Folks, is it woke to want clean air?
Newsmax host Greg Kelly seemed to ask that very question on Wednesday night when he praised the Canadian wildfire smoke covering the eastern seaboard, claiming he enjoyed the odor coming from the “pretty” and “beautiful” dense orange haze.
With the intense forest fires in Canada suddenly making New York City’s air the most polluted on Earth and the air quality actually getting worse by the day, Kelly—a real-life MAGA cartoon character—let his viewers know to stop worrying and love the smoke.
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“Our woke friends to the north in Canada, their forest fires got out of hand and, well, this is what we’re dealing with,” the Greg Kelly Reports anchor cheerfully declared. “It’s complicating some people's lives, but it’s manageable. I’ll tell you, it actually smells like wood smoke. It’s not an unpleasant odor, to be honest. It’s kind of weird when it seeps into the building, but outdoors, I can deal with it.”
With a beatific smile, he did acknowledge the smoke was a “real thing” and “a real complication” for “folks with respiratory issues” before complaining about Democrats tying the issue to climate change.
“The White House is trying to exploit this, saying it’s all because of global warming and the normal talking points that go with that,” he grumbled. “I don’t think that’s the case. I think it’s a forest fire. This actually has happened a couple of times before in history.”
From there, Kelly went right back to gawking at the Manhattan skyline that looks like it was plucked directly out of Blade Runner 2049.
“And for the time being, we can live with it,” he concluded. “But it is pretty, it actually is pretty. It’s a beautiful, interesting aura the city has right now.”
Of course, Kelly is not the only right-wing media star to downplay the dangerous smoke which has plummeted air quality to hazardous and unhealthy levels across the United States.
Several Fox News hosts, for instance, criticized experts for urging people who may be impacted by the smoke to stay indoors and wear N95 masks whenever outside, calling it “mask insanity” while claiming those worried about the hazards are “snowflakes.” Because, naturally, everything is now part of the culture wars.
