MEMORY LANE SERIES - #6
I Have Every Reason Not to Vote for RFK Jr. and Why I am Potentially Voting for Him... (Part 1)
Confessions of a Moral Environmentalist
It all began with a Facebook post by a Climate Change activist and contributor to the independent news outlet Common Dreams that included the above derogatory meme. This in parallel with an inquiry from a close friend regarding an opportunity to share mine and others vision for regenerative agriculture being co-developed through the Institute for Regenerative Deign & Innovation’s first resilient community platform called Renew Forsyth along with conveying my experience in Appalachia as a part of the RFK Jr 2024 campaign.
It was these two factors that tipped the scale and caused me to write this piece along with the overwhelming feeling that I needed to address some lingering questions that were stirring deep within me concerning my past experience with RFK Jr. and the environmental movement as a whole. With all these factors setting the stage along with the following confessions of a moral environmentalist, this trip down memory lane is my humble way of celebrating Earth Day by taking you on a brief three week journey regarding why “I Have Every Reason Not to Vote for RFK Jr. and Why I am Potentially Voting for Him...” First Side Note: By potentially, I mean 1) I am a social scientist and 100% certainty is simply impossible and 2) I am “virtually certain” that I am voting for Kennedy/Shanahan.1
By the time I had seen the above FB meme on April 12th and my friend asked that I convey my reasons for voting for RFK Jr on April 13th, I had already decided to volunteer in supporting the presidential campaign weeks prior after a work colleague listened deeply to my rant regarding how I believed that the political system is deeply (and I stress, deeply!) broken. I expressed my utter frustration with the present ‘State of the Union’ and told him that the last vote that I had genuinely made from the heart was a vote for Obama during his first term. Second Side Note: I didn’t feel as good about the second term vote which was the beginning of the end for my genuine trust in America’s political system.
I then went on to explain to my work colleague and friend how I had worked with (not for) the Obama administration (via Van Jones and Jason Walsh among others) while collaborating with many regional leaders in central Appalachia (Brandon Dennison and Patrick Angel among others) to co-launch what was called at the time the ‘Appalachian Transition’ movement. I continued by telling him how most of my work centered around breaking the strong-hold that modern environmentalism held over the region that I called home for almost 10 years.
He then asked: what about RFK Jr.? Have you ever thought about voting for him? I quickly and sharply responded by telling him ‘why I have every reason not to vote for RFK Jr.’ as I was deeply involved in a 2008 ‘cutting-edge’ project called Coal River Wind Campaign that was built upon some fallacious science produced by the West Virginia based environmental consulting organization Downstream Strategies. This so-called science produced a study that RFK Jr. and many other environmentalist across the country supported.
I then went on to condense what I came to call in 2014 the “Brune Effect of Modern Environmentalism,” named after Michael Brune who was the then former executive director of the quasi-anarcho group called Rainforest Action Network and now executive director of Sierra Club, where stereotypes of coalminers were leveraged by the environmental movement to form a toxic Us vs Them approach to “saving Appalachia”(emphasis on scare quotes).2 The whole ‘Matrix’ of the Appalachian anti-Mountain Top Removal movement from 2005 to 2010 was built upon pitting environmental activist against company workers ‘Captain Planet’ style.
Come to think of it, as I look back it was honestly surreal to see a Captain Planet’s us/them trope come to life before my very eyes which is exactly “Why [Moral] Environmentalists Hate Captain Planet” much less experiencing a real-world manifestation of a fake cartoon-world in a region that had suffered from the log-term effects of industry leveraging Appalachian stereotypes to exploit the region.3 Sharing similar sentiments towards the environmental movement in general that I have developed over the years, the description that the ‘vlogbrothers’ provide for their YouTube critique of Captain Planet hits the nail on the head:
All of this is much easier to see in retrospect, which I think is telling. It's hard to see bias in the moment, and it's easy to feel justified in simplifying the stories of your adversaries when you're in the middle of what you see as a war. But that's why it's good to look back at things like this. I think it's fine to create content for any age that accurately portrays the difficulties we face as a species...that's a completely apolitical act. But while the creators of Captain Planet will tell you that each of the villains represents the extremes, not the norms, none of those things are (at least in the beginning) modeled in nuanced ways. I am particularly troubled by the portrayal of the laborers as sub-human. It's one thing for billionaire Looten Plunder to be terrible (and yes, his pony tail is appropriately grotesque) but modeling the people who are laboring as garbage collectors or machine operators as monsters, at this point, downright pisses me off.4
Well said vlogbrothers… Well said!
While continuing to walk down memory lane regarding my reasons for distrusting RFK Jr., I went on to explain to my friend that I was intimately involved with the Coal River Wind study and found glaring errors in its methodology that proposed what seemed to many at the time (2008) to be a brilliant alternative use of a permitted Mountain Top Removal site in West Virginia that asked the daring question: why not a wind farm instead? A question that seemed like a logical one especially given the fact that West Virginia is home to a massive array of turbines called Mount Storm Wind Farm located in Grant County.
The name of the study says it all: “The Long-Term Economic Benefits of Wind versus Mountain Top Removal Coal on Coal River Mountain, West Virginia.” Trouble was, the researchers had knowingly fudged the numbers by using a completely untenable scenario of building a wind manufacturing plant in coal river valley to not only “produce the towers, turbines, and blades locally” but to bump up the numbers regarding ‘annual job production.’5 In retrospect, this wasn’t a study. It was a kind-of ‘crystalline seed’ that was plated into the hearts and minds of environmentalist in hopes of growing a national environmental movement to stop mountaintop removal. All in preparation for the country’s transition from the Bush years to Obama’s promises of Hope.6
What was unknown to most if not all environmentalist at the time was that the proposed windfarm was more of a computer simulation (i.e., “the little crystalline seed and the vast crystallizable universe” as philosopher Gilles Deleuze calls it) than a genuine Living-Seed of Hope as it was solely based on a wind analysis performed by Appalachian Voices.7 This early stage analysis for developing a windfarm pretty much represented the only due diligence the team had performed for building the proposed Coal River Wind project. Had they done their proper due diligence, the roads into coal river valley would have been the first red flag as the hairpin turns into the valley translated to a completely inaccessible scenario for trucks to bring in turbines much less addressing how the 164 2MW behemoth wind turbines would make it up to the peaks of the ridges.8
Helping us to get a better picture of this unrealistic project that helped crystallize the Deleuzian “power of the false” within the mindscape of environmentalist across the US, below is the topo map image where one of the researchers, who I confronted directly about how he had “arbitrarily placed wind turbines on the ridge” with zero consideration of how they would get there, computationally plopped dots down on the ridge where the highest wind had been measured.9 All the while ignoring the very complicated task of assessing the various go/no-go scenarios involved in developing a wind farm by sitting comfortably behind his virtual black screen assigned to the simplified model of complying with Douglas Tiffany’s 2007 report that “computed economic feasibility of wind turbine construction in Minnesota.”10
What was surprising yet unsurprising at the same time is that the cover of the report (here) testifies to this arbitrary technique of plopping virtual turbines on the peaks of mountains with absolutely no consideration of slope! As if this blatant error posted on the front of the report wasn’t enough, what pissed me off at the time and still disturbs be deeply about the image below is not that it was an unscientific methodology performed by someone completely capable of doing science (here) but that it translated to building false hope in a community that desperately needed an alternative path out of the coal monopsony they were stuck in. All for the sake of saving mountains but at the expense of what?
Basically, this unaccounted reality of linking facts to a community’s hopes and desires boiled the project down to a question of values for me. In describing the distinction between “Single Message Ideologies” and pluralism, Dr. Vincenzo Di Nicola provides us with a clear and timely perspective to interpret not only the Coal River Wind project of the past but also the insidious Us vs. Them logics of today that’s quickly tearing America apart in his article entitled “Polarization: On the Threshold Between Political Ideology and Social Reality.”11 He writes:
Polarization privileges utopian “single-message ideologies” over the pluriverse of the actual world we live in. That is not only driven by getting the facts wrong through misinformation and poor judgment but also by values which may be manipulated in the service of politics that we may not approve of. That is the slippery slope I am describing. “From description to prescription” ultimately means sliding from a consensual social reality balancing facts and values to a divisive political ideology privileging its own narrow view. That is the chasm and the abyss we are living in now in liberal democratic societies.12
With this distinction between crystalline ideals and the living real kept close to our hearts, it was by and through the above virtual image that I first became a proud and loud moral environmentalist and began to call them out, ALL of them in the best way I thought possible. All the while co-building a project in the ‘Heart of the Billion Dollar Coalfields’ rooted in the Holy Matrimony between facts and values. Third Side Note: please trust me here regarding the sacred nature of this facts/values marriage as I have had first hand experience in seeing its fruits of birthing genuine, heart felt hope within some of the most impoverished communities in America!
Pointedly, it was the ‘empty-diagram’ above that further fueled me in attempting to co-build one of the first community-owned wind farms in central Appalachia (w/ Windustry) which is why I have a very intimate understanding of just how complex the go/no-go process is for industrial scale wind development.13 It was through an honest assessment of this project along with assessing numerous other projects that were rooted in real due diligence (facts + values) that I came to focus on as a direct response to the Coal River Wind initiative. Rather than embracing the political ideology of environmental idealism that resembled more of a Captain Planet cartoon scenario than a real-world response to changing people’s lives for the better, I sought to co-create something radically different for the people and by the people.
Of course as “an environmental and economic development consulting firm” that seeks to generate ‘good science,’ Downstream Strategies provided a disclaimer in the Coal River Wind report that “these scenarios are not precise forecasts of what will actually happen. For example, the amount of coal actually mined over the next two decades and the number of turbines actually built would be based on multiple decision criteria that are beyond the scope of this analysis.”14 Too bad this wasn’t emphasized when the national campaign went live as locally-grown activist (who now see the light such as Lorelei Scarbro) were lovingly coerced to speak to legislators as if the “The Long-Term Economic Benefits of Wind versus Mountain Top Removal Coal on Coal River Mountain” had been empirically settled and all that remained to be done is shut down the permit and save one among thousands of mountains slatted for surface mining.
Turns out this simplified logic of 1 + 2 = 3 was not as simple as the Coal vs. Wind campaign made it out to be. It was certainly an ideal goal but was nonetheless an immoral one through and through given its implicit divorcing of facts from values which in all honesty is tantamount to a divorce between ‘truth and freedom’ that I described in my April 12th post entitled “The Reality of Politics...”15 But you may be asking at this point: what does this has to do with RFK Jr.? The answer is simple, this:
From the perspective of a tried and true Street Philosopher, The Last Mountain documentary came to be the absolute Deleuzian(al) Time-Image (i.e., Henri Bergson’s “empty diagram”) that I sought to confront via proactively moving beyond changing “things by fighting the existing reality. To change something,” we had to come together and co-build “a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”16 These wise words of Buckminster Fuller not only defined Sustainable Williamson’s post-environmentalist model of Applied Sustainability but they described the very essence of our strategy that sought to break down the corrosive Us. vs Them logics of the anti-MTR movement by working with rather than against coalminers and the communities that support them.
In philosophical terms, this signified a shift from the ‘empty diagram’ of the anti-MTR movement’s Us/Them logics - to - the Bergsonian “quest for a ‘living unity’ that would link life, consciousness and the material universe” in a way that would break the monosonistic chains that weighed heavy on the communities of central Appalachia.17 This was my first and obviously not my last run in with the “Schmittian ‘Us vs. Them’ algorithm” that is quickly coming to erode America’s delicately interwoven demos in a soul-up (algorithmic) fashion.18 Lucky for us, its political theorist like Samuel Mace and others like him who will continue to remind us that “Carl Schmitt is not your friend” by explaining what’s at stake when contemporary American’s mistake “heated debate with a threat to physical safety.”19 In doing this,..
…we not only misconstrue the nature of our current political dynamics but, paradoxically, build up tensions in the political arena to the point where violence becomes more likely. Exaggerating already existing differences makes a political bridge between competing ideologies and identities even harder to build. In this environment, it can feel as if politics is all or nothing. But labelling it as such commits us to the mistake of imagining that uncivil disagreement is akin to a physically dangerous threat.20
Political reflections aside, I summed up this trip down memory lane by informing my friend that RFK Jr. played a central role in supporting a documentary film that I had dedicated my (at the time) life’s work to rendering obsolete. I did this by moving beyond re-activism’s cartoon-like diagrams and embracing pro-activism’s living-unity that’s built upon the Holy matrimony between facts and values we Christians call morality.21 He listened and then calmly prompted me to still go to the trough and consider drinking the water that at the time seemed more like ‘Electric Kool-Aid’ than refreshing mineral water.
However, given my strong acuity towards the realism of facts and the absolute value I place on Christian forgiveness I told him I will check him out. This decision was based on my acuity towards pro-activism that sought Bergson’s ‘living unity’ rather than cultivating an assemblage of empty diagrams that are built upon various tropes I’ve seen political ideologues put to use. One very clear example of this is the above FB meme that proclaimed RFK Jr. ‘has no redeeming qualities, not one.’ It’s reactionary statements like these that honestly wreak of confirmation bias, following the herd mentality, and the like.
Fourth Side Note: Given I am now an official “We the People” volunteer organizer due to the successful strategy of my friend encouraging me to listen to RFK Jr., I have now deemed this ‘Taste and See’ method that he used to be the ‘leading potential voters to the trough’ approach that’s premised upon 1) just go and check him out, listen to what he’s got to say and 2) check the facts! Above all else, please check the facts. After all, once you reach the trough you can’t blindly drink the water much less swallow it if it has the potential for bitterness (e.g., sludge floating around, smells bad, etc.) or presents a potential danger in poisoning your body.
Drawn from my mother’s experience with horses over the years, the fact that you can literally lead a horse to water but you can’t make them drink took on new meaning for me. As I began to examine the waters of RFK Jr. at the time, I watched numerous interviews that evening and honestly woke up in the middle of the night to watch more. RFK Jr had captivated me but the question still lingered: was I going to drink the water? Especially given my real-world experience with an immoral environmental movement that he was intimately involved in.
Due to this, a plurality of questions remained but one stood at the forefront of all other questions given it directly relates to my experience with his support of pseudoscience in coal country. This question of all questions, the make-it or break-it for me is to ask if he is not only a anti-vaxxer (the central question) as many had and still do claim but is he anti-science, anti-facts, anti-truth (the central questions) or, God forbid, is he anti-Christ? The latter ‘anti’ inquiry comes from my strong suspicion that one of the two presiding ‘duopoly candidates’ seems to be very, very inclined toward the “spirit of the antichrist” as St. John called it.22 More on this in future posts given that what’s important for this particular Memory Lane Series' 6-8 is to answer the above central question(s) regarding RFK Jr.
To kick things off, I will have to embark on a complex journey into a globally traumatic event that crested at the pinnacle of our world resembling a global fascist/communist state apparatus that came to mandate us to be vaccinated before we were able to travel, go to the hospital and in some cases go out to eat or fraternize with our neighbors. I honestly don’t feel moved to cite more than one of these claims as I trust that American experiences can testify to many of these disturbing restrictions that brushed up far too closely to resembling an eschatological (end times) scenario where some infinitely lost souls during an unknown time in the future will be “marked on the right hand or the forehead” (Rev 13:16-18).
Citing one of the most egregious and contradictory positions at this time of all times we have come to call the ‘shutdown’ was crystallized and frozen into an almost picture perfect time-image of the world’s first glimpse of and into the Deleuzian “Politics of Sorcery” (i.e., a central topic of my PhD dissertation) was posited by the California Department of Public Health. During this unveiling of Deleuze’s time-image, the golden state’s regulation of “gatherings that include more than 3 households are prohibited” unveiled a restrictive austerity of the state that strictly enforced atomizing and then crystallizing the social milieu (where Order resides) all the while allowing for numerous ‘George Floyd protests in California’ (Chaos) to go unregulated.23 For those committed Deleuzian sorcerers out there, the “manifestations” of this particular flavor of chaos…24
…refuse to be aligned, or to reconstitute a destiny, but constantly split up any state of equilibrium and each time impose a new 'meander', a new break in causality, which itself forks from the previous one, in a collection of non-linear relations[…] The multiplicity of [BLM-riot] circuits thus finds a new meaning [time and time again]. It is not simply several people each having a flashback, it is the flashback belonging to several people.25
I truly do not want to debate the BLM issue here nor get too bogged down in philosophical reflections, especially how it relates to Deleuzian ‘politics of sorcery’ (this will happen in my both my first two books), as I want to illuminate the very real and unquestionable fact that something terribly wrong and honestly terrifying entered our midst between 2020-21 and it wasn’t the virus.26 To the best of my realist ability I would describe the 2020-21 event as an accelerated descent into dis-trust that carried on a continued progression towards an already existing ‘War on Reality’ that was ironically ushered in by and through the assignation of RKF Jr’s uncle.
Moreover, I still have questions that linger and will perhaps remain unanswered regarding this global EVENT but one thing remains certain, that is, conspiracies are real and so is paranoid schizophrenia. What matters at this point is how we navigate this once fringe outlier and now pop-culture tension between the realism of political corruption and the anti-realism of paranoia’s ‘time-image’ given the fact that we must all contend with what will honestly require a careful navigation of values so that we can sustain a healthy marriage between freedom and truth.
Here is precisely where we find what is at stake! Either we engage in this tedious navigation of overcoming the impending divorce between truth and freedom (they are only separated at this point) that’s poised to release Deleuze’s ‘schizophrenic war machine’ or we sit back and let the existing “multiplicity of circuits” continue to find new (abnormal) meaning within untethered conspiratorial offshoots (such as Alexandra Tanner’s “Mommies”) that worsen rather than heal the growing division between organic facts and spiritual values.27 Within this growing division, Dr. Nicola reminds us that “one of the greatest authorities on religion, race, and social justice was Martin Luther King, Jr, who understood that, ‘Science deals mainly with facts; religion deals mainly with values.’
Yet, he saw them as “complementary” rather than rivals. Science keeps religion from “crippling irrationalism and paralyzing obscurantism,” while religion prevents science from “falling into... obsolete materialism and moral nihilism.” Words to live by!
[…]To be aware of the abyss of polarization is already to be forewarned and forearmed. That knowledge encourages compromise based on an understanding of the shared tasks of social life.28
These ‘shared tasks of social life’ where the knowledge of facts should encourage compromise brings us to considering:
The Value ($) of Politics…
…forces us to contend with the facts of politics and the very reality that the modern American political landscape is without question corrupt if and only if we consider the unquestionable reality of the infamous revolving door. This absolutely nefarious door of all doors that is next door neighbors to…
STAY TUNED:
THE REST OF THIS SECTION WILL BE RELEASED ON MAY 1st @11:00EST
Virtual certain utilizes the IPCC standards outlined in this article Sophie Lewis and Ailie Gallant, “Lost in Translation: Confidence and Certainty in Climate Science,” The Conversation, August 22, 2013, https://theconversation.com/lost-in-translation-confidence-and-certainty-in-climate-science-17181#:~:text=IPCC%20measures%20certainty%20using%20the%20likelihood%20scale.%20The,can%20convey%20is%20virtually%20certain%20%2899-100%25%20probability%29.%20http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ipcc.ch%2Fpublications_and_data%2Far4%2Fwg1%2Fen%2Fch1s1-6.html
J. Eric Mathis, “MEMORY LANE SERIES - #5: A Case for Applied Sustainability: Understanding the Brune Effect of Modern Environmentalism (Part 3.14159265359...),” Seven Storey Garden substack, April 17, 2024,
Vlogbrothers, “Why [Moral] Environmentalists Hate Captain Planet,” Vlogbrothers YouTube Channel, July 27, 2018,
; my graduate thesis focused specifically on this connection between outside industry utilizing Appalachian stereotypes to exploit the region. For more see: J. Eric Mathis, A Practitioner’s Guide to Applied Sustainability: Initial Explorations (Appalachian State University, 2014).
Ibid.
Evan Hansen, Alan Collins, Michael Hendryx, Fritz Boettner and Anne Hereford, “The Long-Term Economic Benefits of Wind versus Mountain Top Removal Coal on Coal River Mountain, West Virginia,” Downstream Strategies, December (2008): vi; I intentionally used the term “knowingly” given I openly expressed my concerns about the report to the core team included my close friend Rory McIlmoil and many others. The report states that “in the long term (five investment cycles for wind turbines), the conservative wind scenario will result in 28% more jobs than the mountaintop removal scenario. Jobs in the local industry wind scenario are 314% greater than the jobs created by mountaintop removal over five investment cycles.” Moreover, they consider a broad trend potentially emerging where “other wind farms are built in southern West Virginia” and thus “a new plant in Raleigh County could provide even more jobs as the plant would manufacture turbines for these other wind sites as well. These extra jobs, earnings, and output can be significant, but are not included in this analysis.” (35) What is included is found in “Figure 12: Annual jobs for each scenario” that included Mountain Top Removal, Conservative Wind and Local Industry Wind. (36) Both the long-term “conservative wind” as well as the “local industry wind” scenarios where used as talking points in the coal river wind campaign in a effort to both stop the permit on ‘The Last Mountain’ as well as to encourage a general restriction of MTR throughout central Appalachia which was in many ways successful regarding the latter strategy.
Philosopher Gilles Deleuze discusses such crystalline seeds (i.e., computational programs) at length in his second work on cinema that describes his beloved ‘time-image.’
Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time Image (University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 81.
Maybe its empirical facts like these that cause some scientist to proclaim that some of the science regarding vaccinations is “undebatable” and thus fuels a lot of the criticism of RFK Jr.? I will deeply explore this as well as many other questions in Part II of this series entitled “The Value ($) of Politics…”
Deleuze, Cinema 2, 131.
Hansen, “The Long-Term Economic Benefits of Wind versus Mountain Top Removal Coal on Coal River Mountain, West Virginia,” 15.
Vincenzo Di Nicola, “Polarization: On the Threshold Between Political Ideology and Social Reality,” Psychiatric Times, April 10, 2024, https://www.psychiatrictimes.com/view/polarization-on-the-threshold-between-political-ideology-and-social-reality
Ibid.
We got the project up to the point of installing a anemometer tower to measure wind over a 1-year period.
First quote taken from “What we Do,” Downstream Strategies website, accessed April, 15, 2024, https://downstreamstrategies.com/ and I included a link to their video that explains their adherence to science; second quote taken from Hansen, “The Long-Term Economic Benefits of Wind versus Mountain Top Removal Coal on Coal River Mountain, West Virginia,” 10.
J. Eric Mathis, “Preface - Part 3: ‘Reality of Politics…,’” Seven Storey Garden substack, April 12, 2014,
First quote taken from Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory ( ), 268. In this work he decribes perfect how we should begin to think about the Coal River Wind Study’s virtual image the proposed windfarm by stating “that which is commonly called a fact is not reality as it appears to immediate intuition, but an adaptation of the real to the interests of practice and to the exigencies of social life. Pure intuition, external or internal, is that of an undivided continuity. We break up this continuity into elements laid side by side, which correspond in the one case to distinct words, in the other to independent objects. But, just because we have thus broken the unity of our original intuition, we feel ourselves obliged to establish between the severed terms a bond which can only then be external and superadded. For the living unity, which was one with internal continuity, we substitute the factitious unity of an empty diagram as lifeless as the parts which it holds together. Empiricism and dogmatism are, at bottom, agreed in starting from phenomena so reconstructed; they differ only in that dogmatism attaches itself more particularly to the form and empiricism to the matter. Empiricism, feeling indeed, but feeling vaguely, the artificial character of the relations which unite the terms together, holds to the terms and neglects the relations. Its error is not that it sets too high a value on experience, but that it substitutes for true experience, that experience which arises from the immediate contact of the mind with its object, an experience which is disarticulated and therefore, most probably, disfigured,-at any rate arranged for the greater facility of action and of language.” (238-240); second quote taken from TBA.
Pierre Montebello and Roxanne Lapidus, “Matter and Light in Bergson's ‘Creative Evolution’,” SubStance 36, no. 3 (2007): 91.
J. Eric Mathis, “Preface - Part 2: "Essential 'Gut Checks,’” Seven Storey Garden substack, March 29, 2014,
Samuel Mace, “Carl Schmitt Is Not Your Friend,” Fusion, accessed April 21, 2024, https://www.fusionaier.org/post/carl-schmitt-is-not-your-friend
Ibid.
After watching “The Last Mountain, director Bill Haney, subject Robert Kennedy, Jr” video after 12 years, RFK Jr. framing of the movie is accurate except that the Sustainable Williamson model transcended all the barriers he described except for the “corporate crony capitalism vs. free market capitalism” he described. A reality that translated to political corruption in the local governments that made up rural central Appalachia. Indeed, it was this corruption that eventually ‘cut off’ my project in Williamson, WV that is briefly described in the Prologue of Seven Storey Garden. His market analysis of coal country was spot on! In fact, he said then what he is saying now which leads me to believe that he never wavered from his anti-fascist/anti-communist path towards supporting a liberal democracy and thus simply absorbed the Coal River Wind Project into his toolbox for achieving his ends. In fact, he was not alone in his support of the national campaign as numerous if not all environmentalist across the country at the time were beating the Wind vs Coal drum. Moreover, it leads me to wonder if RFK Jr. was used in a similar fashion as local coal community members were used to support a movement? His face in the movie needless to say brought wide attention to the movement.
While going down memory lane and listening to various interviews regarding RFK Jr.’s involvement with the Last Mountain film, I came to learn that the wind study was not the focus for him but the destruction of coal communities and their ability to sustain themselves. He also seemed to be very focused on unveiling how corrupt the coal industry was and desired to unveil this industry to million of Americans who otherwise would not give a second thought to what happen when they flip their light switch on. Subverting democracy was and is still his focus however his focus on the coal river wind study as a viable avenue for developing an alternative for Coal River mountain causes my inner realist to cringe. All this can be found in the following video Robert Kennedy Jr., “RFK J. on The Last Mountain,” DeSmog YouTube Channel, April 9, 2011,
1 John 4:3 ESV
First quote taken from Joshua Delpech-Ramey, “Deleuze, Guattari, and the ‘Politics of Sorcery’.” SubStance 39, no. 1 (2010): 8-23; second quote taken from “Guidance for Private Gatherings,” CDPH website, accessed April 17, 2024, https://www.cdph.ca.gov/Programs/CID/DCDC/Pages/COVID-19/CDPH-Guidance-for-the-Prevention-of-COVID-19-Transmission-for-Gatherings-10-09.aspx
Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Time Image (University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 49.
Ibid, brackets are mine.
This introduction sets the stage for me unpacking what I believe entered our midst in 2020-21: J. Eric Mathis, “Preface - Part 1: ‘Introduction,’” Seven Storey Garden substack, March 22, 2024
First quote taken from Deleuze, Cinema 1, 49; it’s in this circuit were we are caught up in an eternal return or feedback loop between the past and present that fundamentally negates the future in terms of hope or obtaining reconciliation. On the previous page, Deleuze writes that “the relation of the actual image to recollection-images can be seen in the flashback. This is precisely a closed circuit which goes from the present to the past, then leads us back to the present. Or rather[…] it is a multiplicity of circuits each of which goes through a zone of recollections and returns to an even deeper, ever more inexorable, state of the present situation.” (48); second quote taken from Alexandra Tanner, “My Mommies and Me,” Jewish Currents, December 8, 2020, https://jewishcurrents.org/my-mommies-and-me
Nicola, “Polarization.”