Year 3, Month 5, Day 30: Heartland Haz A Sad

Awwwwwwww. So sad. Heartland’s feeling some heat:

In a fiery blogpost on the Heartland website, the organisation’s president Joseph Bast admitted Heartland’s defectors were “abandoning us in this moment of need”.

Over the last few weeks, Heartland has lost at least $825,000 in expected funds for 2012, or more than 35% of the funds its planned to raise from corporate donors, according to the campaign group Forecast the Facts, which is pushing companies to boycott the organisation.

The organisation been forced to make up those funds by taking its first publicly acknowledged donations from the coal industry. The main Illinois coal lobby is a last-minute sponsor of this week’s conference, undermining Heartland’s claims to operate independently of fossil fuel interests.

Its entire Washington DC office, barring one staffer, decamped, taking Heartland’s biggest project, involving the insurance industry, with them.

Board directors quit, conference speakers cancelled at short-notice, and associates of long standing demanded Heartland remove their names from its website. The list of conference sponsors shrank by nearly half from 2010, and many of those listed sponsors are just websites operating on the rightwing fringe.

“It’s haemorrhaging,” said Kert Davies, research director of Greenpeace, who has spent years tracking climate contrarian outfits. “Heartland’s true colours finally came through, and now people are jumping ship in quick order.”

Couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch of sociopaths. Sent May 20:

By sponsoring billboards comparing climate scientists to mass murderers, the Heartland Institute proves that bizarre beliefs lead inexorably to bizarre behaviors. This secretive corporatist think-tank has for years invested enormous fiscal and intellectual capital in ideas unconnected to verifiable scientific fact; their plans for the promotion of anti-science curricula demonstrate: this isn’t just ordinary climate-change denial, but near-sociopathic fabulism.

But organizations this disconnected from reality in one area cannot be expected to understand the consequences of their actions in other areas, which is why Heartland’s response to the predictable outrage generated by their grotesque guilt-by-association strategy seems so clumsily pathetic. “Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities,” wrote Voltaire, centuries ago. We now have a new corollary to his apothegm: those who believe their own absurdities cannot recognize their own atrocities.

Heartland’s wounds are entirely self-inflicted — yet another inconvenient reality for them to deny.

Warren Senders