‘Your Response to Charlottesville Enables Racism, Sexism, & Harms Our Country and Planet’
Daniel Kammen has been the Science Envoy for the U.S. State Dept. since February of last year, but on Wednesday he resigned in a very public manner – including a hidden message in his letter of resignation that says “IMPEACH.”
“Mr. President, I am resigning as Science Envoy. Your response to Charlottesville enables racism, sexism, & harms our country and planet,” Kammen wrote on Twitter, including a copy of his resignation letter.
But as HuffPost’s Politics reporter Jennifer Bendery noted on Twitter, the first letters of each paragraph send an important but hidden message: they spell “IMPEACH.”
“My decision to resign is in response to your attacks on core values of the United States,” he says in the “M” paragraph of the IMPEACH message. “Your failure to condemn white supremacists and neo-Nazis has domestic and international ramifications.”
“Character is vital in leadership,” he notes in the “C” portion of “IMPEACH.” He says President Dwight D. Eisenhower said: “A people [or person] that values its privileges above principles soon loses both.”Â
Mashable notes that “Trump can’t afford to lose any scientists from his administration, considering he lacks a White House science advisor, and has barely staffed the Office of Science and Technology Policy, which exists to advise the Executive Branch on science and engineering issues, among other tasks.”
Kammen isn’t the first to resign with such a flourish. On Aug. 18, the entire humanities and the arts council resigned with an acrostic that said “resist.”
Kammen holds degrees in physics from Cornell and Harvard. His appointment announcement touts that he is “a distinguished professor of energy at the University of California, Berkeley, and founding director of the Renewable and Appropriate Energy Laboratory. He is also co-director of the Berkeley Institute of the Environment, director of the Transportation Sustainability Research Center, and serves on the Advisory Committee for Energy & Environment for the X-Prize Foundation. As a Science Envoy, Dr. Kammen will focus on energy innovation in the Middle East and Africa.”
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