ANDERSON did invoke the idealistic liberalism of the 1960s that is associated with his uncle and father. I agreed with many of his assertions, but the speech was vague. It could have been delivered by a wide variety of Democratic Party politicians. So is this just a ’60s nostalgia trip? It’s actually a much weirder and more disturbing journey. This spring, a photo was distributed of RFK Jr. with former Trump administration National Security Advisor Mike Flynn, anti-vaccine proponent Charlene Bollinger, and Trumpwhisperer/longtime political dirty trickster Roger Stone. The photo was taken at a Flynnsponsored “ReAwaken America Tour” rally in California in July 2022. RFK Jr. has appeared at such rallies in the past. Lisa Hagen of NPR reported, “Each stop of the [tour] is part conservative Christian revival, part QAnon expo and part political rally. … There are meet and greets, a buffet and, lately, baptisms and the casting out of demons.” On May 8, MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow reported that a “ReAwaken America” event was being hosted at the Miami-based, Trump-owned National Doral. Two of the speakers, Scott McKay and Charlie Ward, are vehement Hitler-praising anti-Semites. Eric Trump, his wife Lara and “a whole
bunch of other Trump administration folks” would also speak. McKay claims Jews torture children and eat their hearts, and that “Hitler was actually fighting the same people that we’re trying to take down today.” He says Jews were responsible for 9/11, the Oklahoma City bombing and the assassinations of Lincoln, McKinley and JFK. At an event on the tour, Ward said the COVID vaccine had killed more people than the Holocaust. He once shared a post claiming “VIRUSES are Man (JEW) made including influenza, Polio, Measles, AIDS so was Covid created as a ‘excuse’ to vaccinate (contaminate)... ” McKay and Ward were dropped from a few dates on the tour after Maddow’s report, despite Eric Trump threatening to sue Maddow. RFK Jr. decided to no longer participate in the “ReAwaken America” roadshow. MAGA stars like former Trump adviser Steve Bannon, Infowars host Alex Jones and Roger Stone are enthusiastic about RFK Jr. Axios reports that several libertarian-leaning tech moguls in Silicon Valley are supportive. On June 5, RFK Jr. participated in a chat on Twitter with Elon Musk, David Sacks (a top donor to Ron DeSantis) and Tulsi Gabbard. Kennedy told them he want-
ed to close the Mexican border permanently and claimed pharmaceutical drugs were responsible for mass shootings. RFK Jr. was once a crusading environmental lawyer fighting corporations. He now says “free market capitalism” is the answer to all environmental problems. He is leaving energy policy to the
market and says talk about climate change encourages totalitarianism. He’s a pathological liar. It’s difficult to fact-check him in real-time. Does that sound familiar? Bannon and Stone want RFK Jr. to run as Trump’s vice president. This opinion does not necessarily reflect the views of Boulder Weekly.
decades of fire suppression has led to “overgrown” and “unhealthy” forests that threaten those of us living in the wildland-urban interface — it’s a narrative upheld by the forest products and biomass energy industries, federal, state, county and municipal government agencies, and elected officials on both sides of the aisle. It’s true that, over the last three years, Colorado experienced three of its largest and most costly wildfires in a century (each human-caused). But if we go back to early 20th and 19th century records prior to fire suppression, we find that dense forests and severe wildfires were the norm. An April 2023 study in the peerreviewed journal Fire found that “abundant independent sources …
in more than half of the 11 Western states [including Colorado] agreed that historical dry forests were highly variable in tree density and included a substantial area of dense forests.” A 2014 study in PLoS One concluded that, across 54 sampled sites in local Front Range forests, “81% showed mixed- and high-severity fire effects … prior to fire suppression,” while above 6,000 feet “fire severities prior to any fire exclusion effects was sufficient to kill high percentages of mature trees.” But that doesn’t change the fact that wildfires are burning near communities built at the forest’s edge. So, don’t we still need to cut trees?
OPINION
LOCAL FORESTS UNDER FIRE BY JOSH SCHLOSSBERG
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slew of so-called “wildfire risk reduction” logging projects are proposed for tens of millions of acres of public forests across the Western U.S. — 3.5 million acres in the Front Range alone — with several already completed or underway in Boulder and Jefferson counties. The 2021 federal infrastructure bill allotted more than $3 billion to the supposed goal of “reducing exposure of people, communities, and natural resources to the risk of catastrophic wildfire,” with Colorado Rep. Joe
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Neguse and Sens. Michael Bennet and John Hickenlooper seeking another $60 billion. Coupled with a federal emergency action that expedites the removal of so-called “hazardous fuels” (aka trees) while skirting certain legal objections, our public forests are seeing more logging than they have in decades. Before we move things any further down the road, is it not worth a look at some independent, non-agency funded science? You’ve likely heard the claim that
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