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Low Class Oil Trash (LCOT) was an Alberta-based clothing and lifestyle company from 2017 to 2020, owned and operated by Caitlin Lindsay, the wife of an oilfield worker. The website is now barren, and prospective customers can no longer purchase T-shirts that say "Wine 'Em, Dine 'Em, Pipeline 'Em" or hoodies that say "Come West Trudeau" and depict a noose hanging from a tree, but the website's homepage is still up. On it, the words Take Pride are superimposed over a picture of a heavily tattooed woman with her back turned to the camera as she looks out at a row of pumpjacks spreading into the horizon. She wears a black tank top and black booty shorts with the company name on them, and she holds a dirty white hard hat in her left hand, with a Trump/Pence sticker prominently placed on its front. Scrolling down, the brand's mission statement appears:
We believe in the power of oil.
We believe in the oilfield; the adventure, the thrill, the sacrifice and reward.
We believe in the guys busting their asses in one of the most rugged industries still alive.
We believe in supporting local Albertan suppliers.
We believe in the oil trash lifestyle. Big money, big trucks, big dreams.
Most of all, we believe this: fuck the liberals and keep makin' hole. (Low Class OH Trash)
Introduction
Low Class Oil Trash is best understood as one of many pro-oil and gas groups that have emerged in Canada since 2010 as a reactionary response to Indigenous and environmentalist opposition to fossil capitalism, of which the Alberta tar sands have been a focal point (Kinder 3, 95). In "'Our Oil': Extractive Populism in Canadian Social Media," Shane Gunster, Robert Neubauer, John Bermingham, and Alicia Massie use the term extractive populism to describe these groups, which frame themselves as "grassroots" despite often being funded directly by oil and gas companies, and which seek to discursively position the oil and gas industry as "under attack from elites" and in need of "popular mobilization to defend" (Gunster et al. 198). While the oil and gas industry has long employed public relations techniques to secure popular consent, or "social licence," for its activities, extractive populism describes a new phase of stakeholder mobilization...