Paul Driessen
Throughout history despots had effective ways of reducing
dissension in the ranks. Inquisitors burned heretics. Nazi’s burned books –
before taking far more extreme measures. Soviets employed famines, gulags, salt
mines and executions. ChiComs and other tyrants starved, jailed and murdered
millions.
Today’s Green New Dealers and their allies have mapped out their
own totalitarian strategies.
They proclaim themselves socialists, but their economic
policies and tolerance for other viewpoints reflect a different form of
government – fascism: A political
system in which authoritarian government does not own businesses and
industries, but strictly regulates and controls their actions, output and
rights – while constraining and suppressing citizens and their thought, speech and
access to information.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) has “no problem” with the
fact that implementing her Green New Deal would require “massive
government intervention,” wealth redistribution on an unprecedented scale,
and many trillions of dollars in new debt. GNDealers want to totally eliminate
fossil fuel production and use, and control how much we can drive and fly, heat
and cool our homes, eat meat, and live our lives.
If retrofitting 29 million British homes to make them
climate-friendly would cost $5.6
trillion – remaking America’s 125 million generally larger private homes
would easily cost $25 trillion! Putting just five million electric cars on
California roads would require 5
billion pounds of lithium-ion
batteries.
Replacing fossil fuels that provide 82% of our energy and
100% of countless plastic and other products would require biofuels grown on
tens of millions of acres. Replacing coal and gas-generated electricity with
wind and solar would require millions of turbines and panels, on tens of
millions more acres, billions of tons of rare earth and other metals, and hundreds
of billions of pounds of lithium-ion batteries.
China controls all those rare
earth metals and most of the lithium, cadmium and cobalt
needed for all that pseudo-renewable, pretend-sustainable energy. They are
produced in China
and Africa,
often with child labor and near-slave labor, and with virtually no health,
safety or environmental safeguards.
Meanwhile, Asian, African and EU nations are building or
planning over 2,000 coal and gas-fired power plants. So even US elimination of fossil fuels would do absolutely
nothing to reduce global CO2 levels. Moreover, citizens are likely to rise up
in loud opposition to having millions of wind turbines, solar panels, batteries
and biofuel plantations in their backyards and across scenic vistas and
wildlife habitats.
GNDealers don’t want to talk about any of those ethical,
social justice or environmental issues – or about the GIGO computer models and
bald assertions of Climate
Armageddon that have no
basis in real-world evidence. They don’t want anyone else talking about it,
either. They want to control what we say and think, even what ideas and
information we can find online and in print, television, radio and social media.
They loath and fear ideas, facts and questions that
challenge their views and political power. Free speech and access to other
people’s free speech is a clear and present danger to their perceived and
asserted wisdom on fossil fuels, capitalism, manmade climate chaos, Western
culture, and who should make policy decisions on energy, economics, jobs,
living standards, religion, civil rights and other matters.
Their version of “free speech”
thus includes – and demands – that their critics have no free speech. On college campuses, in “mainstream” and social
media, on search engines, in online information libraries, even in the arts,
bakeries and K-12 education, thought control and electronic book burning are
essential. Despite having a 12 to 1 ratio of liberal to conservative
professors, leftist college faculty, administrators and students still ban,
disinvite, disrupt and physically attack conservative speakers and their hosts.
They harass Trump administration
officials in restaurants – and “dox” political opponents, revealing their names
and home addresses, so that other radicals can harass, intimidate and attack them
… thereby “persuading” others to stay silent. They assaulted
North Korean escapees for wearing MAGA hats.
The Big Tech monopoly routinely implements electronic
book-burning tactics. Google and other internet search
engines systematically employ liberal biases and secret algorithms to send climate
realism articles to intellectual Siberia and censor conservative thinking
and discussion. Google
YouTube blocks access to Prager University (PragerU.com) videos that its censors
decree offer “objectionable content” on current events, history, constitutional
principles, environmental policies and other topics.
Google helps
the Chinese government deny its citizens access to “dangerous ideas” – and says
nothing when China sends a million Uighur Muslims to “reeducation camps.” Its
hard-left employees ostracize any conservatives they still find in their ranks
… and claim helping the US Defense Department with Cloud computing or
artificial intelligence surveillance would “violate their principles.”
Facebook
“shadow banned” an ad promoting a Heartland Institute video that called on
millennials to reject socialism and embrace capitalism. Facebook censors told
Heartland they “don’t support ads for your business model” (capitalism) and
would not reveal “red flags” and trade-secret algorithms they use to “identify
violations” of their policies and “help preserve the integrity of our internal
processes.” Google suppressed
Claremont Institute ads for a talk on multiculturalism and political speech
restrictions.
Twitter routinely engages in
similar cold, calculated censorship of views it opposes.
Wikipedia posts distorted
or false bios for climate realist experts and organizations – labeling me
an anti-environment lobbyist – and then pops up ads soliciting money for its
biased “educational” material. Securing corrections is a long, often fruitless
process. Even more totalitarian, the Southern
Poverty Law Center uses phony “hate speech” claims to defund and
“deplatform” conservative groups like David Horowitz’s Freedom Center, by
pressuring credit card companies to close off donations to them.
State
attorneys general and members
of Congress want to prosecute and jail people for “denying the reality” of
“manmade climate cataclysms.” Worst of all, the callous organizations and policies
that Big Tech supports cause
millions of deaths every year, by denying impoverished nations and families
access to the modern energy, insect control and agricultural technologies that its
vocal, racist elements loathe.
Creating conservative competitors or finding ways around
these social media and fake info behemoths is vital, but would be stymied by
their sheer size, wealth and dominance. Trust busting by the FTC, other federal
agencies, Congress
and the courts, á la Standard Oil Company, should certainly be considered.
These cyber-giant social media and information platforms may
be private companies, but they wield massive power, especially with younger
generations that get almost all their information online. They are entirely
dependent on the internet – which was created by US government agencies and
taxpayers. (“You didn’t build that,” President Obama might tell Google.) They have
become essential, dominant public forums for discussing and evaluating public
policies that increasingly affect our lives.
A
federal judge has ruled that President Trump may not block hate-filled
criticism from his Twitter account. Because it is a public forum, akin to a
park or town square, for discussing important policy and personnel matters, it
is protected by the First Amendment. Blocking unwanted tweets is therefore viewpoint
discrimination, and Twitter is not beyond the reach of First Amendment public
forum rules, she held. Her reasoning should not apply only to the President and
his most obnoxious critics.
The right of free speech and free assembly – to participate
fully in debates over important political and public policy matters – is the foundation
for the other rights and freedoms that enable our vibrant nation to function. Banning,
censoring and deliberately falsifying certain viewpoints deprive major segments
of our population and electorate of the right to speak, be heard, become
informed, examine all sides of an issue, and live in harmony, peace and
prosperity.
Viewpoint censorship, bullying and silencing violates the basic
rights of speakers, students, professors, voters and all people whose views an
elite, intolerant, power-hungry few have deemed “inappropriate” or “hurtful” to
the sensitivities of climate alarmist, pro-abortion, atheist and other liberal
factions.
It’s time to take action, demand investigations, and rein in
the monopolistic cyber censors.
Paul
Driessen is senior policy analyst for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow
(www.CFACT.org) and author of books and articles on
energy and environmental science and policy.
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