Immediately after Just Stop Oil made international headlines with their Van Gogh action, rumours began circulating that the group is in the pocket of the oil industry. Within days these rumours had morphed into claims that it was a false-flag being run by security services or corporate intelligence. By Monday, it seemed that everyone had accepted this as settled fact, with half a dozen people DMing me to confidently assert the conspiracy theory that Just Stop Oil is in fact a psy-op being run by Big Oil.

These rumours are based on the fact that Aileen Getty, an heiress who has been giving her inherited money to various causes for decades, has an indirect financial connection to Just Stop Oil. I was curious as to where the leap was first made that this means that JSO is controlled by 'Big Oil' or is in some way dangerously compromised. I used Google search terms like "oil heiress just stop oil" to see what came up and sorted the past week’s News results by date.

The first media outlet I could find making this connection was Fox News. Less than 8 hours after the action had taken place, they had decided what angle to run with: JSO is run by spoiled member of the Liberal Elite, Aileen Getty; the subtext is that it is therefore part of the wider family of Fox-touted conspiracies, in which progressive and left-wing political movements are simply the tools of shadowy billionaires and can therefore be safely discounted. This is a reiteration of the classic far-right ‘the elites are Marxists’ type theory. The connection between JSO and Getty was then also made, less explicitly, in an NPR story that seems to have been very extensively republished on news sites. The notion that JSO is compromised by Big Oil then found its way onto Reddit and other social media platforms where it rapidly became the new truth.

The reality of the situation is that Getty, who inherited her money, has no known active financial ties to the oil and gas industry, and has been giving money to environmentalist causes for a long time now, once gave a start-up grant to a trust called the Climate Emergency Fund. The CEF, which is not owned or controlled by Getty, which has since received many donations from many people, including much bigger donations than her initial grant, and which also funds dozens of other climate activist groups, is one of the principal funders of Just Stop Oil. That is the known extent of the ties between this woman and the organization Just Stop Oil.

It was fascinating to watch, in real time, a right-wing misinformation campaign be taken up wholesale by the Left. Observing this chain of events made me realize that one reason it was so quickly taken up is that it fits very neatly into a pre-existing pattern we have on the Left for eating our own.

In cancel culture, when an accusation is made, typically the severity and emotional weight of the accusation does almost all of the work. It stands in for rigorous evidence and smooths over any gaps in the reasoning. It discourages critical thinking or defence of the target. It makes the target outcast, untouchable, infectious. It discredits the target completely so that nothing they say can be believed or taken seriously. If you go online and say that so-and-so has a documented pattern of harming and manipulating queer femmes of colour, and they say no I don't, you just say: that's exactly what a known harm-causer would say. If someone defends them, you just say: so you're a harm apologist? If one of their friends refuses to dispose of them, you just say: this person is known to be affiliated with a serial harmer. If someone asks what evidence you have, you just say: wow, disgusting that you don't believe in white supremacy and homophobia. Are you a white supremacist homophobe? From McCarthyism to the witch hunts, moral panics using this kind of reasoning seem easily able to short-circuit our brains.

Likewise, with this conspiracy theory about Just Stop Oil, the fact that there is no evidence of any kind is swept away by just repeating the accusation and insinuating that the accusation might also be applied to anyone who questions its basis. Already someone in my DMs has suggested that maybe I'm invested in this issue because I myself am being paid by Getty. Certainly no one has felt compelled to offer any kind of evidence for their claims beyond figuratively pointing at Getty and tapping the side of their head. And as with a cancellation, the word ‘known’ is doing a lot of heavy lifting. It’s known that Just Stop Oil is a psy-op.

In cancel culture, when the cancellation hinges on an ideological disagreement, there is often a kind of willful ignorance on the part of the cancellers wherein they refuse to consider the idea that someone might, in good faith, disagree with them. It isn’t something they are able to conceptualize. If you think that their brand of rigid racial essentialism is counter to solidarity, for example, or itself reproduces racism, they can’t hear it; the only explanation must be that you are at best a naive dupe and at worst a Nazi trying to infiltrate the Left. In the case of Just Stop Oil a similar thing is occurring, where people who dislike the Van Gogh action assume that no one could possibly support the action but a brainwashed fool or a sinister corporate spook. Their disagreement with the action thereby gets added to the ‘evidence’ for the accusations. Personally, I thought the action was pretty dope, and I like to think that I’m not a brainwashed fool.

Interestingly, criticisms of the action itself have an odd, contradictory quality. Several people I’ve spoken to have told me, in the same conversation, both that the action was too ‘divisive’ and that the only effective means of carrying out climate activism is violent attacks on infrastructure, ie shit that would land you a terrorism charge. It’s too extreme, it’s not extreme enough; they just did it for media attention, they’re getting too much media attention; it’s purely symbolic and didn’t do anything material, don’t damage paintings that everyone loves; it’s just property damage, why don’t they try something else, like property damage.

The reality is that environmentalist groups around the world are trying every tactic they can think of. This is one. It made international headlines, probably because it threatened something that PMCs really like, fancy art, so clearly in terms of garnering media attention for their activist group it was an enormous success. Other actions have gotten almost no press, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t taking place. In the UK alone, people have been smashing the windows of oil and gas research facilities. They’ve been destroying gas pumps near highways to block the distribution of gasoline. They’ve been defacing luxury car dealerships. They’ve been shutting down roads and highways continually. They’ve declared an indefinite occupation of Westminster. This is of course not a complete list. Short of carrying out assassinations or terrorist actions, which such groups likely do not have the resources, training, or political will to do, it is difficult to see what else could be done – and if throwing soup at a painting is being called recklessly extreme and divisive and a psy-op, imagine the response to violent actions.

Other criticisms are based on the idea that the strategy of pacifist civil disobedience used by groups like Just Stop Oil and Extinction Rebellion is foolish or naive. People shouldn’t be getting themselves arrested; it’s too ‘liberal’; and maybe the cops are behind it all, trying to herd people into jail. Well, maybe. But isn’t it also true that pacifism and civil disobedience have a long history of use by social movements across the political spectrum? Isn’t it true that, even if you happen to disagree with pacifism and civil disobedience, they are defensible positions for reasonable people to hold? Isn’t it possible that large numbers of sincere and thoughtful people may have considered their options and decided that these tactics are most likely to accomplish their goals?

Ultimately, it seems to me that the only way we are getting out of the climate crisis in anything less than a full-blown apocalypse is if dozens of powerful national governments are forced to act over the long term. They will need to be putting complex policies in place internally and cooperating with each other internationally in complicated ways. National governments are slow to act, and beholden to powerful interests, and often run by unscrupulous and sometimes quite stupid people. This means that people all across the world will need to be using every tactic at our disposal to push in the right direction. We will need both sticks and carrots. We will need electoralism and entryism and lobbying and more radical means. We will need civil disobedience and occupations and property damage and blockades and media stunts and everything else. Probably it will also take some violent action too; that’s the reality.

I think we should get used to the idea of generally supporting climate activists doing shit we personally wouldn’t do, and before we criticize them and say that they should do something different instead, we should check to make sure that they aren’t also literally doing those things, things we ourselves could get up and go do with them. We should also refrain from lobbing baseless accusations at environmentalist organizations. They already have to deal with an insane amount of internal wreckerism from identitarians obsessed with turning everything into a reflection of their pet identity projects; we shouldn’t force them to deal with a whole other level of cancel culture on top of that. And we should absolutely be wary of right-wing media planting wacky conspiracy theories in the news cycle to discredit environmentalists. Because psy-ops are real – make sure you’re not literally participating in one.