Inconvenient Truths

in the midst of another disaster. And sadly, you know, following this horrific, horrific extreme climate event that took place in Kentucky, Mississippi across so many states, we continue to refer to these environmental disasters as natural disasters, when in fact, there's nothing natural about what is transpiring to our climate.

I was really upset the other day while I was watching cable news and listening to the FEMA director, Deanne Griswell I believe is her name, yes, Deanne Griswell, and when she was asked by a host of a cable news show whether or not she felt that what transpired across these Midwestern states was related to climate change, her response was, I don't know, but what I do know is that these events are becoming much more extreme and

much more frequent. I was really angered by the response that she provided because we have allowed the radical right to politicize every goddamn thing that makes sense, from the truth to science, to healthcare to everything in between, so much so that what is normal A normal response would be yes, this is related to climate change. How else could you understand and wrap your mind around again, a once in a century storm? Right? How many times have we heard that over the past couple of years. Oh,

it's a once in a century storm. It's a once in a century hurricane. It's a once in a century tornado. Except it's not once. It's happening every single season, and now, outside of the normal tornado season in December, we're seeing a catastrophe, a catastrophic environmental event that so far has claimed the lives of sixty seven people in one state, seventy four across the states that have been affected, and over a hundred people still missing. Right, we can no

longer pretend that this is just God's will. Right, God's will is not for us to be cloaked in ignorance about how we are effectively rapidly changing our climate. You know, I can remember I was having this conversation the other day. Do you remember an inconvenient truth? Right? Well, Al Gore put up the documentary video about how we were going

to be affecting our climate. That video. Let let's just double check here, because I believe that an inconvenient truth right came out dear friends in two thousand and six.

Two thousand and six, Al Gore was one of the only people most famous, I would say, at that time that transcended the climate field to be talking about what we are doing to destroy our environment and the thing that pisses me off, just like what we saw in terms of the vaccine rollout and how wealthier high income nations are not doing their fair share to contribute to and to support the lower income nations that they have had no problem over generations extracting from right, and so

we have omicron right, our latest variants because of vaccine what hoarding, I don't even know what you call it, vaccine greed right, where we didn't do what was necessary in order to help lower income nations that were asking right, asking for the trips waiver so that they could create and manufacture their own and not weight on the supposed benevolence of higher income nations. Well, here's the same thing

with climate change. We know that it is the higher income, more industrialized nations that have moved us into this place, right, and yet it will be the lower income, small all nations that are situated in the Caribbean that are situated on coasts, right, that are situated in areas where they were going to experience severe drought, severe flooding. Right. We were seeing this happen in a high incombination in Germany, right with their massive flooding that happened that wiped out

an entire fucking town. And so my question is how much more do we need to see before this nation, this world wakes the fuck up? Right? We keep convening the G seven, we keep having these you know, Oh Biden, one of his first announcements was we're re engaging with the Paris Agreement. Well that's great, except what we have seen since the initial signing of that agreement is even more deadly climate events. Think to twenty twenty, we lost a bill in animals on this planet. In the in Australia.

Do you even remember that every fire season now is lasting longer and burning much more ground. Now we have tornadoes that are spanning across multiple states. If you just think about this from an economic perspective, right, if you could care less about the loss of life, the fact that in Kentucky, Governor Andy Bisheer damn near in tears, said that we have lost people from as young as five months old to as old as eighty six thus far, and that they won't know the extent of the fatalities

for weeks. Because if you look at the fucking area that was hit head on, it looks like a bunch of matchsticks that were knocked over, right, that we're built up and then just flattened. And I can't believe we see these pictures that these were homes, these were schools,

these were libraries, right, Whole fucking towns wiped out. And so when you're directly asked, right as the director of the federal emergency response, do you think that these climate events are being caused by our lack of urgency around tackling climate change? And you say I don't know, Well, then you are being intellectually fucking dishonest. And folks can say to me, well, it's not her job, Well whose

fucking job is it? Because it seems not to be the President of the United States's job, it seems not to be Congress's job, right, because once again you've allowed the loudest, most ignorant voices to be able to dictate the narrative around what it is that we need to

do in order to prevent these disasters. This country is going to go fucking bankrupt every season, right hurricane season to tornado season to fire season, and then at some point, folks, they're just gonna all blur together right where they're just going to be popping up, much like this tornado that is outside of the regular season in December, when we're not able to prepare. We know that this is happening.

We are seeing it right now. I came back from my holiday and I'm looking at the weather in New York, you know, waiting, you know, assuming that you know, I would be returning back to freezing temperatures because it's December. No, this whole fucking upcoming week is going to be in the high fifties and on Sundays sixty degrees. It's December, we're in the middle of the month, we are days away from the Christmas holiday, and it was sixty degrees

over the weekend. Now folks can say, well, you know, you might as well enjoy it, but I want you to think about the chain reaction that happens. Right. So you have these warmer climates, right, this warmer weather, So then you have insects right that would normally die off for the winter months that are persisting, right, which then

produce infection, right, Carrie disease. You know West Nile was back to being a big thing last summer, right, because you have mosquito season lasting longer, you have the weather being damper. Then you look at well, where do we get our food from. Many of us think it's just the grocery store. Well, the grocery store has to get that food from somewhere farms. Well, how do you have

seasonal planting? And how are you able to get food when you can't rely on the precipitation levels, You can't rely on weather conditions, on soil conditions, on water conditions. Aren't any of that. So then you talk about the price of food rising, right, because the areas in which we were able to grow that food are now ravaged by regular climate disasters, whether it be fires, whether it be floods, whether it be droughts. And that's how you

create climate refugees. And if we think that that is not going to happen in the United States, it's already happening around the world. And what happens when food becomes scarce, right, is what violence becomes rampant. Because now we're no longer operating from anybody's abundant standpoint. Now we're operating from a

scarcity model. And what happens when we all take on this scarcity, right, this scarcity ideology, which is what has taken over and consumed the Republican Party, is that we start fighting amongst each other, We start ravaging every person for themselves. Right. This is how war crime, all of these things become elevated and increased. So when we're talking about the climate crisis, it isn't just a crisis of changing whether or oh it's warmer in December and shouldn't

we just enjoy it? It is what the ramifications of that warming will do across all of our needs. You know, when I listen and I see these families that are being interviewed right now on the news, and you know, I think to myself, how devastated I am for them, honestly, right, because I cannot imagine. I cannot imagine that everything that you've known just being wiped out within minutes. Like, folks,

just think about this. The destruction that occurred across these states happened in minutes minutes, right, your whole life turned upside down. You don't know where you're getting food, you don't know where you're getting water, there's no electricity, you can't send your kids to school. And oh, by the way, we're still in a global health pandemic. So what do you think is going to be happening in these areas

now following this outbreak of deadly tornadoes? A right is probably in hospitalizations due to COVID on top of the hospitalizations of those that were already harmed in the tornadoes. Folks, we are living in the midst of a perfect fucking nightmare right now. We're everywhere that you look, there is something that is going dramatically wrong, and we still don't seem to have the political will to do what is necessary.

I mean, Joe Biden, the Biden administration right now is still going around selling back, build, back better, which a part of it is about infrastructure and bracing infrastructure for our changing climate. Now, mind you remember Joe Mansion did not want to include that in the infrastructure bill. Right, you're talking about his state, which has also been ravaged

by quote unquote natural disasters. But what kills me about these people that are being interviewed is that I bet if you were to do a poll to figure out where they fall on the political spectrum, that a majority of them are fucking Republicans, voting once again against their own interests, wanting to chuck this up to saying, oh, you know, this is God, this is God's will. It

is not, you know. I tweeted the other day too that I am so fucking tired of hearing thoughts and prayers every fucking disaster, whether it is the mass shooting and Oxford, Michigan, whether it is this you know, spat of deadly tornadoes across the country, everything turns back to thoughts and prayers from politicians. And what I tweeted and said was this, I don't need your thoughts and prayers. If I wanted thoughts and prayers, I would go to

a religious institution. As a politician, thoughts and prayers are not your fucking job. Policy is. But yet we allow them to get away with the idea that they can't change anything, that somehow their hands are tied and I'm confused because I'm like, your hands are not tied. You actually have all of the power, but none of the will. Joe Biden this week is once again sitting down with Joe Manchin, who doesn't want to include dental into the

Human Infrastructure bill. Meanwhile, people in West Virginia I have no fucking teeth. And I don't say that as a joke. I mean they have serious dental issues. How is it a man that is sailing around on a seven hundred thousand dollars yacht has the audacity to tell people, oh, no, we're not going to cover these basic fucking needs. And when the government right is not actually acting as your

safety net, that's when desperation begins at all. That's the difference, folks, between democracies, which we are not democracies, right, and autocracies cuctocracies. We're only the rich right are able to have dental and vision and healthcare and all of these things that everybody else, be damned. And so if we again continue to erode our faith and integrity of these institutions that are supposed to be our social safety nets, then where

do we end up? It is terrifying to think that we are a couple of weeks away from the end of this year, and I want to ask you guys right now and tell me in the comments section, what would you call twenty one when we're referring back to this year? You know, the year of this, you know, the Golden Age, the Age of Enlightenment, blah blah blah, the year of blah blah, the selfie this saying anything, What is what characterizes? What are the themes that would

characterize the year of twenty twenty one? I mean everywhere that you look, from the beginning, the insurrection six days into the new year, two deadly aggressive climate change, provoked tornadoes at the end of the year, and that all of the shit that happened in the middle. I mean, I will be doing a reflection show, so I'm but I'm reflecting in this moment on all that has transpired. And frankly, you know, I know that this administration is

up against a lot of attacks in the media. Politico, which was you know, bought out I believe by the fucking murdocks, has gone after the Vice President with such savagery. It is disgusting. I see that CNN has decided to lift up former Trump administration officials and bring them on their network. I just, folks, you know, it's like you don't face any consequences for doing bad. There's no responsibility

to be had. You just these people just continue to succeed, right while the rest of us are left to scrape around. You know, there is a there is a piece that Charles Burlough wrote in the New York Times, and I gotta tell you it's really good. It's entitled We're Edging

Closer to Civil War and it begins like this. The Supreme Court last Friday issued a decision allowing abortion providers in Texas to continue challenging a new law that bans most abortions in the state after about six weeks of pregnancy. But while the conservative majority didn't close the door on abortion in Texas completely, the degree to which it's cracked open allows in only a sliver of light. For now, the law in question SP eight remains on the books.

Anyone who assists in providing an illegal abortion, from the provider down to the person who gives a woman a ride to the clinic, can still be sued. Roe v. Wade has essentially been overturned in the state and soon that astonishing reality may not only become permanent there, but may also spread to other states. A key component of women's rights and body autonomy is being snatched away as

we watch in a descent. Last week, Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote this, this is a brazen challenge to our federal structure. It echoes the philosophy of John C. Calhoun, a virulent, virulent defender of the slaveholding South, who insisted that states had the right to veto or nullify any federal law which they disagreed. I found the invocation of South Carolina's Calhoun striking. Charles blow Rights for The Times. Yes, he was a strong believer in nullification, the idea that states

could nullify federal laws. But he was also a raging racist who went further than the slave owners who saw slavery as a necessary evil, seeing it instead as a positive good. This is what Calhoun wrote in eighteen thirty seven. He gave a speech. I'm sorry, he gave a speech on the Senate floor that slavery quote quote had grown up with our society and institutions and is so interwoven with them that to destroy it, to destroy slavery would

be to destroy us as a people. This is what he said, and I want you folks to listen to this, because again the attack on facts, history, truth, the truth of our founding, the purpose of which is to have us continue to repeat the same cycles of white supremacy

and terror over and over and over again. It is to have us believe that this has always been the way right, and that how dare any of us challenge an institution that would have some one like a Calhoun say there is no way for us to give up holding slaves, torturing, beating, raping, murdering, lynching these enslaved Africans, because it's just too part of who we are, and

it's for the greater good, the greater white good. What Blow will go on to say in this piece are the parallels between Calhoun's sensibility, which is what son Justice Sonia Sotomayor had said in her descent, and to this new wave of the white supremacist domestic terror party that we see morphing bigger and bigger in front of us, much in the same way as the tornadoes did across the Midwest, destroying everything and anything in its path. Calhoun

said this in this floor speech. But let me not be misunderstood as admitting, even by implication, that the existing relations between the two races in the slaveholding states is an evil. Far otherwise, I hold it to be a good, as it has thus far proved itself to be both and will continue to prove so if not disturbed by

the fell spirit of abolition. I appeal to facts. Never before has the Black race of Central Africa, from the dawn of history to the present day, attained a conditioned, so civilized, and so improved, not only physically, but morally and intellectually. You ripped poets, engineers, farmers, caregivers, tribe leaders, people from their homes. You had the audacity of the place your Eurocentric white supremacist lens to look at their

experience their lives as what savagery. But you don't think the beating, the brutalization, the rape, and the bondage and captivity that you would place enslaved Africans in for hundreds of years. You deem that as a necessary good and not an evil. It is with that lens. It is with that lens that white supremacs have been able to justify everything that they do. And it is with that lens right, that we continue to allow the media to create a narrative around communities of color, around the black

community in particular. That all comes from this way of thinking, oh, you see, they're better off in bondage because left to their own devices, what would they do? This paternalistic, white patriarchal mess that America is and has always been. And we don't just feel right the sentiments the residue of

this now it's still in deeply in practice. But to not understand that history, to not understand the Calhoun sensibility that is now occupying the Republican Party and their belief they're taking their belief of states rights to supersede that of the federal government. So the Supreme Court is now in cahoots with these Republican state governors right, who are in cahoots with Republicans at the national level to create

a patchwork. It is no longer the United States, right, it is the disheveled states of America where you can get an abortion in California and New York and that's it, right, So what else do you think that they're going to be able to institute allow states to decide what it is that they choose to cherry pick from the Constitution what they choose to cherry pick right from federal statutes

in law that no longer sit well with them. Charles Blow goes on to write this, In Calhoun's view, the states had the right to control and oppress black bodies as they saw fit, regardless of any actions to the contrary on the federal level. States, he felt, should be able to choose whether or not they wanted slavery. I see too many uneasy parallels between what is happening nearly two hundred years ago and what is happening now. I see this country on the verge of another civil war

as the Calhounian impulse is reborn. There are enormous obvious differences. Of course, the civil war I see is not the kind that would leave hundreds of thousands of young men dead in combat. That is not to say that we weren't, that we aren't seeing spats of violence, but rather that this new war will be fought in courts, state houses,

and ballot boxes rather than in the fields. And this war won't be only about the subjugation of black people, but also about the subjugation of all who challenge the white racist patriarchy. It will seek to push back against all others, he writes, black people, immigrants, Muslims, Jews, LGBTQ people, and yes, women, particularly liberal ones. You see, I disagree

with Charles Blow on one account. I do think that we are going to see thousandstead Do you think that we are going to see an escalation of violence in our streets? I think that the decision in the Written House case made that all but certain that white vigilanteism

will become the norm. That you will be allowed to roam around with your AAR fifteen slung over your shoulder or your nine millimeter guns stuck into your genes and be able to stand your ground so long as you are white and male and straight wherever the fuck you want. So what does that say for the safety of the

rest of us? Because remind you, and we've talked about this with our friend doctor Jonathan Metzel, there is a court case that has the ability to throw out a hundred year old law in New York that makes it illegal for you to carry weapons, and it is going and is being heard at the Supreme Court. This comes on the heels, folks, of a fifteen year old being able to just pull out a draw in his parents' house, take a nine millimeter gun and go shoot off twenty rounds,

killing four of his classmates. This will be the first case where parents are actually charged for their fucking reckless

negligence for four counts of manslaughter each. And I think, in all honesty, if convicted, that that may in fact be the turning point in the gun rights argument in this country, because if parents much in the same way that we have been locking up black and brown parents for their children's truancy, because that's who gets locked up, by the way, it is black and brown parents, because we love to pathologize them right for their ill parenting,

But not all of these white motherfuckers like Lauren Bobert who posed with her four boys with assault rifles in front of a fucking Christmas tree. You have got to be kidding me. But shit like that, we think it's normal, right, that's not endangering the welfare of a child, that doesn't that doesn't require child protective services. We think that that

shit is okay. But we will throw black and brown parents in jail for the bare minimum, you know, having to work multiple jobs, and it's just so that they can put food on the table, and then their kids skip school for a number of reasons, right, and we're finding them and throwing them in jail. But you can pose with your kids or amp them up and tell them ha haha, don't get caught next time when you're

scrolling for ammunition in your fucking high school class. But those white quote unquote conservative parents are able to seem normal when they are anything but. So I disagree with Charles in terms of we won't see hundreds of thousands of bodies, because let me tell you something, I didn't think i'd see a global health pandemic in my lifetime. I didn't think I would witness a police officer squeeze the fucking life out of a man in broad daylight,

captured on a myriad of recorded phones. I didn't think that in the twenty first century that a black man couldn't go jogging down the street without being lynched. I didn't think that we would see the rollback of Rovie Wade. But yet here the fuck we are. So let us not presume that this next iteration of a civil war is going to be one that it's going to be quote unquote civilized and fought within the ballot boxes and within the courts, that it's going to be a paper

battle and a verbal battle. These people are ripe and ready for fucking war, and they tell us every day, and we still don't believe them. I didn't think that I would see smoke billowing out of the Capitol Building with thousands of enraged white people building a fucking guillotine in the twenty first century calling for the hanging of

the vice President of the United States. And we are coming up, folks, on the year anniversary of that national nightmare, and yet but a handful of motherfuckers are in jail. And not the donors, not the Trumps, not the Jiuliani's, not the masterminds that orchestrated it. We're still filing paperwork around that a year later. Everyone needs to have their eyes wide open to every battle that we are facing

right now, all of which are man made. From the climate crisis to the rise and hate to the disintegration of our democracy, all of it has been done at the hands of greedy, white conservative cis gender men, helped along by their handmaids. That's the fucking truth. That's the truth that you're not going to get on cable news because they want to pontificate about who is to cause, who is to blend? Is it climate change that caused

the tornadoes? Is it white rage and the pushback against the Obama administration and the fact that the demographics are changing that caused the election of Donald Trump? Did Donald Trump cause the insurrection? Did he knowingly spread the coronavirus? Right? And you weaponize it. Let's think about it, let's pontificate, let's build ratings around it instead of telling the fucking truth. If there's any group that needs to be pathologized right now, it is white folks. And I say that very real.

We have no problem talking about every other group as a community. What do lackdnext people think, what do black people think? And what about the Muslims? Right? But we don't dare talk about the legacy of violence, right and terrorism within the white community. We don't dare talk about why you are seeing this pushback and why we all wait with bated breath for the return of guilty verdicts that we know will never come because there's never been accounted.

What have you ever seen a wealthy white man hold another wealthy white man accountable for shit? Give me a fucking break, do you know, which was probably one of the most bipartisan, the most collegial spaces that you'd ever seen, probably Jeffrey Epstein's fucking private island. Because they all have that disgust, that greed, that cruelty, that viciousness in common. But we don't interrogate that truth. We say, oh no, they're individuals. Oh no, it was a lone wolf. Oh no,

was a siloed event. Oh it was an act of nature. Should have called that fucking tornado that tour through Kentucky. You might as well call it McConnell because he's been devastating families across this country, in his own state and across the country. We should call the tornadoes the Republicans right, the GOP, the GOP's climate disaster. But of course we won't do that because you know, we don't want to play politics. But it's totally fine with the radical right

to do so. It is time, it is past time that we begin to find ways to fight fire with fire, because if you think that what Charles Blow is writing about isn't going to transpire, you're not paying attention. I want us to suspend the reality that we've been living in because one we're never going back to that, and two, right at this point, anything can fucking happen, literally anything. He ends with this in his piece, we're edging closer to civil war in some ways. The abortion battle now

being waged in the courts is a test case. Can the States make an argument that a civil right can be reversed on the state level? Can they make the case that all that the Constitution has not explicitly spelled out should be reversed for the States. The Constitution has been silent on quite a bit since it was written in seventeen eighty seven, and the last time it was amended was nearly thirty years ago in nineteen ninety two,

when the States ratified the twenty seventh Amendment. When did Congress first approve that amendment in seventeen eighty nine, having not gotten enough states to ratify it. After passage, it's simply languished for two hundred years. All of us should be very worried about what we see happening with these abortion cases. Not just women who might need abortions or relatives and friends of women who might need them. We should worry about whether or not we are at an

inflection point for an age of aggression. And that's right, folks, the age of aggression, the age of aggression and darkness and hate. It's hard to think back to the election of Barack Obama. It's hard to even think about the term post racial and how America wanted to pat itself

on the back. Look at us giving this black men an opportunity after you know, we murdered so many viciously, After we burned down their towns and cities and killed their leaders and bishops and preachers, and bomb their schools and their churches. We are headed toward an age of violence.

And what scares me the most is that there were so many active and former military and police officers that were part of the insurrection that believe that it was their duty to go out into the streets for Donald Trump to beat police officers their own, their own right. And I think about this setup that is taking place right now, over four hundred voter suppression bills, hundreds of electioneering bills. They are gearing up to take over forever.

Twenty twenty two. The midterm elections will be their warm up. Let us see what sticks and what doesn't. On top of you know, the redistricting that is happening, that is forcing Democrats to lose seats and increasing the stronghold of

white neighborhoods and whiteness. But our refusal to call a spade a spade, our refusal to have conversations that are rooted in truth about who is to blame and who is to have a finger pointed at them, and who we should be building strategy and a plan around instead of trying to, you know, go and get the Karen's right to come and vote with us, to go and get these people that have been so aggrieved by the Democratic Party that they fled to Donald Trump. Like we

think that these motherfuckers are coming back. They're not. They haven't been back since the nineteen fifties. But the reality is is that if we don't create strategies to protect ourselves against their resurgence, we are going to be caught completely off guard by what they are planning. And they are doing it in broad fucking daylight. Can you think about the boldness to put together a PowerPoint presentation to overthrow the fucking government and that motherfucker is not in jail.

Can you think about Lauren Bobert posing with her kids and automatic rifles, and what that would look like if it was ilhan Omar in the same pose with her kids. We are so fucking unbalanced in this country. We have teacher We have teachers right in a viral video from South Dakota that we're competing on the ground scraping for

dollar bills so that they can buy school supplies. They turned it into essentially the Teachers Hunger Games and posted it on social media as if look at this fun activity and you don't think that there's anything wrong with a country that would have teachers begging and scrounging for dollar bills to support our nation's children, to support our fucking future. But we're out here putting billionaires like Elon Musk, these fucking narcissists on the cover of magazines and applauding them.

But we think that teachers should have to beg You think that the Hunger Games and these movies and Black Mirror like these are just shows. We are living in it, and it's happening so fast, it's so fucking unsettling. This week, America has hit a new record. Over eight hundred thousand Americans have died from COVID nineteen and still twenty five

percent of the population won't get vaccinated. Over eight hundred thousand is more than the population of Washington, DC and many fucking states like the North Dakotas and the South Dakotas. It is wild where we are, and yet we want to talk about some in fighting within the administration and whether or not Joe Biden likes Kamala Harris or you know, lauding attacks when literally everything around us is crumbling. Where

are our values? Where is our sense of urgency? And I'm afraid by the time that we find it and answer those questions, it will be too late. That is it for me today. Folks on woke app as always power to the people and to all the people. Power, Get woke and stay woke as fuck.