Trump, Pruitt, Zinke Invite You To Enjoy Destroy The Earth Day 2018

[hatrack]

EDIT

We're hurtling toward a hotter and more disordered future. Longtime right-wing hostility has hardened into outright denial, which is used to blot out a range of economic and public-health benefits that would come from actual action to address climate change. The more indisputable the facts become, the more necessary it is to bury them. Nothing buries facts more effectively than narratives that construct a worldview where they just don't fit. Trump and his team excel at creating those.

Facts alone are powerless in such a situation. They require a framework of counter-narratives that can help make sense of the onslaught on science and the environment. Even conventional media narratives, presumed to be even-handed or “objective,” often serve to reinforce or protect the reality-denying narratives Trump and his team have deployed.

Consider Pruitt's long list of scandals, for example. For a long time they were mostly downplayed or ignored, at best reported in isolation. Now they've become a big story in themselves, but still treated as if they were disconnected from substance of Pruitt's destructive policies. On her April 5 MSNBC show, Rachel Maddow broke free of this narrative frame. She drew connections between Pruitt's $40,000 off-mission trip to Morocco to promote natural-gas sales and the financial interests of Trump's longtime crony Carl Icahn, a shareholder in the only U.S. exporter of liquefied natural gas -- and the man who vetted Pruitt for his job in the Trump administration.

But the connections Maddow drew weren't exceptional, as noted in a blog post by Keith Gaby, communications director for the Environmental Defense Fund. “Pruitt’s behavior is unethical but, even more importantly, his actions will lead to greater health risks from pollution in our air, water, and land,” Gaby wrote. “We can’t ignore the public health crisis created, in part, by Pruitt’s ethical crisis.” But that's precisely what the dominant media narratives do. Trump claimed he would “drain the swamp,” but Pruitt's cozy industry relations are exactly the opposite. An accurate counter-narrative would make that vividly clear — and sink much more than just Pruitt's leaky little boat.

EDIT

https://www.salon.com/2018/04/22/destroy-the-earth-day-under-trump-and-pruitt-the-rights-assault-on-the-environment-goes-nuclear/

[Angry Dragon]

1. TREASON