Robert Tracinski:
Feminist journalist Jill Filipovic recently made a hilariously un-self-aware comment on Twitter.
https://twitter.com/JillFilipovic/status/721025476676972544
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, thesupposed “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.
[youtube]https://youtu.be/xlk4Lt__Sn0[/youtube]
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—hassubpoenaed 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?