In case you’re wondering how the fringe is dealing with the tragic results of the flooding in Texas, here’s a sample from fringe figure and candidate for the House of Representatives from Georgia Kandiss Taylor:
They want us to believe it’s all just natural. The hurricanes. The floods. The droughts. The tornadoes. The fires. …
[Some liberal quasi-quotes]
These people are so brainwashed they sound like programmed zombies. They twist and pervert every word, not because they’re right, but because they can’t handle the truth.
Let’s talk geoengineering. Let’s talk cloud seeding. Let’s talk HAARP, stratospheric aerosol injection, solar radiation management, and weather weaponization.
Yes…those are real terms. Real programs. And they’ve been around for decades. You don’t need a degree in rocket science. You just need eyes to see and ears to hear.
So let’s take this apart, shall we?
- Invocation of conspiracy theory culture. BTW, notice the word natural. It really has no role in her assertion, because the word really means without the interference of human activity, and that’s impossible; the word is used because often the interference is negligible. In the case of climate change, the argument from the conservatives is that human activity influence is negligible, while liberals and scientists assert otherwise, i.e., what is called anthropogenic climate change.
- Prioritization of personal experience over collection & study of data. This justifies the reader’s experience being used to make a judgment, rather than dealing with the massive data collection and interpretation.
- Reminder of conspiracy theories: for readers of Skeptical Inquirer, all of the terms mentioned, besides being legitimate science-related terms, are familiar as being subjects of conspiracy theories. Some are old, such as HAARP, an atmospheric study program from the 1990s, or cloud-seeding, involving silver nitrate seeding of clouds in order to induce rainfall. Some are relatively new, such as geoengineering, the goal of which is to reduce the amount of solar radiation trapped by the Earth’s atmosphere.
- Reiteration of #2.
Then it gets kinda … funny.
What’s happening is not normal.
What’s happening is not natural.
What’s happening is FAKE!
What does fake mean? Those citizens of Texas weren’t killed?
No. She seeks to use fake as a linkage word from her religious tenet that anthropogenic climate change does not exist to the disaster in Texas. It’s clumsy, ungrammatical, and induces uncertainty in her meanings – probably not what she wants.
But she wants power, recognition, and prestige, and better a clumsily written calumny of the liberals than silence.
Because this tragedy is just the sort of thing that happens when climate change hits. Lives are lost, property destroyed, and the fringe-right loses the interest of independents who, until now, feared losing social position and, well, change in general. I can sympathize with the latter.
They were told repeatedly that climate change is a lie.
Then that it’s happening, a little, but it’s from a natural source.
But each bit of evidence that is injurious to those independent citizens also reduces the fringe-right’s influence and power. Every independent that walks away from the position of denying anthropogenic climate change reduces the fringe-right’s power.
And so we get confusing, twisted messages such as Taylor’s.
