Please tell me this is photoshopped. 😩#CongressionalTauntaunPawn https://t.co/oDIuw2bd6x
— Mark Hamill (@HamillHimself) March 26, 2019
After Senator Mike Lee’s (R-UT) bizarre rant on the Senate floor this Tuesday where he attempted to ridicule the Green New Deal by showing visual props of Ronald Reagan riding a velociraptor, his invoking an image from Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back was deemed unacceptable by the film’s hero Luke Skywalker (well, Mark Hamill, the actor who played him). As Second Nexus explained, Lee presented an image of Luke Skywalker riding a tauntaun – the camelesque animal on Hoth that Skywalker slaughtered to shelter Han Solo – to make an argument against adopting climate-friendly policies.
Hamill very much wanted to be excluded from the narrative and sent the above tweet in dismay that a sitting senator used floor time to make evident that he missed the point of Star Wars (and perhaps the environmental and ecological messages of the films).
Why This Matters: Republicans can ridicule the Green New Deal all they want but Americans are already very much feeling the effects of climate change. There’s virtually no place in the United States that is not being altered by climate change or that couldn’t use adaptation and mitigation programs put in action by our lawmakers. As much of the Midwest (and much of it Trump country) sits underwater with poisoned drinking water due to climate-related weather events, it’s hard to imagine that Republicans will still be laughing about efforts to act on climate change as they’re campaigning in the 2020 and subsequent elections.
March 28, 2019 » Green New Deal