misogyny, and oppression all the way down.

Psychologists, too, you know. #Victims

Over 70% of psychologists are women. Of the 30% not female, you'll find very few who would ring the bell of masculinity. This is about as female-dominated of a field as we have. And yet for June, it's not enough. Never enough!

Does the Oppression Porn addiction ever go away? 😵‍💫 https://t.co/TpLSuhY5Kn pic.twitter.com/bqsneAOVRX

— Theo Jordan (@Theo_TJ_Jordan) December 12, 2023

Thanks for letting me share.