Last year we wrote a series of posts about the pro-drilling Americans for American Energy’s bogus grassroots “Stop the War on the Poor” campaign being fronted by Niger Innis and Harry Jackson.
Over the last six months, we haven’t seen anything about them and assumed that they had disbanded … but we were wrong. Apparently, they are still hard at work and are now targeting Robert Redford for hating the poor:
Hollywood’s Sundance Kid is hurting poor people.
So say some East Coast ministers and conservative activists, who took to the streets in front of a downtown Salt Lake City theater on the eve of Robert Redford’s Sundance Film Festival to accuse the actor of holding down low-income Americans with his opposition to oil and gas drilling near national parks in Utah.
The protesters, led by the Congress of Racial Equality’s national spokesman Niger Innis, suggested Redford should “relinquish his wealth” and live like a poor person. They complained that the filmmaker’s anti-drilling stance could lead to higher energy prices for inner-city residents, forcing them to accept a lower standard of living.
The clergymen prayed for Redford “to see the light” and linked his environmental activism with racism.
“The high energy prices we’re going to see this winter are essentially discriminatory,” said Bishop Harry Jackson Jr. of the Hope Christian Church in Beltsville, Md., chairman of the High-Impact Leadership Coalition, a petroleum industry advocate.
This whole thing is laughable, but some good has come of it – like the fact that, from this point forward, whenever I mention Harry Jackson, I will be able to follow it with the phrase “petroleum industry advocate.”
