Last Saturday morning, hundreds of activists gathered outside the Governor’s Residence to protest the approval of the 401 water quality certification for the Line 3 Pipeline. This permit, which was granted on Thursday by the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency, would allow Enbridge to cross 730 acres of wetlands and more than 200 streams in northern Minnesota.
This is the penultimate authorization required by Enbridge before it can officially begin construction on its controversial tar sands pipeline. The 401 permit will be sent to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to ensure it complies with Section 404 of the Clean Water Act. That agency must complete their review process before the MPCA will consider the pipeline’s Construction Stormwater Permit.
Line 3 has been under fire from activists and water protectors since its proposal in 2014. At the protest this morning, demonstrators denounced a number of issues associated with the project, including violations of Indigenous treaty rights, endangerment of wild rice, the correlation between construction (which involves building large man camps for pipeline workers) and sex and drug trafficking, as well as the murders and disapearances of Indigenous women. As a tar sands pipeline, the impacts of Line 3 on global greenhouse emissions, loss of native forests, and destruction of Minnesota wetlands and bodies of water are irreparable.
In the words of Taysha Martineau, a member of Fond du Lac tribe, “Today we are meeting at the Governor’s residence to show solidarity with all Indigenous communities that will be affected by the Line 3 pipeline. When Infrastructure such as Line 3 goes up, the statistics of violence against Indigenous women increase by 22 percent… When Tim Walz put pen to paper, he was educated on these statistics, and himself, Laura Bishop and Peggy Flanagan chose to ignore those voices. We echo those voices and turn those whispers today into screams, shouting with indignation as ongoing injustice against Indigenous people continues in America today.”
At the event, demonstrators formed a large picket line, distributed masks, and remained six feet apart to abide by COVID gathering restrictions. During the demonstration the Line 3 Pledge of Resistance was distributed among demonstrators, who committed to take action against the construction of this pipeline.
Looking forward, legal battles will continue, including challenges to Thursday permits in court, as well as an appeal from the Public Utilities Commission, which argues that the MPCA relied on an incorrect demand forecast when assessing financial need of the pipeline.
Once begun, Enbridge claims that pipeline construction will take between six to nine months to complete. As a result, water protectors are gearing up for a frontline battle, saying, “If you don’t stop Line 3, we will.”
For more information and live updates, call Genna Mastellone at 917-715-0670 or email media@resistline3.org.
In this article, Robert Jensen shares a straight-forward view of Cancel Culture and how critique of a political position is not necessarily directed to mock the people who hold it but rather an invitation to become accountable to one’s obligation to participate in democratic dialogue.
In the current squabble on the liberal/progressive/left side of the fence over so-called “cancel culture,” in which one open letter in favor of freedom of expression led to a rebuttal open letter in favor of a different approach to freedom of expression, I can offer a report on the experience of being canceled.
Several times over the past few years I’ve been asked to speak by university or community groups, only to see those events canceled by organizers after someone complained that I am “transphobic.” At a couple of events that drew complaints but were not canceled, including one in a church, critics tried to disrupt my talk. None of the events was actually a talk on transgender issues. The complaint was that I should not be allowed to speak in progressive settings — about other feminist issues, the ecological crises, or anything else — because what I’ve written about the ideology of the transgender movement is said to be bigoted. A local radical bookstore that denounced me publicly went so far as to no longer carry my books, which I had given them free copies of for years.
If I were, in fact, a bigot, these cancellations would be easy to understand. I have never invited a bigot to speak in a class I taught or at an event I helped organize. I have invited people to speak who held some political views with which I did not agree (after all, if I only invited people who agreed with me on everything, I would be bored and lonely), but I have no interest in giving bigots a public platform.
The curious thing about these canceled/disrupted events is that no one ever pointed to anything I have written or said in public that is, in fact, bigoted. If transphobia is the fear or hatred of people who identify as transgender, nothing I have written or said is transphobic. Most of my critics simply assert that because I support the radical feminist critique of transgender ideology, I am by definition a bigot and transphobe.
For the Sake of Clarity
Let me be clear: I’m not whining or asking for sympathy. I am a white man and a retired university professor with a stable income and a network of friends and comrades who offer support. I continue to do political and intellectual work I find rewarding and can find places to publish my work. While I don’t enjoy being insulted, these verbal attacks don’t have much effect on my life. I’m not concerned about myself but about the progressive community’s capacity for critical thinking and respectful debate.
In that spirit, here is my contribution to that debate on transgenderism and the value of open discussion:
One of the basic points that feminists — along with many other writers — have made is that biological sex categories are real and exist outside of any particular cultural understanding of those categories. The terms “male” and “female” refer to those biological sex categories, while social norms about “masculinity” and “femininity” reflect how any particular society expects males and females to behave. That may seem obvious to many readers, but in some progressive and feminist circles it’s routine for people to say that those sex categories themselves are a “social construction.” I have been told that because I assert that biological sex categories are immutable, I am transphobic.
Is that claim defensible? Are sex categories a social construction?
About Reproduction & Respiration
Let’s think about reproduction. Some creatures reproduce asexually, through such processes as fission and budding, and some animals lay eggs. Most mammals, including all humans, reproduce sexually through the combination of a sperm and an egg (the two types of gamete cells) that leads to live birth.
Now, let’s think about respiration. Most aquatic creatures (whales and dolphins, which are mammals, are an exception) take in oxygen through gills. Mammals, including all humans, get oxygen by taking air into our lungs.
These descriptions of creatures’ reproduction and respiration are the result of a social process we call science, but they are not social constructions. We describe the world with human language, but what we describe doesn’t change just because we might change the language we use.
The term “social construction” implies that a reality can change through social processes. An example is marriage. What is a marriage? That depends on how a particular society constructs the concept. Change the definition — to include same-sex couples, for example — and the reality of who can get married changes.
Cannot Be Changed by Human Action
But again, at the risk of seeming simplistic, these descriptions of reproduction and respiration systems cannot be changed by human action. We cannot socially construct ourselves into reproducing asexually or by laying eggs instead of reproducing sexually through fertilization of egg by sperm, any more than we could socially construct ourselves into breathing through gills instead of lungs.
When it comes to respiration, no one suggests that “lung-based respiration is a social construction.” If someone made such a claim most of us would say, “I’m sorry, but that doesn’t make any sense to me.” Yet when it comes to reproduction, some people argue that “biological sex is a social construction,” which makes no more sense than claiming respiration is a social construction.
To be clear: Humans do create cultural meaning about sex differences. Humans who have a genetic makeup to produce sperm (males) and humans who have a genetic makeup to produce eggs (females) are treated differently in a variety of ways that go beyond roles in reproduction. [Note: A small percentage of the human population is born “intersex,” a term to mark those who do not fit clearly into male/female categories in terms of reproductive systems, secondary sexual characteristics, and chromosomal structure. But the existence of intersex people does not change the realities of sexual reproduction, and they are not a third sex.]
The Radical Change
In the struggle for women’s liberation, feminists in the 1970s began to use the term “gender” to describe the social construction of meaning around the differences in biological sex. When men would say, “Women are just not suited for political leadership,” for example, feminists would point out that this was not a biological fact to be accepted but a cultural norm to be resisted.
To state the obvious: Biological sex categories exist outside of human action. Social gender categories are a product of human action.
This observation leads to reasonable questions, which are not bigoted or transphobic: When those in the transgender movement assert that “trans women are women,” what do they mean? If they mean that a male human can somehow transform into a female human, the claim is incoherent because humans cannot change biological sex categories. If they mean that a male human can feel uncomfortable in the social gender category of “man” and prefer to live in a society’s gender category of “woman,” that is easy to understand. But it begs a question: Is the problem that one is assigned to the wrong category? Or is the problem that society has imposed gender categories that are rigid, repressive, and reactionary on everyone? And if the problem is in society’s gender categories, then is not the solution to analyze the system of patriarchy — institutionalized male dominance — that generates those rigid categories? Should we not seek to dismantle that system? Radical feminists argue for such a radical change in society.
These are the kinds of questions I have asked and the kinds of arguments I have made in writing and speaking. If I am wrong, then critics should point out mistakes and inaccuracies in my work. But if this radical feminist analysis is a strong one, then how can an accurate description of biological realities be evidence of bigotry or transphobia?
An Approach, Not An Attack
When I challenge the ideology of the transgender movement from a radical feminist perspective, which is sometimes referred to as “gender-critical” (critical of the way our culture socially constructs gender norms), I am not attacking people who identify as transgender. Instead, I am offering an alternative approach — one rooted in a collective struggle against patriarchal ideologies, institutions, and practices, rather than a medicalized approach rooted in liberal individualism.
That’s why the label “TERF” (trans-exclusionary radical feminism) is inaccurate. Radical feminists don’t exclude people who identify as transgender but rather offer what we believe is a more productive way to deal with the distress that people feel about gender norms that are rigid, repressive, and reactionary. That is not bigotry, but politics. Our arguments are relevant to the ongoing debate about public policies, such as who is granted access to female-only spaces or who can compete in girls’ and women’s sports. They are relevant to concerns about the safety of puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgical interventions. And radical feminism is grounded in compassion for those who experience gender dysphoria — instead of turning away from reality, we are suggesting ways to cope that we believe to be more productive for everyone.
Now, a final prediction. I expect that some people in the transgender movement will suggest that my reproduction/respiration analogy mocks people who identify as transgender by suggesting that they are ignorant. Let me state clearly: I do not think that. The analogy is offered to point out that an argument relevant to public policy doesn’t hold up. To critique a political position in good faith is not to mock the people who hold it but rather to take seriously one’s obligation to participate in democratic dialogue.
In a cancel culture, people who disagree with me may find it easy to ignore the argument and simply label me a bigot, on the reasoning that because I think the ideology of the transgender movement is open to critique, I obviously am transphobic.
But I want to make one final plea that people not do that, with two questions: If my argument is cogent — and there certainly are good reasons to reach that conclusion — why is it in the interests of anyone — including people who identify as transgender — to ignore such an argument? And how can people determine whether my argument is cogent if it is not part of the public conversation?
This writing was written by Deep Green Resistance cadre in December 2018 and is published here in English for the first time.
Message To the French People
In the past weeks we have seen an uprising of the people. Macron and his cronies in the L’Assemblee have gone too far again. The average people in France are living a precarious life. We are poor, we are sick, and we are tired of the bosses and the politicians, the little dictators.
Now they try to tell us that we are responsible for paying a tax on fuel to solve global warming. These capitalist dogs who caused the problem in the first place now want to turn around and rob us to fix it. Their fuel taxes are a form of theft from the poor, one of the many ways they rob us of life and liberty. First they exploit our labor. Then they poison us with their factories and pollution. Then they rob us as landlords. Next they commodify every part of our lives through mass advertising. These elites are vampires sucking us dry.
The French people have a true sense of our power.
Our forebearers took the rich to the Guillotines and erected the barricades in Paris. Our grandmothers and grandfathers fought the Nazi regime from the streets and rooftops and alleyways and made collaborators pay for their self-serving treachery.
Now our very own government has unleashed their trained dogs against the people, injuring hundreds and leaving the streets of France bloody. We say: no more. No more can we tolerate their capitalist lies. No more will we pay their farcical taxes. No more will we cooperate with their tyrannical vision. No more will we stand idly by as fascists step to the fore.
As the police and security forces of the state run amok through the streets of this country, we say it is time. Let us rise up. We need a radical new imagination to chart a course out of this terrible storm.
What we want:
1. We want the freedom to determine our own destiny. We can no longer rely on distant wealthy politicians.
2. We want an end to the robbery of the people. This means an end to capitalism and to the capitalist economy and a return to localized economies of sharing and cooperation. Life is incompatible with constant growth.
3. We want a true environmentalism that serves the people and the natural world, not the rich. “Green technology” and “green capitalism” are false solutions that have been sold to us through lies. but on reconnecting with the spirit of the land and changing our economic structure.
4. These goals are mutually supportive, and one cannot succeed without the other. Building a new France and a new world means dismantling mass industrial society, ending the reign of capitalism, regaining a sense of our own political power, autonomy, and responsibility, and reintegrating ourselves into the ecology of the land.
As the world falls deeper into crisis, our leaders are showing their ineptitude. They do not serve us, they serve the rich. It is up to the people of France to disarm the state through the solemn manifestation of our will. In the face of racism and bigotry, we must find solidarity. In the face of state violence and repression, we must find courage. It is our obligation to fight and win.
This episode of The Green Flame features an interview with James Darling who is currently on the 8th day of a hunger strike against logging of old-growth forests in British Columbia, Canada (occupied First Nations territory). You can contact James at: (250) 816-4321, or at james0darling@gmail.com.
In this interview, James talks about why he started the hunger strike, the old-growth logging in British Columbia, the path forward for the movement, and revolutions that have used hunger strikes.
Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann was born in 1916 in Berlin, which was ruled by the Weimar Republic and in the middle of World War I. She was an exceptionally bright youth and demonstrated an early aptitude for academia. As a student she had a chance encounter with Adolf Hitler, which she described as “one of the most intensive and strangest moments of my life.” Intellectually, she decided to focus on propaganda and American public opinion research. Professionally, she worked briefly for a Nazi-run publication but was soon fired for replacing unfavourable photos of Franklin Roosevelt for more flattering ones. In 1947, after witnessing the fall of the Third Reich and realising the magnitude of its horrors, Noelle-Neumann decided to focus on public opinion research in an attempt to understand what had happened.
Noelle-Neumann’s most famous contribution is the Spiral of Silence Theory, which attempts to explain why people remain silent in the face of certain types of opposition; she was probably trying to understand why people in Germany failed to effectively speak out against the Nazis when they were first coming to power, and why people remained silent even once they began to understand the evil actions which were taking place.
The Spiral of Silence occurs when people are afraid of being socially isolated or excluded for voicing their opinions; this fear is not always true and can be manufactured by the media, or by false impressions. Here are the four primary steps in the Spiral of Silence:
We can distinguish between fields where the opinions and attitudes involved are static, and fields where those opinions and attitudes are subject to changes… Where opinions are relatively definite and static – for example, “customs” – one has to express or act according to this opinion in public or run the risk of becoming isolated. In contrast, where opinions are in flux or disputed, the individual will try to find out which opinion he can express without becoming isolated.
Individuals who, when observing their environments, notice that their own personal opinion is spreading and is taken over by others, will voice this opinion self-confidently in public. On the other hand, individuals who notice that their own opinions are losing ground will be inclined to adopt a more reserved attitude when expressing their opinions in public.
It follows from this that, as the representatives of the first opinion talk quite a lot while the representatives of the second opinion remain silent, there is a definite influence on the environment: an opinion that is being reinforced in this way appears stronger than it really is, while an opinion suppressed as described will seem to be weaker than it is in reality.
The result is a spiral process which prompts other individuals to perceive the changes in opinion and follow suit, until one opinion has become established as the prevailing attitude while the other opinion will be pushed back and rejected by everybody with the exception of the hardcore that nevertheless sticks to that opinion.
In Germany, Nazis took advantage of this phenomenon by gathering in force, browbeating opponents into silence, and propagating false narratives about the popularity of their messages. In the modern world, this same phenomenon occurs online in settings where “echo chambers” form groups, browbeat opposition, and convince themselves that their ideas are more mainstream than they may be; this occurred during Trump’s election in America, both online and through rallies in strategic locations.
Historically, the environmental movement has consistently fallen victim to the Spiral of Silence, in part because those movements tended to spend more time attempting to convince their opposition than reinforcing the perceived dominance of their ideas. We can all envision the lone eco warrior preaching to an ambivalent, even hostile audience of “mainstream” people, despite ridicule — this image is a catastrophe for environmentalism because it signals to potential supporters that they will be socially isolated if they voice similar opinions.
Rather than spending time attempting to convince the opponents of environmentalism, these eco warriors should organise themselves into “brigades” and focus on reinforcing each others’ ideas in communities that are already vaguely onside, thus shoring up the dominance of their ideas within those groups. Moreover, they should aggressively browbeat moderates as a group in order to manufacture the perception that moderate ideas are unpopular and result in social isolation. These aggressive actions must be balanced out by positive interactions with other bystanders in order to demonstrate social inclusion towards people who either support the group’s ideas or, at least, don’t vocally criticise them.
These tactics may seem distasteful to some, but they are extremely effective and they are being utilised by people who are in the process of destroying life on Earth; if we do not use these tactics we will be victims of them.
“Extinction is the rule. Survival is the exception.” ― Carl Sagan
David Spratt, research director of the Breakthrough National Centre for Climate Restoration in Australia, recently warned us that “no political, social, or military system can cope” with the outcomes of climate collapse. The consequences are almost too extreme to process: global crop failures, water shortages, extreme natural disasters, dying ecosystems, and unstoppable climate feedback systems. These increasingly chaotic variables can lead to crippling uncertainty; should you dedicate all of your energy to fighting against greenhouse gas emissions and ecological destruction? Should you balance your time between resistance and preparing for adaptation? What are the skills and resources needed to survive? This article is the first in a series designed to help frame and answer those questions.
I grew up in the wilderness and was a stranger to civilization until my mid teens. Outside my childhood home I could have walked for weeks or months without encountering another human, and I often spent extended periods of time doing just that. It was a difficult environment to survive in because the summers were searing hot, the winters were far below freezing, there was little water, and vegetation was sprase. My classroom was the natural world, my teachers were the native species, and some of my tests were high stakes. I learned how to quickly build shelters, how to find clean water from miles away, and how to find enough food to survive. It was a perfect childhood, despite many challenges and hardships.
When I moved into the town I was around 14 years old. I found the endless, often arbitrary, rules perplexing and frequently amusing. The “city people” were alien to me. I was utterly convinced that they would die of dehydration if they couldn’t get water from a tap, and that if they were told to walk off a cliff by someone wearing an adequately authoritative costume, they would do so. My amusement with this alternative reality soon turned into frustration. City cultures were full of people whose minds had been filled with often useless information by school curricula that insisted knowing the names and birthdays of bygone presidents was more important that knowing how to grow your own food, purify your own water, or build your own home. I was disturbed by this culture which had stripped people of their ancestral knowledge, of their independence.
Several decades later, my frustration has given way to activism. The brutal reality is that most of us, at least among the English speakers, have no clue how to survive without industrial civilization; which makes us the slaves and victims of that dominant culture. With climate collapse rapidly approaching, one of the most radical things we can do is restore our ancestral knowledge and rebuild the self sufficiency of our families and immediate communities.
Food and Water Security
Fast moving water is generally cleaner than slow or still water. Morning dew is often abundant. Conserving water is as important as collecting it. Sand, rocks, and charcoal purify still water. Trees and bushes transpire. Beaches produce freshwater. These are the lessons we used to learn as children and they provide us with security; indigenous cultures knew thousands of these variations, and specialized them for their local ecosystems over millennia. We need to restore this knowledge and disseminate it widely among our communities, both for our own individual security and also to maintain as much social stability as possible in the midst of collapse. There will be a day when your community attempts to turn on the tap for a glass of water to discover that it’s no longer working, and the ratio of infrastructure downtime will increase until we’re left to fend for ourselves. Communities with better developed skills will be better equipped to avoid desperation and violence.
Likewise, our food security needs to be addressed. Some ecosystems will soon become completely uninhabitable, others may remain habitable but become chaotic and prone to extreme weather events. Most of the food we eat today comes from industrial scale farming, which is entirely reliant on fossil fuels for pesticides, fertilizers, heavy equipment, refrigeration, and shipping. There will come a day, sooner than most people realize, when none of that infrastructure will work. This poses an immense challenge for communities whose farmers have forgotten how to produce crops without tractors and pesticides. Likewise, the average person has no idea how to grow or store their own food, and when the grocery store shelves go empty they’re going to become extremely desperate.
This is why we must prioritize local food and water security, which involves upskilling our communities and also leading efforts to build sustainable local systems. Every child needs to know the basic principles of permaculture, they need to know how to blend perennials and seasonals in regenerative rotations, they need to understand soil balance and which plants produce nitrogen, and they need to learn these things very quickly. Additionally, we need to replace lawns with gardens, ornamental plants with edibles for ourselves and pollinators, and we need to urgently protect the habitats of interdependent species and ecosystems. This starts by forming a group, knocking on your neighbours’ doors, and helping them build their first small garden.
Community Stability
Whether we like it or not, most of us are surrounded by larger communities of people. When people become too thirsty or too hungry their desperations leads to violence, which often ends up exacerbating their condition in a vicious cycle. For this reason, I think the worst possible place to be during climate collapse are cities. By nature of their design, city cultures are largely anonymous, callous, and unsustainable. The only way to feed the inhabitants of a city is to take food and other resources from the surrounding region, which will become increasingly difficult. Scarcity with lead cities to experience worsening class stratification, xenophobia, and misogyny; fear and poverty will also lead to reactionary movements and fascism, as it always does.
Communities will fare better when they’re small enough for the inhabitants to either know each other or recognize each other based on shared relations. I personally think populations between 2,000 and 5,000 are ideal because they’re large enough to significantly share resources and protect themselves, but small enough to be deeply integrated. In sufficiently rural or wilderness settings I would be inclined to live in even smaller populations.
The single most important thing you can do to maintain or prolong local stability is forge strong bonds with your neighbours, and to intentionally do so across preexisting divisions like class, race, and tribe. It’s important to foster a shared identity. One of the best ways to establish these bonds is to lead local permaculture, ecological, and economic adaptation efforts. If it can be at all avoided, never blame individuals in your local community for climate collapse or the worsening state of the world; even if it’s true, you’re now all in this together and those petty divisions can fester into dangerous conflicts as external tension builds.
Also focus on preparing today’s children. The next 10-20 years will be very difficult, but the following 50 years will be inconceivably difficult and we need to provide intensive training for the generation that will be attempting to survive it. Today’s 10 year old will probably be 25-30 years old when civilization as we know it collapses, those of us who are still alive will be relying on them to maintain order and potentially to help care for us as we age, experience illness, or become less independently capable. We will have great regrets if we fail to adequately prepare the next generation for what lies ahead.
Healthcare Essentials
Collapse will be most immediately horrific for people with serious health conditions. I relate deeply to this issue because my own medical condition, if left untreated, will probably significantly shorten my life and result in an unpleasant demise. It will be worse for people with conditions like kidney failure, who will be unable to receive dialysis treatments, or for cancer patients who will be unable to receive chemo therapy. Childbirth will also become increasingly dangerous. The good news is that we can mitigate some of these effects by connecting the dots between modern medical research and the active compounds found in various plants and fungi. Most of the world’s pharmaceuticals were initially derived from medicinal plants and fungi, and indigenous peoples have used those plants (often effectively) for countless generations. There will be increasing demand for local sources of medicine to treat things like infections, chronic pain, epilepsy, and even certain cancers. We need healthcare leaders in the future who are able to connect scientific medical research to processes which employ local plants and fungi.
We also need to improve our relationship with death because, unfortunately, there’s going to be a great deal more of it in the world. Most of our cultures have exacerbated our fear of death, in part because we have become so removed from it. For example, almost everyone eats meat, which obviously involves death, but how many people have slaughtered the animals themselves and processed through those complex emotions? Many of us have had loved ones die, but how many of us have been one of the primary caregivers, washed their body, and cremated/buried them ourselves? We have build entire economies around cultural desires to hide death behind layers of abstraction, and very few of us have learned to deal with it in healthy ways. The dominant culture prefers to pretend that death doesn’t exist; sometimes by ignoring our own mortality until the last minute, and sometimes even by denying mortality at all by propagating superstitions about eternal afterlife.
How we deal with death relates, in many ways, with my final point about healthcare: mental health. Our current frameworks for understanding and addressing mental health are deeply inadequate in the context of climate collapse. As our global and local situations progressively worsen, and as people realize that it will never return to their understanding of “normal” it will cause significant psychological trauma, persistent anxiety, and spiraling depression. I predict that suicide rates will increase dramatically, and I can’t blame those people. Likewise, it will become inceasingly difficult to deal with individuals whose mental health conditions may be significantly disruptive or even dangerous for other members of their communities. We will reach a point where we’re no longer able to access antipsychotic, antidepressant, antianxiety, bipolar, or any number of other mental health medications; this, combined with the intense psychological pressures of collapse will create great volatility among some of the most at risk members of our communities.
Part 1 Summary
This is first article is an overview of the scale of our challenges and some of the most essential priorities (food, water, community, and healthcare). As you can see, we have immense challenges ahead of us and it’s going to be a difficult road even for those of us living in the most temperature ecosystems. In the next article I’ll delve deeper into specific food and water systems, and provide detailed processes for organizing our communities toward those objectives. From a resistance perspective, it’s critical that we begin to address the details of how to resolve these issues. Our communities will be much more supportive of radical, direct action toward preventing global extinction if they feel like their most essential needs can be met in a post-collapse world. If we cannot provide and implement clear strategies for addressing these needs, people will retreat into denialism and delusions, eventually responding violently toward any group or information which threatens their fantasies. This is why we must take urgent action.
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