Thread by @TwisterFilm

A thread about why scientific facts matter. And why amazingly those Amazonian forest fires are not entirely unconnected to the battles raging here about "gender identity". If you listened to @BBCPM last night you, like me, might have despaired at their failure to explore ....

...what's really underway in Brazil. Bruce Parry opined, "we shouldn't point the finger" at the new President, Bolsonaro. Give me a break! This is a guy that signalled during his election he believed Amazonia should be "developed", his public loathing for indigenous peoples..

..is well known and his claim that climate change is a Western conspiracy is a major plank of his manifesto. Clearing the Amazon isn't an accident, it's a strategy. If we can't point the finger at Bolsonaro we should just give up pointing altogether. This failure by our media..

...to dig deeper into what drives this populist's "democratic coup" is dispiriting because if they bothered to look they'd find an assault on science underway that has lessons for us here. Bolsonaro has an acknowledged guru (his own mini-Bannon) called Olavo de Carvalho. He's...

...an ex-astrologer with a (pardon the pun) fireside manner whose videos rail against climate change science; but he doesn't stop there. He disputes the work of that young rookie Sir Isaac Newton and Einstein was, he claims, just elaborately ...

...covering up Copernicus's mistake in claiming that the Earth revolves around the Sun. Yep, I know. Sounds mad. Bolsonaro's guru thinks the Earth doesn't revolve around the Sun: so why wasn't he just laughed out of court? In part, enter stage left, our old friend Queer Theory.

One reason the left wasn't really in a position to call out the nutjob guru of Bolsonaro was that they were implicated themselves in defending the faux science of Queer Theory. One of Bolsonaro's and Calvarho's most successful ploys was to associate the left with its forward ..

march. He called it something different. "Gender ideology", just as Pope Francis has but they both lasered in on Queer Theory's most precious "discovery" that biological sex is effectively meaningless. Don't get me wrong, Bolsonaro is a misogynistic homophobe who hates trans folk

.. and argues smacking boys might help stop them being gay. He only won election because the charismatic leader of the Left (Lula) was prevented from standing & there's shady stuff going on with oil & its privatisation. But the problem for the left was made worse because it ...

...really had linked arms with gender ideology nonsense. Bolsonaro's rise began when he took a leading stance against an educational campaign in schools that was ostensibly against homophobia but was shaped and guided by Queer Theory's notions of gender identity. Sound familar?

Queer Theory had come to the country late. In 2001 Latin American Research Review welcomed its "spring blossoming". "Queer" by the way it defined as "not straight, not normative" and it mentions without criticism Gayle Rubin's writing on paederasty. Yes that P-word Queer Theory..

..just can't seem to shake off. Queer Theory stormed through academia in Brazil as it has here. But in a culture like Brazil's that has long distrusted the State, associating the state with "not normative" ideas was always going to be a dangerous game. And so it proved.

Claims that the anti-homophobia campaign was sexualising kids fuelled distrust of the Worker's Party. And by the time high priestess of QT, Judith Butler arrived in Sao Paolo a year before the election she was sufficiently well-known to be burned in effigy outside the venue.

Appalling & indefensible but it also shows just how much Queer Theory and its idiocies were being exploited by evangelicals, the Catholic Church and then Bolsonaro to whip up populism. Of course Queer Theory on its own didn't swing the election apart from it helping motivate..

the evangelical vote. But here's the thing, it DID do something else that's a lesson for us here. Its sheer deliberate, provocative "not normative" weirdness, it's queerness you might say- was used not to queer the classroom or the academe as its theorists liked to dream...

..It was instead used to Queer the opposition, (the opposition candidate was guy who had promoted the fateful school campaign). Queer Theory was used to make liberals and the left sound like we're the freaks, we're the nutjobs, we're the ones supporting deeply unscientific ..

..notions. And some of us had! So now a populist with a guru who believes the Sun circles the Earth fiddles in Rio as the forests are felled. Science it turns out really matters and when we stop caring about facts or being seen to care about them, literally the world burns.