By Robert Tracinski
Tuesday, April 19, 2016
Feminist journalist Jill Filipovic recently made a
hilariously un-self-aware comment on Twitter.
I wonder: was she around when Barack Obama was running in
2008? (Yes, she was.) Nothing about Bernie’s messiah complex should be remotely
new to you if you followed the Obama phenomenon.
The Left still clings to this old view of themselves as
bold free-thinkers who “question authority,” when they have long since set
themselves up as the authorities everyone else is supposed to bow to.
By coincidence, I came across this at about the same time
as a video of Bill Nye, the supposed “science guy,” taking a break from asking
big and important questions like “What if the Earth were a cube instead of a
ball?” and declaring that maybe
global warming skeptics should be thrown in jail.
He does it through a series of rhetorical questions: “Was
it appropriate to jail the guys from Enron? Was it appropriate to jail people
from the cigarette industry who insisted that this addictive product was not
addictive, and so on.”
Enron was a case of provable fraud, in which executives
lied about specific facts about the operation of their own company—not about
complex scientific conclusions. As for tobacco executives, none of them did go
to jail (much to the consternation of anti-tobacco fanatics), and for good
reason. To ban one side of a political debate from making its case is to
condemn them in advance, denying them an opportunity to speak in their own
defense.
Courts as Tools of
Political Coercion
But Nye isn’t just speculating about putting people in
jail. He is referring to a specific attempt to use the model of those old
tobacco lawsuits to prosecute any company that has ever funded research or
advocacy skeptical of claims about global warming. This campaign was started
last year and has taken its newest steps recently with a meeting of state
attorneys general who vowed to launch “investigations into whether fossil fuel
companies misled investors and the public on the impact of climate change.”
The attorney general of the U.S. Virgin Islands—whom you
would think would have enough to deal with at home straightening out a
notoriously dysfunctional office—has subpoenaed a leading free-market think
tank, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, demanding all of its internal
communications from 1997 through 2007. Why? Because CEI once committed the
presumed crime of accepting money from a major oil company.
This is what you call a “fishing expedition.” The
prosecutors are not demanding any specific evidence of criminal activity,
because they have no specific grounds to suspect it. They’re just demanding
everything, in the hope that once they fish through it, they will find
something they can cast as incriminating, or at least embarrassing. It’s a
well-known form of legal harassment.
To those who object that this will create a “chilling
effect” on scientific debate over global warming, which is the obvious goal of
the investigation, Nye says that’s just fine. “That there is a chilling effect
on scientists who are in extreme doubt about climate change, I think that is
good.”
Goodbye, Free
Speech
As bad as that is, Nye’s justification for it is worse.
“As a taxpayer and voter, the introduction of this extreme doubt about climate
change is affecting my quality of life as a public citizen. So I can see where
people are very concerned about this, and they’re pursuing criminal
investigations.” I could make the case that Nye’s continued existence “affects
my quality of life.” Should I get the government to do something about that?
But wait, there’s more. “The
extreme-doubt-about-climate-change people—without going too far afield here—are
leaving the world worse than they found it because they are keeping us from
getting to work. They are holding us back.” It used to be that the Left wanted
to limit “commercial speech,” but “political speech” was sacrosanct. Now it is
considered acceptable to suppress other people’s speech precisely because they
might have an impact on the political debate.
In other words: Bow to authority. My authority.
Bill Nye is just one entertainer, a third-rate popularizer
of science. But he is totally representative of the Left’s real attitude about
authority. Their fundamental conviction is that the conscience of the
individual must be forced to yield to the demands of the collective, as decided
by the authorities who presume to speak for it.
Try refusing to bake a cake for a gay wedding, and tell
me whether you will be forced to bow to authority. Try running a fast-food
joint or comic-book shop that can’t afford to pay its employees $15 an hour,
and tell me whether you will be forced to bow to authority. Try keep men
dressed as women out of your ladies’ restroom, and tell me whether you will be
forced to bow to authority.
There is no real rhyme or reason to the vast patchwork of
regulation except: bow to authority.
Thanks to the Left, we live in an era of authority.
Authority is their entire agenda, in politics, in economics, in culture, in
religion, in science. It’s grimly amusing when they try to hide this, and a lot
less amusing when the pretense falls away, and they try to make us bow.
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