Danielle Smith is also an enemy of the people. As a serving Canadian politician, this status is almost automatic — she shares the gamut of genocidal opinions without which one is politically ostracized and removed from power. For instance, Smith believes that Israel should exist and has a right to defend itself, that the Al-Aqsa Flood operation of October 7th constituted a “terrible terrorist attack,” etc. What are the full historic depths of her depravity and crimes against the working classes, which are only increasing as she seeks to dismantle Alberta’s social security, healthcare system, and pensions?

Smith lived in subsidized housing growing up. She attributes her interest in politics to her father scolding her about the evils of Communism and the U.S.S.R in the eighth grade after a teacher presented them in a glowing light. One is forced to wonder what her father knows about Communismbeyond the usual misconceptions and propaganda. Indeed, that Smith ever had a teacher in McCarthyite Alberta during the height of the Cold War who portrayed Communism in a remotely positive light beggars belief.

Concerned about “Marxist indoctrination” happening in Alberta’s schools (don’t laugh), Smith’s father scared her back into politically acceptable anti-Communism. He taught her about the non-communist politicians of whom it’s considered appropriate to think highly, such as Ronald Reagan. Smith would become a libertarian who admired all the standard ghouls such as fellow social security recipient Ayn Rand and the queen of the ghouls herself, Margaret Thatcher. While she was in university, Smith was a favored student of disgusting reprobate and conservative thought leader Tom Flanagan. Flanagan is notorious for his affirmative comments about child pornography, his anti-Indigenous political positions and racism, and for once advocating for the assassination of Julian Assange. 

Today, Smith’s politics are a crude synthesis of Thatcherism and the ideas of what’s called the “Calgary School” in order to lend gravitas to its specific blend of Austrian economics and Straussianism; in other words, to validate it as a legitimate political and economic philosophy when it’s actually nonsense. Unfortunately, an elaboration of the many and varied deficiencies in this “school” would be beyond the scope of this article.

Even with no knowledge of Marx or the philosophy underpinning Smith’s actions, the span of her career illustrates the amorality and harm of neoliberalism and conservatism. What she lacks in original ideas, Smith makes up for in a mindless goferism for recapitulating conservative talking points. Even the fact that her own party thinks little of her individuality or autonomy does not discourage her from implementing their platform and pushing it further right. When the party was in danger of losing seats in the most recent Alberta election, they reminded voters that it’s the party’s principles that are important, and the party that makes decisions, not foot-in-her-mouth Danielle Smith. Still, neither the lack of propriety nor knowledge have dissuaded Smith. She’s often spilling out the shit that right wing think tanks like the Fraser Institute fill her with — and spew she does. 

As a “Private Property Rights Advocate” in the nineties, she argued that private property rights trump all other rights, so protections for endangered species should be removed. Naturally, she’s vitriolically anti-Indigenous.

After a brief stint on the Calgary Board of Education, on which she operated as a poison pill against progressive interests, she became a journalist. She didn’t have any journalistic credentials, but was hired as a scab during the 1999-2000 Calgary Herald strike, proving that she has the most important journalistic qualification of all — the sycophantic zeal to regurgitate whatever garbage the Fraser Institute or tobacco lobby put on her plate. Her peers at the Herald didn’t call her “Trash Can Dani” for nothing. At the behest of both the Fraser Institute and the tobacco lobby, Smith famously lauded the “special health benefits” of smoking cigarettes — specifically that “smoking half a pack per day reduces the traditional risks of disease by 75% or more.” She also wrote an article entitled “Natives ultimate losers as reserves become ghettoes” in which she repeated Tom Flanagan’s perverse argument that increased constitutional protections and sovereignty for Indigenous nations encourage segregation and apartheid.

We must make abundantly clear what a bastardization and insidious framing of the issue this perspective is. Flanagan has written several historically revisionist texts which are meant to reframe and justify colonialism as beneficial to the colonized. He would have us believe that the problems which beset Indigenous reserves — from crumbling or non-existent infrastructure to the general poverty and social ills —  are all due to Indigenous mismanagement. For him, it’s the Indigenous unwillingness to peacefully integrate into the “superior, European-modeled society” that is the cause of their troubles — not the underlying issues of colonial trauma and apartheid. Of course, which society imposed the reserve system on the other conveniently slips his mind. This is so he can say any increased sovereignty for reserves, or any token acts of reparation by the Canadian state towards its Indigenous people are actually harmful because they incentivize Indigenous peoples to remain in their own inferior civilizations. Smith espoused this opinion as a journalist about the Nisga’a Treaty of 2000, and the same attitude has pervaded her political stances towards Indigenous nations since. For Flanagan, and, by extension, Smith, any money or support rendered by the Canadian state to Indigenous nations is self-defeating; he believes that corrupt Indigenous leadership will squander whatever is given so that they always have the pretense to ask for more.

In her career as a journalist, Smith enthusiastically propagated this nonsense — it’s a very comforting narrative to a certain strata of settlers who would eventually form her political base.

Flanagan also wrote a dubious biography about Louis Riel, which frames Riel as a millenarian in order to delegitimize Metis land claims. This is eerily similar to the zionist obfuscation that the Palestinian struggle is purely religious and existential, not rooted in the ownership and occupation of land. 

Flanagan and his mouthpiece Smith falsely equate the integration of Indigenous Nations into the Canadian state with the desegregation of the United States and the end of South African apartheid. This is a prevarication. An actual end to Canadian apartheid demands the dissolution of the legal fiction that is the Canadian state and the complete reclamation of Indigenous sovereignty by Indigenous nations.

Eventually, Smith turned her latent fascism into gold and became a politician. In this way, she made the leap from speaking and writing toxic waste to dumping it on millions of Albertans. Informed by her faulty understanding of sovereignty (thanks to having read and repeated Flanagan for so many years), her government passed the Alberta Sovereignty Within a United Canada Act in December 2022. Though it masquerades as protection for Albertan interests against interference from the federal government, the only interests it truly defends are those of the same corporations and conservative political insiders we’ve been describing. The act was criticized by Indigenous leaders on the grounds that it could supersede their tribal rights. Smith even had the gall to compare the quibbles between Alberta and the federal government as comparable to the struggle between Indigenous peoples and the Canadian state. Of course, she apologized for this.  

 The controversies and gaffes of her political career are well-documented and too numerous to get into, and are identical to those of any other fascist politician such as Ron DeSantis, whom she admires. She shares his COVID denialism, has compared vaccinated Canadians to supporters of Hitler, and called unvaccinated people “the most discriminated-against group that I’ve ever witnessed.” Again she issued some lackadaisical apology, but the statement’s function as a dogwhistle had done its work. Ultimately, Smith’s apologies always take this insincere form — she says something that appeals to her base and is incendiary to everyone else, then hastily apologizes. But by the time Smith apologizes, whatever she said has already achieved its purpose, and the apology is comparatively meaningless.

If there’s one way Smith is unlike many similar figures, it’s her “live and let live” attitude about 2SLGBTQIA+ people and communities. But even this is not commendable. Although she is not vocally anti-2SLGBTQIA+ or “anti-woke” in the way many of her supporters wish she was, her desire to “depoliticize the issue” is functionally the same as theirs. By giving equal validity to oppressors and the oppressed, she is siding with the oppressor.

But this all pales compared to Smith’s latest neoliberal machinations, though we should stress one final time that these ideas do not belong to her, per se — she is merely the current, spineless functionary who must enact them. Smith wants Alberta to leave the Canada Pension Plan (CPP) in order to create an Alberta Pension Plan; she wants to dismantle the Alberta Health Service and cannibalize it into four new bureaucratic entities. Even Margaret Thatcher regarded the National Health Service as sacrosanct — if by “sacrosanct” we mean, “a line that even the bourgeoisie hesitate to cross, lest the masses come for their heads.” Though the details of what these nascent policies would entail are murky, history shows that their enactment can only have disastrous effects for the working class. Similar reforms, like those enacted by Thatcher and Pinochet in the eighties, only ever benefited corporations and the government officials who implemented them. They had deleterious impacts upon the social security of the working classes, and their effects remain apparent today.

Both AHS and the CPP leave much to be desired — they are meant to only benefit people as inexpensively and minimally as possible. But that even these programs risk vivisection by Danielle Smith and her handlers should still raise anyone’s alarm. For these policies, her anti-Indigenous attitudes, and for being the pliable tool of humanity’s most reprehensible elements, Danielle Smith is an enemy of the people.  

They’re out to save themselves.

Each one of these so-called environmentalists is either a bare-faced liar — someone with a vested interest in destroying the planet — or a monster willing to sacrifice the rest of humanity for their own, post-cataclysm comfort. Climate change — more properly, the ecocide, the knowing murder, of the planet — is something that is already affecting both capitalist bosses and us workers alike, but, critically, not to anywhere near the same degree. Every drought-triggered crop failure causes agricultural capitalists to miss out on their profits, but meanwhile, thousands of workers are laid off or starve. In fact, most capitalists clearly plan to use their stolen and hoarded wealth to protect them from the worst side-effects of the ongoing climate catastrophe. They’re hiring up guards, building fortified strongholds, and preparing for the worst.

From the outset, we need to be clear: even if it were true that the five listed billionaires above were actively trying to save the planet, it wouldn’t make a lick of difference. They’d be outvoted and outmaneuvered by the other capitalists, the ones who aren’t trying to save the planet and who are willing to make money off of climate-destroying industries. Then, once these “saviors” were outmaneuvered in the marketplace by their more ruthless capitalist cousins, they would be relegated to political unimportance by the power of superior money. The fact is that it’s cheaper and more profitable to destroy the environment. As long as we live in a capitalist economy, this is going to remain true. So long as it’s true, it necessarily follows that those capitalists willing to destroy the economy for an advantage will out-compete and out-perform those who aren’t. And hey, we live in a bourgeois republic, where money is power. These ruthless capitalists will simply buy more politicians and legislation than any would-be climate heroes.

But the fact of the matter is that it’s not even true that Buffet, Bezos, and company are trying to save the planet. What they’re doing is paying a lot of lip service to the idea of environmentalism, and then just going about their business. Just like giving to a charity (that they conveniently own, which furthers their political ends, reduces their taxes, and gets cushy contracts for their corporations), climate activism among the ruling class is nothing more than a dodge, a con, a public relations stunt.

What have these men done to earn this reputation?

In 2012, Buffett argued that “what’s bad for the environment is also bad for the bottom line” in what was essentially a fluff piece put out by one of his corporations. “Taking shortcuts is not the pathway to achieving sustainable competitive advantage,” he warned. In 2022 Forbes glowingly wrote that Buffett’s holding and investment company,  Berkshire Hathaway, “escaped ‘The Coal Trap.’” Berkshire Hathaway energy features a large page on their website devoted to the advancement of “Cleaner Energy” and company jargon cheerily mentions PacifiCorp, the Berkshire Hathaway power company in the Pacific Northwest, and its investments in such glitzy-sounding nonsense as “noncarbon generation,” “modernized transmission,” and the Berkshire Hathaway wind and solar plant. But PacifiCorp not only operates over eleven coal power plants; it also operates captive coal mines. On June 12 of this year, a Multnomah County jury returned a verdict against PacifiCorp finding them liable for more than $70 million in fines for its negligent and reckless management of its power lines that caused one of the biggest and most devastating fires in the history of Oregon, the 2020 Labor Day Fires. Buffett’s words to the public are one thing, and his words to his shareholders are quite another. He has called climate catastrophe an overall benefit to his insurance companies. His real view is the view he shares with the rest of his class: that, overall, climate catastrophe won’t be that bad, that they’ll find ways to make money from the chaos.

So much for Buffett. What about Bezos? The bald gnome responsible for piloting Amazon to the heights of the U.S. market founded the Bezos Earth Fund, investing $1 billion to help “transform food systems to feed a growing population,” after all. In 2021, Bezos pledged $2 billion to help protect the environment. At the same time, the Amazon corporation’s carbon footprint grew by 19%. The $10 billion total investment over all his contributions amounts to little more than 17% of his hoarded fortunes. Not only that, but grants from his foundations come with strings attached; do what Mr. Bezos says, print what Mr. Bezos agrees to, or this sudden flood of funding will dry up. This is one of the shady ways billionaire “philanthropy” works.

Bernard Arnault, one of the richest men in the world, owner of brands like Louis Vuitton, Dior, and Fendi, also masquerades as one of these saviors of Earth and humanity, despite the fact that his companies consistently exploit slave labor. But this contradiction — between the supposed philanthropic environmentalist and the slave magnate — is more apparent than real. There’s no real contradiction between capitalist environmentalism and slavery, even if it seems out of place that a so-called philanthropist would rely on exploitation to fuel his supposed generosity. Slave labor is the modus vivendi of the “green” capitalist movement. For those capitalists who buy into their own bullshit a little more than Bezos and Buffett do, their “green” capitalism is actually a kind of fascist vision of the future. They harken back to the Nazi Reichsminister for Agriculture, R. Walter Darré, the man who coined the phrase “blood and soil,” and who envisioned the future of the earth as a kind of vast eco-preserve administered by “racially pure” hierarchs with a mystic connection to the land — after eliminating all “undesirables,” of course. These green fascists have a long heritage; they’ve inherited the self-satisfied attitude of great feudal lords who kept “pristine” forestland for the sole purpose of hunting. For men like Arnault, the environment is important because it exists to serve them. It exists, not for itself, for its own beauty, but rather to be a parkland where they can unwind. That is the future the far-right green capitalists foresee: a parkland earth, a nature preserve, kept empty of other people, for their own pleasure, whose upkeep falls on the slaves they intend to work out of existence. So it is wrong to call all these capitalists little Hitlers — some of them are little Goerrings and little Darrés instead.

Musk, heir to a Zambian emerald mine and a white South African fortune, also falls into the category of a little Darré-like fascist. This technologically-incompetent Tony Stark prances around with his proclamations of “saving the human race,” but what he really means is that he plans to colonize the Red Planet using glorified indentured labor. He has already revealed plans for laborers to take out loans to pay him for the pleasure of moving to Mars, with the principal to be paid back through work. Never mind the fact that his transportation company, SpaceX, so far can’t get its rockets to function, unless their intended function is egregious pollution in the form of concrete dust, which his rockets habitually create. When Musk talks about environmentalism, he’s talking about a red blood and soil — with a Martian aristocracy living off of indentured colonial labor.

As for Bill Gates, he’s publicly copped to his impact on the environment. “It’s true that my carbon footprint is absurdly high,” he tells us. But don’t worry, he’s “buying offsets through a company that removes carbon dioxide from the air and a nonprofit that installs clean energy upgrades in affordable housing units in Chicago.” So he’s pouring money into startups, which is being suctioned off into the pockets of small scale tech capitalists. Gates has always been loud on climate change — loud in the media, loud in personal conversations, loud everywhere but where it counts: with his investments. In 2011, even as he was publicly declaring his dedication to green solutions, Gates invested in NEOS GeoSolutions, a firm that helps gas and oil companies decide where to drill. In 2020, the Gates Foundation Trust owned 17 million shares — some $1.54 billion worth — of Canadian National Railway Company, which transports oil from Canada’s tar sands.

What else does he spend his time saying about the environment? Oh, only that “[d]ivestment… has reduced about zero tonnes of emissions.” Gates has bought his way into the environmentalist media space so he can champion goofy tech solutions that put money in the pockets of greedy angel investors (like him) and fight real climate change solutions — like divestment from fossil fuels or the implementation of the only real long-term answer: the complete and radical alteration of the economy such to remove the profit motive entirely from production.

So long as the economy remains the private preserve of wealthy individuals, and so long as production is designed not to satisfy the needs of individuals and populations but rather to make certain men (and, occasionally, women) obscenely wealthy; so long as the driving force behind all our industries remains the production of profit rather than the fulfillment of needs; so long as we are forced to deal with the anarchic, disorganized, and individualistic whims of the market to determine what is made and what is wasted, the environment can never be truly safe. So long as Capital remains in control of the economic decision-making, there are only two roads down which we can travel: the utter depletion of the planet and environment’s life-sustaining capacity, or the institution of the parkland fascism that certain sects of the wealthy plan in the gilded rooms of their mansions and yachts. These men are not, by any stretch of the imagination, climate heroes. They are champions of nothing but their own vanity and greed. Capitalism, which has given them such wealth, has also mutilated them. They are incapable of seeing the world as anything other than a subject, something to manipulate and control. The only world they’re out to save is their world, the world that exists for their pleasure, the world that is an extension of themselves. The rest of us? Well, to them, we’re just fuel for the fire.