Yesterday, WUWT’s Anthony Watts proudly visited the Kennedy Space Center in Florida to see the launch of the GOES-S weather satellite. He was invited by NASA to attend, as the agency is making an effort to expand its press outreach to social influencers and digital media.
Now, we can’t be sure if Watts would have gotten press credentials under a different administration, or if the Trump gang are just desperate for anyone with a URL to cover them. Either way, for years it’s been clear Watts wants nothing more than to be treated as credible. For Watts, this invite was a sign of success in that pursuit.
For example, in his post asking for crowdfunding for his trip, Watts notes that that “just like the big guys at NYT and CNN” he had to pay his own way. And you can tell he was proud to have asked questions at the NASA press conference on Wednesday, bragging about how one of his questions “took this NWS administrator by surprise.”
But yesterday Watts also gave us a clear example of how much denier discourse has degraded over the past few years.
Before posting about visiting NASA on Thursday, Watts also published a post under the headline “Bob Ward’s @ret_ward Retwarded thinking again.” (The content of the post is an excerpt from a Cliscep blog that more or less calls Ward a hypocrite for writing about climate deniers being old white men while he himself is an old white man. In other words, a woman’s version of everyone’s favorite Nib comic, Mr. Gotcha.)
While Watts’ headline doesn’t use the literal word, it is clearly a play on Ward’s Twitter handle being a few characters different from a word Watts once recognized as offensive. Back in 2010, Watts wrote a headline that referred to the Australian Rudd government as “retarded.” After a deluge of complaints about the offensive language, Watts changed the word to “restrictive.” He left a note after the edit to say that “while some saw it in the context of ‘mental retardation’, that was not my intent.” He offered an apology “if this offended anyone” and admitted that “it was a poor word to use.”
Watts defended his 2010 headline as being a reference to “retarding enterprise and freedom,” but there is no possibility such generous interpretation for yesterday’s post. (Well, that’s not entirely true--according to Urban Dictionary, a “retward” is someone obsessed with the “Twilight” books...)
While Watts’s choice of words here is certainly a shameful and insensitive display, it is also an illuminating look at the current state of denier affairs. Back in 2010, when he made his first offensive post, Watts was struggling to be seen as a credible source for science. And multiple commenters complained, including many who mentioned their own friends and family in explaining why it was such a hurtful term.
This time around, only one commenter took offense to Watts’s use of the term--and earned a few defenses of the word from other commenters. The majority of the comments on Watts’s post blow by his insensitivity to developmental differences in favor of piling on to bash women in science and bemoaning the state of affairs for old white men. Somehow, deniers have gone from maintaining at least a few standards of decency to typical alt-right troll behavior.
A reader browsing Watts’s blog will see his post about his experience at the NASA launch right after his offensively-headlined post about Ward and its accompanying barrage of sexism.
Is this the sort of content that NASA was expecting to accompany the coverage of the satellite launch when it invited Watts?
Top Climate and Clean Energy Stories: