'It's The Burning Planet, Stupid'

A lot of the political and cultural discourse this summer feels akin to arguing about what radio station to listen to while the car you are riding in careens off of a cliff.

This isn’t to say the world lurching towards authoritarianism, or at least previously stalwart democracies taking a shot at it isn’t important, or a dire threat, or shouldn’t be front and center of any given news cycle.

It certainly should be - but in the U.S., the circus Trump creates has become such a cash cow that the horse race aspect of his legal cases has become most of what MSM is choosing to focus on.

Mainstream media is dominated by hour after hour of paid pundits, many hardly more than online influencers, for their expertise in his legal predicament.

We’re all on ‘indictment watch’ 24/7 and listening to talking heads opine on his fate - while ignoring the climate catastrophe that is consuming much of our planet.

Believe me, nobody wants to see Trump go down hard for his myriad crimes more than me.

He has attacked friends of mine in his decades as a sexual predator (long before he was POTUS) and his odious family was a virtual resentment factory when I observed them up close working on ‘Celebrity Apprentice’.

A more abhorrent group of people you would be hard pressed to meet, including the Kushner branch of the Trump crime family.

When all is said and done, Jared & Vanky may be the ones to walk away with most of the spoils after Donald’s house of cards finally burns to the ground.

Much of the media coverage is skewed towards covering the ongoing saga because of their parent companies and producers. 

Television news is a business after all and a very big one. 

They are beholden to the bottom line and the energy companies that buy the ad time that pays their bills.

It’s alarming though, because if ever there was an issue that required breathless coverage and perhaps radical action, it is climate change and what is happening to our world this summer.

Oil & gas companies and the Republican party spent decades trying to pump the brakes on the study of what burning fossil fuels is doing to our planet. 

Much like tobacco companies before them, they have hidden from the general public and media scrutiny how lethal their product was to consumers because they were making so much money from it.

With that money came outsized influence in the boardrooms and political arenas where they purchased politician after politician willing to do their bidding and protect their interests. 

This happens on both sides of the aisle (see my piece ‘Burn In The USA’ on Joe Manchin).

The Mediterranean and the waters off of the Florida Keys both hit records for water temperatures with some parts of the Keys clicking in at a scalding 100° Fahrenheit.

The shrimp are damn near boiling themselves in Margaritaville this summer: ’Some people claim there’s a hoax to blame, but I know, it’s my own damn fault.’

For a nation built on tough guy iconography and can-do self-reliance, it is well past time to ‘cowboy up’.   

Instead we allow ourselves to become distracted by cameltoe cowboys spewing white supremacist anthems to keep a culturally deprived demographic anemic in thought and action.

They raise their red solo cups to crowds of mostly oblivious partiers as they preach the rural simple life that no longer exists in this land, before repairing back the the Four Seasons and their Frette sheets.

Like some Grand Wizard in a thousand thread count cotton robe.

Of course, social media plays an enormous role in what topics trend throughout the daily news cycle, which is precisely why Elon Musk took over twitter and became such an enervating troll to progressive media.

Musk’s follower count on Twitter is almost equal to half the population of the United States.

That’s a lot of people - but the problem is they are mostly bots and nearly half of his total following was added after he purchased the social media platform late last year.

Before his takeover, Twitter was the world’s largest platform for sharing environmental and progressive news and a very effective means of communication for NGOs battling climate change.

It was also quite effective for Democratic and liberal-leaning influencer accounts which have all been throttled, our follower counts diminished.

Within hours of his takeover, I could no longer share links to the Noel Casler Podcast without a warning going up saying it was from a ‘suspicious site’.

In the two plus previous years I never had warnings attached.

Substack of course has been blocked from twitter; sharing this article will require a screenshot instead of a quote tweet (which made it easier for readers to find and share newsletters).   

Did Elon just tell his minions to move all the bots over to his account when he took over to increase his following?  It jumped from 79 million in late Oct 2022 to almost 150 million now.

Why would there be such value in increasing you follower count even if they were bots?

Let’s put the obvious ego involved in this aside (which I won’t completely discount since he’s obviously a malignant narcissist), I am more interested in the practical and logistical results of such a move.

It stands to reason that any sort of authentic and transparent business person would desire an honest accounting of the size of their audience.

Unless their intent was to manipulate the algorithm of what twitter’s users are exposed to: this was clearly the plan behind Elon Musk’s acquisition from the beginning.

He wanted to destroy what had become the world’s town square for progressive causes.   

The dangers of promoting far-right accounts - and those that not only post climate change disinformation and anti-vaccine rhetoric - can be seen all around his this summer and not just in RFK Jr.’s ridiculous spoiler campaign and his new role as the darling of Fox News.

It can be seen in the wildfires and floods and boiling seas and scalding streets.

Words matter, so does the truth.