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" This is a season of denialism. In my circles, the word tends to mean denial that climate change is real or human-caused. But denialism can stand for something broader: a refusal to see the things that tie us inconveniently together. These include the unequal history that the land remembers, the perennial presence in American life of migration and foreign labor, the decline of relative American power. You could distill it by saying that denialism is the ethos that refuses to see how the world is deeply plural at every scale and that we are in it together. The denial comes not because the denialist cannot see this but because he does see it, not because he doesn’t believe others are there but because he feels their presence so acutely, suspects they will make claims on him, fears they will get power over him and take what he has. When I was in high school in Calhoun County, West Virginia, my classmates told me that Michael Dukakis (the 1988 Democratic presidential nominee) would take everyone’s guns and Jesse Jackson (who ran for the nomination that year) had a plan to put all white people in camps. Today we hear that climate change is an internationalist stalking horse for global government. Interdependence is incipient war and conquest. Climate denial is really less about science than it is about who has claims on you, and who rules you. "

Jedediah Purdy , This Land Is Our Land: The Struggle for a New Commonwealth


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Jedediah Purdy quote : This is a season of denialism. In my circles, the word tends to mean denial that climate change is real or human-caused. But denialism can stand for something broader: a refusal to see the things that tie us inconveniently together. These include the unequal history that the land remembers, the perennial presence in American life of migration and foreign labor, the decline of relative American power. You could distill it by saying that denialism is the ethos that refuses to see how the world is deeply plural at every scale and that we are in it together. The denial comes not because the denialist cannot see this but because he does see it, not because he doesn’t believe others are there but because he feels their presence so acutely, suspects they will make claims on him, fears they will get power over him and take what he has. When I was in high school in Calhoun County, West Virginia, my classmates told me that Michael Dukakis (the 1988 Democratic presidential nominee) would take everyone’s guns and Jesse Jackson (who ran for the nomination that year) had a plan to put all white people in camps. Today we hear that climate change is an internationalist stalking horse for global government. Interdependence is incipient war and conquest. Climate denial is really less about science than it is about who has claims on you, and who rules you.