Reign Of Terror Against Climate Scientists Has Begun

Helping set the tone for the incoming Trump administration,
he recently busied himself helping to create an atmosphere
of threats to federal employees working on
climate change issues. 

As I sort of expected, it looks like the purging has already begun. 

The big threat from the Trump administration is they wouldn't just drum out government workers who they think contradict their odd agenda. 

Some of his minions have threatened to jail these supposed opponents. Plus, the MAGA mob is always at the ready. It's already starting, more than a month Trump actually takes office.   

Per CNN:

"Last week, in the midst of the flurry of his daily missives, Musk reposted two X posts that revealed the names and titles of people holding four relatively obscure climate-related government positions. Each post had been viewed tens of millions of times, and the individuals named have bene subjected to a barrage of negative attention. At least one of the four women named has deleted her social media accounts."

It's a tried and true Trump trick, perpetrated by Trump's newish tech buddy Elon Musk.  Take a relatively low level employee of some federal agency they don't like, dox them so all the Trump cult minions will go out and terrorize them. 

 This move shuts up all the other employees, and likely forces them to quit. It also makes everybody else who could be targets also lay low and then quit, thereby ridding the government of anyone whose expertise or sense of reality clashes with their own carefully constructed (fake) world. 

They target relatively low level employees, not their bosses, because these employees are relatively powerless.  

CNN explains it better:

"Several current federal employees told CNN they're afraid their lives will be forever changed - including physically threatened - as Musk makes behind-the scenes-bureaucrats into personal targets, Others told CNN that the threat of being in Musk's crosshairs might even drive them from their jobs entirely - achieving Musk's smaller government goals without so much as a proper review. 

'These tactics are aimed at sowing terror and fear at federal employees,' said Everett Kelley, president of the American Federation of Government Employees, which represents more than 800,000 of the 2.3 million civilian federal employees. 'It's intended to make them fearful they will become afraid to speak up."

Others have previous had this happen, and speak from experience: Per CNN:

"'It's his way of intimidating people to either quit or also send a signal to all the other agencies that 'your next; said Mary 'Missy Cummings, an engineering and computer science professor at George Mason University, who drew Musk's ire because of her criticisms of Tesla when she was at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration."

 Of course, all this effort to purge "unwanted" federal employees is unfair labor practice writ large, not to mention a possible violation of First Amendment free speech rights of employees.

Or maybe not, because Trump is using Musk, or Musk is using himself to be far too cute. 

Musk is technically not the federal government. Plus, he can argue all he's doing is offering his free speech opinion on his social media platform X that these employees are an example of government waste.  He can also say he didn't post the doxxing of those federal employees. He was just "reposting" something that somebody else produced.

Never mind that he has the fame and following to take an obscure social media post that nobody was paying attention to, and make it into a Big Deal like this became. 

That way he and Trump can seek to avoid responsibility for the "private citizens" (the Trump cult) that are terrorizing these employees through threats and possibly worse. 

Musk is likely seeing his role with Trump as an investment opportunity. He spend $250 million on helping get Trump elected, according to federal campaign finance filings, and now he probably wants to recoup that investment. 

Which is why he's so helpful with Trump's authoritarian moves.

We're going to keep going through this with lots of people in the Trump administration. It won't be limited to just climate scientists, of course, but they will continue to be a target.  So brace yourselves.