Climate deniers backed violence and spread pro-insurrection messages before, during, and after January 6
As the mass radicalization wave surged, some individual opponents of climate action may have been swept along by its broad rightward push, propelling them closer to endorsing political violence.
On the evening of January 6, 2021, the day of the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, former coal mining executive Don Blankenship, who ran against Donald Trump as a third-party candidate in the 2020 election, began an all-caps Twitter thread.
“Why is it that American politicians and the American media support citizen uprisings in China, Poland, South Africa, and throughout the world, but when an American citizen is killed during an uprising against a corrupt American government the citizens are at fault?” @DonBlankenship posted on Twitter.