EPA not allowed to speak to the media

Donald Trump is enforcing a media blackout on all the employees of the Environmental Protection Agency. They’re not allowed to make social media updates, issue press releases, blog, or do anything remotely related to speaking to the media.

I’ve been a proponent of giving Trump the benefit of the doubt, ‘maybe he doesn’t mean a physical wall’, ‘perhaps by pussy he means cat’, ‘once he becomes president, it’ll become obvious that he only said troubling things for publicity’, I think it’s time to start eating down those words.

If the president wants to deny climate change he can do so. If we want to call him an idiot for doing so, that’s also fine. But if he thinks for a second he can get away with threatening a government agency who wants to protect us from climate change — something which has been scientific fact for fuck knows how long — then he’s sorely mistaken.

The EPA released a memo they were sent by the Trump administration (courtesy of BNO News):

EPA instructed to take down their climate change page

Trump has instructed the EPA to take down their climate change page in a bid to deny it as a scientific fact and possibly even to present a middle finger to his predecessor.

The EPA should take a leaf from Julian Assange’s book, if the president is determined to violate their first amendment rights, they should store the information from the climate change page, leak it to a foreign country, and have a third party website set up there.

There are always avenues to bypass government control over free speech but they shouldn’t have to do it, especially in the ‘Land of the Free’.

Possible loss of funding

If it’s found out that the agency are using government funds to publish through foreign sites, their funding will likely be cut, but it appears as though Trump is heading that way anyway.

The problem is that if this censorship issue is taken to court and overturned — which it should be — then Trump can just cut the funding for a different reason.

Ward Churchill — a man deemed a traitor by the US after he suggested the 9/11 attacks were provoked by US foreign policy— had his life dug through by a federal agency in a bid to have him fired from his associate professorship at the University of Colorado Boulder. They succeeded in having him fired in May 2006 under the grounds of “serious research misconduct” based on apparent plagiarism of work. They didn’t have him fired because of his anti US 9/11 writing, as it would violate his first amendment rights; they instead went out of their way to dig for any scrap of misconduct to have him stripped of his profession and what they hoped, his voice.

Conclusion

Trump will find a way to punish the EPA by skirting around their rights as American citizens. We need to stay vigilant and protest against these violations wherever and whenever they rise. The ‘Land of the Free’ isn’t a reference to the free pass Trump feels he was given at his inauguration.