MAGA Potty-Mouth Propaganda in the Duke City

A sordid and repellent nastiness smeared its way into Albuquerque politics a couple of weeks ago.

After Mayor Tim Keller did the right thing and vetoed City Council bills aimed at dismantling the professionally-staffed City/County Air Quality Control Board and replacing it with a new board more responsive to the conservative bias of the current council, something close to malign hysteria ensued. The bills’ sponsor, City Councilor Dan Lewis, published an opinion piece in the Albuquerque Journal that not only declared environmentalists were “extremists” but slandered by name the character of two prominent members of the Mountain View Neighborhood Association, and defamed members of the board itself as “paid professional job killers.” Trumpism’s droppings had fallen again on the Land of Enchantment.

That an elected official has defamed public-minded citizens serving on a lawfully appointed board as well as citizen-activists representing the single most polluted area in the Middle Rio Grande Valley is a reprehensible breech in the process and spirit of democracy in New Mexico. It is a slide into the mud that is unworthy of anyone claiming to be a responsible leader in our city.

Lewis’ editorial makes it clear that Albuquerque is in for some rough times ahead when it is forced by hard necessity to create public health regulations in response to environmental crises brought on by climate-change-caused air pollution. How can we ever seriously hope to plan ahead to preserve a decent way of life with this kind of fallacious mean-spiritedness muddying the waters?

The council’s vetoed bills were designed to thwart a set of sensible and humane public health regulations being proposed before the Air Quality Control Board in early December, a hearing which the Mayor’s veto now makes possible.

What’s known as the Health, Environment and Equity Impacts (HEEI) regulations were proposed by the Mountain View Coalition and the New Mexico Environmental Law Center, representing many thousands of New Mexicans. The goal of the proposed regs is to make sure that “no neighborhood or population group bears the disproportionate health impacts of air emissions that may with reasonable probability injure human health” and that the issuing of permits to locate businesses within poor and polluted neighborhoods “is consistent with the goals of the National Integrated Urban Air Toxics strategy and in the furtherance of environmental justice.”

To call that an “extremist” position is absurd on the face of it. Such inflammatory language is unconscionable spin doctoring, unprovoked, aggressive, and maliciously misleading. The political history of our state shows us that New Mexican’s don’t like that kind of thing one little bit. In fact, when a decent guy, New Mexico Senator and geologist, moon-walk hero Harrison Schmitt, allowed national Republicans led by Lee Atwater to run a smear-dominated reelection campaign, he lost the race despite leading in the polls against New Mexico Attorney General Jeff Bingaman. Schmitt never held public office in New Mexico again.

Councilor Lewis charged, with no supporting evidence, that Mayor Keller’s vetoes have “put the city and state of New Mexico at risk of losing thousands of jobs.” He spread the smear, adding “It’s unfortunate that the mayor has sided with environmental extremists such as Marla Painter, who claims to solely represent the South Valley, and her domestic terrorist husband Mark Rudd of the notorious Weather Underground….”

Both Painter and Rudd belong to the large plurality of New Mexico environmentalists, as does the membership of the New Mexico Environmental Law Center, and tens of thousands of others, myself included. Far from being “extremist,” environmental public health is as mainstream as any political opinion in the country. More than 40 percent of Americans identify as environmentalists, and the number is much higher in New Mexico. For a city councilor to link public health, and the amelioration of environmental injustice with terrorism and extremism is a sickening and dangerous precedent.

Rudd and Painter refused to stoop to an ad hominem response. Rudd wrote, “For decades I have publicly both criticized my past and advocated complete nonviolence in my book, my website, in numerous documentaries and in the pages of the NY Times Opinion section. Is it possible Dan Lewis doesn’t know how to read?” Painter had this to say: “I do not know how an ‘extremist environmentalist’ is defined. If it is someone who cares about justice, who cares about the fate of the planet, who is deeply concerned about the quality of air, water, soil and health of all living creatures, I guess I am an ‘extremist environmentalist.’ Is that a bad thing?” The overwhelming majority of New Mexicans, some 72% according to a 2020 Colorado College poll, would echo, “no, it’s not.” And I’m right there with them.

*Nullius in verba: take nobody’s word for it