Ramasmarmy Amplifies Right Wing Climate, Racial Frames. Also, Hates to be Called Ramasmarmy.

Clip above should begin at the 3:02 mark, where Dana Bash replays Vivek Ramaswamy’s comments as recent as Friday, comparing White Supremacy to mythical Unicorns. This just days before an avowed White supremacist gunned down three black people in a Jacksonville Dollar General.

Phillip Bump in the Washington Post:

It’s useful to consider why Ramaswamy is downplaying the idea of white supremacy as a force in the United States. People like Trump and Tucker Carlson have extrapolated from “criticism of embedded racism that benefits Whites” to “criticism of Whites” to “portraying Whites as inherently racist.” By now, nearly a decade after the start of the “Black Lives Matter” movement, any allegation of racism triggers mockery on the right as necessarily opportunistic or insincere. So Ramaswamy, in his ceaseless effort to generate approval from his audiences, joins in the scoffing.

Dana Bash catches Vivek Ramaswamy in another lie, then it gets heated as she keeps confronting him, and he tries to bullsh*t his way out of it. (Video: CNN) pic.twitter.com/GGgMLal4Z9

— Mike Sington (@MikeSington) August 27, 2023

Then that guy in Florida had to shoot those people in that store. So, to Bash, Ramaswamy admits there’s anti-Black racism — but blames it on the way White people have purportedly been treated. If there is a throughline from efforts to address systemic racism to gunning down Black shoppers, it seems fair to suggest that perhaps the path includes opportunistic arguments that frame those efforts as attacks on White people and their status.

Ramaswamy is a student of right-wing rhetoric, obviously. For example, he pushed back on Bash’s questions about the shooting by suggesting that having respect for the victims necessitated “not bring[ing] them into partisan politics.” He also argued that it was the left who were the real racists, citing, as an example, tech journalist Kara Swisher calling him “Ramasmarmy,” something he said was “effectively reducing me to the color of my skin and my attributes.”

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FYI
Googling “smarmy, meaning” returns:

“ingratiating and wheedling in a way that is perceived as insincere or excessive.” as in
“a smarmy, unctuous reply”
Synonyms include

• smug.
• buttery.
• fulsome.
• insincere.
• oily.
• oleaginous.
• sleek.
• smooth. suave.

More from the CNN interview, the complete exchange on Climate. Ramaswamy brings up the “In the 70s, they said there would be an Ice Age” crock.

"So you're saying, build taller buildings and have better air-conditioning and heating systems?"
CNN's Dana Bash questions GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy's proposed solutions to the climate crisis. @CNNSotu #CNNSOTU pic.twitter.com/vtpD5LsRWW

— CNN (@CNN) August 27, 2023

Journal of the American Meteorological Society, September 1, 2008:

Climate science as we know it today did not exist in the 1960s and 1970s. The integrated enterprise embodied in the Nobel Prizewinning work of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change existed then as separate threads of research pursued by isolated groups of scientists. Atmospheric chemists and modelers grappled with the measurement of changes in carbon dioxide and atmospheric gases, and the changes in climate that might result. Meanwhile, geologists and paleoclimate researchers tried to understand when Earth slipped into and out of ice ages, and why. An enduring popular myth suggests that in the 1970s the climate science community was predicting “global cooling” and an “imminent” ice age, an observation frequently used by those who would undermine what climate scientists say today about the prospect of global warming. A review of the literature suggests that, on the contrary, greenhouse warming even then dominated scientists’ thinking as being one of the most important forces shaping Earth’s climate on human time scales. More importantly than showing the falsehood of the myth, this review describes how scientists of the time built the foundation on which the cohesive enterprise of modern climate science now rests.