New York announced Thursday that it will become the next state to ban the sale of new gas cars by 2035.

At a press conference in the Chester Maple Municipal Garage in White Plains, New York, Governor Kathy Hochul announced that she would be directing the State Department of Environmental Conservation to ban the sale of new gas-powered cars by 2035. Under new state regulations yet to be announced, all new passenger vehicles would be required to be zero-emissions. New York is the latest state to adopt the policy after California announced it would ban new gas car sales by 2035 in August.

“In New York, every week is climate week,” Hochul said after pulling up to the podium in an electric Chevrolet Bolt. “And we’re committed to protecting our environment and combating climate change every single day … electric vehicles are the key to achieving this.”

In a separate statement on the governor’s website, Hochul outlined the details of the new regulatory scheme: under the new rules, by model year 2026, electric vehicles must make up 35% of all new vehicles sales; by 2030, 68% of all new vehicle sales must be electric. The scheme would also establish new emissions standards for cars, light-duty trucks, and medium-duty vehicles from model years 2026 through 2034. In addition, Hochul said in her press conference that by 2027, all new school buses must be zero emissions; the whole fleet must zero-emissions, statewide, by 2035.

Hochul also announced a series of new financial incentives for residents to buy an electric vehicle, and federal and state investments to build fast charging stations and other infrastructure. The Department of Environmental Conservation made available some $5.75 million in grants to help local governments purchase electric cars for their municipal fleet, and to build local fast charging stations.

The state also put up $10 million to its “Drive Clean Rebate” initiative, which offers residents an extra $2,000 state tax rebate, on top of the $7,500 federal tax rebate for new electric vehicles under the Inflation Reduction Act. The state also received $175 million in federal investments form the bipartisan infrastructure law in 2021 to build a network of EV charging stations, on top a $250 million commitment from the state.

“We’re really putting our foot down on the accelerator and revving up our efforts to make sure we have this transition — not someday in the future, but on a specific date, a specific year — by the year 2035,” Hochul said.

Hochul specifically cited California’s move to ban gas-powered car sales as the impetus behind her state’s decision. “We had to wait for California to take a step because there’s some federal requirement that California had to go first … but once they made that decision we were able to step up immediately and say ‘now there’s nothing holding us back.’”

https://www.dailywire.com/news/new-york-becomes-latest-state-to-ban-sale-of-new-gas-cars-by-2035

Trump won the presidency because of his supporters’ ability to use memes and the Internet, a panel of Harvard researchers and professors said.

Most of the panel is from the campus Shorenstein Center, which is currently being sued for false claims about the election and recently hired former CNN host Brian Stelter as a fellow, so take its commentary for what it’s worth.

“Would the January 6th insurrection have happened if not driven by online mobilization tactics like memes and viral content to spread disinformation, promote extremist ideology, and prompt real-world action?” the panel asked.

“Many of the meme lords who really went to work in 2015, they had they were riding off the wave of their success of Gamergate,” Emily Dreyfuss, a director at the Shorenstein Center, said during the Monday panel.

She recently wrote a book with two of the other panelists called “Meme Wars: The Untold Story of the Online Battles Upending Democracy in America.”

Trump was “ the perfect archetype of a meme leader,” Dreyfuss said.

Political operatives like Steve Bannon and Roger Stone “understood that he would be catnip to these alternative media systems and to these folks who wanted something different,” she said.

“So they played them,” Dreyfuss said.

Another researcher and co-author on the meme wars book, blamed conservatives for Hillary Clinton’s inability to connect with voters, not her thousands of character flaws.

“Hillary Clinton was not memeable nor was she meme savvy and even when she launched memetic campaigns online, even with her branding, as my class knows, it’s been hijacked by the right,” Joan Donovan, a researcher with the Shorenstein Center, told the audience. “So when she came out and said things like the alt-right or basket of deplorables or wrote about Pepe on her website it was just like anything online that had to do with Hillary Clinton was incredibly corrosive.”

Pepe is a cartoon frog that some trolls on the Internet adapted primarily to get under the skin of liberals, which it continues to do, seven years later.

Donovan also blamed Russia for Trump’s 2016 victory. She has previously blamed “right-wing agitators” for pushing a false narrative about lawless rioting in 2020.

Shorenstein researcher Brian Friedberg and a co-author of the book cited above, said that Republicans will probably rely on racist messaging to win in 2022, in response to a question about what narratives to be on the lookout for.

“There will be a continued attempt by the right to simultaneously build a multicultural coalition and continue to protect systemic racism,” the researcher said.

“That sort of contradiction and embracing that contradiction has been very discursively powerful in social media so you get sort of one half of the coalition is talking about a race war and the other half is talking about building a multicultural working class that votes Republican,” Friedberg opined.

https://www.thecollegefix.com/trump-won-because-of-memes-harvard-panel-concludes/

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