Many of the people coming to the border of the United States to seek refuge are doing so because of climate change-related reasons. They are climate refugees and have been for many years. Many Americans don't know this because so much time and energy has gone into demonizing them
Now why do you think American politicians and propagandists might be so intent on demonizing climate refugees? Here's a citation on Nicaragua's particular vulnerability, by the way. www1.undp.org/content/dam/ap…
This is not to say that any other reason for seeking refuge is somehow less valid. I just think it's important that Americans in particular understand just how much they're being lied to, and about what
That's why I've been going on and on about the #TantonNetwork, which generates and disseminates white supremacist anti-immigrant and pro-border wall disinformation and propaganda and circulates it to elected officials and media influencers so they can turn their vision to policy
To clarify, this thread is intended to critique the U.S. response to migration and immigration and I'm skipping over a lot of pertinent detail around what's directly propelling people out of Nicaragua. Story from 2020 theguardian.com/global-develop…
Vicious conspiracy theory as policy is exactly the outcome I was hoping we could try to avoid, but here is what it looks like washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/04…
"The bill was passed with no debate in a rushed party-line vote on the floor, and its impact is still unclear. A legislative staff analysis of the proposal was only a page and a half long, and stakeholders... didn’t have time to do their own analyses."
"...local officials say if they are forced to take over the public services done by Disney, such as road maintenance, they will instead have to raise property taxes. Disney has an estimated $1 billion in debt obligations, along with the more than $160 million a year spent on
This is the reason I don't listen to people who think war is glamorous or sexy. My work has always been covering violence and its aftermath. Once you've seen people bleed out you kinda lose your taste for gore. And you can always tell who doesn't know what they're talking about.
And even if you aren't witnessing it in person, that secondhand trauma can suck you in fast and hard. It makes it difficult to look away, too, because you feel like you are doing necessary service. That is a lie, you must look away from time to time, you have to care for yourself
Here's something I wrote about the sort of guilt and pain that comes from this sort of dynamic. It was an early lesson in traumatic imagery and how it changed us. damemagazine.com/2020/01/09/med…
That's a natural side effect of hideously low pay. It winnows out journalists who can't afford to work in journalism, and over time you get a big fat invisible pro-rich bias and we see how that works out in coverage
Meanwhile, executives and techbros get massive golden parachutes off the fruits of our labor as they gaslight the rank and file about why unions are "bad"
Then there's those of us who come from a journalism family, put ourselves through college, and bust our asses just to watch rich kid journo bros successfully steal our ideas every step of the way and now you know why I have such a shitty attitude
"But most of the media attention that the conference attracts focuses on a cohort of rosy young blazer-wearing activists and writers—a crop of people representing the American right’s “radical young intellectuals,” as a headline in The New Republic would soon put it..."
No offense to the writer of this article but how long are we going to let these assholes tell us they're something new when it's just the same boring old tedious racist shit