There's this thing called free speech that the right seems to admire and protect, and the left wants to squash. Oh, the left used to make noises about free speech, back in the '60s, when they were using it to call returning Vietnam veterans baby-killers and so forth. These days, though, it's the right that looks at the First Amendment and sees the value in it - all the value in it. And it's the left who want to ignore it - that is, unless they approve of what's being said.
The left labels dissent as "hate speech" or "misinformation" and demands it be proscribed by law. That's pernicious, it's a direct violation of the First Amendment, but if you took all the unconstitutional notions the left harbors today and laid them all out straight, they'd reach the Crab Nebula.
Case in point: The climate change argument. They are starting to lose this argument, and they are growing desperate - and willing to resort to any means, even jail time. A new editorial at Issues & Insights presents a frightening picture of just how willing the left is to shut you and me up.
A United Nation’s (sic) report issued last month calls for the criminalization of spreading “disinformation and misinformation” about global warming. Is it the desperate act of a dying crusade – or business as usual for the climate fanatics?
While our hope is the former, it’s more likely the latter.
According to Elisa Morgera, the U.N. special rapporteur on climate change, governments should “criminalize misinformation and misrepresentation (greenwashing) by the fossil fuel industry” as well as “criminalize media and advertising firms for amplifying disinformation and misinformation by fossil fuel companies.”
Criminalize, she says. That means "you go to jail if you disagree." And who decides what is "misinformation and misrepresentation" in this case? Presumably, the United Nations. And note that the scope of this isn't limited to fossil fuel companies. It also encompasses the media and advertising firms. In other words, in Elisa Morgera's world, I could be arrested, tried, and jailed for my extensive writings on the climate, and against the claims of the climate scolds.
I'd like to see them try.
Elisa Morgera isn't alone in this. Here are a few people who are also advocating for shutting you and me up by force of law, and we note, it's been going on for some time:
- Democratic Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island urged the Justice Department “to consider filing a racketeering suit against the oil and coal industries for having promoted wrongful thinking on climate change,” author Walter Olson noted in 2015.
- Twenty “scientists” wrote a letter to President Barack Obama to “strongly endorse” Whitehouse’s “call for a RICO investigation.”
Wrongthink is a crime to the left, and wrong speech, even more so. Of course, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse isn't writing from any moral high ground himself, given his membership in a "whites-only" organization, but that just goes to show the left is willing to forgive anything if the offender has a "D" behind their name. Principals, not principles.
In 2016, a year after 17 attorneys general pursued fraud allegations against climate change skeptics, Obama Attorney General Loretta Lynch told the Senate Judiciary Committee that “the FBI was looking into information regarding climate change dissent and ‘whether or not it meets the criteria for what we could take action on,'” the Washington Times reported.
We should all be alarmed at weaponizing the FBI to go after people who are challenging the "settled science," especially since the people who are challenging that notion are the people who understand that science is never settled, the science is a tool, not an ideology, and that only a strict, unflinching, dispassionate look at data will yield useful information. That's not what the climate scolds are doing. Of course, you can add this to a long list of things that the Obama and Biden administrations tried to weaponize the FBI against.
And, finally, here's the United Nations again:
Earlier this year, a screed from a “climate justice” academic writing under the imprimatur of UNESCO, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, asked if “international criminal law” should “be used against those who promote this dangerous trend” of “climate denial.” She answered the question thusly: “Criminal sanctions are the most potent tools we have to mark out conduct that lies beyond all limits of toleration.” The time has arrived, she added, “to prosecute them.”
There it is, folks, in black and white. "...to prosecute them." This "climate justice" academic wants to put us in jail for questioning these most questionable of claims.
This is, as I've been saying and writing for years, not about the climate, not about the environment, not about the earth. It's about control. It's always about control with the left, and once you accept that, everything they do starts to make sense. In fact, that's the only way in which much of what the left does makes any sense.
See Also: Carbon and Climate: A Serious Scientist Brings the Numbers
Climate Oscillations: Some of the Factors That Really Drive Climate
In fact, forget the First Amendment for a moment, and let's just take this back to science. In the scientific method, for people who really understand the scientific method, nothing is off-limits for further inquiry. Oh, there are some matters that have been supported so robustly by evidence that they are broadly accepted. But even those things can be questioned in light of new data. Researchers and analysts, the ones who know what they are doing and know the process, follow the evidence, not an ideology.
And it is anathema to that scientific method to try to silence dissent. Every piece of evidence should be examined, every claim picked apart; either the evidence supports that claim or not, and that, not ideology, makes any determination as to what's true and what isn't.
The climate scolds are losing that fight, they are growing desperate, and now you see their endgame - censorship.
To the United Nations, which would presumably like to see me in jail for my work in this area, I can only say this: I'm right here. Come and get me. I promise you a legal (mostly) scrap the likes of which you've never imagined.
