Yesterday, the Trump Administration placed a gag order on the EPA, prohibiting it and its employees from talking to the press, tweeting, releasing any statements, facts or studies. The reason, without question, is so that its new leaders appointed by Trump can introduce their package of anti-environmental nonsense into the agency — alternative facts, if you will — in order to better accomplish their not-so-secret mission of gutting environmental enforcement and regulation in this country.

This afternoon the person who runs the Twitter account for Badlands National Park tweeted about the environment — carbon in the atmosphere and acidity in the oceans in the industrialized age. The tweets were not arguments or partisan. They did not include conclusions or prescriptions about policy. They were simple recitations of objective scientific fact.

There is a very good chance that this person will be fired as a result. When they are, it will likely be attributed to some administrative violation or the notion that any subject apart from the national park itself is outside of their mission. But we know what it will really be about. It will be for committing the sin of stating a fact in public that reveals the intellectual bankruptcy of the beliefs of our new government. 

The writing of these tweets, which I predict will be deleted by some middle manager following orders, will constitute a career-forfeiting act of dissent and their author will, in turn, become a hero for writing them.

​We live in a mad age.

UPDATE: The rogue tweets have now been deleted. They still live on in this screencap: