(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . You'll Never Guess Who's Debunking Deniers And Dunking On Disinfo Outlets Now [1] ['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.'] Date: 2023-10-24 Last summer, we played a fun game of "who said it, us or the UN?" Now it's time for another round, though this time we're going to give you some quotes that read like they could've been published here, and we'll see if you can guess who said it. First up are quotes from someone with a bit of a bigger public profile than us, who recently felt the need to spell out some basics of climate change. "Despite all attempts to deny, conceal, gloss over or relativize the issue,” they write, “the signs of climate change are here and increasingly evident." Yet "in recent years, some have chosen to deride" facts and reality, "bring[ing] up allegedly solid scientific data, like the fact that the planet has always had, and will have, periods of cooling and warming." But "they forget to mention another relevant datum: that what we are presently experiencing is an unusual acceleration of warming, at such a speed that it will take only one generation – not centuries or millennia – in order to verify it." The author concludes, "It is no longer possible to doubt the human – 'anthropic' – origin of climate change." So, any guesses as to who wrote this fancy version of a disinfo debunking? Here's a hint: the writer felt "obliged to make these clarifications, which may appear obvious, because of certain dismissive and scarcely reasonable opinions that I encounter, even within the Catholic Church." Yes, the author of those quotes is none other than Pope Francis, Holy Father of the Catholic Church! His Holiness wrote those words in his Apostolic Exhortation Laudate Deum , a follow-up to his 2015 Encyclical Laudato Si’ , which implored Catholics to take climate change seriously and take action to stop it . It seems that even the Pope has had to come to terms with the fact that constand floods of disinformation create a major barrier to climate action, one that even the highest moral authority was unable to pierce through in his previous call to action. That leads us to our second surprise speaker, who called out the malign influence of right-wing disinformation outlets in a new book. We're definitely not going to buy the biography of this person (your first hint) but CNN's Oliver Darcy reported on it , so we'll quote Darcy's descriptions and then see if you can guess who he's talking about. According to Darcy, this person "believes the right-wing media machine is at fault for much of the radicalization that has disfigured the GOP." The figure "unleashed a torrent of criticism aimed squarely at the information universe in which most [Republicans] consume their news, characterizing it in a new book as a dangerous propaganda factory detached from reality, poisoning the minds of its inhabitants." That certainly sounds like something we'd say, as does Darcy's conclusion, which describes how the subject blames "the Rupert Murdoch-controlled Fox News as an institution for some of the ugly rhetoric injected into the public discourse." So who is this critic who might have a future filling in for us here at the Roundup and helping point out how dangerous the right-wing disinfo machine is to democracy and society? Here's another hint: they were "once the Republican Party's standard-bearer," Darcy noted at the top of his column, and a "one-time GOP presidential nominee." Give up? That's okay; it's a tough one. Because we certainly never would have guessed that the criticisms of right-wing media would have come from Mr. 47% himself: Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT). Having recently announced his retirement from the Senate, Romney's now free to speak honestly about the disinfo media shaping his political party, and it turns out he's sounding a lot like us! Yes, that is very weird and uncomfortable for us, but hey, if you need to find an extra hobby in your retirement, Mitt, drop us a line! Maybe we can have you write some guest posts about what it was like to happily participate for decades in "the dangerous propaganda factory" of right-wing news, before finally wising up to its poisonous impacts after it turned on you (as Darcy noted.) Seriously, though, if Mitt Romney and the Pope are sounding like us now, that’s a clearer signal than any that, yes, climate change is real, disinfo is in fact a major threat, and we need action now. 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