ZERO DAYS TO WASTE: Most know Trump is an illegitimate president* aided into office by Russian military attacks; some think he’s great, for reasons too dull to get into.
But where all Americans should agree if we want any future on this planet: we’ve got to bury the GOP.
Thread
1/ The GOP under Trump has been trying to relive the “greed is good” ‘80s from the moment he illegitimately took power.
2/ GREAT DANGER: As the theatre of distractions plays on, we can never forget what’s at stake.
Stephen Hawking warned us in 2017: “Trump stance could damage earth.”
@BBCNewsbbc.com/news/science-e…
3/ 😔”The Paris Agreement tried to encourage every nation to cut carbon pollution simultaneously—like a group of children who grab one another’s hands..Trump has significantly diminished this virtuous commitment to fighting climate change.”
@TheAtlantictheatlantic.com/politics/archi…
4/ ANOINTED BY BIG OIL: “Conservative groups, funded by fossil fuel magnates, spend approximately one billion dollars every year interfering with public understanding of what is actually happening to our world.”
@splinter_newssplinternews.com/how-fossil-fue…
8/ GOP likes to make environmental regulations the domain of “libtards”, but you can’t create jobs on a dead planet.
@HuffPosthuffpost.com/entry/runaway-…
9/ Before churchy billionaires of the fossilized set made disbelief in climate change the word of god (see #4), former GOP presidents made historic progress on environmental protections. Hell, Nixon gave us the EPA.
@EPAepa.gov/history/origin…
13/ But overall, Trump’s GOP is a big environmental fail.
@LCVoterslcv.org/trumpyearone/
14/ FAIL: “To simply award Trump an ‘F’ does not come close to capturing both the depth of his administration’s assault on environmental protections..all to provide favors to the wealthiest corporate polluters. The totality of anti-environmental offenses is absolutely staggering”
15/ Climate change is happening and climate change is human caused. So Trump stacks his administration* with deniers.
@NBCNewsnbcnews.com/politics/natio…
19/ "We are close to the tipping point where global warming becomes irreversible. Trump's action could push Earth over the brink, to become like Venus, with a temperature of two hundred and fifty degrees, and raining sulphuric acid," Stephen Hawking.
@cnbccnbc.com/2018/03/15/ste…
20/ “Trump's Dept of Agriculture buries climate-change studies because if you don't talk about it, it's not happening.
22/ So why would a nuclear-armed wreck of a nation put money behind a reality tv bozo.
“There’s no way to understand Trump’s relationship with Russia without oil and climate politics—they’re likely colluding to destroy our planet’s climate system”
@grist grist.org/article/trump-…
23/ CLIMATE APARTHEID: “Climate change is a human rights issue precisely because of the impact it’s having on people..A state that fails to take steps to reduce greenhouse gas emissions is violating their human rights obligations.”-@ashfaqkhalfan
@guardiantheguardian.com/environment/20…
24/ Oh my.
“Climate change is a problem where nothing short of dramatic structural change in the way capitalism works can deliver the 2030 target of a 45% cut in carbon emissions..we are unlikely to recognise it as capitalism”-@paulmasonnews
@NewStatesmannewstatesman.com/politics/econo…
25/ Even the @DalaiLama says Trump is evading global responsibility.
@TIMEtime.com/5616623/dalai-…
26/ Fear of a dead planet.
“We have given our planet the disastrous gift of climate change..there is no new world, no utopia around the corner. We are running out of space, and the only places to go to are other worlds.”-Stephen Hawking
@voxdotcomvox.com/science-and-he…
27/ We don’t have another planet and we’d muck it up anyway. So it’s critical we make it work here. But who holds GOP accountable.
“Exxon’s Arctic dreams fell apart in 2014 after Obama administration slapped sanctions on Russia’s oil industry”
@voxdotcom vox.com/energy-and-env…
28/ The more I investigated Trump-Russia, the more it came back to the oil-war economies. So I got rid of my car. It was one small thing I could do. Not all can do that but what are you willing to do, what sacrifices would you make.
29/ Remember when it took decades to put a warning label on cigarettes because Big Tobacco had a seat at the table. We don’t have time to dither on thwarting climate change and yet...we dither.
@YaleE360e360.yale.edu/digest/fossil-…
31/ It seems inconceivable but in the not so distant past, believing in science wasn’t a partisan thing.
@washingtonpost 2014 archiveswashingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/w…
32/ And then Trump happened. An illegitimately elected president* (see #21) calls climate change a “hoax”, MSM parrots his every phonus ballonus utterance confusing the easily bamboozled, casting doubt where there should be none. GOP deny cuz $💸.
@nytimesnytimes.com/2017/06/03/us/…
“Climate change has been damaging polar bears' habitats, forcing them to scavenge for food on land.”
@BBCNewsbbc.com/news/amp/world…
37/ Not a hoax.🦋
“Human-caused climate change and habitat loss are now threatening North American monarch butterflies with extinction. Increasing carbon dioxide levels may be making milkweed—the only food monarch caterpillars will eat—too toxic.”
@NatGeonationalgeographic.com/animals/2018/1…
38/😔
“Around the world, sea level has risen by almost eight inches..a rate unparalleled in the last 6,000 years..This small mammal is therefore only the first of many species that face significant risk due to a warming climate, the authors warn.”
@NatGeonews.nationalgeographic.com/2016/06/first-…
39/ Dunno about you, but I like a planet populated by all things great and small. I’ve seen orcas off the coast of Washington and marveled at a monarch born on my milkweed plant. The doomsday clock can be reversed or slowed but not with this GOP.
@nytimesnytimes.com/interactive/20…
40/ Hmmm🤔. Let’s see: who else with oil interests thinks climate change is a hoax. Da, this guy.
@FRANCE24france24.com/en/20170331-ru…
41/ Censoring truth: how very autocratic.
“Trump administration officials sought to cut several pages of the document on the grounds that its description of climate science did not mesh with the administration’s official stance.”
@washingtonpostwashingtonpost.com/climate-enviro…
42/ Many stories in this thread would’ve buried any other administration. But with all the money propping up reality tv bozo, real news is avalanched all too often by puff pieces.
43/ I get it. Oil in its various forms used to win wars. Now, it causes cause wars, and cancer, and climate change and extinction. And it has another ill side-effect: it spawns dictators.
@voxdotcom vox.com/2014/4/10/5601…
44/ Gee I know it’s hard to fathom tuning out the consume/obey marketeers on the boob tube for the past sixty years. But pulling up a lawn chair and watching our planet burn has little curb appeal. The GOP has done a hella job misdirecting truth.
@politicopolitico.com/story/2018/03/…
45/ So with all the money—foreign and domestic—propping up a real fake president* and his science denier hacks—useful idiots for energy interests—what’s our strategy to give em the boot. The cult of TrumPutin will not go gently into that dark night. huffpost.com/entry/stephen-…
46/ Perhaps one way to bury the GOP is to find something to unite over. Maybe if we rise above the theatre of distraction by bad actors clinging to antiquated plotlines and find something to all fall in love with. Something that needs our help.
@NewYorkernewyorker.com/culture/annals…
47/ Remember that time in the ‘70s when we had a President who was an environmentalist who’s narrative of truth was crushed by the Greed-80s. Ya, me too. President Carter knows the score.🦋
48/ So we can allow the GOP to illegitimately remain in power, scripting false narratives for Big Oil—and bury the last whale, the last polar bear, and witness the last monarch take flight—or we can bury the GOP. The future is unwritten.
@VanityFair vanityfair.com/news/2019/05/t…
49/ I’m with Greta.🦋
@UNFCCC @GretaThunberg💜
50/ CLIMATE JUSTICE FOR A LIVING PLANET: “We have not come here to beg world leaders to care..We are running out of time. We have come here to let you know that change is coming whether you like it or not. The real power belongs to the people”-@GretaThunberg
Photo @anderspangpang
51/ GOP IS INFORMED ITS DENIALISM IS A FAIL: “In a memo circulated Wednesday to Republican congressional offices, the polling firm of longtime GOP strategist Frank Luntz warned that climate change was ‘a GOP vulnerability.’”
@WSJwsj.com/articles/some-…
52/ RISE ABOVE: Now that you have the facts, clearly we can’t leave the planet’s future to a party that is immoral, kompromised, bot by oil, in denial and only pays lip service to climate change when pollsters tell them to. RIP GOP—you won’t be missed.
@qzqz.com/1632364/kids-s…
53/ CODA:
“They took all the trees
And put 'em in a tree museum
And they charged the people
A dollar and a half to seem 'em
Don't it always seem to go
That you don't know what you've got
Til its gone
They paved paradise...”
58/ To grasp why the Trump administration* would set us back decades in environmental protections, consider his bosses: two villains who stole our data to steal the election, both climate change “deniers” who by installing Trump served themselves billions.
61/ THE POETRY OF A FROG: A special I wrote and produced with a brilliant team of scientists on the importance of rain forests. Seems somehow fitting🔥🌎. aljazeera.com/programmes/tec…
62/ CHOKEHOLD: Another special I wrote and produced with a brilliant group of scientists. Ya, throwaway living is dumb. aljazeera.com/programmes/tec…
@BylineTimes “There are men everywhere who would sell out humanity for their own personal profit. There are stupid and emotional masses everywhere who can be found to follow them, given a few slogans and some nice uniforms.”—Bella Fromm, Blood & Banquets, A Berlin Social Diary, 1943
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@BylineTimes I have spent the last eight years investigating the Trumpocene and Russian information warfare, and the last six months, deeply immersed in research on Weimar Germany.
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@BylineTimes The gravediggers didn’t have to triumph. In 1932, Hitler’s National Socialist party was fracturing, haemorrhaging members, and many in his orbit were showing him only a “performance of solidarity, imposed devotion.”—The Gravediggers: The Last Winter of the Weimar Republic.
It never made any sense, how the most religious people I knew in 2016 became the most virulently anti-Hillary Clinton. More shocking was how they became ardent Trumpists. Church on Sunday, and MAGA-hatted all week.
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We’ve told the story of how the Christian right embraced an amoral man many times on these pages, but we’ve never told the story of redemption.
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IF WE CALLED IT TERRORISM—Lithuanian Minister of Foreign Affairs @GLandsbergis annihilates the weak words we’ve been using to refer to Russia’s terrorism on the West
We are in a war — it has always been a war, because it has always been terrorism.
Lives have been lost — hundreds of thousands in the United States alone — and we have done nothing, because we’ve used weak words.
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We have let billionaires who act as arms of Russian intelligence tell us that if we were to do something, we would be censoring free speech. That is a lie.
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“We’ve recently seen that RT is currently funding bloggers and other YouTube personalities of the right, such as Jordan Peterson, other names that are well known, Tucker Carlson as well, to amplify messages that are destabilizing democracies.”—Justin Trudeau, October 16, 2024
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Prime Minister Justin Trudeau accused pro-Kremlin Canadian psychologist and author, Dr. Jordan Peterson, and pro-Kremlin propagandist, Tucker Carlson, of being funded by RT, which the US State Department said is an arm of Russian military intelligence.
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As with Timothy Snyder’s Bloodlands, it is taking me months to get through The Gravediggers: The Last Winter of the Weimar Republic by historians Rüdiger Barth and Hauke Friederichs.
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Both books are so rich with original source material that I pause to read the books and first-hand reporting referenced, before getting back to each historic work.
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“There comes a moment in a storm at sea when people say to one another, ‘It is at its worst; it can blow no harder,’ and then there is a blast ten times more fierce than any before it. So it was in these British trenches.”—Arthur Machen, The Bowmen, 1914, London Evening News
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I’ve seen angels in the sky and an abundance of feathers in my path.
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