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At a Senate hearing on climate disinformation Wednesday, Oxford-educated Sen. John Neely Kennedy (R-Looziana Awl Bidniss) trotted out his Bumpkin Cornpone Hickfart act to try to smear one of the witnesses as some kind of potty-mouthed radical. Happily, this time it blew up in his nasty smug face.
Kennedy’s an old dawg, and it’s hardly a new trick; he’s always pretending to suggest witnesses are terrible people by trying to associate them with scary radical beliefs they don’t actually hold. Sometimes it even works, like in 2021 when Kennedy forced the withdrawal of a Biden nominee, Cornell law professor Saule Omarova, after he demanded at her confirmation hearing that she prove she was no longer a commie. (She was born in the USSR, and like any other Soviet high school student belonged to the Young Communists.) Absurd though the claim was, Kennedy kept red-baiting her, sneering, “I don’t know whether to call you professor or comrade.” Eventually, five Democrats (you can guess who) said they wouldn’t vote for her, that was it, and she withdrew her nomination.
Wednesday, however, there wasn’t a nomination on the line, just the ability of the planet Earth to remain hospitable to large mammals like capybaras, Siberian tigers, and John Neely Kennedy. The hearing before the Senate Budget Committee discussed the oil industry’s long history of promoting climate denial and disinformation, and among the witnesses was Geoffrey Supran, director of the University of Miami’s Climate Accountability Lab.
Supran is an acknowledged expert on the topic; he and Naomi Oreskes (of Merchants of Doubt fame) co-authored some of the important research detailing how ExxonMobil did extremely good science on global warming in the 1970s, and then covered it all up to keep pumping oil. His written testimony is an easy read, at just 13 pages with another 243 pages of appendices and notes. Dude knows his shit, is what we are saying.
At the hearing, Supran testified that copious evidence demonstrates that
“the fossil fuel regime has deliberately denied Americans and Congress their right to be accurately informed about the climate crisis, just as tobacco companies misled Americans about the harms of smoking.”
Kennedy — who in his career has received $1.5 million from the fossil fuel industry — wasn’t at all interested in Supran’s work, however, and certainly not interested in talking about what his donors have done to obfuscate their role in climate change. So he decided to point to Supran’s 2023 retweet of a single message from the youth-led climate group Climate Defiance, which often says very rude things about politicians and the oil business.
In that message, the group wrote,
We do not do online petitions. We do not do NGO coalition letters. We do not do fucking bus stop ads.
We CHASE fossil fuel CEOs and the politicians who do their bidding. And we do not apologize.
Well that is rude and defiant! And obviously, if Supran retweeted that, he is therefore responsible for everything the group ever said online, because John Neely Kennedy is a fascist creep who knows damn well that guilt by association is both a contemptible logical fallacy and one way to stir up the rubes.
Here’s video, courtesy of the climate newsletter Heated, whence we also take the transcript below (Rebecca reminds Heated to put its meaning-changing punctuation outside the quotes, which she has here fixed):
Kennedy: On December 14th, 2023, you tweeted in support of Climate Defiance. That’s an entity that the Brookings Institute has called a “radical climate change group.” Is that correct?
Supran: I don’t recall, I’m afraid.
Kennedy: Would this be the same Climate Defiance — I’m looking at your tweet, you tweeted in support of them — would this be the same Climate Defiance that called Senator Joe Biden a “sick fuck”?
Supran: I don’t know, but as I —
Kennedy: Would this be the same Climate Defiance that called Senator Lisa Murkowski a “murderer”?
Supran: I don’t know, but as I said in my statement —
Kennedy: Would this be the same Climate Defiance who told the CEO of Exxon to “Eat shit, Darren”?
Supran: I’m not responsible for the statements of others.
Kennedy: Nice group you’re hanging around with, doc.
Then Kennedy read out the tweet we transcribed above, the only time Supran ever retwote or liked anything by the group,
Supran, apparently not remembering a message he retweeted months ago, said that wasn’t his tweet, and Kennedy said yes it is, because a retweet and a tweet, what even are they?
Kennedy even went on to accuse Supran of actually writing messages from Climate Defiance, or maybe controlling its Twitter account, which apparently retweeted an October 30 message by a completely different person tying the cause of climate justice to Israel’s war in Gaza, which no, Supran also neither wrote or retweeted.
Kennedy ran out of time, but not before sarcastically thanking Supran for all of “his” tweets, advice, and “scientific analysis,” because if you retweet something, you actually are responsible for anything that person says, this is just logic.
Supran, who had by then been given a list of Kennedy’s list of tweets by people who were not Geoffrey Supran, tried to clarify that he hadn’t sent any of that stuff. But when he mistakenly described them as “retweets,” Kennedy angrily snapped, “Oh, do you often retweet stuff you don’t support? Is that what you’re telling me, doc?”
With Kennedy trying to shout over him, Supran added, calmly, “I just want to say, this form of character assassination is characteristic of the propaganda techniques of fossil fuel interests,” prompting Kennedy to ask, “are you gonna call ME a sick fuck?”
Well, sure, Senator, you’re a sick fuck all right. A creepy bully and a corrupt dipshit, too. We can keep going all day if you’d like.
Then the 11-second clip of Kennedy’s “are you gonna call me a sick fuck” went viral, and there was rejoicing, as well as many proclamations of Kennedy’s sick fuck status.
It was almost as good as that time he read aloud the good dirty parts of banned books, out of context and sounding like some kind of sick fuck.
Supran, for his part, thanked Kennedy for the unintentional lesson in how disinformation works, saying in a statement to Heated,
More important than the Senator’s theatrics themselves is how they typify the hostile tactics that the fossil fuel industry and its allies have resorted to for decades to attack not just the message but the messenger.
It’s straight out of Big Tobacco’s playbook. In fact, research by John Cook and his colleagues has shown that character assassination has been one of the most common ways in which fossil fuel interests have attempted to deny accountability for the climate crisis.
This is true and depressing, but it’s also an important reminder that if you educate people to engage in real critical thinking, they can free their minds of bullshit — and call it out to others.
PREVIOUSLY!
[Heated / Senate Budget Committee]
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