White supremacists claim atrazine is being used to destroy the “white” race. Pseudo panafricans claim it is being used to destroy Black people. Both are misusing science for political and social media clout.
Worse, they exploit the work of a Black scientist to promote “white” supremacy.
In this essay, I examine the role of gendered rhetoric in scientific and popular representations of this controversy. Through analyzing depictions of Hayes’s frogs in scientific research and the media, I find that Atrazine discourse is imbued with cultural anxieties about the extinction of normative masculinity in an increasingly toxic world. This essay contributes a surprising account of how this rhetoric travels into far-right media commentary about “male decline” and “white genocide.”
