What do Donald Trump, Heartland’s Denial-palooza, and Breitbart have in common, besides their obviously hostile relationship with the truth? They all share a common funding source: the embodiment of every stereotype about socially awkward computer nerds who get rich and became eccentric, Robert Mercer.
The reclusive, model-train loving billionaire got the Jane Mayer treatment in the latest New Yorker, a long read that is well worth poring over. The piece provides a window into the anti-government, “the Clintons are murderers” type of conspiracy-driven libertarian worldview motivating those who brought money and organization to Trump’s campaign.
The Mercers also fund Heartland. The Washington Post reports that, while attending last week’s Heartland conference, Robert’s daughter Rebekah chatted up Heartland President Joe Bast. Robert, true to his antisocial persona, sat silently eating his salad.
Given Trump’s win and the anticipation over yesterday’s executive order (the fact sheet for which was based in part on a debunked, coal-funded study), one would expect the deniers to have been celebrating bigly. However, as Emily Atkin reported from the conference, things were actually pretty tense. Seems there’s a rift between the hardcore deniers from the (Mercer-funded) Heritage Foundation, who populated Trump’s EPA transition team, and the apparently less-hardcore deniers that Pruitt and Trump have brought in from Senator Inhofe’s office. One Heritage/Transition team member said, “We may need some marriage counseling.” (But when Senator Snowball’s staffers aren’t extreme enough for you, you’re probably so divorced from reality that counseling would be a lost cause.)
Encapsulating the most extreme end of denial, James Delingpole at Breitbart accuses Scott Pruitt of “failing to drain the swamp at the EPA.” According to one of Delingpole’s sources (which is almost undoubtedly recently-resigned David Schnare), Pruitt is taking a “moderate” stance as EPA administrator as he eyes a Senate run in 2018.
As evidence for this, Delingpole and the other unhappy Heartlanders point to the fact that Trump’s executive order fails to take on two important pillars of climate action: the Paris Agreement and the endangerment finding.
It’s a bit odd to see criticism of the Trump administration in Breitbart, given that it is part-owned by the Mercers, and its former head Steve Bannon is now Trump’s consigliere. But perhaps the criticism is an attempt by Breitbart to prove it’s no puppet, and deserves to be treated like a real news outlet and not Trump’s own personal Pravda.
Either way, blech. With (at least) another four years of Mercer-backed insanity looming, we’re desperate for some good news. Oh look, here’s the trailer for the new Spiderman movie. And speaking of spiders, new research shows that spiders could eat all of humanity in a single year. So with that blessed release from the toil of Trumpocracy in mind, we would like to welcome our new spider overlords.
Because although being eaten by spiders might suck, it sure beats being trapped in the tangled web of the Trump/Mercer administration.
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