It was about eight to 10 years ago that the Left made a unilateral decision to shut down all opposition and any skepticism about climate change by pronouncing that the debate was over.
The “scientific consensus” had been reached, as if sent down on tablets from God, that mankind was causing the rapid warming of the planet. Period. End of argument. Doubters will be denounced as science deniers and stripped of their science credentials and muzzled by the speech police.
This idea of a scientific consensus is, of course, the diametric opposite of what scientific inquiry is all about. It is completely ahistorical. History’s greatest minds and inventors were people who challenged the conventional wisdom of the day. It’s an updated version of the Flat Earth Societies in the Middle Ages that would imprison those who dared question the scientific consensus of the time that the Earth was flat. The Spanish Inquisition tortured heretics who questioned papal orthodoxy.
The irony of the modern-day inquisitionists is that they are the very people who were the doomsayers of the 1970s who have been so consistently wrong about the future. These were the people who peddled the “population bomb,” which fizzled. They were the ones who said the Earth was cooling and that we were headed into another Ice Age. They were the ones who said we were running out of energy, food and farmland, and we were headed to a Malthusian nightmarish future. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.
You’d think they would be humbled. But they are reiterating their certainty that they are the fountains of wisdom. And now they are getting dangerous with their heavy-handed tactics to squash dissent.
Consider what has happened in California — and soon coming to blue states near you. Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom just signed a law that will revoke a physician’s medical license for conveying “misinformation” (defined as deviation from expert “consensus”) about COVID-19 and its treatments. Remember, by the way, this comes from the same people who said that the scientific consensus was to shut down schools and businesses to stop the spread of COVID-19 and that children as young as 5 had to be vaccinated — yet another set of the catastrophic and wrongheaded decision by “the experts.”
Since when does the government have the right to censor doctors? Whatever happened to doctor-patient confidentiality? Whatever happened to “my body, my choice”? Even Leana Wen, a former leader of Planned Parenthood and Baltimore’s health czar, warns this law “will have a chilling effect on medical practice.”
She worries that physicians could be suspended or have their licenses revoked “for offering nuanced guidance on a complex issue that is hardly settled by existing science.” Those accused of “misinformation” would be subject to discipline from the Medical Board of California, 13 of whose 15 members are appointed by none other than Newsom. We should call this the “inquisition panel.”
These are the political hacks who will decide what transgresses scientific consensus.
During COVID-19, both the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, resembled weather vanes as the “scientific consensus” seemed to shift on the pandemic from day to day. Newsom himself first insisted that travel restrictions were racist and unnecessary, that masks were superfluous and that California had the infection under control. If his censorship law had been around, would the doctors who disagreed with him have been punished for that?
We also now have major social media platforms censoring any skepticism about the effectiveness of the latest vaccines — even the opinions of major medical experts. Even when skeptics are wrong, they should be able to have their voices heard in a free society. Shouldn’t we all be able to agree on that basic truism?
If, God forbid, the COVID-19 speech restrictions are upheld by the courts, the next step will be to muzzle “climate misinformation.” Bans on free speech aren’t far behind in this new age of “scientific consensus,” which is apparently defined as whatever The New York Times and President Joe Biden’s administration decree the consensus to be. At that point, we can toss the First Amendment into the dustbin of history.
This is very scary and dangerous stuff the Left is imposing on us. Most alarming of all is that almost no commonsense liberals are speaking out against this madness. Have they been muzzled, too?
Stephen Moore is a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation and an economist with FreedomWorks. His latest book is “Govzilla: How the Relentless Growth of Government is Devouring our Economy.”
How do you change— change the U.S. from a capitalist system’,
Into a Socialistic Democrat Party government controlled system. ??
1. Healthcare — Control healthcare and you control the people.
2. Welfare — Take control of every aspect of their lives (Food, Housing, and Income).
3. Education — Take control of what people read and listen to — take control of what children and young people learn in schools and colleges.
4. Religion — Remove the belief in the God from the Government and schools.
5. Class Warfare — Divide the people into the wealthy and the poor. This will cause more discontent and it will be easier to take from the wealthy and give to poor. Until there are only the poor.
6. Debt — Increase the debt to an unsustainable level.
7. Gun Control — Remove the ability for the people to defend themselves from the Government. (“Socialist Democrat Party State”)
8. Poverty — Increase the poverty level as high as possible. Poor people are easier to control and will keep socialists in power if they are providing everything for them to live. Encourage, protect and support multi-millions of illegal immigrants who are poor, uneducated and disease ridden.
9. Prevent free speech, destroy those who disagree with the establishment.
Do these look like the tactics of the Democrat Party??
“…During COVID-19, both the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, resembled weather vanes as the “scientific consensus” seemed to shift on the pandemic from day to day….” Taken From Article Above.
And China is the # 1 Aggressor in Dirty AIR Pollution
Who usess a Private Jet Democrat, JOHN KERRY,For one, one of the Democrat elite.
VE are da borg. Individuality vill be crushed. Only the collective matters..
It began with climate change and Al Gore touting there was a concensus among scientists on the subject. Once there was a concensus that the Earth was flat and the center of the universe and those who said the Earth was round and the sun was the center of the universe were accused of heresy, misinformation to the woke crowd, and executed up to the 1300’s. Concensus in science is not truth but opinion agreed to by many but not incontrovertably proven under the scientific method, excluding all other possibilities. Climate has been around for billions of years and it has been changing all that time often to extremes that are not even considered in today’s speculation. Now this idea of concensus is being foisted in just about every area of science that has not yet been proven but has political uses!
great
let’s go with the “consensus” of IGNORANT PEOPLE.
the “consensus” is that CO2 causes warming but that’s a LIE, as proved in the 400,000 ice core studies in Vostok, Antarctica. The problem is that most people (the consensus) is IGNORANT about Science and swallows the LEFTIST (commie) propaganda that wants to send the world back to the 1800s to “save mother earth”, but leave most of it for the self-declared “royalty” to enjoy (such as flying their private jets, spilling tons of CO2, to their climate change conferences)
AND They forget. THE MORE C)2 there is, the HEALTHIER plants get, AS THAT IS WHAT THEY need!