Progressives Can’t Deal with the Truth – So They Plan to Stifle Debate and Ignore the First Amendment

by Nicholas Wishek 

It didn’t make much news at the time, but on May 19^th the Portland School Board decided to ban any classroom materials that cast doubt on climate change. The resolution requires that textbooks and other material purchased by the district present climate change as a fact rather than theory, and to present human activity as one of the main causes. One of those testifying in the hearing said, “It is unacceptable that we have textbooks in our schools that spread doubt about the human causes and urgency of the crisis.” Now, few of the ‘climate change deniers’ are actually disputing that climate changes. Of course it does. Heck, there were glaciers as far south as St. Louis during the last ice age! What we are saying is that if climate has changed in the past long before any possible influence by human beings could account for it, why are we so certain climate is changing now primarily from human activity now? 

Naturally, progressives don’t want to debate the issue rationally and honestly. Instead they resorted to the kind of tactics they always use. They ridiculed and called those who disagreed with them names. They use the repeated lie technique whereby if you tell a lie often enough people will eventually believe it. To an extent they have succeeded, but not enough people are worried enough about climate change to allow them the kinds of draconian measures they want to impose on the country. So to advance their policies, they now want to totally shut down any debate at all. The Portland School Board will not be the only liberal minded school board to ban contrary opinions.

That’s bad, but it gets even worse. Back in March Attorney General Loretta Lynch admitted that the Justice Department is considering legal action against climate change deniers. In fact, Fifteen state attorney generals plus the attorney generals of the District of Columbia and the Virgin Islands have banded together to subpoena records of fossil fuel producers and climate change deniers. New York Attorney General, Eric Schneiderman said, “The bottom line is simple: Climate change is real.” He then said that if companies are committing fraud by “lying” about the dangers of climate change, they will “pursue them to the fullest extent of the law.” This is no different than the Nazi’s burning books that the government deemed unsuitable.

The truth is that the question of to what extent man is causing climate change is not an established or proven fact. It should be investigated, but progressives don’t dare allow honest debate because the facts aren’t on their side. That doesn’t matter to them because man caused climate change is the equivalent of an article of faith to them. Climate change proponents have a pretty poor track record of climate change predictions. During the first Earth Day back in 1970 one of the predictions was, “The world has been chilling sharply for about twenty years. If present trends continue, the world will be about four degrees colder for the global mean temperature in 1990, but eleven degrees colder in the year 2000.

This is about twice what it would take to put us into an ice age.” Didn’t happen. What about the Al Gore film, An Inconvenient truth? It’s been ten years since it was released. His track record is equally bad. Sea levels aren’t rising. Polar bears aren’t dying out, rather they are increasing in number. The Arctic isn’t melting. The Sahel is not drying, it is gaining flora. The list is long and as time goes by will like become even longer. All the computer models are no better than the information that goes into them and have an equally bad prediction record. 

Government should not be involved in scientific debate. When those in power dictate what to believe the results are not good. Consider what happened to Galileo Galilei, when he went against the politically correct idea of the times that the earth was the center of the universe. He was investigated by the inquisition and came close to being executed for heresy. He was forced to recant his beliefs and wound up spending the rest of his life under house arrest. A more recent example of the problems that can arise from politicians interfering with real science was the support of the theory of eugenics in the late 19^th and early 20^th century. As with global warming, many prominent people of the time supported the idea that the human race needed to “purify” our genetic gene pool. Those deemed unfit were sterilized or worse. The Nazis were the biggest supporters of eugenics going so far as exterminating those deemed unworthy by the state.

The progressive desire to shut down opposition and penalize those they disagree with is flat out dangerous to our freedom of speech, but unless saner heads prevail we will have no honest discussion on issues like man caused climate change because those who do dissent will be silenced.