Posted on 04/11/2016 2:10:27 PM PDT by markomalley
Last week, a line was crossed in the ongoing campaign of liberals to criminalize freedom of expression. The attorney general of the U.S. Virgin Islands subpoenaed a decade of materials and work by a private advocacy group that had dared to question the orthodoxy of climate change.
The group is the Competitive Enterprise Institute, and the attorney general is Claude E. Walker, who had recently signed on to a campaign of over a dozen attorneys general to ferret out so-called climate change “deniers.” It is possible that CEI was being targeted by Walker precisely because one of its attorneys, Hans Bader, had criticized New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, who was leading the campaign.
This is all part of growing chorus of officials willing to use their powers to condemn climate change skeptics. A few weeks ago, for example, U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch had asked the FBI to look into the matter of whether climate change-denying scientists could be accused of fraud for not toeing the line.
There is no other way to characterize these moves. They are blatant attempts to bend the law—in Schneiderman’s case, by using consumer protection and securities laws—to shut down free and open research. It is but another example of the new illiberal attempt by progressive liberals to use the power of the law to intimidate and coerce those with whom they disagree.
As I explain in my new book, “The Closing of the Liberal Mind”:
Not since George Orwell’s “thoughtcrimes”—the author’s word for unapproved thoughts in his novel 1984—has there been so little regard for the dangers of controlling free speech. Not only has the bar been lowered from threatening physical violence to merely giving office, it is now up to those who allege an offense to decide whether the offense was intended. The presumption of guilt is built ideologically into the structure of the political narrative underlying the accusations.
According to this mindset, it would be a “thoughtcrime” merely to question why the real-world results of global temperature change don’t match up with predictions by computer models.
What’s going on here? The problem is that progressive liberals see too much freedom of speech as injurious to their cause. It’s not only the egregious abuses that happen regularly on college campuses. It’s increasingly mainstream liberals who are surrendering to a “yes but” strategy on freedom of expression—saying, in effect, “yes, we support it in principle, but not so much when it conflicts with our ideology.”
Then I suggest it’s time We the People begin our own war against liberal attorneys general.
Amen.
They’re not “liberal”, they’re Stalinist.
The only good Stalinist..
If only the Founding Fathers had been wise enough to foresee the possibility of a long train of abuses and usurpations, designed to place the American people under absolute Despotism.
If they had been that clever, they would have put another amendment into the Bill of Rights, to enable the people to protect and defend the security of a free State, as a backup in case the First Amendment were ever systematically violated.
Exactly!
If conservatives ever get back in control, then it would be fair (but equally unconstitutional) to prosecute the people who puhed that false and harmful “climate change” nonsense.
.
Some brave attorney general needs to subpoena Al Gore for the “facts” in his books and other lies he has spread over the decades in favor of the climate hoax. If just one struck back using the same tactics, the others would be scared witless at the prospect of Climate Hoaxer #1 Gore, who has already admitted lying about ethanol, being called into some court to explain that and other lies he has fostered. I would not at all be surprised to see some of the lefty AGs filing friend of the court briefs to try and stop the right from doing the very same thing they are trying to do.
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