pressenza | Hours after writing his screed, Boyd announced his resignation and apologized. But he qualified his apology by saying that he never meant to imply that the helpless elderly were the lazy ones—just everyone else. “I was only making the statement that those folks that are too lazy to get up and fend for themselves but are capable should not be dealt a handout,” he wrote in a manner that suggested he was “sorry, not sorry.”
Most Republicans are not as overt as Boyd in their faith in social Darwinism. Take Texas Governor Greg Abbott, who instead of openly blaming Texans for their own suffering instead decided to blame climate-mitigating policies and renewable energy programs like wind power. Speaking on Fox News, Abbott railed against the “Green New Deal,” claiming that a reliance on wind turbines was disastrous because the state’s wind-generated power “thrust Texas into a situation where it was lacking power on a statewide basis.” For good measure, he added, “It just shows that fossil fuel is necessary.”
The conservative Wall Street Journal, which has long been hostile to tackling climate change through renewable energy, repeated this claim in an editorial blaming “stricter emissions regulation” and the loss of coal-powered plants for widespread misery in the snow-blanketed South.
In fact, millions of Texans are going without power because of the Republican emphasis on cheap power over reliable power. Seeing electricity generation as a profit-making enterprise rather than the fulfillment of a public need, GOP policies in Texas have made the state vulnerable to such mass outages. Moreover, plenty of wintry areas successfully run wind turbines when properly prepared to do so. And, Abbott did not see fit to point out that harsh winter temperatures lead to frozen natural gas pipelines—the real culprit in the outages.
Even as a majority of Texans now believe that climate change is really happening, their governor in late January vowed to “protect the oil and gas industry from any type of hostile attack from Washington.” Apparently protecting Texans from the ravages of the fossil fuel industry is not in his purview. This is hardly surprising given how much fossil fuel industry contributions have ensured Abbott’s loyalty to oil and gas interests.
The conservative mindset can be counted on to prioritize private interests over public ones. In a Republican utopia, the rich are noble and deserving of basic necessities, comforts, and life itself. If they have rigged the system to benefit themselves, it means they are smart, not conniving. In the future that Republicans promise, “Only the strong will survive and the weak will parish (sic),” as per Boyd’s post. In other words, our lives are expendable, and if we die, it is because we deserve it and were simply not smart enough to survive.
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