Bill McKibben in the NYT: Embarrassing Photos of Me, Thanks to My Right-Wing Stalkers

[cali]

<snip>

In one series, my groceries are being packed into plastic bags, as I’d forgotten to bring cloth ones. In other shots, I am getting in and out of … cars. There are video snippets of me giving talks, or standing on the street. Sometimes I see the cameraman, sometimes I don’t. The images are often posted to Twitter, reminders that I’m being watched.


In April, Politico and The Hill reported that America Rising Squared, an arm of the Republican opposition research group America Rising, had decided to go after me and Tom Steyer, another prominent environmentalist, with a campaign on a scale previously reserved for presidential candidates. Using what The Hill called “an unprecedented amount of effort and money,” the group, its executive director said, was seeking to demonstrate our “epic hypocrisy and extreme positions.”

<snip>

This effort has resulted in all kinds of odd things appearing on right-wing corners of the web: out-of-context quotations from old books and articles apparently put on display to prove I’m a zealot, and photos from God knows who intended to make me out as a hypocrite (the plastic bags, for instance, and my travel by car, which, you know, burns gas). Mostly, they’ve just published those creepy videos, to remind me that I’m under surveillance.

I understand that this isn’t horrible in the way that police brutality is horrible, or having your home swept away by a flood is horrible. I know that in other parts of the world, environmentalists have worse things than cameras pointed at them. From Honduras to the Philippines, in the last two years, activists have been assassinated after getting in the way of megaprojects.


<snip>


Merely having someone with a camera follow you somehow makes you feel as if you’re doing something wrong. My house is covered in solar panels, and I plug my car into a socket those panels power. But environmentalists also live in the world we’re trying to change: We take airplanes and rent buses for rallies; we make a living, shop for groceries. None of this should demand an apology. Changing the system, not perfecting our own lives, is the point. “Hypocrisy” is the price of admission in this battle.

<snip>

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/07/opinion/sunday/embarrassing-photos-of-me-thanks-to-my-right-wing-stalkers.html

[UTUSN]

1. Who is this person & even wingnuts must be fanatics to stalk him

[cali]

3. Here:

William Ernest "Bill" McKibben (born December 8, 1960)[1] is an American environmentalist, author, and journalist who has written extensively on the impact of global warming. He is the Schumann Distinguished Scholar at Middlebury College[2] and leader of the anti-carbon campaign group 350.org. He has authored a dozen books about the environment, including his first (The End of Nature) in 1989 about climate change.

In 2009, he led 350.org's organization of 5,200 simultaneous demonstrations in 181 countries. In 2010, McKibben and 350.org conceived the 10/10/10 Global Work Party, which convened more than 7,000 events[3] in 188 countries[4] as he had told a large gathering at Warren Wilson College shortly before the event. In December 2010, 350.org coordinated a planet-scale art project, with many of the 20 works visible from satellites.[5] In 2011 and 2012 he led the environmental campaign against the proposed Keystone XL pipeline project[6] and spent three days in jail in Washington, D.C. It was one of the largest civil disobedience actions in America for decades.[7] Two weeks later he was inducted into the literature section of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.[7]

He was awarded the Gandhi Peace Award in 2013.[8] Foreign Policy magazine named him to its inaugural list[9] of the 100 most important global thinkers in 2009 and MSN named him one of the dozen most influential men of 2009.[10] In 2010, the Boston Globe called him "probably the nation's leading environmentalist"[11] and Time magazine book reviewer Bryan Walsh described him as "the world's best green journalist".[12]

<snip>
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_McKibben

[UTUSN]

4. Thanks! I usually do try to keep up!1 n/t

[cali]

6. It's impossible to keep up with everything.

[Rex]

2. Cons and stalking go hand in hand.

Creepy activity for creepy people.

[SecularMotion]

5. Here's the story on the stalkers

How America Rising Ties the GOP Establishment to the Stalkers Harassing Bill McKibben and Tom Steyer

For the past few months, when they dare venture out to the supermarket, to church, or to a climate rally, Bill McKibben, Tom Steyer, and other climate activists are being stalked by a team of GOP-trained camera operators. The so-called “trackers” with the cameras are working for a group called America Rising Squared (aka America Rising Advanced Research or AR2), and publishing the occasional “embarrassing” display of alleged hypocrisy on a website called CoreNews.org.

DeSmog first covered this new “creepy” campaign back in May, and since then, the harrassment has only gotten worse, as Bill McKibben writes in Sunday's New York Times. In his op-ed, “My Right Wing Stalkers” (the web headline is: “Embarrassing Photos of Me, Thanks to My Right-Wing Stalkers”), McKibben describes what it's like to live under surveillance, and the psychological toll that it takes on him and his family. (One particularly infuriating detail: McKibben's daughter believes that she, too, is being filmed in public.)

McKibben writes:

To be watched so much is a kind of never-ending nightmare. And sometimes it’s just infuriating. I skipped the funeral this summer of Patrick Sorrento, an important mentor to me at my college newspaper, because I didn’t want my minder to follow me and cause a distracting spectacle. When my daughter reports someone taking pictures of her at the airport, it drives me nuts. I have no idea if it’s actually this outfit; common decency would suggest otherwise, but that seems an increasingly rare commodity.

Almost as startling as the tactics of the campaign is how closely it is tied to the mainstream Republican establishment. Core News (and by extension, America Rising Squared) might have the look and feel of a Right Wing lunatic fringe campaign funded by the darkest of oil and gas money. But in actuality it's a foundational block of a prominent GOP opposition research firm, the heads of which have collectively spent decades working for big name Republicans like Mitt Romney, Marco Rubio, John McCain, and even the National Republican Congressional Commitee and the Republican National Committee itself.

http://www.desmogblog.com/2016/08/06/how-america-rising-ties-gop-establishment-stalkers-harassing-bill-mckibben-and-tom-steyer

http://www.democraticunderground.com/1016164870

[cali]

7. Thanks. It's appalling as well as frightening.

[BlancheSplanchnik]

8. Environmentalists... makes sense the pod people are aiming the heavy artillery

at environmentalists now.