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Badlands National Park Service Just Went Rogue In Response To Trump

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Robin Andrews

Science & Policy Writer

A parody account tweets snarky things in support of the actual NPS, which temporarily went rogue itself. BadIandsNPS via Twitter

President Trump never likes it when you call anything of his “small.” We’re all uncomfortably aware of what happened when he was accused of having small hands. In addition, he’s blamed non-existent zombie voters on giving Clinton the popular vote victory, and he’s clearly irked by the tiny size of his inauguration crowd.

Now he’s going after the National Park Service (NPS), the organization responsible for maintaining America’s beautiful federal land. This land also includes the National Mall in Washington D.C., the area in which crowds gathered to watch the inauguration ceremony of Mr Trump.

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After retweeting a photograph comparing the much larger crowd present at Obama’s 2009 inauguration with Trump’s own, the NPS was temporarily banned from tweeting. The offending retweets were also removed.

A South Dakota subsidiary of the NPS, the Badlands National Park, decided to continue to do what it normally did in response to this – tweet about parks, nature, environmental protection, and climate change. It seems that the new administration didn’t take too kindly to the last of those and ordered their deletion.

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After a day or two, however, whomever was managing the Twitter account decided to post the missing tweets about climate change back online. These were also soon deleted, but not before plenty of people screengrabbed them and shared them wildly online.

At the time of writing, the rogue tweeting appears to have stopped, and the Badlands account has been somewhat purged of any references to climate change that also mention human activity.

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Weirdly, it appears that some rather pertinent tweets about the phenomenon still exist on the account, particular when it comes to describing it as a threat to US national security.

Scientists all over the Web have joined in a chorus of support for the NPS, the promotion of science, and the right to the freedom of speech in general. More amusingly, though, are the unofficial NPS Twitter accounts that have cropped up.

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One of them, @BadIandsNPS, describes itself as the “Shmofficial feed of South Dakota's Badlands National Park (Great Again™ Edition).” If you need to find the home of snark on Twitter right now, then this would be your best bet.

“Fun Fact: Prairie dogs live in colonies that can comprise thousands of individuals. As such they are collectivists and will be eradicated,” one tweet reads.

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“The Badlands were created over eons through the gradual erosion of sediment,” another reads, before noting that “the erosion of U.S. democracy, however, will be far more rapid.”

Another account, @AltNatParkSer, says that it’s the unofficial “resistance” team of the NPS. Although less snarky, it does suggest that if you don’t like what’s happening to America right now, there are several ways you can fight back.


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  • tag
  • climate change,

  • rogue,

  • National Park Service,

  • trump,

  • inauguration,

  • tweets,

  • NPS,

  • Badlands,

  • supporters,

  • crowd size

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