Dispatch #3: Looking Behind The Curtain

Some resources to make sense of this moment

We hope your 2025 is getting off to a… tolerable start. Amidst all of the chaos we’ve been surrounded by in the news the last few weeks, we wanted to kick the year off with some resources that have helped us make sense of the political moment we’re in.

It can be difficult to search for the signal amidst the noise. How are we supposed to focus on our work combatting the climate crisis when billionaire oligarchs are giving Nazi salutes at the inauguration of a climate-denying president? For this week’s Dispatch, we wanted to share some articles which we feel help to explain the deeper, structural reasons why it seems like our politics is going so haywire.

Next week, we’ll be back with our longform article on a similar topic: how we avoid getting distracted by all of the noise of our contemporary world, claw back our attention, and refocus on the work we need to be doing in the world. Many of the links today focus on what’s going on in U.S. politics, simply because the profound shifts going on there affect us greatly as well, but expect similar roundups in upcoming pieces focused on the election year we’ve got ahead of us in Canadian politics.

You can expect our regularly scheduled biweekly content of one Dispatch per month and one longform article. We can’t wait to keep curating and growing this space with all of you throughout 2025.

1. Progressive parties are losing ground all over the world - but why? Sociologist Musa al-Gharbi names a clear culprit in his article A Graveyard of Bad Election Narratives: the “knowledge economy” and the economic and cultural divisions it has unleashed. He lays the blame squarely on the group he calls “symbolic capitalists”; highly-educated knowledge workers whose careers benefit from performances of social justice, but who in reality benefit greatly from the systems of financialization, globalization, and deunionization that have driven inequality over the past four decades. A sobering but instructive read.

2. Speaking of the “knowledge economy,” we are clearly living in an age when a handful of social media titans can wield their political muscle to run the United States like a banana republic. But beyond the household names - Musk, Bezos, Zuckerberg - there is one name that is particularly salient: Peter Thiel. Peter Thiel (co-founder of PayPal) is a billionaire scion of Silicon Valley who, unlike Musk or others, has been discreetly influencing right-wing politics for many decades now (case in point: he personally bankrolled J.D. Vance’s entire political career). This excellent article from Harper’s magazine paints a grisly picture of the “national conservatism” movement that Thiel has been architecting, and foreshadows what the world will look like when Trumpism inevitably outlasts Trump.

3. On the topic of Trumpism, it is vital to conceptualize how Trump serves as a convenient vessel for a much larger, much older white Christian identity movement that has been developing in the United States for a long time. In a series of articles, Mother Jones magazine unveiled the sheer scale of the Christian theocratic movement that seeks, in no uncertain terms, to eliminate all separation between church and state. Another article from Propublica uncovers how Ziklag, a shadowy network of Christian billionaires, is spending millions of dollars on its “Seven Mountains Mandate,” a radical agenda to infuse Christian ideals and principles into all aspects of American life. These people are doing their best to make The Handmaid’s Tale look like a documentary.

4. This article by John Ganz for his newsletter Unpopular Front unpacks growing fractures within the modern right, revealing the tension between bourgeois conservatives and an increasingly dominant "mob" mentality. By delving into the ideological roots of this mob—its rejection of societal norms, embrace of conspiracy, and valorization of power and domination—the article offers timely insights into the social and economic forces fueling its rise.

5. One excellent podcast that’s been helpful in making sense of the rightward shift of our politics is In Bed with the Right, hosted by Moira Donegan (The Guardian) and Adrian Daub (Stanford). This show explores the roots of right-wing discourse in the growing centrality of misogyny and reactionary gender politics, and how it shapes our political landscape in insidious ways. The podcast offers insights into the current backlash against human rights and civil rights, to help us better understand the chaos of the present.

Each instalment, we’re going to share a series of open job postings in systems change jobs across the country. Check out our job board for more (we update it weekly)!

1. Junior Sustainability Advisor - Perkins+Will (Toronto, ON, full-time)

2. 2025 Summer Jobs - Parks Canada (Various locations, seasonal, $16.84 - $30/hr)

3. Wildlife Biologist - Government of Alberta (Edson, AB, full-time & temporary positions, $75,610 - $97,655)

4. Finance Coordinator - Second Harvest (Etobicoke, ON, full-time, $52,000 - $57,000)

5. EPR (Extended Producer Responsibility) Compliance Officer - Divert NS (Truro, NS, full-time, $73,135 - $87,587)

Our National Network team has been busy hosting successful on-campus clean career events! Most recently, the team partnered with Climate Justice UofT to host a career panel and networking event exploring diverse sustainability career pathways. Check it out here, and stay tuned as we schedule more upcoming campus events!

Some of our team will be attending the GLOBExCHANGE 2025 conference in Toronto from February 11th to 13th. If you’re planning on attending, let us know! We’d love to meet up and chat.

In other news, we welcomed three new team members to the organization! They’re already making a huge impact, including supporting the promotion of our ReWork Your Future documentary series. In case you missed it, catch up on our latest episode here.

📢 Special Announcement

The Academy for Sustainable Innovation is hosting a course for nonprofits to learn how to integrate climate action into their work. Nonprofit professionals from across Canada are encouraged to sign up, regardless of the sector they support. This includes areas such as housing, education, senior care, youth support, newcomer services, food security, and more.

With nonprofits already facing funding challenges, climate change is making it harder for them to plan, deliver, and adapt their services. This course provides nonprofits with resources to begin their climate action journey, adapt to climate change challenges, and continue supporting and serving their communities.

Early Bird Pricing: Save $50 until Feb 21!

Course Dates: March 26 - April 23, 2025

Registration & More Info: https://sustainableinnovation.academy/courses/climate-action-for-non-profit-leaders/

As Down to Earth grows, we want to point back to earlier pieces that some newer readers might have missed. Last year, we wrote about how climate narratives got so fixated on the apocalypse and how we need to find new stories that are adapted to our time.