The headline itself was not surprising. Seeing it on the leftist Colorado Public Radio website is how coffee got spewed across our computer monitor.
Activists with Sunrise Movement passed out a fake letter from the City of Denver to the media Thursday during the Sustainable Denver Summit declaring the climate emergency while trashing one of the event sponsors, Suncor.
The activists also tweeted it as an actual letter to fool the public:
We’re at the @SustainableDen Summit and we are so excited that @MayorHancock, @GovofCO, and the Office of Sustainability have apologized for allowing @Suncor to sponsor the event…and are finally declaring a Climate Emergency! pic.twitter.com/DYSprJfRhK
— Sunrise Colorado 🌅 (@SunriseMvmtCO) December 5, 2019
Once exposed as a fake, a group leader stood by their tactic with the most bizarre of explanations:
“It puts our representatives in an uncomfortable position where they can’t just divert attention away from the activists. They have to address what we’ve called them out for, and then they either have to agree and declare a climate emergency or they have to publicly backtrack that they’re unwilling to do so,” (Michele) Wiendling said. “That’s more important than temporary disinformation.”
Temporary disinformation is not what we would call it. Looks more like forgery and extortion to us.
This isn’t the first time climate activists have pulled a “disinformation” stunt to trick the media and public into thinking the end is near.
Extinction Rebellion was so convincing in their lies that Gov. Polis had declared a climate emergency during a Boulder event, a Denver TV station reported it as fact.
Even more galling is the associate professor in science at UC Boulder who couldn’t bring himself to condemn the actions, because some see it as clever and effective — as opposed to outright deceit.
But in the understatement of the decade, the professor did warn such treachery (our word) is not useful in building bridges of trust.
Fake news has a habit of doing that.