Year 3, Month 1, Day 20: Cry Me A River, Assholes

The Berthold Recorder (CO) runs a story from Grist detailing the WATB behavior of conservatives who find their shibboleths crumbling into irrelevance under the assault of facts:

Prominent MIT researcher Kerry Emanuel has been receiving an unprecedented “frenzy of hate” after a video featuring an interview with him was published recently by Climate Desk.

Emails contained “veiled threats against my wife,” and other “tangible threats,” Emanuel, a highly-regarded atmospheric scientist and director of MIT’s Atmospheres, Oceans, and Climate program, said in an interview. “They were vile, these emails. They were the kind of emails nobody would like to receive.”

“What was a little bit new about it was dragging family members into it and feeling that my family might be under threat, so naturally I didn’t feel very good about that at all,” Emanuel said. “I thought it was low to drag somebody’s spouse into arguments like this.”

Swine. It reminds me of the bullshit Jessica Ahlquist is currently going through. Sent January 15:

That climatologists are now the target of ideologically driven abuse from climate denialists whose carefully packaged preconceptions are endangered by inconvenient facts is hardly surprising.

These attacks are of a piece with similar responses from conservatives in other spheres who feel their world-views are under attack, as in the case of a teenaged girl in Rhode Island who successfully sued to remove a prayer banner from her public school’s wall, and who’s been receiving threats of violence.

Her offense? An accurate understanding of the ideals of her nation’s founding document, and the temerity to hold an institution accountable to them. Dr. Kerry Emmanuel’s offense? Noting some of the plain facts about global climate change: it’s real, it’s our fault, it’s dangerous, and it needs to be addressed sooner rather than later. Apparently, conservatives go into grotesque spasms of victimhood the moment they have to deal with logic, reason, and factuality.

Warren Senders

Published.