by Paul Driessen, author of Cracking Big Green and Eco-Imperialism: Green Power – Black Death. Article used with permission.
The Green New Dealers and their allies have effective ways of reducing dissension by constraining and suppressing citizens in their thought, speech, and access to information as they pursue the total elimination of fossil fuel production and use, and their desire to control how much we can drive and fly, heat and cool our homes, eat meat, and live our lives.
Replacing fossil fuels that provide 82 percent of our energy and 100 percent of countless plastic products would require biofuels grown on tens of millions of acres. Replacing coal and gas-generated electricity with wind and solar would require millions of turbines and panels, on tens of millions more acres, billions of tons of rare earth and other metals, and hundreds of billions of pounds of lithium-ion batteries. Putting just five million electric cars on California roads would require 5 billion pounds of lithium-ion batteries.
China controls all those rare earth metals and most of the lithium, cadmium and cobalt needed for all that pseudo-renewable, pretend-sustainable energy. They are produced in China and Africa, often with child labor and near-slave labor, and with virtually no health, safety or environmental safeguards.
Meanwhile, Asian, African and European Union nations are building or planning over 2,000 coal and gas-fired power plants. So even U.S. elimination of fossil fuels would do absolutely nothing to reduce global CO2 levels. Moreover, citizens are likely to rise up in loud opposition to having millions of noisy wind turbines, solar panels, batteries and biofuel plantations in their backyards and across scenic vistas and wildlife habitats.
Green New Dealers do not want to talk about any of those ethical, social justice or environmental issues — or about the bald assertions of Climate Armageddon that have no basis in real-world evidence. They don’t want anyone else talking about it, either. They want to control what we say and think, even what ideas and information we can find online and in print, television, radio and social media.
They loathe and fear ideas, facts and questions that challenge their views and political power. Free speech and access to other people’s free speech is a clear and present danger to their perceived wisdom on fossil fuels, capitalism, man-made climate chaos, Western culture, and who should make policy decisions on energy, economics, jobs, living standards, religion, or civil rights.
Their version of “free speech” demands that their critics have no free speech. On college campuses, social media, search engines, online information libraries, even in the arts, bakeries and K-12 education, thought control and electronic book burning are essential. They “dox” political opponents, revealing their names and home addresses, so that other radicals can harass, intimidate and attack them and thereby “persuading” others to stay silent. Despite having a 12 to 1 ratio of liberal to conservative professors, leftist college faculty, administrators and students still ban, disinvite, disrupt and physically attack conservative speakers and their hosts.
The Big Tech monopoly routinely implements electronic book-burning tactics. Google and other internet search engines systematically employ liberal biases and secret algorithms to send climate realism articles to intellectual Siberia and censor conservative thinking and discussion. Google YouTube blocks access to Prager University videos that its censors decree offer “objectionable content” on current events, history, constitutional principles, and environmental policies.
Google helps the Chinese government deny its citizens access to “dangerous ideas” — and says nothing when China sends a million Uighur Muslims to “re-education camps.” Google’s hard-left employees ostracize any conservatives they still find within their ranks, yet claim that helping the U.S. Defense Department with cloud computing or artificial intelligence surveillance would “violate their principles.”
Facebook “shadow banned” an ad promoting a Heartland Institute video that called on millennials to reject socialism and embrace capitalism. Facebook censors told Heartland they “don’t support ads for your business model” (capitalism) and would not reveal “red flags” and trade-secret algorithms they use to “identify violations” of their policies and “help preserve the integrity of our internal processes.” Google suppressed Claremont Institute ads for a talk on multiculturalism and political speech restrictions. Twitter routinely engages in similar cold, calculated censorship of views it opposes.
Wikipedia posts distorted or false bios for climate realist experts and organizations — labeling me an anti-environment lobbyist — and then pops up ads soliciting money for its biased “educational” material. Securing corrections is a long, often fruitless process. The Southern Poverty Law Center has used phony “hate speech” claims to defund and “deplatform” conservative groups by pressuring credit card companies to close off donations to them.
Some state attorneys general and members of Congress even want to prosecute and jail people for “denying the reality” of “man-made climate cataclysms.” Yet, the policies that Big Tech supports cause millions of deaths every year, by denying impoverished nations and families access to the modern energy, insect control, and agricultural technologies that its vocal elements loathe.
Creating conservative competitors or finding ways around these social media and fake information behemoths is vital, but would be stymied by their sheer size, wealth and dominance. Trust busting by federal agencies, Congress and the courts should certainly be considered.
These cyber-giant social media and information platforms may be private companies, but they wield massive power, especially with younger generations who get almost all their information online. These dominant public forums are essential for discussing and evaluating public policies that affect our lives.
A federal judge has ruled that President Trump may not block hate-filled criticism from his Twitter account. Because it is a public forum, akin to a park or town square, for discussing important policy matters, Twitter is protected by the First Amendment. Blocking unwanted tweets is therefore viewpoint discrimination, she held. Her reasoning should not apply only to the President and his most obnoxious critics.
The right of free speech and free assembly — to participate fully in debates over important political and public policy matters — is the foundation of our other rights and freedoms. Banning, censoring, and deliberately falsifying certain viewpoints deprive major segments of our population and electorate of the right to speak, be heard, become informed, and examine all sides of an issue.
Viewpoint censorship and bullying violate the basic rights of anybody whose views an elite, intolerant, power-hungry few have deemed “inappropriate” or “hurtful” to their sensitivities. It is time to rein in the monopolistic cyber censors.