The Slatest

Today in Conservative Media: The Unwelcome Return of Al Gore

Al Gore speaks during a Q&A following a special screening of ‘An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power’ at ACMI on July 13, 2017.

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A daily roundup of the biggest stories in right-wing media.

On Monday, conservatives derided former Vice President Al Gore’s return to the spotlight in advance of his sequel to the climate change documentary An Inconvenient Truth. Julie Kelly at the National Review wrote:

The former vice president and Nobel Peace Prize winner is back in the public eye whether you like it or not. Since Trump’s announcement last month that the U.S. would pull out of the Paris climate pact, Gore has been on a media blitz to reprise his role as the prophet of planetary doom. The timing couldn’t be better for him. Next week, Gore’s new film, An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power, will debut. It’s the follow-up to An Inconvenient Truth, his 2006 documentary that won two Oscars and became the rallying cry for climate-change activists around the world.

Gore has mostly avoided politics and kept a relatively low public profile the past several years, heading up the Climate Reality Project, a nonprofit he founded on the heels of the movie’s success. (He also divorced his wife, Tipper, and sold his Current TV channel to Al Jazeera in 2013 for a reported $100 million.) But Trump’s presidency is now breathing new life into this aging climate crusader, and he is poised to play the Climate Good Cop to Trump’s Bad Climate Cop.

The Daily Caller’s Mike Bastach noted that most Americans disagree with Gore’s assertion that climate change is “the most serious challenge we face.” “[A] Bloomberg poll found that only one in 10 Americans agree with this statement,” he wrote. “In fact, more than three times as many Americans say health care reform is the most important issue facing the U.S. today, according to the poll. All told, 90 percent of Americans identified other issues they felt should be top priorities, like terrorism, jobs and taxes.”

At NewsBusters, Julia A. Seymour mocked CBS for a profile of Gore that aired on the show Sunday Morning. “Acting like a fanboy instead of a professional journalist, [CBS national correspondent Lee] Cowan told former Vice President Al Gore, ‘You’re a movie star, in many respects,’ ” she wrote. “When Gore protested, Cowan insisted: ‘It’s you and Wonder Woman this summer. It is!’ To which Gore laughed and said, ‘Yeah, right.’ ”

In other news:

Conservative outlets ran multiple posts on Kid Rock’s supposed Senate run. On Sunday, the site Girls Just Wanna Have Guns wrote that Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer is “panicking” given a fundraising email the senator sent referencing Rock. “Whatever Kid Rock is up to,” the post read, “we are loving the hell it’s causing the left.” Independent Journal Review’s William Valliancourt covered the first apparent stages of the Rock campaign:

Ritchie has launched a campaign website, kidrockforsenate.com, which boasts slogans like, “Party to the People,” “I’ll Rock the Party,” and “You Never Met a Politician Quite Like Me,” playing off of lyrics to his songs. He is also selling merchandise from a site affiliated with Warner Bros. records.

About this, the Michigan native wrote on his personal website, kidrock.com, “I’m not signed to Warner Bros!!!” He continued, “Like politicians write books during their campaigns, I’m planning on putting out music during mine.”

The Daily Caller’s David Hookstead quoted Rock’s first policy statement, released on Twitter. “I Believe if you work your butt off and pay your taxes, you should be able to easily understand and navigate the laws, tax codes, health care and anything else the government puts in place that affects us all,” Rock said in the attached image on the tweet.