“kind of a bunch of murderers”
What Amber Ruffin said. And: action as an antidote to despair.
“It’s not a disaster,” my mom told me and my husband after Trump’s election victory was announced. I often think back to that statement—meant kindly, meant to reassure.
I thought of it when I saw the headline recently about a University of Cape Town study that predicts the Trump-Musk Administration’s funding freeze will result in an additional 601,000 HIV-related deaths (and nearly as many new infections) in South Africa in the coming decade.
I thought of it when I saw that the United Nations (not exactly a body prone to flights of exaggeration) is warning that, worldwide, the Trump-Musk Administration’s funding freeze will lead to an extra 6.3 million people dying of AIDS-related deaths1 in the next four years alone.
Trump’s return to the White House is not merely a disaster. For millions around the world it is a death sentence. In the light of these science-based assesments, I’ll let you be the judge as to whether the comedian Amber Ruffin’s characterization of the administration as “kind of a bunch of murderers” was a fair assessment2.
Climate messaging expert Genevieve Guenther observed in a recent newsletter of hers that—in the midst of “a full-on authoritarian attempt to take over the US government”—that she felt that giving advice “about the language of climate politics has felt to me like whispering advice in a windstorm — or like recommending a series of home renovations while bulldozers are digging up your house's foundation and excavators are ripping off its roof”.
I’ve been feeling in a similar boat. It’s been difficult to make much progress on a post about CARB regulating dairy methane, for example, when there’s a vicious, autocratic government seemingly hellbent on inflicting as much misery and needless (human and planetary) suffering as it possibly can.
It is really not my place to recommend to you how you spend your Saturday. I am merely a legal permanent resident, after all, and I don’t want to be deported to an El Salvadoran concentration camp (“accidentally” or otherwise) to form a shaven-headed backdrop for the Homeland Security Secretary’s next music video social update. And while I’m curious about some day sampling Cajun cooking, I’d rather not be whisked away by federal agents for incarceration in a privately-run ICE detention facility in Louisiana, either.
It is really not my place to recommend what you get up to on Saturday, April 5th. But I will note Dr. Guenther’s point that
working to stop the destruction — to defeat the fossil-tech-white-supremacist authoritarians — is actually a form of climate action. Indeed, it's the sine qua non of climate action!
My boss isn’t a fan of me quoting other publications’ writing, but this snippet from The New Republic’s Life in a Warming World climate newsletter is too good to keep to myself:
"Action is the antidote to despair," Joan Baez famously said, a line frequently quoted in climate circles. It’s not just an inspirational meme: There’s now a growing body of evidence that climate protest works—not just to decrease anxiety in your head but to change the world outside of it. And contrary to all the stereotypes about preachy greenies putting other people off the cause, there doesn’t seem to be much risk of provoking backlash.
When researchers working with the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication reviewed 50 recent studies on the impact of climate activism for an article published last week, they found “strong evidence that climate activism shifts public opinion and media coverage in a pro-climate direction.” They also found evidence that activism can sway policymakers and increase the percentage of vote share going to pro-climate candidates. One particularly intriguing study from Germany found not only that "areas that were exposed to protests had a higher share of the vote (+2-2.5% points) go to the Green party," but also that "repeated exposure [i.e., more protests] increased this effect."
I’m honing in on HIV/AIDS here but I’ll note that funding freezes and mass retrenchments will doubtless also cause additional lives lost as a result of other diseases, too. And it’s not just disease: the enormous damage being done by the Musk-Trump Administration to the federal agencies and regulations that are intended to protect human health and/or reducing harms from air pollution, toxics, and fossil-fueled extreme weather will also result in many more lives lost than would’ve otherwise been the case.
Fact-based media supposedly places great stock in accuracy—but some journalists will always prioritze access over the truth. Following her comment, the pusillanimous White House Correspondents’ Association (apparently fearful of annoying the Trump-Musk Administration) un-invited Ruffin from appearing at their annual dinner.