Here the word “Resist” appears scrawled on the beach in Acadia National Park in Maine. Photo: Alt National Park Service/Facebook
Badlands National Park made headlines last week for defying an executive-issued gag order and tweeting out climate facts. The tweets have since been deleted, but the spirit of bureaucrats going rogue has swelled, with a number of Twitter accounts and Facebook pages cropping up claiming to be the “alt” or “rogue” versions of said agency, and part of “the resistance.”
It all sounds very Terminator – ironic because on Thursday President Trump and Arnold Schwarzenegger had a very public back and forth about the new Apprentice‘s poor ratings ending with Schwarzenegger saying they should switch jobs. Maybe he is a robot sent back in time by the Resistance after all.
The Alt National Park Service has the largest of all of the so-called rogue social media accounts and pages with over 1.2 million followers. The page has been reposting articles about key environmental issues (including a controversial bill that would lay the groundwork for drilling in National Parks, and proposed legislation to abolish the EPA), and claims to be a coalition of 34 National Park Service employees, 19 National Forest Service employees, and dozens of environmental scientists. Alt NASA and Alt EPA also have a presence on Facebook.
On Twitter, the number of Alt or rogue agencies is larger. Alt USNPS, Alt NASA, and Alt EPA are on there. And so are Alt FDA, Alt NOAA, Alt USDA, Alt DoD, Alt Citizenship and Immigration Services, Rogue POTUS Staff, as well as a handful of alternative twitter accounts for the individual national parks themselves (Bad Hombre Lands National Park is a particularly clever one).
The Inertia has yet to confirm claims that any of these accounts are in fact run by current or former of employees of the actual federal agencies and national parks.
It is interesting, though, that these social media accounts that claim to be part of “#theresistance” have appropriated the prefix “alt,” a clear nod to those of the so-called “alt-right” who championed President Trump’s candidacy – evoking the topsy-turvy feeling that the original “alt” has become mainstream and the mainstream has become “alt.”
