FACE OUR FEARS: The rich don’t care about us.
A group of uber-wealthy women flew 62 miles above Earth earlier this week aboard Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin rocket for about 11 minutes, giving them a few moments of weightlessness and a whole heap of criticism when they arrived back on Earth.
Pop star Katy Perry, former Nasa rocket scientist Aisha Bowe, civil rights activist Amanda Nguyen, film producer Kerianne Flynn, Jeff Bezos's fiancée Lauren Sánchez and CBS presenter Gayle King were on board. King said a highlight of the flight was hearing Perry sing Louis Armstrong's “What a Wonderful World” as they descended.
(Insert eye roll here).
At any other time, this cringey performance of “girl boss power” would make me queasier than if I had been up in that rocket myself — but in this moment — it felt dangerously out of touch.
The PR buzz that surrounded this trip to space was sprinkled with commentary over bringing a glam squad with them which was embarrassing enough. Monse — a luxury fashion brand — took the ick up a notch, making “fashionable and functional” space suits. But then to hear Perry say that she felt “super connected to life” and “so connected to love” after kissing the earth upon arrival did me in.
While the cost of Perry's spaceflight was not publicly disclosed, a seat on a previous Blue Origin flight was auctioned for $28 million. Blue Origin requires a $150,000 deposit to reserve a seat while other companies, like Virgin Galactic, have quoted prices between $200,000 and $450,000 for similar suborbital flights.
I can think of plenty other more important and pressing issues that money could have gone to in this moment. Can you?
A lot of people did and weren’t shy to share on social media.
King was hurt by the criticism of their journey and told Entertainment Tonight: “I'm very disappointed and very saddened by it. And I also say this, what it's doing to inspire other women and young girls, please don't ignore that.”
Ignore what? It seems King is the one with blinders on.
Eos recently reported this:
“NASA has dropped its commitment to land the first woman, the first person of color, and the first non-American astronaut on the Moon through the Artemis program. This move is in response to the Trump administration’s executive directives to eliminate diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs in the federal government.
Abandoning a commitment to diversity will likely affect who is selected to crew the Artemis III mission, currently planned to land astronauts on the moon in 2027.
Journalists at the Orlando Sentinel reported that NASA’s webpage for the Artemis mission removed a sentence that was once a cornerstone of the Artemis program: “NASA will land the first woman, first person of color, and first international partner astronaut on the Moon using innovative technologies to explore more of the lunar surface than ever before.”
As of 21 March, that sentence no longer appears on NASA’s Artemis website.”
King also addressed critics who complained about the environmental impact, saying that Bezos' mission with Blue Origin was to discover if the rocket would be able to take waste from Earth into space to “make our planet cleaner.”
Try again. What would make this planet cleaner is if Amazon and other companies like them actually started taking climate change seriously and reduced their carbon footprint substantially — or better yet — ceased to exist.
According to Geek Wire: Amazon annually releases a corporate sustainability report that discloses its carbon emissions, which have declined slightly over the last two years. The company tallied 68.8 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent in 2023 — which is on par with the emissions generated by the nation of Hungary.
Amazon continues to stoke the flames of the climate crisis through its significant greenhouse gas emissions, reliance on fossil fuels for transportation and logistics, extensive packaging waste, and destruction of returned/unsold products. (Just to scratch the surface).
But it gets worse. By using these women to distract us from the harsh inequities women are experiencing more and more in the United States each day, it is diminishing what is happening in real time.
Reality Check: Women are literally fighting for their lives and their rights.
The SAVE Act, which could disenfranchise 69 MILLION women, as well as trans people, immigrants and the elderly from voting, recently passed the House. Even more disturbing, four Democrats joined the Republicans to deny people the right to vote simply because they changed their name, which will now differ from their original birth certificate.
The Republicans are working overtime to defend their decision to back this bill, with Rep. Scott Perry (R-10) recently tweeting: “Requiring proof of citizenship to register for federal elections is a solution to voter fraud; which is why I co-sponsored the SAVE Act that just passed the House — despite the extremists who still vote against election integrity.”
Do you know how many cases of voter fraud have been found in the highly contested state of Pennsylvania? Heritage data goes back 30 years and covers 32 elections with over 100 million votes cast and found only 39 cases of voter fraud. Just 39.
The percentage of fraudulent votes in Arizona, for example, over the last 25 years of elections was a negligible 0.0000845%.
No election outcome in the U.S. has ever been altered by ballot fraud.
So what is this really about?
This is about voter suppression. The less people that vote, the more likely Republicans can claim victories. This is about misogyny. MAGA hates women. Period. Everything they have shown us to this point underscores that idea, from their deadly abortion bans to threats to cut Medicaid — a service that finances roughly 41% of births in the United States. Nearly two out of every three adult women enrolled in Medicaid are in their reproductive years. They don’t care about us.
In fact, while faux-feminist Katy Perry floated in space to “feel love,” NASA scrubbed any mention of women in space, thanks to Trump’s inane DEI-bans. Scientific American reported that the word “inclusion” has been removed as one of NASA's core pillars. And as 404 Media reported in February, NASA personnel were directed to remove mentions of women in leadership positions from its website.
Meanwhile, Perry hasn’t said one word about these attacks by the Trump regime on women in both space travel and science.
Who is this mutated form of feminism for? Because here on Earth, unless it is intersectional, it’s just girl-boss cosplay.
Until next time, take care of yourselves and each other.
In solidarity,
Natalie
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