Common Ground; Past and Future PMs; & Is Reality Fascist?
Common Ground; Past and Future PMs; & Is Reality Fascist?
In his Editor’s Column this week, Michael Walsh evaluated a book by a Leftist disillusioned with the direction of the Democratic Party, and wondered whether we’re still capable of finding common group with such people.
In Search of Common Ground
Hard as this may seem to believe, back before the election of Barack Hussein Obama -- just seven years after 9/11, remember -- there was at least one thing sane people on both the Left and the Right agreed upon: freedom of speech and the primacy of the First Amendment. Conservatives were dedicated to the constitution in all its aspects, while liberals at least pretended to enjoy the blessings of free expression, even if they often employed the 1A as a shield with which to protect themselves and their dissention from the consequences of their intentions. Honest men on both sides could not only have reasoned discussions with one another, but actually be friends.
Obama's elections, in ways which still remain to be understood, changed all that. The notion that not everybody saw the Lightbringer as a divinized politician descended, deus ex machina, from the flies and wings of the American stage to redeem the U.S.A. from its original sin of "racism" threw them into a fit. By their lights, the election should have been unanimous, by acclamation; how dare their former darling maverick, John McCain, have the effrontery to oppose him? Even the fact that McCain, a born tomato can whose last public act was to betray his Senate comrades and his country over Obamacare, threw the election by "suspending" his campaign near the end didn't appease them. As for those who actually voted against the Punahou Kid, off to purdah and perdition with them. And thus the Cold Civil War (as I dubbed it at the time) was well and truly underway.
Is there still a way for honest patriots on both sides to come together? Yes, there are some, even though the Democrat-Media Complex has erased almost all traces of their existence, owing to its complete control of the public Narrative. One such is my old friend Les Leopold, whose new book, Wall Street's War on Workers, obliquely addresses this very subject while excoriating the contemporary left for its abandonment of the American worker:
To claim that massive job dislocation is the price we must pay for a modern economy is to ignore the political price we also are paying. A volcano of disappointment among working-class people has erupted throughout our country as political elites of all stripes ignore the devastation that job loss has left behind. One result is apparent: Working people—especially rural white working people in the border states as well as in the North and Midwest—are walking away from the Democratic Party, their historic champion. And if nothing is done to provide more stable employment, they may walk away from democracy as well.
That Wall Street as it now functions is a force for social evil is something conservatives need to acknowledge, and abandon their reflexive, knee-jerk fealty to what they perceive as the ghosts of Adam Smith and Milton Friedman. As Eric Hoffer famously observed: "Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket." Neither mercantilism nor stock companies were ever a cause, but they did become a big business, and now have become the tail that wags the dogs of society.
Tom Finnerty wrote about another highlight of the Canada Strong and Free conference, a panel discussion between former prime ministers Boris Johnson and Tony Abbott (of the U.K. and Australia, respectively), and moderated by our own Founding Editor, John O’Sullivan, which got a bit heated when it turned to BoJo’s late-career turn towards climate hysteric and net-zero enthusiast.
On 'Climate,' Boris Johnson's Losing Wager
Johnson immediately seemed flustered. He knew that, surrounded by Canadian conservatives who recognize that energy is the backbone of their economy and who rightly associate net-zero with Justin Trudeau and his activist cronies, he was unlikely to get a friendly reception. So he tossed out a few quips with an eye towards turning down the temperature, mentioning that in his former days as a climate skeptic journalist he used to joke that you could cover Britain with wind turbines and “it wouldn’t pull the skin off a rice pudding,” and suggesting that Canada could "definitely do with a bit of global warming" because of its frigid climate.
But eventually he came to the meat of it -- Boris had changed his opinion on "climate change," he said, because once he got into power, he "got the scientists in," and "really put them through their paces."
And in the end I thought, well look, here's what I really think about this. It's possible it's a load of nonsense. But it's also possible -- and I've got to be humble, I did no science after about the age of about thirteen -- so I had to be humble in the face of what these scientists were telling me.... And so I said I'm going to take a bet. A Pascal's Wager! You remember Pascal's Wager? I said "I'm gonna believe in this, because if I'm wrong, I haven't really lost anything much. But if I'm right, well, it will have saved humanity a great deal of misery, because if you have an exponential warming of the world, it could be very very serious indeed.
It is hard to describe exactly the feeling in the room when it dawned on everyone what Johnson was getting at with his Pascal's Wager reference. We "haven't lost anything much" if we spend trillions of dollars -- engaging in what Sir Iain Duncan Smith called the "largest engineering project ever undertaken -- in order to transition the global economy from safe, reliable energy sources like oil and natural gas to utterly unproven-at-scale sources like wind and solar? To say what he meant is to disprove it. It's madness.
Richard Fernandez contributed a piece about the globalist elite’s increasingly overt embrace of censorship to suppress inconvenient facts and ideas.
The 'Disinformation' Game
The World Economic Forum's thinkers argue that the global system is falling apart under the pressure of climate change, geopolitical conflict, technological disruption and the breakdown of an orderly narrative, also known as disinformation. Disinformation is ranked problem number one in severity by WEF analysts, because the failure to stop it means failure to 'solve' all the rest.
Over the next two years, misinformation and disinformation will present one of the biggest ever challenges to the democratic process. Almost three billion people are due to take part in elections across the world. Voters in Bangladesh, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Pakistan, the United Kingdom and the United States are due to vote.
They need to make the right choices, yet these three billion people could be led astray by the purveyors of conspiracy theories, the WEF implies, thus destroying any hope of saving the global system unless responsible authorities intervene. Yet in the two most high profile examples of authorities suppressing 'disinformation', the cases of Brazilian Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes versus Twitter's Elon Musk and the government of Scotland versus renowned writer J.K. Rowling, do not involve information but authority.
In the former case nobody is actually citing lies that Twitter is alleged to have spread in Brazil. Neither is Rowling, by refusing to accept transgender 'women' as identical to biological women being challenged on factual grounds. Her offense is that her remarks are 'hateful.' Elon's offense is 'obstruction of justice' for allowing Morae's foes a platform to attack him. Both cases have nothing to do with information and everything to do with authority.
But isn't authority, and consequently censorship necessary to save the world? Only if it is based on truth. The problem with the system of virtuous censorship proposed by the WEF is that for it to work it must have the truth: a system of values, what is permissible and strictly forbidden. Most of all it must have a body of reliable knowledge, or else it will never know what impulses or beliefs to proscribe. Censors must, in other words, solve the epistemological challenge of determining moral universality and scientific truth that has proved impossible through history.
The problem of formulating universal values has even eluded designers of artificial intelligence who must align it so machines don't enslave mankind. "AI alignment involves ensuring that an AI system's objectives match those of its designers, users, or widely shared values, objective ethical standards, or the intentions its designers would have if they were more informed and enlightened." But the brightest minds just cannot solve this problem.
Nor are facts easy to pin down. Not only are theories regularly upended by new discoveries, the Covid epidemic demonstrated that even the scientific establishment was not above lying to preserve its authority. When scientists disagreed about the coronavirus, "in the effort to silence alternative voices, widespread use was made not only of censorship, but of tactics of suppression that damaged the reputations and careers of dissenting doctors and scientists, regardless of their academic or medical status and regardless of their stature prior to expressing a contrary position." Those who suppressed the Great Barrington Declaration did not question the evidence or find flaw with the logic of the dissenters. Rather it attacked the act of dissent itself.
Buck Throckmorton wrote a follow-up to his recent piece on the organization Covering Climate Now, which influences media outlets as they use their reporting to push for net-zero policies and the elimination of hydrocarbon energy.
'Covering Climate Now' and the Corrupt Corporate Media
Let's now take a look at ways in which media outlets -- and journalism itself -- have been corrupted by partnering with CCNow, whose practices run contrary to the ethical standards to which journalists once abided. Covering Climate Now proudly boasts of helping journalists “improve the caliber and prominence of their reporting through training, networking, collaboration, and more.” Who are CCNow’s media partners? They include NBC, ABC, CBS News, Reuters, Bloomberg, Time, and many more, including “scores of local and special interest publications.”
In 2022, PBS stations across the country aired a special documentary titled “Burning Questions.” It was hosted by NBC journalists Savannah Sellers and Al Roker to spread CCNow’s propaganda “on a journey across the country and around the world to the frontlines of the climate crisis.” Featured in this fear-mongering production were numerous “objective” and “reputable” media organizations. While not the intent, this documentary neatly captured the depth of journalism’s corruption, and the breadth of the media’s intellectual capture in regards to “climate.”
Never before has reporting from so many major news organizations been brought together to tell the climate story. Journalists from the Guardian, Agence-France Presse, the Los Angeles Times, Sesame Workshop, Al Jazeera English, PBS NewsHour, TIME, Channel 4 (UK), the Post and Courier, and more take viewers behind the scenes, recounting the stories in their award-winning coverage and how they went about reporting them.
The year before, ABC (a Disney Entertainment subsidiary) had proudly announced its partnership with Covering Climate Now as it rolled out “Climate Crisis: Saving Tomorrow,” a month-long blitz of climate hysteria featuring a who’s who of ABC’s premier journalists, including David Muir, Martha Raddatz, Byron Pitts, Amy Robach, and many others. ABC News President Kim Godwin boasted about her entire team's repeating CCNow’s apocalyptic propaganda, stating “our global coverage across each and every continent, reporting on the stark reality of the earth’s dire condition and seeking the answers on how to create change now, reflects our dedication to shedding light on one of the most pressing issues of our time.” Now that's entertainment!
Whether you’re seeing blanket-the-airwaves productions such as that one at ABC, or the daily dose of “climate change’s impact on you” type of stories elsewhere, they probably have CCNow’s fingerprints on them. When CBS broadcast a feature titled “How Climate Change Threatens Pregnant Women and Their Fetuses” the show was produced in association with CCNow. In fact, it can still be accessed at CCNow’s website.
Wherever you find a gaggle of left-wing activists, you’ll also find a group of people pretentiously giving awards to each other, so naturally, there are plenty of climate coverage awards being handed out to journalists of easy virtue spreading CCNow’s propaganda. Winners of the 2023 Covering Climate Now Journalism Awards include those “whose work has appeared on PBS’s Frontline, Bloomberg, VICE News, ProPublica/New York Times, Deutsche Welle, and Al Jazeera English — for rigorous investigative reports, eye-opening exposes of climate injustice, and much-needed analyses of climate solutions.” ….
Because the role of modern journalism is to advocate and influence rather than engage in reporting, CCNow is already at work preparing its propaganda affiliates on how to influence news coverage for the rest of 2024. It will be reported as the hottest year on record – even though the measurements for the remaining 8 months have not even been taken yet: "Prepare Your Newsroom for 2024’s Extreme Heat."
Peter Smith reports that the Leftist government of his native Australia has been struggling to deal with reality’s bias against their policies. Instead of changing course, however, they’ve been doubling down.
Mugged by Reality, Result = Fascism
Socialism stunts progress. People recognize that and rebel. Those in charge either admit they were wrong and bow out, or use force to keep themselves in power. Bank on the latter. Bank on it whenever those in charge set a course which is against the natural order of things. Apropos the replacement of reliable and affordable energy with unreliable and unaffordable energy.
Among my small retinue of conservative friends there is a view that a tipping point will shortly be reached when renewables plus storage fail to cope. On windless nights in heavily populated areas, impossibly humongous and financially ruinous batteries would be required. The arithmetic is compelling. It’s the political outcome which is in dispute.
One outcome is that climate cultists in government admit they were wrong and change course. Is there much experience of that, I wonder? Okay, there’s Gorbachev I suppose, but his approach has not swept away the standard despotic order of service, as dissidents in North Korea or Venezuela might attest. Admitting error is not a common characteristic of despots, whether they are of the old-fashioned socialist type or the newly-minted climate-cult type.
The path is set in Australia. The pipedream of net-zero is being mugged by reality. Repression is the response. In the socialist republic of the state of Victoria, long reigned over by Daniel Andrews of Covid notoriety, and now by his leftist disciple Jacinta Allan, they have banned gas connections in new homes, and intend fast-tracking wind and solar eruptions to override objections from pesky farmers and rural communities.
Don’t want electric vehicles, we’ll tax the bejesus out of ICE cars until you do. To wit, the federal government’s progressively tightening tailgate-emission rules. Announced, like this, straight from the Ministry of Truth:
The Albanese Government is delivering more cars that are cheaper to run, giving motorists choice by introducing a New Vehicle Efficiency Standard for Australia.
And finally a blog post from David Cavena in which he examined the wealth transfer, from the Middle and Working classes to the Rich, at the heart of environmentalist proposals.
A 'Green' Constitutional Solution
That’s all for this week, but keep a look out for all of our articles over at The Pipeline!