The cackling embarrassment known as the vice president of the United States, Kamala Harris, has not been much in the public eye lately, as her handlers have likely determined that the easiest form of damage control is simply to keep her away from the microphones. However, Harris did surface on Friday at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, where she received, according to a NASA press release, “a firsthand look at how the nation’s space program studies climate change and provides crucial information to understand our planet’s changes and their impacts on our lives.” At one point, the person who is Old Joe Biden’s heartbeat away from the presidency interrupted the presentation to ask if NASA could “measure trees” in the cause of “environmental justice.” Yes, it has come to this: trees are racist now.
Video shows the NASA presenter discussing “climate adaptation strategies” when Harris interrupts to ask: “Can you, can you measure, um, trees?” The presenter, perhaps trying to humor the woke ideologue, responded “Yes!,” but Harris plowed on: “‘Cause part of that data that you are referring to, and it’s in EJ, environmental justice — that you can also track by race their averages in terms of the number of trees in the neighborhood where people live.”
NEW – Kamala Harris asks NASA if they are able to "track trees" by race as part of "environmental justice."pic.twitter.com/zFMayeTbhJ
— Disclose.tv (@disclosetv) November 6, 2021
What Harris had in mind was “tree equity,” the idea that minority communities suffer disproportionately from global warming because they generally live in urban areas that get even hotter than the rest of the country does as the internal combustion engines keep eating away at our protection from the sun’s rays, because there is a relative lack of trees compared to the rich, white suburbs. So what we need to do, you see, is plant a lot of trees in urban areas.
This is not just some UC Berkeley students getting stoned and theorizing at 3:00 a.m. about how to save the planet. Old Joe’s Build Back Better agenda actually spends $3 billion of your money and mine on “tree equity,” because as it turns out, according to the Tree Equity Score website (yes, it exists, and yes, it is not a joke), trees are “critical infrastructure that every person in every neighborhood deserves.” In fact, like so many other things these days, they’re “a basic right that we must secure.” However, trees are now distributed in a racist manner: “But a map of tree cover in America’s cities is too often a map of income and race. That’s because trees often are sparse in low-income neighborhoods and some neighborhoods of color. Ensuring equitable tree cover across every neighborhood can help address social inequities so that all people can thrive.”
Planting trees in poor neighborhoods sounds like a fine idea, but the class warfare rhetoric with which it is being pitched is another thing altogether. What might be the next step, if “tree equity” still hasn’t been adequately secured even as all manner of new trees are growing in Brooklyn, in the Bronx, and along Philadelphia’s notorious drug zone, Kensington Avenue? Back in the early days of the Soviet Union, the Communists forcibly turned the wealthy out of their homes, so that they could be divided up into apartments for The People.
Related: Well, Apparently, Trees Might Be Racist Now, Too
It’s inconceivable that anything like that could ever happen in the United States, right? With all the fashionable talk these days about the need to eradicate “systemic racism,” it would be unwise to be too sure. The increasingly authoritarian Left reminds us daily about how “the rich,” which by the time they are through will be essentially everyone making anything above the minimum wage, have to be made to pay their “fair share” in taxes, and some Leftist academics have long since moved beyond demand equality of opportunity to call for equality of outcome, which would mean the forcible redistribution of wealth, a concept outgoing New York Mayor Bill de Blasio has openly espoused.
Once we’re up to the redistribution of wealth, can calls for the redistribution of property be very far behind? Kamala Harris’ asking NASA about tracking trees in various neighborhoods and correlating that data by race certainly opened the door to that possibility. And if she were confronted about this and asked to affirm publicly her commitment to the sanctity of private property, do you really think she would do anything but cackle?
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