Progressives’ Views of Conservatives (1)

I have frequently referred to the autocratic instincts of the American “progressive”. It is such a fascinating characteristic of progressives given their self-picture of themselves as the epitome of tolerance, that I keep coming back to it. I have no doubt one can find some intolerant conservatives as well, but not in such numbers. Even more important, even intolerant conservatives do not want to expand the power of government. Even they do not want to give it the capability to do grievous legal harm to all their opponents on their enemies list! We conservatives fervently desire the reduction of government power, limiting the harm the state can do to both individuals and our collective economy.

About three month’s ago I first started writing on this theme when I asked Do Progressives Want a Police State?  What had captured my attention then were the attempts of a group of Wisconsin Democratic state and municipal prosecutors to criminalize conservative political activity, using political campaign law as an excuse. Ultimately, these political tactics grew to be too much for even the liberal Wisconsin Supreme Court, who tossed all these accusations out. Not, however, before a number of the accused came under considerable legal duress. I also noted at the time the attempts of the Obama administration to do the same thing to conservatives on a national scale using the IRS and the Justice Department.

Having got my dander up, I took a look at the most basic assumptions progressives make about the nature of reality in the posts Progressives’ Basic Assumptions and The Complexity of Reality. I think I was fairly successful in pointing out the progressives’ autocratic nature could be explained by their beliefs: only they could solve difficult and complicated social problems with the power of the state in their hands. The people were simply, well, too simple to know how best to attack their problems, even if they had the power to do so. If the problems did not succumb to the more knowledgeable progressives on their first assault, well, the progressives just had not accumulated enough power to do the job. They would have to fall back, regroup and amass even more state power for the next attempt.

This is the main reason I was so excited by what I was exposed to at the Amputee Coalition’s National Conference in Tucson, Arizona this summer. It was a direct refutation to all the progressive arguments in the previous  paragraph. People can solve their own problems by themselves if allowed to do so and allowed to gather their needs. They may have to organize with others with the same interests to get the economic and intelligence gathering needs to do the job, but they can get it done! The federal government, which does not do a good job on hardly anything, should leave them alone and stay out of their way.

The latest attempt of progressives to criminalize any thought they do not agree with comes in the arguments over global warming, or more specifically man-caused or Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW). Whatever one’s beliefs about AGW (and you can find mine in all the posts I have written about AGW in the Global Warming theme), certainly we should agree that anyone has the constitutional First Amendment right to say whatever he/she believes to whomever will listen. Of course others have the right not to listen, should they be so inclined. As I understand it, political speech, which with the AGW conflicts is mostly what we are talking about here, is the most protected kind of speech around. Yet a sitting Democratic U.S. Senator from Rhode Island, Sheldon Whitehouse, has stated nonbelievers in AGW who speak out about their beliefs should be prosecuted under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO). Posting on the Washington Post’s  Opinions blog, Whitehouse declared the following.

In 2006, Judge Gladys Kessler of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia decided that the tobacco companies’ fraudulent campaign amounted to a racketeering enterprise. According to the court: “Defendants coordinated significant aspects of their public relations, scientific, legal, and marketing activity in furtherance of a shared objective — to . . . maximize industry profits by preserving and expanding the market for cigarettes through a scheme to deceive the public.”

The parallels between what the tobacco industry did and what the fossil fuel industry is doing now are striking. … The coordinated tactics of the climate denial network, Brulle’s report states, “span a wide range of activities, including political lobbying, contributions to political candidates, and a large number of communication and media efforts that aim at undermining climate science.” Compare that again to the findings in the tobacco case.
The tobacco industry was proved to have conducted research that showed the direct opposite of what the industry stated publicly — namely, that tobacco use had serious health effects. Civil discovery would reveal whether and to what extent the fossil fuel industry has crossed this same line. We do know that it has funded research that — to its benefit — directly contradicts the vast majority of peer-reviewed climate science. One scientist who consistently published papers downplaying the role of carbon emissions in climate change, Willie Soon, reportedly received more than half of his funding from oil and electric utility interests: more than $1.2 million.

To be clear: I don’t know whether the fossil fuel industry and its allies engaged in the same kind of racketeering activity as the tobacco industry. We don’t have enough information to make that conclusion. Perhaps it’s all smoke and no fire. But there’s an awful lot of smoke.

So somehow we have traveled from a conviction that an expression of one’s most deeply held beliefs is politically protected under the First Amendment of the Constitution to a suggestion such people should be sent to prison because they do not agree with Whitehouse’s view of reality. Willie Soon is not the only eminent scientist so threatened. In my post The Great Global Warming Scam, I have compiled a very long list of eminent scientists who do not believe in AGW, one of whom is Willie Soon. I did this primarily to show the declaration “the science is settled” to be a lie. Their names in the post are also links to their curricula vitae, and where possible I have included links to the institutions to which they belong. I suspect that if Willie Soon could be sent to federal prison for his beliefs, every single scientist on my list would very quickly also become a political prisoner.

How could we as a people have travelled from personal freedoms to such an Earth-shattering denial of our first-amendment freedoms so quickly? I will finish answering this question in my next post.

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