On Monday, the White House held a special briefing for “new media” — by which they actually meant “pro-Trump influencers,” including such luminaries as Arynne Wexler (who thanked the Trump administration for English-speaking Uber drivers), former senior aide to Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Link Lauren (whose bleached blond hair earned him the nickname “MAGA Malfoy” and who accused Joe Biden of increasing suicide rates), former White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer, “DC Draino,” and Kambree Nelson, an ambassador for the America First Policy Institute.
While they were all special in their own ways, Kambree Nelson is the only one that we know of who was once convinced for seven days straight that the moon had disappeared.
Kambree was widely mocked on Monday after directly asking Karoline Leavitt which direction she should go in, which is not a thing reporters generally do at press briefings.
“I’m kind of the nerd when it comes to reporting,” Nelson said. “I’m not the headline news girl. I’m the nuts-and-bolts, I’m the policy-type nerd; so what direction do you advise me to go into? Like the White House files that y’all send out every single day? Because that’s what people are used to. When they wanna ask me questions, they wanna know the nuts and bolts of everything.”
“I wish there were people in the legacy media that were like you,” Leavitt responded, which may be one of the few true things she’s said so far in her tenure as White House press secretary.
But Nelson is not just a Trump sycophant, she’s also a moon truther. Or she was, for the seven days she recently spent insisting that the moon had disappeared entirely.
“Has anyone seen the moon lately?” Nelson policy-nerdishly asked her 625,000 Xitter followers in October of last year. “I’ve been looking for 7 days.”
A community note attached to her query explained, “[t]he Moon can be difficult to observe in the days around a New Moon because only a small portion of the sunlit side faces Earth and because the Moon is above the horizon mostly during the daytime in this phase. A new moon happens every 29.5 days, most recently on Oct 2.”
A follower agreed with her, saying, “I have not seen it at all. It’s like it disappeared,” and Nelson responded, “It has. Why is everyone silent about this? They are quiet about the white sun, too.”
In case you were until now blissfully unaware, there’s a conspiracy that the sun used to be yellow or orange and has since turned white. It’s not clear what they think caused it, or why anyone would turn the sun white, but they definitely remember it being yellow or orange when they were kids. My guess is that it would have something to do with the flat earth belief that the US is covered by a giant glass firmament, kind of like a snow globe, but I see no mention of the two conspiracies together.
Notably, whenever anyone said they had seen the moon, Nelson more or less called them liars.
This is a person the White House sees as a quality reporter, deserving of access to one of their press briefings. Someone who thinks it’s possible for the moon to “disappear” is someone Karoline Leavitt wishes the “legacy media” would be more like. Perhaps next time, the New York Times can send in a reporter who believes the Middle Ages never happened or CNN can dispatch someone who thinks Tom Hanks wears shoes made of red baby leather.
All is weird in this, the weirdest of all possible timelines.
OPEN THREAD.
PREVIOUSLY ON WONKETTE!
I gotta say, after a 44-year career as an astronomy professor, I find this aggressive ignorance and casual idiocy about celestial matters to be especially painful.
The dynamics of the solar system are among the best-understood things in science, and the subject is almost indescribably beautiful.
Subway art. Seen at the 96th St. station for B/C. https://substack.com/@ziggywiggy/note/c-113672266?utm_source=notes-share-action&r=2knfuc