Thursday, February 2, 2017

Trump Vs. Our National Parks

photo national park service.jpg

The Trumpies are wasting no time in trying to sell-off our National Park System to the highest bidder. It seems very similar to the "Sovereign Citizen" movement that led to the Oregon Standoff at Malheur Wildlife Refuge. Trump and several yokels in Congress who are like kissing cousins to the Bundy clan think they get to decide what happens to protected land that belongs to the American taxpayers.

John Muir and Teddy Roosevelt are turning over in their graves.











Last week, Trump showed his dictatorial attitude when he made a priority of shutting down discussions of climate change within various government agencies.

From Fortune
Employees at several federal agencies including the Department of Agriculture have been barred by the Trump administration from making any statements, or providing any documents to the public or journalists, according to published reports.
The Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Health and Human Services are also impacted by the orders, which were reportedly handed down this week, and include a prohibition against some of the agencies posting on social media.
...A memo sent to EPA staff said that there should be no press releases sent to "external audiences" and that "no social media will be going out," according to a report by The Hill. The memo also says that a digital strategist will be coming in to oversee the agency's social-media policies, and that "existing, individually controlled social-media accounts may become more centrally controlled."

Trump particularly targeted the National Park System Twitter accounts. Why? Because Trump was furious that the Park Service retweeted an article in the New York Times about his small inaugural crowd compared with Obama's in 2009.

From CNN
After the retweet began to get attention, a career staffer at the Interior Department instructed employees that the "new administration has said that the department and all bureau are not supposed to tweet this weekend and wait for guidance until Monday."
The message continued, "Please make sure that any scheduled tweets are no longer scheduled," and referred all questions to another career staffer at the department.
On Saturday, the National Park Service called Friday's retweets "mistaken."



But the folks at Badlands National Monument went rogue and caused a stir:

From Vanity Fair
On Tuesday, the Twitter account for South Dakota’s Badlands National Park—a subsidiary of the National Park Service—began tweeting out climate change facts, in apparent defiance of the gag order. Someone working for the national park’s social media team went rogue and started posting climate change facts from the National Wildlife Federation’s Web site in 140-character bursts. (Trump, who can generously be described as a climate change skeptic, has previously called called climate change a “hoax” engineered by the Chinese.)
The National Park’s tweets were retweeted thousands of times before they were suddenly deleted later Tuesday afternoon.











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