By John McClaughry
The Wall Street Journal had a really concerning editorial entitled: “The Climate Change Censorship: The left is demanding that social media shut down debate even on solutions.”
Whatever became of the genuine liberals of my youth, who defended free speech even of unpopular ideas?
It began, “On Tuesday more than a dozen environmental outfits, including Greenpeace and the Union of Concerned Scientists, wrote to the big tech companies to blame them for “amplifying and perpetuating climate disinformation.”
Citing an early episode of demanded information censorship relating to the COVID pandemic, the Journal wrote that “It’s a bad sign when one side of a political debate demands to cut off the microphones of the people on the other — and the tech censors these days are almost uniformly progressives. … On climate change, the disinformation tag gets liberally applied even to people who agree that it’s real, caused by fossil fuels, and a problem — but who also think that humanity can adapt, apocalyptic predictions are overwrought, and subsidies for green energy are a poor investment.”
A currently popular idea on the left is to make the big tech platforms like Facebook and Twitter legally liable for allowing any point of view the left brands as disinformation, notably skepticism about their demands to put a stop to a supposed climate catastrophe.
Whatever became of the genuine liberals of my youth, who defended free speech even of unpopular ideas? The progressives, especially the climate change warriors, have overpowered and replaced them with a vengeance.
John McClaughry is vice president of the Ethan Allen Institute. Reprinted with permission from the Ethan Allen Institute Blog.
The state of Vermont has been subverted, by the unitparty, aka marxists, corporate globalists….pick you descriptive adjective they are all of the same feather.
They love censorship, has been going on strong for 3 decades at least in this state an only gotten stronger.
They took control of the democratic party decades ago…Bernie leading the way.
True North Reports should be commended for its policy of allowing reader comment and free speech. This is something that is becomming increasingly rare these days.
“It’s a bad sign when one side of a political debate demands to cut off the microphones of the people on the other …. the radical Left wants to make the big tech platforms like Facebook and Twitter [legally liable] for allowing any point of view the left brands as disinformation ….”
You think the burning of bibles is next?
In the Christian world view God controls the weather …. and gravity, and the very hour of his son’s return.
The warm mongers are unable to win over the populaces with fact of sustainable science so they pull out the trump card of denial of all counter voice. Since mostly all media is in their corner along with most of social media they own the majority of spoken and written word. Unfortunately the climate is not cooperating with their doomsday predictions and most of the people are tiring of their constant spew of lies. They feel their demise is coming with Musk’s ownership of twitter which will change their strangle hold on the spoken word and fire a huge number of the truth deniers. They see their days are numbered and are now in survival mode of the great money hoax against capitalism..
Climate change is about how people in power lie to create fear and control people. It is not about climate reality. Climate reality is that there has been no global warming in the past 8 years. You could easily argue there has been no statically valid warming the last 20 years while CO2 is up 13% or more.
One can be any sex one calls oneself: no questions asked.
But challenge the dominant narratives? That’s too much.
I can’t think of any totalitarian regime that didn’t engage in censorship, nor can I think of any time when robust debate led to the downfall of true science. Isn’t it rather that silencing opposing views leads to the establishment of pseudoscience, as it did during Lysenkoism and eugenics?
Jim1