Stephen King sparks anger after blaming Texas power outages on voters
0Stephen King has sparked fury after he fired off a mocking tweet, blaming Texas voters for this week's catastrophic power outages that has left millions of residents in the dark amid a historic winter storm. 'Hey, Texas! Keep voting for officials who don’t believe in climate change and supported privatization of the power grid! Maybe in 4 years you can vote for Trump again. He believes in the latter but not the former. Perfect,' the best-selling author tweeted on Tuesday, King, 73, an outspoken liberal who lives in Maine, quickly came under fire from furious commenters on both sides of the political spectrum, who collectively accused him of displaying a striking lack of compassion for Texans' plight, and also for painting the whole state with a broad brush. Share this article Share 1.5k shares 'Hey Stephen! Texan here. Almost half of our citizenry is Democrat. Our voting laws are the MOST oppressive in the country and we are gerrymandered worse than most other states,' tweeted user @smartsassylib. 'But congrats on owning the citizens of a state that has more Democrats than Maine.'Another peeved commenter wrote: 'I'm sitting in the dark, shivering until my teeth chatter, afraid to sleep because I'm too cold. If I die in this, leave my body on his doorstep, please and thanks.'User @kris10sthoughts chimed in: 'So I guess it’s cool that me and my family suffer in the cold because we don’t live in the right state? Cool. Good to know. I’d think that one of our country’s beloved authors would know not to make sweeping generalizations about an entire state, yet here we are.'Many of the tweets criticizing King's 'hot take' on the disaster unfolding in Texas exhorted him to not kick people when they're down, and to take into account political realities that are beyond average voters' control.'There are dems in Texas & they're working their a** off in the face of gerrymandering & voter suppression. They don't need this chauvinistic bs,' one tweet read. Some people, however, have come to The Shining author's defense, suggesting that King was challenging Texans to do better. 'I don't want anyone to suffer but am very frustrated that TX politicians voted to let other states suffer,' one supporters wrote. 'How's that fair? Elections have consequences.' A few of the critics have turned the tables on the celebrated master of the horror genre, arguing that according to his own logic, if Texans were responsible for the power outages, than, as a Maine voter, he was personally responsible for last year's re-election of Republican Senator Susan Collins. 'Please direct any out-of-state complaints about her to him! Thanks!!' one Twitter wit urged. Earlier this week, as many as 4.4million Texans were without power thanks to a bungled response to once-in-a-decade winter storms from Electric Reliability Council of Texas - the state's energy distributor.Experts blame Texas' independent energy grid, which avoids regulation in favor of market incentives, for all